A Period of Adjustment (5 page)

‘But I still have a week in my room. Until the twenty-sixth?'

‘Indeed. But it will be better for a little paint, and the paper is quite … poor.'

What she meant was that the paper was peeling off in grubby strips like old bandage here and there and would be replaced. Which was good news.

So I nodded, politely, and we went down to the bar, noisier now, with the volume up on the television and a group of truck drivers arguing good-naturedly about tyre pressures. Maurice was among them. He was affable, drew me aside to a corner by the pin-table. Monsieur le Maire was home but weak. He would be relieved if I wished to continue renting the Simca. He had it in mind, anyway, to change to another model when he was better. And was there a question of a telephone? Madame Mazine and Eugène suggested that there might be. Or had he misheard? You could never be certain with Eugène. He was always so busy rushing here and there …

News does indeed travel fast in small communities. But in this case it was saving me a good deal of trouble; after all, his brother-in-law was the mayor and I was paying handsomely for the use of his Simca. I obviously, from what I had been told, was helping out with medical bills, so perhaps someone knew someone who knew someone else who would be sympathetic to my desire for a telephone? Madame Mazine had suggested, quietly, that ‘if you have the money, Monsieur Colcott, you will very shortly have a telephone'. So.

‘No indeed! You heard quite correctly from Eugène. I am about to go into Sainte-Brigitte tomorrow to get the forms and so on.'

To my immense delight, Maurice brushed the remark aside as if it had been a mildly irritating gnat. ‘Boff! Forms! Bureaucrats. Des gens
terribles.'

I agreed warmly and offered him a refill. He had drained his glass after his line about bureaucrats, quite deliberately. We were to discuss telephones.

Sitting at the corner table, which was far enough away from the bar counter to hear oneself talk, he pointed out, with his newly charged glass of Ricard, that my brother, ‘Jimmie', had once applied for a telephone, but had not been able to afford it after all. Times were hard for a painter, wasn't that so? I knew, of course, that the poteaux had already been erected along the road from Saint-Basile, past the house, to Saint-Basile-les-Pins? All that had to be done was take a line from the road up to the house … And so it went on. Reasonable, simple, absolutely ‘pas de problème'. He took a swig of his drink and I picked up my cue. But what, I said worriedly, about the forms and papers and most important of all, how would I go about paying for this bounty? Simple! said Maurice, setting down his glass and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Simple, my dear Monsieur. As I probably knew, Monsieur le Maire had had a very bad time with his prostate; it was a delicate subject to bring up in public, and he apologized, but health was all. Health – malheur! – was life itself! And that cost money. The clinic had been a disastrous expenditure, eating away at his fragile resources, for a maire did not become a millionaire from his work for the community! Ah no!

This line of anguish went on for a time. I let him tell me the story without interruption for fear we'd both lose track of my telephone; but all was well with a second glass of Ricard, and it was agreed, in very low tones as if we had been planning to blow up a bridge somewhere or demolish the mairie itself, that a little ‘gesture' from me, towards the ailing Monsieur le Maire, slipped ‘under the table' would be most acceptable and also go a long way to securing a machine and getting it installed in the charming little house which I would soon claim as my own.

It was unthinkable, Maurice insisted, that a writer such as I should be without a telephone and unable to be in touch with – he hunted about for a few place names anxiously – New York? Washington? London? Moscow even! As a writer I had to be completely au fait with the world. Was that not so? I assured him that it was so and suggested a price might be written down on a piece of paper?

This Maurice agreed to with alacrity. It saved him the acute embarrassment of having to phrase the sum, the amount due to his brother-in-law for the kindness and the amount due to
him
for bringing us together. After all, he had suggested that I rent the Simca in the first place. Hein? It would not be amiss? I sent Giles across to Claude behind the bar to get pen and paper, while Maurice went on to suggest that he had a nephew who had a friend who would both be happy to come and install the poles which would be needed to bring the line from the road. He felt that three would be quite enough, and turning slightly, so that he was screened from any possible observer, he wrote, rather laboriously I felt, some figures on the back of a beer mat which Giles had brought across, with a yellow plastic Biro.

