I returned to France ten days later, without giving any precise instructions to Amyas about the house in Bradeswick, making no firm promises to anyone about anything, taking no positive action at all except to give serious offence to Aunt Sibylla by inviting Alys to visit me in the rue du Bac.
I spent the journey indulging myself with alternate daydreams of Robin Esmond falling at my feet to vow he loved me and my grandfather, browbeaten into a position where he was obliged to confess not his love for me precisely, since even daydreams can only go so far, but his respect.
I reached Paris in excellent spirits, full of energy, information, plans, but although I was very warmly welcomed and everyone had missed me just as they should, it was clear from the moment of my arrival that my mother had lost all interest in Clarrow Fell, listening with a suspicious lack of attention to my account of what, after all, had once been her home and family.
‘Thank God you are here, Olivia.’ But it was my experience as a letter-writer she wanted, my practised turn of phrase, acquired from so many professional beauties and flirtatious wives.
Her affaire with Jean-François was not going well. He had grown cold at the precise moment when her emotions had reached a white and evidently desperate heat. She had accused him of infidelity and dismissed him as she had done a dozen others before him, fully confident that he would return. She had not seen him since. So, if I could just compose a line …?
‘Yes, mother, what do you want to tell him?’
‘That I believe he is killing me, only say it in such a way he will know, should he come to see me, that I will not weep and rave and make one of those distressing scenes which he might be expecting, and which could well be keeping him away. Men do so hate a fuss and Jean-François – well, he is young, I make no secret about that, and young men hate fuss even more than the others. They cannot cope with it, you see, and so they run off and hide and get up to mischief like little boys, to show they don’t care. Bravado. That must be it, Olivia. He wants to come back but can’t find the way, so if we could just point it out to him! He is killing me but I can still smile, that is the tone. Let him know that I care and I am wounded but I will forgive.’
I composed the first letter before my bags were unpacked, two the next day, a long and beautiful epic followed by a curt note breaking everything off.
‘So, that is the end of Jean-François.’
No doubt, in a week or two, there would be a Jean-Paul. But she woke me at five o’clock the next morning, pale and distraught, shaking me from a warm dream of Robin Esmond to the reality of her overstrung nerves, her sleepless night, during which she had been tormented by the thought of her lover with her last, cool letter in his hand.
‘Olivia, I can’t bear it. What might it do to him?’ What had it done to her?
‘We must write again at once, please Olivia, and ease his mind. He has too little experience to know that one says these hard things sometimes without meaning them, just because one cares deeply. It is almost a part of caring. You will know how to make that clear, darling. Just scribble it out for me and I will make a fair copy. Victorine will deliver it.’
There was no reply.
‘But Victorine dear, I told you to wait for an answer. Well, of course he would have written a line if you had only waited a little longer – just to say that he was coming. Now he will have to get his valet to bring it here, poor man.’
And for the rest of the day she hovered about the hall, listening to every step on the stair.
‘Olivia, is that the bell?’
‘No mother.’
‘I swear it is. Victorine, quick, open the door.’
No one was there.
I had seen her in love before. I had seen her tire of men and had seen men tire of her. It had been part of the same glorious game of chance in which one hazarded oneself joyfully and lightly without taking either the pains or the pleasures too much to heart. Whatever happened one recovered from it, and one had the constant comfort of knowing that the best cure for love was simply to take another lover. But now Jean-François was gone, or so it seemed, and she could neither forget him nor replace him. The time of suffering, the ‘later’ in which she had never really believed had overtaken her and, within the apartment, the familiar signs of tension began to grow, Victorine eating, Madelon coughing, Luc disappearing.
‘Where has Luc got to, Victorine?’
‘Upstairs? No? Well, he was here under my feet a moment ago.’
And I would find him in odd and dangerous places, fairgrounds, railway stations, the Place Pigalle, very late at night collecting pennies for a blind man who, when it came to evading the police or ogling a pretty girl, turned out not to be blind at all: once, curled up asleep on a barge on the river.
‘You’d have woken up in Belgium, you little pest.’
‘What fun!’
‘If you do it again I’ll murder you.’
‘You’ll have to catch me first.’
And when I had demonstrated that although he could run faster I could still hit very hard, and had convinced him of the wisdom of keeping to the neighbourhood of the rue du Bac, then came the complaints from the parents of the boy he had punched in the eye, the parents of the boy he was leading into temptation, the boy whose pearl-handled penknife, once admired by Luc, had never been seen again.
‘He gave it to me, Olivia,’ he said, arranging those fluid Junot features into the injured innocence of an angel.
I went up to his attic and there, to my horror, uncovered a magpie hoard of small, shiny things, spoons from the neighbouring cafés, shirt studs and dress buttons, a cigarette holder, the ebony top of a walking cane, chess pieces, a string of amber beads.
