It was true that Evan could be expansively generous when he felt flush for some reason. But I mistrusted the idea of a restorative country idyll. In spite of the daisies he had given Simone and all those landscapes with sheep, I thought that Evan was essentially an urban creature.
Simone recounted this to me but, for better or worse, she was always inclined to take her own decisions, an only-child trait I have noticed in myself. (And in Marigold too, come to that.) She listened to Joyce, and to Evan, wrote to her father, and then came up with a proposal: the owner of a small château in the Creuse – more prosaically a forlorn nineteenth-century mansion with a couple of turrets – was going to spend the summer in Canada with his married daughter, and was looking for a couple to caretake meanwhile and look after his two wolfhounds. They would live rent-free, and he would pay them a retainer. Didn’t that sound, said Simone, just the thing for Evan and Joyce?
Apparently they thought so too, and were at once enthusiastic about the idea. I, however, was extremely taken aback. I was also hurt. I had felt that the Creuse was a magic land into which Simone had introduced me as a mark of special favour and intimacy, and now here she was opening the gate to Evan and Joyce. In particular, I resented the idea of Evan and his ready charm, his pastiche French with its Parisian argot, insinuating his way into Jacquou’s favour – Jacquou, whom I already valued so much. I could not say any of this, I would have felt ridiculously possessive. On the face of it, what could be more natural than some of Simone’s other Paris friends spending the summer in her home territory? But I was greatly relieved when I heard that the château in question was some thirty kilometres from the mill-house, on the far side of Argenton. I had imagined it in the next village. Without a car, they would be decently distant there.
I had recently acquired a car myself – the toothless green Simca, a model from the 1930s, which had somehow survived the war years. Till then, I had been looking forward very much to driving Simone down to the Creuse in July when her exams were over. Now I felt this idyll impinged on by other presences. I confined myself to grumbling at Simone that I hoped Evan and Joyce wouldn’t be wanting lifts all over the place. I knew already (but did not say) that they would never pay for the petrol.
Simone remarked coolly, and reasonably on the face of it, that I didn’t have to offer and, if it came to that, I could always refuse.
But later that evening she relented and said:
‘I know you don’t really want them in the Creuse. I’m sorry.’
‘Good heavens, it’s not for me to dictate.’ (It was my turn to be on the high horse.) ‘If you want them there, it’s entirely up to you.’
‘I don’t,’ she said quietly. ‘Not really. It’s just that … Oh Tom, it’s just that I feel so sorry for them. It really hasn’t been much, to do this for them. And they’re both so pleased about it.’
Sorry for them? At length I said, ‘Well I can see you might feel pretty sorry for Joyce. After all –’
‘No, no, you don’t see; it’s more general than that. It’s just that I’ve had so much given to me. Such a good childhood, such layers and layers of security, a proper education. Proper love … Neither of them has had any of those things, you can see it. Evan even less than Joyce, I think.’
‘Well her childhood seems to have been bleak enough.’
‘Yes, but I think his was actually worse, in its way. Not as poor, perhaps, his father worked at a racecourse – betting, you know. But I think he was a bit louche, and Evan’s mother … Well, by the time Evan was in his teens it was American soldiers and so on.’
‘I didn’t know there were many of those stationed in Wales,’ I said annoyingly. But in general terms I could believe in the truth of what she said.
‘He told you all this?’ Again that hidden pang of resentment. Where, when, had Simone and Evan had these confiding talks? Before I met her? Or more recently?
‘So that,’ she said helplessly after a bit, ‘is why I feel I want to do what I can for them. Sort of redressing the balance. What Papa jokes about as le fair-play. But I’m sorry if it sounds silly, or makes you cross …’
After that, I couldn’t decently be cross, could I?
