The Idea of Love Read online

  THE IDEA OF LOVE

  Louise Dean

  Contents

  THE IDEA OF LOVE

  Also By Louise Dean

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part II

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Discover More

  THE IDEA OF LOVE

  Louise Dean was born in Hastings in 1970 and studied History at Cambridge University. She has lived and worked in London, Hong Kong, New York and in France. She is the author of three other novels and short stories published in Granta and other magazines. Becoming Strangers is her prize-winning debut novel longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Guardian First Book Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award and winner of The Betty Trask Prize and Le Prince Maurice Prize. She is the founder of the novelists’ coaching community The Novelry.

  Also By Louise Dean

  Becoming Strangers

  This Human Season

  The Old Romantic

  Published by The Novelry 2018.

  * * *

  Copyright © Louise Dean, 2004

  * * *

  The right of Louise Dean to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  * * *

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  * * *

  First published in Great Britain by Scribner, 2004

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  In memory of

  Edward George Waller

  1914–1999

  &

  Gwendoline Dorothy Waller

  1916–2001

  ‘This is the great private problem of man; death as the loss of self. But what is the self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.’

  Milan Kundera

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  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.

  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. But he didn’t know what love was until he lost everything.

  An Englishman with a French wife, he lived in one of the small market towns that are 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 riverbed, 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 Valérie 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 the new consumer markets of Eastern Europe and oversaw sales of psycho-pharmaceuticals — anti-depressants and anti-psychotics — with the highest profit margin of any product sold, even oil. His client, the psychiatrist, was clamouring to prescribe these chemicals to people struggling with the transition from the old way of life to the new lonesome urban standard.

  Richard knew from his work, from the pockets of madness and gluts of sadness emerging throughout the developed world, that his family would be better off living among a community in the countryside, 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.

  He himself was rarely 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: Soweto is no zoo for tourist pigs. How pricked he’d felt on his tour bus then. Family life is no zoo either.

  Chapter 2

  His predecessor as Sales Director for Europharm Africa told him over lunch that going to Africa with big bucks looking for mental illness was the craziest damn thing if he thought about it, and the thing was not to think about it.

  With his knife and fork, the retiring salesman folded his last triangle of pizza into a mouth-sized piece and told Richard what he’d seen for himself out in West Africa, which was, he said, a totally different kettle of fish to East Africa; church halls packed with people claiming to be possessed. The play-acting was vaudeville.

  ‘Hey, we aren’t shrinks anyway,’ he said, showing the clean palms of his hands, ‘we’re just salesme
n. But, when you work in Africa, you can’t avoid getting into bed with the government, you’ve still got totalitarianism out there. It’s not a market economy you’re dealing with. So you have to see things differently, Richard. There’s not a nice way of putting what I’m driving at here.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying. You make the market.’

  The girl put down before them a double-scoop ice cream in a cornet for his colleague and a cup of coffee for Richard.

  The table hesitated on the cobbles before Richard settled it with his forearms and, stirring in two sugars, bent into his shadow, thinking as an aside how women were the new men, how aggressive they were in bed.

  The German woman he’d been with the night before in Lyon had asked him to give her anal sex, only she didn’t put it that nicely. He hadn’t felt like it. It was the first time in his life he’d left a woman’s hotel bedroom without having had sex. He’d had to say, look I can’t do this, the first time he’d ever done so, and he’d seen then how strange it was to be there together at all, to have the cold light of day in the middle of the night.

  But if West Africa was overemotional, ‘spiritual’ as they called it, then East Africa was much more sensible, his colleague went on. It was there, on his recommendation, the company were investing their money in relationships with one or two of the better governments, sponsoring clinics and hospital programmes, training the doctors, making the psychiatry module look swish.

  Governments came and went, let alone ministers. Sometimes he’d go one week, see one guy, and the next week he’d go back and the guy would be gone. Richard would need to win brand loyalty at grass roots for the long-term safety of the investment.

  His advice was to get out and about to the local hospitals, to win the medical fraternity over. The doctors would be there for longer than the politicians. Europharm should be seen to take an interest in the mental suffering of the people.

  ‘Lay down roots for the company out in the sticks. You know, be seen to be sincere.’

  Richard found, not for the first time, that he couldn’t pick up the coffee cup; he was shaking. In the last year these peculiar crises came upon him in all sorts of situations, even lunches. It felt as if he were about to fail, suddenly and explosively. His chest was tight like he was having a heart attack. The scene shifted as if it no longer included him; he was central, then he was not. He felt himself flush, he was going to say or do something that would embarrass himself. He thought he might pass out. The more he observed himself feeling this, the more distant he became from himself, the worse it got.

  Watching his waistline, his predecessor said he was, but Fenocchio’s in the Old Town was still the best ice cream in the world. It had been his haven. Worth the twenty-minute journey for lunch. He was having liquorice. Hell, we all have our vices. He didn’t smoke. Or drink coffee.

  He looked at the ice cream before licking it, biting it, trimming it, and he looked at it again after he’d done that, judging the work done and that to come and taking his time.

