Chapter 1

 

 

Lala woke up, as she did most mornings, naked and shaking. A narrow sunbeam shone through the slightly open grey shutters, giving a sparkle to the old cobwebs rolled round by wind and rain. The windows swung slightly as a hot breeze blew across the plum trees on the plain below, letting in more sun, illuminating the high ceiling of the wide room. A musty, cast aside woolen blanket lay in a heap on the unvarnished wood of the herringbone floor next to the bed and its jumble of occupants.

 Lala closed one of her eyes in protest at the searching light. The other scoured the floor beside the bed for the glass of vodka and red bull she had started but not finished last night. It lay beside the book she had been trying to read. Graham Greene, Travels with my Aunt. She had read it once, years ago, long before her life sounded like a chapter from it and had been trying to read it again for nearly a year. She had only managed a third. She pulled her leg from under another one lying heavy, inert, upon it, and reached over the dog-eared Penguin copy of a disaffected Maggie Smith’s celluloid face to grasp the tumbler. Trembling all the while, she lifted the glinting crystal with the reverence of a footballer’s trophy. The liquid swirled around the rim, acrid vapour rising. She pulled it towards her lips and glugged, gulping, downing it at once.

  The effects were immediate. Her senses dulled a little, her emotions roused. And the itch, impossible to scratch, as she rubbed her hands over her body as if trying to feel that she was all there, began again, as it too did most mornings. She turned over and saw the slumbering figure of the slender Malian sleeping. He was also naked, quietly snoring, oblivious. His face, ordinarily scrunched and lined as if a lifetime of rubbing it had made it malleable as plasticine, was now, like the rest of his lean - save for the growing pot-belly - body, motionless as a Dogon face mask.

 Swinging her legs over the side of the bed so that her feet, a concertina of ridged tendons and yellowing toenails returned her searching, uncomprehending gaze, Lala began to remember the night before. There had been the routine argument with Teddy. Hysteria, tears, rage. Consolation in the Malian's arms. He was always sweet and willing. And energetic, she thought. Yes, it was his energy, vitality, that she needed to take her far away from herself. Somewhere far away from that nearing glimpse of twilight revealed in those aging toes, the little aches and pains, her angry, disaffected portrait in the mirror.

 'You are my reward,' Lala said out loud, but the Malian was still sleeping. She rolled over towards him, her generously fleshy body calm from the medicine she had taken, running her hand across his torso. His pectoral muscles flinched under her caress, over the soft mound of floppy jelly, and his body stretched in agreement. Lala shook the hair from off her face and shoulders and held it back with one hand, with the other she took his member between thumb and forefinger, then went down on him.

 Lala's greying blonde hair swung in rhythm with her bobbing head as she became more and more aroused by the act of sex, until Teddy walked into the bedroom without knocking.

 'Good morning, I've brought you a cup of tea and the...' he said, stopping in surprise when he saw the large, moon-white buttocks of his wife sticking out from the bed, and her head buried in the lap of her lover and their mutual friend.

 Both Teddy and Lala called the Malian ‘Don Don’, because they were of that generation, the boomers, growing up in the shadow of the colonial mindset, imbued with a laziness, reluctance, a do-not-see-why-I-should, God given right to refuse to properly pronounce foreign sounding words and names, or to call him by his true name, which happened to be Sèdonoudè Lougè.

 Teddy watched his wife pleasuring the man in the way she had done to him and countless others over the years, and though he knew that this kind of thing was going on, it was what Sèdonoudè was there for, the sight of it that morning was too much. His face turned puce as the jealousy, the sense of impotence and loss rose in his mind, and he muttered loudly, angrily,

  'You fucking whore!' as his face assumed a vision of almost comic contempt.

  Lala interrupted her fellatio and turned to look at her husband standing at the bedroom door, his arms folded and his expression of abject outrage condemning her for yet another time.

 'Well, I have to get it somewhere,' she said, smiling a wicked smile. Sèdonoudè looked up, saw Teddy staring disapprovingly, and smiled cheerfully at him.

