Sabine

by A. P.

  Matty’s bum was perched much higher than the rest of her body, taking on a kind of airborne, independent look. Stealing the show, as far as we were concerned. The militaire was working on it, blind, with his visible hand, trying to negotiate a whole interconnected web of obstacles which reformed and regrouped the moment he got past one of them. He would pull aside the knickers, for example, managing to lay bare a buttock, and as he did so the girdle surmounting the other buttock would snap back into place. So then he’d lock furiously with the girdle, while the knickers would recover their lost territory. And as if these weren’t fronts enough to cover, there was also Matty’s skirt to contend with, which kept on coming loose from its rolled-up position at her waist and slithering down over the field of operations like a safety curtain; plus the lining, which did much the same; plus a layer of petticoat, also proving troublesome, being silk; plus the sturdiest obstacle of all: the last-ditch bulwark of her sanitary pad wedged into the crack of her rump. Kapok in those days, and thick cotton net, and anchored firmly in place like a storm-mooring by hooks and loops and a tight elastic belt.

  I stole a quick glance at Christopher, embarrassed more on my own account than Matty’s by this revelation. Men shouldn’t be let in on such things. If she wasn’t careful the bloodstained side might show any minute. The militaire didn’t matter so much because he couldn’t actually see the thing, only feel it, but Christopher could. I don’t know how Matty could have managed otherwise, given that Tampax was out for us Catholics, but I felt it was a gross betrayal of our sex to flaunt this intimate object in the air, uncaring, like a mandrill its blue stripes.

  As if to prove me right, Christopher grimaced back at me and gave a delighted shudder. Aren’t they awful? he whispered. Isn’t it awful?

  It was. And yet it wasn’t. We lingered. We looked and went on looking. I hadn’t even bothered to put on my dressing gown and the night air was making my teeth chatter, but I couldn’t afford to go and fetch it for fear of what I might miss.

  There were heavings going on now. Matty’s face was red from the rubbings of the militaire’s stubble, and her backside was as high as a puppy’s when it invites another dog to play. The obstacles seemed to have been overcome, most of them, and it was her hand that was constituting the last. Her hand against the militaire’s hand, her strength against his. Fascinating.

  Group sex, even if it’s only vicarious like this was, binds tighter than a lynching. I felt a great sense of closeness to my co-spies all of a sudden. I couldn’t communicate this to either Tessa or Serena by touch because of the window between us, but I laid my head on Christopher’s shoulder and he put half his jacket round me to warm me, and together we smiled fondly at the other two, who smiled just as fondly back. Moment of weird tenderness before the giggles took hold again.

  It might have been then, I think, that I saw the other figure, standing by the far window where the cat had been, gazing into the room just as we were, feeding on the same spectacle. Or maybe it was a few minutes later, when an owl hooted in the forest, and we all jumped and looked around in fright. Anyway, I was the one who saw it first, and recognised it first, and the only one who realised what it was up to.

  Because, at my horrified whisper of, Aimée! It’s Aimée, don’t you see? the other three lost their heads entirely. Instead of hearing a cautious call for their attention they took it as an outright warning. Or, worse, as a signal we’d been caught – in the act of watching the act. Christopher, with one of his gawky, crane-like movements, raised his arms in the air, causing the loose half of the jacket to flap free like a wing, and let out a kind of Indian war cry – Wooo, oooh, oooh! – before totally succumbing to laughter. Serena said, Fuck, under her breath but stood her ground, not laughing at all; Tessa fled, leaving a Cinderella slipper on the gravel; and I just blushed over my entire skin surface; I wasn’t quite sure why or for whom.

  There were rapid cover-up movements inside the room at this point, but I didn’t follow them: I was too intent on watching Aimée – trying to read from her expression, as she drew closer, how long she’d been there and whether she was surprised to see us or had known about our presence all along. She too was in her night attire but had had the forethought to don a dressing gown. It was a shabby tartan wool dressing gown, mannish in cut, and underneath you could see the collar of a heavy flannel nightshirt. (Maybe these garments had belonged to her dead husband, maybe she wore them in remembrance?) Her hair, wispier than ever, had been unwound from the knot she usually wore it in by day, and dangled over her shoulder in a loose, thin plait, like a frayed bell-rope. She cut such a forlorn figure, walking towards us, flicking her fingers and smiling slightly – not scolding at all, just shooing us away – that instead of fearing her or despising her, I felt intensely sad on her account.

