My mother is in bed, her lace sheets around her like the froth of the sea, becalmed and ironed into Spanish submission. Books are scattered around and her tray is on her knees. On her writing table, in front of the open window, are the remains of his breakfast of cereals, honey, seeds and black coffee.
Alexandre is pacing the room, his hands behind his back.
‘Ah, Catherine!’ he says. ‘Catherine, aren’t you happy to have seven brothers and sisters?
‘Seven!’
Poum is mute in her bed. She is staring into an uncertain space. She looks trapped.
‘Catherine, you know you have brothers and sisters, don’t you?’
I nod encouragingly.
‘And you know about the situation?’
‘The situation?’
‘That they have a mother …’
‘Yes, I know. She is the one you go and see on the weekend.’
My mother suddenly whisks herself out of bed and disappears into the bathroom.
I stare aghast as my father pats me on the back.
‘Go, little one. Everything is all right. Go to your room.’
I disappear down the stairs, but the steps feel squashy and even our room feels funny, as if the walls were made of marshmallow.
After an hour Alexandre appears, debonair and making no reference to the situation, the new word that has entered the apartment. He takes me to the little public garden on the rue Gabriel at the end of the street. A merry-go-round stands apart in a darker grove of trees. Autumn in Paris is around us, like the dusk of summer, soft, calm and a little sad. The children in the sandpit play too quietly. The people sitting on benches, their hands in their laps, talk in such low voices they all seem to be saying goodbye to each other. For once, the merry-go-round’s bittersweet music doesn’t haunt me.
Suddenly, when I least expect it, my father lifts me off my feet and puts me on a wooden horse as he does every time we go to this park. They give a hooked iron stick to each child. At every turn, the horses pass in front of a rigid arm with sliding metal rings on it. Every time you go by, you have to pull off as many rings as you can with your stick. He pays the merry-go-round keeper as if he were placing his bet. As usual, stroking my horse’s neck, my father stands beside us like a trainer, whispering encouraging words: ‘It’s easy. Just keep thinking about the rings. Just keep your mind on the stick.’
We start going up and down and turning and turning, slow and fast; I try to concentrate, but all I can feel is the tense bookmaker in the shadows, shoulders hunched, punching the palm of his hand. Usually, I never manage to catch a single ring. The other children’s sticks are full. Before the end of the last turn, just as the horses start slowing down, he snatches me, taking me away in his arms, without a backward glance, whispering urgently: ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.’ I always feel I’ve broken his lucky streak, messed with his baraka, ground his triumph to a halt. Over time, we end up taking roundabout routes to avoid the merry-go-round. But he always ends up bringing me back – like today.
Today, with clammy hands and a thumping heart, I try to think right: the rings, the stick. The children on the other mounts smile back at their waving parents. Suddenly an old lady interrupts my father’s concentration. It’s then that I catch two rings in one go. Leaving the old lady in the middle of a sentence, he snatches me in his arms as I swirl by and carries me off before the end. We go to a pub and drink a brown Pelforth beer to celebrate. To my enormous relief, I know he will not tempt destiny, and that we shall never return to the merry-go-round again. Anyway, I’m getting too old for it. I must be around eight. With the Pelforth, all memory of the situation vanishes.
He walks me back to the apartment, jumps in his car and then he disappears. I press the button and the enormous porch door of the building swings open into an eerie void.
Around that time, one evening I am brought to the library. It doesn’t happen often. But tonight, Sylvia bundles me into my dressing gown and walks me briskly to the library door. My mother touches Sylvia’s arm and Sylvia smiles at her reassuringly, then leaves me there, saying she has to listen to the BBC news. Standing where she’s left me, I look at my parents. Something is funny, I can feel it in the air. Poum is nursing a whisky; Alexandre, sitting on the very edge of the grey sofa, also has one at his elbow. He looks slightly bewildered. His shoulders are hunched forward and he doesn’t smile or extend his arms or laugh my name out.
