by William Boyd
‘Happen?’
‘When you drop off the perch. You can’t just have all this thrown away. There must be fascinating material in there.’
‘Fascinating to me, that’s for sure.’
‘Why don’t I find you some eager young lover of literature to catalogue it all, sort it out?’
‘No thank you. I don’t want a stranger reading my private papers.’
But she inspired me: I have decided to set my house in order.
Rereading my old journals is both a source of revelation and shock. I can see no connection between that schoolboy and the man I am now. What a morose, melancholy, troubled soul I was. That wasn’t me, was it?
The idea of a priori moral judgements (‘It is morally wrong to inflict gratuitous pain’) is completely acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. Only a few philosophers would disagree.
Three bad days of the brown mist so I went to Dr Roisanssac. He’s a good-looking, clean-cut 35-year-old with prematurely grey hair. He checked me out, blood pressure, palpations, blood and urine samples. I told him about my smash-up and he said he could send me to Bordeaux for a brain scan if I wanted. I told him I couldn’t possibly afford it. No, no, he said, it’s free – Monsieur Coin will drive you there and bring you back. You don’t have to pay a penny. It was tempting but I said no: strangely reluctant to have my brain scanned, whatever that may involve. I worry what else they might find.
Drinks at La Sapinière. It’s a beautiful house – eighteenth century, with a dusty yellow crépi on the walls and steeply angled mansard roofs with fish-scale tiles. Two small wings extend forward to enclose a gravelled forecourt with a fountain. At the back there is a balustraded terrace overlooking a newly planted parterre that will be superb in a couple of years. Inside it is still a little empty-looking, but such pieces as Madame Dupetit has placed here and there are commensurate with the age and style of the building. All very sophisticated but, to my eye, a little soulless, museum-like: Aubusson rugs on glossy old parquet, a pair of precisely angled armchairs, dust-free tables and cabinets. Only the pictures appear commonplace: standard portraits, sub-Watteau fêtes champêtres, overvarnished, idealized landscapes. One can’t criticize the taste but one misses the absence of life about the house. I wanted a big carnal nude above the fireplace, or a glass and chrome coffee table stacked with books and magazines – something to clash, to jar, to draw the eye – something that says there is a human being living here.
But Madame Dupetit seems more relaxed in her own domain and consequently looked more pretty. Her hair was down, she wore linen slacks and a white blouse. She has a bosom. We drank gin-tonics in my honour and she smoked a cigarette in a careful way that suggested this was a rare, illicit pleasure. When she leaned forward to stub it out, the collar of her blouse briefly parted and I saw the swell and crease of her breasts, held by the embroidered border of her brassiere. I felt that old sensation of weakness bloom at the base of my spine and I was duly grateful. If I had been twenty years younger I might have wished our neighbourly courtesies would lead further.
She was very friendly – perhaps too friendly – laying her hand on my arm, asking if she might call me Logan and that I was to call her Gabrielle. We would be two allies here in Sainte-Sabine, she said, and added that if I ever needed anything I had only to summon her gardiens. It was all very civilized, sitting on her rear terrace, watching the sun lengthening the shadows, the swifts dodging and dipping above our heads, talking about Paris. She was born there, she said, after the war. La Sapinière had been an old family property and she had bought it from her brother. I sensed that Monsieur Dupetit, whoever he might have been, had been gone a long time.
Francine has announced that she doesn’t want any more visits to her apartment – the neighbours are talking about the men who come and go. She would be very happy to meet me in a hotel, however, and recommended one on the outskirts of town, where she obviously has an understanding with the management. This is unaffordable as far as I am concerned, so the news appears to put an end to my sexual life. I shall miss Francine and her utter lack of curiosity about me. I, by contrast, have always been very curious about her and wonder how this middle-aged housewife embarked on her career as a part-time prostitute. I ask questions but she sidesteps them all.
