Significance (6 page)

Aaron and Scott were near the door to the downstairs bathroom now. Aaron's hair looked wet and it stuck up at odd angles, Scott had a big wet patch on the front of his olive green shirt and smaller dark patches on his sleeves. He was angry.

Sometimes this happened. Invariably it wore them all out, Aaron most of all, so that on this night he was in his bed and sound asleep by eight thirty
-
five.

Scott said he had to get out of the house. He was sorry. Did she mind? He'd go mad if he stayed in. He was sorry, sorry,
sorry
. She gave him her blessing, kissed him.

She scraped Aaron's barely touched plate of food into the bin, then did the same with hers and Scott's. None of them had eaten much of the meal. Prison food, Scott called it, but she knew it wasn't that bad. It was more to do with Scott's complex emotions about himself and his family, how he felt caged in by the fact that his younger brother was so damaged, that all his life he'd had to make sacrifices for the sake of his helpless sibling.

Some people might have called this evening a disaster, but Marilyn knew better. Disasters happened to people who didn't expect them, who were shocked by the disruption to the simple routine of an evening at home. With Aaron to look after she found it was the evenings that went to plan which were the surprise. She understood Scott's need for escape, understood too, that it was nothing to do with her, and that Aaron, his issues and problems and tantrums, somehow weighed less heavily on her. She was not a blood relative – she could, if she wished, just walk away.

L'
é
criture Feminine

Michael and Hilda Eszterhas were celebrating ten years of marriage. They had known one another for nearly fifty years, but for most of those years they had each been in relationships with other people.

‘Do you know, I always sensed that there was something between us,' Hilda said to Michael as they relaxed in the small boulevard café under the shadow of a plane tree. ‘Then when Bill died, I thought… Well, you remember…'

Michael nodded gravely. He was a pragmatist and resisted Hilda's attempts to dwell on romantic notions of fate and lost opportunities. They were together now. That was all that mattered.

Hilda's family life had been fixed and stultifying, middle class and middle England, C of E, tweed and lace, malice over the dinner table, spite in the rose garden, loathing in the bedroom (or so Hilda assumed about this last). Michael was part Spanish, part Jewish, part Irish. They'd first met in a dingy little pub in Cambridge after attending a talk given by E.P. Thompson.

Hilda's hair, though now almost completely white, was still waist length. She rarely wore it loose and tonight she'd woven it into a long plait. Michael was also grey, but these days his hair, or what was left of it, was cropped to a quarter of an inch, and in good weather was usually covered by a jaunty straw hat. In winter he favoured a black bargeman's cap.

They paid little attention to the young blonde woman sitting at the table next to theirs. Though Hilda had happened to glance over just as the blonde (rather ridiculously) tipped a perfectly good cup of espresso into the wooden planter by her side. Hilda had meant to mention it to Michael, but he was busy reminiscing about Paris in May 1968.

They were both still passionate about politics, but had long ago ceased to speak of revolution. The word ‘revolution' seemed to have become an obscure pop lyric. Both Hilda and Michael had police records. Not that anyone looking at them would guess that. And, as much as a criminal record might paint a picture of amoral lying, scheming, selfish ne'er
-
do
-
wells, both Hilda and Michael Eszterhas believed they were ethical, moral, selfless, honest people. That their criminal activities were righteous and legitimate, and the law itself was unjust.

‘I sometimes wonder how things would have been if we'd got together sooner,' Hilda had said, after the waitress had taken their order for a bottle of the local cider.

‘The way I see it…' Michael began, and he paused, as he often did when he was about to say something important. In the silence that followed, a fragment of someone else's conversation invaded their ears. Ugly words spoken in English.

Both Hilda and Michael heard it very clearly. Hilda had been gazing at Michael, listening to him, waiting for him to continue. As she heard the other voice, she saw Michael frown at the crudeness of the stranger's words. Hilda's eyes widened and her mouth gaped. Then she shook her head slowly from side to side.

She and Michael understood one another, would not let other people's vileness – their ignorance, lust and cruelty – spoil their evening. Hilda had glanced over at the girl the words had been directed towards. She wore an expression that suggested she was embarrassed, but didn't want to show it. Michael described the same look as a smirk, a smile with indications of cruelty and coldness.

Each of them was absolutely certain of the words the man had spoken. Michael said he had heard the man say, ‘I follow strange women and I fuck them.'

Hilda disagreed; she was infuriated with Michael because she knew he was wrong. What Hilda heard was, ‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them.'

‘I remembered you see, because it struck me how unusual it was. I've been reading the French theorists – Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva – so I was immediately struck by the seeming passivity of the man's words. Or rather by the contradictory nature of the sentence: “I let strange women follow me” is a passive statement and therefore feminine. “Then I fuck them” is active and thus masculine. The young woman did indeed smile, but it was a conflicted smile, defensive, and when the man got up and left the table she looked very confused, and deflated.'

‘But,' Michael said, ‘when the young woman came to the café she was alone. The man joined her sometime after. So he must have followed her, mustn't he?'

‘That may be,' said Hilda, ‘but I am certain of what I heard.'

‘And so am I,' Michael said, and neither of them would stand down, or be shaken from their respective positions. Each of them was used to being disbelieved by others due to their long involvement with politics – they had warned of the threat of pollution, of the dangers of pesticides and other scientific adjustments to nature, they had spoken of a future with government cameras on every street corner, and bugs (that was how they had described it in the seventies) which monitored every member of the population, seeing what it read or bought, what it watched on TV. They had made grim statements about the blind hedonism of the western world and the effects of its endless consumerism and bullying in the Third World. They had lectured and written pamphlets, and marched and joined organisations. And they had been laughed at. There was not much consolation in finally being proved right.

