Mr Wrong (19 page)

The week in the villa had turned into a luxury nightmare: one of the gardeners had climbed through her window one night and actually tried to go to bed with her. It was not that Harriet was
against going to bed with gardeners; she was miserably and chronically tied to an architect who was married with four children, and before going to France she had promised herself – and, far
worse, him – that she would remain constant to their furtive, irregular, and increasingly unsatisfactory hours of meeting. But other difficulties at the villa had proved more constant than
the gardener, who had actually looked very nice, with black hair, brandy-snap eyes and white, or gold, teeth regularly disposed within his inviting smile. He had given up with all the good-humour
of an experienced optimist. No, it was the prolonged drinks time, twice a day, when people talked almost exclusively of other people whom they knew and Harriet did not. If they had talked about
literature, painting, or even music, she would have been able to keep her end up, but when they were not bandying about one might almost say geographical names, they were immersed in stock markets
of Wall Street and the City, with American politics, with where they had just been and where they were just going. Their clothes, their cars, their hair, their air was of such palatial well-being
that they might have come from Mars. She also could not understand their jokes, and there is little more frightening than that. At any rate, she gradually became afraid of them, and this, with
Harriet, meant that she never spoke unless spoken to, did everything she could to do as everybody else did, but was so passive and reserved that nobody made her, and she was finally pronounced
frigid and dull by the men and odd and difficult by the women. Everybody concluded these remarks with the coda that she had ‘good manners’.

Anyway, she could tell Sue all about it, and they would add some new jokes to the very old but private ones that were beginning to wear out.

The train stopped many times: people got in and out at the next station. None of
them
were rich. One man put two live ducks, their legs tied together, on to the rack. The ducks were
silent with fright, and the air smelled of hot feathers. An old lady, blackly dressed, came into Harriet’s compartment with a very young olive-skinned girl carrying a baby. Harriet was unable
to understand whether they were speaking French, but when the baby began to cry, the girl muttered something to her mother and began to undo her blouse, where-upon the grandmother whipped off her
black woollen shawl and held it round mother and baby as a tent, or shield from Harriet’s eyes. This was more like travelling, Harriet thought to herself in order not to feel bored. The
moment that daughter, grandmother and baby got in, she had a passionate desire to smoke, but felt that this would be wrong. She stared out of the window as the apricot, blue, pink, white and even
unpainted houses or villas with their palms, their oleander, their bougainvillaea, their geraniums and washing hanging from lines passed slowly by. Their shutters were nearly all closed, as of
houses asleep. There seemed to be no birds, but when the train stopped, she could hear the tireless, insistent cicadas. Sometimes the sea was visible, purple blue or swimming-bath green with huge
coloured parasols that looked perfect on the pale sand. She imagined all the people she had left, having long siestas before bathing again, having drinks, and playing
boule
on the gravel
outside the front door (the chauffeur had to move all the cars for this every day). Thinking of this, she, too, fell into a light sleep.

She awoke suddenly, sure that this must be her station, and it was. She struggled to haul her suitcase off the rack, convinced in a sleepy panic that the train would move on before she could get
out. But nothing was like that: a porter opened the door for her, and took her case. At the end of the long city platform she could see Sue standing, in dark glasses, jeans and a sleeveless shirt.
What she had always worn, thought Harriet with a pang of affection. Her hair was still short and cut with a fringe. She had not yet seen Harriet, so a moment of the most acute observation was open
to her – restricted only by distance. When she felt that she could learn no more, she waved, and instantly Sue waved back at twice the speed. They met, hugged each other and laughed, and each
thought – quite wrongly – that the other had not changed. Each was so charged with things to tell and to say, that they said nothing, until the porter had brought Harriet’s bag to
the car, and Sue had thanked and tipped him so that he went off smiling.

