ONE

At breakfast the next morning they all drank their coffee and ate their bread and jam with lowered eyes. No one spoke. Carmen sat with arched eyebrows looking out of the window at the olive tree as if convinced that the silence at table was caused by her dramatic departure. She may have been waiting for someone to beg her to stay on, but no one did: indeed the only interruption to the sound of their sipping and chewing, and the rustling of Nice-Matin, was Charlie’s broken French from the hall as he telephoned Air Inter to reserve her a seat on the next flight to Paris.

At eleven he drove Carmen to the airport. She took her leave of the others with the same aggrieved expression she had worn since the previous evening. There was no kissing or shaking hands. Even Charlie, as he put her suitcase into the boot of the Jaguar, seemed quite detached about the departure of the girl he had meant to be his wife, as if he was her chauffeur and nothing more.

Once they had gone, Simon and Priss set to work to get rid of all the alcohol in the house. They opened and emptied every bottle of wine they could find, and drained the dregs of those already empty, before throwing them into the bin. All the cognac, marc and some duty-free whisky that Simon had brought with him from England was emptied down the kitchen sink.

At lunch they drank water. Priss sat at her usual place at table while Helen perched uneasily on Willy’s chair. Simon and Charlie sat between the two women. With Carmen gone, and Willy still asleep in his room, they all seemed more at ease. Charlie gave a scathing account of Carmen’s histrionic parting at the airport, while Simon joked about the drunken fish which would be found stranded where the sewage from the Villa Golitsyn emptied into the sea. Helen laughed, not just because their jokes were funny, but also because Carmen’s departure had put her in a good mood. Priss too seemed cheerful. She chatted for a while about their plans, interspersing what she said with casual references to the recent drama: ‘I’m sorry Carmen never saw the Matisse Chapel,’ and ‘If Will is well enough,’ and then finally she seemed to decide that she must mention what no one had referred to that day. ‘Look,’ she said to Charlie. ‘Did Carmen leave because of me and Will – because of what I told you last night?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t tell her. She just split, that’s all.’ He glanced at Simon for confirmation.

‘Split from here or from you?’ asked Priss.

Charlie laughed. ‘A bit of both.’

‘But what about getting married?’

He looked vaguely towards the Baie des Anges. ‘It wouldn’t have worked.’

Priss leaned across the table and put her hand on his forearm – on his brown skin covered with golden hairs. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie,’ she said, ‘I really am.’

He sighed. ‘In California it seemed different … I mean, she seemed different, or I guess I was different.’

‘But you could have gone back with her.’

‘I never really belonged there,’ he said wistfully.

Priss took her hand off his arm and turned to address all three of her guests. ‘You’re kind to stay,’ she said, ‘but now that you know about Will and me, you mustn’t feel you have to.’

‘It makes no difference,’ said Helen – quietly, but with a fierce edge to her voice. ‘It doesn’t matter who people are or what they do … if you like them.’ She blushed as she spoke: her youthful flesh went pink from her jowls to her nose.

Simon cleared his throat. ‘I don’t think any of us think worse of you,’ he said. ‘The problem is, whether Willy thinks worse of himself and drinks as a result.’

‘Yes,’ said Priss, ‘it is perhaps that. When he was younger – well, you can remember what he was like. He wanted his moral values to be his own – to accept nothing from others, particularly not from the conventional moralists whom he despised.’

‘I can remember,’ said Simon.

‘Me too,’ said Charlie.

‘I adored him,’ said Priss. ‘I accepted everything he said. I thought he was funny and clever and handsome, and the other boys I met seemed terribly dull compared to Will. Of course a lot of girls feel like that about their brothers and don’t sleep with them …’ She turned to Simon. ‘I told you about my father. He slept with anyone and everyone, so we grew up in … well, a permissive climate of opinion. One holiday Will came back from school where he’d been trying things out with you boys and it seemed obvious, I suppose, to try things out with me.’ She turned to Helen. ‘I was about your age when we first slept together. It was terribly risky because in those days there was no such thing as the pill. We had this huge house in Suffolk called Hensfield where as children we’d always been abandoned with our nanny. It had attics filled with old furniture, and there, well, we did it once or twice, just thinking that it was interesting and fun. Then Will went up to Cambridge where he had other girlfriends, and I used to go out with men who’d grope at me in taxis – Guards Officers and stockbrokers and that sort of thing. At Cambridge Will fell in love with a girl – a real bitch as it turned out. He came back and told me that he was going to marry her, which upset me, I suppose, but I accepted it as inevitable. Then, a month before the wedding, he found out that she was sleeping with someone else – a friend of his …’ She stopped. ‘Is this embarrassing?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, Will was rather disillusioned after that. He came back to Hensfield – that was the house in Suffolk – and that’s when we really fell in love. Mother was dead; father was hardly ever there, and we both hated him anyway. It was a wonderful summer. We were alone together for about two months. In the autumn Will went up to London to start at the Foreign Office. I came up too and worked in an art gallery. I still went out with other men for form’s sake, and Will went out with girls, but we saw each other at least twice a week all that year. Then he was sent abroad and that was awful.’

