‘It doesn’t matter, no.’
‘I now think,’ she said, ‘that perhaps I’m not good for him; that he blames me for what’s gone wrong in his life, and that if he lived with someone else he might stop drinking and do something.’
‘I talked to Helen just now,’ said Simon. ‘She seems to be game.’
‘For a baby?’
‘For anything. She’s under the Ludley spell.’
Priss smiled. ‘Like you?’
‘Like me.’
‘Well tonight’s not the night,’ she said, biting her lower lip. ‘In fact it’s going to be tricky to get them together. He can’t sleep with her if he’s drunk, and he won’t if he’s sober.’
‘Why not?’
‘He just won’t.’
‘But he likes her, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘He fancies her?’
‘A lot.’
‘He must know she’s willing.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he knows you won’t mind?’
‘Only too well.’
‘So what stops him?’
She laughed. ‘I think he thinks it would be wrong.’
‘Why? Because of her age?’
‘I suppose so. I don’t really know.’
‘Perhaps he’s afraid he won’t make it.’
She shook her head. ‘No. He may be weak but he’s nervous, and nervousness and lechery go together, don’t they?’
‘You should know.’
She blushed. ‘He certainly could if he wanted to.’
‘Then perhaps he will.’
‘We must push him along.’ She smiled. ‘He’s like an old bull with a young heifer. He needs a bit of help.’
‘I’ll do what I can but …’ He hesitated.
‘What?’
‘I’m not altogether surprised that Willy hesitates before fathering a child by a runaway schoolgirl.’
‘That’s a very predictable opinion,’ she snapped. ‘Of course conventionally it might be thought wrong. I’m sure her parents would be appalled. But if Will doesn’t sleep with her, someone else will – probably one of those students who sleep on the beach. She’s longing to lose her virginity. I know. I can remember how I felt at that age. She’s longing to and she will, so she may as well lose it to Will and save his life at the same time.’
She stood. Simon paid for the drinks; and then they both set off back to the Villa Golitsyn.
They could hear screams from the bottom of the steps like those of an angry baby, only deep and hoarse. Simon being ahead of Priss, reached the house before she did. He ran up the stairs and into the Ludleys’ bedroom. The bed was empty. For a moment he could see no one in the gloomy light, and the loud cries seemed to come from all four corners of the room. Then he caught sight of Helen’s white blouse, and as he came nearer he saw her dishevelled hair and the tears streaming down her face. She was sobbing and saying soothing words into a dark space between a painted linen chest and the wall. Simon came closer still and saw Willy cowering in this confined space, screaming, shaking and kicking – not at Helen, who kept her distance, but at something which seemed to be attacking him on the floor.
So convincing was his terror that Simon thought he must have fallen into a nest of ants, and was about to pull him clear when Priss came up behind him. She pushed past and stood for a moment next to Helen. Willy showed no sign of recognizing her: his eyes stared straight ahead and his face was twisted with disgust as if he saw only too clearly what they could not see crawling towards him on the floor. He kicked at them with his bare feet, crashing his heels onto the hard parquet, apparently unconscious of the pain it must have caused him.
‘Shall I pick him up?’ asked Simon.
‘No,’ said Priss.
‘He’s being bitten by something …’
‘There’s nothing there,’ said Helen.
‘Just watch him,’ said Priss. ‘I’ll get the doctor.’ She started towards the door, then turned to Helen. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Helen sniffed, ‘but Willy …’
‘He’ll be all right. It’s DTs.’
‘Oh.’ She did not understand.
‘He thinks he’s being attacked by rats,’ said Simon. ‘It’s what happens when you drink too much.’
Helen burst into tears. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she said. ‘He asked for some brandy so I brought up the bottle.’
Priss left the room to call the doctor.
Charlie had returned with Carmen by the time the doctor came, and together with Simon he held Willy still on his bed while the doctor stuck a syringe into his pale, flabby buttock. In only a few seconds the drug took effect: Willy was calm and soon slept.
