From the Fifteenth District (15 page)

She did remark to both Mrs. Massie and Mr. Cranefield that she hated the Rivabella school. She said, “I would give anything to be sent home to England, but I can’t leave my father.”

After a long conversation with Mrs. Massie, Mr. Cranefield agreed to speak to Alec. Interfering with other people was not his way, but Molly struck him as being pathetic. Something told him that Molly was not useful leverage with either parent and so he mentioned Will first: Will would soon be fourteen, too old for the school at Rivabella. Unless the Webb children were enrolled, and quickly, in good French establishments – say, in lycées at Nice – they would become unfit for anything save menial work in a foreign language they could not speak in an educated way. Of course, the ideal solution would be England, if Alec felt he could manage that.

Alec listened, sitting not quite straight in his chair, wearing a dressing gown, his back to a window. He found all light intolerable now. Several times he lifted his hand as if he were trying to see through it. No one knew why Alec made these odd gestures; some people thought he had gone slightly mad because death was too long in coming. He parted his lips and whispered, “French school … If you would look after it,” and then, “I would be grateful.”

Mr. Cranefield dropped his voice too, as if the gray of the
room called for hush. He asked if Alec had thought of appointing a guardian for them. The hand Alec seemed to want transparent waved back and forth, stiffly, like a shut ivory fan.

All that Barbara said to Mr. Cranefield was “Good idea,” once he had assured her French high schools were not priest-ridden.

“It might have occurred to
her
to have done something about it,” said Mrs. Massie, when this was repeated.

“Things do occur to Barbara,” said Mr. Cranefield. “But she doesn’t herself get the drift of them.”

The only disturbing part of the new arrangement was that the children had been assigned to separate establishments, whose schedules did not coincide; this meant they would not necessarily travel in the same bus. Molly had shot up as tall as Will now. Her hair was dark and curled all over her head. Her bones and her hands and feet were going to be larger, stronger, than her mother’s and brothers’. She looked, already, considerably older than her age. She was obstinately innocent, turning her face away when Barbara, for her own good, tried to tell her something about men.

Barbara imagined her willful, ignorant daughter being enticed, trapped, molested, impregnated, and disgraced.
And
ending up wondering how it happened, Barbara thought. She saw Molly’s seducer, brutish and dull. I’d get him by the throat, she said to herself. She imagined the man’s strong neck and her own small hands, her brittle bird-bones. She said, “You are never, ever to speak to a stranger on the bus. You’re not to get in a car with a man – not even if you know him.”

“I don’t know any man with a car.”

“You could be waiting for a bus on a dark afternoon,” said Barbara. “A car might pull up. Would you like a lift? No, you
must answer. No and no and no. It is different for the boys. There are the two of them. They could put up a fight.”

“Nobody bothers boys,” said Molly.

Barbara drew breath but for once in her life said nothing.

Alec’s remission was no longer just miraculous – it had become unreasonable. Barbara’s oldest brother hinted that Alec might be better off in England, cared for on National Health: they were paying unholy taxes for just such a privilege. Barbara replied that Alec had no use for England, where the Labour government had sapped everyone’s self-reliance. He believed in having exactly the amount of suffering you could pay for, no less and no more. She knew this theory did not hold water, because the Laceys and Alec’s own sister had done the paying. It was too late now; they should have thought a bit sooner; and Alec was too ravaged to make a new move.

T
he car that, inevitably, pulled up to a bus stop in Nice was driven by a Mr. Wilkinson. He had just taken Major Lamprey and the Major’s old mother to the airport. He rolled his window down and called to Molly, through pouring rain, “I say, aren’t you from Lou Mas?”

