by Rose Tremain
“Ever?”
“I don’t know about ever. She won’t go back yet. Whether she goes back eventually is up to you.”
“I’d like to marry her,” says Dr. O. and swallows, as if this admission chokes him.
“Of course you would,” says Leni, “but I can’t imagine why you thought it’d be easy. Perhaps you don’t understand women, Oz?”
“No, I don’t,” says Dr. O. “I’ve never needed to till now.”
Leni looks at him sadly. Takes away her butterfly hand. She’s made it clear, I’m on your side, but more for him she can’t do. She feels an arm on her shoulder and turns to see Gary, very splendid tonight in a magenta shirt, smiling down at her.
“Okay, Mother sweet?”
“Yes, Gary. Where are you off to, darling, you look so wonderful.”
“Oh, you know. Out.”
“Is Gabriel here?”
“No, alas. He wasn’t able.”
“But you’re meeting him later on?”
“Yes. After his rehearsal.”
“You know Oz of course.”
Gary and Dr. O. look up and each nods an awkward greeting. They’re like two different species, Leni notes with a secret smile. If only Oz could acquire some of Gary’s dazzle . . .
“I met your colleague on Wednesday,” Gary says to Dr. O. “By the river.”
“My colleague?”
“Yes. Miss Atwood. She and I seem to enjoy the same bit of river.”
Dr. O. looks petrified, as if news of a rail disaster or a tenement fire had suddenly reached him.
“Ah,” he says. “Yes. Yes, yes.”
He didn’t know Bernice took herself off to the river. The river and Bernice seem quite alien to each other and immediately he’s frightened for her. His confused and embattled mind dresses her in Ophelia’s white skirts: Ophelia gathering her rue.
On this same evening, as the red “sold” stickers go up on Miriam’s watercolours of Pomerac, Mme. de la Brosse arrives in her house and her maid, Lisette, draws the heavy, timeworn drapes of the salon across the winter night.
“I’m afraid it’s very cold, Madame.”
“Yes. I’ll have my supper in here, by the fire.”
She sits in the armchair Anatole used to favour, still wearing her Paris suit and a silk scarf at her neck. They’re burning applewood this year – one of the old, tired orchards cut down at last.
“Shall we replant, Madame?” her manager had asked, and she’d hesitated. Her heart isn’t in this land any more. She doesn’t want to spend money on hundreds of new young trees which will all outlast her. Better to redecorate the bedroom of her Paris flat, plant “orchards” there, where at least she’ll see them. So she remains undecided. The old trees are torn out and some of them saved and stacked for burning, but the field where they grew is left to seed itself with thistles.
When she looks round at the room, lit with yellowy light from the fire and from two table lamps in the shape of cannons, she feels weary with its familiarity and tired in its shabbiness. She remembers her father-in-law in it, pouring port from his boxed decanters, his leather boots creaking, his slicked hair smelling of almond oil. He loved Pomerac. He planted the trees she’s just cut down. He was an expert in soil analysis and worked hard to improve his vineyards. His military mind drilled the land into obedience. Now she lets it go. The morale of her manager is low and production is down, year after year. She stares at the dancing fire and decides, I’ve got to be rid of it.
Lisette puts up a gate-legged table in front of Madame’s armchair and lays it with the heavy old de la Brosse knives and forks and beige lace mats for her plate and glass. Outside, the stumps of limes stand guard on a clear, star-laden night and frost glimmers in the furrows of the Pomerac lanes. Douce Nuit. Sainte Nuit. With the arrival of Mme. de la Brosse, Christmas isn’t far off. The children are dreaming of pencil boxes, the wooden swivel kind their parents told them they once got. Gervaise is sizing up her geese, deciding which one to fatten. And the maid, Lisette, can’t refrain from asking: “We’re giving wine after midnight mass as usual, Madame?” Because she senses in Mme. de la Brosse her weariness of the place. I’m a Parisian now, say her clothes, her subdued smile, her lack of appetite for the big meal Lisette has prepared.
“Wine at Christmas?” says Mme. de la Brosse, “Yes I suppose it’ll be expected. I suppose we must carry on the tradition.” But then she thinks, this will have to be the last year. I can’t keep on and on. In the spring, I’ll sell.
