by Mary Byrne
‘And they wonder why they want to come to Europe,’ I said.
‘Don’t start,’ said Bea.
Then I had a summer school in Ireland, where my temper improved immediately in the more modest temperatures. Things in Ireland had never been better: you could sit on the grass, swim every day, organize a picnic, all without having a Plan B. Demand was so brisk that every garage and supermarket in the country ran out of charcoal for barbecues.
Late one night after Bea went to sleep, I stuck in my earphone and switched on the radio on my cell phone. A scratchy French station was talking about hundreds of deaths all over Paris. The funeral parlors were overflowing, they said. They were requisitioning cold storage places to accommodate the bodies, there were so many of them.
‘What the hell is this?’ I said, into the night.
It was all over by the time we got back. Paris had settled into a sinister post-disaster calm. I bought the papers in the station. The media were down to the usual ding-dong about who was to blame: society was at fault, there was no respect for the old. One family, abroad on holidays (I think—perhaps they were only in the south on a beach) asked the authorities if they would hold on to the grandmother’s body till their holidays were over, ‘She’s dead, she’s going noplace anyway,’ they were reputed to have said.
The big heat was over. Our building would be pretty well empty, we reckoned, which was normal for late August. However, when we punched in our code and the door opened stiffly, who should we find standing in the hall but the Queen of Hearts.
‘Still here?’ we said.
‘What with all that happened,’ she said.
She had opened the glass door on the notice board and was fumbling with a black-edged handwritten sign. She held it up to us.
It announced that Marie-Louise was dead.
‘Family won’t do it,’ she whispered.
Before I could ask why she was whispering, she hissed: ‘Body’s still up there.’ She raised her eyes, ‘They haven’t even appeared once. No one to sit with the body. Think of it. No priest said the last prayers. Left it all to the undertakers,’ she concluded, folding her arms and studying us for reactions. ‘A civil funeral, they call it—they bury people like dogs in this country.’
It was Bea who said, ‘But she was far too young to die from the heat!’
‘Not the heat,’ said the Queen of Hearts. ‘The loneliness.’
Marie-Louise had even phoned Vlasta the night before she did it and asked him to come into town. He told her to take a sleeping pill and go to bed. How the Queen of Hearts knew all this is anyone’s guess. When Marie-Louise didn’t turn up at work the next day, the Post Office called around and it emerged that she hadn’t left her apartment.
I pictured the Queen of Hearts in full authoritative mode, a locksmith at her feet fumbling with instruments.
‘She was lying on her right-hand side,’ she hissed loudly, ‘The stuff she took was on the bedside table.’
In a way, I thought, the Queen of Hearts’ curiosity was healthier than any French attitude to family. Then, with considerable misgiving, I began to wonder if religion might not have a role to play after all. I was careful not to mention this to Bea.
Later, as we lay in bed studying the cracks in the ceiling that needed redecorating, Bea said, ‘Just think of her going through that and us on a white beach in the Aran Islands.’
‘I’ve decided Marie-Louise wasn’t bonkers,’ I said after a while. ‘Everything is so complicated, it simply has to have a cause,’ I told her.
She sat up on one elbow and looked me straight in the eye.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to fall back on Intelligent Design and all that? After complaining for all these years about how even Descartes leaned on God, in the end?’
I realized it was too late to wrench the subject away from the possibility of supreme beings. It dawned on me that Bea’s was an anger built up over years of packing boxes and moving them with me and my career.
‘You were the one who wanted to come to France—because of ideas, because of the Enlightenment. You fled Ireland because of the priests! We moved here—lock, stock and barrel—because of Reason!’
By now Bea was yelling.
I tried to calm her by telling other stories by Marie Louise—her nightmare about being pursued into a room full of furnaces and another about lining up for punishment by burning. ‘I was always with other people, always accompanied,’ Marie-Louise had said.
Bea rolled her eyes. ‘Please, Frank,’ she said. ‘Don’t start.’
