Carrie knocked a mug off the table. Bill knelt to pick up the pieces. ‘No need to get over-excited, now.’
‘What about Diana?’ wailed Carrie.
‘Diana might well follow us on down later. Doubt if she could get off from the gallery quite as soon as that.’
Bill dumped the pieces of the mug in the dustbin. ‘Good for you to get abroad, dearie. Make the most of it.’
‘I hate abroad. I was brought up there.’
‘It’s improved since then,’ said Bill. ‘They have proper loos these days. And they’re into fast food. You’ll love it.’
Carrie, crimson, gabbled of passports and money and a delivery of heathers and her primula seedlings.
‘She doesn’t get on all that well with her mum,’ Bill explained to Mark.
Mark nodded understandingly.
‘I’ll see to all the bumph. Tickets and stuff. Has she got a passport?’
Bill rummaged in the kitchen drawer. ‘Should be here somewhere. Yup. All clear.’
Carrie glared. Outside, tyres scrunched on the gravel. ‘That’ll be the Taplin lorry,’ said Bill. ‘Coming, Carrie?’ Carrie followed him from the room. At the door she turned and threw Mark a look of appeal. Mark smiled placatingly. When she had gone he picked up the passport. There was a blizzard of frontier stamps until 1970 and then nothing, but it had been renewed. In the photograph she looked about twelve.
For the rest of the day she avoided him. At dinner she refused to say a word to anyone and vanished immediately afterwards. Bill, a note of compunction in his voice, said, ‘Carrie does get a bit uptight about her mum. Mind you, she is rather a horror. But it’s high time the girl had a holiday.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Mark heartily. ‘We needn’t stay all that long. Nice break for me too. And Diana,’ he added.
When eventually they did come face to face, she rounded on him like a small animal, cornered but still showing some fight. ‘You planned the whole thing.’
‘Planned?’ said Mark innocently.
‘You didn’t have to go yourself. Someone else could have.’
‘I have to see your mother at some point. There are things I need to ask her. She is after all Strong’s daughter.’
Carrie was silent, exuding truculence. He hadn’t realised she could be like this. It was surprising. His elation, suddenly, began to subside.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If the idea of a few days in France with me is so absolutely appalling, let’s forget it. Stay here. I’ll go alone.’
‘Would you mind?’
‘Of course I’d mind.’
Carrie chewed a finger-nail. She blinked. He watched her. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come. Just for a little while.’
9
Diana stalked up and down the room. ‘France! Next week … ! What on earth’s got into you? You’re immovable, normally. Next week … Where does she live, did you say?’
‘Sarlat-la-Canéda.’
‘Dordogne. Lovely. But I can’t possibly get away next week. Suzanne’d have a blue fit.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mark.
‘The week after, possibly, when the exhibition’s over. Can’t you wait till then?’
‘No.’
Diana, disoriented by this waywardness, flung herself into a chair. ‘I can’t think what’s the matter with you.’
‘I’m writing a book,’ said Mark tranquilly.
‘Of course you’re writing a book. You’re always writing a book. But you don’t normally want to go dashing off to France. Is she married?’
‘She has some sort of arrangement, I understand.’
‘And how on earth are you going to manage without me to navigate? You loathe long-distance driving.’
‘Carrie thinks she may be able to come along, actually.’
Diana, disorientation complete, gazed. ‘Carrie?’
‘She is Hermione’s daughter,’ he reminded.
‘I thought they didn’t get on.’
Mark shrugged.
Diana, silent, gathered all this in and set about sorting it out. After a moment she said, ‘I’ll ring Suzanne and see if she can get Peggy to come in for a week or two. It’ll all be the most terrible rush. The car should be serviced. I haven’t got the clothes I’d need. I s’pose I’ll get a train down and you’ll pick me up at the nearest station?’
‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘I should think that’s the best thing to do.’
Diana, distracted from her earlier consternation by this feast of necessary planning, reached for a notepad and began to make lists. Mark retreated to his study and set about his own projections, which involved sitting at his desk and staring, frequently and for longish periods, out of the window.
