Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  “I remember the lunch and the dinner and sitting up all night at the Flore and how quickly we established a rapport. It was like opening the window in a musty room, and having an eagle fly in. At that moment he was living in London, a free soul, and the whole thing appealed to me. I went over there and saw his life and I wanted it. It was fun.”

  André asked, “So you married him?”

  “Yes. I married him. Why did I do it? I asked myself. And others asked it from Geneva to New York. Escape. Différence was the answer. Contrast. Escape. Hope. Desperation. A role-changing act.

  “Not like the rest of my circle. Removal from the squalor of the political-legal scene. Divorce from my mother’s life and attitudes. Disillusionment, complete. Yes, commonplace though it is I was kicking against my background.

  “Novelty, Dermot suggested, when I first met him. Novelty? Why did I do it? Why indeed? Well, look at the offers I had. The first from a buttoned-down American executive from the New York office, all Notre Dame and Brooks Brothers suits. The next from a Swiss client. Swiss! Chocolate and cuckoo clocks. The next a plummy Englishman, shooting grouse on the Twelfth of August. Then, a weasel of a Frenchman, dishonest, sucking up to the boss. And always my old Sciences-Po friend, Marcel. Plus a man in the Conseil d’Etat. He had wanted to marry me. My family wanted me to marry him. His parents were rich intellectuals though it was rumoured that his grandmother was illegitimate by a famous writer who was partly Jewish. But I could not bear to have him touch me. He had his problems and I had enough of my own. Later he was killed in a car accident. So much for the life of the privileged establishment. Prestige, perhaps, but not much fun. I wanted fun! I felt like committing a bêtise. I certainly achieved it.

  “In comes a wild Irishman, ranting, irreverent, unclassified, out of the rut. I said, I want to be be happy. To be happy is to be different to them. To be modern and a success. I am not going to live like my mother! That’s what I determined. And what bigger challenge than the wild Dermot?

  “I’ll tell you the real reason. He made me laugh. He took me out of myself.

  “And he was acceptable to my mother. He was Irish. That meant Catholic. And anti-British. She would never have agreed to meet an Englishman. It seemed made in heaven.”

  She said, “Listen.”

  Maman: Laure, I don’t understand you. Me: What don’t you understand? That I don’t agree with all this antide Gaulle, anti-Semitic, anti-English, anti-Socialist nonsense? That I don’t want to live this kind of life? Boring, reactionary, royalist, for heaven’s sake! I don’t want any part of this family’s past. Look, here in the book, Fascism in France and in the American book, Action Française, your father’s words, in 1935, about the new martial spirit of Mussolini’s new army—don’t you find that a joke now?—Listen: ‘Les âmes délicates sont parfois choquées par les violences qui accompagment cette immense opération de réveil national. Ha! Tant pis pour les âmes délicates! Il n’y a plus beaucoup de place pour elles dans le monde rude d’aujourd’hui.’ Tant pis pour les âmes délicate! Every day I see it. His support of the German moves against the Jews. OK, so I loved him. And I know you can make a mistake. But you go on believing Dreyfus was guilty. You go on about the English sinking the French fleet at Mers el Kebir. Grandfather killed untold thousands with his incitement to racial intolerance. It’s mad! I don’t want to be a part of it. You have no remorse. And you think the world begins and ends in the Sixteenth arrondissement or the Quai d’Orsay. Le Quai! Mother, that world has gone. It died in 1940 or before. I have no intention of living my life in a musty law cabinet with all those superannuated functionaries. Besides, you have lived all your life in the shadow of my father. He has no consideration. He goes off on his butterfly hunts whenever he has time. Ecuador, Madagascar, the Cameroons, Borneo! You only see him at meal-times. The rest of the time he’s in his room playing with his moths. Whenever there’s a crisis, he leaves for some exotic place. Where do you ever go? Colonfay. The Aisne. Not me, never. I’ll have a life of my own.”

