by Melvyn Bragg
They played children’s games with children’s energy. Joe, or Joseph as everyone called him, was bemused and then elated at this younger immature Natasha, reclaiming a meagrely loved past, he thought, delinquent, in full flow, cheating at table tennis and cards, turning hide-and-seek into a horror movie, seeing who could get around the room without touching the floor, starting cushion fights and then instructing Joseph to organise charades ‘the English way’, the Stevenses’ way, embraced by and embracing her brothers and sister with an openness and passion concealed when the full family was in formal session. To the delight of the younger ones, who had expected an Englishman in a bowler hat with a pin-striped suit, a rolled umbrella and a monocle, Joseph was swept up in the games in this fortress of a house, swept along, too, by Natasha’s unbridled new siblings.
‘She is making them over-excited again,’ said Véronique, of the distant laughter. She had tried hard to block it out with the new Françoise Sagan.
Louis as usual had made a desk out of his armchair by putting a large chopping board across the arms. He looked up calmly from his small fast neat handwriting. Sometimes it annoyed him too.
‘It is the holidays,’ he said, ‘in Paris they have to be so careful. I don’t hear them.’
‘Natasha offered to look after François if we wanted to send him to London to retake his baccalaureate. The French School is very good in London.’
‘That is a lot to ask of her, and of Joseph,’ Louis said. ‘They have a life to begin. They have to learn how to live together. That can be very difficult.’
But François disturbs you, she thought, and you think his slowness is my fault.
‘Natasha is much better than she was,’ said Véronique, to please.
‘Yes,’ his eyes were now on the page, ‘this young Englishman will be good for her.’
‘He is not like an Englishman,’ Véronique murmured, ‘not like those we meet in Paris.’
But Louis’s attention had returned to the paper he was drafting and Véronique made another assault on Françoise Sagan. Downstairs the challenging laughter continued, even louder, but she set herself against it.
Members of Dr Prévost’s family came to see them in La Rotonde for tea, bearing gifts. Despite some effort at generalisation, conversation was soon back among the histories of the family and what Joe could understand he could appreciate: just like home, he thought approvingly.
But the visit to the two aunts, the sisters of Natasha’s mother, had to be made at their house across country; a long journey, beyond Arles. Joe asked Dr Prévost – he never used the ‘Papa’ which Natasha suggested – if they could stop in Arles so that he could see some of the places painted by Van Gogh and just stroll around where the great artist had lived.
‘Of course! We will leave early. My wife will drive one car and I will drive the other one. You must see the Roman remains. They are very important. In the South there is much to see from Roman times. We will leave the house at seven o’clock to avoid the heat. I have not been there for three years.’
Louis Prévost strode through the city like an emperor but in his case a ruler of information. The Amphitheatre was closely examined, the aqueducts were analysed in detail and praised – ‘A reliable supply of fresh water and good engineering are the key to civilisation,’ he said. Gradually the family peeled away until only Joseph and Natasha were left with him as he exulted in the architecture, placed Arles in context and in an hour and a quarter delivered the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as experienced through this one city in Provence. When it came to Van Gogh he waved a rather punch-drunk Joe in the right direction and invited Natasha to have a glass of citron pressé with him.
Joe was disappointed. After the Romans and the atmosphere built up by Natasha’s father, his solitary meander, more closely to understand the lonely genius of Van Gogh, fell flat. It was too hot; people were too well dressed; the normality and efficiency of the French squeezed out the frenized, irredeemably unhappy Dutchman Joe was looking for. Even the famous café held no magic. He bought a few postcards to send back home.
The sisters lived together in one house although the married one, Marie-Christine, occupied two-thirds of it with her husband, a lawyer, Yvon; Marie-Françoise had what amounted to a wing of the ample eighteenth-century manor. The de Vivaise family, Joseph was told by Natasha’s father a few minutes before they arrived for lunch, had lived there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Sophie, Natasha’s mother, had been the eldest of the three girls: there were no male heirs.
