A Period of Adjustment (16 page)

She raised the coffee cup in her hand, looked at it intently as if she had just discovered it. ‘No need to have an excuse. The belief is all. Or disbelief, do I mean?' She placed the cup back on the table, folded her hands in her lap, still looking away from me. ‘I am a general's daughter, a colonel's widow, mother of a captain, all in the same regiment, all most brutally taken from me. A military woman, you might agree?'

‘I might agree indeed. And I do.'

‘I was born in Algeria, I am what we call a “pied noir”. We served in Indochine in ‘53, in Algeria again in ‘60, so I know enough of brutality and death, you see? It has always been about me. I cannot be expected to go through my final years encumbered with the absurdity of such a platitude. There is no such thing as the sanctity of human life in real life: that has been invented by bishops and theologians. I know. I have seen. Smelled it. I have cradled the brutally dead.'

The church clock had stopped clanging. All was suddenly still in the conservatory. I remained motionless, and then she broke the stillness with a little rasping laugh, briskly fixed a pin into the grey hair. Still looking away
from me, unwilling apparently to meet my eyes, she said, ‘The meek, my dear Monsieur Colcott, do
not
inherit the earth. You will see. One day. I bid you goodbye.'

I still had my hand on the door-knob, pushed the door wider. She finished fixing her hair, sat perfectly still, straight-backed, head high, hands folded before her brass trinkets.

‘Good day, Madame. I shall remember what you have said, thank you.'

She slightly inclined her head, reached for the folded yellow duster, took up the brass-scaled fish again. ‘Thank
you,
Monsieur Colcott, for
your discretion
.' She began polishing busily as I closed the door and went into the shadowy hall.

The stewardess slid a tray on to Giles's little table, smiled indifferently at me when I refused mine, and moved on up the aisle. Giles sat looking at his tray of neatly arranged inedibles.

‘Aren't you having yours? Don't you want it?'

‘No. I'll have a sandwich or something. In London.'

‘If you'd said yes, and didn't really want it, I could have had a second helping. Couldn't I? It was pretty mean. It's free, isn't it?'

‘Part of the price of your fare. Not free, mate. You're flying Business Class.'

He was unwrapping his bunch of knives and forks. ‘Wow! Brilliant. And you're having champagne. I thought there was a cork? Nigel Mansell and all the football people, they always have to get the cork out before they can spray it on people. There
should
be a cork.'

‘Well, there isn't. And I'm not about to spray people, I'm drinking mine.'

He poked cautiously at something pink. ‘Well, it's pretty small, your bottle. What's this stuff?'

‘Smoked salmon.'

‘Will I like it?'

‘Haven't an idea. Why not try it?'

A couple of evenings after the meeting I had had with Madame Prideaux I was sweeping up a pile of ‘thinnings' from the vine out on the terrace when the phone rang. It was still such a novelty in the house that I automatically froze wondering at the sound and then heard Giles yelling from somewhere upstairs.

‘Telly-phone! Quick!'

It was Helen, slightly irritated, on the line. ‘I had to call that damned hotel to get your number.
I
didn't know you'd got a telephone!'

‘It's new. I almost don't know myself.'

‘Why didn't you call me? Let me know?'

‘I haven't got a number for you, if you are still in Valbonne. Remember?'

‘Of course I'm still in Valbonne. You could have written, anyway. It's about the house. A letter from Andrews and Fry. They've had a decent offer. £300,000. I know it's a bit of a drop, but the market's depressed. Some American firm want it for an employee. What do you think?
I
said yes, but I'd have to speak to you first. It took
ages
to get you. That damn hotel can't cope with English, so it's too late to call London back.'

‘Do it tomorrow morning then. Say yes. I agree. Fine. Let's clinch things. When do you intend to go to London?'

‘The day after tomorrow. I'm booked anyway. Eric has to be in New York on Thursday. So I said I'd go with him as far as London. When will you come?'

‘End of the week. Got to close this place up, get the tickets, so on. I'll bring Giles, of course; will that give you time?'

‘For what? And of course Giles
must
come. I haven't seen him for a month. And Annicka will come up with me from Mummy's place. We can sort things out together. I mean
you and I. So I say yes, all right? Get it all over. Just make a few lists, of things you want to keep, you know, and the stuff we'll sell off.'

