A Pure Clear Light (3 page)

‘Yes,’ Lydia agreed.

She folded her arms and looked at him; she seemed to be smiling, half at him (at him, not with him) and half to herself: a smile which seemed challenging, ironical, mysterious, and almost— had it not suddenly vanished—infuriating. Who the hell are you, he might almost have said, to smile at me like that?

‘Let me offer you a drink before you go,’ she said, and she turned before he could refuse and looked inside a Victorian sideboard affair. ‘I’m sure I’ve got something here, somewhere.’ He stood there, helpless, while she rattled bottles, and then she stood up, holding one aloft. ‘How about this?’ she said.

It was a bottle of green Chartreuse. Well, what else should it have been? ‘Just a very small one,’ he said.

‘Of course.’ She poured out two liqueur glasses full and handed him one. ‘Do sit down,’ she said, nodding towards the sofa. It was very faded and threadbare, and was draped with a large silk-fringed shawl. Simon sat down at one end, but Lydia remained standing by the sideboard. It was hard to tell in this half-light, but she seemed to be staring at him—not rudely, but certainly, frankly, staring.

‘Won’t you join me?’ he said, inclining his head towards the other end of the sofa. She said nothing but crossed the room and sat down.

He hadn’t quite noticed before how well she moved: she had a firm, rhythmical tread, and when she sat, her frame folded, just so, her back very straight. Where could she have learned to do all that? She moved—now he came to think of it; now that he’d actually watched her, properly, for the first time in all these years of intermittent brief meetings—like one of those old-time actresses. Deportment. A nice old-fashioned word for a nice old-fashioned thing. She sipped at the drink. There was something just right about the way she did that, too. Who, now he came to think of it (he must once have been told, but he hadn’t actually been listening),
was
she?
Who are you
,
Lydia?

‘Have you lived here long?’ he said, looking around the room again. Shabby didn’t begin to say it: the curtains, for instance, were half in tatters, and the large Aubusson-style carpet on the floor was virtually threadbare—here and there you could just discern a rose-petal or two, the end of a blue riband, half a spray of foliage.

Lydia considered. ‘I bought it three and a half years ago,’ she said.

‘Oh, you own it then.’

‘Yes. My mother had one of her fits of conscience, and gave me the money.’

‘Ah.’

‘One of these days she may have another such fit, and I’ll be able to do it up properly.’

‘What about your father?’

‘He has no conscience.’

‘Your mother—’ ‘Lives in Australia. She ran off with an abstract expressionist when I was fourteen years old.’

Simon began to laugh, and then stopped. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

‘Your father, then—’

‘My father’s remarried and has another family; they all live in Bucks. I was my parents’ only child. Now you know everything there is to know about me: I need only add that art is long and life is short—as I dare say you have already realised.’ Her glance fell on him briefly, teasingly, dismissively. Now you can go, she might have said: and he was for the moment paralysed; he did not know how, politely, gracefully, to make a move. It was as if she had heard his unspoken question and had teasingly, then dismissively, answered it—but only to leave him wondering still further.
Yes
,
but who are you?

He looked into his glass and then drained it and put it down on the low table in front of the sofa. ‘I really must be going,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the Chartreuse.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said.

‘Thanks for the lift, and everything.’

He was standing up. It had all taken an almost superhuman effort; she rose in one swift, easy movement, like a bird taking flight, and walked over to the door and opened it. She stood, waiting for him to follow her and depart, her head slightly tilted. That smile again. He stood in the doorway, not twelve inches from her. She was almost as tall as he—much taller than Flora: her eyes almost directly met his. ‘Well, goodbye,’ he said. And, oh God, for one terrible instant he was seized by the impulse to lean forward and kiss her on the mouth; to extinguish that smile, subdue that teasing, alien glance. How could this be? He stopped himself just in time, of course.

But there was worse. For as he turned to go, finally, truly to depart, he saw that she had seen this impulse come and go, and thought as little of him for having resisted it as she would have thought of him for succumbing to it. He hastened down the stairs almost at a run, and escaped the terrible house. He did not see her again for another six months or so, and, when he did, had all but forgotten that dreadful moment in the doorway: but looking at her at the other end of a dinner table—at the Carringtons’, was it?—he thought, she’s not my type at all, not remotely. Could she be anyone’s?

