Филиппа Карр: We'll meet again

The outcome was inevitable. In a short time we were lovers. And what an exciting lover he was! How different from Dermot!

I knew how shocked my family would have been if they had known, and that included Violetta. She had always been rather conventional.

I could not imagine her straying from the path of virtue. I think I was more apprehensive of her discovering than I was of Dermot.

I have always been the sort of person who lives in the present.

Violetta calls it the "butterfly existence.”

"Fluttering hither and thither," she said, "round the candle until you scorch your wings.”

It could not last, of course. Though I made myself believe it would.

Jacques would not stay forever and then I would return to my old, dull existence.

Then one day Jacques said: "Why not come with me? You'd like Paris.”

I said: "How wonderful!" and let myself believe it was possible.

I suppose Jacques's nature is really like mine. We started to plan.

I love planning. I think up the wildest ideas, which I make myself believe in while they last. In the past Violetta had been there with her common sense. "How absurd you are being!”

"How could you possibly do that? You're not being logical." And she would have shown me right from the beginning how stupid I was. But she was not there and Jacques and I used to lie in the bed in the inn where there was scarcely room for us both, and float into that world of fantasy. We made plans and deluded ourselves into thinking they were not impossible.

"I have it!" I cried. "The feud.”

Jacques's eyes sparkled. He was enjoying these plans as much as I was.

They certainly helped me to evade the unpleasant fact that parting could not be far off.

I said, "In the feud... this Jermyn girl-I can't remember her name, so I'll call her Juliet-was so heartbroken because they wouldn't let her marry the man she wanted to that she went down to the beach and walked into the sea. Dermot's first wife was also drowned in that way.

Suppose I arranged a 'drowning accident'? I know. I'll go down to the beach every morning to have a bathe, and one day they'll find my bathrobe and shoes and I shall have disappeared.”

Jacques laughed. It was a brilliant idea. His eyes sparkled and he started to plan how we would do it.

We made the wildest suggestions. It was not impossible. They would think I was drowned. I did not want poor Dermot to know I was tired of him. That would hurt him too much. We would fix it all beautifully.

I would simply have gone bathing and not come back.

Just as Juliet Jermyn had done, and as Dermot's first wife had done.

We had to make sure that the truth about my departure was never discovered.

We planned and planned. We were caught up in the idea-and then somehow it became a reality. Jacques said: "You can bring a few things with you. Not much, or they'll get suspicious. There's a snag. You'll want your passport.”

We were thoughtful.

"Why should they think to look for a passport?" I asked.

"They might not immediately. But sometime perhaps somebody will.”

"We can't worry about a detail like that. They'd think I'd lost it.

I do lose things.”

So the plan was that I should slip a few things out of the house while Jacques would be waiting for me in the car Hans Fleisch had hired. He would lend it to Jacques without demur. And so we should be ready for the day of departure. I had to make a habit of taking a bathe in the early morning just for a few days before we left. Then on the night we were to get away, I would slip out of the house and join Jacques.

First I would put my bathrobe and shoes on the beach and people would believe I had gone for my early morning swim.

Hans Fleisch would drive us to the coast and return to Poldown afterwards, for he planned to stay another week or so. It was all quite simple.

My conscience worried me that night. I was glad Violetta was not then at Tregarland's. I was sure she would have guessed I was, as she would say, "up to something." I promised myself that later I would find some way of seeing her. I would write to her and she would come to Paris. I had a miniature of her-a beautiful thing, and she had one of me-and I took it with me.

And it all went according to plan.

I know now that my clothes were found on the beach, just as I intended, and they all believed I had been drowned-except Violetta.

There was that strong bond between us and instinctively she knew I was not dead.

Well, she knows the truth now, and when I did come back, she helped me to concoct a story of my loss of memory and being picked up by a yacht.

Violetta said this talk would never have been accepted but for the fact that the war had come and such affairs as mine were trivial compared with that.

Such was my nature that I could forget all the difficulties, even the enormity of what I was doing, in the excitement of the moment. I know I am shallow and pleasure-seeking, but I found Jacques so exciting and amusing, and I had convinced myself that I must escape from the eerie atmosphere of Tregarland and that sometime in the future I should be able to justify myself in what I had done.

There is something intoxicating about the very air of Paris. During my first days there I was so exhilarated that I told myself that everything that came after would be worth it. During that period, I stilled my conscience which, in spite of myself, kept intruding. I would think of Tristan, Violetta, Dermot, and my parents all mourning for me-for they would mourn deeply, in spite of my unworthiness. I wished that I could find some means of telling them that I was alive.

Violetta will know, I promised myself. She must. And that comforted me a little, and for those days when I walked the streets of Paris, buying the clothes I needed, absorbing that atmosphere which is indigenous to the city, I lived on excitement. I loved the cafes with their gay awnings, and the little tables at which people sat, drinking their coffee or wine. I loved the famous streets and the narrow ones, and the shops, the smell of freshly baked bread which came from some of them, and the remains of the old city before Hausemann had rebuilt it, after the damage it had suffered during the Revolution.

I spent a certain amount of time strolling through the streets, looking at the places which had been only names to me before. I loved the ancient bridges, and I gazed in wonder at the majestic Notre Dame. I wished I had paid more attention to my lessons, and I thought if Violetta were here she would be able to tell me a great deal about these places.

Jacques did not accompany me on these journeys. He was not the type to wander round gaping at everything like a tourist. He had work to do.

He had changed a little. He was no less the ardent lover, and that part of our relationship remained. It was just that, when I expressed the excitement I felt in Paris and wished that he would show me certain places, he became remote and evasive. He had some sketches to do. He was not free that day.

"If only Violetta were here," I said.

He smiled and nodded vaguely. He could not understand what existed between me and Violetta.

I had always imagined that artists lived in attics in abject poverty and went to cafes to celebrate when they sold a picture and there caroused with their impecunious friends.

This was not the case with Jacques.

He had a small house on the Left Bank, it was true, but he lived in a certain degree of comfort. There was an attic in which he worked because the light was from the north. But it was just his working area and below was an ordinary dwelling which one might expect anywhere.

In the basement were a husband and wife who looked after his needs.

They were Jean and Marie, middle-aged, eager to please and not really surprised to see me, which was a little disconcerting.