Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  “Requiescat in pace. Amen …”

  She’s a lot of the things they say but she’s not a hypocrite. She gave up religion a long time ago. When she heard that Cardinal Baudrillart, archbishop of Paris had prayed publicly for a German victory and was an active collaborationist, she stopped going to Mass. And this happened while Marcel was kept hidden in case Bousquet sent him to join his parents at Auschwitz.

  She heard the murmur of resentment. She’s done it again. She stood over the grave and dropped a sprig on the top of the coffin. A small olive branch. Tante Marie would understand. She paused for a few seconds, unfeeling, then turned and pushed back between the inspecteur des finances and the prof de philo with his docile wife. Her uncle René, Marie’s younger brother, Greek scholar, writer of unreadable tomes, pompous, censorious, glared at her. Yes, she thought, what a family. She added up their reactionary habits, the things Dermot wouldn’t at first believe and then roared with laughter when he recounted them to his friends.

  Oncle René is a modern man. He finally bought a dishwasher for Tante Adrienne. He resisted it for years because, as he said, one of his pleasures in life was to sit in a comfortable chair after dinner, with a glass of cognac and a good cigar, and to listen to the sound of his wife in the kitchen washing the dishes.

  “What do you think of that?” asked Laure.

  “Sounds like a harmless pleasure to me,” said Dermot, and the fat was in the fire. Grand-père Jacques insisted on his marital rights. He made Grand-mère Héléne wear his new nightshirts until they stopped itching. He was a bit of a dandy. He sent his shirts to London to be laundered because he claimed the English were the only people who knew how to starch a collar properly. There was always one hamper of laundry on the way there and one on the way back. Who says the French don’t admire the English?

  Grand-mère Hélène was famous for her melons. In a country where all melons were exceptional, hers were spectacular. No one could touch them. She made sure of that by checking that none of the pips found their way into the purses or pockets of her envious guests. She cleaned out the pips herself and she made sure that the cook didn’t give any away. There were ladies who tried to sneak into the kitchen and bribe the cook to do so.

  Laure thought—Uncle René. He’s in for a surprise, that one. She withdrew to the back of the group. All standing about with severe looks, exuding sanctity, in correct uniforms like a lot of crows. She in her casual dress of jeans and multicolored sweater. Not crows. Ravens. Nevermore.

  Suddenly, Dermot’s mongrel tied up at the gate broke loose and tore through the legs of Uncle René, nearly toppling him, the old man held up by his son, Jacques. The hairy bitch stopped at the pile of earth and squatted to pee. There was an audible intake of breath. She found the leash and hauled the irreverent animal back. They turned and looked at her in disapproval. Anger even.

  She said—PAX, and smiled sweetly.

  Tante Marie would have smiled too. A little dog’s piss in the grave wouldn’t worry her. Love from Dermot. It was his dog and she loved him too.

  Strangely, for a moment Laure missed his support. Her absent husband. It was so demeaning to have to find excuses for his constant absence. This time he’s paid for humiliating her. They turned back, shutting her out. PAX is not for nonconformists. Not for Laure de Coucy, épouse McManus, adultress, lover of Jews, traitor, socialist, républicaine, betrayer of the family Catholic tradition.

  She left the cemetery and walked up to the village to give them a chance to escape. She would come back later. They wouldn’t want her around to embarrass them. The less they saw of her the better. But she has an invitation to the house. For some reason they insist on her presence at lunch. She’s not looking forward to it. But she intends to go out not with a whimper but a good loud bang. It brought back memories. The last funeral she came to in this cemetery. Great-Uncle Pierre. ‘Pay.’ After his execution by the gallant résistants.

  10. Armand, the Moth Man

  Armand de Coucy chased moths. It was his only interest. A lifetime passion since he was a student. Lying there on the table, conscious part of the time, and to forget his cramped situation he did a mental inventory of his collection. The drawers filled with boxes of similar moths. Dull, but he wasn’t impressed by exoticism. Size and color meant nothing to him. He couldn’t put together one of those flashy boxes that are all the designer’s rage nowadays. He was not an enthusiastic amateur, waving his net about in the Alpine meadows, like Nabokov.

  He was a scientist, an authority. Until his accident in Africa Armand had been an intrepid hunter of the night moth wherever it might lurk—in the jungles of the Cameroons, on the mountains of Ecuador or Sarawak, in Madagascar. He was to be found at night in the steamy swamps, his light fixed to a tree to attract the quarry. He was dropped by helicopter onto remote mountains in Nepal and left there for weeks. There was not a moth with whose sexual organs he was not intimately familiar, this being the means of identifying lepidoptera. He had discovered over five hundred new species.

