The Janeites
Page 13
Madame Bénédicte who never mentions a name if it can be avoided, and pretends not to know anyone’s occupation, did not go into details. ‘Young Mireille has been silly enough to form an emotional attachment.’ The permanent representative of a Power has weight in Community circles and draws a lot of water in her book. If he expresses a violent dislike for anything within her sphere of activity, she does not ask whether this is rational behaviour; it so seldom is. Something will be done, and he has the right to know nothing about it: that’s what he pays for. Success in business depends upon getting other people to do the work for you. She wants a customer to feel comfortable.
It isn’t a coincidence either that Dr Valdez knows nothing about PermRep; a scrap or two of Community hearsay – this isn’t Brussels but it’s just as gossipy. Janine’s demeanours, maybe misdemeanours in the past had never interested him much: everyone has things in their life they prefer not to talk about. She had floated into his and at ‘the bottom of his heart’ (wherever that is) he had known that she would float out. Such things are painful when they happen. William had a notion that it was on her account someone took an acute dislike to his nose; a good job of surgery that had been – painful, very, but pain is not a punishment handed out for sleeping with Janine. You accept it. Pain is one of the world’s basic realities. William is an ex-security-guard and sees things under the bed. People use the most brutal violence to man, as to tree, earth or water, for the basest of motives. A man, a woman, a small child – such are the ways of the Crab. There’s nothing to say, beyond Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, I beg your pardon for the kitchen Latin.
“Felix qui potuit,” said Raymond sententiously, putting Joséphine instantly on her mettle. School Latin.
“Happy is he – I hope I may be allowed to say she – who can, perhaps could? – understand the causes of things. Rather a trite remark, not? Who’s that, Aristotle?”
“Henri Fabre, a very great saint. Marvellous writer, wonderful scientist, the bastards in the Sorbonne wouldn’t give him a job, he spent his savings on a little cottage in Provence with a bare patch of ground, made the greatest entomological study ever known and while he was at it filled the garden with flowers and rare plants for his beasts to feed on.”
“You could do the same here.” August is the month of many many sorts of spiders and the house is full of them, giving pleasure.
“A century ago Provence was not polluted. Somebody in England looked in a rockpool at low tide, said never again will man see what I now see. We’re losing biological species a thousand a day. I can call spirits from the vast deep, though precious few of them will do as I say.” It has been raining hard for several days and there isn’t much to do but drink and talk.
Of the very essence of romanticism is the truth so often trivialized into cliché, that the adventure begun in sunlight ends in humid, chilly shadow. Marie has awakened the sleeping Manda in the field by the river by tickling him with a grassblade. He opens his eyes and her smiling face close to his own is haloed by the dazzle of the sunlight directly behind her. Jacques Becker’s film is well known to both because Casque d’Or is a classic of the cinema and there is nothing in it that is not perfect, necessary: it walks the tightrope of talent stretched taut, flowers into miracle.
Those two have one weekend. As they come out of the dark little church where Marie has watched the comic, touching peasant marriage, the chill strikes her and she draws her shawl closer. Round the corner innocently wheeling his bicycle, is the traitor, and that evening, sitting on the doorstep of the little shack, Manda knows what he has to do, and that he has no choice in the matter. To die is nothing much but to renounce the easy path makes a man.
Neither Raymond nor Joséphine will speak of this. He has little experience of life, though much of death, but his instincts are fortified by the discipline he has chosen to follow, and – allegro vivace – to disregard. She in a shortish time has known something of the world, but a woman is born to understanding. The hair’s breadth between pleasure and pain is her biology.
Nothing chillier than a chilly August. But the house is dry and warm; Ray has learned the art of a log fire. The last time down-the-hill Joséphine had bought beef, and to save this from going off had put it in a bowl with a bottle of wine poured over it. There are some bacon scraps, and one day they had picked a basket of mushrooms, so that she has made a bourguignon stew, which has been all night in the oven and now it smells heavenly: the biggest potatoes had been put in the woodashes, and a field salad made of ‘the weed from the garden’. Here recollections of children’s botany are better than his, since he has none at all. She has promised him (‘is this mushroom an amanita?’) that ‘we won’t die poisoned’. Another bottle, an extravagant one, Brother Gorenflot’s favourite Romanée, is taking the air, not too close to the embers.
