Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  Delia didn’t think she was a prude, but there was an awful lot of screwing in France, in the public toilets, or with people listening two feet away—for of course she was awake, four o‘clock, the heure blanche of jet lag. They had told her it would take a day for every hour of time difference—nine—and it was true, she had been in France a week and.still her eyes flew open at four, and could not stay open at four in the afternoon. And from the next room she could perfectly well hear the fall of bedclothes, the slapping sound of surreptitious slippery friction, a stifled giggle, gasps.

  People having intercourse at her elbow, she uncomfortably installed on a sofa, using somebody else’s bathroom, strangers, with their toothbrushes there, their mouthwash and stuff, no way at all to find out what happened to Gabriel except if they would help her. “Don’t abandon me, remember,” he had said lightly but seriously. He’d been scared and the man in the flea market had been dead. Something grim was afoot. But if female friendship and resolution could save Gabriel, she would summon that resolve.

  19

  At Madame du Barry’s

  They all slept, eventually, and awoke Friday morning to face the first question of what to do with their Oregon visitor. Anne-Sophie, always cross when she had slept badly, insisted that Delia must go to Clara Cray without delay. Not entirely without reasons of his own—fascination with Cray and with his beautiful wife—Tim thought Anne-Sophie’s idea about calling the Crays a sensible one. To his surprise, it was Delia who resisted it.

  “I can’t sponge off her. I shouldn’t have called her to begin with. It came to me that though I’d asked for help from Clara, I’d never even been to see her mother, even though Mrs. Holly is right down the road from my own mother, and I had known that Mrs. Holly was old and housebound, because she used to come to the library all the time, and would always be there when I went to the library. And then she wasn’t there, so I asked the librarian who told me she doesn’t come in anymore, Cristal Wilson comes and gets her books.”

  So Delia cursed herself about that, should have seen from that that Mrs. Holly was housebound and would appreciate visitors. She was so insensitive sometimes.

  “But Gabriel had given me Clara’s phone number, and I just panicked and called it.”

  “He had their phone number?”

  “I don’t know why he had it. It is sort of odd, when you think of it,” she agreed. “He gave it to me, I see now he must have known he wasn’t coming back.”

  Anne-Sophie gave the phone to Delia with a compelling scowl. Clara, sounding surprised, said that Delia was welcome to stay, and Tim could drive her out this morning. He had almost had the impression, speaking to Clara about the time, that she—something in her voice had intimated—that she would be glad to see him. Anne-Sophie could see Tim was not reluctant at the prospect of another visit to this glamorous domain.

  “I will come with you,” she said. They were speaking in English for Delia’s sake. “I die to see this place, and maybe Serge Cray himself?”

  They finished their buttered toast, an American habit Anne-Sophie had adopted, and prepared for the trip to the Crays’ château, a pretty drive through the forest via Saint-Cloud, Tim’s familiar tennis route. Despite herself, Delia seemed to enjoy the bare trees, many with petals of gold still clinging to them, the russet carpet of fallen leaves, and the pleasant impression of the sumptuous and orderly banlieue beyond Paris. A smile replaced her scowl, and the slightly pinched air of mistrust they were used to her wearing.

  The Crays’ big house rose before them at the end of an allée of the soldierly trees outside the village of Etang-la-Reine. As before, Clara opened the door herself and greeted them warmly, though it seemed to Anne-Sophie not very warmly. She saw Clara look twice as Delia walked, perhaps had not noticed before her lameness? They declined coffee, so Clara said she would show Delia up to her room. Delia seemed dazed by the size and age of the place, but of course she had as yet seen almost nothing else of France.

  “Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Clara asked them. Anne-Sophie eagerly agreed. Tim would have gone with them, but just then Cray came in, wearing slippers and a sweater.

  “Let me have a word with you,” he said to Tim, without any greeting. “Come upstairs.” As the two men turned toward the stairs, they could hear Anne-Sophie happily commenting in the hall on the features of the château for Delia’s benefit. “Imaginez! La du Barry herself! Which was her room? La pauvre! You know what happened to her? They cut off her head, though she was not at all a haughty traitor to her class, she was a nice woman. Even if she took up with a king, she remembered her roots!”

