Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  “Laure, I forbid you!”

  She went on, “When her husband died she was financially embarrassed. He bought the house and let her live there rent free. When he died she sent copies of his letters to you and Pay and said that if you didn’t agree to sell her the house for ten thousand francs she would send the originals to Grandmother.

  “Really, Laure, how dare you!”

  “That would really have put the cat among the pigeons, as Grandmother had always boasted about her ‘best friend,’ Madame Schidlovsky, the famous concert pianist. Little did she know the lady was playing concertos in bed with Grandfather’s piccolo.”

  “There’s no need to be vulgar, Laure.”

  “Well, children, your uncles had little option but to agree to the demand. And your grandmother went to her grave believing in her husband’s rectitude and still boasting of her friendship with the beautiful and talented pianist. Let us not forget the skeletons in the Montriveau closet. True, mon oncle?”

  There was a long silence. He looked at her.

  He murmured, “Let those of you who are without sin cast the first stone.”

  Laure laughed, “Ah, well, a little fornication is less reprehensible than the scurrilous things he wrote about Jews. Tell me, is Cousin Jean still living with his little sailor in Geneva, Uncle?”

  “I think, unless you would prefer to leave, we will discontinue this conversation, Laure.”

  She was merciless. It had taken a long time to reach this state of independence.

  “Then there was Great-Uncle Henri. He had an affair with the friend of his mother. She had his baby. It was adopted by another friend of the family. Everyone happy. Quite a performance. So what’s new? Would you like me to tell you about Uncle Didier? The Milicien. The paedophile. Who abused me when I was a little girl? No? I thought not.”

  There was an embarrassed silence. Finally broken by Uncle René. He struggled gamely to keep his cool.

  “Do you remember this house?”

  “Yes. I spent some interesting days here.”

  “Fortunately, you were too young to understand.”

  “Not altogether, Uncle. Remember, I was here when Grand-Uncle Pierre was shot. And when we took Grandfather to Geneva. I gather they had been on the wrong side.”

  “No. They were for France.”

  “La vieille France. What a joke.”

  “Oh, Laure. Joke, no. Our France.”

  “Not mine.”

  “Is yours better?” her uncle demanded, “drugs, crime, arabs, blacks everywhere. Corruption in every political party. Ministers in jail, power-mad vulgarians in the prefecture of Vaucluse, all the maires on the take. The fabric of society disintegrating. You can’t walk in Avignon these days without getting robbed. Football hooligans in the assembly. Vulgarity everywhere. The oil company Elf set up to provide a spy base and supply money to the politicians. Mitterand, decorated by the Marshal and then a turncoat at the last minute. A Socialist for power. Dumas. Minister of foreign affairs. The most unscrupulous bunch ever. Avignon is the crime centre of France.”

  “Well, Avignon was like that in the days of the popes. A sanctuary for criminals. The law of the land ended outside the walls. What’s different? And I seem to remember that it was a right-wing president who took diamonds from an African dictator. And right-wing scandals about property.”

  “Laure, you should remember something. We had a France that was decadent. The Marshal said, ‘I summon you to an intellectual redressing!’ What else could we do? We had a choice between communism, which very nearly took over here, and capitalism, American capitalism controlled by Jews and pretending to be democracy. Or totalitarianism. That was represented by National Socialism. We hated the Germans, perhaps not so much as the English, again a Jewish-led society of bankers and Freemasons, but not so much as the Americans. We monarchists.”

  “You’re not still playing that intellectual game, surely?”

  “Go on, sneer. We always believed that it was monarchy which gave France its staple base for centuries. The Revolution and Napoleon destroyed our ancient society. What has it achieved? Look at the socialist dictator in the Elysée. All his friends shooting themselves. Let’s drop it. Your views are too superficial. Too biased by your associates.” He changed the subject. “How’s your father? Still chasing butterflies?”

  “He was until he had an accident. I gather he’s laid up.”

  “Haven’t you seen him?”

  “Not for some time. He disapproves of my lifestyle. And I of his views.”

  “Why, Laure? Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you against everything? You must be very unhappy.”

  “No, not any longer. A Jewish psychiatrist saved my sanity and a Jewish art publisher gave me my direction.”

  “What a sad comment.”

