Sabine

by A. P.

  Not that it signifies much either way. That cat was so nifty in its comings and goings it could have reached us at the equator, let alone a few kilometres away, which was all the distance that separated the two dwellings. But if we were still at Sabine’s, then it must have been towards the very end of my stay, or Aimée would surely have set her forces in motion immediately instead of waiting till we were back in the château for the summer term. The cat shit would have hit the fan that much earlier.

  Love was drawing us, you see, as Sabine had predicted: drawing us together on the physical plane as well. The body is its natural medium of transmission, I reckon. Can spirits love? Despite the hype I very much doubt it. And can loving bodies stay apart? Again, unless separated by time or space or chains of some description, I very much doubt it. Sabine and I were coeval and together and as yet unchained – in what other direction could we go except towards each other?

  Unnatural? Rot. It was as natural as breathing. Unnatural is the man-made law that decrees it so. Nature makes stags in stag-shape: it takes men to make them in the shape of a stranded jellyfish.

  And what does it take to make a nosy old woman in the shape of a nosy old cat? Ah, now you’re asking. The cat – sorry about this silly verb, but after that first apparition at the window the cat began to dog us. Every time Sabine and I were alone together, there it would be, watching, unblinking, its head tilted slightly to one side. We even took it on board, more or less, made a threesome with it; allowed it to slip between us as we lay there together, holding hands and touching foreheads and talking ourselves into ever deeper discovery; held it close to us and cuddled it: there is nothing nicer than cat fur on bare skin, or so we thought – despite the grit with which the cat’s pelt was dusted, which came off on us like sand. It became a joke, a mascot: our cat. Our companion cat and, yes, to some degree, chaperone cat too, because while it is true that we were young and green and in no hurry, a third party, even if it’s only an animal party, puts a break on certain activities – especially when it stares the way that cat did.

  Chat-peron. Chat-stité. Chat-grin, chat-grin, as in the fashionable cat book of that time. We never made it, not quite the whole way, or this story would have been different. A Johnny Walker cork, another courgette, perhaps even one of Sabine’s nimble fingers, say three to make sure, that’s all it would have taken, and we would have been safe – out of their clutches. Talk about butterfly effect: the hymen is not that much thicker than a pair of butterfly’s wings …

  Sabine would be furious with me, of course, for clinging to this theory – she was as furious as she could be, even at the time I first explained it to her. They were so devious, you see, so cunning in the way they acted, and she so straightforward, with her logic and her medicine and her science. Perhaps if I had had that cat-fur grit analysed it would have furnished a bit of hard evidence with which to convince her. Henna, says the dictionary, Lawsonia inermis. The crushed leaves thereof, used as a dye, esp. of hair. Myself, I can dispense with such Scotland Yard procedures: I know this is how things went, I know it – to my cost.

  X

  The Bal Masqué

  Good news, petits lapins, I have a proper teacher for you this term. He is coming tomorrow. His name is M. Bosse and he used to teach in a big lycée in Touraine. Until his retirement, that is, some years ago now. (How many, you old slypuss? Come clean. Like a hundred?) Maybe, just to begin with, you will find him a little less sympathique than Sabine. But only a little and only to begin with. Sabine was quite strict with you, too, no? And yet you came to like her …

  Aimée dropped this bombshell as lightly as a discarded tissue, without once looking in my direction. Oh, yes, she was sly all right, they all were. No vetoes, no tearing us apart, no wedges driven between us; no hint really, except for the mute scrutiny of the cat, that anyone had seen any need as yet for our separation. Just an old new teacher, and an empty feeling in my stomach, and an empty bedroom, seeing that there was no point in Sabine staying on now that her replacement had arrived. Better for her, too, Aimée added, false and greasy as an old toupee, she will have more time for her medical studies, a girl of her age, de bonne famille, shouldn’t really be holding down a full-time job. She will still come in on Thursdays, however, when M. Bosse has his day off, to give you an hour’s lesson in the afternoon.

  Do you miss her? Tessa asked gently, the first morning we awoke to her absence. What is it like falling for a girl? Is she really a lesbian, like Christopher said? Do you think you are too?

