Sabine

by A. P.

  Sabine

  Sabine

  A.P.

  Copyright © 2005 by A. P.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by

  Bloomsbury Publishing Pic, London

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A. P.

  Sabine / A.P.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9981-2

  1. Teenage girls—France—Fiction. 2. Women teachers—France—Fiction. 3. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 4. Lesbians—Fiction. 5. Schools—France—Fiction. 6. Castles—France—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6100.A1S33 2006

  823′.92—dc22

  2006040126

  Black Cat

  a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Ali and Sarah

  Once the mark is branded

  on the victim’s skin,

  the little green door opens

  and, soundless, beckons in.

  On the grassy threshold

  gleams my blood like sap.

  Night, oh, come and crown me

  with a dunce’s cap.

  – from ‘Heimweg’

  by Ingeborg Bachmann

  I

  Overture

  France. The château country inside it. The château itself inside the country, and Aimée and us inside the château. Five non-students, in a non-school, run by a non-teacher with no qualifications at all, bar one, and that unmentionable. I haven’t been back there in my mind, not into the two inner chambers anyway, for more years than I care to remember.

  There was a time when I could think of nowhere else, live nowhere else, no matter where my body happened to be living. But then, in self-protection I suppose, a curtain came down and all this time since I haven’t cared, or dared, to shift it. Now that I finally risk a peep behind the folds, however, the first and almost only thing I see is grey – a wash of grey. Or greys, to be more precise, for there are many of them. There is the warm mouse-belly grey of the château walls for a start, shading into yellow where the lichen blooms, topped by the harsh slatey grey of the tiles on the roof, much darker, much colder, bluer, barely separable from the backdrop of pewter autumn sky. Then there’s the wishy-washy lavender colour of the many, many shutters, all silently crying out for a good coat of paint; and the window-boxes, ditto; and the cement basin of the empty goldfish pond, closer to brown in the sludgy part; and the near-black wrought-iron railings with the asphalt of the road behind. Along which the cars pass so close they all but whisk the courtesy title of ‘château’ away with them, leaving just that of ‘house’ or ‘road-house’. It’s hard to think of any upwardly mobile family building their dwelling on this spot unless they went in for highway robbery. The garden is grey too – a dusty platinum hay-grey, legacy of a long dry summer and a lazy gardener who has let things rip. And so is the cat: a dingy pearl. La vie en gris, Tante Aimée, la vie en gris.

  Goodness, it was difficult to call her aunt. We all found it so, even our first French teacher, Marie-Louise, who was in fact her niece. (By marriage, of course, not by blood, certainly not.) ‘Madame’ sufficed for the first day or two, while she still stood bedecked, maypole-like, with a few ragged streamers of authority, but they peeled off so fast – came away in our hands with so little tugging – that after the last one fell it seemed natural to pass straight on to ‘Aimée’ and the second person singular. Oui, Madame, Non, Madame, ’sais pas, Aimée, fiche-moi la paix.

  And yet we didn’t use this intimate form of address. Why not? Simple. For the same reason we didn’t stray far from the château, or neglect our lessons, or invite men in without Aimée’s knowledge, or commit any other gross infraction of the rules: because her laxity terrified us. Far more than her severity would have done. We were in her hands entirely, five seventeen-year-olds in a foreign country, in a remote spot, in a partially derelict house with a wonky telephone and a whimsical power supply – it behoved us at least to pretend that her hands were strong and capable. Even when they were on the wheel of her perilous Peugeot and we in the passenger seats, being bowled along at breakneck speed to visit some other derelict château in some other equally godforsaken spot. Even when we were feverish and the hands were intent on immersing us willy-nilly into an ice-cold bath. (To make the body react, mes enfants. And jeepers, it did.) Even when it was night-time and Brassens was growling away on the gramophone, and the hands touching us weren’t hers at all but belonged to …

  How fast I do go. How fast it all passes in front of me now – a derailed roller coaster tearing by and plunging, plunging, plunging. Where was I? Ah, yes, with the greys, stay with the greys. Well, Aimée’s wispy unruly hair was grey too, in defiance of the henna mud-packs she applied to it constantly, so there’s another nuance to add to the rest (although strictly speaking the very same nuance is there already in the dusty opalescence of the cat’s fur). And the Peugeot was grey, battleship shade, and when she drove it she nearly always wore a baggy greeny-grey cardigan with the sleeves thrown round her neck to ward off her most hated enemies, the courants d’air.

  My memory’s eye searches vainly for colour – perhaps it is frightened of finding it. But anyway, for the moment it finds none, so it can relax: it is the late fifties and it is Existentialist time in France, even for us bumpkin Brits. Christopher, our only male, wears drainpipe jeans and a long black fisherman’s jersey. Day in, day out. He’s practically an albino, so his hair, though bright, scarcely counts as colour. We four girls wear long black fisherman’s jerseys too, and black high-heeled shoes and stockings, with barely a hyphen of skirt in between. And as for make-up, if we can’t find sufficiently pallid lipstick and foundation in the local Prisunic we caulk ourselves over with acne-eraser instead. You look pale, mes petits lapins, Aimée wails at us at mealtimes and plies us for some reason with radishes – maybe economy, or maybe in the hope their skin tint will migrate to ours.

