Authors: Philippa Carr
It was Christmas time when Jacques was in Cornwall and it was at Jermyn Priory that I first met him. I was feeling particularly disillusioned with my life at that time, deeply aware of the mistake I had made, seeing the dreary years ahead—and there was Jacques.
It seemed that Jowan had met him somewhere on the Continent. He must have talked to Jacques about Cornwall and said something like, “You must come and see us if you are ever our way.” It was one of those casual meetings at which such invitations are lightly issued and seem little likely to come to anything at the time. And then fate plays an unexpected trick, and that seemingly insignificant fact is the catalyst which changes our lives.
Certainly it would have been better for me if Jowan had not met Jacques Dubois and issued that casual invitation.
Well, Jacques came. He was staying at one of the inns in Poldown. He had a friend with him—Hans Fleisch, I remember, a German and an artist, as Jacques was.
They had arrived with their sketch pads and declared themselves excited by the beauty of the Cornish coast. I remember so vividly how I felt at that time—depressed by the dullness and monotony of life. Jacques was different from anyone I had known, very worldly, everything that Dermot was not. He seemed to sense how I felt and he understood it. He was sympathetic and very attentive. I went home from that gathering at Jermyn’s in that state of excitement which I needed in my life.
The next day I met him when he was painting on the cliffs. It was one of those mild winter days which one gets hereabouts. He looked remarkably pleased to see me. I sat beside him and asked if I were interrupting his work. Indeed not, he said. The work could only interrupt his meeting with me and could be set aside with the greatest pleasure. At times like that, Jacques always knew the right thing to say.
We walked and the time flew by. I had no idea I was with him so long.
“I am here every day,” he told me. “The weather is not always as good as this, but if it is not, I shall be at the inn. I’d like to show you my work sometime.”
For three days we met on the cliffs. Then I began to see how it was between us. To me it was more than a passing flirtation. It was arranged that I should go along to the inn to see him. Of course, if anyone observed my going to his room, there would be a good deal of talk. It seemed an added excitement to plan my visits and seek an opportunity to slip up to his room unseen.
The outcome was inevitable. In a short time we were lovers. And what an exciting lover he was! How different from Dermot!
I knew how shocked my family would have been if they had known, and that included Violetta. She had always been rather conventional. I could not imagine her straying from the path of virtue. I think I was more apprehensive of her discovering than I was of Dermot.
I have always been the sort of person who lives in the present. Violetta calls it the “butterfly existence.”
“Fluttering hither and thither,” she said, “round the candle until you scorch your wings.”
It could not last, of course. Though I made myself believe it would. Jacques would not stay forever and then I would return to my old, dull existence.
Then one day Jacques said: “Why not come with me? You’d like Paris.”
I said: “How wonderful!” and let myself believe it was possible.
I suppose Jacques’s nature is really like mine. We started to plan. I love planning. I think up the wildest ideas, which I make myself believe in while they last. In the past Violetta had been there with her common sense. “How absurd you are being!” “How could you possibly do that? You’re not being logical.” And she would have shown me right from the beginning how stupid I was. But she was not there and Jacques and I used to lie in the bed in the inn where there was scarcely room for us both, and float into that world of fantasy. We made plans and deluded ourselves into thinking they were not impossible.
“I have it!” I cried. “The feud.”
Jacques’s eyes sparkled. He was enjoying these plans as much as I was. They certainly helped me to evade the unpleasant fact that parting could not be far off.
I said, “In the feud … this Jermyn girl—I can’t remember her name, so I’ll call her Juliet—was so heartbroken because they wouldn’t let her marry the man she wanted to that she went down to the beach and walked into the sea. Dermot’s first wife was also drowned in that way. Suppose I arranged a ‘drowning accident’? I know. I’ll go down to the beach every morning to have a bathe, and one day they’ll find my bathrobe and shoes and I shall have disappeared.”
Jacques laughed. It was a brilliant idea. His eyes sparkled and he started to plan how we would do it.
