A Natural Curiosity Page 17

  Shirley says that maybe things will alter, improve. He shakes his head. No, it is over, he says.

  She tells him of her clever daughter Celia, of her two difficult truant boys.

  He tells her of his son Lucas, who is now a computer programmer, and of his son Edward, who is physically handicapped.

  Their stories interweave, join, separate, and join again. He drives, as he had claimed, well. It is a strange sensation, to be in the care of a man, to be with a man who takes responsibility. Shirley reflects that for years now, she had been living with Cliff as with a stranger, had been taking care of him as though he were a stranger, had been dreading, foreseeing, from a distance, the inevitable collapse. Robert is companionable, easy. They talk, fall silent, talk again. Eventually she falls asleep, and when she wakes they are in an unfamiliar Paris, making their way through broad, then narrower streets, until they turn down a one-way road, slow down, and turn through an archway. Robert gets out, unlocks an iron gate, and drives through into a small cobbled courtyard.

  ‘Here we are,’ he says.

  Shirley looks around, rubs her eyes. Is she dreaming? Is she hallucinating? It is a little French courtyard, ancient, rustic. She knows they are in a heavily built-up area, she can sense that they are not far from the centre, not far from the Paris that everybody knows, but this is a corner out of time. There are flower pots and, to the right, a long obliquely angled three-storeyed building with shutters and little iron balconies. A small tree grows in the middle of the irregular long triangle of yard. Grass sprouts from the cobbles: a little house, a cottage, faces them, separate from the long larger building, tucked away perched, stranded, a little house all on its own. Robert parks the car in front of this little doll’s house, this little garden pavilion. He gets out, goes back to shut the iron gate, comes to open her door. She gets out and stands in the cold Paris night. The air smells of France.

  A few steps, a little iron staircase, lead up to the front door. She follows him. The heavy door, unlocked by an impressive tangle of antiquated keys, opens straight into the tiny living-room. He switches on the light.

  ‘Well, this is it,’ says Robert: meaning that only this floor is his, that whatever goes on upstairs is nothing to do with him. And there are no stairs. There are three doors, opening off this central chamber. This is it.

  The apartment is half stripped, as perhaps he had half expected. She senses his distress, as he looks around. The pot plants are dead or dying. A packing case stands in a corner. The ornately papered dark walls show pale patches, where paintings have been removed. Other paintings stand on the floor, their faces to the skirting board. The small round dining-table has two envelopes upon it. ‘Robert,’ one says, in a firm large script. The other says, more waveringly, ‘M. Holland’. Robert stands there jangling the keys, weighing them in his hand, and sighs. The apartment is warm: the heating is on. He stands. Shirley wonders whether to speak. But he speaks first.

  ‘Well, at least she hasn’t taken the lampshades,’ he says, and Shirley looks up and round. She sees that the lampshades are pretty, patterned, brown and red and orange flowered, art nouveau. The room must have been cosy, intimate, a little brownred nest. It is still cosy, even in its half-dismantled state. Shirley decides to say so.

  ‘What a lovely room,’ she risks, on its threshold. Robert is roused back to concern, chivalry. ‘Yes, it’s a good corner,’ he says, as he puts down Shirley’s bags (he has none) and waves to the couch. ‘Sit down,’ he says, ‘sit down,’ and he reaches for his letters, opens them, glances at them, throws them back on the table. She does not sit.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we’d better see what she’s left. Would you like a drink? I could do with a drink. I wonder if there’s anything to eat?’

  He opens one of the three doors, which reveals a tiny kitchen, into which he disappears. She hears him rummaging through cupboards. Shirley looks round, inspecting more closely the remnants of a ten-year intimacy, wondering which is the bedroom, wondering about beds. The couch, upholstered in shiny repellent striped fabric, has wooden scrolled ends and is as hard as a rock. The rooms must all be tiny, she supposes.

  Robert returns with a couple of glasses and a couple of bottles. He offers a choice of Pernod and whisky. She chooses Pernod, because there is more of it, and she thinks it might be milder. He has the same. He tops it up, reassuringly, with water.

