My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  None of us could eat much of the early supper Mlle Martel provided, and the moment the little white bus she had ordered appeared on the drive, we teetered out in all our finery, taking a double-seat each and carefully spreading out our precious skirts. After long thought, Cally had tied a black velvet ribbon round her white throat, and together with the spangled gauze stole the effect was stunning. Throughout the drive she sat silently, calm and serene, while Sara and I twitched and chattered nervously, and Mlle Martel and Mme Germaine made teasing remarks from the front seat just behind the driver.

  We gasped when the Ecole Militaire came into sight, an enchanted castle all flood-lit and spot-lit and under-lit, with fountains flinging sparkling streams of diamonds into the air, and a huge marquee banked with flowers and pulsing with music.

  The moment I got out of the bus I realised that my tight skirt and high heels were going to be a nightmare on the cobbles, but no matter: there were our three cavaliers – teasingly dubbed Les Trois Moustiquaires by Mlle Martel – looking incredibly glamorous in what I suppose was their mess-kit, tight trousers, gleaming buttons and shimmering epaulettes, waiting to greet us: proud, fiery, dark-haired Christian, who had a handle to his name and was Mlle Martel’s favourite; his tall, fair-haired, good-looking friend Michel, and Bernard, whom they called ‘Le Professeur,’ short, balding, and with owlish spectacles.

  No prizes for guessing who had been assigned to look after me. Christian bowed and smiled at Cally, who drifted away with him as if in a dream. Michel clicked his heels and asked Sara to dance and, after a few minutes’ standing rather awkwardly on the cobbles while Bernard chatted to our chaperones, Mlle Martel took her sister’s arm, said firmly, ‘Allez, mes enfants, amusez-vous bien!’ and vanished into the crowd.

  I felt a momentary panic, but there was no need. Bernard may not have been glamorous but he was good-natured and extremely polite, and took his duties as host very seriously. We danced, he brought me a glass of wine, he introduced me to other officer cadets who danced with me, and though from time to time he returned me to Mlle Martel, he always came back before I could feel a wallflower.

  Now and then we caught glimpses of Cally and Sara whirling away with their beaux and around 2am, when I was beginning to wonder if my toes would ever regain their normal shape after being forced into points for so long, I noticed that they had swapped partners. Michel was holding Cally very close, his cheek pressed to the top of her head and his big shoulders bent protectively over her, while Sara and Christian danced with exaggerated formality at arm’s length, his hand barely touching her waist, and both their heads well back as if to avoid contact. Sara looked annoyed, and Christian had a red mark on his cheekbone.

  Bernard chuckled as he pointed out the new pairing to Mlle Martel, whose expressive mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Oh, la la! Il est jaloux comme un tigre, le pauvre,’ she said. She shook her head and gave him a beseeching look. ‘Be an angel and calm him, chou-chou.’

  Bernard rose and took my hand. ‘Come, mademoiselle.’ I was far from pleased that they had chosen to feed me to the tiger, but Christian was too much of a gentleman to let his feelings get the better of him, and when tapped on the shoulder and offered me as a substitute dancing partner, he accepted the situation with good enough grace, while over the other side of the dance-floor Cally, eyes half closed, drifted serenely on, tightly wrapped in Michel’s embrace.

  On the way home in the breaking dawn, Sara was full of indignation. ‘They had a fight! When I tried to stop them Christian pushed me away and I fell over and tore my skirt. Serves him right if he got a black eye.’

  Though grateful for Bernard’s protection throughout the long evening, I couldn’t help regretting having missed this drama.

  On Monday, however, when we surfaced round about midday, we found that Lisa had returned in an agitated state of mind. For some reason she chose to confide in me as we walked down the long avenue to the main road in the cool of the evening, and what she told me entirely altered my view of her.

  She had not, it appeared, spent the weekend in Paris with her uncle. The letter purporting to be from him which she had shown Mlle Martel had actually been written by her boyfriend Nathaniel, whom she had arranged to meet in London. On arrival at the Gare de Lyons, therefore, she had crossed Paris by taxi, which made a large dent in her savings, taken the train to the coast and bought a ticket for the ferry from Calais to Dover. Another train deposited her at Waterloo station, where Nathaniel was waiting.

