Life: An Exploded Diagram (13 page)

S
HE WAS YOUNGER
than he was, which would surprise him. He’d thought she was at least his age. She seemed it. But she was only just sixteen. She’d been born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1946, on an April night during which an unseasonably late snowfall muffled the city. Hers was a difficult birth. Afterward the senior obstetrician took her father aside and told him that it would be extremely unwise for his wife to have another child. Gerard took it badly. The Mortimer estates in England had been inherited by sons for countless generations. That he — or Nicole, rather — would break that continuous line troubled him enormously. He stood over his daughter’s hospital cot, gazing at her yellowish and clenched little face, and understood that he would have to be very careful about whom she would marry.

One of her earliest memories was of her father and mother pulling her bumpily to the crèche on a sled. The cars parked on the silent suburban streets had fat white pillows on their roofs. She wore a coat with a fur-lined hood that teased her face.

Almost effortlessly, she became bilingual, like her mother. Her schooling and her friendships were in French. Her home life, when her father was there, was in English. (Gerard spoke French like a man translating a dead language. Nicole couldn’t bear to listen to him; she’d cover her ears and sing loud nonsense when he tried.) Françoise flip-flopped between the two languages almost without thinking, as you might turn the pages of a book. Just now and again she’d forget and speak to her mother in French at dinner. Then Gerard would slap the tabletop, making the wineglasses and the maid jump, and bark, “In English, please, Françoise!”

Her father loved her in a prowling, anxious sort of a way. He called her Treasure but often seemed disappointed in her, like a miser with too small a hoard.

Nicole Mortimer was a famous beauty from a rich family. Françoise liked to kneel on a chair beside her while she applied her makeup before going out for the evening. The fastidious ritual and its materials — the lotions, the powders, the brushes in their shiny little scabbards — hypnotized the child. She would stare into the boudoir mirror, not breathing, during the tricky processes that transformed her mother’s eyes.

“Voilà!”
Nicole would say, at last.
“Qu’en penses-tu, Françoise?”

And Françoise would say,
“Tu es belle, Maman,”
and lean to kiss her.

But always her mother turned her face away.

“
Pas de bisous, ma chérie. Tu vas gâcher mon lipstick.”

The slow calamity, England, began when Françoise was ten years old.

She came home from school to find Agnes, the maid (who was also Françoise’s nanny and best friend), in tears. From the hallway Françoise could hear her father talking loudly, in his terrible French, on the telephone. She found her mother in her dressing room, tapping cigarette ash into a tray already half full of butts.

Grandpa Edmund, her English grandfather, had had something called a heart attack:
une crise cardiaque.
He might die. They were all going to England soon. They might have to stay for quite a long time.

The train journey from Quebec to New York was boring and thrilling in equal doses. A black man with a shining face and a beautiful uniform served them dinner while Vermont blurred into darkness outside the window. He risked a wink at her when he poured her Coke from a frosted bottle. In the sleeping car, she insisted on having the curtain of her bunk open so that she could see where her parents were, across the aisle. Eventually she was jiggled, juggled, into sleep by the regular racketing of the wheels on the rails beneath her.

Of New York she had only two abiding memories: a huge ice-cream sundae in the cafeteria of a huge store (Bloomingdale’s?) and the vast black wall of the ship.

During the whole long Atlantic crossing, she felt slushy in her guts. One night, wearing a bib-fronted silk dress, she sat on a velvet-upholstered chair at the edge of the ballroom, watching the adults dance. The window behind her right shoulder framed an infinite moon track, shifting on the soft swell of the sea. The little orchestra was playing a waltz. Her eyes were locked on her parents. Partway through the dance, she saw her mother break away from her father and raise her hands and shake her head. She saw him say something angrily. Her mother hurried away toward the arched doorway into the salon, with one hand over her mouth. For a moment, her father stood islanded on the dance floor with his hands in his pockets, then set off after her. At the doorway, he remembered and came back. He stooped down to her.

“Bedtime, Françoise. Your mother is not feeling well.”

England was dismal. Sooty rain streaked the windows of the train that took them from Southampton to London. Cattle stood, like unfinished black-and-white jigsaw puzzles, in sodden fields, watching them pass. The compartment smelled of fart and smoke.

London was full of wet gray air, and Françoise was amazed that it was still so bomb-damaged. Long lines of black brick houses were punctuated by areas of rubble, in which grubby children swarmed. Colorless and poor-looking people stood in queues outside dimly lit shops.

Her father tapped her arm and pointed.

“There, Françoise, look: Saint Paul’s Cathedral!”

But she was still looking back from the taxi window at a pair of houses propped up by great balks of wood. Their faces had been ripped off, exposing peeled wallpaper, bedroom fireplaces, the splayed blackened rib cages of floors under torn linoleum skins.

She was astonished, alarmed, by how foreign England was. The fact that she spoke its language was — it seemed to her — no more than a weird coincidence.

Grandpa Edmund had sent a car to collect them from the railway station in Norwich. The driver was a red-faced young man with receding hair. Neither Françoise nor her mother could understand a word he said.

When the car emerged from the city, Norfolk was in its autumn beauty. Fields rolled away toward woods and hedges the colors of spices: cinnamon, ginger, paprika. A tractor towed a plow and a snow flurry of seagulls. The sky was immense.

Her father pointed out items of interest: “A windmill, Françoise; see?” A black-and-white wooden building, like a giant cuckoo clock with four overgrown hands.

They passed through a village where a humpbacked bridge gave them a view of sailing boats and a tract of glittering water.

“The Norfolk Broads,” her father announced.

Her mother laughed incredulously.
“Broads,
Gerard? Did you say
broads
?”

