The Janeites

by Nicolas Freeling

  “Stendhal. He did too.” She is still worrying about him.

  Joséphine loves eating. After laughing heartily at his antique gas stove she has taken with enthusiasm to cooking on it.

  “Well made. They didn’t cut corners then, look at the thickness of this metal. And properly designed.”

  “Yes but one can’t get spare parts any more, so that when it wears out, which it will…” she has got reconciled to Arab ways. ‘Modern equipment’ would mean a new set of cables, a new meter. The electricity company would have a fit. There’ll be a ghastly fire one of these days.

  “This living as though you were poor is pure hypocrisy.”

  “I suppose it is, yes.” She never has been poor. But she loves his spaghetti; introduces variations of her own. There’s this advantage to living in the old town; the little shops (where Arabs go) which have fresh vegetables, proper fruit. Supermarket once a week, a suburban couple pushing the trolley, ferrying large packets up the stairs. The butcher is a mortification.

  “But surely you knew about that from before?”

  “True. Geoffrey has a man in the country, trained to hang meat.” She has moved in, is now used to the oddities – the pull-and-let-go in the lavatory.

  She held up a round of bread with a bite out of it, took another and said, “Look, a map of France”, with her mouth full.

  “Very bad manners,” said Raymond austerely.

  “Yes, we did this as children. That’s Bretagne. German bread, good for our teeth. Got tremendously beaten.”

  “For bad manners?” Hers are terrible…

  “Of course. But still more, because bread is a symbol. The greatest there is. The body of Christ. You ought to know that.”

  “I do… It’s the same in Poland.”

  “We must never cut bread, once it was sliced. Break it before buttering – and if we dropped it, get down and ask forgiveness.” Taking another large bite … “Look – Pyrenées.”

  Yes. This is ‘the upper classes’. She has never made any other reference to his ‘being a Jesuit’. Adultery is for the poor. Arabs have scruples about it. Are very strict about it. Exact blood for it.

  ‘Aristocracy.’ He had noticed these habits in the Marquis. Amazingly scrupulous in all sorts of small ways, and no manners at all. Utterly ruthless.

  William to be sure had lived with the old man for many years.

  Raymond now understands William better.

  William’s grand life-style has been lowered, but the reader’s maintained: as Raymond remarked, ‘We’d never get that past the Social Security office anyhow’. Dolores herself said she likes to finish what she began. Admits to enjoying herself.

  “It’s totally different to reading it by oneself.”

  This peaceful countryside, which she doesn’t even describe. The social fabric – of which she says nothing. Mr Knightley has farms and works at them, but where does the Woodhouse money come from? Are they landowners? Never a word about the ordinary people, who must have been bitterly poor. You wonder about the price of food, about taxes, oh, all the things that we worry about. Never mentioned, any more than war, or Napoleon, or the world outside.

  “That’s the point,” said William, serious. “It seems deathly dull, and then I’m drawn in, and it becomes exciting and I’m listening with all my nerve-ends.”

  “But why?” asked Dolores. “I suppose because leaving all that out she concentrates one upon the real essentials.”

  “Which are what?” asked Raymond. Wasn’t this exactly what he was after.

  “Well, not just who loves who, and who’s going to marry who.” Dolores a little defensive, nervous of sounding ridiculous.

  “Things everyone cared about. Miss Bates too, and the workers even if we never hear about them. Pride, and honour, and pain.”

  “Exactly.”

  “She wrote about what she knew. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’”

  It’s a Valdez hobbyhorse. The world is like William, in total disharmony with itself. What the woman called the social fabric was more closely knit. They were in harmony with themselves and one another, and the land they lived on. They had friends. Look at today; nobody even knows their neighbour.

  They died of course – but I’ll make you a bet, not of cancers and not of heart diseases. In the cities of course, tuberculosis, typhus, dirt, malnutrition. Plague to be sure, since the rats were always with us; cholera. You notice nowadays that the plagues take a subtler form, attack the nervous system, where the immunity has broken down. Rather well suited to peoples who have forgotten their own purpose. Television, or the internet – these are plague-epidemics.

