The Colonnel’s Daughter

The Princesse de Villemorin crossed her still estimable legs and glared at the sunset now faded to a luminous mauve that almost matched her high-heeled sandals.

‘People seem to think I’m immune from inflation. But no one is immune. Take just the servants. I’m paying them fifty per cent more than I was five years ago. So you see . . .’

The princess turned and reached out a caressing hand. Discreet turquoise bangles gently clinked as the hand came to rest on Guy’s naked shoulder. The hand journeyed upwards, fingering the warm back of the neck, then tugging at the roots of hair so marvellously blond she privately compared it to the gold spun from flax in a fairytale she had long forgotten.

‘Please don’t be cross, darling.’

‘I need the bronze, Penelope.’

‘I know you do, but have you any idea what bronze in that kind of quantity costs now?’

‘You can afford it.’

‘Couldn’t you work in lead or metal or something? You hear of terribly successful sculptors making things out of old prams these days and showing them at the Tate.’

‘Not me.’

‘You don’t hear of anyone – except perhaps Henry Moore – working in bronze.’

‘Bronze is the only substance I can relate to.’

‘Substance? You make it sound like putty.’

The princess’s hand tumbled as Guy rose and walked to the edge of the terrace. Beneath him, the garden lay in shadow, puffing its exotic breath at the encroaching dusk. He was aware, as he sighed, of Penelope on her chair, her body in its floating dress, her eyes watching, possessing, her thought: without my money he can’t work. Anger welled up, familiar yet absurd. One day, I will leave her.

‘Of course,’ came her silky voice, ‘you can have the bronze. Guy? Listen to me, darling. You can have the bronze. I’ll ring my stockbroker in the morning and arrange the money. It’s only that sometimes . . .’

‘What?’

‘I wish you’d be more grateful.’

Guy was silent, smelling the white flowers shaped like stars that climbed the terrace wall. His mind charged to her morning ceremonial, she exquisitely in place on her satin sheets, her body massaged and tremulous with its invitation, her eyes lidded with silver, sparkler-fizzing for the first touch of him. And the weight she demanded, the strength that had to clutch and devour so that her face lay buried in his neck, his dragon-panting fanning her hair, his sweat sucking his belly to hers, her deep and buried sigh of triumph as she used him up.

I wish you’d be more grateful.

The thought followed Guy from her bed to his studio. On entering the high room, he’d perch on a stool and will the thought to settle in the plaster dust, become obliterated in his work. Because here – only here – was he safe from her. This was Bluebeard’s room, the one the Princesse de Villemorin couldn’t enter. Once it had been a laundry. Far into the twentieth century, women had slapped and pummelled the soiled linen of the châtelaine on stones worn to glimmering. Now it held the quiet of his inspiration. Nothing moved in it but Guy and the straining forms imprisoned first in clay, then finally in bronze.

As the sculptor worked, he chose to forget, if he could, the presence of the Princesse de Villemorin embarked upon the journey of each sumptuous day, little chiselled heels clacking over sunlight on her polished floors, voice dealing faultless instructions to the sallow-faced people she called les domestiques, pointed fingers rearranging a bowl of roses, fluttering from the roses to the rosewood bureau to gather the telephone, to pick up a gold pen and begin to notate in ruled columns, ankles crossed now, the body at peace with its arithmetic. I wish you’d be more grateful . . .

She disturbs me. In every sense of this word, she is a disturbing woman. If she was French, she would disturb me less; it’s the Englishness staring out of her French name – the Princesse Penelope de Villemorin – that gives her away to me and makes me loathe where (I have vowed to my art) I must try to love. Yet she says she belongs to France now. When she snoozes in the afternoons, she has nightmares of the old prince her husband and the line of noble cousins, nephews (yet not children) dangling from his limbs to weigh him down with magisterial expectations and with a voice bleeting sorrow for the gravest of his failures, his bitter marriage. Mon dieu, mon dieu, an English divorcee and a Protestant, snickered the ancient trussed-up de Villemorin aunts. What a blow for the famille! What a muddying of the line! ‘I was married to him for eight years,’ said Penelope, ‘and that family taught me nothing except how to hate them.’

