A Place of Greater Safety (11 page)

Read A Place of Greater Safety Online

Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
9.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
She moved to sit beside him, holding the large dictionary into which she would cram letters and shopping lists and anything she needed to keep safe. She opened the book—carefully, or its contents would have cascaded out. He examined the flower. Delicately with a fingernail he turned up the underside of its papery leaf. He frowned at it. “Probably some extremely common noxious weed,” he said.
He put an arm around her and tried to kiss her. More out of astonishment than intention, she jumped away. She dropped the dictionary
and everything fell out. It would have been quite in order to slap his face, but what a cliché, she thought, and besides she was off balance. She had always wanted to do it to someone, but would have preferred someone more robust; so, between one thing and another, the moment passed. She clutched the sofa and stood up, unsteadily.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That lacked finesse.”
He was trembling a little.
“How could you?”
He raised a hand, palm upwards. “Oh, because, Annette, I want you.”
“It’s out of the question,” she said. She picked her feet out of the scattered papers. Some verses he had written lay on the carpet folded with a milliner’s bill she had found it necessary to conceal from Claude. Camille, she thought, would never in a thousand years ask questions about the price of a woman’s hat. It would be beyond him; beyond, and beneath. She found it necessary to stare out of the window (even though it was a bleak winter’s day as unpromising as this one) and to bite her lips to stop them from quivering.
This had been going on for a year now.
 
 
T
hey talked about the theater, about books and about people they knew; really though, they were only ever talking about one thing, and that was whether she would go to bed with him. She said the usual things. He said that her arguments were stale and that these were the things people always said, because they were afraid of themselves and afraid of trying to be happy in case God smote them and because they were choked up with puritanism and guilt.
She thought (privately) that he was more afraid of himself than anyone she had ever known: and that he had reason to be.
She said that she was not going to change her mind, and that the argument could be prolonged indefinitely. Not indefinitely, Camille said, not strictly speaking: but until they were both so old that they were no longer interested. The English do it, he said, in the House of Commons. She raised a shocked face. No, not what she had so clearly on her mind: but if someone proposes a measure you don’t like, you can just stand up and start spinning out the pros and cons until everybody goes home, or the session ends and there’s no more time. It’s called talking a measure out. It can go on for years. “Considered in one way,” he said, “since I like talking to you, it might be a pleasant way to spend my life. But in fact I want you now.”
 
 
A
fter that first occasion she had always been cool, fended him off rather expertly. Not that he had ever touched her again. He had seldom allowed her to touch him. If he had brushed against her, even accidentally, he had apologized. It was better like this, he said. Human nature being what it is, and the afternoons so long; the girls visiting friends, the streets deserted, no sound in the room except the ticking of clocks, the beating of hearts.
It had been her intention to end this non-affair smoothly, in her own good time; considered as a non-affair, it had had its moments. But then, obviously, Camille had started talking to somebody, or one of her husband’s friends had been observant: and everybody knew. Claude had a host of interested acquaintances. The question was contended for in robing rooms (scouted at the Châtelet but proposed in the civil courts as the scandal of the year, in the middle-class scandals division); it was circulated around the more select cafés, and mulled over at the ministry. In the gossips’ minds there were no debates, no delicately balanced temptations and counter-temptations, no moral anguish, no scruples. She was attractive, bored, not a girl anymore. He was young and persistent. Of course they were—well, what would you think? Since when, is the question. And when will Duplessis decide to know?
Now Claude may be deaf, he may be blind, he may be dumb, but he is not a saint, he is not a martyr. Adultery is an ugly word. Time to end it, Annette thought; time to end what has never begun.
She remembered, for some reason, a couple of occasions when she’d thought she might be pregnant again, in the years before she and Claude had separate rooms. You thought you might be, you had those strange feelings, but then you bled and you knew you weren’t. A week, a fortnight out of your life had gone by, a certain life had been considered, a certain steady flow of love had begun, from the mind to the body and into the world and the years to come. Then it was over, or had never been: a miscarriage of love. The child went on in your mind. Would it have had blue eyes? What would its character have been?
 
A
nd now the day had come. Annette sat at her dressing table. Her maid fussed about, tweaking and pulling at her hair. “Not like that,” Annette said. “I don’t like it like that. Makes me look older.”
“No!” said the maid, with a pretense at horror. “Not a day over thirty-eight.”
“I don’t like thirty-eight,” Annette said. “I like a nice round number. Say, thirty-five.”
“Forty’s a nice round number.”
Annette took a sip of her cider vinegar. She grimaced. “Your visitor’s here,” the maid said.
The rain blew in gusts against the window.
 