Consternation at the Superette: frowns, head shaking, dark mutterings. Didier Mazeau asked me if I had seen what had gone up on the wall at La Sapinière. No, I said, what is it? You’d better take a look, Didier advised – me, I’m saying nothing. So I detoured on my mobylette and passed by. And there to the right of the gateposts, set in the wall, was a stone plaque with carved letters that read (in French): ‘To the memory of Benoit Verdel (1916-1971), known as “Raoul”, commandant of the Resistance group “Renard” that liberated Sainte-Sabine from the German yoke on the 6th June 1944’. So, more becomes clear: a family property; her father a Resistance fighter, perhaps a local hero. How come no one in Sainte-Sabine knew of the connection and why was Didier Mazeau so frowningly circumspect?
‘As sound as a bell of brass.’ This is a phrase my father used to describe perfectly frozen meat. Can’t think why it should suddenly pop up in my head. I haven’t thought of him for years and as I bring him to mind, and recall his tolerant sad smile, I feel my tear ducts smart, automatically.
Gabrielle to drinks here. I must say I miss the company of women. Nothing is going to occur between us, but to smell her perfume, to watch her sit back in the armchair and cross her legs, to lean forward and hold a match to her cigarette, to feel the guiding pressure of her fingers on the back of my hand, provide an intense feeling of sensual pleasure. I infuse her presence here in my house with as much suppressed and tender eroticism as I dare without being impolite. I showed her around and she spotted the little Picasso sketch on my study wall. I told her how it had come about and she was, I think, quite amazed to learn that I’d met him. She looked at the piles of books and the boxes of papers and asked me what I was working on, so I told her a little about Octet.
Then I said I had seen the plaque on the wall and she explained its significance to me. Her father had been in the Resistance during the war but she had only learned this after his death. Her mother had told her the few facts that were available: his code name, that he had run a group known as ‘Renard’ in the Lot, and that his orders on the day of the invasion were to liberate Sainte-Sabine and establish strong points on key roads and bridges in the area. From what she had read of histories of the Resistance she knew also that their other tasks were to round up and arrest Nazi sympathizers and collaborators. After the war he had bought La Sapinière but shortly after his business had taken him abroad and the family moved to Paris, where she was born and then her brother, some six years later. ‘It’s entirely possible that I was conceived in La Sapinière,’ she said with a laugh. ‘And after my father died, when we discovered we owned the property, the family decided the easiest solution was to rent it out.’ Then she hinted at her own marital difficulties and, after they were ‘solved’, she decided she needed to make a significant change in her life and thought it would be a fitting gesture to her father’s memory to restore the house and celebrate what he had done for Sainte-Sabine. He never spoke about the war, I asked? Never, she said. Even her mother knew very little – she had met her father in 1946 and a year later they were in Paris. You have to understand, she said, that for men of her father’s generation the liberation, however longed for, also provoked enormous trauma: in order to fight the Germans you often had to fight Frenchmen too – and when the war was over there was the matter of justice and retribution. It wasn’t easy to live with the knowledge of what he had seen and what, perhaps, he had been obliged to do. Mieux de se taire.
Huge storm in the night. Stepping out in the morning to find the ground drenched and sodden but the air seeming fresh, newly rinsed, newly decanted.
*
Milau-Plage. Hôtel des Dunes. A sudden desire to be by the ocean has brought me here, south of
Mimizan on the Atlantic coast. This small hotel backs into the dunes and faces a tidal salt-water inlet-cum-lake, the Étang de Milau. There are six rooms on the first floor and down below there is a restaurant, Chez Yvette, where they push back the sliding doors in summer and place tables on a rectangle of wooden decking beneath a thick and shady vine.
Milau-Plage is a little resort town that is just far enough away from major centres of population to remain essentially unspoilt and unpretentious. On the étang side there is the old quartier des pêcheurs with its bright wooden fishermen’s cabins and around that a couple of streets with shops and bars, the whole town dominated by its lofty red-and-white striped lighthouse. You leave the sheltered streets of the town and climb up through the dunes to find the huge sandy beaches on this west coast of France. Here and there surviving concrete bunkers and gun emplacements of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall topple and slide slowly down the eroding dunes to the ocean beyond. Beach life centres around an école de surf and a couple of beach shacks selling drinks and sandwiches.
