Goodbye Again (5 page)

‘I’ve had just that happen with several people in my life,’ I said. ‘It’s an old trick. People have to damn your own fairly honest character, so they can survive with their own pretty dishonest one. Then they can throw you overboard without a qualm and stay secure on their comfy, cagey raft of lies. I’ve sometimes felt I should have joined them there for an easier life.’  

‘No. You can’t do that. It’s no use trying to be an apple tree when you’re a mulberry bush.’  

There was silence, with the swell rocking the boat gently and the anchor chain grating softly against the stern.

‘Listen.’ She spoke up. ‘You said you wanted to explore the Rhône Valley, and maybe on to Italy? I’m going down that way for this book on olives and oil. I was going anyway, before my father started sinking. We could go together?’  

I considered the matter, unconcerned, as if she’d suggested we take a trip to the local supermarket.  

‘What would I do?’  

‘The Modigliani nude,’ she said at once. ‘You said it might be at the heart of the whole business, the connection between my father and yours.’  

‘Yes, I did. I do.’  

‘So maybe we could find out about it together? Who it belonged to originally, how it got to be hidden in your father’s attic, and so on.’  

She smiled. And so on, I thought. That was likely to be the real problem, but I wasn’t going to turn down her suggestion on that account. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps find out who the woman in the painting was. Though I don’t know quite where one would start.’  

‘The archives in the Louvre? – or the Musée d’Orsay?’  

That provocative smile again. Like Katie’s, when she wanted me to do something with her. Paris, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay – that had been the first trip Katie and I had made abroad together, five years before, in early summer. And here was almost her double, beckoning me along the same path. Up the garden path? To a dead end? That’s how it had ended with Katie.  

Well, damn it, Katie was dead and Elsa was alive and I would go to Paris with her. So I said, ‘Yes, start in Paris. I’ve an old friend there, an American art collector – Harry Broughton. Knows all about French paintings, painters, the Impressionists, and the School of Paris – Utrillo, Modigliani, Soutine, all those wild boys. He’d help.’  

‘So, it’s an idea then?’  

‘It’s a good idea.’

‘You could take your stuff with you, and start painting again. You painters have portable easels, don’t you? Parasols and so on?’  

‘Oh yes, and smocks and berets and we hit the absinthe and cut our ears off when things aren’t going well.’ Silence, until we both smiled. ‘But yes, I could bring my stuff with me.’  

‘Plenty to paint, if you do the olive groves with me.’  

‘Trouble is, I tend to concentrate on the nude.’  

‘I see,’ she said, nodding. ‘Now it’s clear. I thought you were just a lecher, the way you looked at me at the reception and when we had coffee.’  

‘I am, but I like to paint the women first.’  

Again, I expected her disapproval. Instead, she kept looking at me, smiling slightly in the hot silence. ‘Shall we swim?’ she asked suddenly.  

‘I didn’t bring a costume.’  

‘Nor did I. But it doesn’t matter. No one’s looking.’  

We swam, just in our underwear, off the end of the boat, between the stern and the rocks, under the cliffs, in the deep blue water, with the seaweed swaying over the barnacles fifteen feet down. We dived, alternately, a froth of bubbles rising to the surface, shooting up like rockets from the depths into the bright heat.  

Now I saw her body properly: the almost unnatural splay at her waist, fine rounded thighs, sturdy legs, small feet, the flash of flattened, water-soaked dark hair, glistening in the sun, as she shot up from the sea like a missile. Her body, as I’d thought, was very like Katie’s.  

Afterwards, both of us drying on the deck of the boat, flat out, eyes closed, she asked, ‘That person you were talking about, who had to do you down so they could throw you overboard – I assume it was a woman. Your wife?’  

‘Yes, and another later woman, the most recent one.’  

‘I don’t want to pry.’

‘Why not? Supposed to be honest, aren’t we?’  

‘I’m good at being honest about others, not so much with myself.’ She stayed as she was, eyes closed, stretched out. ‘It’s a relief, hearing you talk like that,’ she said. ‘Because rather the same sort of thing happened to me.’

‘Your husband?’  

‘No, that was something else, years ago. No, by a woman I loved, in New York.’  

‘I see.’ I didn’t see. I saw only disappointment and surprise. The last thing I’d have guessed of her. Yet maybe I should have seen it. There was a tomboyish air about her, like Katie, who had once told me she’d liked to have been a man.  

