Dead Romantic (12 page)

‘But you
can.'
The girl was suddenly insistent. ‘You can help us. That's why I wanted to see you.'

Madeleine looked puzzled.

‘Look, you know how I used to come and stay with you, down in your house. . .?'

‘Yes. You haven't done it so much recently, I may say.' Madeleine could not resist this expression of pique.

‘I know, but Mum still wouldn't think anything of it if I said I was going to spend the night at your place.'

Light dawned on Madeleine, and it was not a wholly pleasing light. ‘You mean you want me to be an alibi for you, to help you to deceive Aggie? I'm to say that you're staying with me, while in fact you're off in some hotel with Terry?'

Laura avoided her aunt's eyes as she spoke. ‘I was meaning even more than that. I was meaning that I actually should be in your house.'

‘With Terry?'

Laura nodded, her eyes still downcast.

Madeleine let the silence linger. Her first reaction to Laura's suggestion was affront, annoyance that her niece had fixed up this meeting with such a cold-bloodedly practical intention. It had not been a sign of any
rapprochement
between the two; Laura had merely wanted something and hoped to use her aunt to get it.

But, as the pique receded, Madeleine saw other possibilities in the situation. First, there was the appeal of intrigue. Her role in the proceedings (which she still saw as that of Friar Laurence rather than Pandarus) was capable of considerable histrionic development, and she relished playing the scenes to which it might lead.

Also the situation offered her power over Laura, so dependent now on her aunt's decision.

‘Laura,' she said, ending the silence unhelpfully as they rose to collect their earthenware mugs of decaffeinated coffee, ‘I will think about it.'

And in the evening, as she lay back in her bath and did think about it, Madeleine felt good. She had got Laura back. Laura needed her. Even though what Laura needed her for was something purely practical, perhaps sordid, the dependence had been re-established.

And Madeleine also had Bernard. Bernard, who moved her so strangely and whom she seemed to have known all her life.

Her muscles relaxed. The warm water melted away the familiar ache in her back, the bloated feeling of the day receded, and her body began again its comforting cycle of blood, as it had, regularly and without interruption, some three hundred times before in her adult life.

That same evening, Paul Grigson was alone in the house. He hadn't been to the hospital, but he had phoned the ward-sister and received the information that his mother was sleeping, but fine, there was nothing to worry about.

Paul felt his freedom trickling away. He had had the house to himself and not taken advantage of it. He shouldn't have behaved so badly with Sharon Wilkinson last time. She wasn't Madeleine and never would be, but he was further advanced with her than with any other girl, and he had to lose his virginity somehow, with someone. Maybe if he had invited her round for the evening, with no one else there. . .

The idea brought him an instant erection. He went up to his bedroom and, lifting the top of his divan, fumbled through the folded blankets for the stock of books he kept there. If he was going to do it again, at least he'd build up a decent fantasy.

While he was looking through the books for a suitable body on which to graft Sharon's face, the doorbell rang.

Guiltily, he dropped the divan lid and went on to the landing. Then, struck by doubt, he returned to his bedroom to check that he really had put the books out of sight. He had.

When he opened the front door, he was confronted by Tony Ashton, slouched against the frame, holding a video-box in his hand.

‘What do you want? Why are you here?'

Tony grinned. ‘Bob said your mother was away for a day or two. Got another hot video here. Thought you might fancy seeing it.'

‘No, thank you.' Paul moved to close the door, but Tony's foot prevented him.

‘Why, you got someone in there?'

‘No.'

‘Shagging that Sharon Wilkinson, are you?'

‘No, I'm not.'

Tony's grin grew broader. ‘No, you're not, are you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I took her out Tuesday.'

‘So? I don't care.'

‘No. No, you don't, do you?'

Paul made another attempt to close the door, but Tony's foot remained fixed.

‘Telling me all about you, she was. Not that there's much to tell, is there?' Tony Ashton laughed harshly. ‘Ever thought of joining Virgins Anonymous, Grigson?'