  Allez! Allez dormir! she called out to us softly. We were her good little rabbits, she was not angry with us at all, only with the naughty Matilda and the soldier, and she would deal with them in a moment as they deserved. Matilda was her first South American charge: she would think twice before taking on another one. Hot blood, she added, more softly still, and the smile broadened and took on a mischievous twist at one corner, Hot blood. Little English bunnies were tout autre chose. Off with us now, little English bunnies, leave the culprits to her. Goodnight and sweet dreams.

  I’m not sure about my compatriot bunnies – we discussed these matters less and less often the grubbier our collective conscience became – but for me, yes, the events of that evening rang in my ears like a prelude, and a puzzling, disquieting one at that. You know the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni? Those hellish opening bars that are swept away so soon you hardly remember hearing them, but which linger with you all the same, affecting all the other music, darkening the gay bits, weighing down the light? Well, that was more or less the effect that that night had on me: it tinged all the normal days that followed with a streak of the bizarre. My mind soon mislaid the cause – it had no knowledge, really, to fix it to: I doubt voyeur was in my lexicon yet, let alone voyeuse, let alone respectable middle-aged voyeuse responsible for my education – but the effect remained.

  Boredom returned, innocence (of a rather studied kind) returned: we went back to our fatuous lessons, put on an Anouilh play, pruned Aimée’s fruit trees for her and lit a bonfire with the prunings, round which we danced like children, and then stood, with glowing cheeks, roasting chestnuts in the punctured lid of a biscuit tin, presenting an image of wholesomeness that we were the first to try to believe in.

  On peut offrir un marron, Tante Aimée?

  She smiled and stayed with us and guzzled a whole handful. She liked us in this girl-guide mode. That other evening might never have happened; Matty’s trespasses might never have been.

  We went on visits to some celebrated châteaux, in a different league from ours. Most of them – and it was practically all we were told about them, certainly all we retained – beginning with a C. At another, a non-C, which had some link with Diane de Poitiers (famous frog tart, so Christopher dismissed her), we sat through a freezing Son et Lumière. We read, we smoked ourselves to haddock-point, we fiddled with translations set us by Marie-Louise, doing a bit each so as to spread the load. Tessa trimmed her cuticles tirelessly, Serena made herself a circular skirt under the supervision of Mme Goujon and flounced around in it like an osprey in a cage. Matty penned lovesick messages to the militaire in his barracks. Christopher jived alone. And all the while I could feel, as Aimée did behind the wheel of her car, this insidious courant d’air, blowing changes our way. Something was riding on it, something new, something different. Trick or treat, impossible to tell.

  III

  The Dancing Starts

  Imagine Cassandra saying something on these lines: Cheer up, Trojans, don’t ask me how or when but I have a kind of inkling this dreary deadlock is not going to last. Would it have earned her the same status as a prophetess? I doubt it: when issuing a warning, understatement is further off the mark tha
n no statement at all.

  Probably a good thing, then, that I kept my premonitions to myself. It must have been early to mid October when the pattern broke. (Although the days swam past us identical as tadpoles, making it hard to give even a vague date. Lounge-about lessons with Marie-Louise till lunchtime; loll-about disc-session afterwards; a few stabs at homework between tea and dinner, and then an orgy of smoke and rock and chocolate to round it all off – even Kant would have had trouble with his time-keeping on a schedule like that.)

  The telephone started ringing at breakfast, which in itself was unusual. Aimée hurried out of the room to answer it, her face still blank and doughy from sleep – it never took on much character till she got around to pencilling in the eyebrows – and came back transfigured. Her face full of character now. Full of mischief again too. Imagine, petits lapins, imagine the good news. The de Vallemberts had arrived, ten days earlier than planned, and had asked us over that very afternoon. For tea, a proper English tea, in our honour. And for cards as well, and maybe (twinkle, twinkle, little browless eye) a spot of dancing. Young Hervé de Vallembert, she seemed to remember from last year’s outings, was a very keen dancer. Château Vallembert was well worth a visit too, we would see, one of the oldest châteaux in the region. It had a moat and dated back to the twelfth century in parts.

