Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  He said, “Well, I suppose you have to make your profit. Business is business.”

  Not recognizing the fact that Marcel wasn’t interested in buying or selling the picture for him. Then he had deliberately insulted Marcel by asking how they had made out during the war.

  Marcel replied, “I spent it hidden in an armoire in Périgord. There were some decent French even in those days. Not in these parts, from what I hear.”

  It was not a success. Laure was furious. Ashamed. Never again. She tried to make love to him that night at the Auberge Provençale in Eygalières. It was a disaster. Dry and sore and closed up tight. She couldn’t be touched in her secret place. Marcel wept.

  It was the first time she had been mentally unfaithful to Dermot.

  22. Dermot, Up the Creek, Dries Out

  Memories, indelible memories. Betrayal.

  Valdemarsvik, a small port up a fjord in Sweden. Remote, unknown. The end of the world. The end of the season. A Saturday afternoon. The town deserted.

  The crew already left in a hire car to Norrkoping. Dermot alone in his yawl, waiting for the yard to open on Monday. To unship the masts and slip the boat. Haul her up into the shed for the winter.

  The long Swedish winter. Already signs. Trees shedding leaves. Ducks on the vik looking cold. ‘Vik’ a fjord of the Vikings. The dying year. The islands deserted. Cabins closed. The skerries, the world’s last unspoilt playground. ‘Walking in the garden,’ the Swedes called sailing among the rocks. Soon to be locked in ice. Cold, dark, friendless. Only the cries of the birds ’til the ice broke up in April, or often May. Lonely. Cries and whispers. The sadness of a Bergman film.

  There’s no place as lonely as an empty vessel. No more desolate feeling than to be alone in a cabin up a forgotten fjord, alone in a boat that cries out for—for what?

  For Laure.

  Who hated Scandinavia because it wasn’t Latin.

  Impoverished. Empty blondes. Frigidity. No art, no literature, no culture. Strindberg? Ugh. Ibsen? Ugh. No feeling for yachts, no interest in vessels. Immune to the beauty, the elegance, the craftsmanship, the protectiveness of his ship. The warm cabin, all oiled teak and golden mahogany and hand-woven fabrics from Gotland.

  He needed Laure.

  Up the road to the small hotel and made a call. She would be there on Saturday, listening to Beethoven, reading Stendhal. Sitting in a Louis Quinze fauteuil, the carved legs full of worm holes and half destroyed by the cats.

  No reply. Maybe she was at the cinema. He had coffee. Tried again. And again. Suddenly knew. Emptiness. Desperation. An urgent need to be back in Paris. Left a note for the yard, got a taxi to Norrkoping. Called from the airport. No reply. A flight to Copenhagen and stayed at the SAS hotel until the first flight in the morning. Called all night. Every half-hour, sick with apprehension. Fear. Back to Paris, the taxi slow to the Rue Madame. Upstairs, heart beating wildly. Apartment empty. Bed made. Cats screaming for food. All night alone, dying.

  Then the arrival on Monday morning. The anger, the resentment at his questions, the careless, unapologetic manner.

  “Yes, I spent the weekend with Marcel. Yes, I have every right. It’s none of your business.”

