by Michel D
‘Here it’s all over!’ the marquis broke in. ‘In the space of a hundred and fifty years the Napoleonic Code has destroyed property ownership. The estates are disappearing one after another, parcelled up, subdivided and disposed of. We’re condemned to having a single child. Since Napoleon, Paris has been governing France with its eyes closed. They see us as Chouans. There’s not a single countryman in the government. Just professors, lawyers and mathematicians. Once every four years they notice us, in time for us to go out and vote for the conservatives.’
The marquis was happy to have an audience for his precious ideas. Jean listened to him, steeling himself to pay attention and trying to disregard the lovely figure of Chantal, who was busying herself around the table. In the farms nearby, Jean knew, women also served and kept quiet. The marquis began yawning. His day had started at dawn, he had ridden out for two hours with his daughter, and that afternoon had had several drinks while he waited for Jean and Chantal at the café.
‘My boy, no standing on ceremony: you’ll sleep here tonight. Monsieur Cliquet shares his only bedroom with your father. Captain Duclou goes to bed very early since he had his little attack, and the abbé is away at Lourdes with the young maids of Grangeville. Tomorrow you’ll tell us your plans. Goodnight.’
He shook Jean’s hand vigorously and left, shambling slightly from the effects of the pre-dinner pastis, red wine at table, and cognac warmed and cradled in his hand in a large snifter. Madame de Malemort put more logs on the fire and sat in an armchair next to the fireplace with a tapestry on her lap. She would not forget the proprieties: one did not leave a young woman of marriageable age and a young man alone together. Chantal sat on a sofa, making a place for Jean, and showed him photos taken during the summer at horse shows at which she had entered her mare. Having heard nothing from the English he had met but talk of lawns, rain, dogs and horses, Jean was able to answer with a few well-chosen words. Chantal was astonished.
‘I thought you were only interested in cycling and rowing.’
‘I’ve changed.’
‘Very much?’
‘Basically, no,’ he said.
Chantal returned his gaze, paling a little. The marquise was ozing. Her days started early too. Her head rested on a wing of the armchair, stretching the folds of her neck. She was ageless; perhaps she had never even been young, just as she would never be old. With a face that was free of wrinkles but vacant too, her fine features expressed a distinguished absence of character.
‘Don’t stop talking,’ Chantal whispered, ‘if you stop she’ll wake up.’
‘Everything I want to say to you isn’t ready to be said. I only started thinking about it today, on the ferry from Newhaven.’
‘And before?’
‘I was looking for you.’
‘In other women?’
‘Yes and no. No, because you’re not in any of the ones I meet.’
‘Why did you come back?’
‘Is it a reproach?’
‘No, but tell me the reason.’
Admit Geneviève? It was out of the question. Anyhow, that encounter had perhaps been no more than an illusion, mischief-making to throw him off his chosen path. He took a deep breath.
‘An irresistible desire came over me, to find out who my mother is. To be clear – I don’t care a damn about my father, who must be totally ignorant of my existence.’
Chantal lowered her head and was silent. Madame de Malemort started, opened her eyes and picked up her tapestry with a limp hand.
‘I must show you,’ Chantal said in a normal voice, ‘the filly and the colt that were both born on the same day last week. Papa is giving them to me.’
The marquise’s eyelids gradually closed on her vacant stare, her head fell forward and her work-worn hands opened on her tapestry. She was not yet fifty. This family ate horrible reheated stews but did so from Limoges china, drank table wine but from crystal glasses, sliced their meat with chipped knives whose silver handles were engraved with their initials. They owned saddle horses and draught horses and arrived at mass in a trap, but drove to town in a 301 that was as old-fashioned as it was battered. They were lost between two worlds – the one they had come from and the one they were going to – that were entirely unalike. To forget that fatal contradiction, they shut themselves away in their mansion and accepted one invitation in ten. At no time had it ever crossed their minds that Chantal might break with tradition and marry someone other than a country gentleman.
