Cover

Dirk Bogarde

Voices in the Garden

Dedication

For

Charlotte and Jean-Michel Jarre

with my love

When the fire-fly hides its spot,

When the garden voices fail

In the darkness thick and hot,

Shall another voice avail,

That shape be where those are not?

Robert Browning

From ‘A Serenade at the Villa’

Chapter One

The lawn, green and smooth as a length of baize, sloped gently down through tall pines to the far end of the point where it ended in a neat curve, a crumbling stone urn of geraniums, a low stone wall and the end of the land. Beyond the wall, jagged rocks and boulders; shaggy myrtle bushes and a golden broom hung high above the sea.

She walked slowly and deliberately down the middle of the lawn only half aware that her heels were leaving deep holes in the sodden turf and that she had received the full force of one of the sprinklers across the front of her thin silk shirt. It would dry out in a second once she had reached the sunlight at the end of the point, and Archie could grumble as much as he liked about the heel marks. This wasn’t a time to be fussy. They’d disappear in a day or two. Anyway, she didn’t care. Such a minor thing. Minor things faded into the shadows of major things.

Normally she would have walked down the raked gravel path at the side; that was the rule when wearing heels. But this was not a normal day. Her first essential was to get as far away from the house, from the windows, as possible. Just so that she could have a few minutes quiet to herself. A pulling-together time. Air travel always made her feel displaced and odd, almost unsteady. That could be the wine, wine on an empty stomach. Should have had breakfast before leaving. Simply couldn’t eat anything. But it would all be better now that she was home. The last four days would start to fade out in the warmth and peace of the villa.

Wouldn’t they?

She had reached the end of the pine-shaded lawn and the sun almost blinded her as she continued towards the point, screwing up her eyes against the glittering light which bounced off the sea far below. A perfect example of leaving darkness for the light; but only physically. One couldn’t do that mentally. Not yet anyway. Mentally it was all dark.

She reached the crumbling urn, automatically deadheaded some geraniums only half looking at them, half looking down at the sea and the ragged line of rocks which ran along the side of the Cap winding away to her left. She threw the faded blooms vaguely over the wall, a listless gesture which scattered them among the myrtle below. On her right, across the bay, the scabby heights of Mont Boron and the old Fort on top, at this time of day soft with blue shadow. That’s the trouble with the other side of the bay, no sun in the late afternoon: it was one of the very first things which Archie’s father had fussed about from the beginning, when he had first seen the site in the Twenties. Where did the sun rise, where did it set? No point, he had said, in building a house in the South of France which didn’t receive the sun at every moment of the day. A senseless thing to do. Since the whole ten acres was, at that time, just one large pine-wood set among great rocks it was difficult to tell immediately, but with maps and compass and carefully planned visits at all times of the day from dawn to dusk over a period of weeks, he had determined that though they would not get the first morning sun, because of the bulk of the Cap behind them, they would have it from about 10 a.m. right through until the last moments of the day.

And I the child-bride. I really didn’t give a damn where the sun rose or where it set just as long as it shone and I was in it. I left all the fussing to the others. Fussing is fatiguing. Archie and his father liked fussing: a family trait. So I left it to them. Always have. Did. I’m not a fusser. Not even now.

She turned slowly, looking back the way she had come, wide shaded lawns running up towards the house through a tunnel of tall pines; the few which had remained after the weeks of wrenching, hauling and carting which had gone on for many months in order to secure a level site for the house and its gardens.

Dottie Wrotham said it was like a tiny Blenheim when she saw it first, which was as absurd a remark as Benjie Westlake’s when he said that it reminded him of Alcatraz; to which, as far as she knew, he had never been.

Today, embowered in wistaria, plumbago and bougainvillaea, it sat pleasantly among its trees with the comfort and security of constancy. Which was nonsense, of course. There was no real comfort or security now. No constancy. It was a mirage perhaps? A vision shimmering in the air; a reflection of some other time and place. But perhaps that is only me. Others would see it all differently of course. Supposing I said, suddenly to Tonnino, ‘Tonnino, stop mulching your hideous Super Stars which I know are the pride and joy of your dreary life, and tell me just what you see up there among the trees?’

