Читать книгу Super-Cannes - Ali Smith, Ali Smith - Страница 15

AS STOICAL AS the wife of a kamikaze pilot protecting the wreckage of his plane, Mrs Yasuda stood on the pavement outside the house and waited as her husband’s damaged Porsche was hoisted onto the removal truck. The winch moaned and sighed, sharing all the pain inflicted on the car. An oblique front-end collision had torn the right fender from its frame, crushed the headlight and frosted the windscreen, through which Mr Yasuda had punched an observation space.

Staring at this hole, Mrs Yasuda’s face was without emotion, her cheeks drained of colour, as if the accident to her husband’s sports car had stopped the clocks of human response. When the removal driver asked for her signature she wrote her name in a large cursive script and closed the door before he could doff his cap.

Fortunately, Mr Yasuda had not been injured in the accident, as I had seen a few hours earlier. Still awake at three that morning, I left Jane asleep, face down like a teenager with a pillow over her head. Wandering naked from one room to the next, I was still trying to come to terms with the ugly incident in the clinic car park.

The display of brutality had unsettled me. I said nothing to Jane as we drove into Cannes for dinner, but a dormant part of my mind had been aroused – not by the cruelty, which I detested, but by the discovery that Eden-Olympia offered more to its residents than what met the visitor’s gaze. Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence.

Slipping on my bathrobe, I kissed Jane’s small hand, still faintly scented with some hospital reagent, and watched her fingers jump in a childlike reflex. I went downstairs, opened the sun-lounge door and strolled across the lawn, past the pool with its sealed surface like a black dance floor. I opened the wire gate into the tennis court and paced the marker lines that ran through the moonlight, thinking of the resigned eyes of the old Senegalese.

A car approached the Yasudas’ house, its engine labouring. It limped along in low gear, metal scraping a tyre as it turned into the drive. A table lamp lit up Mrs Yasuda’s first-floor study, where she had been sitting in the darkness, perhaps watching her English neighbour prowl the baselines of his mind. She moved to the window, and waved to her husband when he stepped from the damaged car.

A few minutes later I saw them through the slatted blinds of their bedroom. Still wearing his leather jacket, the stocky businessman strode around the room, gesticulating as his wife watched him from the bed. He seemed to be enacting scenes from a violent martial-arts film, perhaps shown that evening to the Japanese community in Cannes. He at last undressed, and sat at the foot of the bed, a portly would-be samurai. His wife stood between his knees, her hands on his shoulders, waiting until he slipped the straps of her nightdress.

They began to make love, and I left the tennis court and walked back to the house. Lying beside Jane, I listened to her breathy murmur as she dreamed her young wife’s dreams. Somewhere a horn sounded in the residential enclave, followed by another in reply, as cars returned from the outposts of the night.

Señora Morales was giving the morning’s instructions to the Italian maids. For an hour they would work downstairs, leaving me with ample time to shave, shower and muse over the possibilities of the day. The flow of faxes and e-mails from London had begun to fall away, and with my agreement Charles had taken over the editorship of the two aviation journals.

Faced with the imposed boredom of Eden-Olympia, I lay back on the bed, feeling the warm imprint of Jane’s body beside me. We, too, had made love on returning from Cannes, a rare event after her long working days. Sex, at the business park, was something one watched on the adult film channels. But Jane had been excited by the illicit pleasure of leaving for Cannes on the spur of the moment. An impulsive decision ran counter to the entire ethos of Eden-Olympia. When she stepped from the car onto the Croisette she seemed almost light-headed. In a tabac near the Majestic she picked a Paris-Match from the racks and calmly walked out without paying. It lay on our table at Mère Besson beside the aïoli of cod and carrots, and Jane was well aware that she had stolen the magazine. But she shrugged and smiled cheerfully, accepting that a benign lightning strike had illuminated our excessively ordered world. The mental climate that presided over Eden-Olympia never varied, its moral thermostat set somewhere between duty and caution. The emotion had been draining from our lives, leaving a numbness that paled the sun. The stolen magazine quickened our lovemaking …

As the floor-polishers drummed away, I strolled through the empty bedrooms, searching for further traces of David Greenwood. I sat on the draped mattress in the children’s room, surrounded by a frieze of cartoon figures – Donald Duck, Babar and Tintin – and thinking of the child that I hoped Jane would bear one day, and how it would sleep and play in a room as sunny as this one.

