Skiddlethorpe and other stories
Page 10
rather mysterious e-mail urged me to keep free a particular week some months on. Nearer that time came another package, with a photograph of Svetlana looking beatifically happy beside a man very smart in military uniform, and a formal invitation to their wedding. Also enclosed were a business-class return ticket to Moscow, instructions for meeting the chauffeur on arrival, and a voucher for a pre-paid three-day reservation in the Slavyanskaya Hotel.
Apart from the need to get a new suit, I’ve only one problem with that. What on earth am I to give as a wedding present?
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FAMILY REUNION
I thought we were going to have a week of my annual leave free from outside commitments so I could get on with some long-overdue maintenance jobs. How wrong can you be? Leafing through the bills and junk mail on the Saturday morning before it, I was about to throw out a sheaf of appeals from various no doubt worthy but importunate charities when I noticed caught between them a smaller envelope that turned out to be addressed to Lucy, with a French stamp. The writing looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a moment to recognise it as belonging to Lucy’s sister Sophie.
I’d known the two of them since my teens. Sophie was the glamorous one, and in those days I fancied her achingly myself but never stood a chance. For that I’ve since been very thankful as her waywardness would have driven me mad. Her elder sister, practical, affectionate and reliable, if perhaps - how should I put it? - a shade less exciting, suited my own temperament far better, and on the whole our marriage has worked very well.
“Lucy!” I called. “Letter from Sophie, I think.”
“What sort of mess has she got herself into this time, I wonder?”
Sophie, unfortunately, is one of those women who always go for exactly the wrong man, and when things don’t work out she is liable to fall flat on her face. Her most recent partner, Robert, had been in jail for assaulting her the last time I heard and Sophie herself had had a nervous breakdown. Lucy had every reason to expect this latest of her rather infrequent communications to be about yet another disaster.
Surprisingly, it was not. Sophie had bought a house on the Breton coast between Brest and Quimper, about as far to the west as you can go in France, and demanded that we should visit her there as soon as possible. I was doubtful, but Lucy jumped at the idea; although they were never particularly close as adults and hadn’t met in years, she welcomed the opportunity. The only possible time as far as I was concerned was the following week, and I cursed the short notice. However, when I checked the postmark which for once was partly legible, I mentally apologised; the letter had taken the best part of a month in transit.
I looked up the various travel possibilities while Lucy phoned her sister. It was going to be a formidable journey whichever way we went, and since I don’t like driving too far on the continent, the main alternatives seemed to be the ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff or the Channel tunnel to Paris and then by rail to Brest. Lucy was still on the phone (no surprise there) so I put a note beside her to ask which route Sophie would recommend.
Sophie had no clear preference. However, rumours of a French rail strike raised doubts about the land route, and after checking that we could hire a car in Roscoff I settled for that.
Luckily we had a calm crossing. It was a long one and I’d taken a book, but my mind wandered to Sophie’s amatory history, at least what we knew of it; there was undoubtedly a great deal she kept to herself. It started off quite innocently with a hopeless crush on a fellow-student for whom she had no chance against wealthy competition, very fortunately as she realised years later on coming across a press account of his involvement in a sordid scandal.
She got over that in time, only to fall victim to a lecherous lecturer she was naïve enough to believe in his declarations of passionate devotion to her, that is until she realised she was merely one of a harem. Swearing in a fit of indignation that she was done with men, she then concentrated on her studies and in due course got a first-class degree in modern languages. There was nothing wrong with her brain; it was her heart, or her hormones, that always let her down. To celebrate that success, and the promise of a good job with a solid and reputable travel company, she went on a tour of the ancient sites in Turkey and despite her resolution fell heavily for the guide, who lavished attention on her but of course turned out to be already married to a woman with control of the money.