  She went on, “It was like talking to the wall. So I got pleasure out of going into the vulgar publicity business. In those days it was not a business for well-educated, well-brought-up young ladies from the Sixteenth arrondissement. A business for vulgarians. It still is. And a woman was in it just for the false glamor and the opportunities it offered for diversions. I was delirious at the idea of marrying Dermot. I knew everyone was astounded and I enjoyed it. It was a funny business. The agency was a serious advertising company with big international accounts but it was also an office the purpose of which appeared to be to provide a cover for CIA people. Some had absolutely no knowledge of the advertising business. One was so ignorant he had to be a CIA man. All the men were unlettered and embarrassingly uncultured. When an art director showed an ad with a drawing of a nude with vulva and pubic hair prominent and suggested doing something similar and I pointed out that, after all, being by Gustav Klimt made it permissible, he looked at me and said, “Who is Gustav Klimt?” Hard to take. An interest in culture was seen to be detrimental to the business of making money.

  “Fortunately I was insulated from most of that sort of contact by my legal standing. When it became known that I was going to marry Dermot, another admirer, the plummy type from the London office, said he was a crude colonial from Australia with the mud still on his boots. A womanizer. Improvident. Rude. He wasn’t of course Australian. He’d been in the Sydney office for four years. But he couldn’t have sold him higher. The trouble was he didn’t behave with me the way they said he would. He was full of respect. I suppose I didn’t explode people into an instant state of lust so much as make people want to talk to me.

  “I would have preferred that they had the first impulse. I didn’t want to be talked to: I wanted to be taken. That too like everybody else.”

  Laure went on. “When we became lovers, the sex part was awful but I thought that was to be expected at the beginning. The English have a joke about ‘just lie back and close your eyes and think of England!’ I moved out of the Rue Freycinet and took a small apartment on the Rue Visconti. He liked the Latin Quarter and stayed in the licentious Hotel d’Alsace just around the corner on the Rue des Beaux Arts. That was where it started. Decadence, he often said, is the highest form of culture. And he certainly seemed bent on proving it.”

  The Hotel d’Alsace. 13, rue des Beaux Arts. She looked at the plaque on the wall that said Oscar Wilde died there. She went in, tentatively. He had asked her to lunch there. It was all very odd. A strange venue for a business lunch. She was dressed for the Bristol or the Ritz, regulation Sixteenth arrondissement, ultra conservative, imprisoned in the regulations of the caste. Her manners matched her style. Correct.

  The excitement hit her when she walked in the door. It was like opening up the shutters in Provence and letting the dazzling sunlight into a dark room. Light, bright, alive. It knocked the inherited conceit and assumed superiority out of her. It was as if she knew there was a forbidden world in here. There was an electrical charge of sensuality in the place. Baudelaire, Lautrec, Piaf. A scruffy fin de siècle look. Threadbare, heavy red velvet, decadence. Unimportant fripperies disdained. Even the furnishings had a look of anarchism.

  Freedom, but not open to everyone. The girl in reception looked at her suspiciously. They looked after their guests there and they vetted the visitors. Who knows, it might be someone he didn’t want to see. A wife? A pregnant girlfriend? A spy from his office? Laure carried herself with authority after all. In fact, she was not at ease, and compensated for it by being ultra ‘correct,’ almost officious. Her manners, too, were much too severe for that environment.

  She led Laure through a dark lounge to the small courtyard at the back. There was a big table, the traditional table d’hôte, where the lunch was being laid by a cross-eyed maid.

  He sat at the table by the fountain. A dishevelled character, looking as if he had been dragged through a hedge backwards. Fair, rough-hewn and laughing. Loud check spo
rts coat, shirt open at the neck, hair falling over his lined forehead and in his blue eyes. He had, as they say, the map of Ireland on his face and he could have been a model for the Marlboro Man. He could never, ever be a French lawyer or bureaucrat. Point one in his favor.

  The receptionist put her arm around his shoulders and kissed him lingeringly on the mouth when he turned his head. This was giving Laure the message.

  She said, “I’m Laure de Coucy. You asked me to meet you here.”

  “Yes, indeed. But I should have warned you. This is a pretty strange place.”

