The Bay of Angels Page 13

  But normality for my mother was now the Résidence Sainte Thérèse, the church of Sainte Rita, her newspaper, and the café on the corner. In a vain attempt to awaken earlier responses I plied her with questions about my father, to whom I felt vaguely disloyal in those straitened times, when family affections seemed to be a matter of prestige. My mother regarded my questions with a glint of irony, as if she knew that I was attempting to engage her in a therapeutic exercise destined to investigate her memory, and to see if she had any real recollection of her own history. That look of amused scepticism was the only truly adult expression I had seen on her face for months, years, probably; it returned her to adulthood in a way that singularly reduced my own age, as if once more I were a clumsy apprentice, or worse, that reader of fairy tales avid for romance that I had been as a child. It revealed her briefly as a woman with a mind and body of her own, one who, if she cared to, would understand the extent of her present humble mien, and reject it.

  My father, of whom I had no memory, apart from that of an undifferentiated face overhanging mine, was someone who preceded and therefore excluded me. I did not even know why he had died, or how, for this was in a curious way a subject too delicate for me to approach. This aura of mystery had kept me at arm’s length for most of my life. I understood, without being explicitly told, that it was too painful for my mother to discuss. I respected this, did not even mind too much, but now that our conversation was restricted to exchanges about other people’s relatives I felt we should both lay claim to relatives of our own.

  My inquiries were routine rather than heartfelt, but I had read an article in a magazine about an enterprise which encouraged retired people to put their reminiscences on tape in the interest of family history. Privately I considered such an undertaking worthless, but I could see that it might have some value if the participants were lonely and old. I assumed that my mother was lonely, if not old: how could she be otherwise? I understood her relief at being in a place of safety, in which her health had clearly improved, but I wanted her to react against her own passivity, which seemed to me disastrously premature. I saw a kind of willed collapse in what was in reality an habitual dreaminess. Because I never spoke of Simon, unwilling as I was to awaken painful memories, I felt that my father must pull his weight, must contribute something in the way of information, might even furnish some conversational appeal on those arid days in the middle of the week when there was no man in sight, other than Jérôme, who polished the floors and who averted his eyes when anyone addressed him. A charming story, brought to life again by my diligent questions, might be of benefit to all.

  ‘David?’ she said. ‘You funny girl. Why do you want to know that now?’

  ‘Well, I never knew him.’

  ‘You were unlucky. We both were. He died too young. We were both young. He was my first boyfriend, and I was his first girlfriend. People don’t live like that any more.’

  Virgins, I translated. I thought it a poor way to go about the business. Then I felt more sympathy for this unknown David. Simon had been a true father figure, supplying security, money, a beautiful house, whereas my father I saw as a sort of novice, returning every evening to his wife and baby after a day’s virtuous occupation in the prelapsarian days of the 1950s.

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked.

  ‘He worked in the library of the House of Commons. He loved it, though he was only a clerk. I dare say he would have stayed there if he had had the chance.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘A heart attack. I don’t really want to talk about this, Zoë. We loved each other. There’s nothing more to say. In many ways my life ended when he died. But of course I had the baby to look after. I think of him a great deal.’

  ‘And do you think of Simon?’

  ‘Not in the same way.’

  ‘Do you wish you had met Simon first?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly. ‘Simon was a different matter altogether.’

  I waited for her to say more, but she was rigorously silent, as if I had intruded on a private memory. My role in her life seemed reduced by the legacy of that young husband and of her own younger self. Incredible though it might seem all the women at the Résidence Sainte Thérèse had once been young and ardent, and of that youth and ardour no trace remained.

  ‘One comes to terms,’ she said, smiling faintly, as if divining my thoughts. ‘Mme de Pass was married three times. I dare say you find that unbelievable. And I have no doubt that she was in love more than once. But you will find that it is not always comfortable to remember such feelings. There is something indecent about old women who talk about their love affairs.’

  ‘You are not old, Mama.’

  ‘I have become old, Zoë. Now let’s talk about something else. Where are we to live? When we go home, I mean.’

  ‘I might go back in a day or two. Look around.’

  ‘Do that, darling. Fortunately, we are in no hurry.’

  I glanced at her, surprised, and saw that her face had gone pale again, as it had in the clinic when some subject had exhausted her.

  ‘Would you like to rest, Mama? Have I tired you?’

  ‘I still get these silly feelings of weakness, as if I had come up against something too big for me to take in.’

  ‘Would you like to come out? For a walk in the sun?’

  ‘No, dear.’ With an effort she waved goodbye to a man with a small girl, who waved back. ‘Violette,’ she said. ‘A darling. I’ll just go to my room until dinner. I feel a little tired. Sundays are almost too exciting.’

