A Period of Adjustment Read online

  I told her, as briefly as I could, what had happened since the telephone call from Aronovich at the hotel to alert me to the fact that my brother had been found, was dead, and to where I could find him. Search over. Mission accomplished. She didn’t move all the time I was talking, just sat quite still, her pale blue eyes holding mine, wisps of her faded fair hair fluttering lightly under the brim of her hat in the little eddies of air. The sky above was sparkling blue, clean, wiped, infinite. It dazzled to look up into it. Then she put the secateurs on a tiled table before her, took off her hat, and fiddled with the untidy plait of hair coiled about her head.

  ‘When the boy hadn’t arrived by nine-thirty I guessed something was wrong. I called your hotel and they said you’d rushed off to Cannes together. A call at breakfast time? So I guessed you were off on the hunt. I’m most dreadfully sorry for you. What an appalling shock. Can you say what had happened?’

  ‘He was in a clinic. A friend called me to say he had died in the night – well, early morning – from … pneumonia. Double pneumonia and pleurisy …’ The lie fell sweetly from my lips. Dottie nodded sadly, sighed, put a hand on my knee and said, again, how terrible and how sorry she was.

  ‘I gather from his mother-in-law that he was dreadfully headstrong, very stubborn.’

  ‘You mean the daunting Sidonie Prideaux! A tough lady …’

  ‘Umm, she was in despair of him, often. At bridge she used to be so very cast down … and then when he left his wife, for ever one gathers, to go off as he did … fearful…’

  ‘I know. It was a dreadful shock to them all. Just going away, into the night -’

  ‘No, no. I mean to go off in that manner! On a cycle! In nothing but a jacket and trousers, not even a coat! In January, in snow … Madness! No wonder, if you’ll pardon me for saying such an apparently callous thing, no wonder he caught pneumonia! I mean, no wonder.’

  ‘So Giles had missed a morning’s lessons. But can I ask you a favour?’ She nodded, twisting her plait gently to the top of her head, and sticking in a hairpin. ‘Could you just keep an eye on him here for the afternoon? I have to get over to the village and tell Florence and Madame Prideaux. They’ll have discovered that I left. Madame Mazine at the hotel has a hot line to the Prideaux house.’

  For the first time Dottie looked lost. ‘Hot line? What’s that?’ So I had to explain, and she laughed lightly, and said, ‘Of course. Why not stay to luncheon? Just pâté, salad and cheese?’ I accepted gratefully: there was no point in returning to the hotel now, and I was desperate for a drink, even if the thought of food was not terribly attractive.

  Dottie had got to her feet and was removing her little checked pinafore as Arthur and Giles came down the path towards us, Giles chattering like a magpie, but, alas, not in French. Arthur waved; he looked comfortable, easy, his bony, bronzed legs sticking out of slapping khaki shorts, his laceless boots clattering up the steps to the terrace.

  ‘Morning!’ he called. Dottie said we were staying to lunch and would he get me a drink, I looked as if I needed it. Or would I prefer to wash my hands first? Giles said that he would, he knew where to go, and belted off. Arthur motioned me to sit.

  ‘You’ve had a bit of a trip. Eh? Giles is starry-eyed about giant bamboo and seeing giraffes by the side of the auto-route. Amazed! I told him there was a wild sort of zoo at Fréjus. I’ll get you a drink. Wine? Or a stiff Scotch? Or just water … what you will.’

  The good thing about Dottie was that she really did just chuck things on the table. There was no fussing, no dainty teas caper. There were a bundle of forks and knives, a bowl of radish, assorted cheeses capped with fresh fig leaves, a huge bowl of lettuce and endive, a pile of odd plates, a jug of wine and, finally, brought from the cool of the kitchen, a crock of rich-looking pâté and a bowl of cornichons. Lunch was on the table.

  ‘Sometimes English guests ask for butter with all this, but it really is criminally insane. Think of one’s liver! Giles, get the baguettes will you? From the kitchen, et de la moutarde pour votre Papa. Vous voulez de la moutarde, Monsieur Colcott?’ Giles had gone off, and she was smiling, and so was I, with a large goblet of Frascati handed over by Arthur.