  “In any case, I’m not so unhappy as my mother. She spent her life being a slave to my father. Terribly unhappy. No life of her own at all. Fighting her brother in the courts. Dominated by her fascist sister. Misguided, biased, racist.”

  “Well, it’s a good job she didn’t meet your friends. I never got along with my sister but Oriane did her duty. And she had her religion. She was made unhappy by the desertion of your brother. He didn’t remember his duty.”

  “Duty! Patrick’s concept of duty was different from Mother’s. Her duty was to the ideals of her father. A blind duty. All wrong. His was the Free French. The truly free.”

  “That’s your opinion, my niece.”

  “I have a few questions. May I ask them?”

  “What are they about?”

  “The war.”

  “Come into my study. The others will excuse us.”

  As they went through the hall, the telephone rang. He excused himself and took the call. He went white and staggered. He sat down heavily on the chair by the telephone table.

  He said only, “Yes, I understand. Thank you.”

  She went over and touched him. He was very distressed. He shook her off, and marched back into the dining-room. Standing in the doorway, he rapped with his stick on the floor.

  He said, “The gravestone has been broken. The grave desecrated. Our family disturbed. They have painted disgusting things. The gendarmes say they had a call to tell us ‘Happy Anniversary.’ I wish you farewell, Laure.”

  And he turned and went slowly up the stairs, his son Jacques holding his left elbow. His other son, René, came to her side.

  He offered, “I’ll drive you back to Maurepas.”

  She answered, “No. I’ve got someone waiting for me in the village. I’ll walk back there.”

  Wednesday

  15. Armand and Days of Glory

  A newsreel passed in front of Armand’s eyes. FADE IN: Himself as a young man, an Olympic hurdler. CUT TO: Sciences-Po, doing the usual course for a degree in political science. He took a law degree concurrently and later took the ‘agrégation,’ the top examination and the most difficult. He passed out number three. DISSOLVE TO: Him as an inspecteur des Finances, one of the twenty thousand top functionaries who run France and speak only to God or the President, roles which in France the latter often confuses with the former. FAST CUTS: At the Cavalry School at Saumur for his military service; as an officer when the war started; leading his men south on a reciprocal course to the fighting; demobilized in Toulouse in 1940, without hearing a shot fired. Armand, a pacific man, was not against the Armistice. He had little confidence that his sword, carried with style in his right hand and resting on his shoulder, would strike fear into the hearts of Hitler’s Waffen SS.

  He was probably right.

  Dermot said “Had it been me, I would have put the trusty steed into a horse box and towed it behind a Ferrari to Bordeaux, leaving the stricken field to the foe.”

  Armand asked “What’s a Ferrari?”

  He joined the government of Vichy. He had very little choice. As a senior functionary he was at the call of the legitimate government and that was emb
odied in Marshal Pétain, an octogenarian who in the eyes of the French could do no wrong, being given to illicit copulation at the age of eighty-four, convincing proof of virility and fitness for leadership of the French nation in time of stress.

  Armand was sent to Paris to negotiate quotas of labor to be exported (rather forcibly) to Germany. This job, which he fulfilled with apparent diligence, did not meet with universal approval after the war. It had put him in some very bad company indeed.

  A series of visions. Blurred visions. Sunday afternoons in the apartment on the Rue Freycinet in Paris.

  July 1942. The Great Raid of July 16/17 when the Jews were rounded up.

  “President Laval has proposed in the case of deporting Jewish families from the non-occupied zone, to include as well children under sixteen years of age. The question of Jewish children in the occupied zone is of no interest to him.”

  He saw his brother-in-law laughing as he read his father’s—Armand’s father-in-law’s—column in l’Action Française.

  Bousquet, Secrétaire Général for the Police Nationale, sleek, distinguished, full of charm, smiling at Laval’s statement. He remembered the conceit of Leguay, Bousquet’s representative, who arranged the shipments of bodies, pleased to report the productivity and the non-assistance of the Germans.

  Leguay boasting, “15,000 in one day! All our own work! And we gave them French Jews as well as the foreign Jews! And children, even though they didn’t want them! A bonus!”

  Brasillach, the talented writer, dumpy, bookish and disagreeably surprised at the number of yellow stars and the number of Jews he had been living amongst. Proud of his editorial in Je Suis Partout. Passing it around in the de Coucy apartment, drinking, licking his lips at the foie gras.

