Dear Shirl:
A word to say I am safely in Three Rivers as you sounded frantic when we talked on the phone. Am staying with the family of the young man I told you about that I met on the train coming up from Rome. Getting on pretty well but don’t follow all the gabbling. The young man has won an award for the best TV play of the month. It is about some boy practicing self-abuse in a Jesuit school and all that goes through his mind—waves on beach, showers of plum blossom, sheep grazing, Hiroshima. The play does not tell why these thoughts occur. Probably had no mother. Hope all your worries are over, tho’ they seldom are until the grave, ha ha.
Your old Friend
Cat Castle
The Norman wardrobe had been moved out of the Maurels’ entrance hall and into the living room, and most of the furniture had been re-covered with Gordon Hunting tartan.
“Claudie’s idea,” said Maman. “She had great gifts as a decorator. She is now planning to work in that direction.”
Maman’s hair was half gray, as if she had achieved what she wanted finally and no longer felt any need to look young. The gray made her seem less fragile, more determined. Papa was dressed as if he had indulged in a shopping weekend in London. The new Anglomania Shirley had noticed in store windows and on the boulevards had overtaken even the Maurels. The tiered First Communion pictures were still in a corner, with a newcomer among them: a framed magazine cover showing the young widow and her two children under the printed words “Hommage à Jackie Kennedy.” It was a family photograph, like the picture of Marie-Thérèse as a bride.
Maman said, “You are so thin!”
“I always was.”
“Perhaps. But were you always so fair?” Maman looked accusing. Now that she had stopped dying her own hair she had become suspicious of everyone else.
“It was the sun in Greece. No, I wasn’t there the whole winter. First I went to Canada. Last August. Yes, suddenly. I was sent for. My mother died.” All she could see in her mind was the picture someone had taken, and forced her to look at, of her mother in her coffin: her mother, who had never worn makeup, made foreign with lipstick and rouge. “I had to stay quite some time. There was so much to do. Everything had been ransacked or pillaged or given away. At the end, there was no one to stop her from giving everything away. Most of the gifts were made in her lifetime. By the time she died the pictures were out of their frames and stacked around the walls on the floor. Sometimes people she had given them to only took the frames. The rugs were rolled and tied with string. She had given away all the linen. She had embroidered linen from her own mother’s trousseau that had never been used. Gone. She gave to anyone who came to the door. She gave my christening silver to the postman. It had my name on it. I might have wanted it for my own children . . . but perhaps it’s better not to hand anything on.”
“But her fortune?” said Maman, clasping her hands.
“Bills, mostly. There was no money in my family. Did I behave as if there was? I didn’t mean to. I don’t believe my mother really left bills. She wasn’t like that. All sorts of people came round claiming from me. I had no way of proving, one way or another. She never kept records and never wrote her own checks.”
“But you—?” said Maman.
“Nothing, except her library. She left me her books. She tried to give them away too, but of course no one would have them. That’s how they happened to come to me. I had to pay someone to cart them off. I only wanted my childhood books but they had vanished ages ago. I don’t think she imagined she was doing anything against me. She may have had a motive, but it wasn’t hostility or revenge. She knew I had something from my mother-in-law. By the way, I am Mrs. Higgins again. I was finally divorced for desertion. I suppose it was only fair. You don’t keep your divorced husband’s name in France. I didn’t know until Philippe’s lawyer sent me a registered letter threatening me with something.”
Maman and Papa Maurel looked at each other, not covertly; it was not a sly exchange, but a bold, frank, long look. Shirley had never seen them look at each other before. Her words had brought out in them whatever they had in common—something to do with money, family, privacy, one’s race. How barbaric, how curious this is, they were telling each other. What an eccentric family she must have. How fortunate that nothing like that could happen to us. Nothing unusual will ever touch the Maurels. The pain she had felt when she looked at the photographs began to recede. She wanted to tell them, “Of course I’m peculiar, but then I was born feet first.” She saw a silhouette in the passage and then a girl of about fifteen came into the room. Her hair hung to within an inch of her shoulders. She was dressed in a short skirt and a tight pink sweater. As she sat down, Shirley saw the edge of a lace petticoat. The girl wore her high-heeled shoes awkwardly, as if she knew they were too grownup for her.
