The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  PART 13

  During this pause in my wanderings I continue to think of you, cher Monsieur. I burn my letters to you, as usual. Here, at Nohant, I give them to the housemaid to use as kindling. A fire in my bedroom—what luxury. I used to say I did not care for luxuries, but that, I realise now, was because I had none; whereas this château is full of them.

  I’m writing this upstairs after dinner. The main bedrooms are all up here on the first floor, arranged, off corridors, in interconnecting sequences. For the first few days, I kept getting lost in what seemed a maze, and throwing open sets of double doors in the wrong direction. My windows look out over the flower garden at the side of the house. My hostess, Madame Sand, wants me to have all the quiet I need. She herself rises at dawn every day to write. Oh, she says, with a wave of the hand: just my little annual novel. I get up later than she does. I loiter under soft quilts in a neat four-poster, hung with pink and cream chintz, surveying my writing-table in cherrywood, the two little armchairs, and the cupboard carved with garlands of oak leaves and corn wreaths. My room is enormous, to one used to the parsonage at Haworth.

  All the floors up here are of highly polished parquet; I hear the maid’s heels tapping along the corridor from a long way off. The servants have their own little staircase, which rises in the middle of the house, easy of access from the kitchen quarters. The cook has her bedroom tucked away in a turn of those stairs. Madame Sand sympathises with the hardships of the local peasants’ lives. She believes in the rights and dignity of the working man. But her family’s château was not constructed to accommodate these beliefs. The maids live in cramped, unheated quarters overhead. Up and down they clatter in the morning, up and down, fetching hot water, and materials for lighting a fire, and a cup of hot chocolate if that’s what you require; tending to all one’s needs all day long.

  You didn’t know I was in France, did you? I don’t think I wrote down the story of my journey to Paris. I was in an odd state during that time; not in the mood for writing. But now I’m settled here for the moment the old urge to write to you once more comes over me. Whatever happens to me, snatch of amusing conversation overheard or bizarre incident experienced or small adventure undertaken, you’re still the one I want to tell about it. I hold back, of course, for fear of exasperating and boring you. Unlike Madame Sand, who has male friends, correspondents, confidants as a matter of course. She is the veteran of many love affairs, and that has made her confident.

  Madame Sand does not look like a romantic heroine. Not in the least. Not until she glances up and shows you her big black eyes, which are still the eyes of a young woman, ardent and fearless. On the surface she seems placid, and serene. Wrinkles and grey hairs, a troop of visitors, children and grandchildren to keep her busy, an elevated position in her community, all her myriad love affairs well behind her. So she says. Calm and chaste in her lace cap, never to be suspected of passionate yearnings, eagerness for sex. She’s over fifty; at first glance merely a cosy sibyl.

  A lovely disguise: lady wolf dressed up as virtuous chatelaine. That’s how you could do it, I see. Squat a gingerbread château in the woods; lure in the boys with offers of sugar-plums. Lull them. Watch, bright-eyed, from your rocking-chair. Then what? She wants to gobble them up, smacking her lips over every delicious bit, but she knows she mustn’t. If she pounces they’ll flee, screaming, to fetch help, and then their fathers and brothers will come and burn her house down, flay her alive, make slippers out of her furry grey skin. Poor Mrs Wolf: she doesn’t deserve to die. She just wants a lover or two. She behaves herself, Mrs Wolf, just as she ought. She controls herself. Instead of springing on people she writes novels. She lies in bed in her frilled nightcap and she makes up stories.

  Do I believe her, that her love life is over? No. But she’s a novelist, and telling lies is required of her. She gives me, for example, different versions of her past. Sometimes she’s had thirty lovers. Sometimes forty. Sometimes so many that she can’t remember the precise number, and certainly not their names. She has desired men and women both. The heart, she says, does not discriminate.

  Her grandchildren clamour for her stories, just as I do. In the evenings, before they go to bed, she reads to them from the illustrated volume of Perrault, embroidering a bit, adding a few extra gothic touches, a few extra bloodthirsty details. My return to health is marked by my new-found relish of bright images, my reawoken pleasure in others’ word-spinning. I’m hardly a convalescent at all anymore.