  She was embarrassed, aware of the fact that she looked out of place. Inhibited, and she felt he knew it.

  “I’m sorry. It seems pretty casual here. I like it.”

  “Casual’s the word. Look around. See, there’s an ocelot tied to the tree. And a pheasant. It has no tail because the dog got it. Look at the other tree. Yes, that’s a python lying on the branch. Belongs to a Swedish girl who lives with a pop singer and invites people to watch it enjoying its supper of live rats.”

  “Ugh!”

  “Yes, I agree. But we have others. There’s a professor from Stanford who is here for the cure.”

  “The cure?”

  “The cure. One week is all it takes to get rid of your neuroses. When he arrived he was all uptight and couldn’t talk to anyone. Now he’s mixing it with everyone. Normal. We have a car designer who does nice drawings. We have, let’s see, all sorts of art experts, authors, American models, photographers, a doctor of medicine, an architect. Come this evening, we’re having a party. We roll the carpet up in the lounge and let her rip.”

  “I’m afraid I’d be a liability. I don’t drink or dance.”

  “Neither do I. But here nobody expects you to do anything except get along.”

  “Who was the girl who showed me in?”

  “Oh, that was Astrid. One of six sisters of the owner. Look, we can’t talk here. Come on up to my room after lunch.”

  She hesitated. The idea of going up to a man’s room! Would he try …?

  He noticed her hesitation.

  “Relax. That’s it up there. The open window looks over this courtyard. If I try to rape you just yell. I mean, nobody will take any notice but it will make you feel good! It happens to be the room in which Oscar Wilde died. It’s worth a visit.

  Lunch was full of laughter and the sound of friends. Everybody talked to her, put her at her ease. Warned her to look out for him, he was a real philanderer.

  Afterwards they went up to his room. He didn’t try anything. She was slightly disappointed. He told her the story of the company and its French problems. Said it wan’t normally in his line of work. He was a creative type but they made him a vice president and charged him with checking out the Paris office. He was a reluctant spy. A dishonest manager was cooking the books but they had no proof. They were going to fire him if they could find a way of doing so without paying the huge penalty that French law provided for. They suspected that he would backdate various contracts for his cronies and this would cost a lot. The job was permanent. Regardless of who was manager. Corporation lawyer. Was she interested?

  Was she! She had never heard of advertising, ‘la pub’ as they called publicity in Paris, a very vulgar sort of métier in those days. And exactly the sort of occupation which would shock her family. Just as he, a wild Irishman, would cause consternation. How could she resist?

  She went back to the office and resigned. Then she went shopping for a more liberated dress. Younger, more daring, more fun. To the hairdresser to get a looser style. A cliché, that. Change the lifestyle, change the hair-style, change the perfume.

  She met him for dinner at la Coupole and he took one look and said, Wow! They talked. They went to Castel where he was admitted without trouble and all the model girls seemed to know him. The noise was too great and they left and sat outside the Flore until the small hours. He became less worldly as the night wore on. More innocent, if you like. Told her the story of how he was initiated into the free world of the Hotel d’Alsace and was liberated from the snobbish club of Mayfair, Eton and the Guards. He was practically a virgin when he came to the Hotel d’Alsace. The first day he was there he was invited to a partouze. He was ashamed to admit he didn’t know what it meant so he said yes. He had hardly done it with the lights on. The two sisters in the reception giggled. An American girl checking in said, oh boy. She was playing hookey from le Rosey in Switzerland. At lunch in the courtyard someone told him a partouze was an orgy and he found an excuse not to go. It was in a barge on the Seine and all the rage in those days. He was tempted but not ready for it.

  ‘I’ll tell Father Tobin on you!”

  They still had him in their grip. Not that you needed a special partouze. The hotel offered enough scope for variety and experiment. The air was laden with sexual excitement. It was a total immersion course in French, language and culture, as they say at the Alliance Française, pillow culture. It was good for what ailed you and it cost less than a shrink.

