A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Thérèse looked more uncomfortable. Even seated next to the fireplace she was tall, and she was sweet, with her father’s warmth and wit. But she was also as pious and as devoted to the truth as had been her mother before her. She said, “You know, my father … unfortunately, my father really enjoyed a good story.”

  FOURTEEN

  “But I’ve been in the cave,” I protested. “Your father crammed a bunch of us into his ‘Deux Chevaux’ one afternoon twenty years ago, with Julia’s mother next to him up front, and took us across the valley. We went up through woods and fields until we got to the mouth of a limestone cave hidden among nettles and brambles. When we went down into it, it seemed easily large enough for the population of the town. I remember galleries, and a ceiling supported by columns, and that limestone smell like my downstairs kitchen. We walked around in that cave. The children shouted for the echoes. I’ve been there. No doubt about it,” I insisted.

  Only reluctantly, and briefly, did Thérèse pull her mind out of the more interesting ancient past. “Maybe. That would be where they mined the stone for the church,” Thérèse said. “A quarry. The first church in Mesnil—you can still see one arch of it—was built in the tenth or eleventh century, when William the Conqueror’s family was covering the country with what historians call a ‘white mask of churches.’ Most of the present building dates from the thirteenth century, after the first church was torn down. Who knows why? The tower came later. Anyway, I suppose the quarry could have been a refuge for the townsfolk of Mesnil when Edward III of England swept through, looting and pillaging, on his way from the Cotentin to Crécy and Calais, which those Rodin Burghers turned over to him in 1347. Edward had to pass through Lisieux, not all that far from here. It’s interesting that you should mention your mother’s birthday, because Lisieux fell to Edward III on that same day. He and his troops liked it here and didn’t leave Normandy until they were driven out by the Black Plague of 1348. All this will be in my history of Mesnil.”

  She took a sip of her tea and looked at me happily, as if to measure my endurance, like an actress wondering if the moment had arrived when she’d do well to show a little leg.

  “I have to admit, I never understood even one year out of the Hundred Years’ War,” I confessed. I offered her a little of the calvados I had found remaining after the O’Banyons’ summer, but she had no need of it.

  “You’ll find the whole thing in my book, but from the point of view of Mesnil. During the second half of the fourteenth century, between a third and a half of Normandy died, what with the war and the peste. The population fell from a million two hundred down to six hundred thousand souls. If Mesnil had consisted of thirty hearths, it now dropped to fifteen—which meant there was a lot of wasteland between firesides. Then, in 1416, the year after the big win at Agincourt that made him a movie star, Henry V of England came.”

  “I’m with you now,” I said. “But of course our reading of those events is all based on English propaganda.”

  “Right,” Thérèse said. “Once more unto the breach: Olivier and Branagh and that Thompson woman doing her Inspector Clouseau imitation. Anyway, Henry V and his brother the Duke of Clarence landed near Deauville on Sunday, August first. By the next day—I’ll remember it as your mother’s birthday from now on—they were attacking the castle of Touques, and then Henry sent Clarence upriver along the same road on which Guillaume Apollinaire had his flat tire. They planned to winter in the area. Lisieux fell to Clarence on August fourth, and for the next thirty years, like the rest of Normandy, it was administered by a different pecking order because the top cock had been changed. Everyone was fine so long as they agreed with the new arrangement, did their jobs, and paid taxes to the new boys.

  “Now this is interesting, and we’re getting closer to Mesnil.” She fished into her bag again and pulled out some notes to read from. “On February eighteenth of the next year, five months after the English landed, our enemy Henry V decreed that by the twenty-seventh of the same month, ‘sub pena et periculo quod si quis eorum ad diem illum in domo sua hujus non inventus, extra protectionem nostram ponatur et tamquam brigans et inimicus noster teneatur et puniatur’—meaning, essentially, that all who refused to return to their dwellings would be declared brigands and punished as such. The punishment for brigandage was death, as well as the confiscation of all worldly goods for the benefit of the offended party—i.e., Henry V. Some did not obey, of course, and the countryside was filled with looting bands of soldiers who had not been paid, and troublemakers, and Norman holdouts who took to the woods, leaving their homes and properties to the English or to other, collaborating—that is to say, ‘obedient’—citizens.”

