The Claimant

Home > Other > The Claimant > Page 25
The Claimant Page 25

by Janette Turner Hospital


  Christophe le Jardinier smiles. ‘She had a wicked sense of humour.’

  ‘A dangerous one,’ Marie-Claire says.

  The Goldbergs had to stay under the van floor till nightfall. They had cramps in their legs. They were afraid they would scream from the pain. The baskets of laundry were unloaded in the chateau courtyard with the SS watching.

  ‘Lilith and I did it together. We should have been terrified,’ the gardener says, ‘but in fact it gave us a bit of a thrill.’

  Ti-Christophe presses his fingertips to his temples. ‘I remember that.’

  ‘No. You couldn’t. I made Marie-Claire keep you inside because the curiosity of children is dangerous. What you remember happened later.’

  ‘What happened later?’ Cap asks.

  ‘We got the Goldbergs out after dark.’

  ‘That’s what I remember,’ Ti-Christophe says. ‘Walking through the woods without a candle. That’s how I learned where the safe house was.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to come. I told Marie-Claire to keep you inside.’

  ‘I put him to bed,’ Marie-Claire says, ‘but he climbed out the window and down a tree. Bit of a wild one, weren’t you, Ti-Christophe? And still are. You’ll get yourself killed one of these days.’

  The Goldbergs were in the safe house for two days before Grand Loup rowed them across the Vienne.

  ‘Papa?’ Cap prompts. ‘And then?’

  ‘One of our people met us,’ her father says, ‘and then I rowed back.’

  The new escort took the Goldbergs to Loudun, and they made their way, as so many others had done, from safe house to safe house until they reached the Pyrenees, then Spain, then Portugal. Myriam had an uncle in New York who sent them visas, but for years they had wanted to come back to find Lilith and Grand Loup and say thank you.

  Where is Lilith? they want to know. What happened to her?

  ‘She died in the convent in Tours,’ Christophe le Jardinier reports. ‘In childbirth.’

  Christophe the Younger and Capucine lock eyes. Her brother places his index finger against his lips.

  Myriam Goldberg covers her face with her hands. ‘We lost a child,’ she says. ‘I went into premature labour.’ She contemplates her laced fingers and white knuckles. ‘The Manhattan Pier. Immigration and Customs. It was chaos.’

  ‘We had a girl,’ Aaron says, ‘and we called her Lilith but she died.’

  Marie-Claire moves from her chair near the fireplace. She places one hand on Myriam’s arm. ‘We all lost …’ she begins to say. She is not able to finish her sentence.

  ‘We never had other children,’ Myriam says. ‘We’d left it too late to get out of France. We had friends in Paris who were art collectors and we thought they’d protect us. They did try. They managed to hide us for two years.’

  ‘We all lost someone,’ the gardener says. ‘But here we are. Those of us who survived.’

  ‘You know that sketch?’ Myriam Goldberg is suddenly struck by a memory, energised by it, pulling herself out of sorrow. ‘That Modigliani in the chateau? We used to own it. It’s actually a portrait of my own grandparents, though it probably did serve as a template for his later portrait of Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz. We had to sell it, of course, to buy hiding time and to fund our escape.’

  ‘Lipchitz got out earlier than we did,’ Aaron Goldberg explains, ‘but he got out the same way. Safe house to safe house. Over the Pyrenees, then a ship out of Portugal. He got there years ahead of us, but we met up again in New York. Good friends.’

  ‘Lilith …’ Myriam Goldberg says.

  ‘I’m Capucine.’

  ‘Yes. Forgive me. We owe our lives … We can never repay.’

  13.

  Afternoons are for Latin. Father John Gabriel is discoursing on Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, and on his courtier Damocles, and on the sword suspended by a hair above the head of Damocles, and on the idiomatic meaning of the phrase de pilo pendet.

  ‘Translate,’ Father JG orders Ti-Loup. ‘Literally.’

  ‘It hangs by a hair,’ Ti-Loup responds.

  ‘Good. And colloquially?’

  ‘What happens next is in the lap of the gods,’ Ti-Loup says.