  Did I tell you that I’d been ill? Probably not. I forget. I was delirious, I do remember the doctor telling me that. He said I rambled; I cried out distressing things; I didn’t want to see Arthur; I turned my face away even from Papa. Too much imagination; that’s what the doctor said. His diagnosis was that I was ill in my mind: I’d gone away from those who loved me into a fairy world; I’d turned my back on real life for the sake of living in a story that was not my own.

  Such a rousing story it was. You were in it, Monsieur. We floated through your walled garden in the sunlight; the grass was radiant, like green fire; arm in arm we sauntered down the gravelled allées between the flowerbeds to the central berceau crowned with leaping flames; and then we went further; over green hills, into the woods; and here we lay down in a glade of chestnut trees. You spread your coat for me; smooth wool hot with sun.

  Every afternoon this story repeated itself. Oh, we were far from Haworth, I can tell you. Nor did we seem to be in Brussels: that city with its tight, confining rules. Instead we’d arrived somewhere in France, which made me laugh because in my younger days I’d been so suspicious of the French and their penchant for pleasure, and here we were learning to be like them. You were no longer a respectable Belgian professor: your bonnet-grec and paletot were abandoned, your spectacles flung down. I begged the doctor not to take me away, but he hauled me back to Haworth. Now, Charlotte, for the sake of your husband and father, you must try; you must make an effort to get better. I obeyed. Then, as soon as I was well enough, I packed a bag, took the train for London, and bought a ticket on the Channel packet.

  In Paris I necessarily abandoned all my old shyness. Since I’d long been an admirer of Madame Sand’s novels, I enquired for her address, then boldly went and called upon her. She invited me to come and visit her in the country. So here I am.

  I’ve come back to reality. Which is the world of the imagination. That’s the true world, Monsieur. Why did I ever allow myself to forget? You have to conjure it, that’s all. Sometimes you can completely forget it’s there. You get ground down in the minutiae of daily life, the details. And then it’s as though a door swings open, a door concealed in the wall, and you walk through, and you’re in that other place.

  Night after night I dream I still live in Haworth, in our tiny, crowded house surrounded by tall looming tombstones. You’ve vanished to a far-off foreign land. I’ll never see you again. Loss saws my insides. This is my life now, to the end of my days. Having to live without you, hold this wrenching absence, survive this pain.

  Then I suddenly discover the parsonage is much bigger than I thought. I find a door, in the back wall, which leads into another room; a secret one; and I go into it, and you’re there. Waiting for me in that new place. You’re not gone away after all; you’re not lost; you exist, smiling, in flesh and blood; I find you; I can touch you.

  These dreams weave through my enjoyment of the company of Madame Sand. We talk to each other for hours; sitting by the fire, or working in the garden, or over supper; about whatever we want. These conversations are nourishment for which I’ve been starving without knowing it; I eat them; I drink them in. She fills me up with good things. Talking to her, I’m reminded of my games with Emily, how we used to come home from walks on the moors and show each other the treasures we’d picked up; a feather; a sprig of heather; a round pebble from the brook; swap them from hand to hand. We’d arrange them on the window-sill; little shifting exhibitions of whatever had taken our fancy that day. With Madame Sand it
’s the same; we put a shape on things. Her mind is honest and inventive, springy and robust. She eagerly catches whatever words I want to throw at her, spins them in the air, tosses back her own.

  I dreamed of you last night and so I awoke happy, here in my bedroom at Nohant. The sun shining on the polished wooden floor. The two worlds of night and day connected by that door swinging wide then beginning to close. You faded away behind me as I groped back towards the light of morning but I was able to leave you without too much sorrow. I knew you existed there in the darkness of the other world, waiting for me. You hadn’t vanished forever just because for the moment I couldn’t see you. That’s what the abandoned baby thinks, that her mother will never come back. The end of the world. She rages and weeps. That’s what I was like when I was young; when I lost Emily; when I lost my own baby; when I lost you. But now I’m older, and I’m learning about true love; how indestructible it is.

  So I clambered towards waking. The sun broke through the gap between the shutters, a white slash of light on the dark wooden floor, bright and imperious, ordering me to get up now. The maid came in, smiling, threw open the shutters and pronounced it a fine morning, emptied my wastepaper basket of crumpled-up pages of letters, lit me a fire. I watched my words to you flare up then fall.