We made the wildest suggestions. It was not impossible. They would think I was drowned. I did not want poor Dermot to know I was tired of him. That would hurt him too much. We would fix it all beautifully. I would simply have gone bathing and not come back. Just as Juliet Jermyn had done, and as Dermot’s first wife had done.
We had to make sure that the truth about my departure was never discovered.
We planned and planned. We were caught up in the idea—and then somehow it became a reality. Jacques said: “You can bring a few things with you. Not much, or they’ll get suspicious. There’s a snag. You’ll want your passport.”
We were thoughtful.
“Why should they think to look for a passport?” I asked.
“They might not immediately. But sometime perhaps somebody will.”
“We can’t worry about a detail like that. They’d think I’d lost it. I do lose things.”
So the plan was that I should slip a few things out of the house while Jacques would be waiting for me in the car Hans Fleisch had hired. He would lend it to Jacques without demur. And so we should be ready for the day of departure. I had to make a habit of taking a bathe in the early morning just for a few days before we left. Then on the night we were to get away, I would slip out of the house and join Jacques. First I would put my bathrobe and shoes on the beach and people would believe I had gone for my early morning swim.
Hans Fleisch would drive us to the coast and return to Poldown afterwards, for he planned to stay another week or so. It was all quite simple.
My conscience worried me that night. I was glad Violetta was not then at Tregarland’s. I was sure she would have guessed I was, as she would say, “up to something.” I promised myself that later I would find some way of seeing her. I would write to her and she would come to Paris. I had a miniature of her—a beautiful thing, and she had one of me—and I took it with me.
And it all went according to plan.
I know now that my clothes were found on the beach, just as I intended, and they all believed I had been drowned—except Violetta. There was that strong bond between us and instinctively she knew I was not dead.
Well, she knows the truth now, and when I did come back, she helped me to concoct a story of my loss of memory and being picked up by a yacht. Violetta said this talk would never have been accepted but for the fact that the war had come and such affairs as mine were trivial compared with that.
Such was my nature that I could forget all the difficulties, even the enormity of what I was doing, in the excitement of the moment. I know I am shallow and pleasure-seeking, but I found Jacques so exciting and amusing, and I had convinced myself that I must escape from the eerie atmosphere of Tregarland and that sometime in the future I should be able to justify myself in what I had done.
There is something intoxicating about the very air of Paris. During my first days there I was so exhilarated that I told myself that everything that came after would be worth it. During that period, I stilled my conscience which, in spite of myself, kept intruding. I would think of Tristan, Violetta, Dermot, and my parents all mourning for me—for they would mourn deeply, in spite of my unworthiness. I wished that I could find some means of telling them that I was alive. Violetta will know, I promised myself. She must. And that comforted me a little, and for those days when I walked the streets of Paris, buying the clothes I needed, absorbing that atmosphere which is indigenous to the city, I lived on excitement. I loved the cafes with their gay awnings, and the little tables at which people sat, drinking their coffee or wine. I loved the famous streets and the narrow ones, and the shops, the smell of freshly baked bread which came from some of them, and the remains of the old city before Hausemann had rebuilt it, after the damage it had suffered during the Revolution.
I spent a certain amount of time strolling through the streets, looking at the places which had been only names to me before. I loved the ancient bridges, and I gazed in wonder at the majestic Notre Dame. I wished I had paid more attention to my lessons, and I thought if Violetta were here she would be able to tell me a great deal about these places.
Jacques did not accompany me on these journeys. He was not the type to wander round gaping at everything like a tourist. He had work to do. He had changed a little. He was no less the ardent lover, and that part of our relationship remained. It was just that, when I expressed the excitement I felt in Paris and wished that he would show me certain places, he became remote and evasive. He had some sketches to do. He was not free that day.
“If only Violetta were here,” I said.
He smiled and nodded vaguely. He could not understand what existed between me and Violetta.