  It was the nearest thing to a happy home that he had ever found. They said it was all happening in London but permissiveness had been around in Saint Germain des Prés for a long time. It wasn’t so forced or desperate: it was normal. It got so permissive he used to send telexes from Madrid and places saying keep my room but there’s no need to fill the bed. But that was later when he was properly run in. Swinging came with the room rent in the Hotel d’Alsace. He was the only one there who was gainfully employed so he had the Oscar Wilde suite. Thirty four francs a night including breakfast. The Immortal One had died in that room and his spirit was still around resisting everything except temptation. He must have been shocked at the heterosexual nature of the games. Not all, of course. Gallery owners from the street and the nearby Rue de Seine met there every day. There was a certain sexual ambiguity about them but they were polished.

  Nowhere on earth offered such considerate abandon. Laure took to going there when he was in town and before she joined the company. He resisted taking it beyond the friendly stage.

  She was too eager. He was obviously involved with a girl in London, apart from various casual affairs in Paris. Still, she had her target and she kept it in her sights. The sun shone every day even when it rained. They would walk up the Rue Bonaparte to the Café de Flore or down the Rue de Seine to the Quai de Conti and he would smoke a special pipe with Sterling Hayden in his Dutch barge. Sterling, and the hotel, and go out for a quick dinner in the Bistrot St. Benôit. With photographers or painters or booking girls from the model agencies. Or American girls having a fling. With the men the emphasis was rather homosexual and there were a few lesbians amongst the women. All sexes were gay in the good old-fashioned sense of the word. Knowing the men made him frequent the galleries.

  Before he gave up the sauce he used to drink in the Colony Room in London with Francis Bacon. Suddenly he became fascinated by the history of art. He loitered around the Louvre. They went together to the Uffizi in Florence. Separate rooms. He found reasons to visit all the important exhibitions. Urbino, the Frick, the Prado, Ferrara, Mantua, Parma. He started to collect drawings. It became another obsession. It was at a time when contemporary art was going through the roof and people had forgotten that they weren’t making old masters any more. Good drawings were cheap; mannerist paintings, too. The sexual license and the world of art was all an eye-opener to him. You didn’t find it in the County Kilkenny.

  He compressed a lifetime’s lasciviousness into one year and an art education that started and continued and provided a lifetime focus. They shared certain cultural interests but the gap was too wide. She knew he was afraid to touch her. He had her on a pedestal. She wanted to be on the bed. But someone else had that privilege. Like a fool she called on him one day and asked the girl at the reception not to announce her. His door was unlocked. She walked in thinking to give him a nice surprise. He was on the bed with Nana kneeling over him. She had never done that with him. She ran out in hysterics.
But she didn’t give up. He promised to stop seeing her and she believed him.

  Laure continued, “I suppose the letters did it. We would one day collect the letters as a sort of history of the affair. We both liked to write. He was going to be travelling a lot and life was short. We needed to close the culture gap. We needed, too, he said, a lightning conductor to help this electricity—do you feel it?—find a mutual earth. It would have to be a full-frontal exposure of the personality. Easier to put things in words than to say them face-to-face, especially since he wasn’t fluent in French. My English was pretty good because I had polished it in England and read it since I was a child. My grandfather made me read his translations of Walter Scott and Stevenson. We had a Scottish governess for some time. But I wrote in French and translated the difficult parts when we met. It seemed a good idea.

  “OK,” I said.

  “And that started it. What he called The Confession Book. Total exposure.

  “Charlotte, the psychiatrist, said, ‘He seems to have a fixation about confession and absolution.’ Yes, it was all guilt. He was loaded with it. Acted tough but paid heavily for everything he did. ‘Whatever you do you must not enjoy yourself!’ That’s the rule, and he never succeeded in breaking it. Except perhaps with Nana. And, I think, with Penelope. He had a habit of ending every letter with a little poem. They were entertaining. He wrote short stories.

  “Well, you get the picture. Rather childish, I suppose, the game. Trite? Facile? Pretentious? Well, I suppose. But it was the kind of pet language you devise as a substitute for deep communication. An act. It was a verbal contact, not of the senses. It spoiled the future. I was impatient, all right. The impatience was rewarded.