According to Mark

  ‘Good. Do you want to see the monastery? Ruins of.’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘Don’t forget this,’ said Mark, picking up Emma. ‘I draw the line at searching out yet another copy.’ Carrie’s marking slip, he noticed, had crept half-way through the book. He, at one point, had browsed through a few pages, finding the Box Hill picnic curiously transposed by being in French, both more florid and somehow a little arch. But that, of course, was because a foreign language has resonances that would not be there for native readers. English cannot sound to others as it does to the English. This brought to mind some of Strong’s more stridently unperceptive literary comments which were on Flaubert – criticism had not in any case been his strength and clearly where the French novel was concerned he suffered from a total absence of sympathy; nevertheless, being Strong, he had had a go. It was the first time in several days Mark had thought of Strong; his bombastic personality was as out of place here as … well, in fact, as the pastoral and crumbling France peopled by gnarled peasants, goats and quaintly spoken curés described in Strong’s only writings on the place, a handful of essays published in the twenties. No doubt, Mark recollected, at the time when he was swanning around the south with Stella Bruce instead of doing serious travelling in the Caucasus. The France of supermarchés, fibre-glass canoes, chromium racing cycles and a Renault to every household was as alien to then as Strong’s merrie England of the shires to the Dorset or Wiltshire of today.

  All this prompted a line of thought about travel being as much a temporal as a physical process that distracted him from the matter in hand – which was the extrication of the car from the crammed car park in which they had left it. Someone had parked a Citroën right up against his bumper; with gathering irritation he shunted to and fro, getting hotter and hotter. Carrie sat tranquilly at his side. Diana would have been issuing instructions, or hopping out in search of the Citroën owner. His foot slipped off the clutch and the car leaped forward; there was a thump and the splintering sound of breaking plastic. Two passing women stared at him censoriously. He got out; it was his light that was broken, of course, not the Citroën’s. He set about further shunting, grimly, and at last freed the car. He was now streaming with sweat. ‘Where are we going next?’ asked Carrie cheerfully.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the map.’

  They were no great distance now from Sarlat. ‘I should think the best thing is just to push on until we find somewhere that looks nice to spend the night. The last night,’ he added, looking at her.

  Carrie was intent upon the map. ‘There are points de vue and châteaux and lots of stuff like that ahead.’

  ‘I don’t doubt,’ said Mark.

  Carrying their cases, for the fourth time, up strange stairs and into a strange bedroom, it seemed to both of them in independent ways as though they had been doing this for ever. For Carrie it was a small revelation about the nature of marriage. If you were married to someone you were with them all the time, pretty well; being alone was when there was just the two of you, as opposed to the two of you and other people. Being alone in the proper sense was only when you were in the bathroom, or suchlike stray moments. Of course, living with Bill had its affinities with marriage but was different in a significant way. Going to bed with someone, both literally and in its euphemistic sense, was more important than she had quite realised. Whatever was it like in perpetuity? Pondering this, she sat down on the edge of the bed and rummaged in her case for a fresh T-shirt. Another thing she had forgotten about abroad was how hot it was.

  For Mark the whole thing had moved from heady and unsettling unreality to a dreamlike dailiness. Last Monday was now as long ago as last month, last year; Diana was as benign and remote as some friend long unseen. He had to remind himself that in three days’ time she would arrive in Sarlat. So far as his feelings were concerned, they were beyond analysis: a horrid ferment in which surfaced now delight, now guilt, now boredom, now irritation. With Carrie almost constantly at his side, he no longer had the pain and pleasure of thinking about her in the abstract. He could not envisage what things would be like once all this was over. Lust had been satisfied, supposedly; but of course lust is never satisfied, that is its awful power; it is forever regenerated. He watched Carrie putting on an emerald green T-shirt with a small rip under one arm and thought, simultaneously and quite detachedly, of his small, book-crammed study at home in London. It seemed like a lost paradise – the contentment of a perpetual autumn afternoon in there, in front of his typewriter, amid his papers and card-indexes, with Diana shortly due home, bearing gossip and maybe something tasty for supper. Time before Carrie; time when this insanity was unconceived and inconceivable. Time before Strong, come to that. Confound him.

