Mark, momentarily uplifted by the final word, said, ‘Ah. What part of London would that be?’
‘Balham,’ said Sid, with great promptness. It occurred to Mark with sudden insight that this was probably quite untrue; a nice semi in Camberley, more like. Social posing takes various forms, nowadays.
At nine-thirty Hermione and Sid moved into the kitchen from which, after much noisy bickering, they came up with a large and watery omelette and a salad. This, with cheese and fruit, was eaten off the dusty table on the patio. Carrie reappeared. Hermione said she couldn’t understand how people could bear to live in England when they could be somewhere like this. At midnight Mark went to bed with a headache.
11
‘That woman’s half-witted,’ said Diana. ‘And as for the boyfriend! Proper Lady Chatterley set-up, I must say. What the hell are we doing in this menagerie, I ask myself.’ She shot Mark a look. ‘Don’t you ask yourself?’
‘Sssh …’
Throughout the farmhouse you could hear pretty well everything anyone else said. The Lammings’ bedtime exchanges were conducted now in harsh whispers. It is extraordinarily difficult to give vent to the full range of emotion in a whisper; Diana, in moments of unendurable frustration, would break the sound-barrier.
‘All right. And it’s like spending one’s holiday on a building-site. We’d do better to take off for some nice pension in the town. How much longer do you need on this tape, anyway?’
‘Not sure,’ said Mark, hedging. ‘Anyway, you’re usually so keen to come to France.’
‘There’s France and France. This particular version of it is unfamiliar to me.’
‘I could do with another couple of days here. Then maybe we might push on somewhere else. Provence? I dare say it would be a kindness to take Carrie along,’ he said casually. ‘She doesn’t exactly love it here.’
‘All right. I must say I’d like to see Avignon again.’
Carrie, of course, was the problem. In fact he had done pretty well as much recording of Hermione as he wished to do and would be only too happy to see the back of her; what he could not endure was the thought of separation from Carrie. Carrie a reluctant prisoner in the back of the car would be better than no Carrie at all. If she would agree to come.
She had continued to efface herself. That morning he had managed to waylay her for a few minutes in the garden – or rather, the parched and whiskery wilderness called by Hermione the garden. Wearing shorts, bra and a large sun-hat she was doing something intricate to a geranium with secateurs and twine. Diana was sitting on the terrace reading. From the swimming-pool – the only completed feature of the landscape – came the sounds of Hermione and Sid engaged in noisy horseplay. Carrie said, ‘Hello. Could you just hold the end of the twine for me?’ He had sat down beside her and for a few minutes all had been peace and pleasure. And then Hermione, draped in a towel that matched her bikini, had come up and said she must redo that last recording, she’d had second thoughts about it. So that had been that.
Diana had now been at Sarlat for two days, her initial good humour and sociability abating by the hour. She remained outwardly genial towards Hermione but was barely able to conceal her contempt for Sid. ‘Christ!’ she had muttered, on first sight of the studio and demonstration of Sid’s professional skills. ‘We get plenty like him at the gallery. And he no more comes from Balham than I do. It’s taken years of cultivation, that accent.’ She had sought out Carrie, in so far as Carrie could be found – presumably in desperation. Mark had recorded Hermione: a far more lengthy and tedious process than ever he had anticipated. In the first place most of what was said turned out to be more about Hermione than about Strong; and then no sooner was a sequence taped than Hermione would decide she had said it wrong and demand to do it over again. In all his experience of interviewing and listening, Mark grimly reflected, there had been no one to equal Hermione for irrelevance, egotism, inaccuracy and sublime stupidity. It seemed quite extraordinary that she could be Strong’s daughter. He even entertained, lying in bed one morning, a wild fantasy involving successfully concealed cuckolding by Mrs Strong. At any rate, clearly that rich vein of perception, intuition, intellectual application and so forth had stopped short of Hermione. He thought, with new understanding and sympathy, of Mr Weatherby in the London office of Weatherby and Proctor, for whom Hermione was an inescapable and remorseless professional hazard. Hermione spoke frequently of Mr Weatherby, to whom she referred as that little man or Mr Thing. Mr Weatherby, evidently, was doing a grand job in preventing Hermione from acquiring and spending any more money than she already did. Sid, too, it was clear, had interesting powers of perception when it came to financial matters, despite the artistic status which, according to Hermione, raised him above such matters. He treated Mark to a disjointed tirade which appeared to mean that he had thought out a scheme whereby, with Carrie’s consent, the entail could be broken and Dean Close sold for the general benefit.
