Daughter of Catalonia (3 page)

As the years went by she mended her manners, learnt to play tennis and the piano, forgot her Catalan, and kept her French for
Maman
. She had her passions well hidden, and moved through life trying not to stir any waters. She lacked Robert’s easy good humour and brilliant smile. Where he was popular and sought after, she was happy to live in the shadows.

She hoped to be unnoticeable today as she entered the dining room, and quietly helped herself to some salad and a little cold meat. Grandfather lifted his head from his pills and grunted a greeting, but Grandmama rose to kiss her on both cheeks, and led her to her chair. She had changed, Madeleine noticed, from the green silk she had been wearing this morning to a sober grey jersey suit. Not yet full mourning, but just the right touch for a house on the verge of a death. Madeleine’s pink cardigan looked both shabby and uncaring in contrast.

‘My poor girl,’ intoned Grandmama, pouring a small quantity of wine into Madeleine’s glass. ‘We are all going to have to be very brave.’

‘She’s sleeping again,’ Madeleine replied, not bothering to keep the weariness from her voice. ‘I hope she wakes for Robert.’

Grandmama inclined her head, and gave a small sigh.
‘I must go to see her after lunch. My last remaining child. It will be so very hard.’ Grandmama’s sigh was perhaps genuine, thought Madeleine. It was maybe just her style which seemed so insincere.

‘Nurse will tell us when we need to go up,’ muttered Grandfather. Then, as if it would solve everything, ‘We’ll wait for Robert.’

And after lunch he came, striding through the doors and wafting in the cool, crisp air of the world outside, where normal people lived and worked and walked in the spring sunshine. He kissed Grandmama on both cheeks, clasped Grandfather briefly, then took Madeleine in his arms.

‘Is she really going, then?’ he whispered.

‘Really, yes, Bobo. She’s more and more drugged – hardly wakes. But she smiled at me this morning.’

She drew him up the stairs, and hesitated by her mother’s door. ‘She’s in a lot of pain now, Bobo. It’s hard to watch at times. You’ll see. It will be best if she goes quickly now, really it will.’

Robert nodded impatiently and put her aside to open the door, entering the room with the almost offensive vigour of the young and healthy. He slowed, though, as he approached the bedside, and then stopped, reaching for Madeleine’s hand. His face was leaden as he surveyed the ashen face, thinner even than the last time he had visited, sunk in deep sleep.

He was silent for several minutes. Madeleine watched him rather than their mother, trying to read his thoughts. She was so unsure of how he would react, but until he
spoke his face gave little away. When he did speak, his bitterness was fierce. Bitterness at the illness, but especially at Elise. It was unlike him and it shocked Madeleine to the core.

‘It makes me so angry to see her lying there like that,’ he muttered with real fury. ‘It just seems to sum up her life. Lying there so passive, so stupidly passive. Giving in as usual. Suffering as always. Why couldn’t she ever live? She might as well die of cancer. She doesn’t even
want
to be here with us.’

Madeleine flinched at his anger, but heard his pain and the years of loss he was trying to express. For a young man eager for life, Elise had been a poor role model, meek, submissive and inactive, too rarely laughing, too frequently placating.

She thought carefully before replying. ‘She loved us, Bobo. She lived a lot through us, I know, and should have got more from life, but she wasn’t always passive. She could be quite fiery at times, especially when defending us – defending you mainly, when Grandfather wanted to punish you for breaking a window, or for wrecking the plant border with your cricket games.’

Robert smiled briefly in acknowledgement, and she pressed home her point. ‘Do you remember how she would laugh with us later, up here away from the rest of the house, and she would produce some chocolates from the hidden drawer to calm you down. You used to get so mad when Grandfather told you off!’

‘I know, I know,’ he acknowledged. ‘There were some special private moments. But what a life overall, in the
end. Was she ever really happy, do you think?’

His hand was still in Madeleine’s, and she squeezed it. She noticed out of the corner of her eye the nurse quietly leaving the room, and was relieved at their solitude.