  So far, so successful, but after this the story went steeply downhill. They had booked into a hotel in Sloane Street as man and wife, but after making love – first time for either of them – she had been gripped by such an agonising pain in her down-belows that she had forced Nathaniel to go out into the street to find an all-night chemist and explain the problem as best he could. The pharmacist, no doubt sniffing irregularity, had not been sympathetic or helpful, and poor Nathaniel, hot with embarrassment and without a prescription, had not been able to obtain anything stronger than aspirin.

  All the next day had been spent holed up in the cheap hotel, Lisa doubled up with cramps and Nathaniel hovering anxiously. She had blamed him, snapped at him, and when finally he left to go back to St John’s Leatherhead, where he was in the Sixth Form, told him she never wanted to see him again – words she now bitterly regretted.

  By degrees the cramps eased, and she made the return journey without incident, but now – inevitably – she was terribly afraid she might be pregnant. The whole adventure had been an unmitigated disaster, and she wished very much that she had come to the St Maixent Summer Ball instead.

  I made soothing noises and longed to tell the others the whole story, but unfortunately she’d made me promise not to, though from then on I regarded her in a very different light.

  Much more frequent visitors than the glamorous officer-cadets were the three sons of a neighbouring landowner, all in their early twenties and unashamedly looking for wives. The eldest was Paul, the Vicomte, who wasn’t actually deformed but nevertheless always reminded me of Toulouse-Lautrec, with a big head on top of hunched shoulders and thin legs. Next in line came fair-haired, silent, wooden-featured Pierre; and the youngest – our favourite – florid, jolly, roly-poly Hilaire, who looked like a peasant farmer and, being the proud owner of one of the very few tractors in the neighbourhood did, indeed, spend most of his life on it.

  Though none of us had yet thought of actively looking for husbands and scoffed at the very idea, the mere fact of being eyed up as wife-material lent a certain spark to the banter over the bridge-table. Late, late into the night, in a thick fug of cigarette smoke – Sobranie, Virginia, and the Gaullois I pretended to like although they made me feel dizzy – we played rubber after rubber before tiptoeing down the stone steps to Celestine’s cavernous kitchen and raiding the larder for galette and deliciously runny Brie.

  We also drank heroic quantities of wine and pineau, but despite Sara’s morning ritual at the mirror, it never seemed to do much harm. I suppose it wasn’t particularly strong.

  The only bathroom in the house adjoined our bedroom – a gloomy place smelling strongly of drains with a deep, greyish basin whose enamel was so scratched and scarred that it never looked clean, and a narrow bath with a complicated arrangement of taps that produced tepid water impartially from each head. There was also a stove. One Sunday morning I met Celestine toiling upstairs with a basket of logs, and presently the smell of woodsmoke filled the house.

  ‘Mademoiselle va se baigner,’ she explained.

  ‘Se’ baigner turned out to be a very loose interpretation. When Mademoiselle Martel took a bath – once a term – she liked everyone in the household to be in attendance, just in case…

  When the stove had heated a big copper jug of water near to boiling point, Celestine poured it into the bath and ceremoniously diluted it with cold until the temperature was pronounced ‘convenable’. Then she and Madame Germaine helped Mlle Martel to remove her clo
thes and lower herself gingerly into the water. Sara and I stood by the door, ready to sound the alarm if she should come over faint, and Gaston, the gardener, stationed himself at the foot of the stairs, all prepared to dash up and fish his employer out of the bath at a moment’s notice.

  Cally – who had a gentle, soothing voice and was less inclined to giggle than the rest of us – was co-opted to stand in a corner of the bathroom to pass the soap and face-cloth and, ultimately, the carefully warmed towel. The whole performance was highly choreographed, with messages passing up and down the chain of command.

  ‘She’s in the water.’

  ‘She’s having her back washed.’

  ‘Madame Germaine is cutting her toe-nails.’ (That was the point at which I quit, never having been keen on foot-care.)