  Clara’s lower voice was describing what she and Serge had done to the place, a railing restored here, a room scraped down to its original color, a new bathroom, mouldings to replace those that had been taken away sometime in the past.

  “This is my little boy’s room,” she could be heard to say as Tim and Cray climbed the stairs behind them. “He’s away at school.” This was the first Tim had thought of Clara as a mother. It was hard to think of Anne-Sophie in that role either, though presumably he would be the agent of that change in her life. From time to time these implications of marriage would attack and slightly disconcert him for a second. “La du Barry,” Anne-Sophie’s happy voice was saying. “Imagine her walking on these stairs!”

  Then other voices and car doors slamming could be heard below outside the house. From Cray’s study window they could see a party of men in two cars assembling in the courtyard.

  Clara continued with Delia and Anne-Sophie up another flight of stairs to the small third floor, to a pretty room with flowered wallpaper and mirrored cupboards. Seeing it, Delia looked radiant at this hopeful change in her fortunes. She began immediately to unpack her few things, and though she continued to complain that she ought to be doing something about her plight, she saw there was nothing whatever to do.

  It was apparent to the others that she was relieved that she now found herself in a luxurious country home instead of a seedy fleabag hotel. But she had yet to see the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Elysées or the Louvre, especially the Louvre. She lamented that it was entirely possible and maybe in the cards that she’d be back on the airplane without having seen any cultural landmarks of Paris whatever and without eating anything specifically French unless you counted the toasted cheese sandwich with an egg on it in the brasserie by the hotel, or the veal stew Anne-Sophie had made last night, which she hadn’t eaten on principle.

  Anne-Sophie put the purse full of Delia’s belongings on the dressing table. “How pretty, dix-huitième,” Anne-Sophie said, peering with expert interest at the dressing table itself.

  “Serge is the great flea market person,” Clara Holly said. “He goes all the time. No one recognizes him. He buys everything there. All the chandeliers in the ballrooms and restaurants in Queen Caroline came from there. Did you see it?”

  “Yes, très bien, superbe,” Anne-Sophie said.

  “No,” said Delia. She had, though. She didn’t know why she didn’t want to admit it, or be obliged to say how wonderful everything was, or acknowledge Clara’s high connection to the glamour world of film and money, in case Clara would think that was why she had called her in the first place.

  “After it was shot, we brought all that grand stage stuff to our house here,” Clara said. “It all probably came from someplace like this in the first place, was sold off, and now it’s just back where it belongs. We didn’t try to restore the place, really. You can’t be slavish about the past....” She had an air of inattention, as if she merely repeated what she had heard somebody else, probably her husband, say.

  Clara was listening to cars in the drive outside, and looked out the window. “It’s the hunters!” she said.

  Anne-Sophie did not at first understand the note of disapproval. She knew people in the local hunt, including the president, Monsieur Crépin. Leaving Delia to arrange her things, she followed Clara downstairs again and outside, and cheer
fully advanced on the party to greet them. She had not realized that Antoine de Persand hunted; she knew the Persand family in Paris, yet there he was with the others, a party of men in green felt hats. Persand, apparently, had just come from town, and was wearing a business suit and Burberry raincoat, with the requisite scarf.

  Hearing the voices in the courtyard, Cray frowned and rose, signalling Tim to follow him. When they came downstairs, Clara was just coming in the front door, and Anne-Sophie was chatting with the party of men that now stood, in yellow green-collared jackets and boots, looking restlessly at the woods. One of the many things Tim admired about Anne-Sophie was her sociability, her perfect recall of names from the Bottin mondain without ulterior motive, her perfect ease in greeting people and introducing herself if they didn’t remember her.

  “It’s a delegation from the mairie,” Clara said to Cray, rather grimly. Tim didn’t then know the history of their standoff with the mayor. “The shooting of small game opens tomorrow and they want to talk to you.”