Oh but they taught you how to value money! That was the legacy of the marriage, the one you used against them after the prince left you. Poor old prince, with his exquisite nails. He wanted to tear your flesh with his nails for squandering all that he gave you, for wasting it all, wasting his love. Yet he put on a clean silk shirt, tied his paisley tie from Simpson’s of Piccadilly, clicked his heels at eight years of marriage and walked out without touching you or seeing you again. And you squawked like a macaw for the best lawyers. You scented a fortune and it hung like a whiff of tar in solicitors’ rooms, crouched just out of sight in the creases of solicitors’ smiles. You knew you should get half. But the family fought you. All with their filbert nails and perfected manners, they fought you like cockerels. So you settled for a lump sum. You stopped sniffing the tar smell of ‘half’. The lump sum was more than enough.

Or so you thought then, when it was you alone, Penelope – no longer a princess, but still calling yourself one – and moved in alone to your pretty château ‘with it’s own historical laundry and stabling for five cars’. But the years picked at it. Your own tastes became richer: the aloneness of you sought compensation. And the menopausal Penelope mourned the dying out of beauty. You touched the crevices of your body and remembered the gaudy kisses of the young. One night, you started going to the town in your Mercedes, drinking a crème de menthe in one of the bars and driving home with a young man’s head in your lap. For a while, the young men were cheap. And then, in the same bar, in the same way, I met you.

Penelope adjusted the thin heelstrap of a mauve shoe and stood up. ‘Come on, Guy darling. Stop pouting and put your shirt on. I’ve told you, we’ll arrange for the shipment of bronze. I was only teasing about the old prams.’

She held out her arm, waiting for his hand to steer her inside to the candlelit dining room, but he was fussing with his shirt, his face turned away from her.

‘Hurry up, darling. I want to talk to you over dinner, about Lorna.’

‘What about Lorna?’

‘I’ve got a letter from her, full of all her dull goings on in Australia. But it seems she’s coming to Europe and wants to see me.’

‘Why does she want to see you?’

‘Money, I suppose. Why else do stubborn daughters creep back to mothers they affect to despise? But God knows, on a teacher’s salary, how she can afford the airfare.’

Guy tucked his shirt inside the pale blue trousers the princess had bought for him in Paris. There were moments, and this was one of them, when Penelope de Villemorin felt impaled by her own yearnings. Sainte Marie, let him never leave me.

‘Come along, Guy. Anita has made a soufflé and it will spoil.’

So they sat close to each other in the pretty dining room and were served. Guy noticed, in between forkfuls of the soufflé, that Penelope had begun to economise on her wines: the Pouilly-Montrachet he had learned to expect had been replaced by a cheap local Loire wine. He longed to ask her suddenly precisely how rich she was. Tell me precisely, he wanted to say, how much money and what assets you own. But certain questions breed for a lifetime and are never uttered. He would ask her instead about the gallery.

‘The gallery?’

‘Yes.’ Guy wondered why she sounded surprised.

‘Well, what can I tell you? You know it all already. Our policy is sound in my view. We search for young painters and help them on their way. We create fashions.’

‘And your stake was half?’ The word never lost its particular meaning for the princess.

‘I believe it’s an excellent investment – and a lovely excuse to go to Paris more often! Of course, one could wish that returns were higher. It seems not enough collectors are prepared to take the financial risks on new artists.’

‘Art isn’t a commodity, Penelope.’

‘Oh no! I didn’t mean to imply that. But as you yourself know, it’s a very costly business. Art would simply not exist without the rich.’

‘Of course it would exist!’

‘Well exist, yes, but no one could live by it. Anyway darling, let’s not argue. There’s no earthly reason we couldn’t give you an autumn show at the gallery.’

‘And you take sixty per cent of everything I sell!’

Penelope smiled. She noticed, fleetingly, that the prawns in the soufflé echoed perfectly the colour of the dining-room walls.

‘I expect,’ she said, ‘we could make an exception in your case.’

Memories of her daughter (‘always clever, Penelope. Lorna was always clever . . .’) made her fidget with guilt and irritation. She tugged at a piece of stiff writing paper and began: ‘My dear Lorna, I’m so very sorry to say that an August visit won’t be possible as I shall be travelling . . .’ but quickly crumpled it. The clever girl would find some way to see her. The clever girl’s eyes would ferret among the telltale creases of fifty-five years and decide with satisfaction, Mother’s power is waning. Oh it was cruel, miserable! Why ever had this teacher daughter decided to poke and pry after eight blissful years of separation and silence?