She paused with a melancholy expression on her face as if remembering that period of her life. ‘I’ve never suffered as much as I did then,’ she went on. ‘Indonesia was so very far away, and although we never spoke about it, we both thought that we ought to use the separation to find someone else. I almost became engaged to a poor old chap called Geoffrey. He was terribly proper and never laid a finger on me, not even in taxis. The only way I could bring myself to smile when I was with him was by imagining the look on his face if I told him about Will and me.

‘I broke up with Geoffrey. I couldn’t face marrying him or anyone else. I decided quite by myself that if I couldn’t live with Will, I’d live alone. I suppose that’s why incest is forbidden: if you are close to your brother, you’ve got so much in common, so many shared experiences and tastes, that adding sex makes it quite exceptional …’ She stopped again and looked pensive. ‘Perhaps,’ she added, ‘if we had been happier as children, we might have found it easier to get on with other people. As it was, we both felt that only the other could understand that misery which was part of our characters, and that someone outside the family would never comprehend it.’

‘Did Willy then send for you?’ asked Simon.

‘No. I went to live in Morocco. I had some money and wanted to try and be a painter, so I bought a house near Marrakesh. I set myself up as an eccentric English spinster and was going to stay there forever.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Charlie.

‘Father died. Both Will and I came back for the funeral. We just looked at one another over the grave and both knew that it was no good. We couldn’t go on without being together.’

‘So you flew to Singapore?’ said Simon.

‘Yes. More or less.’

‘But weren’t there aunts and uncles and cousins who wondered what had happened to you?’

‘I didn’t go straight to Singapore. I went back to Marrakesh and lived there for four and a half months. It’s still my address as far as people like the solicitors are concerned. One friend from school came out to see me there, but after that, no one.’

‘No relatives? No cousins?’

‘I think I told you,’ said Priss, ‘that my father was an exceptionally unpleasant man. We had cousins on both sides of the family, but we never saw them. He thought they were a waste of time. Anyway,’ she added, ‘it’s surprising how quickly people forget you when you go abroad.’

Remembering how quickly he had forgotten Willy, Simon did not disagree. ‘Were you married in Singapore?’ he asked.

‘No. How could we marry? We arranged a sort of blessing by a Buddhist monk who Will found in a sidestreet somewhere. He didn’t know, of course. I think he thought we were marrying without our parents’ consent.’

‘Then you sailed away …’

‘Yes.’

‘And how long did this idyll last?’ Simon asked in a drawl.

Priss glanced at him sharply to see how much sarcasm he had intended. ‘It was an idyll,’ she said. ‘We met in Singapore and then sailed away from everything – from our wretched childhood, from the stupid conventions of the middle classes, from a country that was finished – and for months, no for years, we were completely happy.’

‘What went wrong?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It happened so slowly. I think Will was bored: that was one of the problems. He tried ranching but wasn’t much good at it, and he hated the Argentinians – all that maté and machismo. He had nothing in common with them; there were no theatres or cinemas, and anyway he couldn’t speak Spanish, so he used to read – novels, and then philosophy, and finally the Bible.’ She said this last word with great contempt.

‘Why the Bible?’ asked Charlie.

‘He pretended it was only curiosity, but the more he read it the more gloomy he became. I tried to get him onto P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, which are the sort of books I like, but he said they were superficial, and that he didn’t read to amuse himself but to learn. Yet all this so-called learning just made him more and more depressed, and the only way out of his depression was drink.’

‘Do you think he feels remorse?’

‘Remorse? I don’t know. What is remorse? I think that once you’ve made your bed, you must sleep in it.’

‘With no second thoughts?’

‘What’s the point? The reasons we had at the beginning for rejecting the conventional view of the rights and wrongs of incest still hold good, so it’s particularly stupid to read books like the Bible which can only make you feel guilty.’

‘Perhaps Willy’s a sort of spiritual masochist?’ said Charlie.

‘Then he wouldn’t drink to dull the pain,’ said Priss.

‘That’s true.’

‘Do you ever discuss his state of mind with him?’ asked Simon.

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

She frowned. ‘He knows that I think any guilt or remorse is self-indulgent.’

‘You’re exceptionally confident of your point of view.’

‘To do wrong,’ said Priss, ‘you have to harm others. Whom have we harmed?’

Simon shrugged his shoulders. ‘No one, certainly, other than yourselves.’

‘We haven’t harmed ourselves,’ she said firmly.

‘You have had to make sacrifices.’

‘What sacrifices?’

‘Well, you can’t live in England or have a child. Perhaps Willy now regrets that you have had to give up one or the other of those?’

‘Both those problems could be solved,’ said Priss, looking at Simon with an expression in her eye which referred him to their earlier conversation.

‘You could adopt a child,’ said Charlie blithely.

‘Or Will could have one by someone else,’ said Priss. ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ She glanced at Helen and Helen smiled.

‘Or you could have a child by another man,’ Simon said to Priss with a trace of mockery in his voice.

‘I can’t,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s too late for that now.’