Fearful Symmetry (21 page)

Helene ate little but drank some wine and kept Sara’s plate generously supplied, like a practised dispenser of nourishment. Sara felt certain that she was the first person Helene had fed since she had given Adele her meals, and that she was in some way gratified by the familiar activity.

The kitchen revealed more personality than the drawing room, pointing to even quite contradictory tastes and preoccupations. Next to a bottle of olive oil on the worktop was a box of rice crackers. A copy of
New Statesman
lay under the
Lady
on the dresser. On the shelves above,
Music Therapy for the Autistic Child
stood alongside
Thinner Thighs in Thirty Days,
while a hardback edition of
Delia Smith’s Winter Collection
lay on its side, almost invisible under a pile of cut-out recipes, opened envelopes, supermarket coupons, loose sheets of paper and a thick pamphlet of train times from Bath. Propped against a mug on a lower shelf was a miniature reproduction under a glass clip frame of a Sheppard drawing of Christopher Robin pulling on his Wellingtons and Winnie-the-Pooh watching. Sara craned a little to read the caption, which was: ‘Promise me you’ll never forget me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.’ Sara realised that her lips must have tightened with distaste because Helene said, ‘Not guilty. Not me, it was Poppy. She gave that to Cosmo the other day. Oh, have another chorizo, dear, do.’

A little cautiously, Sara said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was quite Cosmo’s sort of thing, somehow. He doesn’t seem the Winnie-the-Pooh type.’

‘He isn’t, not in the least. But it’s very much Poppy’s. I’m afraid she called it a “prezzie”. A “little prezzie” to cheer Cosmo up because he was working too hard and getting too preoccupied. She plonked it up there, not him. I don’t think he cares for it.’

‘That’s a bit sad.’

‘Oh, it is. She said if she wasn’t so fascinated herself, she would be “almost jealous” of Beau Nash. She’s just trying to remind Cosmo she’s here. If she’d asked me, I think I could have suggested better ways.’

The two women exchanged a look of amusement. Sara said, ‘In my experience, “almost jealous” means gnawed to the bone with it. Poor Poppy.’

‘Well, quite. And all this over supper, in front of me, as if I needed a little show of togetherness. But I suppose it takes my mind off other things.’ Helene sighed. ‘She goes in for little “prezzies” a lot, Poppy does. She got those for Jim. She’s been round there quite a lot. They’ve obviously been talking container gardens.’ She nodded at a Waitrose bag on the floor which had two healthy-looking plants in it. ‘In fact, you could do me a favour, after lunch. On your way back, would you drop those off? She said she was busy and would I take them round but I’m not sure I feel up to seeing Jim.’

‘Sure. If you want to avoid seeing him. I think I understand that.’

Helene considered. ‘No, it’s not that I need to avoid him, exactly. I really don’t blame Jim for what happened. I just . . . don’t feel up to it.’ She paused. ‘I’m not sure what I do feel. But since we’ve been so honest already, I think I’m really more bored by Jim than anything else. We were friends in a way, never more than that. Now Adele’s gone and I don’t need to be grateful to him anymore for entertaining her or employing her, I just don’t see the point. I don’t mind him being in the opera, in fact I’ve told Poppy she can invite him back if she wants to, but I’m taking a backseat. If that sounds very callous, it’s too bad. I can’t pretend I really care one way or the other about Jim.’

‘I see,’ Sara said, believing she did. ‘I’d better not give him your love, then, when I give him these.’

‘They’re from Poppy,’ Helene said firmly. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘What’s it like, having Poppy and Cosmo here? Don’t you mind? I can imagine wanting to be left on my own, after . . . such a terrible thing.’

Helene waved her arm in the direction of the dresser. ‘Oh, well, I’m rather used to them. They’ve made themselves at home, certainly. I encouraged them to. What they don’t realise is that I couldn’t care less about the opera now. I really don’t care one way or the other, though none of them guesses it.’ She said this quite matter-of-factly. ‘I suppose I was hardly thinking straight at the time, but I wish I’d stopped them going ahead. I was never convinced by this tribute idea. It doesn’t mean anything.’ Helene’s voice had grown husky and tears began to run down her face.

