She heard the question a fraction before Francine, and wished she could snatch it back. Stupid, stupid, she thought, but it was too late to unsay it.
‘Of course. Did I feel sad, yes. But there are many things in life to make us sad. I have my house, my friends. I like my visitors, some more than the others.’
Flora acknowledged the compliment with a little dip of her head. Her view of Francine was shifting with each turn of the conversation. This, she supposed, was how friendship worked. You met, you talked, you found out more about each other. This was what other people learned in primary school; what she had somehow ignored in her haste to master maths and biology.
‘It’s worse to be made unhappy by children,’ Francine said. ‘This is true for some people, I think.’
‘Is it?’ Another thing Flora had never considered.
‘Some of my guests are unhappy. The women. The mothers.’
‘With their children, or their husbands?’ Flora asked.
‘That is a question, of course. But if you have no children, you can lose the husband, if you want to. Isn’t that so?’
Could Francine lose her husband, then, if she wanted to? Was this, possibly, what Francine had come to tell her: that she intended to exchange her husband for another whom she’d foolishly passed over years before? Flora felt a blush creep round from her ears.
‘Things change,’ she said. ‘Sometimes people find a way to be happier than they have been.’
‘Like you,’ said Francine, without a blink.
Flora laughed then, and drained the last of her cognac. That was enough of a lesson in friendship for one evening, she thought. Perhaps it wasn’t so much draughts as monopoly, and Francine, she could see, owned most of the board.
‘Tell me about the concert,’ she said. ‘When is it?’
September 1989
The performance is electrifying. They should come to the theatre more often, Flora thinks. She says so, in the interval – and Henry, pouring Sémillon Blanc into two glasses, raises an eyebrow. She knows what he means: that she’s too busy to go out in the evenings. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. She could make the time, as she has done tonight. He rarely suggests outings to the theatre. It was the novelty of this production, the great opera singer trying his hand at a spoken role as Othello, that Henry couldn’t resist.
‘We only came to see this because of Willard White,’ she says.
Henry lifts his glass. ‘And the rest of them,’ he says. ‘Imogen Stubbs, Zoe Wanamaker, Ian McKellen. Stellar cast. Especially for the Young Vic.’
The Young Vic is one of Henry’s favourite theatres, Flora knows; an opportunity for him to use words like accessible and immediate and experimental.
‘It would be quite different in a bigger theatre,’ she says, determined to voice an opinion, even if it’s not an original one.
‘It would have made more money in a bigger theatre,’ Henry says, ‘but it’s good to see artistic integrity’s alive and kicking. That’s a lovely dress, by the way.’
Flora glances down. ‘Thank you,’ she says. It was expensive, the dress, bought on a whim she can’t account for. It’s short, fitted, made of raw silk, and she can see that the Young Vic isn’t quite the right arena for it. But even so, she thinks.
‘It’s a horrid play,’ Henry says. ‘I’ve always thought so.’
He smiles again, and for a moment they look straight at each other. Flora has a sense, not unfamiliar, of conversation leapfrogging; of not being sure where it might find itself, a sentence or two hence. She’s irked, too: it goes without saying, surely, that they are both aware of the irony of the plot, the husband deceived into believing in his wife’s infidelity.
‘Brilliant, though,’ she says, as breezily as she can manage. ‘And Willard can certainly act, can’t he?’
The bell rings. Henry, more accustomed to performances and to being, in his way, important to them, ignores it, but Flora empties her glass and gets up.
‘We’re in the middle of the row,’ she reminds him. ‘I don’t want to climb over everyone in this dress.’
As the second half progresses, Flora finds her mind – loosened by the interval wine – sliding between fact and fiction, sometimes completely immersed in the play, at others watching from a hovering distance. Sitting in the dark, her own emotions reverberate in the small space between audience and actors. Othello, she thinks with mounting frustration, has none of her grounds for jealousy – and as the last act approaches she feels an almost irresistible desire to do something, to shout out loud that he’s got it wrong. Of course she knows you can’t do that, she’s not a lunatic, but she can feel the tussle inside her between temptation and restraint, like standing at the edge of a cliff and knowing you could jump off. Her hands grip the edge of her seat as she watches Othello’s terrible descent towards murder.
And then there’s a noise close to them, a sound she assumes at first is coming from someone else who has been pushed beyond endurance by the tension on stage. She glances round. In the row behind them a man is having a grand mal fit, his arms and legs writhing, and choked, gurgling sounds coming from his mouth.
Flora clicks instantly into professional mode. They are sitting on benches arranged in a horseshoe around the stage, an arrangement which has its downsides but which makes it easy to manoeuvre herself into a position where she can help. Whispering reassurances to the people nearby, she kneels down in the cramped space beside the man’s head. Behind her, she can hear Willard White’s voice, increasingly impassioned. Flora turns the man onto his side, sliding her coat alongside him to protect his limbs from the wooden bench. It’s years since she managed an epileptic fit, but she knows that the drama on stage is more important, in its way, than this; or at least, that it’s not necessary to interrupt it.