  ‘A rather free translation, but well put. The question inevitably arises: are we merely the playthings of the gods, or can we influence fate? As Brutus expressed it, There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood … Melusine, continue this quotation and tell us what was on the mind of Brutus when Shakespeare had him speak these words.’

  ‘Which, taken at the flood,’ Cap recites, ‘leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries … He was considering whether or not to take part in the assassination of Julius Caesar.’

  ‘Good. And do you have a sense, mon jeune vicomte, that the decision of Brutus was hanging by a hair? That it could have gone either way?’

  ‘Do you mean Shakespeare’s Brutus or Plutarch’s Brutus or the actual historical Brutus?’ Ti-Loup asks.

  Father JG raises his eyebrows. ‘And what sources other than Plutarch can you cite, Monsieur le Vicomte, for the “actual historical Brutus”, as you put it?’

  ‘Well, Cicero,’ Ti-Loup says.

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘Plutarch was born one hundred years after the death of Julius Caesar, but Cicero and Caesar knew each other. Cicero’s letters to Atticus were Plutarch’s source, and Plutarch was Shakespeare’s source, and Brutus is different each time.’

  ‘True. In what way?’

  ‘Cicero was hostile towards both Caesar and Mark Antony, and Plutarch was ambivalent about both. Plutarch raises the possibility that Brutus was actually the illegitimate son of Caesar, and that both Caesar and Brutus were aware of this, and if that was true, then yes, I think the decision of Brutus must have been agonising and could have gone either way.’

  ‘It is true,’ Father JG acknowledges. ‘Plutarch raises the spectre of the Oedipal struggle, which Shakespeare surely picked up on with his Et tu, Brute. But, as you point out, there is no hint of this in Cicero, who was Caesar’s contemporary, and who hosted Caesar in his own home. So we can probably dismiss the theory as Plutarch’s invention. On the other hand, it may have seemed to Cicero a matter too risky and too delicate to mention.’

  ‘Cicero was like Pétain,’ Cap interjects. ‘He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to stay on good terms with both sides. He sucked up to Caesar, then he sucked up to Brutus even more, but he never had the guts to face the music. The consequences were someone else’s affair. He hightailed it out of Rome and fled to Greece.’

  Father JG frowns. He is playing with a pencil, turning it in circles with the fingers of his right hand. ‘That is an intemperate and ill-informed and unorthodox view, Mademoiselle Melusine.’ His right hand clenches in disapproval. The pencil snaps into two parts. ‘Cicero is the father of civilised discourse,’ Father JG says. His voice seems to jab at the air. ‘He was admired by Locke and Hume, but also by Jefferson. He was a father of the very idea of liberty. And he most certainly did face consequences. He was assassinated by the henchmen of Mark Antony just a year after Caesar’s death, and he died defending the rights of citizens against dictators.’

  ‘He had some dictatorial tendencies himself,’ Cap argues. ‘When he was consul, he executed five Roman citizens without trial.’

  Father JG is palpably angry now. ‘To save the republic. He was up against the Catiline conspiracy.’

  ‘Pétain made the same argument,’ Cap says. ‘He did it to save France. So he claimed.’

  ‘The situations are not remotely comparable.’ Father JG is red in the face. ‘Your interpretation of historical evidence is perverse, Mademoiselle. Uh … Madame la Comtesse, I beg your pardon … I hope you will excuse this heated discussion.’

  ‘Evidence of excellent teaching,’ the countess says from the doorway. ‘Father John Gabriel, I wish to have a word with Melusine.’

  Now you’re
in trouble, Ti-Loup telegraphs with his eyes.

  But the countess simply takes Cap’s hand and leads her towards the prie-dieux in the great salon. ‘When I am distressed,’ she says, ‘I pray to the Virgin for peace. Pray with me.’

  Cap fingers her rosary while the countess prays.

  Eventually the countess says: ‘There have been a number of recent events, Melusine, that are very disturbing to me. I need to speak to your father. Will you bring him to the chateau?’

  ‘Now, Madame la Comtesse?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘He will be in the vineyard or the potager,’ Cap says, puzzled. ‘It may take me a while to find him.’