They left Priss with the doctor and went down to the drawing-room. Charlie was shaking; he went to the sideboard to pour himself a drink, but put down the bottle of wine before filling his glass as if Willy’s troubles had put him off. He went to the sofa and sat down next to Carmen, who still wore a sulky expression on her face as if afraid that Willy’s delirium tremens would upstage her wounded pride.
‘What the hell are we going to do?’ asked Charlie.
Simon was uninhibited by the example of his friend, and had poured himself a glass of whisky. ‘We’ve got to stop him drinking,’ he said.
‘But how?’
‘Keep him here. Hide the wine. Throw it all out.’
‘It wouldn’t work. He’d climb out of his room and go down to the café.’
‘What else can we do? Everything else has been tried.’
‘I don’t know why you don’t just let him kill himself,’ said Carmen.
‘No …’ Charlie raised his hand in a gesture of exasperation. ‘I know it’s difficult for you to believe it, but he used to be a wonderful guy …’
‘He sure isn’t now.’
‘But he could be again.’
Carmen shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I’m not going to stay around until he is.’
‘Perhaps in America,’ said Helen quietly from the corner where she was sitting on an upright chair, ‘you don’t have friends in the same way as we do.’
‘Of course we have friends,’ said Carmen.
‘And don’t you stick by them?’
‘Not if they try and break up your relationship with your man.’
Charlie sighed. ‘I don’t think he wants to break up our relationship, Carmen.’
‘Of course he does,’ said Carmen. ‘He’s still crazy about you and deeply resentful of me. Can’t you see that?’
Charlie gave a snort – half laugh, half sigh – and rolled his head from side to side on the back of the spinach-green sofa. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘he isn’t crazy about me. He isn’t even gay. He never was.’
‘Except at school.’
‘That wasn’t serious.’
‘He was your first guy, wasn’t he?’
‘He was my first anything.’
‘Would you have gone gay if it wasn’t for Willy?’ she asked.
Charlie stopped rolling his head. ‘Probably not.’
‘There you are, then.’
‘Willy isn’t queer,’ Simon said to Carmen. ‘He doesn’t fancy Charlie.’
She turned on him fiercely. ‘How do you know? And how do I know that you’re telling the truth? You’re probably gay too. I don’t know where I am with any of you British.’
‘He doesn’t fancy Charlie,’ said Simon, ‘because he fancies Helen.’
‘Huh.’ Carmen seemed reluctant to believe what he said.
‘He does, doesn’t he?’ Simon said to Helen.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
‘Well, that’s pretty disgusting, too. A man of his age with a little girl like that.’
‘But it has nothing to do with you,’ said Helen.
‘I don’t care if it does or not,’ said Carmen, ‘and I don’t care if Willy does or doesn’t fancy Charlie. I’m not staying in this mad-house. I didn’t come
all the way to Europe to spend my time with drunks.’
‘We can’t go,’ said Charlie. ‘We can’t leave them in the lurch.’
‘Of course we can,’ said Carmen. ‘Simon and Helen will stay on. You’ve done your bit.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Charlie.
‘Oh fuck you, I do understand,’ Carmen screamed at him. ‘You’re the one who’s crazy about him. Well it’s him or me. You’ll have to choose.’ She stood. ‘If you won’t come with me, then I’ll go on my own.’ She flounced (theatrically) out of the room.
Simon looked at Charlie. He had not moved his head from the back of the sofa. ‘Perhaps you’d better go with her,’ Simon said. ‘Helen and I will stay on.’
Charlie sighed. ‘The trouble is that in a way she’s right. Old Willy, really, means more to me that she does. After all, there are other people like Carmen, and like me, and like you Simon, but there’s no one else like Willy, is there?’
‘None that I know,’ said Simon.
They heard the front door close as the doctor left, and then saw Priss come in from the hall.
‘What did he say?’ asked Simon.
She shrugged her shoulders and sat down. ‘He said what you might expect him to say, that if Will goes on drinking he’ll die; that his liver is likely to pack up at any minute; that his brain is half-pickled already; that his heart is weak.’ She looked drawn, tired and sad. The end of her nose was red: she sniffed and wiped it with her hand.
