A Good Woman Read online

  PRAISE FOR LISA APPIGNANESI

  ___________________________

  A Good Woman

  ‘Half thriller, half romance, this elegant, sophisticated story unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, each more tantalising than the last. It is that rare thing – a quality popular novel.’

  Sarah Dunant

  ‘Gripping’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Highly entertaining’

  Sunday Times

  Memory and Desire

  ‘A rich, epic novel… A superbly plotted saga of passion and heartbreak. Appignanesi will keep you guessing until the last full stop.’

  Cosmopolitan

  ‘A monumental novel, intelligent and well-written.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A darkly erotic novel, Memory and Desire lays bare the many faces of a modern Eve… An absorbing story of sexual compulsion and emotional obsession, it continued to haunt me long after the last page was turned.’

  Sally Beauman

  ‘An erotic and deeply intelligent novel.’

  Rosie Thomas

  ‘As subtle as it is thought-provoking…reminiscent, in some elusive way, of Willian Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.’

  Chicago Tribune

  ‘Emotional, Freudian…fascinating.’

  Booklist

  A GOOD WOMAN

  __________________________

  Lisa Appignanesi

  _____________

  From the bestselling author of Memory and Desire and Dreams of Innocence comes a spellbinding novel of crime and passion and the sliding logic of good and bad. Chilling, wise, erotic, A Good Woman confirms Lisa Appignanesi’s power as a storyteller of the first rank.

  Maria D’Este is beautiful – effortlessly so. Her seductive power has attracted men and worldly success in equal measure. It has also attracted fatality.

  Driven by remorse, Maria leaves New York behind her and returns to Paris, the city of her birth. She is determined that things will be different – that, like her childhood friend Beatrice, she will now be good. But as she enters the world of the law in quest of women who murder, good and bad turn out to be unnervingly blurred. And once again her fatal charm is poised to damage a man she loves.

  ©Lisa Appignanesi

  First published by Harper Collins UK, 1996

  Other Books by Lisa Appignanesi

  ___________________________

  Novels

  ______

  Memory and Desire

  Dreams of Innocence

  The Things We Do for Love

  The Dead of Winter

  Sanctuary

  Paris Requiem

  Unholy Loves

  Kicking Fifty

  The Memory Man

  Non-Fiction

  ___________

  All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

  Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800

  Freud’s Women (with John Forrester)

  Losing the Dead

  Simone de Beauvoir

  The Cabaret

  Femininity and the Creative Imagination: Proust, James and Musil

  Edited Volumes

  _____________

  Free Expression is No Offence

  The Rushdie File (with Sarah Maitland)

  Dismantling Truth (with Hilary Lawson)

  Postmodernism

  Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory

  For my mother, Hana

  And my daughter, Katrina

  ‘One’s real life is often the life one does not lead.’

  Oscar Wilde

  Contents

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART THREE

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  _____________________________________________

  I would have liked this story to have a happy ending. You know the kind I mean: soft morning light, the couple arm in arm walking into a distance beckoning with future promise, the past eradicated. It’s not like that. Though sometimes I think the future I’m in is that happiness. You’ll have to judge. It’s all finally a matter of perspective. And the perspective is what I’m trying to find.

  It was when I realized that people were taking everything I said seriously, that I knew I had to leave New York. I had entered the second minute of my fifteen minutes of fame and I could have mumbled the most banal nonsense - ‘today I bought a pound of bananas’ - and the sentence would have been scrutinized for its deeper significance and seen as a step on the road to a good life. And then something else happened which made leaving imperative.

  I am not cut out to be a public figure. Quite the contrary. My talents, such as they are and I’m well acquainted with them, find their fullest expression behind the scenes. It was the purest accident that I had stumbled into the limelight where I didn’t belong. And I ran from it. Ran fast and far. All the way to what some might have considered my home.

  Home is where this story begins.

  -1-

  Paris is all sky, a cold bright blueness which rinses stone white and attacks the eyes. Only the placid nymphs in the fountains of the Concorde seem immune to it. So they should be. They have sat watching weather and traffic, hurtling clouds and endless processions, for well over a century. I, on the other hand, need my dark glasses. For more reasons than I care to think of.

  But I take them off in the plush gloom of the Hotel Intercontinental. From behind the reception counter, a man with impeccable hair and smile, addresses me politely.

  ‘Bonjour Madame. Vous avez reservé, Madame?’

  I nod, give him my name, or at least the name that came to my lips when I made this booking at the airport. ‘Maria d’Esté.’ It is my mother’s name. Why have I chosen to use it?

  I write the letters with an untried flourish in the hotel register. My nails against the white paper are a perfect, unchipped carmine. The body is oddly resilient.

