by Rumer Godden
It was altogether a poet’s town. Monsieur Joubert made us see that; he was working on two canvases, a morning one and one that he began after four o’clock when the light turned more gold. Looking at those paintings, watching as they slowly came to life, we saw the colours of the houses along the river bank and up the hill, the faint varyings of the shabby plaster, the pink and grey-green of the paint as it blistered on doors and shutters; I do not think there was a newly painted house in the whole town. We saw the shadows of the river, the black, white and scarlet reflections of a barge eddying in the water, reflections of houses, trees, fishermen, children. Up above were the ruins of the monastery walls, their old stone turned a honey-yellow; the air was hazed with the town smoke against the sky. There were other colours: grains of grey and white that were pigeons and cats, the unexpected pink of an apron, a man’s blue overalls, a jug, a cask, a child’s toy; and there were sounds: the sound of the bells, of hammering from the boatyards, the hoot of a barge, the land hooter of the Brass Instruments Factory behind the town and, nearer, the cries of children bathing in the Plage des Saules.
In Vieux-Moutiers we were foreigners, which was more comfortable than being odd; the town was accustomed to tourists and nobody stared at us; we had achieved an obscurity that was strangely restful.
In Southstone our family circle had been five children alone with Mother. Our importance had receded only on Father’s rare visits; Uncle William and his friends were as uninteresting as the dead to us, and children’s doings, problems, ideas and jokes had filled all our horizons. At Les Oeillets we were as insignificant as grass under trees, under the light and shadow of the grown-ups.
We had, too, been chiefly with girls and women, and had been ruled by Mother, who made a private child’s world for us; now suddenly we were surrounded by a public and almost rude life. Madame Corbet told us not to go beyond the gates at night because on the bridge into the town and along the canal behind the Plage sometimes there were drunken men; we often heard their uncertain singing. Monsieur Joubert was painting a picture—a picture to hang in a public gallery—of Robert’s wife, suckling her baby. In the kitchen we saw Paul pull Mauricette down on his lap and run his hand up under her skirt; then Monsieur Armand would turn round and give Paul a box on the ear and pull Mauricette to him and kiss her himself. “With those moustaches it must prick,” said Hester, which was a little girl’s view, while I had become as stretched and as sensitive as an Indian with his ear to the ground, or as an insect’s feeler or the needle in a compass to these doings. The sound of those loud kisses seemed to go on and on in my ears; but that was nothing to the way I watched how Mademoiselle Zizi would catch at Eliot as he went by, and how he would kiss her hand or her arm or her neck, sometimes her mouth. Eliot and Mademoiselle Zizi—and Madame Corbet—made an intense drama for me.
It was Paul who told us about the drama. We could speak little French; he had no more than a word or two of American English and yet Paul, as he sat with us on the kitchen steps those summer evenings, was like a floodlamp, illuminating everyone at Les Oeillets in the most garish possible colours.
When I say us I mean Hester and me. Hester seemed to have moved up to become to me what I had been to Joss, a second self, a substantial shadow. Willmouse and Vicky had other interests. France and Mademoiselle Zizi had given Willmouse new ideas, and he was busily making a new collection; his atelier was a grass bank in the orchard under a cherry tree. Vicky had attached herself to Monsieur Armand, who gave her tidbits from morning to night. If Joss had not still been ill we should not have seen so much of Paul—“I do not talk to kitchen boys,” she said, which explained why she was so ignorant—but her bout of sickness would not stop. “It is the shock,” said the doctor. It was more than shock; she had one of her womanly times—‘Eve’s curse’ we called it. It was as if she were being changed, sloughing off the old Joss like a skin. The doctor, whom we had learned to call Monsieur le Directeur from our visits to the hospital, came to see her twice and talked of moving her to be with Mother; in French hospitals, it seemed, there was a bed for a relation in private rooms. “But your mother is too ill,” said Madame Corbet. She added that we were all a great nuisance.
