Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  The girl was followed by a distinguished man in drill slacks and a business shirt; with rimless glasses and the look of someone who, as Dermot might have said, keeps a weather eye on the leech of the mainsail on Long Island Sound. No, he’d be wrong. This one was too sensitive, slightly tortured. Lean and austere. Slim, hooked nose, cerebral type. Lawyer? Academic? Essayist? Washington Post journalist? No espadrilles but normal polished loafers. Plain steel watch and carrying the New York Review. Yes, American. Sensitive. He saw her looking at him. She was embarrassed. But suddenly bold. He held her gaze, interested, the signal. The girl dragged him away. He looked back once. Maybe she doesn’t hate all the human race. Maybe not all men are brutes. What would it be like? Maybe—the pilot light was lit. When would the afterburner cut in?

  They paid and left. Pascale went into the paper shop; Laure walked down the narrow street lined with stalls selling junk jewelry and suchlike. She stopped at a stand to look at some peasant outfits. They were surprisingly original, subtle and stylish. Castelbajac in l’Isle sur la Sorgue.

  She was touching a skirt when a voice out of the distant past said “Laure!” and there was Clémence, her cousin, standing behind the clothes rack and with dawning recognition, blushing with awkward embarrassment. Instinctive clutching and kissing. Confused jabbering.

  “It’s you, Clémence!”

  “Yes, it’s Clémence, Laure.”

  Clémence, the wild one, eccentric, who had married an Englishman and, though no one in the family knew it, a Jew. English! And a Jew! A rich investment trust type, riding to hounds, stalking stags in Scotland, Sassooning all over the place, as Dermot put it. Clémence, who had worked in the French Embassy in London and saw her escape route. What now?

  “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in England? Where’s Jeremy?”

  “In Hampshire, no doubt. With his horses.”

  “And the children?”

  “Giles at Ampleforth, Camille at St. Mary’s, Ascot. Catholic schools to let them learn about the enemy. Proper little English children. Abandoned by their wayward mother.”

  As Clémence talked, The Man came up and kissed her quickly on both cheeks. He turned to leave, but he looked hard at Laure and the girl standing behind was eyeing her coldly from the background. Her antenna had picked up his interest in Laure and there was a hint of possessiveness in her appraisal. It was the couple she saw outside the Café de France. Laure was too embarrassed to ask Clémence who he was but felt happy that she could establish that later.

  “Now, what are you doing?” she asked Clémence.

  “I’ve had enough, Laure. Quite enough. I’m divorcing.”

  “No!”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No. I’m only surprised you could stick it out for so long. I mean, who could you talk to?”

  “Oh, everyone. Provided it was about schools or horses or property or Prince Charles’s desire to be a Tampax inside Camilla.”

  “But you liked it.”

  “Yes. Well, it was different. A different prison.”

  “I remember you saying you were going to marry a rich millionaire.”

  “Yes, well. Conservative balls, house parties in Scotland, Trevor Square. Money is the root of all boredom. Give me my little cabanon in France. Listen, Laure. You must come to Maman’s funeral. On Tuesday. That’s one of the reasons I came back now. She always asked about you. You were her favorite. She was so proud of your success.”

  “What success?”

  “Survival, for a start. Defiance. Look, we have to talk. I tried calling you in Paris, and Maurepas. You must come to the funeral. It would make her so happy. And come to dinner tonight.”

  “Oh, Clémence. After all these years. I can’t. I’m going back to Paris tomorrow.”

  “You must.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Clémence. I can’t face that lot again.”

  “After all she did for you? She practically brought you up during the war. It’s not asking much.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t. After all, she was an exception.”

  “Yes, but she supported Uncle René against my mother. And she hid Grandfather.”

  “What would you have her do? All that’s long ago. I hate them as much as you. Come to dinner and talk about it? I need you to be there, for moral support. And Maman would expect it of you. Do you remember that time in the wood?”

  Yes, she remembered. She was a wartime refugee at her maternal grandmother’s home of La Fontanelle.

