Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  The ad said that the house was for rent by the week from May to September, that it was 25 kilometers from the sea, on the Spanish border, that it was sunny and in a village. The rent was too cheap, but I didn’t want the kind of people who were going to worry when the door handles fell off. I was lucky. Every person who came to stay in the house, including Irene herself, was the kind of person who brought, and left behind, something rich and often strange.

  Holidays are special instances of how the shutter can open for a second’s worth, a week or two in a longish life, when color and light and shape and shadow burn into the liquid film and are fixed. When people come to your house, to a new place, on the strength of a three-line ad, you hand over an image from which endless prints can be made, different every time. For each family, or couple or group of friends, the place shifted and rearranged itself. First impressions last only a couple of days; after three days the main street starts to look different, a sense of the whole modifies the first encountered part.

  I envied them that first period of disorientation, when the ordinary still looked unusual and strange. It’s a gift some painters and writers have of perceiving the foreignness of the everyday and of existence, of being as disoriented in the world as visitors to a new place, experiencing the same sense of unsureness as a motorist trying to drive through a narrow gap. I always thought that hymn “New Every Morning Is the Love” must be about that. Every day new, asking for an accommodation of the heart to what had grown unfamiliar overnight. All the interesting people I’ve known have loved to travel to new places.

  Except Luc. He would never move unless he had to. He considered the desire to travel a sign of weakness, the way primary-school teachers regard not being able to sit still. He despised Angélique of Papillon Vert because she kept a picture of a beach in the Dominican Republic taped above the toasted-sandwich maker in her café to keep her going. He disliked the way time was now divided between work and leisure. He would have liked a life in which work was leisure and leisure, work. You could be a shepherd, I suggested. “Or a writer,” he replied. The work/leisure divide was particularly acute in cities. He had no time for people who lived “en ville.” “Ils sont cons,” he would say, and shake his head and chuckle at their absurdity. I pointed out that a) people needed jobs b) most people had to live in cities if they wanted work and c) not everyone had the luck to be born in a beautiful place, and the inherited wealth to stay there even if they were.

  “Do I live like a king? Do I ask for much? Anyone would say I lived in virtual poverty. I eat rice and eggs, and grow my own vegetables and my own hay.”

  “Yes,” I’d say, “but you need a big estate to do that. You don’t get depressed eating rice and eggs because you do it sitting on your terrace at sunset with your horses munching down below, a bottle of wine that cost 5 francs, or nothing, and cheese one of your patients has given you and fruit from your trees. Of course it costs you nothing. You can afford to be poor.”

  It was important not to look like a tourist. Anyone who did was committing the double felony of being on holiday and not being “d’ici.” Luc and his friends would always blink at foreigners who ran around wearing shorts. I’d say, but look how comfortable they are. You’ve all got sweat running down the inside legs of your jeans. “On n’est pas à la plage,” they would say. “On est en ville.” It showed a lack of respect, childish treatment. Did the English wear shorts in their own country? Their own towns? To go shopping? I said that in the same way that English architects had gotten back from the Costa Brava in the seventies and built white block houses to deflect the sun, English designers had come back with the sun in their eyes and run up shorts for us to walk around our white block houses in, and now we’d seize any opportunity to wear them, appropriate or not. It was all part of the travel boom; the world getting smaller.

  “Ah, le global village,” they said, glumly, a phrase they had picked up from reading Le Monde. In the global village, in cyberspace, everyone was a tourist. That was the style de l’époque: dipping in, dipping out; popping up here, vanishing there; sampling and discarding; dabbling and appropriating.

  So when my visitors arrived he would feel sad for them, these Englanders, that their own country wasn’t good enough, that they were “on holiday,” and when he saw them photographing each other on the café terrace or under the plane trees, it seemed to him they were faking something, like when you stick your head through the opening left for a face in the wooden cutout of a muscle man or a fille des Folies Bergères at a fairground. He would nod at them, embarrassed in front of his friends that he was responsible, through me, for introducing these strangers onto the streets.

  I did my best, by speaking little and sticking my head in a newspaper whenever I was at the café, not to betray my nationality. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be English. I just didn’t want to be English in France. Frenchwomen said that Englishmen were all either Neanderthals or they looked like Prince Charles, and no wonder so many Englishwomen went out with Frenchmen. I knew this was rubbish, and that Ralph Fiennes was the best-looking man in the world, but they had only seen The English Patient, and remembered him with his face burned away, so it was a difficult argument to sustain.

  The older French, in particular, didn’t even pretend to like the English. During the week of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the D-Day landings, when Clinton, Mitterrand and the Queen posed for pictures on the beach in Boulogne, and complicated coastal maps were shown on the evening news, Luc’s mother said over lunch, “I don’t know why they invited the Queen of England. After all, the English did nothing in the war, just kept themselves to themselves and looked after their own till the Americans stepped in, and now they try to claim some glory from it. Have they got no shame?”

  I mentioned the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and Dunkirk, trying not to sound like someone Mrs. Thatcher would have invited to sit on a conference platform.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, “we know all about that. What about the number of boys from this village who were killed getting British airmen across the border?” I stared at my grated carrots and courgettes and I thought, Why didn’t they teach me enough at school so that I’d know what to say now? How come I know what kind of crockery the ancient Egyptians ate their millet out of, but I can’t win this argument in one simple sentence?

