A Closed Eye Read Free

or at least she supposed he was, and passionately Anglophile. On Saturdays he would go to the station bookstall in Geneva and buy up the English magazines:
Vogue, Country Life, The Economist
. He had been at Oxford, had held a post at the Swiss Embassy in London, but remained, after a lifetime of presumably honourable activity, like a boy, pre-sexual. He dressed floridly, in coloured waistcoats, with a silk handkerchief cascading from his breast pocket. Harriet, from her window in the morning, could see the top of his tartan cap, or the voluminous beret he wore when it was damp.
    He had been marvellous when Freddie was ill.
‘Allons-y, avançons,’
he had joked, supporting the bent figure as it crept up the stairs. He had had more patience with Freddie than Harriet had had herself, regarded an afternoon spent in Freddie’s largely wordless company as a treat in itself, just one of the many that filled his pleasant days. She remained drily grateful to him for his ministrations, yet aware that he could never share her own dark thoughts.
    He beamed at her in the open doorway.
    ‘Ah.’ She sniffed.
‘Monsieur Rochas?’
    ‘No,’ he said happily.
‘Gentleman, de Givenchy.’
    Never very expertly shaved—unusual, she thought, in a diplomat, although he was now long retired—he exuded
bonhomie
and waves of scent as he followed her into the salon, rubbing his hands with enjoyment.
    ‘Such an interesting day,’ he said, in his faultless English. ‘I went through my photographs. All the early albums, you know. Father and I on holiday at Bembridge. We went there every year when I was a boy. Father had the yacht then, of course.’
    ‘Your mother died young, I think you told me?’ said Harriet, pouring out the Muscadet. She had heard this story before, many times, but it served as a subject for conversation in this strange place.
    ‘I never knew her,’ he said. ‘She died when I was a baby. But I have photographs. A beautiful woman. Father never forgot her, never thought of marrying again.’
    ‘And how did you grow up to be so contented? One would think you had had a great deal of love to be so, well, so happy, so satisfied … I don’t know how to put it. You always strike me as a very fulfilled person.’
    ‘Fulfilled!’ He took a handful of peanuts, a couple of which came to rest on his canary-yellow tie. ‘I am fulfilled, Harriet! But I owe that entirely to Missy.’
    ‘Of course, Missy,’ said Harriet. The beloved governess, with whom he had certainly been in love, as a child, as a boy, perhaps even as a man.
    ‘I cannot remember life without Missy,’ he went on. ‘She was with me until she died, you know.’ As always, at this point in his recital his eyes filled with tears. ‘She kept house for me, when I was working.’
    ‘Where did you live?’ she asked.
    ‘Hyde Park Gate. A flat, just big enough for the two of us. When she died I came back here: I couldn’t have stayed on. In any event I had already retired. There was nothing to keep me.’ His face fell into the pouches and folds characteristic of old age. For a moment he looked almost mature.
    ‘So we both ended up in the Résidence Cécil.’
    ‘But you will go home, Harriet! Once you have recovered your spirits. And what shall I do without you?’
    She smiled at him. ‘I shall have to go back to London at some point, I suppose. The house is still there. But that is what I cannot face—the empty house.’
    His face sprang into an energetic grimace of sympathy.
    ‘Ah, yes. The empty house. Without Freddie. I understand.’
    She was silent, as always, when this matter arose, not quite knowing how to convey the fact that Freddie’s death was the last link in the chain that had once bound her to her own life, that she had in more ways than one outlived him, even before he died, and that she now functioned in ghostly form, as if all the living substance had been withdrawn, and only her strong and obstinate heart, beating away