The Janeites

by Nicolas Freeling

  He was reading the paper when the idea came to him. Simplicity and force, how had he never thought of that before? Some of these imbecile independence-warriors in Brittany had stolen industrial explosive from a quarry; dynamite, gelignite, whatever it’s called. He knows nothing about the subject but it sounds quite simple. The stuff is easily placed without attracting attention, can be detonated at a comfortable distance. They’d blown up – at least, created a lot of damage – a tax office, a sub-prefecture. Symbols of authority to cock a snook at. Works very well. You create fear, uncertainty, apprehension, as well as the physical damage you cause. And you can be anonymous or not, exactly as you please. The more he thought about it the more he liked it. But how do you get hold of explosives? Not his field. .

  The man-at-arms will know; sort of thing he does know. Monsieur Philippe is not keen on taking a lout like that into his confidence but has quite enough of a hold upon him to ensure that his mouth stays shut. A large noisy pub is easily found, where the company one keeps is unnoticed by anybody. Outline the notion after a few drinks.

  “Explosives I wouldn’t know. Sure I know how to do it, goes back a long way that, during the war, railways or whatever, stick of the whosit in the crankshaft. But that stuff’s pretty closely guarded, sure, mines, quarries, demolition job on old buildings, but not sure I can get you that. Be pretty pricy too. I got a better idea. Gas tank, ordinary butane cylinder, countryside’s full of them, that’d be easy. Disadvantage though, weighs a bit and bulky, can’t just put it in your pocket.” Yes indeed. Open it, light it, you’ve plenty of time to get away.

  “The price would be right.”

  “Mate, the price comes in two halves. Getting it, yes, I reckon that could be managed. I know of a village, up in the hills, the shop keeps them in the shed, haven’t much more than a padlock to bust.”

  “No no, that makes it too obvious. But getting a key to fit this padlock…”

  “Maybe. He might have twenty tanks there, the truck doesn’t come round that often and one less might not be missed for a week or two. Would cost you though. But placing it, that’s another ball game. No no, Nelly, there you’re on your own.”

  “I daresay the principal might be expected to throw in a decent bonus.”

  “You tell him from me, pad his figure with a few zeroes, still won’t give me the horn. I drive trucks, I have some nice stuff inside these trucks, pay my holidays in Bermuda, blowing up houses is too rich for my blood. Just for getting it – cash up front, and no credit cards. Liquid, mate, in the bank in Luxembourg.”

  The bargain was too steep, but Monsieur Philippe feels a raging thirst there’s no quenching until that fancy palazzo goes up skywards.

  All very well for him! – sparing a spiteful thought for Terry-the-Trucker, rolling in the profits from cigarettes, probably illegal immigrants, in fact you-name-it: muscles like Popeye and the brains of a black beetle. Monsieur Philippe is prudent. Stops the car a long way back: this hillside ground is dry and drains well but it won’t do to leave any tell-tales behind. There’s a bit of a slope down to the courtyard and just as well; carrying this gas tank is impossible. Brains are better than muscles. If the tank makes tracks that’s unimportant; he is wearing an old wornout pair of canvas sneakers he’d found in the dustbin, and ancient gardening gloves. Thus equipped Minnie Mouse crossed the courtyard with his burden. That was scary but he’s pretty sure that bedrooms are at the back and nobody comes along the path which is a dead end and marked as such a long way back. Where to place his bomb? Not going to risk climbing steps – under the steps is surely best. The screw of the valve is hideously tight; he had to wrestle with that, sweating like a pig in a monsoon, what seemed a good five minutes. Once he had the thing lit, scramble all aircraft; he fair scuttled, backing the car till he could turn it, sweating, it’s a Turkish bath inside, he’s making enough noise to waken the entire village. He hears no bang but the whole idea is to be well out of the way before there’s any bang. He was back out on the main road thinking of where to dump the shoes and the gloves before there was a distant whump, so unimportant one wondered whether that was It. And now there is traffic again so concentrate on driving rather slow and cautious. His mouth of course was cinder-dry and he’d thought of everything except water to drink.

