‘“Was it a bad bill?” William asked.
‘“Bill?”
‘“The one you dropped.”
‘“Oh that. I haven’t opened it yet.”
‘“You’ll lose it again if you’re not careful.”
‘“That would be a good thing to do, wouldn’t it, with a bill?” Melany said good-humouredly, but the words belied her nature – she never kept a tradesman waiting and never allowed one to extend her credit beyond a month. Now she wiped her fingers on the Kleenex and opened the yellow envelope. The first words she read, unevenly typed, were “Your husband, madam …”
‘“No,” she said, “not bad. Just tiresome.” And she read the letter carefully to the end – it was signed “A neighbour and well-wisher”. Then she tore it in little pieces and dropped them in her waste-paper basket.
‘“You shouldn’t destroy a bill,” William said.
‘“A few shillings at the newspaper shop. I paid it this morning.” She looked at William and said, “What a good husband you’ve always been, William.” She came to the bed and kissed him and William could detect her intention. “How tired a party makes me,” he said, excusing himself weakly, with a faint yawn.
‘“Of course, dear,” Melany said, lying down beside him without any complaint. “Happy dreams,” and then she noticed all those dabs of cotton wool. “Oh you poor dear,” she said, “you’ve cut yourself. Let your Melany make them clean,” and then and there she busied herself, for ten minutes at least, washing the wounds in chemists’ alcohol and fixing bits of Elastoplast, as though nothing important had happened. “How funny you look now,” she said, quite gay and carefree, and William told your father there was no longer any hint of danger in the kiss she planted on the end of his nose. “Dear funny William. I could forgive you anything.” It was then William gave up all hope – she was a perfect wife, uncrackably perfect, and your father used to say that the word “forgive” tolled on in William’s ears like the bell at Newgate signalling an execution.’
‘So he never escaped?’ I asked.
‘He died many years later in Melany’s arms,’ Aunt Augusta said, and we finished our apple tart in silence.
18
NEXT morning, which was just as grey as the last had been, Aunt Augusta and I climbed the long hill towards the cemetery. A shop advertised ‘Deuil en 24 heures’, and a wild boar, hung outside a butcher’s shop, dripped blood, and a notice pinned on the muzzle read, ‘Retenez vos morceaux pour jeudi,’ but Thursday meant nothing to me, and not very much to Aunt Augusta. ‘The feast of the Little Flower,’ she said, looking the date up in her missal which she had brought with her because it was a suitable occasion, ‘but a boar seems hardly suitable. Also apparently the feast of St Thomas of Hereford who died in exile in Orvieto, but I doubt if even the English have heard of him.’
Outside the gates of the Ville Haute there was a plaque commemorating the death of a ‘Hero of the Resistance’. ‘The dead of an army,’ my aunt said, ‘become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs. I wonder about this man St Thomas. I would have thought he was very lucky to die in Orvieto rather than in Hereford. A small civilized place even today with a far, far better climate and an excellent restaurant in the Via Garibaldi.’
‘Are you really a Roman Catholic?’ I asked my aunt with interest. She replied promptly and seriously, ‘Yes, my dear, only I just don’t believe in all the things they believe in.’
To find my father’s grave in the enormous grey cemetery would have been like finding an individual house without a street number in Camden Town. The noise of trains came up from below the hill and the smoke of coal fires from the high town blew across the maze of graves. A man from a little square house, which was like a tomb itself, offered to conduct us. I had brought a wreath of flowers, though my aunt thought my gesture a little exaggerated. ‘They will be very conspicuous,’ she said. ‘The French believe in remembering the dead once a year on the Feast of All Souls. It is tidy and convenient like Communion at Easter,’ and it is true that I saw few flowers, even immortelles, among the angels, the cherubs, the bust of a bold man like a lycée professor, and the huge tomb, which apparently contained La Famille Flageollet. An English inscription on one monument caught my eye: ‘In loving memory of my devoted son Edward Rhodes Robinson who died in Bombay where he is buried’, but there was nothing English about his pyramid. Surely my father would have preferred an English graveyard of lichened stones with worn-out inscriptions and tags of pious verse to these shiny black made-to-last slabs which no Boulogne weather could ever erode, all with the same headlines, like copies of the same newspaper: ‘À la mémoire’, ‘Ici repose le corps …’ Except for a small elderly woman in black who stood with bowed head at the end of a long aisle like the solitary visitor in a provincial museum there seemed no one but ourselves in the whole heartless place.
