The Point

by Marion Halligan

  With beetroot, asks Ivan.

  Well …

  Pizzas with pineapple, says Jerome, if you want truly awful. Flora vetoes that too, on the grounds that it’s a travesty.

  There are a lot of oysters, there’s something comfortingly excessive about such a quantity of them, let alone the nature.

  Next is soup, a zippy light puree of vegetables: potato, leek, carrot, says Flora vaguely, meaning she’s not going to give them the recipe. Then it’s the moment of the no main course. Instead there is a large platter of raw ham, and a salad of thin beans with walnut oil and sherry vinegar. Flora puts this on the table, and another bowl of lettuce salad, and at the end, pushing aside the book piles, a plate with cheeses, another with red and yellow pears, and a small pyramid of lemon tarts. Made by Kate in the restaurant.

  There, she says, what you see is what you get. Now I am sitting down for the rest of the meal. Though she does fetch clean plates. Jerome pours the wine.

  I see no main course doesn’t mean fewer courses, or eating less, says Ivan.

  Oh Ivan; I think you didn’t trust me.

  Of course I did. I was just curious, that’s all.

  I believe you and Flora are writing a book, Jerome says to Elinor.

  Elinor looks at Flora, who has gone rather pink. It is a long time ago that they planned to write a book about the women in the Séverac story of the duchess murdered by her husband in punishment for her adultery. A sort of vertical cross-section of all the lives of all the women who lived in the castle at that one moment in history. Start with Gloriande and work down. Or with the scullery maid, pot girl, and work up. Including the hideously ugly and Calvinistic mother-in-law, who schemed and perhaps invented the duchess’s downfall, and Catherine her maid, her lady-in-waiting, her confidante, whose husband the steward betrayed Gloriande to the duke. Gloriande the spirited, witty, beautiful woman who’d repulsed the steward’s amorous advances. How to work out whose side Catherine was on? Husband or mistress: who had her loyalty? Great stuff there, and in past times they’d plotted their use of these narratives. Even though Ivan said that neither of them was a historian, did they have any idea of the work involved?

  I’m not sure that writing is the right verb, says Elinor. Pondering maybe.

  Pondering, says Flora. Imbroglioing.

  That’s nice.

  Whatever it means.

  Maybe hatching, says Elinor. Gestating? No. Hatching. A couple of broody hens sitting on a clutch of eggs that might not even be fertilised. Just going rotten while the poor old clucky hens hatch away, hoping for golden chicks.

  I see, said Jerome. But you’re not exactly lost for words.

  She’s a dictionary maker, says Flora. She knows words that the rest of us can only have nightmares about.

  They’re all common currency, says Elinor. More or less. Sometime or other. Besides, she says, and she knows she’s being a bit unkind here, but seeing Flora sitting beside Jerome so safely means she can risk a bit of bracing malice. Besides, I thought you were going to write your food book first.

  Perhaps, says Flora, faintly smiling. Séverac is another country, and I am not the person I was then. I did not know what life could do.

  Oh yes, but who does, says Elinor, seeing where Flora’s thoughts have gone and hasty to move them away. Ivan was having his fling with the floozy then, she says, and I was rather prone to noticing wronged women. Gloriande, I mean, and wanting to slit the floozy’s wrists and ankles, the way the duke did to his wife. I remember doing a lot of bleeding her to death.

  Elinor is about to add, Fancy you still thinking about that book, all these years on, remembering Flora in the beautiful self-containment of her youth. Instead she says, We should go to Séverac, one day, and do it.

  Oh, says Flora. One day.

  Jerome says, Tell us about your overseas plans. Isn’t this a farewell dinner? He lifts his glass. To hopeful travelling, and happy arriving.

  22

  The Spensers have no intention of going to Séverac on this trip. It is to be a stay in London, with Ivan working at the British Library, and then to Paris, to the Bibliothèque de France. Elinor is going for the ride; her work is not done overseas. She will do Paris things, walk about a lot, catch her favourite buses, make her usual pilgrimages. To the Marais. Ste Geneviève du Mont. Cluny and the Lady with the Unicorn. And they will see old friends.

