A Natural Curiosity (21 page)

And are you, perhaps, on a little holiday, he inquires? A spring break? He is only being polite.

Yes she agrees, a little holiday.

And will she visit the new gallery at the Musée d’Orsay? All Paris talks of it, visits it, queues for it, he assures her.

Yes, she says, she probably will. She has not heard of the Musée d’Orsay.

And is she spending her holiday alone? Escaping, perhaps, for a little peace and quiet from her family obligations? Or will she be meeting friends in Paris, staying with friends?

Shirley’s head begins to thrum and throb. The note of polite, civilized sympathy and interest in his voice assaults her defences. She feels a little faint. She shuts her eyes for a moment. The boat is heaving and lurching.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ he asks, anxiously. ‘It
is
a little on the rough side today, isn’t it?’

His tone is impeccable. Courteous, restrained, unintrusive.

‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’ And then she hears herself go on to say, ‘My husband died this week. I’ve run away. Yes, that’s what I’ve done, I’ve run away.’

Her eyes are still shut. The ferry creaks and slaps its way on. He hesitates, then she feels his hand upon her hand.

‘Oh. I
say
, my dear, I
say
,’ he says, ‘I
am
so sorry. I
say
, poor thing, I say.’

Tears stand in her eyes, her lip trembles. She stiffens it. His voice is so acceptable, so miraculously acceptable. Who would have believed it possible? A human being is speaking to her. She has been locked into solitude for years, for a decade at least. Now, somebody speaks, a stranger speaks. He does not rise and reject her, he does not run away in shock. He pats her hand and says, ‘Oh, oh dear, poor
thing
.’

She opens her eyes and smiles, bravely. He is leaning towards her, full of concern. ‘There, there,’ he says, and pats her hand, then withdraws, in case he should cause offence by too much solicitude.

They sit there like that for a minute or two, in silence. He offers, again, to get her a drink—a soft drink, a glass of water? She shakes her head.

And where is she staying in Paris, he wants to know? She shakes her head. She admits that she has no idea.

‘I left—on impulse,’ she says. ‘I had to get away.’

The ferry is nearing Calais. The gulls cry.

‘But will you be all right, on your own?’ he wants to know, as announcements are made about the rejoining of cars and the not switching on of engines.

‘Oh yes,’ says Shirley bravely, but when she rises to her feet she is shaking violently. Her teeth chatter, she is suddenly, mortally cold. Her legs will hardly support her. Surely, at this stage, he will summon a doctor, summon the police and desert her? She should never have admitted a moment of human weakness, it has destroyed her.

He takes her elbow. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘you’re not fit to drive. You’re not well.’

‘I’m fine,’ she says, as she stands there trembling. She takes a deep breath, calms herself by force. ‘I’m fine,’ she repeats, and starts to move calmly towards the door, towards the stairs to Car Deck B. He follows her. He follows her to the door of her little red Mini, watches anxiously as she unlocks it and climbs in. She sits there and rests her head for a moment on the wheel. The truth is that she has no idea how she will ever get the car off the ferry, her knees are shaking, her heart is pounding, her head is buzzing, and however would she in this condition manage to drive to anywhere on the right-hand side of the road? It was a miracle that she got up the gangplank onto the ferry at all. She will never get off. She sits upright, smiles again. He is still there, hovering.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘let me help.’

She cannot believe her ears.

‘Let me help,’ he repeats. He can read her mind.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘you get in my car, and I’ll drive you off, then come back for yours. Then we’ll think about it.’

She begins to cry, noiselessly, and bows her head again over the wheel. He takes her elbow, helps her to her feet, takes the car keys from her, lets her into his own car, into the passenger seat of a spacious, elderly, slightly battered grey Citroën. ‘Just sit there,’ he tells her, and she sits obediently, as he vanishes, then returns. ‘They say they’ll drive it off for you,’ he says. ‘Is that all right?’

She nods.

‘I’ve told him to follow me,’ he says. ‘Is that all right?’

She nods again, and sits there as the ferry docks, as the bow doors swing open, as he starts up the engine. ‘I told them you’d been taken ill,’ he said, with a hint of returning humour, growing intimacy. ‘They were very understanding,’ he said. She smiles acknowledgement, but dares not speak. ‘This kind of thing probably happens all the time,’ he says. The car moves forwards, she turns round, sees her own red Mini with a uniformed seaman at the wheel. The seaman waves encouragement, starts up after them.

