She said, “I must go. Come to breakfast at nine. Bring shrimps.”
“Is that all?”
“No. I’m hungry.”
“I love you.”
“Yes. You love my cunt. But that’s all right.”
“No, it’s more. I can’t leave you alone. I want to make love to you all the time from now on.”
“I fuck. I don’t make love.”
“Don’t you?”
“You know I do. Oh, why do you come back? I can’t stand it when you leave.”
“I’m staying.”
“I’ll bet.”
Dermot McManus and Nana ‘Troll’ Alsen, as she then was. Running away from reality, people said. It’s obscene, they said. (Little did they know.) Still playing games. But not playing with a full deck. The wild card was missing.
The French Legacy. Soon be time to put it on the table.
He went about cleaning up the cabin. His cathedral. All Honduras mahogany and teak. Fitted together like a Stradivarius by Oscar Schelin at Kungsor, Sweden. Tree wood and no plastic.
The boat is the other thing that possesses him. His escape vehicle. Designed for him; built for him; created to make him in one place at least, ‘sole Master under God,’ as the Lloyd’s policy says.
He found her gold chain necklace under the gimballed table. Heavy enough to use as the cable for the light Danforth anchor. He hung it on the bulkhead next to the instruments.
He thought, ‘She’s left it in some funny places. Lost and found in four-poster beds in 14th-century fortress hotels in Portugal. In the Carlyle in New York and the Dolder Grand in Zurich and Blake’s in London and the Lungarno in Florence and The Copper & Lumber Store in Antigua and the Auberge Provençale in Eygalières and and and.… In boats, aeroplanes, cars. Scandalous behavior under the eyes of truck drivers on the autostrada through the Appenines. Country roads in Tuscany. Beech woods in Denmark. Courtyards in ruins in the Lubéron. Beaches in Greece. At Terme di Saturnia, the sulphur springs, waking to the smell of brimstone and saying if this is hell, God, you made the right decision. Saturnalia.
No limits. Every which way. Always new and different. Acrobats. Giving the intellects a rest; snatching victory from the enemy, convention. Infantile. Unserious. Silly games. Talk about hearing the chimes at midnight. But no lawnmowers, golf handicaps, art lectures, home-made marmalade, sociology.
People said, “They’re children. Unstable, immature. He’s in love with her beard. She’s flaky. Ping-pong brain. Will she ever grow up?”
He thought, ‘That’s us. Isn’t it nice we don’t have to grow up just yet?’
How did it start? He was on the top of the Eggli, the mountain at Gstaad. Snow and skiiers. Sitting at the outside restaurant, stealing a weekend after a Friday meeting in Geneva. ‘Share of mind’ and ‘market penetration.’ ‘Perceptual segmentation,’ for Christ’s sake. The meaningless buzzwords of the professional liars. A prelude to another marital confrontation in Paris. He sat at the end of a long table with his back to the wall, doodling lazy headings in a notebook.
Trying to figure out how to handle the domestic situation. Not wanting to go back to the fray. Thinking aggravation is no substitute for copulation. From time to time he tried reading Rilke but it was impossible to concentrate. He couldn’t get past the first lines of the first Duino Elegy. ‘Who, if I shouted, among the hierarchy of angels would hear me?’
Too right. Who indeed? Literature clashed with the surrounding frivolity. He abandoned himself to the visual stimuli. He painted with his eyes and rearranged the idealized components. The jagged mountain peaks became a sales graph. He thought about market penetration. But the altitude or the ozone or whatever switched on his flippant mood.
Penetration is a sacrament. How many bottom lines have you penetrated this month? This being the second Sunday after Penetration, say three Our Fathers and six Hail Marys. For six days shalt thou labour and the seventh penetrate.
It was only fifteen hundred meters high but the air made him light-headed. Sensuality pervaded the location. Licentiousness was never far away in a ski resort. His crotch was tight and for no apparent reason he felt a tumescence. How extraordinarly deprived I am, he thought. How deplorably physical. It had all gone on too bloody long. Intellectual wrangling; intercultural competition. Too cerebral. Too bloody polite; too civilized. But an underlying resentment. A never-ending state of conflict. Sensual starvation. No action. That day he would have jumped off the mountain without skis or a hang-glider for a fast fix of danger.
