“A rat got in,” said Nadine. She repeated yesterday’s white-mouse handshake, then slapped hopelessly at the curtains.
“Do these rats run up curtains?” Lucie was merely after knowledge, but Nadine gave her a long cold glance instead of a reply. A few minutes later, as Lucie sat eating her breakfast, she saw the rat. He came along the terrace and thrust his elderly face under the curtain. Without saying anything, Lucie got up and closed the glass doors.
Nadine looked dirty to Lucie. She reminded Lucie of girls she had known in her hospital years, girls who would not wash their underclothes because their mothers had always done it for them. Nadine’s sleeve grazed the honeypot. She smoked and sent ash flying. Women smokers are always making little private slums, said Lucie. She had to limit her disapproval to women, otherwise it implied a criticism of Jérôme.
“All our neutral descriptive words in French are masculine,” said Nadine, putting Jérôme at the heart of the timeless conspiracy.
“A brute. A person. A victim. All feminine,” said Jérôme.
“Brute, victim. Your choice is revealing,” said Nadine. “All you people, you intellectuals, are still living in the nineteen sixties.” Before then life had been nothing but legends: grandfather’s death as a hero, great-uncle’s deportation, grandmother in London being brave and bombed.
Lucie tried to break in to defend Jérôme: he most certainly was not a brute, if that was what Nadine had meant. This had the effect of halting, for the moment, the double monologue. Jérôme pulled a piece of cold toast toward him, smashed it carefully, began tormenting the crumbs.
“Only Michael Haydn matters,” said Nadine suddenly. Jérôme began to laugh as if he would never stop. Her imitation of Gilles was nothing like him, but Jérôme must have repeated some of the conversation in the car. Harping on Gilles was at least a sign that he noticed other people. At the same time it worried Lucie to think that this spoiled, inexperienced child – Nadine – should mock a successful doctor. It was simply not anything Lucie was used to.
“Gilles is very intelligent,” Lucie said. “His first research grant was five hundred thousand dollars – I think. He was younger than I am now.”
If Nadine had been trained in any one thing, it was how to divert a conversation from shipwreck. “I have been meaning to ask you,” she said to Jérôme. “What do you do?”
“Jérôme hasn’t quite found what he wants to do yet,” said Lucie, out of habit. She wasn’t answering for him – it was just that sometimes he never answered at all. “He has degrees in literature and … all of that.”
“What a waste,” said Nadine. “I was hoping you had studied law, like Fidel Castro.” This must have been tied to last night’s conversation too, because it made Jérôme smile.
Lucie was not a jealous wife. At least, she did not wish to be one. As soon as she had finished her breakfast she left the two to their politics and private laughter and strolled over the courtyard to the summer kitchen. She would address herself to the servants, and learn something useful about French life.
“May I watch you preparing lunch?” she said.
Marcelle, the mustached senior servant, turned down the radio. She had been smoking a thin cigar while her assistant played Patience. The assistant gathered the cards together with two sweeping movements and put them in the pocket of her apron.
“I won’t be cooking lunch for some time, little lady,” said Marcelle. “Madame’s train from Paris does not arrive until after one.”
“I am longing to meet her,” said Lucie. “There are no photographs of her in the house. Does she look like Nadine?”
Lucie was no threat to the servants: she was nothing to worry about. The assistant took out her cards again. Sitting down, drinking reheated coffee, homesick Lucie said, “Do you mean you have never been to Canada? You could easily go on a charter flight.”
“That is true,” said Marcelle.
“We speak the true French,” said Lucie, pulling apart everything she had ever heard Jérôme say, as if unravelling a sweater. “The French of Louis XIII. Perhaps. Certainly Louis xv – no one can contradict that. Your kings talked just as I do. As for French cooking, the first settlers had to eat what they could find. They ate molasses.” Marcelle said she had eaten molasses; the other woman had not. Allowing for the interruption, Lucie went on, “Also, buckwheat pancakes. The English were rich and ate meat. But our people lived on beans. Sometimes they owned just one plate for each person and they ate the beans on one side of the plate and then turned it over and ate the molasses out of the little hollow.”