‘We humans are hard-wired to want lies,’ I plunged into ever deeper water. ‘Lies plug the breaches we find in causality. When we don’t have answers, we content ourselves with lies. Fictions and stories comfort us, where the truth—the absence of a cause, the lack of a reason—would disturb us.’
I warmed to my subject. Bea turned away from me and got out of bed.
‘Cave paintings were stories people told themselves about themselves too,’ I said, as she closed the bedroom door behind her.
I’m Talking Too Much, Aren’t I?
‘Darling! Of all the gin joints in all the world! Wonderful to see you. What’re you doing here? So long since you left St Pierre!
I’m here with a crowd—up for the weekend to celebrate the birthday of a gay friend I met on a train ten years ago. We counted it last night. We’ve been great friends since, although he’s beginning to be a bit of a bore because he’s been sitting in front of a computer for ten years and that’s just too long. He organized this weekend in gay Paree with thirty-five friends, block-booked a hotel and paid for us all, and another American organized the party last night, champagne flowing and caterers in and all. We’re just working it off now. The whole thing is mad. I’d only just gone back to the Vaucluse, but I decided to come up for it anyway. They’re all younger than me but I didn’t feel like a mother hen at all.
You and yours all well?
My son Anton’s success in New York still has me bowled over—the fruit of my loins is a novelist!—the novel got a four-star review in the papers, which is really good but me and Anton had a big fight and I said in revenge you can’t go to the house in the Vaucluse but then we made it up, because I realized it was either that or see even less of him, and after all I’ll be fifty soon—again!—and he lives in New York. So then I relented and he came to Ste Eulalie after all and filled the house with young Americans. Anton is wonderful, of course he still has all those phobias, but he has that cheeky smile and, hey, take a look at these photographs. One evening he stood up—just like that—and read parts of his new novel for the company and it was terrific. He told me he once found himself in a sauna with eight women and he said to the girl next to him, “I’m the only guy here,” and she said, “I’m the only straight girl!”
I’m also ecstatic about having earned enough money this year to put a pool in at the house in St Eulalie (an architect friend will do the drawings free in exchange for free stays and Njiro will do the work although I haven’t asked him yet). The whole money thing started through something I designed for an auction for charity in the 16th arrondissement and the opening happened on St Patrick’s Day and I just went in and although the place hadn’t been done up or anything they were all there, Irish from everywhere, the Ambassador and all, there was even one called Ben who said, “I should be called Patrick really because it’s my birthday today.” And they kept saying, “This is the designer,” like I was really important when they introduced me around and I laughed and they were so nice and so enthusiastic, all these Irish people. One of them asked if I hadn’t a drop of Irish blood and I said I might. Then because of the free work I’d done, Irish people who live in France with lots of dosh—yes, well plenty of them are still well off, you know—just booked me for loads of work, although of course I didn’t do it for that. I asked one of them, “What do you do?” an
d he said “I import eels to sell to the French”!
I’m coping better with Leila’s thought disorder. Now it’s not a brain disorder as such but a variant of schizophrenia, for example see the pepper and salt cellars there, well, if you had a thought disorder you’d say for example one is the man and the other is the woman, but then you’d carry on with the thing from there in a logical progression like asking, for example, Why is the man wearing a hat because the salt cellar has a black top. It just gets completely barmy. You know she wanted to kill me and sometimes the police ring and say she’s gone missing again and I say how the fuck can this happen but then this is much better than when she was in a squat and turning up from time to time in the street bawling. Anyway, that summer of the great heat wave, she stopped taking her medication altogether and finished up in a right pickle, fire- and ambulance-men round to the house, the whole bit. Finished up in a clinic for months. I’m thinking of sending her to a place in Belgium where they’re treated like humans, encouraged to paint and play music and spend lots of time outdoors, plenty of living space and freedom. Lock her up, but humanely, you could say.