He realised that it was a long time since he had experienced the delicious pleasure of looking forward to something. There were small anticipations, of course – seeing a friend, or some outing to a theatre or concert – but this internal glow was a sensation almost forgotten. Tenderly, he let it have its way. He luxuriated in it. For one whose professional concern was the examination of the feelings and motivations of others, his own state of mind was curiously unexplored: a foreign country. How all this could end except in tears (his, probably) he had no idea but he simply didn’t care. It was enough to sit amid the infinitely familiar but subtly transformed landscape of his study and wallow in it.
‘She’ll drive you nuts,’ said Diana. ‘That girl. What on earth will you talk to her about?’
He telephoned her to tell her to get travellers’ cheques and then he telephoned her to remind her of the time of the ferry and finally he telephoned anyway and got Bill. Carrie was in the greenhouses and Bill didn’t reckon she’d take kindly to being called in. Mark said uneasily, ‘D’you think she’s remembered we must leave at ten sharp?’
‘Doubt it. Leave it to me, I’ll get her lined up.’
‘Thank you, Bill. I’ll be down this evening, then.’
‘See you later, squire.’
When he reached Dean Close she was nowhere to be found. There was a half-packed grip in the kitchen, which looked encouraging, but no Carrie. He wandered around and eventually found her in Strong’s study, standing in front of the bookcase.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
She jumped guiltily. ‘Oh, hello.’
‘Hello.’
This was one of the moments he’d been caressing at his desk in London for the last week. It was indeed rich but oddly the expectation of it now had a nostalgic glow of its own.
‘I was looking for something to read,’ said Carrie.
‘To read this minute?’
‘No. In France. You’ll be reading sometimes, won’t you? In the evenings, for instance.’
‘Yes,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I suppose I might be.’
‘Well, then … I thought I’d better too. I mean, I won’t have anything else to do and I’m not used to not having anything to do and it’ll be a bit irritating for you if I just sit there doing nothing. What shall I take?’
He stared at the ranks of Gilbert Strong’s books. There was the lot there, more or less; just about everything that mattered written over the last two hundred years.
‘A novel, were you thinking of?’ he enquired, cautiously.
‘Oh, I should think so, wouldn’t you?’
He scanned the shelves. He hesitated, discarded, scanned again. He took down Emma. ‘You could try this.’
Carrie gave him a distinctly mischievous look. ‘Actually I’ve heard of Jane Austen. I even know when she lived. O.K., then.’
They emerged from the maw of the car ferry. Carrie wound down the window and slap through it there came a pungent gust of something that made her wince: the smell of abroad. Goodness knows of what it was composed: cigarettes and rubbish and petrol and food or perhaps it just came smoking out of the ground. She would have known it anywhere; this was France smell, but there was also, for her, Greece smell and Italy smell and Spain smell and each summoned separate
and on the whole disagreeable sensations. France smell flung her with awful immediacy into the skin of another Carrie, a morose and weary Carrie aged nine or twelve or fifteen, stoically waiting on a bony café chair while Hermione and her friends had yet another glass of something before the lunch or dinner that was already postponed by two hours. She stared with hostility at the French customs officials and the man selling Figaro and ParisMatch and the line of GB cars snaking ahead of them out of the docks.
As Carrie opened the car window, Mark was swamped with a sudden titivating combination of guilt and excitement which he at first attributed to his present state of mind and then realised was nothing to do with it. It was prompted by the whiff of the cigarette held by the official lolling at the barrier, a Gitane or whatever, just such as he himself as a schoolboy had furtively smoked with his companions of the Upper Fifth on a French Club outing to Chartres. A feeling of cheery relief took over, succeeded by exhilaration. He decided that he had been underrating travel. Indeed probably he had been passing up much enriching experience. It was partly Diana’s fault, of course; one had been pushed into reaction against her pursuit of the latest flea-bitten Turkish town or whatever it was that the Sunday newspapers or the Suzannes of this world were going on about. A couple of dire sessions in Corfu and Gozo in the early days of their marriage had a lot to answer for. And then more distantly there was the remembered foreign fever of his parents’ generation just after the war, when everything continental was good and everything British was bad. Les Enfants du Paradis and Elizabeth David cookery books and the toile de Jouy fabrics with which his mother enveloped the living-room. Sex, in his youth, had been firmly associated with the Continent; the first time he had achieved it what seemed disorienting was that the girl had not spoken in sub-titles. Even at the time it had struck him, looking around the homeland, that all this supercilious dismissal of what on the face of it was an interesting and often spectacularly attractive country was a bit silly. Later, this resistance to fashion had developed into a form of quiet xenophobia.
