The engines started to roar. ‘You’ll find in the course of your life,’ boomed Nicholas, and then, realizing that he sounded pompous, he put on his funny pompous voice, ‘as I have found in the course of mine, that such people, though perhaps destructive and cruel towards those who are closest to them, often possess a vitality that makes other people seem dull by comparison.’
‘Oh, God, gimme a break,’ said Bridget. The plane gathered speed and shuddered into the pasty English sky.
5
AS ELEANOR’S BUICK DRIFTED along the slow back roads to Signes the sky was almost clear except for a straggling cloud dissolving in front of the sun. Through the tinted border of the windscreen, Anne saw the cloud’s edges curling and melting in the heat. The car had already been caught behind an orange tractor, its trailer loaded with dusty purple grapes; the driver had waved them on magnanimously. Inside the car, the air conditioning gently refrigerated the atmosphere. Anne had tried to prise the keys from her, but Eleanor said that nobody else ever drove her car. Now the soft suspension and streams of cold air made the dangers of her driving seem more remote.
It was still only eleven o’clock and Anne was not looking forward to the long day ahead. There had been an awkward, stale silence since she’d made the mistake of asking how Patrick was. Anne felt a maternal instinct towards him, which was more than she could say for his mother. Eleanor had snapped at her, ‘Why do people think they are likely to please me by asking how Patrick is, or how David is? I don’t know how they are, only they know.’
Anne was stunned. A long time went by before Anne tried again. ‘What did you think of Vijay?’
‘Not much.’
‘Me neither. Luckily he had to leave earlier than expected.’ Anne still did not know how much to reveal about the row with Vijay. ‘He was going to stay with that old man they all worship, Jonathan somebody, who writes those awful books with the crazy titles, like Anemones and Enemies or Antics and Antiques. You know the one I mean?’
‘Oh, him, Jesus, he’s awful. He used to come to my mother’s house in Rome. He would always say things like, “The streets are pullulating with beggars,” which made me really angry when I was sixteen. But is that Vijay man rich? He kept talking as if he must be, but he didn’t look as if he ever spent any money – not on his clothes anyhow?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Anne, ‘he is so rich: he is factory-rich, bank-rich. He keeps polo ponies in Calcutta, but he doesn’t like polo and never goes to Calcutta. Now that’s what I call rich.’
Eleanor was silent for a while. It was a subject in which she felt quietly competitive. She did not want to agree too readily that neglecting polo ponies in Calcutta was what she called rich.
‘But stingy as hell,’ said Anne to cover the silence. ‘That was one of the reasons we had a row.’ She was longing to tell the truth now, but she was still unsure. ‘Every evening he rang home, which is Switzerland, to chat in Gujarati to his aged mother, and if there was no answer, he’d show up in the kitchen with a black shawl around his frail shoulders, looking like an old woman himself. Finally I had to ask him for some money for the phone calls.’
‘And did he pay you?’
‘Only after I lost my temper.’
‘Didn’t Victor help?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Victor shies away from crass things like money.’
The road had cut into cork forests, and trees with old or fresh wounds where belts of bark had been stripped from their trunks grew thickly on both sides.
‘Has Victor been doing much writing this summer?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Hardly any. And it’s not as if he does anything else when he’s at home,’ Anne replied. ‘You know, he’s been coming down here for what? Eight years? And he’s never even been over to say hello to those farmers next door.’
‘The Fauberts?’
‘Right. Not once. They live three hundred yards away in that old farmhouse, with the two cypresses out front. Victor’s garden practically belongs to them, but they’ve never exchanged a word. “We haven’t been introduced,” is his excuse,’ said Anne.
‘He’s terribly English for an Austrian, isn’t he?’ smiled Eleanor. ‘Oh look, we’re coming up to Signes. I hope I can find that funny restaurant. It’s in a square opposite one of those fountains that’s turned into a mound of wet moss with ferns growing out of it. And inside there are heads of wild boars with polished yellow tusks all over the walls. Their mouths are painted red, so it looks as if they could still charge out from behind the wall.’
‘God, how terrifying,’ said Anne, drily.
‘When the Germans left here,’ Eleanor continued, ‘at the end of the war, they shot every man in the village, except for Marcel – the one who owns the restaurant. He was away when it happened.’
Anne was silenced by Eleanor’s air of crazed empathy. Once they’d found the restaurant, she was at once relieved and a little disappointed that the dark watery square was not more redolent of sacrifice and retribution. The walls of the restaurant were made of blonde plastic moulded to look like planks of pine and there were in fact only two boars’ heads in the rather empty room, which was harshly lit by bare fluorescent tubes. After the first course of tiny thrushes full of lead shot and trussed up on pieces of greasy toast, Anne could only toy with the dark depressing stew, loaded onto a pile of overcooked noodles. The red wine was cold and raw and came in old green bottles with no label.
‘Great place, isn’t it?’ said Eleanor.
‘It’s certainly got atmosphere,’ said Anne.
‘Look, there’s Marcel,’ said Eleanor desperately.
‘Ah, Madame Melrose, je ne vous ai pas vue,’ he said, pretending to notice Eleanor for the first time. He hurried round the end of the bar with quick small steps, wiping his hands on the stained white apron. Anne noticed his drooping moustache and the extraordinary bags under his eyes.
Immediately, he offered Eleanor and Anne some cognac. Anne refused despite his claim that it would do her good, but Eleanor accepted, and then returned the offer. They drank another and chatted about the grape harvest while Anne, who could only understand a little of his midi accent, regretted even more that she was not allowed to drive.
By the time they got back to the car, the cognac and tranquillizers had come into their own and Eleanor felt her blood tumbling like ball bearings through the veins under her numbed skin. Her head was as heavy as a sack of coins and she closed her eyes slowly, slowly, completely in control.
‘Hey,’ said Anne, ‘wake up.’
‘I am awake,’ said Eleanor grumpily and then more serenely, ‘I’m awake.’ Her eyes remained closed.
‘Please let me drive.’ Anne was ready to argue the point.
‘Sure,’ said Eleanor. She opened her eyes, which suddenly seemed intensely blue against the pinkish tinge of frayed blood vessels. ‘I trust you.’
Eleanor slept for about half an hour while Anne drove up and down the twisting roads from Signes to Marseilles.
When Eleanor woke up, she was lucid again and said, ‘Goodness that stew was awfully rich, I did feel a little weighed down after lunch.’ The high from the Dexedrine was back; like the theme from The Valkyrie, it could not be kept down for long, even if it took a more muted and disguised form than before.
‘What’s Le Wild Ouest?’ said Anne. ‘I keep passing pictures of cowboys with arrows through their hats.’