A Period of Adjustment (28 page)

‘Yup. You also said that the people here, at Les Palmiers, would start to get a bit suspicious if we came here …'

‘And just parked? And never opened the shutters. It could be difficult.'

‘I know. You said.'

‘And Marcia. I don't want to get her in trouble. You know, she'll be arriving back soon. At least, I suppose so.
You never can tell with Marcia. Rome today, Athens or maybe Malibu. Never know. Doesn't know herself really. Where she is …'

‘Drop in at any moment? Catch us by surprise? That it?'

‘That's exactly it. And then, well, there is Freddy. He has to go see his father. We have to go up to Rome. See Bobbie. It's all part of the deal, you know? Not Rome, really. Outside. It's quite pleasant. Lago Bracciano, cooler than the city in July and August. But I do have to take him up.' She stopped and pulled off a flip-flop, examined the sole with care.

‘When do you go? Exactly?'

‘Pretty soon … I trod in some chewing-gum. Disgusting … Soon. I want to avoid Ferragosto, the big holiday, in August.'

‘So soon.'

‘So soon.' She slid her foot into the sandal. ‘We really have to go.' She was not looking at me, jingled the little key.

I took her face in my hand and tilted it towards me. I was vaguely surprised, chastened, to see that her eyes were brightly rimmed.

‘Not tears?'

‘Almost. Silly. Yes.'

‘This is all just concealing one simple word, isn't it?'

She drew her head away from my hand. ‘I'm not that clever. Can't write books and things. Don't know about words. What word?'

‘Goodbye. That's it. Isn't it?'

We stood together in the filtered light in the drab little room, a splinter of sunlight sparked for a moment on the rail of the brass bed.

‘It sounds awful. Just like that.'

‘But that's what it is, okay?'

She suddenly brushed the fist holding the dangling key
across her eyes. ‘I guess so. Wiser. Did you turn off that tap in the shower? Really hard?'

‘I did. Yes.'

‘It drips.'

‘Sure.' I leant down and kissed her on the forehead. She stood motionless. ‘Now, Lulu, remember. What we did this afternoon?'

‘I got my hair done at Etienne's, had lunch with Véronique at her studio. She'll confirm. She's all right.'

‘I was over at Saint-Jeannet at the co-operative. Two blades for the scythes. They're already in the car. I got them yesterday. Then to Draguignan to look at the Allied Cemetery outside Muy.'

We had crossed the room. I reached up by the door, straightened a cheap print of Antibes harbour.

‘You go on down,' she said. ‘By the stairs. I'll wait here, then I'll take the elevator. You never know …'

‘Like two felons.'

‘I'll come down when you've driven away.'

‘Will you hear me? Drive away?'

She looked deliberately across the room. ‘I'll hear. Oh yes. I'll hear you go,' she said.

Standing at the far end of the studio, unfazed by the steep climb up from the Long Room, Dottie clapped her hands with delighted surprise. ‘But it's huge! The whole length of the house, isn't it? I'm amazed, it's really marvellous.'

I pushed open a shutter which had swung closed. ‘It will be. When I have got it all sorted out. This stuff, the desk, chairs, the crates all arrived from London yesterday. A half-load, they call it. Sharing with someone else, I think at Le Foux. Come and sit down.' I pulled a rush-bottomed chair into the centre of the tiled floor and she sat among the tea chests and as yet unwrapped stuff from Simla Road. ‘Poor
old Arthur!' I screwed up a mass of old newspaper. ‘I loathe dentists.'

She pulled off her straw hat, fixed a hairpin in her plait, curled tight on the top of her head. ‘I call it my whipped-cream walnut, this hair-style. Arthur won't let me cut it. Idiot. It's his own fault, the dentist. He hasn't been for months and yesterday the throbbing started again. An abscess, of course. Maddening.'

‘But a good excuse for you to come here?' I chucked the paper bundle in a corner.

‘Oh, yes! Fearfully good. Well, he was passing on his way. Just dropped me off.' She looked round the long white-walled room. ‘In all the years we've lived here, before Arthur retired even, I have often passed Jericho but never been inside. Was it like this before? I mean with your brother and Florence?'

I sat down on one of the tea chests. It had ‘office books' chalked across its side. ‘More or less. After he disappeared, I rather think she stripped it out. It was pretty Spartan when I first saw it. I've tarted it up since April.'