  Finally, with maximum hullabaloo, she rose from the bath like Venus from the foam, was swaddled in several fluffy white towels and given a restorative nip of brandy. She spent the rest of the day lying down to regain her composure, while Celestine and Gaston cleared up the bathroom.

  I was so happy at Availles that I would have liked to spend the rest of the year there, but over the summer holidays a new plan was hatched, and this time the Paris-touting culture-vultures had their way.

  It so happened that Aunt Nancy’s former governess, Mlle Roblin, with whom she had kept in touch over the past thirty years, had invested all her savings in buying a small modern flat in the 6th Arondissement, not far from the Jardins de Luxembourg, 11 rue Joseph Bara. Her idea was to board English pupils, who would enrol in the 10-week Cours de Civilisation run by the Sorbonne as a nice little money-spinner, and introduce them to the delights of French culture.

  Aunt Nancy had loyally booked a place for Clarissa in Mlle Roblin’s initial intake, and leaned heavily on my parents to do the same with me. It was absurd, she said, to spend a year buried in the depths of la France profonde in the company of a lot of country bumpkins when all the glamour and glory of Paris was there for the taking, and so persuasive was she that finally they agreed.

  So it was that Clarissa and I, along with her school friend Rosemary and the daughter of a vague connection of Uncle Harold’s named Gina found ourselves that autumn cooped up in extremely tight quarters with tall, severe, black-haired Mlle Roblin, whom I’m afraid I disliked on sight. It wasn’t that she was in any way unkind, far from it, but she was strict and humourless and made all sorts of pettyfogging rules about keys, and using the telephone, and when you could or couldn’t use the shower. It was worse than being back at school.

  Right from the start Paris was a disappointment to me. I have never been happy in towns, hate the noise and smell of traffic, and feel uneasy among crowds. After the fun and freedom of the Chateau d’Availles, the cramped little flat with four strapping teenagers in it felt unbearably claustrophobic and I took to walking alone in the Jardin de Luxembourg like a prisoner in the exercise yard, Les sanglots longs, Des violons, De l’automne, Blessent mon coeur/D’une langueur/Monotone… pounding maddeningly in my mind. An equally depressing song popular at the time, Les Feuilles Mortes, seemed to echo my mood. The last line, I remember, was ‘Et la mer efface sur le sable/Les pas des amants desunis,’ and I tried to whip up self-pity and emotion by imagining myself cruelly parted from a lover, but without success since the poor chap simply didn’t exist.

  Unlike Lisa, Sara, and particularly Cally, my life so far had been quite remarkably free of lovers, and the prospect of finding one in Paris seemed remote. Mlle Roblin didn’t have the kind of social network that had made Availles such a lively, friendly place. If she had young friends and relations, she didn’t risk introducing them to us, and our male fellow-students at the Sorbonne’s Cours de Civilisation were a scruffy lot of the beards-and-sandals tendency, many of them German and Italian, their ages ranging from the teens to early thirties. It was difficult to imagine falling madly in love with any of them.

  We attended lectures in the huge Amphitheatre Richelieu, a domed and cavernous hall with galleries on two levels. Even the twelve hundred students on the course made a thinnish audience in such a space, but the lecturers were first-class, spoke extremely clearly, and held our attention effortlessly – no mean feat with such a mixed bag of foreigners. Every morning there would be three lectures with a fifteen-minute break between each, during which time we would dash out to the corridors and courtyards for a drag.

  The proper students – the French ones – seemed to be in a permanent state of fury with the authorities, and because we had very little interaction it was hard for us to make out exactly what was bugging them; but I thought money – or rather the lack of it – was the root of the problem. One exciting morning a flying mob came pelting up the steps from the cobbled courtyard, some limping, some with blood on their faces, shouting out that the riot police were after them.

  ‘Prenez garde! Ils tappent sur n’importe qui! They hit first and ask questions later!’ one was good enough to warn us as he dashed past.

  The university authorities locked the doors and we had a long wait before we were allowed home for lunch. Historically the Sorbonne had a name as a home-from-home for subversives, and over the next years relations between students and police continued to deteriorate until they came to a head in the full-scale riots of 1968.