From the moment the cars turned through the gates and up the drive, healthy with weeds, flanked by plane trees, Joe thought he was in a film by Jean Renoir. To dispel the daze of being in such unexpected, splendid and unearned surroundings, he kept going an independent line of thought in which he saw it all as a film.
There would be maids at the table, he guessed, and there were (two, one hired for the day), though no butler; there would be cooks (one, permanent, in her seventies), and a gardener, and there was; the woods beyond the gardens would be full of game to be shot by parties who stayed overnight and criss-crossed the corridors between bedrooms; and it would all be too large to maintain, which it was, but its owners would not publicly acknowledge this and behave as if the war, and the economic collapse, had never happened, which they did.
The grounds in which the house was set were an Impressionist’s canvas, Joe thought, as in the paintings of Jean Renoir’s father, Pierre Auguste, whose works he had studied in those summer weeks in Paris, three years ago. And to complete this scenario, all that was needed was for Jean Renoir, himself an actor as well as director, to appear, that large man, with his kindly ugly face, who played the fool while filled with wisdom and sadness. And he appeared! In the person of Yvon, the bulbous-nosed lawyer, dandruff and all, he appeared, to Joe’s delight, and he was remarkably close to the original. He almost shook Joe’s hand off and from then on Joe knew that he would enjoy this lunch. When he saw the degree of attention Natasha paid to every word and gesture spoken by the sisters, her aunts, he knew that she, too, was caught up in the day.
The plates and crockery, used no more than twice a year, were Limoges, which passed Joe by but brought a smile of thanks directed from Natasha to her hostess aunt, a smile which acknowledged the quality of the reception given. The glasses were old crystal and after he had accidentally fingernailed one, Joe had to resist pinging them for their remarkably pure sound. The silver cutlery bore the family crest and there were two large art nouveau vases of lilies, the best that the leaking and dilapidated conservatory could supply. Marie-Christine tinkled a small silver bell when she wanted the table cleared. The maids did not always come instantly and Marie-Christine would roll her eyes.
Unlike the conversation in the Prévost gathering where family matters had soon taken the reins, the talk at the de Vivaise lunch, directed by Marie-Christine, whose steeliness it was agreed had ‘kept everything together over the years’, centred, as good manners demanded, around England and the English.
Like the French spoken by Louis and her sister Marie-Françoise, Marie-Christine’s French was clear, unhurried and roundly pronounced, similar to that which had been dinned into Joe at school and been a compulsory part of his history course at university. To his surprise he had little difficulty in joining in, save for mistakes of vocabulary which all around the table were pleased to correct. Most of them were much cheered by this, having braced themselves for an English-speaking lunch. Joe was self-conscious at first, especially as Natasha had always teased him about his French and always spoke to him in English. But Marie-Christine would not have him teased. She acted as his champion. She said ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Bien fait’ and ‘Mais alors il parle le français très bien, mais très, très bien,’ building up his confidence until Joe, fortified by the wine which was modest in portion but high in quality and changed with every dish, brimmed full of social contentment.
‘To talk about the English in the French language,’ said
Yvon, who could not find a signal which would indicate to the new maid that he absolutely needed much more wine than the others, ‘is a great joy and a great revenge, because so much of the English language is itself French.’ He toasted his own observation, finished the St Julien, held up the empty glass and twirled it round as if a toast earned a refill, but was obliged to put it down unrecharged.
The English, said Louis, and here his two sisters-in-law, who had adored him since his marriage into the de Vivaise family, almost physically bristled with the fierceness of their attention, were the most strange people in Europe. Three very important things needed always to be remembered, he said, as he took a sip of wine and then lectured them. Firstly, the English lived on an island and though this was an obvious fact, it was a key one psychologically. Secondly, and paradoxically, they had been invaded by many different peoples. Consequently they had a unique combination of the Romantic and the German and the Nordic which was later enriched by exiles fleeing from Europe, so they were not a race but, much better, a people. Thirdly, to trade, they had to cross the water, so the English became masters of the seas and peoples from all over the world knew them and their language and came back to live there and so their island also became a little world of its own.
