It wasn't pique. It was something deeper. The flight was miserable because of it. All her life she had been beautiful, had enjoyed such admiration for it. Now she had just reached her 30s, so many years of longing eyes upon her had lost that special thrill. It was an accident of birth she now told herself. To be beautiful is not a moral worth. She had realised that recently. Those women without natural gifts who make themselves attractive, they have the virtue. Hers was merely luck, good fortune. She stepped off the plane. The sun was hot outside the airport. It scorched her white suit, blistered her dark glasses. Her relaxed, erect pose was neutral. People seemed to leave a space around her.
She would wait for ‘them’ to come to her. If ‘they’ were among the sparse throng waiting for bags, she would leave ‘them’ to spot her. They were not in view; they must have taken a different flight.
---------- <^> ----------
Sitting briefly in the small garden of the hotel after arriving, waiting for the waiter to bring her a drink she felt as out of place as she looked. But for different reasons. Her natural exotic features looked out of place anywhere – in her native east London, or in this frantically watered garden in the Dordogne. But she was out of place too because she felt different. And she had been feeling so different lately. Was it something other people called jealousy? This was not a holiday; she had brought some sort of emotional baggage along with her. ‘They’, the others, were the ones on holiday.
She was not spying or intruding on them; yet she was not on her holidays. And yet again, emphatically, she was not on business. So, she told herself. On and off during the whole flight she had told herself so. How come she felt like elastic? Between her and Gregory. He had told her it was just holiday time. And she, no reason, had come along. His hotel was only a short distance away. She knew its name. The waiter gave her directions to it. He spoke in abbreviated French to make it easy for her to understand. Now she knew all she needed to know. In fact, in the event, she would not ever go to their hotel.
What was that continually rising confusion about? What did she actually want?
The waiter stuttered on proudly, trying to be kind to this splendid English guest. Her French was fluent, but she did not embarrass him by showing his efforts were unnecessary. Her considerate manners had been acquired like one of the accessories she carefully chose.
---------- <^> ----------
The business she had with Gregory in England was a secret from that other one, that other ‘her’ in his life. It was entirely legitimate, though questionably moral. As a beautician she was her own advertisement. Her face had peered out from thousands of adverts – photographed through rose-covered trelliswork, from under a motorbike, couched in a pile of silk underwear. But always Jane's perfect features. Those adverts proclaimed her animal-free potions – for beauty and potency. ‘Momtaz’, she called her range of products, after the beauty of the Taj Mahal - the most fabulous in the world. Then she had become Zena-Jane, to complement the plain syllable she had been assigned by her grandmother. ‘He’, that is Gregory, had put up the money for Jane's business, linked it to his own business, a clinic for cosmetic surgery. He did not do the surgery himself. He was not a doctor, though he was willing enough to allow people to honour him with that title. He had his young specialists, teamed up in relays like an athletics match. It was on the supermarket principle – off-the-shelf nose, cheekbones, jaw and so on. Jane ran the health farm where the customers relaxed, scanned the catalogues, met the surgeons, chose their faces and convalesced in luxury till the skin wounds had faded.
Not that Jane had been a beneficiary of the treatment; no more than she needed her own spurious potions. Her beauty rose above that. But Beatrix had been through it.
At the time, Beatrix had probably been the wealthiest client of the clinic. So, it was only partly her new jaw-line that had made him – that is, Gregory – fall in love with her.
Gregory was significantly older than either of the women – Jane his mistress, or Beatrix his wife. His steel grey hair met an equally steely eye that sometimes broke into wrinkles. It did so at unexpectedly tense moments sometimes when he wanted to put you completely at your ease. Disconcertingly, it always felt like his ease, composed and imposed by him. He was swarthy and conveyed a purposeful energy in his movements and his severe expression. He portrayed a pointed single-mindedness which was alluring to women and captured a loyalty from younger men. That is what made him plausible, regarded as a doctor, a top surgeon; and none of his young doctors minded. One of his assets was that he never fully concealed that roguishness; it was always peeping out like the corner of a handkerchief, casual but self-conscious. There was self-apology in his manner which gave the necessary charm. But he was not all assertive, self-centred bluster. Beatrix – that is, his wife – could spot sincerity in him as well. He genuinely believed he could make everyone happy.
Beatrix, a long, willowy, blond, could almost have passed for Scandinavian, had she not displayed the characteristic demandingness of the wealthy and educated English. Coolness of appearance, stiffness of movement; and that apparent air of command in her slightly complaining voice marked her as separate from Gregory or Jane. And therefore, fascinating to both. She had inherited that lofty stooped posture towards those who served her. And yet it did not sit easily. Her evident docility appeared as a deference to her husband. In so far as Gregory was able, he loved her. He had rescued her from depression. He was flattered by her loyalty. The new petite jaw he had arranged for her was clearly more in keeping with her personality than the previous more Germanic jut.
Gregory and Beatrix complemented each other grandly. They created a presence in the small village hotel snuggling into a fold of the Dordogne River.
Beatrix loved him dearly and was grateful to be able to bring out the softer and sentimental side of him – his devotion to re-organising her stables; his passion for small animals, those small enough to pick up and cuddle, from snakes to apes and even caged birds. With her seemingly unlimited wealth, their home could spread into ever larger tracts of deep Surrey countryside. She was immensely proud of him. She was proud of his success, of his tenderness to animals, and indeed in his own pride in managing her life and wealth.
Because of her devotion, as loyal as the animals, she was blind. So, Gregory had no difficulty in deflecting small sums, a permanent rivulet, drained from her wealth, and into Jane's luxuriant enterprise. Beatrix, quiet and unsuspecting, never even wanted to question Gregory's use of her inheritance. His management of it merely proved his care for her.