By the end of the session I had secured my telephone. When the instrument would be delivered was uncertain, but it was mine, for sure. The nephews and the poles and the ‘tra tra la la' (meaning the cable or line) would be discussed, as would the price for them, as soon as he could find them and bring them all together. About this time, just as the third Ricard was being raised in a salute to the completion of the transaction, Eugène arrived and slid the menu for the evening across the little table and said he'd be back in fifteen minutes. Maurice, by this time, was sitting comfortably, his eyes slightly glazing with the Ricard consumed, the beer mat safe in his inner pocket, with my signature of acceptance for the sum indicated.

Giles took the menu and asked what I'd like. I suggested biscuits and cheese after this essay into financial largesse. It had not been desperately immodest, but not minor either. When Eugène returned I settled for the tagliatelle and chicken livers.

‘Yuck. Will I like that?' said Giles.

‘I honestly don't know, Giles, and at this very moment I don't terribly care. You are not going to your bed with a gut full of veal and saffron rice. You've been stuffing yourself the entire day. You'll be sick.'

‘I might. I jolly well might. Chicken livers! Yuck!'

‘Well, we'll find out, won't we? It takes about seven hours to get through your system. We'll see if you've been poisoned. The lavatory is at the end of your corridor. Convenient.'

‘A convenient convenience,' he said brightly, watching to see my reaction.

I made none at all.

Aronovich was as good as his word, coped with the cremation arrangements, and left me to get on to the very understanding Vice-Consul in Nice. I sorted out the bank, and really almost effortlessly, it would seem, James and his mortal remains were disposed of without fuss or fury. I attended the brief ceremony with Aronovich. No one else was present apart from two young women whom we thought might have been nurses from the clinic. But we none of us spoke. It was simple, tidy, absolutely unemotional.

The last member of the family I grew up with was finally scattered to the four winds a few days later. I drove along the coastal road and pulled into a lay-by where I chucked the dust which had, I supposed, been James Elliot Caldicott over the cliffs near Le Trayas. There was no one there, no one saw me. The winds whipped and gusted over the sharp
red rocks and the seething foam-frilled sea far below and then he had gone.

There was nothing now left of him. I'd already got rid of the shabby little holdall from the hospital and the bits and pieces it contained, even the old photograph of the family on the beach at Dieppe which he had treasured. The torn bit of label dangling on the handle was from an Hotel Amstel, Amsterdam, wherever that was. I just stuffed it all into a poubelle in the court under my window. I heard the dustcart in the early morning grinding away towards the square. And that was that.

After chucking the ashes I drove back slowly along the coast road and got to Dottie and Arthur Theobald's just in time for tea, to collect Giles. Dottie was in the kitchen setting Lulu biscuits on a plate. The kettle boiled, whisperingly.

‘All done?' she said, pushing a strand of faded hair into the plait on her head. ‘So easy, cremation. No fuss, no wailing. At least in this case, I suppose? Arthur and I have insisted on it. It's still not frightfully popular in France. They do so adore all that white marble and weeping angels in Catholic countries. Little sepia photographs set into the stone. Awful really. But it takes all kinds, doesn't it? They say it is burning the soul but I don't know.'

I turned in the paper flap on the biscuit packet. ‘I suppose that James must have had a soul to burn?' I said. ‘Must have. He was a painter. He did appreciate light, colour, design. He just wasn't very good at expressing what he felt from what he saw. Distilling, do I mean? Rendering the emotion on to canvas. Couldn't transfer what he felt from what he actually saw. Something on those lines. Perhaps he never really “felt”? His work was frighteningly angry, confused, often violent, or else just awful and bland. Like cheap Christmas cards for socially mobile estate agents and property developers. That sort of thing. Sometimes I wondered
why he ever bothered. We're not an arty family … I wonder where this not very gifted talent came from? Odd, isn't it?'

Dottie had set everything on a tray, told me to bring the teapot and the plate of biscuits and we went out on to the terrace. Arthur and Giles came down the dirt path from the aviaries together, this time talking in French, to my satisfaction. But of course I couldn't be sure that the conversation hadn't started the instant they heard me call up to them to join us. However, it was a short burst of animation, and they were laughing. Giles had a hand held high above his head.