‘I think so, Bobo. Oh yes, she was happy. I have memories of her laughing so freely, so gaily. Teasing Papa, teasing me too. She was really alive then.’

‘I don’t remember anything from those early days. I don’t even remember Papa.’ His voice was bitter, anguished.

Madeleine stood for a moment, conjuring up memories. They came, but with time it was taking longer and longer to retrieve those memories. Maybe it was part of losing your childhood. But the memories were so important.

She shook herself slightly, and squeezed Robert’s hand again. ‘I don’t remember much myself. Just some images which come back to me. Papa in a kind of blue overall, and Uncle Philippe, and they both smoked tiny little cigarettes which they rolled themselves. I don’t think there was much tobacco available. And
Maman
in a flowery apron. We had a big wooden table and a fire in a stove in the corner. I wasn’t allowed to touch it.’

‘A fire? It was the south of France, Madeleine!’

‘There was a fire, with logs, and a really old black stove,’ Madeleine insisted.

‘I wish we knew more. I wish I had asked more.’ Robert removed his hand and moved restlessly to the other side of the bed. Madeleine held his gaze across their mother’s sleeping body, wanting him to listen.

‘She wouldn’t have told you anything. Not after he
died. We used to talk about home all the time when we first came here, but after she got the letter she stopped talking.’

‘She didn’t have the right to be like that,’ growled Robert. ‘Loads of women lost their husbands in the war, but they still helped their children to remember. They still talked about their husbands. It wasn’t fair to us to stay so silent. She just excluded us and left us with nothing!’ It was a poignant cry, and Robert shook his head as if to shake away imminent tears.

‘
Maman
wasn’t allowed to, you know that! None of us were allowed to remember. Poor
Maman
was a family disgrace, come home to do penance. Don’t ever blame her! When did she ever let you down? She loved you and protected you and helped you to be happy here. How can you judge her? Look at her! Look how tired she is! And yet she smiled for me this morning!’ Tears were in Madeleine’s eyes for the first time. Robert came back round the bed to her side, and put his huge arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

‘Sorry, Lena. Sorry. I know, I know. She loved us so much. Will she wake again, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. They give her so many drugs now, and when she wakes she’s in pain.’

‘Then I hope she doesn’t wake. Look how peaceful her face is.’ Robert stroked his mother’s cheek, and freed the hand which the nurse had again tucked severely under the stark white sheet and grey blanket. ‘We should let her go now.’

‘Will you be all right?’

‘A strange question from you, Lena. What about you? What are you going to do here without
Maman
? Join the bridge club? Or marry one of the worthy young men that Grandmama keeps throwing your way? What’s that doctor’s name − Peter, isn’t it? The one who only does dried-up research and runs away from real patients? He’d marry you tomorrow and bottle you up and label you like one of his experiments.’

Madeleine smiled. ‘Peter’s all right, Bobo. He’s interesting, at least, and doesn’t talk about land laws and foxes, or stupid village gossip. He’s been nice too while
Maman
’s been unwell – coming round in his car and making me go out for some fresh air sometimes. And never putting me under any pressure. That’s pretty human behaviour, isn’t it?’

‘Not very passionate though, either, is it?’ Robert grimaced. ‘You surely wouldn’t marry him, Lena?’

‘No. You can rest assured. I don’t want to marry him or anyone. I just want to get away from here. If all else fails I can get a job as a secretary. That was
Maman
’s only success with the elders as far as I’m concerned – getting them to fund my studies. So I’m employable if only I can get away. But I don’t have a bean to get started with.’

‘Fund your studies!’ snorted Robert. ‘Is that what you call it? With your brain it should have been you at Oxford, not me. And all they would allow you to do were secretarial studies! You’re not going to live any life at all as a secretary. You should run away to Paris, that’s what. I was thinking about it on the drive here. You should go to
Tante
Louise. You’d get a real life there – the kind of life you’ll never have here.’