  So there were outings, plural, regular ones. Ah. Had been last year and presumably would be this. Ah. The prospect didn’t galvanise us – another bumpy white-knuckle drive, another moat, another historic building with the parts that Aimée mentioned almost certainly unconnected to one another: we were beginning to know what to expect of these privately owned châteaux – but as departure time came nearer it set us stirring none the less.

  Sabine used to maintain that preparation for a dance is comparable to what goes on in the back room of a butcher’s shop: the meat for consumption is sliced and dressed and put in nice little paper packages, ready for the kitchen. But I hadn’t yet learnt to see things through her fiery Jansenist eyes, I was still with Tolstoy and Natasha and the thrill of a young girl’s first ball, so I remember getting caught up in a frivolous, light-hearted activity that early afternoon. I remember the bathroom and the ubiquitous smoke, compounded by steam from the bath water, and the musky smell of Omy, which was the fashionable bath essence of the time. It came in spherical capsules, if my memory is correct, a bit like outsize cod liver oil pills. Omy balls, Omy balls, sang Christopher, swooping around, trying to avoid being evicted on grounds of gender. He wasn’t gay but he had a strong feminine streak in him, or else was stuck in a puppy stage – pre-pubertal – and he liked all the things we liked, and liked to take part in them. Dear Christopher, poor Christopher, I still see him around occasionally in some of the usual haunts but we never talk now – what is there to say?

  Well, I suppose I could ask him to refresh this next set of memories for me for a start. See if his have weathered the scouring of time any better than mine. And the scouring of shame as well. It’s strange, when the backdrops to most of my early sexual experiences are practically hard-wired into me, so clear and durable is their trace, that all I should have left of these – these soirées, these visites or whatever Aimée used to call them – is a jumble of images of moats and towers and salons and fountains and mirrors and dusty wooden floors, and a jumble of faintly cheesy-sounding names to go with them, like de Roquefort and du Boursin and de Brie, all crammed higgledy-piggledy into my storage cells, with no way of sorting them out. Maybe it’s another defence mechanism like the curtain, or maybe it’s a bit of Sabine, lodged fast inside me, marching furiously up and down the way she used to during lesson times when we were inattentive, cuffing the memories on the head one by one and flinging scraps of argot at them. Fous-moi le camp, salaud, tu m’emmerdes, tu m’emmerdes.

  Which one was Château Camembert, pardon, Vallembert? And which, of the many young men with V-necked sweaters and hedgehog hair and corduroy trousers with stifled erections inside them, was Hervé? Was he the tall, good-looking one with the rather foppish hair that flopped instead of sprouting? No, that was Hervé Someone-else – an Italian name: Minucci, Carlucci – the one Tessa pretended to be keen on when she could be bothered; the one who came to her coming-out dance later and whom she treated like shit and serve him right. (But, no, I’m unkind: our hosts were just as much pawns on Aimée’s board as we were.) Was he the lame one, then, the nice one who liked to talk because he didn’t like to dance, and didn’t dare smooch for fear of rebuff? No, that was Armand, Armand de la Brioche or whatever. So was he perhaps the one with the beautiful eyes, hampered in his advances by the Down’s syndrome brother who tagged along behind him everywhere, even on the dance floor, even to the slowest of slows? Que fais tu? What are you doing with your hands like that? What are you doing to that girl? Show, show. Fais voir, fais voir. No, that was Régis. I remember Régis somewhat more clearly than the others, and I remember his family’s château, too, because of the tower with the bolted door and the Mrs Rochester cackle we heard coming from the other side. Another sibling, we surmised, Serena and I, product of inbreeding, sins of the fathers, and doubled up laughing.

