The Bay of Angels (19 page)

M. Levasseur shook my mother’s hand wholeheartedly, and at last I was able to guide her out into the sun. The café was empty, for the usual habitués were on their way to work, and the later visitors not expected for a couple of hours. She preferred to sit inside; that was where she had sat with Mme Levasseur, the fact of whose death and absence was just beginning to crystallize.

‘Had you met the son before?’ I asked her, curious as to the origins of her briefly authoritative behaviour.

‘No. I recognized him from the way she described him. Poor man; he will go home to a wife who will be relieved to have the matter over and done with. There will be little comfort there. And the boy hated those visits. She was so unhappy on Sunday evenings. I was of little use to her then.’

‘Eat a croissant, Mama. And drink your coffee.’

‘I don’t think I can. I don’t want anything to eat.’

‘The coffee, then. And tell me about Mme Lhomond. You might as well have some company while you are still here.’

She smiled. ‘I have you, darling. Mme Lhomond is a good-natured silly woman who is too naïve to be malicious or unkind. That, alas, does not make her more interesting.’

She brought her coffee cup to her lips, then abruptly put it down again. ‘I don’t think I can drink this after all,’ she said, bewildered.

I looked at her. The brief hectic colour had faded from her face, the unnatural excitement of recent events had deserted her, leaving behind a mournful impression of disaster. I went to the counter and paid the bill. Both our cups had remained untouched, though I was now hungry and would have lingered. But then had I been on my own I would have stayed outside, in the light, not sheltering from a day which was already radiant. Had I been alone I should have made my way to the market in the Cours Saleya, where I could feast on the colours and smells, the evidence of appetite, of nourishment, of life itself. The women there would be robust, noisy, ample; they would shout without embarrassment, embrace one another, give every sign of rude health. No inhibitions there, no circumspection; they were as lavish with their insults as with their greetings. And there would be no hurt feelings, for the common currency was boldness, and those who did not possess it might just as well stay away.

Instead of that ideal boldness I accompanied my mother’s slow steps back to the Résidence Sainte Thérèse, alarmed and puzzled by her sudden loss of vigour. She had begun the day well, and apart from that careless act of undressing, had shown her usual delicacy of feeling, particularly with regard to M. Levasseur. Now she looked haggard, even slightly unkempt; a strand of her grey hair blew gently against my cheek as I attempted to take something of her weight. We reached the end of the street in time for her to recover slightly. Nevertheless her hand went to her heart, as if to still its rapid beat.

Dr Balbi was still in the foyer with M. Levasseur, who did not seem anxious to leave. For all his hefty build he was just another disciple in attendance. Dr Balbi, a man of few words at the best of times, was clearly finding his presence onerous. He looked up with something like relief as we entered, shook M. Levasseur’s hand with finality, and motioned one of the sisters to take him up to his mother’s room to collect her sad possessions. This was no job for a man. I imagined more tears as he faced the pitiful evidence of her clothes, her abandoned necklaces. But there would be no need for fortitude among these relics, for this was the proper place for tears. And when he went downstairs again Dr Balbi would no longer be there, having made good his escape, and leaving Dr Lagarde to deal with further distress.

But Dr Balbi was still there after I had seated my mother in the salon, which was almost empty. Many ladies were resting in their rooms or perfecting their appearance after the events of the previous night, when their sleep had been disturbed by the sound of precipitate footsteps, muted exchanges, all the paraphernalia of an emergency. I thought it better for my mother to have company, even the company of Mme Lhomond. I went in search of one of the maids, to ask if she might have some tea.

‘Tea?’ questioned Dr Balbi. ‘But you have just had coffee.’

‘She didn’t want any.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t seem to have had any either.’

‘Then you will have some now. As I will. It has been a long night.’

We went back to the café, where the proprietor seemed to know him, know what he wanted. All I wanted was coffee, though the smell made me feel slightly sick. Dr Balbi ate decisively, motioning me to do the same. I took a croissant from the basket and nibbled it, then found that I was hungry after all. I drank my coffee, in no hurry to leave.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to faint.’

