by Rose Tremain
This all sounds very high-handed, very preposterous. Forgive me for this. I find it hard to express what I feel.
Now for some news: Thomas was here for a while, but can’t leave the business for long. He seems happy in his life and I think he may get married to Perdita. I love him deeply, the more because he is such fun to be with these days.
Leni is still in hospital after breaking her ankle on the landing. They’re going to keep her there till she can walk with crutches. In herself, she seems much better. I don’t know if this is some lull before the real storm, or if she has recovered. It’s lovely and peaceful here without her, anyway! I’ve turned David’s attic into a studio and sleep in my old room, the little room next to Leni’s. Nothing disturbs me in these two places.
It’s getting very cold here in Oxford. The students are all wrapped up in their scarves. I hate the thought of winter and Christmas in particular. I wish the seasons, along with everything else, would stop changing.
With my loving thoughts.
Miriam
The sadness Larry feels after reading this letter has perhaps less to do with Miriam’s delayed return (he predicted this, after all) than with his awareness that his wife – in all her actions – from the simple choosing of furnishing or clothes through to her loving forgiveness of unfaithfulness and failure – has tended to be right and admirable, whereas he has tended to be clumsy and base. Must she be wise till they die? Will he, dying before her, croak out yet one more, yet one last apology before putting her to the inconvenience and expense of burying him at Ste. Catherine? Briefly, he envies men who have married women in whom, beauty aside or notwithstanding, there’s nothing to admire. All these years, he’s tried to live up to Miriam and still he’s found wanting. He’s nearer than he’s ever been to understanding Harve’s misogamy. Only his armoured ancestors reproach Harve with their clunking weight of bravery and renown. For the rest, he is what he is – himself. No one reproaches him. No one saves him from his plummet down the stairs. He’s the doctor after all and heals himself.
Larry folds the letter and puts it tidily back into its envelope. He then sticks the envelope among the books, just shoving it in where he will forget it. Let Miriam be right once more. Let her profit from her time without him. But she mustn’t imagine, because she’s chosen to set him aside, that he’ll cease to exist.
On this windy day, with the last chestnut leaves flying, Xavier Mallélou arrives in Pomerac. He gets a lift from the Thiviers train as far as Ste. Catherine. He doesn’t stop to glance at the graves or at the children in the schoolyard where he learned clapping songs and the spongy feel of girls’ thighs under their overalls and the art of swopping and dodging and lying. He walks the familiar walk along the Ste. Catherine road, past the sewage plant, past fields of the de la Brosse vines, past the sandy track that once led to the pike river and up the stony road to Pomerac on its hill.
He carries a plastic suitcase, bound with string like a parcel. He feels shame for this broken case and shame for this melancholy, droop-shouldered self sidling home to his mother. In the wind slapping his face, he feels like crying. He’s full of trouble. The dogs sit and bark at him as he comes into Pomerac. He hurries past the Maréchal’s door, dreading the old man’s stare: Xavier? Is it? What’s happened to you, boy? He’s in the lane leading to the cowshed, the lane which skirts Larry’s boundary. He turns a blank face to the yellow crater and the vast heaps of mud and imagines fretfully a tall building going up and dwarfing Gervaise’s house. Fear for his unannounced homecoming mixes with a more cruel fear of unexpected change. In Xavier’s mind, not one stone is turned, not one bough is felled in Pomerac except in obedience to the seasons. In the city, businesses opened, prospered, fell back, went bankrupt, closed. Signs came and went. Everything moved, shifted, altered, stopped and started, as if pushed by perpetual tides. But here in Pomerac you heard the quiet of the land. Even dawn and dusk came slowly. Light or darkness didn’t overtake you. You had time to cross the field and close the gate and take off your boots after the moon was up . . .
Xavier is resting the broken suitcase, and still staring at a row of white lengths of pipe stacked by the pit, when Gervaise comes out of the milking barn, pushing a handcart of muck, and sees her son. What she sees first are his troubled eyes. She runs in her torn working coat calling, calling his name, her fists tight with her protecting love, and flings her hard chest against him and circles him with her grateful arms. “Xavier! Xavier! Oh this is something! This is something!”