Jane, business-like, knew exactly where the money came from, exactly how the channels were carefully covered. And exactly what deal he gave her. They had a discreet chalet in the corner of her health farm; private entrances; nights she gave him by arrangement; other girls provided occasionally when he needed one.
Now this.
Here she was in this boiling cauldron, simply because he had asked her to come. Had she really believed she had to say yes, even to this escapade? Her contempt for herself was obvious - and justified, she muttered. Did she believe he would stop seeing her? If she had refused? Shun her work, stop the vital ‘rivulet’? She had not even considered saying ‘no’. And now she was here. Without properly knowing why. If ‘they’ wanted to go off on holiday, well, good luck to them. Jane did not care. But suddenly, it was madness to come along too. Someone's apparently maiden aunt, alone and stashed away in the hotel down the road! She was exasperated at the thought; she suddenly knew her discomfort all day on the trip; let herself get drawn along into someone else's plan. All her life she had learned the foolishness of being blindly led. You had to know what was in it for you; that was it – principle number one. She could have haggled with him; struck a bargain. And he would remain a businessman. Never forget, she told herself, head turned to the camelias, and hand discretely over her mouth as if burping: his business depended on her. His clinic depended wholly on her clientele in the health farm. She was the one – not him – who could play on her clients temptations. She could supply those whose cheeks he could make blush as with an air-brush. His beauty-surgery needed just those she could tempt with self-love.
Was it her business that required her to agree to be here? No. It was not. No. Yet she had said: yes!
---------- <^> ----------
When he arrived in the garden to greet her he said he had no more than an hour. The hesitant waiter hovered with a half-bottle of champagne till they started to drink; then vanished. They then rehearsed their moment of meeting. They had devised their long-standing ritual. Passion emanated from that moment they closed in together. They had learned to heighten it; how to condense it, to compress that passion. They recited their ritual poem, inane to the outside observer – it was theirs. Partly the catholic mass, partly passages from the story of `O', and partly words that they had charged with a personal meaning. After their soft stuttered murmuring, face to face, they arose and went in from the garden, up to Jane's room, shut the windows and shutters against the afternoon sun. Their bodies completed an immaculate completion. Then Gregory left for his hotel, a little late and a little pink, but with his perfectly constructed composure.
Again, on her own. It was not just pique she felt. Something ineffable was left in her heart. Why did she let him do it to her? And - she vowed - it was going to stop. She must as she so often resolved, move on from being his fine ornament.
Jane had had a hard life when young, when merely plain Jane. She had always looked after herself, driven herself on with vows of revenge. It had not just been the beatings from one of her stepfathers. That was common enough. The girls at school who also knew that kind of life had huddled together. They made mischief to compensate; and understood each other. It had been her other stepfather, who had inflicted ambition on her. He forbade her meals if her homework marks were not good enough. He locked her in her room if she had exams. And, the trouble was, she was bright enough to warrant the ambition. She could achieve what he wanted. And that did set her aside. There was no-one then to huddle behind the school hedge with and plot mischief. She could only keep her own company, harbour her vengeance against the intruder in her family, vow to unburden her brain. By flaunting her body instead, she pained this step-father tragically. And in the end, she had defeated his intention, effortlessly, with that chosen weapon, her physical beauty, and a career as a simple beautician.
She folded away her white suit carefully. Her dark complexion, she caught it in the mirror from the corner of her eye, a shadow that strode across her room. The texture of her skin was unusually fine for someone dark, and it seemed to clothe her shape in a special glow, a dusky sheen. She was now aged enough to begin to wonder when its gloss would begin to tarnish. And what then for her? All her life she had inhabited this beauty. And how much had it amounted to? She had a full day before he would be with her again. She planned it in segments, those for reading, the time for her meticulous body-care, the gentle excursions in the little town, the church, the local museum. She would seethe in the meantime. And she would be ready for him when he returned.
---------- <^> ----------
However, in fact, she did not have to wait completely uneventfully until the next visit. Sitting at supper on the vine-covered terrace overlooking the river, the meal ordered, her aperitif in her hand, a sleek young man came up to her table and spoke to her. His English was ‘public school’ and his shallow smile equally so. She had known young men like this ever since she had grown out of her own background. They could be so immediate but, ultimately, so passive. He was a fine example of England's cream. He offered her his hand, stood beside the table. Jane was leaning forward, elbows gently resting gracefully on the white table-cloth, her glass pressed to her sun-rosed cheek. It was a pensive posture, the straight back alerting the observer to a hidden concentration. She had been interrupted. She did not move except to turn her head, a slight bend of the neck and her eyes looking up into his open face. Otherwise, motionless, an unfriendly stillness. She was reluctant to emerge from her dream. He asked if he might be invited to sit down, to eat supper with her. Equally motionless something changed in her. There was suddenly a full attention. Perhaps her eyelids tightened very slightly, or the muscles of her shoulders tensed beneath the thin cloth of her shirt, the weight no longer on her elbows. His offered hand had fallen away as she did not respond to him. But his face remained as open and as simple as ever. Where, someone would wonder, did he keep his intelligence, if not in his face? She refused without emotion, without response; her silence a response in itself. Some would have taken her as hostile. She merely stared back into his face. Its jovial pastiness nodded good-naturedly, and he moved away to another table. She spent the time of the meal staring ahead of her, over the terrace to the distant valley, much of the time the wine-glass pressed to her cheek pensively, like an insecure child might clutch a favoured toy. She wondered at this resentment she lived all the time, like a drunk with alcohol. There was something else too; like jealousy – that bitch Beatrix. Something like a pity – was it that sponge-like boy. She observed herself with a distant amazement. Something was happening to her these days. A cruel curiosity made her pick over these feelings, like specimens. When necessary, she knew she would shut them away and get on with her mask, her stainless beauty. But in this brief incredulous moment on her own she lost herself in a foreign country in her heart. It would soon be over. Had she looked she would have seen that the boy spent most of the meal looking at her.