Good looking people in vivid ski-suits were all around. A teenage waitress all in black with clinging tights molding her little derrière under a short smock moved like a medieval pageboy in her cowboy boots. He drew her as she moved amongst the tables and reclining chairs. Two Danish dairymaids and their excited husbands kept up a commentary on what they would later boast about back in Viborg and Randers. Occasionally, a burst of Swiss-German like a saw cutting rusty metal rent the air. A few refugees from Baghdad and Kuwait and the Greek shipowners huddled together under their mink tents and jangled their jewelery. The serious skiiers were all at Courchevel and the heavy thinkers in Château d’Oex. The money and the movie stars and the confidence tricksters were in Gstaad and intellectual baggage was checked in at the railway station above Lac Léman in Montreux.
The restaurant was filling up for lunch and Giles Pollock, an account executive who gave style to the advertising agency in Berkeley Square, sat down at his table. He was not alone. He had a new girl with him.
“This is Nana the Troll,” Pollock said. “The Swedish troll. She’s here with Rupert. Lives in London. Talk to her while I look for Caroline.”
Dermot McManus went into shock.
Their eyes met and the world around disappeared. They looked. She blushed. They trembled. Surprise, wonder, certainty.
He whispered, “I shouted, and you among the hierarchy of angels heard me.”
She laughed. And her eyes said, “Yes!”
Life had been a rehearsal for this.
He thought, I wanted danger. Here it was, in spades.
“Let’s go to Greece,” he said.
The first words he uttered to her. Why Greece? He didn’t know. Gods, islands, isolation, naked bodies, get her away from the rest. Time to consolidate.
“I can’t,” she said, as if it was the most natural question in the world. “I can’t just go away and leave Rupert.”
That was the last time she said no to anything he suggested.
She said, “I can meet you in London next week. Giles has my number.”
“Next week will never come.”
The Pollocks came back with Rupert Higham. He knew him slightly and grew a sudden dislike of him. He was one of those strutting hussar types, podgy and full of his own unimportance. The Pollocks were animated, studying the menu. Higham sat tight-lipped and embarrassed and you could sense his frustration. He knew something had happened. It was not right. He was, after all, a managing director. He hadn’t been getting anywhere with her and he had been so diplomatic and considerate. So generous.
Dermot watched them leave. She had the lines of a racing yacht of yesterday. Did Hemingway say that once? No matter. Spare and narrow-beam and with a fine entry. Racy, a Dragon or a Twelve built for speed. Balanced overhangs and small buttocks, the lines drawn on the body plan gave you a promise of buoyancy and lateral stability when heeled.
The metaphor pleased him.
He wanted to knife through the waves with her; to surf down the untameable seas. He wanted her gunnels under water and to hear the shriek of her rigging. To sink into the foam. To fuck up a storm. Lightly built though she was you could drive her hard and she would revel in it. A stayer. She was a vessel for fucking off the wind or in a calm and she would take you where you had never been before, to the secret places which as Melville said are not shown on any chart. She turned to smile ‘a bientôt.’
He followed her slender figure until it was lost in the crowd
s and they turned the corner towards the tele-cabins. Giles came back with his wife, Caroline.
He said “Hello. What’s this?”
He picked up a scarf from the seat where Troll had been sitting. She had left it for him. It couldn’t have been accidental.
Dermot said, “I’ll take it.”
Caroline said, “Ho, ho.”
He still had the scarf. It was almost time to get rid of it. Perhaps he would tie it around his neck the way the Kamikaze pilots used to before going to join their ancestors. It offered the same sort of end. And it delivered.
The phone call out of the blue, after their first meeting in London.
“I’ve decided I want to be your mistress.”
And the excitement of it. The wild, acrobatic, unrestricted danger of it. The God-given antidote; the edge of chaos; the awakening. And, inevitably, the beginnings of apprehension. Her two children. Both wards of court. Her need to be seen by the judge to be ‘respectable.’
Then, within a year, the unwanted phone call.
“I’ve decided I want to get married.”
And his cowardly response. “I hope you have someone in mind”
Fury. Within a month, she was married to Alsen. And he was married to Laure. The accidental meeting after Penelope’s death and Laure’s affair and years of sexual deprivation. A quiet dinner in Lausanne. His polite peck on her cheek as he left her. The phone call as he was lying there at midnight, wanting her.
“I’ll come away with you if you like.”
The addiction. No remission for bad behavior. The pendulum always swinging from mind to penis, from intellectual Laure to wanton Nana. The empty mind hungering for intelligent conversation when he was with Nana and the tumescent prick fantasizing about Nana when he was with ungiving Laure.
