‘Though I feed you with palourdes and salade angevin in the Rue Jacob and I take you in the Musée d’Orsay to make homage to Mr Webb, your own countryman –’
‘Gentille –’ Roland said.
‘– and I cook for you myself two beautiful eggs in the stock from mussels, and I play for you while you eat, Gluck’s most exquisite “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice”. I wake you in my silk robe from the Kenzo house –’
‘Gentille –’ Roland said.
‘I give you only my most precious Arabian coffee, ground with cardamom pods, and still you cannot climb the few small steps to where I sleep –’
‘Good God,’ Roland said, and winced. ‘Gentille. What an idiot I’ve been. Hundred per cent brainless philistine. Dear girl, can you forgive me?’
In reply, Gentille leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. As he gave himself up to the experience, he forgot completely that he was hungry. He was only aware of his thirst. The thirst was like that of a pilgrim in a desert place who has finally come upon a well. Then she drove him back in silence. In silence they parked the car and took the métro into the centre. In silence they climbed the turret stairs beyond the bathroom to where Gentille’s bed lay under the exposed roof beam, like a tranquil grey island in the middle of the floor. To touch her was like putting on silk. Her cold, well-pumiced heels made shock waves judder through his abdomen. Roland had never before felt anything quite so extraordinary.
When he awoke it was the next morning. He saw that the light came in through a small dormer window that gave on to grey slate roofs and that five cloth animals sat in a line on the sill. He saw that the boy’s Lego bricks were stacked in the corner in a wooden box with rope handles. Then he saw that Gentille was standing in the doorway holding that ominously small tray.
‘Bonjour,’ she said. ‘Tu as bien dormi?’ This time it didn’t get on his nerves, but the sight of the tray made him panic as his stomach cried out against its contents.
‘Gentille,’ he said. ‘Tilly. Dear one. Can I tell you something? I’m starving. I’ve been starving ever since I got here. If you don’t want me to expire, don’t even think of offering me those little slivers of nursery toast with that pink marmalade. Don’t even think of it.’
Gentille blinked. ‘You may eat anything you like,’ she said. ‘If you will tell me what it is you like . . .’
Roland thought that maybe what he’d like was half a sheep on a platter, dished up with a two-gallon bucketful of pommes frites. Or perhaps he’d like five poulets, roasted together on a spit.
‘Tilly,’ he said, ‘I’ll eat anything. Frankly, I’m so bloody hungry I could eat a horse.’
Gentille put down the tray and advanced upon the bed. ‘Never,’ she said and she began to draw down the sheet.
‘Gentille,’ he said. ‘Please. Tilly, no. I’m too hungry. I need to pee. I beg you –’
‘Horse?’ she said. ‘But I think an Englishman will never eat a horse.’
When Peter returned, Roland had already taken the métro for Charles de Gaulle. There was nothing observably different about the apartment, except that the chrome replica of the 1950s Citroën had gone. His mother’s bed stood neatly made in the middle of the floor and his animals were waiting for him in a line along the window-sill. Through the window he saw that the piebald cat was once again stalking the pigeons. Everything was the same, except that everything had changed.
His mother faced the change, when it came, with a predictable absence of nostalgia. She moved on. For Peter, it was far more difficult – and no less so because he had initiated the change himself. He had been seduced from isolation by playing tennis on a beach in England. He had fallen in love with an old man and a well-house and a small dog named after the Dog Star. In doing so he had severed something; had left himself bereaved. He had lopped off the limb of his own infancy. But how was he to have anticipated that his mother would fall in love as well?
When Peter’s mother got married again, they moved into a small country house in England, where Gentille took a break from her professional life to bear the schoolmaster’s children. Since she did not wish to extend this phase of her existence indefinitely, Gentille had both the babies within the first two years of her marriage and all those who met her were agreed that she organized her domestic affairs impeccably. With her marriage Gentille had taken on a new commitment and she managed it like a professional brief of a different but challenging kind.