At the last minute before they left, I had to do some giving myself, of a more prosaic sort. Joyce appeared at the door of my room early one morning. Simone, as it happened, had spent the night at her own place. Perhaps it had been Simone Joyce was hoping to find – or had been sent to find: she seemed very embarrassed at having to make her request to me, biting her red lips. They were all ready to set off but there was this little trouble at the hotel. She was afraid Evan might lose his temper; the stupid concierge wouldn’t let them go without settling the bill, even though they were leaving a suitcase there and Evan had explained it all to her … She was so very sorry to bother me again.
I remember now with niggling clarity that the outstanding bill amounted to roughly what I was paid for a month’s part-time teaching. It must have been mounting up for weeks. Dourly I enquired about the train fare to the Creuse.
Oh, they were going to hitchhike down there. Joyce looked quite shocked at the luxurious idea of the train. But she admitted she was worried; it might take several days to get there, and even though they would sleep in the open they must have a little money for food …
I now know, as perhaps I had not then yet realized, that there are two sorts of people in the world, those who always manage to have some money put by and those who don’t, and that this has almost nothing to do with the scale of income. Without any choice in the matter, I belong in the first category. Unenthusiastically, I took Joyce with me to the post office and drew money for her out of my account. It was supposed to be my car-repair fund.
We drove down to the Creuse ourselves after a joyful Quatorze Juillet in Paris. As usual, in Evan and Joyce’s absence, my heart had grown fonder of them. I was even quite looking forward to seeing them again, and I know that Simone was. She had received a couple of stilted little notes in Joyce’s childish hand, telling her how beautiful the countryside was and how enormous and greedy the wolf-hounds. Evan had appended funny messages to these with little drawings – of him and Joyce being walked by the dogs, swimming naked in the lake and being surprised by a gamekeeper. Joyce trying to ride a cow …
On the way down in the car – a minor hiccup with the oilflow in the southern suburbs of Paris, a puncture at Tours – we vaguely discussed possible picnics and excursions for the four of us with pleasurable anticipation. But when, two days after settling in with Jacques, we drove over to the chateau, damply sequestered among pine trees, I picked up from his defensive greeting that Evan had become my enemy, and perhaps Simone’s as well.
Sometimes you sense something in this way which rationality and optimism then reject. It is weeks before mounting unease forces you to realize that your instant impression was the true one. So it was that summer.
Isolated pictures of the four of us come back to memory, but most are blurry, overlaid by others from numerous later, better summers. Pursuing the desperate charade that we were all the best of friends, I’m sure that we took Evan and Joyce to some of our regular favourite places – deep pools under the cliffs of the Creuse downstream where it entered the limestone ravines, standing stones hidden in the forests that the local guidebook misleadingly referred to as ‘Druid altars’. Since Jacquou himself knew the countryside minutely for fifty kilometres around he had taught much of it to Simone, and she in turn had shared it with me the year before. No doubt, in wanting to show that this was our territory, mine and Simone’s, I sometimes seemed arrogant. No doubt, too, the difference between the sort of education Simone and I had received and Evan and Joyce’s historical and cultural ignorance, yawned more obviously when the four of us were thrown together alone than it had in Paris; we should have been more on our guard against this and more tactful. But the fact remains that, however we had behaved, Evan, at some deeper level, wished to discomfit us, and more particularly me, and succeede
d all too well.
He seemed continually on edge, restless, whistling through his teeth, exaggeratedly uninterested in any ancient monument by which we passed, except as a possible source for cigarettes or ‘a nice cold beer’. It was as if he’d deliberately shed his Parisian veneer for the time being and was acting the part of the down-to-earth Real Man, bored stiff by fancy cultural pretensions. He was indeed, I suspect, profoundly bored in his country retreat, missing the daily audience that elsewhere reassured him of his existence. He teased the girls relentlessly, inanely – hiding their clothes when they went swimming, constantly telling Joyce she was too fat and Simone she was too skinny, revealing a line in fatuously coarse jokes (at which Joyce laughed shrilly while Simone pretended not to hear). He tried to enlist me as an ally in this dirty schoolboy sport, and then, when he did not succeed, changed his pattern and became delightful to the girls while excluding me.
