SIX
He was woken by the harsh bell of the telephone. It was light, and when he looked at his watch he saw that it was four in the morning.
He stood and stumbled across the room to answer the telephone. It was the gendarmes in Antibes asking if anyone knew a certain William Ludley.
‘Yes,’ said Simon in muddled French. ‘Why? Is he there? Is he drunk?’
No, the gendarmes replied. He was not drunk. He was dead.
The storm had passed but the air was still soggy and drops of rain slipped off the palm trees onto the ground. The Jaguar would not start. The sound of the motor, growing weaker at each attempt, was – with the drip and patter of this residual rain – the only sound in the early morning air.
Simon abandoned the car and with the frightened, bleary-eyed child stumbling behind him he walked out through the gates in search of a taxi. They found one only when they reached the Boulevard de la Californie, and it took them along the empty roads to the Gendarmerie in Antibes.
They were first shown Willy’s sodden passport, and were asked if the photograph was that of the man they knew. Simon asked if any other bodies had been recovered from the sea.
Several people had been drowned that night, the gendarme told him, but some had been found without their papers. He spoke as if this was something they would have to answer for in the next world.
‘But there were only two others on the boat,’ said Simon.
‘The tidal wave,’ said the gendarme. ‘It took at least a dozen.’
Simon did not understand what the gendarme meant, but did not question him further. He and Helen followed him to the police car.
When they reached the morgue Simon – imagining that Willy’s features might be horrifying to see – suggested to Helen that she wait in the car. She had shown no signs of emotion until that moment, but now she clung to his arm and said: ‘Please let me come’; so together they followed the gendarme down a passage to a small cold room where seven bodies lay on trolleys covered by sheets.
A man in a white coat talked for a moment to the gendarme and then led Simon and Helen to the third trolley. He pulled back the sheet. Simon need not have been concerned about his friend’s appearance because Willy’s face in death looked much as it had done when he had lain next to Helen on his own bed. No one had combed his hair, as Helen had done, but the salt water had stiffened and whitened the wisps which were usually swept back over his scalp and now lay awry over his forehead.
‘Is it Ludley?’ the gendarme asked him.
‘Yes,’ said Simon.
‘Yes,’ Helen repeated softly.
‘Why did you ask if he was drunk?’ the gendarme asked.
‘For no particular reason.’
‘Did he drink?’
‘From time to time.’
‘Only a fool or a drunkard would have gone out in weather like that.’
Simon made no rejoinder. He was led back to the first of the covered corpses, and again the sheet was drawn back from the face. The fine but swarthy face of an Arab looked up at him, the mouth and eyes both open. Helen gripped his arm. Simon shook his head. ‘No, I don’t know who he is.’
They moved on to the second trolley and again the sheet was drawn back, this time to reveal poor Charlie, his mouth and eyes closed, his face set in the same bland expression it had worn in life.
‘He was called Hope,’ said Simon. ‘Charles Hope. He was also on the boat.’
They passed by the third trolley which held Willy’s corpse and moved on to the fourth. The face here was of an older man, thin and pinched but with tough skin and bushy eyebrows. Simon shook his head. They moved on to the fifth.
‘No,’ said the man in white. ‘These are motor accidents.’ And he led Simon and Helen on to the end of the line of bodies. ‘This is a woman,’ he said. ‘She’s the last of the drowned ones for the moment.’ He drew back the sheet and Simon looked down on the exact, almost expressionless face that he had loved so much when she was alive. Her mouth was open a little – the lips a centimetre apart. Her eyes were closed. Her skin had already taken on the shine of a corpse: her features were like those of a life-sized doll.
‘Do you know her?’ asked the gendarme.
‘Yes.’
‘Was she one of your friends?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was she called?’
‘Priscilla Ludley.’
‘The wife of the Ludley there?’
‘Yes. Or rather, no. No. She was his sister.’