Ellen and Lydia, Peter’s half-sisters, were, in appearance, very like the schoolmaster. They were dark-eyed, brown-haired, robust little girls with nut-brown skins and broad, sturdy feet which they planted four-square on the ground. They were merry, outgoing girls, tailor-made to grow up good at tennis and flirting.
This phase of Peter’s life – the phase that followed hard upon the stillness of his grey Parisian sky loft – was something he remembered as a hectic round of nappies and rumpus and bathtime and puréed vegetables, all of which made his head ache almost all of the time. And then there was the business of taking brisk walks in the cold, prefaced by the stuffing of pudgy infant hands into woollen mittens that hung from coat sleeves on strings and the stuffing of pudgy infant feet into red waterproof boots so that Ellen and Lydia could stamp about in puddles of liquid mud, hyping each other with volleys of exuberant, hiccupping laughter.
For Peter, though he presumed neither to resent them, nor to question their right to exist, his sisters were alien creatures; strident cuckoos who had invaded his nest with squawks and scuffles; his nest which had once cradled him so quietly, so remotely, so high above the pavements of the Rue du Bac.
And then he was sent away to school.
It was true that the stars were still the same and they showed themselves very clear, some nights, from the windows of the dormitory, but it was difficult, in an English prep school, to recapture that benign communion. At school there was always somebody requiring that one buck-up, keep-it-up, shut-up, play-up, pull-one’s-socks-up and, above all, be ready at any time, within the hours of daylight, to quote, with alacrity, the cube root of twenty-seven or the factors of sixty-four.
And in the French class, where there might have been respite, his own particular Madame Lazarre was called Madame Maloret. Peter did not consciously understand that she singled him out for the proficiency of his accent and his syntax, both of which constituted an affront to her pre-eminence, but he struggled instinctively to cultivate a protective mediocrity.
She had more than once demanded of him that he make public certain elements of his autobiography. Sacrificial offerings of himself, to be cast before his peers.
‘I used to live in Paris,’ Peter said at last, conceding the point reluctantly.
‘En français, s’il vous plaît!’ she said.
‘J’ai habité une fois à Paris,’ Peter said, struggling against his own facility.
‘Grenouille,’ hissed the voices behind him. ‘Say, Ruskie’s from “Gay Paree” did you know that? Gay Paree, d’you geddit?’ ‘D’you suppose his mother’s a can-can dancer?’ ‘D’you suppose she’s a warty old lesbian grenouille-ess?’ ‘But surely he can’t be a Ruskie and a frog?’
And then, one day, as a follow-up, he heard the voice of Rutherford.
‘Rack off, you morons,’ Rutherford said. ‘God, but aren’t you lame!’ Then he said, ‘My mother’s French too, by the way – if that’s a problem for you.’
Rutherford – star of the house, star of the form – Rutherford, who could have chosen anybody had, for some reason, chosen Peter.
Jago Rutherford’s early experience had been different from Peter’s, though in some superficial respects it was comparable. His father was an English antiques dealer who had met his mother in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Jago’s mother’s family ran a small wine farm in the Carcassonne region of southern France. The antiques dealer’s name was Charles Rutherford and he had met Jago’s mother at a village fête one evening, while holidaying in the house of a friend. He had drive
n through the square in a small open car just in time to hear somebody singing ‘Yes, Sir, She’s My Baby’ in a heavy regional accent from the back of a farmer’s truck. The truck had accommodated the band and all its gear.
Charles Rutherford drew up to enjoy a cigarette and to observe the natives for a moment. It was then that he spotted Mireille in the crowd, among the dancers.
‘Not bad,’ he thought. ‘Hey. Not half bad.’ Being habitually predatory, he left the car immediately and, pausing only to drop his cigarette and grind it underfoot in the pinkish dust, he crossed the square and waited on the sidelines until the music stopped. Then, deftly aborting any possible advance from the quorum of village youth, he took possession of Mireille and led her by the hand on to the floor. A person in the band had begun, a little ironically, to address the keys of a clapped-out, lilac-painted piano.