  “Well,” said the gendarmerie brigadier, “you were lucky in a way. Pretty amateurish, if he’d known how to direct a charge like that in a confined space… not been getting on the wrong side of any Corsicans, have you?” William’s friends in the PJ aren’t greatly excited either.

  “Impelled by vulgar curiosity,” said Xavier. “Not exactly hotfooting it out there with the technical squad. Know better than to tread on the gendarmerie’s toes. Of course, if the insurance people were to book a formal complaint, and if an investigating magistrate were to refer that to us, be a different pair of shoes. I can do a bit of discreet eavesdropping. What d’you make of this yourself? This your little pallywally or have you got some more funny friends?”

  “I’m just an innocent householder,” said William. “They’ve been very busy all morning collecting little bits of débris. A gas tank like this was stolen up in the hills and they may get somewhere with that. I know who and so do you, and where’s the direct proof? Not perhaps a characteristic approach, which I suppose he thinks clever, and he must have an accomplice, like who punched Doctor Valdez in the eye, huh?”

  “So patience; he’s getting bolder; one of these days he’ll trip and we’ve got him. I’ll have a quiet collegial word with the gendarmerie lieutenant.”

  “Leaving me out of it.”

  This is the way it works, thought William. I surprise myself; I become indifferent to the petty ways of the world. The insurance man, chicanery personified, the explosives man from the City fire department – the man from the local paper (but Geoffrey is quite friendly with his editor; three or four lines in the country edition). Quite right; all this is so unimportant. I was a Janeite without knowing it. Knowing it, one enjoys it more.

  He has been reading Pee and Pee, supplied by Dolores. Not at all like her reading aloud, but she has explained that.

  Addicted he is; this one hooked him too, but ‘not the same’. She’s very funny but in a spiteful acid fashion he found himself liking less. Reminding him of the Marquis, to who indeed Mr Collins had been the bread-and-butter of Ministries, while Lady Catherine was a phenomenon one met with daily in the sixteenth arrondissement and around the Parc Monceau. Mr Darcy he had met with in many antechambers, while Mr Bennet was a well known and extremely cynical Academician who hadn’t written anything in the last twenty years but made a very nice living for all that.

  Dolores, appealed to, said that this was Jane when very young and alarmingly clever. He could agree that it was extremely brilliant but he didn’t believe that Elizabeth Bennet would be so quick and so brave at answering-back. But never mind, said Dolores, this prepared you for the mature and beautiful Jane. Persuasion next and that is the best of all.

  As he got further, yes; were they even so exaggeratedly ridiculous? Politicians’ wives, every scrap as talkative as Miss Bates but far less kindhearted (indeed a great deal less sensible, and really quite as silly and as snobbish as Mrs Bennet.) Pillars of party-politics as vulgarly on-the-make as Mr Elton, especially with a Mrs Elton to push them. Worthies, as wearisomely in the right as Mr Knightley (to whom he had taken an instant and durable dislike.) And be honest, at the time when the Marquis had been a sought-after television personality, interviewers had often been the Reverend Mr Collins in spades. He had stood in the shadows, behind the lights of the ‘plateau’, unable to believe his own eyes and ears. An excessively brilliant Minister, dyed-in-the-wool National School of Administration, had turned out gentle – and charitable – in private life, and that shed some light upon Mr Darcy. In England as in France – or anywhere at all.