  Luc raised his eyebrows at me, and said, “Maman,” in a warning voice. He told me afterward that most people around here—unlike the northern French—liked to make out that the British had behaved selfishly in World War Two. The south had little respect for their own role, but at least they had suffered a semi-occupation. Britain didn’t even endure that. It was false and absurd, but it helped them to believe it. It’s a provincial French reflex to scorn the English, just as the English like to scorn the French. It makes you realize what it feels like to belong to a minority group. It feels just like being bullied at school, except that it usually happens behind your back. They excused themselves by saying that, of course, I was exempt from their generalizations, an exception to the rule. Luc would say to me, “You’re OK, you’re more French than English anyway,” and I’d think, No, I’m not. Whenever Britain made some pronouncement on Europe I knew about it before I read it in the paper because people would stop me in the street and say, “What on earth is wrong with you all?”

  One Saturday in May I was introduced to a man sitting with Luc when I came back from the chicken van at the end of the market. I sat down beside him and he began flirting, and soon discovered I wasn’t French. “Dutch? Swedish?” he inquired, coquettishly. “No,” I said, “Anglaise.”

  “I knew you were,” he said. “You only have to look at your skin color. White!” He chuckled. “Red in summer!”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but if you look, my arm is dark brown. You must be confusing it with your own.” He had placed his arm very close to mine on the arm of his chair, and it was piglet pale. He drew backward sharply, clutched his arm to his chest as though I�
��d just poured boiling water onto it. He shook his fist in my face. Luc stopped his conversation on the other side of the table and cocked his head.

  “That,” said the irate Frenchman, jabbing at my arm, “is the skin of an Englishwoman who has finished tanning. And that,” pointing at his own pale flesh, “is a Frenchman who has not yet even begun.”

  MARNIE

  Many of those who came to stay in the house were old but very lively. There was a couple who arrived at the end of the morning market, and went and ate for two hours at Les Lauriers. They announced themselves at the house in midafternoon, smelling sweetly of golden Rivesaltes wine and some fruity dessert, having met half the village already. He had been widowed and had nine children. She’d been his student. I followed them around with my eyes, thinking, That’s it, that’s love. Don’t settle for less. Don’t mistake anything else for that. Luc said they were alcoolos, and he hoped they wouldn’t kick the bucket while they were staying in my house, because he was sure I wasn’t insured for the death of people I wasn’t related to. He said the same thing when a couple arrived from Suffolk, both well into their eighties, reminding me of John Bailey and Iris Murdoch, or what I thought I knew of them then. They had been driving through Suffolk in the early 1970s, they told me, and had seen a for-sale sign outside a deserted priory. They had gone in and explored, and decided they had to live there. So they got together as many friends as they could, and they bought it collectively and had been running it as a free-thinking commune for over twenty years. And there was Marnie, whom I scarcely met.

  Marnie was the first person to come to the house. I had just put the ad in the paper and was in London, arranging for a moving van. I was so sick of packing, I decided I would never move again, that it was too much trouble. Duncan said that when David and Frieda Lawrence moved around all they took with them were some books, but only the essential ones—how did they decide?—and some rolled-up carpets they’d bought in Africa. Whenever they arrived somewhere, Duncan said, they just flung these carpets down on the floor, after Frieda had been around with the broom, of course, and they immediately felt at home. She left her children behind and took two carpets. I’d rationalized my stuff right down to what I thought was a bare minimum, but the bare minimum still seemed to include things like the second edition of the Collins Guide to Animal Spoors in Danish. One day, I believed, it would really come into its own, when someone from Copenhagen was trying to identify a species of boar in the woods. I had files full of parking tickets from the 1980s, because I had the idea that they were like bank statements, if you kept them for seven years and then burned them something magic would happen, a flimsy redemption of a wings and glitterdust nature, which would be denied you if you carelessly threw them away.

  I was packing boxes when the phone rang. I thought at first the woman on the other end of the line had gotten the wrong number and was actually trying to get through to the Samaritans. Her voice was cauterized, deep, as though some of the cables were cut. She said she and her husband were decorating a house in London. She said she had to get away somewhere quickly and she’d seen my ad, and could she go, even though it was April and the ad was for May. I said there was hardly any furniture and only a few plates and glasses, but if she was desperate and didn’t mind a mess then it was fine by me. She said she’d go the following day, a Monday. How could she get there?

  I told her to fly to Barcelona or Gerona, and from there get a train to Figueras. I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was really difficult to get from Figueras across the border to the town, but until you got to Figueras it was so incredibly easy and quick and cheap that it broke your heart to go the long way, on the train via Paris or the plane to Toulouse. The trouble was that, after Figueras, you really were stuck. But she spoke Spanish, so I said maybe there’d be a bus. I gave her Luc’s number at the clinic and told her to call him if she got into trouble.

  Two days later Luc rang me. I was still packing boxes. Marnie had called him from Figueras at midday to say there was no bus. He was just finishing putting a crown on someone’s incisor and was about to go off to the pizzeria for lunch.

