A Period of Adjustment (15 page)

Madame Prideaux didn't look up, but set the duster and the lamp on the table, removed her glasses, folded them deliberately, indicated with them a cane chair in which I might sit, and then laid them among the brass junk on the table. Annette bobbed, closed herself out of the place. Silently.

I dragged the chair across to the little table's side, ducking a frilling of ferns swinging gently from a hanging basket above my head.

‘My monthly chore. Remember?'

She had a pleasant voice, deep, warm almost. She tucked in some grey hairs which had wisped away from the brown velvet ribbon binding the cottage-loaf arrangement on her head. ‘I seem to recollect that I was doing these same labours on the very day you came here to ask Florence about taking over the lease of Jericho from …' For a moment she hesitated, moved the little lamp uneasily, folded her hands in her lap and, for the first time, looked up at me directly. ‘From your brother. James.'

‘Correct. You were indeed. And you were most kind in agreeing that I should.'

She shrugged, picked up an old toothbrush with which she applied her polish. ‘Boff! What else could I do?' She picked up the scaled fish and began to brush it. ‘Your … brother … had paid me three years' rent in advance. I had no complaint. No wish to be a cheating landlady; that is not my métier. I am a colonel's widow, an army woman. Not a commercante, and you
did
agree that I need never be responsible for landlady things: electricity, drains, woodworm and all that nonsense. Ouf! If you had not been quite so imprudent I assure you that, after your brother abandoned my daughter, and “disappeared into the night”, I would have let the house moulder away. I have no love for it. Had no love for it. It was merely a part of my – what do you call it in English? – dowry, my
dot.
Given to me by my papa. He insisted that land and property were far more useful in life than diamonds, or money in the mattress. I never even lived there. Never.'

She leant back in the chair, polishing, poking, fiddling with the fish. ‘When the children were young, Raymond and Florence, we sometimes used to go there and picnic. Then I leased it to a man from Lyon, an industrialist alas! But he enjoyed the solitude and shooting. Raymond enjoyed shooting there too. He stayed for a day or two when he was
on leave from his regiment. He took his military friends. I never asked questions. I am a sensible woman, I like to think.' She held the fish up before me, her grey eyes, agate hard when necessary, were presently kind, amused. She waggled the scales. ‘This is not Moroccan? Or Algerian? Chinese or something, I'd say. Probably Hubert, my husband, picked it up for me in Saigon or Hue. We were stationed there for a while. And you? I talk like a parrot! A sign of age and solitude. You are settled in that wretched house?'

She placed the fish on the table, and looked at me with full expectation. I told her we were all installed, the telephone was connected, that the gardens and potager were my next concern, to restore them, and that I felt, and hoped, a new life was commencing at Jericho, for myself, my son, and for the house itself.

She smiled bleakly, folded the yellow duster she had used for buffing her trinkets. ‘Your brother and my daughter worked themselves to death in that garden. And the wall they built! Stealing stones from the Terrehaute chateau ruins. Madness! The weight! The dust, the cuts and bruises. A wall for Jericho! I had not the least idea, when your brother came to ask me to rent him the house so that he could work at his painting and build a studio, that in fact he was an infant Le Notre! They achieved miracles in only two years. You will have a lot to do. It had been so badly neglected, and you are not exactly young, are you?'

‘Not exactly old, either. I think I still have a little strength left. I'll try.'

‘And why have you come to visit me this morning? I am not your landlady, you recall.'

‘I do, Madame. I am returning, very briefly, to England in a day or two, to sell up my house in London, pack some stuff and ship it out here. I intend to stay on.'

‘So Florence has told me. Well, that is up to you. You
know that Florence is away? She has taken Thomas for a little holiday, a change. A rest after the distress and anguish of the last months. Now that she knows your brother is laid to rest, if that is what one should call a shower of cinders wilfully thrown over a cliff into the sea, the anguish will ease. It has been a very stressful time for her.'

I shifted in my cane chair, it creaked quietly. ‘For all of us, Madame.'

