Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  A couple of days before we left for Burgundy, a gallery owner from Marseilles called Jean-Marc Aurilly came to visit. Aurilly had been born in the village in the 1920s. He was frail and ashen, the son of a mailman who had known Luc’s grandmother well. He told stories about the war in the village, how they were made to produce food off the land which would be sent by rail back to Germany while they fed on rats and mice. I heard so many different versions of the war. Henri, for instance, said his mother had been a pretty wartime teenager in Montpellier, and had learned to dance in the arms of German soldiers, and still went misty-eyed whenever she heard Marlene Dietrich or recalled the feel of a leather collar against her cheek. I thought that would have made a better subject for a short story than the girls Henri met at the beach—his usual inspiration—but when I told him so he said indignantly, “Hang on, I didn’t say she slept with them.” Aurilly started out as a carpenter, but for some reason he left the village in the fifties and set up a gallery of contemporary art in Marseilles. His gallery was very successful; he had a knack of spotting painters whom other gallery owners would later make famous. We went to the opening of a group exhibition, where he was showing a couple of Luc’s paintings—mottled white with sepia strokes, like something found underneath when a fresco is peeled away from the wall. At the dinner for the painters afterward, a man who had shown a cast-iron sculpture and had forearms like truck tires got into an argument with Luc about Uccello. Luc said he’d never heard of him and that he wasn’t interested in the history of art. He knew perfectly well who Uccello was, but he hated artists talking about painting. He loved pretty much anything pre-1600 and post-1907. Anything in between was pompous crap. The sculptor wrote his phone number on a piece of rolled-up paper and slid it to me under the table. Underneath he’d written, “When you get tired of this idiot call me.”

  Aurilly took his breakfast on the terrace outside the café at nine-thirty, hoping someone he knew would pass, but the only person whoever did was me. He’d begun to suffer from moments of forgetfulness. The morning we left he had woken in his room in the hotel, panicked and called his wife, about whom he was otherwise rather dismissive, and said, “Where am I? Where am I? I don’t know where I am.”

  We drove up to Burgundy, leaving town in Luc’s mother’s tin car on a boiling-hot Thursday afternoon, and arriving after dark in a gray town on the river Seine. Luc hated it from the moment we arrived. I loved Burgundy, the churches, the vineyards, the abbeys, the mist—laid on a bit thick for July, but very atmospheric. The show was in a gray stone bourgeois house overlooking the river from a height. All the beau monde of Burgundy were there.

  Luc was unhappy at that time because his life was about to change professionally. Until now he had only worked three days a week, spending the rest of the time painting and riding. Now his partner at the practice was taking early retirement. His eldest daughter had killed herself only a few months before. At first she’d thrown herself off the Pont du Diable, but had only succeeded in breaking her legs, so once she was released from the clinic she got someone to drive her up to the monastery at St. Florian, where she covered herself in petrol and set herself on fire. Luc was interested in the theological implications of this sequence of events, even though he was a humanist himself. She left a child of four, and the grandparents were now bringing him up as their son. As a result of his partner’s retirement, Luc faced the prospect of a full working week in an antiquated office, with no records, no equipment, no nurse, no secretary, increased administrative and financial responsibilities and unshared overhead. It had lovely paintings on the wall, and Luc was very popular with his patients, but those were his only assets. Driving up the highway he said, “I have to stop painting. I can’t do both, not if I have to take over the practice on my own. I don’t want to be a weekend painter.”

  “OK,” I said. “Stop for a bit then. Or take on another associate.”

  We drove on a bit further and then he said, “What about us? How can I live with another artist? Think how you would feel if you couldn’t write and you had to go to work all day and I stayed at home and painted.”

  I thought I might be quite relieved not to write for a bit; it was such hard work. “Do you mean that?”

  “No. But about the painting, yes.”

  He hung the exhibition in the afternoon, and when people started arriving I drove to the station to meet Marcel, who had come down from Paris for the show. Marcel was small, strong, with a big beard and a slash across his chest where they had taken out his heart and reset it the previous year. He always asked me how I was, in a way that had nothing to do with the way people say “and how are you?” For a Freudian he was a great storyteller, too.

  When we got to the gallery, Luc was leaning against a pillar, rolling a cigarette and answering questions. I was surprised he was so relaxed, talking quietly to a crowd of people, not getting irritated when people asked questions he would have refused to answer if they’d come from anyone he knew or expected ever to know better. Anyone who lived in this cold, gray place, with its clammy air, obviously had to be treated kindly.

  The woman who was talking had her back to me and Marcel. She said, “This is very beautiful work. Such strength and elegance, such expression. Could you tell us what you understand by beauty? Is it very important to you?” Marcel had moved forward to stand quite close to Luc, and was now facing the speaker as she asked her question. I saw his face fall, then he straightened up, catching himself, and looked anxiously at Luc while feeling around in his pocket for the pipe he had given up after the operation. Luc answered quietly. He said he had no theory on beauty; he just did it like that, he had no strict rules about it. When I came up afterward, Marcel took my arm and pointed out the woman who had asked the question. Her face was burned almost completely away. It was obvious from the way she was dressed that she was accustomed to appearing in the guise of a beautiful woman. Obvious, also, that the disfigurement was something that had happened very recently. The next morning Luc said to Marcel that he was driving him straight to the station for Paris, that we had to get back down south.

