by Michel Déon
‘I treated you unfairly a month ago. I still think about that awful moment with my revolver … fortunately God didn’t want it to end in tragedy … I’d punished you for something that wasn’t your fault … that letter from your friend. It’s on my mind all the time. I hate unfairness, and towards you it’s worse, it’s a crime. My only excuse is that my migraines make me irritable, so I easily become unfair to you and your mother, and even to people at work, but there’s no real excuse for being unfair to anybody. If you have children one day, never treat them unfairly. When you realise that you have, because you were in a bad mood, it’s unbearable. My parents were simple people, and they hid their goodness by being very strict. I’m less simple than they were, partly thanks to your mother, and undoubtedly I’m less good than them too because of her. You need to try to understand me, and her.’
Teddy managed to articulate a weak ‘yes’.
‘… forget and forgive me … so that I can be at peace again …’
Teddy listened closely to the night voice, talking to him as if in a dream.
‘… at peace! I only have one child, and then, in a ridiculous bad mood, I unfairly accuse him of doing something wrong. It weighs on my conscience, an intolerable weight. I need to admit all this to you, so that we can love each other again. After today we’ll never talk about it any more. You must just try to remember it when I’m no longer here.’
He moved up to the head of the bed and knelt down next to Teddy, who was holding out his arms. Hugging each other, their cheeks pressed together, they wept and their tears mingled.
The boy would get his voice back, and the father would become distant once more, distracted again. Within a few weeks his sinusitis would turn out to be a brain tumour and he would be taken prisoner by another world, his turn to be aphasic, locked in, looking out with a burning stare. When they were alone together at the principality’s hospital, where Teddy went every day between lessons, trying to get a reaction that would unite them again, his father’s dark eyes, already dulled by the inescapable end, shone again for an instant, and the one hand that still functioned squeezed, lightly and repeatedly, his son’s hand.
Each would have to carry, one to his grave, the other throughout his life, the sorrow and remorse of having so seldom and so inadequately said what they felt, of having walked past each other without seeing, of not having shown each other affection outside the daily social ritual.
The scars of an uncompleted childhood never heal.
On board her eight-metre Aile III Virginie Hériot aimed for the buoy below the casino and took three lengths from John Filler’s Glorious just as the hearse, expected for the last quarter of an hour or more, stopped in front of the high Italian arcade that housed the cremation niches of the columbarium. The delay had been caused by the prince. The bishop had looked at his watch several times and made a number of murmured comments to his coadjutor. The choirboy responsible for swinging the censer was the youngest brother of N., the champion stair-jumper. Father Chomet had stayed away. The officials in black-bordered jackets, striped trousers and wing collars kept putting their hats on and taking them off again, not knowing which was right. The cemetery dominated the lower town, the Rock and Monte Carlo. The light was stunningly pure. To the east jutted the dark mass of Cap Martin, its red roofs half submerged in the green of the pine forest. To the west, Cap Ferrat slouched languorously in the sea. Blanche was surrounded by female friends. From time to time she lifted her black veil, revealing a face so shattered and pale she looked as though she was about to faint. The third person in her life had not had the nerve to show his face. Teddy was the only child present. Madame H. was there, without Katie. How he missed her! They would have nudged and whispered to each other. She would have cried more than him. Glorious had made up two lengths on Aile III. The prince, who was not fond of this sort of ceremony, finally arrived, wearing a coat and a grey hat, although he was known only to like caps. His presence was possibly an attempt to make amends: not once during the three months that his loyal counsellor had been in hospital had he visited him. Yet he owed him a great deal, if you believed Blanche. No one shook hands; people made do with a nod of the head. The coffin slid out of the hearse on rollers, and four pall-bearers placed it on two trestles. It was midday, the time when, if there was a dead calm, a breeze would blow down from the mountain and fill the yachts’ sails. Glorious was attempting to pass Aile III to starboard and steal her wind. Hats in hand, the officials tried vainly to tame rebellious strands of hair. The bald were luckier. The prince was