Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (30 page)

Jamie had been at her wedding, watched her drift, hauntingly pale and drawn, down the aisle to join her life with that of a sixty-year-old minister of the French cabinet and had seen her, in that centuries old act, grow immeasurably ancient. She had become what so many women before her had been, a chattel, a bit of goods sold to the highest bidder. Clothilde had, as those in her circle were wont to say, married very well. In Jamie’s opinion, it was the poorest match he’d ever seen made.

‘Exchanges, James,’ she’d told him some time later, ‘marriage in my world and no doubt many others, is about exchanges. I have something Henri wants, and in return he has something my family is desperate for.” The somethings as it turned out were her family name, one of the oldest and bluest in France, which came with all the rarefied privilege and respect that Henri so craved. In exchange, Clothilde’s family had access to his numerous and very lucrative business contacts. Clothilde however, was not quite as valuable as Henri had first estimated, for after five years of marriage and numerous consultations with a variety of specialists it was concluded that Clothilde was unable to conceive, she was, in that cruelest of summations, barren.

‘Ah James,’ she’d said as they lolled about one lazy summer afternoon in Provence, first editions of Byron, Shelley and Jamie’s omnipresent Yeats scattered in the grass about them. ‘Have you not heard the words, ‘when I was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a child but now I am a man and have put the things of childhood away?’ Love is the thought, the wish of a child. I have learned slowly and yes painfully to put away the wishes and dreams of a child. But I never thought, not once, to be denied the joy, the absolute right to see those dreams in the faces of my children, no I did not. Bitterness is a very bad thing James; try never to drink from its cup, for the taste can become appealing in a perverse fashion. Just a few sips are enough to make an addict.”

He had kissed her for the first time that day, hardly knowing how long he’d wanted to. She had let him, let him kiss her with all the pain and passion his tender young heart had felt, but after she had shook her head sadly and said ‘no James, as much as we might desire it, some things are simply not possible.’

That had not been her opinion the following summer, his eighteenth. He was spending an idle month of it in France, free from the teachings of Jesuits, headed for Oxford in the autumn. Caught between an ending and a beginning, he was in a poor humor, he’d never liked those lapses in time, they made him feel quite lost. He attended a dinner with her and Henri, to which Henri saw fit to invite his mistress. Clothilde, all things considered, had been perfectly composed, gracious to all who sought her company, though Jamie had noticed she was a shade or two paler than was usual. She made the excuse of a headache to their hostess early in the evening, and left without so much as a glance in Henri’s direction.

“Jamie will you take me home please,” was all she said, but he had noticed her use of the more familiar form of his name and wondered at it. She’d taken his arm in what he perceived as tightly controlled rage and smiling politely, left the house. He was not, as it turned out, completely off the mark in his assumption, only mistaken about the precise nature of her anger.

“Jealous?” she had scoffed in reply to his question. “Oh my naïve boy, that is absurd. Of course I know of his mistresses, that is hardly shocking, in fact I approve of it wholeheartedly, it saves me a great deal of unpleasant business, does it not? No Jamie, it is the humiliation—that he should flaunt her so publicly, so flagrantly in front of our friends, in front of the President,
mon dieu
, it is unthinkable that he should be so—so stupid, so disregarding of the proprieties. Dignity is precious little, but it is what I have in this marriage.” She had turned away then, but Jamie had seen some unnameable quantity in her face that he hoped never to see again.

She came to his room that night, once again composed, dressed in a white silk peignoir, seeming no more than the girl he’d first known her to be. She’d stood silent as Jamie hastened to cover himself with the Kirkpatrick linens she had his bed freshly made with each morning. Then she’d come towards him slowly, sitting on the edge of his bed with the dignity of a born princess, sadly fragile in the light of a summer moon.

“Would you make love to me Jamie, just this once, make me feel like the woman I have never had the privilege of being. If I thought you would find this task distasteful I would not ask, but the desire in your eyes mirrors the desire I have kept hidden.”

Jamie, with a knowledge older than his eighteen years, knew she did not want words, could not indeed have borne them. She wanted no declarations of love, no messy
scandale
from which to extricate herself, so Jamie gave his heart in silence, for no matter the cost to himself he would never cause her a moment of pain.

And so he made love to her gently at first, then with a wildness of heart he’d been unaware of possessing. Clothilde stayed with him all that night, leaving only when dawn streaked into view. Returning, he knew, to her rooms before the household staff arose. Henri might have reneged on the delicate deal of their marriage but Clothilde de Rengac had not been raised for such unseemly behavior.

Their affair continued throughout that summer, Jamie learning bit by bit the subtleties and nuances, the thousand shades of gray that lay at the foundation of every woman.

There were only two instances in Clothilde’s life when her rigidly set mask slipped, one was when she made love with Jamie, and the other was to come years later, in a manner he had not wished to see.

It seemed hardly more than yesterday and yet a lifetime away. The last time he’d made love to Clothilde, out in the country, away from suspicious eyes, she had discarded his clothes along with her own. She’d drunk him in with unabashed pleasure, knowing it was the last day, the final time, basking herself in the pained adoration that shone from his own eyes.

She had cried a little, afterwards, clinging to him in a manner so foreign to her sharply controlled nature, that he knew it came from depths she could scarcely acknowledge.

It was the way he remembered her. Face flushed with love, the heavy branches of an apple tree dappling her face in sunshine and shadow, her hair, fine as a child’s spread about her face like watered rays of light. She had grasped his face between her hands and stared at him with a fierceness that made her seem angry.

“Whatever happens Jamie, don’t let them sell you, don’t be just another part of their ludicrous business dealings. You are too fine for that, keep that sweet soul of yours—swear to me James that you won’t let them do that to you, swear to me.” Jamie had in his innocence sworn, never knowing for one minute what terrible little tricks life could play upon one.

