‘The one in the stable? You were going to tell me about her. But who is Monsieur Seguin?’
‘Ah yes, so I was. But you haven’t quite understood. Choufleur there is actually my goat. Monsieur Seguin’s goat, Blanquette, is the one in a story that all – yes, all – French children read about at school. You know our obsessionally centralized system of education? So now you too shall hear about her –’
And he related to me, in perfect mock solemnity, that story which I too was to come to know so well that the classic schoolroom phrases have become part of me also, and I too have within my own head the rhetorical cadences of a nineteenth-century school teacher. Monsieur Seguin had a white goat, Blanquette, who was the apple of his eye and to whom he gave everything a goat could want etc., etc. And for a long time Blanquette was very happy. But one spring she took it into her head that she wanted to go up onto the mountain to graze on the new grass and the flowers. And Monsieur Seguin said, ‘But Blanquette, you have everything here that a goat could want, plenty of grass, a long rope in the nicest part of the meadow, and here you are safe from the wolf of the mountain.’ But Blanquette was not afraid of the wolf, or of anything else, and she kept insisting that she wanted to see the mountain until Monsieur Seguin, determined to keep her safe, put her into the stable and locked the door. However he had forgotten the window, and hardly was his back turned when Blanquette was out of the window and off. She trotted away to the mountain, where a friendly herd of deer received her like a small queen …
–And the story inexorably continues: Blanquette spent a delightful day on the mountain pastures, sampling the spring flowers and drinking from clear streams. She was enjoying herself too much to notice the coming of dark, and it took her by surprise. She was cold, and a little afraid, and was almost tempted to try to find her way back to the house in the valley she could no longer see. But then she remembered the hedge around the meadow, the rope, the closed stable, and knew that after her day of freedom she could never again live as Monsieur Seguin’s goat, even though he blew his horn from the valley to try to call her home. Then, suddenly, she saw in the moonlight, among the rocks, a little distance off, two great eyes watching her. They came closer …
Poor Blanquette struggled all night to fight off the terrible wolf of the mountain with her small hooves and horns. But by dawn she could fight no longer. Her beautiful white coat was all stained with blood, and in the morning when Monsieur Seguin came to look for her on the mountain, Blanquette, ah, Blanquette – !
‘When I was a very small boy,’ Jacquou concluded, as, later, I always heard him conclude it, so that it became part of the recitation: ‘that story used to make me cry.’
‘I’m not surprised. It practically makes me cry now. I’m sure the stories we tell children in England have happier endings. Perhaps we are softer.’
Jacquou inclined his head, as if he too had formed that impression but did not want to commit himself.
‘What a moral tale, though,’ I said.
‘Of course. It’s a warning to our children to stay at home and not to follow their instincts and go out into the world. As a bigger boy and a young man, naturally I despised it very much. But in later years, more recently … Well, I begin to have some craven sympathy with Monsieur Seguin’s point of view …
‘I told you I retired from the university after the war? Yes. Well it wasn’t just that I wanted to cultivate my garden, as we say. My wife had died. I wanted to be at home more to look after my own little goat properly, so that she did not stray on the mountain.’
‘The one in the stable?’ I said, floundering. It seemed an unlikely preoccupation for such a man, and anyway where in the gentle Creuse were the mountains, where the danger?
‘No, no! My other little goat, my own one – look, here’s her picture.’ He picked an inconspicuous snapshot off a shelf, and I found myself looking at a girl in her teens with long plaits looped up, Jacquou’s obstinate lower lip and the dark eyes of another: Simone.
‘That was taken a few years ago now,’ he said, glancing at the back of it. ‘Yes – just after the Liberation. She must have been fourteen. The next summer her mother died, and Simone and I set up house here on our own.’
‘She looks more than fourteen.’ I wanted to say something admiring, but could not find quite the right thing.
‘Yes, she grew up early. She’s twenty-one now, but she still looks much the same as in this photo. A couple of years ago she cut off her long hair, silly girl, but she’s letting it grow again now, I’m glad to say. I’m old-fashioned about hair. If not about anything else.’