  ‘Well,’ he says, sitting in his specially designed armchair, ‘our health.’

  The Pernod is strong stuff, she realizes, halfway through her glass.

  It is eight o’clock. They talk about Amélie’s desertion, and about the concierge, Madame Lambert, author of the second of Robert’s letters. ‘She’s on my side, of course,’ says Robert, ‘she wanted to let me know she wouldn’t let Amélie take down the curtains. Made her put them back up again, she says.’

  They decide to go out for a bit to eat. ‘There’s nothing much here,’ says Robert. ‘A couple of eggs and an old crust and a tin of anchovies. Well go down to the corner. Have another drink?’

  There is only the one bedroom. When Robert opens the door, he discovers to his irritation that the bed is unmade. ‘Perhaps she’s taken all the sheets,’ he speculates, morosely, as he looks in the wardrobe, in a drawer under the bed. The room is more or less filled by the large double bed. He finds sheets, in a brown laundry parcel under a folded blanket. There is a note on them, from Amélie. ‘I think these are mine, but you can borrow them,’ she has written.

  ‘My God,’ groans Robert. ‘What a woman. Relentless. She might at least have made the bed up.’

  Shirley stands in the doorway. There is nowhere else to stand. She has by now discovered the bathroom, which leads, also, directly from the small square sitting-room.

  ‘Let me help,’ says Shirley. ‘It’s easier with two.’

  This quasi-proverb, this commonplace, seems to soothe Robert. Together, they make up the bed. The sheets, Shirley notes, are pretty, a pale faded blue pattern, with a deep broderie anglaise border, and the pillowcases are lace-edged. They are carefully, professionally ironed. But not new. Nothing here is new. There is a pathos in the old age of the sheets.

  They tuck in the blankets, pull over the pale-blue counterpane.

  ‘Supper, now,’ says Robert, and they put on their coats and go down the street, past butchers, grocers and greengrocers to an unsmart brasserie on the corner, where Robert is greeted as an old friend. ‘Robert, Robert,’ customers and management cry, in French, and shake his hand: masculine solidarity is at work, Shirley reflects, vaguely, as she sinks on to her bench, but she is almost past reflection, she can no longer quite take in where she is or what she is doing. She gazes round semi-dazed, at the strange tortoiseshell-coloured glass panelling of the walls, at the tiled floor, at a plant in a hanging basket, at two middle-aged men leaning on a pinball machine, at an old man in a crumpled shirt and a straying tie drinking a bowl of soup, at a young man in a cloth cap eating a plate of ham and reading a book, at three bearded men in animated conversation over beer, at a middle-aged woman sitting alone eating a great dish of what looks like stuffed cabbage. A wooden napkin ring sits by her plate. She is a regular. Robert orders a steak and frites, Shirley orders an omelette and frites. The young waiter brings bread in a silver-tin basket, a paper cloth for the Formica-topped table, an earthenware jug of wine, and a salad in a glass bowl, and oil and vinegar in a cruet. He wishes them bon apetit. They eat, they drink.

  Robert introduces Shirley to one or two of the clientele, as they pause by Robert’s table, or call across the room. ‘Je vous présente mon amie Shirley, elle est en visite d’Angleterre,’ he cries. Shirley nods and smiles. Her French is not up to replying to courtesies, but nobody seems to mind. The evening wears on. Robert tells her about Amélie’s new-old lover, who is something to do with a bank. Shirley tries to explain about Cliff’s financial troubles and her own uncertain position as shadow director of his company. She asks Robert why Cliff hadn’t left her a suicid
e note. After all these years, says Shirley. Maybe you didn’t look hard enough, says Robert. She has by now revealed the nature of Cliff’s death, but she has not revealed that she did not wait to speak to the police. She allows Robert to think that her running away was less impulsive, less mystifying than in fact it was. She does not want him to turn her over to Interpol. But she finds herself somewhat surprisingly telling him all about the sterilization she had undergone a few years ago, and how (unaccountably) it had depressed her. He is sympathetic, concerned. He tells her of his ex-wife’s troubles with high blood pressure and the pill, her worries about their handicapped son. They order cheese, and more wine.

