by C. K. Stead
Once I visited Gorbio, one of the mountain villages—not in a dream but with the Scarf family. Luke had explored it before, and took me along the first terrace below the parapet to a rock where, on his earlier visit, he’d seen a red adder sunning itself. There was no adder this time so he took me further up into the village, through the winding cobbled streets too steep and narrow for cars, and into a public square hardly bigger than a large room. In the centre was an oak, bursting into new leaf; three old peasant women dressed in black sat talking on a bench; and there was a small marble plaque let into the wall of one of the cottages. It said that in this square, on a June night in 1944, a resistance fighter (and it gave his name) had been fusillé by the Germans.
For a moment I stood there imagining it, pointing the plaque out to Luke. ‘Oh yeah, he got shot,’ Luke said; and he went into a boyish pantomime of the execution, falling to the ground, gurgling and dying.
After that the Gorbio square figured in my dreams. It was like a stage set. Fabrice was there, interchangeable with (sometimes indistinguishable from, as if they were the same person) ‘Mr Martin’, one or the other shooting or being shot under an immense oak and a big golden moon. There was a strange self-mocking but nonetheless dark atmosphere about all this, as if some part of my mind was trying to scare another part which was refusing to take it entirely seriously. So I was tied to a post while the architect in his officer’s uniform stamped up and down, looking impatiently at his watch and smacking his leg with a swagger stick, and the executioner, unmasking himself, was Fabrice. ‘How beautiful death is,’ he said—‘Comme la mort est belle’—coming towards me and kissing me.
I wrote it all down, hoping something might come of it. Nothing did, of course—or not until now. After two years in the South of France I would go back to journalism, in London first, then as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor—the usual upwardly mobile path, finishing once again, and quite sufficiently grandly, in London. There was to be another marriage of course, and after two children and many years together another divorce, which was really no more than a mutual and almost-amiable severance. She liked London, I had had enough of it. When I retired it was not back to New Zealand but to Spain, where I live now and run a small wine business that keeps me busy and in contact with people. My children—even the one who has chosen to marry a New Zealander and live there—visit me from time to time.
The ghost of Great-uncle Desmond also visits, nudges me sometimes in the night, reminds me of those terminal conversations when he was on the way out. He may even be overseeing these pages as I write.
… All the way to the frontier Fabrice keeping up a continuous rambling lament in three languages. We weren’t going to make it. Carlo was no baby. He was big time. They didn’t turn out the civil guard for a few ounces of hash. When we got to bed that night it would be behind bars on a plank. They wouldn’t worry whether they were going to get a conviction against us. They would put us in the cold store. It would cost Fabrice his job—or, at the very least, more than he could afford in the form of a bribe. And what about Carlo the shit? He’d pulled up his anchor and made a run for it. That was an Italian for you. It didn’t matter what flag they marched under—red, black or tricolour—they were all yellow.
The headlights picked up red flowers and grey-green cacti flashing by among the rocks—an agave, an aloe, a Barbary fig, a pistachio tree.
Up to the autostrada we went, to get us away from the coast road, the obvious route for runaways, and at the toll booth, while I paid out silly numbers of lire and shouted ‘Grazie! Ciao!’ a phone rang, and as we pulled away Katy looking back saw someone running, waving. I put my foot down and they didn’t come after us—but they didn’t need to, there was no way off. They would phone through to the next booth ten kilometres on the French side and there the gendarmes would be waiting.
And that was when Fabrice emerged out of his monologue with a bright idea. On the autoroute where it comes out of the tunnel on the mountain slope above Garavan we would double back on our tracks—bounce the Fiat over the median strip (there was no steel barrier in those days) so we were still on the autoroute but pointing back into Italy. And then we would pull up on the shoulder. Fabrice and Clifton, Katy and Peggy would get out and scramble down the slope to the little road that ran up there close to the autoroute, and down on foot all the way to Garavan, and I would drive back solo and unnoticed into Italy and then return by the coast road, a quiet Kiwi tourist rambling back late after a night of innocent fun.
So it was agreed, and coming out of that tunnel, one or two hundred metres from the exit, I chose my place and swung hard. There was nothing else in sight up there and the Fiat bumped and scraped up and over the centre on to the other ribbon of autoroute. I pulled over on to the gravelled shoulder—too far over. We had all got out and were looking over and picking out where they could make their way down when the Fiat started to slide, to skid, to kick and fly …
That was when I made my dive for the door and got knocked down by it, painfully. I picked myself up, holding my bruised head, to see the car bouncing down there, rolling, and finally crashing and bursting into flames on the lower road …
4. The quarrel
THE GULLS THAT HAD come ashore with the storm and had filled the town with their insistent cries were gone back to sea, or the seafront, and the soundscape was full of swallows again, that elongated twitter as mad and mysterious as the fact that they never landed until it was time to nest, but slept on the wing, and spent their lives in the air, hunting and twittering. What was the use of the twitter if they were only up there to hunt? I still hear it as one of the memory markers of that year—like the faint drains smell of French towns of that period, mixed always with the perfumes of the coast; and the roar of powerful cars, ostentatious, self-assertive, emerging late at night from Italy; or the parallel baby-noisiness of motor-scooters ridden by school kids and students who liked to remove their silencers for greater effect. And then there were the weekend weddings with their barrage of car horns.