  Ray’s colleagues listen indulgently. You’ve got to remember, Valdez is a bloody Jesuit when all is said – sees God all over the shop.

  “What did you think”, William had asked, “about having your head bashed in?”

  “I didn’t think at all. Things like that can happen to anyone, and frequently do.”

  William is a great deal better. Proof, if you like, is that he’s going to school to learn carpentry. Craftsmanship. As for the technical details, Dr Valdez takes no credit. Internal cancers have been known to stop, even to go away. The patient’s own interior resources are the key. As for Jane – he’s taken to reading them himself. Why shouldn’t it work for me too?

  Living with Joséphine has a good rich texture. Coarse now and then, gritty. She was eating Serrano ham on her bread and butter.

  “What happens to the rest of the pig? Why can’t we get Serrano sowbelly?”

  “Have you ever read Emma which he is working at?”

  “Of course I have; I was well brought up. Mr Woodhouse could never believe that anyone would think differently to himself. My brother Geoffrey’s exactly like that. But a kindhearted polite old man while Geoffrey is so conspicuously neither. That and the appalling vulgarity of Mrs Elton. This seems to be all I can remember.”

  “A searching analysis,” lovingly.

  “There’s a great deal of irony,” with just a small flash of lightning, “and a lot about elegance and delicacy. Soeur Marie-Thérèse came down heavily on both, since the great aim was to turn out well-bred girls even with nothing at all between their ears.”

  Joséphine has had a number of jobs. Doesn’t believe in them much, unsurprisingly: the girls at that convent would have felt sorry for poor Jane Fairfax obliged to go out and earn her living as a governess. Well-bred young ladies – elegant – were sometimes persuaded into secretarial work for politicians. With a little seasoning, press attachée to a publishing house. Worlds which William got to know.

  “Politics! Just the thing for crooks like Geoffrey.” When young she’d wanted to be a sculptress, in rather a clean overall. After, that is, her National Velvet years. “The extremely severe discipline of a racing stable isn’t that different to life among the holy nuns. Adolescent female sexual desires thoroughly well channelled.” Or perhaps a poet… Not having a job is so much more elegant; didn’t go much on up at seven and shaving clean at a quarter past. Working for Médecins-sans-frontières was all right – and of course unpaid; the paperwork is simply shocking. Being able to read and write is an advantage since so very few can.

  A Jesuit education, thought Raymond, has its points: you progress from grammar to syntax, and long hours of the dirtiest work uncomplaining. Joséphine scrubs a floor as though her life depended on it.

  As we were taught, mankind is different to beasts. At some point in development this was borne in upon us; that we laugh and can inhibit defecation. That we have a soul had also to be learned. (Poor George Orwell’s lasting experience of the civil war in Spain was that his pathetically primitive boys walked out and had a shit absolutely anywhere.) History… he’d had a good professor, fond of really sadistic illustrations from the dreadful fourteenth century – ‘that’s yesterday’. The condition of the poor. Meanwhile, learning absolutely nothing from Crécy, Poitiers, nor even Agincourt the landowning aristocracy of Franc
e, with a vanity and imbecility you’d scarcely credit, got itself slaughtered. And serve it right. While the poor suffered, here is where you learn about the basic economy of the countryside, and how taxation pays for the rich. The rich! (warming to his theme). They are only to be stopped with a scythe to the hamstrings or a bellyful of buckshot.

  Those knights – deserving all the man said of them – had very likely included forebears of Joséphine’s. Had they learned anything at all in the few hundred years between? Vanity, disregarding all else, still characterizes their behaviour. The ruling caste, be it military (Dien Bien Phu was Crécy all over again), medical (the mandarinat; of elderly professors), bureaucratic or intellectual (never do anything simple when you can make it complicated) – all of it the utter ruin of an endlessly abused and plundered people of great worth and merit.

  Not at all surprisingly Joséphine got cross and there was a huge blazing row. He learned something then which touched him. This woman who had been taught so much nonsense in childhood had also been taught a dogma. Never let the sun go down upon your anger. Like a child she came and said that she was sorry, and put her arms round him. “I was in the wrong and I know it.”

  Given a lesson, Raymond was ashamed of himself.