Madeleine could only gape at him. What was he saying? Paris? She tried to digest the idea. He might have been suggesting she go to the moon, for all she could imagine it.

She looked again at Robert, his intense eyes all lit up.
Oh, my God, France
, she thought, and the idea was suddenly electrifying.

‘Could I?’ she questioned, more to herself than to him. ‘Could I really go to
Tante
Louise? But how? I can’t live without money, and if I don’t work I only have what Grandfather gives me.’

‘I don’t know. We need to write to
Tante
Louise. Maybe if she invites you the elders will stump up the cash to send you there.’

‘Are you joking? After
Maman
went to Paris as a girl and disgraced the family by running off with Papa? They’ve hardly even communicated since, the elders and the Paris family. They blame
Tante
Louise for everything.’

Robert took his time replying. ‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘So you find the fare somehow and then get a job in Paris. There must be people there who want a bilingual secretary. You could make more money there than here, surely? And Lena …’ Robert’s voice took on a new urgent edge.

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe once you are in France you could find out something about us. About Papa. Maybe
Tante
Louise can help answer our questions about him. You could even go south to Vermeilla and find Uncle Philippe.’

Madeleine stared at him blankly, her head spinning. So many possibilities opened up before her, but it took such a leap of faith to believe them achievable. Robert had a child’s imagination, unlike her. They’d sapped her imagination, the elders, with their restrictions and inertia.

But as she looked again into Robert’s impulsive, hopeful face, it came to her with complete certainty she would leave, and that if
Tante
Louise would have her, she would go to France. But the money. How to get the money? She looked down at her mother for inspiration, and was surprised by a smile on her face. The merest whisper of a smile, in sleep.

Elise Garriga died early the following morning, without regaining consciousness. A rather timid sun was nudging over the horizon, and Robert had opened the curtains and the window, to the nurse’s dismay, so that a fresh breeze caressed her cheeks and hands. Grandfather and Grandmama had visited the night before, after dinner, and Madeleine had been surprised to see a rim of tears in her grandfather’s eyes as he gazed down at his daughter, and held her hand in the sombre gloom.

But as day broke only Robert and Madeleine were with their mother, and when she stopped breathing the change was so subtle it took them time to realise that she had gone. Before they called the nurse, they unearthed her favourite flowered bedspread from a cupboard, and put it back on the bed, and brought the vase of roses from the dressing table to the bedside, so that their mother slept as
she had always slept, surrounded by flowers.

‘Say your goodbyes now, Lena,’ Robert had said, as they stood together looking at Elise for the last time alone. ‘Her burial won’t have much to do with us, if I know Grandfather. She has peace now for the first time in years, but they won’t give her much peace from now until she’s finally in the ground.’

Robert stayed until after the funeral. It was strange to be burying
Maman
from the gloomy, Gothic village church which she had refused to attend ever since her return to England. This was another aberration for which Grandfather had blamed the atheist Luis Garriga, but now the English were fully reclaiming Elise, burying her in the local churchyard after a decently low-Anglican service, followed by sandwiches at the house, in the large, musty, front drawing room. The funeral and reception, and all the condolence visits which had preceded it, were a dreary trial dominated by the rural genteel, their faces set in platitudes, their feet in sensible shoes. The rector hovered around them, benignly haughty, drinking sherry in painstaking minuscule sips. Having barely known Elise, he focused on his more amenable parishioners, talking in soft tones about the prospects for the summer weather and the best dates for the pruning of roses.

Four figures enlivened the day, descended from London to give some family representation. An uncle, aunt and two cousins from Grandfather’s family, they came from another world, from the world of restaurants and cinema and theatre and London shops. From the world of work and colleagues and gossip and movement.
Grandfather had climbed further in society than his brothers, but had paid heavily with his middle-class soul. His brother’s son, a prosperous trader, mocked gently the studied gentility of life at Forsham, while his two daughters talked of rock and roll and Marlon Brando, of cabriolets and American fashion. Forsham society looked on, bemused, and Grandfather glowered as his beloved Robert blossomed. Cousins Cicely and Eve enfolded Robert in their casual sophistication, and made clear their admiration of his charms, rendering him almost sheepish by their side. Cicely had a particular radiance, with her dark hair loosely curling inside the enormous raised collar of her tight-waisted jacket, and her slender pencil skirt skimming her calves. She lived with another girl in an apartment in Chelsea, and worked for a property agency.

