Restless - Boyd William - Страница 7

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'What if I say no?' she asked.

'Just give it back to me. Nobody wants to force you.'

'But you had the passport ready.'

Romer smiled, showing his white teeth, and for once she thought it might be a genuine smile.

'You've no idea how easy it is to have a passport made up. No, I thought…' he paused and frowned. 'I don't know you, Eva, in the way I knew Kolia – but I thought, because of him, and because you remind me of him, that there was a chance you might join us.'

Eva smiled ruefully at the memory of this conversation – its mix of sincerity and vast duplicity – and leant forward as they steamed into Edinburgh and craned her head up to look at the castle on the rock, almost black, as if, made of coal, it sat on a crag of coal, as they slowed beneath it, slipping into the station. Now there were shreds of blue amongst the hurrying clouds – it was brighter, the sky no longer white and neutral – perhaps that was what made the castle and its rock seem so black.

She stepped down from the train with her suitcase ('Only one suitcase,' Romer had insisted) and wandered up the platform. All he had told her was that she would be met. She looked about her at the families and couples greeting each other and embracing, politely declined the services of a porter and walked out into the main concourse of Waverley Station.

'Miss Dalton?'

She turned, thinking how quickly one becomes accustomed to a new name – she had been Miss Eve Dalton for only two days now – and saw that the man facing her was stout in a too tight grey suit and a too tight collar.

'I'm Staff Sergeant Law,' the man said. 'Please follow me.' He did not offer to carry her suitcase.

'"YES, MRS AMBERSON THOUGHT, it was my doing nothing that made the difference."'

Hugues looked more than usually puzzled, almost panicked in fact. He was always puzzled by English grammar, anyway – frowning, muttering, talking to himself in French – but today I had painted him into a corner

'My doing nothing – what?' he said, helplessly.

'My doing nothing – nothing. It's a gerund.' I tried to look alert and interested but decided, there and then, to cut the lesson short by ten minutes. I felt the pressure of desperate concentration in my head – I had been almost furious in my application, all to keep my mind occupied – but my attention was beginning to fray badly. 'We'll tackle the gerund and gerundive tomorrow,' I said, closing the book (Life with the Ambersons, vol.III) then added, apologetically, aware of the agitation I'd aroused in him, 'C'est tres complique.'

'Ah, bon.'

Like Hugues, I too was sick of the Amberson family and their laborious journey through the labyrinth of English grammar. And yet I was still bound to them like an indentured servant – tied to the Ambersons and their horrible lifestyle – and the new pupil was due to arrive: only another two hours in their company to go.

Hugues pulled on his sports jacket – it was olive green with a charcoal check and I thought the material was cashmere. It was meant to look, I supposed, like the sort of jacket that an Englishman – in some mythological English world – would unreflectingly don to go and see to his hounds, or meet his estate manager, or take tea with his maiden aunt, but I had to confess I had yet to encounter a fellow countryman sporting clothing quite so fine and so well cut.

Hugues Corbillard stood in my small, narrow study, pensively stroking his blond moustache, a troubled expression still on his face – thinking about the gerund and gerundive, I supposed. He was a rising young executive in P'TIT PRIX, a low-cost French supermarket chain, and had been obliged by senior management to improve his English so that P'TIT PRIX could access new markets. I liked him – actually, I liked most of my pupils – Hugues was a rare lazy one: often he spoke French to me throughout the lesson and I English to him, but today had been something of an assault course. Usually we talked about anything except English grammar, anything to avoid the Amberson family and their doings – their trips, their modest crises (plumbing failures, chicken-pox, broken limbs), visits from relatives, Christmas holidays, children's exams, etcetera – and more and more our conversation returned to the unusual heat of this English summer, how Hugues was slowly stifling in his broiling bed and breakfast, about his incomprehension at being obliged to sit down to eat a three-course, starchy evening meal at 6.00 p.m., with the sun slamming down on the scorched, dehydrated garden. When my conscience pricked me and I felt I should remonstrate and urge him to speak in English, Hugues would say that it was all conversation, n'est ce pas? with a shy guilty smile, conscious he was breaking the strict terms of the contract, it must be helping his comprehension, surely? I did not disagree: I was earning ?7 an hour chatting to him in this way – if he was happy, I was happy.

I walked him through the flat to the back stairway. We were on the first floor and in the garden I could see Mr Scott, my landlord and my dentist, doing his strange exercises – waving his arms, stamping his big feet – before another patient arrived in his surgery down below us.

Hugues said goodbye and I sat down in the kitchen, leaving the door open, waiting for my next pupil from Oxford English Plus. This would be her first day and I knew little about her apart from her name – Berangere Wu – her status – beginner/ intermediate – and her timetable – four weeks, two hours a day, five days a week. Good, steady money. Then I heard voices in the garden and stepped out of the kitchen on to the landing at the top of the wrought-iron staircase, looking down to see Mr Scott talking urgently to a small woman in a fur coat and pointing repeatedly at the front gate.

'Mr Scott?' I called. 'I think she's for me.'

The woman – a young woman – a young oriental woman – climbed the staircase to my kitchen. She was wearing, despite the summer heat, some kind of long, expensive-looking, tawny fur coat slung across her shoulders and, as far as I could tell from an initial glance, her other clothes – the satin blouse, the camel trousers, the heavy jewels – were expensive-looking also.

'Hello, I'm Ruth,' I said and we shook hands.

'Berangere,' she said, looking round my kitchen as a dowager duchess might, visiting the home of one of her poorer tenants. She followed me through to the study, where I relieved her of her coat and sat her down. I hung the coat on the back of the door – it seemed near weightless.

'This coat is amazing,' I said. 'So light. What is it?'

'It's a fox from Asia. They shave it.'

'Shaved Asian fox.'

'Yes… I am speaking English not so well,' she said.

I reached for Life with the Ambersons, vol. 1. 'So, why don't we start at the beginning,' I said.

I think I liked Berangere, I concluded, as I walked down the road to collect Jochen from school. In the two-hour tutorial (as we came to know the Amberson family – Keith and Brenda, their children, Dan and Sara, and their dog, Rasputin) we had each smoked four cigarettes (all hers) and drunk two cups of tea. Her father was Vietnamese, she said, her mother, French. She, Berangere, worked in a furrier's in Monte Carlo – Fourrures Monte Carle – and, if she could improve her English, she would be promoted to manager. She was incredibly petite, the size of a nine-year-old girl, I thought, one of those girl-women who made me feel like a strapping milkmaid or an Eastern-bloc pentathlete. Everything about her appeared cared-for and nurtured: her hair, her nails, her eyebrows, her teeth – and I was sure this same attention to detail applied to those parts of her not visible to me: her toenails, her underwear – her pubic hair, for all I knew. Beside her I felt scruffy and not a little unclean but, for all this manicured perfection, I sensed there was another Berangere lurking beneath. As we said goodbye she asked me where was a good place in Oxford to meet men.

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