The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Have you been to St Vaast?" said Paul.

  I told him I had passed it on the evening I arrived in town, roaming about . . . "It was locked," I said, "I couldn't get in. It looked rather melancholy, I think."

  "I'm afraid it is. This little parish is a very poor one. The people still use the church, but they've never had the money to do it up. It had that rather wonderful porch tacked on in the seventeenth century. Since then it's been more or less left alone."

  We turned a corner and there it was, at the end of the street. It gave me a shock: not only its nightmarish appearance—the bleak, battlemented tower so out of scale with the low old cottages around it, the derelict theatricality of the porch, with its barley-sugar columns and shit-crusted ledges—but also the shot of pure recall, my first hours here, full of forced excitement and independence, fighting back home-sickness.

  "The area's suffered a lot in the past ten years. There used to be several factories across the canal but they've all been closed down."

  "And I believe there was a hotel?" I said—half-expecting to be told there wasn't.

  "The old Pilgrimage and Commercial? Quite right. You have picked up an amazing knowledge of the town." I thought how lamentably wide of the mark that was. Anything I knew had been absorbed unconsciously on my wishful loopings through certain quarters; I'd been incurious about every history but one.

  When we entered the church Paul swept off his hat and at the first pew-end dipped to one knee, his coat fanned for a second behind him on the stones. I was surprised, and the way he rose and hurried me on suggested it was mere habit, a conciliatory gesture to the believers kneeling here and there in prayer. In front of them, and at several side-altars, pyramids of patchy candle-light lit up the insensible faces of saints and Virgins. Beyond that there was only an impression of decrepitude and Romanesque gloom.

  I followed Paul as he wandered down a narrow aisle, almost blocked with the black wardrobes of confessionals. Perhaps we should just pop into one of those and get it over with. Then he turned back, he seemed uncertain himself, hesitated with a hand on my shoulder, looked guardedly across the scattering of kneeling figures. "Let's stay a moment," he muttered, and slipped into a pew. I followed him again and sat by him waiting. There was a sombre echo. It was as if a coffin might any moment be brought in.

  Sometimes a careworn old woman entered, or another ended her prayers and shuffled out; sometimes a shuffling old man, a widower among all these widows who presumably believed in miracles and hell. The church was lively, in its destitute way, compared with the emptiness of the streets outside. Perhaps that was itself the secret, the place where the pious gathered as they approached the end, though no one saw them come here. It occurred to me as a vague possibility that it might be something to do with Paul's wife, whom he never spoke of and whom I knew about only from the tragic anecdote I'd buuied from Marcel. There was a snapshot of her in an ivory frame on the desk in Paul's office, a sensible boyish blonde among Orst's menacing red-heads. To marry at last at fifty and then lose your wife, to find the long decades of bachelordom creep up again like some funereal Daimler that matched your pace, its leathery soutude always in waiting, patient of the brief postponement . . .

  "This is probably a complete waste of time," Paul whispered. "I can't quite think why I bothered dragging you out here."

  "I remember Orst used the tower of this church in the picture for the story of the False Chaplain," I said, like a doggy student.

  "Yes. He used to come here, you're quite right."

  There was a pause. "It's not easy to imagine why," I said.

  "It had one attraction."

  "Well, it is a church."

  "He wasn't a religious man. Well, he observed religion, in the sense of looking at it very much with an eye to its forms and legends, and he was moved by the primitive faith of his country and obviously the idea of mystery; but he wasn't properly a religious observer. He liked to watch people at prayer, but didn't pray himself—or so he claimed."

  "I think you're suggesting there was a particular person who prayed here that he liked to watch."

  Paul looked a little embarrassed that I had got the point; I couldn't help feeling he could have just told me—back home in the warm, proposing a pre-lunch gin as he opened the burgundy to breathe . . . Or would it have been quite the same? I glanced away, to shawled figures, lost profiles, lips moving almost silently, as if in troubled sleep, the bleak old building given depth and tenderness by the multiple soft pulses of the candlelight. And here Edgard Orst would sit or kneel among the poor, his fastidious mouth closed, his eyes behind his powerful spectacles drifting always to the same unwitting worshipper.

  "They seem all to be old people here," I said quiedy—some perhaps were only Paul's age, though so much more bent and buffeted.

  "She was a young woman of the parish—only twenty-five or so when Orst first met her. I believe she had lost her fiance in the Great War. She took in washing, like so many of the women round here. I can still remember the long drying-racks along the canal-side, and the tunnels and alleyways of sheets you could get lost in if you were a child."

  "So they had an affair?"

  "Well, it must be said she didn't only take in washing."

  "I see."

  "She had always had something of a reputation, though it's not clear to me that Orst ever knew that."

  "He became her—client, do you call it?"

  "He saw her one day coming from the market-place. She got on to a tram, and he immediately followed her. The thing was that she looked uncanmly like Jane Byron; rather statuesque, with of course the amazing red hair—orange was his word, I think quite literal."

  "He surely didn't tell you about all this."

