The Kiss (18 page)

‘Yes, all right, Mrs Bain, I take your point, I might even agree with you to a certain degree, but let’s get back to Clarinda.’

‘I did not think you would answer any of my points and you have not.’ She was wearing her smile again. He
wanted to strangle her. ‘But, yes, do let us get back to Clarinda. Her happiness is the most important thing in my life. More important than my own life.’

‘And her wellbeing, as a student, is important to me, but purely as a student.’

‘And you expect me to believe that? Come, come, Mr Aherne, let us be honest with each other. She told me you spent time alone in Paris together. Can you deny that?’

‘It was by accident, not design.’

‘Accident? But more than once? And late at night? Really, you must think I am very naive.’

‘She ran off. I had to go after her. She was going crazy.’

‘Why, I wonder? She is normally a very calm girl. Something must have upset her.’

‘She’d allowed herself to become obsessed with the relationship between Gwen John and Rodin, that’s why. You must know that. She’s bound to have talked to you about it.’

‘We are very close. We share our interests, so naturally she did. We’re more like sisters than mother and daughter.’

He had thought he would hear that at some point or other. He hoped she was not waiting for a compliment for none would be forthcoming. It might be politic for
him to hand her one but he could not bend his pride to do it.

‘I don’t think we can lay
all
the blame on Gwen John,’ she went on, ‘do you? Why was it you who went after Clarinda and not the other teacher? Did you feel personally responsible for her?’

‘As a matter of fact I did. I would be expected to. Since she is a pupil of mine—’

‘Indeed.’

They paused.

‘My daughter tells me everything,’ said Clarinda’s mother.

‘You are not foolish enough to believe that, are you, Mrs Bain? Or to believe everything she tells you?’

It was a mistake, of course, yet another, for him to have spoken to Mrs Bain in such a contemptuous fashion – not that he had actually intended his remark to convey contempt, but she certainly took it as such. She dropped her hand from her shiny hip to face him more squarely.

‘You are not suggesting that my daughter is a liar, are you, Mr Aherne?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. It is for you to decide whether your daughter speaks the truth or not.’

‘Exactly.’ Now she folded her arms under her billowing bosom. That was how he saw her, billowing, floating in
orange and purple satin, like an over-coloured, gaudy witch. He noticed that the motifs adorning her were dragons. They shimmered as her body moved with indignation beneath them. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I am the person best equipped to decide whether my daughter can be trusted to tell the truth or not.’

Even then he did not think she would go to the police.

‘If you’ll excuse me, Mrs Bain, I must go home.’

‘I won’t excuse you anything, Mr Aherne,’ said Clarinda’s mother.

Next afternoon, he was summoned to the headmaster’s office.

Rachel and Archie Gibson
.

Come to think of it, they might have been better suited from the start. They had both gone to similar, independent, fee-paying schools and lived in similar leafy suburban roads with walled gardens, and Archie’s father had been a lawyer while Rachel’s plied his merchant banking trade. Their families would have been better pleased had they chosen each other than with the choices that they did make. Archie’s mother was never able to abide his wife Sheila; she found her loud. So did Cormac, in fact, though he feels more sympathetic towards her now than he ever has. He wonders if Archie might
not have fancied Rachel in the very beginning but he, Cormac, saw her first and asked her out and Archie was too honourable a man to cut in on a friend’s woman. He remembers once saying jokingly to Rachel, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t marry Archie. He’d have been a better bet. He’s a steady chap, he earns a regular wage, and he comes from a good home.’

‘I didn’t want Archie,’ she replied. ‘It was you I wanted.’

Rachel rings after Davy is in bed and says she was thinking she might pop round for a chat, would that be all right? Fine, he replies, he’s not doing anything in particular. He seldom is these evenings now that he no longer has essays to mark or his studio to retreat to. Did he use it too much as a retreat when they were together? Once when they were having a row she accused him of cutting himself off from the family when it suited him, especially if there was a problem in the offing. See you shortly, she says before ringing off. They agreed before they separated to remain friends so why should she not pop round when she feels like it? This is the first time that she has.