Poum looks at me and jerks her chin towards him. It’s not unfriendly. She just wants me to do something. I decide to tread across the carpet that separates us, climb onto his knee and put my arms around his neck. It’s obviously the right thing to do because the room relaxes. My mother takes a sip of her drink and smiles encouragingly. His arms steal around my Viyella dressing gown and hold on tight, as if they took the decision on their own. I don’t move or breathe. Then, he pushes me back and smiles as usual.
‘Catherine! How are you tonight, little one?’
I tell him about the book I’m reading and he nods. I don’t tell him about school. We both know that school, like the bank, is hell. The ice cubes in my mother’s drink chink in a friendly way. Everything about her is strangely friendly. She walks back and forth in front of us, each step sewing an invisible stitch. Alexandre looks up at her, but speaks to me.
‘Do you know, Catherine, you have a cousin.’
This does not impress me; cousins and aunts always seem to creep up.
‘Not a French cousin, an American one.’
‘American!’
‘Yes, she’s the daughter of my brother André in America. She’s called Niki.’
I wait. I know of my father’s brothers, but they have a smoky, mystical nature and no geography.
‘She’s an artist. And she has just made a sculpture of me as a banker holding a pot of gold in his hands like Harpagon. It’s now in a museum of modern art.’
I frown. I know all about Harpagon, because he has read Molière’s play to me.
‘Does she think you are a miser?’
He shrugs.
‘I don’t know, Catherine, but it’s all over the newspapers.’
I snuggle back into him. My mother eyes us, still pacing with the ice cubes knocking about in her glass. Then she stops and faces us. She’s still expecting something, but I don’t know what.
‘Why would Niki do that?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, Catherine,’ answers Alexandre humbly.
‘It’s not nice,’ I say, interrupting their common silence.
Poum puts her whisky down. My father’s laughter wells up.
‘It’s not nice!’ they both chime back in unison.
Sylvia comes back announcing it’s long past my bedtime. As we walk away, we can hear them giggling behind the library door:
‘It’s not nice, no, not nice at all!’
23
MONT SAINT-MICHEL
The Mont Saint-Michel is a rocky spur in the middle of the sea off the coast of Normandy, one kilometre from land, a pointy medieval stone fist thrust to the sky. It was once a monastery and its fortifications speak of a savage religion in which crusaders rampaged, in which monks baptised with swords at their belts, in which the Holy Land was a prize to be wrenched from heathens. Poum and Alexandre have the habit of tripping off there at the drop of a hat.
The Saturday after the episode of my cousin Niki’s sculpture, they pile Sylvia and me into the car and set off early. Even though she hates being separated from her bed and her books before 11am, my mother is smiling beatifically. Obviously, there is to be no country visit for Alexandre this Sunday. It’s even a public holiday. We will sleep there and return at an unknown date. My parents live by habit; each one is an institution. But when they shake the dust off their feet, their departures are always sudden.
Alexandre, driving with the sun on his face, has divested himself of his suit, his tie. His open-necked linen shirt, his grey trousers and even his tweed jacket, flung in the back with us,
all speak of freedom. The air of the car is full of it. The jerks and bumps that shake us to and fro seem to have settled into a journey as Alexandre’s absent-minded driving navigates us through the flow of cars like a bobbing cork. When Sylvia asks him if he can please look at the road, my parents both laugh. ‘The English are so careful … but so brave,’ they whisper to each other. Sylvia’s eyes, raised to the car roof, suggest she has three kids to look after, not one.
Poum twists round to smile at her.
‘Do you know, Sylvia, that when Charles I was beheaded, he exclaimed: “Don’t touch the blade!” so it would stay sharp. He wanted the executioner to do a clean job of putting him to death. Sometimes it was very messy – they had to hack at people’s necks several times before successfully decapitating them.’
My father smiles affectionately at my mother and Sylvia shudders. Poum, who loves Sylvia as much as she delights in shocking her, turns round again. Something in me knows she is going to trot out her favourite story.