He can smell the farm on her, the milk, the cowshit, the earth. From a perfume counter he’s brought her toilet-water and soap, to make her smell like a woman. He chokes with love for her. So brave she seems in her headscarf and rubber boots. He knows in that instant that he and his brother, Philippe, have none of this bravery. Gervaise has always humbled him and here was his principal reason for escaping her and her timeless landscape. Though he towers over her, he feels small.
She doesn’t ask why he’s come. She pulls back and stares at him. Under his eye is a blemish of raw skin, an eczema he rubs and fidgets with. She touches this sore place and he winces.
“Don’t touch it, Maman.”
“You’re not ill, Xavier?”
“No.”
“You’re skinny. Mallélou said you were skinny.”
“Well, I used to eat okay, but now . . .”
“I’ll take care of you.”
“It’s cold . . .”
She feels him shivering. She feels the sobbing he keeps buried in his ribcage. Her boy. Her baby. Beautiful from the day they tugged him from her.
“Oh Xavier . . .”
“It’s cold, eh, Maman?”
“Well, it’s November.”
“I remembered your birthday. I got something . . .”
“Come in and get warm. It’s warm by the fire. Then we’ll see to a room.”
She picks up the tied-together suitcase. Where they turn in to the yard the wind drops suddenly and the noisy hens and guineafowl peck as idly as on a June morning. Xavier stares. In their midst, plumper even than the birds, is a bright-fleshed, golden-haired man he has never seen. In his huge hands is a basket of eggs and his body is draped in a rain-cape. He sees Gervaise and Xavier and smiles. All maliciousness seems absent from his face. Behind him, Xavier senses his mother hesitate before she tells him quietly, “This is Klaus, Xavier. Klaus lives with us now.”
Immediately, Xavier’s mind accuses this man of beginning, next door, the building that will blot out this farm. When he holds a hand out to shake his, his look is uneasy.
The little room Xavier had here as a boy is used by Mallélou now. On one of its walls is a faded poster of Jean-Claude Killy, the skier, put up by Xavier when, in the hot snows of adolescence, he had dreams of mountains and fame. Mallélou likes the poster, yellowy though it is. It reminds him not only of his son but of the grace and daring the human body is capable of expressing in certain seasons of his mind. He sleeps facing it, his back to the room, his back to the barnyard noises.
It is here, still sleeping, that Mallélou is to be found on the morning of his son’s arrival. Xavier shivers by the stove downstairs while Gervaise boils milk for coffee. She remembers Mallélou snoring up there with his light burning and feels ashamed that Xavier should discover his father like this. “Your father’s not well,” she tells him. “So I let him sleep these mornings. He’s not well at all.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He won’t say.”
“So he’s skiving. As usual.”
“No, no.”
“Letting you do all the work.”
“I like the work. You know that.”
“But Papa should help you.”
“He does what he can. He’s put in a new fence on the top meadow since the summer.”
“What’s that mess next door, Maman?”
“What mess?” Gervaise is uncritical of Larry’s excavations. She can see in her mind only the finis
hed St. Front pool.
“What are they doing? Building a tower block?”
“A tower block?”
“Or what?”
“Where?”
“In Lemoine’s house.”
“Ah. Lemoine’s long gone, you know. The house was sold to some English people.”
“Lemoine’s dead?”
“No. Put away. He was put away.”
Change. Xavier huddles near the stove where Gervaise watches the milk. Change has crept here, right to his mother’s frayed hem. Xavier feels so sickly and troubled, he knows his whole body is shaking. Gervaise, moving quietly, trying not to be agitated, makes a bowl of milky coffee and puts this gently into Xavier’s hands.
“I’d like a drop of cognac in it, Maman.”
“I don’t keep cognac, Xavier. Only eau de vie.”