  The hotel was an old building with a central courtyard in which were set out tables and chairs with sun umbrellas. There were tubs and pots of trailing plants of which Carrie was grudgingly appreciative, as they sat there for a pre-dinner drink. She had been relentlessly critical of French gardening. Mark drank two Cinzanos in rapid succession and felt better. Here they were, and that was all that mattered at this moment. The future, right now, could take care of itself. Carrie too seemed relaxed and more conversationally forthcoming than usual. She chattered about her first job, at the big plant nursery in Hertfordshire.

  ‘Who was Jim?’ interrupted Mark.

  ‘He was the owner’s son.’

  ‘I suppose he was your boyfriend.’

  ‘Well. Sort of.’

  ‘Why didn’t you marry him?’

  ‘He didn’t ask me,’ said Carrie. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I was talking about how I got interested in alpines, really, not about Jim.’

  Mark sighed. ‘Sorry.’ He put his hand on hers and they sat in silence. After a few moments Carrie said, ‘Would it be O.K. to have another drink? Is there enough money?’ She had insisted on handing over to Mark a lump sum on which to draw for her share of the expenses.

  ‘Of course.’

  He went in search of the waiter. When he returned Carrie was reading Emma. She looked up, smiled, and returned to the book. Mark, mildly affronted, sat watching other patrons of the hotel. From time to time he glanced at Carrie, who continued to read; her eyes moved, pages turned, there was no pretence about it. Eventually he said, ‘Shall we have some dinner?’

  The menu was extensive. Carrie worked her way through five courses.

  ‘You’d better make the most of it,’ said Mark. ‘What’s your mother’s cooking like?’

  ‘Oh gosh, I’d almost forgotten we’ll be there tomorrow.’ She looked suddenly downcast. ‘Well … She can’t cook much. Usually there were people who did it.’

  The dining-room had filled up, The service became slower. Coffee, it seemed, was failing to materialise at all. Carrie, furtively, reopened Emma. After a few minutes, Mark said petulantly, ‘Still reading?’

  ‘I have to read more slowly in French.’

  ‘You don’t have to read at all.’

  She lowered the book and gazed at him. ‘But I’m enjoying it.’

  ‘It is our last night together.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She closed the book, marking the place with a toothpick, and regarded him with kindly expectation. Mark could think of nothing whatsoever to say. They sat in silence while the waitress swept plates from around them and dumped the bill beside Mark. ‘Café,’ he snapped, ‘s’il vous plaît.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Carrie again. ‘I remember now – it’s bad manners to read at meals, isn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t the manners part I minded about.’

  He and Diana, in fact, frequently read through breakfast, lunch and even occasionally dinner. Which was beside the point. That, somehow, was perfectly all right but this wasn’t.

  ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I’m glad it was such a success. You’ll have to try the rest of your grandfather’s library now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Carrie was also thinking of domestic practice. She and Bill frequently listened to the radio while
eating; this, since it was a shared activity, was not bad manners, she supposed. Actually Bill never minded what she did anyway, which was why being with him was so comfortable.

  ‘What do you particularly like about Emma?’

  Carrie reflected. ‘I want to know who she marries in the end.’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘No. Don’t tell me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  There was a pause. The coffee came. Mark laid his knee against Carrie’s under the table. ‘Never mind Emma. Tell me something honestly.’

  ‘Mmn?’

  ‘Have you enjoyed this?’

  ‘Being with you?’ said Carrie cautiously. ‘Or being in France?’

  ‘The first.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  All right, he said to himself savagely, ask a silly question and you get a neutral answer. ‘Well, I have, Carrie.’