In the morning, he tried again. He managed to follow her into breakfast. She refused his request to sit at table with her. Finally, he encountered her again mid-morning sipping coffee outside the small bar in the central place de la village. Her cool loose blouse was brilliant green. It blended with a very slight reddish streak in her dark hair. The blouse rode above the top of her grey linen jeans. Her appearance was compelling, as always. He did not invite himself to her table this time but sat at the adjacent one. Slightly behind her, he was in fact closer than if he had faced her from the chair opposite. She had not changed her pose with his arrival and in her characteristic posture, lightly resting her graceful arms on the table-top, he was facing her, inches from her left shoulder, by her side.
There was not much about the boy, she thought. “Peter”, he told her, “I'm called”. Tall, slightly awkward with youth, his hair was surprisingly fair, and a little lank, threatening to intrude on his face so that he pushed it back with a thumb and forefinger either side of his forehead in a repeated mannerism. It tended to make his full face fuller and more present to whoever spoke to him. She did not. For him her silence emphasised a quality that he called ethereal. No longer youthfully uncertain, she was not yet old, even by Peter's young standards. He saw her beauty in a perpetual interlude, never growing, never fading, like the confident endurance of classical marble. Indeed, like a statue, she seemed all surface, and untouchable, and still magnetic. He began to tell her a few things, hesitantly at first and uninvited: his college; the school he had been to previously; his recent 21st birthday which had culminated in this trip; a girl he had liked but knew he was too young to take seriously; his hopes for a future as a manager for some national opera company where he had connections...
Without meaning to, Jane idly listened, but never responded, never encouraged this advantaged, callow youth. Only once did she turn to look into his pleasing face. There was not much to see; except... except one thing. There was that same plausible earnestness in there, which conveyed that though you would get honesty willingly from him, you were most unlikely to get the whole truth. A plausibility she recognised in all the smart men who pursued her like this. Reminiscent slightly of her aging man at the hotel up the road. “By any chance,” she enquired at last, “do you know a businessman by the name of Gregory Belgrave?”
“Of course,” he smiled and, relieved that at last she had addressed him, “how else would I be here? Why else would I be talking to you?” He nodded with significance as if scornful of her naivety.
He got up to go, offered to carry her parcel back for her. She did not reply; but also did not stop him lifting it and carrying it. She had bought a piece of local pottery, quite heavy. He continued to smile and chatter away as he walked beside her: about the girl he had just finished with; playing rugby for his college last year; the quite good degree which his father had been proud of. It was not clear if she listened to any of it. He accepted her as a challenge, a refusal to be deflated.
If she had not been so angry, she might have wondered more about who this associate of Gregory's really was. When they had crossed the bridge and turned up the ancient path to the hotel. he told her he would be ‘trotting off’ now. She stopped and looked at the boy. He smiled a slightly cheeky grin; he gave her a mock salute as if a messenger; but really, he mocked the angry authority her silence asserted. He turned to go. “And listen to me,” she snapped, calling him back, “I don't want you hanging around, eyeing me all the time.” She was deliberate in her intention. She thought that her blunt command was the best insult to his couth aplomb. She felt insulted and was intent on demolishing him. And she succeeded; for the first time he became somewhat crestfallen. This woman his father had brought him to see was no fading violet awaiting his lavish attentions. If his father had fixed him up with this companion, Peter did not mind too much who she was, but she could enthuse her job a bit more. If he thought about it, he would have assumed his father had paid her. It was why, perhaps, he found it too delicate to refer to his father.
She noticed him begin to sag, “Get out of here,” she added as if throwing out a piece of crumpled litter. She turned to go into the hotel. He offered the parcel he was carrying. She took it gravely letting it hang from her hand in a gesture of casual disregard. She was resentful, felt affronted by being subjected to the boy's interest. She felt insulted by his adolescent drool, but also by his chatter to her as if she were his mother; and above all by succumbing to being made so cross by his presence. Gregory was no different from these casual predators trying their luck – except Gregory always brought it off. Damn. Damn him.
In her room she went to the mirror and stared at what she saw. As always, the sight was the one thing that would make her feel better about herself. She noticed a warmer feeling swell up inside her. Ugh, kids. Even big ones. She gazed on her mature body - no longer a child herself. She believed she had become a person. She forgot her brutal dismissal of the boy.
Peter too bounced back easily from his rebuffs. Within a 100 metres he had forgotten the beautiful ‘old bag’. He padded along in his shorts and espadrilles but remembering his view of her chest. He prided himself on how courteous he had remained. He formed in his thoughts how he could tell it to his father as an amusing story.
It was not a long walk through the lanes from one hotel to another. It was a surprisingly green little valley.
---------- <^> ----------
She had never heard that Gregory had a son. And nor had Beatrix; but that is by-the-by for the moment.
Peter identified the acacia trees, some ancient and some young yet standing to the same height along the road in front of the rough stone walling. There were many exotic plants, but many grew in England, and he could imagine again the countryside where he was at school.
His father would fix it, as everything else in Peter's life; and as Peter would one day fix everything for his own children. Whatever was eating that woman, Dad would set it right, for her, and for Peter. Dad would know when it was some money that was needed, some flattery, when a good ticking off - and so on. He looked forward to seeing how his father would deal with it.
He had not heard of Jane until a couple of weeks ago when Gregory proposed the trip for Peter's wider experience. He was not, he could tell himself, completely ignorant about women. But what his father intended was to give him a proper grounding. In truth his world of women had really only been the female servants at his schools, and the anxious girls at university as ignorantly complacent as himself. There was a little vegetable garden now, on the right. Asparagus, he recognised; rosemary, he thought; and smart little rows of leaves for the salade vert. The road twisted up towards the hotel.
