But she didn’t believe it possible that no one was trying to get her out; it must be that her case was insoluble, that there was some proof existing against her of some crime, in violation of some inexorable French law no one could do anything about. When she asked to telephone Serge, she was told that responsibles of the jail would convey messages from her. But her messages lacked conviction; she had nothing to say. Knowing he would naturally be trying to rescue her, she fell back on reassuring him, that she was okay, that she was being fed. She asked him not to notify Lars, who was timid and would have been frightened for her. It went without saying she wanted to get out.
How in just three days could you begin to feel all vitality ebb, and passivity and despair crush in on you?
She slept badly. After the second night, she asked for sleeping medicine and finally was allowed to get a prescription sent over from her doctor. She didn’t sleep all the same, lay awake going over things, even things unrelated to her predicament, the nightly roll taken of concerns, intentions, failures. Her mother, Lars, her mother, Lars, the garden, the poor deer and rabbits, Lady the dog, the Frenchman, her mother, Lars. The handsome Frenchman, Antoine de Persand. Serge.
Her innocence of theft got her to thinking obsessively through the long nights about all the things she probably was guilty of—neglecting her mother, not going home, and Lars, she’d been too docile about Serge sending him away, and before that, that rash during her pregnancy, was it measles? No, nothing could have been done, they always assured her of that, but was it true? And his whole life now a vast silence.
Serge believed, now that Lars could lipread as well as sign, the child could lead a normal life, more or less, and must learn to get along with normal people, as if it hadn’t happened, and not to think of himself as apart. And he believed that English schoolboys would not be cruel to a deaf boy, which she didn’t believe for a minute. Not that she had anything against the English, but. They wouldn’t be cruel to a boy who had his mother’s good nature and looks (said Serge). Clara wasn’t so sure. She worried all the time about Lars at a subconscious level where worries are put that are not likely to go away. These would never go away, and Lars would never hear them.
He would be so big before her mother saw him again, they must go this summer, must positively go; no one must tell her mother about this, she would blame Serge, she didn’t like Serge as it was.
And had Monsieur de Persand had something to do with her arrest, was that why he didn’t come in for sandwiches? But of course it was probably the mayor or one of the others who had thought up this vengeful action. She reviewed their malicious faces in her mind, studying them for signs of treachery. How odd that her usually indifferent memory now became as sharp as a pain in the heart, almost photographic when it came to the expressions of the men, the choler in the mayor’s eyes, or in those of the sandy-haired master of the hunt, always in boots, with creases in his earlobes they say will kill you. No doubt they thought it was only she who hated hunting, they hadn’t reckoned with Serge. Only you. How lucky she had discovered that Persand had no particular feeling for her, didn’t come in with the others.
She thought of men’s bodies. Their grace and strength stirred her. She was glad that even though faithfully married she retained this abstract erotic admiration of how men looked, the potentiality of their bodies. The way she had noticed certain things about Persand, really inconsequential things, that to judge from his open shirt collar he had a hairy chest, something she didn’t really like, but why had she noticed it? She kept seeing his open collar, the strong neck, his rather high color, the tuft of hair....
She thought of women touching men. She never touched Serge, he was not a person who accepted caresses. She wanted to touch the hard shoulder of a man and stroke his back, caress his hard sex.
Tim Nolinger went out to the Crays’ the second day after he heard about the arrest—the soonest he could tactfully take the car—hoping to be able to help in some way, and wondering if the thief had called and so on. He seemed able to contrive reasons ad lib to go out there, though he knew she would not be there. He parked on the main road and walked to the house. The house was emitting a sort of heat of wariness, something hostile and electronic and charged. As he stood at the door, he realized that with a strange silent step, not even crunching on the gravel of the courtyard, a massive Rottweiler had come out of the shrubbery and stood, ears up, watching him. The Crays had house dogs, the yellow Labs named Freddy and Taffy, but he hadn’t seen this dog before. Then there was a second Rottweiler, two silent creatures watching him, both wearing heavy leather muzzles. He had a feeling that if he’d . stepped off the path they would have approached, maybe attacked him. These were dogs with orders, baleful and conscientious. No question that dogs are intimidating beyond the extent to which they could actually hurt you. Unmuzzled these would kill you.
Senhora Alvares let him in. “O senhor está em cima.” Tim knew from her distracted manner Clara was still in jail. She took him to the table in the breakfast room and brought coffee, and presently Cray came down.
“Did you have trouble with the dogs? They have orders not to bother people coming to the front door. They patrol the woods, but I suppose their main instinct is to protect the house. There’s a maître-chien who sees to them.”
“No, they stood and watched me. They’re muzzled.”
“I’m told they are nearly as deadly with the muzzle on, they strike the intruder with the heavy leather tip. I should have got them here before this.”
“Intruders, that is to say hunters?”
“Exactly.”
This was an escalation, undoubtedly. Tim wondered if the local hunters would now make a point of stomping through Cray’s land to defy the dogs, and so on.
“Is there anything I can do for your wife? For you?”
“I think they’ll let her out on bail tomorrow. Then we’ll see,” he said grimly. “As to the other matter, there’s no news at all, only silence.”
