‘Your mother is different.’
He doesn’t explain anything else. He doesn’t need to. My mother resembles no one at all, no one with a name. She’s an educated giraffe, a dressed gazelle, a rare artefact, unearthed and dusted, in pristine condition. She’s a bottle found in the sea – its message intact but unreadable.
‘What happened to the peasant girl?’
He looks at me as if he were counting my eyelashes.
‘Catherine, it happened about half a century ago. Men have done things like that forever and women have suffered. It’s unfair and sad, but it has always been and always will be.’
I stare at him.
‘Men are predators, Catherine. You must imagine them like tigers in the jungle or hovering night owls that fall like a stone on a mouse or a rabbit. Fashions and morals change superficially, but men, real men, are hunters and women are their prey. You can write a hundred poems around it, but that’s the bottom truth.’
I am digesting this.
‘Did you fall like a stone on my mother?’
He smiles.
‘I did.’
His eyes are holding mine gleefully.
‘She was so unsuspecting. She didn’t stand a chance.’
I study his features as I would a mysterious rock face. My father is a man. I suddenly realise that. I didn’t before. He was always a gigantic best friend, a shelter, an abode, a shining laugh. But now, as I stare at his Roman emperor nose, his thin lips, his blue, blue eyes, I realise with a shock that he’s not handsome. He’s powerful. Something emanates from his daring, his absence of fear: the stuff of generals, eagles, musketeers – people who took what they wanted, who paid the price, sometimes, but not always. Women become animated in his presence – all women: nuns, secretaries, aunts, teachers, grandmothers, maids, schoolmates, wives. I always noticed their tremor without understanding it. I do now. They have suddenly become rabbits. They have suddenly become prey.
Strangely, I don’t think about my mother – about her being prey. Maybe because she always seems prey to me – prey to everyone – to the aunts, to the concierge, to the nuns, to the cook, all except to strangers, with whom she gets on in a flash: strangers on the bus, in the Metro, in shops, in the street. They seem to recognise her, honour her for what she truly is – someone straight from the moon.
Once they both descended into my bedroom in the middle of the night. Sylvia was out somewhere. Their chattering in the semi-darkness woke me. Half-asleep, I could see them moving in and out of scenes on the wallpaper. My mother had chosen a blood-red toile de Jouy depicting Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s characters, Paul and Virginie, struggling against dreadful circumstances. In my sleepy mind, my parents were the ones who seemed to be lost in forests, shipwrecked, separated and reunited over and over again. Until, suddenly, my father swooped on Poum and twirled her around in a silent swish. I could see her hands fluttering behind his head before he carried her off. She didn’t stand a chance.
But his mind is on other things now. His face has lost its victorious aura. He just squeezes my hand and I can feel his sigh despite the wind.
‘Your brother found it difficult after the war …’
Something in me knows it’s the brother who walked in front of the tanks with a machine gun in his hand. It’s not so much the description as the tone that I recognise, for my father’s voice plucks a different chord for each of his sons.
‘He wasn’t made for peace, for towns, for jobs, for a normal, steady life. He came back, ready for more of the same. But there were no tanks in Paris, no sudden attacks, no enemy – or no immediate enemy.’
He shakes his head.
‘He had serial weddings. To the point where I asked him: “Why do you need to marry them every time?”’
‘Did he love one especially?’
My father shakes his head.
‘No, it was restlessness. He was the kind of man who was good at war but not good at peace. His captain explained a lot to me when I went to see him, but it was too late – too late for me to understand my son.’
He frowns.
‘I did all the wrong things. I was not helpful. I asked too much. And he broke away.’
I wait.
‘Something snapped between him and me. We are very different men. But I didn’t try to understand him enough.’
His eyes slightly glazed, he looks at me hungrily as if I, or someone right behind me, could provide him with an explanation. The wind is becoming colder and colder; it wrenches itself from the clouds and takes swipes at us. We just walk and walk on the jetty. My father’s sadness is a physical thing, a dark room we have to walk through, right there, on the stone above the grey sea. He sighs again.
‘I was so proud of him. But when he came back, it was just one thing after the other. Did I tell you about the little Beuniot?’
I shake my head, but he doesn’t even look. Sometimes I think he forgets who he’s speaking to.
‘Your brother came to me. This girl was expecting his baby and he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t love her anymore.’
‘Did he sleep with her in the hay?’
‘No, Catherine, not the hay.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I got him to give me her name and address. I went to see her.’
His face is sad.
‘Was she a nice person?’
He turns round gently towards me and looks through me as he so often does, but without shutting me out either, as if he were including us both in something wider, wilder, more wilful, more independent than anything we could be on our own.
‘She was a lovely person. She was short, fair, with blue eyes. A little plump maybe, with an honest face – she could have been quite ordinary, but she wasn’t. There was only charm, only beauty, only sweetness there to see.’
‘What did she say?’
‘We didn’t say much. She knew he didn’t love her anymore, even while she was still desperately in love with him.’
‘Did you help her?’
‘Yes, I helped her. I had her stay in a very comfortable place to have her baby. I talked to her father, to her mother. It was just after the war. Everybody was very impressed by your brother.’
