A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  Jeanne lived her life from one minute to the next, with no plan for the future and no sense that she would one day grow old or weak. By rising an hour before anyone else in the house she felt she stayed ahead of the others and that her disadvantages would not bring her to grief for at least another day.

  She continually talked to God, her lips moving silently as she cleared the ashes from the grate in the parlour or scrubbed the front step. This was not prayer so much as putting her thoughts into words, but she had a clear picture in her mind who the listener was. He was the wooden figure on the cross in the village church where the children of her orphanage had gone every Sunday – a half-naked, bearded man with a wound in his side and a rough coronet of thorns on his head. Her time at the orphanage had given her a fierce sense of the supernatural. God had not only created the world and all that was in it, He was preoccupied with Jeanne for each moment of her waking day. He watched and judged her every action and unvoiced thought; he knew if her intentions were pure and if she told the smallest lie. She had no difficulty in believing in an invisible being. She understood so little of the material world – how water boiled, why a walnut fell from the tree – that she had had to take almost everything on trust. For her to believe that the organising power of the universe had chosen to make Himself invisible required less than to accept that – as Marcel had once tried to persuade her – the tides of the sea were drawn by the power of the moon. Of course God watched her and loved her; she felt Him near. Of course she could not see Him – otherwise there would be no need for Faith! And of course there were saints whose lives were an example, and naturally there was damnation for sinners; that was fair and just. And what was there in all this that was hard to believe?

  From time to time Madame Lagarde thought she should try to educate her servant, though she lacked the stamina to carry out her good intentions in person. She had recovered from the mania that followed the birth of her children, but still suffered periods of melancholy during which she could barely stir from her room. The priest told her that she should busy herself with good deeds among the poor; the local doctor bled her with leeches. Eventually her husband paid for a well-known physician to come from Limoges.

  He examined Madame Lagarde and sat by her bed for an hour before he delivered his verdict. ‘Madame, I believe that one day your illness will be curable, but you have been born too soon. There is a doctor in Paris, a man called Pinel, who is beginning a new branch of medicine he calls “moral therapy”. Perhaps you have heard how he freed the madwomen from their chains. One day, I suppose, we will understand how the mind works. Until then you must bear your fate as best you can. I suggest you take the air as much as possible, walk in the fields, ride a horse. Take a glass of wine or brandy with dinner. Try not to despair.’

  ‘Despair is a sin,’ said Madame Lagarde mechanically, though she was not properly religious, being no more than what she called a ‘deist’.

  Monsieur Lagarde regarded this advice as a poor return for the doctor’s bill, and told him so. To placate his client, the doctor had a case of medicine delivered from Ussel; it contained twelve corked red bottles of sugared water, for which he made no charge. Monsieur Lagarde was happy to administer two spoonfuls of the elixir each day, as instructed.

  In one of her brief periods of vigour, Madame Lagarde arranged for Madame Mechenet, the young wife of the mayor, to teach Jeanne the rudiments of writing and reading. This Madame Mechenet had recently given birth to twins and was preoccupied by them, but thought her ‘position’ in the village made it important for her to continue with some charitable work. She was a young woman with hair dressed in a fashionable way and she had a simpering manner that set Jeanne’s teeth on edge. She sat her pupil at a large table in the parlour and spread out the letters of the alphabet, printed on wooden blocks. It did not go well. Madame Mechenet tried, without losing her dignity, to imitate the sound made by each letter. Jeanne looked at her blankly. They had got as far as the letter ‘k’ when a maid brought in the twins, and to Jeanne’s astonishment, Madame Mechenet unfastened her dress and fed them, one at each breast, as though Jeanne’s presence was of no more account to her than that of the dogs sleeping on stone flags by the fire.

  Jeanne never went back for the second lesson and from then on referred to Madame Mechenet as ‘that whelping bitch’, a phrase that delighted Marcel and Clémence so much that they mouthed it silently to one another at any half-appropriate moment.

