The Bay of Angels (13 page)

I was still in tears in the rue de France, although my room seemed almost acceptable, or would have done had it not been encumbered by two large suitcases which took up most of the floor space. Outside the window I could hear the footsteps of a strolling populace. Night time here would be noisy, and I might be glad of it: I lacked company as never before. But tonight I must sleep, for on the following day I must telephone Mr Redman, and consult Dr Balbi, and assume a confident air with which to console my mother. My tears started again. There was a knock on the door. I wondered whether I had been sobbing out loud, whether my sobs had disturbed anyone. On the landing stood M. Cottin, still in his short-sleeved shirt and beret. He was holding a cup of coffee which he presented to me.

‘Je me suis dit, cette petite dame va tomber dans les pommes.’

I thanked him, no longer conscious of the tears running down my face. It was the first kindness I had received since leaving London. I drank the coffee gratefully. It was bitter and only lukewarm, but it was the best I had ever tasted. Then I removed the harsh brown coverlet from the bed, took off my clothes, and fell into the deepest sleep I thought I had ever known. Like the coffee the night lacked certain refinements, but when I awoke it was with a sense of renewed purpose which I hoped would see me through the day, and through the days after that.

I took the cup and saucer down to M. Cottin and offered him my truly grateful thanks. He nodded briefly and went back to trundling his stands of postcards onto the pavement. The air was fresh, clear; it would be a fine day. I found a café where, presumably, I should eat all my meals, and had breakfast. As soon as the post office opened I should telephone Mr Redman. Dr Blackburn I dismissed as a lost cause; my work would speak for me, if anything could, but was not to be contemplated at the moment. When this appalling adventure was concluded I would make a reasoned attempt to minimize it, for his benefit, and indeed for my own, and persuade him that I was employable once again. As always, when I was in Nice, London seemed remote, a place of dull skies and inferior weather. I lingered as long as I could, then, with a sigh, set off on my errands. I noticed that the sun was already hot, and once again realized that I was not entitled to enjoy it. This was the mood that had greeted me at Nice airport. It was infinitely seductive, an invitation to forget my obligations, or rather to lay them aside onto somebody else, somebody older, wiser, stronger, richer. Above all, richer. The money in my bag had been sufficient for my rent and would probably take care of my mother’s costs for the time being. The telephone call to Mr Redman was therefore my first priority.

At some point I should have to open another bank account to receive the shower of gold from Switzerland. The same dilemma presented itself: Nice or London? Nice, if I had to pay my mother’s charges, and also my own. At some further point I would have to go back to London to collect some more clothes, and also minimal household effects. It seemed as if I were destined to stay in the rue de France for at least a month, probably longer. Now that I had found somewhere to eat I did not dislike my room. The bed was narrow and hard, but the table and chair were of fairly good quality, and there was a shelf on which I could stack books, if I had any. It seemed to me a decent enough place in which to work, until I remembered that I had no work. The ‘student’ who had had the room before me had stuck a few pictures on the walls, stills from Hollywood films cut out from magazines, all of women, sultry temptresses with enigmatic expressions and copious hair. This unknown person, a man, surely, with a young man’s tastes, had been formed by the cinema, but evidently preferred the sexual promise of earlier icons to anything he might have seen in the rue de France. I was comforted by this unknown presence, with its reassuring idealism. I had slept well; I was in some way reconciled to spending time here. I decided to telephone Mr Redman every day, to give him up-to-date news of my affairs, and to learn from him if there were any new developments in the way of Simon’s legacy. At some point money would be produced; at some point I should have to find somewhere for us to live. And, sooner rather than later, I should have to deal with my mother’s state of mind, which would be one of dispossession, of shipwreck, perhaps worse.

The weather was so beguiling that I was tempted to sit down and drink more coffee, but I felt that I had no right to do so. After the brilliant sunshine the clinic seemed relatively dim, for blinds were kept lowered at all times. I found my mother propped up with pillows, sipping orange juice through a glass straw. I hardly recognized this emaciated woman, with huge eyes, and the air of questing for approbation. She smiled cautiously when I approached the bed, intent on holding her glass of orange juice, a little of which had spilled on to the sheet.

