Daughter of Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  Whatever happened now, she knew she would go. They could rant and rave but she had breached the ramparts and Grandmama’s tone alone told her they knew it. For years she’d let Maman’s quiet submissiveness be her guide, watched as Maman saved her energy and held her ground only for her children, only for the biggest, most momentous things in their lives. She’d copied her, but it had never suited her character, and now she was a new creature. Her father’s daughter! Tante Louise’s niece! Cicely’s cousin! All of these people, yet more importantly, she was herself, and she was about to find out who that person really was.

  She walked for hours, not thinking too much, just content to know that she herself had made this move. It was enough for the moment. Later they could tell her what they had decided in these further discussions of theirs. Either they would pay her fare and send her, in which case she would have to put up with tiresome weeks of interference before she finally boarded any train, or they would remain immovable, in which case she would simply go around them and sell the jewellery her mother would never have grudged her. The latter would be simpler really. She could then just leave, maybe stay with Cicely while she arranged tickets, a passport, then go independently to Paris. The mere thought was as exhilarating as the wind.

  Night fell early in March, and by the time she made her way back along the too familiar country roads to the house a half-moon was trying to show itself through the clouds. She’d left the house without a coat or gloves, and only by tucking them into her jumper could she keep any feeling in her hands. Her feet were also as cold as ice, and she knew that the rest of her would feel the chill as soon as she went indoors. But the cold was like a triumph, vital, rejuvenating. It quickened the breath and strangely fired up the heart.

  She entered the house by the side door, looking for the first time at her watch. They would already be at dinner. Life was marked at the moment by a series of mealtime encounters, it seemed, by the monotony of the round of breakfasts, lunches and dinners all served in that same green dining room with its oppressive mahogany sideboards and the huge table of which the three diners occupied one tiny end. Casserole for lunch, what would it be for dinner? Fish, probably. Grandmama liked to eat light foods in the evening. They never ate badly at Forsham, Madeleine acknowledged. Grandmama was French, after all. It was the predictability of each meal, and the repetitive conversations, and the long silences, and the criticisms hovering in waiting for any misplaced word which had annihilated Madeleine for years. Now she went in head high and smiling. Who cared, after all?

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Gare du Nord was teeming with people at the rush hour as Madeleine and Robert hauled their cases off the train from Boulogne and looked around for a porter. At first sight the station looked just the same as any busy London station: dark, grimy, metallic, smelling of oil and dirt. Even the passengers looked the same with the harried look of passengers everywhere. Madeleine felt a pang of disappointment, but as the porter reached them, muttering in French, pulling on a chewed cigarette, a whiff of French tobacco came towards her and she felt a surge of excitement. Further along the platform café tables spilt into the alleyway, and as she followed the trolley towards them she was hit by the smell of intense, freshly ground coffee. Men in work clothes leant on the café bar’s counter drinking what she thought must be pastis, cloudy and yellow in thin, straight, painted glasses. Workers in overalls stood alongside raincoated office workers with an eye on their watches, not a word passing between them. Madeleine slowed to pass the tables, stepping around a child playing on the grubby floor, his mother in furs, gazing intently at her companion over something long and mint-coloured in a tall glass. Her husband? Her lover? Madeleine felt as though she was moving in slow motion through a long-lost world.

  Robert strode along before her alongside the porter. She’d made it to France more easily than she could have imagined after all, but the elders had insisted she mustn’t travel alone, and had sent Robert with her on the outward journey. Not that she was complaining. It was wonderful to have Robert with her, and he too had a past and a present to discover in France.

  At the end of the platform, behind the barrier, she could already see Cousin Solange, standing out in an elegant cream suit in front of all the rest of the waiting crowd. Beside her, with a hand lightly holding her elbow, stood a rather round, pepper-haired man with a small moustache, whom Madeleine supposed must be Solange’s husband Bernard. She waved, and Solange surged forward until she was nearly touching the barrier.

  As Madeleine came through, Solange wafted her into an embrace. ‘Madeleine. I would hardly have known you. How wonderful to see you. And this must be … oh!’