And so Flora crouches, with her back to the stage, while Henry and several hundred other people watch Othello smother his wife. She listens to the tragic consequence of reason overcome by deceiving rhetoric, to the once-adoring husband ignoring the desperate pleas and protestations of love that continue, pathetically, until Desdemona’s last breath. Her hands resting on the wrenching, contorted body of a stranger, Flora feels a potent mix of sadness and of peace.
By some odd synchronicity, the fit ends at almost exactly the same moment as the play. By the time the standing ovations are over and the audience is beginning to filter reluctantly out of the auditorium, the man is lying still, his wife leaning over him and murmuring quietly.
‘All OK?’ Flora asks. ‘Can I do anything more?’
The woman shakes her head. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘If you’re sure.’ Flora hesitates for a moment, and then she turns to Henry, and they both stand up.
As they shuffle their way along the row to join the press of people making for the door, Flora feels Henry’s hand in the small of her back. She waits for him to move it, but he doesn’t; there it is, a slight but definite pressure, as they edge forward in the middle of the crowd, and a tingle of pleasure radiates up her spine. These exits would be no good in a fire, she thinks, but she doesn’t care. She’d be happy never to reach the door, never even to turn and look at Henry, just to stand here and feel the warmth of his hand through the expensive, crumpled stuff of her dress. The strange submersion of belief and disbelief she felt earlier swirls in her head again, the mingling of fact and fantasy, and for a moment she thinks she might faint with the excess of it all – but then there’s someone speaking, a man who was sitting in the same row as them.
‘So lucky your wife’s a nurse,’ he says.
‘Oh, she’s not,’ Henry says. There’s a jaunty edge to his voice; the man looks at them both, his face foolish. ‘She’s an undertaker, actually,’ Henry says.
The man keeps smiling, bound by some code of decorum, and Henry slides his hand further down Flora’s back, its intention clear now.
Flora doesn’t get the joke until they’re in the taxi.
<
br /> ‘Idiot,’ Henry says, amicably. ‘Nurse, indeed.’
His arm is around her shoulder, and he pulls her towards him. ‘A lovely dress,’ he says, into her hair, ‘for the sexiest surgeon in London.’
Flora shuts her eyes, feeling the jolt and rumble of the taxi as it weaves its way across the city towards Paddington. Here they are, she thinks, Othello and Desdemona, transposed and delivered by the suspension of disbelief.
29
Flora came in from the garden earlier than usual on Saturday afternoon. The evening had lain enticingly ahead of her as she toiled in the flowerbeds. It was a marker of how life had changed, she thought, that she’d spent some time calculating how long she might need to get ready.
The beautiful bathroom, with its blue panelled walls and its state-of-the-art shower, was one of the great joys of Les Violettes. Standing under the powerful jets felt like something from a myth: like being transformed into a water nymph. Flora remembered lying in the bath the night Martin had taken her out for dinner, and how the water had felt magical then too. Could that really be only three weeks ago?
Perhaps it was the effect of her exertions in the garden, or the veil of water that surrounded her, but she found she could look back on that brief dalliance now with a calmness different from the flat rationality she was expert at applying to life. She’d been wrong to regret it: she could see now that it had served an important purpose. It had provided some punctuation in the blank sprawl of her new existence. The film she’d imagined living through during those dark days at the Abelards’ had moved on through several reels now, and that was a good thing. Simply living was a good thing, passing the days, seeing that you could survive.
Turning off the water, she wrapped herself in one of Martin’s enormous towels and took out the black dress she had bought in a boutique (the only boutique) in St Rémy. No harm in dressing up for the occasion, she’d thought – this was France, and women of her age were expected to make an effort – but the result made her feel a little self-conscious. Looking in the mirror, it struck her that the years of benign neglect had left her skin remarkably smooth, and the streaking of grey through her hair could almost be mistaken for expensive highlighting. Not convincing in Paris or London, perhaps, but enough for here. Enough for her.
While she waited for Francine, Flora stood on the terrace, admiring the vibrancy of the roses, the dusty shimmer of purple over the lavender bushes. The sun was descending slowly, and the garden was filled with a beautiful light: a reward for a cloudy day, this intensity of colour before dusk. Francine’s company wasn’t the least of the pleasures in store this evening, despite – or perhaps because of – the twists and turns of their last meeting. Flora was curious to see what was round the next corner. About the concert itself she had mixed feelings. It was a performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which Francine – who had formed from somewhere a high opinion of Flora’s cultural fluency – clearly assumed she was familiar with. Purcell, Flora thought, was not especially dangerous territory. Henry had had a brief fling with baroque opera at one stage, perhaps coinciding with a brief fling with a mezzo-soprano who specialised in trouser roles – but Flora had never, in any case, gone with him to many concerts. She’d decided early on that it was easier to leave his world well alone.
*
The church of St Julien was set back a little from a square in the centre historique of Tours, its antiquity clear even to the casual observer. Inside it was strikingly beautiful, the familiar pale Touraine stone spun and stretched into marvellous arches and pillars and windows. But before Flora had time to take in the details of the architecture, her attention was caught by a poster advertising the concert. Halfway down, in plain view, she read: Aeneas – Landon Peverell.