‘And who gave you these?’
‘Oh those,’ he smiled at me engagingly. ‘I just found them. You’d be surprised, Olivia, at the things one can find, under the tables and in the toilets at the Deux Magots, for instance, or the Brasserie Malakoff.’
I went to my mother and warned her. ‘He’ll end up in a house of correction, that one.’
But her life, from the deepest shades of tragedy, had entered into full sunshine that morning for she had received, at last, a note from her lover and was radiant, ecstatic, opening her arms to a cloudless future.
‘He is just a child, darling, and children get up to these monkey tricks. Everyone understands it, scolds maybe just a little and then hugs them better when they cry.’
‘Which, I suppose, is what you are planning to do with Jean-François.’
‘Darling, what a lovely idea. He is coming to dinner tonight and Victorine has promised to cook. I have just sent her out to buy foie gras?‘
‘Can you afford foie gras?’
‘My dear, when could I ever afford anything? If one lived one’s life by what one could afford, what a meagre existence that would be.’
‘She is using the rent money,’ Victorine told me as we sat together in the kitchen that night, my mother and Jean-François having dined sumptuously en tête-à-tête, ‘She has sold her pearl ring too, so you had better keep a tight hold on your inheritance.’
‘Sold it, to entertain him?’
‘Yes, either to entertain him or to pay his debts. He has not been near her since you went away. And if you want my opinion he has only come tonight to borrow money or to flirt with Madelon.’
It was possible. Sickening but possible, even very likely when one thought how very pretty Madelon was, how much like mother had been in the days when handsome men had tempted her to folly, not the other way round.
‘Does mother know about this?’
Victorine shrugged, her shoulders by no means fluid like Luc’s but solid with hearty nourishment, her appetite larger than ever in times of uncertainty, annoyance, or stress.
‘She doesn’t want to see it. Madelon is still a pretty child to her, young enough to be asked to give a gentleman a kiss. And what he whispers in her ear – well, mother is not to know.’
Poor Madelon. I had gone through it all myself at her age, the ‘uncles’with straying fingers, all the sly stroking and squeezing which accompanied the gift of a few chocolates, the elderly, overheated leg pressed against mine beneath the dinner-table, I remembered. I had been embarrassed, scared, and then, understanding the relatively small degree of peril, learned to cope with it. It was disgusting but unlikely to be fatal, unless one happened to be timid yet, at the same time, desperately eager to please, like Madelon.
‘We shall have to put a stop to it, Victorine.’
‘How?’ my sister said, as earthy and shrewd and heavy as any peasant. ‘When Jean-François goes there will be another. And at the moment if he tried to make love to Madelon under mother’s nose she still would not see. Madelon must learn to handle it, as you had to do. Fortunately I am too solid to suit the tastes of mother’s gentlemen and they do not bother me.’
Had that been Victorine’s solution? But Madelon had no toughness, no resource, no ability to fend for herself. Madelon, unless something was done about it, would be badly hurt.
‘She can’t do it,’ I said flatly. ‘Not Madelon.’
‘Then she’ll end up in a nunnery. Or worse.’
‘How cheerful, Victorine. And what about us since you’re telling fortunes tonight?’
‘Oh, we’ll be all right. I’ll marry the fishmonger from the rue de Bellechasse and you’ll meet an old man rich enough to do as he pleases, no matter what his family have to say about it, who’ll take you as his second wife.’
‘I don’t think I’d like that.’
‘You’d be lucky to get the chance.’
‘And what of the fishmonger?’
I did not even realize, at that point, that he existed.
‘Marcel Lefevre? He’s forty-six, big as an ox and almost as simple. He’d be good to me.’
‘Victorine. You can’t be serious!’
‘Why ever not?’
‘You haven’t promised anything have you – haven’t done anything …?’
‘He hasn’t asked me yet, Olivia.’
Victorine, a fishwife, married to a middle-aged ox! It was unthinkable. And then, suddenly, it seemed quite likely, just as Luc – unless I did something swift and drastic to prevent it – might go to prison one day like his father before him. And what of my mother, approaching the end of her looks, the final pretence of youth? She did not believe, as yet, that she was growing old, but I believed it, just as I believed Victorine deserved more than a fish shop in the rue de Bellechasse, Madelon far more than the ‘protection’ of elderly men who would discard her when her fragile bloom was gone. Once again my loved ones were being threatened by a greedy, grasping world, were being exploited by young men who should have been kinder and old ones who should have had more sense. And I – who else? – would have to do something very sure and very positive in order to protect them.
Jean-François, who was soon to merge in my memory with Jean-Paul, Jean-Louis, Jean-Pierre, who had preceded him, left early, my mother remaining a long time alone at the dinner-table, contemplating the remains of the foie gras, the canard aux cerises, the champagne which had failed, after all, to restore to her the tender, tantalizing bloom of Madelon.
