The Colonel's Daughter (11 page)

I'm trying to remember the Toomin Valley. I believe it's an immense desert of a place, inhabited by no one and nothing except the mining machinery and the Nickel Consortium employees, whose clusters of houses I ordered to be whitewashed to hide the cheap grey building blocks. The windows of the houses are small, to keep out the sun. In the back yards are spindly eucalyptus trees, blown by the scorching winds. I want to ask the Australian wife: ‘Did you have freckles before you went to live in the Toomin Valley, and does some wandering prima ballerina dance
Giselle
on the gritty escarpment above the mine?'

My scallops arrive, saffron yellow and orange in the blue and white dish – the colours of a childhood summer. The flesh of a scallop is firm yet soft, the texture of a woman's thigh (when she is young, of course; before the skin hardens and the flesh bags out). A forkful of scallop is immeasurably easier to lift than the glass of wine, and the Australian wife (why don't I know either of their names?) smiles at me approvingly as I lift the succulent parcel of food to my mouth and chew it without dribbling. My wife, too, is watching, ready with the little scented handkerchief, yet talking as she eats, talking of Australia as the second bottle of Chablis arrives and she tastes it hurriedly, with a curt nod to the thin waiter. I exist only in the corner of her eye, at its inmost edge, where the vulnerable triangle of red flesh is startling.

‘Of course I've often tried to tell Hubert' (she pronounces my name ‘Eieu-bert', trying and failing with what she recognises as the upper class ‘h') ‘that it's very unfair to expect people like you to live in some out-of-the-way place. I was brought up in a village, you see, and I know that an out-of-the-way village is so dead. No culture. The same in Toomin, no? Absolutely no culture at all. Everybody dead.'

The Australian wife looks – seemingly for the first time – straight at my wife. ‘We're outdoor people,' she says.

I remember now. A river used to flow through the Toomin Valley. Torrential in the rainy season, they said. It dried up in the early forties. One or two sparse willows remain, grey testimony to the long-ago existence of water-rich soil. I imagine the young Australian couple, brown as chestnuts, swimming in the Toomin River, resting on its gentle banks with their fingers touching, a little loving nest of bone. There is no river. Yet when they look at each other, almost furtively under my vacant gaze, I recognise the look. The look says: ‘These moments with strangers are nothing. Into our private moments together – only there – is crammed all that we ask of a life.'

‘Yes, we're outdoor folk.' The Australian man is smiling. ‘You can play tennis most of the year round at Toomin. I'm President of the Tennis Club. And we have our own pool now.'

I don't remember these things: tennis courts and swimming pools.

‘Well, of course you have the climate for this.' My wife is signalling our waiter to bring her Perrier water. ‘And it's something to do, isn't it? Perhaps, when the new expansions of the company are made, a concert hall could be built for you, or a theatre?'

‘A theatre!' The Australian wife's mouth opens to reveal perfect, freshly peeled teeth and a laugh escapes. She blushes. My wife's dark lips are puckered into a sneer. But the Australian man is laughing too – a rich laugh you might easily remember on the other side of the world – and slapping his thigh. ‘A theatre! What about that, ay!'

She wanted, she said as she smoked my American cigarettes, to see
Don Giovanni
. Since leaving Russia with her French mother and her Russian father, no one had ever taken her to the opera. She had seen the posters advertising
Don Giovanni
and asked her father to buy her a ticket. He had shouted at her: ‘Remember whose child you are! Do you imagine taxi drivers can afford seats at the Opéra?'

‘Take me to see
Don Giovanni
,' she said, ‘and then I will fuck for nothing.'

I've never really appreciated the opera. The Don was fat. It was difficult imagining so many women wanting to lie with this fat man. Yet afterwards, she leant over and put her head on my shoulder and wept. Nothing, she told me, had ever moved her so much, nothing in her life had touched the core of her being as this had done, this production of
Don Giovanni
. ‘If only,' she said, ‘I had money as you have money, then I would go to hear music all the time and see the classical ballet and learn from these what is life.'

