by Liz Nugent
I loved it from the moment I arrived. I was used to manual labor from my extracurricular job in the markets, and while the others took a little while to adjust, I found it relatively easy. Irish summers could be gray, damp, and miserable, but here the sun shone every day, and although we could see marvelous lightning storms at night at the other end of our valley, the rain did not fall in Clochamps. My college friends complained of heat and sunburn, but I easily acclimatized. The meals provided gratis were simple but excellent, wine was free too, and Laura and I easily found time and space to be intimate away from her brother and the others.
The elderly owner of Château d’Aigse befriended me early on. I translated for the others. My spoken and written French were good, and he was genuinely interested in me and wanted to know what I was studying, how I intended to use my degree, my plans for the future. After two weeks, Monsieur asked if I would be interested in doing some transcribing work for him. I readily agreed, thinking that the office work would involve typing invoices or some kind of record keeping. That is what he led his daughter to believe. He asked for my discretion and overpaid me. He introduced me to his grandson, Jean-Luc, the most beautiful and charming child I will ever know.
On the first day I reported for duty in the library, Jean-Luc was there also and Monsieur asked me to take a seat while he read his grandson a story. I was intrigued. Jean-Luc formally stepped forward and shook my hand. I knelt down to his eye level and returned his greeting with a little bow. He laughed and looked up at his grandfather and, pointing at me, he called me “Frown.”
As Monsieur began to tell the story, I watched the boy’s face as he perched on his papi’s knee. He was transfixed by the tale of a happy young prince of a fantastical land and would exclaim in the middle of the telling, would hide his eyes at the arrival of the bad witch, and clap his hands in excitement at our hero’s escape in the end. I realized that Frown was a character who protected the Prince, and that the Prince was clearly modeled on Jean-Luc. I, too, thought the story was wonderful and said so to Monsieur d’Aigse. He was very happy to be complimented and explained that he had written a series of these stories on and off over the last decades, but that they consisted of handwritten notes. He wasn’t even sure how many stories there were. He had developed a palsy in his right hand and could no longer trust his own penmanship. My task, he said, was to write up all these stories in some expensive leather-bound books he had bought for the purpose. It was to be our secret. He thought his daughter would disapprove that I was not being used for estate work, but I think she very quickly guessed what I had been employed to do. She did not interfere, however.
As I heard his stories, I thought they were good enough to send to a publisher, but Monsieur insisted that they were written solely for his family and that when Jean-Luc was older, he could decide what to do with them.
Laura began to complain bitterly that I was not spending enough time with her. She was right. I was enjoying myself with my two companions, and on several occasions I was invited to dine with the family. Madame Véronique was a little more distant than her father and son, but I loved being there with them and was reluctant to leave when the working day was done.
I tried to humor Laura, promising that I would devote the next night to her, but I rarely kept those promises. The old man treated me like a son. He thought I was a good man. A family was more seductive than anything she could offer me, although I continued to sleep with her because, after all, a man has needs.
• • •
As I set about typing these stories and then laboriously pasting them into the leather-bound books, I found myself growing closer to the old man and the little boy. I was included in their secret world, and they accepted me without question. I couldn’t get enough of their company, and it suddenly seemed to me as if I had somehow been wasting my time with Laura, as if no mere romantic relationship could be worth more than this platonic one between three menfolk who might, in some realm of possibility, have been three generations of the same family. I lost almost total interest in her affection and her vibrancy, and by now used her only for sex. All of the things in which I had previously delighted were now meaningless, as if the spell of the enchantress were broken. This new connection felt somehow purer.
For the first time in my life, I felt able to confide my private thoughts. I told Monsieur of my father’s lack of interest in me. He was clearly appalled and he shook his head in wonder, as if to say, “How could a man not be proud of this boy?” and I loved him for it. He suggested that there was enough transcribing work to keep me busy for more than one summer, and I agreed enthusiastically to return the following year.
The truth is that I didn’t want to leave. There wasn’t that much time left. The idea of returning to my drab and lonely bedsit filled me with revulsion, and even thoughts of Laura’s affection failed to quell my growing anxiety about the future.
At this time, I was worried about my prospects. I had not the family support that most of my fellow students had, and my existence in Dublin was hand to mouth. I hid it well, bought good secondhand clothing, borrowed books, stole stationery, and when in private survived on tea, bread, and whatever fruit I could scrounge from the market. I let my friends think my parents lived in the countryside somewhere and never allowed any visitors to my bedsit. I stayed in their homes and met their families and got more insight into how the other half lived. I desperately wanted what they had, but there seemed to be no way for me to achieve it. I was jealous of their lifestyle and their lack of anxiety about what lay ahead. I was headed for the lowest rung of the civil service, without the all-important contacts that everybody else seemed to have or the financial backing to set them up in business. When I borrowed the fare to France, Father Daniel very gently informed me that he could not continue to fund my life beyond college. We were both mortified. I was grateful for everything he had done for me. He again suggested that I could come back to the school and teach, but that was now out of the question. I had finally escaped boarding school and there was no way I was going back. I was getting plenty of female attention, but I foresaw that when it came to marrying time, no family of good standing would allow their daughter to hitch herself to a penniless nobody. I needed a plan.
