Lew obviously regretted this. He wished he could display his omniscience to the world (right down to who had been holding the winning hand).
Harry was forearmed against lurid stories. They might have been true, anything might be true in far-away France. Robbie Maslin was dead and wouldn’t be coming home. Best to leave it at that. Best to leave the nasty details to the likes of Lew, for whom the war was an enthralling sporting event.
‘Very sad,’ Harry told him. ‘Very sad for everyone.’
‘Oh I don’t know, Harry. Far be it for me to speak ill of a chap who’s fallen on the field of valour, but there’s no denying Robbie Maslin was a terrible piss-pot. And by God didn’t he give poor Dotty an awful pizzling! That woman’s been a picture of health since he went. And the pension’s nothing to be sneezed at. What’s she got – three, four children? Why that’s four pound fortnightly, four pound fifteen shillings if my reckoning’s halfway decent. Dotty wouldn’t have seen two shillings from Robbie.’
‘His father wasn’t much better,’ Sarah said at last. ‘Sozzled day and night.’
‘Old Pop Maslin? No, Sarah, you malign the poor fellow. The drunkard was his brother Ted – Teddy as married little Sheila Richardson . . . ’
‘Heavens, you’re right! Little Sheila with the crooked eye.’
‘Now you’re on track.’
Harry grinned over his plate to think how expertly she’d led him back to common ground. Of course she knew her Maslins, probably better than Lew. Fifty years of shared memories. Yes, Lew was just the one. A bag of tricks. Look at the good he was doing her!
sixteen
John Lambert,
37 New Street,
Brighton, Melbourne,
Victoria,
August 25, 1968
My dear Julie,
You have no idea how pleased and grateful your aunt and I are that you have put this event in motion. We will most certainly attend, and I believe I have the answer to your venue difficulties. You are perhaps aware of our Masonic Temple in Church Street. It is a substantial building with an excellent reception area. I have checked to see whether it might be made available and at what price. The 11th of November is out of the question, but the 12th is fine. Is $115 too much? I am happy to contribute; please let me know.
As you know I have a great many curiosities from my time in the islands and would be delighted to have them displayed. Unfortunately, I have nothing at all to help you commemorate Uncle Harry. You probably know that I did once have his funerary urn, which Lew Broughton obtained from France via the War Graves Commission. I believe there was also a letter from his French wife, although I did not find it among Lew’s papers when I acted as his executor. Should you hear tell of this letter, please let me know. As for the urn, I would dearly love it back. I imagine all families have these silly little squabbles and disputes. They are quite demeaning. I have written to your cousin Terry several times, as I wrote to his father before him, but he refuses to answer. If you are able to talk some sense to him I’d be very grateful. His grandmother, Margaret McArdle, was always the stubborn and assertive one in this affair. She once saw the urn in Lorna’s locked buffet and demanded the key. There was a terrible scene. Then a month or two later little Terry comes visiting and the urn goes missing. I don’t believe she put him up to it. I imagine he simply wanted to please his grandmother. I thought it might come back to me quietly, without a fuss, after she passed away, but no. Forgive me, my girl, for loading you up with such foolishness. You have bigger things on your mind.
Your Aunt Lorna asks whether you have given much thought to catering. She says to tell you she knows of a very good person connected with the Girl Guides, and that she has eaten their fare twice at bowls club functions. $3.25 a head for a roast and vegetables, pudding with custard and a cup of tea. That was for a group of 55. Lorna checked and they are free for the 12th, which would tie in well with the availability of the Masonic Temple. Time is pressing on, so in both cases we would need to book immediately.
We look forward to hearing from you,
all our love,
John and Lorna Lambert
PROJECT NOTES, August 28, 1968
Rang Terry straight away. I knew he’d enjoy this, though at first he was annoyed, calling Uncle John a Slimy Old Bastard. He said he wasn’t going anywhere near anything the S.O.B. had a hand in. He blamed me for involving him. I explained that I had not corresponded with S.O.B. at all, and that S.O.B. had got hold of it all by himself and offered his services. After that Terry cooled down.
I said, ‘Does this mean you might come?’ Last week he’d said it was too far – nine hours on a hot bike, not his idea of fun. Now he says ‘Maybe’.
I wanted to know about the urn. Should I take it seriously?
He laughed. ‘You don’t remember do you?’
‘Remember what?’