‘I doubt,’ said Mark coldly, ‘if she’d agree. Apart from anything else she happens to earn her living there. And there’s the small matter of the Strong Society, and their administration of the house.’
‘The old guy,’ admitted Sid, ‘buggers things up. Pas de joie, then, you think? No dice? Shame. Nice little bit of capital there for the girls.’
Mark raised his eyes from the tape recorder, which was giving trouble, and gave him a withering look. ‘How nice of you to have their interests so close at heart.’
‘Hermione,’ Sid confided earnestly, ‘is an O.K. señora. Believe me. Molto good fun.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Mark. He glared into the tape recorder. Sid, with some breezy remark about having work to do, slopped away into the farmhouse. It was insufferably hot. Hermione was asleep on a lilo by the pool. In the evening there would have to be another tape session which, with any luck, could be curtailed by mechanical failure. And then there would be no further reason to stay here. At some point soon he must get Carrie on her own and see if she could be persuaded to come with them. There was no sign of her in either the house or the garden at the moment, nor indeed of Diana. He wondered where they both were.
Diana sat at the café in the main square in Sarlat drinking Pernod. The town, its antiquity groomed to museum standards, seethed with people. Carrie sat at the other side of the table, an ice-cream in front of her that she did not appear to be eating.
‘All right,’ said Diana. ‘Let’s sort this out. Have you been to bed with him?’
Carrie found that it was quite impossible to look away. She gazed at Diana in acute discomfort. She felt herself get redder and redder; she blazed; her insides heaved. ‘Yes. About four times, actually.’
‘I don’t want to know how often,’ snapped Diana. ‘I just want to know yes or no. At least you’re honest.’
At the convent Carrie had briefly attended when she was twelve you got a credit mark for owning up to things you’d done wrong before you were found out; this felt a little like that. She bowed her head.
There was a silence. At last Diana said, more to herself than to Carrie, ‘He’s temporarily off his rocker, I imagine.’
‘Yes,’ said Carrie with enthusiasm.
‘You simply are not in any way his type.’
‘No, I know.’
Diana took a swig at her drink and waved at the waiter. ‘I suppose he may have to have therapy when we get back to London. If I can get him to a therapist.’ She eyed Carrie. ‘Do you do a lot of this?’
‘No,’ said Carrie.
‘Neither does Mark. At least not so far as I’m aware.’ Diana continued to study Carrie. ‘And, not to put too fine a point on it, you’re about the last person I’d have expected.’
Since Carrie entirely agreed with this, she could think of nothing to say.
Diana ordered herself another Pernod. ‘Would you like one?’
Carrie shook her head.
‘Well,’ said Diana briskly. ‘It’s got to stop.’
Carrie agreed wit
h alacrity. ‘Anyway I think he might have been getting a bit tired of me, on the last day or so. He didn’t like me reading at dinner.’
‘Reading?’ Diana stared. ‘Reading what? Oh, never mind … I must say you are … well, not quite like anyone one’s come across. I suppose that’s precisely why … Are you in love with Mark?’
‘No,’ said Carrie apologetically. ‘I’m afraid I’m not.’
Diana, for a moment, looked distinctly offended. ‘I see. That simplifies things, I suppose. The point is, what’s to be done from now on? There’s still the rest of this damn book.’
Carrie decided to eat her ice-cream before it melted. She was, she realised with relief, being regarded as some kind of natural hazard, a nuisance rather than an object of blame. She had expected worse than this. Indeed, from the moment that morning when Diana announced rather than suggested a short tour of the town by the two of them, she had feared that this was in the offing. Since she could think of no way of getting out of it, she had allowed Diana to tow her around the churches and the museum and through the narrow streets and finally they had come to rest at this café table, precisely as she had known they would.
