by Allan Massie
I saw him shiver. A white peacock shrieked from the broken temple and a voice called, ‘Bubi, Bubi.’ The boy dropped to his knees, and the glade was transformed into a court full of men in uniform. At a word of command two of them seized the boy, and threw him across a bench. He screamed, and his legs twitched as he sank his head, and the bird answered his cry, as if in mockery. I thrust out my hand for Rose, but she was not there. My mouth was dry, and the wind blew hot and gusty from the east.
I was sweating, and switched on the lamp by my bedside. Three o’clock and a well-mannered Swiss silence in the street without, and in the depths of my hotel. I was brought up to believe that dreams had a meaning. Any African will tell you that, and without believing that they crudely reveal the future, I have never doubted that they disclose a parallel world. One’s secret self forces itself through the veil of consciousness. The world of night is the same as the world of day; the same objects stand in the same relation to each other. Space is not altered by dark, and yet who in man’s history has ever felt night not to be different?
The boy’s fear had excited me. Was that why Rose had slipped from my side?
I rose and put on a dressing-gown and opened the window, and stared through the wet street-lamps of Geneva. It had begun to rain and the drops leapt from the purple puddles. The setting of the dream was nowhere I knew, except in imagination. And Rose had not left me for that reason or for any cause that was equally serious. She had been bored and she had fallen in love, to speak loosely, and that was that. But I heard the boy scream and saw the shiver of his flesh and the peacock strut.
I have written nothing in this journal for three days, not since I recorded that dream (which, I think, if I ever come to showing this little school exercise book to anyone – or leave it behind me – I shall destroy), and in these three days I have felt myself more nervous and have experienced a certain horror of my own nature. Yet my nature is only human – the most pathetic of standard excuses – and humanity has shown such a relish for cruelty as exists in no other species. It is ironic that we also use the word ‘humanity’ to describe a moral quality of which we approve. At this very moment a trial for war crimes is being held in Israel, and we read, over our croissants and apricot jam, of how the guards in the death camps would select prisoners for execution; any prisoner marked by a blow from the guards would be executed the same day.
And what is also horrifying: if I told my dream to the Baroness, she would seize my hand and cover it with eager kisses.
Young Mr Challefray will be here tomorrow. One thing is certain, and I suppose, some relief. Mr Challefray’s book will never be written.
My certainty would surprise some, for he is a young man of very obvious energy and enthusiasm, with brush-like reddish hair, a pale freckled face, and a warmth of manner. He leapt to his feet as soon as he saw me, and bounded forward with a wide and, I think, genuine smile of welcome on his face. He at once transformed himself into the host, solicitous for my welfare.
‘I don’t think I can help you,’ I said, ‘if I read your letter right. I know next to nothing of these matters.’
‘It’s something in the way of a general discussion I want,’ he said. ‘I’m still at a preliminary stage.’
‘And yet you have reached me – surely the most remote sources …’
‘The preliminaries are taking a long time,’ he said, snapping his fingers for a waiter and ordering coffee when he obtained one. This took him a long time also, despite his energy. Perhaps it was then that I concluded that the book would be beyond him.
He began to outline the origins of his interest, giving me first of all a canter over his qualifications. I barely listened. His American accent was slight, as if it had been acquired late, and his voice pleasant. He came to an end just as the coffee arrived and then busied himself seeing that I had just what I wanted.
‘Your name suggests that your own family is French,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but not for a while back. We’re French-Canadians in fact, but I’ve never lived in Canada: or not much. My father was a diplomat, worked for the UN, I’ve moved around a lot, and went to university first in England, Oxford actually. But you were Cambridge, weren’t you?
‘So,’ he said, ‘I came to you this way. Your father’s essays interested me. One in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1942, particularly.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I doubt if I’ve read it.’
‘It was remarkable,’ he said. ‘Remarkably logical and cogent. He argued that while there might have been a patriotic case for de Gaulle, or for opposing Pétain, in 1940, there was none in 1942, since by then a German defeat must result in a Russian victory. Communism, he argued, offered a more serious threat to France than Germany did, because it threatened the national identity.’
‘History,’ I said, ‘hardly suggests that his judgement is to be applauded. Where is Communism today?’
Mr Challefray sighed. ‘I take your point, of course, but you miss mine,’ he said. ‘You have to consider the intellectual atmosphere in which I grew up to understand it perhaps. And I was struck also by what he called “the morality of Macchiavelli”, which really startled me. He said, more or less, I’m awfully bad at quoting from memory, though I’ve got it all on disc of course, that the only true difference between the Macchiavellian governor or statesman and the common run was that he understood that no politician could really be in sympathy with the people, and this realisation gave him a degree of consciousness that they lacked; he was the point of intelligence in the system of force. I found that persuasive. So straight away Lucien de Balafré seemed to me one of the more interesting minds I was dealing with. What sort of man was he?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’d forgotten that he was to be taken seriously.’