Next to the bathroom was a fitted cupboard, decorated with Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books. I opened the doors, and found myself gazing at a modest library, the first real trace of Greenwood’s tenancy. Some thirty copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass sat on the shelves, translations into French, Spanish and even Serbo-Croat. Over drinks the previous weekend, Wilder Penrose had told me of David’s enthusiasm for the Alice books, and the Lewis Carroll society he had formed at Eden-Olympia. The Paris surrealists embraced Carroll as one of their great precursors, but Eden-Olympia seemed an unlikely recruiting ground. Perhaps the multinational executives possessed a more whimsical sense of humour than I realized, and saw affinities between the business park and Alice’s hyper-logical mind.

The copies were well thumbed, loaned to the youthful readership at the La Bocca children’s refuge. The flyleaves were marked with names, in what I guessed was David’s scrawl.

‘Fatima … Elisabeth … Véronique … Natasha …’

‘Curiouser and curiouser …’ Jane ran a hand over the books in the cupboard. ‘This Russian who mugged you turns out to be a devoted father, trying to borrow a library book for his daughter Natasha.’

‘It does look like it.’

‘Come on, Paul. You jumped into the deep end and went straight to the bottom. Not every Russian on the Côte d’Azur is a mafioso. The poor man was introducing Natasha to an English classic. You make fun of his teeth, steal one of his shoes, and launch a full-scale manhunt.’

‘I know. I regret it now.’

‘At least they didn’t catch him. Halder looks as if he’d love to beat the hell out of someone.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ I straightened the row of books. ‘For a library user, the Russian I saw was amazingly aggressive.’

‘Of course he was.’ Jane lay back on the bed, savouring her triumph. Still wearing her white hospital coat, she had come home to change before a conference in Nice. ‘The Russians had to fight for the right to read … Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. Think of it, Paul. You were lining up with all those KGB types against this poor migrant worker and little Natasha.’

‘You win.’ I sat beside Jane and massaged her calves. ‘It’s a touching thought, all those Alice books in the refuge, pored over by Véronique and Fatima. Where are they now?’

‘Working in some awful factory, I imagine, packing espadrilles for five francs an hour, while they wonder what happened to the kind English doctor. Don’t think too badly of David. He did some good things here.’

‘I accept that. How well did you really know him?’

‘We worked together. Paul, what are you driving at?’

‘Nothing. I’ve always been curious.’

‘You know I don’t like that. David isn’t coming back, so forget about him.’ Irritated by me, Jane rose from the bed and took off her white coat. She seemed older than I remembered, her hair neatly groomed, the scar from her nasal ring concealed with cosmetic filler. She raised a hand as if to slap me, then relented and took my arm. ‘I keep telling you – I never had many lovers.’

‘I thought you had an army of them.’

‘I wonder why …’ She stood by the window, looking across the business park towards the sea. ‘You’re still locked into the past. It’s a huge phantom limb that aches and throbs. We’re here, Paul. We breathe this air, and we see this light …’

I watched her chin lift as she spoke, and realized that she was staring, not at the handsome headland of Cap d’Antibes and the pewter glimmer of the sea, but at the office buildings of Eden-Olympia, at the satellite dishes and microwave aerials. The business park had adopted her.

‘Jane, you like it here, don’t you.’

‘Eden-Olympia? Well, it has a lot going for it. It’s open to talent and hard work. There’s no ground already staked out, no title deeds going back to bloody Magna Carta. You feel anything could happen.’

‘But nothing ever does. All you people do is work. It’s wonderful here, but they left out reality. No one sits on the local council, or has a say about the fire service.’

‘Good. Who wants to?’

‘That’s my point. The whole place is probably run by a management consultancy in Osaka.’

‘Fine by me. It might be a lot fairer. At Guy’s there are two sets of stairs. One at the front for the men that goes up to the roof, and the converted servant’s staircase at the back that ends on the third floor. I don’t need to tell you who that’s reserved for.’

‘Things are changing.’

