The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  —She’s called the Virgin of the Thorn, Adam explained: apparently a pilgrim was bringing some of her breast milk home from the Holy Land as a relic, but then he fell asleep under a bush, having hung the bag of milk on a branch, and when he woke up the bush had grown into a tree so that the bag of milk was out of reach, so he prayed to the Virgin and she bent the branch and he got the milk back. So the chapel was built to commemorate the miracle. That’s how the story goes, anyway.

  —What kind of bush? Vinny asked.

  —A hawthorn, Adam said: they crop up in stories of visions all the time. They’re magical bushes. Nearly always connected with the Virgin. Very powerful.

  —For someone who was brought up an atheist, Vinny said: you know a lot about religious legends.

  He blushed. She suddenly remembered that his mother had run away. Perhaps, irreligious as he was, he’d adopted this Virgin. Perhaps she symbolised a mother’s continuing though invisible presence. One mother in the world who would never vanish, never fail you. She couldn’t believe in that herself, but she was touched that perhaps Adam did.

  —Sorry, she said.

  —Stop apologising all the time, Adam snapped at her: it’s really irritating.

  Tears sprang into her eyes. She averted her face and began to inspect the large exercise book that lay open on a table next to the bank of lit candles. This proved to be a work by many authors, its ruled pages filled with painstakingly inscribed sentences in different varieties of the same hand, the round wobbly letters decorated with curlicues and flourishes. At first the writing was hard to read; quite different from the version she’d been taught in England.

  Sainte Mère, aidez-moi.

  Sainte Mère, exaucez-moi.

  Sainte Mère, priez pour moi.

  Detailed explanations of what was wrong; cries of need and anguish and suffering; all carefully traced in blue biro. A cheap plastic pen tethered by a length of string.

  The Virgin stared sternly ahead. Vinny shivered.

  Adam took her hand awkwardly.

  —I had a bit of a row with Dad before coming out. He doesn’t like me borrowing the car. It put me in a bad mood.

  Why take it out on me? Vinny thought. But she saw this was the closest he could come to apologising. She followed him back to the sunshine outside, to the café where Catherine sat waiting, but not before she had hastily bought and lit a tall candle. For her intentions. Whatever those were.

  —As though the Virgin put on her spectacles every night and read her correspondence, Catherine mused over icy lager: so sweet.

  Catherine had headed for the quincaillerie. She displayed her purchases: a blue canvas apron, a wooden scrubbing brush and a bottle of eau de Javel, a bunch of yellow dusters, a set of bowls and buckets, a dustpan and brush, a sponge.

  That same afternoon she began cleaning, with Robert’s amused permission. Vinny watched Robert studying them. Who were those two sisters in that French fairy tale? Rose Red and Snow White. One good and one bad. One feminine and one not. One kindly, pretty strawberry blonde who saw housework as an act of love, and one difficult gingernut tomboy who preferred to play outside. Was that the right story? No, Vinny shouted to herself: too simplistic, I refuse to be set against Catherine like that.

  Catherine shrugged at Robert. She just got on with her self-appointed job and enjoyed herself, head turbaned in a tea-towel, apron tied over her skimpy shorts, transistor radio full on. Once the house had been scoured and mopped it was an easy place to keep clean: there was so little clutter in it. The furniture was simple, picked up cheap from farm sales: a long table and benches in the living-room, a smaller table in the kitchen, mattresses on metal spring bases in the rooms upstairs. Clothes were hung from hooks, pots and pans stored on shelves. There were no armchairs. French farmers didn’t use them, Adam explained: the locals did all their socialising around the table. Instead, a half-moon of battered wicker garden chairs, packed with cushions, curved in front of the big stone fireplace.

  Catherine plumped up the cushions every morning after she had swept the floor. She set jugs of buttercups, cow-parsley and Queen Anne’s lace here and there. She washed and ironed a blue and white checked cloth she found stuffed under the kitchen sink, scoured the rusted blades of the old black-handled knives, and laid the table carefully at night. She set out a group of candles stuck on saucers, arranged the prettiest and least chipped of the stack of old plates, and sliced the baguette into a basket she lined with a blue check handkerchief bought in the market.

  Robert nodded to his guest over a tumbler of wine every supper-time, toasting her: ah, that Catherine, she knows what she’s about.