“Hello,” said Claudie in a shy voice. She pressed Shirley’s hand and sat down on a footstool, pulling her skirt to her knees with care, and then resting her chin on her hands. She looked up as if at three adults, and as though wondering what she herself would be like one day. While the others talked, she played with the ring Shirley had given her, a band set with turquoise and pearls. There was something so passive in her waxen young face that Shirley felt she was again seeing a picture of the rouged and powdered dead. It seemed to her she had seen traces of this effigy from the beginning. Yes, in the taxi, that first day. She remembered Claudie’s face, and she recalled a drowned pigeon in the current of the Seine.
“My girl,” her mother called her now, as if Claudie had found a relationship but lost her own name.
“I am looking for a job,” said Claudie plaintively, “but everywhere I go, they tell me I am too young. When I say I have a child to support no one will believe me. I am so tired of it.”
Papa almost smiled. “Ah, my girl,” said Maman again. Claudie turned her head in the old way to see the effect on Shirley of what she had just said, and for a second Shirley saw a living face.
“The brasserie is closed, Claudie. They have built a great fence around it and they say there will be a supermarket on that corner.”
Claudie looked as if she had never heard of a brasserie, that or any other, in her life.
“What about James?” said Maman.
“James is all right. He is with an architect in Athens. He really is an architect—at least, he is being one in Athens. I saw his sisters and Jo-Jo and Rex. They all have very large flats in very white buildings. James is at home, though he pretends he hates it and misses Paris. He bullies his married sisters.” All eyes were on her face now, and she went on bravely. “I would never have fitted in. I couldn’t have spent my life eating cakes and talking about movies, which is all there is for women. Or gossiping, and it isn’t interesting gossip. The Parthenon is lighted up, but one can’t live on that. There are foreigners, but they don’t work. They are on the fringe. I couldn’t live that way, or live like a Greek. James says he would rather be here but I’m not sure that it’s true. He can always come back to Paris for holidays and be sentimental. But there was nothing for me, nothing at all.”
“So you are not married and not engaged,” said Maman with satisfaction. “Like our little Claudie. But Claudie has time.”
“She seems to be giving herself time,” said Shirley. “Wouldn’t we all, if we knew how? It’s true that I’m twenty-seven now, but Jane Austen could have been wrong.”
No one asked who Miss Austen was. They were through with foreigners forever. Still, they were sorry when Shirley rose to leave, and they kissed her as if she were departing on a journey instead of having returned from one. Claudie’s lips were cool and reluctant as a fastidious child’s.
Papa saw Shirley out to the lift. He stood with his hand on the elevator button, as if he could make it climb faster. He said, without lowering his voice. “Claudie is fine now.”
“My girl!” they heard Maman cry within the flat. “Where are you? What are you doing? Is Alain awake? Asleep?”
“She seems cal
m,” said Shirley.
“Claudie is happy,” said Papa, as if he had decided it that way once and for all. The pressure of his hand on hers as they parted was without meaning. He had never known her except as Claudie’s disturbing, picked-up acquaintance. “They are all happy,” he said. “All the women. You will be happy too one day. As happy as any of them. Be patient.” He shut her away into the lift before she could ask him to say what he meant.
15
SHE HAD always known that sorting would be a waste of effort. There was nothing she wanted to keep. The Australian could have the ironing board, the box of tennis balls, her mother’s letters, the mop with its skirt of furry dust, her raincoat, twenty or so coat hangers, two boxes of Christmas tree ornaments, a shoe carton holding a folded beach hat and a roll of scotch tape, a zippered, insulated picnic carryall, a Portuguese shopping basket, a plastic bottle for sprinkling clothes, a spray can of starch, a flashlight, a roll of velvet self-adhering wallpaper, a Chianti bottle wired for use as a lamp, a leather box containing loose coins from four or five countries, a stack of books, a bread board, a cheese board, a round tin box for storing Christmas cake, a painting of a rag doll signed Renata Maguire—that was all she cared to enumerate for today. Philippe had done some shedding too: he had left manuscript paper, clips, brown paper envelopes, a portable radio, espadrilles and a cache of Le Miroir tied with string; slipped under the string was a tag reading, “Articles 1961–2.” Philippe might want those. As she picked the bundle up the string broke. “In this, the last spring of the long Algerian war . . .” she read. Would this war produce its author, its filmmaker? That must have been what Philippe had been asking when he wrote, “Creation is independent of reality, or, more explicitly, it finds its roots in time and events only to detach itself . . .” She remembered Madame Roux saying, “If I had a bath every day, my skin would detach itself in long strips.” She continued reading “. . . progressively. A series of plastic events can only flow from spontaneous exigencies. Politics and creation . . .”