He meant the Driad manuscript. Tim was just as glad nothing had been heard on that. Later that day he was to face another legal matter, the signing for the apartment he and Anne-Sophie had bought, which was enough entanglement in the murky mire of legal matters and debt.
He hung around the Crays’ a few minutes, then went to meet Adrian Wilcox at the tennis club. The next players were late, and they got to keep their court an extra three-quarters of an hour, so he was obliged to take the peripherique at an illegal speed to get to the notaire, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, in time for the signing of the promesse de vente.
He saw at once it was a mistake to come to this ceremony wearing his tennis clothes, but he was late as it was, with no time to change, and, innocent of real estate transactions in either society, had opted for the American take on such procedures, to wit, that the signing of one’s name to a document obliging one to pay hundreds of thousands of francs and take a mortgage forever should be greeted with the same insouciance we admire in the march of great rogues to the gallows.
Anne-Sophie was in her most serious suit, high heels, flushed with excitement; Estelle was there, and the sellers, a Monsieur and Madame Flieu, whose birth dates, marital history, progeny, and addresses were all listed on the document read out and then placed before Tim for initialing on forty-seven pages, turned one by one. All were as dressed up as Anne-Sophie, as was the notaire behind his desk. Tim assumed, at least, a grave demeanor, and indeed felt gravely uneasy, beset by the specters of mistake, overreaching, no turning back.
The Flieus pressed their hands, wished them marital happiness, and remarked that they should all meet now or later to decide the cost of such things as the light fixtures and the bookcases, or perhaps they would not be wanting these items?
“On pensait, we were thinking, thirty thousand francs for the total,” said Monsieur Flieu. “Is that good?”
Anne-Sophie sighed. “We’ll have to think.”
Tim had no idea what they were talking about, though th
ere were some built-in bookcases in the dining room, and one serious chandelier he thought a bit overdone anyway.
They shook hands again. “We’ll be in touch very soon,” Anne-Sophie said.
Outside Anne-Sophie explained to him that the seller was now suggesting they pay an extra thirty thousand francs for the built-in bookcases. They had discussed it before, she reminded him.
“I can leave these bookcases for you, if you like,” Madame Flieu had said amiably when they had gone back for a better look at certain features and at the cave.
“I love your bookcases,” he had said, with some happy image of himself surrounded by his books, which were at the moment in haphazard squalor under his bed and on kitchen counters.
A little note had come a day or two later, listing several things Madame Flieu was prepared to leave—bookcases, medicine cabinet, heated towel rack. But she had said nothing about thirty thousand francs, nearly five thousand dollars! Tim was stunned. Anne-Sophie was less stunned, though she pursed her rosy good-businesswoman’s lips and thought about the sum.
“We have to bring them down a bit,” she said as they left the notary’s office. “I think that is high.”
“Thirty thousand francs! What are they talking about? We can go to the BHV and buy some fucking bookcases.”
Anne-Sophie pursued her dealer’s train of thought: “They want us to buy the bookcases, which of course you must have, but I don’t know about the lustre. It is eighteenth century. Of the trente mille, the lustre must be worth the half. We can tell him to keep his lustre, and thus pay only fifteen for the bookcases. I can do better on a lustre at the puces.”
“Wait a minute, these things were part of the apartment! Bookcases are built in, attached!”
“Sometimes people take over their new apartment and all the door handles, even the plumbing, is gone,” Anne-Sophie said. “But these people seem very nice, I am not in the least worried. Anyway the agent will check before we sign the final sale.”
Thus did he learn that all is not what it seems, and that if they weren’t careful, the Flieus might carry off the toilets and sinks on the grounds that in France you buy only the walls. He was shocked that he was now being held up for an extra five thousand dollars for the very items that had prompted their offer in the first place, and he found it infuriating in the extreme not to have been told all this beforehand. Would it have influenced his enthusiasm for the place? He didn’t know. Luckily, Anne-Sophie did not seem to find anything out of the ordinary, so he let the matter drop, or rather tried to refocus on finding the extra money. For her part, Anne-Sophie seemed newly at peace with the apartment, her reservations having given way before the exciting reality of this significant step.
They kissed at the entrance to the metro; Anne-Sophie was rushing off to look at an estate sale.
“Well, c‘est fait,” she said, smiling.
i“Madame la proprietaire.”
But they didn’t go off to drink champagne as Tim had vaguely thought they would. They had lost an opportunity to celebrate a solemn, happy moment, the committment they had made as a couple for a place to live together, the sort of thing you ought to clink champagne glasses over. He went away with a wistful feeling of loss instead of accomplishment.
“Tim Nolinger has bought not too far from you,” said Vivian Gibbs to Kathy Dolan, whose husband worked as a U.S. cultural attaché. “Passage de la Visitation. Did you know that behind those gates at the end of the street, there is a Rothschild?”
“Just your little newlywed starter nest?” Kathy wondered. The rumor of Tim’s heritage had by now reached the embassy, probably explaining the fact the Tim and Anne-Sophie were invited to several functions there, one a dinner for lawyers and journalists, another to honor the conductor of an American symphony orchestra. Tim surprised himself by feeling rather pleased, though unsure why and how America had found him; Belgium had never invited him anywhere.