  Solange’s eyes gaped, and as Madeleine looked from her to Robert she suddenly realised why. Solange had never met Robert, who was so much the image of the young Luis whom Solange and her family had known. They could expect this level of astonishment from everyone who had known their father. She hastened to explain, with an extraordinary flush of pleasure.

  ‘This is Robert, Solange. He is very like our father, I know. Is that what surprised you?’

  ‘Surprised me? It’s astonishing!’ said Solange. She reached out to Robert and smiled rather shakily. ‘Robert you are very welcome. My mother will be incredulous when she sees you. Your father was such a distinctive-looking man, so … so broad, and dark and handsome. Oh, I sound stupid, but you are Luis. You are simply Luis.’

  Robert smiled, and allowed himself to be enfolded in a perfumed embrace. Solange kissed him on both cheeks and then turned to her husband.

  ‘Bernard, these are my cousins Madeleine and Robert. You know their history, but you just can’t know what it means to see this young man, so much the image of that astonishing father of his.’

  Bernard came forward, gracefully manoeuvring past Robert, and first kissed Madeleine on both cheeks. ‘No doubt, Solange, but my first welcome must be for this beautiful young woman. How do you do, my dear Madeleine? I have heard so much about you ever since Solange visited London and met you. She has always talked about how much of your father she saw in you also, as well as the beauty of your mother. I only met your mother once, but I will never forget how lovely she was.’

  He turned to Robert, and shook his hand. ‘Robert, it is good to meet you at last. You are very welcome. You are both very welcome.’

  Madeleine drank in the moment, not wanting to move. These people welcomed them because of their parents, not in spite of them. There were memories here which they could explore, and goodwill which radiated and warmed them. She looked across at Robert again, looking for the mirror of her excitement, and caught a reflected smile.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Solange. ‘My mother is waiting anxiously to see you.’

  A short taxi ride took them through some of the most famous streets of Paris. They swept down the rue Lafayette, and on into the Boulevard Haussmann. The evening was drawing in, and behind the avenue of trees the department stores were all lit up, revealing a quick glimpse of chic luxury as the taxi followed the slow-moving evening traffic. The Arc de Triomphe loomed ahead.

  ‘Look!’ Madeleine breathed at Robert, as they drove past the arch, and on into the Avenue Victor Hugo.

  ‘I know,’ he replied, with suppressed excitement.

  On down the Victor Hugo and into the sixteenth arrondissement, where Tante Louise had her apartment. Madeleine had known that the family lived in the heart of fashionable Paris, but was awed now that she was here.

  ‘Don’t be too impressed,’ said Solange, as they drew up outside the beautiful old stone apartment block, with its elaborate wrought iron balconies framing every window. ‘This apartment has belonged to the family for a very long time, and those who had the money to buy it are long dead. Even the furniture, which is quite beautiful, was mainly bought by my grandfather.’

  Access to the second-floor apartment was by an ancient lift with a grill which had to be pulled across and clicked shut before the lift would move. In previous times, Madelei
ne guessed, there would have been a man operating the lift for residents, just as the desk in the entrance hall would have had a permanent concierge. The hallways were still perfectly maintained, with immaculate black and white tiling on the floors and lovely green glass tiling on the bottom half of the walls.

  As the lift doors opened onto the second floor, Bernard stepped out ahead of Madeleine, and held out a hand to guide her quite unnecessarily over the lip of the grill door. She took the hand with a rush of feminine pleasure. He led her to a panelled wooden door and rang the bell. A maid quickly answered, dressed in a black dress and white apron, and ushered them into a high-ceilinged entrance hall. Madeleine took in the marble flooring, a side table from the early nineteenth century, possibly Bourbon, she thought, and a Sèvres vase painted in gold. There was an old landscape as well, a hunting scene with graceful, long-limbed hounds. The whole scene was so elegant, so impossibly French, that it reminded Madeleine of idealised Hollywood visions of Paris, except that here was Tante Louise, emerging from a door facing them, busy and tiny and mobile as ever, her face a mass of tiny lines which framed her thin lips and nose, and almost seemed to be holding her bird-like little face together.

