They found the animals in the mud, on a stump, and still waiting on Poohsticks Bridge, and when they returned to the house Nanny quietly hand washed the toys in the same tub Christopher had bathed in.
* * *
Instead of stuffed toys Christopher and his family found a Newton’s cradle on the desk in the guest room. There were five metal balls suspended by strings, and Daniel lifted the ball to his right and let go, setting the balls to clacking.
“It’s teatime,” Abby said.
It was teatime, she was right, and they ought to pop down to the kitchen to see if they were expected there.
“Daphne and Alan often had tea in the nook off the kitchen,” Christopher said. Christopher called his parents by their first names when he spoke to his wife, as he felt it was less confusing to refer to them this way, and if they were going to name everyone by their familial titles then she would have to refer to her father, for instance, as both her father and Christopher’s uncle Lawrence, and she would refer to her mother as Aunt Judy? All of it seemed unnecessary. Her father was Lawrence, and Christopher’s father was Alan. That was simple, and if it was also a bit modern, well the impropriety didn’t bother him.
When they arrived downstairs they found that Daphne wasn’t there, although she’d left a plate of mallows on the table in the nook. Christopher’s mother had been waylaid from tea by a visitor. She was showing this young man around the backyard. There was Christopher’s mother with her grey hair and stooped dignity, walking through the garden with a man with long blond hair. The young man was wearing blue jeans, motorcycle boots, and a shirt patterned after the American flag.
“What’s this?” Christopher asked.
“Slow down, dear,” Abby said. Christopher turned to his wife but she was talking to Daniel who’d started in on the mallows. He had two of them in his mouth and another was melting in his hand.
“I’ll be just a moment.”
It turned out that the gentleman in the American flag was a British pop star. The man’s name, Brian Jones, meant nothing to Christopher but he did recognize the name of the band. He’d heard of the musical group called the Rolling Stones. Brian Jones was in the process of purchasing Cotchford Farm, and Christopher’s mother was obliged to accompany the young man as he surveyed the property.
“Are you Christopher Robin then?” Brian Jones asked.
“Christopher Milne, actually. How do you do?”
“Very sorry to hear about your father. I quite liked him. He was a funny chap, wasn’t he?”
“That was his living.”
“Well, my condolences and I’m sorry to interrupt. It’s just this was scheduled ahead.”
Christopher scratched his head.
“We are selling Cotchford Farm to Mr. Jones,” his mother informed him.
“I would’ve postponed except for I’m going on tour. It had to be today.” The pop star in their garden leaned against the stone statue by the walkway. He put his left elbow on the stone head of a boy named Christopher Robin and the statue seemed to shift a bit.
“Please. You’re going to topple that.”
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t worry. It’s solid.”
Brian Jones put his foot against the pedestal that the statue of Christopher Robin was set on and he pushed off it, jumping back. “I’d need a crane to topple that monster,” Brian Jones said. “That fellow isn’t going anywhere.”
Christopher realized the pop star was quite right. Even now, after his father the writer was dead, the little boy made of stone continued on. Christopher might never get away from himself.
* * *
Christopher stepped slowly down the hall in his socked feet, especially careful to step softly as he made his way past the master bedroom where his mother slept, and slowing still more as he passed the small bedroom and office where his father had spent so many years in a kind of solitary confinement with only his typewriter and books to keep him company. Chris glanced down at the intricate pattern in the oriental rug, at the crazy red, blue, and beige mandala under his feet.
Christopher could not sleep at Cotchford Farm, but was drawn into the halls, compelled to pace. It was late, sometime in the very early morning, perhaps past two, and Christopher switched on the Adams style bronze chandelier in the drawing room. He approached the piano on the north wall and touched the sheet music propped up on the stand. The music for Bill Murray’s “Shine On Harvest Moon” had yellowed.
Christopher decided to make himself a cup of tea.
The kitchen was tidy and modern, and Christopher wondered when his mother had purchased the electric stove. He boiled water in an orange enamel teakettle and searched for a teapot but found the good china had already been packed away. There were only a few coffee mugs in the cabinet, coffee mugs his father had received as a gift from Disney. Christopher chose the cup featuring a cartoon deer. He only steeped his tea for ten seconds or so as he’d picked a black tea and he still had ambitions toward sleep.
Back in the drawing room Christopher sat on the knit coverlet that covered the cushioned seat of the Queen Anne wingback chair. The vase of flowers on the small wood table in the centre of the room contained an amazing display of orange lilies in full bloom, but the seams on each plastic bud were visible even in the dim light from the chandelier. Christopher took a sip of his weak tea and realized that his father was really and truly dead. Cotchford Farm was a memorial now, but then it always had been.
The writer Father had admired most was Thackeray. Father had followed Thackeray’s example and written for Punch, and Father had built his vacation home in Thackeray’s honor, but now Thackeray was remembered mostly as a satirist who wrote against the times and values that he, in fact, cherished most. Thackeray and Father would be misremembered. Thackeray would be misremembered through Vanity Fair, and Father would be misremembered through that stupid bear. Buying Cotchford Farm had been an act of faith on Father’s part, and over the years the estate had been transformed into a religious institution of some sort. Kings and queens didn’t matter anymore and everyone was now a humanist, but a man of letters needed the right furniture and the correct table. These decisions still had relevance and importance.