  I replied honestly that I didn’t know, that it was a label I didn’t know how to stick on other people, let alone on myself. Love was such a person-dependent thing: I’d fallen for Sabine, OK, but not necessarily a category or a gender.

  Tessa struck up her morning fag and puffed thoughtfully at the ceiling in a volley of tiny smoke rings. Mmm. You liked little thingamajig, little Aymar, a bit, didn’t you, too? Perhaps you’re both. Bisexual, like a worm.

  Yes, perhaps she was right, perhaps I was. Downcast as a worm as well. One hour’s lesson a week with Sabine was almost worse than not seeing her at all. We had agreed to telephone each other at regular intervals, but the night before, when I had tried to ring her, there had been a funny interference noise and the line had gone dead on me. Not in itself a major disappointment: dead or alive, the school telephone was a miserable machine you could hardly hear through for the crackle. But worrying all the same.

  I know – Tessa was exerting herself to cheer me up, she never usually expressed any ideas in the morning, if indeed later – there’s a big fancy dress party at the de Vibreys’ this weekend. If Sabine’s been invited – and she probably has, or could cadge an invitation anyway – you’ll be able to see each other there. She giggled, dispersing the smoke rings. You could even dance together, like we used to do at school. Her leading, you following.

  Yes, why not? Or vice versa, seeing that that’s the whole beauty of the same-sex relationship in my experience: no fixed roles, no leading and following, no domination. No overdog or underdog, simply an unleashed pair coursing along together side by side. Equals. A draw. Love seventeen and advantage no one.

  Does the butcher shop metaphor hold if it is you I am dressing for, Sabine? No, it doesn’t and it didn’t. I wasn’t meat that day, minced or sliced or otherwise, and I didn’t cram myself into a tidy package with a view to the customer: I made myself – freely, willingly, autonomously – as pretty as I possibly could for the sheer glee of it, full stop.

  On this occasion too I remember the dressing ceremony in the fugged-up bathroom as clearly as if it were yesterday and there had been no fug. Although, seeing as it was the last time in my life that I was ever totally, straightforwardly, unalloyedly happy, it is quite possible I constructed much of the memory in hindsight using pieces of other days – wishful remembrance and hardly any fact at all. Christopher’s voice beating out ‘Blueberry Hill’ in bad fake American: ‘My heart stood steeheel’. He is getting himself into the part. With his hair pomaded into an Elvis crest, and a guitar borrowed from Mme Goujon’s teenage son, he is going as a pop singer. Matty in the bath, shaving her legs and cursing herself for having waxed them on a par with the arms: it has made things worse, made the hairs grow inwards and now not even the razor can crop them. Mierda. Black stockings is the only answer. But black stockings on an angel …? Too late now to switch to that red affair and go as a Flamenco dancer, it needs sewing. Mierda, mierda, mierda. What can she do? Stay starkers and go as the Yeti, Christopher suggests, ducking to avoid a wet sponge. Serena and Tessa squabbling over a filthy starched petticoat, passed around between us so often, as we shift from Greco mode to Bardot, that its ownership record is lost. I have a feeling it is actually mine, brought back from America by my dad, but to say so would only complicate matters at this stage. Besides, it has gone the shape and colour of a rotten cauliflower. Who wants Bardot anyway? Who wants Greco either? Tonight I am to be Cleopatra. I will have no traffic with the musty pile of dre
ssing-up clothes Aimée has put at our disposal – no telling who has worn those tawdry time-stained dresses, and when and where and in what mood. (Why, she did, you idiot. Forties boxes, thirties clingers, twenties sheaths, even second Empire crinolines like as not – she wore them herself, in a mopey mood, all down the decades.) Instead I have settled on a comparatively clean sheet, which I have just finished draping round myself in a sexy Liz Taylor fashion, anchoring it at the top to the struts of Serena’s strapless bra and then clamping it in at the waist with a gold chain belt. On my feet I have a pair of sandals, also gold – perhaps more slave than queen, but still – and my arms, neck, head and ears are garnished by all the fake jewellery we have managed to assemble between us – quite a haul. I have a bottle of instant suntan also, nicked by Tessa from a party during the hols, which no one else dares use, and while all these other things are going on I am staring at myself in a soggy little pond of mirror, rubbed free of steam, to watch the effect develop. At present my blackheads are just getting blacker, but on the last glimpse before we leave I shall be bowled over by my own appearance: two kohl-rimmed elfin eyes in a shining brown face, ringed around by curls and glitter. Never before have I been so bewitching. Hindsight, like I said, is a great fudger of memories, but I think even then, at the very moment that I gasp and wonder, I have a kind of presentiment that never will I be so again; that tonight, come later what may in the way of poise and better dress sense, I peak. Not so dire to peak at seventeen. Some do so in their prams, poor things, and some I reckon never peak, they just dip.