‘Why does it matter so much to you?’ Chantal said with a sigh.
‘I don’t know: a physical need.’
‘No. There must be a reason.’
Jean thought that she was more perceptive than she looked.
‘Someone said to me, with great certainty …’
He stopped, embarrassed.
‘Said what?’
‘That I look physically as if I’m related to the du Courseaus.’
Chantal put her hand on his arm.
‘It’s true. And I’m not the only one to have noticed it.’
‘Do they know?’
‘No. They don’t see themselves.’
‘No one sees himself.’
Jean thought for a moment. In the du Courseau family one person had examined his features with extreme attentiveness. The album Michel had given him on the eve of his departure for England was perhaps also an admission. And hadn’t Marie-Thérèse du Courseau – before the unpleasant story at the cliff – shown a possessive generosity towards him that could not just be explained by her ostentatiously charitable behaviour? Finally, in the realm of the unsayable there was also the secret pact he had sealed with Antoine on the occasion of the punctured hosepipe, and then his alliance with Antoinette that had reached its culmination on the night he passed his baccalauréat, and lastly his attraction for Geneviève, and the way she had responded, holding him at arm’s length.
‘You know,’ Chantal added, ‘people talk without any selfrestraint. Only one person could tell you: the abbé Le Couec. Even though he doesn’t like you to raise subjects that embarrass him …’
The marquise raised her head.
‘Children, it is getting late … Chantal, you ought to show Jean his room.’
She collected together her tapestry and wools and put both into a work-table, yawned unrestrainedly, kissed Jean on the cheek, stroked her daughter’s face, and left the room after quenching the last of the blaze with a glass of water.
Chantal led Jean to a round room in the tower, the guest room, with an enormous bed swollen by a red quilt.
‘I find all this strange,’ he said. ‘This morning I was still in London. Now I’m here with you. Where do you sleep?’
She did not answer, and began to unfasten her dress. Jean was afraid. An idea about what love should be was shattering in front of him as Chantal’s body was exposed, white, slender, exquisite and fragile as a Dresden figurine. She kept her gaze fixed on him and, so as not to miss her looking at him, he hardly dared look at her. When she put her arms around his neck he was seized by a terrible anxiety.
He awoke at dawn, on his own in the great bed. A cock was crowing under his window. He patted the sheets with the flat of his hand to find a trace of the body that had vanished while he slept. No, he had not dreamt it. What an awful cheat life was! The one being he had respected endlessly had given herself to him without a word, and he had not ravished a virgin. Chantal knew as much about love as he did. He wanted to cry. He had never felt so lonely as he did for the two hours that preceded a discreet knock at the door and Chantal’s voice calling, ‘Jean, breakfast is ready.’
He stuck his head under the cold tap and went downstairs. The marquis was pushing away his soup plate before he sugared his bowl of coffee. Madame de Malemort was in her dressing gown, adjusting the toaster. Chantal, already dressed, looked down so as not to see Jean. A much more extraordinary thing than leaving London in the morning and going to bed the same night in a Norman château was being Chantal�
�s lover now, and enjoying with her a confused pleasure in which were mingled images of Geneviève. The one, the girl, inspired all his desire; the other, the woman, inspired his admiration.
‘Good morning!’ the marquis roared in English. ‘We’re having a lazy start. Well, guests are allowed, but only on the first day.’
At eight in the morning he had already driven his cows out, fed the horses, cut down a tree and given the hens their grain. He had a full schedule for the day: to ride with his daughter, train a young Brittany spaniel, cut back the yews at the gates, get the churns ready for the milk collector, and that afternoon wait for the combine harvester hired for the week.
‘I feel ashamed,’ Jean said.
It was true, but for reasons that the Malemorts could not suspect. Standing behind them, Chantal looked at Jean. Nothing gave her away, except perhaps a faint shadow under her eyes. He no longer knew whether he loved her, now that she had given herself to him. The fallen veil had stripped of its attractions an old dream born in his childhood. He would have given everything to erase the night just past and go on living with his illusions.