‘For all of you. Of course.' She was agreeing only to be civil. She smoothed the brown velvet ribbon binding her hair. ‘So. Alors. What can I do? Why did you ask me to receive you?'

‘My address in London. And telephone number.' I fished a sealed envelope from my jacket pocket, laid it among the brass toys before us. ‘I'll be away when she gets back. Just in case she wants to contact me
before
I return.'

‘Why do you imagine she would want to contact you? Remember that she has gone away to think things out. To restore her mind. When she returns she will try to restart her life. She has the boy, she will have to find a job. A disabled child is an expensive joy. She will not view you, I think, or any member of your family with affection. Her grief has almost consumed her.'

‘She still carries my family name. Her son is still my brother's son.'

‘Thomas is the centre of her life. She has no room for anything or anyone else. A ruinous, appalling, state of affairs.' She shrugged lightly. ‘But consider, Monsieur, who could accept her with the burden which she would bring him? An imperfect, incontinent creature which she must tend for the rest of her life? You understand me?'

‘Perfectly, Madame.'

‘It is perhaps unfortunate that you are so near; that you have taken over Jericho. I should perhaps have thought of
that? Memories stirred. But we must all be civilized about it. I am certain that we can be.
I
see no reason for her to wish to contact you again, however near. Ever.'

‘Except that I love her. Am in love with her. She knows that. We have spoken of it a number of times: she knows I will be patient, that I am stubborn, that she is absolutely all that I want in my life, to cherish and to heal.'

Madame Prideaux looked at me calmly. She made no move, her eyes were quite flat, unfathomable.

I sat back in my chair. ‘I am not a youth, Madame. I know exactly what I am saying.'

‘You are not a youth, indeed. You are a married man with children. You appear to have failed in your marriage and now attempt to restart your life in middle age with the woman your brother so brutally discarded. What impertinence! I am certain that your protestations of “love” were severely rebuked.'

‘Rebuked indeed. But with infinite gentleness and sweetness. Obviously she has told you of this. I am certain she told you without anger or disdain.'

Madame Prideaux looked across the conservatory to the bubbling fish tank, then down at her lap, flicked a piece of fluff from her flannel skirt. Looked up. ‘Yes. Yes, she told me. I still consider it immoral and distasteful. Your brother never even married her: fathered a malformed child, and fled away to rejoin his loathsome friends from Paris. The sodomites, those who corrupted him from his earliest days. He had no courage. He was unmanly. No courage. He abandoned my child as a spinster, with a disabled child, alone in a small, gossiping little village. What chivalry! How gallant!'

‘She was abandoned as his
wife,
Madame. As Madame Caldicott,
not
as a spinster.'

‘Boff! A faux-marriage on some beach by moonlight, with a tin ring! Capricious, romantic idiots. Very well, I can,
almost,
accept that, but the brutality of his desertion, and of that disgusting creature, Aronovich!'

I leant towards her, the cane chair creaking noisily. ‘
No
! Now I must rebuke
you.
He is not “disgusting”. If it had not been for Solomon Aronovich in the first place my brother surely
would
have been destroyed by those ugly people in Paris. I can agree there. It was Aronovich who got him away from that city, from them, who got him to come here, who forced him to paint, to work, to start his life afresh. Aronovich was his patron, paid him for his paintings, commissioned him to work for him for his new hotel in Cannes. If it had not been for Aronovich, Madame, your daughter would never have had the little joy which once she did. She owes all the happiness she had to him, however brief it might have been. And then, finally, he cared for James after he disappeared. If it hadn't been for him we would none of us ever have known what had happened to him, where he had gone. That he had died -'

‘Of
pneumonia?
In some
private
clinic? In Cannes?'

‘That is so. You may check, if you will, with the British Consul in Nice -'

‘I have not the slightest wish to do so. He is dead. And that is enough for me. But, Monsieur, do not try to cajole me into admiring Monsieur Aronovich. I know those people. I know his tribe. I detest them. They buy and sell and demand their pound of flesh. Remember your own Mr Shakespeare! He knew them … I know them, they are parasites.' She got up abruptly, and walked with anguished little steps towards the potted palms and geraniums.

