Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

Princesse Mathilde, when she and Frederick had originally taken over the Château had been similarly inspired by its location. In 1937, she felt she had had enough of the pernicious course of human history. And though she had been sensitive to the Château’s own architectural beauty, she had stripped one entire back portion of the interior in response to the natural environment. What resulted was a vast room whose span of glass and white walls welcomed the mountains in. The furnishings were raw in their modernity, leather sofas, thick white rugs over glistening natural wood, pictures whose vibrant abstract shapes echoed the landscape without representing it.

  It was in this room that Princesse Mathilde, a dramatic figure in a long black hostess gown, welcomed them. Her eyes, despite her years, still held their fire and, though her figure had thickened somewhat, to Katherine’s young eyes she seemed the very embodiment of the word regal. Mathilde and Jacob embraced in the manner of old friends and then the older woman held Katherine at arm’s length and scrutinized her.

  ‘Your father didn’t warn me quite what a striking young woman you had grown into,’ the Princesse said in English with a wry glint in her eye. She hugged Katherine. ‘I hope we shall become the best of friends. You must treat this place as your second home.’

  Katherine smiled politely. Then, as she felt a large paw on her thigh, she unbent a little.

  ‘Ah yes, Pilkou and Martine, don’t want to be forgotten. You must shake hands with them, Katherine. They have been so well brought up, they put the rest of us to shame.’ the Princesse laughed girlishly. ‘I’m afraid these two, despite their growing girth, are my constant companions. They’re one of the reasons I now make everyone come to me, rather than traipsing round the world.’ She shook her head in self-mockery.

  ‘Now Mat, you know your notion of a retreat would put most people’s social diaries to shame. Don’t give Katherine the wrong idea,’ Jacob intervened playfully.

  ‘The first lesson on entering this house, Katherine, is that you must only take half of what your father says to me seriously,’ the Princesse responded in kind. ‘But it’s time to sit down to breakfast. I think cook has outdone herself. I asked her to prepare everything as it might be in America, so that you would feel at home. I suspect she imagines you are built like a giant.’

  They followed the Princesse into the dining room where a sideboard heaved with food - cereals, fruit, muffins of all description, hot rolls, a pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice. No sooner had Katherine helped herself, than a maid appeared with a silver plateau heaped with pancakes. ‘You see,’ the Princesse smiled as Katherine gasped. ‘And we must eat as much as possible or she will be deeply insulted.’

  While they ate, the Princesse and Jacob began to chat in French. As Katherine watched them and listened, she was suddenly aware that her father seemed different than he did in New York. There was a lightness to his gestures, a ready smile on his lips. He was utterly relaxed, at home. For the first time it occurred to Katherine as a conscious thought that he might find life with her mother a trial in ways which didn’t only concern her. The notion, now that it was clear, depressed her. She had been selfish in coming here. She was abandoning him.

  Princesse Mat read her thoughts.

  ‘Katherine, I haven’t yet told you how pleased we all are that you shall be going to school here and be with us at Valois frequently. I hope it will provide your parents,’ she stressed the word, ‘with an excuse to come and visit me more often.’ She stood up and extended a hand to Katherine. ‘But now you probably want to rest. We have fixed up a room which you can call your own.’ She put all her expressive charm into her smile. ‘Violette has even advised me as to what you might like. You’ll find a pile of novels, a record player, and an assortment of Elvis Presley and Dave Brubeck records…’ She pronounced the names as if they were utterly outlandish.

  Jacob chuckled, ‘Princesse Mathilde has always had the aspirations of a fairy godmother.’

  Mathilde gazed at Katherine benignly. The girl looked as if she could do with a fairy godmother, or perhaps with just a mother. Jacob should never have allowed it to go this far. But then men were never very good at seeing what was in front of their noses. For all her beauty, Katherine had a wary look about her, as if she couldn’t afford to laugh or cry or show any sign of emotion. She was contained, far too contained for a girl of her age. She had none of that innocence or boundless enthusiasm that the Princesse always saw as the stamp of the American girl.

