Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  He must live that long!

  He craved her forgiveness. He was not, after all, a murderous fiend. Or an accessory to a child molester. And if he had been misguided at the beginning of the war, he had tried to make up for it at the end. He was too shy a man—too proud and, for a placid person, too angry to explain—when she attacked him on the few occasions that they met.

  Only Dermot seemed to understand human frailty. He had been shot at. He knew there are no heroes, only suicidal fools. And, as he said, there are more ways of choking a cat than giving it melted butter to eat. Sometimes you can be on the side of the angels, yet work from inside the enemy’s camp. His attempts to get her to soften her attitude towards her father had only made Laure more angry. Of course, he didn’t know the dark side of her childhood.

  What right had his daughter to criticize him? To accuse him? What did she know about the circumstances? Only what her leftish friends told her. Jews and socialists no doubt. It was not his fault that she had read about him in the book The Vichyists published before the full facts were known.

  No, Dermot was his only hope. He would come—if it wasn’t too late. He could sift the evidence. He could persuade Laure. When she knew she would forgive him. This became his imperative. He would stay alive until that happened.

  The lawyer, his lifelong friend Alain de Malherbe, would arrange the inheritance, but only Dermot could make Laure accept it. After all, it was not negligible. This house and the farm and cottages. The building in Paris. The stocks and the gold. And the drawings. Oh, Lord. They must be explained to her. He was only holding them in trust for Max Farber.

  Who would get the books? Would Laure keep them? (Patrick, his son, had quit the family in 1940, and spent the war with de Gaulle in London. Apart from one standoff meeting at the notaire’s over his mother’s estate, his son and heir had never spoken to him again. Patrick was a lost cause.) It was all lost in complexity. Ignorance. Pride. Divided wartime loyalties. A misunderstanding, that was it. An unfortunate misinterpretation of his actions. What choice did he have?

  As he said to Dermot one day, “If I had been in England during the war perhaps I would have behaved like an Englishman.” The very idea of him behaving like an Englishman was ludicrous. You could see it stuck in his craw. He was full of sin, but he wasn’t that bad. Dermot said, “I can just see you in your bowler hat with a neatly furled umbrella and a neatly furled mind!”

  He listened to the buzz of the midges and the howling of a dog from the German war cemetery just down the road. Le Sourd, The Deaf. And deaf they were, the cream of the German aristocracy, fallen at the Battle of Guise on August 30, 1914. Over sixty years ago. It came back with crystal clarity. It was just before the Germans overran the estate and Armand and his parents moved back into their apartment in the building that they owned on the Rue Freycinet in Paris.

  The day the family left, their faith in French arms shaken by the arrival in the library of one of Krupp of Essen’s 26cm howitzer shells, the château was captured. They just beat the gun. To balance the score, the retreating French Fifth Army put a shell into the dining-room. Tit for tat, but it changed nothing. You could still see the mark where the south wall had been repaired.

  Armand passed out again. He faded out that real papillon and faded in his childhood fantasy Schmetterling. The fantasy that was triggered by expolosive reality. The shell landing in the park, the haphazard presence of its victim, and, later, inventing the story just to bring in a butterfly, his new obsession. He called it ‘The Random Significance of the Butterfly’ and it was his first entry in his diary of entomology. It was also his only departure from the cold, scientific facts which would dominate his life. It was a story inspired by his father saying, “A people with a language that can make a papillon, a mariposa, a butterfly, into a Schmetterling are capable of anything.”