  I said, “You must write this book.” I was thinking that one happy thing about a book was that you could put it down after a few hours, or minutes. But then you would lose the passion in the author’s delivery.

  “So if you think of this as peaceful country,” Thérèse said, “you must think again. Peace is a luxury we don’t get very much of around here. Not in my history. Uprisings and wars of attrition finally drove the English out, but at considerable expense to us. Pont l’Evêque, held by the English but hard to defend, fell to the French in 1440, but only for long enough for the homes of the Anglophiles to be looted. Joan of Arc’s infamous judge, Pierre Cauchon”—whose name rhymes with “pig”—“was made Bishop of Lisieux under the English, and his acquiescent administration was ruthless: it suppressed two uprisings during the troubles, in which thousands of persons from the countryside, branded as bandits because they disagreed with the invaders, were hanged and disemboweled, and their separated parts exhibited everywhere so as to encourage their neighbors.”

  Thérèse started putting her notes back into her bag and fidgeting, no doubt thinking of the next day’s trip and her life class, maybe a new model to draw or paint. She stood and was about to leave when her eye fell on something else in her notes that she had to tell me about.

  “I haven’t found Mesnil mentioned in the records of properties transferred by confiscation during this period, but neighboring Blangy shows up often, as does Eparfontaines (now Fierville), three minutes down the road by car, where you remember the train used to stop.” She pointed through my library to the south. “Look, in Fierville, in 1434, John Chamberlain, an English knight, was awarded in fief (meaning that he got to collect taxes on it and pay the next man up the line) land that had been confiscated from Guillaume le Gris (absent, and therefore disobedient), along with goods formerly in the possession of Raoul and Edmond de Tournay, knights, and other property that had belonged to Jacques Advisse, and to Jean Séguin, all of them absent and disobedient. He also received part of the heritage of Jean des Chesnes, knight, in the successions of his father and mother, as well as the goods of Jean le Forestier and his squire, who had been executed at Lisieux as ‘adversaries of the king our lord.’ By now our so-called king and lord was Henry VI of England, Henry V having died—a tragedy, according to the English and anyone else who lets Shakespeare be his guide to all this history. My own history of Mesnil will correct such misapprehensions. I have to go. I like to get to class first so I can pose the model.”

  We went downstairs and I helped Thérèse into her coat, thinking to myself, She’s worse than I am. I was on the point of projecting that idea across the Atlantic toward my wife when I heard Julia’s instant and obvious rejoinder: Yeah, and nobody’s trying to live with her.

  Thérèse took out a flashlight and walked twenty paces into the rainy darkness. Mme. Vera’s lights were already extinguished, and only the small pool of light that fell from the dining-room window separated us from the Cretaceous.

  “So don’t think it’s always been quiet like this,” Thérèse called. “Not much, and not often, since the world began.” She turned and came toward me again. “Nineteen forty-four would not have been the first time it made sense to hide the family and the cows in a cave within the commune of Mesnil. But I wouldn’t know how to find that quarry,�
�� Thérèse told me. “If it’s there.”

  FIFTEEN

  Thérèse’s passion for history put me to shame and reduced the scope of what I was occupied with to almost reasonable proportions. I always brought work with me, and the place was filled with its own projects, as well as the unfinished tasks of other people, and all of that suited me fine once I had adjusted to it—especially given the broader picture Thérèse had painted. But still, there were large, messy, and unexpected structural problems that I had to deal with quickly. That afternoon, after my shower, I had learned from Mme. Le Planquay that nothing could be done about the plumbing until two days later, when M. Le Planquay’s people would start to replace the lead pipes in the sous-sol, reseal the wastepipe on the upstairs toilet, and, as a bonus, run a pipe for hot water from the electric tank into the downstairs bath so I could dispense once and for all with the propane lottery system. I was permitted to use the electricity in the meantime, she said, so long as I made sure that the hot-water tank was not empty. She suggested that I close the main valve in the downstairs kitchen and open it only when I must have water. So after Thérèse left, it was into a dry kitchen that I carried our teacups.

