Mischief (21 page)

‘I could offer her a gold charm from my bracelet,’ said Lucy. ‘In fact I think I’ll do that.’

And to her astonishment Pierre hit her, or she thought that was what had happened, since there was a sudden kind of stinging blackness around her head, but how could she know, no one had ever hit her before. For a second or so she couldn’t see, and was perhaps suffering from amnesia, for she couldn’t quite remember where she was; but yes, it wasn’t home, it was indeed an inn somewhere in the South of France, and she was leaning against a whitewashed wall, while a strange man rather younger than herself apologised for something rather trivial, and she could hear a kind of knock, knock, knock, which she thought was Edwin chopping down the Christmas Tree, the one that had started little and grown deep and strong. Edwin divided it root from branch, because it spoke of a celebration Lucy could no longer name, and anyway it spoke a lie. But of course the sound was only the knock, knock, knock of the landlady at the door, demanding money she and Pierre didn’t have, speaking in a language Lucy didn’t understand, but who knew them better than they knew themselves. She could see that to look after yourself you would have to know yourself, but who was there in that land, in that time, to hear such a thing if it were said?

1991

It is said that Gustave Flaubert wove his novel
Madame Bovary
around a press cutting he read in a local newspaper- the sorry tale of a provincial doctor’s wife who, unable to face the consequences of debt and adultery, took poison and committed suicide. It is my belief that gloom, and a passion to punish the frivolous Madame Bovary for the vulgarity of her sins, clouded the great writer’s judgment. He was reading about attempted suicide, not suicide. The story has come down to me through members of my own family, that though in shame and desperation Emma did indeed cram arsenic into her pretty mouth, Justin the apprentice had wisely taken the precaution of liberally mixing the stuff with sugar and she survived. Black bile poured out of her mouth, true: her limbs for a time were mottled brown, the desecration of her marriage vows took visible and outward form – but there God and Flaubert’s punishment ended – Emma lived. And if man’s punishment came hot upon the Almighty’s – poor pretty Emma went to prison for two years for her sin – to attempt suicide was at the time both a mortal and a criminal offence - there came an end to that too, and fortunately before she had altogether lost her looks.

My grandfather taught Emma’s great grandchild the violin at the New York conservatoire, which is how I happen to know the truth of the matter. Perhaps the story has become garbled through the generations, for certainly the timescale is a little strange: but the fictional universe has its own rules as it brushes up against our own. I am happy enough to accept the family version.

Flaubert, having dismissed Emma to the grave, in an elaborate coffin which her husband Charles could ill afford, chose to visit unmitigated disaster on the whole Bovary family. The debts Emma had incurred in life had to be met by Charles in what remained of his, and he was left in penury. His eventual discovery of Emma’s love letters to Leon and Rodolphe upset him dreadfully – the maid Felicite having already badly damaged his faith in human nature by stealing all Emma’s clothes and running off with them - and the poor man died of grief. Emma’s little girl Berthe, orphaned, went to live with her grandmother, and on the old woman’s death ended up working in a cotton mill, and that was the end of the Bovarys.

The version handed down by my family is far more benign. After poor Emma went to prison in Rouen, Charles visited her weekly for a time – but dressed in drab as she was, her hair pulled back and greasy, her skin still blotchy from the effects of arsenic – his adoration for her quickly waned, and his visits became infrequent and then ceased. The servant Felicite, far from stealing Emma’s clothes, simply wore them around the house to keep Charles happy, and was very soon replacing Emma in her master’s bed. There is some reason to believe that Felicite’s affair with Charles had been going on secretly for some years, and under Emma’s nose. Charles had more or less pushed Leon and Rodolphe into Emma’s arms and this is a sure sign of a guilty man. But perhaps it was no bad thing. Felicite made a gift of her considerable savings to Charles and financial disaster was replaced by prosperity. Under the girl’s solicitous care little Berthe bloomed and was happy. Nor was the village unduly censorious.

Although Charles found Emma plain and unappealing, the Prison Governor at Rouen did not. Much moved by Emma’s plight, he allowed her many special privileges. She ate and slept in his quarters and having a gift for sewing and a love of fabric was kept more than busy embroidering his fine uniforms. Word of Charles’s involvement with Felicite having come to Emma, she did not hesitate to accept the Governor’s offer when her prison term was up, of a boat fare to New York. He was after all a married man.