Yannick Lefrère-Brunot recommended Milau-Plage to me when I told him of my urge to be by the sea once more – on the condition that I told nobody else. He also told me to inform Yvette Pelegris, the proprietress of the hotel, that I was a friend of his. It made a marginal difference to her welcome, I think. Yvette is a buxom, hard-faced woman with vivid auburn hair who knows she runs the best restaurant on this section of the coast. Consequently she has hoiked her prices to deter the kids and the trippers, and her clientele is either well-heeled or ageing or both. I have had a good year with my bothy-rentals and I felt I deserved a treat. I booked in here for an initial week but I’ve already extended it for another. I sleep well and breakfast late on the terrace. Then I wander about the town, buy a newspaper and at lunchtime usually make my way up through the dunes to the beach and have a beer and a sandwich at one or other of the beach shacks. Dinner at 8.00 sharp Chez Yvette: invariably oysters, grilled fish, tarte du jour and a bottle of wine. The wine could be better, so I asked Yvette if she would mind if I supplied my own – no problem, she said, as long as I didn’t object to paying un petit supplément.
So now I sit in an umbrella’s circle of shade on the planked deck of a beach shack, a beer in my hand and a book in my lap, and I look at the people as they come and go and listen to the crash and hiss of the breakers as they curve in, flatten and explode on the sand. I must do this every year, while I have the money and the strength – good for the soul, a few days like this.
I had just achieved a neat solution to a complicated time-jump in Octet, lunch was approaching and I had just opened a bottle of wine, when Gabrielle telephoned.1 She sounded very tense and asked if I would come over straight away. So I jumped on my mobylette and motored over to La Sapinière. Gabrielle was standing on the road by the gates, smoking. We didn’t kiss hello – she merely pointed, wordlessly, to the wall.
The plaque had been crudely defaced, as if struck hard by the spike of a pickaxe, five or six big gouges having been torn in the stone, leaving it entirely ruined. Gabrielle was red-eyed with angry tears and quivering with suppressed fury. ‘What kind of people do this, Logan?’ she said in English as if her French was not to be sullied by comment on this sad little outrage. Had she called the gendarmes? Of course. What could they do? Nothing. Kids, vandals – they see something new, they want to destroy it. Then she began to cry – which was very upsetting – and I put my arms around her and walked her back to the house. I stayed for lunch and she slowly composed herself, making plans to replace the stone – perhaps something cast in metal would be better. I applauded the idea.
Here’s a dark thought for a dark night: we all want a sudden death but we know we’re not all going to be provided with one. So our end will be our ultimate bit of good luck or bad luck – the final addition to the respective piles. But nature does offer some form of consolation, so it strikes me now, as I wonder how I will go. The more drawn out, painful and undignified our dying, the more we long for death – we can’t wait for life to end, we’re in a hurry, hungry for oblivion. But is that a consolation? When you’re comparatively fit and well you want to stay as long as you can and you fear and repudiate death. Is it better to be longing for the end?…Now I’m in my eighties – toothless, limping, the brown fog descending from time to time, but otherwise as well as I can expect – I find myself asking the universe for one more piece of good luck. A sudden exit, please. Just switch the lights out.
I suddenly started thinking of Dick Hodge today and I remembered a piece of social advice he gave me if I ever found myself at a dinner party, stuck for conversation. It’s incredibly easy, Dick claimed: in order to start chatting, Dick said, just tell lies. Say, to the woman on your right, ‘I suffer appallingly from insomnia, how do you sleep?’ Or confess that your wife’s ex-husband has threatened to kill you. Or that you were mugged the week before. It always works, he says. Say you knew someone in a recent air-crash, or that you’d heard that a member of the Royal Family was converting to Islam. Most dinner-party conversations are so boring that you’ll have an avid audience for the duration. Never fails, he said.
Interesting to observe that there is comparatively little sympathy in Sainte-Sabine for Gabrielle over the vandalization of her father’s memorial. Norbert shrugs – Les jeunes. Didier and Lucette observe that these things happen. Only Jean-Robert says that maybe someone has a grudge against her father. Jean-Robert came to Sainte-Sabine in the 1950s, and so knows nothing of the war years, but, by means of a series of eloquent inflections in his voice and little grimaces that he makes, he manages to imply that Sainte-Sabine has many dark secrets to reveal. He’s heard a few rumours: ‘Some people, the older men… ‘He’ll go no further.