They returned to the Gendarmerie. The fact that the Ludleys had lived in France for some years without a visa or a permis de séjour made Simon too an object of suspicion until he had established that he worked for the Foreign Office in London. The attitude of the gendarme then changed. He seemed to feel an automatic respect for a fellow official, even an official of a foreign government. In his heavy, Provençal accent he even expressed some sympathy for the death of Simon’s friends.
It was nine in the morning when they came out of the Gendarmerie into the weak sunshine. They walked towards the sea and stopped at a café to eat breakfast. Simon bought a copy of Nice-Matin, which gave a dramatic account of the tidal wave which had killed their friends. The torrent of water rushing down the Var into the Baie des Anges had dislodged the earth emptied into the sea by the airport. This massive subsidence beneath the surface had sucked down the sea, leading to a huge tidal wave which had swept back and forth across the bay, smashing the sailing boats moored in the harbour of Antibes on the one side, and sweeping into the sea nine labourers on the site of the new port on the other. A sailing boat had also been caught in its path: three English tourists had been drowned.
As he translated this story from the paper for Helen, Simon glanced at her every now and then to see if she was about to cry, but she still held the same expression on her face of wide-eyed shock. Only when he had finished reading did she say: ‘Was it an accident?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought, perhaps, that he wanted to die because of me and Priss and that business about the baby.’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘I’m sure that if it hadn’t been for the tidal wave, the boat would have survived the storm.’
They took a cab from Antibes back to the Villa Golitsyn. There they were both so tired, after an almost sleepless night, that they went to their rooms to sleep.
Simon was woken by hunger at three in the afternoon. He went down to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich with a piece of stale baguette and some Emmenthal cheese. He did not sit down to eat it. The house seemed hollow without its owners: he felt ill-at-ease – a trespasser. He walked through from the kitchen into the living-room, wondering if there was any reason why he should not leave for London that night, or at the latest the next morning. The three dead bodies could either be buried in Nice or sent back to England: in either case it was a matter for solicitors and the police. It had nothing to do with him.
He frowned as he munched his sandwich. He was inwardly embarrassed that he felt no grief over the death of his three friends. When he thought of the two Ludleys lying in the morgue, he was overwhelmed not by sorrow but by frustration and annoyance. It irritated him that his holiday in the South of France should have ended like this. He felt cheated by them both – by Willy of the solution to the Djakarta leak; by Priss of her love and her body.
He wished that Priss was with him there in the room. The sight of her corpse had not doused his desire; indeed the very certainty that it was now impossible to consummate it exacerbated his frustration. His sexual hunger, quiescent for so long after his divorce, had returned with a ravenous force, yet the warm and supple body to which he had looked for its satisfaction was now cold and rotting on a trolley in Antibes. The only woman he wanted could not be his.
He turned and looked out of the window, remembering the agreeable prostitutes who always stood on the pavements of the Boulevard de la Californie. Before it would have seemed brutish to go to one of them, but desire
still gnawed at his groin. How absurd to be fastidious about where one sends one’s sperm, he thought to himself, his eyes on the box hedge outside the kitchen window. That was Willy’s mistake. He died to escape from his own desire for a girl he did not love. But how could he love her? There was nothing there to love. He should have just had her and let it go at that.
Simon pushed the last morsel of bread and cheese into his mouth and wiped some butter from his fingers onto a dishcloth. Sex can be sublime, he thought, but it is also a natural function, like crapping. Willy was constipated and it killed him.
He left the kitchen and went upstairs to return to his room. He stopped on the landing by the door to the Prince’s dressing-room. He should wake Helen. She should get ready to go back to England. He knocked at the door to her room. There was no answer. He opened the door and as he did so the memory returned to him of how he had seen her before – once in her blue schoolgirl’s bloomers, and later with her nightdress hitched round her waist.
