Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘What about the coats?’ Viva loved the distinctive angles of Henri’s teeth as he talked, the eye teeth clambering over the front four like children wanting a better view. ‘Maybe they’re geologists,’ he said, his top lip dipping into the question.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Their pockets look as though they’re loaded with chisels and mallets. But equally, I suppose, they could be farmers. Maybe they’re carrying potatoes and turnips.’ His eyes danced as he leant against the windows. He was enjoying the trip, but just as he seemed about to reappraise the situation and enfold Viva into it more closely, he looked out the window and started talking about Normandy’s black cows.

  The smelly men had boarded the train in Paris, just when Viva and Henri thought they had a carriage to themselves. Beyond a little staleness, they hadn’t smelt much at first, but the increasing heat of the day began to draw out disgusting odours.

  Viva could see the two bags of journals in the racks over the men’s heads. She and Henri had been told not to allow them out of their sight. ‘I wonder why they want so many copies in Bagnoles?’ she asked. Even Henri, with his beautiful strong arms, had found them heavy to hoist onto the racks. He didn’t speculate; he said his sense of smell had been dulled by living in the Icebox. If he could smell properly, he supposed, the carriage would be unbearable to sit in. The atmosphere in the Icebox was so oppressive in summer they called it the Sweatbox. Capable of creating draughts and indoor hurricanes all winter long, the air went to sleep in summer, and couldn’t be inveigled in or out of windows from its stale resting places under beds.

  Back in the compartment the three men were sitting still and silent as before, their coats open, betraying nothing of what made them bulky. But for the bored jiggling of one man’s foot, they might have been dummies.

  Henri told the jiggler his girlfriend wanted to know what he had in his pockets but, with slow insolence, the man just folded his tongue between his teeth and passed his eyes over Henri, smirking.

  Viva, proud to have been called Henri’s girlfriend, began to think this smirk and the stares of the other two men were masking some nefarious plot in which she and Henri seemed to have a part, however small.

  As they came into Briouze, where they were to take a branch line to Bagnoles, the men left the carriage ahead of them, while Henri hefted down the papers. Strange to say, most of the twenty-odd people who alighted at Briouze also boarded the train for Bagnoles. Perhaps it was a bigger place than they’d thought.

  The men in the smelly coats had gone and instead they were sharing their carriage with a mature, elegant woman who was sporting a man’s white suit and matching beret. She went to some lengths to beg Henri not to trip over her legs. The slightest knock, apparently, could have maimed them irreparably. On her dignity, Viva gave the woman a levelling stare she’d been cultivating. The woman was travelling with a companion who was either a nurse or a dutiful daughter. Whichever, she snapped at Viva, ‘There’s a risk of gangrene.’

  The woman’s legs looked perfectly all right to Viva. She didn’t walk with sticks or crutches; rather, you would have noticed her for her elegant deportment.

  ‘Wretched trains,’ the woman said, ‘you ring ahead for a first class carriage only to find there aren’t any. Don’t breathe a word to anyone you’ve seen me here.’

  Perhaps she was someone famous.

  Then, ‘Is one of you afflicted? Or are you just going to visit someone?’

  ‘We’re on our honeymoon,’ said Viva.

  ‘Oh, really? You could have gone to the Côte d’Azure at this time of year. What? Haven’t any money? Shame. There’s a casino at Bagnoles. The place was highly recommended to me. There’s a battery of doctors. Terrible shame if either of you is afflicted. You’re both so young.’

  A mystified silence fell on the carriage while the woman crossed her legs with care and put on more lipstick, gazing lovingly into the mirror of her compact. Snapping it shut, she said, ‘They told me a story about a Capuchin monk who came here crippled. After he took the waters at Bagnoles, he was able to leap between two pinnacles of rock way up in the air. It was a miracle. And there’s another story about an eighty-year-old man whose old horse came back to him rejuvenated after being lost in the forest. He followed the horse to Bagnoles, bathed in the waters, got married and had a dozen children. He built a tower in the shape of an erection to show his appreciation of whatever power it is that makes the waters miraculous.’