She pulled out her portfolio (how it had dwindled!) of stocks and shares. How utterly miserable to be selling off yet more. But the bronze, though. She must find a way to purchase this wretched bronze for Guy. The princess rubbed her eyes, puffy from snatched sleep. Money is power. So whispered the de Villemorin aunts, clucking over each her own fortune. They died in their bonnets and were buried unmourned. The money was shared among the cousins who squandered it, so complained the prince, on American luxuries, not forgetting American women . . .

The sun came up beyond the steep apple orchards. The house began to murmur with the tiptoeing of servants. It was the hour when the princess usually rose and washed her body, before presenting it, creamed and scented, to Guy. Obliterate me, said this scented yearning body. But this morning, immobile at her desk, the princess felt too tired.

A stubbornly hot fortnight and the death of the one stockbroker she trusted had ravaged the poise of the princess. She had enraged Guy by drinking more wine than she could hold and wailing in her little-girl’s voice that she had never been loved. As he touched the bronze, the sun falling on his wide hand, he tried not to measure the price he was paying for this precious metal.

He stayed in the laundry studio all day, working in clay. When the sun dipped from the high windows, he came out into the hot evening. He was tired. He longed to lie down in a cool bed, alone.

He showered and changed (this much I can do for Penelope’s daughter) and went to find the two women. Penelope looked glittering. As a defence against Lorna’s arrival, she had had her hair re-tinted, she had draped her body in a white, off-the-shoulder dress. She fingered the pearl choker clenched at her neck. ‘This is Lorna. Lorna, this is Guy who . . . has the old laundry house as his studio. He’s a very, very talented sculptor, aren’t you darling?’

Lorna got up. The flamboyant introduction had seemed to demand movement of some kind. Guy saw a thin, bony girl with clever brown eyes and thick hair cut very short. She wore an Indian dress, skimpy and creased. Her breasts, covered by this whisper of material, seemed oddly plump, the only part of her body that betrayed any blood tie with her mother. Her smile suggested a knowingness that must surely irritate Penelope.

‘My mother didn’t say you were here.’

Australia. Yes, he could see it now, the woman-stayed-girl at twenty-eight. Freckled. Nourished by enormous skies.

Guy held out his hand, tried to stare past the smile.

‘You’ve come a long way.’

‘Yes. But then it’s years since I saw Mother. I expect she told you.’

‘Lorna loves the house, Guy.’

Penelope had never attempted to quell the enjoyment she got from showing other people her riches. Why bother with Aubusson carpets if no one ever admires them? And Lorna had clearly been astonished by the château and its treasures. She had remembered her mother was rich, yet seemed to have forgotten that riches can gleam at you from surfaces you can touch and smell.

‘And she’s going to stay for ten days, which is wonderful for me. So much to catch up on, haven’t we Lorna?’

Oh yes, thought the Australian girl. But surely you understand that that’s precisely why I came over, to get a full account of a life I’ve only allowed myself to guess at since you left my father and married the stiff and straight prince and became wealthy. And of course you never told me about the sculptor, young enough to be my brother. You left me to imagine you getting old by yourself. I thought at last time had punished you.

Guy sat down. Penelope reached for the champagne in its brimming bucket and poured him a glass. The sun on the terrace was still warm. He took the glass from Penelope and turned to the daughter. Her eyes were lowered, seeming to contemplate her slim, dusty feet in flat sandals.

‘To Lorna!’ said Guy.

Oh Mother, what deafening complaint clanks across the acres of quiet, so carefully tended! I can hear your mind stoking its engines of dissatisfaction, even as you sit on your terrace, so poised, reaching for the bottle in the ice bucket, reaching for the sculptor’s smile. Fears group and regroup in you. Your white dress, at dinner, was splashed with some reddish sauce or other. You looked to the sculptor for help, but he turned away. He turned to me with his smile, yet all I could do was stare. Because what does an artist do to himself if he locks himself inside Mother’s island? What are you doing? Working you say, but working in an old laundry where women were paid a pittance to plunge their red arms into the stained, suddy water of the unassailably rich. How has Mother stained you? Guy, the sculptor. Why do you smile at me when, even this minute perhaps, Mother opens her arms and receives you like a gift of amber, spreads you on her like an ointment – your youth to heal her age.

