Sabine

by A. P.

  My father, although it costs me to admit it, was still close to me at that time; close enough at least to feel – with his nerve-ends, no words needed – that this homecoming daughter was somewhat different from the one he’d seen off. Before, I had always responded to his moods, his rhythms, his whimsical timetable, which decreed no life should assert itself in the house until he gave the signal. A stricture that was all the more easy to enforce now that my grandmother was dead. She used to have blitzes: tea parties, unannounced visits, mornings of potpourri making or sloe-gin brewing, events that called for flurry, which would chase my father, grumbling, into his private retreat on the neglected top floor where only the dogs ventured – dogs and dust and spiders. Since her death, however, the whole house had become his retreat, and he had organised its ways accordingly. Cleaning was done silently and early by a bevy of old helper-biddies who had never ceased to adore him. (Save for a brief period when my mother had been around, but they had seen him punished for his fecklessness and had since taken him back into their hearts. He had winning ways with females of all ages, oh yes.) Cooking was done a little later, its smells and noises sealed off behind the barrier of a heavy green baize door through which no one was allowed to pass until lunchtime. Only Miss Marklin, the secretary, and myself were exempted from this rule and could come and go at will, but once on my father’s side of the barrier another set of sub-rules came into force. Miss Marklin could sit in the office and work, so long as she did so by the light of her green-shaded desk lamp and didn’t use the typewriter: sunshine was bad for hangovers and the tapping of the keys went through the sufferer’s head like a weevil. I could do anything I liked if I kept to my bedroom, even play that obnoxious Elvis Presley, but if I wanted to sit around elsewhere and read, for example, or write letters, or do anything that called for daylight, it must be in the summer house, and if I wanted music it must be classical. Strictly classical: no Baroque, no romantic, and no bloody modern. Meaning anything written since Brahms.

  Lunch was generally a subdued affair but not always, depending on my father’s alcohol intake: if low, he could be as remote and silent as he was at breakfast, and the meal likewise; if high, it could become like a minor version of dinner. Shorter, but dazzling while it lasted. Because dinner was when the lights went on – inside his head as well as out; dinner was a happening, a rite; dinner was when the curtain went up on a world of his creating, and he stepped forward and took you by the hand and whisked you into it.

  Often there were guests, sometimes there weren’t. I liked the evenings with guests best – they went on longer, they began earlier, with a preparation stage to which, like a trusted prop girl, I was sometimes admitted. Caroline is coming tonight, Viola. You remember Caroline? Teddy’s moll. The thin blonde one who models for Vogue, who we all got so excited about until we realised it was only hands and legs. Well, tonight I am going to get her to cry. Don’t ask me how, when she’s tough as they come, but before eleven – no, let’s make it harder, let’s make it half past ten – I am going to have her in floods. Angry ones, not sad ones, I don’t want anyone to be sad except me. You don’t believe it’s possible? Wait and see. Rosie is coming too. Goody. What shall we do with Rosie? Where shall we put her? And what about old Sir Bas, who she always drags along in her wake? I would like to rattle Sir Bas, oh yes, indeed I would. They say that when he was a diplomat he once drank Mustafa Kemal under the table: what about getting him to show some of his old form tonight? Ply him with the pink gin, lovekin, and we’ll have a bash. Remember, always say to him: Would you like a drink, Sir Basil? Never, Would you like another drink? And that applies to everyone.

  Obedient, admiring, attentive, conniving – I was no longer any of these things. And not out of pure rebellious spirit, which he might have liked, might have found flattering, but simply because I was often elsewhere in my thoughts. I ate my meals in England, took my baths in England, but that was about it: the rest of the time, save for brief spells when I was in Luxembourg listening to the radio there, I was in France. I read Saint-Simon and de Montherlant – ostentatiously, not taking in much of either. A snob and a loony – my French would have to progress a lot before I would appreciate why Sabine had recommended them. However, for sheer size they served as a good bulwark against my father’s soundings.

  What’s up with you, Viola? You’re so silent. Have you fallen for a frog, or what? Don’t fall for a frog. They don’t wash enough. And oh, that garlic, you can smell it the moment the porters step on the ferry for your luggage: it rolls before them like a bank of dust before bisons. No, I would hate a French son-in-law. Come on, leave those dreary tomes and let’s have a game of chess.

