by Allan Massie
‘Or whisky?’
‘Not whisky either.’
‘Come on, Higson, what is there?’
‘Might stretch to a drop of gin. It’s my own gin, mind you. But I’ll not grudge it to you.’ He shuffled off, returning a few minutes later with a bottle, perhaps a quarter full, and a jug of water.
‘There’s some letters come for you. Mostly bills, though, so I burned them. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Always burn anything in brown envelopes, that’s what your uncle used to tell me. There’s one from Miss Polly though. I’d have sent it after you, if I didn’t think it would get lost. “Better keep it for the boy,” that’s what I said.’
He pushed me the letter with the South African stamp.
‘Oh dear,’ my mother wrote. ‘I wish you’d consulted me first, and now I’m afraid this letter will be too late. You really are silly and tiresome, darling.
‘You tell me you were off to see your French relations, and it’s really not an awfully good idea as I’m afraid you’ll have found out by the time you get this. Your grandmother’s an old witch, you know, and I daresay completely bats now. Frightfully pi, and like most pi people I’ve ever known, the most awful liar. She absolutely loathed me of course, whatever she has told you. Forked tongues also ran where I was concerned.
‘Oh dear this is difficult. I absolutely loathe writing letters, and wish you were here, though poor Roddy doesn’t. He’s not making much sense these days, poor lamb. Not that I can really think of him as a lamb because most of the time he’s an absolute swine. His ma’s doing – I have been a teeny bit unlucky with my mas-in-law.
‘But that’s not what I wanted to say, only it’s awfully hard, dearie, to get to the point. Which is that I have tried to keep you from the French side of your family, and you may not have liked it, but it was for the best. I know you think I’m a featherbrain, and I daresay you’re right, but there are some things I can’t stand. Aurora was all wrong in what she did, and so was your father, and that’s why I left him, because I knew in my bones what was going to happen. France was no good, we both thought that, but his way of making it better was worse.
‘I knew all that straight away that time he took me to Germany. He said they were awful, but I could see he was impressed. And it’s ever so silly to be impressed by Germans, they always get things wrong, even I know that.
‘Please write to me and tell me if you have been to France. I am anxious, really I am, darling.
‘Love and kisses, Polly.’
I didn’t write. I let France and my French visit fall like a silence between us. What was there to say? That my heart was broken?
Instead I sat in London, moping and pretending to read for my next term, Higson grumbling round me like a mother hen. And Cambridge, when I returned, was flat as the surrounding country. I wrote to Freddie and even posted some of the letters, but got no reply. Perhaps my letters were intercepted. And when a letter came, with a French stamp, from Jeanne-Marie, it was days before I could bring myself to open it.
ENTR’ACTE
1951–9
OVER THE NEXT few years it was only from Jeanne-Marie that I heard. She wrote to me every two to three months, though I rarely replied, and then briefly. I had conceived a loathing of France and the French, and there were times when this seemed even to extend to my dear and delightful cousin. Those were bad years for me, and I don’t want to write about them. Fortunately they are not part of the story which I am trying to tell, for there is little in the memory of that period of my life which does not make my flesh crawl with shame and disgust. There was indeed too much flesh in it. I had, through my grandfather’s influence, found myself a job in a merchant bank – it would be more exact to say that the job was provided for me. I worked hard because industry deadens feeling, and I was successful. None of my colleagues can have felt any warmth for me, and I was satisfied with this.
Everyone I slept with was Freddie, and I abused them. Looking back, I think I was a bit mad in my twenties.
I had one other contact with France. Twice a year I wrote to my grandmother, a formal, cold letter in which I assured her I was well and enquired after her health. I was perversely pleased to perform this dead duty. I told her how much money I was making. It was a sort of mocking triumph.