She thought, Darling Philippe, you can also write it backward; for instance “. . . creation and politics. Spontaneous exigencies flow from a series of plastic events. Ba.” As she tried to knot the broken string she saw on the floor, apart and alone, the guidebook The Peep of Day which Mrs. Castle had given her in Pons. “He will sit upon a white throne,” Shirley read, “and he will wear a crown upon his head, and everybody will stand round his throne. He will open some books, in which are written down all the wicked things that people have done. God has seen all the wrong things you have done. He can see in the dark as well as in the light, and knows all your bad thoughts. He will read everything out of his book before the angels that stand around. Yet God will forgive some people, because Christ died on the cross for them. Whom will he forgive?”
The answer that followed was not reassuring. “Dearest Girl,” she found, on a single sheet of paper, folded and tucked between the end page and cover. “The sadly macerated and decomposed specimen you sent me for identification is without doubt Endymion nutans or Endymion non-scriptus, or Scilla nutans or non-scriptus.” She remembered now that all but one page of this letter had been incorporated into Geneviève’s novel. One day, owing to Shirley’s carelessness, Philippe might be called on to praise in print a passage such as (French), “ ‘Very well,’ said Bertrand, and his shoulders were eloquent of his defeat. ‘Who is the greatest anthropologist of our day?’ ”; immediately followed by (English), “Hope all this is not so as her trip is costing her children a lot of money.”
This was no good either. Philippe’s articles must be separated somehow or other from the dust mop and the can of starch. She saw herself turning the key over to Madame Roux and heard her own voice saying, “A man is coming to take everything away at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. He will drive a bright yellow truck, and he will know exactly what to do.” Madame Roux and Sutton McGrath would sit and wait for the yellow truck. They would run to the shop window whenever a car stopped, but all they would find would be the Japanese importer pretending to look at old teakettles and trying to discover if Madame Roux was wearing blue. Smiling now, she stepped back from a trodden sheet of yellow paper. She turned it over and saw, under a famous poem, a familiar hand:
GOODSIDE’S GOODSIDE’S GANDER
WITHA WATHA WARES
HOW SAD TO PUNCH A POOR OLD MAN!
AND THROW HIM DOWN THE STARE’S!
“How to decipher this? How can it be applied? The rise of Africa? Fathers supplanted by their sons?”
Shirley knelt on the floor and spread this sheet of paper on a trunk. It was a trunk she had not yet opened and now quite happily knew she never would. She wrote, “Darling Philippe, I have finally come round to your way of thinking. G. Gander is without doubt concerned with loyalty, fidelity, passing the buck and the situation in Berlin.” She wanted to add, “It is also what Ruskin missed,” but who was Ruskin? She slipped the page inside one of the envelopes Philippe had abandoned and addressed it to him in care of his mother.
She posted the message about an hour later. It slipped through steel teeth concealed behind the mail slot and became an irretrievable error. The wind that April afternoon blew straight from Russia. She saw a blossoming pear tree in front of the Église des St. Pères. The gutters were full of cigarette butts and fallen chestnut flowers. When she lifted her sunglasses she noticed that the sky was an extraordinary color, on the frontier of white and blue. She supposed that they would see each other again in time, in dreams and recollections.
GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY
Ay, now am I in Arden; the more
fool I; when I was at home, I
was in a better place: but
travellers must be content.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It, Act II
1
THEY WENT off for the day and left him, in the slyest, sneakiest way you could imagine. Nothing of the betrayal to come showed on their faces that morning as they sat having breakfast with him, out on the hotel terrace, a few inches away from the Grand Canal. If he had been given something the right length, a broom, say, he could have stirred the hardly moving layer of morning muck, the orange halves, the pulpy melons, the rotting bits of lettuce, black under water, green above. Water lapped against the gondolas moored below the terrace. He remembered the sound, the soft, dull slapping, all his life. He heard them say at the table they would never come here in August again. They urged him to eat, and drew his attention to gondoliers. He refused everything they offered. It was all as usual, except that a few minutes after he was in an open boat, churning across to the Lido with Aunt Bonnie and Florence. Flor and Aunt Bonnie pushed along to the prow and sat down side by side on a bench, and Aunt Bonnie pulled George toward her, so he was half on her lap. You couldn’t sit properly: her lap held a beach bag full of towels. The wind picked up Flor’s long pony tail of hair and sent it across George’s face. His cousin’s hair smelled coppery and warm, like its color. He wouldn’t have called it unpleasant. All the same, it was an outrage, and he started to whine: “Where are they?” but the wind blew so that you couldn’t hear a thing.