“‘Als ik kan’” said Raymond watching the play of the little green and blue flames: “it was the motto of the painter Jan van Eyck.” Joséphine has less trouble with Flamand (she is Alsacienne born) than with Latin.
“When I can? If I can? As long as I am able?”
“It has to be stronger than that, I think. ‘To my limit’? ‘To my last limit’. Or perhaps it is humble. ‘Knowing my limit’.
“Ours is awful. ‘We keep faith’ – one wonders how often they did.”
“I had the Van Eyck picture once, cut out and pasted up. Chancellor Rollin praying to the Madonna. In every line of him a frightful crook but his prayer is utterly sincere.”
“Perhaps he says ‘I will always be faithful to you darling in my fashion’.”
“Yes, probably that’s the best we can do,” looking after her with love. “But you mustn’t be cynical, my darling. ‘To our utmost’ and we make that ours.”
“At school they went on no end about honour. There was an Irish girl called Honour. We used to tease her. She said it was quite a common name, there.”
“Not a bad one, either. I had a book once of American history – Indians. A Century of Dishonour – one of the best titles I know.
Joséphine is remembering.
“There were things for which we had to give ‘our word of honour’ and one had to think carefully, before one did so. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid.”
“It is what we lose. It can also be what we win back.” She stretched out her hand, and put it in his, as she had done in the restaurant, in Paris.
They’ve gone and modernized Gitanes! One of the last remaining symbols of la-belle-France… which should have been eternal, and a national monument like Guimard’s Métro entrances. Joséphine’s cigarette-packet was on the kitchen table; the petrol blue now a chaste Madonna colour, the neon-green lettering a slimmed and sobered white. The Gitana herself still danced the tarantella in her swirl of smoke, defiant as ever, but she seemed smaller, less robust; the famous black silhouette now a stage-lit sweetheart about to take a bow, as though knowing the performance is over. As a doctor Raymond is bound to disapprove of her but his affections remain intact. She is no pasty-faced Marianne smirking in the mayor’s office but the France which always somehow survives, loathed by all and still inspiring love.
Joséphine came in upon the wool-gatherer from outer space, picked up the packet, put a cigarette in her mouth in a challenging way (she’s not supposed to go over three a day but it was plainly his fault for standing staring) and said abruptly,
“How is William?”
“No means of knowing.”
“Dammit, you’re the doctor,” snapping the lighter like the lock of a pistol.
“Quite right. He’s a lot better. Beyond that, you may as well go to the casino, take a hand at blackjack. Give me a card, whoops it’s a deuce, another, it’s a trey, yay, one more I’ve got a five-and-under. Go for it and shit, it’s a knave and I’m busted. A cancer can go coy, playing footsie, now you see me now you don’t. Been known to turn back, don’t like it here, I’m going on holiday. But one never can say, Right, you, you’re paid off, goodbye.”
Joséphine has listened to Doctor-Valdez-playing-cards; one couldn’t for a moment guess whether she was interested.
“You remind me of Geoffrey saying ‘he calls the knaves jacks, this peasant’. Oh well, I’m a very old-fashioned girl myself. There was one the other day – she’s modern, you understand – got herself raped in an underground parking, said she wasn’t at all bothered since her cunt was an underground parking. The more the merrier.”
Raymond, straightfaced: “My dick when fully erect measures twenty-two centimetres.” Joséphine has an acute sense of the ridiculous, bless her.
“My fan – the name of the rose is the Rose. Won’t be rose-like without the help of Monsieur Saint-Laurent. Fresh sea water any good? The Aphrodite Anadyomene did no better.” she sat down and started to peel potatoes… he could see her looking for a ‘tactful formula’. They aren’t any, but she tries to soothe – down, dog – her dreadful habit of being blunt. Can one put a thing like this on a rational footing?