“What little hollow?” said Marcelle.
Lucie turned her saucer over; the bottom side was flat. “Those were different plates,” she said.
“In the country, when I was a child, we ate that way,” said Marcelle’s crony suddenly. “Cleaned the plate with bread, turned it upside down, ate jam.”
But Lucie did not need support. She had known she was right all along. “We suffer from the Oedipus feeling of having been abandoned,” she said, unravelling more and more carelessly now. “Abandoned by the mother, by France – by you. Who knows what this new Oedipus won’t do now that he has grown up? Nothing will ever be the same after the next elections.”
Here came a pause, as all three thought of different elections. “It is true that nothing is the same,” said the second old woman finally. “Now if it rains you have floods. In good weather the trees die. Only one person in this village was given a telephone, in spite of the last elections.”
Marcelle agreed. Elections were meaningless. She told about how her nephew had come back blinded after a war, and how his wife had deserted him. Marcelle was still working at her age because she had spent all her postal savings to support the blind nephew’s forsaken children. The other woman now began touching the playing cards, and from something hinted, Lucie understood she had overstayed. She also realized that the crony had not been playing Patience, but telling Marcelle’s fortune – divining the risks, chances, and changes in love, health, and money that lay before her still.
Nadine had dressed meantime and she and Jérôme now walked through a grey and redbrick village. Every other façade looked lost and crumbling. He read, across the wall of one blind shuttered house, “The Rural Proletariat Needs Holidays Too.”
“I painted that,” said Nadine.
The house they stopped at was low and new; it stood in the way of a much older house of brick and stone falling to ruin. They came straight into a kitchen full of women and small children dressed for church. Black currant liqueur was instantly served in heavy glasses. Jérôme, the only man in the room, sat on a narrow bench and heard a story about a last illness, a death, a will, lawyers’ fees, and state taxation. The woman telling this had on a felt hat. An unborn child was considered a legal heir if it had attained five months of its pre-natal life; but if a foetus was unlucky enough to lose its father when it was only four and three-quarter months old, then it came into the world without any inheritance whatever. It could not inherit its father’s land, his gold coins, his farm machinery, his livestock.
“What do you think of my washing machine?” said another woman, cutting off the story.
What made this room unlike a kitchen in a city? The smell, said Jérôme, though he could not have defined it. The crumbling house behind this must have been where the family had once lived – for hundreds of years, perhaps.
The owner of the new washing machine was named Pierrette. Her skin was pink, her eyes were blue, and although she spoke to Nadine, it was Jérôme’s admiration she wanted. “We used to launder in the public wash-house, in spring water, and dry the sheets on the grass,” she said. “God, that spring water was cold! We boiled the sheets with wood ash and rinsed them – it was like melted ice. Your grandmother gave all her linen to my mother to wash,” she said to Nadine. “She used to send her sheets from Paris in winter.”
“I think I remember,” said Nadine. “The fresh scent of the sheets at my g
randmother’s house. Now everybody has a washing machine and the bedclothes smell of detergents.” Nadine looked at the new machine as if expecting Pierrette to say she was sorry she owned it. “You probably laughed at your work,” said Nadine severely. “A collective action is … well … collective. But the machine is lonely. Think of it, Jérôme,” she said, suddenly turning to him. “Marcelle alone with her machine. Pierrette alone here.”
“Our hands used to be chapped and covered with blood,” said the woman with the felt hat. “We had to leave off rinsing so as not to bloody the clothes. And I was allergic to wood ash, although we didn’t know the word for allergy then.”
“And the cold,” said Pierrette. “My mother crossing her arms, trying to bring life back to her cold hands.”
“It is true that we laughed,” said another woman, so that the male guest would not feel uneasy among women’s disagreements. “But we couldn’t use the public wash-house now even if we still wanted to, because it is full of rubbish thrown there by Parisians after their picnics.” As this was not a criticism, but something she would herself have done had she been a picnicking Parisian, she gave Jérôme a gap-toothed and reassuring smile.