He did not come back. No one came. She sat in our little salon at the table by the window, thin, nervous hands laying out cards for fortunes or for solitaire, quick, nervous eyes flickering constantly to the street; waiting, listening, a burden to herself, a gnawing anxiety to us. She wanted neither money nor power nor any kind of material benefit from men and had never wanted such things. When mink was freely available she would wear it but would sell it happily next morning to help a friend. Nor was she moved by any great physical urges, taking the old-fashioned view, perhaps not far removed from her sister Sibylla’s, that sex was for the gentlemen, God bless them, and who was to deny their little pleasures?
She understood flirtation, dalliance, her nature – and this was her tragedy – having remained a restless, questing adolescent within a body unable to stand its pace. And what she craved, as ardently as any craving for opium or cocaine, was not the deep fulfilment of love’s maturity but the sunbursts and summer lightening of a perpetual seventeen. She needed to be outrageous, had nourished herself all these years on the scandals she had created. She was now faced with normality, the condition of an ordinary middle-aged woman, and it appalled her. My grandfather had judged her incapable of real suffering. Remembering her previous heartbreaks and miraculous recoveries I had been inclined to agree. We had both been wrong.
She lost sleep and appetite and weight, swallowed laudanum and alcohol in quantities which left her grey-faced, heavy, lethargic, unequal to the effort of powdering her face or brushing her hair or even getting dressed when there was no one to see. Why go through the tedious routines of beauty, why even be clean, when her world was in ashes, when every time she put her head outside the door someone, some kind friend, and dear God, with such friends she had no need of enemies, would come rushing to tell her such tales, to pour out such jealousy and spite. Why not simply sit here and decay, moulder, since who cared, who would come running to enquire, who would shed more than a casual tear in her memory? What a cruel world! What a cruel city! If she could only get away from this flat, this street, these false friends. That would be her salvation.
‘There is the house in Bradeswick, mother,’ I suggested carefully, ‘It might be fun to go and look it over. Sell it, or knock it down, or something .…’
But at this stage she wanted neither consolation nor solutions. She wanted to agonize, to burn, and even then at the height of it, she might never be desperate enough to consider? Bradeswick.
‘Dear God,’ she said, ‘does Bradeswick still stand? I thought they must have levelled it to the ground years ago as a service to humanity. You cannot seriously imagine that I would set foot in Bradeswick or anywhere near it in my present sorry condition?’
‘He is not worth this agony, you know, mother. No man could possibly be worth it.’
‘Oh darling,’ she said, shaking her head and opening her arms wide in a rueful, graceful gesture. ‘Are you really so sure of that?’
And because, with the memory of Robin Esmond still engraved on my mind, I was not in the least sure of it, found myself swallowing hard and blinking away the tears which, since my return, had kept on taking me, most annoyingly, by surprise.
‘There you are,’ she said, triumphant yet a little tearful herself. ‘You did not mean it. No daughter of mine ever could. It has nothing to do with worth or good sense or reason. Heavens – I do still have a little of all that. It makes no difference. It is what one feels. And I cannot feel old, Olivia, I almost wish I could.’
‘You are not old, mother.’ And I did my utmost to sound absolutely certain of that.
‘Of course not. It is just that sometimes I am a little tired …’
‘Then come away, mother – a change – a rest …’
‘In Bradeswick?’
Her nostrils wrinkled with distaste, her long fine mouth expressing its utter abhorrence of these provincial manners and morals which inexplicably had so attracted me. And then, blue eyes suddenly wide open, she leaned forward and peered at me, an odd mixture of perplexity, satisfaction and regret in her face.
‘Darling – I am so very sorry.’
‘Mother! Whatever for?’
‘Because I have not been listening, have I? All these days since you came home, I have been bombarding you with my own misery and I just didn’t see … There is a young man in Bradeswick. Now I understand. Darling, I am so glad.’
She threw out her arms again in a gesture expansive enough to embrace a whole world of young girls in love, so very ready, in the midst of all her sorrows, to rejoice for me that my voice, in reply, sounded gruff with a familiar mixture of affection and exasperation.
‘Heavens – I may never see him again.’
‘But you do want to see him?’
‘Oh yes.’ My answer came swift and fierce with eagerness to be followed instantly by a denial. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
For I had no intention of letting her know that it was she, who so believed in love, who was keeping me away from him.
She hesitated a moment and then sat down at the table where she had laid out yet another solitaire, her head bent for a moment, considering the cards, her long, thin hands clasped tight together.
‘Oh dear …’ she said. ‘Oh dear .…’
And she raised her head, rather slowly, to look at me, all her elegance and sophistication faded, briefly but most alarmingly, to reveal the timid, infinitely, breakable spirit of my sister, Madelon.
‘You must see him, Olivia.’
