The story continues from Tranche Seven
Father Gerard’s recommendation that Marcus speak to his friend Armand Caldieri, a psychologist, causes Marcus a deal of worry during the night. Although Marcus understands that a psychologist is different from a psychiatrist, he would not have been able to explain the difference. His simple assumption would assign psychiatrists to the treatment of those with badly damaged mental processes who had to be confined in asylums, while psychologists dealt with the mildly disturbed, the walking wounded. He already knows he is not ‘normal’ in the way other boys are and he decides to see Armand Caldieri to confirm his self-diagnosis…
Monday, 22nd August
The brass plate beside the double-doored entry was inscribed Cabinet, Armand Caldieri, Thérapeute. The concierge directed Marcus to the first floor where a middle-aged woman received him with a dismissive glance, indicated a chair by the window and continued her typing. It was several minutes before a woman with a child came out of the inner office and began making further arrangements with the receptionist.
“Marcus? Please come in…”
A shortish, rotundish man beckoned from the door to his cabinet. He wore half-moon spectacles, a bow tie and his luxuriant moustache contrasted vividly with his shiny bald pate. Marcus observed that the consulting room, quietly dark behind shuttered windows, had a couch, a green velvet chaise longue draped with a blanket embroidered in startling primary colours, and two armchairs. One short wall opposite the window was shelves of books above cupboards. Either side of the fireplace were hung pictures that might have been cubist or modernist. On the wall behind the desk were two framed certificates. And on the same wall but on the other side of the door were a couple of portrait photographs, one of a worried looking man with wild hair, the other calmly avuncular. Marcus sat in one of the armchairs.
“I’m glad you came, Marcus: I talked with Gerard this morning: he feared you might not. He told me that you hitch-hiked from London, are working temporarily in a café and are trying to decide what to do next. Is that about right?”
Marcus was surprised by the gentleness of the question. The priest must have said more than that. He nodded assent but was wary.
“Gerard told me you had to leave home because you failed some exams. So, let’s start there. Why do you think you did not perform as well as expected?”
“I gave up. I didn’t revise properly.”
“You gave up… do you always give up when faced with a challenge?”
Since talking to the priest Marcus had been haunted by his assertion that his mother had been disappointed by the men in her life. That had not been a considered statement. It had been a response to the mental image of all the adults in his life standing with their backs to each other. Yet, while they might have their backs to each other, they had never turned their backs on him, yet...
“I try to be the person everyone expects… but I always fail.”
“Always?”
“Yes... well… except…”
Armand Caldieri, the clipboard resting on his knees, his expression calmly encouraging, watched Marcus.
Marcus was wrestling with that inescapable ‘except’. Might it be more honest to say that most of the time he had done the best that he could in the circumstances? Yet that wasn’t true either, or not wholly true.
“It’s true I failed my exams. It’s true I didn’t revise. But until then I had worked really hard. I had tried to succeed. I suppose I just gave up. I don’t know why…”
The man sitting opposite uncapped his pen and wrote something, a short sentence on the clipboard, and replaced the cap with a faint but clear click. Marcus felt compelled to find some way of saying what was concerning him.
“My dad would just say I have to work harder. My mum thinks I’m obsessed with girls and I have to avoid getting distracted. They’re both wrong. I can never do well enough to satisfy dad, but I am good at some things – they’re just not important to him. Maybe I am obsessed with girls – but I never know what they want from me. I always offend them or hurt them. It’s like now with Lizzy and Marthe. They fixed it for me to have a place at Antoine’s. I think they are lovely, especially Lizzy – but I don’t know just how to be calm and friendly… It was easy to help Lizzy with the hymn books, but I wouldn’t know how to ask her out…”
“Do you want to?”
“She’s not interested.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know… but…”
“But what, Marcus?”
Marcus had anticipated that gentle challenge. He had boxed himself in, again. This wasn’t about Lizzy, or Sophie, or any of the other girls he liked: it wasn’t about them liking him…
“This isn’t about asking Lizzy out. It’s about me. I just don’t feel enough. Good enough. Bright enough. Confident enough. Just anything enough!”
Armand had his head down. He was writing on the clipboard. “I hear you,” he said, looking up. “But who is telling you what is enough?”
That was easy! “I do, of course.”