‘I need to go and see my father,’ he said.
‘How he will love that!’ the marquise said, with the same conviction as if she had forecast that it would rain that afternoon. ‘I saw him the day before yesterday at Marie-Thérèse’s. He was watering.’
Yes, what else would he have been doing, dear Albert, but watering, planting, pruning trees and cutting back rose bushes? It was all he had left, now that he was without a home, a wife, a son. Life had been excessively unfair to him. And to rub salt into the wound, here was war looming once more, delivering a fatal blow to his life’s hopes. On 11 March Hitler had invaded and annexed Austria. So Ernst had been right. You only had to read Mein Kampf. Jean had been expecting the usual litanies of life at Grangeville, but everything was changing. When, after seeing Chantal and her father off on their morning ride, he borrowed the marquis’s old bike to cover the ten kilometres from Malemort to Grangeville, he was assailed by memories. He knew every bend, every farm, every spinney. On the hills he had paced himself on the way up, then thrown caution to the wind on the way down. He remembered a happy time that had posed few more challenging problems than that of keeping fit. Today his legs were like cotton wool, and he laboured half-heartedly along the road. A feeling of unease gripped him, something that would perhaps never leave him, a nausea he refused to identify. At last he saw Monsieur Cliquet’s burr-stone cottage: a closed world, remote from the foolish drama that had taken him by surprise. Albert appeared on the doorstep; he was leaning on a walking stick, having for years refused to use one out of pride. A few steps from his adoptive father, Jean experienced a sudden lightening of spirit: this man was simple and good, narrow-minded but of a rectitude that nothing could break. There was a moment of uncertainty, a hesitation. Albert was not sure that the elegant young man in front of him, in a shirt and tie and wearing a cap of the same cloth as his jacket, was his son. They kissed each other, and Jean recognised the familiar prickle of his father’s moustache and smell of cold caporal tobacco and coffee mixed with calvados that had been the smell of every morning of his childhood.
‘Have you just arrived?’
‘Yesterday evening.’
‘Where did you sleep?’
‘At the Malemorts'.’
Albert raised his eyebrows. He was not very happy about it. The classes ought not to mix, despite the marquis looking more and more like any other farmer. But how could he make Jean see it? Times were changing; the golden rules of twenty years ago meant nothing to the new generation. Jean saw his father’s unhappy astonishment and tried to explain.
‘They offered so kindly and naturally that I couldn’t say no. And apparently the abbé is away on a pilgrimage.’
‘Then you did the right thing. What about tonight?’
‘I’m staying with them again, as long as you don’t mind.’
‘Me? You must be joking. Your uncle’s still asleep. He’s a late riser. You can say hello on the way back. Come to Madame du Courseau’s with me. They’ll be pleased to see you.’
They walked together to the new villa, completed at long last and standing in the middle of a garden in which Jean recognised his father’s fixations: squares of lawn, ruthlessly symmetrical flowerbeds, saplings in staggered rows, with none of the exuberant, romantic untidiness of English gardens.
‘It’ll be all right in two or three years’ time,’ Albert said, looking for Jean’s approval. ‘But will I see it? You’ve no idea how old I feel since your mother died.’
‘I can imagine.’
They pushed open the gate with its painted plaque: ‘La Michelière.’ So Marie-Thérèse was clear about who she wanted this house to go to after Antoinette left home. The first person they saw was Michel. He was crouching with his hand extended over an ornamental pond, holding out birdseed to a pair of white pigeons that were flapping their wings on the far side, not daring to fly to him. Jean’s appearance made him stand up.
‘How did you get here? I wanted to write and thank you, but ask you to stop: I’m not ready.’
It took Jean a few seconds to remember that Geneviève had shown the album of drawings to a London gallerist, who had offered Michel a show in October.
