by Rose Tremain
“Start the pool if you can. If the weather’s good.”
“Yes. We’ll need some building, though, to house the filter plant.”
“A shed?”
“Yes. Or I thought we could run a driveway by the wall, curve it round to a garage, there.”
“Too expensive, I would have thought. And we don’t really need a garage.”
“Well, handy though. And I’d fit the plant at one end of it. Nice short run from there to the skimmers.”
“Our trouble was we always did things too grandly. Why build a garage?”
“You must conceive grandly! Or not bother.”
“A hut would do.”
“No. Not for me.”
Miriam lightly tugs away her imprisoned hand. “You’ve got to stop dreaming, Larry.”
And she walks away from him slowly towards the house; the mother withdraws her love, slaps the child awake. Larry sighs. His heart is throbbing.
By the time her plane leaves on Monday, he’s ready to feel relief at her going. On Monday morning, he sees the eagle again. It stares at him with an eye so flint-hard, he senses a challenge and he feels his spirit lift. When the eagle takes off, he knows it will return. What he dreads is to see its mate come, the pair. Only in its isolation does the bird inspire him.
At Bordeaux airport, it is still raining. In Miriam’s mind, Oxford is cloudless, the stones yellow in afternoon light. All light has gone from the tarmac as she follows the crowd to the plane. Unseen by her, Larry waves, but she doesn’t turn. As he climbs wearily back into the Granada he thinks of Agnès hurtling south on the Paris train, to be met, at last, by Nadia’s waiting gabble. Travel. Change. Arrival. Loss. Hello Mary-Lou. Goodbye heart.
News of Gervaise’s youngest son, Xavier, comes to Pomerac.
At twenty, Xavier Mallélou kissed a bitter goodbye to his job on the railways, told his boss, in fact, that he could stick this particular job (the laying of sleepers on a new stretch of the Bordeaux-to-Biarritz line) up his grandmother’s cunt, and went to work for a certain Mme. Motte who ran a cheap restaurant for long-distance truckers in Bordeaux. Neither Gervaise nor Mallélou had ever met Mme. Motte, nor seen the small premises where she offered a five-course set meal (soup, cold hors d’oeuvres, hot dish, cheese, sweet) for thirty-five francs, but Xavier had written one letter to say he had some responsibility in this new work. He wasn’t just waiting tables: he was negotiating with a new wine supplier and was “getting to know properly” the regular customers. He’d also convinced Mme. Motte to get little cards printed with the name and address and the price of the menu on them. Business was brisk. On winter days, he was warm by the chip-fryer instead of freezing to death on that bitch of a line. Mallélou shrugged, remembering the signal box and the coffee and the thighs of the ashtray. He didn’t blame his son for wanting to be warm, but he considered the railways to be “a fair master”, whereas a widow running a café, what kind of boss was this for a young man? Klaus reassured him. He’d worked for a woman once, learning the bread business. They could treat you fair. Yet Mallélou felt disappointed in Xavier. He wrote to his son and advised him never to trust Mme. Motte and never to do her favours, sexual or otherwise.
Now a letter comes from the police. Xavier is accused of stealing seventeen cases of wine, and three hundredweight of potatoes from Mme. Motte over a period of six and a half months. Bail has been set at eight thousand francs. The accused is being held in custody until this sum has been raised. The accused has no visible means of support.
Gervaise weeps. That wasteland, that no-man’s-land, poisoned the heads of her sons. Everything they touched was foul. They played football with old cans, they made swings with worn tyres, they fished in a dead river. And the language. That language of the hard, mucky wasteland boys. Fuck and suck. Cunt. Arseholes. Nigger-lovers. Kill the Socialists. She weeps for all of that which was, or should have been, their childhood and which, in its own bitter words, fucked them.
She goes up to the Maréchal’s house. The mist and damp are still heavy on the village. The Maréchal sits by his range with a half-made basket on his knee. The pipe, barely alight in his mouth, is shiny with spittle. When he sees Gervaise, his owl’s eyes take fire and he holds out his arms to her. She stoops and plants a little gobble of a kiss on each of his papery cheeks, then unwraps her gift to him, a roasted guineafowl. He looks at it in surprise, grabs the pipe out of his mouth.