Few people write to her at the Pomerac house. Invoices have come, for gutters repaired, from the stonemason who has rebuilt a section of the garden wall. Among these is an invitation from Hervé Prière to a dinner party, enclosing a note which explains: I’m spending three months of the winter in Florida – a retirement present I have looked forward to for some time. So this is a farewell dinner. Please do accept. And she thinks with envy of Hervé getting out of an aeroplane onto warm tarmac and feeling in the hot wind no trace of winter. The cycle of her year, with these lonely visits to this once-fine, once-grand house has begun to irritate her. Better far to abandon it and spend the cold months travelling. Better to see London and New York with their streets lit up and their hotels warm than the hard, simple, earth-reared, toil-blinded faces of the people of Pomerac.
Lisette takes away her half-eaten meal and brings her coffee in a silver pot. She sits back and stares into the burning apple logs. That’s it, she thinks. It’s decided. Years of obedience to Anatole’s memory fall away. She lights a cigarette and feels herself relax. At least in that high bed upstairs she will sleep well.
“Goodnight, Madame,” says Lisette at the door and Mme. de las Brosse turns in the tall chair and smiles at her maid. Lisette’s eyes are bright and nervous when she says: “Oh I forgot to tell you, Madame. We have something new in Pomerac since your last visit.”
Mme. de la Brosse inserts her cigarette into her Dupont holder and inquires without any interest: “Something new?”
“Yes,” says Lisette, “down at the English house. A swimming pool.”
“A swimming pool?”
“Yes. Quite a few of the village people are helping to build it.”
How strange, she thinks. Just when I’m giving it up, someone is starting something here, someone is building. How perverse. And a pool, mon dieu. A desecration. A vulgarity.
“Was permission granted from the Mairie for the pool?”
“I don’t know, Madame.”
“You don’t know? Well we must find out. Nothing can be built here without permission. Good night, Lisette.”
Dismissed, the maid retreats into the big, draughty kitchen and begins to wash up the crockery. She’s just old enough to remember a time when five-course banquets were prepared here and thirty bottles of wine were drunk in one night.
While Mme. de la Brosse lies and dreams of a life reduced and simplified to the small, pleasant trafficking she does to and from the Place St. Sulpice, the Maréchal wakes in the frosty quiet and finds on his lips the words: So it’s here, then. His head is burning hot. He moves it and sees at the window the impish faces of his sons, grinning and laughing and moving their spread hands backwards and forwards like shoe-shufflers, a little cheeky dance. They’re eight or nine. They wear their lives like bobble hats, easily, jauntily. The Maréchal stares. “You don’t take me in,” he says to his children, “you don’t convince me.” So they back off, still grinning and showing their pink palms. “What boys!” he mutters into his damp pillow and curses the need these ghosts have woken in him to pee. Though his head burns, his body in its ancient bedding feels cold and weak. Without lighting his lamp, he leans over and reaches for the chipped china pot he keeps under his cot and slides it out. He looks at it. For years and years Eulalie used to hitch up her pinch-pleated nightgowns and settle down on this potty like a nesting hen. So sweet and white. So modest in her little performance. She never let you see her yellow streams. He crawls out of the bed, and the pyjamas
smelling of earth, smelling of his damp habitation, fall round his knees and he kneels in front of the pot as if before his Maker, with his pale legs shivering and his hands cupping what he calls these days “my old bunch of figs”. A luminous fat half-moon etches the pot. As he pees, he silently admires: I’m pissing streams of light! But in the fire that binds his head flickers the truth that woke him: It’s here then: this is the beginning of the road down: Ste. Catherine is waiting . . .
Though he manages to pull up his pyjamas and tumble back into his bed, he feels trembly in the dark as if he’d shed his strength like a carapace. Cover me, he whispers. Tears of helplessness start in his owl’s eyes. Deep in his throat the prairie grass sings with the dry souls of Eulalie and his dead sons, beckoning him out.