  The telephone rang and “How is everything?” Julia asked.

  “Beautiful,” I said. You know—with one thing and another and all.

  “And the house is clean, you said?” Julia continued. “You have water this time?”

  “Plenty. Things all right there?”

  “Good,” she said, not stopping to answer my inquiry. “Because Margaret called. She and Ben are traveling in England with some friends. She wondered if anyone was in the house in Normandy, and if she could show it to Ben, and I said you’d love to have company. You’re going to be there three or four more days, yes? What’s the matter?”

  “Rough spot on the satellite,” I said.

  “I thought you yelped and dropped something. Anyway, I think she said they’d arrive tomorrow night, and I told her there was plenty of room. What’s wrong?”

  I was in no condition to have guests. What was more, though there was nobody I would rather have a visit from than Margaret and Ben—old friends and pals and colleagues, people from whom I would normally have no secrets—I had inadvertently, a moment before, committed myself to not telling Julia about the state of the plumbing and the bathroom floor until some auspicious if undefined future moment, which plan Margaret and Ben were bound to preempt.

  “What’s wrong?” Julia repeated.

  “Nothing. As Thoreau said, ‘Simplify! Simplify!’ I’ll just gird my loins and go into bed-and-breakfast mode.”

  This, I should have remembered, was a sore point. American friends, visiting us in couples during past summers and wearing different clothes each day, had sometimes looked speculatively at the wholly colorful situation of the house (and of their hosts) and seen the field as almost pure potential. Not only could we do this, and this, and this, they said, to make the house habitable (never mind that each “this” would cost at least twenty thousand dollars), but afterward we could run an outstanding bed-and-breakfast in the showplace that would result.

  “Don’t talk to me about B and B’s,” Julia said. “I’m just back from Waterville, Maine, helping Sally get material for her book. You’d be amazed, all these people who used to live in perfectly good cities going out to lonely but awful places and running bed-and-breakfasts. Waterville’s got ten thousand people and there’s nothing at all there except twelve B and B’s and in every one of them the wives have left. Sally was so busy getting info for the book that she didn’t even notice this interesting little social sidelight. I mean,” Julia emphasized darkly, “what can happen. In a lonely place.

  “If either of us is going to do breakfast for anybody, it had damned well better be a friend, not somebody who thinks she is paying for the chance to express an opinion about the coffee. Friends like Margaret and Ben. They’re good friends, and the only reason in the world I can think of at the moment to even consider having a great huge galumphing place on the other side of nowhere that we don’t need is so our friends can visit.”

  I stood corrected.

  SIXTEEN

  I woke to thin rain falling against the slates and realized that I was to have four guests by evening: Margaret and Ben and their friends from Amsterdam. My situation could be funny only in a movie. Aside from stumbling onto big problems, I had got nothing done, and I had only a couple of days left here. The place was a shambles. Margaret had encountered the medieval comforts of the house when she visited many years before, so she knew basically what to expect—though the medieval quality of the comfort had increased dramatically with the recent collapse of the heating system and disappearance of the bathroom floor, the fact that running water was available only on demand, and my temporary bachelorhood.

  The weather had changed: it was now as cold and wet outside as it was inside the house.

  I must manufacture a speedy masquerade. Living alone, I had been camping, a concession both to my own inclination and to the state of the plumbing; I walked around wearing as many sweaters as I needed and did not care that it was cold. But now this had to seem like a house. I lay in bed, listening to the donkey singing from Mount Angel, and watching white clouds of condensation issue from my mouth as I breathed. I’d have to try to make them comfortable. The impending guests deserved meals that could be distinguished one from another, as well as sheets. Four guests would mean an aftermath of six to eight sheets in addition to mine, and four pillowcases, and four towels—all of which must be washed and persuaded to become dry before I would be free to go back to Paris. For the past several years in a row, I had been bringing quick-drying cotton sheets with me from home, since they were too expensive to buy in France. It came to me now that during my brief inventory of the linen closet the day before, in a quest driven from my mind since then by the state of the bathroom floor, I had noticed that these cotton sheets were the ones that had gone scarce or missing. I must therefore fall back on linen.