‘Where is she just now?’ I asked. Perhaps she was due to appear at the kitchen door, dutifully home with the gathering dark.
‘Away studying,’ he said, and I felt a pang of disappointment. Maybe, apart from my own selfish young man’s interest, I had picked up some unspoken yearning in Jacquou’s own carefully casual tone.
‘In Paris. I sent her there to do her degree. It was a great temptation to let her go somewhere near here where she would come home at weekends. Well, Poitiers was the obvious place. You know that is our usual system here in France, it is different from yours as I understand it. But – let us say I did not want to be Monsieur Seguin.’
‘She’s at the Sorbonne?’ I persisted. Jacquou shot me a glance of amusement. ‘Yes, yes. Don’t worry, young man; if you like, you shall meet her. I’ll arrange it.’
I set out to chronicle my meeting with Simone. But I see now that what I have done is to describe how I came to meet her father, and, in doing so, have said already almost as much as I am able about Simone herself. How can you ‘describe’ someone who is for ever part of you, the one who makes all the others seem like imitations?
I have tried, with an effort of concentrated memory, to isolate my first impression of my father-in-law and to recreate the mill-house kitchen as it was then, before Simone managed to banish a few of the ancient implements to the barn, before we persuaded Jacquou to have an extra window made in the south side and a proper sink put in beneath it – before, indeed, Choufleur’s one-time stable became our own room for holiday visits. But I have no doubt made factual mistakes even so, endowing that first, so long distant evening not only with the accreted emotion of the years to come but with objects from the future also.
For instance, I know that the medieval angel with the broken wing must have already been in its place on the chimneypiece that first time, because it was Jacquou’s own father, a local school teacher and sometime Mayor of the district, who had found it. One exceptionally dry nineteenth-century summer he came upon it in the exposed bed of the Creuse, buried in the peaty mud that had by a freak preserved it. Local antiquarian theory held that it had probably come from a nearby monastery chapel that had been looted at the Revolution. The family story, a mild anti-Catholic joke recounted to Jacquou as a small boy and passed on in turn to Simone and then to Marigold, was that the angel had flown rebelliously away from the chapel one beautiful summer morning, had been shot through the wing like a buzzard by an inept hunter and had plummeted into the river. Maybe on that very first evening I commented on the angel and was told this tale. But the other winged wooden carving, the swallow in flight formed from one perfect piece of chestnut wood, which I believe I remember noticing at the same time, was perhaps not there at all. Indeed on reflection I think the swallow only appeared in the house in the course of the following year, after its prototype had been admired in the local café and then taken from there.
Come to that, although I am sure the two painted chests were in the mill when I first went there – Jacquou kept his Resistance ‘archives’ in one of them, deceptively innocuous beneath a lid decorated with water birds and mallows – the little chair must have come much later, since we commissioned it ourselves, for Marigold. I have been thinking that it was, like most of Marigold’s ‘French home’ possessions, once Simone’s. But the man who embellished the deal boxes and chairs so gracefully, and carved the swallows
also, only appeared in the district after the war when Simone was already in her teens. He was a Pole with a name full of s’s and z’s who was known locally as ‘Monsieur Maryk’. A refugee, he had no family: he had nothing. He used to sit in the café in the evenings near the iron stove and draw sketches of animals and birds in charcoal on the backs of handbills. Jacquou befriended him, bought him some paints and other materials to replace those arbitrarily destroyed by Hitler, and the furniture and birds were the result. By the time I came on the scene Maryk had acquired a modest celebrity in the region and had a workshop in a barn some miles off.