‘Je me suis trompé,’ our conductor said, turning sharply on his heel, and he led us back towards the grave where the old woman stood, apparently in prayer.
‘How odd! There seems to be another mourner,’ Aunt Augusta said, and sure enough, on the slab of marble lay a wreath twice as large as mine made of flowers twice as expensive from the hot-houses of the south. I laid my own beside it. The headlines were hidden: there was only part of my father’s name sticking out like an exclamation: ‘… chard Pulling’, and a date, 2 October 1923.
The little woman looked at us with astonishment. ‘Qui êtesvous?’ she asked us.
Her accent was not quite French and my aunt replied as bluntly in English, ‘Who are you?’
‘Miss Paterson,’ the little woman replied with a hint of frightened defiance.
‘And what has this grave to do with you?’ my aunt demanded.
‘I have come here on this day for more than forty years, and I have never seen either of you here before.’
‘Have you any rights over this grave?’ my aunt asked.
Something in the woman’s manner had riled her – perhaps it was her air of timid belligerence, for my aunt had little patience with weakness even when it was concealed.
The woman was cornered and showed fight. ‘I’ve never heard there are rights in a grave,’ she said.
‘A grave – like a house – has been paid for by someone.’
‘And if a house is left abandoned for forty years, hasn’t even a stranger the right …?’
‘Who are you?’ my aunt repeated.
‘I told you. I am Miss Paterson.’
‘Did you know my brother-in-law?’
‘Your brother-in-law!’ the old lady exclaimed. She looked at my wreath, she looked at me, she looked at my aunt.
‘And this, my good woman, is Richard Pulling’s son.’
She said with dismay, ‘The family’, as though the word meant ‘the enemy’.
‘So you see,’ my aunt said, ‘we at any rate do have certain rights.’
I couldn’t understand my aunt’s harshness and I intervened. ‘I think it is very kind of you,’ I said, ‘to lay flowers on my father’s grave. It may seem strange to you that I have never been here before …’
‘It is quite typical of you all,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘of you all. Your mother never even came to the funeral. I was the only one. I and the concierge of the hotel. A kind man.’ She added with tears in her eyes, ‘It was a wet wet day, and he brought his big umbrella …’
‘Then you knew my father … You were here …?’
‘He died gently gently in my arms,’ Miss Paterson said. She had a way of repeating words as though she were used to reading children’s books aloud.
‘It is very cold,’ my aunt interrupted. ‘Henry, you have laid your wreath, I shall go back to the hotel, this is not a place for prolonged conversation.’ She began to walk away: it was almost like an admission of defeat, and she tried to carry it off with disdain, like a great dane which turns its back on some small defenceless dog defiant in a corner and pretends it unworthy of its teeth.
‘I know I am old-fashioned,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘so very old-fashioned.’
‘But you will at least have tea with us? At the Meurice?’
‘I will come,’ Miss Paterson said with frightened dignity. ‘You must tell your aunt however – she is your aunt? – that she mustn’t take offence at me. He has been dead a long time. It is unfair of her to be jealous of me because I care so much, so much still.’
I repeated the message to my aunt exactly, and she was astonished. ‘Did she really believe me to be jealous? The only time I can remember being jealous was over Curran, and that experience taught me better. You know how little jealous I was even of Monsieur Dambreuse …’
‘You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Aunt Augusta,’ I said.
