A Period of Adjustment

Dirk Bogarde

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Giles said, ‘Well, now that you've found him and he's dead, what will you do?'

We had just turned into rue des Serbes down towards the sea.

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘Does it mean we'll have to go back? To England?'

‘Not sure yet.'

‘I expect so. I expect there will have to be a funeral, won't there?'

‘I expect so.'

I turned right on to the Croisette, lights in my favour. People stood in impatient clusters waiting to cross to the beaches. Arms piled high with umbrellas, beach-balls, inflatable ducks and sea-lions, towels. Light breeze flicked and snapped the flags and pennants on the yachts sliding at anchor on the gently heaving water of the harbour. The sky was achingly blue: morning blue, clean, refreshed by the night. Men unravelled long skeins of net along the cobbles of the quay, stacked lobster pots, bawled and laughed to each other. They were still washing and sweeping the pavement and street outside the bars and restaurants along quai Saint-Pierre, sunlight sequinning the spilt water among the
cobbles. It was still reasonably early; up on the clock of Le Suquet it said ten-thirty. But you couldn't be absolutely sure of that really. Inaccurate.

It seemed to me that I had been gutted. I felt transparent. Hollow. Tap me and I'd sound like an empty vessel. I was driving all right, no problems, automatic reflexes were all intact, it was just that my real mind seemed to be mislaid. Elsewhere. I could hear Giles's voice as if he were speaking into an empty bottle. A vaguely booming sound, far too adult for a nine-year-old boy to use.

‘What is AIDS?' he said.

I turned left at the port, straight down to the sea and then right on boulevard Jean Hibert, and the Hôtel Méditerranée, along the coast road to La Napoule, past the Aérospatiale factory, the umbrella pines of the golf course. The traffic was already heavy.

‘Will? Is it something really bad? Something like … an appendix?'

‘Who said anything about AIDS?'

‘You did. Talking to that man, your friend at the clinic place. The tall man in the blazer.'

‘No such thing. I never said anything.'

‘“So
that's
what AIDS does,” you said. And he said, “Yes. I did warn you.”'

‘Little pitchers have large ears.' I
had
said it, I remembered. Just forgot to lower my voice, I suppose. I thought the boy was still in the car, but of course he'd got out and wandered about the
parking.
He was sitting in the shade under a mimosa bush – it was already hot – and he'd heard Aronovich and me talking. I'd forgotten. Naturally. I was not altogether used to having him around all the time.

‘Yes. Pretty awful. Shut up for a bit, will you?'

‘I thought it was. You look funny.'

‘Do I? What sort of “funny”?'

He shook his head, dismissing thought. ‘Nothing. Just funny. Nothing …'

‘Do you want a coffee? Orangina? Something?'

‘Well, we had breakfast ages ago … But I wouldn't mind … A croissant? Can I have one? Some honey?'

At a small café by the harbour in La Napoule we sat under an umbrella at a tin table. A girl in flip-flops set a tray of things before me, cups, pot, so on. There were two other people having a late breakfast. Probably German or English. She in a white cardigan and bright floral print, he in baggy cotton trousers and an over-washed Aertex shirt. He studied a folded map; she sipped her coffee or whatever, contented, smiling vaguely, peering fatly at a happy world through pink-rimmed sunglasses.

Giles was slowly unwrapping a butter pat. ‘It's frozen hard. Silly. Terribly hard to undo.'

‘Leave it in the sun for a bit. It'll melt. Get soft …'

‘Was he a doctor or something? The man in white trousers and a blazer?'

‘No. No, he was a friend of Uncle James. Knew him very well, nice man. Didn't you meet him once? At Jericho? When he came to collect some stuff? Paintings.'

Giles had unwrapped his butter and was pressing lumps of it on to a piece of warm croissant, with his thumb. He shook his head at my question. ‘I don't think so. Perhaps I was with Dottie and Arthur or … I don't know. I didn't recognize him.' He stuffed a piece of croissant into his mouth.

‘His name is Solomon Aronovich. Just keep your voice down. I think they may be English at that table there.
Don't
look! Just talk, if you have to, about “ill” instead of the other thing. Okay? “Ill”.'

‘Instead of AIDS?'

‘Clever boy.'

‘I suppose now you'll have to tell Florence, won't you? I
mean she's his wife and so on. Did she know he was … “ill”? Well, dying really?'

‘No. No. She didn't know. But she was sure that he was dead. She said so … she had a hunch. You know? People do get hunches like that. When he went away all that time ago, she was pretty certain he'd gone for good. Wasn't around …'

‘But all the time he was at that clinic! Dead.' He pushed another piece of honey-dripping croissant into his mouth.

The amazing insouciance of youth almost made me laugh. Almost. Yes, now I'd have to tell Florence. I'd have to tell my wife Helen – Giles's mother – as well. Not that she'd care a jot, but she'd have to know that the ‘job', my search for a missing little brother, had ended this morning. Now I would be free to return to family life and pick up the reins which I had laid down on the reception of a small package from France all those weeks ago. There on the kitchen table in Parsons Green. No duty to pay, an old key and a message:
Don't come to try and find me. I've gone away for ever. My house is yours. Here's the key.