Thus it is that I find myself, the next market day, looking at the old timers as they stand around and chat. 1940 to 1944 – almost anyone in their sixties would be able to tell you something of life under the Occupation in Sainte-Sabine. I know some of these older people well but I’m very reluctant to introduce the subject – I don’t want to raise the stone and see what etiolated terrified creatures might be squirming around beneath.
I spoke to Lucien about it. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared hard at the ground.
‘It’s a shame,’ I prompted. ‘She’s an extremely nice woman. She’s very upset.’
‘Of course,’ Lucien said. ‘But did she have permission?’
‘Permission for what?’
‘Permission to put such a memorial up in the first place.’
‘It’s her property, she can do what she likes. She doesn’t need permission to honour her father.’
Lucien looked fixedly at me. ‘In my experience, when you’re a stranger it’s always better to ask permission.’ Then he smiled, showing me his fine silver teeth, and invited me over for dinner.
The winters here enchant in their own way almost as much as summer. First thing in the morning I come through and build a new fire on the embers of last night’s. I lay down a handful of sarments2 and then some sticks of kindling – then a few huffs and puffs of the bellows and we’re away. When the flames have taken, I place a couple of split logs against the fire back. Hodge and Bowser like to sit and watch me start the fire and as soon as they see that it is going they wander off, as if the flames are a signal that the day is authorized to begin. We have heavy frosts here that can last for days – the landscape as white and frozen as if it had been snowed upon.
Winter reveals the massive, complex, muscular organization of the ancient oak. Like an old man stripped of his Savile Row, tailored suit – no less impressive in his mature nakedness.
*
Last week Gabrielle had a new plaque – of embossed metal – set in her wall and this morning it was desecrated again with acid and tar. She was weeping uncontrollably when I went round and I offered to go and see the mayor on her behalf. She was very grateful and I made an appointment with Yannick Lefrère-Brunot for Wednesday.
I am aware, though it
does not concern me as directly, that I am almost as affronted by these two events as Gabrielle. I know that no community is perfect, but these attacks on Gabrielle’s memorial reveal another side of Sainte-Sabine that I find deeply unsettling. Clearly the village shares some dark and shameful secret that Benoit Verdel was involved in exposing – and possibly punishing – in 1944, and, equally clearly, the bitter resentment continues. I feel I am about to turn on friends and family: I don’t want to know what went on but it appears I have no choice.
My conversation with Yannick Lefrère-Brunot was not very satisfactory. He offered me a drink and I declined – I wanted this to be formal, official. I asked him if he had any idea who had damaged Madame Dupetit’s memorial and he said he had no clue – perhaps vandals? I said I didn’t believe him, said I was sure virtually everyone in the village knew who was responsible but they were covering up. I mentioned the word ‘collaborator’ and he shook his head wearily.
Y L-B: Can I give you some advice, Monsieur Mountstuart?
LMS: I can’t stop you.
Y L-B: Leave it alone. It doesn’t concern you. You are much liked here. Please, don’t be any more involved. It will sort itself out.
LMS: Typical. But you’re wrong: you have to take responsibility in life. There’s no use turning your back.
He urged me again to leave the matter alone with a quiet vehemence that only increased my suspicions. I reminded him of my profession and suggested – a little vaingloriously, I confess –that this was the kind of story that a writer could easily propagate and embellish.
Yannick Lefrère-Brunot seemed genuinely aggrieved and pained at this course our discussion had taken and repeatedly urged me to step back – there was no need to consign anything to print, such a step would be wholly out of proportion. I saw in him all the petty and shameful compromises of political life, no matter how small scale and confined that life might be. Somebody, with some power and influence, is behind all this, and Y L-B is hopelessly stuck in the middle. Even he doesn’t dare risk ventilating the wartime secrets of Sainte-Sabine despite the fact he comes of a generation untainted by the period.