  I was the first in the household down to breakfast. I took my cup of coffee outside, stood at the top of the steep flight of steps that leads down from the front door, and looked out.

  So unlike the black stone and gloom and oppression of Haworth. Here there seems to be more light, sun, sky. The château, grey and compact, is set on one side of this small village, and is surrounded by tall trees. Lacy green foliage in every direction. The church bells bang out their iron song. Cocks crow. From beyond the stone walls surrounding us comes the lowing of cattle, the cooing of pigeons and doves, the barking of dogs, the cries of children, the singing and calling of people at work. When the Angelus rings, morning and evening, you hear them down tools and shout out a prayer.

  I descended to the gravelled forecourt, and thence to the sanded paths of the flower-garden, to pick a nosegay for the breakfast table. Dew glittered on leaves and petals. Threads of mist, like the finest wisps of white wool, filled the hollows of the meadow beyond the low garden wall. As though sheep drifted past and their fleece caught on the fence. Though it was still early, and the air was cool, it was sweet as plums. Low, slanting sun furred the ground with gold. I chose a few white roses, some rusty pink chrysanthemums, some tawny dahlias, one or two blossoms from the sprawl of pale yellow climbing nasturtiums fallen in the long grass around a post. We ate breakfast outside, the pot of flowers next to the basket of rolls.

  Later I worked in the vegetable plot with Madame Sand and her gardener Thomas. We harvested a basketful of green beans, several pumpkins, spinach that squeaked and jumped about in Thomas’s hands as he crammed it into a sack to take back to the house. He talks with a strong local accent, using so many dialect words it is hard to understand him. He has a carved brown face; a face you see everywhere on the men here; merry and alive. He’s teaching me his names for things. He handed me a bunch of long pods speckled pink and red. Are these beans? I asked. Grelots, he said: that’s what we call them, they’ve got lots of names, we baptise them. Later, having shelled them, the cook baptised them; she practised total immersion; she boiled them for fifteen minutes precisely; and then we ate them, bathed in hot cream, for supper.

  In the middle of the afternoon two old countrywomen arrived, bringing gifts: bunches of blue asters tied with twine, a bowl of eggs, bouquets of parsley, big bags of walnuts. To say thank you to Madame Sand for curing their illnesses. Kill or cure, I’d have thought: she doctors them, poor wretches, with all kinds of infusions of herbs, which she stirs up in a little saucepan on the kitchen stove. Disgusting, weedy messes, bitterly sour-smelling, they are too. I’ve watched her concoct them. She is curing me too, but not with herbs, I’m glad to say.

  And so good night, dear friend.

  Charlotte

  PART 14

  Catherine constructed her week to unroll, like a speeded-up film, in a blur of busyness. Work eat bed sleep work eat bed sleep. She was a tiny mannequin with jerking arms and legs, mouth open silently screeching. Any gaps in her frantic timetable she stuffed with shopping, cooking, washing, cleaning. Adam was distant, shut away behind glass.

  On Friday morning she woke up weeping, knowing she had dreamed of her sons. The dream shimmered; faded.

  Adam had already left. She squatted in front of the bedroom wardrobe and reached for the shoebox containing Robert’s tapes. She emptied them into a brown manila envelope and tucked this into her briefcase. On her way in to work she went to the travel agent on Holloway Road. At lunchtime she went out with colleagues to the pub and downed three glasses of white wine. Back in college she phoned Adam at the gallery.

  —I need to talk to you, but there’s never time to talk at home, or else we’re too tired. Shall I come and meet you after work tonight? We could go to the Wheatsheaf and have a drink.

  —All right, Adam said.

  His voice seemed to arrive from far away. Catherine waited. The quietness hummed between them. Once she would have been able to guess at what it meant. Now she no longer could.

  —Six o’clock? Adam said: see you then.

  He replaced the receiver. The line burred and chirruped. Catherine hung up. She took out Robert’s four tapes and played them on the machine she had borrowed from Media Studies. She ran them back and forth, fast-forwarding then rewinding, to make sure she had missed nothing. Each one was blank. Catherine shuddered with relief. She picked up her folder of teaching notes for Wide Sargasso Sea and went off to her class.