They danced for an hour in the small, dusty square, under the strings of crudely rigged, many-coloured lights, which swung from the shutters of the rough, pink stone houses that bordered the square. Then they took a walk. For the remaining weeks of Charles’s vacation, he and Mireille were inseparable. They touched and kissed on all the beaches around Béziers and Narbonne, and on all the banks of all the rocky inland pools. They kissed in the food markets before the varied rows of spiced, dried sausages, and in the cloisters of ruined abbeys and under the arches of the old bridge in Lagrasse. They dined out each night in one or other of the seemingly endless small fishbars and cafés round the coast.
Had he not got Mireille pregnant, Charles – his skin baked a few shades browner, his wild fair curls bleached lighter – would have closed the book on this agreeable interlude and returned unencumbered to his stalking-grounds off the Bayswater Road. As it was – and given that Mireille had lost no time in making the matter known both to him and to her entire family – Charles saw no good reason why he should not marry the girl. The long summer holiday had warmed his skin and the plates full of local fish stew and little spider crabs and fish striped pink and silver, and the glasses of pale rose and straw-coloured wine, had all left him rather more mellow than he normally found himself in his flat full of unwashed empties in the real world of his life. And one would, after all, get married to some girl or other some day, and this one, let’s face it, was not only a great deal prettier than most of the spoilt, silly girls who pestered him back home, but – given that she didn’t hang out with the gaggle – she made a hell of a lot less racket.
Charles Rutherford was clever, indolent and pleasure-seeking. He was also, when leaned on, rather a bully, but, with his golden curls, his Byronic looks and his dare-it-all way of proceeding, he had always been attractive to young women, many of whom were more than ready to leave their knickers on his bedroom floor.
They were married with little delay in the local church alongside the square where they had first met. This feat was made all the easier since through happy fluke Charles had been born to his C of E parents while they were holidaying in France and had been baptized there by the local Catholic priest.
Charles enjoyed his wedding. It was rather like being suddenly given the lead in a film by Claude Chabrol, and he played his part with gusto. He had already endeared himself to Mireille’s family and he joined in the festivities with aplomb, laughing and joking with his many new brothers and cousins-in-law, one of whom, a young man he had previously observed returning with rugby boots tied around his neck, turned out to be the priest who had married them. He even took the trouble to cause little flutters of excitement in the bosom of Mireille’s younger sister.
‘You never told me you had all those names, Mireille,’ he said. ‘ “I, Charles, take thee, Mireille Aurélie Arianne Odile . . .” Whatever made you think I could pronounce them?’
After the wedding and the brief honeymoon, which the couple took in Cyprus, Charles swept Mireille off to London, where he ensconced her in his tiny, rather rough-and-ready flat. He continued to live as he had always done. That is, he proved quite incapable of spending a single evening at home and, if Mireille had no inclination to go out with him, he simply went out without her. It did not help that she felt sick for much of the pregnancy, and that her father-in-law took to coming round, rather too frequently, when Charles was not there.
Mr Rutherford senior had proposed within the month that they exchange apartments with him – since he was one, he said, and they would soon be three, or four if they decided to use the services of a nanny, as he had pressed them to – and the exchange was duly effected.
In spite of the obvious advantage of extra space, this measure was disadvantageous to Mireille in two ways. The first was that she did not like being indebted to her father-in-law, whose loud, pukkah-sahib voice and big red face alarmed her. The second was that she found the flat itself uncongenial.
It was on the top floor of a red-brick mansion block and as such, its hour had come again architecturally, but to Mireille the edifice, along with its wide, dark corridors, looked like nothing so much as a penal institution. And old Mr Rutherford’s furnishings were uncomfortably foreign to her. After the warmth of the French farmhouse kitchen and the simple, shuttered rooms with their naked, tiled floors, Mireille now found herself in a living space that was furnished like a gentlemen’s club.
