The Janeites

by Nicolas Freeling

  “Are you going to give me a child? Of my own?” fiddling with the temperature of the shower – she likes it a bit hotter than he does – “I’m going to have a damn good try.” Sentimental, is it? The woman he had known well enough to raise the point were oddly biased in favour of monogamy. One day over the coffee cups – ‘You ever been married, Charlotte?’

  ‘Was once. Not any more. Buggered off, so he did. Oh well, learn to do without. Not such a great drama as they’d have you believe.’ Or Patricia, a woman still young, fresh, attractive. Warm, a laugher, you couldn’t possibly call her a priss. A friend.

  ‘You ever sleep with other men, do you, Lavigne? Have the odd bit on the side?’

  ‘People do sometimes very kindly offer.’ And then, seriously – ‘That’s a terrible trap, you know. I’ve tottered on the brink, once or twice. What would I say, to my children?’ She has two little girls. ‘Think of it as normal, what one hears,’ he suggested.

  ‘What you hear. What they hear too, yes. But that’s not what they know. Not what they expect from me, either.’ Or Bernadette, judge of instruction with twenty years’ experience.

  ‘Statistics are crap. You must know this, from your police years – crime, from the misdemeanour right up to the Assize Court, begins ninety-nine times in the hundred with a miserable story of a broken marriage. Anything else they tell you is just so much toasted marshmallow.’

  Feminist talk. Women get very hot indeed under the collar. ‘What collar?’ Ray Valdez would have asked. ‘Are we talking about horses?’ They’ll embark upon a tirade, talk your ear off; about the men going off as cool as you like, shrugging and saying it wasn’t important, they’d had a few drinks, they’d been very tired at the time, no need to make such a fuss, it’s meaningless really. Not like the days when a girl might get stuck with a baby. This, the women will say, is quite typical. Men are exactly like a child who breaks a toy, says he never meant to and it was no good anyhow. The woman will always be left to carry the can.

  William had asked Albert, on a stinking hot summer day which had made Albert’s gardening unusually intensive. ‘You’d think I was a stoker on the flaming Titanic.’ Sitting with a quiet beer in the arbour, down at the end where vines had been trained to go over the top, and a rusty old table underneath.

  ‘You ever commit adultery, Albert?’ Wonderful line, Ray Valdez would have called that. But beside friendship, and being in the shade after burning sunlight, and that incomparable first shot of a cool beer, this is a man who likes the direct, factual, concrete question, answers it the same way.

  ‘Yes. Not a good experience. Not recalled with any pride or satisfaction.’

  ‘Bernadette know?’

  ‘Women always get to find out.’

  ‘What she do?’

  ‘Did. Said. Nothing whatsoever. Left me stew in it. Plenty written on her face.’ Took another long drink of beer. ‘Not going to talk about it.’

  No. That advice he’d had already, in bits and pieces at various times. Regarding Joséphine, say nothing, do nothing: it won’t help.

  Albert went off for a long blissful shower. Bernadette home from work, already showered, in shorts and a band round her hair, was making mayonnaise in the kitchen, invited him to stay to supper.

  ‘I’ve made too much. Never mind, it’ll keep.’ The judge quite often talked about her work; it interested her that his professional background would often shed a bit of extra light, perhaps fortify her in a decision she had made but not yet pronounced, wanting still to ‘think about it overnight’.

  On this, but on many other occasions of the sort, he had got to know her mind; Albert’s too, though by character he’s a lot less articulate. This judge doesn’t like cut’n’dried formulae, accepted wisdom, pat answers; is ready to go back and think again. Do we ‘have a view’ upon whatever? Sometimes. One might have come up against philosophic groundrock. But we know so little. Do we have a view, say, about divorce? Not really. It’s one of our modern plagues: two hundred years ago we were more dogmatic. (Yes; as in Jane.) Only for the very rich then, who could afford to defy society. What d’you want to do – legislate against it? Like Americans with what they call liquor? It’s bad so forbid it? Sure it’s bad. It kills people, like the cholera, and we’ve not found the vaccine. Ravages; you’ve only to look at the children’s faces.

  ‘But just because adultery is a sought-after commodity on account of being fashionable, doesn’t mean you have to invest in the shares.’

