by Allan Massie
He kicked his chair away so that it fell over backwards, and was on his feet, emitting a wave of energy which seemed foreign to that silent kitchen, where even the clock was broken.
‘I don’t know why you have come here, but there’s nothing left. I tell you that, understand it well. They are diseased, both of them, riddled with the plague.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘“I don’t know what you are talking about.” How very English. I am talking about France and madness. I am talking about what I have suffered. Nobody will have told you about my sufferings, they pretend they don’t exist. As if it’s not something to be imprisoned by two minds that are in prison themselves, as if it’s not something to have been scorned as a child because of them, as if it’s not something to have seen my mother sitting here, in this chair, in the lap of a German soldier, while the other one entertained his officers in the drawing room. Now do you understand or do you still refuse to know what I am talking about?’
I was rescued by the return of Marthe to the kitchen. She was holding a small blond boy by the hand. She must have heard her son shrieking at me, and probably his precise words, for she at once told him to be quiet. That was no way to speak to Monsieur Etienne.
‘No, of course not,’ he said, ‘not to Monsieur Etienne. I was forgetting he is the son of a saint and hero. You must forgive me, Monsieur Etienne, for addressing you as if my words might mean anything to you. You will have to learn, Kurt,’ he seized the small boy by the hair, ‘that most things which ought to be said must not be said. It is a very difficult lesson, little brother, but if you attend to your Maman as I have not, then you will learn it. And grow up an imbecile.’
He shook the boy’s head, till I saw the child’s eyes water, and then released it, uttered a theatrical laugh and stamped out of the kitchen.
‘I am sorry for that,’ Marthe said. ‘He should not have spoken so. And he has been drinking. Now I expect you want some coffee.’
Well, yes, I did, I still did.
It is not often you encounter what seems like hatred, and it is unnerving. I think this is what makes expressions of racial antipathy so disturbing: the loosing of the irrational. Yet that cannot be enough in itself. What else, after all, is love?
That evening I nerved myself to ask my grandmother about the young man.
‘He is canaille. There is no more to be said.’
‘But why do you let him come here?’
‘It is not for me to keep a son from his mother. You may wonder why I keep Marthe. Well, there are worse sins than fornication, and she is loyal. She has suffered, herself, like me, with me. That is a bond. Are you bored here, Etienne?’
‘Bored? No, I’m not easily bored. But this afternoon I was disturbed. I didn’t like that young man …’
‘Of course not, he is canaille, I tell you …’
‘But I found him alarming …’
‘Come,’ she said, ‘I have something to show you, something for you. It is time you had it.’
She led me out of the room and upstairs. It was painful for her to mount the stairs. She had to grip the banister hard and use her arm to help her legs. When we reached the landing she led me along a corridor to the right. It was a part of the house I hadn’t been in before, for I had been careful to regard myself as being there on sufferance. She drew a key from a pocket in the front of her dress and unlocked the door that faced us at the end of the passage.
‘It is not,’ she said, ‘I assure you, Bluebeard’s Chamber.’
It was the first joke I had heard her make, and it didn’t seem like a good one, because I had a nervous feeling that the room would reveal something equally awful. That was silly of course, and it was just an ordinary room: evidently a study, the walls lined with book cases, the shutters closed, a couple of Oriental-looking rugs on the polished floor. Everything was clean and polished, even to a row of pipes that hung alongside a plaster statuette of the Madonna. There were photographs in silver frames on a table to the right of the desk, and I was surprised to see that the largest was of my mother and myself. It was a photograph she kept on her dressing table: I was perhaps five years old and we were on a beach.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘this is your father’s study. Nothing is changed, but of course it is yours now, Etienne.’
A small pile of letters had been placed beside a pad of blotting paper, just below the inkstand. I picked up the top letter. The seal was unbroken.
My grandmother lowered herself into a high-backed chair beside the table with the photographs. She indicated that I should sit at the desk. As I did so, I saw the room as in a mirror. Only, the figure behind the desk was my father; he had pushed the spectacles back on his forehead and was lighting a pipe and watching me over the flame. I didn’t know what I had done wrong.
‘It is time we talked,’ she said. ‘I have been waiting for this moment for six years, to see you in that chair. When you told me of that appalling young man, I knew it had come.’
‘Do you know why I came here before I said I would? I mean, I know you don’t because I haven’t told you.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I am just glad that you did.’
‘But it does,’ and I recounted the conversation at Mrs Fernie’s dinner table.
She shook her head.
‘I knew none of his literary friends, though he would speak of them. I cannot recall the man of whom you speak. Obviously, he had talent, or Lucien would not have published him. Obviously, he is canaille, like the wretched Yves. Your father was too generous.’ She picked up the photograph of my mother and myself. ‘He was deceived by his generosity. Your mother was very beautiful, of course. Is she still?’
‘I think so. I think most people do.’
‘Does she speak of your father?’
‘Sometimes, of the days before the war.’
‘She abandoned him. I told him she would. When the war comes, I said, she will belong to England, not to France. He could not see that.’
It was not a view of my mother that was familiar to me.