  The way to Bagnoles was wooded and very green. As the woman squished her lips about, marshalling the lipstick into the cracks, Viva identified beech and chestnut trees. She had always identified trees, right from childhood, thinking out their timber content and the uses to which they might be put. The woods were scumbled darkly with pines and larches. Hazel, cotoneaster and blackberry sprouted on the margins of the trainline. So, Bagnoles was a health spa. Yet it gave her an unhealthy feeling, because the way there was not unlike the way to the timber towns from Melbourne. By contrast, however, the people who went to Bagnoles seemed well heeled and, this being very unusual in a courier run, the adventure had taken on an air of mystery that had Henri hunting about for clues. His eyes were roving and his face was cracked with uneasy anticipation.

  Because of the delicate state of their fellow traveller’s legs, Henri caused much toe-pointed perching when he left the carriage for the corridor, beckoning Viva to follow him.

  They were supposed to take their consignment to a Hôtel Cordier and book in for the night under the name of Picard. They were to behave as if they were a young married couple, but no one had told them in what capacity they were going to Bagnoles, whom they were going to meet or what was to become of the papers they were carrying. All they knew was they were to ask for a Monsieur Genet at their hotel and all would be made clear to them. Allegra had given Henri her engagement and wedding rings for Viva to wear. Up until this, he had kept them in his wallet. ‘Better put them on,’ he said, taking them out, ‘but be careful, won’t you, because they’re quite valuable.’

  Viva had fantasised this moment the whole trip, imagining it would mark a turning point in Henri’s affections. He was just slipping the rings onto her hand and realising that they were going to be rather tight on her when the woman’s companion came outside looking for the lavatory. Henri covered Viva’s ring-encumbered knuckle by folding her hand into his and placing it over his heart. Viva, nearly dying of sexual excitement, stood on tiptoes and kissed him passionately. But when the woman had passed, Henri held her off and shook his head slowly. ‘We can’t,’ he said. Viva read that as We can, We must and We will. Heaving with desire, she returned to the carriage and did her best to flash Allegra’s rocks to advantage before the invalid. But the ego opposite had the knack of flattening any story besides her own, making of her companions two-dimensional creatures who might have been decorations on the lining of a box around a Christmas present.

  The sea at Indented Head sloshed through Viva’s story like a photocopier telling off the pages. It was getting too late for her to go back to Melbourne, and I was in that state between wakefulness and sleep when the irrelevancies brush like trailed coats over snags, bits of them coming off and lodging on the groundscape of one’s thoughts. Viva’s talk had set me vaguely thinking about arterial trees and what it might be that blocks them; clots, like marbles, rolled onto T-junctions and sat there, producing downward starvation and upward glut. Limbs went numb and withered, while all around in her story the earth most gorgeously held up its green bounty, stiff with water pressure to the intricate tips, and I could not help wondering what Dadda might have been feeling.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Justice and Liberty

  VIVA AND I were inside the beach house now. It had been dark for some time Jack Ives had made us both some dinner which we’d eaten on our laps. Then he’d gone off to sketch out what he would do the next day. She was reclining on Harry’s white couch, the Fortuny model in decline. On her head was a thick white
headache band. Her face strained for dignity, a withered bird’s face, the skin very dark around the eyes.

  ‘There were several cars parked around the station at Bagnoles,’ she said. ‘They all had their hoods back and their windows were wound down and rattling. There was a lad in a cap beside one of them, with a sign clasped to his chest saying “Cordier”. We’d heard about runners from the woman with the legs, who said there was a class of person at these resorts who lived on nothing but tips.

  ‘Your father didn’t approve of this sort of thing at all, and I felt very self-conscious what with our two sacks of paper and a couple of sugar bags for our clothes. Henri said he abhorred servitude of the sort expected from the boy, who was lumping bundles into the trunk of this throbbing black Renault sent up to fetch us. When Henri tipped him a good many more francs than was customary, he got a chagrined look in return, probably for his lack of savoir faire.