  Saying, after a trip to Germany “I had a love affair with Germany.”

  Drieu la Rochelle, author and editor, rabid anti-Semite, bedding the wife of Louis Renault.

  Drieu said “I see no alternative to the genius of Hitler.”

  The writers and the artists. All brilliant. The so-called independents. Armand saw them passing through the doors. The thought leaders. The intellectual elite.

  Cardinal Baudrillart

  Montherlant

  Abel Bonnard

  Cocteau

  Daudet

  Léautaud

  Giraudoux

  Braque

  Derain

  Vlaminck

  Maillol

  All pro-German, if not collaborators. And the comfort ladies, the soldiers’ friends:

  Coco Chanel

  Arletty (My heart is French but my ass is international)

  Louise de Villemorin (It’s more chic to be a collaborator!)

  Princess Murat

  Daisy Fellowes and Daughters

  All happy to mingle with the likes of Ernst Jünger, with all the homosexuals in love with Karl-Heinz Bremer at the Deutsche Institut, blond and handsome and inspiring Brasillach to write, ‘You will always arise for us like a young Siegfried conquering evil spells.’

  Children too, for some of the collaborators. Brought in at night and taken to the bedrooms. Girls and boys. Mostly the latter. The sickness. But in a world that was so diseased anything was normal. Even pedophilia. Armand was shocked, embarrassed. Then, again in denial of unpleasant affairs, dismissed it and refused to acknowledge its occurrence.

  Max Farber, downstairs in Paris, just before they took him away. The Vélodrome d’Hiver, grandstands, packed with 15,000 people. Children. Mothers pleading. Max and Karen Farber pushed around. Laughed at. Spat upon. Trains. Filth. Incomprehension.

  Dermot: What were the Germans really like?

  Armand: They were correct.

  Dermot: And efficient.

  Armand: Oh, very efficient.

  Dermot: Keen on the old productivity.

  Armand: You could say that.

  Dermot: Yes. You could. In three months in 1944, 437,000 Jews were gassed to death in Auschwitz.

  Armand: Ce n’est pas vrai!

  Dermot: Yes, indeed. Great organizers. Of course, they had some help. 30,000 French Milice. 100,000 French in German uniforms by 1943.

  Armand: Mais non!

  Dermot: ‘Fraid so, mon vieux. How many did you deport?

  Armand: I suppose about 200,000. A lot were volunteers.

  Dermot: Volunteers for the camps?

  Armand: No, the labor for German industry.

  Dermot: Some communists too.

  Armand: Oh, yes. Marchais, head of the Party, volunteered twice for the Messerschmitt factory.

  Dermot: No wonder the ME109 fighter wasn’t up to the Spitfire.

  Armand: Listen, Dermot. If I hadn’t argued every day with my German counterpart, they’d have taken twice as many French people to Germany.

  Dermot: I believe you. Begod, they should have given you a medal. I mean, Pétain decorated Mitterrand.

  Armand: Me too!

  Dermot: Attaboy, mon beau-père!

  Armand married a saint. A woman of unrelenting religiosity and unbending principles. Full of Christian charity, within the limits of the family code on race. Oriane de Montriveau of La Fontanelle near Montdidier-les-Murs in the Vaucluse of Provence.

  Her father, Hubert de Montriveau, député and maire of Montdidier, political correspondent of l’Action Française, the extreme right-wing, Catholic, anti-Semitic, monarchist paper of Charles Maurras. Partner of Armand’s father in the Lille mine and sundry other activities. A natural match.

  Oriane. And her sister, Bernadette, a Catholic fundamentalist and watchdog of the family morals, a racist who lived with them during the war.

  But La Fontanelle is the South Pole to Colonfay, the North Pole. The 45th parallel, halfway between the true North Pole and the equator, passes through Valence, not far to the north of Montdidier-les-Murs. There has always been a sort of tug-of-war between Colonfay and the de Coucys and La Fontanelle and the Montriveau.

  Oriane, dominated by her sister, never really lost her family ties. In the fullness of time three children were born. In 1940 Laure was shipped down to La Fontanelle for safekeeping. With terrible consequences.