  How near he came to falling off the wagon. Then remembered. 1957. A rough pheasant shoot in Hampshire. Him shaking. Carried the shotgun broken all morning. Settled his nerves with a few fast brandies at lunchtime. Shot the only cock pheasant in the afternoon. A good shot. But he couldn’t pick it up. Nearly blew his foot off giving it the other barrel on the ground. Nerves shot too. Nearly drove them off the road going back to London. Stopped the car. He said to Mouse, “I want to go somewhere and die.” Through a reformed drunk she got the name of Lincoln Williams and talked him into accepting Dermot without a prior interview. They went straight out to the Hall at Harrow Weald. He had absolutely no confidence in ever kicking the booze. Committed himself just to have a place to crawl into and die. Lincoln Williams got through to him. Because he was simple and human. No bullshit like the other shrinks. After all, Dermot had read all about Freud and psychology for his job of understanding perceptions and motives. Lincoln Williams told him a few dirty jokes. Let him see that he was worthwhile. Believed in building up his self-esteeem rather than reducing him to the clochard level. Luxury. Chef, valet, civilized surroundings. Other patients of intelligence, importance. Sex. The doctor sent in various people to talk to him and make him feel at home amongst the inmates. One redhead from Munich proved most welcoming. Lincoln Williams came in unexpectedly and found her administering to him. With her voracious mouth. The doctor said, “Always looking for something to put in the mouth, Alexandra. Oral gratification, my dear. Carry on!” Mouse went to see him in the Hall after he had been through the mill. He said, “Mouse, nothing the Japs did was half as bad as this. They come in at the break of dawn. They give you a jab of something to make you sick. Then they force you to drink quarts of a warm saline solution. They wheel you into a dark room. They bring up a trolley laden with every type of alcohol you can imagine. They also wheel in an oxygen cylinder in case you peg out. They make you sniff the various glasses of booze. By this time you’re starting to vomit. They then make you sip one of each of the different drinks. You are now puking your guts up. They make you drink full glasses of gin, whisky, brandy and a variety of other drinks. You are now really sick, everywhere. They don’t stop. They go on forcing it down your gullet. This goes on for what seems hours. You don’t care whether you live or die. The booze tastes awful. Must be just like the way the Japs used to pour water down the prisoners’ throats as a form of torture. Just when you think it’s at an end they bring in glasses of warm beer. Ugh! The memory of it is too much.”

  This was an aversion treatment?

  “No, nothing that simple. All the time the doctor is talking to you, implanting positive messages in your jelly-like brain. What it is is a breaking down of your personality so that he can commence building it up again from scratch. It seemed to have worked.”

  23. Laure Exposes Herself

  She walked back to the house. Into the courtyard. The black cat was looking up at the pigeons’ nest. Another killer. She hadn’t realized when she was a child that she would grow up to find the family’s behavior sickening. That the day would come when she couldn’t stomach them. Vichyistes. Anti-Semites. They stamped her with their name. It was like the number tattooed in a camp. But this one was the stamp of the murderer. Her grandfathers, especially her maternal grandfather, and her father. Criminals, all. She found out about them at the lectures on recent history when the names Montriveau and de Coucy came up in books on fascism, on Dreyfus, on l’Action Française before and during the war.

  It destroyed the past. It was a betrayal of her childhood. It demolished her family base. By this time Marcel was well on his way to eminence in the world of art. His scholarship was recognized. He was an intermediary in the acquisition of old masters by all the museums of the world. She owed him a lot, not least the ownership of a small collection of old master drawings that he had steered her towards at various times.

  She was lying on a chaise lounge by the pool. André was sitting in the lotus position at her feet. They were both nude. Unselfconscious. He was drawing. Her mons was enormous in the drawings, her head in the distance small. It suddenly occurred to her that his drawing was making a point.

  She said, “You are moving the point of interest to the lower extremities.”

  André said, “Yes. The head doesn’t work.”

  “Oh, I think it does. And the heart. I want a spiritual relationship with you.”

  He avoided the invitation.

  He asked, “Tell me more about your father.”

  She said, “My father’s family come from the north. They owned a mine and enough of the Chemins de Fer du Nord to have a station put on their land, and a fair slice of the Chemins de Fer de l’Est. The family house is at Colonfay in the Aisne. Northeners are different to southerners.

  “De Gaulle had no
time for the people from the Midi. He divided France into the coffee drinkers versus the wine drinkers. The serious versus the frivolous. A bit arbitrary but he was not a man who cared much for details. This family hated him. I liked him. When I worked in Chevalier’s cabinet he invited me to a ball at Versailles.

  “So I’m north and south. Two poles. Split in two. We had our eccentrics in my father’s family too. Le Vieux. My great-grandfather. An exception to all the rules. He graduated first at the Polytechnique, with Joffre second. At seventeen. That’s bright. Unusually bright academically for that industrial family.”

  “I only did it to please my mother,” he said.