‘What did he suggest?’ Simon asked.
‘A clinic.’
‘Did you tell him what happened before?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He shrugged his shoulders in the usual French way.’
‘What could he say?’ said Charlie.
‘Not much, I suppose,’ said Simon. ‘The diagnosis is clear enough: alcoholism. The cure is simple: no alcohol. How the cure is administered is up to us.’
‘He gave me some tranquillizers,’ said Priss, showing them a carton she held in her hand.
‘That’ll help,’ said Charlie.
‘Up to a point,’ said Simon.
‘What else can we do?’ said Priss. ‘We’ll just have to watch him, but I warn you – it’s a terrible bore.’
‘We don’t mind,’ said Charlie. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
‘It won’t be much fun for Carmen.’
‘She’s leaving.’
‘Oh.’ Priss paused as if taking in an unspoken explanation; then she added: ‘I’m sorry.’
Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘C’est la vie,’ he said with a weak smile.
Simon stood up and walked across the room. His civil servant’s mind was drawing up a memorandum which he spoke aloud. ‘The beast we have to deal with,’ he said, standing with his back to the desk, ‘has two horns. There’s Willy’s physical addiction to alcohol, which can be dealt with by keeping him away from drink: and there is the second addiction – the psychological propensity to seek oblivion in drunkenness. Why does he hate to be sober? We haven’t really tackled the problem, have we?’
‘He thinks he’s a failure – a raté,’ said Charlie.
‘Yes,’ said Priss. ‘He thinks he’s wasted his life.’
‘Are you sure that that is the explanation?’ asked Simon.
‘Isn’t it enough?’ said Priss.
‘We all feel at times – at our age, at any rate – that we’ve wasted our lives. Whether we have or not depends upon our expectations. Now if Willy had wanted to be prime minister and now found himself twenty years later still on the back benches; or if he had been a writer and still couldn’t get his books published; then I would understand that he might feel that he had wasted his life. But that isn’t the case. At the age of twenty-four or so, Willy chose to become an expatriate, and one couldn’t say that he had failed at that.’
‘Perhaps he regrets the choice he made at twenty-four,’ said Charlie.
‘Then why doesn’t he go back to England? Or why didn’t he ten years ago?’
‘He couldn’t, could he?’ Charlie looked at Priss, who as they were talking had started to grip the hand which held the tranquillizers with the other, and twist them together.
‘No he couldn’t,’ she said simply.
‘Why not?’ asked Simon.
She said nothing: there was no particular expression on her face.
‘You should tell us,’ said Simon. ‘It might help.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
Simon came and stood in front of her. ‘If I told you that I knew, and that it didn’t matter, and that after so long no one cared any more, would that make a difference?’
She looked up at him. Their eyes met – hers tired and sad, his bright with a devious, bureaucratic benevolence. ‘How can you know?’ she said. ‘No one knows.’
‘We’ve known for a long time.’ Simon turned to Charlie and Helen. ‘Willy was a traitor,’ he said. ‘In Djakarta, while second secretary at the Embassy, he photographed a map and gave it to the Indonesian Communists. It led to an ambush of a British patrol in Borneo, and the death of one of his friends.’
‘No,’ said Priss quietly. ‘That’s not it. He isn’t a traitor. He’s my brother, my older brother. That’s why we can’t go back to England.’
PART THREE
ONE
At breakfast the next morning they all drank their coffee and ate their bread and jam with lowered eyes. No one spoke. Carmen sat with arched eyebrows looking out of the window at the olive tree as if convinced that the silence at table was caused by her dramatic departure. She may have been waiting for someone to beg her to stay on, but no one did: indeed the only interruption to the sound of their sipping and chewing, and the rustling of Nice-Matin, was Charlie’s broken French from the hall as he telephoned Air Inter to reserve her a seat on the next flight to Paris.