  ‘A brimming glass. Don’t spill a drop. Nectar. I get this in crates from a chap over at Sainte-Brigitte. Deceptively good: like drinking lemonade with the ultimate kick of a Cretan mule. Giles seems quite unruffled by the events of the morning. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to be that age again. He says he’s staying on? Correct?’ Arthur bit into a radish with strong teeth, raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you? Here, I mean.’

  ‘I’m not absolutely certain yet. A lot to sort out now that the main item in the treasure hunt, so to speak, has been found. Tragically. But, yes, Giles wants to stay on. Here. But more importantly, and a bit worryingly, he wants to stay on with me. Not to return to the UK and, I regret to say it, to his mother.’

  Dottie was mixing the salad with a large pair of wooden forks, watching me carefully. ‘To stay with you? I see, well, quite a responsibility of course. Is that something you’ll be happy about?’

  Giles came back with the bread and the jar of mustard. ‘Take your shoes off, boy! Like I do,’ said Arthur. ‘Scuffing the polish!’

  ‘Yes. It’s something I’ll be very happy about,’ I said. ‘Take a bit of getting used to, but I rather think it might work out. We’ll see.’

  And then I said no more, before Giles and Arthur started to push knives and forks about, and asked where the plates were, found them, and generally busied the table and we all set to and ate. It was relaxed, warm. I mean the atmosphere, not just the morning, and Dottie said that she had made the pâté a day or two ago and let it stand uncut so that the flavours would all blend deliciously. Her word. And they did. After lunch we three adults sat about comforted by simple food and, in my case anyway, a good deal of the Frascati, which dulled grief and worry. Giles had gone off with some fruit pieces for a perroquet or something up in the aviary, then Dottie was making coffee somewhere in the cool of the house.

  Arthur said suddenly, ‘Seems a very relaxed boy. Anyway, with you. Things not quite what they should be at home? I pry, forgive me. But he has mentioned it before. About hoping he could stay with you. Children do rather bash on if they feel one is being sympathetic. I try to keep him on French – he’s picking it up quite well—but we tend to have to stick to English when he gets to the business of relationships, you know? His French vocabulary is very limited but he is quite loquacious in English. I do hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘His mother is a splendid person really, it’s all rather my fault. I trapped her into marriage when really she was a career woman, if you follow. She had a very good job in the commercial television world. Thought she could give it all up and have a family. Before she was too old. Which, indeed she did. Brilliantly … but I am afraid I didn’t really help her much. Immersed in my world I left her to flop about being a mum. She got bored with that in time, some women do … And there is a daughter. I have a daughter. Nice child, Annie, the eldest, but Giles and she don’t really enjoy each other. She is her mother’s child. Giles got slightly left out, and I didn’t, I regret to say, notice it all happening, until I got here and he was sent out to me to “sort out”. Sulky, sullen and rude, I was told … Difficult.’

  Dottie came through on to the terrace with the coffee. The clatter and clash of the bamboo and bead curtain, whispers in the sweetness of the afternoon, swung gently behind her.

  ‘Arthur, move the things, the table is like a Harrods sale …’

  We collected plates, stacked, clutched cutlery, rattled it into a neat pile.

  ‘Giles is staying on for the afternoon. So your nap will have to wait.’

  Arthur poured the last of the wine into our glasses, said he was delighted, and that he only napped when he had nothing else to do and no one with which to do it. Giles would be very useful to him. They could clean out the small aviary.

  ‘When will you collect him?’

  ‘
About five? Is that all right?’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Dottie. ‘And don’t try to give me a hand with the washing up or I’ll kill you. I know where everything goes and it goes where it lives, in my own time. I don’t want to have to search drawers, long after you have gone away, to find a pickle-fork.’

  I left shortly after, hazed in Frascati comfort, not in the least drunk, merely eased – braver, if you like – to meet Florence, which was my next stop.

  Before I left I called up to Giles, scrabbling somewhere up among the roses by the bird-cages. He half ran down the hill towards me, apprehension in his urgency, but I stopped him with a hand and shouted that I’d collect him very soon, about five. He came down a little nearer to me, shading his eyes from the sun. His feet were bare; he carried a little bunch of green feathers in one hand.