  Chess, our old sparring ground. I was no match for him but sometimes, flukily, through sheer stubbornness and refusal to quit, I could give him a bit of a battle. Now I just moved the pieces around, wondering inside myself what he would make of a French daughter-in-law.

  I’ll have your queen if you do that.

  Take her then, the silly old trout, I muttered to myself, shoving my bishop to a random square. Let’s get it over with.

  And if you do that it’s check. Where’s my old bottle of water/daughter got to, eh? Where’s my budding Botvinnik? You may well have learned some French with that Madame Whatshername, but at the expense of half your brain cells by the looks of things.

  No, he was wrong, at the expense of my entire being. I was not his bottle of water any more, or his budding Botvinnik or his anything else, and he knew it. Tonight, I vowed silently, I’ll leave you to cope alone with your guests and your manoeuvrings and your storm-in-a-wine-glass dramas, I have better things to do. And tomorrow morning I’ll fill the house with ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and sunshine. I am tired of abiding by your cranky rules: if you have morning-after headaches it’s your own fault: you shouldn’t drink so much.

  Or smoke so much either. Cigarettes – another point of contention between us, perhaps the most symbolic of all. Following a shaky theory of my father’s that if he actively encouraged me in the habit I would smoke less not more, cigarettes were always strewn around the house, in big help-yourself silver boxes, one to practically every room. They were his own special brand: a loose-packed tipless cylinder of Virginia tobacco that smelt of molasses, let off a damp blue smoke, and left bitter, treacly flakes on your tongue. During all recent school holidays I had puffed on them avidly (my father tended to keep count of things, fags especially, so I knew the bonanza wouldn’t last); now, after the toasty French taste I had become accustomed to, they turned my stomach, made me physically sick. When he pressed one on me I turned away with an Ugh.

  He read the signal clearly – I said he was still too close for comfort. Love him, love his cigarettes, and vice versa: shun them, shun him. I was slipping from his grasp. He didn’t know how fast and he didn’t know why – was it just natural independence asserting itself or was there someone on the other side, pulling? – but his biddable Viola (named for the violin he loved to play and also to bend to his will, insofar as that was possible for a lazy dilettante who could never be bothered to practise) was slipping from his grasp.

  Oh, a daughter’s education was such a headache in this day and age. What should he do? What could he do? Too late now to send her somewhere else: there weren’t many suitable places anyway, and the ones there were got so booked up. Could it be anything seriously to worry about? Could Madame Tiddlypush be unreliable on this score? Surely not, people swore by her. There had been an accident once, apparently, but a long time ago and not of that kind … something to do with a car. Well, that was one thing at least he needn’t worry about, or not until Viola passed her test: car crashes. And even then – lightning never struck twice. All the same, perhaps he ought to have a word with Madame over the blower before the next term started, just to be on the safe side. Tell her to keep her eyes open. How could he put it in his rusty French that would hit the right note and not give offence? Cherchez l’homme? Gare à qui la louche? He had lost a wife to an a
lien plunderer once, he was damned if he was going to lose a daughter.

  IX

  A Sliver of Bliss

  Happiness makes for a boring story, so they say. Well, not to worry, there wasn’t much happiness to relate, not lengthwise. The brief Easter term I went back to, the brief Easter holiday that followed – miraculously spent staying with Sabine because my father was away travelling and Aimée was busy doing I dread to think what – how long would it have been? Three and a half months? Not much longer. Bear with me, then, through this blissful/boring time: the tempo will soon pick up again.

  There’s not even any sex to tide us over. Just closeness, and gender-free passion, and two young girls’ minds roving through their private universe together. A universe made of paper mostly: we read ourselves blind. Men are so sold on the fucking, Sabine said, they get drawn into love by it: foutre today, foutre tomorrow, and that’s it, they’re hooked. With us it will be different: we will be so sold on the love it will one day draw us into fucking.

  As if our time together had no boundary. As if, as if.