‘I suppose,’ said Diana, ‘I shall just have to come down to Dean Close with him every time, which will be a damn nuisance.’
Carrie nodded sympathetically, thinking of the guest room mattress.
‘So it’ll have to be weekends, because of the gallery.’
Carrie’s relief grew. She was always busy at weekends anyway, what with extra customers and the girl in the office not there. She and Bill could just keep out of the way. Her attention began to wander, straying to the curious ginger-coloured stone houses, with their balconies and discreet notices tethering them to some other century, and the rivers of polyglot people that flowed around them. Hardly anyone seemed to be French. There were Scandinavian families with flaxen-haired children, matching clean-limbed blond parents, droves of young Americans, Japanese slung about with photographic equipment. They were sitting in the midst of the old town, which seemed to have been efficiently rinsed of both residents and any manifestation of age that was decrepit rather than engaging: what remained was a convenient and antiseptic receptacle for passers-by.
‘… sit around twiddling my fingers all day.’
Carrie jumped. ‘Sorry?’
Diana, it seemed, was offering the benefit of her administrative expertise at Dean Close. A face-lift for the sales office, which she’d had a glance into once and frankly … A once-over of the book-keeping.
‘Well …’ said Carrie awkwardly. She wasn’t sure how Bill would take to that. Diana had moved on to an energetic consideration of redesigning the main part of the house.
‘But it’s supposed to be kept exactly like it was,’ protested Carrie.
‘There’s keeping things like they were and keeping them like they ought to have been,’ said Diana. ‘Now take your grandfather’s study …’
At the farthest end of the scrubland that would be Hermione’s amusing formal French garden, because this was the closest she could find to privacy, Diana attended to Mark.
‘She has the educational attainments of a check-out girl in Marks and Spencer. She has read about five books in her life. She can’t spell. She doesn’t know if the Prime Minister is Labour or Conservative. She isn’t even pretty. And you’re in love with her.’
‘Up to a point,’ said Mark.
Diana snorted. ‘Up to a point, my foot. I thought better of you, frankly.’
Mark gazed at a plant: a disagreeable plant with fleshy leaves that looked as though it should be in a hot-house, not sprawling around in the dust. ‘I’m assuming,’ he said in a distant voice, ‘and indeed fervently hoping, that it will pass. In the meantime I can only apologise. Humbly.’
‘You told her,’ he said.
‘She asked,’ said Carrie, ‘if we had or not.’
‘And you told her we had.’
‘What else could I have said?’
‘Various things,’ said Mark at last. ‘You always tell the truth, don’t you? Now I know what it is that’s so disturbing about you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Hermione, presiding over pre-dinner drinks on the terrace, said, ‘Everyone’s very quiet this evening, I must say. Here am I, feeling gay and forthcoming and none of you will take me on.’
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ suggested Sid.
Hermione laughed indulgently. ‘I want to be entertained. And you’re all off tomorrow. I must say I think it’s awfully sweet of you to take Carrie with you. Not that she couldn’t have stayed here, of course – darling, I never did find a moment to take you to that hair place, for heaven’s sake get something done about it when you go home. And she’s been to Provence lots of times – we had that gorgeous little villa in Grasse on and off for years.’
Mark, with an effort, remarked that no doubt Carrie would see changes. He felt at the moment like an invalid, as though he were in a fragile state of health and must take great care of himself. He was beyond, even, being irritated by Sid. Hermione, by now, seemed merely an unavoidable fact, like some landscape blight that eventually becomes so known that the eye digests without seeing. She was remarkable only for being connected to Strong. That she had sprung from the loins of Gilbert Strong was indeed something to be wondered at. She was off on a final round of filial reminiscence.
‘… And of course one grew up surrounded by all those famous people. Everyone used to come to Dean Close, and to the London house before that. I can remember, um, Shaw and H. G. Wells and, um, someone with a pointy beard, terribly well known, goodness who was it, I know so well …’
‘D. H. Lawrence?’
