by Unknown
When at last Alfred appeared he seemed quite worn out. ‘I’m sorry to be late – I had to get quickly into a bath – I was simply soaked with rotten eggs at the France versus England. Lord, how I do hate sport. Then I had an endless visit from the Irish Ambassador about those wretched cows.’
Chapter Fifteen
FOR a long time now Charles-Édouard de Valhubert had been urging me to go with him and visit the old Duchesse de Sauveterre at her country house, the Château de Boisdormant. He said she wanted to talk about her grandchild, little Fabrice. We had twice made plans to do this; for one reason or another they had come to nothing; at last a day was fixed which suited all of us. Grace, who was expecting a baby and felt rather sick, decided to stay at home. I had always felt nervous at the idea of a long motor drive alone with Valhubert, who intimidated me, but since my talk with Davey I positively dreaded it. If it was really my duty to speak about Northey, now would be the time. However, sitting in the front seat of a new Jaguar, with Valhubert at the wheel, I soon found that the physical terror far outweighed the moral.
‘Have I not a style of my own, in driving?’ he said, weaving up the rue Lafayette. ‘I don’t take the outer boulevards, they are too ugly.’
The style consisted in never slowing down. I began to pray for the traffic lights to go red and stop him; my foot was clamped to an imaginary brake until the muscles hurt. The terror increased when he began to imitate the style of other drivers; the young chauffeur of a Marshal of France, the old chauffeur of an American hostess, the driver of a police car (hands never on the wheel) and M. Bouche-Bontemps. He kept looking at me to see if I were laughing, which, indeed, I was; finally his eyes never seemed to be on the road at all. ‘Oh please, do be yourself!’ I said, and wished I had not as he spurted forward.
Once outside Paris and past Le Bourget I calmed down. He was in full control of the machine, though he went much too fast. We chatted away enjoyably and I realized that he was not at all frightening, much less than he seemed to be when one met him at a Parisian party. When we passed the cross-roads at Gonesse he recited the names of all the people he knew who had been killed there in motor-car accidents, after which silence fell, because of my inability, since I had not known any of them, to aliment the conversation. Thinking that now was my chance, I bravely forced myself to say, ‘I worry about Northey.’
‘I love this little girl.’
‘Yes. That’s exactly why I worry.’ I was astounded at my own courage.
‘Ah – no!’ He looked vastly amused and not at all embarrassed. ‘I don’t love her – I mean I like her very much.’
‘It’s not you I worry about. She might love. She tells me she thinks of being a concubine.’
He roared with laughter. ‘Not in my harem, I can assure you. Why, she is only two years older than Sigi – and half his mental age.’
‘That’s no protection, surely?’
‘With me it is. I don’t happen to be attracted by children – not yet – no doubt that will come, one of the horrors of senility. And I dislike the sensation of doing wrong.’
‘I thought it added to the amusement?’
‘Greatly, if one is cocufying some old prig one was at school with. But to seduce Northey would do her harm and also lead to trouble. I love Mees and I hate trouble. No, we must marry her to Philip – I’m working for that. If he thinks I am courting her and if she seems to cool off him, that, human nature being what it is, may do the trick. He has sighed after Grace quite long enough, it’s a bore. Like this I hope to kill two birds with one stone.’
I was not completely reassured but there was nothing more I could say. It was another beautiful day. (When I look back on our first months in France we seem to have enjoyed an un-interrupted Indian summer.) Valhubert and I were now crossing the Seine-et-Marne country where everything is on an enormous scale. Avenues of poplar trees rush over vast horizons and encircle the globe; down the roads bordered by them the largest, whitest of horses draw ancient wagons loaded with beetroots the size of footballs; each farm with its basse-cour, kennels, cow-byres, stables, barns and sheds occupies enough space for a whole village. The land breathes of prosperity; the predominating colour at that time of year is gold.
‘This is the battlefield of the Marne,’ he told me, ‘where thousands of young men were killed in 1914, on days like this, almost before they could have realized they were at war. The Uhlans, mounted, with their lances, the Cuirassiers glittering in polished armour, went into action on horseback. Those battles were more like a military tournament than modern warfare – to read of them now is reminiscent of Agincourt or Crécy. One can’t believe they happened in living memory and that there are still many people we know who took part in them.’