 'Mornin' Mista Teddy!' he said, his body and own smile now deflating under Teddy’s disapproving glare.

 'Morning Don Don, fucking shit! For fuck's sake stop calling me "Mista"! I'm not a fucking foggy morning. Fuck, fuck, fuck!' muttered Teddy, as he stormed off, leaving the still steaming mug of tea and her newspaper set down on the bedroom floor.

 

***

 

 Downstairs, putting the seedy business to the back of his mind, Teddy sat in the kitchen reading his copy of The Latest, on his comfy old Parker Knoll chair. His aging west highland white terrier lay sympathetically close on a smelly velvet cushion. When Lala came in, Teddy ignored her. Soon after, Sèdonoudè slipped silently out of the kitchen door, in a tacit acceptance that sometimes one can be party to too much information. A little time and a lot of alcohol would need to flow under the bridge of their menage à trois.

 Lala had already begun that journey. Like most mornings, the alcohol flowed almost immediately, steadying her nerves. It was impossible to escape in this country, and her cupboards and cellar were crammed, and the supermarket shelves, and everywhere she ate, and everyone she knew, were the calming rain which swelled rivers of the stuff until they lapped, pressing, flooding her with the only relief she had ever known to work. The drugs were no good. They just made her lethargic and confused. Alcohol, though, Lala understood. You take a little, and life's sharp edges are blunted. You take a lot, and they are abandoned. Lala always had, nowadays, to aim for abandonment.

 Perhaps Lala could have struggled on with her mental illness, undiagnosed, as surely many who suffer from it may do, staying just the right side of utility. But that first major episode, many years back, the one where she lost her mind - eyes bulging, roaring rage, cranial shattering explosion of everything that was wrong - meant that she needed help. It was Teddy who called in the doctors. They fluttered round her, her only seeing them through a haze of lithium, as they scrutinised her with distant eyes. Bi-polar disorder, they said. Bi-polar, or what used to be known as manic depression.

   Manic depression sounded better to Lala’s ear. In her mind's eye, to suffer alternately from mania, and then depression, sounded more human. Like every-day fits of enthusiasm, or cases of the doldrums. It sounded benign. But bi-polar is, perhaps, more exactly what Lala was: intelligently intolerant, ironic, funny, sexually vivacious, and voracious on her good days, and a shaking, crying, numb minded, erratic, and sometimes murderous mess on her worst. There were times when these moods fluctuated in the space of minutes, or even seconds, and then the best bet for bystanders was to keep one's head down and call a doctor. When she was in crisis, she could explode without warning, summoning the sound of the furies to reverberate round the skulls of those in her vicinity.

 Though such misery might take an unbearable toll on anyone’s existence, the fact is that for Lala, and for Teddy, the problems of their lives were smoothed over with vast sums of money. It was that money which insulated Lala from institutionalisation. She had the best doctors, nurses, and care staff, when she needed them, and drifters like Sèdonoudè, who stayed and were paid to provide the things which Teddy no longer could. The former paid via credit card and complicated insurance schemes, the latter in drink and gambling money, and money given and sometimes pilfered, then sent home to the old country or spent on living the ‘high life’.

 Whether it was money to build ma/na a new home in a village near The Cliff of Bandiagara or to spend thriftlessly, he, like the lorry drivers and labourers and gardeners, and sometimes even the husbands and boyfriends of local women in the villages, scions of the paysan, opportunists all, were a supply line of men who would have sex with Lala.

 The only people who say money cannot buy you everything are those who have never had it. People who watch their preachers dealing in God or lies (are they the same?) getting rich while they must wonder what on earth it takes. And, if it will not pay fully for happiness or love as it sometimes might not, it will do for an approximation of them. One where the difference, on balance, is hardly noticeable. As for the rest, health, longevity, those too are outcomes more often affected by access to medicine and the philosophy of Hippocrates, than by the dread and final hand of fate.