This overheard fragment of conversation on a French café terrace was one of the few things they disagreed on.

The police inspector, a man by the name of Vivier, believed (just as Hilda might have predicted) Michael. The plain
-
clothes female officer (Hilda wasn't sure of her rank) whose name was Sabine, seemed to believe Hilda.

On the whole however, the police didn't see that there was any great difference; a man had been overheard saying the words ‘follow', ‘strange women' and ‘fuck them'. And the woman he had said them to was dead. The finer points of syntax, the groundbreaking work of French literary theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray, ideas based around
l'
é
criture feminine
and Hilda's absolute certainty were as chaff in a hurricane; irrelevances, superficialities and distractions that should not be attended to lest they sway the investigation and the course of justice.

Miroir Noir

With her empty wine glass on the table in front of her, Lucy considered her options. Scott was still inside the café chatting amiably with the staff and customers. She felt envious of him because he seemed to have formed bonds here in this small town. It was something she would have liked for herself.

She lit a cigarette – the last from her pack – and smoked it reflectively. That was what she liked about smoking, it provided an interval of time in which one could stop and consider the next move. She was also consciously using the cigarette to make decisions. If he doesn't come out before I've finished this cigarette, she thought, I'll stub this out, pick up my lighter, my bag, my cardigan and be on my way. No backward glances, no attempts to catch his eye or wave. I will just become what I was a few days ago, a woman alone, quietly going about my own business.

She looked about her. Only three other tables were occupied. A bodybuilder in a Real Madrid football shirt was hunched over the table by the exit with his back to her. His neck, she noticed, was almost as thick as his head. The shirt was very tight on him, giving the impression that he had been inflated inside it. She supposed some women would find such a build attractive, but it did nothing for her. At the table nearest the entrance to the café were four young people, three girls and a boy who seemed to be playing some sort of game, each of them taking turns to speak while the others paid careful attention. Perhaps it was one of those memory word games where you had to remember and add to alphabetically arranged but otherwise unconnected items bought at a supermarket. She was too far away to hear the words, and when they occasionally raised their voices she didn't recognise the language.

Nearest to her, two tables away, was a middle
-
aged couple. The woman had a striking plait of long silver hair that reached halfway down her back. You seldom saw older women with hair that long, or certainly not hair which was long and had been left to go grey naturally. She was plump but shapely, with large breasts, large hips and by comparison, a smallish waist. She wore a navy linen dress with a deep V at the neck. The skin on her chest looked red and almost bruised with sunburn, though her face wasn't affected. The man she was with had closely cropped salt and pepper hair. He wore a brightly patterned shirt in splashes of orange and turquoise that jarred and jumped, a mushroom
-
coloured seersucker suit and a straw hat. He looked like a character from a John Grisham novel, a New Orleans lawyer with some kind of secret weakness that would be his downfall. Lucy's eye happened to drop towards his feet. Socks and sandals. Mottled grey and green socks, a little thin at the heel, and brown leather sandals. Not a Grisham character at all then – he had to be British – the proverbial Englishman abroad.

Lucy had been half aware of voices speaking English close by, but had somehow tuned them out or rather taken them for granted, forgetting for a little time, while she had talked to Scott that she was in France. Now as she measured time with each slow puff on her cigarette, she tuned her ears towards the older couple's conversation.

‘Is this the world we created?' the man said. ‘Are we culpable? My God, it's worse now than I could ever have imagined.'

In a different frame of mind Lucy might have been fascinated to overhear such a conversation, but at this moment, in this angry state of mind, she felt only a raw resentment and felt that this old man, this straw man was lecturing the woman he was with, lecturing Lucy too.

The woman reached for the man's hand. ‘We tried,' she said. ‘We shouldn't forget that.'

Lucy stubbed out her cigarette, and slowly gathered her belongings. It was still warm so she didn't put her cardigan on, but draped it over her bag. She stood, resisting the urge to look in the direction of the café. Hesitated. A coffee and two half litres of house wine, plus a tip would cost less than twenty Euros. She took a twenty Euro note from her purse and placed them under the empty carafe, a ring of burgundy liquid seeped onto the note.

She picked her way between the tables and out onto the pavement, and at a stroll began to head back in the direction she'd come.

Her hotel was a good twenty
-
five minutes walk away, and she needed to navigate her journey by returning via La Coquille Bleue, then doubling back to the hotel. But there were many side streets which could provide a faster route. She did not wish to pass the house with the yellow shutters again tonight, and planned to avoid it for the next few days. She had a fairly good sense of direction and it was only a small town. (Hell, if she could find her way around Glasgow, London and New York, she was sure she wouldn't get lost for long here.) And she enjoyed walking.

But first, some cigarettes. She would stick to the main drag, then stop at one of the last cafés, one of those with the friendly red and white signs that read Tabac.

When she had walked for five minutes, she turned to glance behind her. Scott, she thought, might be hurrying to catch up with her. To apologise. But there was no one, just the few straggling tourists and locals going about their business, none of them paying any attention to her. Which was just as it should be, except that right now she would really welcome some company.

Lucy thought about ringing Thom. It would be good to hear his voice. She imagined him saying, ‘Oh Lucy. God, I've missed you. Where are you? When can I see you?' to which she would say, ‘I'm sorry. I'm in France. I'll come back tomorrow.' Or ‘Well, why don't you come here?'