Sara’s eyes brimmed. Her own memories were not so far below the surface. ‘Someone . . . someone I loved dearly, he died, nearly three years ago now,’ she said. ‘They did all sorts of tributes then. There’s even a memorial fund. But you’re right, it doesn’t help, certainly not at the beginning.’ She paused. ‘In a way, that was an accident, too. He was ill, you see, but I didn’t realise. Appendicitis. And I let him get on a plane. So it was hours before he got to hospital. Too late. It was too late, he died of septicaemia.’

Helene nodded. ‘Matteo Becker the conductor, still in his thirties. I remember reading about it.’

‘At first I thought it was my fault. I spent over a year convinced of it. But it was an accident. Like Adele.’

‘Somehow I still feel I should have prevented it.’

‘I know. But you couldn’t. You have to realise that. Look, I don’t mean to say it’s just the same for you. I didn’t lose a child. It must be worse to lose a child.’ As she spoke she reflected that she must have changed. Was it possible that she could really countenance the idea that there could be loss greater than hers? That losing Matteo, her lover, partner, friend—and for a stupid, prosaic medical reason that proved fatal only through bad timing—could have even its equal in someone else’s pain? With the years her grief had subsided but the fact of the loss was not altered. Was it then some shift in her understanding about what a child must mean to a mother?

‘Loss is loss,’ Helene was saying. ‘People don’t begin to understand unless they’ve felt it themselves. Good old Helene will rise above it, that’s what they think. It’s not as if Adele was even normal. So that’s what I’ll do, rise above it, because I always have. It’s what I do. Oh, look, don’t let me get all self-pitying.’ Helene blew her nose. ‘I’m all right. It’s nice to talk to someone who does understand. You liked that drawing of hers you saw, didn’t you? The one like a snowflake? I’d like to show you something.’

Helene rose and bent down to the dresser to pull out the deep bottom drawer, which was heavy and came slowly. It was full of artists’ notebooks of varying sizes. Helene picked up the top three, straightening up stiffly, and brought them to the table as Sara moved the remains of their lunch to the side of the sink to make room. Helene opened one of the books reverentially. Page after page of the sketchbook was filled with finely detailed and shaded pencil drawings of architectural ornamentation: scrolls, festoons, swags, figures, shells and leaves and other solid, carved-looking patterns and abstract shapes of variously Baroque, Regency, Rococo, Art Nouveau influence. As Sara turned the pages, dumbstruck, she saw that all of them had been set down with the same unerring accuracy that revealed not a moment’s wavering of certainty between hand and eye. They were not drawings of any whole buildings but more like designs for the ornamentation of doorways, windows, friezes, panels, columns, pilasters or fireplaces. And yet not so, because the artist had clearly been so caught up in creating patterns of intense, perfect symmetrical beauty that the designs, although drawn to look as if executed in plaster, wood or stone, were so detailed and fantastical as to be utterly unrealisable. Adele’s perfect built world was one of possible and yet impossible beauty, too fragile to be fingered into shape in any earthy material, imaginable only as if spun from hair or moulded out of the clouds.

‘They’re all beautiful,’ Sara said, turning the pages.

Helene was smiling. ‘This is what my girl could do. Books and books of it. Everything from memory. A faithful record of real things, all of them symmetrical, most of them based on buildings in Bath. Somehow her eyes took in all the tiny details without her being aware of it at the time, and she could draw them afterwards, as if everything was stored in some extraordinary visual memory.’

‘Uncanny,’ Sara said, feeling the word inadequate.

‘I know. But it’s not as if it made up for everything. You’d give anything for normality sometimes,’ Helene said, eager for Sara to understand. ‘Just to have the normal problems of bringing up a child. I thought I could cope with that, you see, and manage a career as well. We thought she was just a difficult baby.’ She gazed in silence at a drawing of a classical stone urn.

‘Two seasons at the Met,’ she said, leafing gently through the book. ‘That’s as far as I got. Supporting roles: Michaela in
Carmen,
the maid in
Trovatore
. They might have led to greater things; I truly think they might. But by then Adele was having about a dozen tantrums a day. I couldn’t keep things together. I couldn’t keep a nanny. I couldn’t even keep my husband.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, nothing dramatic, in the end. Edward was still trying to get noticed in opera, as a director. He did one or two good things, but nothing much was happening. Then he got involved in some film of
Don Giovanni
and met people, went to Los Angeles. We didn’t go with him, and that was it, really. I can understand what an escape it must have been for him. In New York there was nothing but me, Adele, and no work. Nothing he wanted to come back to. He’s been doing things in movies ever since, but I couldn’t really tell you what. He’s been good about money. He’s still in LA. Called Ed now, of course.’