We came to a village of whitewashed houses with red and navy-blue roofs clustered round a twelfth-century church. ‘I have an uncle who was wounded here at St Soupplets. When he came to, in hospital, they said “You were in the Battle of the Marne.” He was perfectly amazed. He remembered seeing a few Germans round that inn across the road there – and then he was knocked down by a bullet, but he had no idea he had been in anything as important as a battle.’
‘Stendhal’s description of Waterloo is rather like that – casual and unfrightening.’
‘I love this country so much but now it makes me feel sad to come here. We must look at it with all our eyes because in ten years’ time it will be utterly different. No more stooks of corn or heaps of manure to dot the stubble with light and shade, no more peasants in blue overalls, no more horses and carts, nothing but mechanicians driving tractors and lorries. The trees are going at a fearful rate. Last time I came along this road it was bordered by apple trees – look, you can see the stumps. Some admirer of Bernard Buffet has put up these telegraph poles instead.’
‘It is still very beautiful,’ I said, ‘I never saw the apples trees so I don’t grieve for them as you do. When I go to the country I always wonder how any of us can bear to live in towns – it seems perfect madness.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t feel like that when you were Northey’s age.’
‘Now I come to think of it, when I was Northey’s age I did live in the country and my only idea was how to get to London.’
‘Of course it was. Young people need urban life, to exchange thoughts and see what goes on in the world – it’s quite right and natural. By degrees the tempo slows down and we take to peaceful pleasures like gardening or just sitting in the sun. Very few young people are sensitive to beauty, that’s why there are so few poets.’
‘Yes. But now it seems almost unbearable to think what one is missing by being in a town as the days and months go by. So dreadful only to know the seasons by the flower and vegetable shops.’
‘I call that rather ungrateful. Your embassy is in a forest.’
‘I know. Our Oxford house is not, however.’
‘When were you born?’
‘In 1911.’
‘And I the year after. So we remember the old world as it had been for a thousand years, so beautiful and diverse, and which, in only thirty years, has crumbled away. When we were young every country still had its own architecture and customs and food. Can you ever forget the first sight of Italy? Those ochre houses, all different, each with such character, with their trompe-l’ail paintings on the stucco? Queer and fascinating and strange even to a Provençal like me. Now, the dreariness! The suburbs of every town uniform all over the world, while perhaps in the very centre a few old monuments sadly survive as though in a glass case. Venice is still wonderful, though the approach to it makes me shudder, but most of the other Italian towns are engulfed in sky-scrapers and tangles of wire. Even Rome has this American rind! “Roma senza speranza”, I saw in an Italian paper; all is said.’ He sighed deeply. ‘But like you with the apple trees, our children never saw that world so they cannot share our sadness. One more of the many things that divide us. There is an immense gap between us and them, caused by unshared experience. Never i
n history have the past and the present been so different; never have the generations been divided as they are now.’
‘If they are happy and good in the new world it doesn’t much matter,’ I said.
‘Will they be happy? I think modern architecture is the greatest anti-happiness there has ever been. Nobody can live in those shelves, they can’t do more than eat and sleep there; for their hours of leisure and their weeks of holiday they are driven on to the roads. That is why a young couple would rather have a motor-car than anything else – it’s not in order to go to special places but a means of getting away from the machine where they exist. The Americans have lived like that, between earth and sky, for a generation now and we are beginning to see the result. Gloom, hysteria, madness, suicide. If all human beings must come to this, is it worth struggling on with the world? So,’ he said, narrowly missed by a D.S. which, at a hundred miles an hour and the law on its side, hurtled at us from a right-hand turning, ‘shall we put an end to it all?’
‘No,’ I said hurriedly, ‘we must wait and see. I have a few things to leave in order when I go – Northey – the boys. It may not be as bad as we fear. There may be less happiness than when we were young – there is probably less unhappiness. I expect it all evens out. When would you have liked to be born?’