  ‘Actually, it was better than I thought it would be. I mean, I don’t really like abroad so I didn’t specially want to go there again but it’s been more interesting than I expected. It hasn’t been like before, with Ma, when I was a child. It’s much nicer being with you.’ She went pink, but continued. ‘So I just wanted to say thank you very much for bringing me and telling me about things like those Crusades and that abbey. I’m sorry I sometimes don’t talk very much. And I’m sorry about not feeling about you the way you do about me but in fact it’s just as well, isn’t it? I mean, it would all be rather awful if I did. So we should be thankful in fact. But I’ve really liked being with you and you’ve been very nice.’ She beamed. The waitress returned, offering more coffee.

  Mark sat on a terrace gritty with crumbs of cement and contemplated Hermione. He was not required to do anything else since Hermione seldom stopped talking for long enough to allow intrusion by others; when this did happen she did not listen to what they were saying. One of the several disquieting things about contemplation of Hermione was the way in which there were about her faint echoes of Carrie. In fact they did not look at all like each other but nevertheless some perverse genetic prank allowed a hint of Carrie to show from time to time: an expression, an inflection of the voice, the turn of a wrist. And, conversely and distressingly, he could see now the occasional whisper of Hermione in Carrie.

  Actually, he had not seen much of Carrie at all since their arrival. She had undergone a total transformation from the moment they had stepped out of the car and Hermione, sunbathing in a lime-green bikini on the rubble-strewn terrace, had waved a languid hand. Carrie had simply effaced herself, literally by vanishing into some other part of the house or into the wilderness surrounding it, and otherwise by retreating into passive silence, as though she could escape from what was going on around her by hiding somewhere deep inside herself.

  The house was the shell of an old farm now in the process of undergoing massive abuse by builders who were nowhere to be seen but overwhelmingly evident in the form of ladders, cement mixers, rusting empty tins and mounds of ginger sand. Hermione’s act of welcome had been to take Mark and Carrie on a tour of the place with explanations of how heavenly it was all going to be eventually. They had gazed into skeletal rooms with square glassless spaces where windows would be and crunched across bare cement floors and inspected the pit where there was going to be an amusing little conservatory and the half-demolished pig-stys that would become this super guest annexe. All this, it became apparent, had been going on for some three or four years now.

  ‘I dare say,’ said Mark politely, ‘builders are as slow here as in England.’

  Sid Coates snorted. ‘Aggro about lolly, mate. Niente dollars. No more loot.’

  ‘Oh don’t be silly, darling,’ exclaimed Hermione. ‘That’s just a tiny snag – till that stupid Mr Thing who handles the Trust sees sense.’

  Sid snorted again. He spoke, with strident south London diction, a fractured language composed entirely of colloquialisms spattered with foreign words and rendered in phrases rather than sentences, like a character in a comic fettered by the requirements of balloon speech. He was sunburnt to the colour and texture of cardboard and wore nothing but a pair of jeans shorn off above the knee. He was, Hermione had respectfully explained, working on a major sequence of murals that would adorn the walls of the farmhouse. Preliminary jottings for some of these were already apparent around the whitewashed studio and as a backdrop to the terrace. Mark had taken a dislike to Sid so violent that he had to avoid looking at him. Every time Sid spoke Mark’s irritation became physical: his crotch itched and his head began to ache.

  And now, at the end of the day, they were all four on the terrace having what Hermione called an aperitif and Sid a jar of vino. And Hermione was talking. She had dealt exhaustively with the plans for the house, given a run-down on Sid’s career, which apparently had been blocked at every step by the prejudice and lack of perception of London art galleries, and had moved, at last, to her father and the reasons for Mark’s presence.

  ‘Of course I remember him absolutely even though I was terribly young when he died. He and Mummy were quite old when I was born, you know.’

  Mark nodded, reflecting that she was getting herself in a fine fix about what was considered old and what was considered young. Hermione herself must have been in her late thirties when Strong died, and he in his early forties when she was born. Subjectivity is all. She was, one had to admit, a handsome woman, and well-structured for sixty-two. Even the bikini, now replaced by a long flowered skirt and top, had been just about tolerable.