They reach dry land, park. Money changes hands. Her new friend is good at such things. Everybody smiles, including Shirley. The seaman departs.

‘And now,’ he says, ‘what now?’

, ‘I don’t know,’ says Shirley. All sorts of possibilities are passing through her head. She does not know what to say, what not to say.

‘I wanted to disappear,’ she says, forlornly, in the hiatus.

He shows no sign of losing patience with her. He sits and waits for more.

‘They don’t know where I am,’ she offers.

‘You can leave your car here, and come to Paris with me,’ he offers in return.

‘But they’ll find the car,’ she says. ‘I should never have brought the car. I nearly left it in Luton. I ought to have left it in Luton.’

‘We’ll leave it,’ he says. ‘In the supermarket car-park. Could you drive, do you think, just a few minutes? You could follow me.’

She nods.

‘We’ll get your things out first,’ he says. They get out, into the fresh cold air, into a light rain, into the darkening afternoon. The cold revives her. They transfer her suitcases, her raincoat, her plastic bags to the boot of the Citroen. She has become a hostage.

‘All right,’ she says, and gets back into the driver’s seat of her Mini.

‘Just follow me,’ he calls. ‘And drive on the right, remember!’

She follows him, slowly, carefully until they arrive in a large, roughly surfaced, almost deserted supermarket car-park on the fringes of town. It is
PARKING GRATUIT
. Free Parking. How did he know it was here, Shirley asks herself? Shirley parks her car with its nose in a corner, next to a small rusted van which looks as though it has been there for some time. She gets out. Her friend gets out. It is very cold now. He puts his arm round her shoulders, in a friendly, comforting gesture. They stand there, for a moment. He squeezes her far shoulder, lightly, slightly.

‘All right?’ he asks.

‘All right,’ she agrees. He opens his car door for her. She gets in, docile, passive, bold, and sits down, leans back, stretches out her legs.

‘You see,’ he says, with an air of patience, of reason, ‘you can’t just set off into the night, with no booking, and no idea where you’re going. When you’re not feeling well. Can you?’

Shirley thinks. ‘Well,’ she says, after a while, ‘I suppose I could have done. If I hadn’t met you.’

He turns the key in the ignition.

‘But you did meet me. Or rather, I met you. It was my idea, remember.’ He moves off, gently. The car’s suspension is very good, it rises softly up, then inches smoothly over the bumpy waste site, gathers slow speed on the tarmac, accelerates as he sets off towards Paris. She does not even look back, towards her abandoned loyal faithful decent red Mini.

‘You can spend the night in my apartment. No strings attached, of course. But at least spend the night there quietly, and think things over.’ He pauses, continues. ‘It will do me good, to have someone to look after. Take my mind off my own worries.’

‘You are too good,’ she says.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m just pretending to be, for a change. People tell me I’m not very good at all.’

She gazes out at the dark mistletoed landscape of northern France.

‘But you can trust me,’ he adds, as an afterthought. ‘I’m quite a safe driver.’

She laughs at this.

‘My name is Shirley,’ she says.

‘And mine is Robert,’ he says.

They drive on, into the darkness. As they go, Shirley tells him something (not too much) about her flight. She leaves some details vague, purposefully vague. He listens, sympathetically, quietly, with the odd exclamation of commiseration. ‘Poor thing,’ he says, from time to time, ‘you poor thing.’ Then he tells her the story of Amélie and her infidelity. He had considered Amélie a permanence, a consort until death, a lover confirmed by distance, he tells Shirley: a perpetual romance. Amélie worked in Paris, he was taken by business affairs regularly almost weekly to Paris. He has suspected nothing. Yes, he had had a wife in England, years ago, but she had divorced him over Amélie and remarried. Quite happily, he thought. He had trusted Amélie. ‘It was by accident that I discovered,’ he said. ‘I arrived unexpectedly. The only time in ten years. The phone was out of order. I wish I had never found out.’

Shirley says that maybe things will alter, improve. He shakes his head. No, it is over, he says.

She tells him of her clever daughter Celia, of her two difficult truant boys.

He tells her of his son Lucas, who is now a computer programmer, and of his son Edward, who is physically handicapped.