  Particularly Marie-Claude. Marie-Claude is now a widow. Christophe has died. Every now and then Elinor says these words over in her head. There’s something terrifying about them because they seem to have lost their meaning. She is used to words obeying her. She expects them to be transparent. These she can say, but she cannot understand them. Christophe: the charming elegant funny man she made love with the summer of unfaithful Ivan’s winter with Samantha. He is the man who taught her the notion of loving friends, who said he did not love Marie-Claude any less or any less importantly because he was having sexy fun with Elinor. She’d always wondered if Marie-Claude saw it quite like that. She’d said to Christophe that Ivan certainly didn’t; having sexy fun with Samantha meant that he wanted to go and live with her forever. Christophe said in that case Ivan was a very foolish man and everybody could only hope he would come to see the error of his ways.

  Christophe. Lovely lively Christophe. How can he be dead? It is as though there is a rather poor joke going on and he will slip into the room and say, Boo! in that rather endearing nursery way his English often takes him.

  Marie-Claude does not look any different: thin, quick, neat, in smart dark clothes, perhaps a bit more severe but they are all getting older and this is how it shows with her. As usual, she makes Elinor feel large, like a horse beside a pony. Once she might have thought, like a carthorse beside a racehorse, but now she is not so hard on herself. Ponies are okay and so are horses.

  Elinor contemplates her friend’s grief. She has expected silence, and weeping, and the avoidance of difficult subjects. Instead, Marie-Claude talks about Christophe all the time. She is even more garrulous than usual. She tells stories about him, and that he told, his jokes, his habits. If Christophe were here, she says, he would make us eat lettuce soup – and they all remember eating lettuce soup to cure the liver. He would not let us eat such smelly cheese in the summer. The wines would be considerably more thoughtful. He would make us go to that dreadful play at the Comédie Française. Listening to her talk it is as though Christophe were somewhere and will be home soon. You almost expect him to telephone. Elinor is at first taken aback but very soon she likes this mode of grieving, remembering and celebrating the beloved person. They sit over meals and with a sort of modest hilarity, and pride as well, tell tales about him.

  His death is one of them. Not sudden, but quick. A heart attack, quite severe, although he did not lose consciousness, his brain wasn’t damaged. I do not know how I would have borne it, said Marie-Claude, if he had lost his mind. His mind was him, I did not lose him before I lost him. He was frail, in bed, but we could talk, I could spend the days with him and talk. The doctors spoke of an operation, but I knew he was too fragile for that. I may be a pediatrician, but I knew that. We talked, we lived our lives again in the words.

  Christophe had another heart attack, and that one killed him.

  He did not suffer, says Marie-Claude. Poom. Fast. My gratitude for that is out of bounds.

  He was young, says Ivan.

  Sixty-one.

  Too young.

  Oh yes, says Marie-Claude.

  It is that moment that Marie-Claude asks Elinor to go down to Séverac with her. Elinor is surprised to be asked, astonished even, which is why she says yes. Ivan can’t, he has to be back, but Elinor rings up her dictionary and tells them she will be away a while longer. They can manage without her. They will have a little play while the cat is away? asks Marie-Claude, and Ivan says, That’s no problem, they all play together. Ivan is always saying, Elinor has such fun at work it’s almost obscene that she gets paid for it, and Elinor replie
s that there’s no point in having a job if you don’t enjoy it. It’s your luck, says Ivan. It’s not normal.

  They drive to Séverac. No longer the Ami 8 that her friends lent her to make the journey all those years ago, the difficult old car that trundled through the dreaming countryside at its own leisurely pace. Marie-Claude has a quite new Peugeot 406, two-door, very sporty, a dark green colour. It does 180 kilometres down the motorway, no bother. Marie-Claude loves driving. Though she has not been to Séverac for a long time. It was Christophe who loved the house, she preferring her family’s place on the Mediterranean coast. Elinor doesn’t talk much on the way, thinking it best to let Marie-Claude concentrate on the driving, at that speed.