Nevertheless, he decided, as the line of cars crept forward another few yards, one had ended up victim oneself of a reverse prejudice. It was too long since he had done this kind of thing. Dreamy enticing images swept through his head: poplars flashing past and blinding sweeps of sunflowers and lovely solitary Romanesque churches and glistening mayonnaise and croissants and huge peaches and wine drunk at bosky roadsides. He wanted to transmit this to Carrie but couldn’t think how to, so began instead to talk about routes. He wondered if she would turn out to be any good at map-reading. She seemed, at this moment, somewhat glum. They were out of the docks and emerging into the town traffic; he applied himself to the matter of staying on the right side of the road and finding which way to go.
‘How long is it going to take us to get there?’ Carrie enquired. She seemed to have little or no idea of distances or geography.
‘Well … I thought a couple of nights on the way, possibly three.’ Which was about as slowly as you could plausibly do it. ‘There are some nice places we could see. Shall we start looking for a hotel soon? I’m beginning to feel I’ve had enough driving.’
Quite enough. One thing he had forgotten was the potent combination of murderous and suicidal urges with which all French drivers were apparently possessed. It wonderfully concentrated the mind; solitary Romanesque churches, if they were around, went unappreciated.
‘O.K., if you want to.’
‘That red book on the floor … If you look up the next town, it’ll tell you what hotels there are and what they’re like.’
Carrie, intrigued, investigated the complexities of Michelin. Mark, distracted now by a further preoccupation, scraped the car against a projecting wall. ‘Hell!’
He stopped to size up the damage. Carrie said, ‘Will Diana be cross?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it more her car than your car?’
‘It’s both of us’s car.’ He was snapping, he realised. And pouring with sweat. He got out a handkerchief and wiped his face.
‘I’ve found a hotel with the right knives and forks and what-not.’
‘Good.’ He continued to sit. Carrie looked at him expectantly.
‘Shall we go on, then?’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to say.’
‘I s’posed you would. About one room or two.’
He gazed at her, startled. ‘Well, yes.’
‘I should think,’ she said, ‘it had better be one because otherwise you’ll be driving into things like just now and we can’t go on like that all the way to this place Ma’s living at if it’s going to take three days.’ She went richly pink as she spoke and added, ‘At least, if that’s what you meant.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’
‘O.K., then. It’s called the Auberge des Fleurs, this place. It’s got some sort of garden.’
He started the car. He would have asked if this sternly practical resolution of the problem was her only interest in it, but did not dare; the answer might well be unwelcome. He devoted himself to driving very carefully and deliberately and, in so far as it was possible, to thinking of absolutely nothing at all except Carrie’s directions about street names and turning right or left. He parked the car and went into the hotel and, yes, they had a double room for the night. He informed Carrie and disembarked the cases and led her into the hotel and up the stairs and into a room in which was a large double bed and, presumably, other appurtenances but that was all he could see. This moment also had been mulled over back in the study in London but now that it had arrived it was entirely different. Carrie walked to the window and looked out of it. ‘You can have dinner in the garden. There are tables and chairs.’
‘Ah, good.’
She turned round and inspected the room. After a moment she said, ‘I s’pose Diana would be even more cross about this.’
When he woke the next morning and had weathered the initial shock of where and with whom he was he thought she had disappeared. The bed felt empty. He turned over, warily, and there she was at the far side sitting bolt upright with her glasses on reading Emma.
She looked down at him. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.’
There was, he saw, a wodge of read pages. ‘How long have you been awake?’
‘Ages. I’m not used to being in bed this late.’ She turned a page and continued to read.
Mark lay contemplating her for a couple of minutes. Finally he said, ‘What do you think of it?’