‘Any time between the Renaissance and the Second Empire.’
I trotted out the platitude, ‘But only if you were a privileged person?’
He said, simply, ‘If I were not, I wouldn’t be me.’
Very true. Such men as Valhubert, my father, Uncle Matthew would not have been themselves had they not always been kings in their own little castles. Their kind is vanishing as surely as the peasants, the horses and the avenues, to be replaced, like them, by something less picturesque, more utilitarian.
I said, ‘Perhaps the Russians will explore some nice empty planet and allow people like us to go and live on it.’
‘No good to me,’ said Valhubert, ‘I wouldn’t care a bit for oceans on which Ulysses never sailed, mountains uncrossed by Hannibal and Napoleon. I must live and die a European.’
We whizzed down the ancient roads leading to the Holy Roman Empire in silence now, each thinking his own thoughts. I was no longer frightened by the speed, but exhilarated, enjoying myself. Up in the sky two parallel white lines drawn by two tiny black crosses showed that young men in aeroplanes were also enjoying themselves on this perfect day. At last a signpost marked Boisdormant showed that we were nearing our destination.
‘Madame dc Sauveterre –?’ I said. ‘Just tell me –’
‘You have never seen her?’
‘Such years ago. I used to stay with an old woman called Lady Montdore –’
‘The famous one?’
‘Yes, I suppose she was. When I was about eighteen I met Sauveterre and his mother there. It’s the only time I ever saw him.’
‘Poor Fabrice! He was the most charming person I have known, by very far.’
‘So was my cousin Linda.’
‘Le coquin! You say he hid her in Paris for months and nobody had any idea of it.’
‘She wasn’t divorced. Besides, she was terrified that her parents would find out.’
‘Yes. And the war had only just begun and didn’t seem serious, then. Life appeared to be endless in front of one. Also I think Fabrice had somebody else – another reason for secrecy. Always these complications!’
‘Were you very intimate?’
‘Oh, very. His mother is my great-aurit – Fabrice was much older than me, twelve years at least – but as soon as I was grown up we became bosom friends. It was an adoration on my side. Hard to think of him as dead, even now.’
‘His mother –’ I said, coming back to the point.
‘She’s a worldly old woman as you will see. Fabrice was the only meaning to her existence. Now that he has gone she lives for money and food, torn between miserliness and greed. Enormously rich, no family, no heir. That’s why it’s important that she should see the boy.’
‘Good of you to take so much trouble. You must remember he may not play up. Children are unpredictable – at his age old people are a bore and money hardly seems to exist.’
‘He has good manners and he looks like his father. I’ll be very much surprised if he doesn’t win her over.’
We were now on a little white, untarred country lane winding between rank hedgerows. The crop of berries that year was rich and glistening; I thought I had not seen so white a road and such scarlet berries since I was a child. Presently we came to a park wall of stones covered with peeling plaster – perched up in one corner of it like a bird’s nest there was a little round thatched summer-house.
‘Is it not typically French, all this?’ said Valhubert. ‘What makes it so, I wonder? The colour of that wall, perhaps?’
‘And that ruin on the hill, with a walnut tree growing out of it; and the trees in the park, so tall and thin and regular –’
An avenue of chestnuts led from the lodge gates to the house, their leaves lay in the drive, unswept. A flock of sheep, watched by a shepherd with a crook, were cropping away at long dark green grass. The house, an old fortress built round three sides of a square, was surrounded by a moat, the turrets at its corners were entirely covered, even to their pointed roofs, with ancient ivy so that they looked like four huge mysterious trees. Valhubert stopped the engine, saying, ‘I don’t trust that drawbridge. I think we’ll walk from here.’
The oldest butler in the world opened the front door long before we reached it. He greeted Valhubert in the way of a servant with somebody he has known and loved from childhood, hurried us upstairs into a round white drawing-room, inside one of the ivy trees, sunny and cheerful, and vanished at the double.