‘He was a hero,’ she said, ‘and a patriot. You are very like him sitting at his desk. He used to wear just that same frown.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I can claim to be like him. He was obviously very clever, I’m just … ordinary, I only scraped into Cambridge, you know, and my supervisors don’t think much of my essays.’
‘None of that is important. You are very like him, even to some of your gestures. I see him in you, very often.’
A little gust of wind rattled thin branches against the shutters. The lights flickered. Far down the valley a dog barked; further off another answered; then another. The fringes of the lampshade fluttered and the light’s reflection danced on the row of my father’s pipes.
‘How did he die? My mother never told me.’
‘Like a hero. He had an idea of France, and Frenchmen failed him. As they have failed heroes since the Revolution.’
She smoothed her hands over her dress.
‘I like seeing you there. I hope you will regard this room as your own. Now that you have come home.’
The word was like the turning of a key; but which side of the door was I? She rose and, for the first time, brushed my brow with her lips, and I listened to the sound of her footsteps die away. I was left to myself and the murmur of the branches against the shutter.
I was left with the ghost of my father. Could personality still inhabit a room? After so many years? And what sort of personality was it here? I pulled open the top drawer of the desk. It was full of papers, all arranged in order, held together in neat piles by red ribbon. I fingered them without untying the ribbons. There was too much here: letters, receipts, anything; no place to start. I tried another drawer, and found a stack of leather-bound volumes each stamped with the date of a year. They were reflective journals, notebooks rather than strict diaries, but burrowing through them I came to the year of my birth, the month, the date:
And how strange, if it came to that, to be a son finding himself in this sort of relationship to an unknown parent.
‘It is such an involuntary relationship. When I held the baby in my arms, he seemed to have no connection with me or even – and this is strange – with his mother. It was as if God himself had breathed life into the little body …’
I put the book down, hearing my mother’s derisive laugh; and yet this same man had smoked these pipes that hung there and which were still polished. And had he prayed to that Madonna? The room oppressed me, overladen with the being of another from whom personality had departed. Yet wasn’t it precisely to discover that personality that I had come here? On the other hand – I picked up the photograph that showed me with my mother – since I could sense no correspondence between myself and the child pictured there, who had nevertheless indubitably been me myself, what chance did I have of achieving reconciliation with a dead father I had scarcely known?
On an impulse, I fished in the desk and found writing-paper. There was a pen there too and the inkstand was full of new ink, as if my grandmother had kept everything ready for me, as if the turning of the key in the lock had been like that moment when the prince cuts through the cobwebs to release the Sleeping Beauty from her trance. To break out of mine, I would write to Eddie. I paused, pen suspended, conscious of the enormity of the attempt to open one life to another.
I spent much of the next fortnight in that study. We were in high summer now – July – and from the middle of the morning the heat, rarely disturbed by a little breeze, baked the earth. I would rise early, usually to find Marthe in her bare feet in the kitchen swabbing the stone flags. She would give me a bowl of coffee and a cut of yesterday’s bread to dunk in it, and then I would stride up the hillside to a grove of chestnut trees, from where one could see right down our valley to the yellowish stretch of flat country which marked the point at which it entered the wider vale of the next river. The mountains backed up behind me as I sat against the trunk of a tree and smoked. The air was keen with the morning and the scent of thyme and marjoram. Sometimes sheep bleated from higher up the hill, and one morning I heard their shepherd play a little tune on a reedy pipe which carried the imagination back to Arcady. Stretched out on the rough ground below the tree, listening to the myriad of little sounds, which only deepened the silence that was the background to their music, it was possible to imagine that there was no such thing as History.
But in my father’s study History was all too present. I set about things methodically, reading his journals in order. They by no means offered a complete record of his life, for there were many blank periods, and I soon realised that my father, whatever his literary talents might have been, was no Boswell. His capacity for introspection was limited. He lacked the shamelessness of the born journaliser. Many of his views seemed to me to be no more than the reflections of what he heard others say, so that someone unconcerned with Lucien de Balafré would have found him of interest only as a specimen, hardly at all as an individual. When he wrote of his courtship – and it was a courtship – of my mother, his language was quite without any individuality: a display of conventional ineptitude, in which I could not recognise my mother. He seemed humourless, unless there was a certain deadpan humour in his description of his first visit to Gore Court, my mother’s father’s house in Northamptonshire.
And yet I found myself liking him – he was so sorely troubled in a priggish way, and so surprised by his feeling for my mother, whom he knew from the first to belong to an alien species, not because of her nationality, but because of her temperament.
As I read I became aware of the depths of my ignorance. My study of French History at Cambridge had so far taken me no further than the July Revolution of 1830. I had read Voltaire and doted on Saint-Simon. I knew something of the Dreyfus case and more about France’s appalling losses in the First War. I had read a little Gide – La Symphonie Pastorale and Les Faux-Monnayeurs – and some Balzac, but when it came to other French novels, the only writer with whom I could claim much acquaintance was Simenon. I had as a child revered General de Gaulle, who seemed to me to represent the honour of France in a profoundly satisfactory manner, and it still amused me to proclaim his moral and intellectual superiority to Winston Churchill, whom I liked to describe in Belloc’s admirable and ridiculous phrase as ‘that Yankee careerist’; but really I knew very little about him, and nothing that hadn’t appeared in the newspapers I read. He had been engaged for the past three years in the movement which he called Le Rassemblement du Peuple Français, which had struck me, from a distance, as admirably exciting, but I had so far found no one in France with whom I felt I could discuss this phenomenon, and I was obscurely certain that my grandmother would not be that person.