  It is late now, and a drunken Englishman enters the bar and greets Robert as a long-lost friend. He talks and talks, but Shirley cannot follow. The talk is of something called TEFAL, which Shirley assumes at first is a consumer product, a trade name, as most of the talk is financial, but she gradually realizes that TEFAL is something to do with the teaching of English, and that both Robert and this newcomer are involved in it. They talk of tapes and audio-visual aids. The English language, she learns, is a marketable product, it seems it sells better than the wing mirrors and picnic kits of Taiwanese steel that have ruined Cliff Harper and his partner Jim Bakewell. Shirley yawns, accepts another coffee. Her head swims. The talk lurches from visual aids to AIDS and the drunken Englishman declares that the slowly acquired morality of nations is in sudden eclipse, and that the poets and novelists of the future would have to change their tune about sex pretty sharply. Not so, not so, argues Robert, AIDS is merely another manifestation of the dangers of sexuality, dangers which have always existed, risk is part and always has been part of the game, physical risk, emotional risk, says Robert, and had anyone read Goethe’s Roman Elegies, which are obsessed both with sexual passion and with venereal disease?

  Zwei gefährliche Schlangen, vom Chore der Dichter gescholten, Grausend nennt sie die Welt Jahre die tausende schön, Python dich unter dich Lernaischer Drache!

  he intones, to the incomprehending but interested stares of Shirley, the Englishman, and other drinkers and diners: wonderful poet, says Robert, to himself almost, quite unperturbed by the lack of more animated response, for clearly Goethe’s Roman Elegies do not pass for currency with anyone within hearing. ‘The longing for the south, the flight from the north,’ says Robert. ‘Oh, how happy I feel in Rome, when I think of the dull old grey days of the dark leaden north, that’s what Goethe wrote.’ Rome, Paris, the same kind of thing. Flight from the grey pall.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ says the drunken Englishman, who has lost the thread more than Shirley (who sort of thinks she follows it). The Englishman says goodnight, and wanders off uncertainly into the brightly lit darkness.

  The café shows signs of shutting down. Robert calls for the bill. Robert and Shirley walk arm in arm down the narrow little street to the archway and the iron gate and the courtyard. They let themselves in with the large bunch of keys. It seems that they have been living here, together, for a very long time. Shirley tries to have a bath, but cannot control the antique gas jet or the snake-like vicious shower attachments, so satisfies herself with a cold wash. Shivering, she puts on the new nightdress she had providentially purchased, a hundred years ago, in the Marks & Spencer of Dover. Robert is already in bed. She joins him. He puts his arms around her, kisses her, holds her. He is very broad, very warm. He strokes her hair and kisses her on the face, the lips, the throat. She takes off her new nightdress, and he enters her, very slowly and firmly and heavily. He makes love to her for what seems like hours. He seems completely untroubled by the process. Shirley is too tired to work out what is happening, but her body responds for her, it warms up and melts and receives him. She is passive, at peace. They do not speak, until after some time he murmurs in her hot, wet ear, ‘More?’ and she says, ‘Yes, more,’ and he goes on and on, without excitement, with a kind of swelling reassuring persistence. Her body has not felt so comfortable for years. She dissolves and cries out. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, and comes into hèr, fully, generously, completely. They lie there, half asleep. They fade into contentment, into sleep. She turns over, he puts his arm around her breasts, holds her against him. They drift away between the pale-blue faded sheets.

  Maybe, in the morning, when they face one another over what little coffee Amélie has left them, he will discover that she is a temporarily unbalanced small-minded suburban housewife, consumed with embarrassment and shame: maybe she will discover that he is a middle-aged bore and a philandering neurotic who has treated the women in his life with a callousness that deserves their desertion. Maybe. Meanwhile, let them lie there, for the night, safe in one another’s arms. It is not impossible, that they should lie there. Not quite impossible.

