Read Online The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online Page B

where he sits down and begins to write. In no more than a few minutes, he covers a page with a minutely perceived description of Charlotte, focusing on the heaviness of her eyes, the seeming hard strength of her body, the wide spread of her hands. But then he sits back, gulps wine, slows his breathing, forces himself to think not of Charlotte but of himself. ‘Exile (Voluntary. American),’ he begins, ‘Finds himself at centre of case which will shock this nation (in ways particular to this nation and its class system) more than far more terrible things, i.e. deaths in Lebanon. Or so I predict. Propose – yes, I do propose – to put myself in major role (for first time in life) in historic circumstance. Ways to go about this must include a) Visit to parents, b) Visit to parents of Jim Reese, if alive, c) Visit to all groups C. has worked or is working for, d) Access to press archives, e) Seeking legal ways to gain access to C. (NB phone Bob Mandlebaum). Eventual aim must be saleable screenplay and/or book like Mailer and Schiller’s Executioner’s Song .
    But here he stops writing. He knows why he feels like a traveller, pain, excitement, fear, mingling in his blood. He knows why he will stay awake till dawn, planning, constructing, ignoring calls on his Answerphone, disdaining sleep: he has entered on the most perfect love affair of his life. In Charlotte, he has found both woman and livelihood, fortuitously joined. Charlotte Browne is not only herself, but her story. Her story will become his. He will make the two inseparable. It doesn’t concern Franklin Doyle on this long summer night that Charlotte the woman has, by giving him this story, put herself beyond the reach of his body. Because his body, with its disappointments of forty-seven years, is already anointed by the brief touch of her in the hospital bed and he will not be denied her. She will be locked away from him, but he will remake her. To Charlotte, prisoner, he will offer the story of Charlotte; in Charlotte, remade as fiction, will he spend his love.
    The wine is gone. Doyle goes to the kitchen, hauls out an opened bottle of cheap retsina. With this beginning to slide through his excited blood, he returns to his description of Charlotte. After a while, he abandons it again, continues his note-making, then stops suddenly and looks up. He reminds himself that all, all that is now taking place is taking place because of the interception of Julietta Annipavroni, once beautiful Italian girl, now struggling through middle age ‘saving the lives’ of those rich enough to pay her two pounds an hour. He smiles, remembering the flowers he has sent; Julietta Annipavroni arranges them in a vast green vase, won at a funfair. The blue of the cornflowers reminds her of the sky above Naples. ‘Don’t touch them!’ she yells at her children.
    Like Charlotte, prisoner, Doyle sleeps at dawn. The sun comes up on London. The same sounds of blackbirds trilling in cherry trees, so lately heard by Jim Reese in a basement flat, begin in the street, but Doyle is dreaming of fame and money and does not hear them.

Wedding Night
    At the time of my father’s second wedding, we lived in Paris, in a house a little grander than we could afford. It was the kind of house, in the Avenue Foch, which is today divided up very profitably and let as luxury flats. It seems astonishing to me now that our family once owned the whole of it. The drawing room, I recall, was on the first floor. Two sets of French windows led out from it onto small balconies. On these extremely pretty balconies my mother had always placed stone pots of geraniums. Well, in summer she had, I suppose. Geraniums don’t survive winters, do they? It was high summer when my father got married for the second time, and I know that, by then, there weren’t any geraniums on the drawing-room balconies.
    I have always remembered the details of things, especially of rooms