Wicked Women (12 page)
“Milena,” I said, and I was only temporising, “I have no way of knowing this baby is mine, if baby there be.” Milena threw her hands into the air, and cried aloud, a thin, horrid squeal, chin to the heavens, lips drawn back in a harsh grimace. There were few people left on the bridge. The fog had driven them away. The seller of rubber spiders had given up and gone home. Milena ran towards the parapet, and wriggled and crawled until she lay along its top on the cold stone, and then she simply rolled off and fell into the water below; this in the most casual way possible. From my straightforward question to this dramatic answer only fifteen seconds can have intervened. I was too stunned to feel alarm. I found myself leaning over the parapet to look downwards; the fog was patchy. I saw a police launch veer off course and make for the spot where Milena fell. No doubt she had seen it coming or she would not have done what she did, launched herself into thick air, thin, swirling water. I had confidence in her ability to survive. Authorities of one kind or another, as merciful in succour as they were cruel in the detection of sedition, would pull her out of the wet murk, dry her, wrap her in blankets, warm her, return her to her apartment. She would be all right.
I walked to the end of the bridge, unsure as to whether I would then turn left to the police pier and Milena or to the right and the taxi rank. Why had the woman done it? Hysteria, despair, or some convenient social way of terminating unwanted pregnancies? I could take a flight back home, if I chose, forty-eight hours earlier than I had intended. The flights were full, but I would get a priority booking, as befitted my status, however whimsical, as a provider of hard currency. The powerful are indeed whimsical: they leave their elegant droppings where they choose—be they Milena’s baby, Benetton, the Marlboro ads which now dominate the city: no end even now to the wheezing, the coughing, the death rattling along the river.
I turned to the right, where the taxis stood waiting for stray foreigners, anxious to get out of the fog, back to their hotels. “The airport,” I said. He understood. “To the airport” are golden words to taxi drivers all over the world. This way at least I created a smile. To have turned left would have meant endless trouble. I was thoroughly out of love with Milena. I wanted to help, of course I did, but the child in the Southern provinces would have had to be fetched by the Catholic mother, taken in. There would be no end to it. My children would not accept a new family: Joanna would have been made thoroughly miserable. To do good to one is to do bad to another. But you don’t need to hear my excuses. They are the same that everyone makes to themselves when faced with the misery of others, and though they would like to do the right thing, simply fail to do so, but look after themselves instead.
“H
APPY CHRISTMAS, MY OWN
true love,” said Lucy to Pierre, on the morning of December 25, 1899. She woke amongst a flurry of white sheets and feather pillows and this was the nearest she would get to seasonal and romantic snow, for the day was mild and they were in the South of France, not Connecticut, which was Lucy’s home, or Paris, which was Pierre’s.
Pierre stirred but did not wake. Lucy whispered in his ear again. “Happy Christmas, my own true love,” and this time he murmured a reply.
“If you and I are to be free souls, Lucy,” said Pierre with a clarity apparently quite undiminished by slumber, “we must put all such religious cant behind us,” and closed his eyes again and slept on. His arms lay brown and young amongst the sheets and his dark hair was wild and curly on the pillow and she loved him. But she loved Christmas too, and always had.
Morning sun shone in through the little square window and bounced back from the whitewashed walls. She smoothed down her white cambric nightgown and wound her hair back around her head and pinned it up, and climbed down from the high bed, and crossed the bare wooden floor and looked out of the undraped window. She could see across a river valley to vineyards which marched across hills like soldiers going to their death. She put the image from her mind. And if there was a smell of rottenness in the air, as if all the grapes which should have been gathered in the autumn to make wine had been allowed to fall and fester on the ground instead, that was nothing worse than French plumbing. Some things had to be bad, Pierre said, so bad there was nothing left for them to do but get better.
“Religion is the opiate of the people,” said Pierre from his pillow. “God is a drug fed by the masters to the poor and hungry, so they are content with poverty and hunger. Jesus was never born: heaven does not exist. Blind belief is a thorn in the side of mankind and we will pluck it out.”