‘Oh well – perhaps I will. There’s no great hurry .…’
‘Nonsense. We know better than that, darling. You must see him soon. And if he turns out to be less than you remembered then never mind. What matters is that you know you can feel. Not everyone can – not really, not in the way that counts. And you may believe me, my darling, when I tell you that nothing can compare with it. It is worth anything. There is nothing one should hesitate to give up, or lose, just to experience it. I am so pleased for you. And you must not think of wasting it, as one does sometimes, for reasons which may seem sound but which turn out not to be – which couldn’t be. So if your heart is in Bradeswick or Clarrow Fell then, however ironic, I suppose …’
‘Mother!’ Had I sounded too eager? ‘Couldn’t we go to Bradeswick for just a week or two? It might be fun …’
‘Fun?’ Her total, blank amazement told me that, in her view, fun was a commodity which had never been available in Bradeswick, and then, remembering my reasons for thinking differently, she bit her lip and sighed, ‘Oh, darling, I’ll try. But not now. Really not now. There are reasons – my fault, of course, and I must take the consequences – all my fault. I can’t tell you – except that I am to blame.’
What had she done? She went to her room, closed the door and left us wondering.
‘She’s pawned her jewellery,’ said Luc, appearing for once when we would have preferred him to go away. ‘Her earrings are in the window of that little shop in Saint-Germain-des-Prés – you know the one.’
We knew. But there must be more than that.
‘She seemed so frightened,’ whispered Madelon, looking terrified.
‘Her man has taken up with a dancer from the Deux Moulins,’ announced Luc, a conjurer producing a verbal rabbit from his hat and expecting my applause for it. ‘Everybody knows.’
‘No they don’t, little beast. How do you know?’
‘Because I saw them together, weeks ago, and he gave me ten francs not to tell.’
‘Why should that have stopped you?’ He shrugged, examining my question from all its angles to see if I had spotted some way in which he could have further exploited the situation and earned himself another ten francs from somebody else.
‘Poor mother,’ breathed Madelon sadly, knowing exactly how she would have felt herself in that situation.
‘She owes money in all the shops too,’ said Victorine, slapping out pastry dough on the kitchen table, having acquired great quantities of over-ripe berries somewhere or other which, all day, she had been putting into pies.
‘What money? Did one of the shopkeepers ask you for any?’
‘No. Marcel Lefevre told me.’
Her fishman. And if he knew about it then did it mean that my mother owed money as far afield as the rue de Bellechasse?
‘Victorine – mother has never bought a pound of fish in her life, not even on credit.’
‘No. She sends me, which is how I met Marcel. But there is the hat-shop on the corner, and the place that sells embroidered stockings and doeskin gloves, and the antique dealer with the carved ivory in his window.’
I had seen no new hats or gloves, no carved ivories. Had they too gone to pay for Jean-François’champagne or to calm the nerves of his creditors?
‘How long have you known about it, Victorine?’
‘Not long,’ she said, continuing to slap her dough about the table, dogged in her determination that any void, no matter how painful, could be filled with food. ‘Marcel mentioned it last night. He thought we should know.’
‘And just where did you see your fishmonger last night?’
‘He came here, to the kitchen door, if you must know.’
‘Victorine – like calling on a housemaid.’
‘Yes,’ she snapped, her chin clenched at its most pugnacious angle, her hands still deftly shaping the pastry and trimming its edges. ‘Yes, Olivia, just like that.’
‘Please,’ whispered Madelon. ‘Please don’t quarrel.’
I had a great deal to occupy my mind that night and lay awake until the approach of a cold dawn sorting out the list of my anxieties, arranging them first in the order of their gravity and then on a varying scale of what I could realistically hope to do about them. I could not control Luc, and, therefore, I would have to find some way of removing him from the source of his temptation. Madelon too was badly in need of a refuge for I had long been of the opinion that a little stability, a little peace of mind would cure her cough far more effectively than medicines. And how long would it be – unless positive action were taken against it – before Victorine’s Marcel made sure of his bride in the traditional kitchen-door manner of making her pregnant? He must be only too eager. What middle-aged fishmonger could be otherwise? While she, I suspected, was becoming every day more resigned to a marriage she might call convenient but which I considered to be a waste. Ten years from now she would have grown fat on fried fish and potatoes, loud from the racket of the fish market, rough-skinned from gutting and filleting and scouring. And since I could not forbid her to see him, the solution, in her case too, would be to move away.
Everything – my personal desires not least of all – pointed to Bradeswick. There was a house there, a reason to make the journey, a task to perform on arriving. My sisters and Luc presented no problem for they had been brought up to follow me. But how – with all the persistence of which I knew myself capable – could I possibly get my mother there?