Jeanne-Marie wrote to me that Freddie was married, then that she was going to have a baby, then that she had lost the child, and sunk into depression. I told myself she wasn’t even a memory, though scarcely a night passed that I didn’t long for her. Jeanne-Marie informed me that Freddie had been committed to a clinic, that she had run away, taken a car, crashed it and killed herself. ‘Whenever we met in these last months, she used to talk of you, Etienne. With a faraway look in her eyes. It was terrible what was done.’
So we were both victims. Very well. I picked up a slut in a coffee-bar and took her to Brighton for the weekend. I doubt if it was what she had hoped for. Anyway, there was a bit of bother, we were asked to leave the hotel, and only my full wallet prevented it from becoming a police matter. When we parted, she told me I should see a doctor. I think that was brave of her, and kind, in the circumstances. Needless to say, I didn’t follow her advice; not then. Psychoanalysis came later; without success.
The next death was my grandmother’s. I was in New York at the time, and so there was no question of my attending the funeral. Probably I wouldn’t have gone anyway. But I was, of course, her principal heir. It was necessary to visit Provence. I travelled south in the first days of December.
The business with lawyers was transacted as briskly as is possible with French country notaries. My own experience had made me sharp in such affairs (as in those which, for want of a better term, may be called ‘of the heart’). I was aware that they looked on me with some curiosity, but I answered few of their questions and no direct ones. It was impossible to say what I would do with my inheritance.
My visit to the house was brief. Its air of desolation was more intense than I remembered and anyway the mistral was blowing. Marthe had gone – had Jeanne-Marie told me of that? – and a slatternly domestic was acting as caretaker. I confirmed her in her post and told her that I would arrange for the lawyer to continue to pay her wages. Why now? Someone had to live there.
My grandmother had gone out of life very neatly. There was only a tiny void where she had been. Her smell still lingered in her bedroom, and the velvet that covered the prie-Dieu was worn to shreds.
I unlocked the Bluebeard’s Chamber that had been my father’s study. The room was cold and damp, but I sat there behind his desk, and smoked a cigar. It was later that I had his papers collected and sent to me in London.
I stayed in the hotel in the town and ate little and badly. After my meal I took a turn along the street but, soon defeated by the morose wind and rain, returned to the hotel bar and settled myself with a cigar and the inevitable pastis of the South, which, without meaning to, I had felt myself compelled to order. There was a group of four men playing cards and drinking pastis like myself, while half a dozen young men disported themselves around a billiard table.
One of them broke away and lounged across the room in my direction. He swung out a chair from the table and sat astride it, his forearms resting on its back. He looked at me without removing the cigarette which dangled from the corner of his mouth.
‘I’ve been wondering when you would show up,’ he said. ‘You don’t remember me?’
I didn’t like the mockery in his eyes and told him that I had no recollection of him at all. But I did of course; it was Marthe’s son Yves. He had been angry before; now my first impression was that he had come to terms with himself. Yet there was something repellent in his air of a lounging beast, the suggestion which emanated from him, that always, given the chance or the opportunity, he would do the dirt on life. So it amused me to force him to tell me who he was, to admit to having made less impression than he was accustomed to leave.
‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry,
but I don’t remember meeting you.’
‘So the old bitch is dead,’ he said, ‘and the other, well, she’s had her come-uppance too.’
‘The lawyers tell me she’s ill. I’m sorry to hear it. She served my grandmother well.’
‘That’s not the way we talk now,’ he said.
‘Perhaps not, but it’s true all the same.’
‘I remember you,’ he said, ‘you were stuck-up then too.’
‘Oh, stuck up,’ I said. ‘That’s your choice of word. I don’t suppose I have a higher opinion of myself than you do of yourself.’
‘So you do remember me?’
‘I remember an angry boy.’ I was tired of the game.
‘But you remember my little brother better. My little half-brother. You were soft on him. I reckon you fucked him. Well,’ he laughed, ‘you won’t have the chance to do that again, not unless you arrive where the likes of you deserve to be.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Why don’t you go back and join your friends. They must be missing your conversation.’