7

Apparently not. Apparently no one wanted to hook up with Lydia. ‘But how old exactly is she now? Thirty-five-ish?’ Simon asked Flora, on the way home from that particular dinner party.

Flora was driving; Simon had been knocking back the pinot noir like no one’s business. ‘She’s, well, a bit older than I am,’ said Flora. ‘She came up late to Cambridge: she went out to Australia for a few years after she left school.’

‘Oh,’ said Simon. He made no mention of his having heard the tale of Lydia’s errant mother. You’d have thought his interest in the subject was nil. Well, and so it was.

‘Her mother lives out there,’ Flora went on. ‘She has a gallery. In Sydney.’

‘No kidding,’ said Simon. Flora glanced at him. Well! It was, after all, he who had raised the topic of Lydia. ‘Isn’t it time old Lydia found herself a bloke?’ he’d said, as they were driving along the embankment. ‘She isn’t
old
,’ Flora had replied.

Simon thought, for one last moment, of Lydia: there was only one way to find out who she was, and he wasn’t going to do so. He didn’t even want to. Would anyone?

8

‘All the same,’ said Flora, ‘I think I should ask her to come to France with us.’

‘Please, Mum,
don
’
t
,’ said Janey. ‘
Please.

’ ‘She can sleep in my room,’ said Nell. ‘She can come with me.’

‘Can Fergus come too?’ asked Thomas. ‘Can we ask Fergus to come to France with us? Fergus can sleep with me.’

‘You won’t even have room for her,’ said Simon. A futile discussion ensued about the number and disposition of the beds and bedrooms at the
gîte
; ‘I mean in the car, anyway. It’ll be a squash as it is.’

‘It would have been even squashier if you’d been coming,’ said Flora.

‘The whole advantage of my not coming,’ said Simon, ‘is that you won’t be squashed in the car. Just think about it.’

‘Can Fergus come?’ Thomas asked again. ‘Fergus won’t squash.’

‘She probably can’t come anyway,’ said Flora. ‘She probably has too much to do here, at this time of the year.’

‘Sure to,’ said Simon. ‘Leave her to get on with it.’

Lydia with advancing years and a receding economy had become unemployable, so had had perforce to employ herself: she was now the sole proprietor—and, indeed, employee—of Floating World Postcards Ltd, and had been trading, latterly at a small profit, for almost three years. The postcards depicted London in its more
insolite
aspects (she resorted to a small stable of freelance photographers, followers of E. Atget and A. Monnier and that ilk) and were gradually finding their way into the collections of the better class of tourist. ‘I’ll give her a ring, anyway,’ said Flora weakly.

‘
Please
don’t ask her to come to France, Mum,’ said Janey. ‘I do
implore
you.’

‘Can Fergus come?’ said Thomas again. ‘Please, Mum, I do
implore
you.’

Flora, who was sitting to one side of him, and Nell, on the other, began to tickle him. ‘No, you silly sausage,’ Flora said. ‘He can’t. Fergus is going to Italy, so there!’ Fergus Carrington! That was all they needed.

‘Can we go to Italy?’ asked Thomas.

This time everyone spoke with one voice. ‘No,’ they cried. ‘
We
’
re
going to
France
!’

9

‘If she’d got herself a bloke,’ said Simon, ‘the problem wouldn’t arise.’

‘Oh, Mother of God,’ said Flora, taking off her make-up. ‘If.’

‘What’s all this Mother of God racket we’ve been hearing lately?’ said Simon. He was lying in bed looking at a script.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Flora.

‘Then I wish you’d knock it off,’ said Simon. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

‘Why should it do that?’

‘Well, since there’s no such being as God, it’s a bit too spooky by half to be hearing about the Mother of. Be reasonable.’

‘Ah,’ said Flora. ‘Reasonable.
Raisonnable.
Well, who are we to know what’s reasonable? Let alone
raisonnable.

’ ‘The very people,’ said Simon. ‘That’s who.’

‘Us sinners,’ said Flora. ‘
We
sinners.’

‘Yes, that’s one of many possible appellations.’

‘It’s the most
raisonnable.

’ ‘Listen, Flora,’ said Simon. ‘I married you for your looks, not your brains.’

‘I’m one seamless whole,’ said Flora. ‘Take it or leave it.’ She got into bed.

‘It’s too late even to talk about leaving it,’ said Simon. He turned off the lamp and held her in his arms, still lying on his back, and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m stuck with it,’ he said.

