The Bay of Angels (24 page)

‘No,’ he said.

‘I just don’t want to turn into the sort of person my mother had become, dignified, but essentially helpless. And this is what I seem to be doing now, only without the dignity. I would rather be defiant and rather nasty, eager to censure, to hand out blame. But there is no one to blame, is there? You cannot be blamed for anything, not even for not taking me seriously.’

‘No, I cannot be blamed for that. If you are ready we will go and see your mother now. Before she is taken away. Dr Lagarde has been expecting you.’

We walked slowly out of the café, up the steps of the clinic, and took the lift to a basement room, where my mother was lying on a small bed. The light was kept low, for which I was grateful. She looked calm, untouched.

‘Please do what has to be done,’ I said. I kissed her and turned away.

In his office he opened a cupboard and took out her small suitcase and her bag. The bag contained a card giving details of her name, address, date of birth, her bank in London, and the telephone number of a firm unknown to me, but presumably known to the staff of the Résidence Sainte Thérèse: in brackets were the words
Jourdain, Pompes Funèbres
. There were no letters; she had received none. Nothing from home except a photograph of myself as a small child. On the back of this was written, ‘My darling girl’.

Dr Balbi moved quietly about the room, giving me time to recover myself. This was not easy, yet I had gone through the day relatively tearless. And I would be tearless again, on the following day. I would be that managerial person I always intended to be, nodding wryly in the direction of the fates, or the furies, or whatever agencies had brought me to this pass. It was just that one’s resolve slackens at night. This worldly conclusion was my first step to becoming that other person. Yet the transformation was not yet within my grasp. As I broke into tears once again I felt two hands on my shoulders.

‘Dr Balbi,’ I began.

The hands tightened on my shoulders. ‘Antoine,’ he said. ‘My name is Antoine.’

16

The ladies were all present in the salon when I went to the Résidence Sainte Thérèse to collect the rest of my mother’s possessions. They were formally dressed, although this was not a normal visiting day: they were observing an occasion which none of them wished to observe, for the death of one of their number was a matter on which they did not care to dwell. The tributes were led by Mme de Pass, who could not entirely manage to conceal an expression of disapproval. It appeared that my mother was at fault in some way, first by being so much younger than themselves, and second by dying in so inconclusive a manner. There may have been a third reason: she had not appeared to mourn her husband, or at least to reminisce complacently about her previous life. This they could not forgive: they had perfected the art of editing their own lives in such a way as to make them acceptable to others of their kind. My mother had offended against the prevailing code by being both heartbroken and so obviously relieved, so that the heartbreak had to be attributed to factors in the unknowable past, to which they were not privy. I doubted whether such invisible wounds were much to their taste. Their widowhood had been turned around, from bereavement to a sort of satisfaction: they had survived. Yet my mother’s survival had been so compromised that her previous marriage, of which they knew little, was either more memorable than their own or so entirely dreadful that she preferred to offer no information about it, let alone the complacent accounts which they all colluded in offering to the public gaze.

‘Elle n’avait pas la santé, la pauvre Anne,’
said Mme de Pass.
‘Je lui disais, mais il faut réagir! Mais elle n’avait le cœur à rien.’

It was true that she had no heart for anything. I was impressed, against my will, by the strength these women had accumulated along the way, so that they had managed to accommodate their reduced way of life in a manner which they thought fitting. True value was placed in what remained: their own carefully monitored health, their children, their appearance, the routines they had devised for getting through the day. I suspected that they were sorry for me, not because I was an orphan, but because I was unmarried myself and would have no emotional capital on which to draw. They did not envy me my new appalling freedom, and they were right not to do so. I did not value it myself. They may even have suspected that I had once longed for such freedom, whereas they had learned the value of community, even the community of their peers. I stood more or less helplessly as, one after another, they came forward and pressed my hand. Mme Lhomond was in tears, and that too was out of order. The correct stance was one of dignity; there were forms of behaviour to be observed, and they had perfected these in the course of their long lives. Anything less temperate than dignity was to be deplored.