The next day he flew back to Ireland to prepare for his sojourn at Oxford as five generations of Kirkpatricks had done before him.

His path would not cross Clothilde’s again for some years, though he always sent her a breathtaking arrangement of flowers on her birthday and a polite note at Christmas.

Then one wintry day in Paris, where he was conducting a lengthy round of negotiations for the purchase of two Belgian linen mills, he saw a slender figure in a deep gray coat alighting from the back of a silver Daimler. Her ash-blonde hair was a little paler but still not a strand of it out of place.

Henri had died a year earlier and Jamie had sent the proper condolences, though he’d felt congratulations were more in order. Clothilde would finally have her freedom and at forty-two a woman, such as she was, was only coming into her vintage years.

He’d coaxed her into dinner that night and it was then she brought up the past they’d so carefully skirted all afternoon.

“So James you too have grown a little older, perhaps a little wiser. Ah
, mon dieu
, is that a touch of the cynic I see in your eyes? Well, James, that is what comes of breaking promises. Do not give me that puzzled look, acting is not one of your talents. You made me a promise once, not such a long time ago. But you broke it, didn’t you? You let them have what was most precious in you for their own ends.”

“Life only gives you so many choices,” he’d said quietly, eyes turned away from Clothilde’s all-seeing dark ones.

“Don’t lie to me James, it ill suits your nature. It was an exchange, you gave your dreams to save your father’s soul, one of you was cheated though and it wasn’t your father.”

Jamie made no reply, for Clothilde expected none. He had no argument to make in his defense. She knew as well as he the reasons he’d let go of the deepest desires of his heart, that his father, to whom he’d given love and loyalty without measure all his days, had used the very fineness of his son’s character against him in the end.

It wasn’t until after they had returned to her beautiful apartment, overlooking the Seine, for after-dinner cognac, that Jamie saw how tired she appeared, how drawn and old.

“Are you ill?” he’d asked bluntly, not knowing how to broach such an unbroachable subject.

“Ill, Jamie what a weak word that is, no I am not ill. I have cancer, some would classify that as ill, but I can reassure you there are many, many worlds between those two words.”

He did not need to ask the next question, for it was answered by the quiet desperation that every pore and fiber of her being spoke of. Clothilde would not have her vintage years, would never be granted freedom in this life. She had been given away to an uncaring, thoughtless man years ago and now some unseen force had seen fit to give her over to a disease that in its monstrous, mindless gluttony would clutch and claw at every cell in her body, until it took the very last breath from her. Clothilde, aged forty-two, would never know another moment of freedom in her life.

She would live another eighteen months. Brutal, agonizing months. It would be Jamie who stood by her through the worst of it. He who lived this double life—a wife, pregnant for the second time and terrified, at home and an ex-lover dying in Paris. Flying back and forth, exhausted, fleeing grief in two countries. He who held Clothilde’s hand when she wept with pure terror and held her head on the days when her stomach refused to hold so much as a cup of weak tea.

Jamie who buried his second son while Clothilde took a few more steps towards her own grave. Who watched his wife spiral into a depression so severe he feared for her life. It was he who held Clothilde at the end as she hovered somewhere between the agony of the final stage of cancer and the oblivion of drugs. Jamie, who against doctor’s orders took her from the sterile confines of the hospital and drove her to her beloved Provence, praying the whole way that she would make it through those last few miles. And so, it was he who held her tightly, like father to child, as she watched the last rites of the world she knew, the rise and fall of the summer moon, the burning fire of a red-gold sun in the dewdrop hours. Jamie who heard her last words.

“Jamie, the colors of my life have been dark, but for one summer I had a rainbow. Thank you, my love, for that season.” She’d held his hand tightly, crying a little as the pain came in waves, rhythmic and unceasing. “I will take care of your babies for you, I promise. Remember, in the beginning and in the end there are only dreams.”

He had, only minutes later, closed her eyes against a glorious summer morning. Relieved in some small measure that her pain was over and hopeful, in a place very far down, that his baby sons would no longer be alone. Through Clothilde he’d made reparations to the mother who had died so similarly, took care as the man what he could not as the boy.

One year later, there was another son, a wee fiery-headed scrap of a man who was born before his time but unlike his brothers before him, born breathing. Stuart Gordon Kirkpatrick survived only three weeks and when Jamie laid his third son to rest in a little blue velvet-lined casket he closed the door on hope and happiness and saw his wife do the same. Neither spoke of children again, it was a silent agreement. Another death would finish them both. Colleen took refuge in God, had the marriage annulled by taking Holy Orders and went away to live with the Blessed Sisters of Mercy.

In a world that had once seemed so limitless with possibility, so wide open with an unending array of adventure, that had seemed so damn—golden, the lights for Jamie, once an incurable optimist, had dimmed considerably.

“Oh Jamie, I’m so sorry, I’d no idea—about your babies—I—”

Jamie came round sharply and suddenly to the realization that he had revealed far more than he’d intended to and that Pamela had tear tracks streaming down her face.

“Sweetheart I’m sorry, I never meant to go on like that. God knows I’ve been drunk and foolish many a time but I’ve never babbled on like this.”

She disregarded his protest. “Your sons, all three, it seems too cruel to be true. How can you believe in God after He took so much from you?”

“Because I’m a good Catholic boy at heart,” he said bitterly and then meeting her eyes gave in to the truth. “I’d nothing else left to believe in and there were plenty of dark nights when I cursed him aloud, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life it’s that you’ve got to believe in something, small or big, or you’ll completely lose your hold on living. My sons are with God. So you see if I didn’t believe in Him I’d have gone insane.”