  She was seven. Chased, in panic, her legs like lead, the two louts from the village trying to take their revenge on the people in the château. Falling, torn, screaming. His thing, all red and purple. Her scratched thigh. His finger inside her. Her aunt coming on them like an avenging angel. Beating them with her stick. Her grandfather’s anger, having them put away, the gap between peasants and the family widened even more. The nightmares. Aunt Marie sleeping with her, guarding her, teaching her. That did it. She was a child again. Back at La Fontanelle. Motherless, friendless, abandoned, for her own safety, they said, but it didn’t matter. She’d rather be in Paris with her parents and her brother. Aunt Marie helped her through the long years. Aunt Marie, a war widow, selfless, converting her sadness into abundant care for her daughter, Clémence, four, who had never known a father, and her niece, Laure. The awful time when they took her to Avignon to go back to Paris and she threw herself on the rails because she didn’t want now to leave Aunt Marie.

  Yes, she owed her. And she remembered the other childhood shock when the gallant résistants came to take their revenge. Laure’s recurring nightmare. She was still seven. The age of reason, it’s supposed to be. The First Communion. The year between August 1944 and August 1945. An impressionable age. Certainly the impressions come back sharply. It was a year when she moved about from pillar to post. Une saison en enfer, as Rimbaud put it. It was a bad year for vipers and scorpions and other venomous creatures in Provence. The épuration at Montdidier-les-Murs.

  She was sitting by the fountain playing with the cat when they came. She was still wearing the petticoat made from the American parachute that they picked up in St. Tropez when two Americans landed in her paternal grandmother’s rose garden there. The sound of the truck. They pushed in through the gate at the end of the avenue of pines, carrying shotguns and a submachine gun. A sullen crowd and dangerous. The vengeful peasants of the Midi. Settling scores and claiming to dispense justice. Eliminating witnessess to their own behaviour. One was the tenant farmer who wouldn’t pay the rent. Another the mad baker who worked with the Germans and was now filled with righteousness and a need to earn his place with the heroes of la Résistance. They all got medals. ‘Ils se couchèrent Pétainistes et se réveillèrent Gaullistes.’ She ran inside. Her Great-Uncle Pierre, ‘Pay,’ met her as he emerged from the study. He handed her the book he was carrying and steered her gently into an armchair. He stood at the top of the steps and looked down scornfully. Then he looked away and surveyed for the last time the old bastide from which had been issued the five volumes of carefully crafted words on Greek civilization. He said “I am Pierre de Montriveau. I imagine you want my brother. He’s not here. He’s in Switzerland. Kindly leave. Allez-vous-en! he said. His tone did not please the so-called résistants who have now, like scorpions, crawled out from under the stones with a sting in their Stens. “You’ll do,” said the leader, and motioned him out. They prodded him with the guns, but they didn’t look at him. They were guilty and embarrassed. He led them behind the house into the courtyard and she heard the bark of the shotguns and the chatter of the automatic weapon. She stumbled out and found him lying on his back on the gravel. She knelt and touched his hand. Blood had soaked his shirt but he still had a look of disdain on his face. Acceptance. Inevitability. Her Aunt Marie came and took her away, shielding her face from the torn flesh of her gentle great-uncle. She kept the book in her hand and it was bloodied when she fell down beside him. It was his own trans
lation of Sophocles’s Ajax. ‘The gods may judge me but not these men.’ The executioners slunk away. The platanes moaned in the fresh mistral. The Dentelles de Montmirail bit into the clear sky of Provence and Mont Ventoux reared up, topped by white limestone and its gaunt crucifix silhouetted in agony on the barren ridge. Calvary, again.

  They met that evening at her cousin Clémence’s little house near Vaugines. Sat outside in the balmy air, it saturated by the sweet scent of the broom growing on the hill behind, the landscape falling away over the valley of the Durance to the Trevaresse and beyond the outline of Sainte-Victoire, crouching in the distance, all planes and recessions of greys and blues, viewed through a misty filter. Clémence, nervous. Her daughter, Camille, over from London for the funeral of her grandmother, missing her boyfriend at Eton, sulky.

  From inside the house came the sound of a lone cello. In the stilly night the Schubert Sonata Arpegione, then Brahms, then a rare piece, which made her wonder. Filling the night, speaking direct to her heart. The perfect touch. Unreal. The warm night air, the scent of the broom, the soft landscape, the purple sky, the music. The cello, played with certainty, deep and clear.

  Laure wondered aloud, “Who?”

  Her friend and collaborator, Pascale said, “I don’t know.”

  The old retired ambassador, François, said, “A master.”