  It is my turn to smile politely as the man scans my passport, takes in the discrepancy between Maria Regnier and the name in the register, settles on the photograph with almost tangible relief. I can see the fantasies mounting behind his eyes, the illicit bodies taking shape on crumpled sheets, the irate husband or wife at the door, the divorce detective inspecting the register. Indeed, I catch him sneaking a glance at my hand in pursuit of the telltale ring. I have not known so many men for nothing.

  ‘Vous restez combien de nuits?’ he asks me.

  I baulk at this. I have no idea how long I am staying. Two nights, three, six, seven… I point imperiously at my three overburdened cases. The remains of my life stuffed into worn leather. ‘Have these taken up to my room,’ I tell him. ‘J’ai un rendez-vous.’ And though I have no one to meet, I know t
hat I need to get out there into the glaring blue of the streets, if only so that I can learn to be as unruffled as those stone nymphs.

  As I turn on my heel, I give him the polite smile again. My mother taught it to me, I now remember - that quick arching of the lips, that ‘Bonjour Monsieur’ and ‘Merci Madame’, that little nod, a shortcut to a bow, endlessly repeated at the butchers and the bakers, in all shops and public places large or small. At least once a day for the length of my childhood, she reiterated the value of social correctness.

  -2-

  This is my mother’s city. I left it when I was eighteen and have not set foot in it for some fourteen years. I had never intended to return. Memories of it neither haunted me nor seduced me. Yet I have come here now.

  I walk through the columned arcades which flank the Tuileries Gardens and stare desultorily into shop windows - useless bric a brac, cheap souvenirs side by side with expensive apparel for the richer tourist. Huddled on the ground beneath one of these columns is a supine woman, her head wrapped in a flowered shawl. Her eyes are closed in sleep or misery. In the folds of her tattered brown coat, a small child kneels, its hands clasped, its eyes raised in a medieval supplicant’s prayer. I stop.

  I am not a good person. I would rather avert my gaze from distress than confront it. I would prefer all beggars to be shipped to some asylum far from my attention than to have to trip over them in the streets of our western cities. But there is something in this child’s posture which makes me reach into my bag and for lack of French change, take out a twenty dollar bill, and place it in her tin.

  There is no change of expression on the child’s face. The frozen eye’s still stare steadily towards heaven. I have a violent urge to shake her, wake her mother, rail at her for lying here instead of doing something with her life, her child’s life. I want to steal the child away, wash her, send her off to school.

  I walk away, turn quickly into a sidestreet. I am shaking, as if I had been accosted on a dark New York street. But the taste of the fear is different. It is more subtle, like a premonition. Perhaps it was simply to assuage that superstitious fear that I opened my bag.

  No, I am not a good person. Not even a good woman. I know because I learned the lessons of goodness young, though I haven’t thought about them for some time. My mother was the teacher and she was a fine one at home as well as professionally from all accounts. No hypocritical catechism for her. What she said, she did. I was taught to share because she shared. There was always a jar of freshly made soup, a slice of tart, an errand to be run for the old woman across the landing. Our spare room must have been on some refugee organization list. Strangers would turn up sporadically from distant parts of the globe - Argentina, Chile, Africa, Vietnam - and stay a week, a month, two. Their eyes would look glazed as my mother tried to communicate the basics of life in Paris to them or filled out incomprehensible sheets of printed paper.

  From the time that I could read, she would sit me down with her over the accounts, which now that I think of it could hardly have been ample, and I would see the proportion allotted to charities of every designation. When I started to get pocket money, I too was asked to consider whether a part might be given away. Asked, mind, not told.

  I hated the giving. A bright bauble always seemed to dangle in my imagination, as I parted with the centimes. The spare room, larger than my own, took on palatial proportions. I coveted it, almost more than I coveted the ruffled party dresses in the shop windows or the shiny new bicycles other children rode in the Luxembourg Gardens. Everything I had was second hand or second best.

  I have reached the Place du Palais-Royal. I hardly recognize it. This is not the Paris we came to much. Perhaps this is why I have chosen a hotel in this part of the city. The posters on the Comédie Française advertise Molière’s L’Avare. I am not miserly. I am greedy. And as if to prove to myself just how spendthrift I am, how different I am to the little girl I was, I sit down at one of those cafes with burgundy awnings and gorge myself on flaky croissant and cafe au lait and then top it off with a glazed raspberry tart heaped with fruit. Sitting in cafes was not something my mother believed in.

  The cloak of memory has wrapped itself over my shoulders. It weighs heavily. I stare at passers-by to shake it off. I have not come here to remember. I have come here to forget.

  When I knew I had to leave New York, my first idea was London. All my thoughts in those last weeks while I was selling up my share in the agency, briefing partners about clients they would be taking over, were about London. Then I realized that I knew too many people there, too many more were promising to visit.

  It was Steve who put it into words for me.

  ‘I think you really want to disappear,’ he said to me.

  For the first time in our long working lives together, I caught him feeling sorry for me. It was an emotion he rarely gave and I never elicited. In the recognition of it, we were both intensely uncomfortable.

