The Colonel's Daughter (10 page)

‘I don't really mind,' I said, ‘I mean, I don't mind at all. The thing is that I've got seven thousand francs . . .'

Again, they looked at each other and grinned. One of them pulled a silky shawl round her shoulders, touched my chin lightly and tenderly and began to walk away. I watched her go with a feeling of dismay. She suddenly seemed perfect: long, dark hair, swinging as she walked, a fleshy bottom encased in a tight skirt that shimmered. I wanted to call her back, but I felt a gentle hand on my arm and forced myself to look more closely at the woman who was to be ours. She had red hair and a wide smile. She wore a lacy blouse over bunched up, milky breasts. On her upper lip was the dark blotch of a mole.

*

‘Somebody like flowers in this house?' she said, seeing the banked arrangements that filled the hall.

‘Ssh,' I whispered, ‘my father's in bed. He had his wedding today.'

She began to laugh, put a fist up to stifle it. From the fist hung a little ornate velvet purse with an amber clasp. Soon, all my savings and Paul's would be inside this purse.

A light was on under my father's door now as we passed it. I imagined him hearing our footsteps, feeling his way to the door and opening it – and seeing nothing of course. To live with a blind man is to have the power of invisibility. We hurried on up, me leading, not daring to look behind me. Was the red-haired woman old? How would she seem to Paul in the paisley lamplight? Would he mind the mole on her lip? Old women don't have red hair or high breasts, do they? I felt absolutely responsible to Paul for my choice. My own daring had only been in recognition of his. We had a perfect sense, in those days, of what each of us owed to the other. Over the years, this sense has clouded, disappeared.

‘Here we are,' I said, quietly opening the door to our room. Paul, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed, trying not to crumple the eiderdown, stood up stiffly.

‘Oh, good evening . . .' he said.

I put my hand on the woman's arm and led her forward. The skin of her arm was freckled and soft. Her hair, I saw now, was a marvellous colour and very clean.

‘This is my twin brother, Paul,' I said apologetically. ‘I wonder if you could tell us your name?'

‘Oh yes. Bettina. All nations can pronounce ‘Bettina'.'

‘Oh. All nations, eh?'

‘I think it's a terrific name,' said Paul.

Bettina was smiling. I felt relieved. I hadn't dared to tell her there would be two of us. She crossed to the bed, sat down and looked up at us.

‘Money first,' she said, opening the velvet purse. ‘Five thousand each. I like to get this part of it over. Then we can enjoy ourselves, eh?'

I produced the seven thousand. ‘This is really all we've got . . .' I began, but Paul, without any hesitation, had tugged out the gold cufflinks given to him that very morning by our father and Pierrette (an identical pair to me) to mark their wedding day.

‘I'd be honoured,' he said in a speechy voice, ‘if you would accept these. They are worth considerably more than the three thousand owing to you.'

Bettina took them, inspected them for the gold hallmark, dropped them and the crumpled notes I had given her into the purse. She laid the purse down, kicked off her shoes and began to unroll her stockings.

I sat down. I was shaking, not with sexual excitement, but with a sense of absolute strangeness. I thought, the walk out into the night, everything from that moment is a dream and I shall wake up in the morning and life will be precisely as it was, with only the
Thousand and One Nights
within my reach. There will have been no scarf on the lampshade, no act of daring and maturity . . . I blinked, rubbed my eyes, felt thirsty, stared at Paul, who was unbuttoning his trousers. I longed for a cool drink of milk or lemonade, but I had the notion that time was sliding away from me immeasurably fast; yes, life itself was slipping, altering, as Paul stepped out of his trousers, nervously fingering his penis, already erect, and I had to stay and be part of it, or miss it for ever.

I sat on the bed and watched as Bettina arrayed for us on the satin eiderdowns a body of such white voluptuousness its form has stayed huddled in memory all my life and through all my loving. Flesh has never again seemed in itself so magnificent a thing, so utterly and uncontrollably inviting. All strangeness, all fear vanished. Paul parted Bettina's legs, and we glimpsed for the first time in our lives the glistening dark channel that puerile imagination never imagines perfectly enough, the deep and private walls of ripeness, where the boy deluges his fountain of dreams.

