by Rose Tremain
We’d tiptoe to our father’s study, carrying our shoes. Pierrette and my father would be talking in whispers. We’d press our ears to the door. Very often, they seemed only to be talking about books. We’d stay hunched by the door till our feet grew numb, and they would simply talk on and on, quietly, intimately, like people who have loved each other for years.
One night, we saw Pierrette go to our father’s room. We crept to his door, but all we could hear was laughter. Paul hated this. He went very white and led me away. ‘I’m going to put a turd in her bed,’ he announced, as we crept along the passage. I felt frightened: frightened by change which is final and irrevocable, frightened by the whiteness of my brother’s face. We went to the bathroom. I sat on the bath edge and rocked to and fro to calm my fear and Paul sat on the lavatory, straining to produce the offensive offering he would stick between Pierrette’s sheets. But my fear wouldn’t go and Paul’s bowels wouldn’t move. Status quo . . . I repeated over and over, status quo.
One part of me wanted to be back at school. At least in England, in that jungle of rule and counter-rule, we would be away from what was happening. We could grieve for our mother in her own country and have no part in this hothouse betrayal. But we knew we wouldn’t be sent back until the autumn. Easter came, and Pierrette went home to her family in Bourges. We cheered up. Blochot recovered and started work again. We were given money for spring clothes. Our father resumed his walks with the army wives. Pierrette was not mentioned. We were invited to an uncle’s house in the Loire valley. We left Paris with relief and our father stayed behind. When we returned, Pierrette was back.
*
We had never done any of the things we’d planned. We’d never tried to pretend to the blind man that Pierrette had flat feet or buck teeth. I had sold her Pensées, but she never knew it was me. At lessons, we were sulky and uncooperative and made snobby remarks about the bourgeois of Bourges, but to our father we were polite in a cold kind of way. He didn’t seem to notice any change in us.
It was an extraordinary spring in Paris. The railings outside our house were warm; the magnolia tree pushed out its showy blooms into an air of utter stillness. We strode around in our new clothes and thought of the long summer. At the end of May, we were summoned to the drawing room and told by our father that he was going to marry Pierrette. Pierrette wasn’t there. He had granted us this courtesy; he knew we would require an explanation. ‘Never doubt,’ he said, ‘my love for your mother. She was a remarkable woman and I trust that you may be so fortunate as to have inherited some of her qualities. But when you grow up and become men, you will, I hope, understand that a man of my years cannot content himself with a celibate life. It is not in a man’s nature. And Pierrette and I have found in each other an affinity I never thought I would be lucky enough to feel. I may as well admit to you that, much as I admired your mother, we were never sexually compatible and our marriage was not successful from this point of view.’
Tears began to stream down Paul’s face. I remembered, grimly, how hard he had tried to cry after our mother’s death. I pinched his arm. I didn’t think this was a moment for weakness.
‘May we go now, father?’ I asked.
‘Go? Aren’t you going to offer me your congratulations?’
Paul made a choking sound. I tugged him towards the door. My father’s head jerked up.
‘Is one of you crying?’
‘No,’ I stammered, ‘Paul’s got a cold. Congratulations, father.’
I got Paul up to our room, where he lay on the bed and sobbed and shook. I stole a bottle of brandy from Blochot’s pantry, took this upstairs and tried to dribble some into Paul’s runny mouth. In the end, he gulped quite a lot of brandy down, I covered him with my eiderdown and he went to sleep, still shuddering.
We were fifteen by then, not obviously tall or strong or handsome, yet, being twins, we enjoyed attention from people which, singly, neither of us would have earned. It was as if the two of us equalled one very striking person. We are not identical, yet have a strong resemblance. At forty-two, I know that I look older than Paul. At fifteen, our experience of life had been in every way identical and neither we, nor people we met, could separate us out. And over the question of father’s marriage, we acted of course as one. We offered Pierrette glacial felicitations; we told our snobby Parisian friends that father was marrying ‘an ugly bourgeoise from Bourges’; we fuelled Blochot’s sense of something done too hastily by reminding him constantly of all the years we had been ‘one family’, with our mother, nostrils flared as if breathing the air of the sea, in her place at the helm. We did everything we could, in fact, to wreck the coming marriage, by insinuation, by sulking, by discourtesy, and by downright lies. Yet we knew it would happen. One morning we’d wake up and that would be the day, and after it what? After it, what? We asked each other that question very often: what happens when it’s over?