  This bright halo of confidence came with me to the dance and enveloped me for most of the evening, making it difficult for me to see, outside its radius, what was going on. I noticed Roland de Vibrey at once, of course. It was difficult to miss him. A) because he was standing at the entrance of the ballroom with his parents, greeting the guests as they came in; B) because his greeting to me was particularly flattering, inasmuch as the long eyelashes flickered in surprise and from behind them shot a look of such intensity it had me fancying he fancied me on my merits, silly puffed-up coot that I was; C) because he was wearing a long blond straw wig with flowers in it to crown his Ophelia get-up; and D) because, wig and all, he was the most beautiful creature, male or female, animal or vegetable, I had ever seen. Or anyone had ever seen.

  Bit of a wide statement, that, so I will narrow it by adding a ‘possibly’, and then broaden it again by affirming that the possibility is very remote. Beatrice, Laura, Stella, Helen of Troy, Pasiphae’s bull, Adonis, Mr W. H., the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – you can bet none of them had such a head carriage, such high cheekbones, such slanting cobalt-blue eyes with such a lofty noli me tangere look in them, or such a shy friendly smile underneath to cancel it out. No, truly, he was magnificent: a human power plant that made the whole place blaze and hum and quiver.

  I blazed and hummed myself but mostly on energy of my own generating. Out of sheer honesty I’ll admit to a 3 per cent contribution due to the charge of this rogue Ophelia’s staggering presence, but no more. After all, what was he to me at that stage? Nothing, not even a person really, let alone a person to worry about, just an extra source of homage. Where homage was due and abundant. It was my evening, or so I still foolishly imagined. I had so many partners and danced so many dances it was like being on a roundabout: no leisure to observe, no time to think, just a whirl of lights and colours and faces spinning round me; and inside, like a pivot holding everything firm, the knowledge that Sabine’s face was amongst them, a buccaneer moustache drawn in eye-pencil on her upper lip, and that at some time in the evening – no hurry, no hurry, maybe when they serve supper, maybe later still when the music slows and the costumes wilt and the sidling off begins – we would be together. Strangely, although she must have chosen her pirate guise for its male swagger (I can think of no other reason for her consenting to fancy dress, I had expected the jeans again and a mouth full of Boris Vian spittle), it made her look more feminine. In fact it made her look downright beautiful, like it did Sonya in War and Peace. Damn her, damn him, damn Tolstoy, damn everything.

  I think it was while I was dancing with the Marquis de Vibrey père – what an honour: on the sidelines Aimée was positively purring at this vicarious success, the crafty old feline – that the roundabout gradually ground to a halt and I noticed what had been happening while my back was turning. Roland and Sabine had hitched up and were dancing together. Sabine. Dancing. With a man. And what a man.

  Nothing so terrible in this, you may think: the young host and his childhood pal taking a spin together to fill in time while, secretly, both of them would have preferred to be with me. But, oh yes, there was. I knew it at once, long before I knew the reason. It was not so much the way they looked in themselves, although they made a compelling enough pair, the piratess and the drag maiden, both tall, both blond, both moving slightly rigidly to the music as if their rightful place was on a pair of stony Norman tombs, side by stately side for eternity. No, it was the way the rest of the room looked at them: complacent, indulgent, approving. Far from frowning on this unlikely cross-dress match, society was smiling and nodding its head. Next to Aimée I caught sight of Sabine’s mum: contentment seemed to fly off her in sparks. At last her darling hoyden daughter was doing something publicly right.