There was swimming too, another marker. I swam a lot, sometimes with the Scarf family, sometimes alone—seldom with Javine who seemed to regard it as a Northern fetish, something done by Germans and Swedes so astonished to find water they could get into without pain, and so health-crazed, they came all this way only to get wet. But it was not like the sea-swimming I had done in New Zealand—the water was so clear, and with a pervasive blueness, as if the colour was not just of the surface, and the sky, and the sky reflected on the surface, but was of the water itself, a kind of dye. And then there was the deeper blue when you swam out far enough and couldn’t see the bottom—dark, ‘navy blue’, the colour of oceans. It wasn’t always calm clear and blue like that—there were days of wind, of overcast skies and cloudy-brown shallows, and even (as I’ve recorded) of storms—but more often than not ‘the Med’ matched the brochures and brought the crowds.
Now it was a Saturday and the wedding-horns were blaring. I was sitting at my table, writing. Wasn’t I? Something didn’t seem right. A suspicion hovered that I wasn’t writing at all but sleeping. Sleeping and dreaming. I checked. There was the pale flecked wood of the table top. There was the pen in my hand. There was the lined notebook open before me, the pen travelling neatly over it, the black ink-marks travelling from left to right, then down a line and again from left to right, steadily. There was the blue portable Olivetti, open on the table, a pile of books beside it with red and blue dust-covers. And out there to my left beyond the yellow curtains was the terrace, the heads of palm trees peering over the parapet, the southern light glittering on the sea beyond the town. And—yes, my pen still moved over the page, steadily over, left to right and down, left to right and down.
I was writing about Javine. That was my subject, was it? Was she? Javine? I was making love to her on the terrace of Fabrice’s house below the boulevard de Garavan. The terrace seemed to hang high and absolute over the sea off which that southern light struck more than e
ver dazzlingly.
Javine’s head moved from side to side, at first slowly, then faster. ‘Je … Je … J’a …’ she said, and it came to me as a surprise that her language, even at this moment, should be French—her head thrust sideways now, staring into the great blindness of sun-struck sea, her mouth open.
‘J’arrive,’ was what she said. ‘J’arr-iive!’
Was I inventing? ‘Javine—J’arrive’— it was the verbal echo that bothered me, made me uncertain, made me doubt the dream.
From somewhere above I seemed to hear Fabrice saying, ‘If you don’t believe what you write, who else will believe it?’
And then I was falling from the terrace and was jolted awake. I was sitting at my table as in the dream. There was no pen in my hand. The notebook was open but the page was blank. The typewriter was on the floor. Outside, a cloud had drifted across the sun.
I MET KATY SCARF sometimes in the mornings at the market and we would have coffee together in the Place aux Herbes. I was now, in a mood of self-analysis and squaring up to being ‘a writer’, which seemed to call for self-knowledge, considering seriously my obsession with Katy. Wasn’t she, I asked myself, the lovely full-time mum I’d wanted the wife I’d divorced to be? Wasn’t there a part of me that wanted to be Clifton, with this wife, with these children?
If the sun was shining Katy and I had our coffee out of doors. The two older Scarf kids had started school, but Hermi was always with Katy. Hermi could be bribed into good behaviour with chewing gum. I handed her a stick as Katy and I sat down, and she wandered away across the square, addressing remarks in English, with just the odd experimental word or phrase of French, to anyone who looked her way. When the gum lost its flavour she returned, handed the chewed piece to Katy and hung on to her mother’s knees, looking sideways at me and threatening to break up the conversation. I slipped her another stick and off she went again; but the intervals got shorter until the time came when she accepted the stick but didn’t move. At that point our talk was over for the day.
Katy knew well enough how much I liked her. She didn’t seem to mind but she didn’t encourage me either. She let me tell her about my failed marriage. She probably guessed that with her good looks and her three charming and beautiful children she filled the role I had blindly assigned to Deirdre. She treated me warmly, like a real and welcome friend, but at the same time just faintly mocking. I was someone she was confident she could manage.
Once when I was visiting the Scarfs at their apartment Clifton was in the dining room getting the kids up to the table and Katy called me to the kitchen to help her carry in the meal. She handed me a covered dish and in a moment of I don’t know what—confidence, or more likely it was just experiment—I put my hand over her wrist and stared into her eyes with a look that was probably meant to be challenging and soulful.
‘Take it,’ she said. ‘It’s hot.’
I took it but I didn’t get my fingers around the oven cloth. The dish was very hot. I dropped it and it broke.
I crouched down to gather the potatoes off the tiled parterre. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry sorry sorry-damn-and-fuck.’
She crouched beside me with a new dish. ‘No harm done,’ she said, helping me gather them up.
As we stood again I said, ‘Apologies, Katy. Wrong time, wrong place.’
She was smiling and looked amused. ‘And wrong person,’ she added.
The weather was getting warmer and I called once at their apartment on a Saturday afternoon. The door was open and from the sitting room I could hear a strange murmuring and scuffling, and sometimes a squeak or squeal that had to be Hermi.