It was a July wedding, held in Paris and not in Bourges in deference to our father’s blindness and Pierrette’s sense of grandeur. The reception took place in the drawing room of our house. Pierrette wore a white coat and skirt and an ugly white velvet hat which made her look like a rich American child. The Bourges relations clearly envied her her new life and wondered (but did not ask) how a philosophy degree had won her a soldier. My father pinned his medals onto his dress uniform. His blind person’s gestures were already the gestures of an old man, yet on that day Blochot had helped him to look resplendent and brave, which, in his way, he was.
Paul and I had been bought identical grey suits. All suits, in those days, seemed to be grey and we wore them obediently, not proudly. The buttonhole carnations we had been given we decided not to pin on. At one time, Paul had wanted to make us black armbands, but these, I calculated, would have been more shocking and insulting in their way than any of the punishments we had thought up. So I suggested instead that we simply get drunk and try to pretend that nothing mattered – life, death, blindness, war, bereavement, marriage, crooked stocking seams – nothing signified. We had seen it all.
*
The honeymoon was to be in a house on the Côte d’Azur, leant by some uncle or rich godfather. But our father knew he would find the reception tiring, so it was decided that he and Pierrette would take the Paris-to-Nice sleeper the following evening. The wedding night would be spent in our house.
By eight or nine, all the reception guests, there since two, had trickled away into the stifling evening. My father stood on one of the balconies, jerking his head in the direction of the sun tumbling straight down behind the Avenue de la Grande Armée, his hand clasping his new bride to him, his body in its dress uniform very straight and proud. We, lolling on sofas, slightly bilious from the quantity of champagne we had drunk, stared at their backs in silent contempt. ‘It’s as if,’ Paul whispered, ‘mother had never existed.’ Pierrette turned and stared at us, her skin blotchy with excitement and alcohol. ‘I suggest,’ she said, in a voice of new authority, ‘that you boys get yourselves some supper and go to bed.’
Father didn’t move. We were dismissed. We slipped sullenly away, carrying our jackets and ties that we had taken off. We climbed the stairs to our room. We didn’t speak. What had invaded us, at precisely the same moment, was a boredom so colossal, so heavy and unyielding that neither of us could utter. Life wasn’t tragic after all; it was dull. In the south of England, an old man banged a washing bowl and greedy gulls began to circle, but there was no magic in it, only boring reflex and tearing, ugly beaks. All was predictable and ignoble and stupid. The roses in the pewter vase had long ago wilted and turned brown. Some old scavenging woman with her savings in a shoebox had stolen the vase, just as the leatherbound copy of Pascal had been stolen. Nothing signified – no gesture or act or artefact or idea. Jésus dans l’ennui . . . No one had redeemed man from his eternal mediocrity.
We lay in silence for several hours, sprawled on our beds, dozing now and then. Darkness came. In the dark, the sounds of the street below seemed to
grow louder. Cars roared. Lights came glimmering on.
‘I’m going down,’ Paul announced suddenly, ‘to buy us a woman.’
We stared at each other. In that instant, boredom had disappeared, belief in magic returned. To find it, we only had to reach out and dip into the darkness.
‘It’s expensive,’ I said nonchalantly.
‘We’ll get a cheap one.’
‘How would one tell . . .?’
‘Which are the cheap ones? The old ones.’
‘Let’s not get an old one.’
‘How much have you got?’
The thought slipped into my mind, if I hadn’t bought the pewter vase . . . I banished it. ‘About three thousand francs,’ I said.
‘I’ve got more than that,’ said Paul. ‘We should be alright. We can probably afford one who looks young in the dark.’
‘What about the room?’ I said.