I paint with my prick, said Renoir.
You must write with an erection, said Flaubert.
It’s the only part of me that works, said Dermot.
14. Laure in the Lion’s Den
Laure walked up the hill from the cemetery. She was desperate to see André. The liberator. The exorcist. The sensual drug that banished thoughts and memories. She was practically jogging. She was tense with the love for him. He was there, in the Place, sitting by the fountain. They barely had time to kiss before Monsieur Grégoire came by. He stopped. He looked at her.
He said, “You’re Laure?”
She answered, “Yes, Monsieur Grégoire.”
She introduced André. The old man was well over eighty. She thought he must now be the Elder of the Village. Had been maire a number of times. He remembered her and the incident in the wood. He sat down heavily.
He said, “Your aunt was a fine lady. The best of the bunch.”
“You didn’t much care for the rest?”
“No, I didn’t. But it’s all in the past. We were on different sides. They don’t seem to learn. You know my brother was executed. He was a member of the communist cell in Pernes. Someone betrayed him. We’ve always had our suspicions. But it’s all a long time ago now.”
He looked long and hard at André.
He said, “A lot of us paid for Monsieur de Montriveau’s writing. N’est -ce pas, monsieur?”
André hesitated and said, “Yes. I suppose so.”
They exchanged some banalities and he got up and painfully worked his way down the main street. Monsieur Grégoire had been a farmer and a communist.
He had told her his granddaughter, Christiane, went to l’ENA. She now works in the Senate. The Palais du Luxembourg was just up the road from where Laure lived when she was in Paris. She reminded herself to look her up when she went back there. They could have lunch at the bar on the Rue de Tournon. The Café de Tournon, hard by the Palace. Appropriately enough, it was where Joseph Roth used to drink and write. He lived above it. Another Jew who fled fascism but never forgot his Austro-Hungarian homeland. He died in penury, in deprivation of his proper roots, an alcoholic genius. Christiane Grégoire could fill in some gaps.
Laure said, “I have to go to the house. Will you wait for me? You can go to Pernes for lunch. Drive me to the cemetery. It’s on the way.”
In the car, irresistible impulse. Touching. Pulled away from him as they reached the gates.
The family had gone. There was no sign of life except for an abandoned bulldozer by the side of the road. She pushed André down onto the iron seat outside the gate. She walked away just up the road a bit. To try to muster a modicum of holiness and respect. At the corner she climbed the bank and looked at the landscape. Still a windless day, pale sun, weak, lifeless. Uncertain. Held in suspension, like her memories. It’s a stunted valley, a sort of afterthought scooped out between Mont Ventoux and the Plateau de Vaucluse. Vaucluse, meaning ‘the closed valley.’
Oh, certainly, closed. Minds slammed shut. The world locked out. The cemetery of Montdidier-les-Murs. A kilometer to the house, La Fontanelle; five to Pernes-les-Fontaines. Not much further to Sorgues, from where the last cattle-wagons of Jews were taken away to the camps. The village high above, white houses staggered against the cliffs. A typical Provençal hill village. And an empty, dead valley. The valley of the dead.
Her father’s dead are in the north. In Colonfay. And one in Paris. Penelope.
The hope of the world. The faithful Penelope. Always waiting for Dermot. The glue of the marriage.
She thought, ‘When my turn comes I’ll be burned and my ashes scattered, partly, from the Pont des Arts. When no one’s looking. The rest near Urbino, in sight of the Palazzo Ducale. Where I have been happy. Where no memories of war intrude. She thought of the untold thousands sent to the camps with the approval of her beloved grandfather. André’s family? She walked slowly back.
André asked, “Can I see the grave of your ancestors?”
“My maternal ancestors.”
She lifted the latch and led him into the cemetery. Even in the small churchyard, the family lay proud. Two large plots, tucked away in a corner under the shade of the platane, facing up to the village. The white village backed by the cliffs, the simple houses stacked below the crest. Our village, they still thought, repopulated by their grandfather with grateful Banat-ais, refugees from Transylvania when the place was dying after the war. Well, grateful for a limited time. She pointed out the family grave.
He asked, in a funny voice, “Montriveau. Is that the name of your family?”
She said, “Yes. Have you heard of them?”
“It strikes a chord. Rings a bell somewhere. Like a funeral knell.”
She said, “I never see any of the family. Only my brother, Patrick. I suppose I share their cultural conceit. There must be something in this genetic business.”