He murmured to them in corners, joking and sniggering, and more openly in cafés when I went to pay for our drinks at the bar. Standing self-consciously there, I tried to calculate whether I was really paying, overall, much more than my share, as it seemed to me, and at the same time felt petty. I guessed that an image of myself as a stuffy odd-man-out was being skilfully promoted behind my back. In contrast with Evan’s persuasive charm, his relentless, aggressive gaiety, I must indeed, I thought dourly, seem dull, a spoilsport. My spirits were sinking with every expedition. I was beginning to harbour a deep, suppressed anger – not just with Evan, but with soft, corruptible Joyce, and, far more painfully, with Simone for not defending me. Once or twice I caught her looking stricken at some puerile, sadistic sally of Evan’s, and took grim comfort from the knowledge that she wasn’t really enjoying herself any more than I was, but felt still more cross with her that she said nothing. We were both failing to stand up to Evan, but that fact in itself was no comfort.
Had I ever been bullied at school, or in the Army, I should no doubt have got some practice in dealing with it. Later, as a teacher, I had little difficulty putting down the class trouble-maker from my position of strength. But I was unused to being cast in the role of victim: I had no devious skills and was as defenceless and stupid as a bear being baited.
One evening, in the village café nearest to the mill-house, Evan drank a good deal. At first he was charming, singing to his guitar, getting the bemused but enthusiastic peasant farmers to join in the refrains. He complimented the café-owner on the beautiful little bird, carved from one piece of chestnut wood, that hung over the bar, delicate but strong among the advertisements for Ricard and Brrh. The owner took it down for Evan to examine with an air of expertise (‘I’m an artist myself, you see, and I’m thinking of moving into sculpture’) and it continued to lie on the table while the man explained that it was the work of a refugee Pole who had settled in the area. ‘Monsieur Maryk, we call him. What a gift! Lots of people have admired that bird, but I’m not parting with it, not for any money. He paints too: that’s one of his pictures up there. He’s a good customer. He’s not in here tonight, but he often is. You ought to meet him, M’sieur, you both being in the same line –’
‘I most certainly would like to,’ said Evan fluently, and, with a sinking heart, I heard plans being mooted for Friday evening. But they seemed to be forgotten later in the general clamour, the click of dominoes and smoke of the advancing hour. I took comfort in the thought that next week, thank God, Evan and Joyce were supposed to be going back to Paris. I had rashly promised to drive them to Châteauroux in the adjacent Department where the express trains stopped. Evan had apparently got some more money from somewhere.
At last I managed to get us all out of the café. Evan stood swaying a little in the sudden cool of the night air. I thought I could hear the river rushing far below us; I felt a longing to go down there now, on my own, without even Simone, rather than driving my ungrateful car-load nearly thirty kilometres in the dark and then returning the same distance.
‘Into the car,’ I said, surly.
‘’Scuse me, Sir, can’t I have a pee first, Sir?’
‘Oh go on then,’ I said, turning my back on him. I could tell, from Joyce’s subsequent giggles, that he was having it in an exhibitionist way.
When we were all in the car Simone suddenly said, in a strained voice:
‘Tom – sorry: could you let me out again? I think I won’t come over there with you to drop Evan and Joyce off. I think I’ll just walk down now to the mill-house. I’m tired, and Papa might be wondering where we’ve got to. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, relieved on several counts. ‘But you needn’t walk down in the dark. We’ll drop you off.’
‘Isn’t it in the other direction?’ said Evan loudly, lolling in the front seat.
‘Only a couple of kilometres,’ I said firmly. And added under my breath ‘You sod.’