Mr Challefray’s face assumed an air of incomprehension. I stretched out my hand for the coffee-cup.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I can’t imagine that I can be of any help to you. I’ve never been interested in my father’s ideas. All this stuff about Macchiavelli is way above my head. I don’t suppose I have opened a book of philosophy since Cambridge. I’m a businessman and wine-grower. Or was, till I retired last year. I’m sorry to disappoint you.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I checked you out. I wasn’t looking for this sort of co-operation from you. Like I say, I’ve got all that on disc and I have a computer system to run it through which lets me evaluate it. It was something quite different I was looking for. Look, I don’t know how much time you can give me, sir, but I observe that the sun’s coming out. Can we take a walk? I’d like to see something of the city, and then you would perhaps allow me to buy you lunch.’
‘That’s the Palais de Justice,’ I said, as we walked along. ‘It ought to interest you.’
‘You’re laughing at me, sir, but do you know that epigram, I can’t remember whose …’
(‘But you’ve got it on disc,’ I thought; will computers destroy memory? Is that the future? Does that way happiness lie? But then memory has charms too …)
‘“Treason doth never prosper: What the reason? For if it prosper, None dare call it treason.” Don’t you think that might be held to apply to recent French history?’
‘And those who fail are traitors? Look,’ I said, ‘Servetus was burned here.’
‘Servetus? I can’t recall who he was I’m afraid. Was he significant?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it all depends on what you mean by significant. But you might rather call his history ironical. He was burned by a heretic, Calvin, on account of heresy. It should be rather to your taste.’
He digested the matter and then said, ‘It’s not like that, exactly.’
We walked for perhaps five minutes in silence. The sun had indeed emerged after days of concealment and now shone with a shy wonder, like a refugee who has passed a frontier post. Trams clanked by us. There was snow on the mountains, and a blonde girl at a café table threw her coat open and leaned back, gazing at the peaks and im
bibing the sunshine.
‘I like this city,’ Mr Challefray said, ‘it has a good feel.’
‘All you have to do,’ I said, ‘to be comfortable here is pay your way. And the nice thing about modern Europe is that it seems to be tending to the condition of Switzerland. There’s a lot to be said for that.’
We settled ourselves in a restaurant, and Mr Challefray quickly asked if they had lobster, to put me at my ease perhaps, and let me see that expense or expense account was no object. When I said that all I wanted was a sausage and a hot potato salad, he looked disappointed.
‘And how do you remember him?’ he asked, unfolding his napkin.
‘I never saw him after I was nine.’
‘Tell me about him. What happened then?’
‘Isn’t this,’ I said, ‘some way from – what is it? – the ideological ethos of Vichy sympathisers?’
‘It’s background,’ he said.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there would be no mileage in a book about him. I warn you of that. Nobody remembers him, and, as far as I know, there are no papers of especial interest. He wasn’t of any great importance, you know.’
‘But you must remember something?’
You must remember something. Of course, yes: a thin and gentle man who was very anxious that I should speak correct French. ‘It’s all we have left,’ he said to my mother once as he corrected some inelegance. ‘It’s almost the only thing that holds France together. Even a Communist like Louis speaks and writes beautiful French.’ My mother of course, like many foreigners – but it was also natural for her – was in love with slang. That pained my father. But he also spoke and wrote Provençal. ‘The strength of France is in the provinces; it was the heresy of the Revolution to try to impose uniformity on the nation. Of course, with a democracy, what can you expect?’
‘It must have been a peculiar and unexpected marriage.’
No doubt: but they fell in love. I have never had reason to question that. So many other things, but not that …
PART TWO
1951
CHAPTER ONE
IN THOSE DAYS the Golden Arrow still had some style, but we didn’t realise it. Indeed, quite the reverse. All the way to Dover we sighed for the lost graces of pre-war Europe. Were we unfashion-able young men? I can’t say. I am inclined to think we must have been, for I have never felt in tune with my generation. Perhaps that is why I drift round Geneva like a stateless person.
The engine hissed steam, and when I look back now, I see Victoria Station like an old black-and-white movie. We had porters, two of them for three undergraduates. It would be only a few years before denim became the uniform of a student generation, but all three of us wore suits. Did we travel first-class? We may well have done.
We aspired to nonchalance, as the approved mode in which to face life, but only Jamie Fernie at that moment achieved it. His father was on the staff of SHAEF and he had made this journey in the last two vacations, but both Eddie Scrope-Smith and I were lively with excitement. Eddie was nineteen and it was his first time out of England, and as for me I had not been in France since we decamped in 1939.
‘Do you know what Wilkie Collins said to Dickens?’ Eddie asked. And without waiting to hear if we did, said, ‘“The morality of England is firmly based on the immorality of Paris.” I must say, I do hope so,’ and he rolled mischievous dark eyes and pushed a lock of hair off his left eye.
Jamie busied himself giving instructions to the porters. Our luggage was at last stowed aboard, and we settled ourselves in a carriage.
‘Do you think we should have some champagne?’ Eddie asked.
‘I wish you weren’t always so flash, Eddie,’ Jamie said.
‘Me flash? I’m a perfect beau.’
When Eddie used that word, which had become one of his favourites that summer term, he recalled not only the Regency, in which he delighted, but also the fiction of the Old South, and Tennessee Williams’ plays, the first of which had been staged in London. They enthralled him, and for several weeks the long vowels of the South invaded his speech.
