by A. P.
Even the biggest blaze, though, has to start somewhere, with a tiny spark, or arsonists would be out of business. This one had started as a dare. We were nonplussed by Sabine at the outset and we were slightly scared of her. She generated giggles but at the same time she generated respect. The word didn’t exist then except to describe temperature, but despite her quirks and her clothes and her complete detachment from everything that set us ticking, we found her cool. Yes, that was it exactly, we found her cool. As a teacher she never wooed us, never threw out hooks of any kind, never even beckoned; she just sat there in front of us, Gauloise clamped between faintly scornful lips (a sneer, or just a smoke grimace?), and set before us, indifferent to our reactions, samples of things she relied on to do the wooing for her. This is Pascal, musing on Cleopatra’s nose. This is the Alexandrine hexameter in the hands of someone who can really beat the shit out of it. This is Victor Hugo in a sad, quiet mood, all bombast leached out of him by grief. This is du Bellay’s showpiece, this is an exchange from Molière, so funny on the surface yet so mordant it draws blood … This is this, this is the other: take it or leave it. But if you leave it I shall know darn well with whom the fault lies …
(… Just as I know already where the fault for your snogging sessions lies, before I’ve even seen one for myself. You think I’m weird and unfeminine and out of things, but there you’re wrong: I’ve grown up with most of these boys and, precisely because I’m weird and unfeminine, they talk in front of me like soldiers in a barracks. You wouldn’t be so keen on them if you could hear some of the things they say: That one’s hot; that one’s dopey; that one’s a whore; that one’s got breasts on her so small they’re like mosquito bites. Really, Sabine? Yes, really, Sabine. Oh, I know Aimée’s a warped old vulture who’s seen no pickings since her husband died in the war, but you don’t have to provide them for her, do you? Not so readily? Not on such a scale? You could – idea, idea – put a bit more value on yourselves and spend the weekends studying instead. Girls have brains, you know, some of them. Who knows? Maybe you do too.)
She’s a roaring lesbian, of course, Christopher told us knowledgeably, round about the fourth morning of lessons.
Somehow none of us girls had realised that. (It was news to me even that lesbians roared. How did they roar, I wondered? Anything like the stags?) We were rather cross that he had got there before us, poaching on what should have been female ground. Oh surely not, we countered, she’s just a bit masculine, that’s all.
Serena, on the basis of a boarding-school scuffle in which a prefect had tried to assault her under the shower with a toothbrush (Which end? Bristly or smooth? She hadn’t had time to notice, silly, and nor would you with your fanny under siege), quickly claimed superior knowledge. It’s never the ones who look mannish, she explained, it’s the ones that look female but sort of tough – the ones with bulging biceps and no podgy patches at the tops of their thighs, they’re the ones you want to watch out for.
Is that true? Tessa was sufficiently intrigued to sit bolt upright for a change. I thought it was more the clothes – dinner jackets and cigars and pipes and things, and cropped hair and living in the country and breeding dogs. She pulled up her skirt and pinched at her thighs enquiringly. I haven’t got any fat at the top of my …
God, we knew nothing. Nobody had ever told us anything. I knew so little I didn’t dare contribute to the discussion at all.
But you haven’t got any biceps either, dolt.
Nor I have. Tessa sank into reclining pose again, relieved, and the conversation shifted to the practical – how and whether this admittedly shallow pool of information could contribute to a correct reading of Sabine. Had anyone noticed her biceps? Anyone caught a glimpse of her thighs, or would we have to wait till summer when we went bathing?
Ninnies. It was Christopher again. No need to go spying around under Sabine’s jupon mité, and no need to wait for her to take it off either, it was much more simple: we just had to flirt with her, that’s all. Not all together, of course – it’d look odd, like we’d been dosed with Spanish Fly in Mme Goujon’s soup – but gradually, one at a time. We flirt with her and we see how she reacts. To whom she reacts. Bet it’s Serena, bet it’s any of you in fact, but I bet it’s not me. Now, who volunteers to go first?
Is that a good pyre for the spark of love to ignite? A quarter disgust, a quarter fear, and the other half bravado? Well, it seems like it is. Like it was. So good that I am tempted to think a fair-sized flame was there already – else why should I have resented Christopher plumping straight away for Serena? Why Serena, for Christ’s sake? Why not me? When you are older, Viola, said my father during one of those charged, maudlin, evening performances that he scripted and directed with such skill, you will learn about love; you will know nothing about it, really, until you are older. No one ever does.
I think it was meant sincerely, but what a falsehood that is. I am older now – quite long in the tooth, as my father mischievously liked to describe himself – and I know nothing about love any more, least of all where to find it. I know about taste, and I know a certain amount about the human body, and I know about allergies and food intolerance, and gardening and armchair tennis, and a little about human nature too. I know about comfort, cars, Mozart operas, cooking, mushrooms, birds of prey, all sorts of things, but any knowledge of love has gone, leaving just a sweet-scented rim of memory in my head, like the slick of Omy essence around the bathtub.
Love is about giving, about caring for the other person’s welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives’ tales, old husbands’ tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old.