  16. Mouse back to Erin

  Me back to Ireland. My house now. Dermot’s house before. A millstone round my neck but I can’t bear to part with it. Near Piltown, County Kilkenny. Grove House used to be ‘the Dower House’ of Bessborough House, that great Palladian pile. The Dower House was Dermot’s birthplace and childhood home. For him it was not the House of Mirth. His prison, he calls it.

  Not like that for me. Coming every summer from England, all school uniforms and hockey sticks and rules and regulations and little goody-two-shoes girls, Ireland was a place of fun and freedom. The skies were always bluer and the grass greener and every day there were new antics of the locals to laugh about. It was, as Uncle Mike put it, ‘worth a guinea a minute.’ I was always ‘one of the boys.’ Three up on a bucking donkey, chasing the pony around the field. Swimming in the river and exploring each other’s nether regions in the small cabin of the cutter. Weekly expedition to Tramore in the old Fiat. Salmon leaping, the woods and the beeches sighing. The old steam threshing machine, straw in the hair and the dust in the eyes and the billycan of tea with the soda bread and the apple tart with the juice running out of the top. Pitchforks and honest sweat.

  Dermot, an outsider. A silent dreamer. Always off by himself, refusing to join the other children at play. Being older, I was a sort of gang leader. I understood him. He was alienated from the rest.

  I liked Uncle Mike, but Dermot disagreed with his father.

  ‘The Boss,’ as we called him, was an old soldier, what he called ‘an Irish loyalist.’ Ridiculous loyalty. Clinging to the wreckage. Pretty silly way of being agin the government in Ireland in the Thirties. A disciplinarian, Victorian, trying to force Dermot into a pattern for which he was unsuited. Trying, with the best intentions, to mold him into a different adult to himself. Laughing at Dermot’s republican instincts, angry at his be
liefs. Making him an outcast amongst his fellows. The road to hell is paved with the good intentions of Irish fathers.

  There were various outbuildings at the Dower House. A boat-house, where the rowing boats and a small gaff cutter were kept, before being taken down to the jetty near the bridge on the River Suir in the spring. The signal for fun and games.

  One game too many for Dermot.

  He was always in a state of conflict with his father but fishing the old man out of the river was traumatic.

  I was there that day. He became a changed boy. Angry. Older than his years and full of hate for the murderers. He was determined never to live in Ireland again. He made the one visit and that was that. But what he learned that day from Paddy Kennington added a handicap that he found impossible to shake off.

  When I think of all the things that went into the making of Dermot versus the things that went into Laure, I wonder they could even talk to each other at all. There she was at her Horace or learning Greek, when she was his age, and there he was a physical Irish lad.