  Radishes are red, yes, radishes are red. The dread colour seeping in at last. And so, at a very different place on the spectrum, is Matty’s hair. Mad Matty, batty Matty, our rich Colombian reject, tossed from school to school across the continents like a hot jet-set potato. And so is the Virginia creeper on the wall outside, and so are Marie-Louise’s cheeks: crimson red and lobster red, respectively. Stop here. Marie-Louise is highly religious, related in some way to a well-known Jesuit philosopher: she will have no truck with dangerous Left Bank effluvia. Deaf to our pleas for Sartre and Camus, at reading time she sticks stolidly to Claudel, Péguy and the odd chapter from Le Grand Meaulnes thrown in as a sop. Someone has told us this last is a must for all self-respecting rebels, but in Marie-Louise’s rendering we can’t think why.

  How can she stomach the atmosphere, this upright young woman in our morally teetering midst? Cynical Christopher, me, Matty, the live-wire Serena and languid Tessa (whose names would have fitted so much better had they been switched) – the five of us presided over by Aimée, the most unstable element of all? Well, she can’t, she won’t, not fo
r long. Even if the true name of the game eludes her, the Gitanes we all puff on round the clock will eventually choke her out.

  Yes, because the inside of the château is grey too, I was forgetting that. Apart from the fact that the shutters are nearly always closed – Aimée typically shuns the glare – a fog of cigarette smoke obscures the furnishings in virtually every room, bathrooms included, constantly swirling and constantly replenished. We smoke like dogs in kennels scratch: from boredom, frustration and pent-up energy we no longer feel we have. I share a bedroom with Tessa and the first thing I see every morning is her beautifully manicured hand – she is fanatical about her hands, they are the only thing she’s really prepared to work on – reaching out from under the covers for her lighter and packet of weeds. Rasp, gasp, grunt; Don’t look so disapproving, Viola: gotta have a drag to get me started. And then in goes the hand again and up go the covers. So the bedlinen is pretty grey too – from ash and frequent washing.

  That’s quite enough about colours for the time being, I reckon. What about sounds? Hmmm. Sounds are less problematic. We didn’t agree on sounds, as far as I remember, except for Brassens, and you can’t have Brassens on the turntable all day, no matter how Existentialist you are: he sears you, burns you out. So as regards sounds I have a medley of Strauss waltzes and Chopin polonaises and Dvořàk and Presley and Fats Domino in my ears, with Brassens as a kind of ritornello theme, cropping up in between. Anything else there may have been – voices, birdsong, even the belling of the stags in the forest – is for the moment drowned out by the music, because that was the way it was: music, music, records, records, noise to cover silence.

  What do we do all day? We don’t. We lounge, we smoke, we yawn, we smoke, we stuff ourselves with chocolate from the nearby chocolate factory and smoke again till our mouths fur. We flick through our copy books, drawing little pin-figures on the corners pf the pages, trying to portray them in wicked activities. Is this what our parents have sent us here for? If not, then for what? I managed to get out of my convent by making my father laugh: I told him over the telephone in a dramatic voice that life was passing me by. He has countered my move, sly chess-player that he is, by sending me here, where not only is life passing me by but it’s passing by unperceived – there is no trace of it here; you can’t even feel the air displaced by its passage. All is still. Through the smoke we stare listlessly at the things that surround us: dusty bookshelves, balding Aubusson carpet, battered Louis XVI chairs. It would surprise none of us, I think, if, sitting on one of them, we were to come across a figure in powdered wig and panniers. Caught in a time-warp like we ourselves are, passed by completely – by life, by death, by everything.

  II

  Prelude to the Dance

  It strikes me now that this diet of lethargy Aimée fed us at the beginning may have been part of her strategy, although, with her vagueness and almost total subscription to laissez-faire in most areas, it is hard to think of her as having a strategy. More likely it was just the dictates of the social season: her – what shall I call them? Neighbours? Cronies? Clients? Accomplices? – all being away in Paris till the strains of the huntsman’s horn brought them back. Still. Following on the heels of boredom, fear may not only be welcomed, it may actually pass unrecognised for what it is. Something, after all, is happening at last; something breaks in on the scene and your dormant senses tingle at the prospect. What is it? No way of telling, but it’s alive and beckoning so let’s go with it.

  There was only one foretaste of something spicier on our curriculum, or only one sufficiently strong for me to notice, and that was a curious evening, sometime in our second or maybe third week there, when Matty turned up with a pick-up, a young officer she and Christopher had met on the road to Tours. One of the bikes they had been riding had had a puncture, and this guy – I don’t remember his name, Aimée just called him dismissively le p’tit militaire – had stopped, either immediately taken with Matty or else halted by the traffic light of her hair, and had escorted them both back to the château in his car with their bikes roped to the roof.