  Feldwebel Heinrich Schmutz of the 2nd German Army was tired of operating at the edge of chaos. Limbering up and hauling the 26cm howitzer from Liege to Namur to Maubeuge to Guise inside ten days was no picnic. In a sweaty August, 1914. His face was caked with burnt cordite, his head deadened from sleeplessness and the constant crumps. At last the French seemed to have stopped for a day. Prima! The gun was settled, the Krupp barrel loaded with shell and cordite and the breech closed and locked. He took his place at the gunlayer’s position. The Hauptmann shouted the elevation. The map coordinates were fixed on the château at Colonfay. Heinrich cranked the wheel until the needle was just hairline off the right position on the brass dial. The snout of the howitzer cocked up high into the air. Heinrich saw a butterfly land on the barrel. He was distracted for a second. He thought: Ach! Ein Schmetterling! Schön!—and shouted the confirmation of the elevation. He completely forgot to fine-tune the dial. The Hauptmann sneezed and jerked the lanyard at that second. The gun belched flame and hot cordite. Heinrich Schmutz said, “Scheisse!” as he was thrown away from the jumping recoil. The loader, a bit of a wag from Kassel, shouted, “Cordite burning brightly, Sir!” The projectile, inscribed this time not with a quotation from Kant but with ‘Gott strafe England’ was hurled away to descend a bare hundred meters on the far side of the château, in the park, quite near the cedar of Lebanon. It threw up a geyser of dirt and filled the park with black smoke. It did very little damage, unless you count the loss of a British liaison officer who had wrung it out and was shaking the drops off next to the tree.

  Armand, lying there, immobile, tried to bring order out of it all, but it eluded him and he abandoned himself to a not-unpleasant state of hallucination. The dog lay against his thigh and looked up once in a while and barked. There was a constant ache but no severe pain. He tried to move his fingers. They worked. He dug them into the muddy soil. His fingernails scraped up the earth on which he lived and to which he would soon go. The land of his fathers. Land from which they were still digging out shells from the First World War. Land which had been in the de Coucy family continuously since the seventeenth century. Now it was the end of the line. Patrick had no children and Laure was determined not to have another. Her one child, a daughter, Penelope, had died not long ago. Suddenly he felt cold. The pain became severe. His whole back was hurting. He wished for an injection to anesthetize it.

  The park was totally enclosed by woods. No one would come until Colette, his housekeeper, came back from the village, maybe at ten o’clock. He hoped she would look for him and not just leave his lunch on the kitchen table.

  When she did find him, he kept repeating—Faites venir Monsieur McManus. Telephonez Maître de Malherbe.

  Little did Armand de Coucy know it, but when he stirred up the hornet’s nest the sting of one in the remote hamlet of Colonfay would have a fallout in southern France, Denmark, Ireland.

  Well, as we noted, it was a French hornet.

  The farmer and his worker lifted him gently onto a door and carried him into the house. He was delirious. They put a mattress on the long table in the dining room and he lay there. They managed after great exertions to change his wet clothes for dry ones and they lit a fire to raise the temperature even though it was hot outside. When the SAMU—the service d’aide médicale d’urgence—arrived they first blocked his body with sandbags.

  When they prepared to move him onto a stretcher he came out of his coma and insisted that he not be taken to hospital. He was vehement and kicked to such an extent that they were afraid he’d do himself terminal damage. They called the hospital at St. Quentin and were told that a doctor would come immediately. To leave him alone. The maire of the commune was summoned because he knew him well. He could make contact, if anyone could, with Laure and Dermot. Patrick’s whereabouts were unknown, except to the lawyer, Alain de Malherbe, whose office would only say that he was somewhere in the Midi, due in Aix en Provence on Tuesday. It would be Wednesday at least before either Laure or Dermot could be reached.

  Immobile as Armand was, when conscious, his head angled, he could still see out the window to the park, and the thing he focused on was the
cedar of Lebanon. It continued to dominate his thoughts and as he lapsed in and out of the dream world he imagined himself still under the tree.

  6. Laure and Her Fall

  The Midi of France. Maurepas, a village in the Lubéron of Provence, in between Avignon and Aix.

  Laure, Armand de Coucy’s estranged daughter, came awake reluctantly. She was swimming with an amorous serpent in a lake of cream. A shaft of light on her eye. Her black hair spread across the lace pillow. Nude, one arm under her, an alabaster body and long. Her upper back exposed to the waist. Her head on her other outstretched arm. Her classical features, pale and still unlined, in repose. She was forty-seven but could have been thirty-five. The black cat walked on her face. She shrugged him off. He came back, protesting, waiting to be fed. The big ginger cat stayed curled up by her feet.

  The Provençal sun through the half-open shutters was too bright, too soon. It spotlighted an errant branch with the orange trumpet flowers that were trying to creep in the open window. Scent of honeysuckle, mint. Pigeons cooing. Doors rattling in the mistral. The Judas tree scraping the walls in the courtyard. A dog howling in the distance.