What could I do to force the d’Aigses to invite me to stay here with them? How could I endear myself to Monsieur d’Aigse to the extent that he would “adopt” me? I probably could have seduced Madame Véronique if I’d put my mind to it, but I was not attracted to her, and regardless, my dream future entailed my being accepted as me, without pretense. I did not want to live a lie. Not then.
My French was good enough to be able to converse with the locals. I knew of Monsieur’s several acts of bravery during the war. He was a hero in the commune. Could I be a hero too? What if I were to save a life? I began to fantasize about how I could achieve Monsieur’s iconic status. It amused me in my idle hours to imagine being embraced as one of their own. What if I could save Jean-Luc’s life? Wouldn’t that earn their loyalty and gratitude? Wouldn’t they beg me to stay and live with them forever, as part of the family, their protector? But I reasoned I could never save Jean-Luc’s life without jeopardizing it, and that, obviously, was out of the question. Still, I couldn’t shake off my romanticized dreams of the future. It became as real to me as if it had already happened, and I regarded the old man and his grandson with ever growing affection.
Then, I thought, what if I were to save the château? Surely that would be on a par with saving a life. And maybe it was something I could engineer if I put my mind to it. The idea came together slowly over several weeks—though in the beginning I believe I thought of it as comforting fantasy rather than a plan; something to puzzle over, as if teasing out a mathematical equation. But gradually I began to look around with a sense of purpose. I scrutinized the château in a new way.
It struck me that fire was something I understood. Any boy who spent time in a boarding school was well versed in the art of pyrotechnics. It is
said that necessity is the mother of invention, but often it is in fact boredom. We knew what burned fastest, loudest, and most colorfully. We knew what caused explosions, what made a damp squib, how to cover up the smell of sulfur. I knew how to start a fire, and I also knew how to contain it.
The harvest started in early September, so all hands were required in the vineyard, but by then I knew my way around the ground floor of the house and I knew that the most flammable part of it must be Monsieur’s library, with its dusty collection of books, maps, and ancient ledgers detailing the commerce of the house over centuries. If I could be the first on the scene, if I could save the house, then I would be the hero. I could be employed to restore the library to its former glory. I was the only person who knew where everything in it was kept. Surely, Monsieur would see the wisdom of keeping me on? He would blame himself: a spark from his pipe must have escaped unnoticed, he would think, and smoldered slowly until it caught fire.
Shaking Laura off that night was the difficult part. She had something to tell me, she said; she needed time alone with me. I assumed she was going to tell me that her brother was a queer, but everyone knew that already. I put her off, saying that I was exhausted and needed to sleep. She insisted it was urgent; she had to tell me something important. I lost my temper with her then, told her I’d had enough of her clinginess, her jealousy of my work in the house, her demanding my attention constantly. I told her our relationship was over and that she should find somebody else to follow like a dog. I was unnecessarily cruel. I regret it. I was too absorbed by my own skulduggery to give much thought to her feelings.
Monsieur and Jean-Luc came down to the vineyard to say good night to me that night. We were working till dusk, and I had not been inside the château for a week.
“Good night, Frown!” said the little boy, and laughed, delighted with himself.
“Good night, Prince Felix!” I responded.
• • •
I must have drunk six cups of coffee that night to keep myself awake. I was exhausted, naturally, but exhilarated by the task I had determined to undertake. Nobody stayed up too late, aware of another arduous day ahead. I lay in my bunk, listening to their breathing, waiting for each roommate to succumb to hard-earned slumber. Michael tried to engage me in whispered conversation about Laura. He had noticed she had seemed upset earlier in the evening. I admitted we had had an argument but avoided the details of my vindictiveness. I assured him that I would talk to her in the morning and that we would patch things up. He was content with this, and soon he was breathing evenly.
As soon as everyone was asleep, I made my way silently up to the back door beside the lean-to building and into the library. The leather-bound books and handwritten papers that I had been working on were kept on a shelf in a corner of the room by the door. It struck me that these must be saved from the fire. How grateful might they be to discover that the summer’s work had been rescued and that Jean-Luc’s most personal inheritance was intact?
I put them to one side while I amassed a bundle of loose typing paper all around the bookcase and doused it with lighter fuel. I planned to be the one to discover the fire in about twenty minutes so that I could be the hero who stopped the fire going out of control. I lit the touchpaper and watched for a moment. I hoped the fire would catch in time. Hiding the leather-bound books near the bunkhouse, I crept back to wait for the appropriate moment to sound the alarm.
I checked my watch about every six seconds, but time seemed to relax its grip and the minute hand of my watch appeared to freeze. I held it to my ear, and tick, tick, tick, yes it was working as it should. Minutes before my planned alarm raising, I heard my name being called softly from the door of the bunkhouse. Damn, Laura. I got up and went to her and we had the same argument again that we had had earlier in the evening, but this time she began to fight back.