If he sounded like a foreigner’s Englishman, like a man in a British joke, it was probably because he had said so many British-sounding lines in films set on the Riviera. Eric Wilkinson was the chap with the strong blue eyes and ginger mustache, never younger than thirty-four, never as much as forty, who flashed on for a second, just long enough to show there was an Englishman in the room. He could handle a uniform, a dinner jacket, tails, a monocle, a cigarette holder, a swagger stick, a polo mallet, could open a cigarette case
without looking like a gigolo, could say without being an ass about it, “Bless my soul, wasn’t that the little Maharani?” or even, “Come along, old boy – fair play with Monica, now!” Foreigners meeting him often said, “That is what the British used to be like, when they were still all right, when the Riviera was still fit to live in.” But the British who knew him were apt to glaze over: “You mean Wilkinson?” Mrs. Massie and Mr. Cranefield said, “Well, Wilkinson, what are you up to now?” There was no harm to him: his one-line roles did not support him, but he could do anything, even cook. He used his car as a private taxi, driving people to airports, meeting them when they came off cruise ships. He was not a chauffeur, never said “sir,” and at the same time kept a certain distance, was not shy about money changing hands – no fake pride, no petit-bourgeois demand for a slipped envelope. Good-natured. Navy blazer. Summer whites in August. Wore a tie that carried a message. What did it stand for? A third-rate school? A disgraced, disbanded regiment? A club raided by the police? No one knew. Perhaps it was the symbol of something new altogether. “Still playing in those films of yours, Wilkinson?” He would flash on and off – British gent at roulette, British Army officer, British diplomat, British political agent, British anything. Spoke his line, fitted his monocle, pressed the catch on his cigarette case. His ease with other people was genuine, his financial predicament unfeigned. He had never been married, and had no children that he knew of.

“By Jove, it’s nippy,” said Wilkinson, when Molly had settled beside him, her books on her lap.

What made her do this – accept a lift from a murderer of schoolgirls? First, she had seen him somewhere safe once – at Mr. Cranefield’s. Also, she was wet through, and chilled to the
heart. Barbara kept refusing or neglecting or forgetting to buy her the things she needed: a lined raincoat, a jersey the right size. (The boys were wearing hand-me-down clothes from England now, but no one Barbara knew of seemed to have a daughter.) The sleeves of her old jacket were so short that she put her hands in her pockets, so that Mr. Wilkinson would not despise her. He talked to Molly as he did to everyone, as if they were of an age, informing her that Major Lamprey and his mother were flying to Malta to look at a house. A number of people were getting ready to leave the South of France now; it had become so seedy and expensive, and all the wrong people were starting to move in.

“What kind of wrong people?” She sat tense beside him until he said, “Why, like Eric Wilkinson, I should think,” and she laughed when his own laugh said she was meant to. He was nice to her; even later, when she thought she had reason to hate him, she would remember that Wilkinson had been nice. He drove beyond his destination – a block of flats that he waved at in passing and that Molly in a confused way supposed he owned. They stopped in the road behind Lou Mas; she thanked him fervently, and then, struck with something, sat staring at him: “Mr. Wilkinson,” she said. “Please – I am not allowed to be in cars with men alone. In case someone happened to see us, would you mind just coming and meeting my mother? Just so she can see who you are?”

“God bless my soul,” said Wilkinson, sincerely.

Once, Alec had believed that Barbara was not frightened by anything, and that this absence of fear was her principal weakness. It was true that she had begun drifting out of her old life now, as calmly as Alec drifted away from life altogether. Her mock phrase for each additional Lou Mas catastrophe had
become “the usual daily developments.” The usual developments over seven rainy days had been the departure of the cook, who took with her all she could lay her hands on, and a French social-security fine that had come down hard on the remains of her marble block of money, reducing it to pebbles and dust. She had never filled out employer’s forms for the people she had hired, because she had not known she was supposed to and none of them had suggested it; for a number of reasons having to do with government offices and tax files, none of them had wanted even this modest income to be registered anywhere. As it turned out, the gardener had also been receiving unemployment benefits, which, unfairly, had increased the amount of the fine Barbara had to pay. Rivabella turned out to be just as grim and bossy as England – worse, even, for it kept up a camouflage of wine and sunshine and olive trees and of amiable southern idiots who, if sacked, thought nothing of informing on one.

She sat at the dining-room table, wearing around her shoulders a red cardigan Molly had outgrown. On the table were the Sunday papers Alec’s sister continued to send faithfully from England, and Alec’s lunch tray, exactly as she had taken it up to him except that everything on it was now cold. She glanced up and saw the two of them enter – one stricken and guilty-looking, the other male, confident, smiling. The recognition that leaped between Barbara and Wilkinson was the last thing that Wilkinson in his right mind should have wanted, and absolutely everything Barbara now desired and craved. Neither of them heard Molly saying, “Mummy, this is Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson wants to tell you how he came to drive me home.”