“Why not laugh?” said Pierrette, whose new machine had come out of this conversation second-best. “Certain categories of people seem to be expected to laugh at their work.”
“I know,” said Nadine, but vaguely, for this conversation kept twisting and doubling back.
“Oh, you know, do you?” said Pierrette.
And now it was Nadine who was undervalued – not just the machine. Nadine had painted a slogan in favor of these people only a few houses away. She took out her change purse and paid for ducks, strawberries, and asparagus – standing very straight, granddaughter of Madame Arrieu and of a national hero for whom streets had been named.
On their way home, Nadine said to Jérôme, “Tell me – what do you think of me?” She wore a leather skirt, leather sandals, there were leather buttons on her blouse. The blouse was transparent. She had not dared to leave off her brassiere, in case Marcelle were to notice and inform her grandmother.
Jérôme said, “Whatever happened, I always liked women.”
“All?”
“In a way, yes. Even that farmer’s wife – what was her name? Pierrette? If she had said something to me …”
“Something friendly?” said Nadine, without sarcasm. She was considering this as a possibility, a way of looking at people.
“Well, friendly too. I could have found her charming. It could work. It could work with almost anyone.”
“Then why do you stay with your wife?” said Nadine.
“Because she is my wife,” said Jérôme.
There was a finality about this, a warning almost, that closed the subject. All the same, she was sure he had told her something Lucie would never know. She understood that he had no use for her, Nadine, because he had no use for any one person. She wanted to dash ahead and throw pebbles or kick at stone doorsteps. But she walked along quietly thinking, I hope I won’t grow old too suddenly. She stopped and said, laughing, “Well, kiss me,” for that was all she knew about rites.
Lucie sat alone at the Scrabble board putting together highscoring words in the best places. She jumped up when she heard the two, wishing this was her house and that she could welcome strangers to it. The minute Nadine saw Lucie, she seemed reminded of an obligation, or a promise. She hung her head and muttered,
“I have to fetch my grandmother at the station.”
“I know,” said Lucie. “They told me in the kitchen. Her train is after one.”
“I am sorry to leave you here,” said Nadine, as though Lucie had not been alone for much of the morning.
“Oh, but I’d love to come!” said Lucie. “Just to see – a French railway station.”
“It is twenty-six kilometers from here, on a boring road. I have something to do in the town,” said Nadine. Please don’t come, but at the same time please don’t think I don’t want you, she was also saying.
Lucie wondered if Nadine and Jérôme had quarrelled, if their tense teasing at breakfast had gone straight through to hatred.
“Is it a town with a wall and two towers?” said Jérôme.
“You don’t see the towers from the road,” said Nadine. “Not the road I take. The old ramparts are there,” drawing a half-moon from card table to window with her sandal, “but we drive this way, to the station, which is outside the walls, in the new town.” That road ran along the edge of the carpet.
“I know the town,” said Jérôme. “I might want to buy a house there. I’m thinking of coming back to France to live. Also,” turning to Lucie, “I think we should get back to Paris. Go and pack. We can take a train from the station.”
“Oh,” said Nadine, flushed, staring from one to the other. She stated the most important objection first: “There is lunch, and the two ducks. And also … my grandmother … she will think I haven’t been nice to you.”
“We leave tomorrow afternoon, Jérôme, when Gilles stops by to fetch us,” said Lucie. Sometimes everyone around her seemed half the size people ought to be. No one could handle Jérôme the way Lucie could – doctors had praised her for it. And it was all instinct on her part, or so she had been told. The more mysterious Jérôme seemed to those other half-sized people, the more Lucie seemed to grow tall.
He seemed under a strain just now; perhaps it had to do with Nadine’s lowering of interest. He didn’t take a sleeping pill last night, Lucie remembered. He walked round the room. She tidied the Scrabble letters; put the lid on the box; was supreme in her confidence.
