Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

She heard Imelda mounting the stairs with her herb tea. She climbed to her feet. Her head felt like a dead weight on her shoulders, dull as a pumpkin. In the bedroom she poured water into her china bowl and began to wash the rouge and powder from her face. Imelda entered the room behind her. The chink of a cup and saucer on the dressing-table, a sigh as that day’s clothes were laid across the bed.

When she walked into the parlour, Théo was smothering a yawn. She wondered if the clink and jangle of her bracelets had kept him awake; she must have tossed and turned on that hard wood floor all night. But he greeted her as if nothing had happened. All but asked her how she had slept. This ability of his to forget any unpleasantness, though something of a relief on this occasion, she often took to be a form of cowardice. It occurred to her that he must have stepped over her to reach the stairs that morning. She was beneath contempt, quite literally. She felt her anger flare, as sudden as a struck match. She was surprised that it had lasted through the night, surprised that she had slept at all with such a simmering below her skin. But then it died away again, blown out by weariness. She sat down at the table. She poured some coffee, spooned a few thin slices of fruit on to a plate.

‘There’s a letter,’ Théo said, ‘from Monsieur Eiffel.’

‘What does he say?’

‘Shall I read it to you?’

In this simple question, she heard his desire for a truce, his longing to restore the balance.

‘If you like,’ she said.

She knew that Monsieur Eiffel would serve as his apologist. Their marriage might be disintegrating, but otherwise, in all other fields of endeavour, Théo was excelling himself. So, actually, everything was all right. The letter could not have arrived at a more appropriate time.

Théo began to read, his voice lowered, his eyes avoiding hers. It was as she had anticipated. Eiffel praised him for his efforts in the most testing of conditions; he had every confidence in Théo’s ability to complete the assembly to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. He mentioned several projects that were presently engaging his attention: a proposal for a Paris Métro, based on the London model; an observatory intended for the summit of Mont Blanc; an underwater bridge to cross the Channel. There followed a brief discourse on buoyancy and equilibrium. Her eyes moved to the window. Vultures paddled in the air above the ridge. She did not notice when it was that Théo stopped reading, only that he had. He was looking where she was looking.

‘Something must have died,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Something did.’

She could see his mother, during one of her frequent visits to their house on the Rue de Rivoli. Madame Valence had an invulnerable air about her, the effect, perhaps, of the severe dresses that she favoured, steel-grey and veiled in crêpe. She resembled an engine of war that could be wheeled on to any battlefield and would always find the weakest point. Her eyes closing in on Théo, her only son, as, studying his hands, he said, ‘We are trying, mother.’ ‘Trying?’ Madame Valence’s gaze shifted to her daughter-in-law. ‘Is something wrong?’ ‘Nothing’s wrong, Madame,’ Suzanne replied. She saw Madame Valence tighten her lips, signalling her scepticism, and arch her pencilled eyebrows slightly as she returned to her embroidery.

The questions had begun six months after the wedding, when Suzanne showed no signs of having conceived. ‘And when shall we see a little one?’ Madame Valence would ask, her light-hearted words masking an interest that was gruelling, that could, on occasion, seem like greed. As the years passed, the mask was dropped, all semblance of light-heartedness abandoned. A kind of quiet panic took its place. Suzanne did her utmost to ignore it — but sometimes she dreamed that Madame Valence had devoured her children.

Her eyes still fixed on the ridge, she pictured the horse’s corpse with vultures hooked into its flanks, their wings spread wide for balance. Their beaks lurched downwards, ripped ungainly holes in the glossy coat and then jerked sideways, trailing bowels and intestines on the ground. The stench of blood had reached her nostrils. She brought her fan up to her face and moved the air away.

Théo was reading the letter again, in silence now. As he neared the end, he looked up.

‘He mentions you, Suzanne.’

‘What does he say?’

He took out his watch. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘I must go. Here.’ Handing her the letter, he excused himself and, rising from the table, left the house.

His haste seemed natural until her eyes fell on a sentence close to the bottom of the page: I have no doubt but that your decision to take Madame Valence with you has by now been vindicated, and that she has proved herself a most worthy and beneficial addition to the community. She came close to laughing out loud. Such savage irony. No wonder Théo had not read the letter to the end. No wonder he had left the house with such alacrity.

And yet, a moment later, she found herself curiously touched by the words. There was someone who believed in her, someone who thought she was of value. She read on: I remember well that, during the construction of the Douro Bridge in 1876, I travelled to Portugal myself, together with my wife, and stayed in a villa on the outskirts of Oporto. It is a time that I still think of to this day with great fondness. His wife had died, of course, some few years later, and he had never married again. He had come to rely more and more on the company of his faithful eldest daughter, Claire.

Two summers ago Suzanne and Théo had been invited to spend a week at Monsieur Eiffel’s house in the South of France, the Villa Salles at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. She remembered walking in the gardens with him one afternoon, through cloisters, between clipped hedges, past stone lions, the scent of lemon and hibiscus sharpening the air, sunlight on the lawn, fountains of bougainvillaea. He had always treated her with the utmost courtesy, and his sober and impassive features, which you saw in photographs and which so many people feared, would soften whenever he set eyes on her. In private he was self-effacing, genuinely unimpressed with his achievements; he did not act the famous man at all. That afternoon, in the gardens of the villa, he had entertained her with stories from his youth — dancing the quadrille with English girls, swimming across the Seine at night. His most humiliating year, he said, was 1860, when four girls, three of them blonde, rejected his proposals of marriage, all in the space of seven months. They laughed together over his misfortunes, dwarfed as they were by what had happened to him since.

‘They did not know what they were turning down,’ she said.

He fixed her with his blue eyes, the fingers of one hand moving thoughtfully among the silver threads of his goatee. ‘Do you think that would have made a difference? If they had known?’

She smiled. ‘It’s hard to say. If you cannot see something, then perhaps it is not for you.’

This must have sounded a little sententious, yet he indulged her. She could tell that she amused him, that he was stimulated by her company, and she sometimes wondered if he did not see in her some incarnation of his previous desires.

A knocking reached down to where she was, among her memories.

‘Imelda?’ she called out.

There was no reply. Imelda would be elsewhere in the house, making the beds upstairs or in the kitchen hut, preparing lunch. She rose from her chair and opened the door herself. Montoya was standing on the veranda. It seemed that every time she answered the door she answered it to him. He must have waited until Théo left for work. He must have been watching the house.