She was tugging angrily at some yellowing leaves when I said, quietly, ‘You tried to kill James, didn't you. In your car. Tried to run him down. Just after Thomas was born? When it was certain that he was a Down's Syndrome child. Correct?'

She stood absolutely still. One hand clutching a scatter of dead leaves, the other rigid at her side.

‘That is so, Madame, isn't it? You saw James, and he saw you, that day. C'est ça?'

‘That's so. I did. But I touched him. Struck him, and he fell. I hit the iron barrier outside that wretched little bar at Saint-Basile … drove away.'

‘Dented your mudguard. You should have had it repainted perhaps.'

‘One day I will.' She dropped the dead geranium leaves into a pot on the tiled floor, wiped her hands. ‘We distress each other. Life is so strange. I was almost certain that I had got him. I hit his bicycle, from behind, so I felt certain he would not see me or the car. Helas! … How many people did he tell? Not Florence … ?' She turned towards me with a white-knuckled clasp of her hands. ‘Who told
you?

I had got to my feet by this time, and was standing by the Moroccan table. I picked up the waggling fish, flipped its jointed tail. ‘He telephoned the people up at the house where he spent so much time, the people he had known in Paris. He was unhurt -'

She cut me short swiftly. ‘An American writer called Millar? I know him. At L'Hermitage. Of course he
would
run to that dreadful man. Of course. Who told
you?
'

‘Solomon Aronovich. He just mentioned that it had happened. An accident at La Source. James, I think, rather waited for you to try again. But you didn't, did you? Did you try again?'

She shook her head in a preoccupied way, looking at the tiles on the floor, her hair shaking under its fixing of brown ribbon. ‘No. I never did. But I wished him dead. I must confess that. I wished him dead for the wickedness he did to my child. Not
because
of Thomas, you understand – how does anyone know, absolutely, who is responsible for that fault in a child? It is all a question of chromosomes. But for
his desertion, for the depravity of his life from then on, the cowardice, the terrible pain and grief he caused. I hated him for that, and …' She walked slowly towards me across the tiles, her heels clacking slowly and quietly, and when she had got close to me she looked at me with steady grey eyes. ‘And I still do. I will always hate him for the lives he has ruined.' And then she turned and went back to her chair, sat down heavily, put on her glasses, picked up her toothbrush and a piece of brass. ‘No. I never tried to run him down again. I was too shocked by the first attempt. I had never, in my long life, wished to kill another human being until then. I did not cherish the experience. But I could again if necessary …'

And then, as if we had never had the conversation at all, she said, in a high, light, conversational voice, ‘I understand from Dorothée Theobald that all goes well with your son and the French lessons? That must be very satisfactory? They are charming people, Arthur and Dorothée … not terribly clever at the bridge table — they seldom win — but charming guests and good in the garden. You have seen her garden, of course? She is passionate about it, but they do find the living expensive, on his pension. There
is
a modest inheritance, I believe, and that is why I suggested that they earn a few centimes by tutoring after all those years in a school, and their French is perfect. Accented, of course, but pure. So. Excellent. I am happy it has worked so well for everyone.'

She started brushing again, rather too energetically, head down, brush flying. I knew that the meeting was at an end, and moved to the curtain which covered the door to the hall.

‘All has worked very well, Madame. Thank you.'

At the door I turned. She did not look up but said, ‘I will give Florence your envelope. When she returns from Marseilles.'

‘Thank you.' The church clock was striking eleven, as I began to open the door.

She clattered the bit of brass on to the table, placed the battered toothbrush beside it, half turned towards me.

‘You are English of course, Monsieur Colcott, but perhaps you are not a Catholic? It is possible?'

‘Quite possible. I am not. Not anything, frankly.'

She took up a little brass coffee cup, polished it absently on a sleeve, eyes fixed thoughtfully far across the humid room. ‘Nevertheless, I imagine that you believe in the sanctity of human life?'

‘No. Really not. And as I am too young to have experienced a war I can't possibly make that an excuse.'