Of a seventeen-year-old girl on horseback, in the forecourt of the Château de Vibrey, on a raw December morning – can it be the feast day of Saint Hubert? Some special hunting occasion anyway – as the Marquis de Vibrey’s deer hounds pour out of their kennels, a howling hairy river, straining for the chase. Because it was there, or so this leathery old relic inside the specimen jar tells me, that the blaze really took hold.
Aimée was desperate that at least one of us should take part in this equine rally, so loaded with social implications, in her book at any rate. Doesn’t any one of you know how to ride a horse? she asked plaintively at lunchtime, and then again at dinner, and at lunch the next day. I thought English children all learned how to ride horses. Isn’t le foxhunting your national sport? The Marquis would so appreciate it if someone from the school were to show up at the meet, I know he would. He would even lend us mounts. Viola? Your father comes to Longchamps for the races, and he is a friend of the Marquis too. No? You are sure? Christophair? Matty? Personne?
Hunting was not cool, and definitely not Existentialist. Imagine Sartre in a pink coat and breeches, imagine Simone de Beauvoir in bowler hat and veil. Brushing aside these considerations, however, I finally came clean about my riding skills and volunteered when I saw the outfit that Aimée was putting on the line as a special lure for her recalcitrant charges. Her own outfit once upon a more glamorous time. Even Christopher would have looked good in it, although in a manner that might have raised an eyebrow or two among the rest of the field. The coat was not pink but a beautiful dull-green velvet, olive-cum-moss, and the breeches were concealed by a swathe of the same material, which could either be draped sideways across both legs, should the rider be sitting side-saddle, or, in the case of an astri
de rider, be removed altogether to give sway to the breeches – buff-coloured suede, and skin, skintight. The waist of the jacket was tight-fitted too, before jutting out in a redingote flare, and the fastenings were brocaded froggings which did up, Chinese fashion, on one side. The veil was there – a very finely meshed one – but instead of being attached to the brim of a top hat or bowler, it hung from the two side-horns of a green velvet tricorne, braided round with old-gold braid. This veil went with the skirt, in my opinion, and in Aimée’s too, and was regretfully set aside. A shame I insisted on riding à califourchon and not in the proper ladies’ way: the Marquis would have been charmed to see me in full regalia, but never mind, if that was how things were done in England nowadays …
Even in its shorn version I loved myself in this costume the moment I put it on, and I loved myself in it in a different way later, because – well, because it led to what it did. How important is scenography for love? I wonder. Perhaps, despite everything, very. Perhaps, despite everything, it even caused Sabine to fall in love with me on that particular day instead of another, though she would have bitten her tongue out rather than admit it: the costume; the Marquis’s peppery little mare, skitting around, farting her rump off; the sharp glittery frosty morning air; the yelping hounds; the yew-lined forecourt with the brooding façade of the château casting its shadow over the jostling mêlée assembled there. The absurd, anachronistic tang of it all – the age-old savage rite, masked with the trappings of an elegant epoch that lay between, and crowned by a modernity that didn’t even jar, but merely added the pathos of the real, like the fly in a Flemish still-life. The Marquise’s goggles, to shield her contact lenses, brought out for her on a silver tray. The huntsman’s state-of-the-art artillery. The tractor in the corner, with the cart for hauling away the carcass. The row of low-slung Citroens parked outside the gates. And Sabine’s rolled-up jeans.
For the lens of Visconti, Sabine would have been dressed like me, only more severely. Black maybe, or midnight blue. Hatless, a white jabot at her throat, her hair tied back in a Jacobean bow. The horse she rode would have been bigger and darker, and she would have sat on it astride while I would have perched on mine sideways, Aimée’s velvet skirt spread to best advantage. I don’t know which director would have put her in jeans like that, or placed her on a moped, sandwiched between two little kid brothers, one fore, one aft. A neo-realist like Rossellini perhaps, or perhaps the early Louis Malle.
Someone at any rate who knew his visual onions. Set off against the riders in their traditional chasseur garb, she looked fantastic – smouldering and chippy, like a slightly more feminine version of James Dean. Or maybe, from the aggressiveness point of view, like a slightly more masculine version of James Dean. Same iconic aura, same swung-dash mouth and rebel glare. Instead of seeming out of place she managed somehow to displace the rest of us. Her brothers, far from glaring, perched there enraptured, goggling appreciatively at everything. (Doubly silly of them when she, their sister, was the only thing there worth goggling at: the only real live person in a museum full of waxworks.) Ten years later she’d have had a placard round her neck saying, Stop the Slaughter, Save the Stags, or something like that, but the stags, poor beasts, were not that high on Sabine’s political agenda as yet: they were masculine, after all. Like the brothers she had to cart around with her, and to whose education she must contribute money and, if necessary, subordinate her own. No, it was more caste and gender she was reacting against: the artificial, stick-in-the-mud nature of the social system into which she was born. She was reacting, in a nutshell, against the very tricornes and velvets that I was wearing. And that most of the other flibbertigibbets were wearing too, because the green get-up was the official hunt dress for ladies. Grow up, the lot of you, step into the twentieth century. Take cognisance of your poules de luxe status. Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of what it’s doing to her innards, poor wretch, think of the strain on her spine when she goes over the fences.