The silence that followed was uncomfortable. Marcus felt he had said something wrong, yet it had been an honest answer - when he had voiced it. He was reminded of the moment, a year and a half previously, when he had looked into the shaving mirror at school and said ‘I hate you’ to the image facing him; adding as a sort of codicil, ‘but if I achieve nothing in life I want to be proud of you’. That had been the beginning of the descent – the point where he had given up when he ought to have begun fighting back.
“I’m the problem, aren’t I?” Marcus said after a long pause.
“Do you think you are?” Armand asked gently.
Marcus was struggling to contain the emotion that was rising like magma. He had to remain calm! He could not speak. He had to suppress the burning tears. He could not appear weak. He dared not let this stranger see his anger. He fought to retain control. How many times had he looked in the mirror and wanted to wring the neck of the scrawny boy who stared back at him with hollow eyes and clenched jaw? He was back on the verandah of the flat with its view of the glittering ocean, the lighthouse, the abandoned fort and hearing his father asking why he had not done better in his exams. He had wanted to shout that he had tried; that he didn’t know what was expected of him, that he was never going to be the son he wanted. He was back in the kitchen with his mother brandishing the buff folder of letters, asking him who were they, why were they writing to him with rounded hand on scented paper; why was he consorting with these cheap girls? He had wanted to say that she knew them, that they were his friends, that she had no right to read his letters, or his diary. He had not argued. He had not defended his friends. He had accepted her decision to burn the letters, the diary and to summon his father to fly five thousand miles just to give him seven days to leave the family home.
“My parents think I’m worthless, so I must be…”
“Do you think you’re worthless?”
“Of course not! But…” Marcus couldn’t say any more. One more word and he would collapse. He couldn’t allow a stranger to see that. He had accepted his punishment. He had left home, gone to London, tried to survive. And now he was here being judged by Hercule Poirot. He had to leave.
“Cigarette?” Armand opened a silver box.
Marcus reached out. The box had been on the low table. It had an inner wood lining and was divided, filter cigarettes in one section, untipped in the other. Marcus wondered what brands they were. He hadn’t had a cigarette since… the square by the church… before he had met Marthe in the cemetery. Friday. It would be three days by the evening. The consulting room did not smell of cigarette smoke. Was he being tested? Neither Marthe nor Lizzy smoked, or hadn’t while he’d been with them. Neither had Sophie. He’d read somewhere that kissing a smoker was like licking an ashtray. Is that how he had appeared to Sophie?
“No. Thank you”
“I’m Québecois,” Armand said as he closed and replaced the box. “The French laugh at my accent just as the Americans did when I went to the University of Chicago. I felt like an outsider. I was studying Physics. As you probably know, much of the early work on the Atom Bomb was done in Montréal and Chicago. My father worked on it. One day a girl invited me to a lecture by Carl Rogers, her professor. The next day I abandoned Physics for Humanistic Psychology. That girl is now in London. She changed my life. Perhaps she might do the same for you.”
Armand had to be about the same age as his parents yet they had never disclosed anything as intimate as this. Or had they? They must have done. Even as he asked himself the question at least half a dozen memories challenged his immediate, negative, response. That negativity was bolstered by defensiveness: his parents had tried. He was the one who failed.
“I couldn’t afford anything like that.”
“I accept that that may be true as you sit here, now, but ask yourself why your immediate response to an offer of help should appear to me as a refusal of it?”
“Did it? I’m sorry. I thought I was being rational.”
“You are rational, Marcus. Father Gerard referred the intelligent, attractive, compassionate, self-reliant young man I see in front of me. I trust Gerard’s judgement just as he trusted his niece’s. The real question is, Marcus, do you trust yourself?”
His immediate thought was ‘who else can I trust?’ But that would sound dismissive, negative. He had already made one statement that he thought reasonable only to have it turned back on him. Perhaps perceptions of his negativity lay not in the answer itself but the way he phrased it? Without having to think too hard he had to accept that he almost always answered a question that was seeking to open a door to discussion by shutting it. How might he answer and leave the door ajar?
“I don’t feel able to trust anyone else.” It said the same thing. How would Armand respond?
“Have others betrayed your trust?”
“Not directly.”
“Could you explain?”
“Not easily... But… when Dad wanted to go abroad again, they asked us-”
“Sorry to interrupt – who are ‘they’?
“Mum and Dad. They called my brother and me into their bedroom, explained about Dad’s job offer, and asked if we wanted to go to boarding school. We both said no, but they sent us anyway.”
“How is that a betrayal of trust?”