Beatrix he had heard of and knew a lot about. His father waxed prolific about her at times. Peter had resented her without meeting. Some might say she was a rival to him; some might say a rival to his mother. Though, to be honest, his mother had been rather cool and he felt little for her. He preferred his school from an early age and paid little attention to regular though dull letters to him. It had been decided, too, that it was best he should not meet Beatrix. He knew it had all been worked out for him by his father. Sometimes it was a puzzle why he felt so against Beatrix when his father talked on about her. He had for as long as he could remember enjoyed a suave composure towards everyone he met.
It had been a kind of joy to learn of the secret Jane. A mean laugh at the deceived Beatrix. Perhaps, for Gregory, his unacknowledged son was the one person he could talk to about his secret mistress. It seemed a prankish joke if his father brought them both on holiday as well. In his own mind it would be Beatrix who would be left the odd one out. Though he relented a little and could allow Beatrix to have his father in their hotel together, Peter found his tolerance of his parents' holiday was only on the basis that he would be fixed up himself in the hotel with Jane.
He sat on the wall for a few moments. The road had risen to a few metres above the river here. Did it flood in this valley? Everything can be too full once in a lifetime - it was a rule he had once heard. It had come from the careful girl-friend he had had at university. They had spent a couple of years at college going to social occasions together. They were good friends, and still were; and they had had good friends. But she had been cautious, and they'd only groped in the car. He hadn't really minded. But wondered sometimes if he ought to. She told him she had been traumatised when her parents had died in a fire, an atrocity committed on the farmstead in South Africa. She had been eleven and it happened shortly after she had been sent to school in Zimbabwe. She had never been back to South Africa because it had not been good for her. Her uncle was a psychologist in Kings Lynn and had helped her to understand how she must help herself. She had needed, she said, his understanding. So, he had given it. Recently she had conveyed to Peter that she was strong enough if he wanted to break off the relationship with her when they both finished their degrees. So, he had decided to. Whatever the effects of her trauma, he knew there was a lot on his side of the relationship for him to learn as well. He judged it by the way his father had talked to him. And indeed, that was why he had talked to his father. Gregory had been confident how to handle the problem. Peter felt relaxed sitting on the wall, reviewing the reasons for being out here; the experience his father had promised would be forthcoming from Jane. At last, he was being invited into the world where others lived so happily.
---------- <^> ----------
Beatrix did not consider where her husband disappeared to. Reclining on the lounger by the pool's edge, the hot sun was dripping inertia onto her body. Beatrix was 37, her muscles were toned to the condition of a 17-year-old, and her skin had been tanned in regular doses under the commercial UV machine at work; her life cared for her in every respect. Yet she knew she had to fight off that lethargy before it permanently got the better of her. She was old enough to know that risk. That state of ennui would come on her slowly; there had been points all through her life when it seemed to pop up compellingly, temptingly. And if she did not get up off the lounger, find the next paperback to read, get a mid-afternoon drink, plan a shopping trip, then it would flood back into her heart. Such life activities did not seem to arise smoothly. They required an energised will. Why did life not seem more natural? Distractions were the essence of life for Beatrix. She barely realised the difference.
Nevertheless, she had come to be puzzled. She had everything, material provision in every respect, a loving husband, even an indulgent priest hanging over from her school days (so long ago now) if she were ever to need one. Her marriage was cruising along absolutely perfectly: the dinners, the theatres and concerts, the house parties (given and invited to); and in just two years time, as she had planned, and Gregory had agreed, she would have reached the point to start their family. Her health was good, wealth never a problem. There was no reason for that sinking emptiness, like a bruise in the tummy; no reason for it to open up under her whenever she stopped busying herself. And she told herself carefully, it didn't! It did not happen; no. And why? Because, from long ago, she could control it. If her mind was busy – reading, planning, arranging – then it never came upon her. And, therefore, it never existed. She was quite content with her logic. She looked at the locker beside her on the edge of the swimming pool – the extra pair of sunglasses, the tumbler of cool water, the comb, the packet of cigarettes with lighter neatly parked on top, the hair-band in case she went in for a dip, the suntan tube, and the insect spray – the last two stood upright together as if guarding the rest. It was all there as she glanced, as so often, to take it in, to check it; a kind of Kim's game that she was always winning. It reminded her of the locker in the school dormitory when she had gone away at fourteen. It had been the tidiest and best kept locker in the school. Her parents had been proud of that before they died - even if they had been troubled that she could not keep up with the lessons.
As she was reminiscing to herself about her childhood and its perfections, a slightly hot blond head emerged, climbing the steps from the road, then his long gangling body, and, last, a pair of white thin legs below the baggy shorts. The head looked around and glanced back at the long sleek body on the lounger. Someone must be inside that body, but he wondered whether to pass it by as a statue. Beatrix had a swimming costume cut very high over the hip bones and pulled tight in her crotch. Peter noticed. She was quite old, he thought, neutrally.
With his arrival, she had something outside her own head to concentrate on, to distract. “You, from England?” The familiarity of her tone was as a girl of his own age. He felt uncomfortable at having examined the body so closely.
“Yes, actually. Absolutely.” He chuckled slightly and felt suddenly at his ease with her. “I'm looking for my father,” he said inquiringly.
`Where is he?' she asked purposelessly. As if she thought he were silly enough to have mislaid something, the key to his room, his bathrobe.
And then a slightly hard look came across her jocular face. There were no other English in the hotel. Who could his father be? “Who is it?” she asked, sounding more puzzled than she intended.
He told her. There was silence.
---------- <^> ----------
The scene took place in “their” room on the first floor of the hotel, some mock mahogany and a wide high window showing a lot of sky and the dark green mountains rather near. Gregory had been shaving. His bathrobe was open and bathing trunks of several sharp colours crossed his stomach. He turned as Beatrix entered. “Ah”, he said, absent-mindedly and with his usual abbreviated sentences, “Was about to join you. Missed my chance? Hey?” Then he saw Peter entering the room behind her.