‘I’m sorry,’ I said at last. ‘It’s tough, being given the boot by someone you love. Worse still when they invent reasons for it.’  

‘Well, that’s reason enough for the chucking, isn’t it? – that they have to invent an excuse for it, a lie, like we were saying, because there’s usually some other reason in their lives. They usually chuck you for their own problems – not yours. That’s what happened with me, though she prettied it up by saying that she had to be free of me, to live.’ She paused, opening her eyes.  

‘My friend – the last woman I was with – wanted to be free of me, not to live,’ I said.  

‘I don’t follow.’  

‘A week ago, near my barn in the Cotswolds where I live, when we last saw each other, she dumped me, then drove away and killed herself.’  

Elsa sat up, startled. ‘She what?’  

‘Drove into a tree. The car caught fire, she wouldn’t get out. Burnt herself alive.’  

Elsa shook her head. ‘God, I’m sorry – that’s terrible. I still don’t follow.’  

‘Nor do I.’

Elsa bowed her head, arms resting on her hunched-up knees. Her skin was dry now, and bronzed all over. I wanted to paint her. Looking at her, as she sat on the deck hunched up, in a graceful combination of angled and paralleled arms and legs, face hidden, head bowed between her knees, the crown of damp dark hair, all quite still, frozen in the sun – I wanted to paint her like she was now, there and the-+n.  

The real inspiration in all my paint-and-turpentine business is this sense of excitement, in looking at a woman, and falling in love with her body, and knowing that whatever happens later, in loving or leaving, you’re going to capture her body, its contours and colours, and the thoughts in her face, and all the sex you may or may not have shared with her – and all the details of her bones, all the shapes and slopes that you were closest to, most intimate and happy with, that the whole complex thrill, whatever the loss or gain in reality, will always be there on canvas, incorruptible.  

Elsa stood up finally. She looked out to sea. ‘Olives and the oil … It’s lucky I write. And that you paint.’  

‘When I did paint. I think Katie – that was her name – was jealous of my painting. I sensed it, it was something she couldn’t do, and wanted to do, and control, like everything else in her life.’  

‘I’ve wondered if that was Martha’s problem too – my
cookbooks
. She was younger than me, a successful attorney, but who came to think she should be writing smart-ass sexy novels about the law and the cops – but she never had that boring gift, and she knew it. So she took it out on me, and my cookbooks. But maybe I’m wrong about Martha being jealous of my work, and there’s no accounting for it.’  

Silence, until I said, ‘There is accounting for it. There’s accounting for everything and everybody, if you work hard enough at it, in a book or a painting. Or at that Modigliani nude,’ I added.  

‘Yes.’ She seemed doubtful.

‘Hey, you know something? We could go straight to Paris on this boat.’  

‘To Paris – how?’  

‘Down the Irish Sea here, and across the channel to Le Havre, then up the Seine to Paris.’  

‘Could we?’ She was pleased, like a child.  

‘Of course we could! In this good weather, no trouble. Three or four days. She’s a fast boat and I’m a good sailor. I was going to join the British navy once.’  

‘All right then, yes!’ she said urgently, eyes glittering.  

Standing up, semi-naked in the bright light, she dusted herself down, patting her bronzed thighs. It was strange how easy and informal she was, wearing hardly any clothes, with a man she barely knew; as if she’d known me for years and I was her lover.  

Katie had been just the same, quite unashamed, from the word go. But then I had been her lover almost from the beginning, for she had made the running with me. I’d liked her – her
reticence
, her independent, secretive air, the original talk and dry wit. And I’d liked the look of her even more. The sense of a fine body, sturdy and sexy, beneath her clothes. I’d never thought to become her lover. She seemed too prim and proper for that. A decorous woman, polite, virtuous, honourable – and married.  

How wrong even I can be about people.  

About a month after we’d met, she said she’d been given two tickets for the little theatre in Chipping Norton, not far from the riding school and my old barn. Would I like to come with her? I picked her up in my car. On the way back afterwards, as if in a quite unconscious gesture, she’d put her hand on my knee. She said nothing, and I did nothing, until she’d said, ‘There’s a track off the road a mile ahead.’ It was the track leading up to my barn. I turned into it, drove past the Phillip’s farm, stopped the car, and kissed her chastely, her face faintly illuminated by the dashboard lights. She
reached forward, holding me, wanting to kiss again, relaxed but with an eagerness I could feel all over her body. She took my hand, putting it on her knee, then lifted the hem of her skirt and placed my hand on her naked knee, encouraging it further, up her thigh, where soon I found she wasn’t wearing any knickers. We’d made love, her skirt around her neck – passionate, furious, fulfilling – as if neither of us had had it in years, which was true.  