Thackeray had developed a knack for describing the furniture of the seventeenth century precisely because these sorts of objects were all that remained of the old aristocracy, but now Father’s silver vase contained flowers from Disney’s America. Cotchford Farm had been invaded by the new vision, and Christopher was sure that the pop star who was purchasing the estate could be relied upon to destroy whatever vestiges of the old monarchist ways remained.
Christopher’s tea was barely stronger than water. Sitting up at that time of night he decided he needed something more substantial to reassure him, but something that would work in the opposite direction. He wanted whiskey, but he wasn’t entirely sure where to find such stuff. A good amount of the estate had already been packed into crates and boxes, and his parents hadn’t entertained during the past few years in any case. It was quite possible that there was none of it, and Christopher did not want to set off on a fool’s errand. Still, if there was no whiskey, or none in evidence, then Christopher would seek out the words of Thackeray instead. Thackeray had always steadied his father; perhaps they would soothe him as well. Christopher would seek out The History of Henry Esmond.
Groping in the cramped darkness of his father’s bedroom, Christopher grasped air before finding the switch for the overhead light. Then, with the yellow light switched on, Christopher was surprised not so much by the sight of the empty mahogany shelves, the clean and polished surface of his father’s little desk, or the absence of his father’s chair, but by the absence of boxes. There were no books, no papers and pens. His father’s closet was empty as well. There was nothing in it but the wood rail along the top. There were not even wire coat hangers left behind.
Finally he found it. There was a cardboard box f
olded shut and pushed half under Father’s stripped bed. Christopher got down on hands and knees to search through it and discovered bed linen.
Where were his father’s books and papers? What had his mother done with his father’s effects? Father had kept on writing even after his heart surgery in 1966, which had been a procedure that had seemed to affect his mind as much as his heart. Christopher had been surprised by how little of his father had remained after the surgery. He’d still managed to appear neat and tidy, and he’d clung to his dignity, but at a high cost. Christopher visited in the summer of ’66, visited them in London, and Father had sat at the dining-room table for tea in his dinner jacket. His posture was perfect, but as Christopher watched his father eat his pudding with raisins he could see how much effort was required to maintain the ritual. Still, Father’s spoon did not shake in his hand. He did not spill any of the pudding on his lap, and in this way the tea was a success. Even after he had become childlike and slow in his daily life, even after simple interactions with people proved to be beyond his capacity, Father had continued writing. He’d gone on producing three to four pages a day just as he had for decades.
There was not a trace of these writings.
Back in the drawing room Christopher stood next to the table with the plastic flowers and found a small pile of mail next to the vase. Putting down the coffee mug directly on the wood, he riffled through the envelopes until he came upon a letter addressed to his father. Opening it he discovered a check from America, a check for a quite goodly amount. Christopher felt slightly sick looking at the number, and eventually placed the check back in its envelope. He placed the envelope back on the table between the Disney mug and a copy of the most current edition of Punch magazine.
Instead of Punch the puppet there was a naked lady on the cover of the magazine. Apparently attempting to satirize Playboy, to satirize what could not be satirized, the headline across the top of the magazine promised the sight of a nude Hugh Hefner inside. Hugh Hefner was Punch’s featured Playmate of the Month.
Punch was parodying pornography, while his mother and soon enough Christopher himself would be living off of American cartoons.
Sitting in the early morning’s electric light, drinking cold and watery tea, and looking for a peek of a nipple on the cover of Punch, Christopher almost felt guilty. His father might be dead, but he was still hovering nearby, and Christopher knew that his father was disappointed by the whole dreadful picture.
9
Natalie said she didn’t know how Gerrard fit into her project with Sagan’s novel and so he tried giving her an alternate novel. He came to her in late October with a dream he’d had that, upon awakening, he’d decided was based on Orwell’s 1984.
“How about George Orwell instead?” Gerrard asked.
In Gerrard’s dream the two of them agreed to finally have sex, but they had to leave the university to do it. They took the train into Paris, to a platform in the Gare du Nord, and held each other. She put her hands under his cotton shirt, and he touched her neck, but they stopped with that. They were caught out on the platform. Dr. Neil Lemay spotted them there, mocked them for their timidity. He told them that he could help them find a private room. He scratched at his beard, looked the two of them over, up and down.
Lemay took them to a bookstore, it turned out it was his store, and Gerrard bought a journal with cream-colored blank pages.
“There was a room above the shop, and Lemay was willing to rent it out by the hour. We went up rickety stairs and found the bed mattress was barely acceptable. We worried about bugs,” Gerrard said.
In his dream Gerrard spotted a portly working-class woman out the window. She was hanging laundry in the next yard.
“The woman is beautiful,” Natalie had said. “Turn around.” When Gerrard turned back she’d removed her skirt and sweater, and her cheeks and lips were a brighter shade of pink than they’d been a moment earlier.