  Madame Mechenet did not discover why Jeanne refused to go back and put it down to peasant idleness. ‘I understand your servant prefers to remain ignorant,’ she said to Monsieur Lagarde at church one Sunday.

  ‘If so, Madame,’ he said, ‘it’s not through any weakness. On the contrary, it’s the fire of her character that will keep her in the dark.’

  Monsieur Lagarde could not help feeling pleased with this remark; it was the sort of thing that he imagined a philosopher might have said. He repeated it to his wife, and later to Jeanne herself, who muttered something inaudible in response as she went down the passageway to her cold bedroom.

  When Clémence was fourteen, Monsieur Lagarde decided it was time she went to a proper school and found there was a convent near Saint-Junien, run by the Little Sisters of the Ascension, that was happy to take her. Although the staff were all nuns, the girls were encouraged to learn social as well as religious graces. Clémence would be taught how to read music and how to do tapestry work; by the time she came home she might be ready to think about marriage. Jeanne helped her to pack a trunk full of clothes and toys, stopping from time to time to comfort her as she wept.

  ‘Stop it, you silly girl. Stop it now.’

  ‘I don’t want to go, Mole.’ This was what she sometimes called Jeanne because of her peering eyes and small size. ‘What if there are insects?’

  ‘Put on your flannel nightgown with the long sleeves. Think of our Lord on the cross. Did he care about insects?’

  ‘And will you pack me some books to read?’

  ‘What use are books? They’ll have books enough there. That’s what nuns do all day. They pray and they read.’

  Clémence cried harder.

  ‘And they fast,’ said Jeanne. ‘They fast all the time.’

  Monsieur Lagarde called in Faucher to load the trunk on to the cart and to drive it home after he and Clémence had taken the coach to Limoges, from where they would take a smaller one to Saint-Junien. Marcel stood at the end of the lane where it met the stony road and waved his handkerchief. Madame Lagarde stood beside him, weeping.

  ‘We can’t get the cart up the road in winter, Mama,’ said Marcel. ‘So we won’t see her till next spring.’

  In fact, it was two years before Clémence returned; and when the coach for Ussel deposited her at the inn in the village no one recognised her. She left her trunk with the ostler, telling him it would be called for later, then walked into the building, bought herself a cup of chocolate and sat down with it outside. She wore a long coat with a fur collar and hat.

  The landlord fussed round the strange young woman. ‘Will that be all, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  Madame Mechenet happened to be going past the inn on her way to her husband’s house, accompanied by her twins, who were now old enough to walk. She paused for a moment as she saw Clémence and let her eye run over her clothes.

  ‘Good morning, Madame,’ she said in a tone of voice she imagined to be ‘cultured’. ‘What pleasant weather we are having.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Clémence, adding under her breath when Madame Mechenet was out of earshot, ‘whelping bitch.’

  Monsieur Lagarde was pleased with the change in Clémence. ‘Goodness me,’ he said to his wife, ‘that’s money well spent. Give her another couple of years and we can aim pretty high.’

  Marcel was not convinced that his sister was as different as she pretended to be. When she had been at home for a few days he left a white mouse in her bedroom and waited for her s
creams. After an hour Clémence emerged, holding the mouse by its tail. ‘I think this may be yours,’ she said to Marcel, dropping the creature on his bed.

  It was Jeanne who was most affected by the alteration in her former charge. When she went to her room to help her prepare for bed, Clémence at first seemed reluctant to let her in. She tossed back her long chestnut hair so it fell over her shoulders and stood with her hands on her hips. Ignoring the unfriendly stance, Jeanne brushed past and started to unpack her clothes.

  ‘Where did you get all these nice things?’ she said.

  ‘We’re allowed to go to the shops. Some of the girls are rich and I asked Papa to send me some more money.’

  ‘Do the nuns let you wear fur?’