fortunate in having his hair cut short, en brosse. His hands clasped in front of him, stiffly at attention, he listened to the bishop giving absolution. The coffin was of oak, or perhaps it was a good imitation. On the lid was a simple wooden crucifix and a red cushion with the cross of the Légion d’honneur and the orders of St Charles and the crown of Italy. Papa had been proud of them. A modest vanity for a man who stayed in the background. A question hung over the crucifix. Would he have wanted it? He who, for reasons that were unclear, had implacably distanced himself from the Church? Wasn’t there a chance that he would suddenly push open the coffin lid, sit up, and with an outstretched arm accuse Blanche, the bishop, the courtiers and his few colleagues who were present of having let him down? It was a futile hope … Before they screwed down the lid he had looked utterly resigned; in fact he had looked … as if he was elsewhere, distracted as he had been so often for some time, and undoubtedly uncomfortable, bundled into his frock coat with his dress decorations pinned in a row across his chest. His stiff collar had bruised the loose skin of his neck, which had already turned a distinct yellow. Between the neighbouring gravestones and along the yew-lined avenues walked families awkwardly holding a pot of flowers or a bunch of chrysanthemums. The widows wore black, and the children were getting bored and playing hide-and-seek behind the headstones and mausoleums. The bishop passed the aspergillum to his followers. The prince shook Blanche’s hand, then Teddy’s, and strode away. Two stepladders permitted the pall-bearers to hoist the coffin up to the third row of the columbarium, where an open niche was waiting. The coffin was thrust into it. One last look at what was now no more than a box of polished wood, and already the niche was being screwed shut with a plate bearing the dates: 1889–1933.
‘Édouard!’ Blanche said.
Teddy too felt a terrible anxiety at the exact moment when the marble plate was being screwed into place. Had they made sure his father was dead, that there was no chance of him suddenly waking up in the darkness of that pitch-black chamber? If he called out for help, no one would hear him. To block out the thought Teddy looked away. A few steps from where he and Blanche were standing, three women dressed in black were walking past. The youngest was his age. The whole lycée fancied Lucienne: a beanpole in a skirt that stopped above her knees, with long legs sheathed in black. They exchanged one of those looks that postpone things to a later date. A bouquet of lilies of the sort that Papa liked, splendid, expressive and dignified, was placed at the foot of his niche. His faith in the benefits of the monarchy had been strong. Only her female friends now stood with Blanche. Not a single man. How could it be? She attracted men like moths to a flame. Could it be true that, in losing her husband, she had lost some of her desirability?
‘Édouard!’ she called again, more plaintively.
Oh no! She wasn’t about to tell him off, was she? Lucienne had only distracted him for a second as she walked past. But a tacit agreement had been made, for four years from now, to meet in a carriage on the night train from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, the day they had sat their philosophy exam, but these were still imprecise matters about which neither of them knew the details. The prince had returned to his car. His departure dispersed the officials and the inquisitive. The victorious Aile III lay alongside Virginie Hériot’s support schooner. Having turned into the wind to wait for the regatta’s end, the white Stella Polaris rounded the Rock, its bow appearing, and slid slowly through the harbour entrance to tie up where the smaller ferries
moored. To be called ‘Édouard’ in public was a novelty. There weren’t enough cars for everybody. Édouard – since that was who he would be from now on – said he would walk, as it was barely a quarter of an hour from home. Marcelle C. said she preferred to walk too. She would go with him. She was a tall woman with very bright lipstick and jet-black cropped hair. People said she was Turkish. Papa used to say that she had the most beautiful legs in the world, and Teddy, as a dutiful pupil, had studied her famous legs on the beach and when she sat down and crossed them. From then on he had decided that they were the ideal legs, which they certainly were, or one ideal at any rate. Together, with her calling him tu and him calling her vous, and followed by two ladies who liked going to funerals and weeping, they walked back up towards Boulevard de l’Observatoire.
‘I think,’ Marcelle said with great gentleness, ‘this is one of those moments when silence says everything we need to say.’
‘Papa said you had the most beautiful legs in the world.’