  Joséphine was reading Persuasion which she said she’d found ‘at home’, to the accompaniment of some doubt ‘how it had g
ot there’. Her claim that Geoffrey had never opened a book in his life was certainly an exaggeration: the cliché of hard-riding claret-swilling wooden-headed barons is one she likes to promote. Raymond’s acquaintance among barons is not large. He supposed there would be more like the Marquis, immensely civilized, widely read; as many no doubt with no great taste for the printed page. Given a guess he would suppose that by and large a country gentleman living in an ancestral château thinks of the library as an essential attribute of his home even when he spends more of his time in the gunroom. At the least there’d be collections of classics, calf bound, in the major European languages. Didn’t the women read? Of course they did, and does one have to say ‘also’? All over north-eastern France you find ruins, where the battlefields of ’14–18 left quite often no stone standing above ground of these country châteaux, just as, throughout central Europe, you hear fearful stories of Russians burning all the books to keep themselves warm; of drunken Americans wreaking equal havoc: châteaux had also well-stocked cellars. Favoured billets for the licentious conquerors. And under all régimes widespread pillaging was the rule. However, Joséphine’s home has not been attacked since the seventeenth century. You would have to go back to ‘Les Suédois’ – in Alsace legendary figures of dread – to find this sort of destruction. Both French and German troops were generally kept in better order. It is true that the famous library of Strasbourg burned during the siege of 1870; true too that the Kaiser was horrified to hear of this, and ordered all the universities of Germany to do what they could to make good Christendom’s appalling loss. One way or another there isn’t anything extraordinary about finding quite a nice little edition of Jane Austen – lacking to be sure modern critical apparatus and commentary by the likes of Dr Chapman – in the library of a European country baron. Some grandmother or great-aunt of Joséphine has left pressed country flowers between the pages as a bookmark.

  She is enjoying Persuasion – now this is ‘adult art’. Vague school-girl recollections of Mr Bennet being witty about that ludicrous Mr Collins had left no real mark. But Anne Elliot is nearly thirty. The bloom is off. In fact she is described as thin, nigh haggard, and slightly faded: now who does that remind Joséphine of?

  Doctor Valdez is catching up on recent medical literature. The room, which is always full of books, lying about everywhere as well as in shelves up to the ceiling, has a pleasant literary feel of peace and quietude. Two people reading, and not much conversation to break a blessèd silence. In the silence, a small noise, definable as a chuckle.

  “You’re enjoying that… It was my friend Mr Kipling’s favourite… I don’t think I’ve ever read it.”

  “It was the last she wrote; seems generally acknowledged the best. There’s a very dramatic Happening, as near as Jane will allow herself to get to Violence.” Yes, Joséphine is also ripe to enter the Society of Janeites (playing a bigger role in Raymond’s recent life than the Society of Jesus).

  “What’s that?” Bored anyhow with Americans being extremely earnest about diabetes.

  “Stupid Louisa acting the goat, falls off the step of the pier, hits her silly nut and they all think she’s DEAD.”

  “Like me tumbling into the ravine.” Raymond is carrying a fine collection of half-healed cuts and bruises. “Good God. But she isn’t…”

  “Of course not. But makes I can tell you one hell of a stir.”

  We speak of a kindly silence. Generally, I think, we mean that our hearing is not – for a blessed moment – assaulted by the bawling of the world. There is another sort; the silence that obtains between two people in kindness with each other.

  This was interrupted by Raymond yawning, at first imperceptibly but gathering momentum as is the way of yawns until it splits one.

  “Is that a dog outside?” asked Joséphine, “or is the lighthouse sending fog signals?” It was nowhere near so late but

  “One, two, three; Time, time.”

  It might have been three; far into the night; when the phone rang. Since Doctor Valdez is not in general practice this is a rarity. And probably a wrong number but he still has to get out of bed (having it next door one only encourages the thing).

  “Yes, Valdez,” and then he listened for a long time but Joséphine has woken, has even switched a light on. To help him listen? Or to watch his face. Sometimes it can be like a burglar alarm ringing in some office.

  “You have to tell me, you know.” He looks constrained, not to say embarrassed. He had said very little.

  “You’re not in any way hurt?… That will be my affair… I’ll be along. Do nothing before then.” He sighed and said, “I have to get dressed. Hazard of this business.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “It was William. Someone seems to have put a bomb. No very great damage.”

  “Then what are you doing?” At that, a flash of sarcasm.

  “I’m going to sit on the café terrace, drink Pernod and listen to the band.” A Bogart line and rather a good one.

  “Exactly,” getting out of bed. “Order one for me.” Ray looking for his shoes and wondering what to say. Whatever – it would be of no use.

  Joséphine, equally, appears concentrated upon not getting her trousers on back to front.

  “Darling there’s no possible point. This may take me some time.”

  “I haven’t bothered with a clean shirt. I’d better have a jacket, seems it might be chilly out.”