‘I knew you’d come,’ she said. Her voice was low, hoarse, unused. ‘Have I been ill?’

‘A little, yes.’

‘Is that why I’m in hospital?’

‘Dr Thibaudet thought it best.’

‘Dear Maurice. Did they get off all right?’

I assured her that they had. I was immensely relieved that she had remembered the name.

‘Is someone looking after Simon?’

‘Mama, Simon is . . . ’

But at that point she closed her eyes and sank back on to the pillows. Marie-Caroline rescued the glass before it fell. Once again my mother’s face was drained, blanched, the face of one who had come back too fast, from too far, from a place where I could not join her.

Marie-Caroline told me that she might be confused for a day or two, but that I could of course visit at any time. It might help if I were to prompt her memory very gently, but not to deluge her with information which would merely bewilder her. Marie-Caroline herself seemed less cheerful than usual, and it was clear that she wanted me out of the way. I asked her if my mother had been seen by Dr Balbi, and was told that he would be in on the following day, when I could talk to him myself.

‘If there is any change we will of course get in touch with you.’

I gave her my new address, and asked her if she expected any change.

‘No, no,’ she said, with something of her old briskness. This all looked more serious than it was. But then she asked if I had a telephone number at which she could call me, and I knew that recovery would be by no means straightforward, might contain unknown risks, might not be assured. She sensed my alarm and smiled a tired smile. She had been on duty every day without a break; the work was tedious, and she was young enough to find the enforced vigilance oppressive. And she had been excellent from all points of view. It was just that now that the prolonged sleep was drawing to a close she was permitted to weigh up the risks of the rest of the procedure, the encouragement to eat, to walk, to wash, to make the sort of recovery set out in all the textbooks. Once again I thought that it would have been better for my mother to have suffered the shock of bereavement straight away rather than be unconscious of it altogether, leaving it to others to instruct her. Those others, and their judgement, or misjudgement, would determine the future of her mental health. It now seemed that this would be precarious. And how could I, so firmly entrenched in this world, make proper contact with one whose senses had been put to sleep, and who might prefer to stay in limbo rather than rejoin me, with my easy unthinking movements, my physicality, and my eagerness, in calculations for a future in which she could not believe, and would not understand?

I stole another look at the figure on the bed, then leaned towards it, as if determined to unlock its secrets. For more than a few moments, maybe for longer, I wondered whether it might be preferable for her to die now, like this, in the care of kindly supervisors who would know how to dispose of her, whether that return to life were not too much to expect of her, indeed of anyone. For to resurrect a fallen life, one which had been all but destroyed, is an almost impossible task, or so it seemed to me, bending over my mother’s sleeping figure, hearing her laggard breath. I even wondered whether there were any way of making my fears—or were they wishes?—known to those in charge, and whether they would regard me as an unnatural daughter, or simply as one who recognized the necessity of solutions. For my mother’s death would be a solution of sorts. It seemed to me so near that I lost all fear of it. This did not in any way diminish my love for her, which had never wavered. But her life now seemed mired in a pathos which I found unacceptable. She had sunk so gratefully back to sleep. Was it the mention of Simon’s name, the beginning of my warning sentence—‘Simon is . . . ’—that had closed down her faculties once again? For somehow she must know what had happened, and for a little while was allowed not to know, preferring this half-life in a hospital bed to a full life in the world.

That world would not deal kindly with a woman who had always been too tender, too trusting, and might now be diminished. Her return to life would be further threatened by the difficulties that awaited her. She would have only the clothes I had managed to rescue for her, and which I had packed too hastily into the suitcases now in the rue de France. She would have nowhere to live. Even if she had never liked Les Mouettes it was her home, and a rather enviable one at that. I knew that she had always preferred her earlier home, and had been impatient with this view, but now I saw that for a woman of her disposition a modest way of life, and the company of a child, might be preferable to the challenges of a late marriage. This was not a popular view, nor would it be understood. And if she were to be exiled to one of those outer suburbs so favoured by Mr Redman, would she ever find company again? And would the memory of her life at Les Mouettes seem so bizarre a construct that she would reject it altogether?