He’d take off his straw hat and hold it against his chest and he’d say, ‘Nothing, Madame.’

‘Nothing, Tonnino? Are you certain? Not a house?’

‘Ah yes! A house. The house. Of course, the house. It has been there always.’

‘You do not think it a mirage then?’

He would look at me curiously. ‘I see the house, Madame,’ Thinking I was a bit tipsy again.

And Archie. Archie would be very grotty. He could be at times. ‘What are you talking about, Cuckoo? What can I see? The house, of course. Arches, windows, terraces, towers and so on. I know every stick and stone and door knob. Should do after fifty years. Are you all right?’

Oh yes. I’m all right. I would have irritated him, of course, because ten to one I’d have interrupted some tremendously involved chain of inner thought. I so often do. The trouble is that I am never perfectly certain if he is just sitting; or just sitting thinking.

Externally there has always seemed to me so little difference. He has a face which conceals thought. Sometimes, looking at him across the terrace in the evenings, it is quite impossible to know if he is re-grouping Poniatowski’s troops at Borodino or simply deciding to replace the blue spruce with a willow. Either way it is a matter of complete withdrawal.

She turned her face up towards the sun, closing her eyes; bars of light drifted across her retina slowly. She opened them quickly. My mind’s eye. In my mind’s eye.

Archie sitting uneasily on the corner of her bed in his Liberty silk dressing-gown, feet in red leather slippers, hair brushed neatly. A brightly wrapped package on his knees.

She replaced the mascara brush in its box and carefully closed the lid. ‘There. My eyes are “on”. Such a bore, fair eyelashes. I should have them dyed: someone said that you could.’ She reached across the cluttered dressing-table for a powder puff. ‘You haven’t opened your present!’

She saw him in the gilt-swagged oval mirror finger the package thoughtfully. ‘I found it in that shop in rue d’Antibes. I don’t think it’s one you’ve got, but if it is you can change it. He said so.’

Archie looked up at her over her shoulder into the looking-glass. ‘I do rather hate birthdays. Being reminded.’

‘Nonsense!’ she said briskly and shook the powder puff gently. ‘I love them.’

‘You aren’t sixty. I am. Today.’

‘And what’s so awful about that? Prime of your life, I’d say.’

‘A definite landmark, sixty; we’re given three score years and ten, remember.’

‘Tosh.’ She patted her fine-boned cheeks busily.

‘Not tosh to me. I have just seen myself in the bathroom mirrors.’

‘Not for the first time, darling, surely!’ A light laugh, dismissing.

‘For the first time as sixty.’

She turned to face him slowly. ‘Archie. What ever is it? You can’t have suddenly aged overnight! You were fifty-nine yesterday. What awful physical metamorphosis has taken place since last night?’

‘My backside is flabby, wrinkled. I’m sort of shrinking. Oh …’ He waved his hand vaguely over the package on his knee. ‘Oh, not since last night, no. It’s been taking place for a time now. I have watched the lines. The general,’ he looked about him worriedly, ‘the general sagging. Sagging. Drooping, age … I think it is quite obscene.’

She looked at him with startled eyes, her arms folded, hands in her lap. ‘Darling Archie. So dreadfully serious. You have a beautiful figure, perfect skin … you always did have. You were always so vain about them.’

‘And have no longer. I don’t like the way things are going; I’m setting in for the winter, you might say, and I can see what it is going to be like. I dislike it all intensely. Don’t care for the way things are settling down. For old age.’

She stared at him helplessly. ‘You’ve never spoken like this before: I’m shattered.’

‘So am I. Shattered too. Vain men are when faced with reality. Quite simply, I hate what is happening to my body: hate it.’ He got up from the bed suddenly, and taking his package with him walked over to the windows and looked out into the golden morning. ‘The idea of performing a sexual act repels me.’

