by Adam Thorpe
* * *
My mother sent Carole a new pink nightdress in the post, because we couldn’t visit that next weekend. It was the tenth anniversary of my grandmother’s death, and we had to pay our respects at her grave. I dreaded it.
It was my mother’s idea, even though it wasn’t her mother. Hers had died after choking on a mandarine in 1952 (the first one she had ever tasted). More members of my extended family than I ever knew existed – about twenty-five, mostly different types of cousins – filed into Bagneux cemetery. It was enormous, and not far from my school at Châtillon. I remembered nothing about my grandmother, although she’d held me on her knees a lot and apparently had a ‘soft spot’ for her first grandson. The one blurry black-and-white photograph of her when old had been taken on a very bright day with the eyes completely invisible behind steel spectacles, so that didn’t help.
Of course, I had been to the grave many times in my life, because my father was buried there, too. My mother liked to visit several times a year, although my uncle only went once a year. I enjoyed these trips, when it was just us. The cemetery reminded me of a huge park, its big old trees and high walls making it a separate world, very quiet after the traffic – the quietness falling like a shutter as soon as you passed through the gate. I’d bring my scooter until I was about eleven, propelling it along the sandy paths with my foot while trying not to scuff my best shoes. Now I had to fold my hands in front of me and look sad with the others while bouquets were laid, hiding the grave completely. The permanent plastic flowers had turned a bit blue, like the cardboard cutout woman; they were removed from their rusty pot and laid on the side.
It was strange seeing so many faces that I didn’t know but which were related to me. Gigi didn’t cry at all, and neither did my uncle standing at the back, but Tante Clothilde sniffled noisily and Gigi bent over to me and said, ‘She’s got to keep the flag flying, y’see.’
I was wearing a new navy-blue jacket. The cuffs ended almost on my knuckles and I felt an idiot.
We stood around the grave and people read things, special prayers and little poems. I didn’t read anything – nobody had asked me to. On the top of the gravestone, underneath the cross, it said FAMILLE GOBAIN. My father’s and grandmother’s names and dates were underneath. On the grave’s gravel were some stone plaques and crucifixes. The plaque from me and Carole was grey and polished and shaped like a wave; it said, A NOTRE PERE BIEN AIME, although I hadn’t been at the funeral. The one from my mother was a thick open book with roses coming out of it and said, A MON EPOUX. In fact, it was just a thin piece of marble, but from the front it looked as thick as a Bible because of the pages carved at the side. I knew the words along the bottom of the gravestone by heart: HEUREUX CEUX QUI ONT LE COEUR PUR CAR ILS VERRONT DIEU. I knew my father’s heart was pure but I wasn’t sure about mine. That meant I couldn’t be happy, although I wasn’t unhappy. I realised by the end that I’d only been thinking about my father. I wondered if other people had been, too.
‘Your shirt’s hanging out,’ my mother hissed, as we were walking slowly away. ‘Please make an effort, dear.’
Everyone came back for coffee, filling the house up. Some of them had been to early Mass with us, but others had arrived just before the ceremony and looked tired and thirsty after a long drive. My mother was upset by Cousin Lucille’s husband (who was a bit of a joker under his beret), emerging from the bathroom dangling a monster cockroach by its leg.
It turned out to be a plastic one; it was a trick he always played on ‘houseproud’ people.
‘Quite unnecessary,’ said my mother, out of earshot in the kitchen. ‘But he’s always been a fabricator, has Emil. Always going too far.’
Everyone had to inspect the showroom. They almost filled it up, wandering around between the American models. Emil said, clapping my uncle around the shoulder and grinning, that it would’ve been less of a risk to have burnt it down. He almost shouted it, in fact; some people laughed and some people rolled their eyes and tutted. I blushed.
‘I was on the point of doing so, mate,’ said my uncle, drawing on his cigarette, ‘but my lighter’d run out.’
Everyone laughed, now, and Emil shouted, tapping his big red nose, ‘You could have borrowed mine, what with all that money you owe me in the balance!’