Fortunately she hadn’t burnt her boats back here, and we found out about this only much later, as indeed we heard very little of her more personal activities for a good few years; she probably didn’t want to lose face by admitting a string of unsatisfactory involvements of which only vague suggestions came our way. She did write occasionally about other matters, and eventually of being put in charge when her company decided to open an office in St. Malo. There she met Robert (pronounced, of course, Rob-air).
He was quite an accomplished artist and she admired his work. For a woman by now within sight of her half-century she had kept herself in pretty fair trim, and he asked to paint her. I’ve seen the picture, and it’s good in its way: superb draughtsmanship, definitely classy, but like much of his output rather lurid in the situation depicted and verging on pornography. Think of Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus” and you’ll get the kind of flavour. I imagine that having got her conveniently in the nude he encouraged nature to take its course; anyway, they set up house together and to everyone’s surprise actually married. It was a quiet affair with few guests, as most of Robert’s friends probably thought it too insufferably bourgeois, but we were invited. Quite against my expectations, I rather took to him at that time.
Despite a bohemian exterior he turned out to have the ideas on marriage once considered conventional, and to be generally a faithful and considerate husband. He did however have a rather volatile temper that gradually became more evident and occasionally flared into violence. Afterwards he was always shamefacedly apologetic, but the episodes became more alarming and eventually, after what later proved to have been a complete misunderstanding, he went definitely too far. Hence the jail sentence.
Arriving in Roscoff we had a bit of a wait for the car hire office to open, so took a stroll round the old town which is quite attractive. Sophie had given us directions not quite as explicit as they might have been, but I had a map in any case and congratulated myself on successfully negotiating the minor roads to Rumengol, cutting off the two longer sides of the big triangle with its western vertex at Brest. Pride before a fall; I then missed the turning to Landévennec. Coming to Crozon, not mentioned in Sophie’s notes, should have given me pause, but I wasn’t fully convinced of the mistake until running out of road at what we later found was the Pointe de Penhir, identified by the hideous memorial to wartime resistance. There was no alternative to turning back, but this time after looking more carefully at the map, I made sure to turn left five kilometres past Crozon and again after another five. After yet another five or six it was a relief to see Sophie herself in the garden of her little house by the long arm of the sea.
Sophie hadn’t mentioned having anyone with her in her new home, and I wondered whether that meant she was by herself or hadn’t dared to admit another folly, so it was another relief to find her in solitary possession. Less pleasing was finding ourselves expected to help sort out everything that needed doing to the place, which was plenty. “Robert’s still in jail, I suppose?” was all I dared to say about it.
Trust me to put my foot in it. Sophie burst into tears, and with a dirty look at me Lucy had to comfort her. It was another ten minutes before she was composed enough to say that he had died a couple of months earlier, probably because of a brain tumour.
That well and truly took the wind out of my sails. “Well, I suppose I ought to say I’m sorry, but ...” At that point Lucy kicked me quite hard and I shut up before digging myself any deeper.
“I got a formal notification from the prison authorities, of course, but a day or two later a very sympathetic letter came from the pr
ison chaplain who’d had quite a lot to do with him. Apparently he’d thought Robert was coming round to a better state of mind. Wishful thinking, I suspect. The tumour wasn’t found until after his death, and I imagine that was the cause of his erratic behaviour, so any real improvement might not have lasted very long. It might just possibly have been found in time, I suppose, but I don’t know whether it was operable. In any case that’s by the way; there was something he wanted me to have.”
She rummaged in what passed for her filing system to produce a rather tatty piece of notepaper that she passed to Lucy, who read it with evident surprise and then handed it on to me without comment. It was a sonnet.
“If in the silence of a summer night
I come to you in form of flesh again
Do not, I beg, my countless faults requite
But think upon my sorrow for your pain.
But if instead I come in spirit form
Intangible as disembodied breath,
A fugitive from life’s destructive storm,
Then take some satisfaction in my death.
That I have sinned I am too well aware
To trouble you with bluster or excuse.
I only ask that you may deign to spare
Some pardon for my