I don't remember taking off my clothes, yet I was naked on the bed, my hand on Paul's buttocks. The motions his body made were tender, unembarrassed, as touching as an animal. His body shone. I was choked by his achievement, his beauty. My head on Bettina's scented hair, I pressed myself to the one body that hers and Paul's had become, rocked as they rocked, felt myself move as Paul moved through waves of mounting ecstasy. ‘It's superb!' Paul trumpeted as he moved and I moved faster and faster, ‘it's superb, Jacques!'

*

I don't know whether it was my father's decision or Pierrette's to separate Paul's life from mine, but this, at the end of the summer, was what happened. We were taken away from our English school for good and sent to different boarding schools in France. I have never been able to understand the reasoning behind this decision and can only guess at it: if we missed each other enough, we would cease to miss our mother, and thus to talk of her.

The odd thing is that ever since that time, I have, all my life, missed them both. Paul's life has taken such a different course from my own that I have long ago lost him as a brother. The man he is, the man I meet at restaurants with our wives, is at best an acquaintance – an acquaintance I don't even like very much.

During periods of anxiety or depression, and only then, do these two ghosts visit me as once they were: Paul making first love to Bettina under the paisley light; my mother sitting on a wall in Cornwall and yelling at the gulls.

My Wife Is a White Russian

I'm a financier. I have financial assets, world-wide. I'm in nickel and pig-iron and gold and diamonds. I like the sound of all these words. They have an edge, I think. The glitter of saying them sometimes gives me an erection.

I'm saying them now, in this French restaurant, where the tablecloths and the table napkins are blue linen, where they serve sea-food on platters of seaweed and crushed ice. It's noisy at lunchtime. It's May and the sun shines in London, through the open restaurant windows. Opposite me, the two young Australians blink as they wait (so damned courteous, and she has freckles like a child) for me to stutter out my hard-word list, to manipulate tongue and memory so that the sound inside me forms just behind my lips and explodes with extraordinary force above my oysters.

Diamonds!

But then I feel a soft, perfumed dabbing at my face. I turn away from the Australians and there she is. My wife. She is smiling as she wipes me. Her gold bracelets rattle. She is smiling at me. Her lips are astonishing, the colour of claret. I've been wanting to ask her for some time: ‘Why are your lips this terrible dark colour these days? Is it a lipstick you put on?'

Still smiling at me, she's talking to the Australians with her odd accent: ‘He's able to enjoy the pleasures of life once more, thank God. For a long time afterwards, I couldn't take him out. Terrible. We couldn't do one single thing, you know. But now . . . He enjoys his wine again.'

The dabbing stops. To the nurse I tried to say when I felt a movement begin: ‘Teach me how to wipe my arse. I cannot let my wife do this because she doesn't love me. If she loved me, she probably wouldn't mind wiping my arse and I wouldn't mind her wiping my arse. But she doesn't love me.'

The Australian man is talking now. I let my hand go up and take hold of my big-bowled wine glass into which a waiter has poured the expensive Chablis my wife likes to drink when she eats fish. Slowly, I guide the glass across the deadweight distance between the table and my mouth. I say ‘deadweight' because the spaces between all my limbs and the surfaces of tangible things have become mighty. To walk is to wade in waist-high water. And to lift this wine glass . . . ‘Help me,' I want to say to her, ‘just this once. Just this once.'

‘Heck,' says the Australian man, ‘we honestly thought he'd made a pretty positive recovery.' His wife, with blue eyes the colour of the napkins, is watching my struggles with the glass. She licks her fine line of a mouth, sensing, I suppose, my longing to taste the wine. The nurse used to stand behind me, guiding the feeding cup in my hand. I never explained to her that the weight of gravity had mysteriously increased. Yet often, as I drank from the feeding cup, I used to imagine myself prancing on the moon.

‘Oh this is a very positive recovery,' says my wife. ‘There's very little he can't do now. He enjoys the ballet, you know, and the opera. People at Covent Garden and the better kind of place are very considerate. We don't go to the cinema because there you have a very inconsiderate type of person. Don't you agree? So riff-raffy? Don't you agree?'

The Australian wife hasn't listened to a word. The Australian wife puts out a lean freckled arm and I watch it come towards me, astounded as usual these days by the speed with which other people can move parts of their bodies. But the arm, six inches from my hand holding the glass, suddenly stops. ‘Don't help him!' snaps my wife. The napkin-blue eyes are lowered. The arm is folded away.