He said, “I hope that’s all you inherited.”
She said, “Yes. I’m opposed to everything they stand for.”
He said, “Good.”
She was remembering the escape from them. Going to Greece. Sleeping out to see the sun come up at Delphi. Of course, that was before droves of tourists went there. Crete too, and then staying in the Villa Medici in Rome.
Alone. Always alone. While the others were going to Hydra or St. Tropez. With boys. Having affairs. Fun. The gnawing ache of apartness. Until Dermot.
PAX. She walked on the grave and traced the word with her finger. She pointed to the names, one after the other. She explained the members of the family who are buried there. She told him that later they will add her aunt’s name to the gravestone, probably tomorrow. Marie Falconnet.
There’s space for her in the grave. Below that of her husband, Jean. All they buried of him was his missal. His friend brought it back from Germany after the war, bloodstained, as the script demanded. He was demolished by a bomb in the prisoner of war camp just before the war ended. An RAF bomb. It would have to be, to suit the preconceptions of this company. The litany. Agincourt, Fashoda, Mers el Kebir, Jean Falconnet.
Pax indeed, but not for the English. Not this week. She told him she felt no emotion. No
sadness, no solemnity. How she remembered her mother saying the only Englishman she admired was Macmillan because he had style. As he lay wounded in no-man’s-land in the Great War, he read his Horace. Whenever a bullet is deflected, it is deflected miraculously by a bible or a holy medal. Or a Latin poet. Uncle Jean’s missal was not good enough to deflect a British thousand-pound bomb.
She told André the last time she had been in this cemetery was when they buried Great-Uncle Pierre. Her grandfather had been smuggled out to Geneva and Pierre was left in La Fontanelle. He was safe. Another professor, at Aix, all he was guilty of was writing a book to prove Dreyfus was guilty.
André said “Well, well. Another liberal type.”
She said “He wasn’t the worst. He had a certain highhandedness with the tenants. One in particular had it in for him. He had dared to suggest that both farms should be sold to the tenants for a nominal sum. Pay had told him to leave. They were good to their tenants but they didn’t realise how much times had changed. The communists had appropriated la Résistance for themselves, and all the Montriveau and their ilk were tarred with the same brush.”
His name was just above that of her grandfather on the tombstone. She told him the story of the execution.
“What about your father’s family?” he asked.
“You really want to know?”
So she told him a bit.
“I’m Laure de Coucy. De Coucy, it’s a good northern name. Old name. Money from mills, mines, railways, local banking. Equally reactionary but not quite so distinguished intellectually. You want a memory of what happened during the war?
One time we were at Monbonnot, near Grenoble. For once I was with my mother and brother. My father stayed in Paris with occasional visits to the farm and the woods at Colonfay. He had permission to use his wing of the house and even was invited to dine with the German general and senior officers. But now, at the end of the war, everything was chaotic. We had been sent away to Grenoble. I didn’t realize the significance of it at the time. Grenoble. That was the worst stage. Until the next worst. La Fontanelle. Then Colonfay. My father had arranged for us to go to Grenoble and stay with my uncle, my mother’s other brother, when it looked as though Paris might become too dangerous. Because of his job, which they didn’t talk about very often, he could get laissez-passers to visit us. They’re always on about childhood trauma these days. But I’ll never forget the anxiety the day he didn’t arrive from Paris. The German patrols everywhere. Just south in the mountains of le Vercors thousands of Maquisards being prepared for the slaughter by the Germans. The most dangerous place in France at that time. The shortage of food. The illness of my grandfather. How Aunt Marie smuggled him out of the house in Vaucluse, hidden under a load of tomatoes, after the avengers had come to get him three times and three times had accepted my aunt’s assurance that he wasn’t there. How she had brought him to Geneva, still hidden under the tomatoes as they crossed the border, and then back to Grenoble when they thought it safe. Grenoble. We were waiting for my father to come. He was bringing us some food that he said he had saved. Although we were protected by the fact that we were living with a well-regarded local surgeon, a friend of my uncle, who gave us a small house on his land, there was a desperate shortage of food. I wanted to see Papa. I remember how my missing father had knocked on the door in Grenoble in the middle of the night. How he told the story. The execution on the station of Saint-André le Gaz. How his only recollection of it was the catching of his first butterflies of a certain type. No remorse over the two victims. How Dermot had reminded him of the fact that he was wise to have chosen a gentile father and to have escaped by the skin of his penis.
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