There is a circularity in time, all the same. Even if the cycles do not renew themselves as we dream they might – our youth given back to us and the dead, like the seasons and the fruits, returning – there are patterns which seem to repeat themselves through families and lives. It is this, as much as the distortions of memory, which gives us the retrospective impression that in our past the then-future was already implicit, a pattern being intricately prepared in cipher, warp and weft. When I met Jacques Mongeux his wife was dead and the centre of his life was his daughter, Simone. Many years later, after Jacques himself lay in the Protestant cemetery in Limoges, I was to find that time had brought me round to the same situation. It was as if Jacques had been, all along, both my model and my dealer of fate, though he never knew it. Simone was dead, like her mother, at barely forty, and I in my turn was a widower in the summer mill-house, strong and active but alone, waiting for my own daughter to return – from a swim, or a bike ride, or a weekend with friends or, later, from the city. Or from another country. Or from some mountain I could not see.
Perhaps this sense of coming back, via the wide detours of living, to the same point, is why the way I met Simone now seems so critical to my life, to everything; pregnant at the start with all that was to come. But in between there were many, many happy, preoccupied years in which I would not have regarded the circumstances in which Simone and I had met as particularly significant. We married in 1954 when my thesis was done, and I brought her back to England with me. Because I was married I needed a job and so became a schoolmaster. Marigold was born in 1956. She was given that name because I, in my conceit, wanted an unusual one for her; and because Simone, convalescent after an unexpectedly difficult birth, was consoled by the idea of naming her after those flowers which, in French, are called sans soucis – ‘without a care’. She turned out to be our only child: a disappointment to Simone, this, less so to me, since my limited imagination could not encompass loving any further child so well. In any event we prospered. Simone taught too: French at a girls’ school. My own career expanded.
If I had any sense, all those happy, busy, ignorant years, of life’s circularity, it was located only in our regular return trips to central France, to the Creuse and the mill-house and Jacquou and his kitchen. How many times, under how many skies, was I to arrive, as I arrived on that first ever evening, and it was always a little different and always the same, the same. After the beginning, I usually came with Simone, and then after a few years with Simone and Marigold. Train and local bus gave way to a beat-up green Simca with several teeth missing in the gear-box: my first vehicle. Later Jacques used to lend us his pre-war Citroën Light-15, a low-slung black car like a symbol on a road-sign. By the time Marigold was there we had a Morris Traveller, whose wooden trims Jacquou’s country neighbours, from their bouncing canvas Deux Chevaux, rather admired. Later came Triumphs, our first ‘good’ car; then, in 1970, the year of Simone’s illness, a large, comfortable Peugeot which made us look back to the green Simca with patronizing amazement that we had ever been so content with it. Simone, who was a good driver, enjoyed the Peugeot: it was almost the last thing she was able to enjoy in that way.
But as we ourselves changed and progressed up the material scale, so did France, even the hidden Creuse. There, too, changes did take place, imperceptibly but cumulatively from year to year. I know that when I first walked beside Simone in the autumn fields of 1952, I was struck by the fact, already picturesque to British eyes, that all the ploughing was done with horse-teams, and the sowers went forth to sow from pouches like Biblical figures. I don’t think there was then a tractor anywhere in that district. France, which had stagnated economically and socially ever since the blow of 1914, had been dealt a further blow in 1940 and the years of Occupation from which she still seemed barely convalescent, a wounded society huddled in her old ways. Rural France seemed to me, as a young man, full of old or simply ageless people in carefully darned clothes, perpetually fixing gates or carts with bits of wire, patching roofs with ends of wood, shepherding tiny flocks of goats, geese or chickens, hoarding obsolescent coins in worn pouches, relieving themselves on manure heaps, prodigal only with food and drink.
But I was wrong, all of us were, for great changes were coming, de Gaulle was coming, the aprés-guerre was after all passing and a hidden prosperity must even then have been on its slow but certain way. I cannot of course remember now which year the first tractors began to appear, or when the old push-bikes were gradually replaced by motorized ones and then by cars. Nor can I remember by what stages the smithy in the village up the hill turned itself into a two-stroke garage, nor when electric petrol pumps replaced the hand one, nor when – later, surely? – the first supermarkets grew monstrously from the earth beside the main highways. I cannot remember just when the village café, where Monsieur Maryk liked to sit, shed its round iron stove and acquired a jukebox and a pin-table, nor yet when the camp site was opened down by the reservoir and pedalos appeared for hire, and there began to be cars from elsewhere outside the restaurants on Sundays. Nor yet can I recall when we first began to hear that this or the other ancient farmhouse had been sold to ‘Parisiens’ (outsiders were always supposed to be from Paris) as a holiday home. But I believe that, throughout the 1960s, while Marigold was growing from a small child into a teenager and we were just busy being ourselves in cheerful unobservance, the great change was taking place. I think that it was more or less complete by 1970.