  He drove to Figueras and picked her up. She had an extremely heavy bag, and around her waist she wore a leather belt with great big studs, like a bulldog’s, which turned out to have some prosthetic function because she’d fallen off a wall at a rock concert as a teenager and damaged her back. She was still in constant pain from the injury. He drove her to the village, dropped her at the café and then said he had to go back to work. He gave her the keys to his Land Rover and said she could get her suitcase out of the back when she wanted, and keep the keys, as long as she got them back to him at the clinic by seven. Seven o’clock came and there were no keys. He went to the house, and it was all opened up, as though someone was there, but no one answered the bell. He went to the parking lot and saw that the car was there. Then he started walking the boulevard, thinking he would see her and be able to recover the car keys. No sign. He went to have his pizza, then doubled back to the house around eight-thirty. Still no answer, though someone had returned and closed the shutters. He decided to make one more tour of the village before giving up and going to borrow his father’s car. As he came back to the parking lot and was about to turn left down the Rue St. Florian to his father’s house, he recognized a famous poet who lived in Paris walking toward him down the street. The poet stopped at the café table, and Luc now realized Marnie had been sitting there for some time, probably with his car keys on the table in front of her, by her glass of beer.

  “She looked like you,” he said. “I think I’d thought it was you, even though I knew you were in England. It didn’t register, either, that it couldn’t be you because you weren’t there, or if it was you it was surprising and I would want to go and sit down with you. And it didn’t occur to me that if it wasn’t you it must be her, and she was the person I was looking for, because it didn’t look like her at first, it looked like you.”

  By the time he’d thought all this she had walked off up the road with the poet, talking as though they knew each other. They got into a car with a Parisian license plate and drove away.

  The next morning, when Luc bumped into Marnie in the street, she produced his car keys from a pouch on her leather belt. They went for lunch, and she told him about the book she was translating from the French, which had originally been translated from Arabic. Luc found the news that she was also translating the lyrics of the songs of Serge Gainsbourg a bit of a disappointment. He didn’t ask her about the poet, and she didn’t volunteer anything, though she told him about other aspects of her life: her marriage to a singer who was at home decorating the house they were going to sell—though now I can’t remember if it was because they were getting together again or splitting up—her work, her time as a rock groupie, her travels in the Middle East. Luc was fascinated by Marnie, and I was surprised that he didn’t leave me for her, but I suppose he thought I was difficult enough, and she was the concentrate form of me. His friends were beginning to think he had some kind of trade going in thin literary English-women with uncommonly brown legs, and Stefan was hopping mad.

  I took the train from Waterloo station early on the morning after the Labour election victory. The moving van had left a few days previously and was due to arrive the following evening in the village, on its way down to the south of Spain. It was odd leaving Waterloo in bright sunshine on a happy morning. A man in his late forties sat opposite me, and next to me was a girl, who turned out to be his daughter. He kept rubbing his hands together gleefully. It was like being in the front row at the Epworth Amateur Dramatic Society’s first rehearsal when one man has already, irritatingly, learned the whole of his part. The rest of us were burying our heads in our newspapers. His daughter, who looked about twelve, was reading Nineteen.

  “Get you some clothes in Paris,” he said. “Christ,” hand rubbing, “eighteen years of Conservative rule. Still can’t believe we did it. Melissa? Can you?”

 
Melissa turned a page without looking up. “I actually have a new pleated skirt,” she said. “Mummy got it in Bath.”

  When we came out of the tunnel he said, “What French do you know?”

  “Je suis en train de lire mon feuilleton,” she said heavily. “On est dans le train.”

  “What’s your French teacher’s name?”

  “Miss Armstrong,” said Melissa.

  “Miss Armstrong! She nice then?”

  “Very.”

  Enraged by Melissa’s ability, like her mother’s, I guessed, to wound him while flicking coolly through a magazine, he reached over and tried to rip it from her. It was an extraordinarily violent gesture. She dodged it, keeping her eyes on the page, and he sagged back, defeated, in his seat.

  “Miss Armstrong has a lover who’s French,” said Melissa quietly. “He’s very poor. She gives him all her salary and buys him sausages.”

  * * *

  Luc met me at the station and wrapped his arms around me. He had a lovely way of making it clear that, for him, I had come home, that he and the dog were waiting for me, and the horses, and that now I’d moved my things out of England we could settle down to our summer, our life, together.

  We arrived back in the village at nine o’clock at night and drove up the street that ran behind Luc’s father’s house, a quiet, narrow street, with an intersection where you could turn left for the bull ring or right for the Rue St. Florian. We had intended to drive straight through, but the intersection was blocked by a huge, long, white truck. It was the biggest thing I had ever seen in the village. Slowly Luc stopped the car. I think we both had the feeling we were seeing something that had arrived by night and was not meant to be seen by other people, some kind of visitation, an apparition. I felt full of apprehension. The piano had come in such a truck. There was a full moon, almost. We got out of the car and walked toward it. Luc said happily, “Qu’est-ce que c’est beau,” admiring its simple Le Corbusier lines.