  “There’s a photograph of him looking like a real tramp. Big beard, Cézanne peasant’s hat, clay pipe. He was surounded by cats. Bribed my father and my uncle to insult members of the Montriveau family when they hove in sight. Rewarded them with money. In between the Aisne and the Vaucluse is Paris. My Paris. I don’t feel happy when I’m away from it for too long. Neither, despite his little adventures, does Dermot. I have no intention of ever seeing the house at Colonfay again. The memory bank is overloaded for me.”

  It was when they went back to Paris in 1945. Back to the building on the Rue Freycinet. Her Uncle Didier’s friend, Claude, friend of Brasillach, Drieu. Another poet. Catholic, monarchist, anti-Bolshevik. He never went out. He played with her, read to her, Rimbaud, Valéry. No Baudelaire. She was told never to mention his presence in the house. One day they came to get him. Her mother was distressed. There was a row between her mother and father, coolness thereafter. Later she found Claude was executed with Brasillach, tried and shot. He left a long poem for her, written in the prison. Calvary Two.

  Later still they went back to the château at Colonfay, the country home. Her mother stayed in Paris. Her embittered Aunt Bernadette went back to La Fontanelle. Her brother hadn’t come back from wherever he was. They said he was in America.

  She wondered. Although they never talked about him she knew that Patrick, her much older brother, had been with de Gaulle in England.

  The house was a mess. It had been used as a German headquarters, fires built everywhere, railway tracks across the attic; it was an observation post up there. Windows broken, panelling stripped off, shutters rotten, slates off the long roof, the park a jungle. Thirty rooms and only five habitable. They had not invaded the family wing, the part they had agreed to leave alone. It was locked up. No heat. But the war over.

  She ran down into the park. Through the high grass. The terrier leading. The trees were still standing, the variety of exotic trees planted by successive generations, dominated by the tall cedar of Lebanon. There was a beaten track to it. She wondered why as she skipped along. She found out why. The dog was barking, jumping excitedly. Sniffing. The body was lying there, hands tied behind his back. A sodden bundle. Her Uncle Didier, her mother’s brother, in a Milice uniform. The execution tree. She was hysterical. She screamed. Her father rushed out. He saw the body. He said “They promised to take him away and try him.” She remembered his words. They kept coming back, awake and in the nightmares. Later, she realized he knew about it before the event. He was responsible for the killing. Too late. Why hadn’t he personally killed him long before? Horror scenes that lasted for years. Too dramatic? Too many scenes? You couldn’t dramatize it. The reality was worse than any fiction.

  A doctor came and gave her an injection. She became tranquil, almost comatose. She was taken to Switzerland. She stayed in a clinic for three months.

  Her Uncle Jacques came to see her every week. His son, Jean, came in between. He made her laugh. He took her out with his friend. They went to Lausanne and even up to Gstaad one weekend. They went all the way to Zurich to see the paintings in the Kunsthalle.

  There was a Claude Lorrain. The Enchanted Castle. On loan from London. She stood before it until they hauled her away. The golden light, the mystery. She went into the picture. Into the Golden Age. Back into innocence. A world without threat. It was a marvelous journey. She was lost in her substitute world where all terror is absent. She was reborn. It was the beginning of her art education. Her essential freedom from people. Nothing could intrude if she didn’t want it to. The appreciation that makes all other endeavors inconsequential. It gave her a target. Everything important would be enclosed in this special world to which only she had the key.

  André asked, “But didn’t this keep out the good things as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “And didn’t it distort your emotional reactions to people around you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be the reason why your relationship with Dermot never actually got off the ground, so to speak?”

  “Yes. Partly. But we are as different, as you say, as chalk and cheese. Dermot’s an activist, I’m contemplative. Dermot’s background is adventurous, mine’s cultural, if that’s not being conceited. We can’t talk about a lot of things because he hasn’t got the key. Besides, he likes dogs, I like cats. If you want to reduce it to important differences! He’s a sensualist, I’m—”

  “Acting like one too. But your classical underpinning resulted in a certain conceit?”

  “Yes. I felt superior to everyone. Until now.”

  “You fucked with the mind instead of the body.”

  “Yes, if you want to put it that way.”

  “There’s no other way.”