  Dr Valdez is tired, edgy, ragged; short of ideas; no fun to be with. Needs a holiday.

  “Yes indeed. We’ll fly to Miami, preferably in the Concorde, and get carried by cruise liner to glamorous places in the tropics never before glimpsed.” Especially in August.

  Joséphine has been thinking.

  “I might be able to borrow the Land Rover, Geoffrey is greatly taken up with his vines.”

  “Why do we want it?”

  “Because there’s no other good way of getting there. As children we rode but there are rough places where we had to get off and lead our horses.” Recognizing that she has got it back to front –

  “We have a cottage, officially a shooting lodge, high in the hills. I don’t think anyone’s been up there for years. The local forester, from time to time. It’s highly ruritanian, earth closet and all. Nothing but trees for miles. Be fearfully musty, I shouldn’t wonder. No electricity. But when the sun shines, which very often it doesn’t…” Dr Valdez is an instant convert.

  “I’ve had leisure to regret this. I packed enough for a bus load, had to throw half of it out. Geoffrey said I was insane, the fraidycat.” Roads, increasingly potholed, led to a village – “there’s a shop, there”, gave way to woodcutters’ tracks and the ‘Maison Forestière’; the intoxicating Vosges smell which he has never experienced, of a stone-built house, a flagged kitchen and wood fires. The Verderer’s wife, amused, gave them coffee, glasses of ferocious schnapps, a bunch of keys, adding ominously, “You can always telephone from here if anything goes amiss.”

  “The worst is to come,” said Joséphine with relish. “The valley goes up steep. I hope I can find the way…” The track hereabout was overgrown with moss and the fluid mountain grass. Twice they had to pull aside broken trunks, rotted and fallen across. Obscure streams made for boggy patches. Quite large stones abounded. Until they reached a plateau and a space cleared for a cottage surprisingly large if only a log cabin of one storey.

  “Stable,” she said welcoming it as one does something long lost. “Haybarn, woodshed. Gamekeeper lived here in my grandfather’s day. It’ll be almighty damp so the first thing is to bring in logs.” The housekeeper took command. The airing of mattresses, the punching at the kitchen stove, ‘grille’s a bit rusty’, the opening of sticking windows. “I don’t know what birds there are now but I hope there will be owls.”

  The well filled him with joy. The source underground filled a stone trough, lipped over a worn flag, lost itself in red sand. The water was cold, rich as a white wine, tasting of black earth, dead leaves.

  Fire on the hearth burned well; old silvered beech logs. Mattresses steamed happily until he had to turn them. Then he could open quite a nice Côtes de Nuits. Watch her cooking.

  “Lara,” he said after searching for the name. “She lives with Doctor Thingummy in an isba with icicles all over it.”

  “I can only remember the tune, unspeakably sentimental. It was in all the music boxes which used to play ‘Für Elise’. I had one – greatly cherished. What do you suppose they ate – Russian porridge?” There are two rings on the kitchen stove, and a little oven below. The top is rusty, but will shine with a bit of emery paper. She draws water to clean the table, hangs a kettle above the big fire on the notched bar the French call ‘la crémaillère’. “For the washing-up,” sternly. “Your turn tomorrow.” Romantic, is it? It’s only risotto. Of course there is no fridge, but there is a larder, delighting him, with stone shelves and mosquito-wire on the window. A high point was reached when she put a zinc tub of water on the stove, and from the outhouse dragged in a hipbath. ‘To this my father was greatly addicted.’ Romance centres upon Joséphine’s shell-pink – Aphrodite-pink – behind; lessens when he has the awkward job of ferrying the damn thing out without spilling to be emptied in distant bushes; mounts when he comes back puffing to find her in a long white nightie wielding a hairbrush. It’s an illustration from Dickens – ‘The lovely lady has her fortune told.’ But the mattresses are dry by now, and unexpectedly comfortable. He can be romantic then, if a bit damped by ‘Wait till you have to empty the earth closet and you’ll see how they grew wonderful vegetables here.’