Cuckoo let out a little cry of anguish and turned swiftly on her dressing-stool, hand to her mouth with amazement.

‘What a terrible thing to say! Archie! You’ve gone mad. You can’t be well.’

‘I’m perfectly well. Merely withering. Withering.’

‘Stop! Stop!’ she cried and covered her ears with her hands.

‘I am a fastidious man, as you know … don’t try not to listen, I shan’t say all this again, you know. In any case the “urges”, or whatever they call them, are fading. You must have been aware of that for some time now: I no longer have the energy, or the desire … the stimulus has died. Dried up, I fear; the juices have gone along with the muscle. I detest it, and I hate to make you sad … but there it is. I’ve said it, and it is fact. It is not your fault, not at all, you are as delightful, maddening, ravishing as you always were but I feel I can no longer be a husband to you in the accepted sense of fulfilling all my duties: I am no longer capable.’

Cuckoo sat stunned with shock. Then very slowly turned back to the dressing-table, automatically found her rings and twisted them on to shaking fingers.

‘This is the most dreadful morning of my life,’ she said and burst into tears which caused the mascara to run down her cheeks in long ragged lines, and sting her eyes cruelly.

‘I think it is a dreadful morning too,’ said Archie still at the window with his back to her, ‘but I realize that it is easier for me than for you. All passion spent for me.’

She was wiping her eyes desperately with a paper tissue. ‘And what about me? What am I to do? You make me feel like a leper!’

‘That is unforgivable of me. I intended no such thing. It is I who feel the leper, not you. But you know I have come very seldom to you in the last few years; it has not been a passionate relationship, has it, my dear? For many years now.’

‘That has not been my fault, Archie! Not mine! You have grown away from me more and more and gone into your beastly books, your researching, all those damned toy soldiers and bits and pieces of someone’s old battles!’ She had cleaned her eyes and surveyed the wreckage of a morning’s intensive work on her haggard face.

‘It’s nothing to do at all with toy soldiers or old pieces of somebody’s battles, as you call them. But it had to do with the war. Our war.’ He moved away from the window and sat down on the corner of the bed again.

‘Five years of separation. A long time. We were strangers when we met again. Nothing worked after that. Nothing. Oh …’ He looked hopelessly into some middle distance of his own. ‘Oh, there was the old affection, familiarity, habit. But the fires had died. You knew that too. It had all been too long: too far away, too exhausting and we’d changed for ever. It happened to so many people.’

‘Don’t!’ she wailed. ‘Don’t say another word. You make it too cruel.’

He shrugged and smoothed his hand over the package which he still held. ‘It was cruel. The end of physical love, attraction if you like, is always cruel.’

She jammed her fingers into a jar of face cream and started to cover her face with it in angry, desperate, movements. ‘You left me first. It was you, Archie. I was always physically in love with you, just remember that.’

He laughed sadly, shook his head. ‘You left far before me, my dear, you’ve been physically in love with every man who ever looked at you: so long as he was younger. What you called “scrumptious”, remember? A “scrumptious” young man on a beach, on a yacht, across a dining-table; any young man with a good figure and a modicum of wit and you were an easy lay.’

She gave a little scream of rage as one of her rings, slippery from the cold cream, slipped from her fingers and rolled away across the parquet floor. ‘A despicable, filthy thing to say. How can you say such vile things?’

‘Easily, sadly. It doesn’t matter now. Hasn’t. Never did, I suppose. For I knew from the very start that I’d never change you. All I’d done was marry you. And that didn’t stop you, did it? Marriage only gave you a licence to “kill”, if you can follow what I mean?’

She wiped her face clean, threw the greasy tissues at her feet. ‘I can’t. I don’t know what you mean. You are being utterly deranged and foul.’

He got up again and wandered across to the window, leaning against the folded shutter. ‘My dear Cuckoo. If I had cut a notch in that big parasol pine down there for every time you had made a “killing” there would be a damned fine totem-pole standing at the edge of the lawn.’