In one more week it would be 1900, the dawn of the twentieth century, and into that dawn would strike through the light of new hope and new liberty, and all the energy of free thought and free love, untrammelled by convention, and Lucy’s soul soared at the thought that Pierre and she were part of it: that he and she were one step ahead of that new dawn. They would be in Paris by New Year’s Eve to be amongst the anarchists; they would gather there together to drink to the future: the passionate brotherhood of the enlightened, and their sisters in that passion.
What a different stroke of midnight it would be from the one she would have envisaged just a few months back: a single glass of wine raised solemnly at the first stroke, in the parlour, in the company of Edwin her husband and Joseph her brother, and then to bed. And each stroke sounding its annual dirge to lost hope and failing passion: its welcome to the triumph of boredom and the death of the soul.
Pierre left the bed and stood beside her. He was naked. Lucy could not become accustomed to it. She had been married to Edwin for fourteen years and had never caught more than a flash of white limb in the bathroom, a movement of bare flesh above her in the bed. Now Pierre unpinned her hair so it flowed around her shoulders.
“So never name that day again,” said Pierre, “or it will drag you back to the Lord of the Dark Domain,” and they both laughed. Lord of the Dark Domain was their name for Edwin. Lucy’s husband wrote novels for a living; once every five years or so, to the acclaim of serious critics, he would publish an extremely melancholy book, the text so closely printed that Lucy had no patience with it, but then she was not expected to. Edwin loved Lucy for her folly; she was his child bride, his pretty wife: now he would see how he had misjudged her! Now he would find out: now that another man understood her talent, her intelligence, her quality, her passion.
“All the same,” said Lucy, “it comes as a shock! No mince pies, no gifts and ribbons and best dresses? Never more?”
“Never more,” said Pierre, “or you will be dragged back into the Hell of Domesticity, which is the Death of Art.”
Pierre was a composer of fine if difficult song cycles which so few people in the world could understand that when Pierre came to New York from Paris to perform, the concert hall was all but empty, the tour was cancelled and Pierre left penniless and stranded in a strange land. Edwin, as an act of kindness, had offered him work for the summer, teaching Bessie and Bertie the piano. Bessie was twelve and Bertie was ten. They would wake this Christmas morning to a house which lacked a mother. Lucy put that image from her too. Bessie had Edwin’s beetling brows; Bertie aped Edwin’s clipped, dry manner of speech. They were Edwin’s children more than Lucy’s. Pierre saw it. Edwin claimed it. The law acknowledged it: let the law have its way.
“An artist needs freedom, not a family,” said Pierre; he could so easily read her mind. She felt his warm breath on her cheek. “The artist’s duty is to all mankind; he must break free of the chains of convention. And women can be artists too, as you are, Lucy, remember that!”
The first time Pierre had heard Lucy sing, in her sweet, clear, untrained voice, helping Bessie’s fumbling notes along, he had claimed her as an artist, the one he had been waiting for, the one who could truly bring his music to life. Poor Bessie was forgotten: she could hardly get to the piano: Lucy and Pierre were always there, as she worked to catch the notes between notes he found so significant he could make them include the whole universe. Edwin was on the last chapter of a novel: a time he found particularly tense. There was to be piano-playing only between two and four o’clock of an afternoon. He said so with some force. The house trembled. People wept.
“He has you in prison,” said Pierre of Edwin then. “For what is a home but a man’s prison for a woman, and what is a wife but an unpaid whore? She lies on her back for her keep, bears children and cooks dinner likewise.” And when Lucy had recovered from her shock, the more she thought of it the more she perceived that what Pierre said was true. Lucy understood now that the sapphire necklace she wore round her neck was the symbol of her imprisonment: that her ruby earrings marked her as an instrument of lust, that the gold charms on her bracelet were for Edwin’s benefit, not her own; for is not a willing slave more useful than one who is unwilling?
“You would not be my slave,” said Pierre, “you would be my love.”
