In the supermarket, somewhere between the soft drinks and the delicatessen counter, Carrie decided to leave Mark and Diana and go back to England. She glanced furtively at them – they were busy arguing about a melon – and slipped away to the check-out. There, she got in a slight panic and picked up a packet of sweets so as to have something to proffer. Once outside she hurried to the car. It was locked, of course, which she had forgotten, so she could not take her hand-grip. Her sweater and her copy of Emma, which she regretted, were on the back seat and also inaccessible. But her passport was in the bag over her shoulder, along with her money and the travellers’ cheques that Mark had made her bring, so that was all right. She could buy some T-shirts and a change of jeans; she had not had much with her in any case by way of clothes and she supposed the Lammings would bring the rest of her things back. She tore a page from her address book and wrote, ‘I decided to go back to England.’ She stared at this for a moment and then added ‘Sorry. Love, Carrie’. She stuck it under the windscreen wiper, looked quickly back in the direction of the supermarket and set off down the road, fast.
12
Carrie, in Paris, in a large cool room, sat gazing at a unicorn in the midst of a flowery meadow. The unicorn wore a jewelled collar and was encircled by a little wooden fence, but it was the carpet of flowers surrounding it that entranced Carrie. There were violets both white and blue, clover, daisy, bluebell, white campion, an orchid of some kind, iris and lily of unidentifiable species, persicaria, ramsons and many other things. She wrote down on the back of an envelope everything she could put a name to, but that still left a dozen or more, neatly stitched there apparently in the sixteenth century. Of course, when you stopped to think about it obviously there were the same flowers then as now, but this precise and lovely demonstration made the fact more startling. Lions and unicorns and those fairy tale people were gone, but violets and daisies and clover flowered away unconcernedly through the years. This was somehow reassuring; it also, in some way that was difficult to define, made you believe more firmly in the sixteenth century.
She had been doing a lot of sightseeing. That was not really what she had at first thought of coming to Paris for – it was simply that the first train that turned up had been an express going only there and it had also seemed to be a good place in which to hide from possible pursuing Lammings. But once she arrived she knew it was the place she wanted. She had been here often enough with Hermione, but all the time seemed to have been spent eating or drinking or shopping. Notre Dame amazed her. She took a train to Versailles and was further astonished. She wished she wasn’t so ignorant. The guide books told you a good deal but they also left out a lot; what was left out, she suspected, was what most people already knew – even the scruffy chattering fellow-tourists by whom she was surrounded. She decided, resenting her own deficiencies, to do something about this. She would buy some books.
There were a number of bookshops near the tapestry museum. In the first she found an Histoire de la France that looked about right for her purposes. But it could not supply her other need, which was a further copy of Emma. She had spent the entire train journey from the Dordogne regretting having had to abandon hers. A helpful assistant suggested a neighbouring establishment which again was unable to oblige. She bought a book about the Revolution – it had illustrations and was less off-putting than its companions – and continued down the road.
She had also acquired a guide to Paris et environs and a map. Her purchases were quite weighing her down. She put the carrier-bag on a chair while she scoured the shelves of the next shop for Emma. She found Hardy and Henry James but no Jane Austen. Reminded of Mark and one of their first conversations, she took down The Golden Bowl – the editions were in English – and dipped into it. The sentences were distressingly long; she fought her way through a few and then tried some dialogue. Her reservations increased; it was hard to see exactly what the speakers meant. She returned the book to the shelf and took out The Mayor of Casterbridge, again remembering Mark. Casterbridge was Dorchester, was that right? But what was the point of all this – presumably there were copies of these back home at Dean Close. She put the book back. At this point a man standing near, whom she had vaguely felt to be watching her, spoke. He said, with an inescapable English accent, ‘Hardy est plus … plus agréable que James, à mon avis. Vous l’avez déjà lu?’
‘I’m English,’ said Carrie.
