‘My simple plants made soil, and I grew more complex plants. I closed in my garden, so that it was like a great terrarium, with its own weather. I did that till the soil was sufficiently deep and fertile, then I took everything up, opened my garden to the air, made a series of hinged hatches in the bubble, then began again. I planted flowering shrubs, creepers – but nothing thirsty. I made a fountain and kept it filled – the water burned away like drops on a hot stove if left. I began to collect roses. The plants that survived changed over the years. Everything darkened in the heat, as copper beeches darken to black at their tops in the hottest summers.
‘After over a thousand years I could leave my garden for longer periods – it’s six days now before trouble starts, if I close most of the hatches and let it live on its own aspired moisture. It’s a sizeable garden. You can’t see the back of it – the big tree – where it loses the light. Have you ever seen an annular eclipse? It has that atmosphere. My light-sensitive flowers never fully open. I add illumination for the weeks the bees are active. All the colours are saturated, plush. The light is greyish, dim, like cold water, and unsteady, as though shining off a lava flow. You expect a chill, but the air is very warm – and the water falling in the fountain sometimes sounds to me like a tongue moving in a wet mouth. The water doesn’t dazzle. And there are no blues. I’ve brought them in – plumbago, cornflower, lavender – but they all bleach out to white. There are no pale greens, and all the rose leaves and stems are dark – the red blooms tend towards black and have that scorched look to their outer petals that some earthly roses have in the bud and lose as they unclench – open, I mean.’
Xas fell silent.
‘I’ll never see it,’ Sobran said. ‘The only hospitable place in Hell.’
‘A twilit, glimmering, perfumed place.’ Xas paused, then asked, ingenuous, ‘Do you no longer expect to go to Hell?’
They looked at each other. Sobran blushed.
‘If we can put that aside,’ Xas said, ‘your conviction that I’ve damned you, then I’m your luck again – and you’re only angry that I didn’t take you completely into my confidence.’
Sobran stopped grinding his teeth to say, ‘All the time you’ve been playing with me.’
‘No. But I have been entertained.’ Xas came closer, leaned against the tree, made its grey grooved bark part of his finery – the palenesses of his feathers, gemstones, gold, white faultless flesh. Each contrast lent itself towards his totality – a fresh assault, the blind force of big surf. ‘It hurt me when you hid from me,’ he said. ‘But I’d learned to be patient with your surprises. Because I’ve been so pointlessly busy all these years I’ve had but few friends, all of them good, men and women of conscience, kindness – or self-command. With the same result: they suspended their appetites, their selves, as though they were born to enact worthiness, to prove the worth of the world. They met me, and thereafter did everything for the glory of God. God being love to some, like my friend the Irish monk, truth to others, like Apharah. You were different. You went on being a soldier, a family man, a vintner, as though in your life I was a condiment, a salt that brought out its full flavour, not its central fact. I was part of your calendar. I think that, before, I always chose hermits, people I found alone at odd hours, or I made hermits of the ones I chose. After all, I’m a hermit in Hell. But you were different – have been different to me.’
Sobran, resisting the angel’s confiding tone, told him that of course a fallen angel would make sure to attach himself only to hermits. Anyone whose business was damnation would need a heart like the hearts of the men who held slave auctions. A heart that heard only the sounds of commerce – plantations, mills and mines – when mothers began to wail for their lost children. How much more comfortable it must be for a fiend as half-hearted and fastidious as Xas was to keep company with people without family or land – those friends of his, those scholars and solitaries.
Xas was quiet for a minute then crouched down, brushing his wing against the tree, rubbing its feathers up the wrong way, so that they seemed to grip the trunk like flat fingers. He looked into Sobran’s face. ‘Tonight you said, “Tell me about something, Xas,” because you were unhappy. Then you get angry and I’m a slave trader, or a murderer, or torturer.’
‘I’m not unhappy,’ Sobran said stiffly. He couldn’t seem to turn his face away, so shut his eyes. Didn’t flinch when the angel placed a warm, callused hand on his cheek.
‘I’m not playing with you. I was always out of my depth. Still – your friendship helped me make sense of my other relationships. I have a better understanding of the pain of a quarrel.’ Xas sighed. ‘But I don’t want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like pollen and I go about pollinating things with God.’
Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Sobran said, ‘I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren’t evil. But I’ve decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God – whether you like it or not.’
‘I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God’s glory. But I think God didn’t make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken.’
This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing – a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered.
In the warm purple pre-dawn light one of the bricklayers came out of the shelter of the new house’s foundation and made water against a wall. He shook himself off, yawned and looked about.
Stared at the hilltop, the seated man. Sobran lifted a hand. Xas, still crouched against the tree, said, ‘Does he see me?’
‘I’m sure he doesn’t know what he sees.’
When Aurora was a girl her father had one lame horse in his stables, an old honoured cavalry horse. The mare had been ridden near a hidden petard. The explosion had disembowelled the young viscount who rode beside Aurora’s father, and felled the viscount’s horse. The mare caught the blast in her flank and leg. She leapt away, prancing a quarter-mile diagonally, like a fancy parade horse, then began to limp. Aurora’s father retired the horse during the battle, and told his groom not to put her down. Three days later, when he found his way back to his regiment, she was still alive and the wounds had begun to heal. The mare was good for nothing, but was kept, an equine pensioner. Years later, as he told the mare’s story, Aurora’s father urged his daughter to press her hand against the pocked hide on the horse’s flank and feel the deeper hardnesses of shrapnel under her old scars.