Apart from the dark green walls and the oil paintings of military seascapes and fox hunts and jolly poachers in ale-houses, and the buttoned leather chairs and inlaid ivory, it seemed to her that the place was far too dense with the relics of dead animals. The hide of a dead zebra was sprawled across the living-room floor with bits of its mane still attached at the centre fold. There was a dead swordfish in a long glass box over the fireplace and a glass urn full of dead humming-birds, wired into permanent hovering position. Umbrellas and walking-sticks were stored in the hall in a hollow, severed elephant’s foot, complete with horny, discoloured toenails, each bigger than Mireille’s fist.
Yet neither of the two gentlemen saw good reason why anything very much should be changed. Old Mr Rutherford because he liked it that way and Charles, not only because he was almost never at home, but also because he considered the flat’s hideousness to be such terrifically good fun.
Because Charles despised the people who trooped through his shop and fell victim to his over-priced, polished-up treasures, he had cultivated a stylish indifference to the furnishings around his own home. Left to himself, he chose naked light bulbs and inverted packing-crates, but, if the old man’s pad came complete with tally-ho place-mats and all that kitsch of Empire, so much the better. The best joke of all – and one that added considerably to his allure as raconteur in the pub – was that the flat boasted a king-size, circular, fur-covered bed.
‘Dirty old bugger,’ he said. ‘It’s round as a plate and covered all over in bunny pelts. God knows, he’s been a widower these twenty-five years.’ He paused to flick ash from his cigarette into a plastic ashtray. ‘Et de plus,’ he said. ‘He’s got these objets in the bathroom, don’t you know? Statuettes of darkies suffering perpetual engorgement of the phallus. Airport ethnic. Love it to death.’
The ‘baby’ materialized, not as one, but as two, since Mireille had been carrying twins. They were born over a Bank Holiday weekend, while Charles was off at the races, and in a grim, Victorian hospital where the medical personnel had kept on changing shift. Thanks to unscheduled bungle and routine staff shortage, only Mireille was on duty continuously, for something like ten hours. Eventually one of the doctors, taking over the evening shift, had declared the babies unacceptably fatigued, and had resorted at once to forceps.
Jago, who was in the vanguard of the process, was born weighing a good eight pounds. He was smooth-skinned and strong and it had taken a lot to fatigue him. Victor followed within ten minutes. He was smaller and not a little blue.
The babies had been sluiced and swaddled by the time Charles appeared. He had been celebrating his winnings and he came high on his luck and bearing flowers for Mireille, along with a bottle of Moët et Ch
andon. He was delighted by the sight of the two boy babies, but his inappropriately sanguine air and the shallowness of his tributes jarred with Mireille who had had a bad time in his absence. He had come too late and the damage was done. Her emotions had been irreparably bruised and she never really forgave him.
‘Well done, well done, old bean,’ he said. And he kissed her pale cheek, but she was hardly in celebratory mood.
It was at this point that Charles became aware that the obstetrics man was poised with needle and thread. He was positioned at the south end of Mireille, where Charles promptly hastened to place himself.
The obstetrics man had been making ready to stitch up an incision in Mireille’s pelvic floor and Charles, coming unexpectedly upon the sight, pulled a ghastly face and winced.
‘God Almighty,’ he said. ‘Is that normal?’
The obstetrics man had a soft spot for young men like Charles. He had been to school with them. He smiled indulgently, wishing to reassure with the implication that all such things were as mother’s milk to him and well within his professional control.
‘Perfectly,’ he said. ‘She’ll bounce back in no time, I assure you.’
‘But what is wrong with me?’ Mireille asked, from the distant, north end of her own body.
‘Ma chérie,’ Charles said, baby-talking to blot out his own nausea and alarm, ‘your poor little old wee-wee place is looking most horribly horrible.’
‘But what is wrong with me?’ Mireille said again.
Neither of them answered her. The obstetrics man had turned instead to address the disquiet of the husband. He felt it a kindness to jolly Charles along. ‘Consider this the honeymoon stitch,’ he said. ‘You’d like it nice and tight, old man?’
‘Oh, rath-er,’ said Charles, covering for his own squeamishness and thinking, as he spoke, that the doctor must be mad – but seriously off his head – to be talking like this about a woman whose privates were currently looking like something in a butcher’s shop, but the connivance was none the less gross.
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