Sue unlocked the car, shoved Harriet’s bag in the boot, and then motioned her to sit in front. In a moment they were hooting and grinding their way out of Marseille. Susan, who had driven
since she was ten, and in a number of countries at that, swerved, hooted, halted her way through the town at maximum speed, and such, Harriet felt, must be her concentration, that they exchanged no
more than ‘Journey all right?’ ‘Fine, it was a real neat little train.’ It had begun in their letters to each other: the practice of using the most outrageously appropriate
English or American phrases; on the whole, American from Harriet and English from Sue, although occasionally both slipped up.

Out of Marseille, they started the gradual climb up to Sue’s village. The air began to smell of hot rosemary and thyme: the sun was setting as slowly and majestically as possible: furnace
clouds, tipped with gold, and backed by a sky that was now the colour of lavender. Their silence in the town seemed to have made spontaneous talk between them either to have got lost, or never to
have existed at all. Harriet (contrary to all her imagining) was just about to announce that she had been involved with Tim for two years, and to go on from there – should she leave him or
should she not: she was really very tired of carrying the burden of his guilt and self-pity – when Sue suddenly said, ‘I’m pregnant. Jesus! I’m sorry it had to be
tonight.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, ducks, that I’ve got to do something about it tonight. If I’d known, I would have called you at your ritzy villa and tried to put you off.’

‘But why on earth should you have done that?’

‘Because I thought that
you
would think we’d have a lovely cosy evening eating and talking about old, hard times. I’m truly sorry.’

There was a really dead silence. Harriet couldn’t think why tonight was so important, couldn’t think why Sue seemed so dedicated and withdrawn, and couldn’t think either what
to say or to do. Finally she said weakly: ‘I’m sorry, Sue.’

‘Nobody is exactly ecstatic.’

This enigmatic answer plunged Harriet into further difficulties. She reverted to her general, panic-stricken theories that she was no good with people, did not understand them, could not love.
Finally, pulling herself together, something she was lamentably used to doing, she said: ‘Sue, you’d better tell me about it. I mean, I don’t know whether you love him, or
–’

‘It’s nothing to do with love. If you live in a small village, you just can’t strut about with a bellyful of other people’s babies. People talk: they
know
. They
just don’t care for it at all. Anyway,’ she added, ‘just think of me with a dear little baby on my hands. My mother would go berserk. Think of my awful, pompous brothers. I
couldn’t say I’d adopted it. Anyway, Jean Christophe would have an awful time with his mother. His father’s dead, and he’s the only child. Madame Lupin expects him to make a
suitable marriage. In fact, she’s practically arranged it.’

By now they were climbing rapidly up round the hairpin bends of a small rocky mountain: there were fir or pine trees on the skyline, and already these had become black, while the bare places of
rock on the right-hand side of the road were an ephemeral, tender pink – the younger trees or bushes a sunlit golden green. It was very beautiful, and Harriet said so.

‘Yeah. You could have done some nice painting here. Can’t you stay a couple of nights?’

‘I must go back, honestly.’ She did not mention that she had stopped painting a long time ago, and that any mention of it hurt – like mentioning a stillborn child to its
mother. This was the kind of analogy of a tragi-sentimental nature that people only make when they have had one half of the experience: but the comparison had struck Harriet’s mind with all
the dramatic force that her frantically disappointed nature had needed. Ever since then, some part of her kept on muttering that nothing was worth trying to do; that most people were either neutral
or fairly kind, that even the fruitless and dull situation with Tim was just about what she deserved.

‘It’s sure good to have you, honey pie.’ Sue gave her a quick little pat on the knee.

‘It’s extremely kind of you to have asked me.’ The language joke has stopped, then, she thought.

They had turned off the mountain road and were approaching what looked like an endless cavern of plane trees – an avenue planted each side of the road. Motor bikes roared to and fro; cats
ran frantically across the road; it was dusk now, and people were sitting outside their houses.

‘What
is
going to happen?’ Harriet asked.

‘What’s going to happen if everything pans out, is that Jean is coming over as soon as it’s dark, and Michèle is asleep (that’s his boring wife), pick up what he
needs from the
pharmacie
– his cousin runs that – and come up to the villa.’

‘I thought you said that Jean wasn’t married – only sort of engaged.’