‘You speak very good English,’ I remarked. ‘And no, I am not going to faint. I have never fainted in my life.’

‘I had a year in Southampton.’

The consonants slightly eluded him, but the accent was excellent.

‘In a hospital?’

‘Of course in a hospital. It was an exchange. I hated it.’

‘Why?’

‘The work was, as always, interesting. But it meant another horrible room . . . ’

‘You missed your mother.’

‘. . . in a terrible little house, with patterned carpet on the stairs. I preferred our building in Marseilles. It was noisy, but you knew there were other people around, all in the same boat, with the same degree of poverty. Yes, I missed my mother.’

‘How did you find this house?’

‘One of the nurses at the hospital lived there with her mother. That, as you can imagine, was frustrating. In the end I had to marry her. It seemed the only thing to do.’

I was shocked. ‘Didn’t you love her?’

‘One has the lovers one can afford. And I wanted to get her away from there. I thought that once we were at home, once she was with my mother . . . ’

‘And of course they didn’t get on.’

‘And she was homesick.’

‘For Southampton?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Are you still married to her? Did you divorce?’

‘Yes, we divorced.’

‘And then you returned to your respective mothers. What a sad story.’

‘Yes, it is. I am fully aware of that.’ He patted his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Miss Cunningham.’ It was a conclusion rather than a preamble.

‘Do you live alone?’

‘Yes, I live alone. Quite near you. I sometimes catch sight of you in the early mornings, or in the evenings. I know you are concerned, not only for your mother, but for yourself. My advice is to use your energies while you still have them. You have friends?’

‘I have no lovers, if that is what you mean. I had them once, but that was when I was free.’

‘One is never free. One has only the illusion of freedom. One is never free of obligations, whether explicit or implicit. The latter are the worst.’

‘That poor man . . . ’

‘Levasseur? There you have the tragedy of a man who knows he will never see his mother again.’

‘Even though he avoided her when she was alive?’

‘When she was alive he was a man. When she died he became a child again. I will walk you back, if you are ready.’

‘You will see my mother?’

‘For a few minutes only. As you will. And you will not return until Sunday. The sooner matters return to normal the better it will be for her. For them all.’

Dr Balbi’s relative loquacity had taken me by surprise, as had his confessions, which were made without any apparent reluctance. If this were a subtle form of treatment I was grateful, for it had worked. I had been jolted out of my nervousness by the sort of exchange that was normal between a man and a woman. My mother too brightened when we made our entrance together. There was an empty cup beside her, and she had her newspaper to hand.

‘Has she eaten anything?’ she asked.

‘Yes, she is quite all right. She will see you on Sunday, as usual.’

‘You have been very kind. You know we are going home soon?’

He patted her hand. ‘Yes, I know all about it. That is why I want you to rest while you are here. You will need to be strong.’

‘Oh, I shall be. Go home now, darling. I don’t want to spoil your day.’

Dr Balbi appeared to endorse this. I saw that she would do whatever he told her to do. I kissed her and left, but lingered outside in case he wanted to talk to me. Yet when he came out he strode off in the opposite direction, without looking round. From that I deduced that my particular consultation with him was over.

I think I knew then, at the precise moment at which I saw his slight figure disappear into the distance, that my mother was doomed. I owed this insight not to her condition, to which I was accustomed, but to Dr Balbi’s tact in diverting me to a story of ordinary love and disappointment. I knew it; Dr Balbi knew it; the only person who did not know it was perhaps my mother. The fiction we all entertained of the return home was simply that: a useful fiction, to which she clung as I had once clung to those fictions I had pursued in the days of my early reading. Such reading was optimistic; that I saw now, though I had once not thought so. The illusions, or delusions, which I had so eagerly accepted, would no longer serve. Neither would the guileless trust I had had that there was a right true end to every endeavour. I felt a childish disappointment that I had been deprived of my happy ending, that I would be obliged to struggle on without that assurance. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. My task was now to let my mother believe that her hopes, wishes, fears were all in my care, that whatever came about would be within my competent grasp. I must show no misgivings, no hesitations. I would transform myself into the sort of useful fiction that beguiles one on a dull afternoon and is remembered faithfully, even when a harsher truth should prevail.