  Cray gave an irritated snort. “I thought you had dealt with this.” He pushed past her and crunched across the gravel toward the group gathered there looking into his woods. Tim saw at once that among the visitors was the man he had seen Clara talk to so warmly at the tennis club, tall and balding, dressed unlike the others in city clothes. She seemed acutely aware of him—her beautiful face was pinkish and self-conscious, in contrast to the languid detachment he had first seen, though it could have been because her husband had spoken so brusquely to her in front of others.

  “A hunter, monsieur!” Anne-Sophie smiled archly at this very man, whom she evidently knew.

  “Not a dedicated killer of animals, I have to say,” replied the man, kissing Anne-Sophie in a fatherly manner, with a glance at Clara. “It’s the same to me if we fail to see a deer. I enjoy the day in the field. How is your mother?”

  “I could let you ride across my land provided nothing was killed, if riding is the thing,” conceded Cray.

  “Antoine de Persand,” said the man, extending his hand to Cray. “I am your neighbor to the rear. You’ve not met monsieur the mayor? Monsieur Briac.” Briac and Cray shook hands, but they had met, were old enemies.

  “I’ve always wanted to see your house, it is said to have belonged for a moment to Madame du Barry, did you know that?” said Persand.

  “Thank you for agreeing to receive us, monsieur,” said Mayor Briac. “If we could, as you once suggested, look at your avenues?”

  “Can we come too?” cried Anne-Sophie. “I long to see your beautiful forêt.”

  Tim and Anne-Sophie strolled diffidently behind the men of the mayor’s party, curious to see what was going on, but knowing it had nothing to do with them.

  “Vous savez, monsieur, that the master of the hunt and the others now believe some of your fences are illegally encroaching on public thoroughfares and traditional rights-of-way in such a manner as to forbid the rights of hunters and passers-through,” the mayor explained. He had a xerox of a statute, which he sternly passed to Cray.

  Cray glanced at it, handed it disdainfully back, and strode off into his wood toward the fences in question, his accusers at his back. “You can look at my fences anytime,” Cray said. “They are utterly legal. I’ve gone into all this with my lawyers.” While his English was perfectly unaccented and American-sounding, he spoke French with a heavy Polish accent.

  Tim followed along with Cray and the other men, striding at a faster pace than the women. He noticed Persand’s backward glance at Clara, as if seeking just the smallest verification of her presence behind them, walking with Anne-Sophie. Tim had an intimation, a reporter’s sense, perhaps, of impending developments. But nothing yet had happened, really, had it? There were but little quickening currents trickling around stones, which would converge into a more insistent torrent, sweeping things along—things floating and then sucked under, the little matchsticks and dandelion spores. It would have been twice as entertaining to speculate in advance which, who, would go under. But things were never apparent except in hindsight, when it was too late to write about them.

  Delia had followed the others downstairs, her heart lighter to find herself safely under the roof of an older female Oregonian; her thoughts could now turn more fiercely to her poor friend Gabriel, with the particular intensity born of guilt for having forgotten him for moments at a time. Was he in a cell somewhere or a police gallery, brutalized with rubber truncheons, or being shipped to the Foreign Legion? Her intention now was to make herself useful to Clara Holly, and also to try to enlist these people in his rescue, for she knew she herself was powerless. The man Tim, she was thinking, was the key to finding out where Gabriel was, he was a reporter who presumably had contacts. The consulate would be another route, where they spoke English and would have been notified, maybe, of the arrest of one of their citizens, or he would have called if they allowed him a phone call. Was Gabriel a citizen? Yes, he’d had an American passport.

  This was underlined when she followed the voices through the entrance hall outside where Clara, Anne-Sophie, and Tim stood talking in the chilly morning air to the group of strange men who were not policemen or the American FBI. She hung back but was near enough to hear that, as they were all talking French, even Clara, she would have no way of being a part of this. Abruptly the group turned toward a path that led to a wood of spindly trees behind the house. They were led by a fattish man with a thunderous scowl whose expression made it plain this was not a pleasure party but a problem. Should she go along or stay? It seemed the part of a cooperative houseguest to go along.