At the age of thirty-three, and six months after celebrating her second marriage, Aurora discovered similar hardnesses in her own flesh. She was in her bath, soaping her underarms, without her sea-sponge, and felt – painless, mysteriously sealed in under smooth skin – balls, it seemed, like buckshot.
Only days later when her maid was unlacing her bodice, Aurora noticed that her side felt stiff, not tender like an injury, but somehow wound too tightly.
She did not walk from her dressing room and into her husband’s, then to his bed. She did not light another candle and write to one of her women friends. At breakfast she informed her husband that she found she tired easily. Paris was too busy; she’d like to go back to Vully. She did answer the questions he put to her about her happiness in regards to himself and their marriage. But she didn’t volunteer any further information. Nor did she, on her way home, take a detour to the house of her former sister-in-law, where her son was with his cousins and in the care of his tutor – although visiting Paul was the only urge it took any strength to repress.
Her own doctor, an elderly and unambitious man, examined her first by proxy – she pointed to the site of her illness on a cloth dummy in a female form. When he looked himself he told her he couldn’t say for certain it was a cancer, till he saw how quickly it grew. There were
city surgeons who could operate. Paris was the best place. But such an operation would mean the loss of some measure of her womanhood, and she should consult her husband to see what he wished.
Aurora took her meals in bed for three days, sat wrapped in a lambs’-wool shawl and re-read her favourite novels. She even picked up the Bible but after an hour put it aside and shook its verses out of her head.
She got dressed and went outdoors. Ten years before, she’d reserved half an acre of flat land, part of the orchard beyond the kitchen garden. She’d had the cherry trees removed and built a trellis on which grape vines grew about evenly spaced columns twelve feet high. When the vines had leaves on them the field was a room, a green gloomy room floored with fallen leaves, in which birds hopped and pecked, through which the wind moved – the quietest, coolest place on the estate. As she walked Aurora worked her arm – felt it pull, as though lines that moored her breast to her side had tightened, and a tide was turning.
She thought about her son, how she couldn’t leave him, how it wasn’t possible to leave him. She was always so fearful for his health, afraid that he’d inherited his father’s consumptive constitution. All his life Paul had been a hot coal in her hand, her hand in the fire.
Aurora worked her arm some more, wondered if she’d lose the use of it. She knew that this disease would make her let her son go; it was a forceful bailiff with its hands on her.
She wove her way between the columns. Two blackbirds hopped ahead of her, cocked their heads, kept her in sight. She came to the centre of the covered space – looked about at the interpenetrating passages, sun at the end of each of them.
Who could she trust not to talk about Heaven? Her husband, Henri. He would make provisions – medicine, surgeons, nursing sisters. A funeral. Henri would arrange Paul’s further education, the management of the estate and, for Paul, keep a cool eye on the marriage market. Aurora could trust her husband to do everything necessary for her comfort.
She would die. She knew it.
If she left Paul in the last sunny meadow, if she watched him go away from her, into a dark wood, if she believed – if she believed that she’d grow wings and fly over the wood and be there when he emerged, unrecognisable, diminished by sorrow, worn by want – what good would it do? What good did it do to believe that, yet not be able to hold his hand through some of his adult life, help him up after its first falls? Forget Heaven. They would leave each other in terror, as Paul’s father had left her, reared up in his bed, eyes fixed to follow his life, that final haemorrhage, a great gout of his own blood.
Aurora had read philosophers, poets, novelists, who talked about death as a place, an estate, the afterlife. Or as an event, of course. But she thought she was experiencing death as the knowledge of death, everything else was loss, the slipperiness of bloodied hands, and grief, about which she knew enough. Knowledge of death lodged like a bullet in her brain, somewhere above her eyes, which looked out beyond the green vistas of a room roofed with vine leaves at brightness every-which-way, looked out from under the bullet-hole, from a mind pierced by death and black in the full light of day.
Aurora wrote to her husband, her sister-in-law, and her distant friends. For now, only they need know. But in writing to her sister-in-law Aurora warned her to prepare Paul. In her letters to her friends Aurora formed her position: reserve, practicality – she would perfect her affections, thereby leave her friends with, she hoped, the feeling of nothing left undone.
She didn’t tell Sobran, but did talk to him.
When they had settled all their business, Sobran poured Aurora a glass of cuvée. Jodeau-Kalmann had a champagne press, the grapes coming from Sabine’s husband’s vineyard near Chalon-sur-Saône. It was a good blond, aromatic, and mouth-wideningly dry.
‘He doesn’t trust himself,’ Sobran said, and chuckled. ‘And doesn’t feel any shame about handing over to his wife’s father.’
‘To think I gave you half my authority.’ Aurora was amused. ‘Now you are all over the province.’
‘They’ll build a statue,’ Sobran said, his nose in his glass.