‘I don’t mean Jean Christophe, I mean Jean Gautier. Although Jean Christophe will probably come too if Jean can think of a good reason for getting him out.’

‘Is Jean Gautier the local doctor?’

‘Jesus, no! He’s the electrician. Good grief!’ she added, as though the idea of a local doctor was too absurd to be contemplated. ‘Jean isn’t bad at it,
though,’ she finished. ‘He’s better at building, that’s what he’s saving for. But he does all the abortions round here. That’s why we have to wait till it’s dark. He always does
them then, because it’s more difficult for people to know where he’s going. Here we go.’ She suddenly swung them violently to the left, up what looked like a cart track. She put
her headlights on, and they bumped and jolted round a series of corners until, without any warning at all, they ended in a pile of gravel. ‘Damn! I thought they were starting the drive this
afternoon: it’s that sod Jules: he only works when he’s short of
pastis
– I might have known it.’

‘Shall I get out and push?’

‘We can try: I’m not in a very pushing mood, though.’

They tried, but with absolutely no success: Sue had driven too fast and got too far into the pile. Finally, Sue took a
torch from her bag; Harriet got her case from the boot, only to find that she was in what was very nearly pitch darkness.

‘Sorry: the battery’s dead, just follow me.’

This was Sue’s voice some yards ahead in the darkness. Harriet stumbled over scratchy bushes, and small rocks; she had the kind of ankles admired by many, but no good for the dark, and she
twisted one quite soon.

In the end, they reached the house. This had, of course, no light, and the shutters were closed. Sue opened the front door with a huge key slung round her neck.

‘Come on in, hon,’ she said with her best Southern accent, which wasn’t very good.

While she was lighting the oil lamp, Harriet noticed that there were no mosquito screens, and indeed their low predatory drone was at once to be heard. But Susan was rich! She had always been
rich – by Harriet’s standards, even when neither of them had seemed to have to worry about dough, much. She slapped the side of her neck inefficiently, and at the same time, saw that
Susan’s kitchen was well up to American standards
vis-à-vis
chrome, formica, and gadgets. When Susan lit the second lamp, the room looked bright and sterile. There was nothing
in the way of food to be seen.

‘What we both need is a good, stiff drink. What’ll you have?’ Susan was rummaging about in the fridge and getting out ice. ‘Whisky, brandy or gin?’

‘Brandy – and soda if you have it, please.’ At this moment she felt as though she had just met Susan, who just happened to look very like somebody she had once known.

‘Sure – we have Perrier, lady. Nothing like it. I’ll do the same.’

By the time they both had drinks in their hands, Harriet had been distinctly bitten four times and wondered whether there were
any
screens in the house.

‘Could I go to the loo?’

‘Sure. Hang on while I find me a torch that actually works. Here you are. The john’s second right down there.’ She opened another door in the kitchen and made a vague
gesture.

Harriet walked cautiously down the tiled passage. Her ankle hurt, she was thirsty and tired, and suddenly remembered the wonderful showers at Mrs Mouncey’s villa. The loo proved to have no
screens either, so that was probably that. Remorse about Sue assailed her. Perhaps she had been desperately keeping up a front living in a small, obscure village because that was the cheapest thing
to do. And now, to be facing what sounded like the most primitive butchery, having driven all the way to Marseille to collect her . . . there was no loo paper and no basin. She felt sticky,
dispirited, and determined to make the brandy do her some good.

Susan had lit a Chesterfield and was looking at it distastefully. ‘At least when this is over, I’ll like smoking again,’ she said as Harriet came in.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Go ahead. And get on to your brandy. I want another.’ Her small, freckled face looked momentarily frightened.

Harriet, when she had sipped her drink (goodness, it was strong!) said
tentatively: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you came back to England with me? I mean – mightn’t it be safer? I could put you up: I’ve got a bed in my other room, and I
could easily get the money –’ this last was not in the least true: but Harriet felt compelled to say it, in case poor Sue was really going through all this midnight fear and anxiety
because she couldn’t afford any other way.