‘Oh, but I’ve been waiting to speak to you.’ And then he told me how Jacques had killed Simon, the garagiste. He dwelled on the details. And how Jacques was now in prison, and how Marthe had had a stroke when she heard.
‘Catatonic,’ he repeated the word several times. ‘Catatonic, that’s what they call it. Makes me laugh.’
Then, changing his tone, he told me about himself, about the difficulties he had experienced, how he was out of work and how his wife had … oh, I forget what; it spilled out in the practised tones of the beggar and indeed, by the end, I was glad to pass him a wad of notes simply to be rid of him. It was a gesture of disgust, using money to put him at a distance, but the disgust was not directed only at him, for, looking at that ugly yellow face, listening to him spew out his accumulated resentment at the hand life had dealt him, I saw my own image there. His coil of bitterness was mine too; his vomit and self-pity mine.
He stuffed the notes in his pocket.
‘I wonder how you dare to come here. After what your father brought on the place. And Jacques too. Simon has a family, don’t forget. Why, there are times when I wonder if my own life may not be in danger because of what they did. No fault of mine.’
‘Nothing is,’ I said.
As he made his way into the street, he paused under the lamp-post and spat into the gutter.
Have you ever visited a French prison? I would not recommend it. Doubtless they are no worse than prisons elsewhere, in material conditions, and better than some. That’s not the point. It is rather that a French prison expresses the Cartesian duality of mind and body, and at the same time a hideous distortion of it. Intellect rules the bodies of certain men in order to annihilate their minds. Moreover the stench of shit permeates the disinfectant.
It had taken a long time to get an order to permit me to see Jacques. By some quirk or anomaly, though too young to be guillotined, he was old enough to be lodged in the adult section of the Saint Paul prison in Lyon. (I don’t know why he was in Lyon; but that was where the prison bureaucracy had assigned him.)
‘This is where the Gestapo murdered the heroes of the Resistance,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that’s why I’m here. After all, Simon was a true hero of the Resistance himself. There were many women, not only my poor mother, on whom he revenged the insults they had inflicted on our beautiful France. Can I have a cigarette, brother?’
‘I didn’t know you knew.’
‘I always knew.’
‘Why didn’t you say, years ago?’
‘What was there to say? Besides, perhaps it never occurred to me that you didn’t.’
He smiled. His smile at least hadn’t changed. He was very thin, and the bones stood out on the back of his hands. His hair was cropped close as it had been when we first met (‘because of the lice’) and his cheekbones were sharp, but they hadn’t managed to suppress his capacity for laughter. I looked on him in wonder.
‘I wish I’d known you knew. Your mother told me you didn’t and made me promise that I wouldn’t tell you. Otherwise …’
I waved my hand, as if to wipe away the years and assure him that everything would have been different if we could have confessed our fraternity to each other.
‘What about the cigarette then?’
I pushed the packet towards him.
‘Ah,’ he said, drawing the smoke into his lungs, ‘a real cigarette. If you want to do something for me, fix with the guard to give me a regular supply. You could afford that, couldn’t you? It’d make all the difference.’
‘Could you trust him?’
‘Sure, I’ll show you which.’
‘Jacques,’ I said, ‘I didn’t believe you. When you said you would shoot Simon. I thought it was just a boy talking.’
‘It was a boy talking, brother. But it was a man who did it. Even though, according to the law …’ he laughed.
‘But why? What good did it do? What about your own life?’
‘Oh, my life? Well, that has to take its chance. Besides, I couldn’t bear seeing him about, strutting round his pumps, thinking himself a hell of a fellow and sure he had got away with it. That’s all really.’
‘I saw Yves,’ I said.
‘He’s not your brother, you know.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Did he touch you for a loan?’ I nodded.
‘Same old Yves. But there you are. When you look at Yves … OK, he’s a shit, pure and simple. Well, not pure and not simple, but you know what I mean. And that’s it, isn’t it? He accepts everything they’ve thrown at him and does nothing but whine. But I acted, you see. I did what I had to do, and that makes me a free man, even here. But Yves is not only a shit, he’s a slave.’