‘Of a buck rabbit.’
‘Aurora!’
She laughed, savoured his shock. Then she said, ‘I’ll be back for the winter, whether or not Henri comes.’
They were quiet again. Aurora looking into her glass at the string of tiny bubbles rising from one speck of sediment. After a while she simply started up, asking, ‘When you were on battlefields, you must have heard men, wounded men, calling out for their mothers. Did they call for their own mothers? Or superhuman mothers like Our Lady?’
‘I don’t know. I never called for mine. Mother was alive and with my family when I was away in the army. I imagined her where I’d always seen her. Not on battlefields. Besides, I was never badly hurt. The nearest I was to death was from freezing – when I thought I saw –’
Aurora could see that Sobran had begun to go carefully. His thoughts and words separated like a lookout and helmsman, and messages moved between them about how to go.
‘I thought I saw an angel. It turned out to be only a broad-shouldered wayside shrine. Mother died the year before my daughter, Nicolette. Thank God she was spared that sorrow. She took sick suddenly, was paralysed and spent two weeks in bed, scarcely able to speak, which angered her at first. Léon wasn’t there, which caused her some grief, but she settled – I don’t mean into indifference, she was at peace. Her death was the best I ever saw.’
‘I never met her. I came to live here after you had lost your daughter. One of the first things I heard about you was that you and Céleste had lost a child to scarlet fever.’
‘Why would you learn that? Other children died that year of the fever. Two babies, one four-year-old and a girl of thirteen. The only reason I’ve forgotten exactly who they were is that the infants’ names were used again, the living children erased the dead ones, and have grown up. The maid was the eldest Garvey, Jeanne.’
‘Why was I told you’d lost a daughter? When my husband died there were those around me determined to point out other members of that secret fraternity, the recently bereaved. You wore a black armband. I remember watching you yoke a horse to a cart full of empty barrels. You took off your coat, pulled the armband from the coat sleeve, drew it up over your shirt sleeve, then rolled your sleeves up. You went about it sensitively, as if everyone was watching – which they were. My uncle had a very high opinion of you, but he said – critically, I think – “Sobran Jodeau feels his sorrows.”’
‘Aurora, what a memory! You’ve made a better study of me than – than my children have.’ Sobran reached forward to touch her briefly on the back of her hand. Then he refilled his glass and held it to the light as if to appreciate its colour.
‘What pleasure does it give you to stare through that glass?’
‘Some. The things of the world are not drained equally. And night is better than day.’ Sobran was thoughtful. Then he said, ‘I know someone who remembers everything.’
‘I’d love to meet her so she could remember,’ Aurora said.
Sobran looked baffled, but had no chance to pursue it because Aurora went on, ‘Would she remember the children dead of scarlet fever who had first use of their families’ Christian names?’
‘If he’d ever learned them, yes.’
The poisoned friendship. He. Aurora looked at Sobran’s lowered eyelids. She felt suddenly split, her stomach dropped. Then she was whole and completely miserable, her prime gone, her breast a bag of rocks tied to her body, then swung over the lip of a grave. What good her discretion, her virtue, her self-denial when his illicit desires were for nothing remotely like her? The poison – as he put it – was just what passes between men who get too close. Hence the starch and buttoned buttons, the sobriety, the church-going. Why hadn’t she guessed before?
She saw him watching her and rallied. If she’d lost colour he couldn’t see it. She asked, ‘Are there any books I can send from Paris?’
Rue du Bac
>
Paris
7th December 1833
M. Jodeau,
As you have not written to me I know that Mama has not told you that she is mortally ill. She can no longer lift her right arm. A surgeon in Paris has some hope of a palliative operation but says it must be soon. However Mama insists on visiting the château despite her weakness and the urgency of her situation. I think she wants to be caught by snow in the country and die beside her own bedroom fire. Recall she isn’t a religious woman. Nor docile. I am in fear. Sir, I cannot prevent her. The Baron is angry but behaves as though he is her master and is all Madame this and Madame that. She will not heed us. She wants me to go with her, of course, has even interviewed half a dozen tutors and hired a terrible German – of whom I shall not complain again if only Mama lives. I have written to my mother’s aunt and to her friends, the sisters Lespes in Piedmont, to do as I desire you to and implore her to do what she can to save her own life.
In trust
Your friend,
Paul de Valday, Comte de Vully
Clos Jodeau
20th December
My Dear Baroness,
Paul has written to me. He tells me you are ill – mortally is the word he used – and that he believes you are avoiding an operation that may save your life. He speaks of this operation as palliative but I hope it is curative. I am sorry if anything I write seems to slight you but this is written in haste as I have the chance only of this next post – after which I think this letter and your carriage would pass each other on the road.
If you fear the operation because it is a mutilation – death is more thoroughly so. You will suffer on any course and I think your courage is equal to the suffering.
To visit the château under these circumstances is time you cannot afford – even if it is to be the last time. I beg you to stay in Paris and chance the knife. It is what everyone who loves you wishes you to do. I refuse to treat this note as my last communication with you. I hope you will take my advice. I pray you will recover. I have faith that I will see you in the spring in better health.
The Vintners Luck Page 12