“I'm early, Dad,” he announced unnecessarily with abandoned guile. “Sorry.” He noticed a moment of apprehension on his father's face. “It's OK. The hotel found me a room here. I thought I’d prefer to be with you for a couple of days. I’ll move over here tomorrow.”
“That's good.” It was a matter of pride for Gregory not to show he was ruffled. His mind had whizzed around a few things; not so much Beatrix's stern face, but Jane who yet knew nothing of his plans for her. “So. Gentleman, Pete! How good to see you. Good journey?” His genuine pleasure at seeing his son began to win through the momentary alarm. The smooth sound of his own urbanity calmed him. It also brought Peter's wide grin back to his face. Beatrix in striking contrast was not smiling, the thunder on her face reached at least to her waistline! She was keeping her mouth shut for fear of what would come out.
“I've met her, Dad.” Peter beamed as if he was announcing an ascent of the Matterhorn.
“Indeed you have.” Gregory had caught sight of his wife's frown. It was no less conspicuous than the sham Louis Quatorze wardrobe. “What a happy meeting,” he gushed. More in hope. Jovially, he waved everyone into the room. They were already there. And it was now rather a cramped room, so no-one moved. Gregory was not one to admit a change in the weather till he had to; and Beatrix had been too dumbstruck at the news of Gregory's unknown son to make her sulk audible, yet. But he could see the moment coming when he would need to dodge the bolts of lightning. “I remember, Peter, when your grandmother first saw you. A baby. In arms. Before your time, my dear,” he addressed Beatrix, as an aside. “Peter's twenty-one, now. Three days ago, right?” Peter nodded. Beatrix glowered. “She took one look at you – ‘Orang-utan’ she said. ‘Long and lanky.’” He guffawed. Peter laughed. Beatrix wisely made no comment still. “She had not known anything about you till I dangled you in her lap – “Wild man of the bungle” she said.” His infectious joviality came powerfully from the increasing loudness of his voice. “Oh. Twenty-one years.”
“She knew what his father was,” Beatrix suddenly added bitterly, “Bungler.” It was the beginning of the insult which something in her believed would pay him back for the jolt to her sanity she had just received. With a world that was as carefully groomed as her make-up everyday, an unknown step-son had been a slap in the middle of it, smudging and stinging. The news that Gregory had had a preceding life before her, deflated her dignity. She felt as crumpled as a discarded bra. She had never paused to consider any prior relationship in his life.
“What's that?” Gregory inquired looking round as if inviting her to join in the joking.
“A bungle,” she repeated, rather overloud, “You're pretty familiar with that sort of thing, aren't you?” And she turned suddenly to sit heavily on the end of the bed in a heap.
“Let's all sit down,” he said managerially; and put himself on the other end of the bed. The room seemed surprisingly small, but with a veranda outside, too hot to venture into in daytime. He was looking relaxed as his robe flopped beside him. Peter looked around the room and decided to lean his bottom against a convenient chest of drawers, an imitation of something priceless. So far, he was satisfied that Beatrix had been left to smoulder uselessly.
Gregory had not finished with his happy reminiscences, “You did look pretty wizened when you were born.”
“Has he got a mother,” Beatrix asked in mock sweetness. “How many more kids have you got hidden away?” She turned to sarcasm, “How many mothers?” And then to hate, “What do you think I feel?” She felt he had not thought about her at all. Hearing the sound of her own voice she was in danger of getting worked up into a tirade. “You're the father of a monkey! What's the mother?”
Gregory spread his hands in an appeasing gesture, as if she was being entirely unreasonable. “Look,” he said and paused while he thought out what she was supposed to look at. “It was long ago. He's twenty-one.” He swept a hand around the tight room towards Peter, as a car salesman might display his wares. “That means it was twenty-one years ago,” he added in all seriousness as if she needed the explanation. She was about to resume the crescendo that had begun to build up, but he continued, “A kind of birthday occasion. For him to come down here.” He appealed for reason as if to a jury that could not possibly convict him. “What do you think?” But he did not have a sympathetic audience.
Beatrix wanted to know why she had not been told. Peter wanted Beatrix to shut up. Gregory was half enjoying the rumpus that only he could sort out. He stood up and leaned against the window frame. The afternoon air came through it like a flame-thrower. His excitement in this temperature brought beads of perspiration to his face. He looked the part of a manic impresario. Everyone and everything in sight had been bought with his money and his energy. All he had to do was dominate them. Except, of course, the money was hers; and all Peter wanted was his father to himself.
“Let's all sit down, and take this calmly,” he repeated in his excitement. Nobody moved as he beamed more desperately at one and then the other of them. He looked like a conjuror concluding a trick that would amaze his audience. Beatrix felt tears welling up noisily. Peter held down his impatience with her by staring blandly at his father. “He's a fine boy,” Gregory said looking round at Peter as if checking for himself. “The mother,” he started, as if this was a new thought, and continued in a confidential tone to Beatrix, “The mother's a bit of disgrace.”
“Quite so,” she added bitterly.
“I haven't seen her for... Ooo. A long time,” he announced vaguely. “When was it, Pete?” He decided to specify a time for her. “When you were seven. A bit of a disgrace,” he added as if musing to himself on a memory that pained him. Then, very quickly he brightened up and said, “Well, we don't want to talk about that in front of the boy. That's that,” and he rubbed his hands together. Peter stared intently at the sobbing figure of Beatrix. Not with compassion, nor without. Simply curious at the kind of woman his father had married. Gregory, familiar over the years with his wife's moods, spread his hands again in his usual gesture, “C'mon, darling.” He reverted to a more vernacular accent that referred back to long ago in his childhood origins. There was a kind of self-mockery in it, “Let's have a smile.”