28
Stir-Crazy
By the fourth day Clara was sunk even deeper in a trance of misery and incomprehension, punctuated by moments of indignation at being persecuted for a moral cause, when her reverie was broken by a guard. She was abruptly led from her cell to the visitors’ area and motioned to sit in a chair on one side of a pane of glass. She peered, heart beating with apprehension, at the empty chair on the other side, waiting for Serge to come in. Then the door beyond opened, and a man walked in with a guard behind him. At first glance she mistook him for a lawyer sent by Serge. A man in a beautifully tailored dark suit, scarf, carrying his camel overcoat. It was Antoine de Persand.
In her astonishment she had nothing to say as he sat down and leaned toward the little grille opening in the glass. It crossed her mind absurdly that she had no makeup on, and wrinkled clothes. She must look so haggard and depressed.
“Madame Cray.”
“I am amazed to see you.”
“I had to come. I don’t know why I am, have come, I have nothing to suggest, I just—it seemed ...” Here he stopped, it appeared baffled.
“It is very strange, this whole thing, I agree,” she said.
“I disliked that you could think I might have had something to do with this, madame. 1 am a friend, be assured, and I part company with the hunt committee on this persecution. Your hectares aren’t so important to the hunt, it is the ego of the mayor by now. I have a fear that monsieur the mayor has a long memory, and though he has no personal animus against you, his amour propre is now involved.”
“Was it difficult, getting in to see me?”
“No, in my case easy. Perhaps it is difficult in general.”
“My husband has not been able to come.”
“Ah,” he said.
“What do I need to do so they will let me out?”
“I have no idea. I’m not an emissary from the mayor. I came because—out of friendship. I have no idea why I am here,” he added in a suprised tone.
“Thank you, all the same. I’m sure I’ll be out soon.”
“Are you—is it all right?”
“French jails are not comfortable.”
“I’ll go to see your husband. I’m sure he has taken measures. Technically I am a lawyer, I have certain connections, if I can help in anything—”
“Thank you, monsieur. I know he is doing all he can.”
More—much more—was spoken by their intense exchange of gazes. Was he too feeling the mute, visceral experience of desire? For it was desire that welled up in her. She felt the inappropriateness of this. Perhaps it was akin to what hostages felt for their captors, some bizarre form of imprinting. You fall in love with the first man who comes to rescue you. The glass barrier seemed intolerable to Clara, and because it prevented so much as a handshake, it prompted fiery and rather abandoned speeches, which she swallowed as well as she could. She wanted to say, If I could just spend a night with you, an afternoon—
Then, against her will and against common sense, she heard herself say it. From a prison cell she, Clara Holly, was proposi tioning a strange Frenchman.
Monsieur de Persand stiffened. He seemed to pale, while her face flamed.
“I just need some strength,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean—anything. I seem to say and think wild thoughts, it’s this place....”
“I must tell you sometime what happened in my family this past year, and you will understand why I ... do not permit myself wild thoughts. The death of my brother, the misery of my mother, the orphelins, the chaos of the heritage, the problems of an aunt and uncle—all because....” He sighed.
“I agree, I agree, I am talking nonsense,” Clara said. “You get rather unsettled in here. Excuse me.” But he must have known exactly what she had meant. Probably female prisoners offered themselves to the lawyers all the time, in their desperate hope for liberty....
At this moment, the stirring of the guards indicated that all were to rise and visitors to leave without further ado. Clara and Antoine de Persand stared desperately at each other, shocked,
through the glass partition. Persand hurried out, clutching his coat.
Back in her cell, Clara’s sufferings increased. Hot tears for the first time rolled on her cheeks. How had she dared say such a thing to Antoine de Persand? Why did she even have such a longing to be in his arms? It was a sign her brain had been turned by prison. She saw herself as a person crawling across a desert toward a watery mirage of love and wild sensuality. And why did this image of aridity apply to her life? Because her life was dry, devoid of voluptuous pleasure, with routine love, infrequent, lacking in true intimacy. It seemed to her that prison was just a metaphor for her whole life. Self-pity and misery overcame her. Four days of confinement had reduced her to a depressed and delusional state.
29
Word from Gabriel
Now Tim made his way out to the Crays’ in Anne-Sophie’s car or by train every day to monitor news of the manuscript thief and the progress of legal matters surrounding Clara’s arrest. He had by now, even in this relatively short time, faute de mieux, achieved the status of family friend, sponsor of Delia, and general factotum. He realized that Cray had relied on Clara as his liaison with the outside world; that person in her absence became him. Why did he oblige? He didn’t know, curiosity or charity, and the article or story that would come out of it. It was more than the pay-check, though he had got his first three thousand dollars from Monday Brothers Films and felt embarrassingly overpaid. It would help with the bookcases, that was for sure.
And there was the curious power of power and glamour to compel his attendance. He despised this in himself. Of his other reason for hanging around—being of help to Clara—only he had an intimation; but also, he did want to see the thing out, to stay to the end of the play.
Le Mariage Page 17