“I did,” he said, turning in his seat to look at her, grinning. In American parlance it was a vulgar term for women.

A little later, he pointed again, his finger just under the driver’s nose. “You see that church, Nicole? That’s where I was christened.”

Its great gargoyled tower dwarfed the brick and flint cottages clustered around it.

Françoise had been to Norfolk once before, as an infant. She had no memory of it. Now she was baffled that things that were small by Montreal standards should look so big. It was hard to make sense of scale. Of anything. She was Alice in Wonderland. She had been removed from the story of her life and plopped into a different story altogether, a story in which words wandered around the dictionary, and everything was old-fashioned. No,
ancient.
Like in a book where witchcraft and stuff like that was real. The huge chestnut trees that lined the avenue to the manor, for instance, with their swirled crusty bark and their branches that were all gnarled elbows and knuckles. What might they do in the night? What might emerge from their darkness?

What emerged now was the house, and when Françoise saw it, she leaned forward between the front seats of the car and said,
“Wow!”

Grandpa Edmund was not (as she had feared) a croaking yellowing thing on a shadowed deathbed, with a heart fumbling for its next beat. He was, first, a voice calling greetings from the terrace above them. Then he was a white-haired, leathery-faced, black-waistcoated man who wrapped his left arm around her while leaning on a walking stick. He smelled of horse and old apples, and the only thing really wrong with him was that he was laughing and crying at the same time.

She grew to love the place, despite the scowling furniture in her bedroom, the peculiar food served in heaps, the sad painting of her dead grandmother that hung over the parlor fireplace. When it finally dawned on her that she was not going home, she was not unhappy.

She learned to ride the bicycle that Edmund had bought her, even though Nicole lamented the scabs on her daughter’s knees. And on a glittering morning in late October, her grandfather led her out into the courtyard to where Magnus, one of his great shire horses, stood waiting, its dappled coat like the shadows on the moon.

Peter, the groom, was the man who had driven them from Norwich; he looked more self-assured holding Magnus’s bridle than he had with his hands on the steering wheel of the car.

Edmund produced a carrot from his jacket pocket.

“Hold it like this, with your hand out flat,” he said. “He’d hate to bite your fingers off. Nasty taste to a horse, young girls’ fingers.”

She did it, daring herself not to close her eyes. The massive head loomed down. The soft clever lips explored her hand. She shuddered. The upper lip lifted; a scoop of monstrous yellow teeth, and the carrot was gone. Edmund applauded her by banging his stick on the cobbles.

“Well done, my lovely! Well done. He knows you now. Very well, then. Peter?”

“Sir,” Peter said. “Here we go, then, Miss.”

And he put his hands under her arms and hoisted her onto the horse’s broad back. Her legs stuck out sideways, like a dropped puppet’s. Peter passed the reins up to her.

“You won’t need ’em,” Edmund said. “Magnus knows where to go. Just you hold on. How’s the world look from up there, young lady?”

It all came to end just before Christmas. Gerard Mortimer had been making inquiries about the local schools. None of them met his standards (which were more disciplinary than academic), so he sought farther afield. Over breakfast on a bitingly cold December morning, he announced that in the New Year Françoise would enroll at a Roman Catholic girls’ boarding school near Cambridge. He extolled its virtues and emphasized the cost. His words meant almost nothing to Françoise. She turned to her mother for help.

“Maman?”

But Nicole didn’t look at her. She punted bits of fried egg around her plate, as though fascinated by the yellow smears they made. Her grandfather would not meet her eyes, either. He bit his lower lip and retreated deeper into the woolen blanket that he was wrapped in. (Françoise had no way of knowing that her education had been one of the many things that her father and grandfather had argued over, bitterly.)

Her banishment changed her utterly. Saint Ethelburger’s was the bleak obverse of the fairy tale: the orphaned, lost-in-the-woods, lonely, and menacing side of the story. The dark stepmothers of the castle were nuns, and they hated her beauty the instant she arrived. Her dark liquid eyes cut no ice with the sisters. Françoise responded to their animosity in kind. She became difficult, truculent, sullen, willfully stupid. Her attractiveness and foreignness made her a victim of the other girls. In less than a term, she shucked off her accent. Still she failed to belong. When she returned to school after her grandfather’s funeral, Gerard had to drag her, howling, from the car.

He made generous donations on top of the fees to keep her there; nevertheless, she was suspended twice, for a fortnight each time. Since this was exactly what Françoise earnestly desired, it was not exactly a smart tactic on the school’s part.

Against the odds, and under protest, she enrolled in the fifth form at the beginning of September 1961. She found herself sharing a dormitory with three older girls. One was an upper sixth-former called Madeleine Travish, and Françoise fell under her spell.

It was Maddie who renamed her Frankie: “It’s rather sweet, don’t you think?”

In the evenings, after prep and prayers, the talk in the dormitories turned, frequently and inevitably, to sex. Inevitably because the sisters hunted down any word or whiff of sex like terriers after a rat, thus guaranteeing it a welcome refuge in the girls’ imaginations, where it bred a host of impure and wildly inaccurate thoughts. Maddie knew a thing or three, though, and had scant respect for the Dire Warnings regularly issued by Sister Benedicta.

“Listening to what
she
has to say about sex is like, well, I don’t know. Like taking music lessons from someone who’s been deaf from birth.
God!
Did I ever tell you what she said to me about patent-leather shoes? No? Well, this is true, as I live and breathe. ‘
Madeleine,
’ she says, ‘
you must never go into town wearing patent-leather shoes.
’ ‘
Why not, Sister?
’ says I. ‘
Because,
’ says she, ‘
boys might see your knickers reflected in them.
’”

“Golly,” said sweet, plump Veronica Drewe. “I’d never have thought of that.”