‘But Jacques, can it matter to you what other people have done to other people? Matter enough to land you here?’
‘Evidently, brother, since it has done just that. I had a choice. I could have let Simon live and in doing so I would have abandoned what I had intended to do since I was a child. Perhaps it would have been right to do so. Perhaps my dream of killing him was only a childish dream, to be put away when I became a man. Instead it is I who have been put away, as a man. But I can stand up. I have done what I set out to do, what seemed right. If Simon had lived, if I had not brought myself to shoot him, all my life I would have been conscious of what I had failed to do. Every day would have been a reproach to me, and I would have asked myself if I had declined to act simply because I was afraid. Now I know, do you understand? Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world,” and that is what I have done. I acted, without hope, which, brother, is ultimately the only way to act and the justification of all actions. And now there is no Simon to reproach me. It is really quite simple.’
I leaned across the table and kissed his cheek, and then left.
Jacques was released some years ago and now runs a bar in another part of France. I sent him the money to establish himself. He is married, and sends me a card at Christmas with a photograph of his two daughters. I am glad they are daughters, though my experience with Sarah had proved to me that not even daughters are safe. Safe from the temptations of idealism, I mean.
PART THREE
1898–1945
CHAPTER ONE
Hôtel des Bergues,
Geneva
2nd November
‘DEAR HUGH,
You said to me: “I would rather write it as a novel”. I sympathise with that. There are too many dissertations, theses, and dead books.
Well, it is the Day of the Dead. All over Catholic Europe, people are visiting cemeteries to lay flowers on family graves. And on an impulse, which will, I think, appeal to you, I called at a florist’s yesterday afternoon and arranged, through Interflora, that a wreath of white chrysanthemums – the flowers of the dead – should be laid at the base of my father’s tombstone. Of course, he doesn’t rest there himself (if indeed he rests anywhere
), for my grandmother was unable to retrieve his body; but she used her influence to have the stone erected in the municipal cemetery; and indeed her name is now on the stone also and she lies there herself.
But this is by the way. I am sending you, as arranged, a packet by registered post. The material for your perusal is very much a mixed bag. There are some of Lucien’s own writings, which you have certainly not seen. I have tried to provide a biographical framework, or biographical notes, and I have also offered a reconstruction of certain episodes in fictional (or perhaps to use the cant term of a few years back, factional) form. That seemed to me the only way of presenting the material to you without constant resort to “may have beens”, “must haves” and “peutêtres”.
I would ask you to remember that we agreed that you should use nothing, and particularly quote nothing, without my approval. This is for background, but I hope you will find it interesting and helpful.
The end is murky, and my version speculative.
When you have read it all, I shall be happy to see you again, if you care to come to Geneva. I recall our previous meeting with pleasure all the greater because I regarded your arrival with a mixture of boredom, suspicion and scepticism.
With all best wishes,
Etienne de Balafré
PS. I have added, by way of introduction, to each passage, an explanatory note, giving its provenance, authenticity, etc.
PPS. I had left this letter open, knowing that there was something nagging on my mind. And I have found it in that soi-disant fictitious journal which Malcolm Lowry – a Canadian like yourself, though an adopted one – fathered on his alter ego Sigbjorn Wilderness: Through the Panama. It is this:
“I am capable of conceiving of a writer today, even intrinsically a first-rate writer, who simply cannot understand, and never has been able to understand, what his fellow writers are driving at, and have been driving at, and who has always been too shy to ask. This writer feels this deficiency in himself to the point of anguish. Essentially a humble fellow, he has tried his hardest all his life to understand (though maybe still not hard enough) so that his room is full of Partisan Reviews, Kenyon Reviews, Minotaurs, Poetry mags, Horizons, even old Dials, of whose contents he is able to make out precisely nothing.”