  We drove all day and arrived late in the evening. The village was a riot of Catalan flags, bright red and yellow; it was the night of the corrida. During the afternoon the bulls had been killed and there had been sardane dancing in the square. There was a smell of roasting meat, and wine everywhere, flamenco dancers weaving great question marks in the air, with taut fingers and long, supple arms. We got separated in the crowd, but I knew where to find him at two in the morning on corrida night. The woman who lived in the huge house by the war memorial was in her nineties and had known Luc’s grandmother as a child. On summer nights she would wander out of her front door in her nightclothes and stop teenagers in the street to ask them the time, over and over. It would bring tears to Luc’s eyes, and he would cross the road from the café and go indoors with her and find a chair in the summer house and sit with her. He was always kind to old people, in the way people are who are old enough to remember how their grandparents grew frail and needed them when they were scarcely more than children. His maternal grandfather had crashed his car in front of Les Lauriers restaurant at ten miles an hour and died. Children came running into the office ten yards away and shouted, “Luc, your grandfather’s dead.” If Luc ever dies a violent death it will be by strolling into something stationary while whistling with his hands in his pockets, feeling around for a light.

  I danced with Stefan, who would always dance, and then joined Luc back at the car. We drove up to the farm, and he stumbled straight out onto the terrace without switching on the light in the living room, and I knew it was because the piano reminded him of the square bourgeois drawing rooms of Burgundy.

  * * *

  An English girl who lived a few villages away with her husband, a travel agent, and their small child, rang me the next day and asked me to meet her at the pizzeria for lunch. I’d never met her before. She was sexy and strong, but her face didn’t look quite real. Ov
er lunch, as she talked to me about her marriage, her affairs, the spinelessness of men, their scant libidos, the mean things her current lover had said about Luc, I realized she had the face of someone put together by a police artist. The eyes did not quite go with the mouth, the cheekbones were out of balance with her chin and the hair color wasn’t quite right.

  “How many lovers have you had since you got married?”

  “Since I split up, you mean?”

  “No, since you got married, sweetheart.”

  “One, I suppose. What about you?”

  “Fuck knows,” she said.

  She wore a sundress with little pink sprigs, like the ones Irish women try to sell you in subway stations. On her chest, above her swooping breasts, her skin was prickled with heat.

  “You should do something about your voice,” she said. “You sound like a dumb blonde, or a kid.”

  * * *

  “What’s up?” Luc asked that night.

  “That girl I met.”

  “What about her?”

  “Something about her. She scared me.”

  “Did she make a pass at you?”

  “No. Something else. She feels like bad luck. Like she tried to find out something, and I told her and then she left.”

  “Oh dear. What did you tell her? Some lies?”

  I hadn’t told her anything, as far as I could remember. Bits and pieces. We’d talked a bit about my ex-husband, about what I thought had been wrong.

  “Nothing.”

  In the middle of the night Luc switched on the light.

  “Bon, c’est fini,” he said heavily. “It’s over. Take your things in the morning. Don’t ever come back. I never want to see you again.”

  After a long silence, in which we both considered what he’d said, I asked, “Why?”

  “Don’t play games,” he said, “it’s obvious.”

  “What?”

  “Look,” he said, “you spend two hours raving about a woman who’s slept with half the village, then you wake up in the middle of the night and say you’ve been sleeping with my best friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Stefan.”

  “I slept with Stefan?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Who says so?”

  “You did. Just now.”

  “Of course I didn’t. That’s crazy. I didn’t say anything at all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Oh. It must have been a dream then.”

  * * *

  The next day, Sunday, he took his horse and set off without telling me, taking his hat. When he got back a couple of hours later I was playing the piano. I heard the stable door slam, which he never allowed it to do. He came in and flung some rice in a pan. I stopped playing and he told me that both the horses were limping. The vet said it was because there had been too much rain in the spring, and now the grass was too rich and lush, and they were eating so much of it that they had gout. “There’s never been abundance or luxury here before,” he said. I thought of the bishop and the tennis racquets. That evening he asked me to play the third Schubert impromptu, Brigitte’s piece. When I’d finished, he said, “What is large, black and shiny, and has three legs?”

  “The piano,” I said.

  “Try again.”

  “I don’t know. What?”

  “The horses,” he said. “Since the piano arrived they’ve been lame. Since the piano arrived everything’s gone wrong. This isn’t my life I’m living, it’s yours.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “How can you say that? Everything we do, it’s because it’s what you do. That’s how it seems to me.”

  “Ah well,” he said sadly, quieter now. “We’ve had it then. On est foutu.”

