by Hilton, Lisa
‘Oh, he’s on the telly,’ chimed in Wendy, ‘you know, Giles, we loved that programme didn’t we?’
Giles Froggett felt it was common to talk about the television, but then this was a friend of Claudia’s, and the Comtesse had brought it up. ‘Yes, very interesting. Not that we watch much.’
Claudia thought that rather dear.
‘He’s gorgeous, isn’t he Claudia?’ Wendy chimed on. ‘You better watch out, Alex!’ Her daughter cringed visibly.
‘No need,’ said Claudia, knowing she was being winsome, looking at the Marquis, ‘Frenchmen are just too charming for me. They can’t be trusted!’ Everybody laughed. Aisling and Claudia both thought about sticking a cocktail stick in Wendy Froggett’s eye.
Jonathan asked where the Marquis had learned his excellent English, and was told that, as a little boy, he had spent the war in England with his mother. This gave rise to several remarks, but it became clear, after an hour, that the English party was not staying to dine. The wine glasses remained emphatically empty.
Aisling, alert to the awfulness of people who came to drinks and stayed put, picked up her handbag determinedly and Claudia followed suit. The Froggetts looked rather surprised. As they said goodbye, Delphine told Aisling, in French, that she would love to come down some time and look at La Maison Bleue, she had heard Aisling had done such clever things with it.
‘Of course,’ Aisling replied, as casually as she could. ‘Why don’t you bring the boys? I’m sure they’d love a swim.’ Later, she asked Jonathan whether he thought that might have seemed rude, that she had made it obvious that there was no pool at the chateau.
‘I can’t imagine she cared,’ he answered, which was unsatisfactory, especially if he were right. When the chicken gremolata was eaten, the Glovers thanked, and Richard and Olly in bed, Aisling sat on the balcony with a glass of wine. Alex said rudely in the car that it felt as though they had been there about a decade, but on the whole she was pleased with the evening. Claudia had surprised her. The girl had been gracious, it must be said. And how did she become so friendly with the Marquis? This Marichalar person must be well known if Wendy Froggett had heard of him, and Claudia, it appeared, had a life, a French life, which brought her into easy contact with such people.
Aisling did not analyse this shift, this softening, of her initial dislike, nor acknowledge that its source was cupidity. Claudia was clearly an interesting person, and her elegance, her cigarettes, were recast by Aisling as symbols of a sort of bohemian glamour. Claudia was possessed of something that she, Aisling, craved, something that she did admit was surprising to find in connection with her husband’s family, but which she saw the opportunity to cultivate. She saw herself with Claudia in Paris – a shopping trip for the wedding? They would pop to the opening of a new gallery, and go to supper with Delphine in a little bistro on the Left Bank, well-dressed women, speaking French. She saw a house party, perhaps next summer, long tables on the lawn of the chateau, a sprawling easiness, someone playing a piano, and the sound drifting down the broad staircase in the twilight. She could do the food. Aisling thought of tureens of chilled green sorrel soup, and quails, lacquered with honey, plump in nests of caramelized Chasselas grapes.
Alex was fucking Claudia on their broad white bed. She was on all fours, a pillow bunched beneath her stomach. She let him pump away in silence, glad that she’d managed to take her linen dress off before he crumpled or ripped it. On either bedpost, Aisling had hung a white muslin bag with a green ribbon, filled with Murblanc lavender. Alex took hold of her hips, pulling them up and hard against him, and Claudia moaned approvingly, as though barely containing her need to scream with pleasure. He moved faster. Claudia put her hand between her legs and scrabbled at herself until she reached some sort of orgasm, relaxed and fell forward a little, tightening her thighs to encourage him to finish. She reached around, straining her shoulder in its socket to prod unenthusiastically at the dry crevice of his arsehole. Alex paused, dipped his mouth to the back of her neck, then pulled out and turned her over. He knelt between her legs, stroking his cock, showing her how stiff it still was. Behind his dangling balls she could see the rindy rims of his feet, the colour of Lancashire cheese. She ran her tongue over her lower lip, keeping her eyes fixed on the spongy helmet of his prick. He settled himself inside her again, the whole weight of him. ‘I can go on as long as you want,’ he rasped, with a look of stupid cleverness. He ground away at her, until she felt hot and dry and extremely bored. ‘As long as you want, baby.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ thought Claudia.