‘How could you forget the Ashes, Jules?’
I thought: Not that again. I have enough people mucking me around.
He said, ‘Don’t you remember carrying the drinks for Australia when you were a little kid? Mick wouldn’t let you bat, you were a girl for Christ’s sake! but you were on the team. Whenever the ball went under the prickle bush we sent you in after it. You were a trooper, mate.’
I recalled the cricket matches – McArdles and kin against a neighbouring English family – but not the Ashes. I communicated my impatience. He said he’d ring back later.
He waited until eleven-thirty, for the exact moment I was getting into bed. ‘Jules! Found it! Got the stolen goods right in front of me. Boy oh boy were there some to-dos over this lump of junk!’
I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to family contentions or cricket. Eventually he described how his grandmother had accused John Lambert of pinching her ‘big Harry’.
‘So the urn in the buffet story is true?’
‘There was a big blow-up, yeah. Great entertainment for a kid. Maggie-Nan was obsessed. What right did bloody John and Lorna have to keep her big Harry locked up in their buffet? She never said a word about how I got it. No questions asked. She kept it like a precious trophy. She would have been happier if there’d been something in it. Earthly remains of the great man. Dad didn’t have the heart to tell her it was just rubbish cooked up by old Lew Broughton. You would have heard of him. Died some time in the thirties. They all talk about him. God knows what he was trying to achieve. Like you said, Uncle Harry was everybody’s hobbyhorse. Everybody wanted a piece. Nan had an excuse. They grew up together. They were like brother and sister. Still, she was gullible. I mean, even if her ‘big Harry’ had been cremated why would his wife put him in an urn inscribed AIF? Maybe she sent him over in something less flashy and Lew rehoused him. The bottom says the manufacturer’s name. Viviers. Well, according to Dad there was a monumental mason in Swan Street, Richmond. Viviers & Son. Turns out they did a nice urn.’
A fake. I couldn’t see any sense in it. Terry merely laughed as if absurdity is the Lambert stock and trade. He says he’ll try Uncle Dick. I explained that I had written to the old boy and received no reply. It’s as if he’s hiding from me. I suspect he thinks I’m out to trivialise the sacred past.
Terry’s last word: ‘Take care, Jules. Keep it bland. Don’t want those old buggers tearing you to bits.’
Rang Army Records again this morning and tried to push things along. The usual excuses. National commemoration. Unprecedented demand for dossiers. A brave boffin suggested I could expect something in the mail early next week. Not holding my breath.
After Terry’s late call I couldn’t sleep. Wrote John a brief note to go with the invitations that came from the printer yesterday. Thanks for the offer but venue and catering all settled. Did not mention the Ashes. As Terry says: ‘Stuff him!’
seventeen
The barn is full of the nasal whistling
of birds, tiny goslings, yellowish fluff-balls that huddle beside their mothers or totter on the flagstones. He is an unexceptional feature of their lives. They aren’t afraid. They nestle in the palms of his hands, and against his chest, and have defecated on him so many times he no longer cares. He sees that they are not so much affectionate as insistent, demanding warmth and food. How is it that he has never thought it possible to be fond of geese? At times he supposes he can distinguish their mothers: ‘Bonjour, Augustine! Bonjour, Celeste!’ Complete guesswork. But it gets a laugh, and the geese themselves appear to accept him as readily as they do her. Only the gander, whom she refers to as ‘le Kaiser’, resists his advances.
‘Les hommes,’ she says – Men! – as if it’s as much his fault as the bird’s.