There was little we could do for Joss. I made her bed and brought her barley drinks; Toinette took her cups of thin soup called ‘bouillon’, Eliot looked in on her every night for a moment; for the rest she lay in the darkened room and told us to leave her alone. It was an odd world without Joss or Mother; every day Hester and I wrote notes to Mother, and the Littles collected bunches of flowers which we all carried over the bridge to the hospital, passing a café called the Giraffe where Eliot often went for a drink. I do not know if Mother read our notes, but not much of ourselves went into them; it was not that we did not care—at moments every day we cared abominably and were often frightened and lost—but Mother seemed to have become remote from us. That was just as well; sometimes I was a little uneasy and thought: If Mother knew what we talk about . . . but she did not know and I crushed the uneasiness down.
Hester asked Paul most of the questions. “Why does Madame Corbet hate us?”
She did hate us. She even wrote the figures into our account as if the pen could poison the paper; we watched in dread for her topknot to bob up over the grille and a reproof to be rapped out. Not even Vicky escaped. ‘Pourquoi est-ce qu’elle nous déteste?”
“Parce-qu’ c’est Eliot qui a tout arrangé.”
“Not Eliot?”
“Si.”
“Then doesn’t she hate Eliot?”
“Si.”
Paul’s ‘Si’ seemed to steal into my bones and stay there; it was sinister but exciting.
“Hates Eliot? Elle déteste Eliot?” I said while Hester’s calm, little-girl voice went on, “Why does she hate Eliot?”
The answer came back, “Parce qu’elle en tient pour Mademoiselle Zizi”; and seeing I did not understand, “She love Mademoiselle Zizi.”
“A lady love a lady?”
We did not believe it, but “Si” said Paul.
Now we had been told we saw it for ourselves. The topknot did not only come up to watch us; it spied on every movement of Mademoiselle Zizi.
Every evening we sat there on the steps—Paul with his Gauloise, his thin knees pointed under his apron—and from the garden, where twilight was falling, came that flower-sweet scent. I had always meant to go and look for its bush, find the flower, and instinctively I knew it was a better idea than to sit listening to this. The kitchen dustbins stood by the steps, the smell of their refuse filled our nostrils. That seemed symbolic and often I half rose, then sat down again on the warm stone. If Paul had the end of a bottle of wine, he would pass it to Hester, who would tip it up, take a mouthful and pass it on to me; I would take one and hand it to Paul. “How disgusting!” said Joss when I told her.
“It isn’t. We wipe the top on Paul’s apron.”
“Ouch!” said Joss and looked as if she would be sick again.
Once, after I had taken such a drink, with the dark vinegar taste of the wine in my mouth, I had said, “I think Mademoiselle Zizi is in love with Eliot.”
There were empty bottles by the dustbin; one of them had gold foil on its neck. Paul stripped the foil off, shaped it into a round and handed it to me. “Tu ne l’as pas volée,” he had said gravely as he gave it to me for a medal.
Evening after evening Hester took up the saga. “Does Eliot love—aime—Mademoiselle Zizi?”
“Pas lui,” said Paul and laughed. “Not him.”
If his ‘Si’ had stolen into my bones, the laughing woke them up. ‘They should never have let you talk to that boy!’ Everyone said that afterwards; it was not Paul who was at fault but my own thoughts. Coming from our Eden world of Belmont Road I was like a young novice horse who jumps too high, while Paul had been born an imp of the world, the real world. To him all this was entirely natural; that was what women were for. “J’avais quatorze ans quand j’ai fait l’amour la première foi
s,” he told me. At fourteen! I looked at him suspiciously, but he was not boasting. He was far more interested in lorries. “Renault, Berliet, Willème,” he said as if they were unimaginably beautiful names, and looked away across the garden, his face soft with his dream. He could not know that when he told me small prickles seemed to be breaking out all over me and the back of my knees felt hot. I had to persist. “You mean . . . you made love? When you were fourteen?”
He laughed and put his arm round my neck, his hand under my dress. I jumped as, quite casually and calmly, he felt my breasts, but he took his hand away. “Deux petits citrons,” he said and laughed. Citrons! Lemons! He laughed again at the outraged look on my face and, with his finger, tapped my nose as one would a little animal if it were too eager. There was no doubt about it. It was I, not Paul, who was bad.