Yet there is something. Not in you, Guy, as much as in me. Some feeling that made me turn away, made me gabble about myself, telling jokes about my Head of Department to see if you laughed and showing off my clever self (‘Lorna is so unlike you, Penelope dear,’ said long-ago friends) to let you know there was substance inside the shorn head, inside the cheap Indian dress so marvellously wrong for Mother’s dining room. And you listened. You watched. Mother buys you. She buys you afresh each day. But a look in you – and in me – lets me believe I could have you free.

Half asleep, deliciously comfortable in the enfolding satin, Guy mumbled ambiguous assent, let the princess caress the side of his face, then slipped with perfect ease into a dream of Lorna. He was bathing in a river. Lorna waded in from a rock, still wearing the skinny dress which, once wetted, clung to her. He gazed at her eyes, lashes flecked with water like minuscule diamonds. When he kissed her, her tongue was long and gentle.

The princess wanted to pull him back from sleep. It was as if, sleeping, Guy deserted her. She said his name. He lay still and golden beside her, barely covered. Look at him, she wanted to wail to the ghost of the prince walled up in some mausoleum near Tours, look at my lover!

‘I hate having my role confused, darling.’

‘Your role?’

‘Yes. Lorna confuses my role, Guy.’

The laugh was mocking, ungentle. The princess looked up sharply. ‘Guy, you did promise me, didn’t you?’

‘Promise you?’

‘That you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t ever, would you?’

‘I already have.’

Not merely in his dreams. He and Lorna had gone walking early on the fourth morning of the ten. The princess sat in bed with her silver breakfast tray, calling Paris, calling London, too preoccupied with the telephone to imagine they could be gone all morning, gone still at lunchtime, eating joyously in a little café with memories of their morning bright in their eyes. Yet what made him admit it? What made him decide not to lie, when lying was so easy? You believe what you want to believe.

‘Oh Guy . . .’ Penelope’s hands were rammed against her mouth. Guy stared, horrified. For a second, he imagined that neither words nor tears would come gushing out from between the fingers, but blood.

‘Penelope . . .’

‘Don’t speak! I can’t listen to anything!’

‘It was terribly innocent, Penelope.’

‘Innocent! Don’t Guy! Don’t! You make me want to be sick. You make me want to die!’

The act innocent because so joyful, he thought, yet the inspiration cruel: two people who approach each other, aware of the invisible onlooker, whose torment drives them on. As they enfold each other, there she is in the touch and push of their bodies, there she is tangled in their moist hair, there she is in their breaths. And afterwards – the glorious knowledge that together they had conquered her, where each had failed to conquer alone. As they walk back, they hear it, the click-clack of Penelope’s high heels, the clink and trinkle of Mother’s bracelets. Perfect, thinks Guy. Perfect, thinks Lorna.

Maurice announced himself. Penelope sipped at her whisky and didn’t turn. A reminder, Madame, says Maurice, only a reminder that no one in the château has received any salaire this month . . .

She waved him away. Let them all desert her. Nothing mattered any more. Only the plans she made in the golden whisky haze: she would buy bronze in quantities no mortal could dream of owning, she would fill the laundry with bronze, she would lay her head on the vast, unmoving lumps of bronze and let her tears flow onto its darkness.

I know him, she whispers to the spent fire, I know he will trade his Sydney teacher (firm though her breasts are, clever though her damned head has always been) for his own statues. The artist in him will win and without money the artist in him will pine. The mouldering de Villemorin jewels will go. They must all go. And Maurice must realise that no one can be paid now, not till I have wedged that studio with what he calls his ‘substance’. Life drowns and gurgles in the sea of the whisky glass. Life sleeps. I am Sleeping Beauty (‘What a joke, at your age, Mother!’) and I refuse to wake up till the prince has picked his way through the briars and grown roses of my daughter’s mind and comes crashing down here, his weight as potent as the weight of bronze, to crush me and still me with life.

On her long flight home to Sydney, Lorna ate none of the food offered her and stayed absolutely still in her seat, talking to no one. Around her parting from Guy, a man who, had she found him before he strayed into a bar one night and met her mother, she believed she might have loved, she concocted an essay subject for her sixth-form students: “What is the function of the creative artist in our materialistic society?” She saw the blackboard where she would write up the title. She saw the thirty or so faces staring at it with anxious frowns. One of the girls raised her hand. ‘Please, miss, I don’t understand.’