  ‘Sure?’ he said. Almost uncertainly. We went through this every time I left him anywhere. Even here, with Dottie and Arthur whom, I knew, he liked and trusted. Somewhere along the line in Parsons Green, when I had not been actually present, like abroad doing research, or merely up in the North for a few days doing Signings, someone had not been quite truthful, or perhaps just a little unreliable? Giles, I was discovering more and more, was terrified of being abandoned. Odd.

  ‘About five o’clock. Okay? I have to go and see your Aunt Florence about this morning. It might take a bit of time. But I’ll be back.’

  He brushed his forehead with the bunch of feathers. ‘Okay. But you will… ?’

  ‘I will. Promise.’ I crossed my heart.

  That seemed to satisfy him. He turned and ran, a loping sprawl, back to whatever he had been doing, and I drove over to Bargemon and Florence.

  Waiting for Florence on an upright cane chair, in the conservatory stuck on to the side of her mother’s house, I realized, I suppose for the first time ever, that even though I had been a visitor to the place for some weeks, I had never got further into the house than here: the conservatory, stuffed with creeper, ferns, a small banana tree, a tank of goldfish and pots of lilies and scarlet geraniums. Very French. I had never seen a sitting-room, a dining-room … nowhere else but here. Apart from crossing the hall, with its heavy banisters, solid staircase, vase of pampas grass, Turkey carpet, I had no territorial knowledge of Florence or her life and habits. And she had always made it quite clear that I never would. Keep-Off-The-Grass was writ large. I had obeyed.

  Presently she came in, tall, slender, neat, good legs and ankles, clear grey eyes, hair in a fringe, a white shirt, open at the throat, grey flannel skirt. She’d never be noticed in a crowd. Deliberately, it seemed. And she was rushed, as usual, and as usual was trying to button a cuff, one arm stretched out, fingers fiddling. An impression, very distinct, that she had just finished washing up, painting a wall, or kneading dough, that there had been some compelling action before my arrival, and that I was interrupting something rather more important that she had to do.

  We had not seen each other since, the day before, she had pleaded with me in this very place to drop my search for her ‘husband’, my brother, and save her and her family the ‘pain’ and ‘distress’ of his possible discovery somewhere. ‘He’s dead. James sought oblivion. His wish. Honour that,’ she had said, in so many words. She had long ago resigned herself to his disappearance, and had come to terms with spending a life caring for her disabled child and her domineering mother. The typical only-daughter bit. The fact that Solomon Aronovich had promised to call me, when he had digested my threat that I would seek official help from the British Consul and the local police if he did not, had disturbed her greatly. I had refused her pleas to leave well alone.

  So our meeting today was one of great concern to her, although this she was determined to hide. Fiddling with a shirt button was the only outward sign of confusion and apprehension.

  ‘I was busy in the kitchen with Celeste,’ she said, finally fastening her sleeve. ‘So, what did Monsieur Aronovich have to say? Has he been quite amazing and finally discovered James? Is that it?’

  We spoke together in French, easily and colloquially. My French was pretty slangy, her English good, but it always fussed her to use it. So we stuck to her formal French and my lightly accented efforts.

  I pulled up a second cane chair, told her to sit down, that what I had to say was difficult and might be distressing. She obediently sat, a slightly mocking smile on her face trying to disguise the agony in her eyes. ‘Oh, la la! We are to be lectured, is it?’ She folded her arms in her lap; her hands were shaking.

  ‘Florence. I found James. He was not in Tunis or Corsica or anywhere. He was in Cannes … he had been in Cannes ever since he left you in January.’

  ‘Was! Had! Past tense … so?’

  ‘James is dead.’

  She flinched, shut her eyes, then looked briefly round the conservatory. Her fists were clenched on her lap, the knuckles white.

  ‘Go on. You are certain?’

  ‘I saw him.’

  There was a longish pause. I could hear a pigeon cooing somewhere up on the roof and someone clanged shut an iron gate in the street outside.