 Neither Teddy nor Lala were money grubbers. The kind of people who obsess over amassing the stuff. Nor were they remotely interested in the stockbroker’s phone calls revealing this percent or that. Or those legions of stuffed shirts in shiny suits milling around Millbank or Cheapside, Guildhall or Bank. Running in and out of tube stations with cups of Costa, Starbucks, Café Nero, or Pret a Manger held aloft in hands. Like ants carrying bits of jungle sugar back to nests. No, there were some people, like the Sutherland-Smyths, who those determined scrabblers ultimately worked for. An old and indifferent money, which allowed day dreamers and wasters to spend an obscene fortune, entertaining ne’er-do-wells in the Gironde, or anywhere else in the farther flung world.

  Teddy still loved her; she knew that. Not with the raging passion of before, but with a tired duty. On her good days she was grateful for it. It was partly due to his habits and residual fondness for her, and partly due to his own depressed apathy, she suspected, that he put up with her excesses. He knew she was mad, but he gave her the one thing she needed more than any of the other distractions, which was understanding. He understood her. Tolerated her. He knew her background. It was familiar. That, in their combined lucid moments, was what counted.

 Wealth came down to Lala from one of those old English families. The ones with big estates and shoots and hunting with hounds. She came from that beautiful corner of England known as Devon, as did Teddy. Before she had inherited, after finishing school, and after coming out, Lala had made her way as a journalist. After a middling degree at Oxford, she wrote an arts column in a Devonshire newspaper, where the editor was determined to elevate his audience above the local football club's travails, and the glorious outrage at civic alterations to Ye Olde Town Centre. Though she was grateful enough to have experienced 'real life' before her inheritance, she soon had enough of it. Afterwards, money piled up in the bank faster than she could count it and then, she married Teddy for, if not truest love then deepest fondness, and took her leave of dear old England.

 They departed to France, found a chateau to live in, and set about spending money with such reckless abandon that the locals soon came to admire them. She hardly looked back. But Teddy continued to take the daily papers for them both and took a perverse pleasure in enjoying his dissatisfaction with England, like a jilted lover from afar.

 Theodore Sutherland-Smyth had failed at almost everything he had tried in life. He was damned if he would at his marriage. He was not nearly as rich as Lala, but neither was he without means. Despite being educated at Winchester, the ensuing world of connections and opportunity came to nothing. Indeed, he had run away from there twice with his best friend, only to be taken back and forced to heel. Only in marriage did he find a thing he could manage. It was easy. Teddy was besotted with Lala. She was a different woman back then. In tribute to that first flush of love, he kept an old black and white photograph on his dressing table. In it, Lala stood smiling happily in her coming out evening dress, with long, white silk gloves past her elbows, and a tiara sitting lightly in her 1970s coiffure. While Her Majesty the Queen no longer gave her patronage to the formal offering of upper-class daughters to upper class sons, the tradition of holding balls and events for eligible young things, like many a tradition, lingered. He had not known her when the picture was taken, but a few years afterwards. Nonetheless he treasured it for the picture of a beautiful young woman that it revealed, a face he had placed on a pedestal for so many years.

 The marriage was good to begin with, but when the madness began to take over Lala, their excessive drinking, as it inevitably will if not stemmed, descended into rampant alcoholism, and Lala, always highly sexed, became what was once known as a nymphomaniac, but now, with the better understanding of and kinder medical words for mental illness, was known as sex addiction.

 Her growing lust was matched only in its degree of severity by Teddy's impotence. Teddy drank to keep his own depression company, and though on rare occasions he was physically capable of gaining an erection, it was more often that he could not get it up and had subsequently lost the urge to make love. Then Lala drank and sought men. Though by now the veil of booze had closed the eye to much of it, and though Teddy had learned also to sometimes take a cuckold's perverse pleasure from her trysts, it still reared up in jealous fury between them as often as not.