My uncle showed them how well the American model sucked up sand and grit, then demonstrated with the very wide head for wet conditions in a puddle of water, the rubber flaps looking as if they were lips, drinking. Unfortunately, a bit of brick got caught in the tube and Emil shook his head.
‘I’ll stick with my old broom and Brigitte Bardot on the end of it,’ he sighed. ‘At least they’re both French.’
I could tell my uncle was a bit annoyed, struggling to get the bit of brick out, because he didn’t joke back.
A little later, just after midday, we drove out in convoy to a restaurant next to the site where they had almost finished building a Champion hypermarket. The convoy got separated and my mother grew very anxious, but everyone found their way in the end, following the stencilled Champion signs for the builders, laughing about it as they got out of their cars in the restaurant car park. We were quite loud, shouting and laughing as if it didn’t matter being loud in a group, and my uncle kept clapping people’s backs and calling us the ‘clan’. He even put his arm around Tante Clothilde as if wrestling with her, and then I remembered that she was his sister. We admired the cranes above the metal skeleton of the hypermarket. Nobody really knew what a hypermarket was, in fact, except that it was bigger than a supermarket. There was a huge area of mud with a few trees not cut down on the edge. The cranes made the trees look short.
The restaurant was ‘practical’ because it had parking. It was ultramodern, too, with a striped orange ceiling and sparkling globes dangling from huge bright-green shapes like dagger-blades. These dagger-shapes seemed to float just below the ceiling and somehow glowed with red lights like a space station. Everyone admired them: my uncle said that the effect was very simple, each sharp shape just had a red neon strip screwed on top of it and anyone could do it at home if they wanted, all you needed were sheets of hardboard, some four-by-twos, an electric saw and good vinyl paint. The men were spreading their arms and nodding as if they knew already, the women were pulling faces and admiring the crochet-work on the hem of the tablecloth. The place had a grandeur, anyway.
At least, that was how my posh third cousin described it – the one with the blonde curls my mother would always go on about. She was called Jocelyne. I didn’t remember meeting her before now. She was about my age and did in fact have pretty blonde curls that made her look American. She lived with her parents in a rich part of Paris near Napoleon’s tomb, though we had never visited them. Her mother had surprised me by stepping out of an enormous, fat fur coat into someone tiny and thin; the father was tall, with a pipe and connecting eyebrows and skin a bit like lard. He hardly opened his mouth and his wife only spoke when spoken to, but their daughter Jocelyne talked a lot about books and so on with an elderly relative opposite, and kept turning to me and saying, ‘You’ve read it?’ This wasn’t a real question, more one that expected me to shake my head. Each time I did shake my head (which was every time, in fact), she tutted and turned back to the elderly relative, who had kept her hat on.
I surprised myself a lot by imagining, during the meal, what it was like under Jocelyne’s red corduroy skirt. It almost came down to the top of her black boots, the type that always look wet. Although my mother had said that it wasn’t a funeral, most relatives had dressed in dark clothes, so Jocelyne stood out even from the other children – me included. She seemed older than twelve, and kept using complicated grown-up sentences, almost as if she was reading from one of my grammar books. Her hands fluttered about her chin like butterflies, and when a spot of cream from the dessert rested in the tiny hairs at the side of her mouth, I was desperate to tell her. Then she dabbed her mouth professionally with her napkin, pouting her lips in a way I
had only seen people in restaurants on television do. Even her figure was almost adult: she had a thin waist which her frilly blouse exaggerated.
I didn’t like her at all: she frightened me. I wondered whether, beneath her skirt, I might find her skin, imagining a kind of coolness to it. Then I wondered if such girls wore the kind of thick tights others did. My bare knees, all rough and bony and cold under my hands, made me feel naked next to her. Also, my hair was combed in the wrong way: my mother had sprayed it and the front was bouncy and stiff.
‘You’ve read it?’ she said again.
‘I’ve just read Gaston Leroux,’ I said. Amazingly, I couldn’t recall the title. I hoped she wouldn’t ask.
‘Oh, him,’ she snorted. ‘So old-fashioned. If you like thrillers you should read the Americans. I’m trying to read them in English!’
