by Allan Massie
Jeanne-Marie had her own cat, a black Angora with yellow eyes; she was called Nefertiti, ‘because the Egyptians were crazy about their cats, and so am I about mine. Isn’t she heaven? She’s the most intelligent person in the house, her only rival for intelligence is Henry.’
Nefertiti was given to scratching and biting, and both the younger girls were frightened of her: ‘She doesn’t like them because they used to chase her when they were little. She’s pre-war, Nefertiti’ – like the Perrier-Jouet, I thought. But if they were frightened by her ill temper, Jeanne-Marie valued her all the more on that account. It was, I suppose, a matter of pride for her that this savage and independent beauty would drape herself round her neck, filling the immediate air with a rasping purr.
There were rabbits in hutches in the garden, but often out of the hutches lolloping round with that air of not knowing where they are or what they are expected to do which is characteristic of rabbits. There was a grey parrot in a cage which was placed out on the verandah every morning as soon as the sun had moved round, away from its favoured corner; the woodwork there had been destroyed by its beak, so that it was now only rarely allowed free of the cage. When it was released it waddled across the floor, clucking disapproval at any dog that dared to lift its head or at any cat which ventured within sight. The parrot was Armand’s and ‘It is perhaps the only parrot in France which is not called Polly, and that’s not because of your mother, because I had him before you were born, before they were married, but because I got him from a Chinaman who had already named him Wu. And Wu he still is.’
‘Daddy will keep calling Wu “him” and “he” but it’s really she,’ Jeanne-Marie said. ‘It was always he, but then one day Wu laid an egg, so that proves Wu is really a girl. She’s an old lady now of course, but parrots live for ages.’
‘So do donkeys,’ Tot said. ‘We have one donkey, Etienne, which is at least forty years old. Jacques, that’s our gardener, says nobody has ever seen a dead donkey.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
There were three donkeys, and the two younger ones used to be loaded with panniers when we went for a picnic, either down to the beach or beyond the house, in the forest. The oldest donkey had been retired but still insisted on accompanying the party.
These picnics took place almost every day, they were part of the routine of summer at Les Trois-Puits. Life started early in the household. Dominique, Tante Berthe’s maid of all work, was busy in the kitchen by six. My bedroom being immediately above it, at the side of the house, facing east towards the forest, I would be awakened by her singing as she worked. She was a stout red-armed Norman girl; I am used myself by thinking that the tanner’s daughter who had caught the eye of Duke William’s father had been of the same robust and sensual sort. It seemed to give a sense of historical continuity to what was otherwise a very mid-twentieth century gathering. Yet even without such, the continuity existed. Les Trois-Puits had been in Tante Berthe’s family for several generations, having originally been bought by a Napoleonic General – her great-great-grandfather, I think, though I may have omitted one generation.
Coffee was served us in big thick white pottery bowls, of local, or perhaps Breton, manufacture. Milky bubbles frothed at the rim of the bowls and we would dunk thick cuts of bread, fresh from the baker, in the coffee. A second slice of bread would be eaten with white Norman butter and apricot jam. Jeanne-Marie always slipped a piece of bread and butter to the spaniel Henry, who had, she explained to me the first morning, a passion for butter and cheese. There was fruit on the table, but few of us ate fruit at breakfast, though Armand would always take an apple, invariably, to tease his daughters, quoting the old saw about an apple a day; ‘Of course,’ he would add, ‘I know that Toinette has no wish to keep Dr Corbier away. She dotes on him, Etienne, though he has mutton-chop whiskers and is at least seventy.’
‘What a fib, Papa,’ Toinette cried, ‘he’s not only seventy, Etienne, but his own breath stinks of rotten apples and when he looks at your throat and commands you to say “Ah”, he always contrives to tickle your cheeks with his whiskers. He’s an old horror.’
‘Don’t forget, Toinette,’ Jeanne-Marie said, ‘that the old horror was a hero during the war. When the Germans were here, Etienne, he kept a family of Jews hidden in the cellar of his house – it’s that big one, behind railings and monkey-puzzle trees which you see to the right of the Hôtel de Ville in the square. And he looked after wounded English airmen too, they didn’t mind what his breath smelled of. It was one of them gave us Henry, in fact, the sweet. When he came back to say thank you after the war, and we got to know him.’
But the war and its memories cast no shadow on that happy house. It was only mentioned in connection with acts of courage or generosity.
Coming from the pinched aridity of my grandmother’s house, and laden with memories of the silent terraces of Roddy’s farm where the bottles of Cape gin and Cape brandy served as symbols of the isolation of husband from wife, it was natural, I suppose, that I should fall in love with the whole family, who accepted me as easily and happily as if I had been a new dog, and made no demands on me, but simply showed, by the ease with which I was included in their daily life, that they were pleased to have me there. I would wake up in the morning knowing I would be happy as sunshine all day long.
But there was more to it than that; I had also fallen particularly in love. The girl was Freddie, Jeanne-Marie’s college friend, whom, till this moment, I have not mentioned, not knowing how to write about her. And I still don’t know.