‘Not much of a job, really,’ she laughed, ‘And just a tiny apartment, you know, very modern – such small rooms they give you these days. But it’s so close to everything I want in London, and it’s so
dusty
to live at home with the parents, don’t you agree?’

Madeleine could only murmur in what she hoped was easy agreement. For her Cicely and Eve were a revelation, they were so vibrant and pleasure-seeking, people whose conversation bubbled and who wanted to amuse and be amused. The way they embraced modern fashions and ideas was electrifying Robert and shocking Grandfather, but for Madeleine it held out a simple glimmer of promise. Could she be like this, she wondered, if she made it to Paris? It seemed a million miles away. Get the funeral over
first, and finish sorting
Maman
’s affairs, then think about the future. Cicely had thrown her an easy invitation to stay ‘any time you are in London’.

Madeleine also overheard her saying to Robert, ‘Your sister has such sultry looks, so sexy and Mediterranean. It’s the eyes, of course, and that amazing mouth. I’m so jealous. Does she live buried down here? No boyfriend or anything? Surely she needs more than this?’

How right you are
, thought Madeleine.
How very right you are
. To hear herself described as sultry and sexy was a little mind-blowing.

Peter was at the funeral, of course. He was a good-looking young man, tall and very slender with long, elegant hands and a face which Grandmama described as being ‘full of refinement’. He came up to Madeleine while she was talking to Cicely, and it amused her to see the play between him and her London cousin, Cicely interested and full of smiles, Peter quite ruthlessly dismissive. He was the type, Madeleine thought, who pursued single-mindedly whatever was his current objective, and didn’t even notice what was in the periphery. It made him successful, but rather narrow of vision.

Right now his objective was clearly Madeleine, not some shallow London cousin.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t call round before the funeral,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘I’ve been away – a conference – I only heard yesterday about your mother’s death. I hope the end was as easy as possible, for her and for you.’

‘She went peacefully, yes, thanks, and Robert was with me.’

‘I’m glad it was peaceful.’ Peter’s hand shifted slightly in
hers, his fingers tightening slightly as he held her gaze. ‘It’ll take you some time to adjust.’

Was he calculating how long, wondered Madeleine? A month, two months, before he could make his move? She wasn’t sure what he saw in her, but something had settled in his mind that she was a suitable wife. He certainly wasn’t passionate – Robert was right about that. But he was keen. She wondered what he would say if she asked him why. All of a sudden she wanted him gone. She wanted to talk to Cicely again – happy, frivolous Cicely.

Let me out, oh please, God, get me out of here!
The thought was so vivid she wondered if she had spoken aloud. She drew her hand away from Peter, and muttered her excuses as she turned to attend to other guests. He followed her.

‘I’ll call to see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can go for a drive.’ His voice was gentle, but confident and dominant.

‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘Maybe later in the week, though. Robert is still here, you see.’

‘Yes, I can understand you want to spend time together. I’ll telephone and find out when he has gone.’

The words were fine, but the faintly smug tone was unbearable. Madeleine simply nodded and made her escape, looking for Robert and finding him happily surrounded by the cousins. As he and Cicely turned to smile at her, at once the day seemed brighter again, and she could even imagine her mother taking comfort. These cousins were perhaps shallow, but they were from the world she yearned
for. Their laughter was a comfort and their insouciance for now seemed infinitely more real than Peter’s careful sympathy.

