Patrick Parker's Progress (41 page)

She was equally surprised at how much she enjoyed reading it, and - even more surprising - how much of it she understood. If things had been different, she thought, if things had only been different
...
But she remembered her little
frisot
tis's
face when she told him she had never voted. Despite his claim that the world was beyond needing such puny stuff, he was clearly astonished - horrified even. It took a while, quite a long while, for her to understand that things could only be different if she had made them different. And she had not. It was as simple as that. She had fallen into Edwin's arms without giving anything else a second thought. A random moment changing the whole course of her life. But a random moment caused by -
Oh Bugger Lilly and her Good Forward Planning - caused by Patrick Parker, and it was him she blamed. Oh and Florence, mustn't forget Florence. But at least it seemed that Florence Parker had got her Come-Uppance, was paying the price. Patrick had not. Unjust. She saw the happy newspaper cuttings with all those smiling teeth of his. Oh, no. Patrick had paid for none of it. Nor ever would
...
All the same - she liked to daydream - that one day he might.

Gradually a few minor changes in Audrey's status took place as Madame Bonnard became less sprightly. Invitations occasionally arrived which would once have requested 'Monsieur et Madame Edwin Bonnard'; now, sometimes, they tactfully suggested that he bring either an unnamed guest, or - occasionally - they mentioned Audrey by name. She understood that she was a recognised - even accepted - fixture. Edwin's children were grown up with families of their own and quite unconcerned about their father's morality. Life had moved on since her youth. Many great men had been delivered of their haloes by the women they once kept and then abandoned thinking they could do so with impunity. The world had seen enough to find it salacious amusement rather than genuinely shocking. It was the way of things, now, thought Audrey. The world was confused about its women so it was the women's job not to be confused about themselves. At least she was clear on where she stood and she did not mind. A kept women without an independent existence of her own, she thought, can be anything. Edwin was growing old now, and as he once predicted, she was still young. Or young enough. Caterpillar, Chrysalis and Butterfly: if she had lived in the days when heraldry designated status and belief, that is what she would have borne on her shield. In the meantime, she was content enough. Like a good bourgeoise. Indeed, sometimes Audrey laughed outright to see how much they appeared to be living in a painting by one of Edwin's ancestors.

And then, as if to spite their calm, affectionate, almost bourgeois life together, along came a fierce little zephyr to blow on that near-dormant flame of hers. It happened in Paris, and it was thus
...

9

Madame Bonnard
Regnant

Apsu wrote an answer to one of her A-level papers in which she suggested that if the world designed its new roads to be curved, then people would necessarily drive more slowly. A short answer, she wrote, to some of the gravest ecological problems, and a way of taking the masculine style out of fast driving. She was marked down for making design a gender issue in such a blatant, unprovable way. She objected. Her examiner, one Peter Greene, who was very keen on the stylistic qualities of garden decking, fought back. Apsu fought, too. Taking it to the very top. She stood before the panel and she made her apologia. 'Testosterone rules such things,' she said. 'It is drawn on the caveman's walls.' But she also produced statistics kindly provided by the Automobile Association.

She won. She was granted her A level. Peter Greene gave an interview in the
Daily Express
saying that the world had gone far too far in its political correctness - it was all the Americans' fault with their
vertically challenged
for short and their
sight impaired
for downright blind.

Apsu countered this with an interview in the
Daily Mail.
She said the issues had not been taken far enough. They asked her to pull her skirt a little higher over her knees for the photograph. She turned on her heels (flat), and left.

'That is some young woman,' said the journalist. With admiration. She wrote a scathing piec
e about Apsu and her arrogance.

The French had long recognised the gifts of J. M. W. Turner, smiling to themselves at the English who took such a long time to understand the bridge he formed between the old and the new, the living world and the sublime. How absurd, they shrugged, that he has no museum of his own. How idiotic that there is no monument. Well, they would show those Philistine English how they regarded genius. Like buccaneers rifling through a stolen jewel chest, they plucked him out. They would honour him if his fellow countrymen would not. The French cultural establishment licked its lips and clapped its hands as it began to arrange a grand exhibition of his work to be
held in the newly built Centre L’
Arlesienne. Along with works from the great collections by artists who were known to have been influenced by him. Girtin, Cotman and Gilchrist, of course, and all the 'landskip' greats - but also the French moderns, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, hung there in homage. The English, but only in very rare exceptions, were once more fashionable.