JUNE 1940
Cathérine waited for her as usual at the top of the Murblanc lane as she walked down to work, but before she was close enough to speak, Oriane had known that something was wrong.
‘They’re here,’ was all Cathérine said.
That was the day they listened to the radio, Père Guillaume’s radio that he’d brought out from the presbytery. All the Nadls went, and when they arrived in the village nobody was at work, the men were already grouped around the door of the Mairie, smoking, and the women in the square. None of the Castroux girls had gone up to the chateau, the Chauvignats were there from Saintonge. Some women had their hands occupied, wiping a dish over and over, holding a loaf or a baby, darting quick glances at the men and talking, talking, with their heads close together. No one was doing anything but it seemed no one thought to sit down. Laurent held Oriane’s arm, he squeezed it above the elbow as he went off with Papie to join the other men. It was already hot again. William was fretting, wanting to play. René Larivière hushed everyone, then they listened to the broadcast in the Mairie and sat waiting through the long afternoon.
Everyone was weary of it, but it was impossible to move until something happened, something that could be reacted to, but nothing did. Maréchal Pétain said it was time to stop fighting, that things had to be finished. The church tower was like a giant sundial, the shadow swung slowly around across the square until the Mairie was in the evening sun. Monsieur Dubois and a few of the men pulled out more benches from the café, Betty brought a few jugs of wine and orange sirop for the little ones. The women went to their houses, Hilaire Charrot fetched the bread, which had been warm that morning and had lain neglected all the day. Terrines were put out, a blue dish of boiled eggs, a plate of radishes. The priest twiddled at the dials of the radio, irritably pushing back the sleeve of his cassock where it flowed forward over the machine, all that came out was dance tunes. They ate, more wine was brought for the men, and someone said, ‘Give us a tune, William.’ At first he copied a few things he had heard on the radio, American music, fast and snappy. Then he played a tune that Oriane did not recognize. Laurent said later it was a song from the war, the first war, a song about Alsace. Oriane was never sure if William had understood why he played it. Laurent was seated next to her, she touched his shirtsleeve and saw that there were tears on his face. It was growing dark now, and the men’s faces looked paler, bluish. They clasped one another’s hands as William played, and bowed their heads.
Like everyone in Castroux, Oriane divided the time of the war between before and after their arrival in France. Hardly anyone in the village had paid much attention to the declaration of war a few months after Mademoiselle Lafage got married. Before they came, it was William she remembered more than anything, William playing. Later, when she thought of the wedding, she remembered distinctly the song he played outside the Mairie, the night they all waited there, though that was the year after the wedding party, and she had not been wearing her dress with the flowers. Somehow those times ran together, the recollection of the heat in the square, and the people watching, and all that Oriane knew was that she had been happy then, although she should not. The Marquis d’Esceyrac had arrived that night, she remembered, in his big car from Paris with his man in the seat next to him, so it must have been the next day that the chateau was closed up, but time had got mangled, she couldn’t smooth it out. What was left was William with Papie’s vio
lin under his chin and the heat draining out of the day, under the chestnut tree.
When Pétain’s speech was over, the gay music had continued, interspersed with alarming gunfire bursts of crackling static. That hideous music that seemed suddenly so coarse conjured to François Boissière the squalid gyrations of a decadent time. François remembered that he had burst out in protest, trying to galvanize the silent men who clustered hopelessly around the radio, gazing at it as though it would magically deliver them, sputter into life and tell them the world had not changed. François raced back to the schoolhouse and fumbled for a magazine from the box of cuttings he saved next to his chair in the parlour. His wife stood amongst the other women. He read excitedly from the turned-back page, holding it high to block his eyes against the sun. At first the men listened respectfully, since he was the teacher after all, as he described the Gauls as the greatest cuckolds of Christianity, who had left nothing of their souls or their speech in France. Nic Dubois, Jean Charrot and Marcel Vionne stared at him with the same surly expressions of incomprehension he had seen on their faces along the schoolroom forms only a year or so before. Marcel’s father had fought and returned, Dubois had lost an uncle and Charrot two. He raised his voice. ‘So you see, you see, if the word “shit” is left of the French language in generations to come, we’ll be lucky! Do you understand? We have to accept,’ he paused, his customary fluidity diverted by agitation, but it was no good. Père Guillaume said there was no need for bad language.