  Yes, police work is just the same: the well-worn lecture gets delivered over and over; Sisyphus rolling his stone.

  ‘Help me peel these,’ shooting a pile of langoustines on the table, sadly clutching claws and pathetic little antennae.

  ‘So you’ve got to try to get each and every individual to accept where the responsibility lies. Since there’s no rule any more, no ukase from society, no brakes on the cart. Two in a marriage; if there’s two to get behind the stone, does make the road a bit less steep. I’ll push if you’ll heave.’ Albert came in still mopping at his wet hair.

  ‘Sounds like something the bishop said to the actress… Ooh, langoustines, goody.’

  ‘You shut up,’ said Bernadette who was skinning tomatoes, ‘or I’ll plunge you in the boiling water.’

  Monsieur le Baron, Joséphine was told, was in the gunroom. Joséphine likes the gunroom, albeit with a small shudder; in her childhood, when they had been really naughty, they got sent here to be beaten. It’s very manor-house here: tall mahogany presses with fishing-rods and cute little drawers for flies and lures, which might be looked at but never played with. And a mahogany table, with Geoffrey and several guns, and the paraphernalia of pullthrough and soft flannel, and the wonderful intoxicating smell of gun oil. This is a religious rite; Geoffrey loves his guns. There are two rifles, the ‘big’ Mauser, guaranteed to stop a charging boar, and the ‘little’ Remington; the twelve-bore shotgun, an English-made side by side, a terrific treasure: his little one for blackbirds and thrushes, naughty greedy beasts which tear at the vines. Her own sixteen-bore must be here somewhere: bouh, it’s a collection for John Wayne (Geoffrey has a Winchester-repeater for repelling boarders, Pancho Villa and the like). Roundabout is a lot of plumage showily mounted, cock-pheasants and things, now a bit dingy. He looked up and nodded, rubbing away at imaginary flecks of rust. She perched her bottom on the table and watched in silence.

  “So you’ve gone back to your husband… Good…”

  “Why is it good?”

  “I don’t know… Family counts for something.” She knew that at the back of his mind was his own wife, Liliane, who is like her name, a thin pale blonde, alarmingly ladylike. Joséphine had never liked her much, had been heard to say that just as Geoffrey belonged in his gunroom, so Liliane belonged in ‘the flower room’ along the passage, where she keeps her gardening tools, always meticulously clean. But it’s not her fault: she is childless and it’s a great sorrow to them both.

  “In this house,” grunting and sighting down a barrel,” we don’t believe in divorce.”

  “Well don’t point that thing at me; I don’t either.”

  “Don’t be silly. Inoffensive as a clock. As you know very well I only meant… in this house our family has lived a long time. We’ve obligations. Traditions.”

  “We’ve never done anything.”

  “Not much!” Nettled, glaring. Why is it that I’m always tempted into irritating him? “We’ve held fast and we’ve held our own.” All set to launch into his history lesson, which is as well worn as Bernadette Martin’s lecture on adultery. “Back in the old times we survived the Bishops – greedy pigs they were – the Emperor, the ghastly Duc de Bourgogne.” Banging the table; he really means it. “Turenne… The Bourbons.” The series of splendid engravings, showing the Joyous Entry of Louis XV into his good city of Strasbourg, hangs in the passage which is rather dark; they aren’t in very good condition.

  “The Revolution.” Shucks; fleeing to Baden-Baden. “Bis
marck. The Hohenzollerns. Finding ourselves German again.”

  “We bent with the wind.”

  “When I think of that unspeakable Hitler,” wrathfully picking up another gun.

  “Our father successfully claimed his heart was bad. Much surprise when he found that to be the truth.”

  “He was genuinely pleased to be flying the Tricolour again from the tower. Monstrous bonfire for the village. You and I weren’t even born. I don’t mind being French, myself, it doesn’t seem to me all that important.”

  “They try to make it important. Remember the radioactive cloud when the power station blew up? It stopped dead in the exact middle of the Rhine because it didn’t dare invade the territory of the Republic.” Geoffrey didn’t suppress a grin and it was unpompously that he said, “Being patriotic means being true to this house and this village.”