  Château de Vallembert. Château de Vallembert. The first of the venues and in its unexpectedness the worst. It must be there somewhere and so must its owners and so must the happenings of that late autumn afternoon, blueprint for so many that followed: a chill lemony cup of tea in a room the size of a rugby pitch, some chill lemony conversation with the adults – Oui, j’habite à Cambridge. Oui, Monsieur, the seat of the famous University. Non, Madame, the Cambridge accent is not all that fancy, it’s the Oxford one I think you have in mind – while their gangling scions stood around on the sidelines, sizing us up, making their choices; and then the tumbling over ourselves as, released, we raced through flights of similar rooms, aiming for some gramophone-equipped den where the scrum could begin.

  Begin but never end, because that was the nature of Aimée’s game. At some point – a carefully calculated point, you could be sure, honed to the nanosecond by years of practice – creak would go the door and on would go the lights and there she would be, hands raised in token horror. Pencilled eyebrows too. But beneath them the telltale glitter of her greedy, naughty, lonely eyes. Oh, what were her bunnies up to? Turn her back for a moment and look what happened. No, no, she didn’t want to hear any excuses, whose idea it was, who started it, we were all equally to blame. Straight into the car with us, and no more parties until we learned to dance nicely, to nice music, with the lights on.

  Cruel? Yes, cruel, slightly, but in a natural way, a bit like dog-fighting only without the violence. Put them in a pen together and see what they get up to. My brief against Aimée has nothing to do, really, with this teasing little hobby of hers. Despite Sabine’s lambastings. After all, we enjoyed it too, didn’t we? Our blood hummed just as fast as Aimée’s did, the rushes of unsated yearning swirling through it were every bit as sweet. Nobody but nature forced us to tart ourselves up punctually every weekend, Friday after Friday and Saturday after Saturday, and pile into the Peugeot and make for another trysting place and start all over again. And stop all over again, and start and stop, and start and stop, until not only our knickers, but, Christ, every fibre of our clothing, and of our bodies too for that matter, were in a twist. Years later I saw a film – poignantly sad, and for me unbearably so – about a scientist who had invented a kind of total sense recorder, not just video but audio and smellio and touchio and the rest, which he set to play every afternoon in a given place at a given time, for as long as the mechanism lasted. The scene he projected was that of a dozen or so young couples dancing on a terrace in the same holiday house, on the same island, where the recorder itself was kept. Then this young man comes across it while it is playing and at first is convinced he is watching a real occurrence: he sees this beautiful girl, in her slinky 1930s outfit, dancing and laughing and chattering with her friends, and he falls in love with her on the spot. Second day, second time aro
und, he comes to the island at a slightly different time so he sees a slightly different excerpt, and still doesn’t twig and falls deeper in love. And so on and so forth for various days until he happens on a duplicate bit and realises something is wrong. But by then, of course, he is irretrievably hooked. So what does he do? He digs out the machine, fiddles with its insides until he has grasped its workings, and then sets it up in recording mode and records himself into the scene in a desperate last-ditch attempt to join the dancers. Which works, and there he stays: trapped there amongst them in a virtual dimension, forever young, forever re-enacting the same little loop of life, over and over.

  In her voyeuse guise, Aimée reminds me of this melancholy young man. How many times, and for how many years, must she have watched the same short take repeat itself, with only the most minor of minor variants? It is depressing merely to hazard a guess. Though the music, I suppose, must have changed a bit – the music and the clothes. Young couples dancing, clinging to one another, swaying to the beat almost imperceptibly, their feet hardly moving, while on the microscopic scale their bodies whirl. The males maybe a little more groggy than the females when the lights go on, but not necessarily so. And how many stills has she got in her mental album of a roomful of bemused, embarrassed interruptus faces and blinking eyes and mussed-up hair? (Which also must have changed a bit in style before reaching the Juliette Greco theatre-curtains that we strove to achieve.) And how long and how badly must she have yearned for her face to be one of them again? What iron-bound impulse drove her to the gaming board, time after time, to set out her compliant pieces? Bad Aimée but in this respect poor Aimée: for her there was no time machine, no recorder, total or otherwise, no way, except by proxy, of worming herself once more into the scene.