‘She’ll be down in exactly a quarter of an hour,’ said Valhubert. ‘Grace thinks she can’t bear to begin painting her face until she actually sees us arriving for fear we should have an accident on the road and then all the powder and paint and eye black would be wasted. She and Oudineau are hard at it now. He’s her lady’s maid as well as butler, caretaker, woodman, chauffeur, gardener and gamekeeper. Nobody has ever been so much à tout faire. The exquisite luncheon we are about to eat (you’ll see how it’s worth the journey for that alone) will have been fished, shot and grown by Oudineau and cooked by his son. This Jacques has an enormous situation in Paris, but he is obliged to drive down here and do the cooking when my aunt has guests. I must say it only happens once in a blue moon.’
‘Is he a chef, in Paris?’
‘By no means! He directs an enormous electrical concern – Jacques Oudineau will produce all the atomic plant of the future. He’s immensely powerful and very attractive, one meets him dining out everywhere – that’s his Mercedes, parked by the kitchen garden.’
‘What a charming room this is!’
‘Yes – there’s nothing so pretty as a château-fort – redecorated in the eighteenth century. This panelling is by Pineau. Look at those heaps of illustrated papers – they go back fifty years and more. One day Grace and I were waiting for her to come down and we began looking at them (I am particularly fond of Matania – orgies – galley-slaves – jousting and so on). Literally showers of banknotes came tumbling out of them, all obsolete. Yes, she’s a miser in the true sense of the word.’
Presently our hostess appeared looking, I thought, exactly the same as she had some twenty-seven years ago, at Hampton. She had then been in her fifties; she was now in her eighties; she had seemed old then and not a day older now. She must once have been pretty, with little turned-up nose and black eyes, but almost before middle age, probably, she had become stout; there was something porcine in her look. It was hard to imagine that she could have given birth to the irresistible Fabrice. Almost on her heels, Oudineau reappeared and in a voice of thunder announced, ‘’chesse est servie.’
We lunched, in a narrow room with windows on both sides, off Sèvres plates which must literally have been worth their weight in gold
. ‘They belonged to Bauffremont – you know them very well, my dear Charles-Édouard. I never allow Jacques Oudineau to wash them up; he is quite a good cook, but a most unreliable boy in other ways.’
The luncheon was indeed worth the journey. We began with brochet. Why is brocket so good and pike so nasty, since the dictionary affirms that they are one and the same? Then partridges, followed by thick juicy French cutlets quite unlike the penny on the end of a brittle bone which is the English butcher’s presentation of that piece of meat. They were burnt on the outside, inside almost raw. Boiled eggs suddenly appeared, with fingers of buttered toast, in case anybody should still be famished. Then a whole brie on bed of straw; then chocolate profiterolles. I was beginning to get used to such meals, but they always made me feel rather drunk and stupid for an hour or two afterwards.
When she tasted the salad, Mme de Sauveterre said ‘Vinegar!’
‘Jacques is in despair, Mme la Duchesse, he forgot to bring a lemon.’
‘It’s inadmissible. This boy always forgets something. Last time it was the truffles. He has no head. Thank goodness I haven’t got shares in his concern.’
‘Thank goodness I have,’ said Valhubert, ‘since they double every year.’
The Duchess asked a hundred questions about the Embassy, specially wanting to know what had become of all the English people she had known there in the past.
‘Et cette adorable Ava – et la belle Peggy – et ce vieux type si agréable du Service, Sir Charles?’
When she saw how little I could tell her about any of them she put me down for what I am, provincial. Valhubert, however, knew all the answers. He told her that she had met me already, at Hampton, after which she got on to Lady Montdore and her circle. Here I did better.
‘Yes, she died before the war, of heart failure while having an operation in Switzerland.’
I did not add that it was an operation for leg-lifting which Cedric, the present Lord Montdore, had persuaded her to undergo against a great deal of medical advice. He said that he utterly refused to be seen with her at the Lido again until it had been done. Her heart, worn out by dieting and excessive social life, had stopped under the anaesthetic. As this happened at a very convenient moment for him, the whole affair seemed fishy and many people openly said that he had murdered her. Soon afterwards the war broke out and he fled to America. ‘Darling, you can’t really imagine ONE going over the top?’