‘The room?’
‘Well, look at it. She’ll be able to tell it’s just a boys’ room.’
‘Yes. Well, let’s tidy it at least.’
Urgently then we bundled away the litter of clothes into the wardrobes, put the Thousand and One Nights back into its Jock of the Bushveld dustjacket, and, silently as we could, moved the two beds together and covered them with the satin eiderdowns. Finally, Paul hunted in his chest of drawers for a red paisley silk scarf – a present from our English grandfather – which he draped round the central parchment lampshade. The room was transformed by the light, reddened, ready.
‘Well . . .’ I said.
‘Why don’t you go down?’ said Paul.
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You’re taller.’
‘No, I’m not. We’re the same.’
‘You look older.’
So it was that around midnight I found myself with seven thousand francs in my pocket, carrying my shoes, creeping silently down past our father’s room where the lights were turned out, past the drawing room where the one hundred guests had eaten salmon, down into the hall which had been filled with flowers and out at last into the street.
The night was colder than I had expected. I was glad I’d done up my tie and put my jacket on. I was nervous, yet I felt light with my own extraordinary purpose. My whole life shadowed me as I walked; the shadow was obedient and vast.
We knew where the whores congregated. The Avenue Foch was the rather verdant beat of a cavalcade of spikey-eyed women. In gateways and on corners, they stood and waited. Cars drew up. They got in, in ones and twos. Hunched up men steered them away down side streets. I had often passed these furtive stoppings, noted the quick exchange of words, the clacking heels being hurried over the cobbles, little wisps of laughter or anger trailing off into the night.
I felt tiny. The city hummed, like a dome, round me. I walked very slowly, hearing each footstep. The night was superb. I pitied my father who would never see it – the Arc de Triomphe on its hill of light, the glistening foliage of gardens and entrances, a cluster of stars above the tall-shouldered houses . . . I thought of Paul, waiting on the satin eiderdowns and grinned. I have never admired my brother as ardently as I did that night. I admired him firstly for his daring and secondly for the cowardice which had tempered it and which allowed me to be here in the street. I truly loved him.
The two women I stopped at, hesitating, my hand clutching the money in my pocket, looked at me first with the disdain of giraffes, then, seeing me planted in front of them, speechless but earnest, they smiled and made almost identical movements of their hips, shifting weight from one long leg to the other. The thought whizzed through me: will women always be taller than me? I cleared my throat. ‘I didn’t know . . .’ I began, ‘whether one of you might like to . . . come along to my house. I mean, just for half an hour or something . . .’
The women looked at each other and grinned, looked back at me, grinned again.
‘Which one of us did you have in mind?’
I remembered Paul’s knowing statement: the oldest are the cheapest. Neither of these women seemed particularly old, nor particularly young. I couldn’t have told whether they were twenty-five or forty. They were just women – available women. I stared up at them, trying to guess which of them might be the cheapest, but I simply couldn’t tell. Nor, I realised, did I want to offend either of them by choosing one and rejecting the other.
‘I don’t really mind,’ I said, ‘I mean, I don’t mind at all. The thing is that I’ve got seven thousand francs . . .’
Again, they looked at each other and grinned. One of them pulled a silky shawl round her shoulders, touched my chin lightly and tenderly and began to walk away. I watched her go with a feeling of dismay. She suddenly seemed perfect: long, dark hair, swinging as she walked, a fleshy bottom encased in a tight skirt that shimmered. I wanted to call her back, but I felt a gentle hand on my arm and forced myself to look more closely at the woman who was to be ours. She had red hair and a wide smile. She wore a lacy blouse over bunched up, milky breasts. On her upper lip was the dark blotch of a mole.
*
‘Somebody like flowers in this house?’ she said, seeing the banked arrangements that filled the hall.
‘Ssh,’ I whispered, ‘my father’s in bed. He had his wedding today.’
She began to laugh, put a fist up to stifle it. From the fist hung a little ornate velvet purse with an amber clasp. Soon, all my savings and Paul’s would be inside this purse.