At eleven he drove Carmen to the airport. She took her leave of the others with the same aggrieved expression she had worn since the previous evening. There was no kissing or shaking hands. Even Charlie, as he put her suitcase into the boot of the Jaguar, seemed quite detached about the departure of the girl he had meant to be his wife, as if he was her chauffeur and nothing more.
Once they had gone, Simon and Priss set to work to get rid of all the alcohol in the house. They opened and emptied every bottle of wine they could find, and drained the dregs of those already empty, before throwing them into the bin. All the cognac, marc and some duty-free whisky that Simon had brought with him from England was emptied down the kitchen sink.
At lunch they drank water. Priss sat at her usual place at table while Helen perched uneasily on Willy’s chair. Simon and Charlie sat between the two women. With Carmen gone, and Willy still asleep in his room, they all seemed more at ease. Charlie gave a scathing account of Carmen’s histrionic parting at the airport, while Simon joked about the drunken fish which would be found stranded where the sewage from the Villa Golitsyn emptied into the sea. Helen laughed, not just because their jokes were funny, but also because Carmen’s departure had put her in a good mood. Priss too seemed cheerful. She chatted for a while about their plans, interspersing what she said with casual references to the recent drama: ‘I’m sorry Carmen never saw the Matisse Chapel,’ and ‘If Will is well enough,’ and then finally she seemed to decide that she must mention what no one had referred to that day. ‘Look,’ she said to Charlie. ‘Did Carmen leave because of me and Will – because of what I told you last night?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t tell her. She just split, that’s all.’ He glanced at Simon for confirmation.
‘Split from here or from you?’ asked Priss.
Charlie laughed. ‘A bit of both.’
‘But what about getting married?’
He looked vaguely towards the Baie des Anges. ‘It wouldn’t have worked.’
Priss leaned across the table and put her hand on his forearm – on his brown ski
n covered with golden hairs. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie,’ she said, ‘I really am.’
He sighed. ‘In California it seemed different … I mean, she seemed different, or I guess I was different.’
‘But you could have gone back with her.’
‘I never really belonged there,’ he said wistfully.
Priss took her hand off his arm and turned to address all three of her guests. ‘You’re kind to stay,’ she said, ‘but now that you know about Will and me, you mustn’t feel you have to.’
‘It makes no difference,’ said Helen – quietly, but with a fierce edge to her voice. ‘It doesn’t matter who people are or what they do … if you like them.’ She blushed as she spoke: her youthful flesh went pink from her jowls to her nose.
Simon cleared his throat. ‘I don’t think any of us think worse of you,’ he said. ‘The problem is, whether Willy thinks worse of himself and drinks as a result.’
‘Yes,’ said Priss, ‘it is perhaps that. When he was younger – well, you can remember what he was like. He wanted his moral values to be his own – to accept nothing from others, particularly not from the conventional moralists whom he despised.’
‘I can remember,’ said Simon.
‘Me too,’ said Charlie.
‘I adored him,’ said Priss. ‘I accepted everything he said. I thought he was funny and clever and handsome, and the other boys I met seemed terribly dull compared to Will. Of course a lot of girls feel like that about their brothers and don’t sleep with them …’ She turned to Simon. ‘I told you about my father. He slept with anyone and everyone, so we grew up in … well, a permissive climate of opinion. One holiday Will came back from school where he’d been trying things out with you boys and it seemed obvious, I suppose, to try things out with me.’ She turned to Helen. ‘I was about your age when we first slept together. It was terribly risky because in those days there was no such thing as the pill. We had this huge house in Suffolk called Hensfield where as children we’d always been abandoned with our nanny. It had attics filled with old furniture, and there, well, we did it once or twice, just thinking that it was interesting and fun. Then Will went up to Cambridge where he had other girlfriends, and I used to go out with men who’d grope at me in taxis – Guards Officers and stockbrokers and that sort of thing. At Cambridge Will fell in love with a girl – a real bitch as it turned out. He came back and told me that he was going to marry her, which upset me, I suppose, but I accepted it as inevitable. Then, a month before the wedding, he found out that she was sleeping with someone else – a friend of his …’ She stopped. ‘Is this embarrassing?’ she asked.
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