  This Katherine instead reminded her a little of those refugee children she had housed during the war, ever polite, ever ready to comply, but as old as the world and never altogether of it. As if at some point in their lives they had decided that the only way to survive was to retreat to a still centre in themselves. A magically barred inner space, removed from everyday life. They guarded it superstitiously, for while it remained impenetrable, they felt they could stay alive, whatever the horror of the world outside.

  She would have liked to take the girl in her arms and hold her for a long time.

  Not privy to the Princesse’s thoughts, Katherine smiled. She had the sense she was inhabiting a dream from which she had no desire to wake. Everyone was so kind, so good to her. Everything was so beautiful.

  The dream persisted throughout her stay at Valois. They drove to a point higher up the mountains where the snow was already thick, and Katherine had her first skiing lessons. The sense of whizzing through the snow with only hills and trees around her made her jubilant. She loved the speed, the recklessness. She felt triumphantly free for the first time in her life. She was grateful that Sylvie had not taken up the Princesse’s invitation to join them for the holidays and a little guiltily that Leo hadn’t either. Instead of Leo, there was Violette.

  Violette, dark-haired, vivacious, instantly installed herself as Katherine’s loquacious elder sister. She fussed, gave advice which she laughingly contradicted the next minute, and talked enthusiastically about the business she had just initiated. Violette had set up as a paper restorer, an arcane occupation which took precise scientific skill but involved her in outlandish escapades with police and businessmen or lawyers. Having worked as a freelance for a while, she had recently opened an office in Geneva.

  Over a lavish Christmas dinner which Katherine thought must have taken cook weeks to prepare, Violette regaled them with tales of bizarre exploits. She talked as if she had taken on the mantle of Philip Marlowe, an arch female sleuth for whom the teeming underworld held no secrets.

  ‘So after the fire, Himmelbrau and Strick called me in to see whether I could do something to re-establish their client files - thirty years of legal practice up in smoke. I set to work with my little bag of magic potions and do you know what I discovered,’ Violette paused to make sure everyone’s interest had reached an appropriate pitch. ‘I found as the charred remains came to light that one of their employees, who had left the firm last year, had been embezzling them for years and had set fire to the premises so that no trace could be found of his dirty work. Now the police never stop ringing me,’ Violette giggled triumphantly.

  ‘My daughter has a highly developed sense of adventure,’ the Princesse said wryly. ‘I don’t know where it comes from.’

  ‘Yes, you do Mat.’ Violette countered her. ‘Apart from the tiny genetic component, it has everything to do with Madame Chardin’s establishment. Oh yes, Katherine, the school you are about to go to is a very special sort of place.’ She paused dramatically.

  Katherine saw her father exchange a worried look with the Princesse.

  ‘Don’t let Violette provoke you,’ the Princesse laughed. ‘Madame Chardin is a model of academic rectitude.’

  ‘So she must be. She has helped to mould our wonderful Violette,’ Jacob looked happily on Violette, gaining reassurance from her presence if not her words. In any event, he consoled himself, nothing could be worse for Katherine than the situation that had developed at home. With the exception, perhaps, of a continued stay with the dangerously attractive Th
omas Sachs. And Madame Chardin would take Katherine away from both.

  ‘A model of rectitude Madame Chardin may be, and a whip hand at Latin declensions and trigonometry, but what the girls get up to is something else,’ Violette countered mysteriously.

  What the girls got up to was something Katherine was only to learn gradually. Her first impression of her new school filled her with trepidation. It was not the premises themselves. The school was perched on a hillside at the edge of a little village half way between Geneva and the Princesse’s Château. A pastoral atmosphere prevailed, despite the looming brick of the three-story structure with its adjoining chapel and outlying houses.

  What Katherine found daunting was the ambience within: the large unsmiling woman who sat at a table in the entrance hall and stiffly handed her two sheets of paper, one with a map of the school which showed her own room clearly marked, one with a long list of instructions printed in four languages, French, German, Italian and English; a smell which mingled disinfectant and scouring soap; the difference in temperature between the stifling main body of the school and the chill of the outlying wing where she found her room.