  Here she smiled, with something of a return to her original irony. But the light soon went out of her eyes. I kissed her and prepared to leave, as that was what she wanted me to do. One or two ladies nodded to me kindly. They were all kind, had learned to tread a careful path among dangerous subjects. I had no doubt that they would be tactful, would make no reference to her change of colour. Dinner on Sunday evenings would be a quiet affair, since all emotion had been newly found to be exhausting. By Monday defences would be once more in place, and life would be resumed. The maids would come back and their youth would be acceptable, not yet endangered by illness and by the shadow of times for ever concluded. Then it would be possible once more to propose a short walk, a cup of coffee. Some kind of balance would be restored, and it was one to which outsiders could be only briefly admitted.

  She had forgotten, or seemed to have forgotten, my approaching birthday. Whether this was a simple oversight or a genuine desire to arrest time seemed to me equally significant. Simon would have made a fuss; he set a great store by family celebrations. Such celebrations were now inappropriate, and in the circles in which I now moved I could expect no congratulations. Even at the Résidence Sainte Thérèse birthdays were not celebrated, for all knew the downward path they now traced. Muted good wishes would be offered and received, but the ladies would have to wait until Sunday to acknowledge that triple kiss that signified that a son, a grandson, a nephew had remembered the date. And what were birthdays, or indeed any celebrations, without a man? I was fascinated, despite myself, by the persistence of this attitude, which was more than an attitude, an article of faith.

  The young doctor who had assessed my mother when she arrived to take up residence had been regarded with a kind of contempt by the other ladies, for his eagerness, his boyishness, or rather his girlishness. He was good-looking, had all the components of masculinity, bright eyes, brilliant teeth, a lithe deference, yet he made as little impression as the man who came to polish the floors. Was he too assiduous, too anxious to please, too, in a word, kind? It was as if a man needed, to preserve his autonomy, to be respected. Those ladies, whose experience was, after all, authentic, would respond more to embarrassment, even to a kind of surliness as long as these were accompanied by proper male qualities: independence, a suspicion that women would overrule them if given half a chance, the sort of instinctive wariness that so often defeats women, even more than a desire to annexe, to conquer, t
o seduce.

  I remembered that Adam had tried to explain this and had done so rather badly, but I retained from that conversation the idea that a certain resistance was called for on both sides if a love affair were to be experienced as truly powerful. Poor Dr Lagarde had shown none of this and had thus failed some elementary test. Women would submit to his professional care without embarrassment, judging him inadequate for any other kind of exchange. They would recognize that he was probably a good son, a faithful brother, but would cast him in these subordinate roles and abandon him to his fate, as though he were doomed to be forever eager and forever unimportant. After his ministrations he was usually dismissed kindly, but without special appreciation, as if he were some kind of servant, for he lacked that essential quality that would have enabled them to regard him as a proper man.

  I had been brought up to regard men as potential saviours, guardians, preservers, but this attitude was no longer viable. Perhaps it never had been. Those doughty French ladies, now reduced to quasi-impotence, knew that love was a battleground, on which territory had to be won, and were quite happy with this knowledge. That was why they were still so susceptible to male reluctance; that was why they so instinctively understood the resistance of Jean-Claude, the little boy who evaded his grandmother’s embraces, not only from disgust at her old age but from an altogether masculine withdrawal from unsought ardour. And this was what the other women had understood. They had excused the child with a smile, and had no doubt cast a complacent backward glance at their own strategies of enticement. The confusion so unfortunately manifested by Mme Levasseur in the circumstances would be sincerely regretted on her behalf, but it would be instinctively condemned. They would take all the more care to receive their own offspring with the detachment, the worldly smile, that would signify not only to others, but also to themselves, that no pride had been relinquished in the course of their long incarceration, and that they were still capable of responding to a man in a way that the man would find acceptable. Yet with what keenness would the touch of a masculine cheek be received, and be remembered in the eventless days and evenings until the following Sunday, when the same good manners would prevail! What memories might be evoked by those long legs striding so confidently out of the door when the magic hour was over!

  I was now caught up in this web, albeit only as an observer. I sometimes thought that I had much to learn from these women, or rather that they had nothing to learn from one such as myself. A daughter was not worth as much as a son in their eyes, and although they applauded our devotion to one another, my mother and I understood that, in the absence of a man, we had both undergone some process of diminution. The friends of my youth would have despised such an attitude, but I was uneasily aware that it had some validity. I was more aware of this on Sundays, when I witnessed the superb arrogance with which those filial kisses were received, as if, in the war between men and women, certain tactical victories were still de rigueur. My mother, in her perpetual innocence, was unaware of the complexities of this particular commerce. Her account of my father had not inclined me in his favour. No doubt a marriage in which each partner respected the innocence of the other was a marriage of true minds, but in my view it did not amount to the real thing. No fairy story would persuade me now. I required more in the way of artfulness, which is not a fairy attribute. And I would reject any pilgrimage which was content merely to anticipate a happy ending.