‘That old mantra – women have listened to it for too long. How many teaching professors are women? Even in gynae?’ Lowering her voice, she said in an offhand way: ‘Kalman tells me they haven’t filled my post yet. He asked if I’d like to stay on for another six months.’

‘Would you?’

‘Yes, if I’m honest. Think about it. More time here would do you good. A mild winter, a couple of hours of tennis every day. We’ll find someone to play with you – maybe Mrs Yasuda.’

‘Jane…’ I tried to embrace her, but she tensed herself, exposing the sharp bones of her shoulders. ‘I have to get back to London. There’s a business to run. Charles won’t carry me for ever.’

‘I know. Still, you could fly out at weekends. It’s only an hour from London.’

‘You work at weekends.’

She made no reply, and stared down at the swimming pool. Her eyes avoided mine, and she seemed to be mentally subdividing her new domain, unpacking her real baggage in the privacy of her mind.

‘Paul, relax …’ She spoke brightly, as if she remembered an exciting experience we had once shared. ‘We stay together, whatever happens. You’re my wounded pilot, I have to sew up your wings. Are you all right?’

‘Just about.’ For the first time the wifely baby-talk sounded unconvincing. I noticed the transfers of the Hatter, the Dormouse and the Red Queen that Greenwood had pasted to the wardrobe door. Jane was growing up, like the Alice of Through the Looking-Glass, and I sensed something of Carroll’s regret when he realized that his little heroine was turning into a young woman and would soon be leaving him.

I closed the library door and said: ‘You’d better change. Kalman’s collecting you in an hour. Before you go, I’d like a printout of that appointments list.’

‘David’s? Why?’ Jane picked up her white coat. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘No one will know. Can you access it on the terminal downstairs?’

‘Yes, but … why do you want it?’

‘Just a hunch. I need to track it down. Then I can lay David to rest.’

‘Well … keep it to yourself. These senior people don’t like their medical records floating around.’

‘It’s a list, Jane. I could have copied it out of the phone book.’ I paused by the stairs. ‘Have you been able to find out why they were seeing David? Was there anything wrong with them?’

‘Just sports injuries. Nothing else. Skin lacerations, one or two broken bones. There’s some very rough touch rugby being played at Eden-Olympia.’

The pressure of Jane’s mouth still dented my lips as I walked to the car. I thought of her with the computer in the study, watching me warily as she searched through Greenwood’s records. Had she been testing me, with her talk of extending the contract? After another six months she would be as institutionalized as any long-term convict, locked inside a virtual cell she called her office. Eden-Olympia demanded a special type of temperament, committed to work rather than to pleasure, to the balance sheet and the drawing board rather than to the brothels and gaming tables of the Old Riviera. Somehow I needed to remind Jane of her true self. In its way her theft of the magazine from the tabac was a small ray of hope.

I tucked the appointments list into my breast pocket and searched for the car keys. Parked behind the Jaguar on the sloping forecourt was Wilder Penrose’s sports saloon, a low-slung Japanese confection with huge wing mirrors, grotesque spoiler and air intakes large enough for a ramjet. To my puritan eye the car was an anthology of marketing tricks, and I refused even to identify its manufacturer.

I assumed that Penrose was making a house call on Simone Delage, easing this highly-strung woman through the aftermath of some troubled dream or advising her about the impotence problems of over-promoted accountants. He had deliberately parked a few inches from the Jaguar, rather than on the Delages’ forecourt, forcing me to make a tight turn that would show up the Jaguar’s heavy steering.

I started the engine, listening with pleasure to the hungry gasp of the rival carburettors, for once ready to sink their differences against a common enemy. I edged forward and swung the steering wheel, but found my way blocked by the plinth of the dolphin sculpture. I reversed, careful not to touch the Japanese car, but at the last moment, giving way to a sudden impulse, I raised my foot from the brake pedal. I felt the Jaguar’s heavy chrome bumper bite deep into soft fibreglass, almost buckling the passenger door of the sports saloon. It rocked under the impact, its hydraulics letting out a chorus of neurotic cries.

Trying to ignore what I had done, but admitting to a distinct lightness of heart, I rolled down the ramp towards the street.