She put her hat on the floor beside her, looking round with obvious pleasure. ‘I wouldn't say “tarted”. The whole house feels “lived in”. It all feels very personal to you. Your house. And you've even got an aquarium! My word. I thought one only found them in dentists' waiting-rooms and Chinese restaurants.'

‘Well you've found one here. It's Giles's, need I say? My present for his tenth last week. He was almost sick with delirious joy, and then went into sullen rage when I insisted it was put here. Not downstairs, or his bedroom. I had a hell of a time. But I've won, as you can see.'

‘Far better. It's rather noisy.'

‘Oxygenator. I'll switch it off, kill the fish, when I start work here. But he has done it all himself. Landscaped it.
Can
you landscape under water? Rocks and pebbles and so on. The fish were gifts from Clotilde and her chum.'

‘Clotilde served us that huge couscous at the party? I had never eaten there before, the Maison Blanche. Really rather good.'

‘She also appropriated the blond god you admired working in the garden.'

‘The Donatello? Very fine. She found him? Is he French?'

‘Yes. We call him Mon-Ami, he's really Luc Roux. His parents own the traiteur in Saint-Basile. You know it?'

She nodded, picked up her hat, settled it on her knees. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. He's obviously a by-blow from the Occupation days. A few of the local girls suddenly gave birth to corn-blond children in the late forties. No one was desperately upset down here. Far more easy-going than up north. I assume that Papa is also blond?'

‘And getting fat. Thinning blond. Pity if his son follows on. Being fat would put an end to his labours here. What an odd world it all is.'

For a little time we sat up in the studio in the cool, idly talking. It was just after three o'clock, too soon for tea, too early for wine. L'heure verte. Giles was over at the Villa des Violettes with Frederick. His time with his new friend was rapidly running out. In a week or so he'd be off to the ‘Lago' and his father. Ferragosta was the fifteenth of August. I'd miss him too: when he left I'd be firmly on my own with Giles. A daunting thought. How to amuse him?

As if she had sensed that my scattered observations were prompted by some family problem, Dottie got up and wandered slowly across to the aquarium. I followed her, hands in my pockets. She was wearing a thin cotton shirt, a blue and white striped skirt, tiny pearl ear-rings. No denim now. ‘It's very pretty. All the bubbles. What happens to Giles when the summer ends? Back to the UK? He's ten now. You can't leave it too late.'

‘I know, I know. It haunts me, don't think it doesn't. I'll cope with that a bit later, not today.'

She traced a finger along the glass side of the tank, fish swung away, startled. ‘No shrimps in here?' she said quietly, not looking at me.

I half laughed. Caught it, suppressed it. ‘No shrimps. Sharp as a box of knives, you are.'

She put a hand on my arm without looking at me. ‘I am being perfectly idiotic'

‘No. I know you, Mrs Theobald. You weren't far off the mark at the very start. The only shrimp there is stands beside you. Simple.'

‘Into the net were you?'

‘Into the net. Willingly. No regrets. The only regret I might feel is that next week there won't be a “shrimper” around.'

‘Oh? She is so attractive. Wildly attractive, alive, fresh, gay. Don't blame you for a moment. She was,
is,
good for you. Got you to shake yourself up, change your attitude, what you wear, who you are, that absurd yellow car! Simply marvellous, huge fun!' She turned and we walked through the stacked packing-chests, the wrapped bits of stuff from Simla Road waiting to be unpacked. Picked her hat from the floor where she had left it.

‘Dottie?' I touched her shoulder. ‘Isn't it amazing just how often one can go trundling through life being absolutely convinced that how you are existing is exactly, and precisely, how you have always wanted to exist – and be quite wrong? You discover you have made a very grievous error, and you shouldn't have been existing as you have at all. Your new existence could be just across a room or, as in this case, just across your terrace one afternoon. I was losing out slowly. I was forced to reconsider my life.'