Their stories interweave, join, separate, and join again. He drives, as he had claimed, well. It is a strange sensation, to be in the care of a man, to be with a man who takes responsibility. Shirley reflects that for years now, she had been living with Cliff as with a stranger, had been taking care of him as though he were a stranger, had been dreading, foreseeing, from a distance, the inevitable collapse. Robert is companionable, easy. They talk, fall silent, talk again. Eventually she falls asleep, and when she wakes they are in an unfamiliar Paris, making their way through broad, then narrower streets, until they turn down a one-way road, slow down, and turn through an archway. Robert gets out, unlocks an iron gate, and drives through into a small cobbled courtyard.

‘Here we are,’ he says.

Shirley looks around, rubs her eyes. Is she dreaming? Is she hallucinating? It is a little French courtyard, ancient, rustic. She knows they are in a heavily built-up area, she can sense that they are not far from the centre, not far from the Paris that everybody knows, but this is a corner out of time. There are flower pots and, to the right, a long obliquely angled three-storeyed building with shutters and little iron balconies. A small tree grows in the middle of the irregular long triangle of yard. Grass sprouts from the cobbles: a little house, a cottage, faces them, separate from the long larger building, tucked away perched, stranded, a little house all on its own. Robert parks the car in front of this little doll’s house, this little garden pavilion. He gets out, goes back to shut the iron gate, comes to open her door. She gets out and stands in the cold Paris night. The air smells of France.

A few steps, a little iron staircase, lead up to the front door. She follows him. The heavy door, unlocked by an impressive tangle of antiquated keys, opens straight into the tiny living-room. He switches on the light.

‘Well, this is it,’ says Robert: meaning that only this floor is his, that whatever goes on upstairs is nothing to do with him. And there are no stairs. There are three doors, opening off this central chamber. This is it.

The apartment is half stripped, as perhaps he had half expected. She senses his distress, as he looks around. The pot plants are dead or dying. A packing case stands in a corner. The ornately papered dark walls show pale patches, where paintings have been removed. Other paintings stand on the floor, their faces to the skirting board. The small round dining-table has two envelopes upon it. ‘Robert,’ one says, in a firm large script. The other says, more waveringly, ‘M. Holland’. Robert stands there jangling the keys, weighing them in his hand, and sighs. The apartment is warm: the heating is on. He stands. Shirley wonders whether to speak. But he speaks first.

‘Well, at least she hasn’t taken the lampshades,’ he says, and Shirley looks up and round. She sees that the lampshades are pretty, patterned, brown and red and orange flowered, art nouveau. The room must have been cosy, intimate, a little brownred nest. It is still cosy, even in its half-dismantled state. Shirley decides to say so.

‘What a lovely room,’ she risks, on its threshold. Robert is roused back to concern, chivalry. ‘Yes, it’s a good corner,’ he says, as he puts down Shirley’s bags (he has none) and waves to the couch. ‘Sit down,’ he says, ‘sit down,’ and he reaches for his letters, opens them, glances at them, throws them back on the table. She does not sit.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘we’d better see what she’s left. Would you like a drink? I could do with a drink. I wonder if there’s anything to eat?’

He opens one of the three doors, which reveals a tiny kitchen, into which he disappears. She hears him rummaging through cupboards. Shirley looks round, inspecting more closely the remnants of a ten-year intimacy, wondering which is the bedroom, wondering about beds. The couch, upholstered in shiny repellent striped fabric, has wooden scrolled ends and is as hard as a rock. The rooms must all be tiny, she supposes.

Robert returns with a couple of glasses and a couple of bottles. He offers a choice of Pernod and whisky. She chooses Pernod, because there is more of it, and she thinks it might be milder. He has the same. He tops it up, reassuringly, with water.

‘Well,’ he says, sitting in his specially designed armchair, ‘our health.’

The Pernod is strong stuff, she realizes, halfway through her glass.

It is eight o’clock. They talk about Amélie’s desertion, and about the concierge, Madame Lambert, author of the second of Robert’s letters. ‘She’s on my side, of course,’ says Robert, ‘she wanted to let me know she wouldn’t let Amélie take down the curtains. Made her put them back up again, she says.’

They decide to go out for a bit to eat. ‘There’s nothing much here,’ says Robert. ‘A couple of eggs and an old crust and a tin of anchovies. Well go down to the corner. Have another drink?’