She considered. ‘You feel they all ought to have something to do and then they wouldn’t go on so much about money and getting married. But all the same you want to know what’s going to happen.’
‘Mmn.’
She flipped back a page or two, as though to check something. ‘Is Emma meant to be nice or not?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I s’pose it’s not so much a question of is she nice as how she sees herself.’ He stopped. Carrie gazed down at him enquiringly. ‘And that the reader is allowed to see what’s going on while Emma never does, although she thinks she’s so perceptive.’
‘I see,’ said Carrie. She started to read once more.
God, he thought, this is what people like me come to. Holding forth about ‘the reader’ at a moment like this. He said, ‘I wish you’d stop.’
‘Stop what?’
He pointed a dismissive finger at Emma. Carrie put the book down. ‘Should we go and have breakfast?’
‘Do you love me? All right … I shouldn’t have asked. Do you like me?’
‘Usually. Just now I do. Actually, I nearly always do.’
‘But not absolutely always?’
She was beginning to slither from the bed, as though hoping he might not notice. He took hold of her arm.
‘Not absolutely always, no.’
‘Then why are you doing this?’
‘Because you’d have kept going on about it otherwise. And it seemed awfully rude to be saying no for ever.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Oh yes, thanks. Very much. I nearly always do.’
He let go of her arm. She shot into the bathroom with a backwards glance of apology. Mark continued to lie in the bed. Exasperation and euphoria were now so hideously mixed that he felt slightly ill. One should never, ever ask questions of a person disposed to tell the truth. That last remark, for instance. Who? When? Bloody well don’t ask, he told himself savagely.
It was hot. They breakfasted in the garden. Mark was careful to make no comment. Last night, at dinner, he had looked round casually and said, ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Carrie. He looked again, puzzled, at what seemed to him an agreeable enough pot-pourri of flowers and plants.
‘The geraniums are horrid with the French marigolds and salvia is nasty anyway and everything’s in straight lines.’
‘Oh,’ he said, humbled.
This morning, he treated it with the contempt it evidently deserved. The croissants weren’t all that marvellous, either. He drank a great deal of coffee and allowed himself many quick looks at Carrie. She was sitting in a shaft of sunlight that turned her completely golden; ginger-golden curly hair and arms and legs pollened with streaks of gold and glinting eyelashes. He knew now that her pubic hair was sandy-coloured also, which admittedly was to be expected but at the time he had been oddly startled.
They bought food and wine for a picnic lunch in a small local supermarket. Carrie said, ‘This is just like Tesco’s or Fine Fare except that the stuff’s French.’ She sounded rather cheerful about it. ‘They didn’t have places like this when I was here with Ma.’ Mark, perusing the range of wines (some of them bottled in plastic), observed that you wouldn’t be buying pâté or bread like this in Tesco’s. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ said Carrie. ‘I don’t really know about things like that. Diana’s very good at food, isn’t she?’ Mark, picking something he hoped would be drinkable, did not answer. He thought again about bosky roadsides.
In the event, it was extraordinarily difficult to find anywhere to stop at all. They pounded on in rising heat, Mark’s nerves jangling from the demands of the constant leap-frog overtaking as he strained for the split-second chance to pass the lorry ahead before the blaring Citroën behind rode up his back. There was nowhere to turn off the road, or if there was it was gone before the decision could be made. Carrie said she wanted to go to the lavatory. Eventually, in desperation, he pulled into a lay-by. Carrie slithered down into some adjacent scrub. Mark got out the food and a rug and arranged it as far from the road as possible; even so each passing car sent a swirl of dust over the rug. Carrie was gone for so long that he had visions of rape or abduction; eventually she came strolling back from a completely different direction looking very sunny with a handful of wild flowers. They ate to the accompaniment of the whoosh-whoosh of cars and the occasional wham of a lorry. Carrie pored over her flowers and then read Emma. Mark went through three quite stunningly uninteresting articles in Le Monde and had some rather incoherent thoughts about the connection or more probably the lack of connection between expectation and realisation. When he got home he would consider this constructively, possibly in its application to Strong. He said, ‘Shall we go on – this isn’t all that nice a place.’ ‘O.K.,’ said Carrie amiably.