‘Ah, Sylvia, I must tell you a little Spanish story. It was during the Spanish Civil War. On a freezing dawn, two guardias civiles in their black patent-leather hats were taking a prisoner to be executed in a field outside the village. The prisoner was sitting between his two guards in the horse-drawn cart. Rubbing his hands together he commented: “Hace un frio de la gran puta!” – It’s a big whore of a cold day. Oh, oh … It’s too funny for words.’
Her muffled attempts to pursue her tale make the car swerve because Alexandre is chuckling too.
‘Oh, oh, I can’t continue. How Spanish, how very Spanish,’ moans Poum, who is particularly susceptible to her own brand of humour.
Sylvia is full of disapproving silence. But my parents are rocking in some kind of fateful joy.
‘Do you know how the two guardias civiles responded, Sylvia?’ Then before collapsing in another spasm of glee, she exhales: ‘“Yes, but think of us, who have to return afterwards!”’
The happiness in the two front seats is inversely proportionate to the horror in the back seat. My parents’ companionship settles into a cosy silence for a few kilometres, then Alexandre’s pangs of hunger bring the car screeching to a halt in front of a wisteria-covered half-timbered house on the side of the road.
‘This looks perfect!’
In a twinkling he is out of the car, striding in, calling for the waiter: ‘Garçon!’
A tall young man appears with a thoughtful step. His sweet smile seems to be waiting for us alone, as if he recognised every last one of us. My father runs towards him, oblivious.
‘Do you have a table? We’re terribly hungry.’
‘Of course, Monsieur, here by the window.’
Once seated with a large serviette on his lap, he relaxes and looks around him. His eyes narrow, a frown appears on his face as he takes stock of the place. Then he seems to interrupt his own thoughts and launches himself into questioning Sylvia about her childhood in Felpham, West Sussex. Sylvia, usually diffident, relents. She knows them well by now and sometimes hands over what they want as a treat.
‘An uncle of mine was run over by a car when I was a child.’
‘How terrible!’
‘Yes, I must have been about six. I was with my mother in the kitchen at home and a policeman knocked at the door.’
‘Madre de Dios!’
Spanish is resorted to as soon as there is any whiff of death.
‘And what did your mother say?’ exclaims Poum, hurrying along the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon narrative style.
‘Oh, nothing, the policeman was the one who said something.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said: “Sit down and prepare yourselves for a nasty shock.” And he told her that her brother had just died in a car accident.’
At that point, to my father’s horror, Poum collapses. He locks his eyes on her, but we all know it’s too late. She’s reduced to irreducible laughter. Alexandre shakes his head. There’s nothing to say – until the culprit lifts a tear-stained face out of her serviette.
‘Sy-lvia, please forgive me! I am so sorry, but this is all so un-Latin.’
Then she puts out her hand and touches Sylvia’s arm. Poum rarely touches people; when she does it changes situations in an instant. Her hand knows how to care when she appears not to, making us all belong together as if this were some happy wake.
‘It was many years ago.’ Sylvia smiles. ‘I can hardly remember him.’
Alexandre heaves a sigh of relief and starts eating again. He pours wine for the three of them and smiles his satisfaction.
‘Sylvia, wait till you see the Mont Saint-Michel. Wait till you eat the omelettes at La Mère Poulard.’
Both my parents like to show Sylvia things. When they look at her blue eyes, her stern smile, her fair skin, her shimmer of golden hair and her enormous body that seems to jeer at diets, they see the cliffs of Dover, William the Conqueror, the Magna Carta – a freedom and pugnacity they admire, as if any French courage were pusillanimous by comparison. By showing her things, they hope she will be amused and fortified in her exile.