I was still a novice at grasping what was going through Sabine’s mind but, even so, what little I grasped I subscribed to instinctively from that instant onward. From swanking, which was what I had been busy doing before I spotted her, I felt suddenly ashamed. Obsolete, ridiculous, uncouth – a barbarian faced with the evidence of another, more progressive, civilisation. A Scythian eyeing the workmanship on Alexander’s chariot, an ancient Briton watching a Roman plumber lay the drains. Where did I belong? On which side of the divide did my inner voice tell me to range myself? With the pack? With the baying hounds and the stomping horses and the blithe, confident band of riders, bobbing out of the courtyard already on a wave of predatory bonhomie? Or with the lone, thoughtful, challenging figure left behind on the moped with the kids? The misfit, the stumbling block, the gadfly.
No question, my place was on the outside, with Sabine. But no question, either, that my new address took some time to filter through to me. I was in the swim that day and might as well go with it. Even Saint Augustine, I seem to remember, took a bit of time over his conversion, hedged a bit, dawdled a bit over his parting with his pagan mistress. So, one last hunt, ma copine, if you don’t mind, and let it be a good one.
VI
The Hunt
The hunt was not a good one, it was a disappointment, and serve me right. I did the same with childhood – tried to stay there just that little bit longer than I had a right to, and as a result my games went dead on me.
The hunt went dead on me too – not stone-cold dead but steaming dead, like the flayed body of the stag, ready for partition: Mane, Thekel, Uphares. Some critic, comparing French to English poetry, once said that the first is like a well-schooled horse going through its paces, while the second is a horse that bolts and then takes wing. Well, if my brief experience is anything to go by, you could say the same for French hunting. And possibly for their gardens too.
Not that I want to defend blood sports – how could I? From the position I’m in now sport and blood can’t even be spoken of in the same breath – but in every hunt I had taken part in thus far, the adrenaline rush had always been sufficient to sweep the mind clean of other considerations. One little quick natural death – what was that when set against the waxing bliss of the pursuit? To merge with another animal, to be a centaur again, to have the acumen of a human and the strength of a horse, and to focus these powers on the attainment of a single, simple goal: to follow the chase, to follow the chase. I had first felt this atavistic rapture as a toddler, my mount attached to my mother’s by the umbilical cord of a leading rein, and it had never failed me since, not till this day with the de Vibrey deer hounds.
There was no chase, you see, no call for strength and still less for acumen. Everyone knew from the outset exactly where the stag would make for: the river had been made inaccessible to him, so he would head instead for the only expanse of water at his disposal: a small artificial lake, triangular in shape and trap-like in position, situated in a clearing at the centre of the forest. Once he got there, unless they muffed it badly, his escape would be blocked by the hounds on the hypotenuse and by cliffs of tufa on the other two sides, lowish but too high for him to clear. Leaving the narrow circumference of the huntsman’s bullet as the only exit.
Knowing this, what need was there for us ladies to sully our velvet habits in the mire or tear them to shreds leaping over hedges and ditches and other obstacles? And what need for the horses to strain their tendons, or the gentlemen to risk a fall and a return to their Paris offices in Paris plaster? None at all. Naturally, everyone was anxious to show off a bit, do a little cavorting around, sail over a few docile fences (else what was the point in swapping the Citroen for horseback in the first place?), so to this end several long straight avenues had been cut through the forest, each one presenting, to the right, a row of brushwood-covered hurdles about the height of a coffee-ta
ble, and to the left, a chequered sward of new-laid tufted grass. The direction of the avenues led inexorably lakewards: all that was missing were the signposts.
Hoppity, hoppity, hop. Over the hurdles we went in a tidy cavalcade and made for the next lot. Those who were less athletically inclined loped along on the grass carpet, parallel to the jumpers, making conversation. A salon in the saddle. A mounted minuet.
Where were the hounds all this leisurely while? Loping through a smaller set of avenues, no doubt. On the sound assumption they knew the measures as well as the riders did. And where was the huntsman? Would he have bothered to go with them? Well, perhaps yes, just in case they took a short cut and ended up in the local butcher’s shop before the stag did, but probably no: having seen his pack safely off on the scent, he was cutting comfortably through the forest by his own route. Direct to the place of rendezvous, no coffee-table obstacles for him. Wiping the spit from his horn, maybe, in order to get it to sound – the French hunting horn looked to be an admirably designed spit-trap – or loading his gun in preparation for the coup de grâce.
For the kill, to give it its more fitting name, since grace hardly came into the picture. In Suffolk, in Somerset, in Ireland, in all the places I had hunted before, the kill had been an adjunct, significant but at the same time dispensable, like the coda to an already finished and well-rounded piece of music. Here, on the other hand, it was the centrepiece. In its absence our dainty little suite of caprioles would have had no sense at all. Instead of getting things over swiftly, therefore, in a low-key fashion in front of the few spectators who had managed to keep his pace, the huntsman postponed his task until the arrival of the entire field. Piling artifice on artifice, and creating a long interval between grab and strike, which is not a good thing, either for prey or predator. Judges know this. I know it too.