The effect on Beatrix was hardly a cessation of her tears, more a sucking them back inside her as she drew herself up into a queenly pose. Without lifting her head, she could still give the immediate impression of looking down her nose. “Handkerchief,” she announced in her own accent that had moved up the scale with an equal and opposite force. “Handkerchief, my dear.” And Gregory humbly offered his. The restoration of her aplomb had been cleverly engineered by his descent into a momentary servility. All of this, a tiny drama they seemed to have accomplished many, many times before in their marriage, was a slick collaborative performance, smoothed and oiled with years of performing together.
Peter felt a scarring ire in his belly, as if a ball of barbed wire was working its way through his system: Beatrix preening her ego whilst Gregory suddenly cringed. Peter wanted to send a clenched fist winging its way through the air at her head; but what he said was: “I've met her Dad. Not Beatrix. The other one. Jane.” Despite the innocent air of a lad telling his Dad some news, it was obvious he meant more. It was truly as if a fist had landed with force on the top of Beatrix's head! She bounced. Her startle reverberated on the bedsprings and she shot up a couple of inches.
Gregory, too, labouring to restore Beatrix after Peter's first bombshell, was himself caught unawares by the second. He mumbled ruefully, “You've really got your timing right today, haven't you, Pete? We need to get better co-ordinated.”
Peter looked at his father seriously. He had already written off Beatrix as unworthy of his father. She no longer counted for any consideration. “Come on, Dad. Let's leave her for a minute. I need to talk it over with you. Come down to the bar.” He mooched out of the room. His quandary was the jaundiced Jane.
Gregory now torn between the two of them, had every right to be angry with his son who had stirred poison far beyond any reasonable limits. But instead, he turned rather sharply to Beatrix. “See what you've done,” he snapped inexplicably. He followed his son.
---------- <^> ----------
But Beatrix was no longer going to preserve her role of frail victim wreathed in sobs. Hampered by her need to redo her make-up, she flounced into the hotel lounge some ten minutes after father and son had reached there. Peter had explained his predicament; the welcome that had not been forthcoming from Jane; the humiliating rebuffs she had delivered like letter bombs. Gregory had soothed. The party in question being not present he refused to believe that she was so obstinately unfriendly. He sustained his familiar wishful thinking and advised persistence and stamina. And Peter knew no better.
Beatrix entered, unusually with a presence the size of a mountain like the lion emerging from the cage in the big top. Both the men held their breath. If only she had remained standing, their apprehension at her fury would have prolonged their sudden shrinking. But she sat down suddenly like a pocket-knife snapping shut. She looked immediately reduced, as reduced as she felt. “Now, she said thickly, “who's Jane. It's not her, that health farm woman. She's not here, is she?” Suddenly she seemed to be pleading, pleading for an answer.
“Right.” Gregory glowed with a hopeless smile. He swallowed and recovered his garrulousness. “Well. Jane, of course, is an old colleague,” he turned to Peter as if they had not been having the talk they had in fact had. He continued as if explaining to Peter. “She is an old colleague, a friend really of Bea's and mine. We've known her for years. For years and years. She works closely with us. In an associated company, actually. I've helped her a good deal. You know what it's like. In business; scratch my back, scratch yours, what?”
Beatrix watched him. The stinging energy she had so recently felt had nearly evaporated. What had happened; why had that woman turned up? What had Gregory brought her here for, into the midst of their holiday together? For that matter, what had he brought this spindly illegitimate kid for? “What is going on?” A madhouse. “Where's she staying? Here?”
“Oh, Bea!” Gregory reacted as if unreasonably taxed. “Of course not. She wanted a holiday. I told her where we were going to be. She found a hotel somewhere around here.”
“About a kilometre down the road,” Peter added helpfully.
Beatrix had judged that a tearful performance again so soon would not get the same result. In that case she could do nothing but express her perplexity, and her deep, deep sense of suspicion.
“Don't be suspicious. My dear heart.” Gregory remonstrated. “It's not like you to get ideas in your head.” The ambiguity in what he had said was lost on him at that moment. And on her too.
“Everybody knows she eats men,” she said to Peter as if he had asked. “Gregory is the only one who has stood up to her temptations. That's right, isn't it Gregory? You've always told me that.”
“Sure. I have always told you that.” This time he was aware of an evasive meaning. “You have always believed me. I told young Peter here to come on out to France and he...” even Gregory had to think for a moment what words to use, “he could keep her company for a bit. Since she is here. On her own.”
“I don't see it.” She was close to whining; begging for Gregory's reassurance, “I don't understand. Why has she come here on her own. She could get anybody to come with her - from Prince Charming to King Kong; they'd follow her like dogs.” She looked at Peter and before she had a chance to continue, Gregory pounced on her words.
“But you see, of course, she wants to be alone. That's the problem. Flies around the proverbial honeypot. She can't get away”.
“So you fixed her up with the boy here?”
“Yup,” he said defiantly, “She is not going to be bothered by him, is she?” Peter blanched. Gregory did not look at him.
“Let's pack. We're going,” she announced as if to Peter. And she stood up, once again to her queenly height. But there was no longer the angry flush on her face, no longer the command in her stride. She posed this time. Both the men looked at her without movement. She stopped before she left the lounge and with a revealing hesitation looked back.
Gregory's astuteness gave him all the winning advantages. He knew she would not go through with leaving unless he sanctioned it. He allowed the indignity in her hesitation to last for a moment. And said, “Okay, love. If you want to. But I for one will be sad, yes, sad, if we do not have your company here.” He used the term ‘we’ carefully. She noticed it. Her defeat seemed complete. She returned to sit beside them again. “Your a good sort,” he said consolingly. “I knew you'd realise there's nothing to be suspicious of. She's not a bad type, Jane. She wouldn't do anything behind your back either. Would she?” Peter looked on at this blatant lying. He studied Gregory's effect; how he handled a woman being difficult. Plenty of tips to tuck away for future use and gain.
