Patrick Parker's Progress (36 page)

The exercise became her, the boredom of the city had lifted and the air pinkened her cheeks. The young skiing instructor whispered things and held her arm or touched her leg a little too lingeringly. Nobody seemed to mind, so why should she? It was enjoyable being with someone of her own age. Edwin looked on. He might smile, but at night he warned her: 'Remember "My Last Duchess",' he said. And now she understood. It made her flesh creep - like something out of a Hitchcock movie. 'You mean he murdered her? Just for some imagined dishonour?'

'Oh no,' said Edwin, laughing. 'The Duke of Ferrara didn't murder her
...'

'Well, that's a relief,' said Audrey.

'He had someone else do the deed. It is the lot of a mistress to be at the master's mercy, you surely see that?'

Audrey had no idea if Edwin was joking or not. But it reminded her where the power lay. Youth might be hers but the power and the pleasure lay with him.

On one or two of the days, instead of skiing, they walked, shopped a little, dined at the Eagle Club, drove into Rougemont, took a hot-air balloon over the snowy range and tobogganed near the Schonreid. She pinched herself. Impossible to imagine the Audrey from London doing any of this. The dream was continuing and it was lovely, lovely, lovely. From a distance she saw Princess Margaret and her group, and she saw Jackie Kennedy and her party. 'Ah, the merry widow,' said Edwin, and bowed low. Audrey sent her mother a card the very next day, underlining the names of both Princess Margaret and Jackie Kennedy. It was fairyland all right.

One lazy morning, when she could scarcely stop yawning and he called her his dormouse, which was just about right, they were due to take a sleigh ride and stay overnight at a little inn above Zweisimmen.

He woke her. She rolled over and went back to sleep. In the end they left in a rush and she was still half awake as she snuggled up to Edwin during the ride. Through sleepy eyes she watched the beauties of the journey and felt very loved and very cherished, even if she was only a mistress. The next morning she discovered that she had not brought her little foil packet of pills and she also remembered that she had not taken one the day before either. Well. What was the harm? She decided to say nothing and take three the next day when they returned to the Palace Hotel. Such, she thought in later years, was the extent of her naivety, and the last of it.

Six weeks later she realised that something was not quite right and she called the doctor, who came and examined her. She had been very sick for a couple of days - what could it possibly be? The doctor telephoned Edwin and they both came to her apartment. She was pregnant. A wonderful warmth ran through her. With child. I am so happy, she thought. She waited for Edwin's rapture. For the first time she saw that he could be as ugly as a thwarted child himself.
‘I
said no children and I meant no children,' he said, stony-faced. 'Dr Claude will see to it.'

Then she wept. First real tears since Patrick. She was aware of that amid all the bucketings. It could not be happening. To be told to grow up? She had never felt smaller. The days before the appointment at the clinic were spent weeping. Surely, surely he could not mean it? She tried asking him again.

'If you have a child
’
he said, 'you will not have me. I have a wife and I have a son and I have a daughter; that is as it should be. I want no more. I never said we would have children. I have been honest with you. You must be honest with me, now. Does our bargain stand?'

Impossible to say that she had never believed in it because she certainly did now.

He softened a little, almost became Edwin again.
‘I
should be more sorry to lose you than you might believe at this moment. You must decide.' He hesitated - then picked up his hat and left the apartment. Audrey continued to cry.

Afterwards, in the little private room, at the small discreet clinic by the Forest of Fontainebleau (Napoleon's favourite retreat, so she was told), she received a small bouquet of spring flowers and a note which said that Edwin would be away for a while, that he hoped she would soon be restored. It was sent with his love, he said. Audrey continued to cry. She cried in the clinic and she cried in the taxi, she cried in the apartment and she cried in the street, and when Edwin arrived back, three weeks later, she was still crying. 'Either the crying stops, or I go,' he said. 'Which?'

Audrey stopped crying. The prospect of being sent home at such a
time was completely beyond her.

5

Scar Tissue

'You are cleverer than your brother
’
whispered Apsu's mother to her,
‘I
>ut you must not let him know it. You are a girl.'

Immediately Apsu rushed to the door of her brother's room and shouted at the top of her lungs: 'I am cleverer than you, I am cleverer than you. And I am a girl.'

Her brother threw his much chewed pencil at h
er. She caught it, and laughed.

She needed to heal both physically (there was an infection) and emotionally. It seemed a good time, therefore, to return to England and visit her parents. Edwin suggested it and Audrey welcomed it. He, also, would go to England and visit his mother. This simple statement caused Audrey a sharp pang, reminding her of how she was the first time they met. How excited she felt, how delighted with her he was. Now she had learned so much, and presumably still had so much more to learn.

London was different. Everyone, it seemed, who was anyone, was young. Even the Queen wore skirts above her knee. Audrey had already passed her quarter of a century and she suddenly felt very old. She watched the laughing long-haired youths and the wide-eyed mini-skirted girls and saw that the world belonged to them. She felt even more angry with Patrick for abandoning her. For abandoning this. It was exactly the way of living he believed in, talked to her about - it was what all those books and posters and plays were driving towards - a dream of the future - the future he would design and build for and which together they would be a part of. Brave New World. All that. And now here she was outside it. All cried out. Seeing the colours and the joyful silliness as if she was staring through a goldfish bowl. The Revolution was here and she had missed it. Free Love, it said in the headlines.

But she was charging for hers.

Mr Wapshott shifted from foot to foot as they waited for Dolly to come back from the florist's. Dolly had gone to get some flowers to put in a vase for her room. Audrey felt strange. She did not want to be treated like visiting royalty she wanted to feel normal.