  On Sunday evenings, I re-entered the noisy streets as if I had been freed on probation. Nice was never so shamelessly sexy as at that hour. Some visitors still find the winter season preferable, but the true Niçois came alive in the intemperate heat, the long days, and the even longer nights. From my room I could hear laughter into the small hours. At times like these I could even envisage maintaining a permanent foothold in Nice, or, if that were impossible, of returning at regular intervals, much as if Les Mouettes were still available to me. Instead of this I must re-evaluate our possibilities, if possibilities there were, of either remaining or returning. In the Cours Saleya I could still smell the aroma of the market, of the vegetables that had been crushed underfoot. The pâtisserie, where the Sunday gâteaux were bought, was still open, though its shelves were now bare. Cafés were full: the visitors were now in command, over-excited, over-tired, but beautiful in a way they would never be at home. It was impossible not to applaud their enjoyment, even if one were denied such enjoyment for oneself. Tomorrow would be a working day, yet something of that effervescence would remain. My own Sunday observances had left me tired, and my solitary cup of coffee was a mere gesture towards the fact that I was on my own again. I should go back to London for a few days, and on the following Sunday I should reacquaint my mother with news of ‘home’, her home, and no doubt my own in the days to come.

  12

  London was full of children, on their long summer break, and also of tourists, ambling slowly, clutching maps. ‘Been away?’ people inquired of each other, as if going away were the whole point of staying at home. My eye encountered brick house fronts and shady domestic trees which seemed to me utterly strange. This strangeness extended to the flat, which I remembered as from long ago. I felt little affection for it, but saw it quite objectively as a place which would accommodate two persons only with difficulty. The small second bedroom, which would be mine, was sparsely furnished with a single bed and a chair positioned near the window. The window looked out on that famous courtyard which the estate agent had so admired, but which kept the room in semi-darkness. At some point I must have gone out and bought that bedcover, which now struck me as intolerably jaunty; in a brief moment of optimism I had had an architectural engraving framed and hung on the wall.

  Now it all seemed quite mute and alien, as did the kitchen with its dripping tap, and the sitting-room, with the books I no longer read. Those long winter days which were spent indoors had been banished, as if for ever, by the fierce alien sun which I now accepted as my birthright. But they would come again, and with them a proximity to my mother that was only half desired. She would be comfortable; I could see to that; but how would we fare in the dark days when we were obliged to scrutinize each other, for want of other company? My life would be hedged in by duties, most of them of an unwanted nature, most of them inherited from other guardians who were more competent than I could ever be. And my mother’s longing for home might prove illusory once the reality of the small flat in the quiet street was seen as less reassuring than had been her distant view of it. Moving carefully around each other we should be polite, accommodating, yet uncomfortable, for nothing could revive those days of childhood when such companionship was second nature to us both. Now events had intervened, had altered us; we might find ourselves to be strangers, and that would be the saddest outcome of all.

  Conscientiously I went back to the estate agent and told him that I needed a bigger flat. He looked at me incredulously when I mentioned the price I was willing to pay, based on the sale of the flat that was still mine. ‘There’s a housing boom,’ he told me. ‘Prices have gone through the roof. My advice would be to sell your flat and rent somewhere. It’s a short-term solution, I know, but I don’t see how you can do otherwise.’ He then showed me some details, and it was my turn to laugh incredulously. Every available property was out of our reach, or rather out of my reach, for I did not know exactly how much money my mother had in her account. We were living on the sale of those policies in the safe in Walthamstow, sufficient for our present needs but no more. Our only hope was the Swiss bank account, but that seemed as far out of reach as it had ever been. We were needy; there was no other view to be taken. We could afford our present arrangements; we could even afford to live in my flat, but the future would depend on what I could earn.

  And with this in mind I contacted Dr Blackburn, who supplied me with such work as I was able to undertake. He too was incurious, as incurious as M. Cottin. There was an index to be prepared, he said, for a thesis accepted for publication. It was what I wanted; it was wor
k that could be done at home, either in London or in Nice, but it was not a prospect that filled me with pleasure. I had become used to spending my days out of doors, either on the way from the rue de France to the rue Droite, or, restlessly, in the late afternoons, among the crowds and the traffic of the Promenade des Anglais. It suited me now to be something of a vagrant, wandering at will, returning only very late to my room. Even in my bed I was reassured to hear the footsteps of passers-by, their snatches of conversation, just as I was reassured, on my visits to the Résidence Sainte Thérèse, to know that there were other conversations in the background, as my mother and I attempted to renew our intimacy after so many upheavals.