Flora stared, certain at first that she’d made a mistake.
Francine was at her shoulder.
‘It is a good choir,’ she said. ‘I am sure you will enjoy it.’
They had expensive seats, in the middle of the second row. Her father had been the treasurer of the choir, Francine had explained. Two tickets were still sent every year, with the compliments of the committee. Looking at the chairs set out for the soloists, Flora wished the committee’s gratitude had waned a little by now. Did performers look closely enough at the audience, she wondered, to recognise acquaintances they weren’t expecting to see? She couldn’t account for her agitation about seeing Landon: or at least, she could have offered two or three explanations, but none of them was adequate. Being in France was part of it, though; it would seem somehow less like chance, her being at the concert.
The choir was filing onto the stage now, and the orchestra filling the space in front. The soloists followed shortly, and Flora’s question was answered almost at once. Landon was right in the middle, only a few feet away from her, and before he’d taken his seat – before the singers had made their bow – his eyes had fallen on her and he had smiled, and raised his eyebrows, and smiled again. While the conductor made his own sweeping bow and turned to open his score, Francine looked quizzically at Flora.
‘An old friend,’ Flora whispered. ‘I had no idea he was singing.’ But she could tell from the way Francine’s eyes dwelled for a moment on her dress, then flicked back to Landon, that she didn’t believe her.
The concert began, the orchestra setting the scene before one of the sopranos led the choir into the first chorus. It was a dramatic piece, even in a concert version. The lack of staging and gesture made it harder to follow the story, but Flora was happy to let the music wash over her. It had been a very long time since she’d heard Landon perform live, and she’d forgotten how imposing he looked on stage and how convincingly he communicated. He might be the wrong side of sixty, but his voice was still wonderful. The choir and orchestra were good too, but it was Landon’s face that her eyes kept stealing back to, hoping that his weren’t on her.
Flora had entertained a wild hope that she might be able to slip incognito into the throng of the audience during the interval, but even if she’d dipped her eyes in time to miss the look Landon gave her before leaving the stage, there was no avoiding Francine’s determination to assist. She knew the layout of the church, and she steered Flora firmly towards the door to the vestry.
Landon appeared almost at once, and his face spread into a smile when he saw that she was already there, waiting for him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what a lovely surprise.’
30
Alice’s career had ticked along modestly for the first few years Lou had known her, her creative work vying for time with the mixed bag of teaching that provided most of her income. But her success in the Morris Prize had triggered a flood of enquiries from different quarters: there had been a feature in Art Today, an invitation to teach on a prestigious American summer school. Alice regarded most of this attention as a curious phenomenon that had touched her by chance and would pass soon enough. But there was one project that excited her: an outdoor sculpture for a children’s adventure centre near Birmingham. Parnells was funded by a local tycoon, and – according to its glossy brochure – aimed to provide an environment that children with and without disabilities could explore together.
The brief, Alice reported after a meeting with the trustees, was for art that inspired without patronising.
‘We have to think as much about equal access as aesthetics,’ she said, over supper.
It was hard to tell from her tone whether she was excited or bemused. It all sounded terrifying to Lou: the kind of place where she might be exposed as a capitalist with the wrong principles. She felt more comfortable defending her own ideological corner than minding her Ps and Qs in other people’s.
‘It sounds great,’ she said. ‘We should go and visit.’
*
It threatened rain on the day of the Parnells trip. Heavy skies followed them up the M40, and they passed through several miles of featureless countryside before spotting a jaunty sign for the centre. But the site itself was breathtaking. In
side and out, there were colourful areas, noisy areas and scented areas; exhibits to touch and press; playground equipment to swing on and slide down and slither over.
The woman who showed them round radiated enthusiasm and good-heartedness, and Lou was ashamed of her earlier misgivings. As they circled the lake (a homage to Monet, with its bridges and water lilies), she reflected that she’d never been much good with children, but now she was pregnant she felt an instant affinity was expected. Even passing a pram in the street she had the sense that she was being tested. She’d expected to find the children at Parnells an even greater challenge, and in some ways they were, but not in the way she’d anticipated. Watching a group with cerebral palsy romping in the rainforest-themed soft play area, she felt profoundly moved. She didn’t think Alice had noticed, but as they moved away Alice slipped a hand through her arm.
‘We’d better see the site we have in mind for you,’ said their guide – Parnells’ Head of Education, Lou had gathered. ‘It doesn’t look like much yet, but that’s because we wanted to give you a blank canvas.’ She smiled, pleased with her turn of phrase. ‘We want your piece to be very much at the centre of it, conceptually.’
She led them out through the back of the main building and round to the far side of the administration block, where an area about the size of a squash court was roughly fenced off. Patches of concrete testified to the recent demolition of three or four small outbuildings. It looked unprepossessing to Lou: she couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
Alice stood very still – a stance which might suggest misgiving, but which Lou knew was simply a sign of concentration. Her eyes moved slowly from one side to the other, then upwards. Lou followed them to the skyline, where a low hill broke the horizon, scrubby woodland tumbling down it towards the perimeter of the site.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘There’s space to breathe here. Space to think.’
The Things You Do for Love Page 21