'I'll make a pot of tea,' she said, for what could be more normal than that?

'You will not,' said her father. 'Your mother would skin me alive. You sit there and I'll do it.'

If her father was prepared to make the tea, then what hope was there for normality? But it was better once Mrs Wapshott returned. Excited she might be, but there was little outward manifestation of this. She gave her daughter one, long look and said that she looked peaky. This was, apparently, all the fault of that foreign food - the oil, the garlic, the frogs' legs - she'd read about them. And she set about putting it right in the English way. She baked a ham and she mashed potatoes with plenty of butter and the top of the milk, and she laid out the pickles. Audrey, who still seemed to see babies in everything, poked at the bright pink, fleshy ham and tried to go back to being the girl she had been, the girl who would have eaten it up without blinking. But she could not. 'I wonder,' she said, without considering the consequences, 'if I could just have a little cheese?' Mrs Wapshott's mouth puckered and Audrey knew that she was thinking along the lines of Hoity-Toity. A large piece of yellow cheddar was placed on the table, along with half a dozen Jacob's cream crackers and the glistening, even yellower, butter.

Years later, if ever she began the torture of self-doubt and was casting around for something,
anything
to remind herself that she was better than that, she remembered that particular meal and how -against all odds of gravity - the cheddar, the biscuits, the butter, they all stayed down, along with the milky tea and baked rice pudding. In one of those peculiar twists of reason, she thought that if she ate of the foods at the table of her mother, it might - somehow - compensate her mother for what she, without knowing it, had lost. A daughter who would one day get married, put into practice all the skills her mother had taught her (like baking a ham) and produce grandchildren to be spoilt.

Staring at the pink meat she had pushed aside on the plate, she suddenly understood that Edwin meant every word. There would be no marriage, and there would be no children - his loving and his cherishing were real, but they were finite. Now she could never come back here (she stared, as if through a stranger's eyes, at the cream-painted kitchen, the old polished Rayburn, the multi-coloured plastic strips hanging at the back door that supposedly kept out flies); she had moved on from this and into a never-ending twilight. She was a princess in a cage who would never be Queen.

'You look very down in the jib,' said her mother more softly.

'It'll be the travelling,' said her father.

'Yes,' she said.

And everyone was content.

If Audrey was worried about how to avoid talking about her job in the days that followed, and the telling of more lies, the difficulty never materialised. Of all the conversations she and her mother had at the kitchen table, or queuing at the Co-op, there never was one that asked her, outright, exactly what she did. Dolly was much more interested in whom she knew.

'And have you seen any more of Princess Margaret?' she asked her loudly one day, when they were taking the bus up to the Junction.

Audrey decided to indulge her. 'Oh no,' she said, 'we only meet skiing.'

Dolly looked around at the passengers in the bus in triumph. She was no longer herself to anyone. Not even her mother.

Edwin did not care very much for the Beatles. He thought they were brash in their music, rude in their manners. In Paris, if she listened to them at all, it was on her own. Now, in London, they were everywhere, flooding the city the shops, the radio, with wonderful, raw sound. By comparison her French chic was old-fashioned and alien in the London streets. She bought herself a mini-skirt - Edwin did not like her to wear them too short (though she noticed how his eyes lingered on the Lulus who wore them) - and she bought herself a pair of wine-coloured patent knee-high boots.

She was stared at, whistled at by builders, asked out by the postman and Dolly raised her eyebrows - but it did not go beneath the skin. This was all disguise. Underneath she was, and always would be, an alien.
Avortement. Abortion.
They were the same in either language.
Article-declasser. Reject.
Those, too. No matter what the clothing, the person stayed the same. When she returned to Paris she donated the skirt and the boots to Sandy's new girlfriend, a plain, friendly, dumpling of a girl who was sure the skirt could be made to fit. Dolly approved of her - she was very good at sewing.

In the kitchen one evening, not long after she arrived, and when her father was at the pub and her mother was relaxed, Audrey dared to bring up the subject of Women's Things.

'Did you mind,' she said, tracing the squares on the tablecloth as if she were not really there, 'that you only had two children, Mum?'

Her mother laughed but without much joy. 'Why should I? Two's more than enough.'

'Yes - but - well - there might have been - well -
’
I
thought -'

'Thinking doesn't do,' said Mrs Wapshott pointedly.

Audrey was still in slight pain from the infection. She put her hand over her lower stomach, feeling the comfort of the warmth of her palm. 'I've - um -' She squeezed the place. She was desperate to talk about it. Mrs Wapshott was not.

'You need an aspirin for that,' she said, and got up and fetched one, as relieved to do so as one who is drowning is suddenly relieved at her toes touching sand.

'Did you -' said Audrey as she took the tablet, 'um - ever have -' she whispered, 'an - infection?'

There, it was out. And along with it came the tears. What Audrey had heard as she dressed after the painful examination - that
sotto voce
conversation between Edwin and Doctor Claude - returned to her, and the tears increased. 'It might,' Doctor Claude whispered, 'mean that the matter is out of our hands.'

'In what way?' the anxious Edwin had asked.

'In the possibility of any future - er - such mistakes.'

'Explain?'

'Scar tissue, Monsieur Bonnard, and the damage to - er -' Afterwards she had looked up the whispered French
'trompe de Fallope'
and then she had looked up the function of that part of the anatomy, and then she had understood. The good doctor was telling the good lover that her
fecondite
might be gone for good.