“No it wasn’t. I just didn’t want to let that old misery think she had it all her own way.”
“She’s got a lot of support, though. They really don’t like the prospect of outsiders coming in, do they?”
The older woman, Daisy realized, was chuckling and shaking her head. Her face was wry, its features suddenly softened. “Things never change,” she said comfortably. “They never change.”
She reached for one of her folders. “Tell you what, you go and get me a glass of wine, and I’ll show you what this house used to be like. Then you’ll see what I mean.”
“The pictures.”
“Decent wine. French. If it’s that Blue Nun or whatever you and Mr. Jones were talking about the other night, then you can forget it. I’ll go right now.”
Daisy got up to fetch a glass. She halted in the doorway to the kitchen and turned.
“You know, I hope it’s not too nosy or anything, but I have to ask: How did you end up owning this place? If it wasn’t anything to do with your husband, I mean? There aren’t many women who end up with an architectural masterpiece to use as their own private bolt-hole.”
“Oh, you don’t want to go getting into all that.”
“Yes I do. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
Mrs. Bernard looked down. Traced the top of her folder with her finger. “I got left it.”
“You got left it.”
“Yes.”
“Left it.”
There was a lengthy pause.
“And that’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“What else do you need to know?”
“I don’t
need
to know anything . . . but do you have to keep everything so close to your chest? Come on, Mrs. Bernard. Unthaw a little. You know a damn sight more about me than I know about you. It doesn’t all have to be a state secret. I’m not going to say anything. I’ve got no one to tell, have I?”
“I’m showing you the pictures, aren’t I?”
“But they’re not about you. They’re about the house.”
“It might be the same thing.”
“I give up.” Daisy disappeared into the kitchen, then came back, shrugging good-humoredly. “I know when I’m beaten. Let’s talk fabrics, then.”
The older woman sat back and looked at Daisy, a long, steady look. Something had shifted in her this evening, Daisy thought. There was an air about her, a kind of “Well, if we’ve come this far . . .” Daisy waited, saying nothing, as Mrs. Bernard turned back to her folders and then, finally, opened one, faceup, on her lap.
“All right. If it bothers you so much,” she said. “I’ll tell you how I got it, as long as you promise me you’re not going to go blabbing to everyone. But first I need a drink. And enough of this Mrs. Bernard nonsense. If I’m going to have to tell you all my state secrets, as you so charmingly put it, you can call me by my first name. Lottie.”
Dear Joe
,
Thank you for your letter and the photograph of you with your new car. It certainly looks very smart and a very nice shade of red, and you look quite the proud owner. I have put it on my little table, near the one of my mother. I don’t have many pictures, so it was a bit of a treat
.
There is nothing much to report here. I am having a break from housework and reading a book that Adeline has lent me. I like the art history ones best. She says she is going to turn me into a reader. Like she is getting me to practice my painting so that I can give Frances a surprise when she gets here. I am not very good—my watercolors tend to run into each other, and I get more charcoal on my fingers than my paper. But I quite enjoy it. It’s not like we did it at school. Adeline keeps going on about me learning to “express myself.” When Julian comes, meanwhile, he says I am “expanding my vistas” and that one day he’ll frame one and sell it for me. I think this may be his idea of a joke
.
Not that there are many jokes here. In the village you are evidently considered a fast sort if you dare to put a brooch on your dress and it’s not a Sunday. There is one woman, who runs the bread shop (the bread is in sticks as long as your leg!), who is very cheerful and chats away to us. But Mme Migot, who is a sort of doctor, always looks very severe at her. Then again she looks severe at everyone. Me and Adeline especially
.
I don’t know if I told you where our village was. It is halfway up a mountain, Mont Faron, but it’s not like the mountains in books with snow at the top. This one is very hot and dry and has a military fort, and when George drove Adeline and me up the narrow path to the top the first time, I was almost sick with fright. Even at the top I had to hang on to a tree. Did you know they have pines here? Not the same as the ones at home, but it did make me feel better
.
Adeline sends her love. She is picking herbs in the garden. They smell very strong here in the heat, not like Mrs. H’s old garden at all
.
I hope you are well, Joe. And thanks for keeping on writing. Sometimes I have been a bit lonely, truth to tell, and your letters have been a comfort to me
.
Yours, etc
.