  In 1968, and for a few years afterward, once we started returning regularly to the house, people from the countryside would appear at the door from time to time carrying household goods that they, or their parents, had removed from the house pour la chère Madame Frieseke, in order to preserve them during the war. We might be busy, say, putting glass into an attic window when there came a ring on the bell we’d hung outside the downstairs-kitchen door, announcing the arrival of a middle-aged man (sometimes with family), whom my mother (quickly snatching off her apron and putting on a kettle in the same motion) slowly recalled (with mutual tears) from a catechism class she had taught in 1935 to children in the village. He might have with him a china pitcher, or a teapot, or a long-handled copper saucepan.

  It is always sort of hectic, Julia’s mother wrote, as friends keep dropping in and everyone has to go up to the salon and “causer” [chat].

  The memories brought back by these visits, mixed with gratitude, joy, concern, and the social burden of having to drop whatever was being repaired in order to respond to the bell—and to the news of deaths and marriages and births—could be quite wearing on my mother, the only one of us with any intimate emotional involvement with the callers. Plans for the day inevitably had to be jettisoned on such occasions, but there were ample compensations: among the treasures that reappeared this way were my grandmother’s linen sheets, which for years remained the only ones in the house. They wore like wet iron, having been made to last the ages by my grandmother, who, when preparing her trousseau, had embroidered her maiden initials, S.O.B., into the pillowcases and roof-sized double-bed sheets, under the orders of the implacable nuns of the Visitation convent in Wheeling, West Virginia. The monogram branded the user.

  Linen, like the bread of Paris, holds moisture well and is reluctant to part with it. Rain on a morning when guests loomed therefore caused me to recall, as I listened to the Angelus bells and delayed getting up, the bone-harrowing slide into chilled damp linen, as well a
s the nightmare battles waged in the name of getting the sheets dry.

  For years the house had had no washing machine, and we still had no dryer. That was supposed to be the sun’s job (or fault). Where my grandparents had employed people to beat the linen in the pond below the cider press and spread it on the grass to bleach and dry before they ironed it, our laundry days required the cooperation of at least three of our own number: one to wash, one to watch the weather, and one to rush out to the line in time to haul the sheets down before a spate of rain, and hang them up again to wrest the most from any sun that appeared. The person who watched the weather—usually a child who had other business outside, like chasing chickens—also had to keep guard over the line, since hopeful calves would suck holes into the wet laundry.

  Mme. Vera’s as seen from the house (with laundry), 1995. Photo by author

  Thus I started this day thinking dark housewifely thoughts. It was cold, dark, and familiar in the house. I put on sweaters and looked at the rain, which seemed impermanent somehow, a series of curtains spun of gauze or spiderweb filling the valley, showing no rifts. It could be like this for days. I listened awhile to the doves affirming bad news to each other in the eaves, then made coffee and sat in the dining room and let the BBC newscaster echo the doves while I looked out the window at the string of cattle ambling across the green slope between the cider press and the house, indifferent to the rain, eating as they walked. This was the Norman weather I’d expected. It, not the inside of a decaying house, was my real reason for being here—because, perversely enough, I loved this weather. It made the air active and the colors of the world defiant, and eliminated horizon lines right up to the windowsills. It forced plants to grow in a way that seemed preternatural. I’d found, for example, a limb cut off last summer by the O’Banyons from the plum tree that grew outside the guest room—a log thick as my thigh, just lying on the ground under the vanished lindens—putting out fresh new shoots and leaves this spring, even though, when I lifted it, there was no sign of its having bothered to send out roots. It was just continuing to do what it had always done, prompted by a climate that imposed life.