The next day she wrote to
Tante
Louise. It was the first time in her life she had ever written to her. As she sat with her pen poised above Grandmama’s best inlaid paper, she conjured up a picture of the tiny Parisian woman, with her deeply lined, very mobile face and expressive kohl-lined eyes, topped by expertly dyed hair tied back in a heavy French chignon, and the whole head perched on a bird-like neck which seemed too thin and fragile to support her. The last time Madeleine had seen her was in London, when Louise and her daughter Solange came on a visit, and Madeleine had gone with her mother and grandmother to tea with them at the Ritz. Grandfather had, of course, refused to come, and also refused to invite them to Forsham. They’d had the most elegant English tea, she remembered, and
Tante
Louise seemed to dance verbally among them, while Grandmama rigidly tried to control the conversation. But after a while, Louise had woven a spell over Grandmama as much as the rest of them, and she had unbent, and begun talking hungrily about the old days in Paris. Louise was Grandmama’s cousin, a few years younger than her, but they had partied their way through the twenties together in Paris, in the days when they were the closest of cousins, before
Maman
’s disastrous visit in 1935.

Madeleine had watched Grandmama’s transformation with wide eyes; this elderly woman emerged from a tired
life in rural England, her soul taking flight once more under the influence of the little, wrinkled Frenchwoman with incessantly mobile hands and a tantalising smile. Louise was quite simply bewitching. Even
Maman
had come alive with this woman she had always known as her beloved
Tante
, and gained the confidence to talk about her summer in Paris, for once forgetting the cloak of shame which her parents had thrown over the whole episode. For
Maman
the summer had been a turning point in her life, and a period of liberation. Solange and she had gone to parties and fashion shows, theatre premieres and the ballet, part of a fashionable Paris set following a determined social scene which defied Europe’s financial and political troubles. They had been girls together, and for a while
Maman
had been a girl again that afternoon in London.

At fifteen, Madeleine couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother like this, so happy and free. Later that day, as they returned to Forsham by train, as
Tante
Louise’s personality receded and Grandmama became her normal controlling self, Madeleine watched with a sense of loss as her mother withdrew inexorably again into herself. She had a sudden burning vision of her mother in earlier years, and thought that just as she had stored away jealously the memories of moments from her childhood, of her mother laughing alongside her father, so she must store the memory of
Maman
’s extraordinary blossoming this afternoon. But at fifteen she hadn’t imagined herself writing this letter to Louise nearly seven years later.

The letter written, and quickly posted before she could worry about her words or what she was doing, Madeleine had nothing to do but wait for an answer, breaking the idleness of the imposed period of mourning at Forsham by frenetic walks on her own through the Berkshire countryside, largely soaked by a spell of prolonged rain which sluiced through raincoats. Madeleine welcomed the rain which spattered her face under her rain hat, and tingled her ungloved fingers. It was a sign of life, a world of sensation outside the dead interior of her grandparents’ house. What she would do if she didn’t hear from
Tante
Louise she could no longer imagine. The yearned-for letter had become her link of hope to the future.

And when the letter finally arrived it was so simple, so astonishingly simple.
Tante
Louise replied,

As she read the words Madeleine surprised herself in floods of tears. Here were people who had loved
Maman
, and who had known and appreciated her father. ‘I remember you being born,’
Tante
Louise had written. Suddenly Madeleine felt a hunger she could hardly contain for this acceptance and belonging. Whatever happened now
she would definitely go to Paris, with or without her grandparents’ approval.

But first she had to run that particular gauntlet, whatever the outcome. She just wanted it to happen now. Soon her grandparents would receive their own letter from Paris. She could barely eat and certainly not sleep as she waited for the storm to break.

Tante
’s letter to Grandmama arrived the following day. Madeleine saw it arrive, but at first all was quiet. No one said a word to her, and by the end of the day she realised that the elders were going to ignore the letter completely. She could appreciate the strategy, but her need to bring the issue into the open was now stronger than any fear of confrontation. So she waited until lunchtime the following day, as they sat over a beef casserole, and with hammering heart she brought it up herself, pouring the words out in one breath.