The room was dark – the shutters closed. He peered at her bed and saw that although the blankets and sheets were disarranged, no one lay in it. He thought that she might have got up before him, and had perhaps gone down to the town, but as he turned to go back onto the landing he remembered the passage between this, the Prince’s dressing-room, and the Prince’s bedroom where the Ludleys had slept. He crossed the room, passed by the open wardrobes containing Priss and Willy’s clothes, and entered the large bedroom near to the window which led onto the balcony. The shutters here were ajar; he could see that Helen was asleep on their bed.
He went closer. She lay on her back, her head and one shoulder all that showed above the line of sheets and blankets. There was a mark on the shoulder where it had been creased by the strap of her slip. The skin around her eyes was red, as if she had cried herself to sleep. Methodically he took off his clothes, laying them neatly on the chair by the bed. Last of all he removed his wristwatch: the metal strap clicked on the glass top of the bedside table. It was a quarter to four. Helen shifted slightly and murmured in her sleep. He watched her, waiting, and when she lay still again carefully raised the blankets and slid in beside her. She moved drowsily as he embraced her but became only properly conscious when her virginity was gone.
PART FOUR
ONE
On the pretext of seeing to the Ludleys’ affairs, Simon stayed on at the Villa Golitsyn. Helen stayed with him, and apart from the time he spent at the Prefecture in Old Nice, or in talking on the telephone to the Ludleys’ solicitor in London, Simon kept the company of his callow mistress.
As Priss had predicted, Helen had seemed happy enough to lose her virginity, and on the evening after Simon had seduced her she cooked supper for him as if that too was part of her new adult role. She put the ravioli they had bought in the old town into a pan of boiling water but cooked it for too short a time. His teeth stuck into the hard lumps of pasta which she had crowned with warmed but otherwise untreated tomatoes.
After that, in the evening, they ate out. The food was better in the restaurants but the making of conversation was an ordeal. Willy too had been right: Helen had the body of a woman but the mind of an uninteresting child. Simon could think of nothing to say to her, and when she talked to him – about her parents, her school or her pony – he found it difficult to listen. The only two things they had in common were sex and the Ludleys, and as if by an unspoken agreement the Ludleys were forbidden as a topic of conversation.
They therefore returned to sex, and certainly Helen was interested enough in that. They talked about it at table and practised it back at the Villa Golitsyn. In the absence of her hors catégorie lover, she made the most of the five-star, and Simon did what he could to live up to his rating. He stimulated his flagging appetite by varying the ways in which he made love to her, and went on to enact pantomimes of his own invention. He called her his ‘pet’, tied a poodle’s collar around her neck and led her naked on all fours around the Ludleys’ bedroom. Helen accepted everything he suggested, as if she was being taught the rules of a new game: when he brought her champagne in a saucer she lapped it up like a cat while Simon stood back to admire the tableau he had created – the naked girl crouching by the open window, pink in the light of the setting sun.
Quite soon, however, he tired of these games with her body and became impatient to get back to England but it was not until the tenth day after the drowning that the formalities were completed for the return of the corpses to England. It would have been done sooner had not the heir to the Ludley estate, a second cousin, asked to have them buried in Nice – by doing so he hoped to avoid Transfer Tax on the Ludley assets outside the United Kingdom. But both Willy and Priss, soon after leaving England, had made wills which stated quite clearly that wherever they should happen to die, their bodies should be buried in the churchyard at Hensfield, their family home in Suffolk. And so, at the solicitor’s request, Simon dispatched the sealed coffins to London and followed with Helen the next day.
Already at the airport he felt embarrassed to have Helen at his side. He was annoyed at having to pay for her ticket, and at the way in which she seemed to cling to him – not touching him but placing herself next to him as if they were a couple. The sounds and smells of the airport reminded Simon of the many times he had flown abroad on Foreign Office business, and for the first time he began to worry that someone who knew him might see him with Helen and imagine that he had picked her up on the Riviera. Certainly she now looked more like the mistress of a middle-aged man than a runaway schoolgirl. She had short, well-cut hair and wore the elegant, grown-up clothes that Priss had bought for her. She was thinner, too, and had an older look on her face. Only her mind remained that of a child, and it was well concealed by her sophisticated appearance.