‘I will. We'll stay at the house? Simla Road? To start with?'

‘You
will. I'll commute from Mummy's, it's no distance. I'll get on to Mrs Nicholls, to get in bread, eggs, coffee, milk, all that stuff. All right?'

‘Fine. I'll call you as soon as I'm leaving. Probably be Thursday if I can get a flight.'

‘Well, try. Don't let's have a weekend just hanging about. Huge love to Giles, see you.' And she hung up.

And somehow, the way that things on occasion do happen, everything turned out perfectly smoothly. I got the bookings, alerted Clotilde, arranged with my publisher to be met at the airport, told the Theobalds and Madame Mazine at the hotel, and gave her my London number and address (just in case, by some mischance, Madame Prideaux omitted to give Florence my envelope), and finally, after tremendous effort, I got Giles to pack and repack his blue holdall, an enterprise which lasted him two days, chucking things out and putting things in. Eventually we were ready and left Jericho very early for the trip to Nice and the airport.

And then there was the pleasant early-Victorian house in Simla Road, the green iron gate, faded windowboxes, dusty lilac bushes. Opening the door, my own front door, just as I had always done for fourteen years, was suddenly intensely strange. After two months away, with so much happening to cram the weeks, it didn't seem very much like a homecoming, rather an entrance into a new experience.

The house felt unused, even though Helen had only been away a couple of weeks and now had come effusively into the long hall and swept a slightly cautious Giles into her
arms with a great deal of air-kissing and little cries of ‘You're
so HUGEl
God!
How
you've grown—and brown! Aren't you
brown
?' to all of which Giles responded with twisted smiles and twisted feet.

Annie came bounding down the stairs crying, ‘Giles! How
big
you've got! And I've got a pony, did you know? Granny gave him to me. His name is Merlin. Hello, Daddy, kissy, kissy? Did you have a lovely holiday in France?'

All that sort of stuff. Family together again. I had forgotten how much I had got used to it and how much I had, frankly, tried to join in but had really failed at the same time. I never felt, truthfully, that I belonged in this rather emotional overtly artificial, family life business. I had been a lousy father, that I knew, and nothing had improved in the time I'd been absent. I had not, I knew, been missed by Helen or Annie, and really with fairly good reason. There wasn't much to miss about me anyway. Oddly enough, now that I was back in the frame, among familiar yet forgotten things, like the wallpapers, the carpets, the curtain which had lost two hooks and always sagged when pulled, the Munnings prints, the bits of Helen's hideous china, the view from the kitchen windows over the weedy, dismal, narrow London garden, the slate sky, the stale smell of closed rooms, in spite of all the things I remembered and could touch even, it all felt distant and faded. A perfectly familiar stage set, awaiting demolition. And I felt merely an observing stranger looking at someone else's life and belongings, perfectly aware but apart, outside.

Somewhere at the very back of my head I heard Arthur's voice saying that divorce and moving house were as devastating as death. Looking round my dusty, still, messy little office up in the attic, jammed with shelves, filing cabinets, books, papers, folders, boxes and jars of pens, rubber bands, paper-clips, gummy bottles of Tipp-Ex,
and sundry envelopes, I realized that, however lugubrious the remark, he was deadly accurate. How was I to clear this terrible chaos? How to sort, stack and pack the books, manuscripts, diaries and dictionaries?

I had spent years of my life in this room with its curtain-less little window looking down over scabby gardens and the two wispy poplar trees. The greyness of it swamped me within an hour. How had I managed to live a life up here in the roof away from my children and my energetic, if irritating, wife? When I was not sealed up here reading and researching (when I was on the biographical leg of my work), I'd be abroad or anyway away from home, seeing for myself the backgrounds against which my subjects had led their lives, or talking, if I was fortunate enough to trace them, to witnesses to the events themselves. At the time I know that I found it perfectly acceptable, enjoyed it even. I had never been cut out, frankly, to be a father, let alone a devoted husband.