“Eau de vie, then.”
They sit at the table in the kitchen where Gervaise had her birthday feast. Outside, Klaus leaves his basket of eggs by the door and walks away, up to the barn, where he continues the shovelling and hauling of manure begun by Gervaise. Upstairs, Mallélou sleeps on, dreams of the railways, never imagines his son has come home.
“I feel a failure, Maman.”
“Get away. You did a stupid thing, that’s all.”
“I won’t last in prison. I’ll be one of the ones who can’t take it.”
“Who says it’ll come to prison?”
“It will. Or a fine we can’t pay.”
“We’ll pay.”
“What with? The Maréchal’s savings?”
Gervaise feels herself blushing. Stupid, she thinks, to blush when no one knows better than Xavier the debts she owes to the old man. Yet, at almost fifty, she’s a proud woman. She doesn’t like to imagine a debt so large it can never be repaid.
“We’ll find a way.”
He’s glad to be with her. He’s always felt pride in belonging to her. From the broken suitcase he tugs out the toilet-water and the soap, gift-wrapped by the shop, and gives them to her – a present from his city life. She smiles and thanks him, but they distress her. In the days of the signal hut, Mallélou would often come home reeking of this same scent. In her mind, it’s the smell of city-death.
“Put some on, Maman.”
“What now? In these clothes?”
“Yes. Why not.”
“No, no.”
“Why not?”
“I’d like to save it.”
“Save it what for?”
She doesn’t know. Some ceremony perhaps. A funeral. Mallélou’s funeral.
“I’ll just save it.”
At her table, drinking the good coffee, Xavier is calmed. He thinks of the room he’s left behind in Bordeaux, his few possessions there, and knows he was right to leave it. He was going mad in there while his neighbours, two students his own age, tormented him with their laughter, with their serious music and with their tender ways. He felt too melancholy even to drink with his friends. The lives of those students on the other side of his wall were full of hope and his own was devoid of it. At night he’d hear them talking about the books they were reading and feel astonished that they could do this in and out of their love-making which was like some novel, full of expressions of fidelity and joy. He wanted to thump the wall to shut them up. One night he brought a whore to his room and screamed at her to keep the students awake. Then, lying by her side, her old puckered mouth snoring, he felt a sorrow for himself so profound he began to cry. He sensed the students listening in silence – holding tight to each other probably – to his pathetic sobbing and found himself wishing they’d come and comfort him. For the first time in his life he longed to have a wife, some woman he could admire, some clean girl with a mind. Women fell for him, that had never been a problem. Corinne, the brunette who worked in a babyshop opposite Mme. Motte’s restaurant was dying of love for him, so she said, literally dying of it. But he was indifferent to her. Not even flattered. Indifferent to them all. Perhaps the woman did not exist who could move him.
He was having perpetual nightmares of the prison, and waking tired, as if he’d really been there in his sleep. He kept imagining himself old and prison-tainted, an old lag, all his good looks gone for ever. Why had he bothered to steal wine and potatoes? Even his mates laughed at the potatoes. He was getting stupid like his father. He began searching for a new job. He applied for posts as a biscuit packer, a florist’s van driver, a station newspaper kiosk attendant, and a demonstrator of electrical goods. He got none of them. For the demonstrator’s job he was expected to have Bac Part II – just to switch on switches, plug in hoses, assemble food processors . . .
His money was low and he saw the winter coming. Already his room was cold. The students started to discuss Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution. Xavier, unaware that there had ever been an English revolution, lay buried in misery like a dog and began to long for the comfort of his mother.
One morning, he knocked on the students’ door. They were pale, dark-eyed people who slightly resembled each other. Xavier told them they could use his room over the winter – “If you have a colleague to put up, or if you want to give a party” – and asked them only to take care of his things. “Where are you going?” they asked, and Xavier looked blank, unprepared for this question, “I have a friend . . .” he stammered and waved his hand hopelessly, “I have a friend . . .”