‘That’s right. Him. I sat on his knee. I sat on his knee and he told me stories, I was only about six or seven. He was sweet.’
‘How extraordinary,’ said Mark. Since Strong’s only meeting with Lawrence had been disastrous and all his references to him scathing, and since Lawrence was in Italy at that time in any case, it was indeed.
‘I know. It’s wonderful how vividly one remembers things like that. He had a dreadful wife, you know, Erica or something, but he was charming – I’ve always loved the books, of course. And then there was that woman with the long face and what’s-his-name, the one who wrote that novel about India, and …’
Uncle Tom Cobley and all, thought Mark. Of course. Shaw, possibly. Certainly not Virginia Woolf, whom Strong detested. Ah well, what did it matter? At this particular moment and in his frail emotional state he was in no condition to cope either with Strong or with the complexities of truth and falsehood. Hermione’s various testimonies would serve only to confirm what he had already learned: that what people remember is distorted not only by the shortcomings of memory but by the myth-making of the rememberer. The various Strongs recreated by friends, foes, former mistresses and the seed of his loins were performing functions far more intricate and impenetrable than ever one knew. He was required to bolster egos, confirm alibis, glamourise his daughter’s picture of herself. He may or may not have faked a travel book, exercised bribery and/or intimidation, been a loving husband and father, a domestic tyrant and marital trickster.
Mark looked across at Diana, who wore an expression of patient interest, and Carrie, who was picking at a patch of peeling sunburn. He didn’t understand why it had been quite so simple to establish that Carrie would come with them tomorrow; nobody had raised the objections he had expected. How things would proceed now he had no idea, nor did he very much care. He would have liked to go to sleep for a long time. Diana, he supposed, would be hatching forms of punishment. As for Carrie, she seemed simply to have switched off; he wondered if, at this precise moment, she was seeing or hearing any of them.
Hermione was talking about D. H. Lawrence for some reason and the awful boyfriend was drinking too much and Mark looked like a zombie. Diana, inspecting Carrie, felt a further uprush of the energy and planning ability that had seized her ever since that
moment in the café in Sarlat. Crises always brought out the best in her; she actually enjoyed episodes like burst pipes or scalded limbs or domestic drama among friends requiring immediate bustle and organisation. She had seen what to do at once. You stepped right into the centre of things and took over. What you certainly did not do was send the girl packing or heap recriminations or stow Mark away under lock and key (as if that were possible). No, what you did was establish control.
She would drive. Mark would come in the front, because he would have to map-read. Carrie and the luggage would go in the back. She, Diana, would draw up an itinerary which Mark in his present shell-shocked state would be unlikely to query. She would see to it that everyone was kept busy, fed and slightly overtired. They would be under her eye. The whole thing would be domesticated and once she got them back to England, she would have had time to work out the next phase. Carrie, who was basically docile, would have accepted her as administrator and decision-maker. Mark … well, Mark would probably be all too ready for the comforts of home and routine.
The sound of her mother’s voice induced in Carrie a Pavlovian response: she simply blotted it out and concentrated on something else. She had mastered the art of doing this when she was seven and was surprised at how easily it came back. Occasionally odd words or names broke through (D. H. Lawrence – prompting the memory of an uneasy evening at the film of Women in Love with the plant nursery proprietor’s son) but on the whole she heard nothing. She felt Mark looking at her and sternly did not look back. Her feelings of joyous anticipation at leaving here quite extinguished any apprehension about what might happen next. She had agreed to go with the Lammings because it seemed the obvious and only thing to do.
It started to rain almost as soon as they left Sarlat. Thunder rumbled from a queasy yellow sky and torrents of warm water descended. Diana, her eyes bright and her shoulders tense, hunched forward over the driving-wheel; the car splashed along black shiny roads, skirting strings of cyclists shrouded in yellow plastic. The roadside fields were dotted with blue and scarlet tents, buttoned up and lashed down like ships weathering a storm. And then all of a sudden the rain ceased and the sun came out and the whole place furiously steamed. Diana said, ‘Right. We’ll stop at the next town and buy stuff for lunch.’