  There is a lot of overtaking, and weaving through traffic. The massive churning wheels of trucks seem very close to Elinor sitting in the passenger seat. 180 kilometres an hour. If something goes wrong at that speed you won’t know much about it. She misses the old landmarks, the necessary crawls along the valleys, beside the rapid-flowing still-pooled rivers, past old cafe-hotels clinging to impossible verges, keeping watch for the castles growing out of the high cliffs’ vantage points. Only the arrival in the Auvergne is still signalled by the great curving uplands of ancient volcanoes and the sky suddenly huge above them.

  They arrive late in the afternoon, and there is the valley, full of its particular light, thick greenish-gold. A palpable and languorous light, as though the sun dusts it with some emanation, like pollen, thick and yellow and as well a kind of hushing substance that slows sound. The house as always smells sweet, old, dusty and spicy. It smells of the times when the children were small and Elinor and Ivan were happy here, of the summer love-making of Christophe and Elinor, sweet and extraordinary as the jam he amused himself with making. To Elinor it smells of these meanings, but she cannot tell what the smells are saying to Marie-Claude.

  They open up the shutters and the hazy light fills the lovely shabby old rooms. Marie-Claude climbs up the hidden cobwebbed staircase to turn the electricity on. They go through all the rooms closing the taps. A lot of the bedrooms have washbasins in them, and when at the end of the summer the water is turned off and methylated spirits poured down each drain hole, all the taps are left open. To prevent the pipes freezing. So next time it is necessary to remember to close them all otherwise there will be a flood. Not forgetting the odd ones, in the closet, in the cellar. For the first time ever Elinor sees Marie-Claude doubtful; of course she remembers how to turn the water on, in the depths of the third cellar, but she would like Elinor to come with her, to hold the torch.

  The cellars are full of junk and swags of cobwebs like Miss Haversham’s wedding feast. Maybe there will be rats too. Marie-Claude turns on the master tap but when Elinor tries the tap in the cellar no water comes. They poke about. No success. The taps splutter a bit of water, then stop. Marie-Claude goes to see the plumber. He won’t be home till eight-thirty, then he’ll come, says his wife.

  Lucky she has brought bottled water. Why, Elinor had asked, doesn’t Séverac have delicious water from the sources of the Avéyron? Not since the motorway, apparently. Lucky, they can wash their faces and clean their teeth in Evian water, for the plumber cannot fix theirs, it is a matter for the mairie, the council, first thing in the morning he’ll have them come.

  They are rather glum over their evening meal. Neither says, though Elinor is sure Marie-Claude is thinking it too, that if Christophe were here it would not be happening. Of course it would, says Elinor to herself, but her low spirits don’t believe her.

  The man from the mairie is handsome, brown, lean, with solid arms and legs and a fine moustache. He is charming to them. He cannot make the water work, either. He uses a metal detector device to find the pipes under the street outside, and digs holes down to them, but cannot find the answer there. He examines the pipes in the cellar, but that doesn’t help. Nor does bringing in a machine to blast compressed air through them. He is downcast. They will have to dig up the street. But first he will put a pipe through from the neighbour, to tide them over. Elinor understands that they cannot be allowed to live without water, it would not be appropriate. Digging up the street seems drastic. It is one of three routes from the old town on the hill down to the main town below; it will be severely inconvenient for a lot of people.

  Idly Elinor turns on the kitchen tap. Water flows.

  Un miracle, says the plumber. He is pleased not to have to dig up the street. He makes Elinor feel very clever to have turned on the tap and found water. He tells her so with gallant Gallic charm.

  But why was there no water? Oooh. Stones in the pipes, perhaps? They are very old. Look, he says, 1923. The date is impressed in an iron cover. Un miracle, no doubt, to have it back, from pipes that old.

