‘Dr Vamel was marvellous. He promised to see that they were properly looked after and I will do what I can for them as well. But, between ourselves, there is no hope. The cure is a complete legend,’ the Count sighed. ‘The masques behaved very well indeed. Dr Vamel told them, and I backed him up, that leprosy isn’t usually contagious in the ordinary sense – not that you can ever be sure. You can touch people a hundred times without catching it. It is prolonged and intimate contacts that are the most dangerous, if you follow me; and that’s half the trouble in this case. You know how drunk everybody gets and what goes on in carnival time. . . . The doctor said he would do what he could, with strong disinfectant, for anyone who felt himself or herself to be specially in danger. In the end, he left for his clinic with a very sad little procession of Gwan-wobes. . . . What a business! We all either danced with them or with people who had; so we are all potential lepers. Poor little Berthe! Toi et moi aussi, et la pauvre Mathilde et les enfants et le Capitaine et Gentilien et tous les invités et tous les noirs! But there’s nothing to be done about it, absolutely nothing. The great thing is not to mention it to anybody, especially not to the Metwopolitains.’
‘What has happened to them now?’ Berthe asked.
‘To the lepers? Gentilien and I locked them in the old coach house with a sucking pig and a demijohn of rum, poor fellows. We’ll have to put our thinking caps on tomorrow. . . . Luckily,’ he went on, waving to the ballroom, which seemed more densely and hilariously populated than ever, ‘nobody seems to have heard yet and the best thing we can do is to forget all about it for the present.’
The Count promptly put his own precept into practice. ‘I really think it’s the best ball we’ve ever had!’ he said. ‘Except for what we were just talking about. Everything has gone right from the start. I was afraid for a moment we might have trouble with Gontran and his brother. You know what they are. But, no – everything is going capitally.’ He paused a moment, and then said, rather cautiously, ‘You know, Madame Sciocca is a most delightful woman. Don’t you think so?’
‘Well . . .’ Berthe began.
The Count raised his hand. ‘I know! You haven’t had time to get to know her yet! But she’s a charming creature and so intelligent and amusing and very well read too! I’m sure you’ll like her. And we were all totally wrong about the Governor too – he’s quite a nice old stick, apart from his infernal politics; though, I’m bound to admit, rather a bore. . . . Of course nobody knows where the money comes from. But, I must say, I don’t think I could ever get to like that ghastly son of his. He gives me goose flesh. I don’t wonder his wife stayed behind in Paris.’
‘His wife?’
‘Yes, quite a nice little thing, she sounds. But I’d be ready to bet a thousand louis that he’s a vilain monsieur. What do you make of him?’
‘I think he’s terrible.’
‘Do you? Do you really?’ He spoke as though Berthe’s answer revealed a new aspect of Marcel Sciocca that had not previously been manifest. ‘I am sure you’re right.’ The subject dropped and the Count hummed the tune of Quand l’amour revient which the band was playing, for a few seconds. ‘Everybody is enjoying themselves, that’s the great thing. Except,’ his brow clouded again, ‘poor Josephine. I don’t know what’s the matter with that child. I went up to get some more cigars about an hour ago and there she was, mooning about by herself in the billiard room passage. She leapt at my neck and embraced me as if her last hour had come. Do you know what’s the matter?’
‘No, I don’t, Cousin Agénor.’
‘Well, whatever it is, I hope she’ll get over it soon. Then there’s Sosthène. Wandering about ever since he got back like a mute at a funeral! Why, at his age, on a night like this, I’d have been through a dozen collars by now! Berthe, you’re so clever and sensible, I wish you’d get them out of it.’ The Count took one of her hands and held it for a moment between both of his. ‘You know how happy Mathilde and I would be if you and Sosthène . . . Well, there’s plenty of time to talk about that.’
He put her hand gently back on her lap and taking two water-ices from a tray held by Gentilien, he gave one of them to Berthe.