‘Ah. The cut of your jeans fooled me.’ He was not in the least disconcerted. Carrie eyed him coldly. And you don’t fool me, she thought – trying to pick up French girls in bookshops. Huh. He was around thirty, thin and dark and with very bright eyes. Carrie prepared to leave.
‘Would you agree?’
‘I’ve never read either of them,’ said Carrie. At that moment she caught sight of a row of Jane Austens on the top shelf and among them – hurray! Emma. She reached up for it; the shelf was too high.
‘Allow me … Which is it you want?’
‘Emma,’ said Carrie, annoyed at her disadvantage.
‘My favourite.’ He handed the book to her.
‘Thank you.’ She moved towards the cash desk. The man followed her, holding a couple of French novels. Carrie delved in the carrier-bag for her purse.
Which was not there. She delved further, went brick red, remembered, now, setting it down at the cash desk of the last shop and, presumably, not picking it up again. She explained, getting redder still. ‘Je reviens … dans quelques instants. Si vous voulez bien garder le livre je …’ ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said the man. ‘I’ll loan you the cash and we’ll go along and collect your purse together. If it’s still there. If not you’re in trouble anyway.’ ‘Please don’t bother,’ said Carrie. ‘I can perfectly well …’ By which time he had swept Emma up with his own purchases, slapped down a wodge of francs and that was that. Carrie followed him out of the shop, feeling even further disadvantaged.
They proceeded down the street. He talked. He was called Nick Temperley and he was a journalist. ‘Not one of your glamorous Sunday paper journalists, I’m afraid. What’s called an educational journalist. I write specialist stuff about teaching and schools. I used to be one – a teacher.’ He was in Paris on holiday and partly to collect material for a piece about the French baccalauréat. Carrie conceded her name and that she was on holiday. And then half way between the two bookshops – on a traffic island, to be precise – something rather curious happened. He laid a hand on her arm to prevent her stepping into the path of a manic cyclist; she felt him looking at her, she glanced back at him and was seized with the thought that she was scruffy, that her hair urgently needed a wash, that her T-shirt was grubby and she very much wished she was looking nicer. Whatever was the matter? She hardly ever cared what she looked like, except from a vague sense of compunction.
The purse had been rescued by an assistant in the bookshop, who produced it with exclamations of triumph. Everybody thanked everybody else. Carrie counted out the right number of notes to repay Nick.
‘Buy me lunch instead.’
‘Oh …’ said Carrie. ‘Well …’
‘Unless you’re meeting someone?’
‘All right,’ said Carrie.
An hour and three quarters later, over the cheese, Carrie was struck at one and the same moment with the realisations that she was hugely enjoying herself and that this was someone she wasn’t actually ever going to see again. The enjoyment sagged; she fell silent; Nick continued cheerfully with an anecdote about the Japanese who lived next door to him and a bottle-opener and the man from the Gas Board. Carrie sat with a listening expression on her face and observed the fan of little lines that spread out from his eyes when he smiled and a front tooth off which a piece had been chipped. She wondered when and how.
‘Hmn …’ he said. ‘That’s the first time that story’s fallen as flat as that. It’s usually considered amusing.’ He contemplated her. ‘By the way you’ve never said what you do.’
‘I run a Garden Cent
re.’
He roared with laughter. ‘You never.’
‘What’s so funny about it?’ enquired Carrie, hurt.
‘Well … It’s just so unexpected. And not the sort of thing anyone I’ve ever known did.’
‘I’ve never met an educational journalist before,’ said Carrie with dignity.
‘How long are you staying here?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I’m here another week or so.’
‘Oh,’ said Carrie.
‘I thought of going to Fontainebleau tomorrow.’
‘Oh.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No,’ said Carrie, suppressing an unwelcome recollection of a jaunt with Hermione and some exceptionally awful friends of Hermione’s.
‘Why don’t you come along, then?’