It was Laurent Nadl who talked about the hero of Verdun. The Maréchal knew better than to waste more French lives. Laurent looked meaningfully at Jean-Marc Teulière who had been pushed up quietly in his chair. Men raised their voices, the word ‘Communist’ was spoken, and they looked shiftily at François and his magazine when the schoolteacher tried to explain that he agreed with Laurent, that was the point of the example, that they must avoid destruction. The English had betrayed them. The Jews had betrayed them. Emile Chauvignat spoke up and said that there could be something in it for everyone if they went along with it, and a few heads nodded, though the Chauvignats were not well liked.
It was too late to say so later when no one believed him, but René Larivière said to himself that not a man of them had talked of fighting. Hours passed as they stood there. René’s head was aching, he wanted to sit down, he wondered stupidly if he ought to put on his mayoral sash. Père Guillame led them in prayer, they bowed their heads dutifully, as they had listened to François, and over the square the women crossed themselves. René heard that day described as unforgettable, but it seemed to him that nothing was recalled with any clarity, and the only sensation that remained honest in him was the astonishment he had felt at his own fear.
As René saw the Marquis’s car drawing up by the church, he felt relief. At least there would be news, some sense of direction. He felt he had no authority, that there was nothing he knew how to do or was certain ought to be done. The telephone lines to Monguèriac were deaf. Perhaps he should have asked Nadl to go, on his motorbike, but until the Marquis appeared, he remained with the others in the square, pointlessly returning to the radio as Père Guillaume turned the dials, sometimes slowly, as though there was information to be caught if only it could be pulled in, like a sleepy trout from the Landine, sometimes abruptly, trying to wrench some certainty from the shrieking whine of the airwaves. He drank a glass or two of wine, but did not share the food the women had brought out. When the car arrived he felt ashamed of his own eager deference. He did join the group that immediately surrounded the Marquis but hung back in the open doorway of the Mairie, where the mosquitoes hummed under the yellow strip of light. Monsieur d’Esceyrac climbed out, wrapped in a pale motoring coat, flexing his fingers where they had been gripping the wheel. René remained in the doorway, feeling he should not approach unless he was asked, wondering whether he should not walk authoritatively to the centre of the group and speak up. He saw a few women pointing down to the Mairie, and the Marquis came towards him. René was pleased that it was the other now, who hung back, though he was ashamed of himself for thinking such a thing.
Monsieur d’Esceyrac was pale and his face looked pulled tight. When he spoke, René could smell the staleness of his breath, tobacco mixed with a dirty cabbagy scent, as though his mouth had been dry for a long time. René beckoned to Betty Dubois and whispered to her to fetch some water and a glass of wine for the Marquis. The men shook hands. ‘Won’t you sit down, Monsieur le Marquis?’
The Marquis smiled wryly, ‘Thank you, but I’ve been sitting down since Paris. We left this morning.’
Betty brought a glass in either hand. The Marquis swallowed the water quickly, then looked down into the wine glass without drinking. Betty hovered until René sent her off with a jerk of his head. They stood there a moment, two shadows in the warm yellow doorway, then the Marquis asked if they had heard the radio.
‘It’s true then?’
‘They’re in Paris.’
René had to look up to see the Marquis’s eyes, conscious of his own sweat-marked collar and dusty boots. The Marquis lifted his head and drank off the wine. He gave a dry laugh.