Marcus could barely disguise his annoyance. “Why would they ask if they didn’t intend to listen to us? But it’s more than that. It wasn’t easy to change schools like that. It was O-Level year and I really struggled with the change of school, the syllabus, the set books, the different social stuff…”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I really struggled to catch up. To do well. But I couldn’t. I had to give up Latin and failed English language, which had been my best subject. Dad just said I hadn’t worked hard enough. I didn’t think he was being fair.”
The silence in the room settled slowly, like dust. Marcus tensed in the chair. He was remembering that day. He remembered the candlewick bedspread. He remembered his mother sitting on the stool with the dressing table behind her. He could see himself and Peter perched on the edge of the bed. His father was standing next to his mother, but he wasn’t beside her, there was a gap, maybe a hands-width, that, in the silence of this consulting room, felt as wide as the Grand Canyon. He raised his eyes to meet Armand’s. He blinked to suppress the sensation of tearfulness. Please, just let me go, he thought, waiting for the next question.
“And what about your mother?”
“She was just supporting Dad…” He felt the rasp in his throat. No, it wasn’t support, he thought; more like resignation. “I doubt she could have done anything else.”
When Armand spoke, it was gently. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“No!” Anger shot up like a bolt of lightning from his belly into his throat. Marcus was shocked by his own anger. He struggled to calm himself sufficiently to answer. “Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing but it didn’t feel like it then and doesn’t feel like it now…”
He wanted to curl up in the armchair. He wanted to admit that he felt his parents had abandoned him. Why would they do that? He must have done something terrible. Why didn’t he know what that was? Why? Why? Why?
“Do you keep a diary? A journal?”
Marcus shook his head. He wanted to say that it was writing things down that got him thrown out, except he didn’t.
“I’d like you to come and see me on Thursday. Same time. Please think about your life goals – are you the sort of person you want to be? You might find it useful to write a journal – argue with yourself in private on paper. And - I’ll make a suggestion – if you see Gerard’s niece again, ask her for a date. She might say no… but she might say yes. Take a risk. Oh, and Gerard didn’t say anything about her, I heard a note of wistfulness in your voice earlier. I hope you will come on Thursday. In the meantime I shall contact my friend in London”
Tuesday, 23rd August
Marcus went early to the boulangerie. Madaleno returned his smile as she handed him the bundle of baguettes and bags of pastries. Then he went to the market with Mathilde’s long and detailed list. It was a hazy morning. The horizon was almost indiscernible. An American aircraft carrier and its accompanying destroyer seemed to have been painted onto a steely blue canvas backdrop with, in the foreground, two men, like stagehands, raking the beach as an old woman walked briskly across the sand, ignoring them. Resignedly, or so it seemed to Marcus, the men erased her footsteps. The stall holders recognized him. He and they exchanged simple civil greetings. Vittorio asked after Antoine and Marcus was able to say ‘aujourd’hui ils sortie l’hôpital’. The man smiled and added half a dozen oranges to the bag. Marcus hadn’t fully understood what they said but he would tell Mathilde that everyone was pleased that Antoine was coming home.
The man Marcus helped up the stairs and into the apartment above the café was little more than a bag of bones with a grey pallor to his skin and rheumy eyes. Mathilde had brought him home in a taxi while Clareto looked after the café’s early clientele. Clareto was shocked when she helped Mathilde get Antoine out of the taxi. She was in tears and asked Marcus to help Mathilde. He must have been a big man, Marcus thought, feeling the bones under the loose clothes yet he could have carried him up the stairs. So this is what death looks like, he thought as Mathilde shooed him out of the bedroom.
The café was busy. People had heard Antoine was home. Clareto left him in charge and went upstairs to support Mathilde. Marcus found himself having to deal with the people: he could not let Mathilde down. Despite his fractured French and their impenetrable accents, his own as much as theirs, he worked the Gaggia, poured Pastis and early morning wine, made baguettes filled with ham and whatever seemed appropriate. No-one complained. Madaleno came with more bread and pastries. Anastasia, one of Mathilde’s friends from the group that gathered under the plane tree, took over in the kitchen.
After a hectic lunchtime, the café emptied into the somnolent afternoon. Marcus and Pepe, the verger from the church, carried an armchair down into the square and then brought Antoine to sit under the plane tree. Men and women came in ones and twos, like some sort of social relay, to sit with him and talk.
Marcus sat at an outside table under the awning. Armand had suggested he start a journal. He had bought a notebook in the stationers on the way from the market. How to start?