‘Defend myself? I certainly have not fallen as low as that. I am trying to explain my feelings, that is all. The woman seemed to me totally inadequate to her grief. You can’t pour a glass of wine into an after-dinner cup of coffee. She irritated me. To think that she was with your father when he died.’
‘Presumably there was a doctor too.’
‘He wouldn’t have died if she had not been so feeble. I am convinced of that. Your father had to be shaken into action. The trouble with Richard was his appearance. He was strikingly good-looking. He never had to make an effort with a woman. And finally he was too lazy to struggle. If I had been with him I would have seen that he was alive today.’
‘Today?’
‘He would not have been much older than Mr Visconti.’
‘Be kind to her all the same, Aunt Augusta.’
‘I shall be as sweet as sugar,’ my aunt promised.
And that afternoon I could tell that she was really trying to hide her irritation at Miss Paterson’s mannerisms, of which there were many besides her habit of repeating words. She had for example a twitch in her right foot (the first time it happened I really thought that Aunt Augusta had kicked her), and, when she had been silent a little while and her mind wandered, her teeth began to click as though she were manipulating a pair of false dentures. We had tea in my aunt’s room, for there was no proper lounge in the square miniature skyscraper which sat between two identical others on the quay.
‘You must forgive us,’ my aunt said, ‘they have only Lipton’s Indian.’
‘Oh, but I like Lipton’s,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘with one little little lump.’
‘Did you come via Calais?’ my aunt asked, making polite conversation. ‘We came that way yesterday. Or by the ferry?’
‘Oh no,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘you see, I live here. I have always lived here, that is to say since Richard died.’ She gave a scared glance at me and said, ‘Mr Pulling, I mean.’
‘Even during the war?’ my aunt asked with a touch of suspicion. She would have been glad, I think, to have found a chink in Miss Paterson’s integrity, if only a small error of fact.
‘It was a time of some privation,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘Perhaps the bombardments seemed less terrible to me because I had my children to think of.’
‘Your children?’ my aunt exclaimed. ‘Surely Richard …’
‘Oh no, no, no,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘I refer only to the children whom I taught. I taught English in the Lycée.’
‘Didn’t the Germans intern you?’
‘The people here were very good to me. I was protected. The mayor provided me with an identity card.’ Miss Paterson’s leg jumped. ‘After the war they even gave me a medal.’
‘A medal for teaching English?’ my aunt asked incredulously.
‘And other things,’ Miss Paterson said. She leant back in her chair and her teeth began to click. Her thoughts were far away.
‘Tell me about my father,’ I told her. ‘What brought him to Boulogne?’
‘He wanted to give me a holiday,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘He was worried about my health. He said I needed sea air.’ My aunt rattled her spoon and I feared for her patience. ‘Just a day trip you know. We took the boat like you to Calais, for he wanted to show me where the burghers came from, and then we took a bus here to see the Napoleon column – he had just read his biography by Sir Walter Scott – and we found there was no boat back from Boulogne.’
‘That came as a surprise to him, I suppose?’ my aunt asked with an irony which was obvious to me but not to Miss Paterson.
‘Yes,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘He was very apologetic for his lack of forethought. However we found two clean rooms in a little inn up in the high town in the square by the mairie.’
‘Adjoining rooms, I assume,’ my aunt said. I couldn’t understand why she was so severe.
‘Yes,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘because I was frightened.’
‘Of what?’
‘I had never been abroad before, nor had Mr Pulling. I had to translate for both of us.’
‘You knew French?’
‘I had taken a course at the Berlitz.’
‘You mustn’t mind our interest, Miss Paterson,’ I said. ‘You see, I have never heard any details of my father’s death – my mother never spoke of it. She always shut me up when I asked questions. She told me he had died on a business trip, and somehow I always assumed that he had died at Wolverhampton – he often went to Wolverhampton.’
‘When did you meet my brother-in-law?’ Aunt Augusta asked. ‘May I pour you another cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please. A little bit weaker if it would not be a trouble to you. We met on the top of a 49 bus.’