 
I
n another room, Annette’s daughter Lucile opened her new journal. Now for a fresh start. Red binding. White paper with a satin sheen. A ribbon to mark her place.
“Anne Lucile Philippa Duplessis,” she wrote. She was in the process of changing her handwriting again. “The Journal of Lucile Duplessis, born 1770, died ? Volume III. The year 1786.”
“At this time in my life,” she wrote, “I think a lot about what it would be like to be a Queen. Not our Queen; some more tragic one. I think about Mary Tudor: ‘When I am dead and opened they will find”Calais” written on my heart.’ If I, Lucile, were dead and opened, what they would find written is ‘
Ennui
.’
“Actually, I prefer Maria Stuart. She is my favorite Queen by a long way. I think of her dazzling beauty among the barbarian Scots. I think of the walls of Fotheringay, closing in like the sides of a grave. It’s a pity really that she didn’t die young. It’s always better when people die young, they stay radiant, you don’t have to think of them getting rheumatics or growing stout.”
Lucile left a line. She took a breath, then began again.
“She spent her last night writing letters. She sent a diamond to Mendoza, and one to the King of Spain. When all was under seal, she sat with open eyes while her women prayed.
“At eight o’clock the Provost Marshal came for her. At her prie-dieu, she read in a calm voice the prayers for the dying. Members of her household knelt as she swept into the Great Hall, dressed all in black, an ivory crucifix in her ivory hand.
“Three hundred people had assembled to watch her die. She entered through a small side door, surprising them; her face was composed. The scaffold was draped in black. There was a black cushion for her to kneel upon. But when her attendants stepped forward, and they slipped the black robe from her shoulders, it was seen that she was clothed entirely in scarlet. She had dressed in the color of blood.”
Here Lucile put down her pen. She began to think of synonyms. Vermilion. Flame. Cardinal. Sanguine. Phrases occured to her: caught red-handed. In the red. Red-letter day.
She picked up her pen again.
“What did she think, as she rested her head on the block? As she waited: as the executioner took his stance? Seconds passed; and those seconds went by like years.
“The first blow of the axe gashed the back of the Queen’s head. The second failed to sever her neck, but carpeted the stage with royal blood. The third blow rolled her head across the scaffold. The executioner retrieved it and held it up to the onlookers. It could be seen that the lips were moving; and they continued to move for a quarter of an hour.
“Though who stood over the sodden relic with a fob-watch, I really could not say.”
 
 
A
dèle, her sister, came in. “Doing your diary? Can I read it?”
“Yes; but you may not.”
“Oh, Lucile,” her sister said; and laughed.
Adèle dumped herself into a chair. With some difficulty, Lucile dragged her mind back into the present day, and brought her eyes around to focus on her sister’s face. She is regressing, Lucile thought. If I had been a married woman, however briefly, I would not be spending the afternoons in my parents’ house.
“I’m lonely,” Adèle said. “I’m bored. I can’t go out anywhere because it’s too soon and I have to wear this disgusting mourning.”
“Here’s boring,” Lucile said.
“Here’s just as usual. Isn’t it?”
“Except that Claude is at home less than ever. And this gives Annette more opportunity to be with her Friend.”
It was their impertinent habit, when they were alone, to call their parents by their Christian names.
“And how is that Friend?” Adèle inquired. “Does he still do your Latin for you?”
“I don’t have to do Latin anymore.”
“What a shame. No more pretext to put your heads together, then.”
“I hate you, Adèle.”
“Of course you do,” her sister said good-naturedly. “Think how grown-up I am. Think of all the lovely money my poor husband left me. Think of all the things I
know
, that you don’t. Think of all the fun I’m going to have, when I’m out of mourning. Think of all the men there are in the world! But no. You only think of one.”
“I do not think of him,” Lucile said.
“Does Claude even suspect what’s germinating here, what with him and Annette, and him and you?”
“There’s nothing germinating. Can’t you see? The whole point is that nothing’s going on.”
“Well, maybe not in the crude technical sense,” Adèle said. “But I can’t see Annette holding out for much longer, I mean, even through sheer fatigue. And you—you were twelve when you first saw him. I remember the occasion. Your piggy eyes lit up.”
“I have not got piggy eyes. They did not light up.”
“But he’s exactly what you want,” Adèle said. “Admittedly, he’s not much like anything in the life of Maria Stuart. But he’s just what you need for casting in people’s teeth.”
“He never looks at me anyway,” Lucile said. “He thinks I’m a child. He doesn’t know I’m there.”
“He knows,” Adèle said. “Go through, why don’t you?” She gestured in the direction of the drawing room, towards its closed doors. “Bring me a report. I dare you.”
“I can’t just walk in.”
“Why can’t you? If they’re only sitting around talking, they can’t object, can they? And if they’re not—well, that’s what we want to know, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you go then?”
Adèle looked at her as if she were simple-minded. “Because the more innocent assumption is the one that you would be expected to make.”
Lucile saw this; and she could never resist a dare. Adèle watched her go, her satin slippers noiseless on the carpets. Camille’s odd little face floated into her mind. If he’s not the death of us, she thought, I’ll smash my crystal ball and take up knitting.
 
 
C
amille was punctual; come at two, she had said. On the offensive, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his afternoons. He did not think this worth a reply; but he sensed the drift of things.
Annette had decided to employ that aspect of herself her friends called a Splendid Woman. It involved sweeping about the room and smiling archly.
“So,” she said. “There are rules, and you won’t play by them. You’ve been talking about us to someone.”
“Oh,” Camille said, fiddling with his hair, “if only there were anything to say.”
“Claude is going to find out.”
“Oh, if only there were something for him to find out.” He stared absently at the ceiling. “How is Claude?” he said at last.
“Cross,” Annette said, distracted. “Terribly cross. He put a lot of
money into the Périer brothers’ waterworks schemes, and now the Comte de Mirabeau has written a pamphlet against it and collapsed the stocks.”
“But he must mean it for the public good. I admire Mirabeau.”
“You would. Let a man be a bankrupt, let him be notoriously immoral—oh, don’t distract me, Camille, don’t.”
“I thought you wanted distraction,” he said somberly.
She was keeping a careful distance between them, buttressing her resolve with occasional tables. “It has to stop,” she said. “You have to stop coming here. People are talking, they’re making assumptions. And God knows, I’m sick of it. Whatever made you think in the first place that I would give up the security of my happy marriage for a hole-and-corner affair with you?”

Other books

Wicked Christmas Eve by Eliza Gayle
Darlene by Pearl, Avyn
The Sect by Lane, Courtney
Burning Bridges by Nadege Richards
The Cursed One by Ronda Thompson