They say first love is always the same and always individual. But this wasn’t first love. I had been in love often enough. And yet it was first love because it was the first love of which I knew I had no need to feel ashamed, and also my first love for a girl which attached itself to a person and not just to a body.
And yet it started with the body, as it always has for me. When I first saw her unfold herself from a deckchair on the terrace, I said to myself, ‘This girl is lovely.’ That’s my abiding impression, though her features, except for big brown eyes which contrasted with her blonde hair, cut short like a boy’s, were too clumsy for beauty: her nose was snubby and her mouth too big, and her lower jaw would become too long. And yet she was lovely: she wore that afternoon a white aertex shirt and very brief white shorts, and her legs were long, thin and bronzed. There was a golden sheen to her, touched under her eyes and at the edges with blue.
You cannot conduct a private love affair in a house full of girls, where the whole family is on holiday and people do everything together. I don’t suppose in the first week I was there that Freddie and I were alone by ourselves, and I can’t imagine how we could have found the opportunity to have any conversation that did not include the others. Yet this wasn’t frustrating, though I went to bed thinking of Freddie and woke with her image in my mind. I didn’t touch her that week, except once when we were playing tennis on the hard court at the top end of the garden. It was in poor condition, for nothing had been done to it since before the war, and there were several cracks, ruts and bumps. One afternoon, when we were playing doubles – Freddie and me against Armand and Jeanne-Marie – she stumbled while trying to make a return and fell. I helped her up, and for a minute felt the warm weight of her arm, slightly damp with sweat, around my neck, breathed in at close quarters her almondy smell, and found myself looking full into her face, our lips no more than six inches apart. Then she disengaged herself, and sat down, bending her knee to examine the damage, and I knelt beside her, and saw a trickle of blood force its way to the surface and creep, a shy stream, through the grime from the court and break out into a sudden lake on the brown skin below the knee. She dabbed at it with a handkerchief, and swore (very prettily), and licked the corner of the handkerchief, an inch of pointed pink tongue emerging between the lips that I so wanted to kiss. Then she tied the handkerchief round the wound and jumped to her feet ignoring the hand which I hopefully held out.
Sometimes
in the evening we used to bicycle down into the little port and sit outside the Café des Marins, drinking citrons pressés or beer or perhaps cider, and watching the boats unload their glittering catches while gulls squawked overhead and dived and stole and quarrelled. I think it was there that we were first alone together.
Of course the obvious thing to say was ‘I love you. I want you to be part of me, to share my life for ever and ever amen,’ because that was exactly the thought that filled my mind. But even more of course I didn’t because, first, I didn’t dare to, and second, because that wasn’t, with everything it contained even if leaving unsaid, the sort of thing which, in 1951, it seemed to me you could say out of the blue to a nice girl who was living in your uncle’s house. No doubt that is absurd, and I could perfectly well have said it and it would have pleased her. But I didn’t. I watched her thin fingers lie against the frosted glass of her lemon drink, and I drank my beer, and struggled to find words that would keep her there, and remove any fear that she would decide it was time we mounted our bicycles and returned to the house. (But how were we alone together? I know I hadn’t summoned up the courage to suggest we should ride down to the harbour by ourselves. Perhaps – surely – Jeanne-Marie had accompanied us, and then gone off on some message.)
I was ignorant of girls. I had never been to bed with one, and wasn’t, I confess, certain just how one would go about things when one at last found oneself in that desirable position. I supposed things would happen naturally. And though I wanted to take Freddie to bed, I was also terrified of doing so; and was anyway in that first stage of love, in which emotions just begin to crystallise, when I would have been satisfied with holding her in my arms and kissing her. Satisfied is an inadequate word; I would have been enraptured.
Perhaps we talked of the dogs. I don’t remember.
What I do recall is that my nervous idyll was interrupted by the arrival of Jeanne-Marie – whether she had completed her message or whether she had sent us on as an advance party – and that I was as relieved by her arrival as disappointed. Of course it broke into a beautiful trembling moment, but it also meant that nothing could go wrong now, and that normality could be resumed. As it was, and very happily. But that night, I leaned out of my window, and the air was full of honeysuckle after the day’s heat. The dark was thick and purple. There should have been a moon to complete my mood, and make it perfect, but thick clouds had blown up, and now the night was still, heavy and languorous; and in the dark I saw Freddie, her legs crossed as she sat at the café table, and the long line of her thigh perfect as the rhythms of a Greek vase. Naturally I tried to form a poem; naturally it didn’t work.
That brief, almost silent, encounter confirmed my love. I felt, apart from anything else, enormous relief and gratitude. I was purged. Guilt fell away from me, like the emergence of a butterfly. If anyone had told me Freddie bathed in asses’ milk, I would, in love and thankfulness, have made the rounds of donkey-owners to obtain it.
The first time we kissed – leaning against a gate where the garden gave on to the woods – in twilight with doves cooing in the pine trees, I said, as our lips parted and we looked each other in the face and I drew my finger along the line of her eager lips, ‘What a lot of time we have wasted.’ It was a line from the cinema and I didn’t mean it, for I knew we had escaped from time – we were living in an eternal present which enfolded the future and made the past meaningless. Poetry came to my rescue, as it does in youth, ‘“I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved; were we not weaned till then”,’ and Freddie drew me against her and silenced the poet with a kiss.