Coincidentally, at the extreme end of that year, in the blank, short days between Christmas and New Year, Simone ceased to live. It was more sudden, at the end, than even her doctors had expected.
There are blessings in life, all the same. Jacquou had died the previous year, not long before Simone’s cancer was diagnosed. He was old; he had done most of the things he had wanted to do, indeed I think he had done those things by the time I met him. Certain things, which most men never have to confront however long they live, he had met in his prime and dealt with, for better or worse. Death held no terrors for him: he had seen his grand-daughter grow tall and beautiful, he never knew that his daughter was so soon to follow him. Happy Jacquou.
Under French law, the mill and all its contents came to Simone, and then, when she died soon after, to Marigold under my trusteeship. Which is how, by the early 1970s, Marigold and I found ourselves together in possession of the place, repeating the pattern established a generation before.
I wonder now if it can have been on my first visit to the mill that Jacquou told me the essence of his Resistance activities and showed me some of the papers lying so innocently under the painted lid of one of the Pole’s chests? I remember it that way, but I suspect that the central conversation, so important to me that I have invested it with the intensity of my first visit, actually took place later. That first time, when I came alone and Jacquou received me kindly on Serge Gombach’s recommendation, I believe I asked him a number of prosaic, exploratory questions about the size and composition of the underground network he had headed between 1942 and 1944. I was rewarded with an interesting general lecture on the difficulties of welding together in a common cause people whose motives – even declared motives – varied widely. I already knew, of course, that the Communist allegiance that was the backbone of much valid Resistance to the Nazis had created endemic problems for committed maquisards who were not Party members, nor even left-wing by upbringin
g or temperament. We must have spoken then of the charismatic figures of Frenay, the ex-military editor of Combat, and Jean Moulin who died under Gestapo torture, both of whom came from upper-class, essentially Pétainist worlds. ‘For me, at least, there was no internal conflict,’ Jacquou used to say: ‘Our own family had a long tradition of non-conformity. Robin Hood was a favourite childhood hero. And Jacquou le Croquant, of course. Clandestine resistance suited me.’
I think that on this first occasion he did also mention, and then brushed aside as if it were too obvious to discuss further, the ‘rebellious adolescent’ problem – the difficulties created, particularly in the final stages of the Occupation, by the number of rank-and-file maquisards who had joined not out of idealism and commitment but because they wanted to handle a weapon and to be in on the fun. ‘Violent movements always attract congenital criminals as well as congenital idealists,’ Jacquou used to say. ‘The chance of history will mean a man gets recorded as a hero of the Resistance who, under other circumstances, would just have been a petty crook. Not that that necessarily invalidates his actions, you understand; it’s a nice philosophical point … But it does complicate life when you’re trying to organize and control such people.’
But I am almost sure that on that first occasion he did not let himself be drawn any further, into more personal reminiscences. Why should he? He owed me, an unknown foreign student, nothing. He was getting the measure of me. I was grateful enough – more than grateful, secretly thrilled – when, on the morning I left, he gave me, as well as food for the journey, a note of Simone’s address in Paris.
Long after, he told me with wry amusement that seeing me off like that, making sure I had everything I needed including a contact, had reminded him of something. But not till after I had left, trudging purposefully up the hill with my knapsack on my back, did it come to him that in the war he had frequently seen off on missions young men very much like me. ‘Some of them, it turned out, were going to their deaths,’ he said. ‘I felt most relieved that now my conscience was – more or less – quiet. You were only going to my daughter.’
Give Them All My Love Page 5