I could not help it; it was a stain spreading through my bones. I began to wonder about bones; Vicky’s, I thought, must be like a chicken’s, pearly-pink and blue with a little clear red. Monsieur Joubert’s, for some reason, seemed to me the same as Vicky’s—perhaps they would not take a stain. “Well, he is busy,” said Joss when I expounded this to her. Paul’s and Hester’s seemed red too, clean and honest; Joss’s I did not know about and would not have dared to enquire. I wondered guiltily about mine and passed hastily on. “Mademoiselle Zizi’s are purple,” I said.
“No, mauve,” said Joss.
Madame Corbet’s bones I saw as black and green, gangrenous with wicked thoughts. “And Eliot’s?” asked Joss.
We were both silent. We had not the faintest idea what Eliot’s would be.
CHAPTER 6
“ELIOT EST un vrai mystère,” said Paul. Yes, a great mystery, I thought, and sighed.
One of the oddest things about Eliot was that he had nothing that helped us to understand what kind of a person he was. Everyone else had things, “toi et moi, moi qui parle,” said Paul. That was true. Mademoiselle Zizi had her bottles and jars, her scents and dresses; Madame Corbet had her crucifix and beads, I had seen them on her chest of drawers; Paul had his pictures of lorries, Berliet and Willème, pasted up in his cupboard, just as we had our treasures. “Mais Monsieur Eliot, il n’a rien,” Paul said, not even a photograph or a paper, and even in Eliot’s drawers, Paul told us, were only clothes folded up.
“You mean you look in other people’s drawers?” we said, shocked.
“Si,” said Paul cheerfully. Eliot had nothing, nothing to tell about himself.
“He has books,” I objected. “I cut them for him.” I liked doing it, it was a labour of love to cut the interminable pages of those paper-bound French novels. “But when he has finished them he throws them away,” I had to admit.
“I cut them too,” said Hester, and she added, “but he has something, his beautiful paper-knife.”
I had never seen a paper-knife like Eliot’s. We thought it was silver, but I suppose now it was steel, thin, about twelve inches long. “Thirteen,” said Eliot, “my lucky number.” Its blade was sharp-pointed, with bevelled edges. “Be careful,” said Eliot when we cut the pages; “don’t let the Littles have it, it’s sharp.” It was. I remember once I dropped it point down on the grass, it went in and stayed upright.
It had a ring at the top with strange lettering. “Chinese,” said Eliot.
“Where did you get it?” asked Hester, and Eliot said dramatically, “From my ancestor, Genghis Khan.”
When we were with Eliot all that Paul told us disappeared—or was confirmed, confirmed as a part of life; we no more thought and wondered about it than we should have wondered about Eliot brushing his teeth.
He had us in excellent order, even Vicky. Though we were often a chorus, following him, we kept our distance when told. The hotel had its own bathing place, a cove in an inlet of the river made by a small island a few hundred yards along the bank; it was screened by bulrushes and hazels and shaded by big willow trees; when Eliot had lunched in the hotel he would sunbathe in the cove afterwards, lying on its sand; ‘imported sand,’ he told us. “The Marne has only gravel.” He would not strip but let the sun soak through his clothes, his head and eyes shielded by an old yachting cap.
Then we stayed respectfully at a distance, which is what he meant us to do. He would seldom pick himself up until we had gone in for the goûter we owed to Paul. Paul gave us our food and at four o’clock had taken to coming to the kitchen door and whistling; I think we should have heard that whistle for miles. The goûter was delicious, though I do not know how we held it as well as all the other food; we were beginning to eat as much as the French themselves. Paul would take one of the long thin loaves called ‘baguettes’, chop eight or ten inches off it, split that, spread the split with butter and clap in ham or jam or a slab of chocolate from the showcase in the hall.
“But won’t Madame Corbet . . .?”
Paul made a rude noise and pretended to write with his hand; it was true, Madame Corbet behind the grille was entering the chocolate in the ledger.
Even for Eliot we would not have missed our goûter, but it was a long-drawn-out time, for Monsieur Armand had taken to making us pay for it. “Il faut payer,” he would say gravely. “Little dogs must sing for their supper.” He used to make Vicky, who sometimes lisped, say an old tongue-twister, “Combien sont ces six saucissons? Ces six saucissons sont six sous. Six sous, ces six saucissons? Mais ces six saucissons sont trop chers.”