The conversation of undergraduates can hardly seem other than banal in recollection. It may also appear impenetrable. So much of our talk was based on jokes that depended on secret allusions. You can find the same sort of thing in Byron’s correspondence, and it requires footnotes to elucidate the meaning. But in our case the passage of time has effaced even the content of our talk, let alone its form. I cannot remember another word of that journey, and yet, as I sit in my hotel room, its mood enfolds me, sweet and momentary as evening honeysuckle in the summer garden.
We were all at the point of splendid and irresponsible possibility, when life seems a toy, fluid as mercury, malleable as plasticine. We could be whatever we chose, and what we chose first was to be in love, with ourselves, with each other, with existence and the immediate moment which we enriched by our absorption in a wholly, or almost completely, imaginary past. Our love was tender, nervous and evanescent; it survives as the most distant and faint of woodland melodies. This is why it is possible to gaze back on youth with longing, even while particular instances may remind us that in those days we were just as ready to weep and despair as to laugh and rejoice. All our emotions were merely garments in which the whim of a moment clothed us, and we shed them as easily as we hopped into a bath before preening in front of the glass in a new suit.
Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat …
La Vie en Rose is the tune that sighs through those first days in Paris. And yet I cannot even remember where Jamie’s parents had their apartment. He was nervous before we met them, and they seemed an ill-matched pair. His father gave a good performance as the professional soldier, so good that I had no notion it was a performance. Eddie was more alert: ‘the Poona Pathan’, he called him. But I didn’t see beyond the caustic teasing which he adopted towards Eddie; I saw only the Colonel. As for his mother, there I felt myself on firmer ground. Mrs Fernie looked like an exceedingly well-bred horse, and this struck me as quite suitable because I knew she had some reputation as a novelist. It’s gone now of course, and when out of curiosity I got a couple of her novels from the London Library, they gave off an authentic, yet dead, smell of the forties. Her talent, I realised, lay in her ability to write like Elizabeth Bowen, so like Elizabeth Bowen that you were first surprised, checking back on the book’s spine, to see the name Laura Maudsley there. But that’s all there was, this echo of a stronger writer. Yet with what admiration, amounting even to reverence on the part of some, her books were received then. She doted on Jamie. He was her only child, and she saw him both as an ally in the cold war she conducted with Colonel Fernie, and as someone who had to be protected from her husband’s values; yet these were precisely the civilised standards she upheld in her writing, and in truth he embodied them in action far better than she did. All marriages have something of mystery in them to outsiders.
‘Terribly Oedipal, isn’t it,’ Eddie said, lolling on my bed wrapped in a huge deep-piled yellow bath towel, and admiring his reflection in the glass. ‘No wonder Jamie acts cold. As for the Colonel, it’s a case of “he loves me,” – he puffed out his lips and blew a kiss – “he loves me not.”’
‘How vain you are. You think every Colonel loves you.’
‘Well I do see I am rather a Colonel’s boy. I expect my National Service to be scrumptious.’
‘Oh shut up,’ I said, and threw a pillow at him.
‘Don’t fancy this dinner tonight,’ he said. ‘My lousy Frog will be revealed. It’s all right for you, ducky, speaking Frog like a native.’
‘Don’t let Cyril Connolly hear you call the language Frog.’
‘Why not? My mama tells me his own Frog is something dreadful.’
I began to shave.
‘I think I’ll tell the Colonel my own papa was the wrong sort of CO. That might choke him off. He won’t get it at first probably, like Hannay whe
n he is just about to ask Mary’s aunts what regiment Lancelot Wake commanded, and then remembers what, in their language, the initials stand for. But if he says, “And what did your dad do in the war, young fellow?” what do I tell him? You must see my dilemma. He might after all find it exciting to think I am a conchy’s son. Perhaps’ – he examined his fingernails – ‘perhaps I’ll just say he was in the RASC. Nobody could find the RASC sexy, could they?’
‘So you want to choke him off then, do you?’
‘Oh, I think so, I ever so truly and really and sincerely think so.’
*
‘And what did your dad do in the war, young fellow?’
I had been embarrassed to find myself alone in the drawing room with Colonel Fernie, whom I had surprised mixing a Martini. He hesitated, uncertain whether he should offer me one, and posed this question instead.
I looked round the gilt and heavy mahogany furniture of the Second Empire room and said,
‘He was killed, sir.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘rotten luck for you. And your Ma lives in South Africa, Jamie tells me.’
‘That’s right, sir. She married a South African pilot, and we went out there after the war.’
‘Marvellous country. We called in there on our way to the desert in ’42, and I went down with fever and spent three months convalescing. Marvellous country, I thought, and a great future. To tell you the truth I’ve thought of settling there myself some time, but Laura wouldn’t like it. She’s very cultured, moves in a narrow triangle.’
He jerked his head backward, so that it passed into the shadow of the table lamp beside which he had been mixing his drink, and the movement, of which he was probably quite unconscious himself, suggested a rejection of his wife’s standards, even a revulsion from them.