In the past, in my youthful prime, in between great epic feats of isolation and total immersion in my work, I got sudden violent bursts of hysteria – I suppose you could call it that – and was as desperate as a diabetic for his insulin ‘fix' – in my case, female company. A wife was
not
what I desired, I was restless for ‘assorted flavours'. It would seem to me that I stored up my libidinous urges until the cork exploded from the bottle, and then I just fizzed about in a glory of lust and physical pleasure which I had no intention of continuing once the body had been satiated. I did not want a ‘relationship' as it was called, is still called. I dreaded possession of any kind; so my casual and satisfying encounters were only ever that, and understood by my partners to be just that at all times, until the advent of one Helen Wiltshire, spinster of Chalfont St Giles. She had happened to be just a little too satisfactory, a little too adventurous sexually. Physically she proved to be a disaster
area for me. And, at a late stage in my life, I was getting older if not wiser, feeling that perhaps I should settle down. (Why, for God's sake?) We were married. And here I now was, standing in the middle of the room drained of emotion, anxious to quit, wondering how to start packing up a not altogether happy existence on which I could not look back with the slightest degree of pride or satisfaction in myself. Apart, that is, from Giles. He had been worth it.

And then there he was standing at the door, an empty hamster cage in his arms. ‘I suppose I couldn't keep this now he's dead? But it seems a pity to throw it away.' He came into the room. ‘Gosh! What a mess you've got to pack.'

‘Worse than your hamster cage. Leave it for the men tomorrow. They'll deal with it. I've got to cope up here. You all right? Had some tea or something?'

‘Yup. We've got to go down to Granny at Chalfont.'

‘I know. Good idea really. Saves making beds and things. It'll only be for a day or two. You haven't seen Granny for yonks, have you? And you like her.'

‘Quite. She likes Annie best. I have to call her Annicka now! Mum said so, and
she
said so. She's silly. I don't suppose that Eric will be at Granny's will he? He couldn't be. Could he?'

‘No. He's gone to America for a week.'

‘Mum was very nice to me. She was a bit worried that I really did want to be a, well, she said it … a “little Frenchman”. She said I didn't have to if I didn't want to, she'd seen a lovely school, and I could have my own room and bathroom at their new house. And there were lovely woods and places …'

I was chucking used felt pens into a bin. ‘What did you say to that. Tempting?'

‘I said I'd rather like to be a little Frenchman. I was
getting used to it. But she
did
look sad. I felt … well …' And he sighed. ‘Anyway. She said it was up to me, and then Annie said to come and smell her.'

‘Smell her!'

‘Yes. It was some awful scent from Los Angeles and she had been allowed to wear it to welcome us back. Really yucky … He gave it to her. Eric did. I won't have to stay there, will I? You will remember what you said?'

‘Giles. I'm going to be very, very busy. You are not going to be kidnapped, you'll be at Granny's for a couple of days or so, Mum will bring you up when we are clearer here and you can look out the things you want to take to France, and then we'll go off. Now
you
go off. Be very nice to Mummy, she's not going to find it easy to let you go away with me, so be sensible. Don't overdo things, just be polite, affectionate, and give Granny my love. Now piss off. Right?'

He turned at the door, jiggled the cage, ‘And just leave this in the kitchen?'

‘Just leave it. They'll pack it with everything for storage. Off you go.'

It took three and a half days to clear Simla Road. It was, in spite of my acute anxiety that everything would be chaotic and devastating, perfectly simple in the hands of five experienced men and a couple of vans. I made endless cups of coffee and tea, provided biscuits with a willing, if tearful, Mrs Nicholls, and generally directed operations with the help of Helen who arrived every morning from Chalfont as bright as polished steel and just as hard. The powers of organization and quick-mindedness, the amazing capacity to make instant decisions and judgements, which Eric so admired, were brought into full display. She knew just what should be done, how it should be done, when it should be done. At the end of each working day she drove off again, and I went to the comfortable Cadogan Hotel in Sloane
Street, where I stayed in peace and calm. It really wasn't such a sweat after all, and as the word ‘regret' did not ever come into the scheme of things it was quite unemotional. Fourteen years of living in the one house, of births, of rows, of love, of anger, of all the other bits and pieces which go to make up a life within a handful of rooms, were obliterated tidily by the slamming and rattle of the tailboards or doors of the vans.