  She was about to go and investigate when Clémence came out pulling a man after her. André. The Man from l’Isle sur la Sorgue.

  He smiled. She blushed. She was glad it was too dark to see.

  Clémence said, “This is André. A friend of Georges. He’s a painter. Be careful. He’ll have you posing for the origin of the universe.”

  He held her hand for a long time. It tingled. She shivered.

  He protested, “Don’t listen to her. I’m no Courbet.”

  She said, “If that was you playing, thank you for the music.”

  He asked, “Did you recognize it?”

  She said, “The Schubert and the Brahms, yes. I had trouble over the other piece. Eighteenth century. Could it be the Caix d’Herveloix Suite?”

  “Bravo!”

  “Where did you learn to play like that?”

  “Oh, you know I always had big ideas. Jewish boys are expected to play the violin but it wasn’t big enough for me.”

  “It’s my favorite instrument.”

  “Oh, I hope not.”

  He smiled, “You are certainly the reason I came to dinner. I saw you in l’Isle sur la Sorgue. I know all about you. An intimidating person. All brain. A French intello. Emphasis always on the wrong end. Living your life with the head not the heart, in fiction, in pictures of fantasy. But you have great legs.”

  “For the vieille de village.”

  “The best soup comes from an old pot.”

  “Merci!”

  But she laughed. She sat carelessly. Not provocatively. She wouldn’t know how. She had poise but no artifice. She adjusted her dress.

  “Don’t move,” he said, looking at her through a frame of his hands.

  “Hey, wait a moment.”

  But he was mock serious, wagging his finger, warning.

  “Why? There are not that many moments left. There will never be another tonight. There is only now. Now. And, by the way, I’m not impressed by intelligence. As Mister Aristotle said, there’s nothing in the intelligence that didn’t pass first through the senses.”

  Later. To the house at Le Tholonet, under the shadow of Montagne Sainte Victoire. Liberation.

  Tuesday

  7. Dermot’s Revenge

  It had been a polite nibbling sort of dinner and Dermot felt as out of place as an abortionist at an Irish convent. The elite of Morelia, Mexico, were putting on the monogrammed feed bags and carefully avoiding any unseemly or interesting topics. They were at the Villa la Florída and, courtesy of Mouse, his location scout, who was an old friend of the owner from her days in Mexico City, he was at the host’s table.

  Morelia is the social Everest of Mexico. The hostess fluttered nervously, the guests muttered approvingly. The platitudes came tumbling down. It was all very refined. The food was almost too precious to eat. There were little miniature potatoes (or were they turnips?—he couldn’t tell from the subtle flavor but judging by the color they had the blight and if there were any fewer there would have been a famine). Oh, he thought, these were very nice and very polite people. They were so nice and so polite, yes, and so dedicated to being attentive to Dermot, being a new face and underprivileged by virtue of the fact that he had to work for a living, that they went (painfully) out of their way to make the meat-and-potatoes rough diamond feel at home.

  “Do you have food like this in Ireland,” asked the lady on his right.

  “Ah, no. Begod, pig’s head and cabbage is all we get. And kalcannon on Sundays if the potatoes aren’t rotten. And the pig isn’t sold.”

  Mouse across the table roared again. Approved.

  Her ladyship laughed condescendingly.

  “But you speak French?” she asked.

  “Not a word, milady.”

  From across the table, Mouse listening to this interchange with some amusement, interjected.

  “Don’t you believe him. He’s a cantankerous Celt but he’s well-read in three languages. Been house-broken in the best houses of la vieille France. Married to a distinguished French lady from a distinguished family, la vie de château. and all that. Monarchists, you’ll be happy to learn, princesse. Slightly to the right of Gengis Khan.

  “So why is he so gauche?”

  “Ah, answer me that and we’ll all be in your debt. His mood swings are most unpredictable. At the moment he’s in his anti-French mode.”

  This one had said her name too was rather famous. They all had the noble particule, at least. It was ‘madame la baronne’ this and ‘monsieur le comte’ that. It was so rarified that when his call to France came through he jumped up quickly and shot out like a racehorse out of the gate, full of wonder at the banality of the rich.

  Laure’s voice cold and flat. “What do you want?”

  “Just to hear your voice.”

  “Why don’t you call Nana? I found a letter you wrote to her.”

  He went cold. Hesitated for a moment.

  “What letter?”

