She was calm.
He asked, “What about the funeral arrangements?”
“Alain will make them. He will be buried in the cemetery at Colonfay. Next to my mother. On Tuesday. We’ll take the body up to the church tomorrow and have a special Mass.”
“Will I come up?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Why? I liked him and he liked me.”
“I know. But it seems wrong. A burial and then a divorce.”
The door slammed in his face. With finality.
“What about the Sarah business and the book about the drawings?”
“Mouse and Alain will handle it. I can’t think about the book right now.”
Monday
34. Laure at Colonfay
Colonfay. One week since the fall. Picardy weather. Low clouds, leaden sky, driven showers.
A small gathering. Laure and Patrick and Alain and Hervé and the farmer and his wife. The maire of Colonfay. A mass before the burial. Now on Monday to suit the convenience of the priest. By strange irony, he is a diehard communist who has raved about the bourgeois élite, using the pulpit as a political platform and taking Armand as his prototype. Complained about to the bishop and finally removed but now back for his revenge. Hiding behind the cloth. Threatened by Alain that if he dares to say anything untoward he will find himself in court and defrocked.
A simple ceremony. Laid to rest with the other de Coucys. In the bloody plot over which the guns have boomed and the barbarians tramped.
To the château for the conventional lunch. Awkward, embarrassing, everyone glad when it ends. Laure asking Alain and Hervé to choose a butterfly book from the collection. Protests. Too valuable. Choosing instead a box of moths each. Rushing away.
The house empty. The wind rattling the windows. The mongrel whining in the dining-room.
Laure floats along the corridor on the second floor. It’s lined with bookshelves. Overflow from the library. She picks some out. Leather-bound editions of her grandfather’s and her father’s work.
There’s the 1913 edition of Proust. The Grasset. Only 1700 in existence. She puts it on the window ledge. With unconscious reverence.
She wanders back along to the stairs up to the grenier, passing through the small rooms in the west tower which she had occupied as a lonely child, the room that looks out on the park and the killing tree. As she climbs, slowly, it all seems so remote. The past seems a fiction. Incidents lost in the mist of antiquity. She climbs up to the huge space under the roof, enters the ‘office.’ It’s unlocked. Sits at his desk. Looks at the photographs. Her mother, her brother, her uncle, her father in his cavalry officer’s uniform, mounted.
She pulls open a drawer, not looking for anything in particular. There’s a pistol. There’s a vial of cyanide. Armand got it from the museum to dampen a sponge to kill the butterflies. There’s enough to kill a regiment.
She holds the tube of white powder. Puts it back. Picks up the pistol. She remembers how an old suitor had killed himself with one shot to the heart.
That must be the way to do it.
She throws the pistol back in the drawer. Violent rejection of more death and melodrama. And hurt for Dermot.
She weeps. She spins out of control. She’s overcome with guilt, all the affection withheld, all the rejections, Dermot’s deprivation, all the the conceit and the superciliousness. The vengeful acts perpetrated. The anger. The pride, envy, covetousness, lust, and all the other seven deadly sins.
She decides to call Dermot, to stay anchored in the world. She needs him if she is to go on living. To compensate him. She needs a fix on reality. She goes downstairs to the telephone in the little room off the hall. She dials the number of the downstairs flat in Paris.
Mouse answers. She’s just come back from Provence.
“Dermot’s on his way to the airport.”
“Oh, no! Can you stop him?”
“No, but I can get him tonight in Dublin.”
Laure’s hysterical, too bright, not making much sense.
She says, “Oh, Mouse, it was all a terrible mistake. I’ve been so stupid.”
She’s on an unnatural high. Mouse is imperturbable. She calms.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, perfectly. Resolved. Will you tell him it’s going to be all right? Everything will work out. I want to see him. To please come back soon. We go together, we must forget the rest, look at what we have, and now the paintings, something to work on together, if he can forget Nana—”
“He was never unfaithful to you really.”