‘Do try this,’ he said, ‘it’s a new sort I am experimenting with – it’s made out of mangoes and flavoured with kirsch. And just imagine, in three weeks time the motor car will be here! Think of all the picnics we’ll have . . .’ The Count’s face, radiant once more, seemed to reflect the shining prospects ahead. It was suddenly distorted with a rictus of anguish. ‘A-yi!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a mess they are making of that tune! And we practised it scores of times. I must go and lend a hand.’
He leapt agilely to his feet and, catching sight of his reflection in a long art nouveau looking-glass surrounded by a plaster relief of lotus leaves and poppies, he said, ‘I’m a complete scarecrow.’ He flattened his disordered hair, straightened his Maltese cross, smoothed his moustache, and combed his strong forked beard out from the parting with his finger-tips.
‘Really, this snow,’ he murmured, dusting some flakes from his shoulders, ‘we might be at Chamonix.’ Then his mind jumped back to the motor car. ‘And we could drive up the Salpetrière to the sulphur springs and bathe! Perhaps I ought to have ordered two motors. . . . After all, there’s got to be room for the servants and the tent and the food. . . . Berthe, do go and tell Sosthène and Josephine about it. Nobody knows yet. Also,’ he said with a mysterious smile, ‘there are some more surprises ahead that I’d hate them to miss. It might cheer them up. Tell them everyone’s asking for them. We’ll have the greatest possible fun this spring,’ he leant forward and whispered, ‘if we are not all lepers by then!’
He turned at the doorway and with a serio-comic expression shaped the last phrase silently once more: ‘Pou’vu que nous ne soyions pas tous des Lépweux . . .’ and placed a finger across his lips conspiratorially. A few moments later he was through the door and on the orchestra platform with one of the negroes’ violins under his chin, alternately fiddling and beating the measure with his bow, and reviving by word and example the strayed rhythm of the Washington Post.
•
Gentilien was still standing behind the sofa. Once again Berthe was struck by the resemblance between the two men that centred on that thick single bar of joined eyebrow. He had made signals that he had something important and private to tell her as he handed the ices and Berthe had done her best to hasten Monsieur de Serindan back to the ballroom. Gentilien was agitated. ‘Mademoiselle Berthe,’ he began, holding out an envelope, ‘Numa Pompilius has just discovered this.’ Berthe took the letter. It was a thick envelope, addressed to her, with a big blue J entwined with embossed forget-me-nots on the back. ‘He discovered it in the wire letter box behind the front door which was hooked back, so nobody would have seen it until tomorrow, if Numa had not gone there for a broom to sweep some ashes away. Mademoiselle Josephine has been so strange lately – Fanette is very anxious and I am frightened something might happen to her . . .’ Berthe, meanwhile, after struggling to tear the envelope with her finger, ripped it open with the handle of the ice spoon. It contained several smaller envelopes addressed to the Count and the Countess and the other children and a sheet of paper with a message that ran as follows: My Dearest Darling Berthe. When you read this tomorrow, my darling, I will be on my way to Paris and I am marrying him the second we get there. Please do not be cross or hate me but love me always and come and see me. I’ll write at once and please, please explain everything to Papa and Maman. I can’t help it darling, it’s my fate, and you will love him as much as I do when you all know him. I kiss you tenderly again and again my darling only Berthe. Your Josephine.
There were swollen smudges in places where tears had fallen on the ink, and two lines of crosses. Then in a different-coloured ink: I have just said goodbye to you darling at the bottom of the stairs. You are so kind to me. I wish I were dead and I kiss you again and love you always.