On the train to Thiviers, he imagined the students going through his magazines, and saying: “Look what he reads. He’s thick. Look at this muck he buys.” He envied his brother Philippe his life in Paris. His job wasn’t much – he worked for a cigarette company – but he’d stayed right with the law, he was engaged to the daughter of a chemist, there was hope in his future. It was freezing in the train. When Thiviers station came he didn’t remember it and almost let it go by. Then he got out and felt the bellowing of the wind in the brilliant air. The chestnut leaves and the oak leaves were streaming off. Everything was flying and thudding and whooshing in the huge wind. Well, he thought, let it carry me off. Let it blow me up to hell.
But now the wind’s settled, and, hugging his bowl, he’s calm. Loving this frightened child, glad to be his protector, Gervaise nevertheless begins to wonder how the presence of her son in her house may alter the ways and affections of her lover.
The only resident of Pomerac to have noticed the arrival of Xavier Mallélou is Nadia. Since the evening of the snotty gulashnova, she’s spent a lot of time standing at her window rehearsing what she’ll say to Hervé when he arrives – as she’s certain he will – to scold her for falling in love with him. As she rehearses, she strains anxiously for the sight of his car, even pressing her cheek against the glass. It’s with her face at this peculiar angle that she sights the stranger with his sullen head and his clapped-out suitcase and recognises in this sad-seeming person Gervaise’s son.
With her eye for beauty, her worshipping of straight-limbed, elegant men, Nadia had long ago been fascinated by Xavier Mallélou. His brother Philippe was an ordinary-looking boy, wiry like Gervaise, untidy like Mallélou, but Xavier was different, a changeling, an imposter, illegitimate surely, with the body of a god.
She knows the saga of Mme. Motte and the stolen wine. All was explained to an impatient-sounding lawyer over her telephone. She didn’t expect Xavier to turn up in Pomerac. She stares at him, stares with a feeling of hope she can’t account for. If forced to express it, she might simply say that with Xavier’s arrival, life in Pomerac – she can’t say how or why or when – will be subtly altered. She trusts him to alter it. Her heart cheers him home like a runner.
Larry, arriving soon afterwards at her flat to tell her about the letter from Miriam, is informed immediately. “Come up, Larry. You know that Mallélou boy is arriving, my dear?”
Larry closes Nadia’s door and sits down on her colourful sofa.
“The one who got into trouble?”
“Yes. And he looks you know like the dog coming ho
me, the tail under the legs.”
“You mean he’s arrived?”
“Oh yes. Just one hour ago. I see him come up the hill so bent, you know, like that Prodigal Son. You learn that bloody story? The fatted-up cow is given to this one who is away and fucking, and the good brother who is minding the sheep is getting Matzo balls or what. When I learn this paraphrase I think my God this Christian religion is like Claude sometimes, round its rocker! Anyway, you want tea, my darling?”
Larry laughs, then on impulse says: “Let’s visit Claude. I’ll come with you. Let’s go to Calais or wherever he is and make sure he’s all right.”
Nadia stops her preparation of tea and stares at Larry over the Japanese screen. “You don’t know what you say, Larry. There’s no sense to Claude. And to see this notty man breaks my heart.”
“But he must wonder why you never come, Nadia.”
“No, I don’t think. He forgets me. If I come, he’s saying who is this woman?”
“You don’t know that. Perhaps he’s very lonely and missing you.”
“Oh no, Larry! Don’t talk! My heart is breaking enough . . .”
“But you can’t leave Claude there for ever and never visit him.”
“So, you reproach?”
“No. I’m not scolding you. I’m just thinking how it might be for him. It might make him very happy to see you, Nadia.”
“Well I don’t know if I could do this. We Poles, we know of the institution, you know. We know what is liberty and what is the trouble of the soul in prison. And what am I remembering if I see my Claude? Oh my God I am remembering how he was strong and takes me to an open-air restaurant in the Bois and I’m crying for what is gone. So how is this help Claude, my dear? You tell.”