  ‘They’re not very strict,’ said Clémence, sitting at the dressing table. ‘On Saturday they allow us to do what we like. Some of the older girls go into Saint-Junien and walk in the park. Last year one of them, a girl of eighteen …’

  ‘What?’

  Clémence looked at Jeanne but could not quite find the courage to tell her that the girl had become pregnant as the result of an affair with a clerk in the town hall. There had been a scandal. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  There was an awkward pause while Jeanne tidied the room, knocking into things, as she did when she was nervous or unhappy. She took the hairbrush and stood behind the chair. Then, as she looked down at Clémence’s head, the separation and the change in her seemed to be of no consequence; she felt herself to be standing over the same frightened child she had known on her first day at the Lagardes’ house.

  ‘Shall I do your hair now, Ninou?’

  But Clémence stood up and turned round. ‘No, thank you, I can do it myself. And please don’t call me that any more. In return I promise not to use that silly name I gave you either.’

  Jeanne backed out through the door without speaking and went to the kitchen to prepare supper.

  That night she could hardly find the words with which to shape her prayers. Her understanding of life was so small that she had nothing with which to compare Clémence’s behaviour; she did not know that it was typical of girls of her age to try to loosen the ties of home. For two years her last thought as she laid her head on the pillow each night had been for Clémence. She had pictured her in the dormitory in which she herself had slept so many years at the orphanage, in her very bed, surrounded by strangers and harsh rules and – knowing her, poor girl – shivering in the cold. She had longed for the day Clémence would be back home in her own room and she could resume her care. Now some imposter or cuckoo had taken the place of the girl she had looked after. Clémence was dead.

  When her daughter returned to the convent for her final year, Madame Lagarde seemed to go into a decline. She would wake in the middle of the night, then find it impossible to go back to sleep. She would walk round the room or take a candle and go downstairs to the parlour where she sat staring into the embers of the fire. To spare her husband from her nocturnal ramblings and to give him leisure for his philosophical studies, she moved her clothes and personal belongings into Clémence’s room. She said the view was better and the bed more comfortable.

  Jeanne was appalled by the change. She thought it wrong for a woman to leave her husband’s bed and resented having to take soup and tisane upstairs to Madame Lagarde when she felt ‘too tired’ to come down. And what she saw in her Ninou’s room distressed her. For days on end Madame Lagarde stayed in her nightclothes and took little care of her appearance. Her hair hung down loose and unbrushed, her fingernails looked dirty. Although there were books in the room, she never seemed to read. She merely sat by the window, looking over the pale green fields towards the line of poplar trees along the river. She said that sleep had deserted her, yet for long hours of the day she lay on the bed with her eyes closed.

  In Jeanne’s life, there had never been a choice of whether or not to get dressed. If she had decided one day at the dairy, she told herself, to stay up in the barn and not to milk the cows, she would have been thrown out on her ear. She wondered why Monsieur Lagarde stood for it, but he hardly seemed to notice.

  When Clémence was almost twenty years old she brought a young man home to meet her parents. His name was Étienne Desmarais; his father was a lawyer and he wore a fawn coat with leather riding boots and a white lace neckerchief under his waistcoat. He had a way of holding his head on one side as he looked round the room – or down his nose, it seemed to Jeanne.

  Monsieur Lagarde invited Monsieur and Madame Mechenet to join them that evening; Mechenet was no longer the mayor, but they were still the most distinguished couple in the village and the only people Lagarde thought worthy of meeting the man he expected to become his son-in-law. Dinner was sent up from the inn and arrived with a commotion of china on the back of the cart at seven. Jeanne grumbled that the food was no better than she herself could have cooked, though there was certainly more than usual, with an apple tart and cheeses to follow the dish of venison with morels and potatoes.

  Young Desmarais stood before the fire and talked of his family’s wooded estates near Châteaudun, which meant little to the Lagardes because they had never been that far north. He had been educated in Paris, he told them, and would probably return there to practise law when he had a little more experience. While he talked, Clémence kept her eyes fixed on his handsome face, allowing her gaze to flicker across the room only for a moment to see the effect he was having on her parents. Madame Lagarde had been persuaded to smarten herself for the occasion and sat next to her daughter, trying to look attentive.

