From the Fifteenth District (16 page)

When Wilkinson was not travelling, he stayed at Lou Mas. Until now his base had been a flat he’d shared with a friend who was a lawyer and who was also frequently away. Wilkinson left most of his luggage behind; there was barely enough of his presence to fill a room. For a reason no one
understood Barbara had changed everyone’s room around: she and Molly slept where Alec had been, the boys moved to Barbara’s room, and Wilkinson was given Molly’s bed. It seemed a small bed for so tall a man.

Molly had always slept alone, until now. Some nights, when Wilkinson was sleeping in her old room, she would waken just before dawn and find that her mother had disappeared. Her feeling at the sight of the empty bed was one of panic. She would get up, too, and go in to Will and shake him, saying, “She’s disappeared.”

“No, she hasn’t. She’s with Wilkinson.” Nevertheless, he would rise and stumble, still nearly sleeping, down the passage – Alec’s son, descendant of civil servants, off on a mission.

Barbara slept with her back against Wilkinson’s chest. Outside, Mr. Cranefield’s peacocks greeted first light by screaming murder. Years from now, Will would hear the first stirrings of dawn and dream of assassinations. Wilkinson never moved. Had he shown he was awake, he might have felt obliged to say a suitable one-liner – something like “I say, old chap, you are a bit of a trial, you know.”

Will’s mother picked up the nightgown and robe that lay white on the floor, pulled them on, flung her warm hair back, tied her sash – all without haste. In the passage, the door shut on the quiet Wilkinson, she said tenderly, “Were you worried?”

“Molly was.”

Casual with her sons, she was modest before her daughter. Changing to a clean nightdress, she said, “Turn the other way.” Turning, Molly saw her mother, white and gold, in the depths of Alec’s mirror. Barbara had her arms raised, revealing the profile of a breast with at its tip the palest wash of rose, paler than the palest pink flower. (Like a Fragonard, Barbara
had been told, like a Boucher – not by Alec.) What Molly felt now was immense relief. It was not the fate of every girl to turn into India rubber. But in no other way did she wish to resemble her mother.

Like the residue left by winter rains, awareness of Barbara and Wilkinson seeped through the house. There was a damp chill about it that crept to the bone. One of the children, Will, perceived it as torment. Because of the mother defiled, the source of all such knowledge became polluted, probably forever. The boys withdrew from Barbara, who had let the weather in. James imagined ways of killing Wilkinson, though he drew the line at killing Barbara. He did not want her dead, but different. The mother he wanted did not stand in public squares pointing crazily up to invisible saints, or begin sleeping in one bed and end up in another.

Barbara felt that they were leaving her; she put the blame on Molly, who had the makings of a prude, and who, at worst, might turn out to be something like Alec’s sister. Barbara said to Molly, “I had three children before I was twenty-three, and I was alone, and there were all the air-raids. The life I’ve tried to give you and the boys has been so different, so happy, so free.” Molly folded her arms, looked down at her shoes. Her height, her grave expression, her new figure gave her a bogus air of maturity: she was only thirteen, and she felt like a pony flicked by a crop. Barbara tried to draw near: “My closest friend is my own daughter,” she wanted to be able to say. “I never do a thing without talking it over with Molly.” So she would have said, laughing, her bright head against Molly’s darker hair, if only Molly had given half an inch.

“What a cold creature you are,” Barbara said, sadly. “You live in an ice palace. There is so little happiness in life unless
you let it come near. I always at least had an
idea
about being happy.” The girl’s face stayed shut and locked. All that could cross it now was disappointment.

One night when Molly woke Will, he said, “I don’t care where.she is.” Molly went back to bed. Fetching Barbara had become a habit. She was better off in her room alone.

When they stopped coming to claim her, Barbara perceived it as mortification. She gave up on Molly, for the moment, and turned to the boys, sat curled on the foot of their bed, sipping wine, telling stories, offering to share her cigarette, though James was still twelve. James said, “He told us it was dangerous to smoke in bed. People have died that way.” “He” meant Alec. Was this all James would remember? That he had warned about smoking in-bed?

