‘Perhaps he’s not dead,’ said little Fanny, rubbing Turk gently under his stomach. ‘Perhaps he’s living happily without you in New Orleans.’
‘With a Negress,’ said Margaret, drawing on all she knew of New Orleans. In her imagination Mr Cooper, her father, soon abandoned the black woman to die in her turn of a broken heart, and then came back to Europe.
That Sunday they were taking the dog for a walk beside the canal. They had already had lunch in the empty dining room of The Canal Cross, where Fanny’s father had given them roast beef and beans. The smell lingered about their hair; Fanny, who was ashamed of this, was sombre, and Margaret silent. Near the lock on the way to Argenteuil they saw some men in a boat taking out a drowned man. A crowd of children were watching them. Margaret and Fanny sat on the bank and watched too, and Fanny caught herself wishing that the drowned man was her father, and that made her even more ashamed than the smell of burnt fat from the inn kitchen.
II
Fanny was born on the 15th of April, and Margaret on the 13th of October, the one at Le Raincy, the other at Dieppe, at the hotel Bon Retour—if she had waited a few days more she would have seen the light of day in England. Both grew up in the home of Mme Bonnafé, a native of Grenoble who set up as a baby-farmer in Le Raincy. Bonnafé was a soldier and Mme Bonnafé was quite happy, she said, to have him away on duty. She looked after Margaret and Fanny till they were six. She was a large, fair woman and found consolation in gin, of which she drank a small glass every evening. She taught them sewing and embroidery.
Mme Bonnafé died a few days before Fanny’s sixteenth birthday. One of her sons brought the news to The Canal Cross. His eyes were red and Fanny gave him a hug. Mme Bonnafé had ‘had a stroke’, he said; he was twenty years old, and had found his mother dead beside the fireplace. Fanny at the time was working in the café; she followed the boy back to the Bonnafé house where everyone was in tears. Mme Bonnafé was lying on her bed, her hands folded, a handkerchief over her face. Two Bonnafé girls were sitting at the bedside sobbing soundlessly.
Fanny remembered how one winter night she and Margaret had slept in this same bed alongside big Mme Bonnafé when the cold was biting. Mme Bonnafé in death had been put into her finest dress. Fanny could imagine the round thighs and the bulging calves of her nurse, and the great bosoms she had had. She felt a desire to lie close to Mme Bonnafé; she also wished, with all the force of her being, that the two little girls would go away—something they must have sensed. Left alone with the corpse, however, Fanny contented herself with raising the handkerchief.
Margaret and her aunt came to the burial of Mme Bonnafé. The aunt was still well off, and Margaret was not working: her aunt, thinking she had a voice, made her take courses in dancing, singing, the piano and English. After the Requiem, as they followed the hearse drawn by two black horses, Fanny spoke to Margaret of what she had seen beneath the handkerchief. Mme Bonnafé had died with her eyes open; it had been impossible to close them. Mme Bonnafé had looked at Fanny from the land of the dead. Margaret felt a clutch at her child’s heart; she envied her friend. ‘I would have spoken to her,’ she said to herself, ‘yes I would.’ The open eyes of Mme Bonnafé seemed to lead straight to the limbo in which the souls of her parents were floating. ‘I should have found the way.’
III
Margaret became devout. Every day she went to Vespers at the church in Jourdain. It was after the death of Mme Bonnafé that she first saw, behind the priest at Sunday Mass, a huge eye open in the gilding at the end of the chancel. In the pupil of this eye ill-formed shapes were stirring. She did not speak of this either to her aunt, who was of a mocking temperament, or to her fellow students with Petit and Boismortier, who regarded her with curiosity because she was, they thought, English. Some days the eye did not open; but what unfolded in its depths was never the same. Even when Margaret found a place in the front pew, the forms in the eye were still obscure. One Sunday Margaret went to see Fanny at Le Raincy, but did not dare speak of the eye.
Her aunt had never encouraged these visits to Fanny, whom she thought common. The smell of the rooms in the inn now made Margaret shiver, as did the grease on the collars of Fanny’s dresses. Beneath the stare of the gilt-lidded eye Margaret often prayed for her friend to be set free. When she went to Le Raincy the pair took the path by the canal and went past the fields to La Gandinière, a hotel frequented by the boatmen. These they observed from a distance. Margaret had no exact knowledge of men; Fanny kept company with the timid Bonnafé boy.