My aunt paused with a lump of sugar in mid air. ‘A 49 bus?’ she repeated.
‘Yes, you see, I had heard him ask for his ticket and when his destination came he was fast asleep, so I woke him up, but it was too late. It was a request stop. He was very grateful and came all the way to Chelsea Town Hall with me. I had a basement room then in Oakley Street and he walked back to the house with me. I remember it all so clearly, so clearly,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘as though it were only yesterday. We found many things in common.’ Her foot gave a kick again.
‘That surprises me,’ my aunt said.
‘Oh how we talked that day!’
‘What about?’
‘Mainly I think about Sir Walter Scott. I knew Marmion and little else, but he knew everything that Sir Walter had ever written. He could quote … He had a wonderful memory for poetry.’ She whispered as though to herself:
‘Where shall the traitor rest,
He the deceiver,
Who could win maiden’s breast,
Ruin and leave her?
In the last battle …’
‘And so it all began,’ my aunt interrupted in a tone of impatience. ‘And the traitor rests in Boulogne.’
Miss Paterson coiled up in her chair and kicked her foot vigorously.
‘Nothing began – in the way you mean,’ she said. ‘In the night I heard him knock on the door and call “Dolly?”’
‘Dolly!’ my aunt repeated with distaste as though Dolly were an unmentionable word.
‘Yes. That was what he called me. My name is Dorothy.’
‘You had locked your door, of course.’
‘I had done no such thing. He was a man I trusted absolutely. I told him to come in. I knew he wouldn’t have woken me for any trivial reason.’
‘Certainly I would not describe his reason as trivial,’ my aunt said, ‘go on,’ but Miss Paterson was far away again and her teeth clicked and clicked. She was gazing at something we could not see, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes. I put my hand on her arm and said, ‘Miss Paterson, don’t talk about it any more if it hurts you.’ I was angry with my aunt: her face looked as hard as a face stamped on a coin.
Miss Paterson looked at me and I could watch her beginning to r
eturn from that long time ago. ‘He came in,’ she said, ‘and he whispered, “Dolly, my darling,” and he fell down on the floor. I got down beside him and put his poor poor head in my lap and he never spoke again. I never knew why he came or what he meant to say to me.’
‘I can guess,’ Aunt Augusta said.
Again Miss Paterson coiled herself back in her chair and struck back. It was a sad sight to see these two old women at loggerheads over something that had happened so many years ago. ‘I hope you are right,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘I know well what you are thinking and I hope you are right. I would have done anything that he asked me without hesitation or regret. And I have never loved another man.’
‘You didn’t have the time to love him, it seems,’ my aunt said.
‘There you are quite wrong. Perhaps because you don’t know what love is. I loved him from the moment he got off the bus at Chelsea Town Hall, and I love him today. When he was dead I did everything for him – everything – there was no one else to help my poor dear – his wife wouldn’t come. There had to be a post-mortem, and she wrote to the authorities to bury him in Boulogne – she didn’t want his poor poor mutilated body. So there was only myself and the concierge …’
‘You have certainly been very constant,’ my aunt said, but the remark did not sound like a compliment.
‘No one else has ever again used that name he called me, Dolly,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘but in the war, when I had to use an alias, I let them call me Poupée.’
‘Why on earth did you have an alias?’
‘They were troubled times,’ Miss Paterson said and she began to look for her gloves.
I resented the way my aunt had behaved to Miss Paterson, and a slow flame of anger still burned in me when we went out to dinner for the second and last time in the deserted station. The gay wave-worn fishing boats lay against the jetty, each with a painted pious phrase across the bridge: ‘Dieu bénit la famille’ and ‘Dieu a bien fait’, and I wondered what comfort the mottoes brought in a strong Channel gale. There was the same smell of oil and fish, the same train from Lyon was awaited by no one, and in the restaurant there was the same disgruntled Englishman with the same companion and the same dog – he made the restaurant seem all the emptier with his presence as though there had never been a different customer.
Travels With My Aunt Page 16