Marcelle stopped. She put her hands over her face and shook with a violent sob, standing very straight in her black coat.
‘Teddy, we share the same sorrow.’
She uncovered her face, which shone with tears that blurred her vision, but she was smiling.
‘The most awful thing,’ he said, ‘is that Papa’s on his own now. I should have stayed with him for a while. Now he’s just surrounded by people he doesn’t know who are prisoners too.’
Édouard himself was suffering from problems he couldn’t admit to at that moment. His suit had shrunk at the cleaner’s where it had been dyed for the funeral at twenty-four hours’ notice and it was digging into him at the armholes. His discomfort had increased as he kept pace with Marcelle and was made worse because, as he had no black shoes of his own, Blanche had made him wear a pair that belonged to Papa. His feet swam in them and he feared he would lose them if he didn’t keep his toes permanently tensed under the toecaps. His jerky walk was wrongly interpreted by Marcelle, who thought he must have been traumatised by the horror of the ceremony. He was certainly unhappy, but it was because at that moment he was distracted by an irrelevant physical pain that swirled around him, carrying him further away as each minute passed from the man who was now screwed into a drawer and had disappeared for ever from everyone who had known him.
‘Marcelle, do you believe in reincarnation?’
Taken aback, she stopped dead and stared at him. All the innocence of this warm-hearted woman suddenly came to the surface: she had never thought of it, never imagined anything like it.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I read somewhere in Papa’s library that when everyone who knew him on earth is dead, a good man is reborn in a child’s body somewhere in the world …’
‘Well, that’s not a very comforting idea,’ Marcelle said. ‘So we never see our loved ones again?’
If she was thinking about her own vanished lovers, she had reasons for missing them, despite never having felt any real attachment to any of them. With nostalgia’s help we are very good at constructing false loves, heavily embellished by our imagination. They reached the apartment block where Blanche, accompanied by several of her friends, had already arrived.
‘I don’t know if I can go up to see Maman.’
‘You can’t leave her on her own. You’re the man now.’
‘My main problem is that I really need to change my shoes. Papa’s shoes are making my feet hurt dreadfully. Otherwise …’
‘Otherwise?’
‘I’d go and climb the mountains as far as La Turbie, as far as Mont Agel, and then maybe I’d come back in a hundred years’ time.’
‘Yes, well,’ Marcelle said, ‘that would be a very good way to get rid of your anger.’
*
They were there: half a dozen of them in the sitting room. Since Papa’s aide had left, the cook, Giuseppina Staffaroni, had taken matters in hand. As soon as she was back from the cemetery, still in her Sunday best and with her hair covered by a mantilla, she had served vermouth and savoury biscuits. She was faintly surprised that she had not been invited to sit with the other women gathered around Blanche. She tottered in her stiletto heels, almost twisting her ankle repeatedly, and had never felt so divine. From the hall Édouard could hear his mother’s exhausted voice.
‘I think … I think that Teddy … I mean Édouard, now he’s the man of the house, I think Édouard will be smart and sensitive.’
Marcelle’s voice: ‘He’s been both for a long time.’
Another voice, probably Gladys F.’s: ‘It must be traumatic to have to go from childhood to adulthood just like that.’
Afraid that they might go on talking about him, Édouard walked into the room. Sitting in a winged chair, Marcelle had stretched out her famous legs, now minus one admirer. The conversation stopped as he came in. Ladies sipped their vermouth. Gladys F. popped a savoury biscuit into her mouth. The crunching sound was so inappropriate that she paused and said emphatically, ‘Dear Blanche, everything doesn’t stop with death. You must face life bravely …’
And she quickly crunched the rest of her biscuit, which made a hellish noise that she tried to cover by coughing into her closed fist. Crumbs fell to the carpet and her foot, rather too elegantly shod in a crocodile stiletto, hid them by crushing them a little more.