At sunrise he’s still strong enough to get to his door and poke his shaggy head out into the frosty lane and call to one of the children setting out for school, “Fetch Gervaise. Go quickly.” When she comes, wearing a worried frown, he’s lying on his back and remembering the day of her grandfather’s funeral and the snow that fell in the churchyard, but these memories are as insubstantial as snow. They fall and vanish and, when Gervaise bends over him, the Maréchal believes for a brief second that it’s Eulalie on her way to Ste. Catherine with her sewing box, and to the mortification of Gervaise he mumbles forlornly, “Goodbye, my chicken. Take care of yourself.”
“Maréchal!” Gervaise strokes his cheek gently but her voice is stern. She’s come running to him with her shallow chest full of fear. “Maréchal! It’s me, Gervaise. Tell me what’s happened.”
He focuses on her face. Eulalie with her bindings and her broderies vanishes.
“Oh Gervaise . . .”
“What’s the matter, Maréchal? Aren’t you well?”
“It’s got me, Gervaise . . .”
“What has? Try to make sense, Maréchal.”
“They’ve got me.”
“Who?”
“Those boxmakers at Ste. Catherine.”
So her fear grows. She feels her fear not just in her loudly beating heart but gathering in her sinuses so that her nose twitches like a rabbit’s.
“Can’t you get up, Maréchal?”
“I’m too weak, Gervaise. I’m as weak as a new lamb.”
His face is very hot under her hand.
“Are you in pain?”
He smiles his bird’s smile.
“Pain? We’re all in agony from the day we’re born!”
“Special pain. In your chest? In your stomach?”
“Everywhere. I tell you, they’ve got me.”
“I’ll call the doctor.”
“Stay with me, Gervaise.”
“Yes, yes. I’ll stay. We’ll get you up to my house.”
“That’s good. I don’t want to die in the hospital with those gawpers.”
Gervaise finds clean rugs in an upstairs blanket box and she spreads these over the Maréchal’s cot. The schoolchildren, the message-carriers of Pomerac, are told to call at the Ste. Catherine surgery, where Hervé Prière is toiling out his final week of duty. Gervaise empties the Maréchal’s pot, boils a kettle and brings him a drink of hot honey and water.
Up at her own house, Mallélou is still sleeping with his face turned to the ski-ing poster, but Xavier has been awake since first light, waking in surprise to another day of his infatuation, already aching for his meeting with Agnès. “Xavier!” Gervaise has called on her way to the Maréchal’s room. “You and Klaus see to the cows this morning.” So his city hands, so swift at the Babyfoot table, so deft with bar change and fag-rolling and card playing and the eating of oysters, now tug at the leathery teats of the cows while Klaus makes coffee and sets out bread and ham and warms his rump at the stove.
Gervaise and the Maréchal wait. The Maréchal remembers his children’s impish faces at his window and tells Gervaise, “I saw ghosts this morning. Who’d have thought ghosts would come here? I think it’s that swimming pool.”
“What’s that got to do with the pool?”
“Disturbing the earth. We do too much of that in this time of ours.”
“I didn’t know you were superstitious.”
“I’m not Gervaise. I’m just old. Old men understand certain things.”
“But not how to look after yourself.”
“Well I’ve done it for twenty years.”
“But you’ve let yourself catch a chill.”
“That’s not a chill, my poor Gervaise. That’s death.”
Sitting tall and pale, driving his heavy car, Hervé Prière arrives at the Maréchal’s house, anxiously scanning the lane for any sign of Nadia. These days, he dislikes coming to Pomerac. The smell and the cold of the Maréchal’s decrepit room enter his body and go round in his veins. When he looks at the old man and listens to his shallow breaths, he feels only the weight of their impending obliteration, the marble that will lie on them. Stone, at least, is clean, though. Even France’s horrendous wars are, thank God, remembered in smooth granite and lead and gold. Frailty and decay are, finally, too much for Dr. Prière.
“Swelling?” he asks coldly.
“Eh?” says the Maréchal.
“Any swelling in the groin or neck?”
“I don’t know, Monsieur.”
“We’ll feel, then.”
His long, cold fingers press the Maréchal’s stubbly neck and his almost hairless groin. There is some swelling. Hervé nods his head at his own diagnosis, knowing as he pronounces it that the old man’s life is numbered in weeks or even days.
“He has mumps,” he tells Gervaise, “la parotidite. There’s an epidemic at the school.”