She reeled off some English names, like pop stars.
‘I can’t read Flaubert. He makes me feel suicidal,’ she added, swivelling her eyes up to the ceiling. ‘All those ugly details.’
‘I read Henry Troyat last week,’ I lied. ‘But it was utterly pointless. Very dull and unpleasant.’
‘Troyat? Who got the Goncourt much too young, in his twenties?’
‘He stands up for nine hours a day,’ I added, not knowing what the Goncourt was – maybe an illness. ‘Perhaps he should sit down.’
‘What are you talking about? Which one was dull? There are so many of them, and all the same.’
I escaped Jocelyn’s question by watching what was happening along the table. There was a big painting without a frame hanging on the wall and Emil, the cousin’s husband with the beret and the nose like a clown’s, was ridiculing it in a loud voice. The waiter came up.
‘Hey, I’ve got some good stain-remover for that,’ Emil said to the waiter, jabbing a finger at the painting. Everyone laughed – my uncle more loudly than anyone else, slapping the table like a drunkard.
‘What do you think of it?’ hissed Jocelyne.
She was leaning my way again, asking me as if we were conspirators.
‘Me?’
‘You.’
I looked at the painting again. It was blue with some red splotches on it like squashed flies, which was why Emil had joked about it.
I shrugged. I wanted to impress her. In my boring Catholic youth magazine, Record (my mother had subscribed me to it, so I wouldn’t read Salut les Copains), there had been a comic-strip about Picasso.
‘A bit like Picasso,’ I said, frowning.
She exploded into laughter.
‘You can’t take a joke,’ I said, thinking quickly, my voice cracking.
‘Picasso! At least you didn’t say Modigliani!’
It was funnier even than Emil’s joke about stain-remover, which he was continuing in the background with big hand gestures, like the mime artist I’d seen on television. Jocelyne was frowned at by her mother, who had peeled off her tight-fitting gloves – although the waiter didn’t really know what to do with them. This had annoyed Jocelyne’s mother, whose hair was piled up around her face in big silky waves that made her small brown face look even smaller. She had pale grey eyes, a bit like metal. They were weird. Her face was brown, apparently, because she had just got back from the ski-runs, and the others kept admiring it. My mother had powdered her face white, as she always did on posh occasions, so I felt confused.
‘Sorry I laughed at you,’ Jocelyne said, over the dessert. ‘I can’t control myself when I’m amused. There are so many things in life that amuse one. What do you play?’ she added.
‘Play?’
She had painted her eyelashes and put blue on her eyelids, but it looked silly, as if she was pretending. Her spoon sank into her île flottante, making it bob up and down.
‘Oh, gin-rummy with my dad,’ I said, blushing with the idea that I might have said ‘Lego’ or ‘model tanks’ or ‘Dinkies’.
She made a snorting noise, hand over her mouth, tears springing into her eyes.
‘No, I mean instrument,’ she said, eventually. ‘Which instrument?’
‘Instrument?’
I scrabbled around in my head in panic, seeing only spades and electric drills.
She tutted, as at a dunce. My ears burned away. ‘Music,’ she said. ‘Violin? Piano? Harp? I play the harp. It’s a ridiculous instrument to learn, it costs as much as an apartment and is enormous, but I can’t do anything about it. I am driven to play it. That’s what Papa says. I am driven by a mysterious ardour to play it. I was probably an angel in a previous life. I hope not a fallen angel, Papa says!’
She wasn’t just talking to me, I realised: she was being listened to as well by the elderly relative opposite and a sixteen-year-old male cousin with bad spots two guests along. But her greeny eyes kept coming back to mine. Her corduroy skirt was touching my bare knee.
‘So? What do you play? I’ll bet it’s something chic like an electric guitar, no? I’ll bet your middle name’s Ringo Starr.’
Her eyes were now roaming over my face, as if there was a fly crawling on it. It might be nerves, I thought.
‘I don’t play anything.’
She looked amazed.
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘nothing at all?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, you poor deprived thing!’