  ‘There were three of us for the Cordier. The third was an old man in a homburg, with a bandaged foot. He had to be lifted into the car by the runner and the chauffeur. His tip got a respectful raising of the cap from the boy.

  ‘I felt cross with Henri for being grumpy. Here we were lifted out of the slums and plonked in the lap of luxury. There was the casino on an artificial lake, all flag-poled and cupola’d and obviously very much in use. Henri called it an abomination. He had a look on his face which I hated – his eyes used to disappear into dark caves under his forehead so I couldn’t see anything except the sun shining on the fringe of his lashes. I used to think he did it on purpose. He could be very unreliable when he was young, full of self-righteousness. His mother used to say it was just “his way”, but I thought he was over-concerned with being in the right.

  ‘The Cordier was just as sumptuous as the car. It was built into a hillside; you drove down to it off the road. In keeping with many of the other establishments in Bagnoles it was of grey-white brick, picked out in terracotta round the windows and cornices. A flight of white stairs led from a sun terrace to the driveway, where two porters were ready to lift the crippled man from the car and carry him up to the lobby.

  ‘I felt very shabby and disappointed. After all, I had worked out and practised my seduction technique night and day for a week. I’d primed Henri up properly before the trip and I was saturated with love. Sodden with it – and here was he in a bad mood because Bagnoles hadn’t been designed by Emile Zola. It wasn’t my fault.

  ‘I slapped my ringed hand down on the desk to spite him, and he gave the name we were supposed to give. He didn’t say everything we were supposed to say, though. We were supposed to be meeting someone there called Genet. Since he didn’t say it, I did. Your father was holding his mouth in that disapproving way he used to have …’

  ‘Disapproving?’ I asked. ‘Dadda disapproving?’

  ‘Well, of course, you never saw it, I suppose. He used to hold his mouth in a certain way, with its little side kinks crimped upwards and his lips pursed forward. And, of course, he was grinding his thumbs, making that annoying noise with them. It made me think he was feeling for the fabric of the place. The clerk picked up the phone, began dialling and asked, quite unexpectedly, “Which Monsieur Genet?”

  ‘Well, we didn’t know there was more than one, but apparently the original Monsieur Genet’s brother had arrived at the weekend. The first Monsieur Genet was convalescing from an illness and the second had come to visit him.

  ‘I said we wanted to see the first Monsieur Genet, and although that was probably the right thing to do, it made Henri scowl all the more. The concierge dialled and gave us a room number, saying the porter would take our luggage to our room while we visited Monsieur Genet. Well, we’d been told not to let the journals out of our sight, so I said we had a special reason for wanting to meet Monsieur Genet in the lobby.

  ‘The concierge dialled up again and said we wanted to meet the first Monsieur Genet in the lobby, but apparently he was taking the rest cure, so his brother was on the way instead.

  ‘We were quite nervous, because we’d been told always to follow instructions to a T, and to be very wary of changed instructions. Contrary to expectation, however, the second Monsieur Genet was a roly-poly, beaming sort of man who bounced off the stairs like a cat on springs. He was disarmingly pleasant, and the light kept flashing off his little round spectacles, making him look a bit like a clown.

  ‘He tossed our hessian bags up over his shoulder as if they’d been full of loose-packed straw rather than bundled papers, and he bounded on up the stairs, motioning us to follow.

  ‘I remember the room we went into was quite sumptuous and had open French windows facing out over the gardens at the back of the hotel. There was a trellis smothered in white roses, leading the way to what I supposed was a race. We could see water slipping behind a wall. And there was a huge sequoia on the lawn. I remember thinking it was wearing its shadow like a skirt that had slid from its hips and lay around its feet. As I said, I was soggy with love.

  ‘I didn’t know who it was lying on the bed with his leg up on pillows. Henri told me later it was Carlo Rosselli himself, and the other man was his brother, Nello. Apparently Carlo had developed phlebitis soon after going to Spain. He had fought on in the trenches for six or seven months, but at the end of May he’d come back to France to undergo a cure. But we didn’t know this till afterwards and all Henri could do was sound off about decadent luxury.