‘Brains and all.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m doomed.’ Flora said a few Hail Marys to herself, and fell asleep. Simon disengaged his arms, and turned over, and, after a while, fell asleep too.

10

Flora was thinking about the vast existential difference—it was, wasn’t it?—between being right, and having, as the French say, right, or right-ness:
raison
: reason. There, rightness, or even righteousness, was reasonableness; and wrongness was therefore the consequence—or was it the condition?—of a logical error, a mistake. In French, to be right,
d’avoir raison
, was to have worked out a sum correctly, whereas in English there was no necessary suggestion of the reasonable: to be right in English was more like a piece of luck. Or a gift of God. Or a doom.

Flora was thinking about all this because she wanted to be right; the desire had arisen and was growing in her, she knew not why. The necessity was becoming almost urgent, whether to be right, or
d’avoir raison
, whichever it might more accurately be; and if it were a question after all of working out a sum correctly, then that would be existentially a rather different or even an entirely different affair from succumbing to a doom.

In any event, in so far as she could do the sum at all, or in so far as she could embrace her doom, Flora concluded that it would only be right to ask Lydia to come to France with them.

‘Floating World, hello.’

‘Oh Lydia is that you? Flora here.’

‘Oh Flora, hello, how nice.’

‘I know I mustn’t keep you during working hours, you must be so busy—’

‘So must you—’

‘Yes, thank God, I suppose, it’s just, I was wondering, are you going away this summer, have you anything planned?’

‘Yes, I’m going down to Italy for ten days; I’m sharing that villa in Sardinia for a bit that the Carringtons have taken with Robert’s sister, but she can’t go down until after—anyway—so that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Ah. Yes, well—I’d been wondering whether you might like to come to France with us—Simon can’t get away after all, you see, so we’ve some space—’

‘Oh, so sorry, I would’ve loved to, but it’s all settled now. You
were
sweet to think of me.’

‘Couldn’t you come on?’

‘Now that would be flashy; how I wish; but I can’t really leave the Floating World for that long, you see—not at this time of the year. It’s really my busiest; it’s like Christmas for Hamleys—’

‘Oh, yes, of course, yes, obviously. Well—’

‘Thank you anyway. It would have been lovely.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Sardinia will be lovely too.’

‘I hope so. I’ve just been and bought a new cozzie.’

‘You
are
brave!’

‘Yes. I had a brandy first.’

‘Did you really?’

‘Yes, truly. And then I just marched into Horrids and got it.’

‘Horrids, gosh.’

‘They have such a huge selection.’

‘That’s a point.’

‘And I couldn’t face going from shop to shop to shop.’

‘You are clever.’

‘I could do with being thinner.’

‘The swimming will see to that.’

‘So I do hope. Darling, I must go now, I have to telephone the printer.’

‘Yes, right, I should be getting on with it myself, I’m doing the VA T returns. Have a lovely time in Sardinia if we don’t speak again beforehand—’

‘And you in—where, exactly?’

‘The Périgord.’

‘Oh how lovely.’

‘We’ll be in touch afterwards anyway, won’t we?’

‘Yes of course.’

They said their goodbyes and Flora hung up. Well, so—she felt an odd sense of anti-climax. Honour on the one hand and selfish inclination on the other had both been satisfied: as so rarely can they be. Why then this odd sense of dissatisfaction?

She shrugged it off and went on with the VA T returns, but she could not quite divest herself of the feeling that God had been watching the whole affair from its inception, and was now laughing quietly to Himself: which, if there were no such person, was ridiculous, and, if there were such a person, was—what, exactly? She put down her pen and sat, speculating, for a moment. What, exactly, might one fairly expect the consequences of the Virgin’s mediations to be—supposing, that is, that God existed? Had she been given a sign? She saw that this would not do: any further down that road, she thought, and I’ll be back in the Middle Ages before I know it.

But then, she had in fairness to ask, is that, considering where we all now are, such a very dreadful destination? Flora felt suddenly a sense of the unmitigated grossness of the superstitions of the modern age. You could be crushed to death, if you weren’t lucky. If you got the sum wrong. Hail Mary, she said, full of grace;
etcetera.
You could just conceivably get to a point, she thought, where it didn’t matter whether or not God existed: where the possibility that He did, and might even listen to you, was absolutely all there was between you and hell. Because we do now know, at any rate, that hell exists.