She turned towards him unsteadily, smoothing her hands carefully. ‘What a perfectly ghastly time of day to play the Truth Game. I presume that’s what it is? And you’ve waited forty years to play it. On the morning of your sixtieth birthday. Quite marvellous timing, I suppose. And what, after this quite astonishing confession from you, am I supposed to do? Admit that I was always oversexed and that you were, shall we say, less demanding? Do you care for that better?’

‘I don’t like any of it. At all. Stop please, let us stop!’

‘No we shall not stop, Archie. You started it and we continue. You come into this room with the most appalling, idiotic, remarks and hurt me quite dreadfully. And now, when I am a ruin – look at me! you want to stop. Typical Archie! Typical. Well, I won’t stop. I loved you madly: I thought you were the most god-like thing I had ever seen and I longed to be your wife. And I was. But I didn’t know then, how could I?, that the only way you could really make love to me was dressed in full regalia as if you had just arrived from the Richmond’s ball before Waterloo!’

‘Cuckoo! Stop! Stop this instant!’

‘I will not. It is true. Epaulettes, buttons and those damned tassled boots! This obsession with Napoleon and dressing up. How was I to know?’

‘As far as I am aware you appeared to enjoy it all very much as well.’

‘Of course I did! It was a game. You looked wildly glamorous and dashing. I didn’t mind playing your idiotic game if it pleased you, and it was fun at first.’ She twisted her rings slowly, looking at her hands intently. ‘But in time I realised that there was precious little love about it all. There was no tenderness really, you liked it that way because it hid you; made you feel strong and brave and masculine. It gave you a sense of power, you felt that you were irresistible. To yourself. You were really making love to yourself, Archie, not to me. I sometimes felt that perhaps you were really punishing me: for being barren.’

Archie gave a low cry, muffling it with his fist. She looked up wanly.

‘That was a little below the belt. I know. But you are a vain man, you have just admitted that, a vain and selfish man. But the strange thing is that I loved you in my way, and I still do. In spite of all these cruel and idiotic things we are saying to each other after so many years. It was never the kind of marriage either of us hoped for, I know. But we managed. No one knew, I think. A perfectly acceptable marriage until the war. Until then we played your little game when, as you crudely put it, the urge came upon you. And when it did not, then I skipped off with the gypsies in the woods. I admit that. I had a simply marvellous time. But no one was really hurt, Archie? Were they?’ She reached out a hand towards his bowed back. ‘And I came back. I never threw my bonnet over any windmill to that extent. We tried after … and we failed. But we stayed together, didn’t we?’

He raised his head and stared out across the gardens below. She folded her hands together on her knee.

‘What an odd conversation. After so long.’ She shrugged and laughed softly to herself. ‘Oh, my dear! You knew very well what I was when we married all those years ago. The giddy, golden gel. Cuckoo. In and out of everyone’s nest. That was the saying, wasn’t it? I was one of the good times had by everyone.’

He had lowered his head and rested it against the cool glass of the window. ‘Oh, dear God,’ he said.

She briskly addressed herself to her own reflection in the looking-glass. ‘What a mess. Me. Not us really. Me at this moment. I think we have managed pretty well, frankly.’ She smoothed her face and throat with slender hands. ‘And here we still are. You say that your backside is sagging and your body withering, and I know that I’m really too old for much more cuckooing and in any case you are now about to take the veil, God knows why! I should have thought that a uniform would cover any undesirable signs … if you can find someone to play the game.’

He cleared his throat. ‘It would make me feel obscene. Doing that. At sixty.’

‘Oh, the vanity of it! The sheer vanity! All passion spent, you said. What utter nonsense when there really never was any: on your part, at least.’ She reached out and found a jar of foundation cream and unscrewed the lid angrily. ‘Well, I’m vain too. And a little younger than you. I’m not going into a convent just because you’ve discovered wrinkles on your bottom or anywhere else for that matter.’ She started spreading the pale cream across the gentle contours of her face. ‘I’m not dead yet, my dear. Not yet. Not by a long chalk.’

Not yet.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!