I had no longer the slightest doubt that she had been buying on credit and re-selling or pawning the goods. Could one go to prison for that? It sounded quite possible. And why – why? – had so many of these close-mouthed, over-cautious shopkeepers given her credit in the first place? She was plausible and inventive, I well knew, but what tale could have loosened their purse-strings better than the good fortune of her daughter, Olivia, who was about to inherit – any day now – a great estate, a noble house, to become ‘milady’in her own right like the English ‘milords’who spent their money so freely along the boulevards.
I could imagine her telling the story, breathless and scatterbrained and innocent, giving her orders for kid boots and gloves and wickedly expensive little fur collars almost as an afterthought. How had she hoped to repay? The answer was that she had not given it a thought, repayment like suffering belonging to the list of things which might happen later and possibly not at all.
What could I do? What could Emil Junot have done in this not unfamiliar situation? Taken a cab to the station, I thought, one dark night and disappeared. Bradeswick again. Although Junot, of course, would have taken her to Rome or Lisbon or London. But no matter how humiliating it would be for her to return to Bradeswick in a condition it would be difficult to pass off as triumphant, I remained convinced that it might be the making of us all.
I had spent one day in Bradeswick and had found it ugly, dark, extremely dull, a factory town bordering my grandfather’s land which had nothing to recommend it but its solidity, its lack – surely – of fascinating young men like Jean-François, its distance from the fish shop in the rue de Bellechasse, its close proximity to Clarrow Fell and Robin. My mother might be bored in Bradeswick but she would be safe. Madelon would prefer boredom to her present uncertainties. Victorine, as the sister of Miss Heron of Clarrow Fell would be above the importunities of the local fishing trade. Luc would be well away from the temptations of the Deux Magots and the Brasserie Malakoff. I could be with Robin.
I went no further than that. Bradeswick, not Clarrow Fell. The tall, shabby town house Amyas had shown me, not the Manor. I was too harassed tonight, too busy, too scared, to think about falling in love. But the possibility of love existed. If I never saw him again, then eventually I would forget. But if I did see him! It was as I sank into this most enchanting contemplation that I heard a sound, tried hard to ignore it, heard it again, stiffened, told myself no, it was nothing, and then dry-mouthed, my senses certain of disaster while my mind still tried to reject it, I flung myself out of bed and ran to my mother.
I had not, in any way, expected it. Yet, when I reached her room and saw what she had done, it seemed incredible that I had been so near-sighted, so insensitive. I had judged the degree of her passion to greater than usual and in that I think I had been right. But I had underestimated her fear of debt, a laughing matter once when Emil Junot had been here to spirit her away; appalling now when it was for her, and her alone, that the officers of the law would come looking. I had also misjudged the strength of her attachment to life for its own sake, basing it on my own fierce desire to stay alive forever. And there was more than that. Far more. For I was the one who had pressed her to go to Bradeswick, had made her aware that, even for Robin Esmond, I would not leave her behind. And if she had done this, in any way for me, how could I ever bear it? How could I ever be at peace again?
She had taken laudanum and brandy – I could see and smell that – and a great many other things I could not give a name to, her bedside-table cluttered with pills and powders, a whole lethal array of dark brown and dark blue chemists’bottles. And for an unbelievable moment I stood there in the half-dark looking down at this woman on the bed, this stranger, just female bones and skin, no longer very young, damp hair pulled cruelly back from a face one could see any day of the week in its hundreds and thousands, drawn and plain and weary, plodding home with the laundry, the shopping, a truculent grandchild. My mother? Yes indeed, or the husk of her with the essence drawn out and blown away, the charm and grace and style which had been her true identity gone now so that she could have been anyone, just a poor, sick, worn-out woman, the kind they fish out of the river often enough in any big city. A woman who, despite her shallow, irregular breathing, looked dead, felt dead, had wished to be dead. Mother! And suddenly I was grinding my teeth with what proved a sustaining fury. How could she? How dare she? I loved her. I needed to love her. Mother – please mother – don’t leave me.
I made no conscious decisions. I simply followed the lead of my hands as they grabbed her shoulders and started to shake her hard, my fingers encountering bones as brittle as a bird, but refusing to pity her yet, since I would have to hurt her first – and badly – if I hoped to keep her above the level of that final sleep.
I dragged her out of bed and into the corridor, the dead weight of her more than I had bargained for, and screamed out for Victorine, Madelon, anybody, anything. And for a while I could see nothing but flapping white nightgowns, chalk-white circles that were their faces, open mouths stupid and noisy with panic, my mother staggering like a rag doll from one to the other.
It could not continue. I had to think. Pick up the pieces. Clear up the mess. Think!
‘That’s enough – now listen Victorine, help me hold her up. Madelon, get Luc and quickly. And then the two of you must go and fetch a doctor. Do it, Madelon. And Madelon, you may have to knock on his door and refuse to go away unless he comes. You’ll do that, won’t you, Madelon. Now run.’