A light was on under my father’s door now as we passed it. I imagined him hearing our footsteps, feeling his way to the door and opening it – and seeing nothing of course. To live with a blind man is to have the power of invisibility. We hurried on up, me leading, not daring to look behind me. Was the red-haired woman old? How would she seem to Paul in the paisley lamplight? Would he mind the mole on her lip? Old women don’t have red hair or high breasts, do they? I felt absolutely responsible to Paul for my choice. My own daring had only been in recognition of his. We had a perfect sense, in those days, of what each of us owed to the other. Over the years, this sense has clouded, disappeared.
‘Here we are,’ I said, quietly opening the door to our room. Paul, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed, trying not to crumple the eiderdown, stood up stiffly.
‘Oh, good evening . . .’ he said.
I put my hand on the woman’s arm and led her forward. The skin of her arm was freckled and soft. Her hair, I saw now, was a marvellous colour and very clean.
‘This is my twin brother, Paul,’ I said apologetically. ‘I wonder if you could tell us your name?’
‘Oh yes. Bettina. All nations can pronounce ‘Bettina’.’
‘Oh. All nations, eh?’
‘I think it’s a terrific name,’ said Paul.
Bettina was smiling. I felt relieved. I hadn’t dared to tell her there would be two of us. She crossed to the bed, sat down and looked up at us.
‘Money first,’ she said, opening the velvet purse. ‘Five thousand each. I like to get this part of it over. Then we can enjoy ourselves, eh?’
I produced the seven thousand. ‘This is really all we’ve got . . .’ I began, but Paul, without any hesitation, had tugged out the gold cufflinks given to him that very morning by our father and Pierrette (an identical pair to me) to mark their wedding day.
‘I’d be honoured,’ he said in a speechy voice, ‘if you would accept these. They are worth considerably more than the three thousand owing to you.’
Bettina took them, inspected them for the gold hallmark, dropped them and the crumpled notes I had given her into the purse. She laid the purse down, kicked off her shoes and began to unroll her stockings.
I sat down. I was shaking, not with sexual excitement, but with a sense of absolute strangeness. I thought, the walk out into the night, everything from that moment is a dream and I shall wake up in the morning and life will be precisely as it was, with only the Thousand and One Nights within my reach. There will have been no scarf on the lampshade, no act of daring and matur
ity . . . I blinked, rubbed my eyes, felt thirsty, stared at Paul, who was unbuttoning his trousers. I longed for a cool drink of milk or lemonade, but I had the notion that time was sliding away from me immeasurably fast; yes, life itself was slipping, altering, as Paul stepped out of his trousers, nervously fingering his penis, already erect, and I had to stay and be part of it, or miss it for ever.
I sat on the bed and watched as Bettina arrayed for us on the satin eiderdowns a body of such white voluptuousness its form has stayed huddled in memory all my life and through all my loving. Flesh has never again seemed in itself so magnificent a thing, so utterly and uncontrollably inviting. All strangeness, all fear vanished. Paul parted Bettina’s legs, and we glimpsed for the first time in our lives the glistening dark channel that puerile imagination never imagines perfectly enough, the deep and private walls of ripeness, where the boy deluges his fountain of dreams.
I don’t remember taking off my clothes, yet I was naked on the bed, my hand on Paul’s buttocks. The motions his body made were tender, unembarrassed, as touching as an animal. His body shone. I was choked by his achievement, his beauty. My head on Bettina’s scented hair, I pressed myself to the one body that hers and Paul’s had become, rocked as they rocked, felt myself move as Paul moved through waves of mounting ecstasy. ‘It’s superb!’ Paul trumpeted as he moved and I moved faster and faster, ‘it’s superb, Jacques!’
*
I don’t know whether it was my father’s decision or Pierrette’s to separate Paul’s life from mine, but this, at the end of the summer, was what happened. We were taken away from our English school for good and sent to different boarding schools in France. I have never been able to understand the reasoning behind this decision and can only guess at it: if we missed each other enough, we would cease to miss our mother, and thus to talk of her.