Nadine now looked like a girl who might go in for spells of weeping. She muttered that she would get the car out. It was a car they used here in the country, just for running to the station. Not the best environment for Lucie’s white dress. Also, the Girards would have to wait and be bored while Nadine did her errands.
“My husband is never bored,” said Lucie, saying something she believed profoundly.
4
The car, of a make Lucie did not recognize, and whose shape she associated with the automobiles of her earliest childhood, was fit for a junk-heap. She appraised the worn seat covers, the torn rubber matting on the floor.
“Did anyone hear the thunder last night?” said Nadine.
There was no reply. Lucie, who had not had enough to eat for breakfast, was deep in a vision concerning the physical symptoms of hunger. She saw a stomach contracting and digestive juices pouring forth. Think about something else, she commanded, but all that she could see was home and her own table spread.
“The station,” said Nadine, parking with her back to it. She did not trust these two to know a station when they saw one. “I shall meet you here, at the car, in one hour. Can you remember that?”
“We could help with your errands,” Lucie said.
“They would bore you. My grandmother wants to have an extra key made for her gate. It is an old lock, over one hundred years old. No locksmith wants to be bothered. I know one who might.”
“On a Sunday?” said Lucie – not prying, but simply interested.
“On a Sunday I am certain to find him at home. Don’t lose your way if you walk about. Try to stay on the main street. The stores will stay open until one o’clock, if you want to look in windows. Please notice the number of the car – then you can recognize it.” She was so anxious to get away that Lucie could feel the strain of it. Something tugged at Nadine, like the moon at the sea. Nadine didn’t go to the church this morning, said Lucie suddenly. Neither did the two old servants. It isn’t just Jérôme and myself.
She and Jérôme stood together, children abandoned, next to a row of parking meters in front of a provincial station, and watched Nadine trotting away. She had changed her blouse, Lucie noticed, and tied her hair back with a brown velvet ribbon. “Why is a key so important when she has guests to consider?” said Lucie. “What errand can she have that will take her an hour?” Nadine
broke into a run. The ribbon came loose. “It’s a lie about the key,” Lucie said. “I don’t believe it. She’s going to meet someone. I’m sure it’s a man. Probably married. Why else would she make such a mystery of it? Poor Nadine. She must be an orphan. She never mentions her parents – did you notice that, Jérôme? She forgot to put a coin in the meter. Do you think we should? Maybe you don’t have to on Sundays. Who were her parents? Did you know them? I never heard you say that Madame Arrieu had any children.”
“One stepdaughter,” said Jérôme. “She had a husband, but he took cyanide. The two towers are on the far side of the town,” he said. He raised a hand, wiping out of the present parking meters and cars. He began to walk, Lucie following. He seemed to have forgotten that she was with him. They turned into a street shaded by plane trees; the street presently became too narrow for trees, or even for people walking together. Lucie fell behind, pushed and jostled and sometimes separated from Jérôme by a Sunday provincial crowd. “I remember all of this,” Jérôme said, but not really to her. He looked at his face on a plate glass window. “I remember,” he said, walking again.
The antique china shop with plates against blue silk, said Jérôme. The tobacconist’s with the yellow mailbox outside. The mailbox used to be another color – I think it was blue. (Lucie saw that he was once more beginning to count something on his fingers.) The fishmonger with the trays of cracked ice. The pastry shop. The café. The second café. The chapel.
“Jérôme, there is a sign saying Concert on the door,” said Lucie, close behind him. She was bothered by the Sunday crowd, whose indifference to strangers seemed to her hostile. She wanted Jérôme to stop and rest and even a church would do, even though he said he had finished with religion. All the wrong omens for the day were in place, Jérôme’s constellations of disaster: Jérôme not listening, looking at his face in a shopwindow as if he had forgotten what he was; Jérôme tearing paper, fiddling with breadcrumbs, saying he wanted to buy a house in France when they could barely even afford this trip.
Going Ashore Page 39