I responded as best I could, though I am sure my inexperience showed. They thought I was to be pitied, as my mother had been, but for the wrong reasons. I must have struck them as being deficient in a sort of gravitas which they themselves possessed. Just as Mme Levasseur’s son had given offence by weeping so extravagantly I gave offence by not allowing them to finish their carefully prepared condolences, and also by failing to reassure them that I too was a survivor.

I escaped to my mother’s room as hastily as I could, although I knew that this too was some sort of a lapse of dignity. I should have stayed with them until Mme de Pass had given the signal: then I should have thanked them all in turn for showing their friendship. Instead of which I had cut short the proceedings, leaving them free to discuss me and my inadequate performance for perhaps an hour or so. This would have strengthened them in their own beliefs, their own self-sufficiency. Yet I did not doubt that they were shaken. Their lives were constructed on a bedrock of determination, the sort of determination necessary if one is to weather those last years. My mother had not obeyed the general rule: she had absconded. Though they knew that she had a weak heart they did not see that this was sufficient reason for an early eclipse. If anything such a condition should have stimulated her to more vigorous efforts on her own behalf. As Mme de Pass had stated, she should have reacted. But she had, if anything, collaborated in her own decline, and this they could not allow.

In my mother’s room the bed had been stripped. Another, larger, suitcase stood ready to receive the last of her meagre possessions. I found myself unwilling to handle her clothes, her shoes, her hairbrush, and ended by bundling them out of sight into the case, which I should have preferred to leave downstairs in the courtyard, with the other discards. This again was not to be considered, though I could not discern any clear reason for the prohibition. I had no one now to disapprove of me, for the only possible leavetaking had already taken place in the salon. They pitied my freedom, my unsought freedom, as I did. They did not see how one could live without attachments, and neither did I. They were more prescient than I was, but only just. I saw now that the sort of freedom I was obliged to embrace brings in its wake intolerable anxiety, for there are no permissions and no sanctions. I also saw why it was not quite appropriate to cite freedom as an absolute. This had been pointed out to me by Dr Balbi, when I had known him as Dr Balbi. Perhaps I always should; in my present circumstances kindness was not unusual. In any event he was absent, and I must get used to all kinds of absence. I too should be absent, for it was clear that my presence in this place was no longer required.

The Résidence Sainte Thérèse had been a beneficent institution, and it proved strangely difficult to leave it. When I went downstairs again I looked into the salon to offer final thanks to those present, but the salon was empty. The conventions had been observed, and now the incident could be consigned to the past. I did not doubt that heads would be shaken when my mother’s name was mentioned, nor did I doubt that they had been genuinely fond of her. But she had worried them, and of this they preferred not to think. I could not fault their attitude. Indeed so robust was it that I found myself in sympathy with their disapproval. My own loss was, and would be, irrevocable, yet I too had been alienated by my mother’s passivity. I should have preferred her to be more actively unhappy, more confessional, more open to persuasion. Then I could have comforted her and satisfied my own conscience. I would have wished her to be one of those complacent widows, all previous failures satisfactorily disguised, a resolute face presented to the outside world. And if she had not appreciated being a wife for the second time she should have managed to conceal the fact not only from others but from herself.

That there was something shameful in her failure to do so I could see for myself, just as there was something about my own misgivings that I preferred not to contemplate. She had tacitly refused the life that had been offered to her, or had come to do so, whereas I should always see it as idyllic. I wondered if I had wronged her in coming to this view. It was entirely possible that she had been as happy as she had initially appeared to be, that the marriage to Simon was a success, although in her eyes a mistake. One lives uncomfortably with one’s mistakes; one never entirely comes to terms with them. Simon’s death had in some ways compounded the mistake. He had not given her enough time in which to know him. And the manner of his dying had left a permanent feeling of horror, which had come to envelop the whole episode. Her desire to go home was a desire for a place of safety, where extravagant lives and deaths were unknown. Horror had never quite been banished, as I had seen from her relief in not being allowed back to Les Mouettes. It had persisted throughout her time in the Résidence Sainte Thérèse, so that she had pursued a policy of silence in an effort to conceal her wounds. Never once had she asked me about my own life, my own activities. Maybe she thought my loyalty depended on my having none. This was in fact the case.