This morning she’s purposeful, rounding up the goslings and corralling them behind a barricade of scrap timber. She pries the lid off a can of bitumen then produces a coin, a battered old sou with a hole in the middle. To this she ties a length of string so the coin dangles. She has him remove the first bird and set it down separately on the floor. She jerks the coin over it, and he sees that at first it describes a wobbly ellipse before gradually stabilising and swinging back and forth in a line. Superstition? Or legitimate animal husbandry? He’s inclined to laugh, but senses it wouldn’t be well received. ‘Garcon,’ she says, to teach him. Yes, a boy, he grasps that much, but the rest of the lesson is beyond him. How does this coin signify a boy? Where’s the logic? Patiently she demonstrates that the coin is capable of swinging in a circle. ‘Fille,’ she says. A girl. Alternatively it might swing like a pendulum. A boy. A sort of sexual dowsing. Now he can’t restrain his smile, and is immediately afraid she will think him supercilious, a man puffed up with bogus education. Seeing his scepticism, she insists he try his hand with the coin. He twirls it over the bird, deliberately swinging it wide. The circle gets progressively smaller as he ceases to manipulate the string. After thirty seconds it settles, rocking back and forth in an undeniable line. She cocks an I-told-you-so brow and he sniggers. There has to be a trick. Chicanery! What has sex to do with circles and lines? As further proof she catches his hand and has him extend it palm up, just as he was obliged to do at boarding school when receiving the cuts. She twirls the coin, apparently on the principle that maleness resides in every cell of his body. And sure enough, he’s a boy! This established, she dips a brush in the tar and dabs his knuckle – a black stain, glistening. Then one for the gosling, or gander-to-be. He can imagine the purpose of these stains. The ganders are least valuable, and will be first to be sold off. Room for just one Kaiser Bill in this goose house. Whereas the geese will have a couple of years’ reprieve before they too become roast dinners. They at least are productive.
So enthralled has he become with her small concerns, so at ease in the intimacy of her dark barn, so enclosed, that greater France is a distant abstraction. But from outside comes a shout, the word ‘Colombe’.
Startled, she bustles him into one of the stalls then goes to meet the visitor, but preceded by the gander in full cry. He follows little of this first exchange. An emotional gasp, a blurted greeting, that word again: ‘Colombe’. The visitor is a woman. Curiosity getting the better of him, he moves out to peer between jamb and door. A widow. Formal black crepe. And she embraces his mademoiselle, sobbing into her cotton blouse. Her grief is torrential, and to his British sensibility, extreme. But there is something else, an irregularity, a baffling element that worries him like a small dog tearing at his trouser leg. Colombe, she calls her. Colombe. Suddenly he feels the bite: his mademoiselle is called Colombe! Her name is Colombe!
Stunned, he watches her twist free of the widow and let fly a distracted kick at the overly protective gander. The widow laughs through her tears and they clinch again, clapping one another’s back. Then, like competitors in a three-legged race, they stumble and lurch towards the potted roses. It seems this is what the widow has come for. Still sobbing, but with an eye to quality, she selects one with a single red bud. A martial colour, appropriate for a dead soldier. The mademoiselle – this Colombe – has difficulty wrenching the pot from the ground. The roots have grown through, and in freeing it she cracks the terracotta. No, she won’t accept money. A gift. As they move towards the front of the property the gander blusters ten paces behind, intent on seeing the outsider off.
Sitting opposite him at lunch, she appears quite unaware she has become a stranger again. But certainly she’s changed, a true foreigner for the first time. Elise is almost English, a derivative of Elisa. Colombe? What is Colombe? Not a beautiful sound, for one thing.
After they have finished eating he unfolds a sheet of yellowish paper and lays it on the table. He has salvaged it from the bottom of the wardrobe in his room. With the blunt stub of a pencil he prints in large clear letters: harry george lambert. Curious, she rotates the sheet till the words are right-way up. She manages to make his name sound quite French, a slurred and lazy pronunciation from the front of the mouth. Her smile broadens as she takes the pencil. After smoothing the paper she forms her letters very carefully, tackling her name like a provisional sketch. Seeing her clumsiness, he regrets what he has done. But she isn’t self-conscious. If anything her expression is condescending. A frivolous pastime, this writing. Still, there you have it: colombe adele jacotot.
She is taken aback by his frown. He is sorry to have shown his disappointment. It has the feel of gratuitous cruelty.
Only in her absence can he think. While she escorts her geese out into the spring fields he remains frozen at her table, examining the vastness of his stupidity. It is easy to curse Bunter for fooling him, but he accepts that he himself is most to blame. Remembering back, he realises that the woman did in fact tell him her name. True, he had supposed it was just another unfathomable French word, but perhaps a part of his mind had refused to understand. He recalls her disconcerting coarseness and his determination to overlook it. Surely his gullibility was wilful, a desperate clinging to what he thought he knew. With this he ordered the chaos – with a name, with a tatter of seductive knowledge. Mademoiselle Elise was a precious entity because he had brought her from home. He owned her, as he owns all the sweet and inconsequential detritus of his past. Suddenly she is gone.