That warm glow of enjoyment came flooding back. Carrie beamed. ‘O.K.,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said Nick, beaming also. So lunch came to an end, they stepped out into the street, parted, and Carrie set off back to her hotel, stopping on the way to buy shampoo and, in a moment of heady abandon, a rather nice dress she had caught sight of in a shop window.
The Lammings, after the initial surprise, did not much discuss Carrie’s departure. Diana, reading her note, said, ‘Well, that’s a bit abrupt, I must say. Frankly she is the most peculiar girl.’ Mark said nothing. He felt … well, he was not even entirely sure what he felt. Bleak. Deprived. Also, possibly, a faint twinge of relief. At least perhaps he could now step off that switchback of emotion. He could merely exist, a condition for which there is something to be said.
They went south and examined with diligence Aix and Avignon and Arles. Diana drove. She complained about the condition of the car; ‘What the hell have you been doing to it?’
‘It’s difficult,’ said Mark testily, ‘to drive several hundred miles through France at the height of the holiday season without incurring a single scratch.’
‘All right,’ said Diana, ‘I’ll let you off that one.’ She was not, indeed, going in for recriminations. She was brisk and efficient about maps and hotels and itineraries. They both read at mealtimes. Sometimes Diana would glance at Mark sitting beside her in the car, hunched up so that he looked somehow smaller than usual, with his hands in his lap, staring ahead. And she experienced something odd. She felt … yes, she felt sorry for him, of all things. Occasionally she put out a hand and held, for a moment, his knee, and Mark’s hand would move sideways to touch hers. Neither of them spoke. France continued to roll past at either side.
There was Fontainebleau and then the next day there was the Musée d’Art Moderne where Carrie discovered she liked several kinds of picture she had thought she didn’t care for at all. And there was an old Chaplin film at a little cinema off the Boulevard St Michel on an afternoon when it rained and lunches at the bistro they particularly liked and dinner with some French friends of Nick’s. He had been for a year at the Sorbonne so he knew quite a lot of French people.
In the cinema they held hands and after the dinner with the friends he kissed her and the day after that he came up to her hotel room after lunch and it became apparent that they were going to make love and Carrie said ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ he asked, reasonably enough, she thought. And she said again, just ‘No.’ Because it’s too important, she was saying inside her head, but none of this got spoken; she simply sat on the edge of the bed gazing at him in despair. And he gazed back for a minute or so and then said, ‘You may well be right.’ And they went for a walk along the quai instead, holding hands a great deal.
Carrie telephoned Bill.
‘Well! The prodigal partner! How’s la belle France then?’
‘Lovely.’
‘Lovely, eh?’ said Bill. ‘That’s a bit of a turnaround. I thought we didn’t care for abroad?’
Carrie said it was just that the weather was nice and she’d seen some interesting places. She asked about the alpines and whether the compost delivery had come all right and if Bill had remembered to check the syringas. Bill told her not to teach her grandmother to suck eggs. He asked where she was.
‘Paris.’
‘How’s thingummy – Mark?’
Carrie said actually she wasn’t with Mark any more. ‘Bill?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Would you mind if I stay on a few more days?’
‘You suit yourself, duckie. Why?’
Carrie said there were some museums and art galleries she still hadn’t seen. Bill replied that he was impressed with this sudden thirst for culture and looked forward to a blow by blow account.
The next morning Carrie did indeed spend in the Louvre. She had arranged to meet Nick at lunch-time. By eleven, though, the gallery was unbearably crowded and she had a slight headache; she decided to make her way across the river and look around the shops.
Half an hour later, wandering along the Boulevard St Michel, she glanced across the road and saw Nick. At first she thought it was just someone like him and then it unmistakably was him. Also wandering along. With a girl. With a girl across whose shoulders his arm casually lay.
Some part of Carrie’s intestines turned right over. It was a horrid sensation; she had never felt such a thing in her life. It was like fear and yet not; it was like sudden violent illness and yet not. She stood stock still staring at Nick and the girl and her insides subsided but left her feeling frail and queasy. Then she panicked lest he should see her and plunged away, head down.