‘But wasn’t what he did … wrong?’
He looks at me sharply.
‘Men do these things.’
‘But he must have loved her at one time.’
‘Yes. I tried to convince your brother to marry her, but he refused point blank. He was already interested in someone else.’
‘Someone not so nice?’
‘Yes, Catherine, someone not half so nice. The little Beuniot was a beautiful person altogether. Even though she wasn’t from the kind of family I wanted for him, I would have loved to have had her as a daughter-in-law.’
‘Can we go and have lunch with her?’
‘No.’
‘Did you not see her again?’
‘Yes, I saw her several times. I saw her child and held him in my arms – my own grandson. But a man who loved her and respected her came into her life and married her and adopted her son, too. So we have to leave them in peace.’
Maybe the little Beuniot, as he called her, was my brother’s soul – the one he had lost in the war. I know what the soul is. It’s when you feel you are really there, and not in some other place, quite separate from your life. In the war, my brother was with his lack of fear. In his element every time he moved, his soul smiling hard. Everything he did had meaning. In the war, his soul was a fine thing, as blond, as honest, as free and pure as the little Beuniot. When he came back it was no longer like her at all. This is what my father’s words say – between the lines.
‘It made me feel very bad, Catherine. I felt I had betrayed her myself.’
I turn then and hug his big tummy and we stand there above the sea until he feels better. Then he takes my hand again and his other hand flies out above the waves.
‘Do you know, that woman at the party was my introduc
tion to America!’
‘The one with the big bosoms?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like it when she squashed you?’
He smiles.
‘Not really. I was too innocent.’
‘Like the little Beuniot?’
‘Yes, Catherine, like the little Beuniot.’
He sighs.
‘What happened next?’
‘I worked in the factory. Then I caught jaundice because I worked too hard and ate too little. Maybe that’s why I’m always hungry today.’
He looks around as if hoping to find a boulangerie on the stone pier.
‘Then I went into banking. I started at the lowest level, bringing coffees to the employees, and I got to the top. Your grandfather’s lessons stood me in good stead. I found I had an instinct for the American stock exchange. People fought each other to give me their money. Then came the Crash.’
‘The Crash?’
‘Yes, the Crash of Wall Street. I lost everything. People threw themselves out of windows, just because they had lost all their money.’
He laughs.
‘What did you do?’
‘I had five children by then. I went back to another bank and they asked me what I wanted, explaining they couldn’t give me what I had before. I said: “Any job at any salary.” Within a year I was back at the top.’
He shakes his head.
‘I got on with Americans. I nearly became American. If the war hadn’t happened …’
‘Would you have stayed there with Marguerite?’
He doesn’t answer, chewing his toothpick. He frowns inside himself and I know he’s trying very hard not to think of Marguerite. We are pacing the jetty now, as if it had suddenly become too small. He clears his throat.
‘The America I knew is not the America of today. It was the time of innocence. Now, because of the Vietnam War, they are losing the very quality which seems to define them.’
I’m still thinking of Marguerite and trying not to. I can see her flat, the pot plants she grows by the window, the shelves of books, the yellow light, not too bright or too dark, just nice. I can see the design in the old kilim carpet near the front door. It’s welcoming and careful, as if each object had a life of its own and really wanted to be there. I can’t see Marguerite herself but I can feel her warm smile, her quiet and calm. I know she must like to read and doesn’t have any old aunts. Out of focus, she remains just on the edge of my mind. My father is frowning again. Suddenly he starts talking and I’m not surprised it’s about a war.
‘Those poor Americans GIs are suffering so much in Vietnam. When one of them is caught and tortured by the Vietcong, he will repeat his name, his rank in the US Army and his serial number, over and over again. They are trained to do this.’
‘Are many being tortured?’
‘Many. They are very brave. But this war is a terrible mistake. When a foreign country invades your country, every man, woman and child becomes a soldier. All you can think of is kicking them out. The Americans will lose in the end, just like the Germans in Paris, just like Napoleon and Hitler in Russia.’
I ask him if he misses America. He looks out to the sea.
‘It’s a fantastic country.’
Sometimes he doesn’t answer me directly. Sometimes he has no real answer. Then he turns spontaneously and stares at me fair and square.
‘Just before leaving for America, I was in a field walking with my cousin Jeanne and her sister. I think I was in love with my cousin Jeanne, obscurely – I didn’t even realise it then. Suddenly a bull came at us at a full gallop. Before I could think, I told them “Run!” and pushed them away towards the fence. The bull was distracted. In that second, I squeezed my elbows against my ribs, bent my head and ran towards him. He stopped, surprised, and then swung round and ran the other way.’
His face is happy and relaxed.
‘I think I left for America a few days later.’
22
THE BANKER AND COUSIN NIKI
‘I am a banker,’ confides Alexandre.
I gather from his random remarks that banking is not his forte, but he has this knack with numbers. There is something of the workhorse about him as he trudges every morning to rue Boissy-d’Anglas to the bank that has his name on it. When I have no school I can go along with him. We always take the longest way through the Colysée Gardens to get there. I hate leaving him on the corner and see him disappear down the dark, lonely corridor of the street just behind the place de la Concorde where he will stay the whole day.