  Catherine was almost curtseying and calling him kind sir. Mob-cap and stays for you, my girl. I’d have been the poacher, slinking through the moonlit garden with a rabbit in each pocket. Could I kill an animal? Dunno.

  —The woman’s touch, Vinny said: how to turn a house into a home.

  —Shut up, Vinny, Adam said: leave her alone.

  The house was constructed in thick-walled stone according to the most basic design, almost indistinguishable from the cattle sheds hunched alongside it. Only the former pigeonnier tower, which now housed the kitchen, gave it distinction. The crumbling façade had been crudely patched with cement. The small, shutterless windows were barred. Vinny did like the cool, dark interior, which was restful, and made sense in the summer heat. You could withdraw into it from the blistering sun outside. But she kept finding that rather than identify with the house, as Catherine did, caring for it, she had regularly to go out of it. She had to put some distance between herself and it. Then she could come back inside again. She preferred basking in the garden, letting the dazzling light warm her skin, probe her closed eyelids. The house was a shadowy cave, waiting. She could explore it if she wanted to. A puzzle of interlocking boxes, which might just spring traps. The middle attic with its thick cobwebs and owl droppings; the old bread-oven off the kitchen with its nests of grass-snakes; the damp, disused cellar littered with broken glass. You had to step warily near all of these.

  The chief charm of the house consisted in its two staircases. One, on the left, as you entered, was a boxed-in semi-spiral of oak, rising up inside the stubby pigeonnier tower to reach the bedrooms that Robert had constructed, with Adam’s help, in the former grenier. A makeshift conversion: white plasterboard walls hastily thrown up to divide the long space, one sloping-ceilinged room opening into the other, each lit by a single square pane of glass let into the roof. The end door in the first bedroom made a link into a central attic, which was crossed by a massive low beam. It had been left untouched because of its rotten floor, weakened by rain pouring in through a hole in the roof. The missing slates had been replaced, but then Robert’s energy had run out.

  For Vinny, peering in, this dark, abandoned space, as shadowy and mysterious as night, functioned as a memory of how the whole of the grenier must have formerly been: steeply pitched raftered ceiling showing the underside of the roof, bare unplastered stone walls, floorboards littered with straw, corners silted with grain husks. At the far side of this dusty loft, a door led into a second bedroom, which was reached from the garden by an exterior staircase. So in theory you could circle the house, going in and out, up and along and down.

  You didn’t do this, of course, because of the patch of rotten planks, which might give way beneath you, and because you didn’t intrude into other people’s bedrooms. Robert slept above the kitchen and Adam had the room at the far end. Spartan places, Vinny thought them when she was shown round: unpainted, with 1950s fluted glass lampshades dangling overhead, orange-boxes for cupboards, and ex-army blankets covering the low metal-sprung beds. It was a whim of Robert’s, apparently, to rough it in France, to live as austerely as possible. No hot water, no heating other than the open fire. Robert never came here in winter. He was just playing at rusticity, Vinny thought. Poor people always longed for better conditions. She remembered her mother’s delight when she got a proper washing-ma
chine and no longer had to wind ropes of sheets through the mangle by hand.

  —Where do the painting students sleep when they come? Catherine asked: surely there’s not enough room for them?

  —Oh, they go to the hotel in Sainte-Marthe, Adam said: except for the current favourite, of course.

  Vinny and Catherine shared the guestroom, the former cowshed under Adam’s room. The walls had been whitewashed, long ago, and were still hung with grain sieves, coils of rope, halters, and bits of old harness. The cowshed had a wooden ceiling formed by the underneath of the floorboards above, a combed concrete floor. Furniture was an iron double bed, and a manger in which they stored their clothes. A small uncurtained window in a deep stone recess let in a little daylight. On this ledge Catherine put a jam jar of flowering purple mint pulled from the ditch in the lane. She brushed the thick cobwebs off the walls, sluiced the floor, hung their bead necklaces from a nail on the back of the wide wooden door. This swung open onto the grass. It was easy for Vinny to slip out, up the stairs, and into Adam’s room. At night the garden was cold and damp, threaded through with the shivery calls of owls.

  On that first evening, Catherine was brisk about going to bed early and sending Vinny up to join Adam. Vinny wasn’t even sure she wanted to go. The converted cowshed looked so snug. A lamp enclosing a stub of candle hung from a hook in the wall just above the bed, casting a pool of golden light edged by black shadow.

