The Folding Star (21 page)

I was struck by his unfriendly strength of feeling as he told me all this, and dismayed by the high-principled severity of the young, that was a focusing perhaps of other fears and doubts. I felt quite abashed, sitting there holding his father’s book, as if I were somehow involved or to blame; like when a friend recounts to you an argument he had and enters into it again with such vehemence that you start to feel you are yourself the butt of his remembered anger. I smiled.

‘I am very well disposed towards my mother,’ Luc said solemnly. ‘I don’t want you to think I am not. I get annoyed when she is making so much fuss about him and imagines he will come back, when it is obvious that he won’t. Most of the time I can look after her, but when my father is coming there is not too much I can do.’ How poignant and humbling suddenly to see Luc as the watchful support of this woman I had always thought of as absurd, and now began to picture as the heartbroken dupe of a husband far younger than herself. ‘Already’, he said, ‘I know enough about love to understand why she does it. But still …’

I stared at him for an agonised few seconds, then blurted out optimistically, ‘So you do get on with your father?’

‘I do, of course. And you see, he is very amusing and full of life and so forth.’ He looked down at his two squared fists, which he was knocking nervily together. ‘I used to think it was possible he did not want to have a child. Now I am not sure – I think we are better friends now that we never see each other.’

I didn’t know how to follow so muted and painful a statement. I think he was as surprised as I was at everything that had come out. I leant forward, I might easily have stroked his hand and coaxed the fist into a grateful clasp.

‘Have you met the … actress?’

‘Yes, once at a party with both my parents. It was a long time ago, I think before this love affair began.’ He looked round, as if he might stretch out on the bed, but then thought better of it. ‘But how can we tell?’

I don’t think he expected an answer. ‘Oh, we can’t tell.’

‘She was in a film on the television which was in two or three parts, which I could watch if my mother was not in the house.’ Again the thoughtfulness mixed with mischief. ‘I must say that she is very beautiful, even if she is a very bad actress. You might fall in love with her yourself if you saw her, Edward.’

‘I wonder.’

‘I think I am right that she was only seventeen when he met her.’ I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me pensively, abstracted by his picturing of the girl, or if he was speaking with deadpan cheek. ‘Anyway, he told me once that it was love like a blow of lightning for him, though not for her, which took much more time.’

All this talk of love from him suddenly, it was as if he had just learnt the word: he used it lightly and consciously like a new swearword packed with untried power and provocation.

‘And what about your grandfather’s chateau? Have you ever seen it?’

‘We all went when I was small, perhaps when I was … eight. No one had been there for a long time, and it wasn’t all that safe. I think it wasn’t built correctly.’

‘Oh.’

‘All I can remember well is a round room, do you say a rotunda, with paintings on the ceiling of my grandfather and all his rich friends, who were idlers in fact, dressed up for a fantasy. My grandfather Theo was dressed up like an Indian prince with a long sword.’ Luc looked at me openly. ‘I also remember I was very frightened of his picture.’

‘And what’s happened to it now?’

He shrugged, denying his disappointment. ‘It’s still there, with the windows all blocked up, and there is a metal roof over the top, because of the rain.’

I wanted to go there with him and help him get it back. It was just another strand of longing to know about the dereliction of what should one day be Luc’s Little Trianon, and about a certain baffling shittiness in the last downward flight of the Altidore family history. At the same time I had the image of my own history like a locked and rotting pavilion too far off and too unsafe perhaps for Luc to want to visit it. These lessons were simulacra of conversations, my part pained and inquisitive, his merely reactive and polite. Once or twice I had mentioned my father’s singing or my great-aunt’s novels, both equally forgotten, or spoken reassuringly of my own schooldays and their various failures. His reaction was a tolerant blankness, a pause.

Sometimes the pressure was almost too great, having him there in my sight, looking at me, moistening that fat lip with a hesitant tongue, pushing back his hair with the hand that later would undress him and make free with him. I got up abruptly and asked to be directed to the bathroom.