  He is proud of his vines. He inherited a lot of rubbish, now produces beautiful wine, some outstanding. The Rieslings have never been more than ‘honest’ but the two Pinots, the white and the grey, get recommended by the most snobbish of sommeliers. (She remembers with amusement that the Marquis had some in his cellar and produced them with a flourish; her ‘password’ to those elegant invitations.) Competing with the vineyard world is Geoffrey’s life work. He is right to feel pride.

  “I’ve just brought off rather a good deal with the Brits.”

  “Brits!” Joséphine does not carry the English next to her heart.

  “With no doubt a lot of condescension on their part.” Mimicking – “‘To marry a foreigner is a sure sign of failure.’”

  “I’m not marrying them; I only want to make them drunk.”

  They both laughed; they are ‘friends again’.

  “That imaginary superiority they cart about is their great handicap and they can’t see it.”

  Pleased with her peace-treaty Joséphine moved on to the library next door, a place where Geoffrey never set foot. Their father, who neglected his vines (‘good enough for the pubs in Strasbourg’) had been an omnivorous reader and an enthusiastic book-collector. Joséphine likes this room, where Liliane never came either but where she as a teenager had spent hours of content. Papa’s Anglophilia, so characteristic of French country gentlemen, meant wonderful things like The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or Death comes for the Archbishop. How disappointed she had been to be told that The Story of San Michele was all nonsense.

  She feels she’s had enough of Jane for the moment; wants something romantic – fruitier, more like a Gewurztraminer; lights on Robert Louis Stevenson (enjoyed in childhood, wasn’t sure she’d recapture that now). The Ebbtide and St Ives and Kidnapped. Alan Breck the ‘bonny fighter’; she’d played at that in the orchard. Took it down now, hesitant: the old binding opened on the last page.

  ‘Whatever befell them, it was not dishonour, and whatever failed them, they were not found wanting to themselves.’ A bonny cadence, a bonny writer.

  Joséphine surprised herself by sitting down and having a cry.

  Silvia thought Doctor Valdez looking still ‘simply awful’. It is not her job to say so. She isn’t anyhow the kind of secretary who supplies aspirins and Alka Seltzer for the hungover business men. Brisk, but the maternal is kept for her own family. Doctors are supposed to be able to look after themselves. This one can; highly disciplined. Compartmented; the ‘Jesuit’ stuff is not apparent. Here in the Research Institute they come all sorts. This one is sloppy, eccentric, forgetful; nearly always polite, generally kind, mostly considerate: anyhow he’s a good doctor and she’s proud of him. For a longish while now he’s been dabbling in private practice and he could be building up something of a real reputation as a good man to consult. People ringing her up for appointments, it’s impossible in a place like this. She disapproved greatly of that awful scruffy flat. One has to cut one’s coat according to the tailor one can afford. She wants him in a proper suit and not as in that phrase of his – ‘freshly deloused by the Salvation Army’. A consultant must go to a good shop and be seen to be wearing money. She has conventional ideas of what this should look like. He’s off again to America in a day or so and she wants to be proud of him.

  “I’ve found a place straight off, for you, which was a stroke of luck. The Beethovenstrasse, that’s very suitable.” The ‘Musicians’ Quarter’ is at the flossy end of bourgeois Strasbourg; of nineteenth-century Germanic facture, pompous but of solid worth and weight. Well regarded by the medical profession, which is really why there is an instant barrage of objection and complaint, perturbing Silvia not at all.

  “This will go like the hot-cross-buns so I’ve accepted and I don’t want you putting in a veto.” Raymond gave her a bloodshot look: bossyboots woman, one shouldn’t allow this. So she gave the nail a tap with her hammer.

  “I’ve looked it over, very nice consulting space, came up suddenly, was a cardiologist who suddenly dropped dead.”

  “The way they do.”

  “Quite so, it’s in tiptop condition and you can keep the cleaning-woman and everything.”

  “And the large doses of nitroglycerine.” He’s well aware of being jockeyed.

  “Nice little apartment at the back, just right for you on your own. Love-nest, probably.” That might have been going too far, but he only stared glassily. Oh yes, that WAS an inducement.

  “Good soundproof old building,” went on Silvia hurriedly, “sunny behind. Insurance at street level, a gynaecologist on the floor above, it’s a snip. I must clinch it before midday, everyone’s after it.”

  “Far too expensive,” said Raymond feebly.