  —Sure you’ll be all right down here on your own? Vinny asked.

  Catherine was wearing her pink cardigan over the 1930s crêpe-de-Chine nightdress Vinny had given her last Christmas. She was curled up against a bank of pillows and cushions, reading an old book of recipes she had found in the kitchen, an olive green blanket pulled around her. She looked up and pursed her mouth. She flicked one hand dismissively.

  How black the night was, outside. Vinny, her Afghan waistcoat clutched on over her kimono, blundered, torchless, to the woodshed turned bathroom. Ivy tendrils thrust through a crack in the stone wall and twined about the blotched mirror. A stencilled Chinese tin bowl and jug stood on a slab of cracked marble. You filled these from a tap outside. The lavatory, smelling of chemicals, was like an oil drum, with a thin wooden seat. Damn. She had forgotten her toothbrush and toothpaste, which she’d packed in her shoulder-bag. She’d slung this from her chair at table and left it behind. She would have to go back indoors and fetch it.

  She went out again, surer-footed this time, into the dewy garden. It smelt of fresh earth and cows. No stars. No moon.

  The front door was unlocked. It scraped as she pushed it open. The room was melted to darkness, except for the red glow of the fire. Though the leaping flames of earlier on had died down, half a charred log still smouldered on top of a heap of ashes, the top layer twinkling red.

  The collapsed fire cast enough light to illuminate the late-night visitor. A middle-aged woman wearing a long blue linen dress. She looked up as Vinny pushed in. She was sitting with her bare feet propped on the hearth, her hands folded over a couple of books in her lap. She had short hair dyed dark auburn. Her gaze was surprised and intent. Presumably one of the neighbours. Perhaps the Madame Beauvin who’d been talked of earlier.

  —Oh, excuse me, Vinny said in her best, careful French: I just came in to fetch my bag. I left it in here earlier on.

  The woman nodded at her in a friendly way. Vinny spotted her bag just where she’d left it, suspended from the back of a chair. She picked it up.

  —Bonsoir, Madame.

  The woman nodded again. Vinny went out.

  She skipped cleaning her teeth and ran up the stairs to Adam’s bedroom. She knocked, breathless, at his door.

  He was lying in bed just as Catherine had, curled up around a book; defended and closed off. Then he threw down the book.

  —You look all pink, he said, studying her: are you all right?

  Vinny stripped off her clothes and let them drop. In a few moments she was under the blankets with him, arms round him, head on his shoulder. Either he knew Robert had a visitor or he didn’t. It wasn’t her business.

  They turned their faces towards each other and kissed. Adam hadn’t cleaned his teeth either. He tasted of wine and olive oil. What a mouth he had for kissing, her sweetheart, her milk and honey boy. What a beauty he was, so fierce and soft, so furred, so thin. She could feel his ribs under her hands. The bones of his pelvis pressed into her. She tugged his curls, his ears. The hollow of his collarbone tasted of salt. He held her so tightly he nearly squeezed the breath out of her. She kissed the line of hair that ran down his stomach. His hands stroked her waist and back until she felt she could die from joy.

  When they shambled downstairs in the morning the house was hushed. Robert was already ensconced in his studio. Vinny soon learned his routine. He got up early to work. He vanished after his solitary breakfast, carrying off bread, ham and cider for lunch, and reappeared at dinner. Sometimes he disappeared into the forest on solitary walks, clambering around the rocks on the summit of the hill. This rocky place, littered with granite slabs, was called the Devil’s Table.

  —Can we go and see it? Vinny asked, swigging coffee.

  She and Adam were sitting on the front steps in the sunshine. Catherine sprawled in a ragged deckchair nearby, nibbling a peach. The other two feasted on crusty lengths of bread covered with slabs of cold butter and dollops of apricot jam.

  —Sure, if you want to, Adam said: well, according to Madame Beauvin anyway, witches used to meet there for human sacrifice.

  Vinny decided not to mention that Madame Beauvin had been in the house the night before.

  —Creepy, Catherine said.

  —Lots of caves up there, Adam said: tunnels all through the hillside, apparently.