  "No, no. Mad though he often was he was never indiscreet. But much later on he told his sister, and he started to keep a journal, just under the force of the new emotion, which no one but she and I have ever read."

  "You are incredibly protective," I said rudely, with a short laugh, in unchecked exasperation; he paled, looked aside as if others might have heard the accusation, but didn't retaliate. In fact, no one seemed to care that we were talking. "Go back to the tram," I said softly.

  Paul paused a moment longer. "He followed her on the tram, and followed her when she got off. He felt he was seeing an apparition, as if the image he had been painting over and over for the past twenty years had suddenly come to life—come back to life, as it were. He noted which house she turned into, wrote it in his pocketbook, then wandered on bemusedly and got lost. He didn't know this part of town, despite having lived here all his life. He had to get right back to the other side, to the new suburbs where the Villa Hermes so incongruously was.

  "Like many rather severe people he was actually quite shy. You know he spent the years of the Great War in England"—again, I just smiled and shook my head—"and he had cut himself off so much at the Villa, and in effect denied the present so successfully, that he didn't know how to go about meeting an ordinary girl again."

  "But he must have been much older," I objected. "Surely too old, too self-conscious, if he didn't know what sort of woman she was, to go chasing after her."

  " He was in his mid-fifties, that's all." Paul did look rather piqued at this. "Besides he was infatuated, so age was hardly a consideration he would let stand in his way." And he gave me a complex little smile that referred perhaps to me, perhaps to his own past, I couldn't tell.

  "So he came to the church."

  "He came many times before he spoke to her; he hired a fiacre every Sunday morning to bring him and take him back. He could really hardly believe his eyes, he longed to be with her, but dreaded meeting her and being disabused."

  "Was she really so similar?"

  "It's rather touching, at first he thought identical, but myopically he couldn't be sure—the whole impression, the slow but electrifying movement, what he called Jane's Lady Macbeth quality, seemed to be perfectly reproduced. It was only when he had, well,
picked her up, and taken her for a drive that he conceded the single difference—in place of Jane's virtually colourless eyes, hers were what he called chrysanthemum brown—a tarnished gold colour."

  "Presumably he got her to go with him without too much difficulty."

  "Of course. I think she virtually leapt into the cab. But then to him that only confirmed the sense of reincarnation, of a destined meeting. And she was no fool, she went along with it; she must have had a bit of the actress in her too, although she didn't have anything of the real Jane's artistic background or farrdly connections. She was just a woman of the people. There is an awful kind of unintended humour in his diary if you know what she was and what he thought about her. He simply believed what he so very much wanted to believe."

  "He can't really have believed there was any connection between the two women, surely?"

  Paul looked mildly around the church. "Beliefs a funny thing," he said. "It's the little obstacles to belief that spur one to make the leap of faith."

  When we were outside again, he had the air of someone who has dragged you to see a cult movie at a remote suburban cinema and suspects that it wasn't an unqualified success. "That was very fascinating," I said.

  "I'd hoped to show you something else; but we can't wait all day. It's simply that this church is still used by the prostitutes. I'd hoped some painted ladies might be praying to St Vaast."

  "I think I've got a much better picture of what happened without seeing the real thing." Though it was true I didn't quite feel the thrill or shock of it as Paul clearly hoped. My own obsessions made it hard for me to grant the force of someone else's—and besides it was long ago and part of the never fully plausible world of heterosexual feeling. I started trying to convert it into my own terms; if I had met someone physically identical to Luc would he have done just as well as the object of my wild longings—which flooded into my throat for a second and pricked my eyes as we turned a corner into the cold wind.

  "You say that I'm secretive," he said, in a tone that admitted the charge but showed his pride had in fact been scratched by my remark of a few minutes before. "But I've always been prepared to tell, if I could first find the right person. That's why I'm so glad you've got the point: I very much want you to get the point, since you're helping me so much to get all this done."

  I shoved my hands into my pockets and nursed this to me in a sflence I hoped he didn't feel was negative. I wondered if I had got the point. I had the sense that my importance, my helpfulness, were being flatteringly exaggerated. Proof-reading, fact-checking, were necessary of course; but they could be done just as well by somebody else, better perhaps by somebody who didn't share my groping remoteness from the subject. At the same time I was warmed and bucked up by the confidence Paul put in me, the tone of urgency I had sometimes heard before and the implication that I could meet the crisis, even if I didn't quite know yet what it was. It was as though he saw some virtue in me that I had lost sight of myself, or never believed myself to have possessed.

  Towards the end of lunch I pressed him further about the war. I'd had two or three, perhaps four, glasses of wine, he'd drunk more than usual himself and seemed cautiously to be celebrating. He was giving a comic account of some French art critics and their notions about Orst. I got a very clear impression of their style and their theoretical obtuseness, and also of the disquiet beneath Paul's mockery. Lilli listened to everything he said with her usual, rather stolid, attentiveness, sometimes repeating a phrase when he fell silent as though to memorise it or to help me to. I said simply, "Tell me about your visits to Orst"—and saw her gaze settle on his down-turned face.