There was the merest smile on her lips as she said this, looking down and turning the last leaf of the book. Sara thought back to Helene’s behaviour at the grim rehearsal she had sat through as Andrew’s stand-in, and was wondering why the woman kept this slightly wicked intelligence concealed behind all the showbiz guff. But perhaps the real reason for all the opera-luvvie flannelling was to hide not her worldly intelligence, but the pain and difficulty of being Adele’s mother.

Helene went on, ‘I came back to England when Adele was five and then there were years of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists. There was no question of school, she couldn’t even sit still. Six years looking for a diagnosis, being told one thing after another. Nobody mentioned autism until she was eleven. A lot of the time I pretended to look on the bright side. My training helped. I always know what impression I’m creating. After a while you don’t even need to pretend. You forget it’s acting, and by then you’ve convinced even yourself that you’re all right. Most of the time.’

Helene sighed sadly at these words. Sara said nothing. How could she claim to understand, how would being sorry help? Helene looked up and smiled again, rousing herself in the manner of people who have trained themselves out of self-pity.

‘Coffee? Let’s have coffee. I’ve gone on disgracefully, haven’t I?’ As she set about making it, Helene lapsed a little into the manner she had just been describing, feeling perhaps a little over-exposed by the confidences she had entrusted. ‘Well now! So you’ve got a problem with Herve, have you? Fire away.’

Sara explained carefully, without maligning either Herve or herself, about the row. ‘And I wondered, since the two of you do get on, if you’d just check up for me and see he’s all right? I don’t think he’d speak to me. I might even upset him again.’ She hesitated and added quickly, ‘But if he knew, you see, how sorry I was? It would make it easier. And I really am sorry. Not just that it happened, I mean sorry in case I helped cause it.’ She stopped. It simply was not in her constitution to be any humbler than that.

‘Of course I will. And I’ll suggest it was just a clash of artistic temperaments, which I expect it was,’ Helene said comfortingly. ‘To be truthful, now I’m feeling more up to things, I’m even more curious about Herve. The wonderful Herve Petrescu. He is
rather
wonderful, isn’t he? So distinguished-looking. In its way, it must be thrilling, working with him, apart from the row, I mean. How old is he? He’s not married, is he?’

‘He’s fifty-two. Not married and not seriously attached, either. I actually wish he were. He’d probably be better organised and a bit less of a big baby.’ Sara was surprised by the petulant edge in her own voice. Herve could make even her sound like a bit of a big baby too, damn him.

Helene seemed to think so as well because she said, confidently, ‘Oh, you don’t understand him. You’re too young. I think a man like Herve—’ She took a sharp breath and looked hard at Sara, considering whether or not to carry on.

‘A man like Herve what?’

‘Well, I think he’s one of those men who are better off with someone older. It transforms them, an older woman. Look at Ivo Pogorelic. Herve’s probably the same.’

‘Oh, absolutely! He’d love anybody who’s prepared to be a complete doormat and run around mothering him and treating him like he’s the prince of light come down to walk among us. Then
she’d
become the aging hag who does all the tough stuff and he could carry on being the world’s cherub. Oh, yes, Herve’d
love
that. The trouble is he seems to think that’s what I’m here for.’

As Helene turned round from the worktop with the tray of coffee, Sara saw her face and could have cut her own tongue out. It was too late; she could practically see the words ‘aging hag’ bouncing off the walls and colliding with each other in the air above them.

‘Well, you aren’t,’ Helene was saying smoothly, ‘clearly you aren’t. But perhaps a much older woman than you, more in sympathy with him, might do him a lot of good.’ She sipped from her coffee cup and cast a swift, sly look at Sara, who knew exactly what she meant. Neither of them added aloud that this older woman might, by way of sharing Herve’s international status as well as his money, be doing herself a bit of good, too. Whoever she might be.

S
ARA HAD
expected Jim to be at the shop, so she was startled to see one of the two doors in the basement area swing open.

‘Good gracious me, come in! I thought I heard someone coming down. Come along in, how delightful! I can’t say I was expecting
you
!’ The hearty welcome and the gratitude on Jim’s beaten-looking face made Sara’s heart lurch with sympathy. He led her into a small but neat basement kitchen with a table and two comfortable old chairs. An iron spiral staircase led up from one corner. ‘You’ll have a cup of something? Tea? Coffee?’