Hurriedly he removes the dirty cups from the sitting room and punches the cushions. He is dusting the mantelpiece when he hears her step on the outside stair. He shoves the duster behind a cushion.

She is carrying a bottle of Burgundy. It looks a good one, he remarks as he takes it from her. It’s just what she happened to have in the house, she says. He takes it through to the kitchen to open it and fetch wine glasses. Archie is a keen wine buff, buys all his wine through a club. When they used to go to dinner with him and Sheila he would give them a little spiel about it, which vineyard it came from and all that. Cormac wonders if this bottle came from Archie’s stock. He puts it on a tray with the glasses and carries it through.

Rachel is on her feet with her back to the room looking out of the window though there is nothing unusual to see, only a mirror-image house across the way.

‘Here we are,’ he says brightly.

She turns, gives him a half-smile and sits on the settee. She’s nervous, which is not like her. She takes a large swallow of wine and then says, ‘I’ve come to talk to you.’

‘I didn’t expect you to stay silent!’

‘No, seriously talk, I mean.’

‘Sophie?’

‘No, me.’

‘You’re not ill?’ He is alarmed.

She shakes her head. ‘You’re not going to like this,’ she says and he knows he is not so he gulps down the rest of his wine and refills his glass from Archie’s bottle.

‘The affair that I had,’ she begins and stops. ‘Well, I would never tell you who the man was because it would have upset you too much. But I think you’ve guessed. I’m very sorry, Cormac.’

They drink in silence for a few minutes. A wind has sprung up outside and the window is rattling. He must do something about the frame. All the windows need attention, he ought to be getting on with it now that he has time. When he was still sculpting he wasn’t much use in the house as a do-it-yourself man. Rachel used to do the decorating herself, said she’d rather than wait for him to get round to it.

‘I guess I wasn’t all that great as a husband.’

‘That’s not true. You mustn’t think that. Anyway, it’s not that simple. It never could be.’

‘Artists are pretty self-centred though, aren’t they?’

‘Well, Rodin was, anyway. I don’t suppose he ever did any washing up.’

That makes them laugh and they relax a little. He then asks, ‘Was it really over when you said it was, your affair?’

She nods. ‘And that was the way it stayed until we separated. I hadn’t intended it to start up all over again. He came round to see me …’ She shrugs. ‘And, well, we realised that we were still strongly attracted to each other.’

She is free to do whatever she wants now, without excuse or apology, or need for concealment. As he is. But he does not know what he wants to do: that is the rub. He does not know how to begin again. He is less sure now than he was at seventeen; then, he was single-minded, on stream to do amazing things.

‘Were you not attracted at all to Clarinda?’ asks Rachel. ‘You always said you weren’t.’

And she never quite believed him. That had caused another little crack in their marriage. Their trust in each other had gradually begun to erode. In bed they had stayed more and more often on their own sides, with their backs turned, tucked away inside their own private thoughts, whereas, before, they had always liked to chat before sleeping.

‘I don’t know.’ He is trying to think back to how he felt then. ‘I could see that she was attractive but she was so
young
.’

‘That was what you always said. You were flattered though?’

‘I suppose I was.’

‘You accepted her flattery? You didn’t try to squash it?’

‘Not soon enough.’ Not until she had become obsessed, and by then it was too late. That was his first mistake.

‘But you never laid a finger on her?’

He pauses, then says, ‘I kissed her.’ It is the first time he has admitted it to anyone other than himself.

Mr Aherne, the girl in question maintains that you first kissed her outside the railway station at Montparnasse. Do you deny that?

He did deny it, since the implication, he told himself, in an effort to justify his lie, was that he had gone on to kiss her on other occasions. He knew that it was going to be his word against hers. And he had more at stake than she had. To try to save himself he had to lie. But while telling the lie he could feel himself beginning to sweat. He had been brought up to regard the telling of a falsehood as a sin, and he still did. It was deeply embedded in him, this early teaching. He remembered that the French philosopher Henri Hude said that the first sin is to have no sense of sin. At least he did not have to plead guilty to that one! He wanted to take out his handkerchief and mop his forehead but feared that if he did his interrogators would take it as an admission of guilt.

They finish the bottle of wine, or rather Cormac finishes it. Rachel has only drunk a glass.