  ‘My children!’ she cried, both hands outstretched as she took Madeleine then Robert into her arms. ‘My Robert, oh my goodness, Robert! Why, I haven’t seen you since you were just a baby. I knew then that we didn’t need to worry about Luis’s heritage. You were his image then as you are now.’

  She smiled triumphantly at Solange, who was murmuring agreement. ‘You didn’t ever see Robert as a baby, did you? You must have had a surprise when you saw him today. I remember Elise had a photo of Luis kneeling on the floor in the apartment in Vermeilla looking down into Robert’s eyes. Robert was just a baby and lying on a rug, looking up at Luis – the two of them in profile. The likeness was stunning. I don’t suppose you remember your father, do you Robert? No? Well then, we have much to talk about. But first, come in all of you. It is the aperitif hour, and we have much to celebrate.’

  She led them into the drawing room, ushered Madeleine to a cream-coloured chapeau de gendarme armchair, and drew Robert down next to her on an embroidered sofa on ebony legs, which looked as though it would never carry his weight.

  ‘We’ll have a glass of champagne shall we, my dears, to celebrate? Or would you prefer a whisky, Robert?’

  She talked effortlessly and without pauses, about their journey, about the weather, about what Paris could offer them as entertainment at this season.

  ‘Maria Callas is here, at the Opera House. You must go. She’s so much at her best just now. Rossini’s Tosca, that’s what you must see. And, of course, you must go to the cinema. There’s that amusing little film by Jacques Tati that everyone’s so delighted about. Solange must find you some young people to go to that with. Such a lovable character, Monsieur Hulot. I saw the last film, a few years ago. The style’s really rather modern for me, but terribly clever and such fun.’

  ‘And then, of course, you have to see Paris. Do you like art? Oh, I am glad. So sad to come to Paris and not love its art. We are just coming into the season of major exhibitions. Such a good time for you to visit. And the weather is improving daily. It felt almost like summer yesterday. Robert, how long can you stay with us?’

  ‘No more than ten days, unfortunately, Tante Louise. I’m on holiday just now from Oxford, but the new term begins at the end of April.’

  Tante Louise nodded approvingly. ‘Of course, you are at Oxford University! Clever young man. Well, we’ll just have to make the most of your short time to do all the essential things, then later we can do fashions and the like with Madeleine. Not so, Solange? We’ve been looking forward to having a young lady around again to shop with. Oh, we’ll keep you busy, never you fear.’

  Over a delicate dinner of fish rich in wine and butter, conversation became more serious. Solange wanted to know about their mother’s illness. Had there been warning? How come the news of her illness had only reached them in Paris a few weeks before her death? They would have travelled to see her. There was so much still to be said between them. It filled Madeleine with anger, because she knew that although her mother’s illness had been diagnosed very late, the elders had taken even longer to communicate the news to Paris, leaving no time for any new rapprochement. But there would be no purpose served now by telling them this, so she explained simply how no one had known until very near the end, how Elise had kept her symptoms hidden from them all.

  ‘I don’t think she really wanted to know what was wrong with her, or to be treated,’ she said. ‘Maman was such a private person. She said so little and imposed so little that I don’t think anyone thought to question why she was fading away before our eyes. She just didn’t want to fight, you see.’

  Louise was astonished. ‘But Elise was a fighter! She was an Amazon. She may have looked soft and pink and feminine, but she could take on the world!’

  Robert put down his coffee cup with a start. He gaped at Louise, and she looked back at him with equal surprise. Robert flushed rather self-consciously, and straightened his little cup, which had landed at an awkward angle. He paused deliberately and then smiled at Tante Louise.

  ‘Forgive me, Tante Louise. We didn’t know this Elise,’ he explained. ‘My mother in later life was not the same person we think you knew. She seemed to be a beaten person after my father died. But we know there was more to her than we knew. We have so much we want to learn about her. We don’t know anything, you see. Nothing about her youth, or about her and Papa, or her life in France. She didn’t talk about it, ever.’