I knocked and called, ‘Can I come in?’ No one answered and I called ‘Hullo?’ and ‘Anyone home?’, walking towards a noise that I thought might be someone sweeping the floor. When I got to the door I saw all five Scarfs on the floor. They were rolling about, little Hermi chirping with pleasure, Clifton and Luke emitting low tiger-growls, Katy lying on her back, her eyes closed, alternately smiling and wincing, the middle child, Arlene, climbing on to Clifton’s back and falling off.
It looked like their own private circus and, not wanting to embarrass them, I withdrew before they’d seen me.
A few days later having coffee with Katy I told her what I’d come upon. ‘Why did you go away?’ she said. ‘You should have joined in.’
BUT THEY HAD THEIR troubles too. It was one morning at the Place aux Herbes that I heard about the quarrel. The same afternoon I met Clifton at the bar tabac and he gave me his version of what had happened. It involved Peggy, Ernst Bergen’s American wife. I owed her a visit and of course wanted to hear what she would say about it—so in the end I had the story from all sides. I was still thinking of myself as a writer, and that it was my job to understand and represent—that’s how I would have put it to myself. It was an excuse for what a less pretentious person would call curiosity and gossip.
This, then, briefly, is what it was all about. Ernst Bergen (as I’ve mentioned) drove a Lamborghini. Like a lot of rich men, he was generous to himself and mean with his wife. He had the best car in town, which he parked within sight of the Agence Bienvenue, and Peggy had no car at all. He was always promising to buy her one but would never actually sign the cheque or hand over the cash. Peggy wouldn’t have cared what kind of car so long as it did what cars are supposed to do—moved forward and carried loads; but Ernst thought, or pretended to think, that his wife’s car ought to be a good one. He talked about brands while Peggy dreamed of a voiture d’occasion at 2000 francs. Meanwhile Ernst who (she told everyone) was growing a paunch and needed exercise, never walked. Even in such a compact town, he insisted on being seen everywhere in the big L.
Peggy’s revenge was simple. Three mornings a week she togged herself up in protective clothing, put on a woollen cap and immense goggles, and drove a little power cycle to the market. To see her roaring home with strings of onions and bags of potatoes balanced on either side of that machine made you think again about the pioneering spirit. It perhaps shocked the town, or Ernst said it did, but still he didn’t buy her a car.
Just occasionally, when there had been a row between them about it, Ernst would let her have the Lamborghini. On those days she drove him to his office and then took the car across the border to the market at Ventimiglia. It was on one of those days that she passed Clifton walking from his apartment to the Villa Maria Serena, down by the frontier posts, where the town provided him with a small office. Peggy stopped and offered him a lift. He accepted, and that was the start of the trouble.
Young Luke had set off early for school that morning and taken a big detour down to the Garavan port to take note of the latest fast cars parked there. Back on the promenade and heading for school he saw Bergen’s Lamborghini coming towards him. To Luke it was the most beautiful piece of machinery in France. Of course he was surprised to see his dad riding in it, and that was the first thing he mentioned when he went home for lunch.
Now it just happened that Katy had offered to drive Clifton to Maria Serena that morning and he had said no because he wasn’t getting enough exercise. Katy agreed it was a good thing to walk, but when she stood out on their balcony she’d seen a black cloud out beyond the port, down the coast towards San Remo, growing and approaching. She’d insisted Luke put on his raincoat because he was making that detour to the port. And Clifton should let her take him. It might be one of those quick drenching squalls and if he got caught in it he would be working all morning in wet clothes.
Clifton asked couldn’t she let him make up his own mind whether to walk or go by car? To which she replied she only had his wellbeing in mind; that it suited her fine not to have to drive him; and that he was welcome to inflict colds on himself if he could manage it without making the whole family suffer with him when it happened.
Clifton stamped out slamming the door, the black cloud dispersed somewhere out at sea, the sun came out along the promenade and so did Peggy Bergen in her husband’s Lamborghini. As Clifto
n told it afterwards he accepted the offer of a lift only because it would have seemed unfriendly to explain that, for the sake of his health, he preferred to walk—which Katy countered by saying he hadn’t minded explaining the same point to her. And as for Peggy, she was sure Clifton had been glad to get in with her, and that he hadn’t minded at all when a sudden turn to avoid a double-parked car had thrown them cosily together.
That was where part of the trouble lay. Peggy was bored and she was stirring the pot. It had started the first time she met the Scarfs, the night of the storm when we had entertained the American Navy at the Belle Escale. Peggy liked Clifton and didn’t hide it. I’m not sure what he felt apart from being flattered.
So now Katy was angry. But like most rows this one soon lost sight of its first cause.
MY INTEREST IN THE Scarfs’ quarrel wasn’t just at the level of gossip. They had become part of my inner life, or so I told myself. That evening I had some idea I should maybe visit and stay late because that would prevent them from quarrelling. I even thought I might make myself unpleasant—get drunk, argue with Clifton, or with them both—so they would feel united against me. I hadn’t worked that out exactly either. I just set out thinking I would call on them and see what developed.