  Now Teddy's successes were counted in guilt inducement, and the discomfort of those around him who caused him such feelings. It was not that he objected to Sèdonoudè per se, indeed, he rather liked him, it was the being reminded of his own inadequacy that he resented. There had been times, when he still could, that he had engaged in some of the monkey business Lala had got up to and enjoyed his own indiscretions with the wives of friends and that lonely Lincolnshire housewife, who from time to time he used to make excuses to visit.

 Lala sat down on a stool opposite him and opened her newspaper. Teddy peered over the top of his own, and read the black headline of hers, the Daily Rail, which changed infrequently in its inferences. Today it read: Anger at Those Angrier, and it churned out similar faux outrage and sanctimony to order every day. He wondered why they bothered. Nothing ever changed. Things happen and people moan, ad infinitum. Was he angry or angrier today? His hands shook and the newspaper rustled audibly. Lala put hers down.

 'You're not still angry, are you Teddy?' Teddy ignored her, studying the inky lines in front of him without digesting them. 'You're not ignoring me, Teddy? Don't be so childish.' Teddy turned puce, again.

 'I bring you your tea only to find you with that savage's cock in your mouth, and you tell me not to be childish you heartless bitch! What's wrong with locking the fucking door? What's the fucking time?' He looked at his watch. It was half past eleven. 'Fuck it. I'm having a drink.'

 'Fix me one as well, will you sweetie? A vodka and red bull,' Lala sang after him. He got up from his armchair and walked over to the pantry.

 Teddy stood surrounded by cases of booze: gin, vodka, beer, wine, red, white, and sparkling. One fridge held soft drinks: tins of red bull, coca-cola, lemonade, Indian tonic water, and Perrier. The other held white wine and champagne. He opened the door of the latter, selected a bottle of Pol Roger, and slammed it shut. As an afterthought, he picked up the box of eggs which lay on top of the low, dark-wood Louis XIII buffet, among the tins and jars of cassoulet and haricot beans and gherkins. The eggs were the only fresh food in the house, and Teddy had no idea how fresh they were. What did he care? He returned to the fridge and took out the little porcelain dish of butter, which had bristles of bread and smudges of jam imprinted on its yellow, smeary surface.

 'What are you making, eggs?' asked Lala.

 'What does it look like?' Teddy said, as he put a small saucepan on the gas burner of the old, grease stained Cornlieu cooker, and cut a large chunk of the butter into it. Lala rolled her eyes. There would need to be serious appeasement before Teddy would again deign to treat her with civility. A required level of civility to make their strange, pampered, alcoholically frayed dystopian utopia bearable again.

 Lala wandered into the pantry herself and pulled a bottle of Stolichnya vodka from the half empty case. She opened the soft drinks fridge. Orange juice or red bull? Red bull. It had not existed when she began serious drinking, and now its heavily caffeinated, sugary flavour served to keep the mental dullness she preferred to spend her days on the right side of alert.

 The eggs stiffened as Teddy whisked them. All six of them. He turned off the gas. He picked up a cracked Gien plate and paused briefly to look at the image and words on its surface: La Morale en Action; Missionnaire Convertissant Les Sauvages. A 19th century priest stood with his hand raised over a group of natives with feathered headdresses and bared breasts somewhere in Polynesia. He tipped the eggs onto them. The eggs were undercooked, and left a yellow, greasy slime around the plate's rim, blurring the faraway scene of paradise undone.

 Uninvited, Lala dipped a spoon into the plate and then spilled egg from her mouth. 

'Whoops, clumsy,' she said, as they ran down her chin. Teddy looked at the plate, and then at his wife. Lala the magnificent. He watched her wipe the egg from the mouth she had used with such abandon that morning and then lost his appetite. He now ignored the bottle of champagne glowing with promise on the table next to the - to his eyes - nasty looking eggs. Converting the savages, he thought, but said nothing. He picked up the dog and tucked it under his arm, then strode out of the open kitchen door without another sound.

 'Teddy! Teddy!' Lala called after him, but it was no good, Teddy was already driving along the drive and off their estate, towards the local bastide village of Monsègur.