Louis took another, a merest sip of wine. ‘Louis,’ Marie-Christine whispered to Joe, ‘has always known everything.’
‘Charles de Gaulle,’ exclaimed Marie-Françoise, ‘is a great Frenchman.’ The table murmured assent. ‘But Winston Churchill is a great man. That is different!’ There was, a little to Joe’s surprise, an equal murmur of assent. ‘Winston Churchill,’ said Marie-Françoise, who had exceeded her permitted limit of one glass of wine, ‘was strong. He would never surrender. He would fight in the streets. With the cigar. He is my hero,’ she said. ‘Natasha has chosen the right country.’
Yvon tried to convey that the wine in front of Marie-Françoise would be much better deployed in front of him, but the young maid simply looked away, either unable to read the twitching eyebrows, the barely concealed winks, the toying with the glass, or reading them in an altogether different way.
The children, Joe realised later, were impressively and unnaturally silent, speaking only when addressed and then briefly, muted. Véronique seemed to be an observer but not so reserved as to draw attention to herself.
‘Now,’ said Marie-Christine, standing, ‘the pièce de résistance.’ She took up an envelope, withdrew a sheet of newsprint and carefully unfolded the relevant page of the Oxford Mail, given to Louis by Julia Stevens and brought to the lunch for the aunts. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘My English is not my best language – the grammar is intolerable – but look! Louis has told me what it says. I will spare your blushes, Natasha, but we are very proud in the de Vivaise house.’
‘Yes,’ said Marie-Françoise, loudly. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! We love the photograph of you, we love the Icarus and we hope you will fly better than him.’ Marie-Christine tinkled the bell. ‘Yvon.’
Yvon stood as the glasses of champagne came in on two trays. He made a short speech, looking directly first at Natasha, talking of her, then at Joseph whom he welcomed into the family as a true Englishman; he touched on the joy that would have been experienced by Natasha’s mother and praised Véronique for bringing up Natasha with such success and then he summoned the company to its feet and toasted the new couple and wished them great fortune, great happiness, they were so young. Joe and Natasha, seated, were united in being moved by the kindness and yearning in Yvon’s tone and Natasha smiled when, after draining his glass, he whipped around and held out a commanding hand for a refill. It was impossible for the maid to refuse.
After lunch they walked in the garden and Joseph, clasped by the arm of Marie-Christine, was told of the former splendour and told more about Louis and Sophie than Natasha had ever offered. She also explained that French gardens were formal and English gardens were free and now she preferred English gardens ‘and they are so much cheaper to maintain’. Natasha, who had been claimed by Yvon, his suit looking frayed in the open air, was guided a little apart from the others and told how much he knew she had suffered but how everything in the past had to be forgotten and forgiven now, it was the only way to live. He gave her a tender kiss on both cheeks and, with tears in his eyes, told her that he had always loved her mother above all others and now she had a duty to be happy for her mother’s sake.
At the princely peak of the village, in his favourite spot, on tumbled stones which formed a seat outside the Crusaders’ Tower, Joe sat and smoked and made no attempt to sift and clarify the views and impressions and events that spun through his brain. He was more than content, content as never before, he thought, to let life be.
Darkness gathered around the village he would now have to leave. He would carry it with him. Alongside the wall, below him, there were the dozens of tall cypresses which guarded the cemetery and drew the night into their still branches. He could never get enough of this voluptuous place, the shapes, the cones, the helix of the hill leading to the tower; the past, the windings and the stratifications, and now, the place of Natasha who had been changed in his mind so much since coming to France. Her father, the house, the allusion by Marie-Françoise to the title through the female line that Natasha refused to claim. He did not want to raise the matter with Natasha: he now realised that she felt exposed in her own country and he did not want to rub that sore.