After that, she ignored me, chattering on to the others about music and books as if I didn’t exist. The boy with bad spots, opening his mouth for the first time, said that the only artists he liked were those who served society and Jocelyne asked him for examples and then laughed at each one, calling them dilettantes and mystics and so on. I hadn’t heard of any of them. The spotty boy sank towards his plate, bright red and unhappy – which made me feel better. I imagined her playing the harp, smiling dreamily like the angels in the paintings in church and at school, her wet-looking boots the only strange bit in the picture.
I’d drunk a whole glass of diluted red wine, and now the waiter was pouring sweet white wine. He filled my glass without anyone noticing. I didn’t add water and the taste was delicious, I felt it toughen me up. I thought of Carole in the home not far away by car – but very far away from all this noise and laughter. I hoped she hadn’t been tranquillised for long. I was sure she’d been tranquillised because she’d danced ballet in the nude again. That’s why she’d torn up her nightdress. It was obvious. That’s what the fit was, it was dancing her ballet in the nude again, my mother was just hiding the truth. I took another sip, and another: it was quite like liquid honey. Someone raised a toast for ‘absent friends and family’, and I knew everyone was thinking about Carole. I drank again for the toast, warmth rising up in me with all the voices and laughing and eyes. I could go and rescue Carole. I saw myself swinging into the home with a rope and snatching her away. But it wasn’t a prison. Why did I think it was a prison? She was there to get better. I was desperate for her to get better. I missed her. It wasn’t a home, though, it was a lunatic asylum. It only hit me at that moment, that it was really a lunatic asylum. The wine was making me realise things.
Jocelyne was leaning across me, now, to hear some story Emil was telling. It was about his childhood before the war. I could smell almond shampoo in her curls.
‘Do you do ballet?’ I asked, without preparing it.
She leaned back a little, reacting as if it was the first time I had ever spoken.
‘Did you say ballet?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ she said.
I burped, but kept my mouth closed. The smell leaked out of my nose.
‘Why not?’
‘I know boys. You’ll only make some silly joke, like, “Oh, have you seen a doctor about it? That’s a very serious disease, being a ballerina.”’
Her whiny imitation made my chest prickle.
‘I don’t think it’s a disease. I like ballet.’
‘Do you do it?’ She was looking at me sharply.
‘No, but—’
‘Then it
’s just because you like to see girls in tutus.’
‘Tutus? No, it’s not,’ I said, blushing furiously. ‘I do mime.’
‘Marcel Marceau?’
‘I’m learning. But I’m quite good.’
My blush got worse as I thought of myself miming the two lovers on the bench. Fortunately, she wasn’t looking at me any more.
‘Actually, I’ve a gift for ballet, they say, but it’s so old-fashioned, so conservative, even though I go to an up-to-date place. There’s someone from New York there called Terry. Te-rry. A man. He teaches us modern and jazz and says ballet should really be danced in jeans and T-shirt.’ She sighed. ‘What’s your favourite?’
‘Favourite what?’
‘Favourite ballet, dumbo.’
She giggled. She was, I noticed, allowed to drink wine without water and had already emptied her glass; her cheeks were flushed. I tried to remember the very slim teenager dancing on television – the only ballet I had ever seen. I wasn’t sure what the question meant.
‘I like them all,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a favourite.’
‘How unusual. For a boy. Mine’s Giselle. So poetic.’
She looked at me suspiciously.
‘Oh yes, that’s good,’ I murmured.
She suddenly tucked her hand behind her ear and stretched her other arm out so that it was just below my chin and whispered, ‘I can hear Albert, coming to our meeting.’
She giggled. ‘I always hear words in ballet, as if they’re talking. I love words. That’s why I can’t get on with mime, I’m afraid. I’d much rather be a diva, but I can’t sing, I sound like a squeaky tap. I adore opera. Maman says that her dream was always to sing Melisande, but she gave everything up to be a mother and have me. What a shame. I think that Melisande and Pelleas were guilty, don’t you? I mean, when Melisande says she wasn’t, it’s only because she doesn’t think it is. A sin, I mean. She’s so innocent, she’s beyond moral stricture.’