  After a while he said, "I only hesitate because it's hard to know where to begin." He smiled at me distantly, but seemed reluctant to meet Lilli's eye. Marcel, opposite me, bundled up his napkin and pushed back his chair—I saw he waited for Lilli's nod before he got down. Then she too stood up and reached for our plates and asked us about coffee. Paul watched her go out with the kind of exasperated tenderness I remembered noticing sometimes between my mother and father.

  "I wish I'd seen the Villa Hermes," I said, unsure if he was going to tell me about it or not.

  "I'd like to have seen it in its early days," Paul agreed promptly.

  "Yes."

  "Do you mean it had fallen into disrepair when you knew it?"

  He fiddled with some breadcrumbs on the tablecloth. "The thing is, I never did know it. Orst had moved out years before that brief period when I used to go and see him. It was let to an English artist up until the war, and then stood empty. I knew it as a landmark, of course, if I went to visit schoolfriends on that side of town." I had been hurriedly revising the scenario I had been loosely carrying, of young Paul's visits there and the aesthete blind in his own treasure-house. "No, the only time I entered the villa was in the period before its demolition in the early sixties, when several of us tried to save it and there was a petition signed by, well, by almost nobody really. The Symbolists were still seen as a bit of a sick joke then. Even the children of Symbolist painters were teased about it, as if they had convicts or madmen for fathers. Things which would fetch a fortune today were being sold for their frames."

  For a moment I found myself regretting those missed chances; I wasn't someone who would ever own anything. "But he was still a well-known figure when you met him?"

  "Honestly, no," Paul admitted. "He was remembered in the town, but rather as someone from long ago. His great London days were forty or fifty years before—when he was your age, more or less. He was a blind, half-paralysed, half-mad old man, who might as well have been dead for all anyone cared. I was quite frightened of him, and of course determined to prove I wasn't. If I say so myself, I was very tolerant of him, and came to be fond of him. I used to do a few chores in the house, read to him, listen to him muttering and raving about the past, and the beautiful woman who'd ruined his life and brought him to this state—I didn't understand it all, but I gained a sense of his own mythology, you might say. I knew my way around a place I'd never been. And he could still be quite lucid about the world: 'You be my eyes,' he used to say. 'Tell me what you saw in the street, what was the sky like, what colour were the clouds?' Often, of course, I had no idea, and he would shake his blind head and pretend to be angry. And really he did teach me to see for myself: I did start to take notice. I remember starting to imitate his expressions of aesthetic pleasure—a rather feminine and troubling language for a fifteen-year-old boy, this charmant and exquis and ravissant, all in French, which was the language of his kind." I nodded slowly with recognition—how music has demanded something similar, like the language of endearments which I never voiced except inside my head. "Well, it was a lesson in real life, and I discovered I needed it, I wanted to come back for more. He was my best teacher, not the brave monks who actually taught us and looked after us through those terrible years . . ."

  I felt great wide-eyed questions welling up, about what it had been like; and then shamefaced doubts about what could tolerably be asked by someone who knew nothing about it, who had never known anything like it. "Your parents weren't worried about your spending so much time with him?" was all I prudishly came up with.

  "No, no. It was they who arranged for me to go." I thought Paul was cross with me for a moment, then saw that perhaps it was only with himself. "Put simply: when Orst became too infirm to stay at the Villa he had moved back to his sister's house—now, as you know, our Museum. I'm not sure when he contracted the pox. You probably know there was a great spread of it during the war—it may have been soon after he returned from England, in 1919. I suspect the tertiary stage was very delayed, and when it came it was clearly very prolonged. Anyway, Delphine took him in: she was very tough and capable and . . . unsentimental. That would have been in about 1930. She looked after him with her old servant, who was married to the cook—dear old people. The paintings and most of the contents of the Villa were brought over and stored, a lot of them in this house that we're in n
ow, which had been left to Delphine and which stood unused for years. It was she who made the little passageway that you go through from our sitting-room to my office."

  "Oh!" I said, with slightly more wonder than I could account for.

  "And there he stayed, painting until he could see no more and taking a long time to die." This was what Helene had hinted at on our evening walk—it seemed the embodiment of something I had always felt about the old town, and found shadowed forth in many of Orst's eerie Uthographs, a sense of dying life, life hidden, haunted and winter-slow. "The trouble came with the new war. Edgard and Delphine's mother had been Jewish—oh, quite assimilated, but Jewish. Obviously, they must have watched the deepening of racehatred among the Belgian fascists with alarm; but when the Germans made their move, it was all so incredibly quick and so feebly resisted, they had to make a plan. She fled to England again, at really the last possible moment—it was almost Dunkirk. She stayed with friends until the end of '44, in Chislehurst—they were old patrons of Edgard's."

  "Chislehurst!" This trivial detail surprised me much more than the lightning progress of the German army. She could have known aunt Tina. I remembered Orst's love of the legendary sentiment in English art.