Lucy’s eyes went to the suitcase, and she wondered whether she should check that they were still there, in the suitcase, tucked in tissue in a dancing shoe: the sapphire, the rubies and the gold. But of course they were. Why should they not be? And they were hers by right, every one, payment for years of servitude. In the new world women would have equal dignity with men. When the workers of the world rose up, they would lift up women with them.
“All the same,” said Lucy, “on this day of all days, allow me to feel like a mother, not an artist, and cry just a little.”
“You should be ashamed to even consider such a betrayal,” said Pierre. “Weeping is something which women of the
haute bourgeoisie
do, the better to control men,” and Lucy was glad to understand that he was joking, for Edwin had scolded her and chided her and made her feel foolish from the day he had met her, and never ever joked about anything.
Pierre called down to the landlady to bring breakfast up to the room. He stood naked at the top of the stairs and dodged behind the door when the woman arrived with the tray: she seemed to Lucy too small and old to carry such a weight. The servants at home were stout and strong.
“Don’t upset her too much,” said Lucy when she had stopped laughing. “We owe her too much rent for that. I don’t know why you put off paying her.”
But Pierre said they would wait for dark and then slip away unnoticed and pick up the Paris train before anyone realised, and he didn’t want any silly nonsense from Lucy: the landlady was an old witch who took advantage of travellers and overcharged, and deserved what she got.
Lucy said nothing, but after she’d eaten the breakfast the landlady brought—hot coffee and fresh frothy milk, long crisp bread, and farm butter and apricot preserve—she said, “I’d really rather pay her, Pierre.”
“What with?” asked Pierre. “We have no francs left. The journey across France is costing more than I thought. An artist shouldn’t be bothered by such sordid things as money: I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We’ll send her some from Paris if you insist when we’ve sold your jewellery, but she doesn’t deserve it. She is a lackey of the masters, that’s all she is.”
Lucy felt her eyes mist with tears: she couldn’t tell the difference between the frothy milk and the thick white china jug. They merged together. At home the milk jugs were of fine porcelain, and had little flowers upon them. One of them came from Limoges. She wondered where Limoges was, and if she’d ever go there. She could see such an event was more likely now that she was Pierre’s lover, no longer Edwin’s wife; on the other hand, any such journey would be accomplished in less comfort. She did not understand money: it seemed necessary for all kinds of things she had thought just happened—such as being warm, or welcomed, or treated with politeness by porters, and gendarmes, shopkeepers and landladies. But money did not buy love, or freedom, or truth, or hope, or any of the important things in life. “Don’t cry,” said Pierre. “You’re homesick, that’s all it is,” and he leaned towards her and removed a crumb from her lip, and her heart melted; the act was so tender and true. Edwin would have mentioned the crumb, not removed it. Pierre put on his shirt and she was glad, though she knew she shouldn’t be. “I’m not homesick,” Lucy said, “not one bit. You’ve no idea how dank and drear the woods around the house are at this time of year. How they drip and drizzle!”
“Worse than Bessie on a bad day,” murmured Pierre, nuzzling into her hair, and she thought why is he allowed to mention Bessie’s name and I am not, but Lucy laughed too, to keep Pierre company, to be of one accord in mind, as they were in body. Bessie was a plain girl and had not been blessed with a musical ear, so Pierre could not take her seriously, and that made it hard for Lucy, now Bessie was at a distance, to do so either. Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed. Edwin had married a child and tried to stop her choosing, but now thanks to Pierre she had grown up and made her own choice.
She hoped Edwin would keep Christmas without her. She hoped he would remember, when he brought in the Christmas Tree, the little fir which had grown in its pot on the step since the first year of the marriage, that it had to be watered well. She hoped he knew the boxes in the attic where the decorations were. Lucy added a new one every year—would he remember that? Would he realise you had to balance the golden horses with their silver riders? And part of her hoped he’d get it all wrong. Part of her hoped that now she was not there, he would have no heart for any of it, he would be so sorry she had gone. She would find a letter from him in Paris, forgiving her, asking her to go home. Of course she would not go.