  Where is the pain when your pride is wounded? And why do we say that: wounded? There is no gash, no blood, not even a scratch. Which part of us hurts? The brain cells? The neurons? What, for goodness’ sake, what? You see, Sabine, not everything is there in your materialist picture of the world – whole chunks of the map are missing.

  And how do I always know, a useless split second or so before a bad thing happens, that it is going to happen and will be as bad as bad can be? Answer me that one if you can. I read things into it after? No, I don’t, I read them out of it before. His name passed me by on first hearing? OK, so it did, but that was because there was nothing yet in it to hear, no plot, no danger.

  The music stopped, we all stopped dancing. The Marquis left me with an ironic little flip on my nose: he could see that my attention was elsewhere, but that didn’t bother him – if anything the reverse: things were going according to plan. Sabine left Roland with no particular gesture that I recall and came straight over to me. Her eyes were the same, her smile was the same. Almost. Maybe a trifle wan. She hugged me and ran her finger over the brown on my face. Incroyable, she pronounced, it looked amazing and it didn’t even come off. Let us go and get something to drink – she was thirsty all of a sudden though she couldn’t face food – and then take it somewhere private where we could make plans for next week: how to see each other, where to meet, what to do. She was the same. We were the same. Roland’s glitz didn’t come off either, she was unsullied by it. Relief.

  But short-lived relief. The glitz, no, but the blight, yes. It was already taking hold. It does that sometimes; sometimes the mere nearness is enough, especially when the appetite is strong. Which was, of course, why her appetite had left her. I remember noticing the contrast between our skin tones as our arms untwined (for the last time? No, not the very last, but the last unshadowed time, the last time free of care): we could have been of different races, hers had turned so pale. Already, after just one dance. Oh, Sabine, if only I had known. I would have taken you home myself, pillion on a bike, or in my arms if need be, or on foot and dragging you all the way – anyhow, at any cost, to avoid contagion. But it was too soon for me even to suspect. That’s the catch of this time-bound world: it’s always too soon until it’s too late.

  They weren’t going to run the risk of leaving us à deux, not even for the space of a sip of champagne. Before we had time to reach the table where it was being served, here was the Marquis muscling in between us, flanked by his icy Marquise, and here was Aimée, trailing a beaming and unwitting Ghislaine by the hand, and here was the dread Ophelia, wig in hand, his own hair surprisingly dark for a blue-eyed boy, gauze draperies floating. The drag could have been offensi
ve but on him it was disarming. Not so much, ‘Look at me, I’m so male I can afford these fripperies,’ more, ‘I set no great store by gender, you know, it’s just the way the chromosomes crumble.’

  Eh bien, les voilà, my two little bluestockings. Having a lovely time, no? Having a lovely time? Ah, l’ivresse de la danse. The lights, the music, ah. Aimée flapped round us like a vague old sugary hen, talking nonsense to everyone and no one. The thrill of three de Vibreys at once almost had her moonstruck. (Unless it was all part of the script for her to act like this, in her usual devious-dotty way. But I don’t think so: they can’t have foreseen how quickly the blight would take effect, they can’t have scripted everything.) What a delightful evening, chère Madame de Vibrey. Cher Monsieur, so nice to see the ballroom in use again, why, I haven’t seen it looking so beautiful since … (Oops, that’s right, better not say.) Ghislaine, congratulations on your charming daughter. Si intelligente, such an inspired teacher for her age … such original reading choices … Baudelaire, I never even knew he kept a diary … Everyone so fond … We shall miss her so. And tonight so very séduisante in her – what is it, her outfit? Brigand? Corsair, ah, corsair. But did anyone ever see such a pale-looking … What’s the matter? Oh, ma petite! Oh, la pauvre! Is something wrong? Get a chair for her, someone. Quick, a glass of cold water … Ice … Cognac … Anything … Quick … Vite, vite, vite!