“I'd like to ring her?” Beatrix said, ingenuously. “I'm sure she would like to hear from us.” She gave them a brave smile, as if adjusting the chairs after a dinner party had left. Anger, suspicion, fear for her marriage, all must be put behind them. “Shall we ring, and give her a surprise?”
“Sure,” Gregory said relaxing. “Later”'
“No. Let's invite her over here for dinner. And you too,” she said to Peter.
Peter looked at his father. His father looked at him. “It's a lovely idea, my darling. Peter, never forget the kindness this woman can show. But Bea, honestly, I know that Jane wants to be away from it all. She has enough of me at work. Know what I mean.”
“Oh, no, Gregory,” she said flirtatiously and perking up. “I don't know what you mean. I could never have enough of you!”
“That's a dear,” and he put out his hand to pat her knee leaving it there just slightly longer than necessary to convey a possessiveness; a suggestiveness.
Her knee felt to her like meat, its skin, dead paper. It did not belong.
---------- <^> ----------
Whilst Peter walked back down the lane, Gregory nipped ahead in his brash Porsche, his phone to his ear. Peter rehearsed in his mind all he had learned.
---------- <^> ----------
Even Jane realised she could not spend so much of her time looking in the mirror searching her form for any emerging clues to the decay and decomposition to her perfect image which was bound to start someday. So, she was relieved when the phone rang. She slumped down with it in front of the wide window. Even her underwear seemed to be overdressing in the heat. From the earpiece came the familiar metric rhythm of one of their favourite poems. “John Donne,” she said sulkily.
“J.D., quite right. Good girl,” Gregory responded breezily. “Us - we're just like that.” It was the old formula they had grown up with. Two people like one. “Love and poetry, they're symbiotic. L-and-P.”
“L, little-a, P,” she recited in response.
“Love and poetry, like twins who feed each other.”
“You, little-a, M. You and me, we're the same”' she continued sing-song fashion.
“You and me. My Love. We go together, always have done.”
She always thought of way back, at that young age. Gregory and his lanky friend, Len, kids of thirteen, had chased her into an alleyway, scared her half to death, and had cut off one of her pigtails. She had been five. Then her violent stepfather had scared her to death too when she got home, with his belt. Forbidden ever to meet those ruffians again. And in fact, still it seemed estranged from them today.
“So,” he continued now conversationally, “how goes it?” Just the question she could not answer for herself. So, she was silent. He picked up the tension and wariness, “I'm coming over. I'm in the car now. I got away earlier today.”
The moment he got to her room, he began again, “You've met Peter, have you?” He spread his remark with a nonchalance he was not feeling.
“Your weedy office rat,” she enquired. At first there was some humour, added to the grating displeasure. “What did you send him spying for?” They sat together on a tiny terrace outside her room, no more than a window ledge. The hotel shaded them from the afternoon sun. “You - are you getting jealous in your old age? Want to see what I get up to? He's a bit obvious, isn't he? Your office boy.”
“Come on, GJ,” he appealed to their secret childhood past again. The closest he could get to her. The old taunts he and Len had thrown at her - GJ; Gypsy Jane; Gypsy tipsy Jane. Later they had become daunted and bewildered by her sudden beauty as she emerged as a woman. It had frightened their unsure manhood.
“Don't call me that,” she shouted, as she had all those years ago, too. Now she no longer frightened him, but yet she still sensed he had to work at keeping her on his side. “He's no bloodhound. You're wasting your money. Send him home.”
“No. My love. Be nice to him. In your usual way. Just be nice.”
“Oh no,” she said, or wailed, as if she could not believe she was being asked for something so preposterous. “What the hell does ‘usual way’ mean? I know what you usually mean. But he's a boy. Not with him – what's his business. He can't be any use to us.”
“Don't be like that. He's a good lad. Needs bringing on a bit.”
“True,” she said bitingly. “Who is he?”
“Haven't you guessed?” He kept a pause to convey significance, but she was not having that. She sparked.
“Guessed! Guessed what? Of course, I have. You've dragged me all the way out here to this wine-spattered nowhere. The scenery's like wallpaper, the weather is a furnace; the people are cardboard. And you want to start a quiz-show! Guess what?” Gregory gained a thrill when she got into her imaginative outrages. “And you, fucking love winding me up,” she concluded as she caught the triumphant smile in his eye.
Gregory audibly swallowed, “Okay, okay. You win. A long time ago,” he swallowed again. “Twenty-one years, to be precise, I became a father. Know what I mean,” he added, hesitant – in a coy way.
She thought she had a few sudden sarcastic comments bursting into her brain; she prepared to crank up the decibels. But thought better of it – in these abrupt circumstances. Silence was dignified. It will leave him guessing, she thought. Let him swim in an empty pool. She said nothing. “You still there,” he asked. She said nothing. “It's just... a helping hand – for the lad.”
Now he remained silent, a counter-silence.
He put his hand to her face and kissed her on the cheek. “I've got to go this time,” he said ambiguously. She did not ask him to stay. Her familiar anger had rendered her dumb. Despite his apparent assured manner, in the car he phoned her back, again. “You're a good girl, my love. I love you.”
Still driven to silence, in the end she spoke, “I might. Help your lad.” She patted the place on her head where her plait might have been. “I might,” she repeated sulkily. “If I feel like it,” in a louder voice. Then more shrilly, “But I don't.” She slammed the phone down.
Gregory switched off his telephone more calmly. He turned. “She'll be okay,” he said reassuringly to the embarrassed boy curled up around his own centre of gravity in the passenger seat.