Tempted by that challenge I had come here to find him. And had. As Giles had so correctly said – dead. Up in the clinic, the Villa Mimosa, by the Observatoire in the hills above Cannes. Now all that I had to do was the tidying up. A funeral, of course; first tell his French family, and then decide just what to do myself. What to do with myself was going to be difficult. Helen had cleared off with her lover, a not frightfully savoury gentleman, big in commercial television, immensely rich, leaving me with what she had called a ‘sullen and sulky' son of nine. I'd lived with him all his life but, frankly, hadn't really bothered to get to know him. And here he was, right now, stuffing himself with honey and croissant, swinging his legs cheerfully, nodding about with contentment.

I'd agreed to let him stay in France with me while I searched for his uncle. I didn't at all regret the decision: he was a pleasant companion, I didn't see anything sullen or sulky about him. But I hadn't actually ever seen Helen's friend lying in her bed with his pig-tail untied. Giles had. So.

But now what? Florence was the non-wife of his Uncle James. By that I mean they had actually never been married in a church but had gone through some kind of larky betrothal on a rock on some beach one blazing summer day (I had a snapshot of the silly event to prove it), when they exchanged vows and some cheap metal ring before witnesses, and mingled their blood from a couple of midget scratches on their wrists. All very fey and idiotic. But it had made shacking up together and having a child – she was pregnant it seemed – more acceptable to the people of the village in which she had spent a great deal of her life. A small village full of small minds. Naturally. But the child was ill-born. Down's Syndrome. Adorable, as they so often are, if you could handle it; desperate and ruinous if not. Florence could. James could not. He had eventually fled, convinced that he was guilty, shattered that his own secret and ugly predilections for being bashed to hell by a strong male before other gloating males might very well have resulted in this deformity in his child. Seeking ‘punishment' for this hideous frailty in his infant, he had succumbed entirely to depravity, and died from the loathsome spores which his passions had spawned. I suppose it was all pretty predictable, and it was equally predictable that I, for my part, had of course fallen very much in love with his bewildered wife, Florence. ‘Malchance', as they say in France. Florence had
not
fallen in love with me. Ah, well…

Giles accidentally kicked me under the table. I slopped coffee down my wrist. He apologized, wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand. There was a golden fringe of crumbs stuck under his lower lip.

‘Crumbs. On your chin. Wipe them off … Want any more?'

He shook his head, poked about in the little basket covered with a red gingham cloth. ‘No, thank you. What's this?'

‘A brioche.'

‘Would I like it?'

‘I don't know. You have them for breakfast, don't you? At the hotel?'

He seemed to remember, nodded, pushed the basket aside, sat back in his chair squinting into the sun. ‘I expect you'll have to say it all to Florence. Won't you?'

‘I will. Yes.'

‘I bet she'll be sad. Especially if she didn't know. Very sad, I expect.'

‘Very sad. Look, do shut up for a bit. I really am trying to think things out and you go rabbiting on. Just for a little time? Look at the view, the sea, anything. Be a good chap. All right?'

He looked perfectly pleasant, nodded, swung his legs, sat on his hands, rested his head on his shoulder. I called the girl in flip-flops for the bill. The sunlight sparkled on the little puddles where she had recently washed down the terrace. The man in the Aertex shirt started folding his map; it cracked and rustled. The woman opened her bag, took out a compact, pushed the sunglasses high on her head, pursed her lips, bared them in a deathly plastic smile, snapped the compact shut, fumbled it into her bag. The girl brought the bill, I paid and we walked up to the car in the
parking.

It only then dawned on me that we were on the wrong road. I was on the coast road, not the ‘Provençal'. Old habits died hard. I was familiar with the coast road, but it
would take a couple of hours or more to get to Bargemon-sur-Yves that way.

‘We're on the wrong road. Got to turn back into Cannes, get on to the autoroute.'

Giles had started to stoop into the car. ‘It's jolly hot. Burning. The car, I mean, don't touch it. I think this way is nicer. Must we go back?'

We must and we did; finally we got on to the slip road and started off again. James, the golden ewe lamb, my younger brother by about ten years, had not, as Aronovich had warned me on the telephone when he announced the death, looked remotely like anyone I had ever known. The sunken face, the dark skin, the grinning lips, stretched taut as thin elastic, the teeth like a mad beast's, the sores. Almost no hair; the fair tumbling fall, so very much a feature of his conceit and youth, once worn like a glittering cap, was now so sparse and thin that the speckled scalp showed through it like a bird's egg.

We had stood, Aronovich, his guardian and help, and I, silently in the small white room in the half-light thrown by the morning through tightly slatted shutters. There was nothing to say. Nothing at all. On a small glass shelf a shabby, canvas hand-grip, faded green, leather handles, an old label hanging still in the airless room. Aronovich nodded towards me across the thing on the bed, a sort of ‘Enough? Seen enough?' look. I nodded back and he drew up the sheet and covered the deathly face and then took the hand-grip from the shelf and offered it to me.

‘This was his. All that he had left. You'd better take it. It has an out-of-date passport, the remainder of what little money he had, and … I don't know … bits and pieces. Nothing much. A sketch-block, some pencils, a rubber …'