I left the Résidence Sainte Thérèse without looking back. I wandered down the Cours Saleya, inhaling the smells of the market. Once again, I was weighed down by a suitcase, which I was resolved to leave by M. Cottin’s dustbin. The clothes, which I could not quite bring myself to discard, would find a place in my own cupboards as soon as I got back to London. For there was now little to stop me from returning home, except the emptiness that awaited me there. Similarly there were no reasons for me now to remain in Nice. My return seemed as obligatory as it seemed undesirable. I should have preferred, once I had got rid of the suitcase, to have wandered down to the beach, although it was no time of day for a half-expected encounter. I felt shame that I should still be preoccupied with such encounters: I had little to offer. Nor had any promises been made, any pledges of further meetings. I should have to eschew such fantasies. But they had not quite been fantasies, at least not on my side. They say that love is the antidote to death; they even say that love is more powerful than death. I was willing to believe it, even anxious to do so. But in the absence of a lover this is not entirely possible.

I should have to cure myself of this habit of wandering and speculating. Such activities belonged to the dark and I was now obliged to live by daylight. Yet the day seemed to pass without my noticing it. I did one or two sensible things: I put a notice of my mother’s death in
Le Figaro
, where the ladies of the Résidence Sainte Thérèse would expect to find it. I could satisfy them on that score as on no other. The matter of the suitcase I decided to shelve for the time being. I stowed it under my bed with a view to leaving it there until I vacated the room. This, fortunately, was not a matter of urgency. The rent was paid until the end of the month, for I had foreseen a longer vigil than the one that had taken place. I had grown fond of the room; I should be sorry to leave it, yet I could think of no good reason for remaining in it now that my business in Nice was at an end. I knew that it would never be entirely at an end, for I had felt so much and so deeply in Nice that it seemed to have witnessed my entire life, a life whose shadowy beginnings in London might have been little more than a setting of the scene, after which the main drama could unfold.

Even now the sun blazed outside my window, as if nothing of significance had taken place, as if exits and entrances were part of normal currency, and as if mourning were an act of profligacy out of step with the real profligacy of nature, which was our true endowment. I leaned out of the window for the luxury of witnessing humanity, ordinary movements, ordinary gestures. Below me M. Cottin stood on the threshold of the shop, hands clasped behind his back, surveying his domain. It had become my domain as well; in a little while I should eat a meal in my usual modest café, greeting the proprietor as I always did. These people had been good enough to accept me, and to accept me without question. Delicacy, or a genuine indifference, had kept our exchanges to a minimum. I knew nothing about them, yet they were part of my life; they did not expect me to give an account of myself, did not know of my anxieties, would not presume upon my apparent disposability. I think they saw me as one of their own, laborious, frugal, self-sufficient. That was how I liked to think of myself, while knowing intimately that at any minute I might collapse, implode, and know the despair of one whose life is lacking in several essential components. That this burden could be shouldered by no one but myself was part of my freedom, which I now saw as an existential tragedy. But to peer into that abyss was to court further disaster.

On a sudden prompting I determined to keep the room until the end of the year. While making arrangements in London for my future life there I could prolong the memory of Nice by retaining a foothold in M. Cottin’s establishment. My presence was not required in either place, but at least in Nice there was that everyday busyness that tempted one out into the sun, the flux of life that compensated for one’s very real solitude. Even now, in the disarray of recent events, I began to hanker for my usual wanderings, which, now that they might end, began to assume an exalted significance. There was no need for me to remind myself that nothing had come of them, no apotheosis, no conclusive explanation, or declaration. What I had felt might have been the full extent of what had been enacted on the shore of the Baie des Anges, in shadow, without witnesses, and therefore not on record. It was pointless to speculate about another’s feelings, particularly as that other was not present.