  The trees have grown tall and straggly. The garden is a mess. The grass is too long. It is like hay. The mower won’t work in such a savannah. It will be necessary to get a man with a scythe.

  The jam is mouldy.

  Elinor loves the house. She believes she understands it. I do not know what people see in it, says Marie-Claude. There is nothing to do here. Nothing but the country at work. Industrial agriculture, at that.

  She is thinking of the Mediterranean, of fishing and swimming and sailing and windsurfing. Of golf and tennis. All the busy sports.

  They are sitting over dinner, looking out across the valley brimming with ever more intensely golden light. An enormous tractor big as an insect is weaving back and forth across a field, too far away for any noise to be heard. Elinor is drinking most of the bottle of wine. Marie-Claude is a glass-and-a-half person. They speak English. Elinor will never speak French to someone whose English is better than her French.

  How does one fill one’s days, Marie-Claude asks.

  Elinor stares at the thick yellow light. She drinks some wine. She says: One has to pay attention to oneself. To what one is.

  To be metaphysical, you mean?

  When I first come here I read detective novels. Greedy simpleminded fiction. At first. Then I stop.

  Oh, detective novels. I have never found them interesting.

  There’s a time for them.

  Morbid. Oh, too morbid.

  Not really. A game. A puzzle. No emotions. They clear the mind.

  Yes? says Marie-Claude. I think, tennis, for clearing the mind.

  I suppose, says Elinor, there are different ways of clearing the mind. The energetic kind, and the still kind.

  She’s surprised to find herself saying these things. Marie-Claude is looking baffled, so she changes the subject. This Roquefort, it’s so good. She spreads some on bread. The baguettes here are shorter and fatter than in Paris, more crumb less crust. Serious, not so frivolous as a thin wand of bread nearly all crust.

  Oh yes, this is how it should be, and that is proper, here, this is nearly its home. You don’t want it hard and white.

  Elinor knows this, but she also knows that Marie-Claude has a French housewife’s pride in knowing how to find the right best things.

  The shutters do not stay open. The catches are broken, they slam shut when the wind blows. There are cracks in the ceiling.

  The curtains need washing, says Marie-Claude.

  What will happen to the house?

  Elinor does not ask this question, but Marie-Claude says it for her. I do not know what will become of this house, she says. Falling about as it is. And there are the inheritance taxes to pay. At fifty-five per cent, for family. All these deaths, and always inheritance taxes. All this property. The ambiguous legacy. The children are not really interested. It is a home of Christophe’s family, says Marie-Claude. I never even listened, really. All his family’s stories are here. He told me, I used to like to hear him telling me about them, but I did not really, really … register them. Memorise them. You see all these little bronzes about the place … somebody liked to collect them. The grandfather? The great uncle? He’d go out – but out where? – and come back with something. Where from? How far away? T
he new town? Or Rodez or Millau? Little villages in the country? You think you were listening but when you try to remember you realise you weren’t. Always something. A dog, a bust, a classical figure. An urn. A little green stone buddha – but maybe that came from somebody else … Some of them are astoundingly valuable. Some not at all. I seem to remember the ones I liked best were most usually the less valuable.

  I should sell it. But who would want to buy it? People want new houses down here. Nobody wants the old ones, except for family second residences. Their own, not other people’s. And it would be a betrayal. The children should know the stories, but who can tell them? Christophe supposed there would be time. My cradle, he used to call it – and Elinor remembered him saying, le berceau de Christophe, comically and with deep feeling, in that way of his, to make a joke of some noble sentiment, so he could get away with meaning it – my cradle, and the children have their belonging here too. But how to tell them? He was going to write it down, the history of the house, the history of the family … just to have a record, not to publish …

  Later, Elinor found her sitting on a footstool covered with faded embroidery, holding a small bronze dog in her hands.

  I have never been a pious person, she said. That was always Christophe. As though because he was I didn’t need to be. And now he isn’t here to be. Pious is the word to say, she asked, staring up at Elinor, her face anxious. Paying attention to the family?