Fanny and Margaret were pretty, and sufficiently like each other to be taken for relations. Margaret was a little taller, with a higher colouring; there was nothing amiss with her except that her teeth were irregular. Fanny imitated her clothes and went every day to the public baths of Le Raincy, to the amazement of her father. When she was nineteen she left The Canal Cross and found work first on the Boulevard des Italiens as a shop-assistant at a mercer’s, then in a glove-shop behind the Opera.
A chorus-master at the Opera removed Margaret’s illusions, and she felt the better without them. She ceased seeing the eye, ceased attending Vespers, and read novels. All through the spring she thought she had discovered her father, saved from shipwreck and back in Paris, under the appearance of a bearded man with blue eyes who used to wait for her at the door of the Boismortier establishment, though without ever following her. He carried a cane with a silver top and, as a rule, a travelling coat. She showed him to Fanny, who considered him lugubrious. ‘Why don’t you go and speak to him?’ Seeing himself an object of remark to Fanny, the man never came back.
Margaret dreamed one night that on returning to her aunt’s house in the Rue de Rivoli she found this man in the drawing room, stooped over Fanny who was seated at the piano. Margaret went across to them and Fanny rose in tears, tears—she said, of joy.
‘Margaret, Margaret, your father has returned from the dead.’
‘I have died twice,’ said the father, ‘three times, many times. I died drowned in a shipwreck, I died thrown from a horse in New Orleans, I died of fever in the swamps of Florida. Ah, Margaret, the delights of death!’
At these words Margaret stretched out her hand to her father and looked into the depths of his eyes: ‘This is the way.’
IV
Margaret and Fanny were once again like sisters. On Saturday evenings they went to the Bal Descottes, in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Fanny lived frugally; the aunt, who was getting on in years, looked for a husband for Margaret. Descottes was not too disreputable; medical students went there, and young business men.
Margaret had a first adventure. One Saturday at the beginning of summer she danced with a student whom his friends called ‘Père Lebleu’, though his face was still that of a child. When the dance was over, Père Lebleu touched her hair with a look of ecstasy. They had both drunk deeply, and next morning she remembered nothing but a gleaming pavement and a strong light falling from a window; Père Lebleu took her in his arms and kissed her all round her eyes and lips. Fanny waited for them for two hours in a café that reminded her of The Canal Cross, and impatience made her shrewish. On the Descottes evenings Margaret always slept at Fanny’s place.
They slept, as usual, in the same bed. Margaret in her drunkenness snored gently, and Fanny raised herself to look at her. She lit one of the lamps and put it on the bedside table. Without much thinking what she was doing, she sat down beside Margaret and with a trembling forefinger she raised one eyelid. The sleeping eye of Margaret looked at her vacantly. Fanny wept and bit her knuckles.
Père Lebleu did not last the summer. He was replaced by a dark, experienced boy who pinched Margaret at the base of her back and made her cry out. At the glove shop Fanny made the acquaintance of a frequent customer. Having first come to buy a man’s gloves, he came back, he said on behalf of his sister. Cotton gloves, silk gloves, gloves of lambswool: he bought seven pairs in two weeks. He was not in his first youth; Fanny was surprised to find herself, soon, looking
forward to his visits. This was not the feverish love of Margaret’s friends, students with wet lips who drank to give themselves courage. Edmond waited for her one night when the shop shut. They went down to the bank of the Seine.
Edmond confessed his lie: he had no sister, only, he said, two brothers at Baccarat; ‘But I found you very beautiful.’
‘And what did you do with the gloves?’ she asked smiling.
‘I kept them for you,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you are tired of gloves. I made a parcel of them which I lost at the Gare de L’Est.’ Edmond was pale-skinned, fair-haired with eyes that he often screwed up. His hand on Fanny’s arm was light and friendly. At dinner she looked at him long and often without saying much. It seemed to her that all the dirt and bitterness her soul had absorbed since childhood was melting away in joy.