  ‘Will you tell me where? Am I not to know?’

  ‘In the Villa Mimosa, above Cannes.’

  ‘I don’t know this place. Should I?’

  ‘It’s a private clinic, Florence. He died from AIDS.’

  For the first time she looked at me, her face white, bleak, expressionless.

  ‘Aronovich told you this? Where he was?’

  ‘Yes. He’s been his guardian all the time. He got him into the place. He took me there this morning.’

  She got up slowly, walked away from me, her arms swinging loosely, fingers splaying, as if she was at music practice. Then she stood quite still by a large pot of something, bowed her head, shook it from side to side so that her short hair flung wild, and began to weep helplessly. I made no move. I knew that to touch her would be disaster, her grief was not to be shared or comforted.

  After a minute or two she stopped, wiped her face with both hands, brushed them on her skirt, then she turned and came back to the cane chair and sat down. ‘So. That is that. Poor James, poor boy. The ugliest of deaths for the most fastidious of creatures. Are you content now? You have your proof … I have always known, always. It is something every woman knows the moment the heart dies. Shrivels, withers, rots … I told you so often, I begged you not to search, you ignored me. I pleaded with you to let things alone, to accept the fact that he wished to just creep away, die like a beast in a dark corner, but you were cruel, unthinking! He was my husband … I knew …’

  And I cut in swiftly and angrily. ‘He was not your “husband”, but he was my brother. He was merely your romanticized ideal of a husband – he was as much married to you legally as I am married to Celeste or Brigitte Bardot. It was all in your mind. All nonsense, Florence! I told you yesterday afternoon, here in this very place, that I just couldn’t let him fall off the edge of the world and not do something to find him. If I could have helped him I would. He is my flesh and blood: it counts in the end. He was only someone who took your virginity, someone you gave yourself to willingly because you had never loved anyone before, and had never expected to … James used you, as he used so many people, to amuse himself and give himself an illusion of security, ordinariness, normalcy. He desperately needed that, and therefore he needed you. But when his child was born he knew that he had lost. He lacked the true courage to overcome that, to handle it bravely, as you have done. Instead he took all the blame on himself and fled back to his disgusting little friends to seek punishment for his “sins”. God Almighty! He got his punishment!’

  During this tirade, and I was bloody angry, I know, she sat motionless before me, head bowed, weeping silently. The tears just dribbled down her face and chin, there was no sob or gulp. Silent, ugly misery and suppressed pain splashing out helplessly. I knelt beside her and took a listless hand; it was wet with tears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. You know it’s true, and I know
it’s true, we have both been dreadfully hurt in our different ways, but I know that what I did was the right thing. I could never have given up. I had to find him and now that I have there is a terrible relief. He’s gone, Florence. We know that now. For certain.’

  She withdrew her hand from mine, wiped it across her ruined face, combed fingers wearily through her hair, blinked, brushed her eyes. Her nose was red.

  ‘What will we do now?’

  ‘A funeral. A cremation. Aronovich will cope with that.’

  ‘Will you help me? With Mama, the household, Celeste. What can we say?’

  ‘Say? That he died of pneumonia in Cannes. I traced him. We don’t have to go into more than that. I’ll have to notify the British Consul, which shouldn’t be very difficult, and the mayor of your village, or wherever he got his papers. His resident’s permit, the bank … Aronovich will deal with anything else, apart from money, and I can deal with that.’

  ‘I don’t have to go, do I? To a funeral…’

  ‘Of course not. I’ll go … to the cremation. After that, well, we’ll see.’

  She got up slowly and walked over to the fish tank, dipping a trembling finger into the bubbling water. Everything she did, and said, was as if she was half asleep. The clock in the church tower in the square suddenly jangled with its tinny clang. It was four o’clock. She looked up, shook her head, folded her arms.

  ‘What will you do now? After? Go back to England?’

  ‘I don’t know. I might. Might not. I really don’t know.’

  ‘How long did he have it? This … How long did he have the virus?’

  ‘I have no idea. No one does. Maybe Aronovich? I think that sometimes it can be a long time, sometimes a short time. I really don’t know.’