He feels stiff in the spine, icy at his extremities. He is immobilised by shame and wonder. Undeniably, he has wafted here to this place, to this woman, to this moment, on a self-preserving blimp of delusion. But what astounds him, what reduces him to total incomprehension: it has preserved him.
eighteen
I couldn’t make all the letters properly. I wrote Colombe Adele Jacotot. My husband taught me. Jacotot is his name. I never learnt to write my father’s name. They brought in school and free lessons after I was too old. My sister who came last summer, the one who looked like she’d stepped in shit, she can write. She’s younger. She got it all. I missed everything. My Australian looked very sad. I thought: You stupid man, what’s it to you whether I can read and write? I can look after myself a lot better than you. I can work, I have money, I know how much things cost. But it hurt. You don’t like people looking down on you.
And really, this rush to read things was never there when I was a girl. Even wealthy people didn’t bother. My mother sent me off to keep house for Marsaults when I was twelve. They had bits and pieces of land all over Caen. Could any of them read a word? No. If they wanted something put down on paper they went to the notary.
Oh, they were good years. My head was empty and I was happy. I slept by the kitchen fire. I had plenty to eat. Servants, family and visitors all sat around the table together. On Sunday we trooped off to church in a bunch. Naturally there were distinctions, but no one could say I didn’t belong. That’s how I learnt what a family is. My father wanted to bring me back. He said they should pay me. He was after the money. But my mother said, ‘Leave her there. She’s getting everything she needs. She’s happy.’
; I worked from morning till night – scrubbing and cleaning, helping with the cooking. Then they put me outdoors, which I liked better. Everyone lent a hand with the apples – children, old people, everyone. Marsaults had two large presses and all the neighbours brought their fruit as well. It was a big occasion. Then there was the first tasting, private and just for the household. You felt privileged. You felt cosy. I got dizzy on a single mug of cider. You don’t forget these things. If I smell fruit I’m immediately happy. Do you remember when he brought me pears? I wept. I wept for the smell of them. It was like he was bringing me those four good years in a bag. I learnt everything there. Everything good. Old Henri taught me about poultry. He called me ‘Blossom’. Imagine that. I was already fat but he called me ‘Blossom’. He was the sweetest man. Claire Chabrier warned me he would try to touch me but he never did. There was nothing he didn’t know about birds – how to choose breeders, how to keep them healthy, feeding, butchering, protecting the eggs and young ones from clumsy feet. Geese are rough mothers if you don’t give them room. There they had the run of the orchards. It was all new to me. We’d never stayed in one place long enough to keep poultry. Always flitting about, running between relations and rented rooms. But with Marsaults I had my own life.
Then along came my husband to take it away. Jacotots had a little land, not as much as Marsaults, but to my eyes Jacotots were big people. They had a triangle of pasture on the other side of the stream where I went to do the laundry. He took off his shoes and crossed the water in his bare feet. He said, ‘I am Leon.’ I said, ‘I know who you are.’ I didn’t really. I knew his face. I knew Jacotots were big people. I swear I had no idea what he wanted. I was sixteen and he was twenty-two. I thought that when a man kissed you it meant marriage. He did a lot more than kiss me. It went on for weeks. Then one day he did it to me, the whole jiggety-jig, but I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe he had and maybe he hadn’t. No, I’m not stupid. It felt the same as what he’d been doing. In any case, by that time I thought I loved him. He said, ‘What does it matter if you have a baby? We’re getting married aren’t we?’ That’s what he said and I believed him. I had a cousin rushed to the altar. Everything turned out all right for her. I went down to the stream three times a week because he said he couldn’t go two days without me. I won’t deny I liked it too. You know how it is when everything’s new. Then I stopped bleeding and some instinct told me that meant trouble. Perhaps I had heard something. I told Madame Marsault first, before I had a chance to speak to Leon. It was pure accident, and lucky, even if I didn’t think so at the time. She scolded and hissed and made me cry. She thought it was a disgrace and a big problem. Leon got more than he bargained for. Monsieur Marsault went to his people and said, ‘I didn’t take this girl under my roof for you to mess with. If you think she’s got no one to protect her, think again!’ He didn’t have to say it. They could have dropped me. But he looked on what had happened as a personal slight. He promised them 900 francs if they took me. So we were married and I became a Jacotot. They all complained because they never saw the 900 francs. But it was too late. We’d been to the deputy then stood up in church, so old man Jacotot could cry and carp all he liked and never change a thing.
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