It was on the floor below, next to the marmoreal spare bedroom. Luc showed me in and gestured at the various opulent appointments. After I locked the door I thought he might wait outside, as Mrs Vivier so patiently had at Paul’s house once, and I listened until I heard the creak of the stairs as he went back up. I leant against the door and looked at myself pityingly in the wall of mirror opposite, thinking I must say something to Luc, I couldn’t just let this go on. I felt I might as well have a pee, since I was there, and did so, able to watch myself, as you sometimes can in trains, with a certain admiration. I washed my hands, and noted the mingled bottles on the basin’s mosaic surround – the mother’s lilac talc and cleansing lotion, the son’s canister of shaving foam and Donald Duck toothbrush, caked with pink paste; I remembered it so well, your things took the place of your father’s, you became a kind of couple in your turn. The dry toothbrush tasted of nylon and dead mint.

At the end of the long white bath with its tall, perched and somehow vigilant brass taps was a gingham-lined clothes-basket with a lid. I rootled lightly among its contents – again the mixture of silvery slips and bras and sweatier boy’s things, grimy-necked shirts, inside-out socks and underwear. There were some white Hom briefs, tiny, damp from a towel they were bundled in with. I picked them out and covered my face with them. They seemed spotless, hardly worth changing for new ones, with only a ghost of a smell. When I rolled them up they were almost hidden in my fist. I buried them at the bottom of the basket, but then some awful compulsion made me plunge my arm in for them again.

Before the end of the hour we heard the pneumatic scrunching and electronic whine of a big car being parked in a small space. I saw Luc studying the window spy-glass, and saw the nose of a grey-blue Mercedes swelling towards the front door in the mirror’s convex surface. As it happened I was making another attempt to tell him something about myself, but I watched his attention waver and go.

‘Yeah, my father’s here,’ he said. ‘I think I’d better …’

‘Let’s call it a day,’ I said, and we both sprang up. He had a look of anxious excitement that made me feel both protective and
de trop.
I thought in a way I
should
meet his father; there should be some mutual recognition and professional understanding, as it were, over Luc’s head. Then as we got half-way down the stairs I was simply embarrassed to be a stranger towards whom distracting courtesy would need to be shown at a moment of family greeting and tension. But Luc, though he was ahead of me and so precious to me as I let him go, didn’t forget me. He leapt down the last four steps and, as his father looked up from a muttered exchange with his mother just inside the open front door, wrapped an arm round his neck and kissed him on the lips. Then he half-turned and extended his other arm towards me. ‘This is Edward,’ he said; I came forward with a silly expression of shyness and pride, as if I were someone he wanted to marry.

His father and I exchanged only a few sentences, bantering around his absence and uncertain responsibilities, reassuring ourselves with the facts of Luc’s excellence at English and the inevitability of his good results. I was startled by Martin Alti-dore’s appearance. He was so young. Though I knew he was younger than his wife I had still somehow expected a burgherly figure out of one of the family portraits; but there was nothing of their prudence or their warning glint of power. He was darker than Luc, more animal and compact (Luc’s legginess came from his mother), but with the same long nose and almost the same big lips. And he was in the same stretch of life as me – well, a little further on, but surely only forty. His dark suit was beautifully cut, his off-white shirt and blood-coloured tie were silk. You knew at once he was a fucker. If I’d met him in a bar I’d have wanted him. I was trying to please him, playing to some cockteasy quality he had – charm I suppose, a kind of shallow intimacy; something Luc incuriously lacked – and at the same time to stay in with Luc; and then to be good to his mother, half-forgotten just outside our little male ring.

I went out to the station to greet Edie and had to wait half an hour, pacing the platform systematically and then sitting with a coffee and a cigarette in the nearly empty refreshment hall. It was one of those vacant interludes, when pleasant boredom mixes with anticipation, and six or seven minutes of anonymous sex in the mopped and deserted Gents is what you would like best – you come just as the tannoy chimes and the fast train is competently announced. But there was nothing doing this morning: a few stout minor businessmen in belted macs, an elderly lady with a cart of luggage and a look of foreboding. I was tense but weightless, oddly comforted by the unknown plans and problems of the others. The long hand on a digitless clock-face clunked from minute to minute as the trim red second hand busied round. I gazed through the enormous windows, back towards the city – nearby a little guard-tower with a pointed roof and drooping chequered flag, and beyond it an impression of walls and spires like a city in a book of hours, only blurred and brightened by the gold of horse-chestnuts turning and the paling yellow of limes. It was a good moment for my old friend to see the place.