‘That was English poetry?’
I nodded and kissed her too. The only French poem I could think of was Ronsard’s advice to his girl, that she should look at that morning’s rose, and I was not, we were not, ready for the mature cynicism of all those poets who have followed Horace and, recognising the brevity of love, told us to ‘pluck the day’.
Why should we have been, when we both knew that our love was for all time?
I loved everything about her. I loved her innocent vanity which was coupled with dissatisfaction with her looks. I remember her poring over an illustrated magazine, gazing at the photograph of some famous actress with perfect classical features, and sighing, ‘How I wish I looked like that.’ I kissed the back of her neck and pressed my hand on her bony shoulder, ‘You look better than that.’
‘Oh no, never.’
‘And my legs are too thin,’ she sighed another day, stretching them out in the sun, which they seemed to draw in and then reflect.
‘They’re beautiful,’ I said, and indeed she loved them herself; else why did she wear shorts and acquire that marvellous tan?
I loved pleasing her vanity. One day, in the port, she stopped to admire an embossed leather belt. In the softest, finest leather – kid perhaps – dyed a smokey blue. She hungered for it, and I at once said, ‘You must have it.’ She protested that it was far too expensive, but I insisted and fastened it round her waist there in the shop. And she kissed me, full on the lips, in front of the shopkeeper, who purred and gloated over us, as happy in our love, it seemed, as if he had been a theatrical producer and we his first and most daring creation.
I loved her in every attitude, and I dwell on them in memory now as if I was pursuing the letters which we did not write to each other. I loved her the way that in those years I loved Keats, whom I have not been able to read for thirty years. Have you ever had the experience of coming, in upland wanderings, to a place that all at once spoke to you with complete familiarity, as if you belonged there, and had come home after weary travel? It has happened to me twice: once in Calabria, in a valley in the high Sila, where in the heat of the day, after crossing a bare ridge of burning limestone, I found greenery, and a little spring and a shrine to the Madonna erected by a broken column from the ancient world; distant cowbells tinkled through the blue and golden light and wildflowers grew, purple, pink and white around my feet. And another time in the Scottish Borders, when I had been walking through an October mist, and the sun broke out as I came over a valley and looked down on the ruin of some old castle. The landscape was quite still. There was no sound in the air, and fringes of mist hung around the broken battlements. I can’t account for the feeling on either occasion, but there was magic in the air, and peace. That was how I loved Freddie.
But I also loved her with memories of the morning kraal-smoke on the high veld, of the surge of life imparted by a morning gallop across that springy turf. (When we went riding at Armand’s, our mounts were two fat roan ponies which could hardly be urged into anything more lively than a trot.) I talked to her of South Africa and promised to take her there.
She used to read in the evening by the light fixed up on the terrace which attracted so many moths. She never seemed to notice them. She read with utter concentration. She read Colette, whom I had never read, but I was pleased to see her doing so because I remembered a review by (I think) Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times in which he described her as a ‘national glory, something to enjoy as well as be proud of, like Chambertin, or the Luxembourg Gardens or the Provençal spring’, and it delighted me to see her reading a book which could be compared to a wine or a landscape. It seemed so right.
‘What’s it about?’
‘Oh, love and life. What else?’
‘Would I like it?’
‘Listen …’
And she put her hand on mine, and read tome, her slow delivery not only condescending to any difficulty I might have in following literary French, but also bringing out the melody of the rhythms.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And like us, darling … it says everything, doesn’t it?’
It was the first time she had called me darling.
‘More than that. Don’t read any more. Don’t spoil it. Come into the garden …’
It was still warm under the apple trees, though the grass was wet with de
w. We walked with my arm around her shoulder to the end of the garden and listened to the sea throb below.
Was it the next morning she came into my room and woke me before it was light, and said she wanted to go down to the sea? Perhaps it was not the next morning, and yet the evening and morning are joined together in my memory.
She sat on a rock as the waves lapped below her.
‘It was the curlews woke me,’ she said, for there was a moorland on which sheep were pastured, beyond the point, and when the breeze was in the south we could hear the melancholy two notes of their cry. The back of her hand lay in a little pool left behind by the receding tide, and when she lifted it she presented it to me to smell and lick.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said, ‘I slept badly all night. It was excitement.’
‘I fell asleep thinking of you.’
‘Did you dream of me?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘I haven’t dreamt of you yet, darling. I know I’ll do so when I have to go back to Paris …’
‘It’s not yet.’
‘No, but it’s nearer and nearer. I don’t want it to happen.’
‘Freddie …’
‘Yes?’
‘I wish …’ I pressed her hand to my mouth.
‘So do I. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before …’
I tasted the salt on her skin.
Nor have I. Nor have I. And I never will. My blood sang the message. My lips formed the words and I leaned over and kissed her below the left ear. Then she turned and was in my arms …