I think a thought disorder is also what my recently deceased father had. I tried to help him bring some order to the chaos of his affairs; he decided I was in fact trying to rob him. So I’ve just given up really. Leila’s now a diabetic as well, more or less abandoned by her Polish man, he spends all his time building and she spends all her time whining by email or stuck in self-help books. She sent me a list of reading for New Year and there was only one reference on there that wasn’t a self-help thing—took an overdose of insulin last winter in an attempt to kill herself. Somebody found her lying in a pool of vomit. Didn’t work because she’d drunk a lot of liqueurs in order to prepare herself for the thing and that saved her since they’re full of sugar. So I said to her, I’m taking you to St Eulalie for New Year because I know that’s a bad time for depressives.
You enjoying Paris?
As soon as I leave Ste Eulalie I realize how wonderful a place it is, city pollution gives me a migraine. St Eulalie is the ideal place for re-sourcing yourself on walks like up to the Hermitage or just sitting looking at the river or the wonderful river gorges. I need these times. You might think I just like drinking and sitting round in cafes and generally being in a crowd, but I’m really a gregarious hermit. Jung—was it?—introversion and all that.
I love my roof terrace in Ste Eulalie too, also paid for by cash-in-hand design work. Only the other day I was out there having my breakfast coffee and saw a boar burst through the undergrowth and I said to myself, Just imagine that, a boar in my garden—and past his bedtime!
Jeannine? She’s fine, her relationship with Paul is over—the work is a bit problematic but I’m helping by giving her tutorials. I don’t call it that to her face, of course, but I make her talk about the work for up to three hours at a time. I make suggestions about showing not telling, that kind of thing, and doing more of the shorter novels because those big historic things are antediluvian. That last short book was masterful but I don’t care for those longer ones at all.
Jean-Pierre and Marianne still invite you to dinner and then spoil the great food by drinking too much and fighting with each other throughout the evening. He is wonderful, very funny, although probably was a bit of a bastard in the past, always off with the lads leaving Marianne at home and now they’re down there in that small village and he’ll go slowly out of his mind. He paints well but can’t finish anything because he’s an alcoholic, of course. That last big exhibition with the dark greens and greys was a reflection of his life, you know. Their daughter is down there after yet another breakdown, fat as a fool, eating to beat the band, a path worn from fridge to table. They’ve bought her a house in another village but she refuses to move out to it. She thinks they should split up and live one in each house but they think she’s mad. Marianne is still the same American pretending to be English—you know that accent she has. She even found some connection between their family name and some aristocratic family in England. Now isn’t that just typical? But when you get her on her own she’s great. We took the TGV up here the other day—that merciless hot day they had the strike. I had a big container of wine for the party and it was so crowded there were people sitting in the luggage racks. You know those seats for four people in the middle of the carriage? Well I put Marianne sitting there and just said, ‘Don’t you move even if they bring in an elderly person on a stretcher.’ Marianne just gulped and did what she was told. I said I’d kill for a glass of wine and Marianne said ‘Oh, but you can’t,’ and I said, ‘Wait here.’ So I went off and got one of those, you know, the French plastic water bottles and cut the top off it and turned part of it out to make a spout and got out, you know, my big container of fifty liters of wine and filled it. Of course the wine splashed all over the place onto the floor and everything but I didn’t care although Marianne was worried she was also glad of the wine and in fact got quite tiddly. I was melting, so I just slipped out of my underwear there and then on the train—let down the shoulder straps and just shucked the whole lot out at my feet the way we used to do in boarding school. Marianne said, ‘Well you’ve certainly got the attention of the whole carriage now and no mistake.’
What else? That guy with the ponytail died of a heart attack. Olivier has a lover of fifty-seven. Catherine is still the same wanker, now quite mad, tits down to her knees. Made a piece of furniture for me after my own design, took three years to make and would have been suitable for the Hotel de Ville, especially if they had shares in some poison against woodworm, as I told her. Hubby still in computers, makes frequent trips to Silicon Valley then off in the other direction to India, where he trains the people who’re going to take all our jobs without even leaving home to do so.