  On the empty side of the bed, scattered art books. Two on Pontormo, one on Parmigianino, annotated. A notebook with scribbled drawings of certain pictures, and comments. Bedside table, also piled high with books. The flotsam of a late night catching up on abandoned work. She was trying to finish the new book on Mannerism which was overdue. The publication date was timed to coincide with an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Laure de Coucy (épouse McManus,’ as they put it on all documents, relegating the husband to his proper subsidiary place) was an expert on Italian Mannerism, the intellectual painting and architecture by certain artists between 1520 and 1600.

  It was not an élite pretension with her. She was not conceited about it. It was simply her mental escape from the trappings of the world of law for which she was trained. She was ‘Laurence’ in this, the expert, and in this academic persona, with daunting abstract intelligence, she knew her stuff.

  Was this predisposition to obsessive pursuits genetic, like collecting butterflies? Could be, partly. She was a compulsive student. Sublimated sexual impulses? Unquestionably. Escape? Most certainly. Escape from the constant religious strictures of her mother, her daily lessons in ‘proper’ comportment, her perverted warnings against the physical. Of men. Sex! Filthy! Daily Mass, hidden body, good works. Escape too from the rigid confines of that slice of society which excluded anything modern. No emancipation here. Escape from the daily evidence of her mother’s slavery to her father, a man who took as his natural right to be waited on hand and foot.

  Dermot, too, becoming the heavy husband, seeming the replacement father, older, criticizing. ‘Lolo’ to him, his little girl too, as if he had any right to use her childish pet name. The cell door, the chains that bound, dried out the soul—and other parts. In her Laurence role she wasn’t taking any of that merde.

  The tragedy of Penelope, the wild and wonderful Pen, light of their lives, the glue that held the marriage together and whose sudden death froze in time all communication between Dermot and herself.

  Art history was an exciting, solitary source of discovery. It fed her imagination. With some people escape was the cinema; with Laure it was paintings. She wrote her own scripts in her head. She entered into the pictures. The trick had once returned her to sanity. Sometimes she published her findings. Occasionally she lectured. Above her head, a contemporary copy of the Poussin The Nurture of Jupiter. (They were not Mannerists but Poussin was her God and Claude Lorrain was his Prophet.) On another wall a poster of the Rosso Fiorentino’s Deposizione from Volterra. Now awake, and still the liberated Laure, body-aware and happy, she said, ‘Bonjour!’ to the boy in the Bassano poster of The Flight into Egypt just to the right. He was leading the donkey and looking down at her. She always talked to him. So far he hadn’t replied but she knew he heard her. She shook herself into action. She had to work today. Yesterday was wasted. Well, no. And not the evening! Oh, no!

  Going to her cousin Clémence’s dinner at Vaugines. Tuesday, the funeral of Tante Marie. Holding Clémence’s hand and the agony of a lunch at her uncle René’s house, La Fontanelle, at Montdidier les Murs. Today, she was determined to get down to it, the work, she meant. Unless. Unless André came across.

  André was yesterday’s bombshell. Rocket? No. Tsunami, that was the word. An underwater earthquake erupting and a giant upheaval on the surface.

  A rogue wave that drowned her. Washed out her inhibitions. Drowned her fears. She had kicked over the traces.

  Her friend Pascale has an apartment in the Provençal village of Maurepas and Laure had promised to help her choose a table for it. It was the Sunday market at l’Isle sur la Sorgue. So she went with her to find one. Pascale has uncertain taste and Laure is endowed with all the virtues supposedly. She has an unerring eye. Pascale is working on Laure’s new book. She’s a retired journalist and she’s doing the captions and some of the editing. Pascale is an unpredictable genius. A bouncy little woman, fey and often childish. But brilliant. An owlish woman with a completely round head, and thick glasses behind which sparkle a fearful intelligence and a child’s intuitive understanding of the human condition. She has an antenna which picks up instantly the fraudulent and the phony.