“It’s not a Feast Day, Gervaise.”
“No. She needed killing, that one. She was a screecher.”
“Very kind of you. Very kind . . .”
Gervaise sits opposite the Maréchal. She reaches out and touches his knee.
“I’ve not just come with the bird. I’ve come with a favour to ask.”
“Good. You ask, Gervaise.”
“My Xavier’s in trouble. I’m ashamed. And sad. I’m so sad for him.”
“Well, a child is heartbreak. I told you, Gervaise . . .”
“Yes, you told me.”
“My children are dead. I’ve outlived them, eh?”
“I know.”
“Outlive your children! You don’t imagine that.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you’ll outlive your sons. With your strength, Gervaise . . .”
“Who can say. I think people die younger in the cities.”
“They like the city?”
“Yes, they say they do. They got used to it when they were small.”
“I’ll eat that bird, some of it, this evening.”
“Yes. You enjoy it.”
The Maréchal eats, sleeps, lives in one room now. Upstairs, the old bedrooms are shuttered. Down here, he shuffles between the range and the small table and a tumbled, smelly cot. Outside, on the other side of the wall is a wash-house and a damp privy. On winter nights he pisses in a china pot rather than endure the cold. He has a saying: “Winter’s got me licked, where many women failed.” This one room hugs him and keeps him alive.
“Xavier’s in prison, Maréchal.”
“Xavier?”
“Yes.”
The Maréchal puts his pipe back in his mouth, sucks on the embers. To him prison is wartime. Eating your own misery and loss, living on these until it was over. Like being kept alive on vomit. He’s not sure how he survived it. He thinks part of his brain died, to save the rest.
“Where?”
“Bordeaux.”
“You need the bail money.”
“We have two thousand put away and Klaus has offered us three thousand. We need another three thousand. As a loan of course, Maréchal.”
The Maréchal gently lifts the basket off his knee. He remembers the day Gervaise was born. He got drunk with her father and they walked back from Ste. Catherine wearing their trousers round their necks like scarves. After the two sons, the birth of a girl was a quiet miracle. And thank God for that stupefying, joyful night. Thank God for that baby, Gervaise.
He kneels down and from under his bed tugs a canvas bag, like an army kit bag. He leans on it for a moment, then pushes it towards Gervaise.
“You know the old tin where I used to keep maggots, in that time of the pike fishing?”
She knows the tin. Once, when she was a girl, it had a yellow and red label on it saying Biscuits Chérisy Fils Paris. She didn’t know where or how the Maréchal had come by these delicacies, but gradually the label faded and peeled off, the tin grew dull and rusty and smelled of river slime. Now she holds it in her lap and it feels light. It’s rusty, but clean. No trace of the maggot smell.
“You take out what you need.”
It’s not the first time. She’s borrowed from the Maréchal before. She pays him back slowly, over months and months. The hens and vegetables she brings are the interest still owing.
She takes out three thousand francs and folds the money in the crease of her small breasts. She closes the tin and pushes it back into the bag, where it’s padded out with ancient bits of clothing, some the Maréchal’s, some
his dead wife’s and some, though he’s forgotten what’s what, belonging to his dead sons.
Gervaise’s heart lifts. Tomorrow Mallélou will go to Bordeaux. By Wednesday Xavier must be released. And in this case the Judge must be lenient – a young man too big for his boots, a first offence . . .
“He didn’t kill, did he?”
“No, Maréchal.”
“Your boys wouldn’t kill, would they?”
She shakes her head, her lips tight. Mother-fuckers. Fagsuckers. Jewish shit. Kill the Commies. She feels tears start.
“No. I don’t think they would.”
“Then it’s all right. You take the money. And don’t you worry about it.”
“He robbed a woman.”
“Well. Jewels, was it?”
“No. Wine and potatoes.”