Heads turn in the restaurant. I suppose her voice has carried its inevitable echo round the room where we sit: ‘Don't help him! Don't help him! But now that I have an audience, the glass begins to jolt, the wine splashing up and down the sides of the bowl. I smile. My smile widens as I watch the Chablis begin to slop onto the starched blue cloth.
Waste!
She of all people understands the exquisite luxury of waste. Yet she snatches the glass out of my hand and sets it down by her own. She snaps her fingers and a young beanstick of a waiter arrives. He spreads out a fresh blue napkin where I have spilt my wine. My wife smiles her claret smile. She sucks an oyster into her dark mouth.

The Australian man is, I was told, the manager of the Toomin Valley Nickel Consortium. The Australian man is here to discuss expansion, supposedly with me, unaware until he met me this lunchtime that, despite the pleasing cadences of the words, I'm unable to say ‘Toomin Valley Nickel Consortium'. I can say ‘nickel'. My tongue lashes around in my throat to form the click that comes in the middle of the word. Then out it spills. Nickel! In my mind, oddly enough, the word ‘nickel' is the exact greyish-white colour of an oyster. But ‘consortium' is too difficult for me. I know my limitations.

My wife is talking again: ‘I've always loved the ballet, you see. This is my only happy memory of Russia – the wonderful classical ballet. A little magic. Don't you think? I would never want to be without this kind of magic, would you? Do you have the first-rate ballet companies in Australia? You do? Well, that's good.
Giselle
of course. That's the best one. Don't you think? The dead girl. Don't you think? Wonderful.'

We met on a pavement. I believe it was in the Avenue Matignon but it could have been in the Avenue Montaigne. I often get these muddled. It was in Paris, anyway. Early summer, as it is now. Chestnut candle blooms blown along the gutters. I waited to get into the taxi she was leaving. But I didn't get into it. I followed her. In a bar, she told me she was very poor. Her father drove the taxi I had almost hired. She spoke no English then, only French with a heavy Russian accent. I was just starting to be a financier at that time, but already I was quite rich, rich by her standards – she who had been used to life in post-war Russia. My hotel room was rather grand. She said in her odd French: ‘I'll fuck for money.'

I gave her fifty francs. I suppose it wasn't much, not as much as she'd hoped for, a poor rate of exchange for the white, white body that rode astride me, head thrown back, breasts bouncing. She sat at the dressing table in the hotel room. She smoked my American cigarettes. More than anything, I wanted to brush her gold hair, brush it smooth and hold it against my face. But I didn't ask her if I could do this. I believe I was afraid she would say: ‘You can do it for money.'

The thin waiter is clearing away our oyster platters. I've eaten only three of my oysters, yet I let my plate go. She pretends not to notice how slow I've been with the oysters. And my glass of wine still stands by hers, untasted. Yet she's drinking quite fast. I hear her order a second bottle. The Australian man says: ‘First-rate choice, if I may say. We like Chably.' I raise my left arm and touch her elbow, nodding at the wine. Without looking at me, she puts my glass down in front of me. The Australian wife stares at it. Neither she nor I dare to touch it.

My wife is explaining to the Australians what they are about to eat, as if they were children: ‘I think you will like the turbot very much.
Turbot poché hollandaise
. They cook it very finely. And the hollandaise sauce, you know this of course? Very difficult to achieve, lightness of this sauce. But here they do it very well. And the scallops in saffron. Again a very light sauce. Excellent texture. Just a little cream added. And fresh scallops naturally. We never go to any restaurant where the food is frozen. So I think you will like these dishes you have chosen very much . . .'

We have separate rooms. Long before my illness, when I began to look (yet hardly to feel) old, she demanded her privacy. This was how she put it: she wanted to be private. The bedroom we used to share and which is now hers is very large. The walls are silk. She said: ‘There's no sense in being rich and then cooped up together in one room.' Obediently, I moved out. She wouldn't let me have the guest room, which is also big. I have what we call ‘the little room', which I always used to think of as a child's room. In her ‘privacy' I expect she smiles: ‘the child's room is completely right for him. He's a helpless baby!' Yet she's not a private person. She likes to go out four or five nights a week, returning at two or three in the morning, sometimes with friends, sitting and drinking brandy. Sometimes they play music. Elton John. She has a lover (I don't know his name) who sends her lilies.