  Pascale was a communist, until Hungary. She and her husband, Michel, both at the Sorbonne. He active in the Résistance, Pascale sticking little French flags on the backs of German soldiers in the Métro. Michel went to a station in the Auvergne. To meet a contact. Saw the man on the opposite platform. Didn’t see the Gestapo following him. Waved. Carted off to Buchenwald. Endured the long march from the camp as the Russians advanced. People dropping out, dying, all the time. Worse than the camp itself. Even today he can’t speak to Vichyistes, collaborators. Is reserved with Laure about her experiences because of her family’s Petainist background. Pascale is uncompromising. So is her friend in the local village of Lourmarin, François, the retired ambassador, the man who lives in music. But Pascale knows that Laure has broken the family ties. She knows too that her friend can never break the biological and genetic components.

  They crossed the Lubéron at Bonnieux, Laure trying not to look at Ventoux in the distance and noticing only the splashes of broom, like yellow explosions all over the hills. Sunlight and shadows on the twisty road, rocks overhanging in the Combe de Lourmarin. The hairpin bend, looking back over the ravine of Buoux, a jagged cleft in the earth that Dermot says looks like a vagina dentata. An Irish poet with a dirty mind. Pascale understands him. There was a wild mistral gusting, the branches of the trees in turmoil, the noise of a million waves breaking on rocks, an insane dance of the leaves. The car was buffeted.

  Pascale insisted on shopping for vegetables in the Place de l’Eglise.

  Laure complained, “All the people in the world I want not to see will be there.”

  The place was still possible. Just about. But the professional liars had their eyes on it and soon it would be overrun by the media kids. Now it’s mostly Germans and Swiss and Belgians searching the tables in the street for useless objects, old locks, bugles, biscuit tins, old helmets, stolen silver, junk.

  A squeal, “Fay-leeks! Here’s a brass box you can keep your condoms in!”

  Another squeal of ‘Prima!’ from Felix.

  Laure said, “Quelle horreur!”

  Pascale shrugged, “Des Boches. Quote: When I think of Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, and Wagner I can’t hate the Germans.”

  Laure said, “Today, I can.”

  They sat outside the Café de France, half hidden behind the plane tree, and listened to the vapid conversations of the tourists.

  - Let’s sit here.

  - Yes, do let’s.

  - In the sun?

  - No. In the shade.

  - But I like the sun.

  - I prefer the shade.

  - No, I like the sun.

  - I like the shade.

&n
bsp; - This looks all right.

  - Yes, half in the sun.

  - And half in the shade.

  - The sun is very strong in Provence.

  - Yes. The sun’s strong.

  Pascale said, “Stimulating, no?”

  Laure said, “Live and let live, as the English say.”

  Pascale said, “That’s not a very French concept.”

  Laure agrees. But she wishes she could look upon the human race with a less jaundiced eye. All she asks is to be allowed to wander alone through her inner world of books and pictures, diving into Stendhal and losing herself in Caravaggio. She’s an unhappy island. No common touch. Afraid of human contact. Too much of that when she was young.

  Frozen, waiting for the thaw. Yearning. It’s coming.

  Pascale sat up. She touched her arm.

  “Look! That’s class!”

  A young girl with suntanned, polished thighs in well-cut khaki shorts. Long slender legs. American legs. Coltish. Golden hair cropped like a boy’s, razor-cut and shaped to the head. An arrogant head, high cheekbones, regular features, clear, grey eyes. Man’s white shirt. Showing the long neck, an oblique fringe hanging down over the forehead. Understated. Standing out because there was nothing garish or aggressive about her.

  She strode across the Place like a general reviewing troops or a girl who had since birth been used to looking down on the groom from a high saddle on a thoroughbred hunter.

  She was free!

  Laure felt a pang of envy. Even she couldn’t deny the truth of Pascale’s admiring comments. A northern blonde but with style. Pas moche. She was glad Dermot wasn’t there. He liked them with a pedigree.

  “They’re better over the sticks,” he said. “Great jumpers.”

  He pretended he liked them young and boyish. Sex objects! Small-breasted, lithe. Firm flesh and golden pubic hairs, he said, jokingly, unfeelingly, but it fell flat. Laure is dark and well-endowed. It hurt.