  One faces the music, as they say. Likewise, firing squads. Marshal Ney, it’s said, took off his hat, said “Soldiers!” – hadn’t time for more. Raymond has much too much time.

  “I don’t think this is the moment for discussion. Where are the car keys, bonjour?”

  “There isn’t going to be any discussion.”

  Now Leonora, facing Pizarro who had already raised the arm with the knife, says simply, ‘I am his wife.’ It’s quite all right on the stage. That is what operas are for: to be dramatic. Nobody suggests that Leonora when dressed up as the executioner’s assistant cuts an unconvincing figure. But why is Raymond’s mind running upon midnight assassinations? Baron Scarpia turning to claim the reward of lechery, gets the knife straight up his midriff into the big nerve centre. ‘Here is the kiss of Tosca.’ Follows that heart-wrenching moment – the terrible line ‘And all Rome trembled before you’. The candles on each side of the body; the prayer, kneeling, for a wicked man; the colossal slow exit. The curtain – we’ve had time for the pulse to come down into the low hundreds.

  The Beetle is in no hurry to start. Battery rather flat; Wah-wah-wah in a nasty expiring-threatening way before lurching to life.

  Leonora’s line turns Pizarro to stone, cues that tremendous trumpet call. Hm, a lot of people have thought that a mistake. Big fluster – ‘The Minister has arrived’ – Pizarro yelling that he’d be there this very second – sad contrivances these. It should end upon those bleak monosyllables. ‘I am his wife.’

  Looking at ‘the bombsite’; the house from across the courtyard; Raymond was horrified, stayed so until a long-buried comic memory restored his balance: William was all right and this really was not all that bad.

  A harmless old gentleman had the habit of watercolour painting in the open air; set up his easel in the ‘park’: when there was a brief thunder shower the old boy scampered. After it cleared students gathered to discuss ‘whether it was better art than before’.

  The bits which had been dry – trees and stuff around the building portrayed – were merely blurry. But the architecture, fresh and still damp, had slid in peculiar ways. Trickled? Tumbled even; whole areas of window and masonry, slate and gutter, had disassembled. Dislimmed is the word. The result (which greatly pleased the students) was very much the sight which now met his eye.

  “Superficial really. No very Great harm done.”

  Joséphine’s eye, as it were dryer and less romantic, centred upon Dust. Homely household objects like the vacuum-cleaner. Dustbins full of broken glass. Dare one say it? hideously prosaic
– dustpan-and-brush. Her concierge in Paris, a grey soul in a grey overall, fond of remarking what good friends she was with her broom. One didn’t have to be Corsican to know that bombs are part of existence, really. A well-built house hadn’t suffered – much – structurally. The essential is that William is unharmed, a bit unkempt but looking on the whole quite chipper.

  William was standing there in a formal attitude of welcome, pale in a clean white shirt, upright, face expressionless.

  “Not in any pain right now?”

  “Not so’s I notice. I might find a symptom or two in an hour’s time.” Joséphine, apparently, didn’t find anything to say; stood looking about her as though she had been here before but couldn’t remember when.

  “The police have been?”

  “They’ve only just left. That smell of cigars is our local gendarmerie, amiable and helpful as always. They’ll be back in the morning, bustling about with measuring tapes and things, taking photographs. They aren’t greatly impressed with my bomber, who seems incompetent. Mainly interested in where that gas tank came from.”

  “William, what the hell is all this about?”

  “They think, and I agree, it was more to give me a fright than anything else.”

  “Revenge? For something you did?”

  “Ray – remember me? Paid-up luminary of SPHP – sorry, acronym for the Service of Protection of High Personalities. That’s largely a matter of being seen but not heard. Before that, some few years a working PJ officer. In either role, main preoccupation is to stay off the shit list. But in the Kripo you get heard as well as seen. You might have to arrest people, get confronted with them, maybe give evidence in front of a tribunal. They might go to prison. It’s been known they feel a grievance, brood on it, have some idea of getting even when they come out. Which might be years later. D’you mind if we sit down? I’m beginning to feel tired.”