The Colonel's Daughter (14 page)

Oh but they taught you how to value money! That was the legacy of the marriage, the one you used against them after the prince left you. Poor old prince, with his exquisite nails. He wanted to tear your flesh with his nails for squandering all that he gave you, for wasting it all, wasting his love. Yet he put on a clean silk shirt, tied his paisley tie from Simpson's of Piccadilly, clicked his heels at eight years of marriage and walked out without touching you or seeing you again. And you squawked like a macaw for the best lawyers. You scented a fortune and it hung like a whiff of tar in solicitors' rooms, crouched just out of sight in the creases of solicitors' smiles. You knew you should get half. But the family fought you. All with their filbert nails and perfected manners, they fought you like cockerels. So you settled for a lump sum. You stopped sniffing the tar smell of ‘half'. The lump sum was more than enough.

Or so you thought then, when it was you alone, Penelope – no longer a princess, but still calling yourself one – and moved in alone to your pretty château ‘with it's own historical laundry and stabling for five cars'. But the years picked at it. Your own tastes became richer: the aloneness of you sought compensation. And the menopausal Penelope mourned the dying out of beauty. You touched the crevices of your body and remembered the gaudy kisses of the young. One night, you started going to the town in your Mercedes, drinking a crème de menthe in one of the bars and driving home with a young man's head in your lap. For a while, the young men were cheap. And then, in the same bar, in the same way, I met you.

*

The butler, Maurice, announced dinner.

Penelope adjusted the thin heelstrap of a mauve shoe and stood up. ‘Come on, Guy darling. Stop pouting and put your shirt on. I've told you, we'll arrange for the shipment of bronze. I was only teasing about the old prams.'

She held out her arm, waiting for his hand to steer her inside to the candlelit dining room, but he was fussing with his shirt, his face turned away from her.

‘Hurry up, darling. I want to talk to you over dinner, about Lorna.'

‘What about Lorna?'

‘I've got a letter from her, full of all her dull goings on in Australia. But it seems she's coming to Europe and wants to see me.'

‘Why does she want to see you?'

‘Money, I suppose. Why else do stubborn daughters creep back to mothers they affect to despise? But God knows, on a teacher's salary, how she can afford the airfare.'

Guy tucked his shirt inside the pale blue trousers the princess had bought for him in Paris. There were moments, and this was one of them, when Penelope de Villemorin felt impaled by her own yearnings.
Sainte Marie, let him never leave me.

‘Come along, Guy. Anita has made a soufflé and it will spoil.'

So they sat close to each other in the pretty dining room and were served. Guy noticed, in between forkfuls of the soufflé, that Penelope had begun to economise on her wines: the Pouilly-Montrachet he had learned to expect had been replaced by a cheap local Loire wine. He longed to ask her suddenly precisely how rich she was. Tell me
precisely
, he wanted to say, how much money and what assets you own. But certain questions breed for a lifetime and are never uttered. He would ask her instead about the gallery.

‘The gallery?'

‘Yes.' Guy wondered why she sounded surprised.

‘Well, what can I tell you? You know it all already. Our policy is sound in my view. We search for young painters and help them on their way. We create fashions.'

‘And your stake was half?' The word never lost its particular meaning for the princess.

‘I believe it's an excellent investment – and a lovely excuse to go to Paris more often! Of course, one could wish that returns were higher. It seems not enough collectors are prepared to take the financial risks on new artists.'

‘Art isn't a commodity, Penelope.'

‘Oh no! I didn't mean to imply that. But as you yourself know, it's a very costly business. Art would simply not exist without the rich.'

‘Of course it would exist!'

‘Well exist, yes, but no one could live by it. Anyway darling, let's not argue. There's no earthly reason we couldn't give you an autumn show at the gallery.'

‘And you take sixty per cent of everything I sell!'

Penelope smiled. She noticed, fleetingly, that the prawns in the soufflé echoed perfectly the colour of the dining-room walls.

‘I expect,' she said, ‘we could make an exception in your case.'