James, who was embarrassed by this attempt of hers at making them equals, thought she had an odd smell, like a cat. To Will, at another kind of remove, she stank of folly. They stared at her, as if measuring everything she still had to mean in their lives. This expression she read as she could. Love for Wilkinson had blotted out the last of her dreams and erased her gift of second sight. She said unhappily to Wilkinson, “My children are prigs. But, then, they are only half mine.”

Mademoiselle, whom the children now called by her name – Geneviève – still came to Lou Mas. Nobody paid her, but she corrected the children’s French, which no longer needed correcting, and tried to help with their homework, which amounted to interference. They had always in some way spared her; only James, her favorite, sometimes said, “No, I’d rather work alone.” She knew now that the Webbs were poor, which increased her affection: their descent to low water equalled her own. Sometimes she brought a packet of biscuits
for their tea, which was a dull affair now the cook had gone. They ate the biscuits straight from the paper wrapping: nobody wanted to wash an extra plate. Wilkinson, playing at British something, asked about her aunt. He said “Madame la Comtesse.” When he had gone, she cautioned the children not to say that but simply “your aunt.” But as Geneviève’s aunt did not receive foreigners, save for a few such as Mrs. Massie, they had no reason to ask how she was. When Geneviève realized from something said that Wilkinson more or less lived at Lou Mas, she stopped coming to see them. The Webbs had no further connection with Rivabella then except for their link with the hospital, where Alec still lay quietly, still alive.

Barbara went up every day. She asked the doctor, “Shouldn’t he be having blood transfusions – something of that kind?” She had never been in a hospital except to be born and to have her children. She was remembering films she had seen, bottles dripping liquids, needles taped to the crook of an arm, nursing sisters wheeling oxygen tanks down white halls.

The doctor reminded her that this was Rivabella – a small town where half the population lived without employment. He had been so sympathetic at first, so slow to present a bill. She could not understand what had changed him; but she was hopeless at reading I faces now. She could scarcely read her children’s.

She bent down to Alec, so near that her eyes would have seemed enormous had he been paying attention. She told him the name of the scent she was wearing; it reminded her and perhaps Alec, too, of jasmine. Eric had brought it back from a dinner at Monte Carlo, given to promote this very perfume. He was often invited to these things, where he represented the best sort of Britishness. “Eric is being the greatest help,” she
said to Alec, who might have been listening. She added, for it had to be said some time; “Eric has very kindly offered to stay at Lou Mas.”

Mr. Cranefield and Mrs. Massie continued to plod up the hill, she with increasing difficulty. They brought Alec what they thought he needed. But he had no addictions, no cravings, no use for anything now but his destination. The children were sent up evenings. They never knew what to say or what he could hear. They talked as if they were still eleven or twelve, when Alec had stopped seeing them grow.

To Mr. Cranefield they looked like imitations of English children – loud, humorless, dutiful, clear. “James couldn’t come with us tonight,” said Molly. “He was quite ill, for some reason. He brought his dinner up.” All three spoke the high thin English of expatriate children who, unknowingly, mimic their mothers. The light bulb hanging crooked left Alec’s face in shadow. When the children had kissed Alec and departed Mr. Cranefield could hear them taking the hospital stair headlong, at a gallop. The children were young and alive, and Alec was forty-something and nearly always sleeping. Unequal chances, Mr. Cranefield thought. They can’t really beat their breasts about it. When Mrs. Massie was present, she never failed to say, “Your father is tired,” though nobody knew if Alec was tired or not.

The neighbors pitied the children. Meaning only kindness Mr. Cranefield reminded Molly that one day she would type Mrs. Massie said something more about helping in the garden. That was how everyone saw them now – grubbing, digging lending a hand. They had become Wilkinson’s second-hand kin but without his panache, his ease in adversity. They were Alec’s offspring: stiff. Humiliated, they overheard and garnered
for memory: “We’ve asked Wilkinson to come over and cook up a curry. He’s hours in the kitchen, but I must say it’s worth every penny.” “We might get Wilkinson to drive us to Rome. He doesn’t charge all that much, and he’s such good company.” Always Wilkinson, never Eric, though that was what Barbara had called him from their first meeting. To the children he was, and remained, “Mr. Wilkinson,” friend of both parents, occasional guest in the house.