  Pierre, the Princesse’s chauffeur deposited Katherine’s bags in the middle of the room, smiled reassuringly and said goodbye. He would be back in three weeks, he reminded her, to take her home for the weekend. Every third week, the girls were permitted to have visitors or to leave the premises for the weekend. In between the school was a world wholly unto itself.

  Madame Chardin was an educator with very strict ideas. She believed that girls needed a fair dose of daily and vigorous exercise. This was partially accomplished at seven in the morning when the girls ran three times round the school grounds, unless a particularly heavy snow fall made running utterly impossible; and again in a physical education period in the afternoons. Food was also strictly controlled and no sweets or biscuits were allowed in rooms.

  That apart, moral education was high on the agenda, followed with varying degrees of import by botany, languages and academic subjects. Madame Chardin was a Protestant with distinct Rousseauian leanings, but she had read her Rousseau with an eye to institutions. ‘Natural’ leanings might come first, but these were regulated with the severity of a drill master.

  Some of this Katherine gleaned dimly from the set of house rules she read through three times in a room distinguished only by orderly barrenness. There were three beds, three cupboards, one desk and no external signs that anyone inhabited the space. For a girl who before her recent adventure had never been away from home alone for more than a weekend, the prospect which this room and Madame Chardin’s rules evoked was a daunting one. Had Katherine been able to forget the fear her mother instilled in her, she would have wept out of homesickness. As it was, she thought with longing of Antonia and the informality of her school in New York where teachers could even on occasion be construed of as friends.

  ‘So you’re the new girl,’ a voice stirred her from her reverie and Katherine turned to see a tall slim sandy haired girl enter the room followed by a smaller rounder figure. The tall girl stretched out her hand, ‘I’m Portia Gaitskell and this is Marie-Helene Beaumont,’ she said in a French which bore the traces of English. ‘And don’t pay too much attention to all that gumph. She only gives it to us to scare us when we arrive.’

  The two girls laughed and Katherine smiled a little warily in response.

  ‘This is your bed and your cupboard,’ Portia pointed to the bed furthest from the window. ‘You can unpack now or we can show you round the premises first. ‘It is your duty, girls, to make your new colleagues feel at home here,’ Portia suddenly said in stentorian tones which made Marie-Helene burst out in giggles.

  ‘Portia does an impeccable rendition of Madame Chardin,’ Marie-Helene said in a softly mellifluous voice. ‘As you’ll see. Here, have some of these. They’ll make you feel right at home.’ Marie-Helene opened her wardrobe and reached into the pocket of an ample winter coat to bring out a box of truffles.

  By the end of that evening, after she had sat through a dinner in the large school refectory, listened to Madame Chardin’s opening speech of the term, and lain in the dark listening to her new roommates, Katherine did indeed begin to feel if not at home, then at least marginally more comfortable.

  As the weeks progressed, the only thing which troubled her was that her new friends had seen so much more of the world than she had. Granted Marie-Helene was a year and Portia two older than her. But it wasn’t a question of age. They had both already seen and lived through so much and they were fearless in the way they connived to break the school rules at every opportunity. Their intricate scheming spoke of defiance, but also of a love of conspiracy for its own sake, conspiracy prompted by group living within a regimented and closed institution.

  At an initial reaction the girls’ parents might have been shocked by what they got up to. On second thought, however, they might have reflected that these little conspiratorial activities prepared them quite as adequately for life as the main curriculum. Portia’s father was an ambassador and the family had lived in Nigeria, China and Washington - places where scheming was hardly a novelty. Marie-Hélène’s family were wealthy French industrialists and her summers were spent in a variety of exotic locales, which spurred the girls’ fantasies.