  He was a little swarthy spotty fellow but he snapped his heels together and kissed Aimée’s hand, proffering a surname with a ‘de’ in it, and I think this was what earned him his entrée and his invitation to dinner and the rest. Serena and I notched up a couple of pick-ups too, a little later on, on a shopping expedition: two wondrously beautiful employees of the chocolate factory who you’d think would have suited Aimée’s books far better, but, no, the moment she saw them she chased them away like a bulldog – English, not French – and then turned an isolated flare of rage on us. How dare we behave so brazenly? How dare we bring such people into her house? It was a question of caste, you see, and that was a lesson: one of the few canonical ones she ever imparted and one of the very few that stuck. It’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with.

  But Matty’s militaire, no, he passed muster all right on the strength of a hand-kiss and a syllable. Smarmy little twerp. During dinner nothing particular happened, not that I remember, anyway. Did Aimée seat him to her privileged right? I think she did. I think she chatted mainly to him too, quite a lot, quite graciously; maybe it came as a relief to have someone to talk to, Marie-Louise being such a dead weight, and we being so impeded in our French. I seem to have a picture of her in my mind’s archive, smiling at her unlovely guest and grating nutmeg over his plate of Brussels sprouts. At last, someone who shared her tastes. Filling him up with wine, too, pampering him, making him feel at ease.

  Did I catch her looking at Matty? No, I didn’t. No, she didn’t look at Matty, hardly at all. I looked at Matty. I know this for sure because I remember noticing how pleased with herself she looked – at having made this conquest, and having the conquest so unexpectedly approved. She was as sleek and wriggly as a retriever that’s brought back a pheasant. Or, let’s say, a stoat. And I remember how this fact amazed me and shamed me, because, I mean, Matty – OK, she was foreign and had failed her O levels and had to wax her arms, but there was something attractive about her all the same. The bell of red hair was stunning, for one, and her eyelashes were Disney-long, and, oh, various things, various things she had going for her. Not least her fortune. Whereas the militaire had nothing. Except acne, and a hideous uniform that made you itch just to look at it, and teeth coated in tartar (visible, I swear, from my place on the other side of the table), and that miserable rag of a prefix. And yet here was Matty wriggling, and here was Aimée smiling, and here was a bottle of wine going round instead of the usual carafe, and here were Marie-Louise’s cheeks turning to fuchsia, and Mme Goujon, who did the cooking, swanning in with an emergency pudding when ordinarily we never had puddings, except at weekends. It was embarrassing, it was uncomfortable, it was humiliating. It was downright wrong.

  The stage direction of the latter half of the evening – if there was any on Aimée’s part, and you can bet there was – was finely done. Afterwards I tried to piece together how it was that the rest of us went to bed so early, leaving Matty and her prize alone together in the salon, but everyone was vague about their reasons, myself included. Was it connivance? Was it disgust? Or did Aimée somehow manage to make us feel it was the right thing for us to do – just to slope off and leave them to it? Somehow, none of us could say. Marie-Louise complained of a headache, that I do remember, and was the first to go. A real headache or a diplomatic headache? No telling. But the others? Which of us left last? And who second last? Or did we all go pretty well together? And where was Aimée and why didn’t she stop us? No one said goodnight to her – that came later. So? Where was she? And why were the shutters not shut, when the gardener latched them up every evening like a prison warder, punctually, at half past five, and they were never open that wide anyway? Why? Or had they been shut and had someone then opened them later?

  It was Serena who called us, Tessa and myself; we were asleep already. And it was Christopher who had called Serena. But who called Christopher? No one, according to him:
he just heard noises and went to investigate. First inside, and then, in a moment of great inspiration, out. But who made the noises? The snoggers themselves, or Aimée, or someone else, and if so, who?

  It was quite an eyeful. With the three sets of French windows ablaze with light, and the sofa placed parallel to the bookcase at the back of the room, the scene was like the stage of a theatre at which we had a private box. A programme of Feydeau with a pinch of porn. We crept across the gravel in our pyjamas, already clutching our stomachs with giggles and excitement – there was no one else around then, I’m sure (unless you count the cat, Aimée’s familiar, which was sitting in front of the furthest window, licking its loathsome paws) – and settled ourselves in the shadows on either side of the first window, just outside the trapezoid of light. Serena had mimed the scene for us already, to put us in the party mood: You must see this, she implored as she dragged us protesting from our slumbers. You have to see it. Oh my God, oh my God, it’s so incredible, and she’s got her period too.

  It wasn’t incredible, that wasn’t the right word at all, but it was riveting, mesmerising entertainment, impossible to forgo. On the sofa, on his back, lay the soldier, his itchy jacket discarded, his shirt rucked up to armhole level, his trousers down to knee, revealing a white cotton vest and underpants, separated in their turn by an interesting gap of pallid, slightly freckly flesh. We could only see a sectional side view of him because on top, closing him like a sandwich filling between her and the cushions, lay Matty.

  I say, lay, but her position was more of a crouch. I had no idea at the time that real-life sex was so ungainly. That was part of the fascination, I think: the sheer absurdity, both of the act and the performers. It was what held us there, what permitted us to go on watching. Had the spectacle been pretty, we would have been ashamed because our prurience would have had no cover, but as it was we could go on gaping and giggling ad libitum. (And ad nauseam, because it caused a mixture of both.)