  Then he rushed on. ‘Chuck and I bought this little place in Paris last year. You could go there. Stay for a while. I won’t pass on the address.’

  Paris. I know no one here, though it is my native city. Even my lips as I ask the waiter for more coffee, curl oddly round the distant words. But the polite smile, like a mechanism they instantly trigger, falls readily into place.

  As I get into my coat, put money on the small round table, I see myself in the waiter’s lingering glance. Have I told you yet that I am tall with long auburn hair and grey eyes. ‘Rita,’ my first boss in New York used to call me and it took me a few weeks to realize he meant Hayworth. I tell you now, because my reputedly striking looks play a not inconsequential part in this story.

  I stroll through the galleries of the Palais-Royal, wily old Richelieu’s one-time palace. It comes to me that it was in one of the shops here that Charlotte Corday, herself a revolutionary, bought the knife with which she stabbed Marat, that hero of some people and executioner of others.

  Murder wears too many faces.

  -3-

  When I was six or seven my mother started sending me to England for the summers. There was a teacher at the local école maternelle, the little nursery school, where I had gone for my first years who had a sister in Kent. The sister had a boy a little older than me and agreed to take me in.

  Madame Pichon, as I knew her then, brought me over that first summer herself. On the ferry crossing the Channel, I sat on the deck with her and stared at the receding coastline of France and the ever tinier figure of my mother who had come with us as far as Calais. I was filled with apprehension but also strangely excited. I had never been on a boat before, never seen waves chopping beneath me. Nor had I had many rides in a car. We didn’t have one at home. Stephanie, as she instantly introduced herself, waving aside any family names, came to collect us in one in Dover. The square-shaped Morris Minor with its polished wood trimmings and its vast hairy dog in the back seat seemed to have walked straight out of one of those English adventure stories my mother had started to read to me in preparation for my trip. I leaned into the dog, perversely called Small, and as we bumped towards the farm, all my apprehension was swallowed up in the comfort of his fur and the big brown eyes and drooling snout he poised on my lap. Small is still clearer to me than his mistress.

  Had my mother seen the farm that first year, her tiny perfect nose would have curled involuntarily in disdain. My mother didn’t like dirt. And dirt there was aplenty on Millhill Farm. Not only dirt, but mud and cat and dog hair and dust and flies and a wonderful ramshackle disorder made even more manifest by the profusion of flowers in every available pot or bowl. I learned all their names that summer. There were delphiniums and hollyhocks, clematis and buddleia, irises, lilies, sweet peas, morning glory, dahlias, daisies, geranium and roses of every description.

  I was there to learn. My mother was an English teacher and speaking English was one of the cardinal virtues. It was to be the only one I excelled in.

  Stephanie took one look in my neatly packed ca
se, picked out underwear and socks, the odd jersey, and promptly closed it. She left me for a moment in that tiny room beneath the eaves and when she came back she was carrying two pairs of worn dungarees.

  ‘Here.’ She gestured at me in that loose-boned way that was to become so familiar. ‘These’ll do you.’

  With a twist or two at the cuff, they did. I lived out the summer in those dungarees. Robinson’s dungarees. And in them, I was prepared to meet Robinson.

  He was only a fraction taller than I was, a slender boy with a mop of ash blond hair like his mother’s and candid eyes. I think it was at some point during that first teatime in the kitchen with the huge fireplace that Stephanie announced, ‘Robinson doesn’t usually like girls.’

  I had all but given up concentrating on the flow of English which sounded so different from my mother’s, and was busy covertly stroking Small who had placed himself at my feet, but I heard that. Robinson’s face was all red, when I glanced at him.

  ‘But he’s promised to make an exception in your case,’ Stephanie went on. ‘And now that Small seems to have taken to you, it should prove all the easier.’

  Robinson scraped his chair back from the table and mumbled something I couldn’t make out, before gesturing a distinct ‘come on’ at me. I had never been allowed to leave table before the grown-ups or without special permission and I looked hesitantly at Stephanie, who seemed to make nothing of it. She just smiled and shooed me away.

  Sometime during that first week or two at Millhill Farm I remember saying to Robinson that I would prefer being a dog to being a girl. But by then it didn’t matter. Robinson and I had become friends without even noticing that it had happened. The fields did it, those fields in which we ran or crawled about, pretending to be intrepid explorers in a hostile land. And the little wood where we darted from tree to tree, climbed and tumbled, in endless hides and seek. In the stream which curled round the back of the farm, I learned to paddle about and fish with an old stick of a rod. Sometimes we sailed leaves of boats in it, imagining pirate ships attacking the royal fleet, racing down stream to see whose ships would first reach shore. When it rained, we clambered round the barn, jumping up and down on the prickly hay, constructing elaborate traps for each other. Or we lay quietly, our eyes tightly shut, Small between us, and tried to see if we could identify a particular cow’s moo.