  ‘He is not in the vineyard or the potager,’ the countess says. ‘I have already sent Pierre and others. No one can find him. This is disturbing. I fear this means he is ill. I cannot permit or order my servants into your father’s home without his permission and so I am requesting you to go and find out what is wrong. I need his advice. If he is too ill to come, then, with his permission, I will go to him.’

  Cap is mystified. If her father had shown signs of illness the night before, Ti-Loup would have found a way to let her know in spite of their tutor’s hyper-vigilant eyes and ears. She pushes open the door of the gardener’s cottage. If her father were ill, he would be lying on the couch in front of the stove. The room is empty, but Cap hears sounds from the loft above. Her father’s knees give him trouble now and he does not climb the ladder to the loft anymore. That is Ti-Loup’s space, his private lair.

  Cap listens.

  There is thumping and laughter. She hears the voices of Petit Christophe and Chantal.

  But where is her father?

  If, as the countess insisted, he is not working in the vineyard or the vegetable garden, she can think of only one possible place where he might be. She herself has never actually been in the safe house, the lost cellar, but she knows where it is. She follows the trail into the woods to the ruined foundations – mere rectangular stone outlines – of a seventeenth-century farmhouse. From the entrance, she measures two hundred paces towards the chateau. Here there is a creek, a trickle that runs into the Vienne which runs into the Loire. A small curved stone bridge, centuries old and crumbling, and only eight feet long, crosses the creek. Nobody uses the bridge. Indeed it has been so long – more than a century – since the bridge was used that any footpath which must once have led to it has long been obliterated by moss, ivy and fungal outcrops. The bridge itself is virtually invisible, matted with creepers and hidden behind clumps of holly and overhanging trees. Under the bridge, set into the supporting stone pillar on the chateau side, is a small metal door as green with oxidation and mildew and moss as the vegetation that screens it. In the centre of the green door is a great iron ring.

  Cap’s feet sink into creek mud as she crouches under the bridge. The ring is rusty, but the catch must have been recently oiled. The ring turns easily in Cap’s hands and she swings back the hinged cover to the upside-down world of roots and worms. In the middle of a dark wood and under a bridge, she feels vertigo. She can see only nothing and blackness, but she knows there are steep stone steps going down. ‘Papa?’ she calls, and listens to her voice travel and reverberate and bounce back at her.

  ‘Cap! What are you doing here?’ The voice floats up and echoes as strangely as if her father had six voices, each ghost-like, damp, ricocheting moistly all the way from the sealed-up wall of the chateau cellars.

  ‘The countess wants to see you,’ Cap calls. This is like listening to the mass in the village church, the priest’s voice being chanted up and back, up and back, chorus and antiphony, from stone floor to vaulted stone ceiling. She has to pause and let her voice settle. ‘She said it was urgent.’ Cap waits for the reverberations to subside. ‘I don’t have a flashlight. Can you come up?’

  A glow of light precedes her father. His footsteps multiply themselves like muffled drumbeats against the stone. When he emerges, blinking against the light, Cap blurts: ‘Do you know that Petit Christophe and Chantal are in our loft?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I saw them from the vineyard. Saw them go into the cottage.’

  ‘Then why come here? Here!’

  ‘I don’t know. I needed somewhere dark and private to be afraid. I’ve lost the knack of being afraid. In the war, I was afraid all the time. It was essential to survival and I used to come here.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have stopped them? Ti-Christophe and Chantal?’

  ‘Should I have stopped them?’ Cap’s father repeats this slowly. It is a serious question, but one that he is asking himself.

  ‘This is a bad thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so. I think it’s a bad thing. I don’t like it.’

  ‘So why didn’t you stop them?’

  ‘Why didn’t I stop them?’ Christophe le Jardinier feels in the dark for his own answer. ‘I think what’s happening is unwise and I don’t think any good can come of it. But that’s where your mother and I made you. In that loft. On that straw mattress. It wasn’t wise then and it was extremely dangerous – but look what came of it!’ He ruffles her hair and smiles. ‘My son has the right to choose his own dangers. Everyone has that right.’

  14.

  Dinner at the chateau is a formal though not a solemn affair. The countess sits at the head of the table, Father JG at the foot. Ti-Loup and Capucine face each other across the footed silver candelabra which branches between them like a tree. The butler and a housemaid wait on them. Conversation is usually lively.