  “A letter you wrote after she had been here in November. In my bed. All about your lusting for her and lying in front of the fire and wanting to be with her all the time.”

  “That was a fiction. A total invention. I’m a short-story writer. It was never sent.”

  “Of course. And the nude photographs? This is not a fiction. I’m leaving you. You can stay in Paris until you go somewhere else. But I never want to see you again.”

  “Wait. I’m coming back.”

  “Don’t. I’ve had enough.”

  And she put the phone down.

  He went straight to the cottage in the garden and walked around in a state of shock. Emptied. The whole marriage thing had been uneasy but it was his sheet anchor. Stress every day but he had accepted the strain. Now the anchor was about to drag. The cable was ready to break.

  Still, no wonder he chose locations as far away from France as possible.

  Why Mexico? It was not his favorite country but Mouse, the location scout who knew everything and everybody, knew a Spanish colonial town that offered the right backgrounds for the advertising shots. He hated the job. Corruption, pollution, violence, the federales. Foul food in Puerto Vallarta. Ripe sewage. Diarrhea. And cigarette ads that he was making to spread cancer for a German tobacco company.

  He thought you’d have to be drunk all the time to support life in Mexico. He identified with Malcolm Lowry, the author of Under The Volcano, the autobiography of a drunk in Mexico, alienated from his wife and his own society and hell-bent on self-destruction. He was a satisfying creative role model.

  Dermot thought, ‘Like me, except I’m dry nowadays. You’d need a good supply of mescal to live here. The only for
eign residents who could abide the place came from Toronto and Los Angeles. Well, he could understand that. He’d been in both places.’

  No more! he said to himself as he walked around in his disconnected state. This is the end. Out of the business, out of the marriage, out of everything that went against his nature.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ he told himself. ‘An artist. I don’t have to act like an accountant.’

  A hollow laugh sounded in his brain. The excuse was invalid.

  The whole exercise had been a disaster. He should never have taken it on. Mexico came close to Pakistan and Ireland for the places he could stay away from without any sense of deprivation. He saw it as a vast shantytown, dusty and decrepid and populated by surly and unprepossessing natives. A jabbering of tourists, the men in Hawaiian shirts and their ‘brides’ in gaudy Bermudas. Brides of sixty yet. The Spanish death thing everywhere. Death in Ireland too hung over him like a permanent cloud. Would it never disperse?

  1938. Late summer in south Kilkenny. Slievenamon, ‘the mountain of women,’ brooding there through a misty veil with purple folds. Slack water. A high tide. The River Suir up to the top watermark on the green wall of the quay. Under the bridge, a rowing-boat swinging to its painter through an iron ring set in the wall. Long eelgrass swaying under the surface, thick as a forest of cobras and full of menace. Dermot sits there in the sternsheets with an idle fishing rod over the transom. He’s looking down at the red-haired girl, Mouse, who is lying on her back with her legs up over the thwart. He’s mesmerized by the beauty mark high up on the inside of her thigh. His thoughts are sinful. He has a pubescent’s urge. He looks away into the water. The tide starts to turn. Something catches his eye under the bank. Something white. It comes into view. A hand sticking out of a dark sleeve. The body floats free. He’s frozen with fear. The corpse nudges the boat and comes to rest under the gunnel. He lifts his hand inboard. Mouse sees there’s something wrong. She sits up and looks over the side. She screams. He jumps ashore and pulls her after him. He sends her away for help and she runs towards the village. He feels sick. It isn’t real. At first he’s afraid to look again. Then, almost defiantly, he goes back into the boat and takes an oar and pushes the dead mass back into the weeds and mud. He plants the oar in the mud to stop the thing floating free again. Finally, mustering all his courage, he reaches into the cold water and pulls the body half out onto the bank. It slides up easily. He’s filled with dread. He recognizes the old Norfolk jacket. He pulls again and twists at the same time and although the body will not roll over completely the head flops across and the eyes stare at him with glassy sadness. He is still kneeling there in the mud holding the two lapels of the coat and looking at the unshaven face when they come from the village. The rough stubble will never again graze his cheek as his father plays the game with him. He will remember the shattered head where the bullet has emerged and the slack jaw and the agony. And the High Mass with himself as an altar boy and the whiskey priest and he will remember the words said as they carry the coffin away: Sure, didn’t he ask for it, the West Briton?