  “Stop talking bloody nonsense. Money comes to money. You’ve a patient next week referred by Dr Vincent in Nancy – you must realize, you’re on your way.” And because it is the moment to change the subject – “There’s a flood of e-mail from the people in Oakland about the symposium; oh yes and a new rat joke.”

  “Oh all right, make the call then, and lets’ see the new joke.”

  Rat jokes – they are in fact lawyer-jokes – have been around a long time. Originally it had been noticed that ‘rats and lawyers have much in common. Dishonesty, treachery, and uncontrolled proliferation.’ The corridors of the Internet swarm with hordes of lawyers looking like rats – ‘Watch out; they gnaw the cables’. In the Research Institutes of the world the standard joke, from which the others flow, had been, ‘Why do laboratories use lawyers for experiment?’ There are three standard answers: ‘There are more lawyers; the lab assistant doesn’t get fond of them; there are some things which a rat will simply refuse to do…’ There is no sign of this slackening, especially after a lawyer has sent in his little bill.

  ‘Dear Colleague, it has for long been known that metamorphosis techniques are freely used: masquerading lawyers indistinguishable from real rats. Metempsychosis now flourishes; the souls of our lawyers’ granddams no longer inhabit birds.

  ‘It has recently been signalled that a group of lawyers in the Vatican practises religious discrimination, headed by a gifted swifty, known as Cardinal-Rat. They hand out certificates of conformity, guaranteeing the holder to be a genuine Catholic rat in good standing, backed by the threat that all rats of other persuasions are to be cast out of the community.

  ‘You should place all rats in your laboratory under close surveillance, to determine whether infection is present, not only the familiar phenomenon of rats fluent in legal terminology. Pay particular attention to those with a claim to be orthodox Christian rats (present concern is not so much with Muslim or Jewish rats), especially those wearing ostentatious insignia, showing signs of zealous observance, or otherwise recognizable as engaged in this crusade to eliminate all but true believers. The Cardinal Rat, recognizable by extreme attachment to legal formulae, is said to be active in the Federal Republic, and if seen should be placed in strict isolation.’

  “I don’t get it,” said Silvia. Raymond did though – grinning. His Distinguished Eminence, Cardinal Ratzinger, has been voluble lately about the True Church:
Protestants need not apply. As a Jesuit Raymond is always suspect in scientific circles; we have a bad name for legalistic hair-splitting. The bare word ‘jesuitical’ is automatically pejorative. Too many of us are over-pally with the extreme right wing of clerical reaction, Opus Dei and the like – some indeed downright fascist. Going to America for the symposium, Doctor Valdez is going to get a lot of humour, some of it edgy, fired at him. Respected colleagues, some of them close friends, intensely sensitive about the death penalty or putting icecubes in the cognac, are looking to draw blood elsewhere.

  Raymond’s research work, involving many rats and likely to involve a good many company lawyers, has been relatively peaceable, on the lines of chemical additives to food – a subject that attracts lawyers. Of recent months, a bit more Iatrogenic in quality: a witch-word this, with which medical jargon makes play, confident nobody will understand it. Roughly, there are medical treatments which, of course quite unintentionally, can contribute to the very affliction they are thought to help prevent. He’s aware of being on thin ice here. There are as many cancer-jokes, in the trade, as there are lawyer-jokes.

  After sharing it with the immediate colleagues – ‘Watch out for any rats wearing Lourdes medals or who tend to get in a corner to recite their rosary’ – he went to see Paul the historian, his Companion in Jesus.

  “Paul, where is it you get these marvellous cigars?”

  “Well my dear, if I told you they are a personal tribute from Fidel you’d not believe me, though we’re friends come to that; much abused man, great deal of good in him. I’ll give you an anecdote instead of the ’14 war, on which as you know I’m thought an authority; the before-and-after are both of great interest. I believe it was in Ypres that a group of English soldiers living in great misery found themselves surrounded and their officer handed round a parcel of very good cigars he’d saved for a rainy day. When the Germans lined them up outside they were smoking these wonderful things, to the edification of all present. My own attitude is comparable. It’s raining outside, I believe,” pretending to look. “You wouldn’t come to see me unless you were contemplating surrender.” So that Raymond told him about the Janeites and their wartime origins.