I ask him questions about it. There is something coldly mysterious about his time in that place. He is evasive.
‘I have to go, little one.’
As always, the only explanation for me is that the Roman world prevails over his Carthaginian heart. He explains that other people handle the banking. His work is for the clients. He is like a gardener of the stock market. He feels numbers. He just knows when they are going to go up and down.
‘So why do you have to stay in the bank? Couldn’t you do it from home?’
‘No, the clients need to come and see me and then they put the money in the bank because they trust me.’
‘But do you like it?’
He sighs. I take another tack.
‘Is it like being a marcou with numbers?’
He pounces on that.
‘Yes, little one, that’s it exactly. Like having a green thumb … People keep handing their money over to me.’
He makes a gesture as if they were still pouring it in his lap.
‘Numbers run to me. So that’s why I need the bank to put them in. Once I had a client who was begging me for cash. When I refused, do you know what he did? He flung himself on the ground and started writhing and gnawing on the carpet. He was a gamester. Gaming is the only drug which has no physical substance. You don’t need to inject or swallow or breathe it. Money is like water, Catherine. If you have too much it evaporates; not enough, it turns to ice.’
He looks at me deeply.
‘There are so many things to pay for. The mother of your brothers and sisters, the two apartments, the two houses in the country, two telephone bills, two electricity bills each time! Why can’t we all live together? Tell me that.’
‘The mother of my brothers and sisters …’
I am stunned. I have never heard of her before. Immersed in Greek myths as I am, to me my siblings are the offspring of my father alone. They have jumped out of his thigh or his forehead, even his elbow. They exist so strongly in my imagination, they can hang in thin air without props. But a mother … That’s another kettle of fish, as Sylvia would say. Who is she? What is she like? Is she nice like Marguerite? No, I decide, she can’t be. My father is not wistful when referring to her, as he is when he alludes to Marguerite.
He becomes quite brisk and businesslike.
‘I can’t speak of this with Poum or Helen, only with you, Catherine. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if we could all live together in one house?’
I nod happily at the idea of being with my brothers and sisters at last. Visions of pillow fights and midnight feasts crowd the screen of my imagination.
He sighs.
‘And so much cheaper!’
He waits a bit, frowning, then swings his briefcase.
‘But they would both hate it, of course. Neither of them would hear of it.’
I stare at my father.
‘Is she nice?’
‘Who?’
‘The mother of my brothers and sisters.’
He looks at me in a vague way.
‘Well, yes, poor woman. She would like me to live with her all the time, you see.’
I digest this.
‘And you live with us instead.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it make her unhappy?’
He nods.
‘I think she’s discontented. But I do my duty by her. I will look after her till she dies.’
Once he told me that if I drowne
d he would swim down to get me even if there was no more air in his lungs, even if he had to drown too. He doesn’t let people down. I suddenly realise what a lot of people he would have to leave behind if he was at the bottom of the sea with me.
‘Do you like her a lot?’
He looks at me strangely.
‘Women like me, little one. They always want to stay with me.’
‘Is it like numbers?’
He smiles.
‘A little bit …’
‘But do you love them back?’
He turns towards me swiftly.
‘I love your mother. You are a child of love, Catherine. How could I not love her? Isn’t she something?’
He lets out an impish laugh, as if some bird has landed on his shoulder. And I know that wild bird is Poum.
Then, he goes – disappears down the dark street without letting me follow him to the door. We say goodbye on the corner as if it were still the Resistance, as if we lived parallel lives.
When he comes home in the evening, he runs to my room. He throws his coat, his briefcase, his scarf on the floor and nearly capsizes my bed by sitting down beside me.
I smell his honey breath as he pats my hair. He doesn’t say anything. Turning a little, he lets his hands fall between his knees and turns to look out into the darkness like a captain on the deck of his ship peering into the night.
‘You know your brother will come very soon and take you away in his car and you will have a wonderful time together.’
I nod and believe him, although, at the same time, I am starting to know the brother will never come and get me.
‘Catherine, if they ask you about me, tell them I am a knight balancing on the crest of a wave.’
‘They?’
‘Anyone!’
‘On the crest of a wave?
‘Yes.’
He sighs, still holding his hands loosely between his knees.
‘You believe in me, don’t you? I don’t know what I would do without you, little one. You are the only one I can tell everything to.’
The opposite is true: I’m the one who would drown at the bottom of the sea without him. But this makes me happy all the same. I don’t understand so many of the things he tells me, but one thing I do understand is our friendship, as familiar as the cotton sheets under my chin. I must call it by that name, for if my father and I have anything it’s this friendship, as if we had been shipwrecked on the same island. We don’t need to explain things – in a way it’s lucky because most things between us are inexplicable. He bends over to kiss my cheek, he presses my shoulder as if I were one of his soldiers. We are together in this, says his hand, whatever it is. The next day is a Saturday and, before disappearing into the country, he has breakfast with Poum. I am called up.
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