Édouard left them and calmed himself by walking up and down the long corridor that led to the bedrooms, the kitchen and the pantry. No one had yet dared to clear the coat rack of cruel memories: a fawn overcoat, a Borsalino hat, a yachtsman’s cap and a bamboo walking stick with an ivory handle. For three months their presence had shored up a fragile convention: that Papa would come back, that he had regained the power of speech, that he would go out for a stroll again, twirling his walking stick. His illness was a nightmare that would eventually end because everything was still in place including, on a small console table, his packet of rolling tobacco with which, after lunch, he would roll himself a cigarette in a Job paper. Today the convention had been exposed. It was pointless to go on maintaining the fiction that, against all logic, everyone had still clung to two days earlier. But who would dare to bring it to an end, and with what heartbreak? Édouard was finally able to take his shoes off. To walk on the tiled floor cooled his burning feet. The loose tile that crunched slightly was still there in front of Papa’s bedroom. The door was open. Someone … had put a bunch of anemones in a blue vase on his bedside table. His desk was waiting by the French window: the white glass inkstand, an ivory letter-opener, a blotter with his initials. The bed was made the way he liked it: two pillows laid on top of the bolster. The terrible neuralgia he had had in his final months had forced him to sleep practically sitting up. His carriage clock had stopped a short time after his departure, at twelve thirty. Night or day? Giuseppina Staffaroni opened the kitchen door and, crooking her index finger, beckoned him to join her.
‘Edoardo? Hai fame? Vieni! Ho qualche cosa per te …’
In the pantry, on the oilcloth that covered the table, a white cloth was draped over a round shape. Giuseppina lifted up the cloth: a tomato pie decorated with black olives and green peppers. She poured a glass of lemonade. How would he be able to swallow anything without throwing up, even if he was hungry? To forget he was hungry, he put his hands to his head and shut his eyes. The provocative picture of Lucienne in a skirt that was too short for her and black stockings immediately appeared.
‘Mangiare, Edoardo!’
Giuseppina was extraordinary: a frizzy Gorgon’s head under her mantilla, a swollen, lumpy nose, too much rouge on her cheeks, a coloured glass crucifix that dangled on a black ribbon from her neck, and enormous hands, their fingers deeply fissured from washing up, that lay flat on the table like a laundress’s paddles. When she opened her mouth, a cloud of garlic filled the pantry. Édouard burst out sobbing and hid his head in his arms.
‘Non piangere, Edoardo! Papà è partito per il cielo.’
Heaven! How far away that is!
And the eternity of the journey … as a prisoner of that awful box! Édouard at last lets his tears flood out, there in the pantry, in front of the pie and glass of lemonade, in front of Giuseppina Staffaroni, who speaks almost no French but understands everything, says nothing, and nods her head like a horse pestered by flies, making her heavy earrings sway fascinatingly, like a pendulum.
From the hall came the sound of muffled voices. People were talking as if there were a sick person asleep in the next room. Marcelle had given the mourners the signal to leave; their good intentions, and especially curiosity, were exasperating Blanche.
When Édouard went to find his mother, she was crouching in her bedroom in front of a mountain of letters, sheets of paper with handwriting on them, and small notebooks that had come out of a wide-open drawer in the Italian chest of drawers. After a quick glance – and sometimes without even looking, recognising the handwriting – she tore them up and stuffed the scraps into a canvas bag that Teddy recognised: it was Papa’s sailing bag that he had used to carry a change of clothes, his wash bag, and two or three books whenever he went sailing.
‘Will you leave me alone for a while, darling? We’ll go out before dinner.’
She stayed in her room with the door shut for two hours. When she came out the bag was full to bursting and she had changed into a summer skirt and a pink shirt. Her hair was covered with a headscarf.
She said, to forestall a reproach it hadn’t occurred to her son to make, ‘What people will think of me doesn’t bother me in the slightest. You change too, please. You look too sad in black. We’re going to get some fresh air. We’ll go for a drive, then have dinner in Nice or Cannes, somewhere a long way away. Take this bag downstairs for me and put it behind the car seats. If Giuseppina’s still here, tell her to come and see me … Your eyes are awfully red.’
‘I was crying with Giuseppina. I shouldn’t have held it all back at the cemetery.’