Lottie lay on her side on the cool flagstones, her hips supported by a cushion, another under her neck, waiting for the moment when her bones would start to complain about the uncompromising solidity of the floor below. Her joints didn’t last long now; even on her soft featherbed upstairs, they would begin twingeing within minutes of her settling into any position, demanding that she find new ways to rest, new pressure points upon which to lie.
She rested, feeling the first hints of discomfort creeping up her left thigh, and closed her eyes in irritation. She didn’t want to have to move; the floor was the coolest place to be, in fact the only cool place in a house of simmering heat, scratchy fabrics, and huge, buzzing airborne creatures that crashed into furniture and mumbled angrily against the windows.
Outside she could see Adeline under a large straw hat, moving slowly around the yellowing, overgrown garden, picking herbs and sniffing them before laying them into a little basket. As Adeline began strolling back toward the house, the baby kicked hard, and Lottie muttered bad-temperedly, pulling the silk kimono closed so she didn’t have to look at her swollen stomach.
“Do you want a drink, Lottie dear?”
Adeline stepped over her and made for the sink. She was used to seeing Lottie lying on the floor. She was also used to her cheerlessness.
“No thank you.”
“Oh, bother, we’re out of grenadine. I hope this wretched woman comes from the village this week; we are out of nearly everything. And we need the linen laundered as well—Julian is returning this week.”
Lottie pushed herself upright and fought the urge to apologize. No matter how many times Adeline scolded her for it, she still felt guilty that in these last weeks of pregnancy she was fat and slow and useless. For the months since her arrival, Lottie had managed the housework and cooking (“We had a woman from the village, but she was such a misery”), gradually hauling the ramshackle French house into some kind of orderly shape, molding herself on a hybrid of Mrs. Holden and Virginia, her role as housekeeper her payment for Adeline’s hospitality. Not that Adeline wanted payment. But Lottie felt safer that way. If you earned your keep, then it was harder for people to ask you to leave.
Adeline, meanwhile, had seemed to consider it her mission to persuade Lottie (against all available evidence, as far as Lottie could see) that there were things to be gained from leaving Merham. She had become a sort of teacher, encouraging Lottie to be “brave” in what she attempted to portray for herself. Initially self-conscious and unwilling, Lottie had been surprised that, as someone who no longer appeared to exist anywhere, she could leave such solid images on a page. Adeline’s praise brought a rare sense of achievement in her (Dr. Holden had been the only person to praise her for anything), a sense that there might be some other purpose to her life. And slowly, gradually, Lottie had had to admit a creeping interest in these new worlds. They offered opportunities for escape from her existing one, if nothing else.
But now she was huge. And good for nothing. Now if she stayed upright for too long, she felt dizzy and fluid pooled in her ankles. If she moved too much, she broke into a fine sweat, and the bits of her body that now rubbed against each other for the first time became pink and sore and chafed. The baby moved restlessly, sending her stomach into impossible shapes, pushing against its inelastic confines, leaving her sleepless by night and exhausted by day. So she sat, or lay on the floor, sunk deep into her own misery, waiting for the heat—or the baby—to drop.
Adeline, thankfully, said nothing about her depression and ill temper. Mrs. Holden would have got cross and told her that she was affecting everybody’s moods with her “black dog.” But Adeline didn’t mind if Lottie didn’t want to talk or participate. She just kept on, apparently impervious, humming, moving around Lottie and asking without rancor whether she would like something else to drink, another cushion, perhaps to help her compose another letter to Frances. Adeline wrote a lot of letters to Frances.
She didn’t seem to get any replies.
It was almost six months since Lottie had left England, seven since she’d left Merham. For all the distance between them, it might have been ten years. In her initial state of shock, Lottie had, perhaps naïvely, gone to her mother, who, her hair now fiercely lacquered into a kind of helmet and her mouth a vivid shade of tangerine, had told Lottie not to bother thinking she could bring it home. She couldn’t believe, she said, waving a cigarette, that Lottie hadn’t learned by her own example. Lottie had wasted all the opportunities God had given her (which were a damn sight more than
she
had ever been given). And she’d left the Holdens thinking she was no better than she was.