This time Paul pulled the door back to swing it, and Tony prudently withdrew his foot before the slam.

But the letter-box clacked open and Paul could not shut out the voice that followed him along the hall. ‘You should have had that Sharon Wilkinson. Blew your chance, you did. Take my word for it, Grigson, you missed out on quite a tasty little fuck there.'

Paul crumpled, trembling, at the foot of the stairs.

Since meeting Bernard, Madeleine had decided that she was going to sacrifice her long-preserved virginity. Or it might be more accurate to say that Madeleine had decided to sacrifice her long-preserved virginity and then met Bernard. He had arrived at the right time in her life and, since he passed almost all of the tests by which Madeleine judged men, she had therefore decided that he was to be the recipient of her largesse.

The tests that she applied to potential lovers were mostly social and intellectual. Looks came into it, and Bernard's height, thin frame and pained brown eyes easily qualified him there. The main physical quality that Madeleine required in a man was that he should look ‘sensitive'. On that scale he scored highly.

Socially, the most important component of a suitable man was his voice, and here again Bernard passed the test. Madeleine's antennae were delicately tuned to catch the slightest nuance of ‘commonness' in any area of human behaviour, but especially in the voice. The voice was one of the first things she noticed about people. Keith's was a constant reminder of the gulf between Aggie and her latest husband. It was in part their voices that endeared Julian Garrett to Madeleine and made her feel pity for Paul Grigson.

But Bernard Hopkins had no problem with this stringent oral examination. Public school and Cambridge might have provided the polish required, though his deep, soft speech sounded so natural that it probably derived from being brought up by the right sort of parents. (Madeleine, as yet, knew little of his early background. Their conversation, when it dwelt on the past at all, tended to centre on the poignantly doomed relationship between Madeleine Severn and John Kaczmarek.)

Intellectually, too, Bernard passed with flying colours. His Upper Second in English from Cambridge seemed perfectly to complement Madeleine's Oxford Third in the same subject (won, let it be said, in the face of terrible emotional upheaval after John's death). But Bernard did not only have paper qualifications. He was still prepared – indeed happy – to sit for hours talking literature, discussing poems, listening to Madeleine reading them over a cup of coffee, for all the world as if the years had not passed and their student days were continuing on a permanent lease.

This was very comforting to Madeleine, who had found that, though her acquaintance in Brighton was varied and artistic, she had met few people who seemed to be on her intellectual level. Many were simply unwilling to talk about literature, and those who did had an irritating tendency to introduce into the conversation irrelevancies like contemporary authors or comparisons with other media. It was a huge intellectual relief to encounter a mind like Bernard's, which shared her own views and priorities on the subject of literature, and was prepared to listen to them at length.

The one detail she knew about Bernard's life which might have put off other women – the fact that he was married – seemed to Madeleine, upon consideration, a bonus rather than a disadvantage. For a start, it gave their love a tragic dimension. The mingling of Pain and Pleasure, which she so emphasised in her teaching, was immediately present. However much joy Madeleine and Bernard might derive from the relationship, at the back of their minds must always be the awareness of the potential hurt it was inflicting on his poor, crippled wife. The presence of Shirley's distant shadow also set boundaries round Madeleine and Bernard's life together. She had lived alone for a long time and, with one of those intuitive flashes of self-knowledge that occasionally came to her, recognised that she might have difficulty in adjusting to the presence of a man who could be around all the time. Most important, the fact of Bernard's marriage implied experience, which, together with his gentleness of manner, suggested he would be the ideal instrument of Madeleine's sexual initiation.

The existence of the unknown Shirley also gave the relationship, for Madeleine, a
frisson
of excitement. She liked to feel that she lived a life of mystery, that she had secrets, that there was more to Madeleine Severn than met the eye. But why, given her long history of abstinence – or at least of non-consummation – had Madeleine decided that this ‘marriage of true minds' should take on a physical dimension? There had been plenty of men who had attracted her before; and plenty more who had tried their luck at seducing her, encountering initially polite, but finally intransigent, refusal. Why had Bernard been selected as the one to be favoured with Madeleine's rich gift?