‘Yes,’ she said, very pale, just a thin, unformed child in her cotton nightgown, fine hair hanging down her back, a cough beginning in her chest and then quickly suppressed, her small chin quivering in its heartrending attempt to be resolute.
She went. There were footsteps up and down the stairs, doors banging, Luc – who would know the whereabouts of every doctor in the quartier – dashing past me and then away again. But all this occurred only on the fringes of my vision, my mind entirely filled by the need to keep my mother awake, moving, up and down the hall, up and down, a weight of seaweed hanging limply against me, mindlessly entangling me so that twice I stumbled, taking her down with me as if we were drowning, pulling her to her feet again, using my own rage as my best weapon since it would have enabled me to drag her about by the hair had it become necessary.
‘Make her drink this,’ said Victorine, appearing with some peppery-smelling concoction in a jug. And so we sat her down, held her head, and spooned the mixture into her while she moaned and spat it feebly back at us.
‘She has to be sick,’ said Victorine, dogged even in panic, ‘and if she won’t swallow …’
‘She’ll swallow – one way or another. Come on, mother – come on!’ But she merely slumped lower down in the chair, her body boneless, fluid, looking as if it might evaporate, like water and become just a puff of steam hanging in the air for a moment or two: then nothing. How dare you, mother? Mother – please mother – don’t go. And in desperation I caught hold of her nose, pinched her nostrils viciously together and, when her mouth opened in automatic need for air, poured the whole content of Victorine’s jug inside it.
For a moment of blind terror I thought I had choked her. So did Victorine.
‘Dear God, Olivia!’
Bending her forward we thumped her back while she gagged and spluttered and heaved, her breath eventually wheezing up to us like old machinery creaking through layers of rust and injury. And it was a sign of triumph when she fell on to her knees and vomited with the abandon of a child – or a dog – on the carpet.
‘I’ll fetch the mop and bucket,’ said Victorine.
‘Mother,’ I heard myself whisper stupidly, ‘are you there?’
The doctor was small and precise and irritable, far too accustomed to dealing with hysterical women in unusual situations to be even mildly curious as to why this woman in particular had chosen to poison herself in the middle of a wet Friday night.
‘Her bedroom?’
I showed him. He and I together got her to bed, he closed the door, leaving the others outside, Madelon very white, Luc’s eyes looking twice their normal size, Victorine still at her mopping, and having raised sardonic eyebrows at the bottles on her table he asked me to undress her which I reluctantly did. And then, having stripped her, I suddenly could not stop myself from darting forward and covering her with a blanket.
‘I beg your pardon, monsieur,’ I said feebly in reply to his evident irritation.
‘If you would prefer to wait outside, mademoiselle?’
I shook my head and removed the blanket, disturbed not that he should see her naked but that he should see her ugly.
‘Very well.’
And deftly, without too much interest, he inserted a tube down her throat and pumped out the contents of her stomach, a brutal process from which I averted my head, although my nostrils could not escape the stink nor my ears the gurgling.
‘Hardly necessary, in this case, mademoiselle,’ he said ‘other than to discourage her from doing the same again. And now if your maid would bring me the wherewithal to wash my hands …?’
My maid? Victorine, of course, with her mop and pail, her sturdy fishwife’s build. Victorine, slowly withdrawing from the family circle, abdicating her position as a daughter of the house who must marry a gentleman or stay single. Turning herself into a housemaid for whom the fishmonger of the rue de Bellechasse would be an excellent catch.
‘Yes – of course. I’ll ask.’
But when I opened the door she had anticipated the need and was there with a steaming basin, a new bar of soap, clean towels.
‘Thank you,’ he said, to me not to her, washed his hands, buttoned his shirt cuffs, mentioned his fee, having learned by experience, one supposed, the folly of sending in one’s account at the month-end to a house such as this.
‘Certainly, monsieur.’
I paid him, accompanied him to the street door, finding myself obliged to lean suddenly against the cold wall, my legs shaky, my body feeling hot and hollow, lamentably unsteady.
But experience had also taught him never to involve himself with young ladies in distress.
‘Good night, mademoiselle.’
‘Good night, monsieur.’
Upstairs my mother lay as I had left her, flat on her face, whimpering through her daze and shock, her hair still damp, her skin clammy, her shoulder bones protruding at an awkward, somehow childish angle which reminded me of Madelon.
There was nothing, yet, to say to her. Much to be done. The house was quiet, the floor in the passage clean. I picked up the debris the doctor had left behind and disposed of it in the courtyard, startled by the unexpectedly full light of day. Saturday, I supposed it was, and as I let myself back into the hall I caught the aroma of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen where Victorine, fully dressed, had already started her placid beheading of carrots and sprouts for the day’s pot au feu.
‘Are you all right, Victorine?’
‘Yes. I’ve just warmed this blackcurrant syrup for Madelon.’