  Ready about! How well I remember the old gaff cutter. There we came, sailing up the river, the flood tide giving the boat a lift of three knots and the breeze off the Comeraghs helping with a broad reach. A last short tack, from the Waterford side to the Kilkenny side of the wide River Suir. Dermot, eleven, at the tiller; his father, Uncle Mike, handling the sheets and pumping the bilge and handing the sails. ‘Let’s tame the flogging canvas, boy!’ Lifting up the centerboard, running up into the reeds just below Fiddown Bridge. Dropping the gaff, lowering the burgee, the Royal Cork, red with a gold harp and 1720, sitting in the cockpit, Mike having a shot of brandy, already three sheets to the wind; Dermot and me with lemonade, both of us bored with the whole business. Dermot muttering a salty aside. ‘She’s making too much water. There’s rot in the garboards.’ ‘My son, all good vessels have a bit of rot in them.’ The pentagram that encompassed his childhood. The Valley, the River, the Boat, the Bridge, and in the distance, Slievenamon, the faeries’ mountain, heaving up there like a hog’s back on an empty plain. Our bucolic gopher hole, Dermot called it. Smell of mud and vague putrescence. Now, the Angelus bell. Then, a faint faint whistle in the distance, silence but for the water rushing by, then a long, lingering whistle, echoing off the hills, and the train, the Rosslare Express, thundering through the station at Fiddown. The inevitable comment: ‘She’s on time tonight.’ Dermot looking at me and saying, ‘Not again! Who cares?’ Waiting for Seamus MacMahon, the bridge keeper, to come and help haul the yacht into the reeds past the high-water limit. Then the pony and trap up to Grove House. Up the Long Drive, evening clouds billowing, beeches sighing, smell of lilac, gravel crunching under the wheels. Another time. I remember our fumbling education. Dermot and me in the boat. ‘It’s dark in here.’ ‘Did anyone see us?’ ‘No. Close the hatch.’ ‘Get up on the bunk.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I heard Father talking about showing a woman the golden rivet. Here, hold it.’ ‘You’re bad. It’s big.’ ‘Open your legs a little.’ ‘You musn’t.’ ‘No, just the finger.’ ‘Oh, careful! Do you want me to pull your thing?’ ‘Oh, yes. Squeeze as you pull it. Like this. Milking a cow.’ Guiding her hand. ‘Doesn’t it hurt now? ‘No.’ ‘Oh, Jaysus! It’s all over me. I’m all sticky.’ Pooh. Boys. No wonder I came to like girls better. And Aunt Mary that time she told Uncle Mike about finding his private diary. His first scribbles, highly unorthodox and already agin the government. ‘Your son has a literary bent. “Naturally. It’s in the genes. Isn’t his father a poet?’ ‘It manifests itself in a strange way. Irreligious. Listen. In his diary. His prayer. ‘Our Fin Varra who art in Tir-na-n’Og, hallowed be thy name.’ What’s all that about?’ ‘Fin Varra is supposed to be the King of the Faeries. Tir-na-n’Og, the land of the ever young. Under the water, where some of the fairies live. “‘And instead of the Holy Trinity what do you think he’s written in?’ ‘Go on.’ ‘The Fin Varra, the Leprachaun and the Banshee.’ ‘I like the Banshee for the Holy Ghost.’ ‘He talks about the Cluricauns.’ ‘Munster sprites.’ ‘The four evangalists. Cob, Paralda, Djin and Hicks. Nothing so traditional as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ‘Begod, he has a powerful imagination. Earth, air, fire and water spirits. Wait till he gets to the Virgin Mary.’ ‘He has. She’s The Queen of the Faeries. ‘Let us profoundly hope Father Aloysius doesn’t hear that one. There’s a certain ambiguity about it, and he teaches in an English public school where there may well be another queen of the fairies.’ ‘Is that Jesuit coming again?’ ‘Next week, God help us.’ ‘Jaysus. You’re sure?’ ‘Sure as God made little apples in the Golden Vale.’ Crottin de Cheval. 1937. Boxing Day. Me on my holidays for Christmas. The Meet. Hunters snorting at the Main Gates of Bessborough. Near the fallen tree where Seamus Malone got his back broken. They shouted contradictory instructions and he ran the wrong way. Pat looks at it, the murderous trunk. Seamus used to come to Grove House to play bridge every Wednesday and he’d always slip Dermot and me a half-a-crown as he left. He would hoist us up on the rick when they were threshing. The old stream engine driving the threshing machine through the figure-of-eight long belt. Straw, dust, tea that tasted ten times better out of a billycan sitting with the men. Seamus, who took Dermot out shooting woodcock and let him fire once. We look at Lady MacConnell sitting there sidesaddle in her black riding habit and top hat and a glass in her hand and her laughter louder than the baying of the hounds. The two of us on on our ponies, hands frozen, the road rutted and the tracks covered in thin ice. The beeches moaning in sympathy. Unenthusiastic. If it’s true that the Irish love a lord they worship a lady. Especially if she has a good seat on a horse and can hold her whiskey. She was something, that one. Dermot watches her, fascinated, before she mounts. He doesn’t understand why his father avoids her and she studiously ignores him. He thinks they must hate each other. She sits there with her shooting stick disappearing up her backside, near the back end of the Rolls with the trunk open and a bar in it. And the big chesnut backs round and lifts his tail with its little red ribbon and snorts disdainfully and gives her a baleful look as the message drops out. Plop, plop, plop. Three, then one for the pot. Plop! It splatters her shining boots and her immaculate habit and leaves a steaming pile in front of the local dignitaries. So they give her a leg up and hand her up the glass and she laughs as she knocks it back. ‘Crottin de Cheval.’ Horseshit. The national perfume of Ireland. They should bottle it. Dermot falls behind and walks the pony to the Harrington farmhouse at The Paddock. I trot home.