  His collection of over a hundred thousand was the most valuable of its kind in the world. So was his library. He was on the advisory board of the National Museum, a friend and benefactor to the British Natural History Museum in London; an illustrious and mild-mannered man to whom people wrote soliciting information and advice from Siberia to Tasmania. Apart from the odd telephone discussion with other experts in the métier, and occasional meetings in the museum, he was completely self-contained.

  A true gentle man. Cultivated but totally oblivious to others. Rather daunting. You wouldn’t address him unless you had been introduced. He regarded all words not about butterflies or rugby to be unnecessary. A raucous laugh would attract a glance of such disdain that it would freeze the culprit for days. A mite boring? Who cared about this boring fellow? Actually, very few outside his entomologist colleagues. Not his daughter, not his son.

  Only Dermot. They enjoyed a strange rapport. It may be that they were both nihilists. Or they pretended that life was a huge joke and that there was very little worth worrying about and that there was no real difference between a sinner and a saint. History was bunk and heroics questionable. They exchanged weary looks when the conversation turned to trivia and most things fell into that category.

  Dermot had a soft spot for him. He liked eccentrics. And he recognised that whereas he himself was a flashy, uncultured character, Armand had class. The Irishman’s pulse didn’t race at the thought of a rare night moth the way it did at the sight of a red-haired girl in a miniskirt but chacun son goût, as they say in France. Some people chase butterflies; others chase skirts. All things considered, you’d put Dermot in the latter category. Before he grew out of it.

  Armand remembers clearly his meeting with the first McManus.

  He’s ten. He can hear the guns of von Plattenberg’s Regiment of Guards in the distance. It’s exciting. The sentries are nervous. General Lanrezac, commanding the French Fifth Army, is in the house and his staff are in the farmhouse next door. He sees clearly the rider coming up the drive. An elderly cavalryman in British uniform, with a soft cap and polished riding boots. The man dismounts. He says, “Young man, get your father. I’m here to see General Lanrezac.” Armand follows them to the dining-room where a busy Lanrezac is poring over maps and issuing orders. The English officer, a Captain McManus, says (in accentless French) ‘Field-Marshal Sir John French sends his compliments but regrets he cannot help you. His army was chased by von Kluck and badly mauled at Le Cateau while the French army withdrew and left his flank open. He’s pulling back to the south and west. He cannot protect the left of the French Fifth Army and he has forbidden his 1st Corps to counterattack von Bülow. His troops are too tired.’ Lanrezac’s anger is something to behold. Armand cowers behind his father, even though he is proud of his French general. Lanrezac spits out—Dieu me damme! Le salaud! Ces emmerdeurs d’Anglais! Trop fatigués! Merde! His instinct is to shoot the messenger. He is going to try to stop the Germans and save S
t. Quentin and he’s desperately short of troops. Morale is low. The British officer, Irish as it turns out, red with embassassment, because he disagrees with his Commander in Chief’s decision and it shows, salutes and starts to withdraw. He’s on the side of his own boss, General Smith-Dorrien the commander of the 2nd Corps, who wants to fight, even though they have been badly mauled at Le Cateau and the French withdrew without telling them, leaving their flank unprotected. He always refers to the minute field-marshal as ‘That shortarsed little bugger!’ As he reaches the door, he turns and says, “Mon Général, the British will fight to the last Frenchman!” Lanrezac, the créole, looks furious. Then he smiles. “You’re Irish, McManus. Not English! Bon! Allez! Et bonne chance!” Some chance. McManus hoists Armand up on the horse. He slaps the hunter on the rump. Says, “Giddup, Potheen!” Armand had just taken him to the water trough in the park near the cedar of Lebanon, slid out of the saddle and returned to the house when he hears the sound of an express train coming down from the heavens and both rider and horse disappear in a geyser of dirt and black smoke. They scrape up what was left and bury it temporarily in a corner of the park. They send bits of equipment and harness to the British Headquarters. General Lanrezac personally scribbles a note to Sir John French. ‘You’ve lost a good man. He was Irish.’ Much later, after the war, when the deep crater has been overgrown with grass, Armand digs up a bent cap-badge with the insignia of the 10th Lancers. Much, much later, playing grown-up, Laure clips it on her handbag.

