Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety

‘I just think you would, that’s all.’

‘You think I’m in love with you, don’t you? Your self-conceit is so monstrous –’

‘Annette, let’s run away. Shall we? Tonight?’

She almost said, yes, all right then.

Camille stood up, as if he were going to suggest they start her packing. She stopped pacing, came to a halt before him. She rested her eyes on his face, one hand pointlessly smoothing her skirts. She raised the other hand, touched his shoulder.

He moved towards her, set his hands at either side of her waist. The length of their bodies touched. His heart was beating wildly. He’ll die, she thought, of a heart like that. She spent a moment looking into his eyes. Tentatively, their lips met. A few seconds passed. Annette drew her fingernails along the back of her lover’s neck and knotted them into his hair, pulling his head down towards her.

There was a sharp squeal from behind them. ‘Well,’ a breathy voice said, ‘so it is true after all. And, as Adèle puts it, “in the crude technical sense”.’

Annette plunged away from him and whirled around, the blood draining from her face. Camille regarded her daughter more with interest than surprise, but he blushed, very faintly indeed. And Lucile was shocked, no doubt about that; that was why her voice came out so high and frightened, and why she now appeared rooted to the spot.

‘There wasn’t anything crude about it,’ Camille said. ‘Do you think that, Lucile? That’s sad.’

Lucile turned and fled. Annette let out her breath. Another few minutes, she thought, and God knows. What a ridiculous, wild, stupid woman I am. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Camille, get out of my house. If you ever come within a mile of me again, I’ll arrange to have you arrested.’

Camille looked slightly overawed. He backed off slowly, as if he were leaving a royal audience. She wanted to shout at him ‘What are you thinking of now?’ But she was cowed, like him, by intimations of disaster.

‘IS THIS YOUR ULTIMATE INSANITY?’ d’Anton asked Camille. ‘Or is there more to come?’

Somehow – he does not know how – he has become Camille’s confidant. What he is being told now is unreal and dangerous and perhaps slightly – he relishes the word – depraved.

‘You said,’ Camille protested, ‘that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It’s true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation.’

‘Yes, all right, but that’s what people do. It’s a harmless, necessary, socially accepted convention. It is not like, it is a million miles from, what you are suggesting. Which is, as I understand it, that you start something up with the daughter as a way of getting to the mother.’

‘I don’t know about “start something up”,’ Camille said. ‘I think it would be better if I married her. More permanent, no? Make myself one of the family? Annette can’t have me arrested, not if I’m her son-in-law.’

‘But you ought to be arrested,’ d’Anton said humbly. ‘You ought to be locked up.’ He shook his head …

THE FOLLOWING DAY Lucile received a letter. She never knew how; it was brought up from the kitchen. It must have been given to one of the servants. Normally it would have been handed straight to Madame, but there was a new skivvy, a little girl, she didn’t know any better.

When she had read the letter she turned it over in her hand and smoothed out the pages. She worked through it again, methodically. Then she folded it and tucked it inside a volume of light pastoral verse. Immediately, she thought that she might have slighted it; she took it out again and placed it inside Montesquieu’s Persian Letters . So strange was it, that it might have come from Persia.

And then, as soon as the book was back on the shelf, she wanted the letter in her hand again. She wanted the feel of the paper, the sight of the looped black hand, to run her eye across the phrases – Camille writes beautifully , she thought, beautifully . There were phrases that made her hold her breath. Sentences that seemed to fly from the page. Whole paragraphs that held and then scattered the light: each word strung on a thread, each word a diamond.

Good Lord, she thought. She remembered her journals, with a sense of shame. And I thought I practised prose …

All this time, she was trying to avoid thinking about the content of the letter. She did not really believe it could apply to her, though logic told her that such a thing would not be misdirected.

No, it was she – her soul, her face, her body – that occasioned the prose. You could not examine your soul to see what the fuss was about; even the body and face were not easy. The mirrors in the apartment were all too high; her father, she supposed, had directed where to hang them. She could only see her head, which gave a curious disjointed effect. She had to stand on tiptoe to see some of her neck. She had been a pretty little girl, yes, she knew that. She and Adèle had both been pretty little girls, the kind that fathers dote on. Last year there had been this change.

She knew that for many women beauty was a matter of effort, a great exercise of patience and ingenuity. It required cunning and dedication, a curious honesty and absence of vanity. So, if not precisely a virtue, it might be called a merit.

But she could not claim this merit.

Sometimes she was irritated by the new dispensation – just as some people are irritated by their own laziness, or by the fact that they bite their nails. She would like to work at her looks – but there it is, they don’t require it. She felt herself drifting away from other people, into the realms of being judged by what she cannot help. A friend of her mother said (she was eavesdropping, as it happened): ‘Girls who look like that at her age are nothing by the time they’re twenty-five.’ The truth is, she can’t imagine twenty-five. She is sixteen now; beauty is as final as a birthmark.

Because her skin had a delicate pallor, like that of a woman in an ivory tower, Annette had persuaded her to powder her dark hair, and knot it up with ribbons and flowers to show the flawless bones of her face. It was as well her dark eyes could not be taken out and put back china blue. Or Annette would have done it, perhaps; she wanted to see her own doll’s face looking back. More than once, Lucile had imagined herself a china doll, left over from her mother’s childhood, wrapped up in silk on a high shelf: a doll too fragile and too valuable to be given to the rough, wild children of today.

Life for the most part was dull. She could remember a time when her greatest joy had been a picnic, an excursion to the country, a boat on the river on a hot afternoon. A day with no studies, when the regular hours were broken, and it was possible to forget which day of the week it was. She had looked forward to these days with an excitement very like dread, rising early to scan the sky and predict the weather. There were a few hours when you felt ‘Life is really like this’; you supposed this was happiness, and it was. You thought about it at the time, self-consciously. Then you came back, tired, in the evening, and things went on as before. You said, ‘Last week, when I went to the country, I was happy.’

Now she had outgrown Sunday treats; the river looked always the same, and if it rained, and you stayed indoors, that was no great disaster. After her childhood (after she said to herself, ‘my childhood is over’) events in her imagination became more interesting than anything that happened in the Duplessis household. When her imagination failed her, she wandered the rooms, listless and miserable, destructive thoughts going around in her head. She was glad when it was time for bed and reluctant to get up in the mornings. Life was like that. She would put aside her diaries, consumed with horror at her shapeless days, at the waste of time that stretched before her.