  ‘I adored him. And he absolutely doted on me of course – we were very close.’ She sighed. ‘I still miss him. I can see him now – in the rose garden at Dean Close, sitting in a deck-chair, and I came running over the lawn – I suppose I must have been about ten or eleven – wearing a little blue gingham frock, I can see that still too – and he put down his book and held out his arms and I simply rushed …’

  There was so much amiss with this spiel that Mark had to look away. In the first place the Strongs had not been living at Dean Close when Hermione was ten or eleven. On a more general level, there was little evidence in fact to suggest that Strong had been particularly paternal – indeed references to Hermione were rather infrequent in diaries, letters or anything else; Hermione’s own sentiments, admittedly, were her affair.

  ‘… Of course he had his little quirks, no one was allowed in his study and one wasn’t to make a noise when he was working but after all he was an artist, Mark, a genius in fact, he simply wasn’t like other people. I so wish Sid had known him – they’d have had so much in common.’ She threw a fond look at Sid, who said, ‘Sure thing.’

  Mark glanced at Carrie; she sat gazing into the distance.

  ‘And of course sometimes he was a tiny bit brusque with Mummy but in fact they were devoted. It’s all total nonsense, you know, about him having ladies on the side, not of course that he wasn’t frightfully attractive. He was utterly heart-broken when she died, Susan was just a sort of housekeeper really. Do you want me to remember specific things or just sort of go on in a general way like this? And do you think my voice will come over right or should I be more – more emphatic?’

  So this was a run-through for the recording. Mark, who had been silently considering how ruthlessly he could prune this, or if it would be feasible even to lose it totally at some later date, said, ‘Oh, something along those lines will be very nice. And you sound fine.’

  ‘Good. We’ll work on it properly tomorrow, then.’ Hermione’s attention at this point was diverted suddenly to Carrie; she had a way of being apparently preoccupied and then pouncing in an unexpected direction. ‘Darling, I’m determined to do something about your hair. There’s a frightfully good salon in the town – I’m going to take you there tomorrow.’

  Carrie blinked, but made no comment.

  Hermione turned to Mark. ‘Of course, I’ve always thought this garden shop thing was quite mad. Daddy would turn in his grave frankly. I’ve never understood why M
r Thing at the lawyers gave it the go ahead. And now Carrie just slaves at it night and day, like some sort of peasant.’ She homed in on Carrie again. ‘You ought to get married, anyway.’

  Carrie looked across at her. ‘You’re not married.’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Hermione snappishly. She patted her hair and flexed an ankle. ‘Pour us another drink, Sid.’

  Deciding it might be prudent to intervene, Mark asked a question about Strong’s working habits. Hermione, whether or not these were known to her, was prepared to hold forth at length. At some point Carrie simply evaporated. One moment she was there and then, when Mark looked across again to her chair, was gone. Hermione, running out of steam, sent Sid inside for another bottle. It was now a quarter to nine. Mark wondered when, if ever, there would be something to eat, and who was going to cook it. It seemed unlikely that it was for that purpose that Carrie had departed. Sid returned with more drink. ‘Where’s Carrie?’ demanded Hermione.

  ‘Alfresco. Watering the bloody garden. Peculiar bint, your daughter. Encore booze?’ He waved the bottle at Mark, who shook his head, struggling against a compelling need to get up and hit the man.

  Hermione sighed. ‘She has this obstinate streak. Frightfully independent, as a child. Sweet, of course, in her way, but with this craze for flowers and so on. One always thought she’d grow out of it but then she simply took off like that when she was eighteen, nothing one said made any difference. I was worried sick, of course – a girl of that age. And after one had devoted oneself to her for so long. It’s not easy, bringing up a child on your own, believe me. And after all the lovely opportunities she’d had with me, travelling and meeting interesting people, she had to go off to that dreary college place, when she could have gone to some super finishing school in Switzerland.’

  ‘My mum,’ announced Sid with uncharacteristic fluency, ‘always said the biggest kick up the arse you’ll get in life is from your own kids.’

  ‘She must have been so amusing. I wish we’d known each other.’ Hermione turned to Mark. ‘Sid grew up in the most fascinating part of London. The sort of place one doesn’t know at all. He has the most marvellous stories about it – we’ll get him to tell you some after dinner.’