“What’s it like, being a Jesuit?” It is like, he thinks, the clerihew about a well known French philosopher.
‘D’you know the creeda
Jacques Derrida?
There ain’t no reada.
There ain’t no writa
Eitha.’
“It’s no different to being any other kind of man. Now and then it’s exceptionally disciplined, like being in the Foreign Legion. Betimes they tell you do some weird things. One they sent to Seven Hills, that’s somewhere near Adelaide. ‘Make wine’. He didn’t know a damn thing about it, makes now the best wine in Australia. But the Legion looks after its own you know, they have a home for the aged cripples. Meantime, can’t you tell? I’m like the one in the Piaf song. You smell good of sea water, I smell good, of the Hot Sand.” She bursts out laughing, lovingly.
“Mon Légionnaire…”
It went on raining, Phrases wore thin, wore out. Hung be the heavens with black gave way to never-seen-anything-like-it; the roof started to leak, so that one put buckets under drips, or one would have, if there were any buckets, and jokes about Sadie Thompson never had been that funny: when the battery of Joséphine’s little radio failed, the Let’s get the hell out of here became overmastering. Down-the-hill might be a startling new inland lake but who knows? – maybe the sun is shining. Throw everything into the Land Rover and make a dash for it; nothing could be easier. What is going on in the world? This elemental violence appears excessive. Floods here and forest fires elsewhere. Tornados. The polar ice is melting. Krakatoa has erupted, very likely. Joséphine who is easily given to drama is working herself into a lather.
When violence gives way again to the humdrum, the banalities of being wise after the event appear in deepcut relief upon the frontal, still intact, of bombed temples. It could be something pompous about Look on my works ye mighty, but it’s more likely to be ‘I did tell you you were driving too fast.’ Not that she’ll admit it, or allow herself to believe it. She knows this path by heart. It’s impossible to capsize a Land Rover anyhow. He did say ‘Slow down’; at least, he always claimed he had.
Fifty years ago the woodcutters looked after the paths in the hills. They split logs lengthways and laid them diagonally, primitive but efficient drains; they cleared boulders from eroded slopes and packed them to reinforce soft shoulders. Some of these paths have been carved out wider, brutally, for the passage of today’s heavy machinery: on others, no longer used, the housekeeping has been neglected. Heavy rain starts a hundred little springs and streams across the face of the mountain; torrential rain may be expected to start torrents, which wash the subsoil out into deep gullies. On the path down to the forester’s house there was a kink which had originally been quite a long way from a steep slope, but over the years erosion brought it much closer. Quite large stones had tumbled into the valley; roots and stubs of long-ago trees had been uncovered, loosened, carried away in their turn. One would not notice, until the last minute, that what had seemed a big bank of moss and grass held together by a tangle of heather and bilberry was in fact a fraud; the topsoil had leaked away progressively because under it the sand layer had been carried off. This storm had sent the whole bank down a steep and nasty drop. Once the offside wheels of – even a Land Rover – go past the point of balance you are teetering on the edge of what will kill you very easily.
Sitting on the off side, which was beginning to sag slowly at first, but the momentum piles up, Raymond could get the door open but underneath him was a horrible yawning chasm.
“Jump girl – jump.” No time for polite injunctions or pious ejaculations. Could be described as a bellow, a yap, a howl. He was ejected, in not even three syllables and what the Army used to call ‘without vaseline’.
For Joséphine it was a lot more difficult, sitting on the near side. The door began facing upward; the driver’s seat doesn’t help matters; there are complications like steering-wheels, all sorts of fucking hazards. She’s an athletic girl. Fear, which according to cliché lends wings, is more apt to paralyse, so she’s lucky to be fearless. It took a very long time to scramble, and a bunch of muscles such as one doesn’t think of using as a rule, and some luck. Donkeys are patient, obstinate, sturdy, tenacious. Brit virtues, these. The Land Rover was obstinate before tumbling, and that helped save her life, very likely.