  They were sitting so close together that Vinny could drink in the smell of his skin. She felt contented as a cat full of milk. Last night she’d had her first orgasm with him. He was the first lover with whom that had happened. She’d had them on her own for years, but never with a man so far. She’d been a slow starter. Other boyfriends had lost patience with her and gone off. Am I frigid? she’d fretted to Catherine. Don’t be daft, Catherine had replied. Adam’s curiosity, wanting to find out what she was like, made her feel able to be honest as well as passionate, telling him. Please do this. Yes, I like that. They’d shifted and fingered and nudged for weeks, then suddenly, last night, here in Adam’s room in France, they got the knack; it happened. Something to do with the way that Adam didn’t just retire into himself, fling himself at her, use her for his own pleasure then fall asleep. He remembered who she was and looked into her eyes as they fucked. That was so powerful you could almost feel afraid. Trust and confidence made her come. You desired, you moved the way you needed to, you concentrated, you didn’t stop, and bingo.

  Vinny, coming, had shouted out: I love you I love you I love you. She was so enraptured by her discovery that she could do it that she had wanted to make love again immediately; all night. Adam had protested sleepily. No. So now, this morning, she felt awkward as well as happy, that she’d been too demanding, that she ought to hold herself back, slow down, take his rhythm as her own.

  It became their joke, at first, how often Vinny wanted to make love. How much she wanted of everything. Food wine cigarettes sunshine sleep dope sex. Certainly there was an extra frisson of pleasure from having sex out here, away from home in a foreign country, in this languor-inducing heat. Night after night she slid up the outside stone staircase, pinned Adam down on the bed, and caressed him until he gave in. When she came, he put his hand over her mouth to muffle her cries. When they made love in the daytime he veiled his room with music from his transistor radio.

  Robert also used music to create private space. You could tell when he was in his studio because he had the radio on loud, a reminder to them to keep well away while he concentrated on a painting. He was the only one who worked. The other three were unashamedly on holiday. Often Catherine wandered off, tactfully leaving the
other two alone, smiling, saying she was bored with their company or with the conversation; she’d go and find something else to do. Sometimes she stayed. The three of them were comfortable together, talking idly, sunbathing, lying face down in the grass blank with heat, arguing about whose turn it was to go and fetch some more cold beers from the fridge. Vinny brimmed with happiness. Here she was, with her two best-beloveds. So close. They made a circle that held love. Like a fountain arching up in sunlight, endlessly replenished, endlessly running over.

  The time in summer was different from normal time. It stretched according to whim. The long days, free of schedules or imposed organisation, brought indolence. They could sleep late, loll in deckchairs all afternoon reading, raid the vegetable garden when they got hungry. Adam fetched the bread every morning from the bakery in Sainte-Madeleine, on his bicycle, sometimes taking Vinny with him on another old bone-shaker dug out from a storeroom. Robert went into town in the car once a week to do the shopping. Often Catherine went with him, so that she could force him to accept some housekeeping money from her and Vinny. They all ate together every night, and took turns cooking.

  Vinny had never drunk so much wine before. It accounted for their lethargy in the mornings, their sloth in the afternoon. At night, at supper, fired up by the wine, they talked and argued. Once Vinny mentioned women’s liberation but Robert interrupted her, laughing.

  —I met this feminist chick in London. God, she was scary. Dressed in black leather and riding a motorbike.

  —I’m a feminist, Vinny said.

  —Not like her you’re not. This chick, she was a real feminist all right. Kill you as soon as look at you.

  He leaned across and stroked Vinny’s cheek. She was sitting next to him. She could see the golden hairs on his chest. His brown face was creased up with amusement. Adam frowned. Robert saw the frown, and smiled more broadly. He elaborated. Women’s liberation, now he stopped to think about it, was just a part of sexual freedom. This was a subject he liked to thunder about. He teased the scowling Adam with tales of his exploits, listed the names of sophisticated sexual positions that various girlfriends had enjoyed, quoted from Henry Miller and de Sade and Georges Bataille, scattered porn mags across the bathroom floor. Adam shrugged and remained silent. Catherine was a good child of the sixties, determined to be sturdily unshockable. She humoured Robert. Vinny boiled with resentment, which she tried not to show. He was Adam’s father, after all, and she was a guest in his house. He seemed to like her. He was always giving her bear-hugs; kisses. He called her darling little Miss Puritan-Prig-Prude-Prim. Sometimes she drank enough wine for her discomfort to spill out, incoherent and messy, like vomit on the tablecloth. Adam would watch her miserably as she tried to explain to Robert why he should not define women’s freedom in masculine terms. She failed every time.