*

The princess couldn't sleep. She went to the rosewood bureau. She re-read Lorna's letter, written in large writing she had always considered plain and lacking in character. The letter told her that Lorna (now twenty-eight by Penelope's calculations) would ‘take advantage, this year, of a European summer vacation'. The visit to the château was planned for August.

Memories of her daughter (‘always clever, Penelope. Lorna was always clever . . .') made her fidget with guilt and irritation. She tugged at a piece of stiff writing paper and began: ‘My dear Lorna, I'm so very sorry to say that an August visit won't be possible as I shall be travelling . . .' but quickly crumpled it. The clever girl would find some way to see her. The clever girl's eyes would ferret among the telltale creases of fifty-five years and decide with satisfaction, Mother's power is waning. Oh it was cruel, miserable! Why ever had this teacher daughter decided to poke and pry after eight blissful years of separation and silence?

She pulled out her portfolio (how it had dwindled!) of stocks and shares. How utterly miserable to be selling off yet more. But the bronze, though. She must find a way to purchase this wretched bronze for Guy. The princess rubbed her eyes, puffy from snatched sleep.
Money is power
. So whispered the de Villemorin aunts, clucking over each her own fortune. They died in their bonnets and were buried unmourned. The money was shared among the cousins who squandered it, so complained the prince, on American luxuries, not forgetting American women . . .

The sun came up beyond the steep apple orchards. The house began to murmur with the tiptoeing of servants. It was the hour when the princess usually rose and washed her body, before presenting it, creamed and scented, to Guy.
Obliterate me
, said this scented yearning body. But this morning, immobile at her desk, the princess felt too tired.

*

The bronze and Lorna arrived the same day, 10 August. Guy stood in the laundry, fingering the blackish lumps, beautiful as yet only by their incredible weight.

A stubbornly hot fortnight and the death of the one stockbroker she trusted had ravaged the poise of the princess. She had enraged Guy by drinking more wine than she could hold and wailing in her little-girl's voice that she had never been loved. As he touched the bronze, the sun falling on his wide hand, he tried not to measure the price he was paying for this precious metal.

He stayed in the laundry studio all day, working in clay. When the sun dipped from the high windows, he came out into the hot evening. He was tired. He longed to lie down in a cool bed, alone.

He showered and changed (this much I can do for Penelope's daughter) and went to find the two women. Penelope looked glittering. As a defence against Lorna's arrival, she had had her hair re-tinted, she had draped her body in a white, off-the-shoulder dress. She fingered the pearl choker clenched at her neck. ‘This is Lorna. Lorna, this is Guy who . . . has the old laundry house as his studio. He's a very, very talented sculptor, aren't you darling?'

Lorna got up. The flamboyant introduction had seemed to demand movement of some kind. Guy saw a thin, bony girl with clever brown eyes and thick hair cut very short. She wore an Indian dress, skimpy and creased. Her breasts, covered by this whisper of material, seemed oddly plump, the only part of her body that betrayed any blood tie with her mother. Her smile suggested a knowingness that must surely irritate Penelope.

‘My mother didn't say you were here.'

Australia. Yes, he could see it now, the woman-stayed-girl at twenty-eight. Freckled. Nourished by enormous skies.

Guy held out his hand, tried to stare past the smile.

‘You've come a long way.'

‘Yes. But then it's years since I saw Mother. I expect she told you.'

‘Lorna loves the house, Guy.'

Penelope had never attempted to quell the enjoyment she got from showing other people her riches. Why bother with Aubusson carpets if no one ever admires them? And Lorna had clearly been astonished by the château and its treasures. She had remembered her mother was rich, yet seemed to have forgotten that riches can gleam at you from surfaces you can touch and smell.

‘And she's going to stay for ten days, which is wonderful for me. So much to catch up on, haven't we Lorna?'

Oh yes, thought the Australian girl. But surely you understand that that's precisely why I came over, to get a full account of a life I've only allowed myself to guess at since you left my father and married the stiff and straight prince and became wealthy. And of course you never told me about the sculptor, young enough to be my brother. You left me to imagine you getting old by yourself. I thought at last time had punished you.