Tuesday, 23 August – Chez Antoine, Place St Giacomo, Vieille Ville, Nice.
That is at least a beginning, he thought, but what exactly is a journal? Is it just a diary of events? Is it a record of impressions and feelings? Armand suggested it and he is a psychologist – so does he think I should use it as an extension of the conversation we had? If so, then it must be a conversation I have with myself. Or maybe it is just a place to write out my thoughts. So, let’s begin at the beginning…
It is nine days since I left London. I have no idea why I came here except that I was running away from something – myself I suppose. But that is a very negative view. I’m not like Laurie Lee or Paddy Leigh-Fermor – they walked out with purpose and, I suppose, some sort of adolescent romantic dream. I just ran. In fact, I run away from all my adolescent romantic dreams
He hadn’t planned to write any of that. The words just flowed onto the page. Was it nine or was it ten days since he’d left London? Laurie Lee left Slad for the Civil War in Spain – politics was his romantic motivation. Leigh-Fermor just wanted to see Constantinople and walking there seemed a good way to discover Europe, a journey that would fit him for his wartime exploits and inspire his writing. Whatever their motivation, his was profoundly stupid and unrealistic! He was annoyed with himself. He wrote:
Wake up!
Find a way
out of this
nightmare
“Hi Marcus.” Lizzy’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Writing a novel?”
Marthe and Lizzy stood by the table. They looked like schoolgirls with their almost identical dresses and bags of books.
“I’m attempting a journal…” The two girls pulled chairs to the table and sat down. Marcus noticed Lizzy peering at the notebook and immediately closed it. “Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks. The children are at a party ‘til six and we’re going swimming… Like to come?”
“I have to stay here. Antoine’s out of hospital and Mathilde’s with him…”
Marthe pushed her chair back and went over to two women gossiping under the plane tree. Valerio, one of the women under the tree, smirked at him as she shouted “Vas-y, idiot! J’attendrai,” then turned to her friend and laughed.
Marthe ran over. “Allez, attrape-le” and pulled Marcus off his chair. Lizzy took his notebook and dropped it in her shoulder bag. Moments later the girls were running him down the steps and through the old town, chasing after a bus and, giggling, squeezing him onto a seat. He was out of breath, as much as from the shock of his abduction as the exertion. He could feel the girls pressed against him on each side. He could smell the human aroma of the bus: garlic and lavender, sweat and tobacco, oil and exhaust fumes. He could feel the eyes of the other passengers, headscarved old women in black, men in berets and worn work clothes, women in bright print dresses, dowdy work clothes or tight blouses and short skirts, young men, some with long hair some wearing it slicked back. Children with curious stares.
The bus skirted the port and began to climb. Marthe stood up. He and Lizzy followed. As the bus laboured away up the hill Marcus looked between the roofs of roadside villas towards the sea and the coast that curved away from the harbour mole towards the hazy headland, beyond which was the beach at Golfe Juan where he had slept an aeon ago.
“Come!” Marthe dragged him through a pedestrian gate and into a carefully manicured garden of palms and oleander, vivid flowers, rich herby scents and neatly verged paths leading to a crystal swimming pool set in a broad terrace with panoramic views of the sea.
“This is Marthe’s place,” Lizzy told him as she tossed her bag onto a poolside lounger shaded by a huge parasol. “She’s so lucky. Her people are in Paris and the kids don’t have to be collected until six. Come and swim!”
Marcus looked around him at tall palms reflected in the huge windows of the gleaming Art Deco villa, a sense of rich seclusion despite other villas clinging to the limestone headland to left and right and above them. “I didn’t bring any trunks” he protested.
“Who needs them?” Lizzy unbuttoned her dress and let it drop.
Marthe was watching them both with an expression he could only interpret as intense curiosity. He felt uncomfortable. Marthe was tugging at her dress. Lizzy was unclipping her bra. He turned towards the path by which they’d come. Embarrassment swamped him. He looked away, towards the sea and a distant Cap d’Antibes. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t understand girls. He wanted to run.
But he didn’t…
Marcus is intrigued! He knows he is not ‘normal’ in terms of the expected standards of male adolescent behaviour, but he doesn’t know what ‘normal’ female adolescent behaviour is either. Lizzy and Marthe are not shrinking violets and are showing every sign of enjoying the hedonistic behaviours of the fey young men at Studland that had fascinated him but shocked Brian…
The story continues with Tranche Nine