He was high above the plain. Perched as a lookout on night watch. So still. The clock tower which Natasha had painted several times was silhouetted against the cloud-free sky.
For a few hours on that morning, as she sat with François outside the bar, Natasha thought she might stay, she painting, Joseph writing his stories . . . And as she walked up the hill to the Renaissance house whose door she wanted to draw one last time, it did seem almost possible. Joseph loved the place so much. But as the morning drew on the impulse faded. It was no more than a dream soon drained away by the wounds of memory.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘They are my true parents,’ Natasha said, ‘my father is my father, but he was so often away and . . . they are my true parents.’
They were lying on a small beach a few miles east of St Tropez. It had been only thinly populated through the day and now as the first cool breeze came off the Mediterranean and the sun began to set, it was empty save for the two of them and a beachcomber with his dog in the distance under the cliff. Joe had gazed on the sea and lay in the sun yet again, despite advice. On this fourth beach day, he was still red, rather prickle-skinned, sore, salted, a little feverish. Natasha, who had taken both sun and sea in a modest habituated manner, was freshened by the breeze and relaxed now after La Rotonde.
Joe waited for her to tell him more. He knew by now that too direct a question about her childhood could halt her for days. He had learned to look away from her when she was in this mood in which he sensed both something dangerous and something sacred.
‘Alain was at school with my father,’ she said, propped on her elbows, looking out at the Mediterranean, ‘and then at university, in Montpellier and in Paris. Both of them set out to be doctors but my father went into research and then . . . Alain stayed here, in Provence, and the only thing about him that is not Provençal is Isabel, whom he met in Paris. She comes from a good family, an only child like you. She was a great beauty – I think you can still see it today, but she won’t be photographed! My father laughs at her a little,’ Natasha herself laughed as she said this as if remembering the occasions, ‘because she loves Radio Monte Carlo and takes so much time to dress, but I know he admires her high style, and after all she is Alain’s wife.
‘He always says Alain ought to have gone on into research with him but I think he envies what Alain does. My father’s father, like Alain, was a country doctor in Provence. He knew Braque. My father calls Isabel “La Belle”. She always protests but maybe she doesn’t mind. He can do no wrong. In the old days she told us about Paris and the dresses and the par
ties, but not any more. They could not have children – so she makes a big fuss of the dogs.’ She turned to Joe. ‘And me. And now you.’
Joe felt blessed. This blind and urgent marriage had proved a magic carpet into lives, places, societies previously beyond his horizon. He had not expected any of this and to absorb it was not easy, it was puzzling, there seemed nothing in his past life that linked to this new world and yet everywhere he was accepted as a natural part of it.
‘I like the dogs,’ he said.
‘That’s lucky.’
‘Yes.’ They were German shepherds. ‘I got on their good side as fast as I could.’
‘Do you see how special they are, Isabel and Alain?’
‘Oh yes.’ He meant it and repeated the affirmation. Alain and Isabel Brossart had been emphatically welcoming to him, first at their house near La Rotonde and now here at their house by the sea to which Alain had been obliged to return for a week, giving Isabel the much desired opportunity to have the two young people to herself despite her hatred of the coast in the summer months.
‘We must go in,’ Natasha said, ‘Isabel doesn’t like us to be late for l’apéritif.’
Joe got up very stiffly.
‘Why are you so stupid about the sun, Joseph?’
He shook his head. The beach had been irresistible; warm pure sand which trickled so finely through his fingers, warm blue sea, blue clear skies, sun-filled all day. It was privilege and luxury, it was to his damp Northern-clouded childhood the temptation which had to be taken for it might never come again. Perhaps, Joe told himself, seeking justification, it provoked a deep instinctively compelling sun worship denied for centuries in the weather-beaten North. More likely it began in La Rotonde as a show-off aim to get a tan, surest proof of a holiday Abroad. Loot. It soon became an addiction. Though pitied by Natasha, warned by Alain – ‘speaking as a doctor’ – and told crossly by Isabel that it was not at all ‘chic’, he persisted.