Their plane took off over the Baie des Anges and Helen, who sat by the window, looked down in silence through the scratched Perspex of the windows at the water which had killed their friends. Then, when the Airbus had climbed high enough to fly north over the mountains, she turned her attention to the safety instructions and the flight magazine in the pocket in front of her.
Simon, who had been reading an English newspaper, turned and asked her what she planned to do when they got to London. He put the question in a solicitous tone of voice, as if anxious about her future; but it was firmly phrased to emphasize that he would play no part in it.
For a while she did not answer. Then, without taking her eyes off the magazine, she said: ‘What do you think I should do?’
‘Sooner or later, you’ll have to go home.’
‘I suppose I will.’ She sounded as though she thought she could avoid it.
‘I should get it over and done with.’
She turned to face him. ‘Can’t we stay together?’
Quickly and without meeting her eyes he said: ‘Not really, no.’
She sniffed and looked back at her magazine.
‘You can stay in my flat tonight, if you like,’ said Simon. ‘But tomorrow you’d better go home.’
‘Can’t I go to the funeral.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
She seemed to accept his decision. ‘Won’t we see each other again, then?’
‘Of course. Every now and then.’ He turned and forced himself to smile.
She smiled back. ‘You can come and take me out from school.’
‘I’m sure they won’t send you back to boarding school.’
‘I hope not.’
‘The school is unlikely to take you back.’
‘Then perhaps they’ll send me to a crammer’s in London.’
‘That would make more sense.’
‘Then it would be easy.’
‘What?’
‘To see you.’
‘Yes.’
The stewardess handed them each a plastic cup of fruit juice.
‘The only problem is,’ said Simon shiftily, ‘that I’m often abroad, and when I’m in England I’m usually very busy.’
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She seemed embarrassed by his excuses. ‘Have you really travelled a lot?’ she asked. ‘Can I look at your passport?’
He took it out from the inside pocket of his jacket. She took it and turned the pages, looking at the different visas. ‘You’ve been almost everywhere,’ she said.
‘It’s part of my job.’
‘And all I’ve got,’ she said, taking her shining new passport from her bag, ‘is a tiny little stamp from Calais.’
He took her passport and opened it at the photograph of Helen. It was unrecognizable. She was dressed in her school uniform and her hair was tied in plaits.
‘It’s awful,’ said Helen, trying to snatch the passport back from him.
‘When was it taken?’
‘Years ago.’
‘But the passport is new.’ He turned the pages to see the date of issue; then glanced back to her date of birth. ‘Is this right?’ he asked. ‘Were you born on 10 November 1963?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘It means that you’re only fifteen years old.’
‘Nearly sixteen.’
‘You said you were seventeen.’
‘I wanted you to think I was older.’
He drew in his breath. ‘It’s against the law in England to sleep with a girl under the age of sixteen.’
‘Is it in France?’
‘I don’t know, but if anyone knew it could get me into a lot of trouble.’
‘Good,’ said Helen with a smile. ‘Now I’ll be able to blackmail you.’
TWO
At Heathrow Simon persuaded Helen to stand ahead of him in the queue of passengers waiting to pass through immigration controls. He watched as the official who looked at her passport seemed to make some joke about the photograph, but she was not detained and a few minutes later the two stood together again waiting for their suitcases to come from the plane.
They took a taxi into London. The sight of the red, double-decker buses and the ugly Edwardian houses which lined the road brought home to Simon the risks he had run in seducing the girl beside him. He could not understand why he had done it: he tried to remember the state of mind which had led him to act as he did, but all he could remember was his longing for Priss. What if Helen told her parents? He quickly rehearsed in his mind the explanation he would present if ever he was accused of what he had done. He would deny that he had slept with her. He would deny taking her to the Ludleys. He would say that Charlie had picked her up at the station, and that he could not have reported her presence in the Villa Golitsyn without jeopardizing his investigation into the Djakarta leak. Raison d’état was the best excuse for everything.