The scallops are good. She never learned what is life. I feel emboldened by the food. I put my hand to my glass, heavier than ever now because the waiter has filled it up. The sun shines on my wine and on my hand blotched (splattered, it seems) with the oddly repulsive stains of old age. For a second, I see my hand and the wine glass as a still-life. But then I lift the glass. The Australian wife lowers her eyes. My wife for a moment is silent. I drink. I smile at the Australian wife because I know she wants to applaud.

I'm talking. The words are like stones, weighing down my lower jaw. Nickel. I'm trying to tell the Australian man that I dream about the nickel mine. In my dreams, the Australian miners drag carts loaded with threepenny bits. I run my hands through the coins as through a sack of wheat, and the touch of them is pleasurable and perfect. I also want to say to the Australian man: ‘I hope you're happy in your work. When I was in control, I visited all my mines and all my subsidiaries at least once a year. Even in South Africa, I made sure a living wage was paid. I said to the men underground, I hope you're happy in your work.'

But now I have a manager, a head manager to manage all the other managers, including this one from the Toomin Valley. I am trundled out in my chair to meet them when they come here to discuss redundancy or expansion. My wife and I give them lunch in a restaurant. They remind me that I still have an empire to rule, if I was capable, if my heart had not faltered, if indeed my life had been different since the night of
Don Giovanni
.

When I stopped paying her to sleep with me, her father came to see me. He held his cap in his hands. ‘We're hoping for a marriage,' he said. And what more could I have given – what
less
to the body I had begun to need so terribly? The white and gold of her, I thought, will ornament my life.

Yet now I never touch her. The white and the gold of her lies only in the lilies they send, the unknown lovers she finds in the night, while I lie in the child's room and dream of the nickel mines. My heart is scorched dry like the dry hills of the Toomin Valley. I am punished for my need of her while her life stalks my silence: the white of her, the gold of her – the white of Dior, the gold of Cartier. Why did she never love me? In my dreams, too, the answer comes from deep underground: it's the hardness of my words.

Dinner For One

He said: ‘I'll take you out. We'll go to Partridge's, have something special.' She took off her glasses and looked at him doubtfully.

‘I don't know, Henry. I don't know that we want to make a fuss about it.'

‘Well, it's up to you.'

‘Why is it?'

‘Why is it what?'

‘Up to me?'

She bewildered him. For years she had bewildered him. ‘It's your choice, Lal; that's all I meant. It's your choice – whether we go out or not.'

She sighed. ‘I just thought . . .'

‘What?'

‘I just thought it might be better simply to treat it like any other day.'

‘It's not “any other day”.'

‘No.'

‘But it's your decision. You're the one who makes these decisions. So you let me know if you want to go and I'll ring up and book a table.'

He walked away from her, sat down in his worn red armchair, fumbled for his glasses, found them and took up
The Times
crossword. She watched him, still holding her glasses in her hand. It's funny, she thought, that whenever we talk to each other, we take our glasses off. We blur each other out. I suppose we're afraid that if we see each other clearly – too clearly – communication between us will cease.

‘Six across . . .' he murmured from the faded comfort of his chair, ‘two words, four and three: “Facts of severing the line”.'

‘Anagram,' she whispered, ‘I should think.'

Henry and Lal weren't what anyone expected. Separate from her, he seemed to belong. He belongs; she doesn't, was what people thought. You could pull old Henry's leg and raise that boisterous laugh of his, but with her you didn't know where you were. Quite ordinary remarks – things that everyone laughed at – seemed to worry her. But she never told you why: she just closed her eyes.

There had been so many friends at the beginning. Henry and Lal had belonged then. ‘Isn't my wife the belle of the ball?' he used to say. And there were so many balls, once, to be belle of. The changes had stolen gradually into her; the changes had begun after Henry came home from the War, so that people often said: ‘It was the War that changed her,' and even to her face: ‘It was the War that changed you, Lal, wasn't it?'

