Now that he loves Rachel he can see that losing his family was only
a formality; they were never his. He’d attached himself to them
believing that being sufficiently foreign, sufficiently quaint, almost
rural and almost Catholic they were implicitly better or at the very
least – different.
In truth he’d rarely been at home. He was more of a tourist when
it came to family life. That thought brought to mind a slogan daubed
on a wall in Soweto on one of his first business trips to South Africa
just the year before apartheid crumbled: Soweto is no zoo for tourist
pigs. How pricked he’d felt on his tour bus then. Family life is no zoo
either. At thirty-eight years old hesawthat he’d been ten years staring
at the one cage, the chimps, failing to make any deductions while
they aped his forlorn stare, mimicked his gestures, mirrored his pose.
An Englishman with a French wife, they lived in one of the small
market towns that is on the crossroads of rip-you-off-Riviera and
rob-you-blind-Provence. It was an uneventful and lonely place for
ten months of the year. To the casual eye it was a romantic place;
gorge and ravine, Saracen tower and stony river bed but as one
grew more accustomed to the place, one’s eyes were drawn to the
signs of the struggle between man and nature; here and there in
the middle of a vineyard or a field the stray abandoned one-room
dwelling; broken down, exposed, done with.
They’d come to live there seeking a rural counterpart to his
place of work; Richard’s company’s head office was situated in the
Californian-style suburbs of Antibes with its anodyne office blocks
and roundabouts giving on to roundabouts. He’d worked, when he
met her, for ten years in the dismal man-made ‘town’ of Croydon
for the French pharmaceutical group Europharm, latterly as their
youthful Sales Director. He’d drunk in a pub underneath an
underpass and lived in a flat overlooking a flyover.
A year after Vale´rie moved in with him he was relocated to head
office in Antibes – it seemed too good to be true as she was by then
sick and tired of England – and so they decided to quit, for good
they said, town life. She stayed behind packing his things, disposing
of much of his past he found out later, while he went ahead for a
month-long immersion course in business French. They meant to
be happy.
When they moved out to the South of France, she was pregnant,
and they gathered to them what she had for family in France, her
quick-minded mother and her regretful father – and they made
a home for themselves in the Var region of Provence. He was
promoted to regional positions and oversaw in the new markets
of Eastern Europe sales of psycho-pharmaceuticals, those mindbending
drugs as he dubbed them, principally anti-depressants but
also anti-psychotics, with the highest profit margin of any product
known to man, more profitable even than oil. In these developing
consumer markets, his client, the psychiatrist, was clamouring to
prescribe chemicals to people struggling – as Richard saw it – with
the transition from the old rural community-based life to the new
lonesome urban standard.
Richard knew from his work, from the pockets of madness and
gluts of sadness emerging throughout the urban sprawl, that his
family would be better off in the countryside amongst a community,
even if he had to create it with his own hands, even if he had to
spend money to make it, even if he had to fake it . . .
And then, of a sudden, it was over. He’d failed. And he and his
neighbour’s wife, Rachel, both of them learnt in different ways,
that whilst good may spring from love, love rarely springs from
good intentions alone.
When his wife, Vale´rie, left him for Jeff, his friend and neighbour,
he was incensed, and in his burning and breaking he made himself
a refugee from his former life. He lost his entire wherewithal within
a month of her leaving – the family, the house, the job – and he
lost his grip on reason. The locals round there said that a forest fire
was a necessary evil for it was the fire that released the seeds from
the cones of the pine tree.
He’d thought of himself as a romantic and indeed he had been
insomuch as the romantic clings to the idea of love rather than
daring to love. (Though they don’t mind being loved, if you
insist . . .)Buthedidn’t know what love was until he lost everything.
He found himself, one day in September, at the centre of an
illusion, seeing suddenly that his family was not his family after all,
that his son was not the happy child he thought him, and that his
best friend was not a friend at all. In fact, his wife didn’t know him,
his family were in his pay, his son was disturbed, and his friend was
despicable; a womanizer who barely liked women, a coward and a
dodger.
And Richard hated him because they were alike, and he too
coveted his neighbour’s wife.