Guy sat down. Penelope reached for the champagne in its brimming bucket and poured him a glass. The sun on the terrace was still warm. He took the glass from Penelope and turned to the daughter. Her eyes were lowered, seeming to contemplate her slim, dusty feet in flat sandals.

‘To Lorna!' said Guy.

*

The nights are extraordinary, thought Lorna. So perfectly peaceful. Mother has created an ‘island'. In it, everything breathes as ordained by her, and the world outside, the world I know of cramped rooms and pushing your body into the little corner of sun left on your balcony after four o'clock in the blistering Sydney summers, exists beyond. Useless to tell her of that other world. In it, for her, exists only terror, and she doesn't want to look. Sufficient that the stockbroker died. That was terror enough! She still talks of it: ‘With my kind of money, you have to be careful, you see Lorna. Because people can milk you. I'm being milked by everyone. By the servants, by accountants and even by the gallery in Paris. I honestly don't believe I'm getting my due on my investment. And this spring, I was forced to sell the one mingy tiara given to me by belle-mère de Villemorin. Luckily I know Arnaud Clerc of the Bijouterie Clerc in Paris, or even that could have gone for next to nothing . . .'

Oh Mother, what deafening complaint clanks across the acres of quiet, so carefully tended! I can hear your mind stoking its engines of dissatisfaction, even as you sit on your terrace, so poised, reaching for the bottle in the ice bucket, reaching for the sculptor's smile. Fears group and regroup in you. Your white dress, at dinner, was splashed with some reddish sauce or other. You looked to the sculptor for help, but he turned away. He turned to me with his smile, yet all I could do was stare. Because what does an artist do to himself if he locks himself inside Mother's island? What are you doing? Working you say, but working in an old laundry where women were paid a pittance to plunge their red arms into the stained, suddy water of the unassailably rich. How has Mother stained you? Guy, the sculptor. Why do you smile at me when, even this minute perhaps, Mother opens her arms and receives you like a gift of amber, spreads you on her like an ointment – your youth to heal her age.

Yet there is something. Not in you, Guy, as much as in me. Some feeling that made me turn away, made me gabble about myself, telling jokes about my Head of Department to see if you laughed and showing off my clever self (‘Lorna is so unlike you, Penelope dear,' said long-ago friends) to let you know there was substance inside the shorn head, inside the cheap Indian dress so marvellously wrong for Mother's dining room. And you listened. You watched. Mother buys you. She buys you afresh each day. But a look in you – and in me – lets me believe I could have you free.

*

‘Promise me,' whispered Penelope, ‘that you won't.'

Half asleep, deliciously comfortable in the enfolding satin, Guy mumbled ambiguous assent, let the princess caress the side of his face, then slipped with perfect ease into a dream of Lorna. He was bathing in a river. Lorna waded in from a rock, still wearing the skinny dress which, once wetted, clung to her. He gazed at her eyes, lashes flecked with water like minuscule diamonds. When he kissed her, her tongue was long and gentle.

The princess wanted to pull him back from sleep. It was as if, sleeping, Guy deserted her. She said his name. He lay still and golden beside her, barely covered. Look at him, she wanted to wail to the ghost of the prince walled up in some mausoleum near Tours, look at my lover!

*

The princess had never known such terrible days. Ten in all, she reminded herself. After ten days, she will be gone. She belongs in the history classroom. She belongs in some ugly suburb. Only Guy and I belong here, with my treasures that keep us safe, with each our own role to play.

‘I hate having my role confused, darling.'

‘Your role?'

‘Yes. Lorna confuses my role, Guy.'

The laugh was mocking, ungentle. The princess looked up sharply. ‘Guy, you did promise me, didn't you?'

‘Promise you?'

‘That you wouldn't. You wouldn't ever, would you?'

‘I already have.'

Not merely in his dreams. He and Lorna had gone walking early on the fourth morning of the ten. The princess sat in bed with her silver breakfast tray, calling Paris, calling London, too preoccupied with the telephone to imagine they could be gone all morning, gone still at lunchtime, eating joyously in a little café with memories of their morning bright in their eyes. Yet what made him admit it? What made him decide not to lie, when lying was so easy?
You believe what you want to believe
.