  The image slips to the first meeting with Dermot.

  1956. The day a red sports car came up the drive, shaking the village and bouncing its exhaust off the trees, a prancing horse badge on its hood. Out of it swung a long, dishevelled type with fair hair and a lived-in face with lines like furrows in the top field. Out of the other side came a rich gypsy girl, endless legs and thighs, red-gold hair and freckles and a wild, laughing face. He introduced himself as Dermot McManus and the girl as Nana the Troll. He asked if he could see the place where his grandfather had been killed in 1914.

  Then it clicked. Armand remembered that the British cavalryman had been called McManus. They stood in the overgrown crater next to the cedar. The girl walked around, swinging her hips and taking photographs of the house and the park. He told Dermot that the only thing he had found was a cap badge.

  “10th Lancers,” Dermot remarked. “He must have been sixty, if a day. Silly man. Have you still got the badge?”

  “No. My daughter, Laure, took it. When she was a child she put it on her handbag. Perhaps she’s still got it. She used to hoard.”

  “Where is she?” Dermot asked.

  “In Paris. She’s a lawyer. In the cabinet of Chevalier. He’s now a député. Why not call her? Laure de Coucy.”

  “That’s a good idea. I’m just over from New York to sort out the French company. We need a change of lawyers.”

  And that, as they say, put the cat among the pigeons.

  Dermot departed, the spinning wheels of the Ferrari throwing up the gravel of the driveway, and himself singing lustily:

  It’s a long way to Tipperary

  It’s a long way to go

  It’s a long way to Tipperary

  To the sweetest girl I know

  Goodby, Picadilly

  Farewell Leicester Square

  It’s a long way to Tipperary

  But my heart’s right there

  Armand wasn’t invited to the wedding in Saint-Sulpice and he only saw his granddaughter, Penelope, when Dermot brought her to the apartment in Paris and once when Laure was away and he brought her to play at Colonfay. When Penelope was killed, it seemed that all the joy had gone out of his life. He was closer to Dermot, but Dermot had become a hard man.