Four o’clock was Monsieur Armand’s rest time; the lunches were finished, the kitchen was tidy and it was not time yet to begin dinners. Then he sat at the table by the window, where the light was made green by the vine, and he read the newspaper, and drank a bottle of wine. He was very comfortable, his shoes off, his cap on the dresser; Vicky sat on the table by him, and the kitchen cat, Minette, curled herself in the patch of sun at his feet. It always amused Monsieur Armand to hear us talk—he thought English an excruciatingly funny language—and he had taken to making me, every day, translate some passage in the newspaper. I learned more French in the kitchen at Les Oeillets than even in the punishments at St Helena’s.
That kitchen was a pleasant place; its whitewashed walls were made green near the window by the vine, and orange-gold near the fire; the light caught reflections in the rows of copper pans that hung down the middle of the room. Below them were the working tables, with hot shelves above them from which Mauricette took the dishes on the dining-room side as Monsieur Armand and Paul put them in from the other.
Behind the tables was the great stove of iron with polished steel handles and hinges. There were two sinks, a big one and a smaller for washing up silver and glass and petits déjeuners. In the next room was the machine for ice-cream, the marble slabs for making pâtisserie and the small store of vegetables; beyond that was the big store, where meat, poultry, fish and oysters were kept; Monsieur Armand took out what was needed once each day. The fish were in tanks outside. There was a spit over an open fire at the end of the room, a red-bricked floor, and always a good smell of cooking onions, new bread, coffee and wine. In the afternoons Toinette and Nicole would be talking gently in the scullery as they peeled potatoes or cut beans, or else there would be a smell of singeing and hot linen as they ironed in the linen-room along the passage. Mauricette would wander in and out from the garden, her apron off, and take a sip from Monsieur Armand’s glass, while Paul would pause in his work to tease her, or they would both listen gravely to my reading. I do not know what newspaper Monsieur Armand read, but the bits he gave me were always sensational. “Que veut dire ‘belle-mère’?” I would ask.
“Wife mother,” said Monsieur Armand, making a face.
“Oh, mother-in-law!” and I would read, ‘Mother-in-law hits husband with hatchet’, or ‘Baby girl found dead in trunk in . . . “grenier”, qu’est-ce que c’est?’ but they could not make me understand and I had to look it up; the baby girl had been found in the attic.
Monsieur Armand seemed to think these horrors were good for me, which was odd because he was
very particular what Paul said when we were neat—he did not know what we talked of on the steps—and if Paul used swearwords Monsieur Armand would smack his head. When Vicky’s rosy little mouth said, ‘Merde!’ and ‘Ordure’ he washed it out with a piece of kitchen soap, but when I read, ‘Thieves entice young wife while accomplice takes twenty thousand francs’-worth of rings and brooches’ or ‘Soldiers tie schoolgirl on bed’, he would chuckle with delight.
Sometimes we chafed because we knew when we raced back to the cove Eliot would be gone. He liked to walk along the bank undisturbed—perhaps to get away for a little while from his female admirers—sometimes he would walk downstream into the town and cross the bridge to the Giraffe. We would go back to the house and wait faithfully to see if he wanted us when he came in.
“I like that man,” said Vicky, which was surprising because Eliot never gave her anything to eat and she was allowed to trot round after Monsieur Armand, who gave her plenty; in her time at Les Oeillets Vicky grew very fat. She did not trot round after Eliot—none of us would have dared to do that—but when he noticed us, as he did quite often in an absent-minded way, she would give up the kitchen, the slivers of chicken and spoonfuls of cream, and stay where he was likely to be.
“And I like him,” said Willmouse. “He is the only person I know except Mother who has never laughed at me.”
That was the first time I knew Willmouse minded being laughed at. Then he was brave, this odd little brother of mine; it was strange how having a stranger added to the family had made one look at its members with different eyes.
Eliot treated Willmouse with particular seriousness. He would look at Miss Dawn’s and Dolores’ new dresses, examining them and criticising carefully. He bought Willmouse a book from Paris, not a fashion magazine but a big book of old masters. “Study them,” he told Willmouse, “especially the primitives; they will give you a sense of drapery and colour.” Willmouse only nodded, but his eyes kindled.