  André was still doing rapid sketches and tearing the sheets off and discarding them. She was now foreshortened to the point where the opening of her thighs was massive and the body diminished, exaggerated but readable. It was distorted almost to the abstract. A mix of Henry Moore in shape but Maillol in sensual femininity. All volume, no longer lines. Any likeness would soon disappear altogether and soon he would be entering her, abstracting out the vulva, like going into a flower painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. It was real art.

  “You’re a rose of Picardy,” he said.

  She reached over and picked up the pile of discarded drawings.

  “More and more you have shifted the emphasis to my sex.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the only way you see me?”

  “That’s how I want to see you. I told you, I don’t believe much in the mind and all that intellectual horseshit.”

  “You’re getting very American. Dermot-like.”

  “Could be I’m reacting like him? I’m feeling earthy. Tell me more about your progress to today.”

  “Very well, Doctor Wiseman.”

  Laure in the clinic. She convinced them she was cured. This is an achievement in a Swiss clinic where expensive cures tend to be endless. She was over the trauma of losing her favorite people. Over the shock of learning that her father had betrayed her uncle and probably her great-uncle. As well, the young man they hid who was so nice to her and was taken away and executed.

  She went back to Paris but never to Colonfay. Or La Fontanelle. Never. She hated her mother and her father but her less than him because she was guilty only of the sin of omission. She positively loathed the memory of her Aunt Bernadette.

  Her father insisted on taking her to the Alps chasing butterflies. He was protective. Trying too hard. Not good enough to compensate for his negligence over Uncle Didier. Already, he was an authority. He became the pre-eminent entomologist in his field. ‘The Moth Man.’ Such is fame! They had no communication. She swore she’d escape completely.

  She bided her time and she studied hard. She’d be the best. The very best. And no distractions. She was top of the class at Sainte-Marie de Passy, une école privée pour jeunes filles. The same at thirteen when she left the Cours Hattemaire, the private school in the Rue de la Faisanderie. She got her Bac at sixteen, with two mentions, at the Lycée Molière. At seventeen, one year of Hypokhâgne at the Lycée Jeanson to prepare for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. At eighteen, she went to Sciences-Po, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris.

  No entrance examination because she had the two ‘mentions’ at
her Bac. At twenty-one she gained the Diplôme de Sciences-Po. At the same time she was going to the Faculté de Droit and at twenty-two got her Licence, again with ‘mentions.’ At twenty-three, Diplome d’Etudes Supérieures de Droit Public with “Félicitations du Jury.” At twenty-four, her thesis and her Doctorat in International Law. Then, at twenty-six, her first job, in the law cabinet of Chevalier. With her first salary, she bought her first print, a Piranesi. Now she didn’t need anyone. She never looked back. Except once in a while. In anger. She was twenty-six and never been kissed.

  André bent over her and kissed her, deeply. Then lower down. Mechanically. With skill but not with love. She sat up and swung off the chaise lounge.

  She said, “No, not that. I want something more.”

  He said, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I’m fresh out of love and spirituality.”

  “So all you ever wanted was sex?”

  “Sex is love. Did I ever promise anything else?”

  “No. But I thought we had an emotional connection.”

  “My dear—”

  “Not that, please.”

  “OK. Laure. After one marriage that turned out badly I’m convinced that whoever said you should not mix breeds was right. We inherit not only cultural habits and attitudes but genetic aversions to other species.”

  “Racism. So de Gaulle was right when he said you were the most élite race in the world.”

  “I don’t know about that. But in the background would always be the élitism of the Montriveau. We live in the shadow of Auschwitz. It will never fade. Your people were responsible for thousands of my people going to the gas chambers.”

  “But that’s so unfair. All my life I’ve been in opposition to everything they stand for.”

  “Of course it’s unfair. You’re innocent. But who’s talking about fairness? I’m talking about subconscious resentments. Ingrained beliefs. I don’t believe your parents or your grandparents were inherently bad. They were misguided. By their cultural upbringing, their class, their religion. Catholics, monarchists, products of their time. Like the Brits killing Indians or Zulus. Kill the Jews.”