‘I wish I could tell you something, René, but that’s not—’ His voice did not falter, just stopped short, and when he spoke again René had the sense that he had rehearsed the words as the car ran along the roads. ‘I have made certain arrangements. I’m shutting up the house tomorrow. There’ll be something left for the servants of course. You must do your best, René, you will need to be firm. That’s the thing. I don’t think you’ll be much affected down here, although you’ll see, half of France is on the road. I should get organized, set up some stores, that sort of thing. Things will be back to normal in a few days and you’ll hear from the Préfecture. I should tell you good luck, I suppose.’ He gave the same dry little cough that passed for a laugh.
Then, René despised the Marquis for using his first name. There was an appeal for understanding, René felt, as though the familiarity would charm René into accepting his abandonment of Castroux. René thought he should speak up, say something about courage and duty, show that at least he, the mayor, had some sense of what was right. As it was, he nodded and replied merely, ‘As you say,’ and he never saw Charles again. They did not shake hands.
As the Marquis returned to his car, the village was on its feet. They expected him to speak, they looked for it almost pleadingly in his face as he walked on, drawing his cloth driving gloves over his hands. He crossed through the group of women and seemed to recognize Oriane.
‘You work up at the house, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes sir. My name is Oriane Aucordier.’
‘And you have a brother, don’t you?’
Until now, Oriane had not been afraid. There was too much and too little happening to ignite fear, but now she felt it, cold and sick, squirming in her and catching her breath in her throat so it was difficult to speak. The Marquis had never addressed her before.
‘I do, sir. William.’
‘Quite so. Well, I would like you to bring young William when you come to work tomorrow, as early as you can.’
‘He’s not, that is, he hasn’t done anything wrong, sir. He’s strange, I know that, but he’s as good as gold. You can ask Père Guillaume, really.’
‘Please don’t worry, Mademoiselle. I need your brother to help me with a job, then he can go home with you. It won’t take long.’
The car drove away with the smart man from Paris upright and disdainful in the passenger seat. They could hear the engine travelling down to the river, until it vanished in the thick trees of the avenue. Nothing was said, but it was true dark now and the lights about the square looked meagre and lonely.
The governess, Mademoiselle Cleret had vanished. She must have been listening to her wireless, because Cook said that when they went to look for her she and her little trunk of starched collars were quite gone, and the baby howling alone in his crib. Everyone laughed a bit at Amélie Lespr
ats, who could not conceal her disappointment at not being taken instead, though no one except her vain self had expected that she would leave with the family. The Marquise had departed with just her own maid and the boy. Monsieur Mons the valet was to take those servants who were leaving to the station at Monguèriac in the wagon. There was just himself, Cook, and Clara, who was returning to her family in Lyons. Amélie had packed her suitcase ready, she had been nurserymaid after all, and she was convinced that Madame wouldn’t be able to dispense with her, and that she would soon be kicking up her heels in Monte Carlo. Now she was just going along the valley to her parents, like Cathérine.
‘What did you think Madame would be wanting with you anyway on the Côte d’Azur?’ asked Cathérine nastily, and Amélie cried into her apron and said well, at least it would have been a bit of life. Clara embraced them all and said that she would write, so not to mind. But when Cook and her bundles had been helped into the wagon and they had waved goodbye to cold, silent Monsieur Mons, the three girls sat down suddenly on the terrace steps and looked at one another.
‘I suppose we’d better get on,’ said Oriane.
They trooped back into the house. Monsieur’s instructions had been quite clear. Everything was to be covered in dust sheets and the carpets rolled, the china and the glasses and all Madame’s pretty knick-knacks to be wrapped and put in the big trunks Monsieur Mons had dragged down from the attic. The windows to be washed and covered with paper, the shutters closed and locked. Cook had said they might as well help themselves to the preserves, she and Clara would take what they could carry, but there was no sense in leaving them because you never knew. Monsieur Mons heard that and looked as though he might have something to say, but Cook had given him a look. She did not finish speaking. Oriane was to fold all the linens with mothballs and lock them in the laundry room in baskets, along the drying racks, not on the damp floor. The curtains were to come down and be stored in sacks, the saucepans swaddled in newspaper, the candles sorted into boxes, the whole house was to come to pieces as though it were a spring cleaning, but not be put back together.