‘The telephone,’ Marie-Caroline reminded me. I must go back to the rue de France and give some account of myself to M. Cottin. I was the bearer of information which no one could share. The sheer desire, indeed the need, to involve witnesses, did not preclude prudence. It would not do us any good to confess the various humiliations which had befallen us. And we had been so recently, so splendidly, endowed that we would not attract sympathy. As a chatelaine of sorts my mother would have been welcomed anywhere. In her present condition she would be avoided.

M. Cottin wrote down the number of the telephone in the room behind the shop, and indicated how I might pay for the calls. We had exchanged no information; he was still cautious. I merely told him that my mother was not well, and that I would only use the telephone as and when necessary. He nodded gravely. A hero among men, whom I might trust. Like Blanche Dubois I would now be dependent on the kindness of strangers, no bad thing in the life I was now obliged to live.

10

The obedience with which my mother submitted to the attentions of Marie-Caroline alarmed me. It was the extreme docility of those struck down by illness or immobility in the course of a process of which they were no longer fully conscious. Her hair was now brushed, her nightdress was clean, her appearance more or less restored. Yet she showed no desire to leave her bed, though a chair had been placed next to it, which she was surely expected to occupy.

‘Today,’ she told me beatifically, ‘I am to have a purée, like the ones I used to make for you when you were a baby.’

‘You do know, dear, that Simon has . . . died?’

Her face clouded again. ‘I think so. Was it an accident? Was he in the car?’

‘He was in the house. You both were.’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember coming here. Did he bring me?’

‘No.’

‘Then you did. What happened?’

‘Simon had a fall. You called Dr Thibaudet. Do you remember that?’

‘I remember Dr Thibaudet, of course.’

‘You don’t remember waking up beside Simon?’

A look of extreme horror replaced her earlier expression of slightly infantile acquiescence. This was the change I had been hoping for. Now I was by no means sure that I could deal with it.

‘Then he died at home?’

‘At Les Mouettes, yes.’

She reached out and clutched my hand. ‘I can’t go back there, Zoë. I can never go back.’

As gently as I could I disengaged her fingers. ‘We can’t go back there, Mama. The house has been repossessed, by Simon’s nephew.’

She sank back on the pillows, alarmingly pale. I was unprepared for, and despite myself shocked, by her next remark. ‘Thank God,’ she said.

‘But weren’t you happy there? Simon was so proud of it.’

‘I was happy with Simon. I never liked the house. I should never have thought I could be happy there. I wanted to please him, but really I should have stayed at home. Maybe we could go home now. But are you sure he is dead?’

‘Quite sure, I’m afraid.’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Such a good man. I hope I made him happy.’

‘I’m sure you did. And you were happy, weren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she replied languidly. ‘I was very happy. In a way I shouldn’t have been. He gave me freedom, and then took it away again. And I missed that freedom. I dare say you think me worthless. Worthless and absurd.’

‘It was a new way of life for you. You would have got used to it.’

‘No, darling, I never would have got used to it. I was used to being alone, that was the truth of the matter. A very sad truth, no doubt.’

‘Don’t distress yourself.’

‘He was such a marvellous man.’ She was crying freely now. ‘So generous with his feelings. So unselfishly anxious to make me feel at home. But how could I? He was a stranger to me. And it is possible to love a stranger, Zoë, a great deal, so much so that all I wanted was to make him happy, and to make him think that he had made me happy. He made me lonely in a different way, and I never became familiar with that kind of loneliness.’

‘I thought marriage was a cure for loneliness.’

‘So did I. And there was a longing in him that made me want to comfort him. He looked so upright, so impressive, but in fact I was stronger than he was. My task was not to let him see that. We had a pleasant life, certainly, but it was like being cast in a play, without an audition. And perhaps I wasn’t always as responsive as I might have been. I don’t mean . . . ’ She blushed. ‘I mean appreciative. I was always trying to do what I thought would please him. And sometimes I just longed to get out of the house, to be on my own again. I was happier when you were there. You didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with me.’