  ‘She used to talk, though,’ Madeleine interposed. ‘When we first arrived back in England from Vermeilla we talked all the time about Papa, and France, and all of you, and all the people we’d left behind in the village. We talked about when we would go home, and I used to make up stories about what we would do, and she would laugh at me a little. Robert doesn’t remember.’

  ‘And then it stopped?’ Louise wanted to know.

  ‘Yes, when we got the letter telling us Papa had died. It’s all a bit hazy to me, because for a few weeks I didn’t really see Maman. She was too ill to see anyone, I think. Nobody told me anything, but I wasn’t allowed near her room, and I spent all my time with Robert and his nanny. I didn’t know then that Papa had been killed. Maman told me that later, and she told me he had been very brave and we should be proud of him, and she let me cry, and held me, but that was all. After that, all our little chats about Papa and the friends stopped, and if I asked any questions she would just smile – you know that soft smile of hers – and change the subject. And I soon learnt not to ask any more.’

  ‘And her character changed as well?’

  Madeleine nodded, and Louise nodded in her turn.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me so much. I wondered, that day in London, to see Elise so quiet at first, and sort of faded, almost. But then she became more animated, and more like her old self, so I stopped asking myself questions.’

  Madeleine sighed. ‘It was wonderful that day. It’s the only time I can remember since I was tiny that Maman came to life again. But it was only with you, and it was over as soon as we left you. You even managed to make Grandmama human that day.’

  Solange looked towards Robert.

  ‘And you weren’t even with us that day in London. You don’t even have any memory of your mother as the happy woman we knew. For you that’s very sad.’

  Robert took time to answer. ‘She was good to us, don’t get us wrong. Maman always loved us and looked after us. And we loved her. She was still a wonderful woman. But sometimes I feel she deprived us of our roots, and she even died without leaving us anything. No letters, no token even, no link to our past. She left us nothing but questions.’

  Tante Louise and Solange exchanged glances. It was Louise who spoke.

  ‘And you would like us to give you some answers?’

  Robert nodded. ‘It’s what we’ve been hoping for.�
��

  ‘And what we were expecting, n’est-ce pas, Solange? We knew you would want to hear about Elise and Luis, and we’ve been talking about them a lot ourselves, knowing you were on your way here. It’s such a pleasure to talk about them and bring back their memory. But we don’t know anything about what happened to them in the war, you know.’

  ‘Can you tell us about Paris, about that summer here in your house?’ asked Robert. ‘It was the start of it all, wasn’t it?’

  Solange looked across at Louise. ‘Yes, that much we can certainly tell you. So, who tells, Maman? You or me?’

  ‘You tell, my dear. I’ll listen, and maybe add something if I feel it. But first the cognac, Bernard. Let us be comfortable.’

  Bernard, benign and leisurely, rose from the table and brought a tray with two heavy crystal decanters and glasses from a corner table, offered cognac and chartreuse, and waved his cigar box towards Robert, who declined. The cut glass reflected little glimmers of light from the chandelier, and gave off small chinks of sound as decanter touched goblet. There was hardly a word spoken, just the simple words of service and acceptance. Then Bernard leant back in his chair, raised his glass to them all, and once more to Madeleine, then settled back unhurriedly to light his cigar. Louise waited, took a sip of her own little glass of green chartreuse, and then turned to Solange.

  ‘Now start, my daughter.’

  Madeleine felt quite breathless, like an excited child at story time. She leant forward in her chair, and Solange caught her eye and flashed her a conspiratorial grin.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ she began, ‘il était une fois. There was a lovely young woman, half English, half French, who looked English but moved like a Frenchwoman. She came to Paris as part of her “coming out”, to widen her social circle, to learn a little sophistication. She was so funny, Elise, always laughing – laughing at the French and at the English, at any stuffiness, at French men and their flattery. We had a lot of fun, and I suppose we were as silly as most girls our age at that time. I was two years older than Elise and thought I was much more mature, and I used to tell her off for giggling so much.’