V
Fanny went no more to Descottes. On Saturday evenings Edmond took her to a concert. Margaret shook her head and gave her friend a kiss. ‘You remember Le Raincy? Remember Mme Bonnafé and the funny little dog at her house?’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Fanny. ‘Were not going to be parted.’
The third of her students thought it would be fun to take Margaret to the morgue at La Salpêtrière. He showed her a woman who had died in childbirth and the baby she had brought into the world; the baby had a hole in its head. Margaret passed tremulous fingers over this half-head; in a spell of giddiness she saw, opening in the middle of the child’s deformed forehead, an eye that looked at her. She put on a tight smile and in bravado asked to see a murder-victim. ‘The pretty little ghoul’, said the student, but all he could find in the drawers was an old pauper-woman knocked down by her husband.
Margaret too gave up the hectic evenings at Descottes. Her aunt had found her a young draper, a native, like the Coopers, of Bangor, whose father had sent him to Paris to sell their cashmeres and alpacas. Mr Cowie came to lunch every Sunday. They spoke English, Margaret sang songs and felt as if bayonet blades were growing in her belly.
Fanny saved Margaret from the attentions of Mr Cowie. One Sunday they went back to Le Raincy. Fanny’s father had died the year before; The Canal Cross had been sold and then demolished. Fanny went arm in arm with Edmond; Margaret walked alone, her heart undecided. A cabriolet took them to La Gandinière, which had been smartened up and now offered music and dancing. A wooden platform had been constructed on the riverbank. ‘We’ll dance,’ said Fanny.
A dark-skinned man with a roundish face came along, whom Edmond and Fanny knew. ‘François! What a surprise!’ Margaret was won over by this innocent device. M. François was shy, his eyes seemed restless. He danced with Fanny and then with Margaret. He spoke French with an accent that sounded almost foreign. He was Corsican. ‘Both of us,’ he told Margaret, ‘are islanders.’
VI
It was a double wedding. Edmond and M François were friends, just like Margaret and Fanny. On the wedding morning Margaret, dizzy with love, wished that her father might appear in all the splendour of her childhood recollections; but in fact there came from London only a bald cousin who could hardly speak a word of French. It had been necessary to assure him by a stream of telegrams that no one would ask him to pay the shipwrecked fugitive’s debts. Her aunt and this cousin were the whole of Margaret’s family; for Fanny there came the Boissonneaus of Chartres and Amiens. Edmond and M François were better provided with relations. The aunt found the Corsicans frightening. All the same, two old men who had come down from their mountains for the occasion made her dance like a devil-woman on the wedding night.
Edmond and M François, till lately a bachelor pair, used to share a flat above their workshop, a visit to which nearly caused the cancellation of one of the marriages. They manufactured glass eyes. ‘Don’t you see,’ Fanny said to Margaret, ‘that they’re artists?’ Fanny, after she was married, spent her days at the workshop. Margaret, whom her aunt had dowered generously, supervised the maid in the flat M François rented in the Rue des Acacias. The workshop was in the Rue Brey. In the window there was a huge plaster eye, the iris blue and yellow, which Margaret could never see without thinking of the death of her father. She went there rarely.
On the wedding night when Margaret and M François confronted each other in their new status, for some time they did not know what to do. M François was not a virgin; at Marseilles he had loved a dressmaker who was married to a customs officer. But these adventures were in the distant past. Margaret had had advice lavished upon her by her aunt and by Fanny. When she lay on her back to receive the bumbling homage of Mr François she imagined that at the tip of his member he had a golden eye with which to know her through and through. While he was at work on her she felt its gaze boring through her entrails. What did it see? A miniscule father and mother that she had kept warm inside her? M François did not seek them out; he marvelled at the supple waist of his young wife, at her small firm breasts, at a brown mole she had above her pubis.
VII
Margaret and Fanny became pregnant the same autumn. At the workshop Fanny for a long time continued to keep the orders and accounts tidy and up to date. Margaret had no desire to know anything of the blind, the one-eyed and the mutilated who formed her husband’s clientèle.
Margaret had many nightmares. At night when she was asleep her eyes would be stolen; they would be replaced by two glass marbles; and nobody but she would notice. But how, in this dream, could she see the cruel smile on Fanny’s face, if she had no eyes? Another dream showed her the coming child being born without a head, like the poor monster she had seen in the morgue with Père Lebleu’s friend. ‘When M François takes me, he sees by his penis this headless child.’