  11. Dermot: His Blackout

  Paris. The City of Light when the lights went out. April in the Sixth Arrondissement, the time they put up the equestrian statue at the corner of the Rue du Cherche-Midi and the Rue de Sèvres. César’s huge Centaur in welded iron. Half man and half horse but with certain liberties taken with each. This one has a man’s legs at the front end instead of just a man’s body over a horse’s legs. And two sets of sexual equipment, front and back. Stallion-rigged human and animal. Testicles like cannon balls. The horse’s rump presented at the ready, with the raised tail welded up of sundry tools and the biggest a spade, no doubt to keep the pavement clean when he fired out nuts and bolts. The whole hind quarters elevated like the guns of a battleship ready to fire a salvo. Dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle, as Oscar Wilde said. He could see it from where he sat bleary-eyed outside the little café. He thought of battleships. Guns elevated. Ten fourteen-inch salvoes bombarding the Huns. He had come back from Cologne on the early Lufthansa flight and taken a taxi to the Carrefour de la Croix Rouge. You get up early for that flight and after a heavy dinner with leaden conversation and a restless night and a cabin filled with the sickening stink of men’s perfume he was disconnected. Lightheaded. Queasy. Anything was light after Cologne. Concrete, sex shops and the Maria-Ablass-Platz. Saint Germain was like a glass of champagne sparkling in the morning sunlight. It was a fast fix of heaven. Yes, he admitted, it’s corny. But it’s the way I feel. To live like a God in France, the Germans said, and right they were. Nothing like this on the FrauBertaKruppStrasse, Heinie. Everywhere else is ‘la banlieue de Paris.’ The Carrefour de la Croix Rouge bright with the morning sunlight. The girls from the Académie Julian in the Rue du Dragon sitting outside the little café, laughing and showing their thighs, portfolios full of drawings, but giggling about more important things. They said hello to him. They knew he was waiting for one of them. Her best friend came up and said she’d be out shortly. It is the year of the shortest skirts in a long time. A French girl in a shroud would be sexier than most in a mini, he reflected. It’s the eyes, frank and insolent. A gangly blonde stood at the bar with a pigtail down to her derrière, a bottom barely covered by the little wraparound skirt. She stood first on one leg and then the other with a constant shifting of the buttocks, strapped-in orbs, moving up and down like slow pistons, long lines of thighs and calves, taut sinews and muscles temptingly defined. The shopgirls from the fancy boutiques in the Rue de Grenelle dressed to the nines as walking advertisements for their brand names. A few conceited account executive types and a blue Porsche with all the spoilers, a pimp’s car or an art director’s, and everyone happy and still brown after the rentrée a month or so ago. Paris. Fleshy girls and physical Paris: the unfailing reward. He sat there, watching the cars shooting out of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, horns blasting like bugles sounding the charge, turning to go down the Rue du Four or across to the Rue de Grenelle, and the sun lighting up the wide crossroads. An occasional whiff of fresh morning air stirred the senses and blew away the heady mixture of exhaust fumes and cheap synthetic perfume that the trendy shopgirls affected. It was all very intoxicating. He was happy. He was waiting for Penelope. He made visual notes all the time. He was a poet by instinct and an international marketing consultant, a creative guru, by profession. So they said but he still found it a jokey tag. He looked, and saw what marketing people don’t see. Paris is an open city; a wide sky is painted across the ninteenth-century buildings, mostly six floors high with the zinc roofs. Paris stone, golden, steeped in centuries and luminous, elegant windows, fluted half-columns, delicate black iron balconies, like the lacy underwear of sexy French women, the ‘porte jarretelles’ that symbolize the naughtiness of Paris. An open invitation. Light and airy. Everything is here and you never get used to it. And Penelope. He was impatient to see her. He was always impatient to see her. Yet he could have sat there all morning. He looked at his watch. She came rushing across the Rue de Grenelle in her funny hat with the upturned brim and her metal hawsers jangling on her wrists and her hair in her eyes and he stood up and opened his arms to catch her as she fell out of breath into them. Everyone sitting there laughed. They approved of the great love affair between father and daughter. She was a bubbl
y, laughing girl, freckled with mischievous eyes and a funny tip-tilted nose. Full of life and popular. The only one of the family without serious hangups. He wondered how they had managed to produce someone as happy and unneurotic as Penelope. Half Irish and half French. Maybe the two halves neutralized each other. They sat there and she accused him of flirting with her girl friends. He admitted it. It wasn’t entirely false. “Look,” he said, to change the subject, “I got something for you in Cologne. A Nikon auto-focus. “She shrieked. She kissed him. The other girls came over and sighed with envy. They were taking photography as well as painting. His day was made. The light was back in his life again. She picked up her belongings and followed the others back to the school. She said she would go to the famous store FNAC after to get some film and would be home about three. Then scampered away, all legs and flying hair. He was happy to see she had her mother’s legs, long and shapely, even if she was careless with how much of them she showed. Her dress didn’t cover her; it exposed her. He paid and crossed the ‘carrefour’ to the Rue du Vieux Colombier and the morning sun shone like a searchlight through the towers of Saint Sulpice. It was dazzling. Like driving into full headlights. He walked through the Place and the fountain was sparkling, the water falling like silver foil over the rim between the crouching lions, and the fluted columns of the church soaring elegantly in two layers to the towers on either corner. Apart from the dizzy effect of the sun, he was out of focus from the short night and the early morning flight. He ran up the stairs and the mongrel barked inside the second-floor flat as he fumbled with his keys. The hearty aroma of slow-cooking lunch filled the stairwell. The mad woman on the third floor was shouting into her telephone just inside the door. “Mais dis donc, c’est pas vrai, tu as raison ma chère,” and all the infantile ejaculations that made you wonder if the language of Racine was that rich or vocabularies that small. His phone was ringing as he opened the door. The hairy bitch was jumping all over him. He ignored the phone. Laure was not at home in the upstairs flat. She seldom was these days. They had not lived together for years. He unpacked, showered hot then cold; carefully stowed his Hamburg rig, blazer and grey flannels, striped tie and the rest of the uniform. Into Saint-Germain anonymous style, old jeans and a cord jacket. He fed the dog and put the lead on her and went out. He went through the Place and into the Rue des Canettes and down the Rue du Four to the Boulevard Saint Germain and down to the Palette in the Rue de Seine. Jean-Francois was bustling about. He waved to indicate that the corner table was free so he sat outside having a salad and a Badoit. He became aware of a presence. “That’s not the Cork Examiner you’ve got there, Dermot.” The familiarity irritated him. He turned slowly. He knew it was a London advertising type. “Cronin,” he said, “what are you doing here?”