“Oh,” says the Maréchal, as Hervé begins to pack away his things, “that’s why the boys came to the window. To give me their diseases.”
An hour later, the Maréchal is carried up to Gervaise’s house in Klaus’s arms and laid gently in the hand-painted bed from Heidelberg. With a three-day beard on him, Mallélou shuffles in and stares at him. We’re paying him back finally, he thinks, for all the years of borrowing. He’ll have the last word by dying in our house. But the ghosts have gone. The Maréchal’s sleeping. Gervaise has taken charge. The German bed is soft and large and the clean sheets smell of lavender, reminding him of Eulalie’s petticoats. He doesn’t see Mallélou staring. He sleeps in the knowledge that when he wakes, he’ll only have to lie still and listen to hear, not far away, the sound of Gervaise’s voice.
When two o’clock sounds on the Pomerac hill Xavier is driving furiously in Mallélou’s old fourgon down a silent, sandy track in the heart of Ste. Catherine’s woods. A plantation of pines bends and sighs in the slight wind. Where the track turns left, these give way to oaks and chestnuts and beeches, and it’s here in the belly of the forest, where only the woodmen come, that he expects to see Agnès waiting for him at the wheel of Hervé’s car. She isn’t there. Xavier’s first thought is, she came and went and didn’t wait for me, and his next thought is, she’s decided against me. She’s gone back to Paris and her soldier-boy.
He drives the fourgon off the track and the dead beechleaves fly up round the wheels. He switches off the engine, gets out of the car and stands anxiously listening for the sound of Agnès’s approach. He lights a cigarette. He can still hear the sighing of the pines, though the larger trees are motionless, damp, exhausted in their year’s leafcrop that now lies all around them, waiting sternly for spring. In Xavier’s own heart is a similar extraordinary expectation. Like them, he waits. His Bordeaux life, the pettiness, the hopelessness, he treads these down, kicks them into the past. Even his prison-dread falls away, as if the crime was years ago, already forgotten and forgiven, a thing he did as a boy. His eczema is healed. His work in the fields and on Larry’s pool has brought back his strength. If Nadia at her window saw him coming up the Pomerac hill she would see, in these days of his passion, a fine and proud face, the pretty colt grown to a handsome and sharp-eyed man, a lover to make her little foreign heart stop as it stopped
in the pastry shop when Uncle Leopold laid his big paw on her head. But what does Agnès see as she bounds in Hervé’s car towards Xavier, waiting under the silent trees? She’s running to him fast, wildly. Her eyes aren’t lowered in their usual obedience to orderly things, they’re wide-open, pleading eyes. Devour me, they say. Break me. They see a fleeting grandeur of love, a feast to snatch and swallow. Kill me with love. Kill me before the future comes!
He’s at her car door. He helps her out and binds her to him. The smell of her steals away his breath. No woman he’s ever held has had this sweet, irresistible smell. I want it forever, says his entranced mind. Marry me. She kisses him so hard, his lip is bruised. Her body hurries him. Her desire and not his love, which is a slower thing, a marvelling spectator, hauls him swiftly to his male buck’s antics, butting up into her, the pushing, braying, blunt-snouted animal while her legs flail his back, while she screams and bites and twists her head on its bed of earth and yells to heaven in her pleasure and tears his seed from him like an explosion of flowers.
He stays in her but his head falls. He wants to love her more slowly than this, love her with words and small caresses, with his humanity. He’s not her stud, her buck, her bull. He adores her with the core of his being. He cups her head in his arms and holds it in the hollow of his shoulder. Marry me. The air is freezing on his naked bottom and legs. The wind at my back. This phrase and the cold December ground fill him with a longing for spring and a house of his own and Agnès with him in a high bed.
“Marry me, Agnès.”
“Don’t talk, Xavier.”
“Why, ‘don’t talk’?”
“Because.”
“Tell me why. I want to talk to you.”
“But I just want to hold you.”
Obediently he lies down again and she begins to nibble at his neck and lick it and he laughs. Hearing no answering laugh from her, he looks down at her face and it’s serious and frantic as she says, “I want to come again. I need to come.”
He kisses her gently and asks, “Do you love me, Agnès?”
“Don’t I show it?” she says.