  ‘The meeting didn’t last long. They told us to go and have fun in Bagnoles. Well, we wandered off, me trailing after Henri, who wasn’t even looking at the surroundings, so I had to imagine my idyll rather than have it.

  ‘The situation had snaked out of my control, and it became a lost cause altogether when we saw an eagle pause in the sky, drop and come up out of a cedar with a squirrel in its beak. Henri was disgusted. He turned away and said he wanted to follow the race and see where it went.

  ‘I thought I’d brought a curse on myself, but I couldn’t think what I was doing wrong. Claude was far away but she seemed to be exerting long-distance control.

  ‘And then I realised it wasn’t only Claude who was influencing my mood, because when the race became a stream and was surrounded by weeping willows that were halfway to showing their full leaf, I was reminded of my horrible childhood. Weeping willows beside creeks were a sign of the invader in our town. They symbolised rural pacification. They were where city people had their picnics, spreading their rugs on skerricks of soft green grass in the hope that the place was used enough to consign the stinging ants to its margins. They’d bring wads of newspaper to stun the horseflies and mosquitoes. The idea was you ate your soggy tomato sandwich, drank your thermos of tea, had a bit of a ramble and then went home, supposedly renewed.’

  But Viva knew better than this. She knew that at a similar time of year to June in France, the Australian forests would be alive with rosellas and green parrots, there would be cockatoos, magpies and a banquet of textures, aromas and sounds in which you could lose yourself completely. It could enter you and make you disappear, along with all your fear and anguish.

  She would have liked to tell Henri, but felt her way of telling would be inadequate and would not induce the intended mood. Gates would shut in her mind when she reached for the tender part of herself, and her thoughts could only be conveyed in banalities. Though this was the occasion, if any, to conquer Henri, she was being forbidden to do it. She felt herself to be like the eagle, but trapped too high in air currents to discern her prey, the creature Claude, whose beauty was the perfect camouflage.

  As she was thinking these thoughts, they came on a camp. A rough-looking man was sitting by a tent, skinning a rabbit. He had his back to them but Viva recognised the coat. ‘It’s one of those men from the train,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe they’re poachers and they come here to catch hares and rabbits to sell.’ There were such people in Paris; Viva had seen them at Les Halles, displaying the rabbits hung up inside their open coats.

  The man’s bac
k seemed to mark the boundary of their walk and they turned back without disturbing him.

  ‘We had to sleep in the same bed that night. I tried very hard to be vulnerable and seductive, but we were treated to a champagne and pheasant dinner and your father let himself be disgusted. Oh, the arrogant assumptions of twenty-year-olds! When we went to bed he lined up the pillows in between us.’

  Viva held her devastation at arm’s length so that it seemed like someone else’s. She imagined weeping herself to shreds, but didn’t do it. For years now, the only legitimate reaction she could rouse in herself had been jealousy.

  The next day they took the train back to Paris. Henri had a hangover that lasted the whole trip. When he apologised for his bad mood, she made of it what little she could.

  ‘We went back to Bagnoles years later,’ she continued. ‘I wanted to undo the pain of Henri’s rejection. We spent a few days there but it was winter, and the feeling of the place was quite different. It was all boarded up. The Cordier wasn’t a hotel anymore and we had to stay in a place that was nothing like it. We’d make love in the evenings, but I’d wake up later and find Henri crying. No doubt it was for his lost Claude. But I was not lost, I was there. And then I thought perhaps it wasn’t just for Claude he wept, but for the Rossellis. They were assassinated the day we left Bagnoles all those years ago. The bodies weren’t found until a couple of days after we got back to Paris.

  ‘For a while, Henri and I thought we might have led their killers to them, maybe they were the rabbiters. But that wasn’t it at all. They’d been under the surveillance of a group of right-wing French, a splinter group that formed when the Action française was disbanded. They called themselves the Cagoulards, the Hooded Ones. Apparently a few of them were staying at a hotel opposite the Cordier called the Bel Air. Henri and I looked for it when we went back, but it had been knocked down. Anyway, it was up the hill from the Cordier and had a good view of it.