T
he rains of their third southern spring were still driving hard against the villa when Barbara’s engineer brother wrote to say they were letting Lou Mas. Everything dripped wet as she stood near a window, with bougainvillea soaked and wild-looking on one side of the pane and steam forming on the other, to read this letter. The new tenants were a family of planters who had been forced to leave Malaya; it had a connection with political events, but Barbara’s life was so full now that she never looked at the papers. They would be coming there in June, which gave Barbara plenty of time to find another home. He – her brother – had thought of giving her the Lou Mas cottage, but he wondered if it would suit her, inasmuch as it lacked electric light, running water, an indoor lavatory, most of its windows, and part of its roof. This was not to say it could not be fixed up for the Webbs in the future, when Lou Mas had started paying for itself. Half the rent obtained would be turned over to Barbara. She would have to look hard, he said, before finding brothers who were so considerate of a married sister. She and the children were not likely to suffer from the change, which might even turn out to their moral advantage. Barbara supposed this meant that
Desmond – the richest, the best-educated, the most easily flabbergasted of her brothers – was still mulling over the description of Lou Mas Ron must have taken back.

With Wilkinson helping, the Webbs moved to the far side of the hospital, on a north-facing slope, away from the sea. Here the houses were tall and thin with narrow windows, set in gardens of raked gravel. Their neighbors included the mayor, the more prosperous shopkeepers, and the coach of the local football team. Barbara was enchanted to find industrial activity she had not suspected – a thriving ceramics factory that produced figurines of monks whose heads were mustard pots, dogs holding thermometers in their paws, and the patron saint of Rivabella wearing armor of pink, orange, mauve, or white. These were purchased by tourists who had trudged up to the town in the hope of seeing early Renaissance frescoes.

Barbara had never missed a day with Alec, not even the day of the move. She held his limp hand and told him stories. When he was not stunned by drugs, or too far lost in his past, he seemed to be listening. Sometimes he pressed her fingers. He seldom spoke more than a word at a time. Barbara described to him the pleasures of moving, and how pretty the houses were on the north side, with their gardens growing gnomes and shells and tinted bottles. Why make fun of such people, she asked his still face. They probably knew, by instinct, how to get the best out of life. She meant every word, for she was profoundly in love and knew that Wilkinson would never leave her except for a greater claim. She combed Alec’s hair and bathed him; Wilkinson came whenever he could to shave Alec and cut his nails and help Barbara change the bed-sheets; for it was not the custom of the hospital staff to do any of this.

Sometimes Alec whispered, “Diana,” who might have been either his sister or Mrs. Massie. Barbara tried to remember her old prophetic dreams, from that time when, as compensation for absence of passion, she had been granted second sight. In none had she ever seen herself bending over a dying man, listening to him call her by another woman’s name.

They lived, now, in four dark rooms stuffed with furniture, some of it useful. Upstairs resided the widow of the founder of the ceramics factory. She had been bought out at a loss at the end of the war, and disapproved of the new line of production, especially the monks. She never interfered, never asked questions – simply came down once a month to collect her rent, which was required in cash. She did tell the children that she had never seen the inside of an English villa, but did not seem to think her exclusion was a slight; she took her bearings from a very small span of the French middle-class compass.

Barbara and Wilkinson made jokes about the French widow-lady, but the children did not. To replace their lopped English roots they had grown the sensitive antennae essential to wanderers. They could have drawn the social staircase of Rivabella on a blackboard, and knew how low a step, now, had been assigned to them. Barbara would not have cared. Wherever she stood now seemed to suit her. On her way home from the hospital she saw two men, foreigners, stop and stare and exchange remarks about her. She could not understand the language they spoke, but she saw they had been struck by her beauty. One of them seemed to be asking the other, “Who can she be?” In their new home she took the only bedroom – an imposing matrimonial chamber. When Wilkinson was in residence he shared it as a matter of course. The boys slept on a pull-out sofa in the dining room, and Molly had a couch in a
glassed-in verandah. The verandah contained their landlady’s rubber plants, which Molly scrupulously tended. The boys had stopped quarrelling. They would never argue or ever say much to each other again. Alec’s children seemed to have been collected under one roof by chance, like strays, or refugees. Their narrow faces, their gray eyes, their thinness and dryness, were similar, but not alike; a stranger would not necessarily have known they were of the same father and mother. The boys still wore second-hand clothes sent from England; this was their only connection with English life.