I had always imagined that artists lived in attics in abject poverty and went to cafes to celebrate when they sold a picture and there caroused with their impecunious friends.
This was not the case with Jacques.
He had a small house on the Left Bank, it was true, but he lived in a certain degree of comfort. There was an attic in which he worked because the light was from the north. But it was just his working area and below was an ordinary dwelling which one might expect anywhere.
In the basement were a husband and wife who looked after his needs. They were Jean and Marie, middle-aged, eager to please and not really surprised to see me, which was a little disconcerting.
Jacques was clearly by no means poor. He gave me money to buy clothes and, providing I could subdue my conscience, I was happy during those first weeks.
Jacques worked now and then in the attic which he called his studio. People called often. Some of them were sitters, I presumed; others came and he would take them up to the studio to talk. He did show me one or two portraits. I was hoping he would suggest painting me, but he did not.
People sometimes called in the evenings. Marie would cook a meal for them and Jean would wait at table. I would be present on such occasions, of course, but they spoke such rapid French that I could understand little of what they said. When I told Jacques this, he laughed and said I had missed nothing I needed to know. It was all gossip.
“Do they talk about what is going on in Europe?” I asked. “People were always going on about that at home.”
“It is mentioned.”
“They were all worked up about it in England. I expect they are here. Yet usually they all seem so much more excitable than we do.”
He shrugged his shoulders and I sensed he did not want to talk about the possibilities of war. I was in agreement with that. I had grown weary of the subject before I left home.
About ten days after I had been there, Hans Fleisch came to the house. We greeted each other warmly. He had been a great help to us. He bowed, and clicked his heels, which took me right back to that awful time at the schloss. He asked me in his stilted and rather Germanic English if I were enjoying France. I told him I found it most exciting.
“Jacques is very happy that you are here.”
“What happened in Poldown when they discovered I had gone?” I asked.
He was thoughtful and then said: “They believed you were drowned. That you had gone swimming. It was not a wise thing to do, they said. The sea can be treacherous, and you were lost.”
“Did you happen to see any member of my family?”
“No, but I heard they had come to the house.”
“My sister … ?”
“Yes, I think your sister.”
“I see. So … the story was accepted.”
“It would seem so.”
I thought to myself: Oh, Violetta, dear mother, dear father, I hope you don’t mourn me too much.
I think it was then that I began to regard what I had done more seriously.
I was still fascinated by Jacques. The physical relationship between us was perfect—for him, too, I was sure; but I had built up such an image of life in the Latin Quarter that I was vaguely disappointed because ours seemed so conventional. I had pictured artists coming in every day. I remembered stories I had heard of Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne, and the cafe life of the Bohemians. That was completely missing. Jacques seemed quite affluent. This was perverse of me. I should be grateful. Did I want to live in poverty because it seemed artistic for a moment or two?
I began to know one or two people who came fairly frequently to the studio. One of these, to whom I took a liking, was Georges Mansard. He was a tall man with a ready smile and blue, rather penetrating eyes. He was very fair and did not look very French. He spoke good English and was very interested in me. I always was drawn to people who were. It was something to do with an inferiority complex I had acquired, having grown up lacking Violetta’s intelligence. I enjoyed feeling superior to her in the matter of feminine charm.
The first time Georges Mansard came to the house, I was in the house alone, for Jacques had gone out that morning. He had a way of going off suddenly, not saying where, and I learned not to protest when he returned. Jacques was the sort of man who did not like his actions questioned. It was a trait which was beginning to irritate me.
I heard someone talking to Jean and Marie below and I went down to see who it was.
Jean said: “Monsieur has come to see Monsieur Dubois.”
Delighted to have a visitor, I said: “Oh, do come up. It may be he will not be long.”
The visitor looked pleased and turned to nod at Jean, who looked faintly disturbed, but I said: “That’s all right, Jean. Perhaps,” I went on, “you would bring some coffee.” Then to the guest: “Or would you prefer wine?”