  Alix waits for a reply from Angela Whitmore Malkin, brooding on the image of her summoned up by Bill Whitmore’s indirect discourse. For some reason, Alix is convinced that Angela is a very nasty bit of work. She has little to go on, but she has a smell of her, an instinct. The Bad Mother. Have I been brainwashed by Bowlby? wonders Alix, as she examines her suspicions. The Bad Mother. The Runaway Mother. Can she be blamed for everything? Can she be blamed for the disaster of P. Whitmore and the deaths of his random victims?

  She does not think she will get an answer from Angela. Investigative journalists have tried already to dig up Paul’s mother, to buy her story, but they have failed, so it is not likely that she will respond to Alix. She has gone to earth, deliberately. But Alix has the advantage of an address. Of knowing that she is alive, and lives at Hartley Bridge. She knows that she will go and look for her, invited or not. Angela is uncannily, irresistibly close.

  Meanwhile, in pursuit of other scapegoats, other prime motives, of the primal crimes, she continues to read her Tacitus, even branches out with a little Lucan.

  Lucan’s Pharsalia. Her Latin is a little rusty, for all that she studied it with interest for six years and took an A in her A-Levels, all those decades ago. The Ancient Britons, the Romans. If Paul Whitmore had not become obsessed by them, would his mania have taken another form? Is some innocent secondary schoolteacher in north Staffordshire as implicated in his decapitations as the evil Angela and the butcher’s shop? Alix would like to ask Liz about these questions, but has not quite formulated them, even to herself. But she does sit up with a start when, one evening, she is idly and sleepily watching a television programme about Celtic religion and hears the sentence, ‘As the cross is to Christianity, so the severed head to the Celtic religion.’ She jerks her eyes open, sees museum shots of a few primitive stone têtes coupées, one of them originally from Toxetter. This can only be a coincidence: Paul has never mentioned anything to do with such aspects of his interest in the past. Severed heads. One or two journalists, after Paul’s trial, had tried to make some sense of the symbolism of this obsession, and one had even quoted Iris Murdoch’s contribution on the theme, but nobody had come up with Celtic ritual.

  The soul resided in the head, according to the Celts.

  Alix finds the passage in the Pharsalia which describes Caesar’s desecration of the sacred grove of Massilia. Her copy of Lucan’s work is on loan from the Literary and Philosophical Library of Northam; it is in two volumes, bound in blue canvas, and contains both the Latin text and the English version in heroic couplets by Nicholas Rowe, Esq. It is dated 1812. It was last taken out in 1981. Alix wonders who else had been reading Lucan, so recently.

  Black Springs with pitchy Streams divide the Ground,

  And Bubbling tumble with a sullen Sound.

  Old Images of Forms misshapen stand,

  Rude and unknowing of the Artist’s Hand;

  With hoary Filth begrim’d, each ghastly Head Strikes the astonsh’d Gazer’s Soul with Dread

  . . . simulacraque maesta deorum

  Arte carent caesisque extant informia trunds.

  Yes. She reads on. Caesar sentences the grove to fall by the axe, in order to facilitate his siege of the pro-Pompey Forum of Massi
lia: she does not quite grasp what the sacred grove has to do with Caesar’s battle plans, but quite understands why his soldiers are afraid to chop down the trees and images. Caesar seizes an axe and strikes the first blow:

  Deep sunk within a violated Oak

  The wounding edge, and thus the Warrior spoke.

  Now, let no doubting Hand the Task decline;

  Cut you the Wood, and let the Guilt be mine.

  The men follow his example, unwillingly, chopping down oak and ash and holm and alder, and the trees, crashing, ‘display/Their dark Recesses to the Golden Day’.

  The Gauls watch, some groaning, others assured of the coming vengeance of the gods.

  The golden day.

  Does one admire Caesar for hacking down superstition, for letting in the daylight? Alix thinks that she remembers that Lucan, writing under Nero, was a supporter of Pompey, and portrayed Caesar as a bloodthirsty ogre, so can one trust his account of this episode in the grove? Is it perhaps a subtle atrocity story? Nero compelled Lucan, at the age of twenty-five, to commit suicide. Lucan chose the warm bath, the severed veins.