  Between them the school girls represented a United Nations of wealth and prestige. Katherine felt young and inexperienced in conversations which spanned the pros and cons of marriage, the intricacies of divorce, the complexities of couture and, most frequently, the vagaries and mysteries of men. And she was initially awed by the plots which the girls concocted as they sought to shame a particular teacher or fellow pupil, or simply to escape at impermissible hours from the school grounds. Sometimes she remembered Thomas’s parting words to her and thought that perhaps she was indeed something of an innocent.

  At first she tended to listen and take in what was said in order to mull over it in the quiet of her own bed. She wrote long letters home to Antonia in which she translated the other girls’ lives in terms that made sense to her. She also wrote to her brother, whom she had mostly but not altogether forgiven for his betrayal of her to her mother. And she wrote to her parents, keeping her tone light and giving away little of her present life.

  Thomas Sachs received her longest letters and wrote the longest in return. Their correspondence provided an alternative education for Katherine. He suggested books she might read and when she had, she wrote to him about them. The ensuing exchange over the months turned the whole cast of Balzac’s Comedie Humaine into Katherine’s familiars and gave her an awareness of greed and ambition, love and betrayal far beyond her years. Thomas’s witty and sometimes acerbic voice became the other side of her inner dialogue. When it sometimes emerged from her own lips, her teachers or friends would look at her oddly, wondering whether they had heard her correctly.

  By June, when the little mountain flowers covered the lush meadows with their brightness, Katherine had adjusted to her new life. Rarely did dreams of home and her mother come to haunt her. She lived in the present tense of the school with its totally absorbing pattern of routine and minor rebellion. Only when the other girls exchanged confidences about their parents and sometimes lambasted them with the particular competitive cruelty adolescents are prone to, did Katherine retreat into silence. She was still unable to speak about the circumstances which had brought her to Madame Chardin’s. She preferred not to think about it.

  With the Princesse, she was still timid. The woman inspired her with an admiration which made closeness difficult. Yet Katherine trusted her, as she had never trusted an older woman before. Sometimes she found certain phrases, certain inflections creeping into her French which she recognized as belonging to the Princesse. She was pleased to find them.

  One day, she had shyly asked the Princesse whether Portia might come and spend a week with her at the beginning of the summer break. ‘Of course,’ the Princesse had answered. ‘There is nothing I like
more than having the house filled with young people.’

  Pierre came to pick them up in the long Mercedes and they piled in with all their bags and appurtenances. Their end of term hilarity matched the bright sky and light frolicking tufts of cloud. Château Valois, when they reached it, looked more beautiful than ever amidst the fresh green of early summer leaves and dappled sunshine. Even the much-travelled Portia paused in the ripple of her chatter to exclaim her appreciation. Katherine found herself smiling happily as if the compliment were directed at her own home.

  The Princesse came to greet them as soon as they were over the threshold. She hugged Katherine and stretched out a welcoming hand to Portia. Then she said, ‘There’s a surprise visitor here for you, Katherine.’ Her voice sounded a little strained, but only Portia caught the odd pitying look she gave Katherine as the girl rushed towards the salon.

  Katherine fully expected to fall into her father’s arms. But as she made out the figure who stood darkly outlined against the blaze of the picture window’s light, she stopped abruptly short. The Princesse and Portia looked on as mother and daughter, now almost of an equal height, one blonde, the other dark, took each other in. A hush descended on the room. Then Sylvie walked toward Katherine and pecked her lightly on the cheek. Katherine flinched perceptibly.

  ‘Hello Katherine, You’re looking very well,’ Sylvie said with a falsetto of enthusiasm which grated on Katherine’s ears. ‘It must be Europe. I’ve never believed that New York was good for anyone.’

  Katherine could find no words. She stared at her mother as if she were a ghost, a ghost with streaming blonde hair who wore a tightly unmaternal black dress and puffed incessantly at her cigarette. She glanced anxiously at Portia. How would she judge this peculiar entity which her mother was? Katherine shivered with ugly premonition.

  The Princesse stepped in, held the precarious social balance of the group together. She engaged the girls in a description of their school days, made them chat.