“You can’t just dump me with no explanation! You can’t just leave me! We love each other!”
She was raising her voice, growing hysterical, and I knew I must get away from her, go up to the house and put out the fire. Others had emerged to see what the fuss was about, and Laura was by now grabbing at my shoulders, wailing at me, “Why? Why? What have I done?”
I tried to get her to shut up. “Nothing, you’ve done nothing, I just can’t . . . I don’t . . .”
I was aware of shadows moving around us. We had woken everyone. Michael emerged out of the gloom. He was clearly annoyed and I think embarrassed that Laura was making such a spectacle of us. He took control and ordered us both sternly to go back to bed. What was I to do? Maybe thirty minutes had now passed, but no sign or smell of smoke or fire had yet reached our quarters, and I thought perhaps it might have gone out. I reluctantly followed him back to the bunkhouse as Laura was led away weeping by one of the girls. I lay down, furious, as Michael began to give me a whispered lecture about Laura’s delicate “feelings.” Should I just feign storming off in a temper so that I could go and check on the fire? How much longer could I wait? Could the fire have blown itself out? Michael was still going on and on, but suddenly he stopped. “What’s that smell?” he said, and he leapt out of bed and ran to the door.
Michael was the one to raise the alarm. Michael could have been the hero, not me. But we were both too late to save lives.
I didn’t know about the paraffin cans in the lean-to shed, behind the door. I had never been upstairs in the house, and somehow I got the impression that there were no bedrooms in the east wing. I never meant harm to the boy or his papi, but I am solely responsible for their deaths. I will never forget the sound of Madame Véronique’s screams. It has haunted me for nearly forty years.
• • •
I was just about putting one foot in front of the other in the days that followed, going through the motions of empathy and sympathy, but I felt nothing at all, just a needle-sharp aching wound in the core of my soul. I tried not to sleep, because waking to the horror of the truth every day was unbearable.
Sweet Laura tried to comfort me. It was known that I had grown close to the dead, but I could not take her platitudes and rejected her all over again. I worked with everybody else, trying to clear the mess and the destruction and trying to avoid contact with Madame Véronique, whose family I had murdered.
I cleared out the library, but there was nothing left of it except some maps and an ivory paperweight that were kept in a metal box. Madame came to me and specifically asked about the leather-bound books, among other things. Monsieur must have told her about our project. I told her they too had been destroyed. Then I broke down and wept, and she held me in her bandaged arms and I felt worse. The fire service concluded that a stray ember from Monsieur’s pipe, which somehow ignited the paraffin in the lean-to, must have sparked the fire.
Four days before we were to leave, Laura told me she was pregnant with my baby. I could hardly ingest the information and ignored it and her, but she was everywhere I turned over the following days. In my grief I snapped at her finally, insisting there was no way I could have a family. I had just buried my child. She stared at me, and I realized what I’d said and realized I’d meant it. She cried and pleaded, but I was not going to concede any more emotion. I was already spent. I told her to get herself fixed up and to send me the bill. Somehow, I would scrape the money together to pay for it. She cried more.
Laura wisely decided not to come home with us. I assumed she’d find a little doctor somewhere who could sort her out. Michael was baffled by his sister’s insistence on staying on at Château d’Aigse and negotiated between Laura and her parents in expensive phone calls that went on for two days. I presented it to him as philanthropy on Laura’s part. She simply wanted to stay and help Madame Véronique, and sure, what harm could it do. He knew by then that we had split up, but clearly she had not confided any of the details in him. I couldn’t look at her or Madame Véronique on our day of departure. My shame would have been too obvious.
My shame was not so great, however, that I did n
ot have the leather-bound books containing every story ever written by Vincent d’Aigse wrapped in a towel at the bottom of my suitcase. I’m not sure why I took them. Maybe I wanted some part of my two friends to take with me. Their innocence and their purity. Maybe I needed a reminder of my guilt. I had deliberately lied to Madame Véronique, but these stories were all I had left of those two precious souls and I couldn’t relinquish them.
Back in Dublin, in my sunless bedsit, I spent a week in bed, not leaving the house or speaking to anybody. How could I even begin to explain that I only meant to be a hero, and not a murderer?
The books were on the dresser accusing me, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of them. I didn’t look at them or open them. Finally, I dragged myself out of my decline. I left the house and went to a secondhand furniture shop, where I bought an old wooden box with a sturdy lock. I came home and locked the books into the box and hoped that I would forget where I had hidden the key.
• • •
Laura was not so easy to forget about. She wrote several letters, trying to convince me that “we” could keep the baby, that her parents would stand by us eventually. For a while I considered it but ultimately dismissed the notion. Marrying into a wealthy family was not a bad option, but raising a child? When I had just killed one? I do, after all, have a sense of morality. Then she wrote to say that she was going to have the baby in France and that I must go and join her there to raise our child. Another two months went by, and she wrote that she had changed her mind and was going to keep the baby anyway and bring it home, regardless of my involvement, sending me into paroxysms of panic. I never replied to any of the letters but waited with increasing anxiety for news of the baby’s birth.