Peter unwound himself at the hotel and got out.
---------- <^> ----------
Puzzled by the mosaic of interactions he had witnessed, and not alert to most of them, he admired his father's command. He returned to the hotel to claim his rights with Jane. The goddess, he believed. The opposite pole to the beastly Beatrix. She had shed her loose clothing unceremoniously and sat on the edge of the bed in his room as featureless as he was.
Furious – with Gregory, with herself – she had confronted the hapless youth with a wooden stare. She still had on a pale blue silk bra with black lace, which pushed her parts into a deep cleavage. He slowly took off his clothes, staring hypnotised at her motionless flesh. He lay on the bed beside her. No words were spoken. She looked down at his long, white body. The unfriendliness of her gaze frightened him. Mixed with the long excitement it did not seem to be having the expected effect on him. She picked up his limp organ between thumb and forefinger as if a dead cigarette from an ashtray. Incensed with everyone and feeling manoeuvred into this, she let it drop again, and said with contempt “You won't get far with that, will you?” She turned her head away. As if reluctantly waiting for him.
He put out a hand to bury several fingers in the crevasse in her brassiere. “Can I?” he mumbled, and he started to say something he did not finish. She let him fumble with the clasp till the straps fell away. She neither moved nor spoke. Her breasts came free from the cups. In other circumstances he would have drooled, would have settled in his mind how he would describe them to his mates. But at that point his mouth was dry, his stomach trembling with apprehension, every thought about imitating his father had abandoned him. One palm clutched a globe. He touched as if it were the most fragile bubble. Its weight surprised him. The heavens should have opened; but they did not. Only an effort of concentration made her breast seem different from a large potato, different from a bag of tepid water. Her wooden immobility controlled all of him. He felt an imposter, an intruder, inadequate in the moment of violation. Furiously, her immobility attacked him.
But at the same time, it represented her humiliation, the ignominy in Gregory's demand for his son. The whole of her life she had worked for him, worked under him.... screwed under him! Her thoughts could not be completed, could not be vulgar enough to describe herself. Her time had been one long degradation by Gregory from her earliest years. She fumed. She found herself obediently putting out one slender elegant forearm to feel between his thighs for his sensitive parts again. They rested in the cradle of her strong fingers. The balance between gently soothing them and ripping them off was an exceedingly fine one at that moment. She found herself beginning to squeeze, she felt the temptation to crush this lad's maleness into paste. The desire to destroy the father through macerating the son was almost irresistible. Almost.
In turn he looked in alarm at her arm bearing his trophy. He was not sure if he was being offered excitement by this steely woman. In his innocence he uttered “Aagh...!” thickly and as if acquiescing to her powers. But his fear told him he was in danger. “Ouch. I say. That...” She let go. “That hurt a good bit.” Her mercy reprieved the father; and the boy.
She looked down at his organ again. And he looked down at it too. It was stubbornly limp. In a moment of brief conciliation, she leaned herself across his chest, lowered one shoulder onto his and lay for a moment in contact with him, her face turned away, his arm pinned so that he could not do any foraging or fumbling. After a brief while she said, “I don't think you and I are going to get very far, are we, boy?” Then she suddenly sat upright, squared her shoulders back so that her breasts hung above him, “Why don't you just rub yourself, and we'll call it a day.” She knew how to hurt. “Perhaps women are not what you are into.” He obeyed. He would not let her see tears fall. She turned her head and fixed her eyes on the wall in the stiff pose of an artist's model. Afterwards she climbed silently into her jeans and, buttoning her blouse, she closed the door behind her leaving him wiping himself with a dirty sock.
She padded barefoot down the stone corridor, her gold sandals in one hand, and her humiliation, unmodified, in her heart. On his bed he allowed himself a few gasping sobs. He had not cried since his first fight in his school.
There was the whine of a curlew whistling through the country lanes in the distance. But neither of them noticed.
---------- <^> ----------
Unlike Jane, Beatrix humiliation was screened by a numbness, a grisly emptiness. It had been inexpressible. The advent of the boy, and, on top, the appearance of the sly Jane and her mystery presence, that spoke volumes of suspicion. It was the very lack of means to express any of it any more that delivered the dark cloud of numbness in thinker and thicker proportions She could only now pretend, a pretence was all the options he left her. She was a million miles from his confident belief that he had smoothed everything out for her; had settled her ruffled feelings; had, in the process, convinced her of the silliness of her feelings. Tragically his confidence was unfounded. They were sitting close together on the hotel terrace in the lateness of that afternoon. The sun was calming towards evening. A tiny lapping sound came from the river some 15 metres below. Gregory's hand was proprietorially on Beatrix's thigh. He believed in total possession. And that was what Beatrix gave him. Helplessly, she did. It left her no escape, no room to manoeuvre. There were no words that could form her predicament, no appeal to him about the hurt that burned like a ruthless acid in the place where she wanted love. He required only that she pretend; a pretence that he had made everything alright for her again. Her loneliness was all the more vast for the silence it occupied.
She could bear it no longer. She knew she must do it suddenly. The moment came, the most silent one she had ever heard. She lurched from the chair to the balustrade at the edge of the terrace. As if in perfect slow motion, one foot on the top of the rail, a super-human stride into the air, and she threw herself from the terrace. She briefly noticed the rocks innocently lapped by the gentle water, her wail was not fear, merely a sad defeat. She hit them head-first. The water accepted the body. And carefully rippled around it.
Gregory was already on his feet leaning over the rail, arms outstretched. A small knot of hotel guests gathered instantly to gaze down with him at the sudden corpse. One man was over immediately clambering down, slipping and gashing himself. Another had miraculously found a rope, and was throwing it down to the climber; making it fast on the rail. The receptionist had already rung for the ambulance.
It made the countryside echo with its wail.
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