The Maréchal’s face creases into a thousand laughter lines. “Potatoes! Potatoes! You tell him, just you tell him that’s a waste of time. We’ve got plenty of potatoes here, eh Gervaise?”
Yes. Gervaise touches her eye, where the tears twitch. Yes. It’s pathetic. Her sons are pathetic. Not like she wanted them to be. It’s Mallélou’s fault. It must be. In that sooty, overheated signal hut his blood and his semen grew too stale and hot.
Mallélou doesn’t like it when Gervaise borrows from the Maréchal. In the days when he worked on the railways, he never borrowed and he has tried to teach his sons: never owe anyone. It humiliates him, in particular, to take money from a man who doesn’t like him, who gives it to Gervaise because he’s seen and known more of her life than anyone else. He’s convinced himself that the Maréchal actually saw Gervaise born, was actually there, gawping at the mother’s spread fanny when her little peasant head came pushing out. It’s become the thing he resents most about the old man, this and the way he treats Klaus with contempt. Who does the old bugger think he is? Some tribal chief? Mallélou likes modern hierarchies, hates primitive ones.
So when Gervaise comes back with the three thousand francs, he quashes a momentary fear that the Maréchal wouldn’t give it to her this time, and snatches it from her breasts without a word. Watching this, Klaus feels angry but says nothing.
Hervé Prière compares the touch and scent of his niece, Agnès, to the touch and scent of falling blossom. Everything he notices about her is light, gentle. Her voice, her straight shiny hair, her feet. She plays the Bechstein with a touch so light, she turns concertos to water music. “Play Clair de Lune”, Hervé asks.
And this piece of music enters his willowy soul and moves it. He sees rivers and minnows and stars. His shoulders relax. His restless fingers are still. If he could only hear this music in his dreams, instead of the things he does hear . . .
She’s been there three days. She drives his car and he laughs: “You look like a kid behind the wheel of that car.” She’s twenty. Small like her mother and sister, with the mother’s English peachy skin. Her eyes are green, flecked with brown. She wears pale, soft clothes – little rabbity jerseys, grey skirts – and flat bright buds of shoes. She’s neat in all her ways. When she cooks, she dabs and wipes as she goes. And she likes food to look pretty and neat. Under the baked egg dishes she fans gold maple leaves, she tosses mint flowers onto the potatoes, she arranges cheese on a criss-cross of washed twigs. Hervé is enchanted, captive to these careful ways. Then he starts to wonder about her. He wonders why, at twenty, she gives these things such attention. Like the blossom she reminded him of, falling from the old walled trees of his youth, she seems both old fashioned and somehow lacking in substance.
After dinner, when she’s washed the plates and dishes, and put everything away, she arrives in the sitting room with a sad smile. This sadness, there now and then in her playing, is what moves him in her. Mourning becomes her. She doesn’t see it. He understands why the music school rejected her. She doesn’t. If you’d found that – that grave bit of you – and shown it, they would have accepted you. She may grow old not knowing, not really knowing this.
She mentions a boy called Luc. Her own age. Doing his two years in the army. She thinks they’ll marry when he comes out. She shows a photograph: a smiling, thin-faced young man. Shiny buttons. Hervé nods, approves. “Do you love him, Agnès?”
“Yes.”
“Really love him?”
“We write every week. He’s stationed at Lyon.”
“Could you die for him?”
“No, Uncle Hervé. I don’t want to die. I think, its silly to die for other people. I think it’s a silly question.”
“Do you? Yes, you’re probably right.”
But he has his answer: she doesn’t feel love. What she may never discover, however, is that she doesn’t feel it, letting the substitute for ever – mercifully? – obscure the thing. He hands her back the photograph. He feels both jealous of and sorry for this boy, Luc. He remembers what it is to be twenty and in the army and writing letters to a girl. The girl he wrote to was called Denise. She had spotty twin brothers and an obese mother and he dreaded she would become ugly like them. In his letters, he warned her not to eat chocolate cakes or drink alcohol. All his life, he has feared the blemishes women acquire. He couldn’t have married Denise and watched her grow old. He preferred to remember her as she was, with unlined satin skin and long straight eyelashes like brushes. He knows this fastidiousness has prevented him from feeling the kind of passion which, these days, is expressed in close-ups of pushing sweating limbs in the cinema. He knows his old age will probably be lonely, but better this than sleep with the bad breath of some loyal decaying woman, better this than go mad with the gross imperfections of the domestic world, like poor old Claude.