  * * *

  Later she walked eastwards along the strand. Cloud-roofed conduit, which swirled with rain and hurrying people. Umbrellas bobbed along the wide pavement, bumped each other like jellyfish swimming in dark water. Five thirty. The city traffic was almost at a standstill. Motorbikes could switch lanes, swerve in and out of the near-stationary vehicles with arrogant ease, but the clogging cars, vans and buses were slowed down between roadworks and red lights. Drivers hooted, crept forward, halted, hooted again.

  She had left college at five sharp, to make sure of meeting Adam on time. She didn’t linger as she usually did, talking to the students. She hurried off, calling farewells over her shoulder. She plunged into the tube at Tufnell Park, heading for Borough, but got onto the wrong branch of the Northern Line; suddenly realised she was at Charing Cross.

  She erupted into the open side of the station exit facing Villiers Street, glad of what passed for fresh air, even though it was laden with diesel fumes from a taxi churning by. Gleam of the black chassis as it swung out of the rail-way arches, a sheet of water spraying up on either side. Jaywalkers in its path scattered, then regrouped. The station entrance was a mouth sucking up the damp crowds. They thronged in the foyer, rootling in handbags for change for the ticket machines, consulting maps, shaking the wet from their macs. Drops of water flew down onto the chequered tiled floor, crisscrossed by trails of blurred muddy footprints. To Catherine’s right, the necklace of lightbulbs fringing the green awning above the stacked tiers of the flower stall glowed yellowy-pearl. Under this splashy gold the blooms arranged on the wooden planks were bright as jewels. The flowers lit up the cloudy gloom like planets. In the rain their colours shone impossibly. Bunches of blue violets on thin stems, enclosed in heart-shaped leaves, looked darkly fragile, leaning over the side of a little bucket; as though, once bought and taken into your hands, they would close up, wilt in the tarry air. Taller pots bore cellophane-wrapped mauve and white freesias, tight arrays of pink roses, trumpet sprays of orange and salmon lilies. Under a small red and white canopy a seller, perched on a long-legged stool, palmed coins with one hand and dealt out copies of the evening paper with the other. Opposite, a hawker offered cheap folding brollies. Both chanted their wares, calling out according to some internally imposed, regul
ar rhythm, a guttural music that drowned out the weaker song of the busker strumming his guitar nearby.

  Catherine turned up her padded white coat collar, so that its fur edges stroked her cheeks, and put her hands in her pockets. Hesitating; watching the rain. It fell down in straight lines, like dashes marked in pencil. As it hit the puddles underfoot it stammered into dots, was cut into curves, half-circles. A drawing made with economical gestures; quick as Morse code. The rain; the artist’s pencil; both obeyed laws and both were free. She wished she were rain. It danced up and down on concrete and stone. It gurgled along kerbs, emptied itself down drains, vanished underground, like all those people making for the escalators behind her. Click of tickets; through the waist-level gates; gone.

  She was lucky. She could walk to work from her new house; avoid the rush-hour press and scramble; flee the crowds. Being forced down into the tube was like being buried alive. Panic about no air, not being able to breathe. Let alone move your elbows. Getting into the lift at Tufnell Park she had felt her stomach lurch as the box of people dropped down the deep shaft. Several trains had been cancelled, or were running late; a crowd had built up on the platform. Pushed inexorably forwards by the army of shuffling commuters kneeing her from behind, she feared being swept too close to the edge, toppling over onto the live rails. You teetered; braced yourself; leaned back as forcefully as you could.

  The arriving train shot in solid with bodies. The doors slid open. Like an incision in flesh; blood welling. The wall of people in the train spilt forwards, jammed nose to nose with the wall of people on the platform. Ranks of them behind, mashed together, and in front. She butted her way into the carriage, the dense mass of strangers. Their eyes, lowered in a pretence of indifference, signalled their hostility. Like it or not, you had to get intimate. Insinuate yourself between bellies, breasts. Excuse me. Excuse me. The blank-faced commuters fought back passively by refusing to move, blocking your passage with briefcases and carrier-bags. The guard’s voice over the intercom barked: mind out; move along there; please. The shutting doors sealed them up; gluey squash of flesh. They were all wedged in, crammed against each other’s damp raincoats, sweaty armpits, sour hair. The train jerked away, plunged into the tunnel.