  ‘My time’s my own now. I like golf. I never thought I would. You get all these young guys who want to ask you this and that, how to make markets. Hey, look, I took anti-depressants into the Eastern bloc in eighty-nine, but I’ve made it plain, I’m gone. It’s a long lunch every day and an easy life from now on. Though I doubt I’ll get ice cream like this in Perpignan.’

  ‘I see.’

  With his coffee cold before him, and his hands clasped beneath the table, Richard asked for the bill with a nod at the waitress.

  Richard would get a briefing from the World Health Organization, the old boy said. He raised his eyebrows to show what he thought of that.

  ‘Well, Africa will have the privilege of skipping the asylum and all that jazz. So much the better for them, my friend. Of course it’s tempting to see yourself as a missionary. Bringing progress to Africa and all that. Well, if you must. Look concerned, you know, though. Not everyone in Africa can be got to with baksheesh, don’t think that about them. Oh no.’

  The waitress stood sideways waiting for the transaction to

  complete, the terminal in one loose hand, passing her free hand through her glistening curls, looking towards the sea, towards Africa.

  The retiring salesman rolled the now miniature cone in his fingers. ‘You’ll like the Head of Mental Health at the WHO,’ he said, donning mirrored sunglasses. ‘She’s a woman.’

  Chapter 3

  His return home from work was a forty-minute drive; the scenery shifting to the rugged Wild West of the Var, its ascendancy signalled by Mount Roquebrune, which loomed like a grumpy Ayers Rock. It was here that Richard turned off the A8, relinquishing the daytime brasseries in favour of a dusk of dirty tabacs where old men idled, letting their cigarettes fall to the floor.

  He drove, thinking how when he got in he would be able to tell Valérie that he’d be bringing home one hundred and ten thousand euros per annum.

  He thought of the girl she was, Valérie, when they met. She was his opposite; dark and indolent. He was pale and useful. She was a girl with a savage haircut and dark matte skin, some swagger, almost a boy with long lashes, who sat in his flat in Croydon listening to her Indochine records and smoking cigarettes out of the window. She was the sexiest girl he’d ever met. She went braless, her nipples prominent, her back arched, her body sinuous, her face petulant. Not so very short, she had a way then, of reducing herself, of looking up to him. She hated her bar job, so he told her to give it up and she did. She waited in for him instead.

  ‘Today I ’ave done nothing but play with myself,’ she would say, sighing and smiling.

  Men and women stared at her when they went out and about into pubs and restaurants together. His friends fancied her, their girlfriends didn’t like her. She had a thick accent and spoke little English. She’d followed a boyfriend to England and dropped him for Richard. He’d wooed her with gifts and trips and treats. He made her entertain his friends with tongue twisters. ‘I no pheasant pluck I pleasant fuck his mate.’

  She was so French! She wore things Englishwomen didn’t wear, like matching bras and knickers, she was frank about her periods, not remotely embarrassed about body hair and she got on top of him in bed and screwed up her eyes and concentrated very hard.

  She didn’t mind being driven here or there, she didn’t mind doing whatever he was doing. She didn’t mind staying in all day, doing ‘nussing’ as she said. She had a doll, the miniature of herself, with hacked dark hair, ‘Marguerite’. She wanted a baby, she said.

  They married in France. Their child was born in 1993. He helped her with the baby, though that was not how she recalled it later, but he remembered many nights sitting up with the infant or walking around with him, singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ or ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’. The birth of the child was also the end of the romance.

  She named him ‘Maxence’. (He’d hoped for ‘Edward’.) They’d taken to speaking French between them since moving there. He’d once made her smell Marmite, and her expression then reminded him of how she looked at him if he spoke English to her.

  She bemoaned their son from the day he was born. Nothing was on schedule according to her books, he didn’t sleep well, he had colic, he had colds, he wouldn’t eat vegetables, and all of this she took as some sort of personal indictment. Relax, he told her, enjoy him. Well, there won’t be another one, was her rejoinder.

  As a toddler, he wouldn’t leave her alone, she couldn’t take a pee without him, he was so noisy and violent she claimed, he broke things, he hit her, he hurt animals, he wouldn’t settle to read or play nicely, he wouldn’t go to her parents. She proposed she get a local woman to look after him during the day. The woman had other children at her house, it would ‘socialize’ him she said.

  Richard had so wanted his wife to be at home with their children. No more children, she told him, winking as she popped her pill, waggling her finger in an ironically come-hither sort of way. She’d have Max ready every mor
ning for the woman to collect. She gave the woman an extra three euros a day to prepare his lunch.

  ‘What will you do with yourself?’ he’d asked her.

  She’d shrugged. ‘It will be so much better for Max because when he is here I will be able to give him my full attention. He is a very difficult child.’

  Her parents, Guy and Simone, had come to live next to them just after Max was born. He and Valérie had bought the small bungalow and they paid the mortgage. He’d hoped her mother, who was a warm bosomy woman, would have Max when Valérie needed her to, but it emerged soon after they moved in that Simone was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and needed prolonged periods of rest and little disruption. She tried to help, here and there, and was crestfallen she couldn’t do more, but she was frail, she fell over and if she fell, well — she put her hands in the air — what would become of Guy? (He could not survive without her.)