On the morning of Friday, Agnès’s fifth day at Hervé’s house, Larry’s fifth day without Miriam, the Granada bounds up Hervé’s drive, splattering gravel, and stops at Agnès’s feet. The mist has gone and the sky is cloudless. Agnès has been picking flowers for the drawing room, late roses and Michaelmas daisies. Walking sedately to the front door with her bouquet, she looks like a bridesmaid in rehearsal for a smart wedding. When the car surprises her, she stops absolutely still, as if at some appointed station of the marriage procession, and stares sweetly at Larry. He tugs on the handbrake, his mouth dry. Though he has imagined the wet footprint of Agnès by his pool, he has never clearly enough imagined the girl. She’s wearing a mauve angora jersey the colour of the daisies, her neck and face above this are pale in the bright September light; her feet, in brown pumps, stand neatly together. Larry’s mind frames this picture of her, then he looks away, as if from a snapshot of loved people long dead. He fusses with the car interior, closing the ashtray, winding up the window, extracting the keys from the ignition. Agnès walks on into the house, carrying her flowers. Larry gets out of the Granada and stares at the place where she stood a moment ago. He remembers he’s come with some apology to Hervé, but can’t think now what it might be. Unless it’s to apologise for being there at all, which feels right. He thinks of Miriam in Leni’s Oxford house. Oddly, the picture he makes of these two older women is comforting. He doesn’t know why. He reminds himself to telephone Miriam from Nadia’s flat.
Hervé is in the bureau as usual. His legs are still in plaster, but crutches are now propped against the mantelpiece.
“She’s making me walk, Larry.”
“Well, it’s time you did. You’re wearing your trousers out on the floor.”
“Miriam gone? You never brought me a watercolour.”
This was it. This was the apology. Larry smiles with relief.
“No. I asked her, Harve. In the upset about Leni, she forgot. There are one or two hanging in the house. You could have one of these.”
“But they’re not recent?”
“No.”
“Agnès loves flowers. Bright colours.”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“Oh you saw her. Well I shall call her and introduce you to her.”
“No. Don’t disturb her. I expect she’s busy arranging those flowers.�
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“But you must meet her. Stay to lunch. She’s making a courgette soufflé.”
“My word, Harve . . .”
“Yes.” Then a whisper: “She’s an extraordinary girl, Larry. She knows haute cuisine like a middle-aged chatelaine and she never seems to tire of the little domestic things: arranging this, shining that. I thought young people weren’t meant to be like that any more. I don’t know what’s got into her.”
Arranging this. Shining that. Exquisite. A daughter of mine would have been that kind of person, Larry decides. The extreme opposite of Thomas with his obscene fabrications. Everything quiet and tidy and clean.
Then she comes in. She carries the flowers that were meant for the drawing room and sets them down on the balustrade table. In shadow now, the regimental names lie bedded in the box lid, just within reach of Hervé’s fingers. He holds one hand a few inches above the box (a constant precaution) and with the other gestures Agnès round to the fireplace where she stands, demure and formal, in front of Larry.
“My niece, Agnès Prière. Agnès, this is my good friend, Larry Kendal, who is English. Larry’s wife is the very fine artist I was telling you about.”
“Oh yes. Good morning.”
She holds out a hand that is still the firm, plump hand of a child. Larry takes it and presses it to his lips in the most un-English gesture he has ever made. It smells of the Michaelmas daisies, an almost bitter smell.
“Enchanté, Mademoiselle.”
Ridiculous. He sees the little tableau and himself in it as profoundly ridiculous, so he straightens up immediately from the kiss and lets go of the hand.
“Do you come on holiday to France, Mr. Kendal?”