‘Do you plan to live with him?’ asks Cormac.

‘Oh, no, it’s too early for that. And it would be difficult for him while we were both still married.’

‘A man in his position!’

‘Well, yes. And there’s Sophie to consider.’

They consider Sophie, a mystery to them both. They have no idea what is going on in her head. Now Davy, that is a different matter; he tells them what he is thinking, he protests, he complains, he says I don’t want to do this, I want to do that. They are on safer ground with this conversation; their children are a unifying force.

Rachel gets up, yawning. ‘I must go. You never know, our daughter might have come home! And, by the way, Cormac, any time you want to go out in the evening I’ll keep Davy. You should go out more often. I still do care about you, you know. I’d like you to be happy, and not just to assuage my own guilt!’ She gives him a rueful smile, then she leans over to kiss his cheek, and in the next instant has gone.

He drops Archie Gibson’s empty wine bottle into the bin.

Next day, he sees their daughter. At least he is fairly certain that he has seen her though when he phones Rachel afterwards to tell her she questions it.

‘Are you sure, Cormac?’

Davy was going to a friend’s birthday party after school so Cormac took the opportunity to go up to
the public library on George IV Bridge. He has started to read more now that he has the evenings after eight o’clock to himself. He drifted up the stairs to the art department without thinking and, finding himself standing outside the door, wondered what he was doing there. He was about to turn and go back down when he thought better of it. He pushed open the door and went in. He picked up a magazine and sat down at a table. And then he saw that he was sitting opposite Clarinda Bain.

‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I don’t bite.’ A smile flickered across her face.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked after a moment.

She displayed the cover. It was a book about the Pre-Raphaelites.

‘Pretty romantic,’ he commented. He felt sure Mrs Bain must have some postcards in her domain somewhere. Perhaps in the bathroom where she could gaze at them from her peach-foamed bath.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the Romantic movement,’ said Clarinda. He was struck by how much she had matured in the past year. She had left school after the fuss and gone to a Further Education college to do her Highers. She went on, ‘It had its attractions. Still has. All great art does, doesn’t it? You said that yourself in class.’

‘You have too good a memory.’

She smiled again. ‘I’ve applied to the Slade.’

‘Good. Not easy to get in, but you might as well shoot for the top of the tree.’

‘You told us that too.’

He shifted uncomfortably on his seat. Those, like Clarinda, who listened to and absorbed his words, must wonder what he was doing now, making sandwiches.

‘Yes, OK, Gwen John went to the Slade. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? But that’s not the reason, or the whole reason, anyway. I love her work but I shan’t attempt to copy her style. It’s too finicky for me, too miniaturist. I like something bigger and bolder.’

‘I know you do. You enjoy vivid colour more than she did.’

It was easy to slip back into talking to her about things that interested them both; they had talked a lot, he realised, in the classroom after hours when the rest of the class had gone, as well as in the streets of Paris. This was no place, though, to go on talking. People were reading quietly, making notes, glancing at them. He would have liked to have asked her to have a cup of coffee with him but he knew it would be a mistake. There was no way forward with this; she was too young even though she might not think so herself, but she would, sometime.

He got up. ‘I need to get back for my son. Good luck, Clarinda.’

He left her sitting with her book on the Pre-Raphaelites.

He took the Playfair Steps going down the Mound to Princes Street. At the bottom a couple were sitting with a large dog, a boy and a girl. Nothing unusual in that. Since he did not have Sophie with him he did not intend to give them anything. He recognised the boy, a sharp-faced lad with a distinctive mark below his left eye, a mark shaped like a kite. He was often there. The girl was wrapped in an old overcoat and scarf while her head was swamped by a moth-eaten fur hat. She wore wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose. Cormac gave her only a cursory glance and passed on. He stopped, looked back. She was looking away, up the steps at a woman coming down and holding out her hand in supplication. It couldn’t have been, Cormac told himself, he was having hallucinations. What on earth would his daughter be doing sitting at the bottom of the Playfair Steps begging? He must have been mistaken. And then he remembered that blue and white sports bag with the smelly old clothes in it, clothes suitable for begging.