In New York Emma quickly found work in Lily Bart’s Hat Shop. Lily Bart, you may remember from the Edith Wharton novel
The House of Mirth
– most eloquently filmed in Hollywood, starring the delectable Scully from
The X-Files
– was the unfortunate young woman whose single act of sexual indiscretion in High Society led to her downfall. Cast out from decent company and reduced to penury, Lily, according to Wharton, was obliged to take work in a millinery shop but soon died from sheer despond.

My family assure me that Wharton’s desire for a pointed tragedy must have got the better of her – the truth, and Wharton knew it well enough, was that Lily, though she could not sew for peanuts, was good at figures and soon took over the business: far from fading away she flourished, as did the hat shop. All the rich dowagers of New York flocked to its doors to buy, as did all the tragic heroines of literature, to work.

Customers would find themselves welcomed by none other than the lovely Anna Karenina from Moscow, who had escaped her author in the nick of time, saved herself from the iron wheels of the suicide train and bought a passage to the new world. Norah Krogstad from Norway, allowed by the forward thinking playwright Ibsen to flee from home rather than destroy herself, found the miracle came true in New York. Earning as much as man she could be at one with man. Effie Brieff from Prussia, spared the fate of social obloquy, made an excellent seamstress and quickly regained her health and youthful high spirits.

Pretty little Emma Bovary was more than happy in this company, and many were the tales of love and loss and new determination that were exchanged amongst the women, and many an account of the villainy of men. All were especially fond of Emma, who, being a most imaginative milliner found great favour with the customers, some of whom, being the wives of meat barons, scarcely knew how to arrange a scarf let alone fix a hat.

There was some small trouble amongst the workforce when on one occasion Mr. Rochester came round to buy a grey bonnet, untrimmed, for his wife Jane Eyre, and Emma was found alone in the back room with him, choosing scarlet ribbons. But Emma, reminded that Rochester had in all probability murdered his first wife by pushing her off a roof, agreed not to pursue the matter. Instead, the better to keep her mind off the delights of illicit love, she remembered her role as mother and sent for little Berthe. Charles and Felicite, now having twin sons of their own, were happy enough to see the girl go: she was too like her mother for comfort. Berthe showed considerable musical talent, was enrolled in the New York conservatoire, and within the year had married Lord Henry Ashton of Lammermoor, a baritone. It is thanks to Berthe and Henry’s eldest daughter, a chatty little thing, to whom my grandfather taught the violin, that I come to know so much about Lily Bart’s Hat Shop.

1992

‘Knock-knock,’ said the child into the silence. He was eight. The three adults looked up from their breakfast yoghurt, startled. Harry seldom spoke unless spoken to first. He’d seemed happy enough during the meal. The waiter had fetched him a toy from the hotel kitchens, a miniature Power Ranger out of a cereal packet, and he’d been playing with that, taking no apparent notice of a desultory conversation between Jessica his mother, and Rosemary and Bill, his grandparents.

‘Who’s there?’ asked his mother, obligingly.

‘Me,’ said Harry, with such finality that the game stopped there. He was a quiet, usually self-effacing child; blonde, bronzed and handsome.

Perhaps he’d been more aware of the content of their talk than they’d realised. It had of course been coded for his benefit, couched in abstract terms. The importance of fidelity, the necessity of trust, different cultural expectations either side of the Atlantic, and so on: its real subject being the matter in doubt – should Jessica go home to her faithless husband in Hollywood, or stay with her loving parents in the Cotswolds. To forgive or not to forgive, that was the question.

They’d tried to keep the story from the child, hidden newspapers and magazines. It wasn’t a big scandal, just a little one; not on the Hugh Grant scale: nothing like that, not enough to make TV, just enough to make them all uncomfortable, leave home and take temporary refuge in this staid and stately country hotel, with its willowed drive, its swan-stocked lake, its Laura Ashley interior, where reporters couldn’t find them to ask questions. If you answered the questions it was bad, if you didn’t answer them it was worse. The solution was simply not to be there at all.