She laughs.
“What do you call infidelity?”
“What do you call it?”
“I call it unimportant now. It was silly. A misunderstanding.”
“Nana never meant anything to him. He actually never liked her. He actively disliked her. She has no principles. But she didn’t give him a hard time all the time.”
“Yes, I asked for that.”
“He never saw her without wanting to leave and be with you.”
“Honestly?”
“Yes. He needed to feel wanted. But he always felt you were a virginal type, a sort of Mother Superior. You always made him seem like an oaf. He made the mistake of putting you a pedestal. The physical side seemed almost sinful. Incestuous.”
Mouse gently steers the conversation towards less emotional and more mundane things.
“What are you going to do about Colonfay?”
“We’ll get rid of it. It would always be haunted. Some memories will not go away. Alain can dispose of the butterfly collection and the library.”
“Dermot talks about selling his boat.”
“He mustn’t do that. The old yawl is his escape symbol.”
“You think he’ll want to escape again?”
“Don’t you?”
“No comment, Laure. Ride him with a loose rein. A bit of illicit copulation never hurt anyone. Adultery may be next to godliness. The folly is in confusing lust with love.”
Laure breaks into wild laughter.
“But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
“Don’t tell me more. I’m not old enough. But, Laure, you know there’s no chance of it working unless you lay down some rules and stick to them. I have heard it said that you have to work at it. Personally, thank God, I was not motivated to make marriage work. It’s an altogether unnatural state.”
“Oh, Mouse, you’re lucky. You have the strength to survive alone.”
“Huh! Little do you know. Me and the donkeys for company. The lonely nights and the itch. Sublimation in work. Right now I must get Sarah and the porno drawing sorted out.”
“Yes, work’s the substitute. But it’s not enough for me.”
“Well, good luck Laure. Give it a go.”
Laure goes out the back door and stands on the terrace. She looks down on the park. It’s still a battlefield after the battle. As though a great hand had come down and swept away the shrubs, the trees, parts of the wall and the greenhouse. It all seems strange.
She walks down the park. Stands by the cedar of Lebanon. The mongrel has followed her down and sniffs around. She looks up at Laure and growls.
The branch is still hanging down, held by the white tendons. It creaks in the wind. The slippery ladder still lies next to the trunk. The grass is flattened where Armand lay and the overgrown crater is still there where the shell landed in 1914.
She reaches out and touches the bark of the tree. To connect?
The killing tree. The monument to the innocent and the guilty. Didier, Armand. Dermot’s grandfather. Sundry unimportant collaborators. An execution post, an unmarked war memorial, a center of death from which spread out ripples from the grave to drown the living in a sea of breaking memories.
The de Coucys. The McManuses. Contrasts. Joined together like the planks butted up or scarfed like the strakes of mahogany on Dermot’s wooden yawl. Break the joint and the whole body falls to piec
es, lies around, a rotten hulk.
Within a radius of a hundred meters, a neglected spot in an unknown corner in France, a geographical location unremarked, as wanting in meaning as a bridge over a lesser river in Ireland.
Crossed lives. Parallel lives? Diverging lives? No! Converging lives. It will work.
She goes through the broken wall into the wood and up the rough cart track to the front of the house. She picks up the broken arm of a doll that’s lying in a bush, its pink plastic and string of elastic spoiling the verdant nature.
Penelope’s? Possibly. She carries it with her and drops it onto the front seat of the car. Why? She doesn’t know.
She goes back into the mausoleum.
She gives certain instructions to the faithful retainer. Mostly about guarding the house and especially the library and butterfly collection until Maître de Malherbe arranges for both to be collected. He would continue to pay her and she should take her orders from him.
She sees the mongrel bitch sitting by the car. She opens the back door and the dog jumps in.
She drives through the huge gates without once looking back.
“Pax,” she says, for no good reason.