I did not know if he had heard or not, and did not care. At the corner by the mill-house he made a great performance of getting out of the car to let Simone out of the back. Later, on what seemed to me an interminable journey round dark tree-hung bends, far longer than usual, like a drive in a bad dream, he wanted to get out for another pee. When he settled back in with a great sigh and a graphic comment on his bladder, I thought I heard something crunch under his feet, but felt too depleted to enquire what he was doing to my car. One of his frequent lines was that I drove too slowly on the winding roads, ‘like a nervous old lady’, and that if I’d any sense I’d let him take over sometimes because he’d driven trucks in the Army. With a kind of weary incredulity, I heard him embark on this topic again.
‘You haven’t got a licence,’ I said as usual. And just managed not to add: ‘And you’re drunk as well.’
‘How do you know I haven’t got a licence? In your superior, goody-goody way you just assume it, don’t you. As a matter of fact I have. I’ll prove it to you tomorrow.’
‘He has, actually, Tom,’ added silly Joyce from the back of the car.
Not trusting myself to speak (or not having anything to say) I drove tensely on, and presently realized that he had fallen asleep.
In the end we reached the château, which I had begun to think of as an accursed place, dank among its dark, balding pine-woods. I could hear the neglected wolfhounds baying inside at the sound of the car. Evan was snoring faintly. I got out, releasing Joyce, walked round, opened the front passenger door and stood with elaborately feigned patience waiting for him to come to his senses. He did so abruptly, with a snort, and bundled out.
‘You dropped something, I think,’ I said bleakly. By the moon, I could see something pale glimmer on the floor of the car. I had no idea what it was.
‘Not me, mate – unless it’s me trousers.’
I stooped and picked it up. It was the carved bird, cracked across its neck and one wing where Evan’s heedless feet had earlier trodden on it. Like a real dead bird it flopped across my hand, neck broken.
The scene that followed was brief. I was numbed myself by a kind of disbelief, the weakness of the ordinary person in the face of evil. Had I not been handicapped by this, I think I would have hit Evan. Afterwards, I wished I had, and replayed the scene in my imagination with myself in a more heroic role. I was bigger than he was, and almost certainly stronger: I might have managed to inflict some satisfactory damage on him. But not necessarily. The comfortable idea that all bullies are cowards is, unfortunately, not true, and Evan was a tough boy; he would surely have been a dirty fighter. Perhaps it was as well I kept my hands off him.
He blustered at first that the café-owner had given him the bird; that I just hadn’t been around at that moment. But I had heard the man say that he would not part with it.
‘– And anyway, Evan, bloody hell, you’ve broken it. Not content with stealing it, you just trod on it, didn’t you? You didn’t even want it enough to look after it.’
‘I’m sure Evan didn’t mean … Perhaps we could mend it?’ Joyce hovered, her face a pale
oval, decapitated above her clothes that merged with the dark. I took some minimal comfort from the fact that she, at least, looked suitably upset.
‘I trod on it because I didn’t know it was there, you fool,’ said Evan, getting his second wind. ‘I’d forgotten all about it. Like Joyce says, I didn’t mean to take it. I was a bit tight, that’s all.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said, consciously nasty. ‘And are you tight each time you go pinching odds and ends in the village shops? Don’t think I haven’t noticed – yes, and Joyce hiding them inside her blouse for you.’
I hadn’t really meant to come out with it. I had not been quite sure of what I had seen: on both occasions it had happened so quickly, and anyway I had not wanted to believe the evidence of my own eyes: perhaps the sleight of hand had just been one of Evan’s ‘jokes’, a trick to goad me into further displays of ‘stuffiness’: But I could see by the expression on his face, hastily erased, that I had hit home.
No one said anything else. The hounds still barked forlornly inside the house. ‘Oh, shut up, you fuckers,’ muttered Evan. I got back into the car and turned it round, its weak headlights swinging across the old, dreary mansion. It must have been a fine house, once. Just as I was moving off Joyce’s face appeared agitated at the window.
Give Them All My Love Page 10