As we’re going, Alexandre looks all around the restaurant with a worried look on his face, then abruptly leaves. Back in the car, he drives in silence and suddenly Mont Saint-Michel appears, etched against the sky, boldly sculpted against the clouds. He parks the car and we walk to the island at low tide – all the while, Sylvia is told about the quicksands and how the sea comes in at the speed of a galloping horse. My mother, her nose in the air, secure in her unfailing faith in my father, trots on happily, but Sylvia, holding my hand tightly, has no such sustaining belief.
Soon we are walking up the tightly cobbled streets with nary a space between each medieval house or building. The winding progress, the eagle’s nest feeling at the top, the dizzying views of sea and strand with their large invisible patches of moving sands are as attractive to pilgrims as to children. This is Poum and Alexandre’s lair. They love it here and have come, I soon realise by their exclamations, many times in the past.
Because it’s impossible to get rooms otherwise, Alexandre has reserved the hotel beforehand, contrary to his usual habits. As soon as we set foot in it, his hunger rises as fast as the tide and he’s all for setting off to La Mère Poulard on the spot. But Sylvia has walked too much in the sun and needs to go to bed with slight sunstroke. Poum and Alexandre are frantic.
‘To bed! We must call a doctor!’
‘A specialist!’
No, she insists on just sleeping it off. My mother walks her to the door of our bedroom. Then I am left alone with my parents. I must not bother her and will only be allowed near her when I am very sleepy. Putting Sylvia’s absence to good use, they pour me a small glass of wine.
‘Sunstroke in Normandy! It could only happen to an Englishwoman!’ they exclaim, giggling.
We are dining at the hotel restaurant instead of at La Mère Poulard as planned. They want to take Sylvia there tomorrow when she feels better. The table is near the window. You can see the waves, roaring like angry wolves, quite clearly in the twilight. Alexandre is strangely silent. Poum appears unaware, but I can feel her waiting all the same. Suddenly, my father erupts.
‘Do you know, Poum, I think I knew that waiter in the restaurant where we had lunch … He was in the Resistance with me … He was younger then … I knew he reminded me of someone …’
She nods slowly. The Resistance is hardly ever alluded to, nor the war. As if the dead, still close, still breathing for them, cannot be mentioned so soon.
‘He’s the kid who brought me Rolf Nordling’s message to come and meet von Choltitz. I never saw him again until today … And to think I didn’t say a word to him! He looks older and I was so hungry … But now I’m sure it was him!’
His face falls, cliff-like into a darker sea. Poum sips her wine tentatively. She has no feeling for good wine and prefers the workman’s litron, which she’ll drink with much more gusto than the old Bourgogne filling her glass right now.
Something has happened to our table as if the night outside had climbed in through the window. The waiters are moving more slowly, conversations have dimmed and nearly gone. My father sighs and, to my surprise, looks straight at me.
‘That man who served our lunch, Catherine, was my contact in the Resistance. I remember his younger face so well. I have only just realised it was him. I thought he’d been killed in the last flourishes of the Liberation of Paris. But he’s alive and well.’
I sip my small glass of wine too.
‘Do you know, Catherine, in 1945 Hitler was sending orders to General von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris, to burn the city. Once lit, fire moves from street to street at the speed of a galloping horse.’
I can’t help looking down at the waves, which have indeed surrounded the Mont Saint-Michel very quickly. Poum has her eyes wide open as if the war were happening inside them.
‘But von Choltitz had seen Hitler recently and, finding him foaming at the mouth, had thought to himself: We are in the hands of a madman. He had also realised that the war was lost. A soldier more than a Nazi, a cultured man from an old family with a remnant of decency, he didn’t want to burn Paris, which he saw as a work of art, a place of beauty.’
Suddenly my father stops and looks older, quieter. A small smile hovers sadly at the corner of his mouth, as if he were too tired to continue. The war is still there. It doesn’t just go, like when you get off a plane and still feel a part of yourself in the place you left behind. In the Mont Saint-Michel, Alexandre can hear the German boots on the cobblestones, those same boots that woke him up at dawn in 1940 and had him jump out of bed to rush and join the first Resistance cell he could find.
Poum and Alexandre Page 16