  Still, the morning was all he had hoped for, outdoing imagination built upon ‘You’ve never smelt an August dawn’. With this go two astonishing visuals. One is the filigree silver magic woven by more spiders than he knew existed. The other is the August harebell. That there is also a light grey drizzle cannot bedraggle the spirit, cannot alter nor dilute the flavour. Has he never before tasted the true juice? Once or twice (since medical conferences are very insistent upon creature-comforts) he has been handed a glass of ‘good’ champagne. Far outdone as he has been assured by the stuff which costs a thousand francs a bottle. And outdoing that by just as far is the glass of water kindly handed to him here by the Djinn. The difficulty with djinns is known: you can’t get them back into the bottle.

  Reaction set in around midmorning. He had explored the long neglected garden, in hopes of perhaps-a-few potatoes; maybe a vegetable marrow (hostile animals have left nothing for mere humans). One must also learn the patterns of grisly trenches where the shit-bucket is disposed of: Humus is more than composting dead leaves. A facetious American word attacks him; he is discombobulated. Depersonalized, dissassociated, decomposed. Like the compost which had gone to the making of the vegetable patch. Reality had disintegrated. He trails back to Joséphine who is peeling potatoes on the stoop: the rain has lifted and perhaps this afternoon there might be a glimpse of sun.

  “I know,” she says with the maturity he has not expected in a young woman: his experience is so small. “For a start, there’ll be plenty of work. Any number of things forgotten which we’ll have to go down the hill to find. There are no guns up here. The forester will lend you one, but we’ll have to buy cartridges.” He wasn’t listening.

  “Food for worms,” he said. “Bury me in the compost heap. Bacteriological nuclear pile. Have me down to bones in no time at all.”

  “I know,” she said again. “It’s not romantic up here a bit. No sunset, no cascade, no blue lagoon. It’s violent.”

  “It’s good.” He sat down beside her. “I’m glad you brought me here. I’m overtired and hadn’t realized it.”

  “Sometimes in Paris I thought about this place. Where I had been happy.” She dropped the last potato in the pot, threw the peeler in after it. “Sitting with friends at a café table. After being at the cinema, maybe. People who are secure and comfortable and who prate about violence. Namby-pamby and niminy-piminy. Idiots.” He can feel thunder building up inside her. She wants to talk. “For years I… I knew nothing. I thought it was great. This is the life, this is where it’s at, they know everything here. Sex all the time,
sex all day, it got like it was something that walked around with you, sat at the table, applauded at pop concerts, you couldn’t shake it off. I got so when I heard the word I went cold and clammy. Up till now.” She turned and put her arms round him. “Thank God for you. Sex is you.”

  “Let’s go for a walk while it’s fine.” Narrow shafts of sunlight came filtering through the trees, bundles of arrows hitting the bracken and the moss and the needle-fine clumps of mountain grass. “Comes on to rain we’ll whip back to the cabin and make love and play cards and drink a lot of coffee.”

  She showed him how it had been well thought out, and cleverly made. They were at the very edge of a steep valley. That is the gully down which they throw dirty water. Along the flank of the hill is the path along which they had come, mounting to the plateau where the stumps had been cleared for the house and the garden. This was ‘Camp Five’, for above them the height rose steep and rough to the summit, looking so smooth and easy from a plane; fierce afoot. “We could climb it in mountain boots. I’ve only once been all the way up.”

  Animals, by the score. You’d want to go out early in the morning the way we did sometimes. I doubt there being any rabbits – fox would get them. Predators; pine marten, there was a polecat once, they like buildings. Lynx? “The forester tried, I think, but you know how peasants are, never happy till they’ve shot it.” Hawks, wild cats.

  “What do they prey on?”

  “Mice, voles, shrews; they abound, or would if it weren’t for the bloodthirsty. Deer the forester has to shoot to keep the numbers down. You might try for a few pigeons – think of pigeon pie. There isn’t any live and let live up here. My grandfather claimed he’d seen blackcock, had fantasies about pheasants; I don’t think that lasted long.”

  Yes: it didn’t do, to upset the natural balance.

  “There’s a brutalist school in biology, popular with your friends in Paris, believes everything revolves round sex. Some of these people try to claim that the entire development of human behaviour is explainable by predatory sexual instinct. Rape is natural, justifiable, desirable.”