‘Was it very sad? Going to collect his ashes? Was it?'

I said not really, but he wasn't much interested because he had a small white egg in his hand, lying like a fat pearl on his open palm for me to see. I said it had all been very easy, and he said that the egg came from a Senegal parrot which Arthur had given him because it was cracked and wouldn't turn into another Senegal parrot. Which was a bit of a pity. After this scintillating piece of news, he shut up and got on with his tea and Arthur said he understood that we'd been moved into the Pavilion and was it awful? And I said that we had indeed, and that it was. We had spent a few moderately anguished nights there in the stench of size and cheap super gloss paint, plus the sour smell of bill-sticker's paste, because they had wallpapered the place as well, the evening before.

‘Surely they didn't wallpaper the whole place, did they?' Dottie's eyes were bright with mild amusement. I said not all the room. Just the places where the old paper had peeled off rotted by damp. Nothing matched exactly. The paper had the same pattern all right, but was yellow instead of pink, but that really didn't matter because already three spanking new poteaux had been set along the wall at Jericho and all that we waited for now was the arrival of
the engineer from Sainte-Brigitte with the lines and the instrument and we'd have a telephone at last. And we'd quit the Pavilion as soon as possible.

‘I don't really want to leave the hotel until I hear something from my wife. She's almost bound to try and telephone me now. I got a postcard two days ago from Marbella, sent a
week
before, saying that the recce was over and that she was on her way back to Valbonne. So I have to hang about rather.'

Arthur broke a Lulu biscuit in two and dipped a piece in his tea. ‘She obviously hasn't given you a number?'

‘Ah, no. Helen likes her life private. She'll call when she's ready. No one at Directory Enquiries has ever heard of a Rhys-Evans in Valbonne or at the address I had on the card. So it's a matter of patience.'

Giles was watching me intently, quite still, his biscuit held in his fingers. ‘Maybe she'll call tonight?' He put the bit of biscuit in his mouth, looked away. ‘Perhaps she'll telephone on my birthday? She'll remember that, won't she?'

I have a feeling that I looked pretty blank. Dottie filled in my silence of surprise. ‘You have a birthday! How splendid. Soon?'

Giles looked up at me with slightly raised eyebrows. ‘I bet Will doesn't remember. You don't, do you?'

‘No idea. None at all. Didn't even know you were having one. Sorry. When?'

‘July. The second. The crab, that's my sign.'

‘Very soon,' said Arthur sticking the other half of his biscuit in his tea.

Dottie said sharply, ‘Arthur, I
do
wish you wouldn't do that. It is rather foul and a fearfully bad example to Giles.' And turning to him she said, ‘Surely she'll call before then. That's weeks away. What age will you be? It's so difficult to guess now that you all wear these awful jeans.'

‘I'll be ten.'

‘Giles, are you sure? Ten? God! How the years have gone.' I set my cup down slowly.

‘You weren't noticing perhaps,' said Dottie gently. ‘Years do that, I'm afraid.'

‘I'll be ten. I've been waiting and waiting to be ten, you know? It's quite grown up, isn't it?'

‘Nearly. Not far off. You make me feel dreadfully old.'

‘Well you are really, aren't you? What age were you when I was born, then?'

‘I can't remember. Ten? Well, I was about thirty-six … about that.'

‘Golly!' said Giles admiringly. Arthur snorted with laughter.

After tea we stacked the cups, Arthur and Giles went back to their birds and Dottie got a pair of secateurs and we went up to her rose garden.

‘I'll give you some of my delicious Surpasse Tout. It's an old-fashioned rose and it has the most heavenly scent. For your Pavilion, to fight the wallpaper glue and awful paint smells, and, look, these Provence cabbage are glorious …'

‘I feel pretty awful about Giles's birthday. Fancy forgetting one's son's birthday. Terribly important to him, of course. I've just had rather a lot to cope with recently. I know Helen thinks he's nine. She said so once.'

Dottie snipped away, cautiously. ‘Well, he is. Presently. He'll be ten in a month, or something. He's so tall, one can't guess their ages. He's very handsome. Look, here's a smell-killer. Mind the thorns and the odd greenfly. They are brutes this year.'