But she didn't agree with them. ‘The War changed everyone,' was all she'd say.

‘It always seems . . .'

Henry looked up from the crossword. He was surprised Lal was still in the room. ‘What, Lal?'

‘Such a waste.'

‘What does?'

‘Going out. All that eating.'

‘We can afford it, darling.'

‘Oh, it isn't that.'

Henry took off his glasses. ‘Well, I'm damned if I –'

‘Look at our stomachs! Look at yours. So crammed with food you couldn't push any more in. And mine, a dreadful bulge.'

‘Oh, Lal, for heaven's sake.'

‘It's horrible to eat and eat. What's it for? Just to make us heavier and heavier till we die with all this weight.'

‘You're not fat, Lal. I'm fat! I'm not ashamed of it.'

‘Why.'

‘Why what?'

‘Why aren't you ashamed?'

‘Because it's
my
life. I can be any shape I choose.'

No, she thought, that's wrong. I am haunted by the wrongness of things.

‘Henry,' she said, ‘I hate it –'

‘What?'

‘I hate it when –'

*

Larry Partridge was a popular man. ‘We're so lucky,' ran the county's favourite saying, ‘to have you so near us!' They didn't mean Larry himself (though they liked his silver-haired politeness), they meant his restaurant which, every night of the week except Tuesdays when it was closed, was packed with them.

‘This part of the world was a culinary desert before you came, Larry,' they told him, ‘but now we really are lucky. Partridge's is as good as anything in London and so much more reasonable.'

Of course they had been cautious – caution before ecstasy – because, glancing through the windows of the old run-down pub he had bought, they had noted that the old run-down walls were becoming resplendent in indigos and fruit-fool pinks and this had made them nudge each other: ‘Well, you can tell what
he
is, duckie!'

Now Larry's tightly-clad buttocks circled their contented after-dinner smiles. He extended to each table a limp-handed greeting and waited for the superlatives to flood his ears like warm water. ‘You're so imaginative with food, Larry!'

‘The sauce on the quenelles was out of this world, Larry.'

‘We've had a superb meal, Larry, really superb.'

*

Larry's parents still lived in Romford. He had moved them from their council flat to a detached house. However, Larry's father still called him Lawrence. Lawrence: to say the name to himself was to remind Larry of his father, was to make him shudder as if the thin shadow of the man – neat in his dark green suit and white shirt, ready for work, working all his life, never giving up his dull and hopeless work till one day he would die at it – passed between him and the sun.

For Larry, Lawrence was dead, buried hideously down in the greasy kitchens of the catering school. Lawrence, born in poverty, reared in repression, was the detritus from which Larry, in all his colourful glory, had sprung. He had sprung in 1964, the year he had met Edwin, and each year since then he had bloomed a little more.

‘What can I say about Edwin?' Larry had asked his mother at the time, ‘except that I love him.'

Oh, but they were not prepared for this kind of love, she told him. They had never thought that their own Lawrence, so popular with all the local girls . . . No, it had not once entered their minds and she really did think he should have given them some warning, some indication that he wasn't what they thought . . .

Larry left his parents' flat in Romford and moved into Edwin's flat in Fulham. Edwin found him a job in a local restaurant. Lawrence in Edwin's careful drawing room became Larry, became lover and loved.

All the past, like a dirty old bandage no longer needed, began to unwind and fall off; Larry was healed.

Edwin's money purchased the pub in 1972. One end of the large building was converted into a flat and the move from Fulham was made. A year later, Partridge's opened, each of its walls a reflection of Edwin's taste, Edwin's imaginative eye.

Larry moved with perfect ease and happiness about his steel kitchen, liking his own little kingdom the better because just outside it was a rich land that he shared with Edwin.

‘I do it with love,' Larry sometimes said of his cooking. But the great golden weight of his love for Edwin he seldom talked of. It hung inside him, a burdensome treasure that he knew would never leave him.