J. × × × × ×
Berthe felt
her heart beating fast. Looking at the clock she saw that it was twenty past three. She pushed the letter into the front of her dress and, seizing the butler’s arm, said, ‘Quick, Gentilien! There may still be time.’ They ran along the passage and up the back stairs. A couple were sitting on the top step with their hands lying open on their knees and their eyes shut in a long and motionless kiss. The two heads fell apart as Gentilien and Berthe stepped between them and Berthe saw that the girl was Lucienne, looking up at her with her lids half open as though waking out of sleep. When she saw who it was she jumped up with a cry of, ‘oh!’ but by that time Berthe and Gentilien were halfway up the next flight. Josephine’s room was empty. Her white ball dress was thrown across a chair. The white satin shoes lay beside it and the carpet was scattered with a constellation of gardenias. The sheets and the pillows under the drawn mosquito net were rumpled to look as though Josephine were asleep inside. But the dressing table had been pulled away from the window and, running over to it, Berthe saw a narrow footmark of French chalk from the ballroom floor printed on the polished sill. Outside, the branches of an immense ceiba tree almost touched the wall.
‘It was a way down,’ Berthe said, ‘that we had often used together – more for the excitement of it than from any real need for secrecy. It was only a hop from the window on to the nearest branch, then you climbed from one branch to another almost as easily as walking downstairs and slid down the ropes of a swing on to the grass. But there was nobody about below, nothing but the lawn and then the steep forest and not a movement anywhere except the falling flakes. Where could she have gone? All at once I remembered Marcel Sciocca’s repeated glances at the time, his sudden departure after the challenge, the alacrity of Josephine’s flight upstairs at the approach of three o’clock. . . . Where would they hide, I wondered, in so small an island? There wasn’t a boat for over a week. . . . Then the whole thing suddenly became clear. That light out in the bay! I ran across the landing and looked out of the front window. It was still there. There was no time to lose. “If only Monsieur Sosthène were in!” I said out loud.
‘ “Monsieur Sosthène? But I saw him come in about ten minutes ago. Perhaps he is in his room.” Gentilien picked up the petrol lamp and we went down the passage. No light showed under the door and there was no answer to Gentilien’s knocking and his cries of “Monsieur Sosthène!” Remembering Sosthène’s threats, in a sudden access of alarm I told him to go in. The door was unlocked and I followed him inside. Sosthène was lying with his face to the wall. I opened the mosquito net and put my hand on his shoulder. Without moving he said: “Leave me alone, Gentilien, can’t you?” When he heard my voice he turned over in surprise and sat up. He was covered with ash, his uniform was torn and soaking with dew and one leg was covered up to the knee with marsh slime. He must have been wandering about in the forest ever since he had run away from me at the kiosk in the garden. He was the very picture of misery. Before he could say anything I sat down beside him and told him in a few seconds what was happening. He jumped to the floor before I could finish and, shouting for Gentilien to follow, took my hand and ran downstairs. They could not have left the house more than half an hour ago and if we made haste there was a good chance of overtaking them. Obviously, he said, the ship was waiting out there to pick them up. What would an island boat be doing out to sea on Shrove Tuesday? He and Gentilien decided that the main street through Plessis running down to the Place Hercule and the Mouillage (as the harbour was called) would be blocked with merrymakers, for most of the population of the island streamed to the capital for the last days of the carnival. So we determined to follow the path through the forest. If we took one of the waiting carriages, we would only be able to move through the town at a crawling pace.
‘I stopped and looked down from the landing on the way, in the wild hope that perhaps Sciocca – or even Josephine – might suddenly appear in the ballroom below, but, of course, neither of them was there. I can only have stayed a few seconds but the details remain in my mind as indelibly as a photograph. The scene had never been more animated. Beyond the three great intervening chandeliers that hung below like so many glittering cocoons of revolving insects, lay the whole brilliant apparatus of the ball. There seemed no room to move and yet round and round swung the couples in a great tangle of interweaving eddies, and waves of laughter and music and heat rose from the dancers almost visibly. Cousin Agénor was dancing with Madame Sciocca and the Governor – for many of the masques had returned from the garden – with La Belle Doudou. Lucienne was there with Prosper des Chaumes, her cavalier of the back stairs, and Solange with her cousin Blaise de la Popelinière. Gontran and François, magically resurrected, were singing the ballad about Charette, the leader in the Vendée rebellion – a great song in the part of France I came from – their arms interlocked with several birds of the same feather who had reached a pitch almost equal to their own. Anne-Jules, in spite of the noise, had fallen asleep in a chair. The Captain, a little surprisingly, was dancing spiritedly in the middle of the room with the young negro dressed as a swordfish who had partnered Josephine in the biguine. Cousin Mathilde, looking tired, was sitting in a causeuse by the great window, talking to the bishop. Glancing up towards my vantage point she caught sight of me and, with a tired smile, waved her fan in a friendly and charming greeting across the rotating heads.