Besides (and here her mother had become curiously coy, almost conciliatory), she had made a life for herself now, was courting a nice widower. He was a moral type; he wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t like the others, she said, with a glance toward Lottie that could have been something like a guilty acknowledgment. He was
decent
. Lottie realized, before her cup of tea was half drunk, that not only was she not being invited to stay but that, just as in Merham, she no longer appeared to exist.
Her mother had not told this man that she had a daughter. There had been few pictures of her around the house when she’d lived there; now there were none. Over the mantelpiece, where there had once stood one of her and Auntie Jean, her mother’s late sister, there was now a framed picture of a middle-aged couple, arm in arm outside a country pub, squinting, his bald pate shining in the sunlight.
“I wasn’t asking for anything. I suppose I just wanted to see you.” Lottie began to gather her things, unable even to summon up the energy to feel hurt. Compared to what she had been through, this woman’s rejection felt like a curiously minor thing.
Her mother’s face had looked pinched, as though she were holding back tears. She batted at her nose with a sponge from a powder compact, then reached out a hand and clutched Lottie’s arm. “You let me know where you are. You write, now.”
“Shall I sign it ‘Lottie’?” Lottie turned sulkily toward the door. “Or would you prefer ‘Your good friend’?” Her mother, tight-lipped, had stuffed ten shillings into her hand as she left. Lottie had looked at it and almost laughed.
L
OTTIE DID NOT LOVE
F
RANCE, DESPITE ALL
A
DELINE’S
best efforts. She didn’t much like the food, apart from the bread. The rich stews with their garlic undertone and the meats with their heavy sauces made her long for the comforting blandness of fish and chips and cucumber sandwiches, while her first whiff of strong French cheese in the market had her retching by the side of the road. She didn’t like the heat, which was much fiercer than Merham’s but without the benefit of the sea and its incoming breezes, or the mosquitoes, which attacked her remorselessly, like whining divebombers, at night. She didn’t like the scenery, which seemed arid and unfriendly, its soil parched dry and its vegetation curling surlily under the heat of the sun, or the crickets that clattered away incessantly in the background. And she hated the French, the men who eyed her steadily, speculatively, and, as she grew, the women, who did the same but this time with disapproval and in some cases open disgust.
Mme Migot, who acted as the local midwife, had come to see her twice, at Adeline’s request. Lottie hated her; she would manipulate her stomach roughly as if she were kneading bread, would take her blood pressure and bark instructions at Adeline, who would sound inexplicably calm and unapologetic in return. Mme Migot never once said anything to Lottie; she barely met her eye. “She’s a Catholic,” Adeline would murmur as the older woman left. “It’s to be expected. You of all people should know what they’re like in a small town.”
But that was it. Despite everything, Lottie missed her own small town. She missed the scent of Merham, that mixture of sea salt and asphalt, the sounds of the Scotch pines in the sea breeze, the open greens of the municipal park and the rotting breakwaters stretching off into infinity. She liked the smallness of it, the way one knew its limits and that they were unlikely to be exceeded. She’d never had Celia’s wanderlust, her desire to push out for new horizons; she was just grateful for a tenure in the pleasant, well-ordered town, perhaps presciently aware that it was unlikely to last.
Most of all she missed Guy. During daylight hours she had braced herself against thoughts of him, had erected a barrier in her mind, whereby with a steely determination she could force away his image as if she were pulling a curtain across his face. At night, though, he ignored her pleas for peace and wandered in and out of her dreams, his lopsided smile, his slim brown hands, his tendernesses both calling to her and taunting her with their absence.
Sometimes she woke up speaking his name.
Sometimes she wondered how it were possible to be so far from the sea and still feel as if she were drowning.
S
PRING BECAME SUMMER, AND VISITORS CAME AND WENT,
sitting outside on the terrace under straw hats, drinking red wine, and sleeping in the heat of the afternoon. Often with each other. Julian came, far too polite to mention Lottie’s increasing girth or to ask her how it had come about. He was relentlessly cheerful, dangerously extravagant. He was, apparently, making money again. He gave Adeline the Merham house and a fearfully expensive bust of a woman that, to Lottie, looked like ants had been at it. Stephen came twice. A poet called Si came and in a strong upper-class accent told them all repeatedly that he was “cranked,” said he was only “hanging” till he could find a “gig” and thought Adeline the “most” for “laying on” a room. He was, George said, mockingly, a Beat by way of Basingstoke.