I did not intend to have any far-reaching discussion with her. The time for honesty was past. I blushed when I remembered my clumsy questions to her about my father, though they had seemed to amuse her. If they did it was because they were out of place, because her life had given her too much time for reflection, because she needed no reminders from me of events which she had internalized so thoroughly. The flash of irony that had greeted those questions was an indication of my immaturity. She knew what I wanted, another touching fiction, which she had refused to provide. That was the last time that I had had any sense that she was an adult and that I was her child. But the position was too difficult to maintain. All the time she had really craved the alternative: no thought, no memory. Hence her curious acquiescence, her contentment, even, in the company of Mme Levasseur, of Mme Lhomond. For my visits she put on a show of interest. That interest, I now saw, was limited. Her lack of curiosity about how we should live was more significant than I had realized. What was to be managed, I would manage: she would have no part in it.

I was grateful for Dr Balbi’s finesse, his generosity in reminding me that a world existed beyond the one I was now obliged to inhabit, even if it meant plundering his laconic secrets in order to do so. Yet he had not seemed reluctant. He was a successful man, but even he had succumbed to the lure of conversation. He had no particular liking for me: if anything I was a nuisance who appeared at the wrong time in the wrong places. He had seemed unnaturally alert after his sleepless night, perhaps because of it. He was more authoritative than I had given him credit for, aware of the dilemmas of others, even if he refused to indulge them. I thought of him in that suburban house, with the patterned carpet, of his frustrations as a young man, as a young husband. He was now as he had perhaps not intended to be: dour, self-sufficient, powerful. His power seemed to come from all sorts of negation. I saw the perverse strength that lack of intimate satisfaction can bestow. Quite simply, he had left his youth behind. I should now have to do the same.

I should also, at some point, have to go home. Homecoming is a theme around which many useful fictions have been built. One thinks of Ulysses, but he had Penelope waiting for him. Penelope herself had the suitors to distract her. My mother had been right all along. The home she cherished was devoid of realistic details; it existed in limbo, perhaps in memory. She believed in it as an act of faith, which is the opposite of reality. For as long as she did so she was becalmed. The details could be left to me, for I had become the narrator of that particular story. Magical thinking would do the rest.

My own homecoming would be not the end of exile but the beginning of it. I felt as if I should be saying goodbye to the natural world, and to my own memory, which was of those early days at Les Mouettes, when my movements and my impulses were unrestricted, and were allowed to be. We never mentioned Simon now. By common consent he had been relegated to the past, a past which had been brought to an abrupt conclusion, like an episode from another life, or from someone else’s life. The people who had existed in that life had been healthy, untouched, with nothing to fear. With Simon’s genius removed—and I saw now that it had been a kind of genius—we had acceded to a world of accident, of illness, of poor company, in which it was no longer possible to think of a good outcome. For the good outcome had presented itself, had been embraced, and had then been lost. Even if my mother had not been entirely comfortable in that context she had accepted its reality. I remembered her shy pleasure at Simon’s initial approaches, her awakening to new possibilities. How then had she turned so completely into this unknown woman, who accepted other women as her natural companions?

In the rue de France I switched on the radio, listened for two minutes to a winsome contemporary string quartet, and switched it off again. The radio was redundant: a displacement activity. When I left I would give it to M. Cottin, as well as all the other modest paraphernalia I had managed to collect. I would need no reminders of this life, which would always register as a life I had lost. Home is a closed world, with its own rules and customs, lived mainly indoors, with the usual obligations. I thought that I could deal with absence of company. I had grown so used to my own that it seemed entirely natural to spend days communing only with myself. The visitors to the Résidence Sainte Thérèse all fell into a sort of heartiness that denoted an effort being made. I had thought I had managed to avoid this. With my new perception of the day’s events I saw that such artificiality was a useful stratagem. The affections were still there, but rendered harmless by a carapace of self-protectiveness. If one were to survive one must wear a mask, for to go through the world without one was to court disaster.