In fact when she arrived she found everything wonderful: the clean, late train, the absence of people, the sleek inter-war grandeur of the station with its fawn marble and redundant spaciousness, all seemed hilarious and entrancing to her. We had a fierce hug and I was carried along for a while on the surge of confidence that came from being with a real old friend, whose friendship outlasted and diminished my other frets and misguided wanderings. I balanced up her several bags like an experienced bellhop, and we set off into town on foot. She was travelling with a hat-box.

‘I want you to see it this way, as if you were an old pilgrim, or you couldn’t afford the tram.’

‘Heavenly.’

I led her over a bridge, through an escutcheoned gateway and into the first little square; silent houses and a statue of a nineteenth-century man with swooping moustaches – she ran forward to read his name.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.

‘But darling, I thought you’d know everything by now.’

‘Sorry. I do know one or two things, but … not that.’

‘I see.’ She walked round the statue on its high plinth as if my ignorance made it more interesting or problematic. The nice thing about the man was his thoughtful, almost unhappy expression, as if he felt himself unsuited to the eminent perpetuity of statuedom. He might have been a good doctor or a minor devotional poet. Edie imitated his posture, mocking it gently, and caught the eye of a young boy who came trotting past and stopped in surprise to see a man with a hat-box and a striking dark girl in black tights and tunic and slouch-cap, like a Stuart page-boy in mourning, standing stock-still; while to me it had an older resonance, the busy longueurs of photo-sessions when Edie was still at fashion-school, when we would go on to the common with a suitcase and umbrellas and sheets of tinfoil and one or two of her inventive friends and create our gleaming static happenings, which patient passers-by would stop and puzzle over.

I was bursting with things to say to her; she was an indulgent listener, not like rivalrous old men friends who fought you for the conversational advantage. But I wanted to let the city enfold her first. As we walked on I would point out a church or house or a glimpse into a courtyard, but we hardly spoke. I felt the place was mine, I was proud of it, and of more or less knowing my way through it; and I knew the quality of Edie’s different silences, from the violent to the serene, and that we were together in this one – as I hadn’t been together with anyone since I came here.

We were at a famously pretty point, with a view of the Belfry beyond a canal, leaves fluttering on to the water, a long quay to the left with three receding bridges stepping from the empty sunshine into the narrow lanes of the middle of town.

‘It is absolute bliss,’ Edie said. ‘You’re so lucky, and so right to have come. I couldn’t see why before, to be honest I thought it was quite potty, but you’re absolutely right.’

I swallowed the blunt admission. ‘Voilà.’

‘I must say it is rather peculiarly
quiet.
’ She looked at her watch. ‘I mean we’ve seen three people in the past twenty minutes, and now there’s nobody in sight at all. That sort of
might
get to one.’

‘Yes, things have been a fraction on the dull side since about 1510. But we do what we can to make our own entertainment.’

‘So one rather gathered from your letter.’

She was not ungrand, Edie. My mother often said she came from ‘a very good family’, which was her way of glossing over Edie’s more gavroche and boozy qualities and suggesting I was lucky to be friends with a de Souzay at all. The de Souzays were great liberal philanthropists, though not, by and large, as keen as this one was to get in a pub and talk, at some length, about men and what they liked to do. She had an emphatic contralto speaking-voice, and a certain
hauteur
– undercut by a vulgar laugh that could set other people going in a cinema or café.

She always used the same scent, a beautiful fragrance that was abbeys, aunts, tapestried country houses, dulled petals in china bowls before it was … whatever it was, the discreet phial put up by some Mayfair herbalist for powdered dowagers in black court shoes. It didn’t go particularly with what she tended to wear – often made by herself and usually sexy, theatrical and vaguely disconcerting: she was my earliest experience of glamour, of bold exposure matched with dazzling concealment. Fifteen years ago I had seen her squeeze up her bust like a soubrette in a Restoration comedy, and watched with awe as her face, with its long nose and downed upper lip, was painted and dusted into a challenging and ironic mask. Even then she wore her mysterious perfume, so that to breathe it again now in my rooms was to go back through half a lifetime passed alongside her. It overwhelmed the yellow roses I had bought and stuck in a jug in the middle of the table.