close enough to observe his quarry profitably. He had to wait for some minutes before Mrs Vansittart appeared. She looked around her before descending a path that led to a gap among the rocks from which, later in the day, people bathed. She sat down and lit a cigarette. A moment later the swarthy waiter from the Grand-Hotel hurried to where she was.
Jasper moved cautiously. He was slightly above the pair, but well obscured from their view. Unfortunately it would be impossible to overhear a word they said. Wedging himself uncomfortably, he raised his binoculars and adjusted them.
A conversation, apparently heated, took place. There were many gestures on the part of the swarthy man and at one point he began to go away but was recalled by Mrs Vansittart. She offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. Then Mrs Vansittart took a wallet from a pocket of her trousers and counted a large number of notes on the palm of her companion. ‘My God,’ said Jasper, aloud, ‘she pays for it!’
The couple parted, the waiter hurrying back towards the Grand-Hotel. Mrs Vansittart sat for a moment where he had left her and then clambered slowly back to the coastal path. She disappeared from Jasper’s view.
Privately, Mrs Vansittart keeps an account of her life. While Harry composes his songs she fills a number of hard-backed notebooks with the facts she does not wish to divulge to anyone now but which, one day after her death and after Harry’s, she would like to be known. Of this particular day she wrote:
I paused now and again to watch the early-morning fishermen. I had paid ten thousand francs. At the end of the season the man might go and not return, as he had promised. But I could not be sure.
The morning was beautiful, not yet even faintly hot, the sky a perfect blue. The houses of Beaulieu seemed gracious across the glittering sea, yet the houses of Beaulieu are as ordinary as houses anywhere. A jogger glanced at me as I stood aside to let him pass, perspiration on his nose and chin. He did not speak or smile. I sometimes hate it on Cap Ferrat.
On the coastal path that morning I thought about Harry and myself when we were both eleven; I was in love with him even then. In Holland Falls he’d brought me to his mother’s bedroom to show me the rings she crowded on to her plump fingers, her heavily stoppered scent bottles, her garish silk stockings. But I wasn’t interested in his mother’s things. Harry told me to take my clothes off, which I shyly did, wanting to because he’d asked me and yet keeping my head averted. Everyone knew that Harry loathed his mother, but no one thought about it or blamed him particularly, she being huge and pink and doting on her only child in a shaming way. ‘God!’ he remarked, looking at my scrawny nakedness among his mother’s frills. ‘God,
On the coastal path that morning I told myself it wasn’t fair to remember my father in the moment of his greatest rage. He’d been a gentle man, at his gentlest when operating his high-speed dentist’s drill, white-jacketed and happy. Even so, he never forgave me.
We ran away from Holland Falls when we were twenty-two. Harry had already inherited the paper-mill but it was run by a manager, by whom it has been run ever since. We drove about for a year, from town to town, motel to motel. We occupied different rooms because Harry had begun to compose his cycle and liked to be alone with it at night. I loved him more than I could ever tell him but never again, for Harry, did I take my clothes off. Harry has never kissed me, though I, in parsing, cannot even now resist bending down to touch the side of his face with my lips. A mother’s kiss, I dare say you would call it, and yet when I think of Harry and me I think as well of Heloise and Abelard, Beatrice and Dante, and all the others. Absurd, of course.
I left the coastal path and went down to the rocks again, gazing into the depths of the clear blue water. ‘You’re never cross enough,’ Harry said, with childish petulance in the City Hotel, Harrisburg, when we were still twenty-two. I had come into my room to find the girl lying on my bed, as I had lain on his mother’s with him. In my presence he paid her forty dollars, but I knew he had not laid a finger on her, any more than he had on me when I was her age.
We went to England because Harry was frightened when a police patrol stopped our car one day and asked us if we’d ever been in Harrisburg. I denied it and they let us go, but that was why Harry thought of England, which he took to greatly as soon as we arrived. It became one of the games in our marriage to use only English phrases and to speak in the English way: Harry enjoyed that enormously, almost as much as working on his cycle. And loving him so, I naturally did my best to please him. Any distraction a harmless little game could provide, any compensation: that was how I saw my duty, if in the circumstances that is not too absurd a word. Anyway, the games and the distractions worked, sometimes for years on end. A great deal of time went by, for instance, between the incident in Harrisburg and the first of the two in England. ‘It’s all right,’ the poor child cried out in London when I entered my room. ‘Please don’t tell, Mrs Vansittart.’ Harry paid her the money he had promised her, and when she had gone I broke down and wept. I didn’t even want to look at Harry, I didn’t want to hear him speak. In an hour or so he brought me up a cup of tea.
It was, heaven knows, simple enough on the surface of things: I could not leave Harry because I loved him too much. I loved his chubby white hands and tranquil smile, and the weakness in his eyes when he took his spectacles off. If I’d left him, he would have ended up in prison because Harry needs to be loved. And then, besides, there has been so much happiness, at least for me: our travelling together, the pictures and the furniture we’ve so fondly collected, and of course the Villa Teresa. It’s the strangest thing in the world, all that.
A fisherman brought his boat near to the rocks where I was sitting. I had lit a cigarette and put my sunglasses on because the glare of daytime was beginning. I watched the fisherman unloading his modest catch, his brown fingers expertly arranging nets and hooks. How different, I thought, marriage would have been with that stranger. And yet could I, with anyone else, have experienced such feelings of passion as I have known?
‘I’m sorry,’ Harry began to say, a catch-phrase almost, in the 1950s. He’s always sorry when he Comes in from the flowerbeds with clay on his shoes, or puts the teapot on a polished surface, or breaks the promises he makes. In a way that’s hard to communicate Harry likes being sorry.
‘
Harry would be still in bed, having worked on his cycle until three or four in the morning. Old Pierre and Carola and Madame Spad would not arrive for another hour, and in any case I did not have to be there when they did. But at the back of my mind there’s always the terror that when I return to the Villa Teresa Harry will be dead.