  After dinner, at which they had drunk wine, the conversation became wide-ranging.

  ‘And, Monsieur,’ said Madame Mechenet to Desmarais, ‘do you ever imagine that you will one day live on your family estates?’ She was using the false voice with which she had greeted Clémence at the inn.

  ‘Ah, no, dear Madame,’ said Desmarais. ‘The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.’

  There was a pause as the others looked at one another and Desmarais put his head on one side. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you recognise the quotation from one of our greatest philosophers?’

  ‘Monsieur Lagarde is sure to know it,’ said Madame Mechenet. ‘He’s the philosopher in these parts.’

  Lagarde coughed and adjusted his waistcoat. He did not know.

  ‘Pascal,’ said Desmarais. ‘He was referring to the heavens, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lagarde.

  ‘Was he the man famous for his bet?’ said Clémence, who remembered a few things from school.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Desmarais, and bowed towards Clémence’s father to give him the floor.

  But Pascal’s wager – that, since we can know nothing, we might as well be good in our short life as risk an eternity of damnation by being bad – appeared unknown to him. Madame Lagarde stirred herself enough to move the topic on, but over the next hour the polite Desmarais contrived to offer his host a number of opportunities to redeem himself. He dangled famous lines for his completion and feigned forgetfulness about which philosopher’s maxim had been ‘I abstain’. But there was no answering light, not a flicker, in Lagarde’s eyes, and Madame Mechenet eventually let out a half-stifled laugh.

  Marcel caught Clémence’s eye and mouthed the words ‘whelping bitch’, which made Clémence herself begin to laugh so much that she had to leave the room and the evening came to an end.

  When he was nineteen, Marcel decided to join the army. He was just too late for the Battle of Friedland, but after two years of training, of mild adventures interspersed with boredom, gambling and chasing women, he found himself one summer night on an island in the Danube called Lobau, where his corps was billeted alongside Italian and German allies. He smoked a pipe in his tent and gossiped with his fellow junior officers about what they would do in Vienna when the battle was won.

  It was his first experience of all-out war and it did not go as well as the generals had predicted. The Austria
ns were gathered on the plain ahead of them – a place they often used, oddly enough, for practice manoeuvres – and to start with the Allied infantry made progress on a wide front. In the evening, Marcel was among those ordered to finish the battle in a single day with a decisive attack on the Austrian centre. Soon they had driven the enemy back behind the high ground at Wagram, but as dusk gathered, Marcel’s unit was cut off. The Austrians regrouped and pushed the Allies so far back that all their gains were lost.

  Running through the half-light, in the noise of clashing steel and gunfire, Marcel no longer felt under the command of the emperor or part of a Grande Armée; it was more like the games he had played with the village boys in the hedgerows on the way to school. In the chaos, he shot at anything that moved and killed a man in a white uniform he later thought was probably a Saxon ally.

  He was still deeply asleep in his tent when the Austrians surprised them at dawn. It was a long and awful day, as the massed French cannon on the island of Lobau poured shells into defenceless Austrian infantry, who plodded on until they were too few to go further. It was impossible to watch for more than a minute, whichever side you were on. On the morning of the third day, Marcel’s corps, after a day of inaction, was ordered to advance again and by mid-afternoon they were entering a village called Markgrafneusiedl.

  Marcel was with a dozen French infantry running down a street, past a baker and an ironmonger. He thought how strange it was that these shops would close only for a day or so while something called history was made; then they would resume their sale of bread and nails. He was in fact starving from his own exertions and for a mad moment thought of breaking off his advance to loot the baker’s. Then there was a shout of warning. He turned to see a group of Austrian soldiers emerging from a side street. The range was too close to fire, but – raging and made strong by fear – they closed on the enemy with bayonets.