  ‘Father John Gabriel,’ the countess says, ‘you were having a very ardent discussion about Cicero today before I interrupted the class.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Madame la Comtesse,’ Father JG says carefully.

  ‘You were in verbal combat with Melusine, I think.’

  Father JG clears his throat and takes a sip of wine. ‘Mademoiselle Melusine has rather unorthodox views, Madame la Comtesse, and I felt it incumbent upon me to … to …’

  ‘To spar with her.’

  ‘To counter her unorthodox views, Madame la Comtesse.’

  ‘Not a simple task, Father. Believe me, I know. She is a formidable opponent, is she not? And she has many unorthodox opinions.’

  ‘I’m not unorthodox about Cicero as a rhetorician,’ Cap protests. ‘But I don’t think much of him politically. Too much like Pétain, a moral coward playing it safe and hedging his bets.’

  ‘We will not be discussing Pétain,’ the countess says politely but firmly.

  Ti-Loup announces with unexpected vehemence: ‘You let Cap say things that you’d never forgive me for saying, Maman.’

  Cap stares at him with astonishment.

  A silence descends on the dinner table.

  The countess says, with exquisite politeness, ‘I do not permit any further mention of Pétain. Mes enfants, we will pray together in the salon after the meal.’

  After dinner, Gwynne Patrice and his mother share one prie-dieu, Cap kneels alone at the other. While the countess murmurs her way through the rosary, Ti-Loup and Cap avoid each other’s eyes.

  ‘Amen,’ the countess murmurs.

  ‘Amen,’ Ti-Loup and Cap murmur with relief.

  ‘And now,’ the countess says, ‘we have grave matters to discuss. I have spoken with your father, Melusine. We are deeply disturbed. Monsieur Monsard has paid me a visit. The butcher tells me, Gwynne Patrice, that you have been seen at la boucherie, working as though you were a peasant. Is this true?’

  ‘No, Maman,’ Ti-Loup says evenly. ‘How would it even be possible, with my ancestry, that I could work like a peasant?’

  ‘Melusine has taught you many things,’ the countess says drily, not without the hint of a smile, ‘including how to answer a question with a question, like a lawyer, and how to be courteously caustic.’

  Ti-Loup meets his mother’s eyes steadily, but says nothing.

  ‘When do you visit la boucherie?’ his mother
demands.

  Ti-Loup is silent.

  ‘Unfortunately, Monsieur Monsard has shown me incontrovertible proof of your facility with a butcher’s knife in the room where the carcasses are prepared for sale. I expect you to explain why and how this has come about. Monsieur Monsard says that nobody has seen you enter and he does not know how often you are there or how you get in. I expect an explanation.’

  Ti-Loup says quietly: ‘I have no explanation to give you, Maman.’

  ‘Do Father John Gabriel’s educational trips have anything to do with this?’

  ‘Father John Gabriel knows nothing about my visits to la boucherie, Maman, and he is in no way responsible for them.’

  ‘Visits!’ the countess says. ‘Plural. I see. How many visits? How often?’

  Ti-Loup says nothing.

  The countess holds herself very still for several minutes, then she kneels at her prie-dieu. Time passes. The only sound is the murmur of her prayers and the soft click of rosary beads. She rises and smooths down the crushed silk of her dress.

  ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘All educational trips will be cancelled. You are not to leave the chateau, Gwynne Patrice, at any time. And now, Melusine, I am reluctant to ask you this question, but I know you will be truthful. Did you know that Gwynne Patrice was visiting your brother and engaging in unseemly behaviour for someone of his station in life?’

  Cap thinks of kneeling at her prie-dieu. She thinks of fingering the rosary instead of speaking. She presses her lips together.

  ‘Melusine?’

  ‘Madame la Comtesse, my brother is an artist of the first rank. I do not think the work he does is unseemly for anyone.’

  ‘I do not mean any disrespect for your brother, Melusine. Civilised society cannot maintain itself without excellent butchers. But you have not answered my question. Did you know that Gwynne Patrice has, on at least two occasions and I don’t know how many more, been engaged in butchering carcasses at the establishment of Monsieur Monsard?’

 

‹ Prev