Before they were too gravid they went back to lay flowers on the grave of Mme Bonnafé in the cemetery at Le Raincy. Margaret had never been able to speak to Fanny about this watchful eye. Fanny was in the midst of recollections. Corporal Bonnafé, back from military service, offered them coffee and cake. ‘Mum would be really happy if she could see you so beautiful and well married.’ The timid son had followed his father into the army. Two of the daughters were settled; the others worked in the garden. ‘What was it called, that little dog Mme Bonnafé had when we were children?’ Fanny asked. One of the girls replied it was Ulysses. Margaret and Fanny went off at sunset on a fine late autumn afternoon; the canal was frozen, boys were skating.
Fanny’s son was born on January 3rd, Margaret’s daughter just fifteen days later. They called the boy Pierre Emile Edmond, and the girl Marie Antoinette Françoise. They were both equally big and rosy, and so delighted the aunt that she bought them each, then and there, a silver rattle. She was godmother to both. Margaret did not get up out of bed immediately, and Fanny suckled both infants.
‘Those bayonet thrusts that went into my belly,’ Margaret said to herself, her mind away among the birds, ‘they didn’t destroy the child because she has come out of my body.’ But later when she saw Fanny beside her bed holding the two infants, she imagined that they were both Fanny’s and that she had lost her own. One afternoon she woke up under water. Her long hair floated towards the surface of the sea. Mr Cooper, naked, was sitting on a huge shell stretching out his arms for her. Sirens and Cyclopes danced around them.
VIII
The August following, Edmond and M François left for Baccarat. Margaret’s aunt and her maid took the two children to Dieppe for the sea air; it was agreed that Margaret and Fanny should join them when the ocularists returned. Margaret was in low spirits. She came to sleep with Fanny as she had in the past, at the Rue Brey over the workshop which had its blinds lowered.
‘Fanny,’ asked Margaret the second evening, ‘do you believe that they will come back? I dreamed last night that the train went off the rails over a bridge.’ Margaret had had no such dream, but Fanny’s calm industry was making her fret.
‘Fanny,’ she asked again, ‘do you remember the man who used to wait for me outside Boismortier’s, whom I took for my father? What did you say to him,
that he never came back?’
Fanny was musing in front of a drawer of eyes that she had brought up from the workshop and wanted to sort. Margaret had let down her hair and was weeping softly, without Fanny’s hearing.
‘Fanny, it was so dirty, so dirty and black, that odious inn of your father’s. Do you recall? When I was a child, my aunt didn’t like me to go there to see you, and nor did I, I didn’t like it. Do you remember?’
Fanny did not hear the rest—in fact she could not hear it; she had gone down to the workshop, or else gone out to get help; and Margaret sat before the fireplace in their room. The eyes, which Fanny had left on the bed, looked at her with a hundred glittering irises. One hand took her by the throat and squeezed it for her gently; another wandered blindly over her face. Margaret was so surprised that she did not even think to cry out. ‘It is François,’ she told herself, ‘come back unexpectedly’. The hands laid her on the bed.
The child was beneath the water, in the arms of Mr Cooper. Two corals filled its eye-sockets. Margaret and Mr Cooper were singing it songs of the sea-people. ‘We have two children, and two eyes and two fathers, and two Margarets; the one is enthroned at Neptune’s right hand, the other is in the Rue Brey at the window, waiting for her lover.’
‘I shall pluck out one of your eyes,’ said the hand, ‘and make you swallow it.’
Margaret followed that eye that was descending into her. She saw again the wedding with M François and the clumsy night of nuptials. She saw again young Lebleu and his depraved friends, the nights at Descottes and the man she took for Mr Cooper; she saw again the handfuls of earth thrown on Mme Bonnafé’s coffin, and under the beechwood lid her big open eyes; then the walks along the canal, and Fanny’s thin neck, marked with grease under the ears, the fish they saw threading their way through the weeds of the canal, and the Bonnafé house, with its kitchen where there was always a wailing infant. At last the eye returned to the canal, and Margaret lay there, arms crossed. ‘I shall not stir from here,’ she said. ‘This is where my father will find me, to take me to New Orleans.’
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