‘I’ll take it.’
In another room my younger sister had crept into bed like a little mouse and lay there, her breathing an agony to the ear, her face grey.
‘There’s nothing to worry about now, Madelon.’
But her hands were shaking, her teeth chattering on the rim of the cup, black smudges in the hollows of her eyes; a sick and very frightened child.
‘You did well, Madelon.’
Very well, in fact, for although she could not have found her way through the dark streets without Luc to guide her, she had known, far better than Luc, how to convince the doctor of the urgency of the call. And she had not broken down until her work was done.
Yet where was Luc? Instantly my mind filled with railway stations, night trains to God knew where, boats drifting upstream to destinations beyond my imagining. Not that! But I found him upstairs in his attic sorting through his glittering, stolen treasures, small objects, which were easily portable if one had to run, objects which would not break, could not be damaged by poison in the night or by the infidelities of dashing, young men, objects which, when they grew old, tended not to lose but to increase their value, and were, therefore, dependable.
‘Luc – are you all right?’
He was holding a crystal button up to the light, the hardest, brightest thing he possessed, turning it this way and that, assessing its worth and its market value, by no means the same, of course, but, even then, very well within his grasp.
‘Yes, I’m all right. Are you?’
‘Yes. So is mamma.’
‘Oh good. I thought she might like this.’ He squeezed the crystal tight in his hand, his shrewd little face puckering suddenly with tears. He was giving away his most treasured possession, part of his security, and would probably regret it tomorrow when she was laying out her games of solitaire again and telling him to be quiet. But, nevertheless, he was performing a generous, loving act. He was, and I was quite surprised by it, just a little boy crying for his mother. Hugging him hard, ruffling his hair, I pretended I had not noticed his tears and took him down to Madelon, asking her to look after him, asking him to look after her leaving them curled up together like a pair of stray kittens sheltering under a blanket.
And then I returned to my mother’s room, sat down in her bedside chair, and kept watch.
Remorse came first, a terrible flood of tears and sobs which moved me to cry a little too, then embarrassed me, then unnerved me. She slept a little after that and then, waking to strong sunlight, wanted to die again, hating herself for the condition she was in and me for witnessing it. But this I took to be a better sign and suggested that now she might like me to wash her hair. But I was somewhat too premature. No. She would lie in her own vomit forever. It seemed appropriate. She began to shiver and to cry again. Her throat was sore and swollen. Her stomach ached, she was bruised from head to foot, and as these physical preoccupations began to cancel out her thoughts of death – for if her body hurt then it must surely be alive – there came the hoarsely whispered confession, ‘I am ashamed Olivia. I can never hold up my head again.’
But she and Junot had scattered debts all over Europe and she could hardly feel humiliated by that when so many counts and dukes and princes did the same. She had been scared, certainly, and heartbroken, of course, but the thing that had broken her, the thing she still could not bear was that all those milliners and glove-makers and ivory-sellers should know that she, to whom so much adoration had been given in her summertime, had attempted and failed to buy the affections of a younger man.
‘What a sordid little tale,’ she said, wrinkling her nose with distaste, her eyes still hunted. ‘I have heard it a hundred times. How commonplace it all is. I can’t stay here, Olivia. You do see that?’
I saw it. When the news leaked out our doorbell would know no rest, not merely from the demands of anxious creditors, but the constant parade of my mother’s ‘friends’, men whose advances she had rejected in her hey-day, young women who wished to see for themselves that she was no longer a rival, a woman of her own age who had been less beautiful but had had more sense. They would bring flowers, chocolates, tears and kisses, and then as a final gift, some little tale about Jean François which everybody had known all along and nobody had quite liked to tell. It would be altogether unbearable, I quite agreed with her.
‘I can’t stand it, Olivia.’
‘Then we’ll just have to get you away – somewhere or other.’
‘If only I could – if I could just turn a page, start again …’
‘Yes. But it wouldn’t do just to run off, helter skelter, would it?’
‘Dear God – I don’t know. Why not?’
‘Because people would say you’d let that girl from the Deux Moulins drive you out.’
‘I don’t care what people say.’
‘Yes you do. So we’d have to go somewhere that would seem to be to our advantage. We’d have to make it look as if we were going up in the world, or might be.’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘You go to Bradeswick. Just let me go to hell.’
But her voice lacked conviction, the seed had been sown and, in the manner of Emil Junot before me, I proceeded to make it grow. She would be returning to her own country which might seem a defeat in her eyes but would look natural enough to everybody else. And who in Bradeswick would ever guess that she had left debt and disgrace behind her? They would simply see the mysterious Madame Junot who, between thrilling engagements elsewhere, had come not to ask favours or borrow money but to inspect her daughter’s property. She would, inevitably, be the talk of the town, queen of a small country – very small, in fact – but nonetheless royal for that, since what other woman in Bradeswick could hold a candle to her? Certainly not her sister, Sibylla, the vicar’s wife, nor any other of the stout, high-complexioned matrons I had seen, with their tight-laced corsets and strait-laced manners. While her friends here in Paris could have no notion of the exact size and nature of my inheritance and might easily be encouraged – as easily as our local shopkeepers – to think of her as living in circumstances of considerable affluence.