  In the woods—this was the nicest part of France, you could be in Oregon, nature’s beauty bestowed neutrally on France as on Oregon by the beneficent creator—Delia could feel an inner knot of worry loosen, its tendrils unfurl. She knew she wouldn’t catch up with the others, so she didn’t try, but limped at her pace, enjoying the turning leaves and odor of winter damp. In sunshine the wood at this season would be aflame with golden aspen, but now in the gray light of impending weather it was sullen, with gloomy caverns of shrub.

  Then, as the others stood at the first of the heavy yellow-painted chains Cray had slung across his paths, the French sky with its painterly property of mirroring human emotion turned hostile, and clouds chased before a sudden cold autumn wind. Leaves chattered and fell under the weight of thick raindrops and lay sodden on the ground. Like the impulse of a black heart, the rain struck right down the collars of the party and rolled down their chilly sleeves. Was it hunters on whom heaven scowled, or those who would interfere with a hunter’s rightful pursuit of balance in nature?

  Rain! So productive of instant camaraderie. The French of course had umbrellas, which they stiffly proffered to include the improvident anglophones, and the party turned back for a dash toward Cray’s house. Tim took Anne-Sophie’s umbrella and held it higher to include Anne-Sophie and Clara Holly. He was aware that the Frenchman—somebody Anne-Sophie seemed to know—had stepped forward with his own umbrella for Clara, but she had dashed off with Anne-Sophie, laughing with the gaiety that getting wet seems to bring out in people. Alone, Delia limped along behind them but, like any Oregonian, was untroubled by the downpour.

  20

  Hospitality

  As they had gone fifteen minutes into the woods, they had as far to go back, and it seemed much farther. The trees bent and swayed, the better to let the rain through. Umbrellaed or not, the party arrived soaked, jackets sticking to their backs. “You’d better come in,” Cray said, expressionless, motioning them inside his house. The hunters came into the foyer stamping and shaking their heads like drenched hounds. Clara could see Serge did not like having these their enemies in his house but liked being able to render them beholden for a moment of warmth and dryness.

  Monsieur de Persand, however, did not come in. He murmured some excuse to the mayor, shaking his hand, and then bowed over Clara Holly’s hand. “Madame . . . malheureusement, je suis pressé . . .” “
He nodded to the others and dashed to his car.

  Antoine de Persand had hunted his whole life, a pastime shared with his father and brothers, a part of the local tradition in the countryside around their weekend house, an invigorating outdoor pursuit welcome in the life of an indoor man, a banker and father and the responsable of an extended family. In fact he had no particular liking for killing animals, and didn’t actually like gibier to eat, except for certain rabbit terrines, but that was just a matter of taste. He did like to tromp the fields with his gun. Technically, he didn’t hunt, he shot, but his social stature and his upright, somewhat inflexible rectitude and moral authority had earned him a place on the committee of the local hunt (as well as on various philanthropic and civic boards). And when shooting, he usually did not even fire his gun. This had had the paradoxical effect of making the others think he was the most important man among them, the only one so busy his mind wasn’t on his aim. Once, in pity, his companions awarded him a demi-biche, the hindquarters, which he was obliged to carry to the butcher on the hood of his car.

  He was married to une Strasbourgeoise of German background, Trudi, and had two children. A recent tragedy, the murder of his younger brother by the husband of his mistress, had devastated his mother and placed Antoine nominally at the head of the family interests—investments and such—in the place of his older brother Frédéric, who lived a raffish life in Nice. Antoine was forty-seven and in a high position at Maller et Cie, the bank, for whom he was also one of the leading counsels.

  His decision not to go inside the film director’s house with the rest of the hunt committee was a considered one. The tragedy in his family, arising, basically, from adultery, had been a lesson to him, and he knew he couldn’t bear, or afford, even the smallest self-indulgence of talking to that beautiful woman again. He placed a lot of faith in the virtue of self-control.