Audrey became excited. She expected to be asked to accompany Edwin and there was something delightful about the appropriateness of her first major public appearance with him coinciding with this essentially English exhibition. A landmark in her life. A moment of acceptance. Head held high.

But no.

Not to be.

Madame Bonnard would accompany her husband to the opening of 'Turner and his World', and to the banquet afterwards. Audrey swallowed hard and accepted it. But a few days before the exhibition's official opening, and when the show was hung, Edwin took Audrey for a private evening viewing. Edwin and the Curator were old friends and the Curator also had his little secret sweetheart. It was, Edwin suggested to Audrey as they walked around the exhibition, a handsome show. And a fitting opening to a fine building, which, curiously enough, was also designed by a British partnership. 'Really?' said Audrey, wide-eyed, though she already knew: it was Patrick's. Dolly had sent her the cutting. With exclamation marks in biro all over it. Not that she needed that, either. It was all very well documented in her
Architecture Today.

'Monsieur Parker and his colleagues will be taking on the Louvre next,' the Curator said, highly amused at his wit.
‘I
am told that his practice is one of the best in the world. So - naturally enough - they do most of their best work abroad. Oh, the British, the British
...'
He laughed even more uproariously.

At the private dinner, later, she congratulated the Curator on his remarkably outward-looking vision - 'Not only painters, of course
’
she said. 'As you say - we have produced some of the finest engineers, the finest architects, the finest design visionaries in the world
...'
She waited for his response. 'It would make a marvellous exhibition, don't you think? "
Brunel
and His World"?' ~

The Curator smiled at her politely, if a little uncomfortably, as he filled her glass. 'But yes,' he said smoothly. 'Take a little more of the
foie gras,
why not?'

Such men were nothing if not polite. Then he turned to Edwin and resumed his conversation.

Once Audrey would have said nothing more. Taken the hint. But this time she had something to say and she wished to speak. She interrupted them. "Think of Telford,' she said. "Think of Stephenson. And think of the great, great genius that was Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
.' And then there's all the other great men -' She thought desperately. 'Darwin,' she said triumphantly. 'Even Prince Albert in his way'

The Curator and Edwin both looked at her and blinked. Sometimes the notion of de Beauvoir and Moreau met the reality and that could be awkward. They both gave her a polite smile. The Curator's little friend looked from one to the other and smiled prettily, too. What
was
going on?

Audrey, suddenly annoyed, raised her glass in defiance. 'Perhaps, Monsieur, you should have an exhibition about
Brunel
next,' she said. 'After all - he was half French.' She sipped her drink before adding, 'Normandy I believe. And he was educated in Paris. I've always been
very
fond of his Box Tunnel on the Great Western. Haven't you?'

It would have been a good victory had it not been spoilt by the sudden flash of vivid images from the past - the posters on the wall, the bed - lying there listening to him, believing in his genius and happy to be chosen by him. That Silly Woman, she thought, Daft. 'To Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
,' she said loudly, and then, much more quietly, 'My arse.' And she downed the rather fine Saint-Emilion in one.

Edwin patted her hand and suggested, in an aside, that she should perhaps calm down a little . . .
The foie gras
really was exceptionally good.

But she was still looking fixedly at the Curator.

The Curator smiled. As if to humour her. 'Indeed, indeed,' he said, Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
is - a - future possibility' He made a note on a little pad he requested from his mistress's handbag, before moving the conversation on to the quality of the wine. Later the Curator said quietly to Edwin that women were always a surprise. Edwin agreed. But by now Audrey was properly and safely demure again.