I’d asked her if she was on the pill. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on it almost from the day we first met, wanting you to screw me, and wondering why the hell you wouldn’t do anything about it.’ The surprising sexual coarseness behind the prim-and-proper façade. I ‘made love’. She ‘screwed’. It was an exciting idea to begin with. I’d no idea of the price I’d have to pay for it in the end.  

‘Would you like to see the admiralty charts in the wheelhouse?’ I asked Elsa, ‘How we’ll get to Paris?’  

She nodded. I stood up. ‘There is one thing, though, one obvious point,’ I said, ‘which we should think about before we go. If your father was able to tell you that you should meet me, that I would “explain” everything – why didn’t he tell you what it was that I was to explain to you himself? He must have known the connection between him and my father. So why didn’t he just tell you?’  

‘Yes, I’ve thought of that, and I don’t know why.’  

‘If he didn’t tell you, more than likely it was because it was something unpleasant.’  

‘But what, though? What?’ She came towards me, anguished.  

I was just going to tell her about the list of priceless pictures and objets d’art, the inventory I’d found in the Burges toilet cabinet, but something stopped me. It could wait until we got back to Killiney, or to Paris. She turned and started to get dressed, picking up her bits and pieces. I got dressed myself and we went into the wheelhouse to look at the charts.  

‘Ben,’ she said, turning to me, suddenly alive and buoyant. ‘It’ll
be great to go straight to Paris on this boat! No one will ever know, It’ll be such a good secret.’  

I didn’t know what she meant, but was happy as she was with the idea, so I didn’t ask.  

I thought I was going to France to find out about the Modigliani nude, and have a good time with Elsa. I was kidding myself. I was going to Paris because of the life not lived with Katie – to try to live it with Elsa.  

When we got back that evening, and Elsa had gone home, I felt sufficiently encouraged about things to get out Katie’s journal.  

I glanced through the pages. Quite a bit of it was about us, but whatever good thoughts she had written about us were usually cancelled at once by doubts, questions, criticisms, of herself, then latterly of me – these grim reflections set round the memorabilia of dead wild flowers, herbs and leaves picked up on our walks and trips. A collection of withered stalks and petals, which had
punctuated
the bright days of our affair, now interleaved with a text of despair.  

I skipped through half a dozen pages before I began to read properly towards the end of the journal, a passage dated about two months before, in that fast, sprawling handwriting of hers that used to make my heart race, in earlier times when she had written to me; short notes saying something quite inconsequential, or that she loved me.  

‘Cheerfulness keeps breaking out!’ He said to me after we’d made love last night. Again trying to persuade me of ‘us’, as a pair with a real future together, though I know how very far he is from being cheerful. The hurt to his idealism – I’ve felt it just as deeply as he has – in wanting to live, to be with, to marry me. This is greater than ever in him now, since he keeps it so firmly suppressed. In any case I want to stop his pain for ever. And mine. And the only way to do that is to stop ‘us’, so that I can’t hurt him anymore –
knowing I can’t properly love him now, that I’ve been pretending love with him, almost from the start. Pretending happiness. I know this now, because I’m with the only person I don’t have to pretend with. With him there is a real me, which he evokes – a joyous, soaring, voyaging me…

I couldn’t go on. I was sitting in the drawing room, looking out on the last of the evening light on the bay. Mrs Mullins had cleared away the funeral drinks long before. I went to look for them. After a whiskey I read the passage again. Katie had prided herself on her honesty, but she’d been honest only when it suited her, and she was certainly fooling herself here.

She’d loved me all right, fully and honestly, for three years. You can fake pleasure in the act of love, but not the look of love in a person’s face. You can fake it in a letter, or in words, but not in a tone of voice, or in the eyes. I’d seen and heard her love in all these things, and I’d felt it just as much in bed with her, when she took my hand, falling asleep, fingers entwined. How her love was there even in sleep, when her body gravitated towards mine, loving me unconsciously, when she moved into my arms, hair askew.