  Once, only once, she got me to masturbate in front of her – but in a didactic spirit, to make sure I was doing it properly. It’s a point of strength if you can give yourself pleasure, she explained. Like that you don’t have to depend on others, don’t give them leverage over you. If the clitoris is enough to get you off, as it seems it is with you, then that’s fine, the longer you can stay with it the better, but if you find you need some friction on the inside as well, then I suggest fingers to start with. What do you mean, you won’t be able to manage it? Of course you’ll be able to manage it. Two hands can do two different things at once, don’t be feeble. Try now. Try rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time. See? That’s all it takes – a bit of concentration, a bit of practice, and you’re away. If you do graduate to objects, though, remember: never use anything composite or difficult to retrieve. My medical books are full of lists of items that have got marooned up people’s bodies by mistake. Yes, even a portable umbrella cover, I swear. Although heading the list are Johnny Walker corks, but why Johnny Walker I have no idea, perhaps the name makes it a shade more personal. I de-virginised myself with a courgette, but that wasn’t very clever either.

  Oh, yes, Sabine, it was; if only I had followed your example. In the void I shout out your name sometimes. The world is so weird, with its black holes and time worms, perhaps in some dimension you can hear me. (The same way I can hear you now. That’s right, Coeur de lion, you are saying: Shift to mysto-physics when all else fails. Perhaps in some dimension I am still there, eating and grousing and puffing on my reefers. Hah. Little tip: perhaps you ought to go and see a good psychiatrist – regularly, I mean, undertake a proper course of therapy – before it’s too late. Coming up to retirement age and you’re still raving on about that cat and the blood and the Marquise …)

  And, oh, you too, my loved and hated father. I shout yours too. No, I don’t blame you for what you did – you were doing your best for me, I know, on your scale of values: getting me into the right set, assuring me a dim and lasting future – I blame you for what you didn’t do. I blame you for your silence. And for the veils and curtains you drew over everything, as far back as I remember. You weren’t shielding me, you know, you were exposing me. The half-light, the half-said, the dreadful bog of ignorance in which you left me floundering – this is what I blame you for. Oh, I grant the facts of your life might have been difficult to expound to a growing child, might even have been impossible, but that’s not what I’m talking about here and you know it. I’m talking about my grandmother’s – your mother’s – deathbed, for one. Why did you let me go into that room of horrors unwarned, unarmed, uninformed? I could have said goodbye to her properly, I could have understood why she couldn’t say goodbye to me. I could have governed the grim paraphernalia of the sickroom – those towel-covered basins and stained wads of gauze – so they wouldn’t have haunted my head at night-time, drifting around in my dreams like ghostly galleons. Or, if they had, at least I would have been empowered by knowledge to repulse them.

  I am talking – yes, I am, yippee, at last one of us is – about my mother’s flight as well. Why didn’t you give me a scrap of mental armour against that either? For years I thought it was me she had run away from. Didn’t that ever occur to you – that in my ignorance I might blame myself and suffer as a result? A child so bad her own mother gives up on her and scarpers – with a ski instructor, of all people, she who doesn’t even like skiing. Again, maybe you couldn’t have told me everything, or even very much, but you could have told me something. Told me that marriages fail one in three, or whatever the statistic is; that young women get restless and hanker after a day-life as well as a night-life. After mountain air as well as the fumes of the Four Hundred, or whatever your favourite hang-out in those days was called. You could have told me about the accident in which she died, too. Yourself, instead of just dousing my bedlinen in your tears and leaving the task to Grandmother. It was beyond you at that moment? OK, fair enough – a steering wheel through the sternum is so neat an end in the circumstances that it almost smacks of purpose – but you could have spoken about it later, spoken about her later. Spoken, for Christ’s sake… If only to say you couldn’t speak – for sorrow, if that was what it was, and not just rage at her having given you the slip for good. Knowledge may not be power – Sabine may have been too optimistic on that score – but ignorance is weakness, that’s for sure, and with that diet of ignorance you raised me weak and left me weak.