35. Irish Mud
Dermot’s in Ireland. He stays the night in the Shelbourne in Dublin and drives down to Piltown in a rented car early the next morning.
Mouse calls him. Gives him Laure’s message. The invitation. She’s noncommital. Refuses to elaborate or to comment. She’s saying, Keep me out of it.
Great peace descends upon him. There’s a future. He’s very tired. But happy.
He seems to be floating about it all, looking down on himself as he drives through Inistioge down to the village of Piltown. He needs a few days to pick the pieces up, to make himself whole again—for Laure.
He turns left to Fiddown and the river.
He stands there like the man in the Caspar David Friedrich painting, looking out over the desolate scene.
Nothing’s happened since he left the village years ago. Nothing. It was all a dream. Unreal.
Mud, flats of wet mud with rivulets. Mud banks that slope down to the channel where the last of the ebb flows in a narrow stream and the dark water swirls around the concrete pillars. There’s the smell of a low tide, fishy.
Upstream, under the bridge, the dark mass of Slievenamon broods over the valley and he seems to hear the whistle of the Rosslare Express as it echoes off the lonely mountain.
It’s evening now. A soft evening. The hour of the incarnation, the time of Angelus. The setting sun throws long shadows over the woods across the river on the Waterford hills. The tops of the trees are a lumpy quilt of blue velvet with dark green folds and the gathering clouds piled up above the ridge.
He stands at the edge of the quay, surveying the empty scene. More pictures. Image slippage. Fade out.
He thinks, No linnet’s wings. And no wooden bridge. Well it hadn’t been the Pont Alexandre Trois, or the Palladio in Bassano, much less the Ponta di Santa Trinità in Florence. Just a small bridge. But fine. Big enough to take a pony and trap or three riders abreast.
Under the bridge, swinging to the tide, a rowing boat tied to an iron ring in the wall. In it, a red-headed girl with a beauty mark high up her thigh. And an old soldier floating in the weeds.…
Yesterday. It was yesterday. Nothing has happened since.
Nothing ever happens.
He turns and is about to get back in the car when he spots the pile of lumber under a forest of nettles. Planks and piles from the old bridge. Burma teak. White now like bleached bones.
He finds a short length and detaches it from the rest.
This time he throws it onto the passenger seat of the A chunk of dried mud has fallen off on the fabric. He’s going to scrape it up and keep it. Why? He doesn’t know. It’s just mud. Everything’s clear as mud.
Irish mud.
Epilogue
Since this is a true story, with maybe a few liberties taken here and there, I have to say that Mouse, with the skills developed during her time with the library service of the British Council, a sometime cover for spooky business, tracked down Sarah. Laure and Dermot went off like sniffer dogs afer the paintings. They discovered them in a castle in the Maremma of Tuscany. It caused a lot of commotion in the art world when both drawings and some paintings were exhibited. The nature of them restricted entry to the galleries and, of course, there were ‘correct’ places were they could not be shown. People do not like seeing life in the raw. It is writ: there’s only birth, sex and death. Ask Laure. Or Dermot.
Acknowledgments
I owe a considerable debt to Dr. Margaret Reinhold for her constant encouragement and for advising me on the subject of ‘denial’ of child abuse when it has been perpetuated by another member of the family. Without David Malouf’s critical reading of the early draft of the book and his suggestions, it would be a much more confused text, though you may think that would be difficult. My father-in-law, an eminent entomologist, whose wartime behavior was irreproachable and the very opposite of that of Armand in the book, helped me about lepidoptera and its literature.
Patrick’s story (Chapter 17) was taken word for word from the much-decorated François Paliard, and is of how he was arrested and subsequently escaped over the mountains to Spain, arriving in London and working in intelligence with the Free French under de Gaulle throughout the war. My thanks to him for information and a long friendship.
I have consulted too many sources to list them all here and any errors of interpretation of historical fact are mine alone.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Myles O’Grady
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2475-4
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