‘I can’t do everything at once,’ Michel went on. ‘I’m still working on my engraving, but the most important thing I’m doing is practising for a recital at Pleyel in a year’s time: nothing but Francis Poulenc. He’s going to accompany me himself. You can’t imagine how wonderful he is. From the first moment we met, we understood each other perfectly. He’s writing two new songs for me based on poems by Cavafy … you must know him, the Greek poet …’
‘No, I don’t.’
Michel did not look disappointed. In fact he was not listening, as Jean noticed very quickly. He was only thinking about his recital, in which he had been encouraged by a music critic named Jean Vuillermoz. Vuillermoz was one of the two or three critics who understood modern music. The rest? Old buffoons and failures from the Conservatoire who understood nothing about anything, unless you slipped them an envelope … Albert had moved away, and Jean was Michel’s captive audience as Michel stood at the edge of the pond, looking taller than usual, dressed in beige corduroy trousers and a blue turtleneck sweater. The pair of pigeons flew upwards, circling high above them.
‘They’re lovely, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. I didn’t know you were a pigeon fancier.’
‘I’m learning. Have you ever dreamt you were flying?’
‘Sometimes I do.’
‘Do you know the psychoanalytic explanation of that dream?’
‘No.’
Jean was inordinately relieved to be rescued from a long disquisition on pigeons and dreams by Antoinette’s arrival. She was thinner, and from a distance her silhouette recalled Geneviève’s, with a little less grace and lightness, her very short hair shaping a boy’s face.
‘You pig!’ She ran towards him. ‘You pig, you didn’t tell me you were coming.’
She threw herself at his neck and kissed him on the cheeks with a vehemence that shocked Michel.
‘What’s got into you, Antoinette?’
‘Nothing. I’m just happy to see him.’
‘Me too. We’re all happy …’
Crossly he turned his back on them and went into the house.
‘Come inside. Maman would like to talk to you. I hear you’ve seen Geneviève. How is she? Tell me. Terrific, apparently. Do you know the man who keeps her?’
‘Is that what your mother wants to know?’
‘You idiot! Can you see her asking that question? Come on.’
Albert walked past, ignoring them, pushing a wheelbarrow with a box of petunias in it.
‘I came to help my father.’
‘He can spare you for a minute, and anyway you’re not wearing gardening clothes. What beautiful tweed! Are you rich?’
‘No, utterly broke.’
‘Good. I like you better that way.’
Jean turned away, preferring not to see the lopsided figure of
Albert pushing his wheelbarrow, and let himself be dragged towards the house.
‘Where did you sleep?’ Antoinette asked.
‘At Malemort.’
‘Ah!’
She squeezed his arm violently and was silent. Pigeons flew over their heads and landed at the edge of the pond.
‘Filthy birds,’ Antoinette said. ‘Inedible too. I don’t understand Michel. He spends hours every day taming them. Did you see Chantal?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘Did you sleep with her?’
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘No reason.’
Six months ago Antoinette would never have asked such a question. It made Jean feel uneasy. Piece by piece the edifice was crumbling. Inside the villa several pieces of furniture furtively bought back from the La Sauveté auction reminded him of the old house.
‘Do you remember that chest?’ Antoinette asked.
‘It was in the hall.’
‘I kept the chest of drawers from my bedroom and that low armchair. The rest is new. We had to make a very public show that we were changing our life, that Papa was never coming back.’
‘Where is he?’
‘We don’t know.’
Alerted by the sound of a stranger’s voice, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was coming downstairs. Like the Marquise de Malemort, her face was unchanged. The absence of grace can work miracles. In a flash she assessed Jean’s transformation, the new maturity of his features, the cut of his jacket and flannel trousers. Instinct warned her that he could no longer be spoken to as he once had been. She kissed him nevertheless, with dry, trembling lips.
‘I’m so glad to see you again.’
Doubtless she genuinely was. Jean did not flinch at the sharp gaze that examined him.
‘Did you see Geneviève in London?’
‘Several times.’
‘She wrote to Michel. She’s terribly keen on his drawings and talked about organising a show for him. All thanks to you.’