It would be the perfect answer.
‘No,’ she said, but very wearily, her voice lifting slightly in interrogation. ‘No?’ And then ‘Oh no,’ rather more firmly, ‘Don’t plague me so, Olivia.’
But, somewhat opportunely from my point of view, the milliner from the rue de Bellechasse chose that very afternoon to send round an account for a grey satin hat my mother did not appear to remember.
‘How many more of these to come, Mother?’
The doorbell rang again. Only Victorine’s fishman as it turned out, bringing her a present of hake, but enough to convince my mother that she was living under siege, as Emil Junot had so often done.
She lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes, looking as frail and almost as small as Madelon. When she spoke again they were the words I had often heard her speak to Junot.
‘I’ll go anywhere. Just arrange it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes – yes,’ she said, too frightened now for questions or reasons, wanting simply to be off, to be safe, to snatch once again at that mythical clean page, that fresh start. And, as Junot had always done, I began to make my preparations quickly, knowing that for as long as her panic lasted she was mine.
Madelon would go anywhere I led her. Luc was still small enough to tuck under my arm. Half an hour of my persistent logic assisted by ten minutes of my sharp tongue convinced Victorine that she could not possibly desert her family for a hard-working marriage in the rue de Bellechasse. And having settled that quite satisfactorily I left my sisters busily sorting through our linen and set off, not to pay my mother’s debts, but to get them paid.
Money, I knew, would be a constant problem, for Guy’s allowance, which had been ample for one, must now make do for five. And, the expenses of the journey apart, there would be an hotel in Bradeswick to pay for, since my mother, in her role of Madame Junot, could not take up residence in my house until it was fit to live in. What such repairs and decorations might cost I did not know, except that it would leave me nothing to spare for those shopkeepers who ought not to be left to pay the bill for my mother’s folly and her lover’s foie gras.
I spent the morning among my mother’s friends, just happening to meet them by chance in the places I expected them to be; a tightly knit circle where everybody knew the secrets, of everybody else and secrets, like promises, were not meant to be kept. That afternoon I called on Jean-François and informed him pleasantly that his aunt in Normandy, upon whom his future prosperity depended, would not be pleased to know how ruthlessly he had preyed on a woman and her innocent children, particularly if I went myself to tell her about it, taking frail, gentle Madelon and Luc, who could look very soulful when necessary, with me. Were a few tradesmen’s bills really worth the loss of his aunt’s good opinion or his share of her fortune? For I had heard that she had other nephews who would be only too willing to replace him in her favour. I told him the exact total of my mother’s debts and that I would return for the money the following morning. He paid. I have never cared to enquire how. But by noon my mother’s reputation was entirely restored in the rue du Bac although it was no part of my plan to tell her so.
She had eaten a little luncheon, her hair washed and curled, her face pale but painted very discreetly, blue shadows on a porcelain-tinted skin, cleverly creating a lovely, suffering face, in case anyone should call.
‘Don’t let anyone in to see her, Victorine. I think she knows by now that she can live without Jean-François and if she finds out her debts are paid, we’re done for.’
She smiled, gave a heavy shrug.
‘You’re not troubled by scruples, are you Olivia?’
‘Victorine – it’s for her own good.’
I went out again, sent telegrams to my grandfather’s lawyers and Amyas Hird, wrote a short statement of intent to my grandfather and a long, friendly letter to Alys. I bought train tickets and boat tickets, booked sleeping compartments and cabins, calculated the cost of a night or two in a London hotel and checked it against the dwindling contents of my purse, hoping I had allowed sufficient margin for the emergencies and unforeseen eventualities which would very likely become all too clear. I paid calls on every lady who had ever employed me as a secretary, collecting a great deal of good advice, a few cast-off pairs of gloves, a silk scarf, a parasol and, from the better-hearted, a franc or two. And then on my way home, I stopped at the milliner’s shop in the rue de Bellechasse where my mother had accumulated the largest single debt and, with my secondhand gleanings strewn on the floor around me, bought my mother, cash down, a brand new hat, a gorgeous extravaganza of peach and lilac chiffon, swirl upon swirl of it crowned with a yard of white plumage, a rose-garden of white tulle blossoms on the brim.
There had never been such a hat. I had never felt so sure and so strong. Our boxes were packed, our tickets in my hand, my intentions crystal clear. I was going back to Clarrow Fell on no mission of discovery this time, but to take it by storm.