  I went to Brittany to see my brother for two weeks, and returned after a thirteen-hour train journey to the most beautiful railway station in the world, where Luc was waiting for me in the car. As we drove home he said almost nothing, except, “I saw that girl you had lunch with. She was with your husband in the market.” He drew up outside my apartment, opposite the Museum of Modern Art, where the flag with his name on it still hung, by an oversight, and said, “It’s over. I don’t want to see you again.”

  Later he said, “And that was odd, because it hadn’t occurred to me it was over till I saw you there and you looked so English, so very like an English girl who played the piano.”

  I went home to England. He sold the piano. It was bought by a couple who ran a hotel near the sea, who didn’t play themselves but thought their guests might like to. When I thought of it, it made me think of an unravished bride gazing out to sea. Wherever I looked I saw him, somehow. Even though he wasn’t there, he wouldn’t step back into invisibility. We didn’t speak for six months, until one day the phone rang in London and he said, “OK. I love you, come back.”

  5. VISITORS

  BACK AGAIN

  Luc leaves his office just after twelve o’clock. Before lunch he walks the boulevard once, twice, stopping twice, three times a minute to talk with people he was once in class with, or people he treats, or just everyone who knows him, which is everyone.

  As he goes he peppers the village with gossip. He tells stories—about the funeral director who crashed the hearse; the baker who’s swallowed a tooth; the ski instructor who jumped off the Pont du Diable; the woman who rinsed, spat, delicately wiped and whispered, “Embrasse-moi,” breathing a mix of mint and drilled ceramic in his face.

  Today he has finished early and is already sitting at a table in the shade with his father, who is an old man now and barely knows where he is, except he could be nowhere else, since the only other place he remembers ever having been was a POW camp in Aachen.

  The mayor’s wife, Luc’s mother’s cousin, is standing chatting with him as I cross the square. She leans down and whispers in his ear. The strap of her halter-neck dress has slipped and her darkly speckled shoulder is like a stone. Even his own cousin flirts with him.

  “What did she say?” I ask him as I sit down at the table. “What was she whispering in your ear?”

  He imitates her way of hissing her words, as though she were spraying them onto the skin just below his ear, and then withdrawing quickly, to assess the effect.

  “ ‘Marry that girl,’ ” he whispers. “ ‘Make her a baby, quick!’ ”

  * * *

  At lunch, some days, no one speaks. Others, Luc and his father discuss the family inheritance; old friends who have died; Conchita, the maid; her Spanish resistant husband who has only one lung. Sometimes I just listen and watch. I am always watching him.

  Today I’m reading a letter I found in the tin box on the wall on my way out of the house I’ve recently bought. It is from a woman in North Carolina, who lives in a retirement home, answering an ad I’ve placed in the London Review of Books. Her name is Irene Bishop. She wants to rent the house for three weeks in late October and early November. “P.S. I am seventy-seven and walk with a cane. Please let me know how the house is heated. Could you get in some wood?”

  Luc glances at it when he comes back from paying the bills. “Tell her no. We don’t want to have to bury her. Why won’t these old people stay at home? Quelle époque!” He is always saying “quelle époque” as an aside to his dog, or a horse, or me. But though I write to Irene and tell her the house is really not suitable, that there are too many staircases and only a stove, which has to be fed with wood, and give her, instead, the name of a hotel, she writes back and says a hotel is no way to visit a place. She wants someplace where she can unpack.

  She tells me about herself. The last time she was in France was in the 1950s. Her husband had been working in Europe and their child was born in Paris. She nearly died in childbirth and has been frail ever since. Her husband bolted. She returned to America and taught English literature in New York until she retired to North Carolina. She and her friends in the retirement home started up a reading group. They have just read Love, Again by D
oris Lessing. She says the most important word in that title is the comma.

  When she hears I write books, but that I finished one a year ago and am stuck, when I tell her if I stay now I have to stay forever, that I miss something I can’t put my finger on, that I am sometimes oddly afraid, she sends me an e-mail from her white room in the condominium in North Carolina that says, “Write. It doesn’t matter what you write, just make sure that when the angel comes you’re there in front of your keyboard and not busy dusting down shelves or cooking a meal for some man.”

  She isn’t sure if she will make it to the house—six months is a long time at her age, she says—but she likes to think she might. In the meantime she wants me to write to her about it. She wants to know how to get there, what the house is like, where you can swim, the names of the rivers and the mountains, the store hours, the weather, the temperature, history and the things I love best, even, she says, if that includes a man.

  I’ve never believed in muses. They always seem to take the form of some woman in a condition of exquisite passivity, being there for some man who is fulfilling himself as an artist, sticking her down on a chair and tying her hands behind her back. This woman seems like a different kind of muse. I do what she says, and send her letters, with instructions, just in case she needs them later on.

  * * *

  I’d decided to buy a house when I got back to the village. I would always need somewhere not too isolated to work, whatever happened. When I worked up at the farm all day I saw no one from eight in the morning till eight at night, except the dog, the horses and Luc’s crazy brother. My friends thought I was mad to go back at all, but when I stopped off in Paris on the way down Marcel said, “Off you go. Your story isn’t over, yet.”