He had been on the beach most of the morning before he planted himself in front of Aunt Bonnie in her deck chair and said, “Where’ve they gone? Are they coming here?”
Aunt Bonnie lowered the book she was reading and regarded George with puckered, anxious face—in his memories, an old face, a frightened face. She sat under a series of disks, in dwindling perspective; first an enormous beach umbrella, all in stripes, then her own faded parasol, then a neutral-colored straw hat. She said, “Well, you know, it’s like this, Georgie, they’ve gone off for the day. They wanted to have one little day on their own. You mustn’t be selfish. They’re only looking at old pictures. You’d rather be on the beach than looking at pictures . . .”
“I’d sooner be looking at pictures,” George said.
“. . . so we brought you over to the beach,” said Aunt Bonnie, not even li
stening. “You mustn’t be so selfish all the time. Your mother never has a minute. This trip is no fun for her at all.”
Oh, they had managed it beautifully. First they were out on the hot terrace, offering him gondoliers, then he was abandoned with Aunt Bonnie and Flor.
Even years later, when they talked about that day, and his parents wondered how they had found it in them to creep off that way, without warning or explanation; even when they were admitting it was quite the worst thing to do to a child; even then, there was an annoying taint of self-congratulation in their manner. He had been a willful, whiny, spoiled little boy, and some people, Aunt Bonnie for one, claimed that his parents were almost afraid of him. His Fairlie cousins had called him the Monster, while his mother’s relatives, more serious and concerned, often said he was being badly prepared for the blows and thumps of life, and wouldn’t thank his parents later on. As it happened, George had turned out well. At seventeen, he was a triumphant vindication for his parents of years of hell. Oh, Lord, what he had been at five, his mother liked to say, smiling, shaking her head. At seven! He had ruined their holiday in Venice that time, although they always took all the blame: they should never have gone off for the day, creeping away when his back was turned. It might have marked him for life. There was a frightening thought. Like any averted danger, they liked to bring it up. “Do you remember, George, that time in Venice with Bonnie and Flor?”
Of course he remembered. He still had six little cockleshells picked up on the Lido. He remembered the brilliant parasols, askew in the hot wind, and Flor, his cousin, thin, sunburned, fourteen, sitting straight in the center of a round shadow; she sat and scooped sand with her fingers and looked out on the calm sea. George might have drowned for all she cared. He stumped about on the sand by himself, tomato-pink, fair-haired, deeply injured, rather fat. The sea was so flat, so still, so thick with warmth you might have walked on it. He gathered shells: black, brown, cream-and-pink, with minutely scalloped rims. Aunt Bonnie carried them back to Venice for him in her pockets, and now six were left. They were in a shoebox along with a hundred or so other things he would never throw away. He had another remnant of Venice, a glass bead. It came from a necklace belonging to Flor. She bought it that day, at an open stall, just in front of the place where the boat came in from the Lido. The clock on the Piazza began clanging noon, and the air filled with pigeons and with iron sound. They were filing off the boat in orderly fashion when suddenly Flor darted away and came back with the necklace in her hands. Aunt Bonnie hadn’t finished saying, “Oh, do you like those glass beads, Flor? Because if you do, I’d rather get you something decent . . .” The string of the necklace broke an instant later, the first time Flor pulled it on over her head. The glass beads rolled and bounded all over the paving; pigeons fluttered after them, thinking they were grains of corn. The necklace breaking, the hotly blowing wind, excited Flor. She unstrung the beads still in her hands and flung them after the others, making a wild upward movement with her palms. “Oh, stop it,” her mother cried, for people were looking, and Flor did appear rather mad, with her hair flying and her dress blowing so that anybody could see the starched petticoat underneath, and the sunburned thighs. And poor little George, suddenly anxious about what strangers might think—this new, frantic little George ran here and there, picking up large lozenge-shaped beads from under people’s feet. When he straightened up, hands full of treasure, he saw that Florence was angry, and enjoying herself, all at once. Her hands were still out, as if she wanted to give just anyone a push. But perhaps he imagined that, for she walked quietly beside him, back to the hotel, and told him, kindly, that he could keep all the beads.
A Fairly Good Time Page 30