The main reason was simply chronological. Madeleine had nursed and stored many of her fantasies so long that, when she examined them, even her indulgent eye could not help noticing that they were full of holes, as if some moth of the imagination had invaded their privacy and feasted on them. The greatest fantasy, of the doomed love affair with John Kaczmarek, had suffered most, and now, when she held that one up to the light, it was almost transparent and she could hardly decipher the outlines of its pattern. Though that great love was still precious, and still probably the most important event of her life, she could no longer claim to receive much support from it.

Other fantasies also looked a little threadbare in the cold light of day. The image of Madeleine Severn the
femme fatale
, the mysterious and unattainable woman for whom men lost their reason and committed acts of international folly, now did not even convince its creator. The fact that she could light a spark in Bernard should be particularly valued in the context of few other fires even smouldering.

She had also come, slowly, to acknowledge the power of sex. Probably in this process of recognition the most important factor had been the change in Laura. The estrangement of her niece had at first puzzled Madeleine. For a time she had dismissed the idea that it was a symptom of the girl's finding her own independent identity, and certainly dismissed the idea that that identity had a sexual dimension. But gradually the notion took root and grew into a suspicion, a suspicion whose reality had been confirmed at their recent lunch.

The knowledge that her niece was enjoying (albeit in the backs of cars and on golf-courses) an active sex-life had a complex effect on Madeleine. Partly she experienced a slight shock, as a mother might, but which she, in her accepted role as liberated aunt, knew that she must not express. Also, again as a mother might, she felt a growing gulf between herself and the younger woman and, with this, the need to assert her own sexual identity against the challenge of youth.

A mother whose daughter drifts away from her may feel pain, but at least she has had the experience of bearing and bringing up the child. A mother-substitute whose daughter-substitute drifts away is left empty, and Madeleine was forced to recognise her own childlessness.

This recognition ripped a large hole in the fabric of another of Madeleine's carefully folded and perfumed fantasies. She had always seen herself, not only as an extra mother to Laura, but also, in time, as a real mother. She had seen herself nursing a tiny baby, giving herself to another, imparting herself to a new individual, shaping that individual to her own outlines, regenerating a new Madeleine. In these fantasies there was very rarely a man involved, except as a distant, shadowy presence; the child was always a girl; and always, even at the moment of birth, she had red-gold hair.

While Madeleine knew she had Laura, she had been content to nurse this fantasy, indulge it as she lay in a warm bath, cosset it as she took a solitary walk along the sea-front. The fact that it was only a fantasy gave her no pain. But now Laura had demonstrated her independence, Madeleine's need to make the fantasy real was strong. And, like any woman of her age, Madeleine was aware of the pressures of time. Every month she was reminded not only of her reproductive capability, but also of the time-limit which nature had set upon it. The years were slipping away, and increasingly she needed that baby.

The coincidence of all these feelings with her meeting Bernard had made Madeleine decide to give up her virginity. But it was not a completely cold-blooded decision. She was in love with him. He stirred her in a way that no man before had done. There was a chemistry between them, a kind of chemistry which could only culminate in a physical explosion.

But it suited both to move slowly. Though Madeleine spoke always in terms of grand passions, loves at first sight and sweepings off feet, she was in reality slow to accept change. She always needed time to adjust.

Bernard, too, mindful of past failures, had no wish to rush headlong into another. He applied his own tests to Madeleine, assessing her as she had assessed him, and, though his tests were more emotional than social or intellectual, she passed, just as he had.

But, in spite of her suitability, his feelings for her troubled him. Strong emotions had always troubled him, and what he now felt was the strongest that had hit him for many years. He had contained his life, as most people do, within walls of compromise, evasions and half-truths, and, though he could recognise that the way he lived was incomplete, at least he had achieved something with which he could cope.