  Mlle Roblin did the cooking herself, and fed us like fighting cocks. Once she asked me to collect the money for her weekly shopping from the Bank, and I was appalled to discover that she spent the equivalent of over £70 a week on meat and groceries for us – this when Mummy could feed the whole family for a tenner. I had never handled so much money in my life, and scuttled home on the Metro with my handbag clutched in a death-grip, feeling sure that the X-ray eyes of every thief in the arondissement could see what was in my purse.

  When we returned to the Sorbonne after lunch, sleepy and well-fed, we would be dispersed into classrooms for written work. Thanks to Mammy, I could cope with this pretty well and found myself assigned to the top set where our teacher was the stout, sardonic Professeur Laval, a tremendous roller of Rs who, with one blistering comment, could pulverise the self-esteem of even the most bumptious student. In his presence I kept the lowest of profiles. He was an avowed egalitarian, very likely a communist, and when he took our names at the first lesson he was chagrined to discover among his pupils a face-grinding aristo – a Baron, no less.

  ‘Perhaps Monsieur Celli would give us the benefit of his views on Voltaire,’ he sneered, unable to bring himself to pronounce the title.

  ‘Baron Celli,’ the small, dark Italian murmured, gently but firmly.

  ‘Your views on Voltaire, Monsieur Celli.’

  ‘Baroncelli!’ his friends chorused, because in fact the poor man’s name was Agusto Baroncelli. The Professeur was far from pleased and thereafter seized every opportunity to needle him.

  Because I was living among English speakers, my spoken French had hardly improved at all by the end of term, and though I felt confident enough that I had passed the written tests in French History, Philosophy, and Literature I was horrified to see Professeur Laval among the three examiners for the Oral section of the diploma.

  After a bit of aimless chitchat, I was given a boring passage from an essay entitled ‘L’homme qui sait tout’ to read aloud, and stumbled through it with the doom-laden feeling that I was making a pig’s ear of the pronunciation and they were laughing at my accent.

  ‘Eh bien, now tell me, what does it mean, L’homme qui sait tout?’ asked one of the examiners, and I looked at him uncomprehendingly. What did it mean? Wasn’t that obvious? The man who knows everything – how else could one put it? The Know-All? The Busybody? Was it meant ironically? Like a shorthand writer reading back what she has written, I had been too preoccupied with the words of the text to take in their sense.

  ‘Well, mademoiselle?’ he said impatiently.

  Reaching back into my memory, I fished out a Latin word, hoping it was the same in French. ‘It means omniscient,’ I said t
entatively. ‘He thinks himself omniscient.’ There was a short pause, then Monsieur Laval laughed. ‘Good! C’est trrrres bien, mademoiselle. C’est même savant.’

  To that one lucky word I therefore attribute scoring the second highest marks in the entire diploma course – the winner being none other than Signor Agusto Baroncelli. When the result was read out by the head of the department in the big Amphitheatre, I heard a whoop and saw out of the corner of my eye something drop from the gallery into the body of the hall as the winner abseiled down to collect his certificate without bothering to use the stairs, and I am glad to say that Professeur Laval had the grace to shake him warmly by the hand.

  Life in Paris, with its emphasis on French culture, dignified behaviour, and tidy clothes may not have been entirely my cup of tea, but Mummy’s brothers – Breynton and Giles – snapped into full avuncular mode as soon as they heard I was regretting the freedom of Availles. Not only did they take me and Clarissa to the Opera and the Crazy Horse, but also introduced us to the delights of the racecourses so conveniently placed on the capital’s perimeter.

  Longchamps, Maison Lafitte and Vincennes were all within easy Metro distance from rue Joseph Bara, and as soon as we knew the way we went there most Sunday afternoons. Race-meetings were often on Sunday, and after Matins in the English Church, which provided yet another opportunity to chatter in our own language, we would dive down into the Metro and rattle all the way out to the Bois de Vincennes for the equivalent of about two shillings. I never understood why the London Underground should be so expensive – the longer the journey the more you paid – while you could dart about Paris all day and all night on a single flat-rate ticket.