The story, the embryo scandal, goes thus. Young big-shot Hollywood producer Aaron Scheffer sets off on holiday with English wife of ten years, Jessica, and eight-year-old son Harry, to spend the summer with her parents. At the airport he gets a phone call. His film’s been brought forward, its budget tripled; rising star Maggie Ives has agreed to play the lead. Aaron shouldn’t leave town. He stays, wife and child go. Well, these things happen. Two weeks in and there’s a story plus pics in an international show-biz magazine: Aaron Scheffer intimately entwined behind a palm tree on a restaurant balcony. Who with? Maggie Ives. They’re an item. Other newspapers pick up the story.

No air conditioning in the grandparental home in England: how could it ever work? Why try? The place is impossible to seal. Too many chimneys: too many people in the habit of flinging up windows and opening doors, even when it’s hotter out than in. You’d never stop them. And it’s hot, so hot. A heat wave.

Aaron calls Jessica, much distressed. It’s a set-up, don’t believe a word of it. I have enemies. Jessica replies of course I don’t believe it, stay cool, hang loose, I trust you, I love you.

A chat show runs a piece on spouse infidelity: featuring the phoney airport call; how to get the wife out of town without her suspecting a thing. Ha ha ha.

The heat may be good. It has an anaesthetising effect. Or perhaps Jessica’s just stunned. She cannot endure her parents’ pity: the implicit ‘I told you so.’

Harry’s happy in the grandparental English garden. He is studying the life cycle of frogs. He helps tadpoles out of their pond, his little fingers beneath their limp back legs, helping them on their way. Once tadpoles breathe air, he says, everything about them stiffens. Jessica feels there’s no air around to breathe, it’s too hot.

Best friend and neighbour Kate, back in LA, calls to say Jessica, you have to believe it, you need to know, everyone else knows, Aaron’s been seeing Maggie for months. That’s why she’s got the part.

Jessica can’t even cry. Her eyes are as parched as the garden. Forget tragedy, forget betrayal, how could she ever live in a land without air conditioning?

Phone calls fly. Her father Bill frets about the cost. Aaron says not to believe a word Kate says. Kate’s a woman scorned. By whom? Why, Aaron, the minute Jessica’s back is turned. Come home now, Jessica, pleads Aaron, I love you.

* * *

‘I’ll think about it,’ says Jessica. She asks her mother whether it’s safer to trust a husband or a best friend? ‘Neither,’ says her mother. ‘And Aaron probably only wants you home for a photo-opportunity, to keep the studio quiet.’

The first reporter turns up on the doorstep. Is she hurt? How does it feel? He has other photographs here: they’d like to publish with her comments. Will she stand by her man? Doors slam. No comment. More phone calls.

Aaron confesses: words twinkle across continents and seas. ‘Maggie and I lunched. We drank. We shouldn’t have. She asked me back to her place. I went. I shouldn’t have. We succumbed. We shouldn’t have. We were both upset. I was missing you. I felt you’d put your parents before me. Afterwards we both regretted it. I took her to a restaurant so there’d be no embarrassment, so we could get back to being friends, col­leagues, nothing more than that.’

‘And there just happened to be photographers around,’ Jessica drawls. Heat slows words.

‘Her boyfriend spies on her.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ says Jessica. She’s melting. But perhaps that too is just the heat. ‘What was Maggie so upset about?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ says Aaron. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘That’s a good sign,’ says Jessica. ‘But if you two have to work together, and I can see you can, supposing she gets upset about something else? What then?’

‘Why should she?’ asks Aaron, ‘now she has the part she wants. Please will you come home tomorrow?’

‘No,’ says Jessica. She feels mean and angry. She’d rather he’d gone on lying. She wants him punished. ‘Then I’ll come and collect you,’ he says. ‘Meet me at Heathrow.’ She puts the phone down.

More reporters on the step. The family wait for nightfall, then slip away to the hotel. Jessica calls Aaron. He’s already left for England, says his secretary. Everyone has three days off. Maggie Ives is sick. Aaron’s due at Heathrow at eleven-thirty, Friday.

Now it’s eight-thirty and Friday. And Harry is saying, ‘Knock-knock, who’s there, me!’ And her parents are saying, if she hears them correctly, because they’ll never say it outright, don’t go to him, stay here with us. Crisis time.

And here was home, where no one said anything outright, so at least everything was open to change. Perhaps she hated Hollywood. Perhaps she hated all America. Perhaps the only people you could trust were family; blood relatives; and husbands weren’t even blood relatives. Other people had serial marriages, why shouldn’t she?