See that Misha over there, the one with the high cheekbones? Such a sweet, dreadful accent though. David’s boyfriend, from Siberia. You know nobody ever lived in Siberia until Stalin shunted them all up there. Well his father came over to Ste Eulalie last year and during a party at my house he went up on the roof terrace and bawled at the sky. It was deafening and powerful, and you know Misha is now grieving because he went back to Siberia and committed suicide. Couldn’t take all that change in the USSR and everything breaking up. You know the other night Misha said to me, ‘No woman can do a Cossack dance because they can never get their legs high enough or apart enough,’ and I said, ‘Yes they can’ because I never let anyone away with saying I can’t do anything and so I did the splits and Misha was amazed and I was delighted but I really did hurt myself. The Irish contingent is quite strong here - I found myself walking along the street the other night with them and one of them just burst into song and I said to myself, “This is amazing—these people are total strangers...”
I’m talking far too much aren’t I?
Ah, here’s Marianne now—I get the impression we’re off. Darling, we had no time to talk about you…’
Mastery
The mixture that is not shaken soon stagnates
- Heraclitus
Monsieur Pierre is a vendor in a furniture store, not far from Place de la République in Paris’s teeming north-eastern quarter. In the evenings, when the other vendors have left, the owner confides the store to him before heading off for an apéritif. This is the moment when Monsieur Pierre removes his black jacket and sits on the high stool at the counter, resplendent in his white shirt. People going home on wet streets are struck by his solitude, absorption and control. He reads up on new products and materials, sometimes looking up from his work to survey the furniture and the shop, as if it were all part of his own home.
No one knows much about him and only his employer actually knows if Pierre is his first name or his family name. Something about him suggests another time and place: His head and pale skin retain a boyishness; his high cheekbones have the slight blush of one who lives outdoors. His hair too is that of a boy, with what the
barber calls an ear of corn at the front—a quiff which sticks up in spite of the creams and lotions he uses to control it.
Invariably dressed in a black suit and snow-white shirt, his manner suggests something of a lackey. This is reinforced by a tendency to wring his hands, particularly when elucidating the finer points of the products he sells, or when he senses a sale is close.
Monsieur Pierre’s look belies the fact that he is an expert in the hard sell. He has mastered all the skills and products and can read customers like a book. They are reassured by his penetrating eyes and boyish looks, incapable of suspecting anything but honesty and sincerity. He plays this to the utmost, often calling the store manager to vouch for some of the facts or prolong a special offer, and give the customer time to think. The manager respects these ploys and plays the game. Monsieur Pierre holds the store record for sales and commission. The other vendors say he could sell sand to Arabs, yet few of them actually see him in any other light than the customers: that of a boyish, put-upon hard worker.
Only after closing time does Monsieur Pierre take on a different air, master of all he surveys among the elegant sofas and occasional tables. He prefers certain styles, particularly likes old-fashioned English furniture—he is expert at suggesting to customers where a piece might best fit and what fabrics might match. He gleans information and ideas from a stock of magazines and catalogues he keeps under the counter and sometimes whips out to clinch a sale.
Recently he has noted, but oddly doesn’t mourn, the fact that most of the elegant stuff is disappearing. Things are rapidly changing in the neighborhood. Most elderly people of modest but tasteful means have died or gone into homes. Smaller apartments in rundown buildings are being taken over by a young new breed, who want just a minimum of practical furniture that folds away against the walls, with maybe a transparent telephone or a neon clock. These are trendy twenty-to-forty year-olds who consider themselves ‘zen,’ who move house with a friend’s van, leave stuff they no longer want under a tree for the city to remove, then buy their new needs afresh and cheaply, choosing style before comfort. They rarely spend much time at home anyway, and prefer to hang out with friends in tapas bars and cheap restaurants up and down rue Oberkampf.