Now, reading my father’s journals, which were far more concerned with the discussion of abstract, quasi-philosophical political matters than with the details of his private life – if he had one, beyond his mother and his marriage – I found myself bumping against names which had either only a shadowy significance to me, or none at all. There was André Malraux of whom I had heard; hadn’t he written about China and done something in the Spanish War – but for which side? There was Henri de Montherlant whose novels poor Mr Fielding used so conspicuously and proudly to carry about with him. But who, for instance, were Drieu and Robert Brasillach and Louis (? Aragon, it seemed from references) with whom he held such animated discussions and whom he seemed to regard as of public importance? Evidently there was much background reading that would be necessary if I was to make any sense of my father at all. Which was disheartening, and I wondered, being intellectually lazy, if there was any point to it.
Yet I felt, obscurely, committed, all the more so because my memories of him were so sparse and unsatisfactory. And also because I found that I rather liked him. He was so different from me. I couldn’t imagine him cavorting with Eddie and laughing at the way he eyed up mulatto sailors or making a cult of Flannagan and Allen and taking every opportunity to see the Crazy Gang Show at the Victoria Palace – Eddie and I had seen the latest one three times in one week of the Easter vacation. And this wasn’t simply a difference between England and France – there existed after all French music hall, I had heard of Chevalier and Piaf, but the man about whom I was learning was evidently foreign to that side of French culture; which indeed he might not, I thought, have been prepared to accept as culture.
Was he a bore? I wondered. I could see that in some respects, and for some people, he might have been. But he must have had charm, which he could hardly convey in writing. Polly would not have married him otherwise, would not have fallen for him. Charm was something she needed and responded to. Roddy, for all his faults, had charm.
I traced in my father a desire to succeed, but on his own terms. He returned time and again to the consequences for France of what he described as the abdication of the gens du bien – the well-born men of property. According to him, all the ills of the country – Socialism, irreligion, the dominance of the Jewish interest and high finance – stemmed from the disinclination of men from families like ours to involve themselves in public life.
I was puzzled by his list of enemies. According to my English education, Socialists and financiers were in natural opposition to each other. Lucien seemed to lump them together. How could this be? I wished there was someone to explain.
Then there were his essays. They had titles like ‘The Corruption of Power’, ‘The Inevitable Decadence of Republics’, ‘The Cult of the Individual’, ‘The Failure of our Institutions’, ‘The Latinity of France’, ‘Towards a New Social Dimension’; and they were full of abstract nouns and abstract reasoning. No doubt they would help me to understand him – or his mind at least, by no means the same thing, I now realised. Unfortunately I couldn’t bring myself to read them. They were dea
d as mutton. I felt I was wasting my time.
And yet, despite this, every morning I took myself to the study and delved in his desk, and returned there in the evening for another session. It was like a drug, and it had the same isolating effect. Often I simply sat in the window-seat watching the light die over the Midi, and it was perhaps in those half hours of twilight that I began to come to experience some sense of communion with him. He too must have watched the gold slip away from the trunks of the olive trees, seen them turn silvery-grey, then lose themselves in a thick obscurity.
One morning, having the night before read a poem he had written on Roman Provence, I took a car, an old Citroën, which I had found in a stable and had overhauled in the village – and drove to St-Rémy, and then up the hill, past the hospital where Van Gogh was confined, to the Roman ruins of Glanum. They were deserted, vineyards surrounded them, and fields of maize, the arch that had been the gateway of the town rose like an outcrop of nature, as much part of the land as the rocky hills, les Alpilles, which broke the azure of the sky with their jagged fringe. There were sheep bleating in the distance and, for me, it was no more than agreeable pastoral given a certain edge by the antiquity of the setting. But for Lucien it had been more. This represented the City, that ordered Roman world of intelligence and significant form. That there had been subversive undercurrents in Rome I knew even then – I had read enough Virgil to be aware of that – conscious that even the celebrant of imperial virtue and the imperial mission heard discordant other-worldly strains of music, that a disturbing knowledge underlay the abstract nouns. And yet there was something disturbing in my father’s vision too. A line, which I took to be a quotation, appeared several times in his pages: ‘la beauté véritable est au terme des choses’ – ‘true beauty is found at the limit of things’ – I translate for the benefit of my purely hypothetical grandchildren, if they should ever read this document, as I pored over my father’s notebooks – for it seems unlikely that they will read French. And if they don’t, does that mean that my father’s forebodings are justified? Are we really approaching the end of that historic civilisation of Europe, which – I was beginning to see – he had devoted his life to sustaining? And if we are, will they find ‘la beauté véritable’ there?