She laughed, shrugged, went towards the door, leant against the jamb. ‘The extraordinary thing is that she had
much the same effect on me. She forced me to reconsider
my
life. Ever since she arrived with her child, last summer, she brought a beam of dancing light along with her. It sounds quite silly, but she did. I'd become such a frump. Flopped about into indifference, wore my gardening gear all day. One suitable dress to play bridge. She forced me, by her own attitude, to reflect on mine. To make an effort to change. Not for Arthur, God bless the man: he wouldn't take note if I started to prune the roses in a crinoline. No, the effort was for my own self-respect. Woke me before the cobwebs smothered me, and it was too
late
to change. Easy to let things slide … easy, and quite fatal.' She turned and started down the stairs. I followed her, keeping one step behind; it was a steep descent.

‘All that I can say', she called over her shoulder, ‘is that we were most fortunate in your guest. That evening, at Giles's party, she looked so vivid, so alive, naughty, so attractive … it was splendid. But, of course,
you
knew that already?'

We had reached the bedroom floor, went on down to the Long Room.

‘I knew that already. Yes. I know very well what you mean.'

She smiled lightly, stopped at the door of the Long Room, raised a finger.

‘Listen! Your femme de ménage? Clotilde. Singing like a lark. How pretty it is: “
J
'
attendrai, le jour et la nuit
. “
J
'
attendrai toujours, ton retour.
”' Her voice was sweet, young. She smiled again and we moved into the cool of the room, shadows dark in the corners, slits of light striping through the shutters. ‘A silly popular song, long before she was born. “J'attendrai” meant such a lot during the German Occupation. It was almost a secret thing: people sang it all the time. Whistled it. I am waiting. Waiting for the return of their men from the deportations, for the Germans to be
driven out, for us, the Allies, to arrive. For liberation. It was a sort of symbol, of courage, of holding on. Perhaps
she
sees it as a sort of “holding on”? Possible?'

I thought of Mon-Ami. ‘Quite possible,' I said. ‘But we were talking about Lulu de Terrehaute, remember?'

‘Ah, yes! The shrimping-lady! Let's go into the air.'

On the terrace we took the tin chairs and sat under the vine in the cool. Cicadas chiselled in the olive tree near the house. In the long grass down the path crickets scissored and sawed, and beyond the fig trees, in the shimmer of afternoon, Mon-Ami swung gracefully with his scythe, a gentle, rhythmic movement.

‘Frederick is her only child, I assume. By Robert de Terrehaute? And he's in Rome?'

‘They go up next week. The boy has to spend part of his holiday with his father. Reasonable but tiresome. It's all this ancestor crap. He has to keep his “ancient French” polished. I can't imagine why. No one can understand it and no one uses it any longer.' Dottie stretched her legs before her, turning an ankle to the left, then right. ‘I gather from Lulu that her husband considers that the Louisiana Purchase was evil and corrupt? Which it very probably was, but since it all happened in 1803 I can't imagine what he thinks poor Frederick will gain from it. He's unlikely to become Due or whatever in the democratic USA after all this time! And the family house here is in ruins, the land's split up. No one gives a toss.'

‘Madame Mazine at the hotel does. Almost swooned that night. Remember?'

‘Oh, she would. Some do still. Precious few.' She looked at a little gold watch pinned to her shirt. ‘Arthur's going to be late. That's a bore. The aviaries and so on. Watering to do. But she did look so pretty in candlelight that evening. It made Florence rather irritated, I felt. We are a funny lot, we women.'

‘Funny indeed. Lulu's had all her hair cut off. Like a boy.'

‘Oh Lord! Oh well. I reckon she still looks quite lovely. That exquisite head …'

‘Looked.
I shan't be seeing her again.'

‘I see.' She folded her hands, pursed her lips gently as Clotilde came out with a glass jug of iced lemonade, two glasses and a little bowl of icing sugar. Set them down with a bob and a nod.

‘It's hot, eh, Madame? I have a cold flask here, for mon ami, regardez!' She patted the big pocket of her apron, there was a chink of glass, and she went off down the steps to the scything figure.

‘She looks quite different here. Why?' said Dottie pouring lemonade.

‘She doesn't look like this at home or in town. No bosom, no rose in the hair, no lipstick. That only happens when she's safely away from her papa. Maurice-the-taxi, you know him? An old hypocrite. Knows nothing about her life at Jericho. Thank God.'

‘Well, she looks marvellous. What love can do …' She faltered for a moment, then resumed briskly. ‘Watering tonight! Be dry as old bones. Takes me hours. Then I
do
have to put on gardening gear. You were good to ask me over. I have rather talked myself to silence. You may be glad to hear.'