  And stayed weak yourself. That flipping fiddle of yours, your gift for music, your knack with animals, your flair for chess – think if you had studied these things, gone into them, developed them, think how much richer …

  Oh, what’s the point in my blathering on like this to a set of faded video clips inside my head? Too late for these things now. You’ve gone and I miss you, despite everything. Which is a pretty big everything and a pretty big admission. Cagey, though, weren’t you, Daddy, even in departure? A letter with instructions on how to die. Big deal. Still nothing on how to live – just a detailed, step-by-step info sheet on how to damn well die. Big, big deal.

  But anyway, no doubt it will come in useful some day. Meanwhile back to France and Easter and my sliver of bliss. So thin I could tell it in a sentence, and so intense I could never really tell it in a lifetime. Sabine’s home, for a start. On the surface another of the many châteaux-crumbles Aimée had lugged us to in her mobile Peugeot brothel: the same big, empty, draughty rooms with the little archipelagos of furniture dotted around them: a gilt and crystal table with a photograph of Sabine’s deceased father in company of the Comte de Paris (not, as I took him to be, much to Sabine’s delight, the Emperor of Japan); a set of beautiful rosewood chairs my father would have given one of his much prized eye-teeth for, with the seat-stuffing coming out; a faded wall tapestry of a deer hunt – typical, this; an ormolu clock. The usual tokens of grace and the fall therefrom. Nothing particular to mark it off from the many other similar dwellings we had visited, there was even a room given over to the ever-present apples. But not one of them was rotting, and in that lay the difference. That, and the bright, sunny, almost magical presence of Ghislaine, Sabine’s mum. The place lived. With no money but no fuss either she somehow held it together. No dust, no dirt, no neglect. No veils drawn over horrors because no horrors to draw them over, which to me was the most important point of all. One bathroom only in working order, but a really nice one, with an old-fashioned dappled rocking horse to put the towels on and huge bowls of dried honesty placed in strategic spots to cover up the stains. And even they were scrubbed clean, and painted over, the bigger ones, to make them look like frescoes.

  Beauty struggling against privation, and managing somehow to come out victorious.

  The mistress of the house was the same: welcoming, open, time-scarred and triumphantly beautiful. Old-fashioned, yes, conventional, yes, but in such a simple, unf
orced way, you couldn’t really wish or imagine her otherwise. Criticism seemed alien to her nature, complaint also. Fate had dealt her no money, a dead husband, two growing sons and an unclassifiable daughter: suivi, it had also given her enough love to make the deal worthwhile. Oh, yes, I fell hook line and sinker for Sabine’s mum. I suppose not having one of my own left me vulnerable in this respect. With the turmoil that followed I never wrote to thank her for my stay, and this has weighed on me always. I couldn’t very well have written later – we were past the politeness patch by then and into territory far more complicated – but I could and should have written at the time. No matter how difficult it is to tell someone adequately that they have given you a glimpse of heaven on earth, I should have tried. I just hope, though perception was not her strong point, that she read my gratitude in my face while I was there. While I sat watching her and Sabine together, for example: mother and daughter the way they should be but seldom are, so close that, although their different outlooks furnish ample sandpaper, there is literally no room for chafing. While Sabine and I lay in bed for four days with gastric flu, and she brought us glasses of barley water, and put eau de cologne compresses on our foreheads, and then sat on a stool between the two beds and read us Dumas. Regression? No, for me it was progress: I was learning what a home was like, what a family was like when it was headed by a brave and generous woman and not by a …

  And talking of monsters, I don’t remember when exactly the cat business started, whether we were still at Sabine’s mum’s or back in the château already. The picture I have in my mind is simply that of the corner of a bed, on which Sabine and I are lying, with beyond it, at floor level, the rectangular pane of the French window through which the animal is framed – grey fur against the grey paving stone outside – still as a needlework pattern. If I could see the bed cover I would know: clean, and it would be Sabine’s home; grubby, and it would be Aimée’s. But the foreground is blank, all the focus being turned on that bony, triangular cat face staring through the glass. The school cat, back to its spying tricks. And if I cast around for feelings, all I can recapture is an echo of something distasteful, close to fear or shock. Shock at what, though? At seeing the animal where I do not expect to see it? Or seeing it how I do not expect to see it?