I
t happened at last that Alec had to be taken to the Rivabella hospital, where the local poor went when it was not feasible to let them die at home. Eric Wilkinson, new family friend, drove his car as far as it could go along a winding track, after which they placed Alec on a stretcher; and Wilkinson, Mr. Cranefield, Will, and the doctor carried him the rest of the way. A soft April rain was falling, from which they protected Alec as they could. In the rain the doctor wept unnoticed. The others were silent and absorbed. The hospital stood near the graveyard – shamefully near, Wilkinson finally remarked, to Mr. Cranefield. Will could see the cemetery from his father’s new window, though to do so he had to lean out, as he’d imagined passengers doing and having their heads cut off in the train game long ago. A concession was made to Alec’s status as owner of a large villa, and he was given a private room. It was not a real sickroom but the place where the staff went to eat and drink when they took time off. They cleared away the plates and empty wine bottles and swept up most of the crumbs and wheeled a bed in.

The building was small for a hospital, large for a house. It had been the winter home of a Moscow family, none of whom had come back after 1917. Alec lay flat and still. Under a drift of soot on the ceiling he could make out a wreath of nasturtiums and a bluebird with a ribbon in its beak.

At the window, Will said to Mr. Cranefield, “We can see Lou Mas from here, and even your peacocks.”

Mr. Cranefield fretted, “They shouldn’t be in the rain.”

Alec’s neighbors came to visit. Mrs. Massie, not caring who heard her (one of the children did), said to someone she met on the hospital staircase, “Alec is a gentleman and always will be, but Barbara … Barbara.” She took a rise of the curved marble
stairs at a time. “If the boys were girls they’d be sluts. As it is, they are ruffians. Their old cook saw one of them stoning a cat to death. And now there is Wilkinson. Wilkinson.” She moved on alone, repeating his name.

Everyone was saying “Wilkinson” now. Along with “Wilkinson” they said “Barbara.” You would think that having been married to one man who was leaving her with nothing, leaving her dependent on family charity, she would have looked around, been more careful, picked a reliable kind of person. “A foreigner, say,” said Major Lamprey’s mother, who had not cared for Malta. Italians love children, even other people’s. She might have chosen – you know – one of the cheerful sort, with a clean shirt and a clean white handkerchief, proprietor of a linen shop. The shop would have kept Barbara out of mischief.

No one could blame Wilkinson, who had his reasons. Also, he had said all those British-sounding lines in films, which in a way made him all right. Barbara had probably said she was Irish once too often. “What can you expect?” said Mrs. Massie. “Think how they were in the war. They keep order when there is someone to bully them. Otherwise …” The worst she had to say about Wilkinson was that he was preparing to flash on as the colonel of a regiment in a film about desert warfare; it had been made in the hilly country up behind Monte Carlo.

“Not a grain of sand up there,” said Major Lamprey. He said he wondered what foreigners thought they meant by “desert.”

“A colonel!” said Mrs. Massie.

“Why not?” said Mr. Cranefield.

“They must think he looks it,” said Major Lamprey. “Gets a fiver a day, I’m told, and an extra fiver when he speaks his
line. He says, ‘Don’t underestimate Rommel.’ For a fiver I’d say it,” though he would rather have died.

The conversation veered to Wilkinson’s favor. Wilkinson was merry; told irresistible stories about directors, unmalicious ones about film stars; repeated comic anecdotes concerning underlings who addressed him as “Guy.” “I wonder who they can be?” said Mrs. Massie. “It takes a Wilkinson to find them.” Mr. Cranefield was more indulgent; he had to be. A sardonic turn of mind would have been resented by E. C. Arden’s readers. The blond-headed pair on his desk stood for a world of triumphant love, with which his readers felt easy kinship. The fair couple, though competent in any domain, whether restoring a toppling kingdom or taming a tiger, lived on the same plane as all human creatures except England’s enemies. They raised the level of existence – raised it, and flattened it.

Mr. Cranefield – as is often and incorrectly said of children – lived in a world of his own, too, in which he kept everyone’s identity clear. He did not confuse St. Damian with an Ethiopian, or Wilkinson with Raffles, or Barbara with a slut. This was partly out of the habit of neatness and partly because he could not make up his mind to live openly in the world he wanted, which was a homosexual one. He said about Wilkinson and Barbara and the blazing scandal at Lou Mas, “I am sure there is no harm in it. Barbara has too much to manage alone, and it is probably better for the children to have a man about the place.”