She pulled herself clumsily to her feet: if camels are that awkward she’s sorry for them too. Without any notion of speaking aloud she said, “I’ve probably sprained my wrist. Or my ankle. Or both.” Oh shut up, ninny. Looked around in a drunken way. Oh God where is Ray? Limped to the edge, heart banging; this horrible slidy lip with water trickling over.
“Ray. God. Ray.” She knelt down in the water and sicked up. Then she saw him, ten metres down, a rag, clinging.
He had slid, scorched, down hillsides on his arse and his elbow, but the several tons of hurtling metal had missed him. Perhaps it hit a rock; it must have bounced a bit. He was hanging on to a root, bramblebush or something. He waved arms and legs about; they seemed to work. He tried for a toehold. Under all this loose soil and scree there must be something solid. The distance back to the road was immense; also looking nastily smooth. Maybe one could sort of scrabble sideways. The ten metres of climb turned into thirty, of fearful work. Clothes sticking to him, what’s left of them. Both the arse and elbow in a sad state but don’t seem busted. When he got his face up over the edge he saw Joséphine kneeling there staring at him: she had followed every step from up above, too frightened to speak or even cry. They stood there tottery, holding on to one another. He said something silly. She began to laugh and cry and be sick, all together. Poor girl, she had nothing left to be sick with.
“Oh dear,” wiping a wet dirty face on a wet dirty sleeve. “Geoffrey’s good Land Rover!” Then she had to laugh again. That’s shock, of course. “Thank you, Brits.”
“What Brits?”
“If it had been Japanese I’m sure it would have gone over quicker.”
“What do we do now?”
“We walk. Can’t be all that far.” Not too sure she could. Valdez is supposed to be a doctor. Useless in the circumstances.
“Don’t think it’s sprained, just a bad wrench.”
“Perhaps it’ll get easier as I go along.”
It didn’t take much over an hour: they were soaked through anyhow.
The forester made little of it. To hear him such things happened every day. Occasion for a good guffaw. Even his wife, dry clothes and hot coffee, aspirin, disinfectant, sticking plaster, was pretty unperturbed. Sepp’ll drive you down to the hospital. Nothing very terrible, not as though a tree fell on you.
Good grief – townspeople would have been screaming for the helicopter. Sepp was even jaunty about the Land Rover. Ach what, we’ll bring the hauler up, once we get the
cable hitched on she’ll wind back up nice as Nelly. Bring her down here for the insurance.
His own (Japanese) four by four was surprisingly warm and well padded. Outpatients were thorough but undramatic. Radios showed no bone damage. A tetanus shot would be no bad idea; that’s a lot of skin missing off your backside, mate, but the rest is only cuts and bruises. Extensive, but there’s nothing internal. You’ll be pretty sore for a few days. Some delayed shock, the young lady, but she can go home if she feels up to it.
“Oh dear,” said Silvia. “You’ve been in the wars again.” Raymond’s hateful colleagues were downright hilarious; a week’s supply of jokes about Shortarse Valdez. He went gratefully to bed with some hot cocoa. There was a long but unanguished phone call from Joséphine. Geoffrey had screamed a bit but come round to a fairish level of equanimity. The insurance company will just jolly well stump-up. He’d been thinking of a new one anyhow.
Monsieur Philippe goes about his business but he seethes now and then; feelings of irritability that he wants to scratch. He had gone to a lot of trouble and it had sort of caved in on him. That pair, the doctor and the woman, whom he had counted on, seemed to have disappeared; gone on holiday very likely, it’s the season for holidays, he’d like to get away himself. The man Barton was at home all right, glimpsed from afar a couple of times but caution, caution, it didn’t do to be seen. He felt a standstill. He wanted to find some way of hitting the fellow direct, something that would hurt, damage.