“Lipstick and blush,” Natalie interjected. “Like Julia.”
“I hadn’t noticed that you’d been without makeup, but when you put on that little color I could tell the difference.” In the dream she’d kissed him and Gerrard had caught sight of his reflection in the window. Instead of the portly laundress he saw his own face. His lips had been pink with lipstick.
Natalie kissed him there, in reality, on the concrete bench, and suggested that they should skip out on the professor and his class, that they didn’t need him for what they wanted.
“I think Lemay is confusing you. France is, for the moment anyhow, a capitalist country. We don’t have to find some secret hovel to have sex in. Orwell wasn’t talking about France.”
Gerrard objected to her logic. “The dorms are off-limits, the bushes aren’t tall enough to hide anything. You make it sound simple.”
“It is simple. All we need is to find the commodity for sex. It’s the same for everything, right? In this case what we need is an automobile.”
Natalie’s neighbor in the girls’ dormitory had a Citroën 2CV, a convertible with red leather seats and seat belts, and Natalie managed to convince the girl to lend it to her.
Gerrard was behind the wheel as they headed west, to the countryside. He tested out how the automobile handled. Natalie wore a straw sunhat despite the February weather, and they left the top down for the first few miles until what had been a light sprinkle turned into a steady rain.
Gerrard let his eyes drift off the road for a moment. She had her feet out the window and the muscles in her thighs were visible.
He was a little lost, just east of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and on a dirt road that seemed to stretch on indefinitely. Gerrard turned back to driving, and he watched the windshield wipers keeping time. It was green outside the automobile, green and wet. They were rolling through a forest on mud tracks in the grass. Natalie took off her sandals and again stuck her feet, now bare, out the passenger window. Washing her feet in the rain she leaned against Gerrard and sighed.
“Tell me about your first time,” she said.
“What?”
“This isn’t it, is it? I don’t think I could handle being the first.”
Gerrard told her not to worry.
“But, you aren’t going to tell me.”
“What about you?”
“You want to know about my first?” she asked. “I’ll tell.”
“No. Well … I don’t know.”
Natalie tipped her sunhat forward so that the brim covered her eyes. She told him that her first boyfriend was a boy on the track team in high school, that his name was Patrick, and that he was very attentive.
“Is that what you want? Attention?” he asked.
She sat up straight, put her feet back in the vehicle, and looked out the windshield. She let the wipers move ten or twenty times before answering.
“I’m confused about what I want. It seems like romance is a trap. We invest everything, look for all of life in these boy and girl antics, but how can romance or love change the university, the factory, or any of it,” she said.
“‘The student, if she rebels at all, must first rebel against her studies. But, at the same time, since she is a product of modern society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, her extreme alienation can only be fought through the struggle against the whole society,’” Gerrard recited slowly, drawing each word from his memory and considering it before saying it aloud.
“That’s from the Strasbourg pamphlet,” Natalie said. The pamphlet had come out of the University of Strasbourg two years earlier and it had been a scandal. The students responsible had been expelled for publishing the tract with union funds. The pamphlet was considered a big success by Les Détournés because everyone, especially teenagers, had read about the prank in the newspapers. Many had read the pamphlet itself.
“Do you remember what they said about sex?” Natalie asked.
He didn’t remember, or only vaguely.
“‘Thirty years after Wilhelm Reich’s excellent lessons the student still clin
gs to the most traditional forms of erotic behavior, reproducing at this level the general relations of class society,’” Natalie said.
Natalie and Gerrard parked in the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, along a meander of the Seine. Gerrard stopped the car among the trees and worried about how he was going to find his way back to the main road. He wondered if he’d have to go in reverse the entire way.
“Nice,” Natalie said. “This is like a holiday at the end of the world.” She kissed him and then pulled away again. He watched her pupils move back and forth as she scanned his face.
She adjusted the front seat so that it tipped all the way back, but getting out of their clothes was not as easy as might have been hoped for. Natalie had to lift herself up off him and press her bare ass up against the window as Gerrard struggled to get his trousers down. She left her shirt on, but unbuttoned the front, and then stopped Gerrard from trying to pull his T-shirt off over his head.
“It’s okay. We’re naked enough. Let’s just put it in now,” she said.
They had sex in the front seat, slowly and awkwardly. And as Gerrard neared climax, as he found a rhythm and a way to ignore the way his skin was sticking to the upholstery, as he focused on how Natalie felt against him, about the way she smelled and breathed as she moved, Gerrard wondered how he’d ended up fucking in a convertible.
After working this way and that trying out rhythms, Natalie’s movements became frantic. She seemed to reach climax quickly, and when she came she shouted, “Hello, sadness!”
10
They had breakfast on campus, looking out the pane glass windows to watch other students cross the green lawn.
The café was noisy with talk and music from a Jupiter Jukebox. Johnny Hallyday was singing “San Francisco” as Natalie and Gerrard found a table. They didn’t talk to each other, not right away, but took sips from cups of onion soup and coffee.
Natalie lit a Gitanes cigarette as she silently reread Sagan’s book, while Gerrard stirred his soup and sulked. How was it that so little had changed between them?
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