And so Madame Bonnard took her husband's arm for the L'Arlesienne Grand Opening and the Grand Opening Dinner and Audrey waved Edwin off from her balcony with her usual good humour. Not the end of the world, she told herself, not the end of the world. But she would have liked to take a peek at Patrick in the flesh again after all these years. Somewhere in the apartment she had a pile of his books - never returned. She could have returned them to him tonight - and dropped them on his foot. She closed the windows of her balcony, thought for a moment, then went to her cupboard and lifted from under the yellowing linen the pile of books, still wrapped in Wapshott brown paper and string. She settled down with them by the fire. Memory Lane. Here was the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Great Western Line with its revolutionary Box Tunnel, and the gigantic Great Eastern - the heroic construction which she had once referred to innocently enough as
Brunel
's Big Boat to Patrick's horror - 'Ship, Audrey, it's a ruddy
ship!
'
She reached the biographical section. What she wanted to find was the man.

10

Florence and Audrey

Apsu was offered several places at several universities and colleges and by chance she chose to become a student at Patrick Parker's
alma mater.
She took the Parker Bursary. Though personally as she told her tutor afterwards, she did not trust the man as a designer of bridges at all. All thrust and bollocks, she said of him. Too big for his boots, she called him. She had the English vernacular to a
T
.

But not in her designs which were, so all agreed, entirely her own. When Patrick visited the college, as he did from time to time, and gave a seminar or two, he found Apsu difficult. Sometimes, when he was halfway through a remark, she interrupted him and suggested that there were always multiple ways of looking at the shape of things and it was unlikely that theirs would agree. At the same time he was fascinated by her mixture of old and new, simple and complex - and he used (though he would never acknowledge it) her idea of stayed walkways as developed from the rigging and spars of sailing boats.

Apsu wrote to him afterwards, long afterwards, when the bridge was built in Georgia, and told him that she knew very well what he had done, she forgave him, and that one day she might take something of his in return
..

Now, there was method in Audrey's submissiveness: if she was a woman of little existence, she was not a woman without property. The selling of feminine charms in return for barterable goods to be used when the feminine charms have gone is a feminine way forward at least as long as history. Like it or loathe it, Goods Is Safe. No doubt back in the Savannah, or in those caves of Apsu's, a woman would behave wisely in order to secure her old age - somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two presumably - and whoever brought back the biggest rhino horn to hang around her neck was quite within his rights to demand a bit of rumpo in the tall grasses. She undoubtedly buried the tribute at the back of the charnel house, along with a few others, to be brought out when some other, younger female sashayed up without visible signs of rheumatism. Wealth has a strange effect on aching joints - it soothes the savage knees.

So - Audrey now possessed her own income from investments Edwin selected for her. When she asked what the investments were he just waved his hand dismissively and said, 'Various, various .
..'
in a way that she knew meant 'Don't bother me with trifles . . .' He had placed them in the careful hands of his own broker and that was all she needed to know. She made a note of the broker's name and put it somewhere safe for later.

He also gave her the apartment in Brighton, his mollifying gift after the Turner Exhibition. His mother was long dead, he no longer found himself so interested in
jolies filles
— and it was a handsome way of showing how much she meant to him. He had currently let it on her behalf, on a seven-year lease, which ensured she would stay with him. If he was indulgent, he was no fool. Since his seventieth birthday he had suffered two mild heart attacks, which prompted Audrey to suggest that they both move back to England. If the worst happened, which was inevitable anyway given the difference in their ages, she did not want to live alone in Paris. England would be a good thing for them both, she argued. For Edwin, because he now found Paris and Cannes full of rich, bored, uncultivated creatures (was it, he argued, any different in London? With that ignorant Queen of the Bourgeoisie, Madame Thatcher? She could only shrug.) For her it would be good because she would be home at last - funny how as you got older you dreamed of living back in the old country - her mother was getting on, and her brother and his family were there and - well - she had served her stint in exile. She wanted to go home. But Edwin would not be persuaded. He was quite philosophical about his selfishness. 'It will not be for long,' he said. 'And then you will be quite free to go wherever you will.' But it was Dolly who went first, not Edwin. And that was hard.