She decided not to meet him for lunch. Maybe he wasn’t coming anyway. She decided to do something else; she would visit the tapestries again and then tomorrow she would go home. It was absurd staying here all this time anyway. She set off for the tapestry museum, with this huge lead weight implanted somewhere in the centre of her stomach, and half way there she turned round and headed for the bistro.
Landscapes displayed themselves to Mark as though he watched some travelogue: towns and villages and pastoral settings and the Rhone pouring fat and muddy towards the south. He looked, dutifully, at the things he was told to look at. Roman amphitheatres merged themselves into one composite Roman amphitheatre; Romanesque and Gothic passed before him and busy tree-lined squares and fields of vines or maize or Charolais cattle. Diana negotiated for food and beds; he spoke to no one except her. His thoughts, which were largely on Carrie, were like the chronic physical discomfort of flu or some gastric complaint. Indeed he was, he decided, ill – emotionally ill. But the Carrie of whom he thought, detached from any known setting (where was she? In a train or bus? Sitting at a café table? Walking by some roadside?), was already unreachable, removed by distance as finally as though by time. He had begun to think of her in the past tense. Which in no way diminished his distress.
‘Cheer up,’ said Diana. Irritatingly.
‘I’m all right.’
‘When we get home,’ she went on, in the throw-away tone that, he well knew, concealed hard purpose, ‘it might be an idea to see this rather clever man Suzanne knows. Just to sort of chat.’
‘Chat about what?’
‘About what you’ve been feeling and that sort of thing.’
‘Are you suggesting,’ he growled, ‘that I take a course of psychoanalysis?’
Diana laughed lightly. ‘Heavens, no! This chap’s called a therapist or something. It’s all very informal.’
‘A kind of emotional massage?’
Diana, scenting danger, side-stepped. ‘He sorted Suzanne’s sister out marvellously after her husband left her. She’s completely adjusted now.’
‘I have no wish to be adjusted.’
Diana diplomatically suggested a detour to Troyes to take in the cathedral.
They were on their way north. In a couple of days or so they would cross the Channel. And life would be waiting for them on the other side, rubbing its hands: letters and bank statements and card-index boxes. The book. Dean Close. Carrie.
Carrie over the côtelette de porc garnie which was ste
adily choking her, said, ‘I saw you. Earlier.’
‘Did you? I didn’t see you.’
‘You were with someone.’
‘Why didn’t you shout or something?’
‘A girl.’
‘Yes,’ said Nick. ‘That’s right.’
‘Who is she?’ said Carrie distantly.
‘She’s called Marie-Claire and I’ve known her for nearly ten years and she’s engaged to a friend of mine.’
There was a silence. He looked at her with what seemed to be concern. He asked if there was something wrong with the chop.
‘Oh,’ said Carrie, at last. And then, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Am I sure about what?’
‘About her being engaged to this friend of yours?’
‘Absolutely certain,’ said Nick. The look of concern had changed to one of … well, of amusement. ‘If you’re not going to eat that I’ll have it. I’m still ravenous.’
But Carrie had realised that she was, in fact, hungry and outside the sun had come out and maybe there was no point in rushing off to Dean Close tomorrow after all. Bill was obviously managing perfectly well without her.
Diana, at the same time as she expertly drove and busily observed, provided for the future. Mark required distraction. There must be outings and dinners for friends. She would go to Dean Close with him but not every time. Observation and reflection had now convinced her that it was not Carrie who was the threat but Mark’s state of mind. Carrie, in a sense, was neither here nor there. She was, Diana decided, a figment of Mark’s imagination, in a way; patently she was not the kind of girl he really cared for (his inclinations were, always had been, towards clever well-informed women, women of his own sphere, women in other words somewhat like Diana), so she was a projection of some kind. A projection of restlessness and obsession with the subject of his book and some vague sort of wishful thinking. Figments and projections could be dealt with.