‘No stranger, looking down as I was, could have suspected that the house was at that very moment beset by the prospect of a duel, by the start of a lasting feud that would split the island irreconcilably, by the threat of the suicide of the son and heir, by the elopement and possibly the bigamous marriage of the eldest daughter and by the universal menace of leprosy. I felt a kind of melancholy omniscience as I gazed down, a dismal certainty that I was the only person aware of all the hazards and sorrows ahead, and the memory of those few moments is still so startlingly clear in all its details that it might have been the result of a long scrutiny, consciously pursued with the purpose of printing on my memory the family and the house and the friends and the life that had become my own. It was as though I knew that I would never see any of it again.
‘I joined Sosthène and Gentilien at the bottom of the back stairs. They had both taken cutlasses for the undergrowth and as we passed the yard, which was now as white with flakes as Spitzbergen, the carriages were beginning to assemble once more for the eventual departure of the guests. Gentilien slid two coach lamps from their brackets on a waiting Victoria and handed one of them to Sosthène.
•
‘The sound of raucous and disjointed singing came from the barred windows of the old coach house where the lepers were locked up.
‘It was almost hotter out than indoors and as we ran over the lawns to the two stone nymphs where the little-used path through the forest began, the flakes were falling so thick that it was hard to see. But once under the branches, the air cleared and not a flake penetrated the thick roof of leaves. The path led away westwards from Plessis, round the shoulder of a hill and down a ravine. The music of the ball and of the drums of Plessis soon fell silent, but the stillness of the forest was broken by the startled noises of the birds stirring overhead – an alarmed and unusual chorus of whistling and chattering. The rhythmic croaking of thousands of frogs sounded through the trees, but all the forest noises were dominated by the unbroken, high-pitched and metallic cry of the Jacobean cricket which, with the shrill urgency of a stop-watch, seemed to say Make haste!
‘The narrow track went steeply down, turning and turning on itself like a winding staircase so that the dancing coach lamps revolved through the leaves and the ferns ahead of me in erratic descending circles. Holding the lamps high overhead, Sosthène and Gentilien only halted a moment in their course – borne up, it appeared, by the pale winding currents of the forest mist that reached as high as their armpits – to slash with their cutlasses through a hindering loop of convolvulus or wild vine. I soon threw my shoes away, and, catching up my enormous skirt, pursued them over the dam
p humus of the path in stockinged feet. Outside the radius of the two lamps all was black except for the polygonal dartings of millions of fireflies. A sudden flare from the crater of the Salpetrière would sometimes turn the sky beyond the tree-tops deep red, and, for a few flickering moments, light the enormous liana-tangled architecture of the forest with a faint and infernal glare. Tripping at a turn in the path over what I thought was a stone, I fell full length. When they stopped to help me up, my stumbling block proved to be an armadillo which had rolled itself into a tight ball. The lamplight also revealed a whole army of small fauna retreating downhill – frogs and lizards, an agouti or two, and, here and there, a snake; a sluggish gibnut was lumbering along in the middle of a flurried clouder of wild cats. Overhead, thick flights of pigeons and blue parrots, and even siffleurs montagnes, were on the move in flight from the growing heat in the chaudières higher up the mountain’s flank. Gentilien’s eyes in the lamplight were two emblems of alarm. He crossed himself and muttered, “Je n’aime pas ça!” ’
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 8
