by Allan Massie
‘Martini?’ he now said, perhaps concluding that my assurance of a dead father and a mother domiciled in remote, if marvellous, South Africa made it proper for him to offer me one.
‘I warn you,’ he said, ‘I make them strong. What our American friends irreverently and unfairly call Montgomeries, thirteen parts of gin to one of vermouth, that is. The Field-Marshal’s teetotal himself of course, which makes the description irreverent, and though he was reluctant to engage in battle till the odds were in his favour, he didn’t demand that sort of superiority, which makes it unfair. In fact, it’s practically unattainable in war, and when it comes to superiority in material, well, I have to say that our American friends can give points to anyone. They’ve never in the history of American conflict fought a battle where they suffered material inferiority, not since Robert E. Lee handed over his sword to General Grant. Laura doesn’t like me talking of military matters, no more does Jamie. Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He’s the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.’
I sipped my Martini. It was certainly strong, though it might have surprised him to learn that Jamie made them even stronger. The Colonel downed his, and poured another from the shaker.
‘Sorry about your dad,’ he said. ‘I won’t ask you about it, because I’ve learned it doesn’t always do to nose into these matters, here in France. There’s a very natural sensitivity. I don’t know your politics either, or your family’s. But just remember this. In a civil war, and it was just that in France, there is always right on both sides. And a soldier has to obey orders, which – some folk forget – in 1940 emanated from the Marshal, emanated lawfully. His trial stank. Was your dad a professional soldier?’
‘No, sir. His father was. He was killed at Verdun. He was a regular Army officer and, I believe, was convinced till the day of his death that Dreyfus had been guilty. That sort of professional soldier.’
‘We hardly have that sort in England – not that I’m English – my family’s Scots, but on my mother’s side we’re Ulstermen, and that’s the nearest to a military caste we have produced. Don’t know if you’re interested in these things. I am. Jamie tells me he wants to go into the Diplomatic. His mother’s idea. Talk him out of it, if you get the chance, old man. No life for a chap, just a career.’
He inclined the shaker towards me.
‘Jolly good Martini, sir.’
‘Glad you like it. Sure you should be drinking it, are you? My Dad forbade me spirits till I was twenty-five, but when I came out of Sandhurst, my first Colonel said he wasn’t going to have an officer in his mess who wouldn’t down a glass of brandy in the evening. He’d spent his early service in the Indian Army, you see. I suppose, with a French father, your own French is pretty good, eh?’
‘Well, my first language, sir.’
‘And you’ve kept it up? Good. I spoke nothing but Hindustani till I was five. Or so they tell me. Can’t put ten words together in the language now. Always regretted it. But at least that means that this evening won’t be a trial to you linguistically. We’ll only be 50 per cent French at dinner, but Laura likes general conversation to be conducted in French. Out of courtesy, she says. God knows what she’d demand if I was posted to Constantinople.’
‘You might not invite Turks to dinner, sir.’
‘Hadn’t thought of that. You may be right. Are there any Turk novelists? What’s Jamie’s French like?’
‘Good enough for the Diplomatic, sir, I’m afraid.’
‘Hell’s bells, all grammar and no idiom, eh? The only way to learn a language after you’re a child is to get yourself a mistress, a girl from the streets, or what they call here the demi-monde. A little milliner. That’s what Puggsy Baker used to say. Wouldn’t know myself.’ He laid his finger along the side of his nose. ‘My own French is wooden.’
In fact, it was more fluent, and far more racy, than his wife’s. But the Colonel, as I began to see, was more than a bit of an actor.
‘This shaker’s getting dull. We’d better liven it up,’ he said. ‘Glad you came down early. A man ought to get to know his son’s friends. It’s probably the nearest he can come to knowing his son.’
And he smiled, looking like Mr Punch.
‘All fathers worry about their sons, I suppose,’ he said. ‘That they can’t talk to them. That they will grow up not to resemble them, that they will grow up to do so. Either prospect seems alarming, if we are honest. But it’s hard to be honest about family affairs.’
As he spoke I saw how absurd Eddie’s fantasies were; how, even more than I, he lived in a world of make-believe. We were still in the nursery, playing at grown-ups.
‘But of course, you know what sons want to do,’ the Colonel said. ‘There’s a German proverb I believe: “Happy as the boy who killed his father”. Sums up a lot, I’ve always thought. I hear the bell. Gird up your French, oil your idioms.’
And, very quickly, to assist me, he tipped the cocktail shaker in the direction of my glass.
I soon saw that Jamie was sulking. He had been placed opposite me, at a slight angle, between two Frenchwomen, one blonde and statuesque, as if she had risen from a marble plinth in the Louvre where she had been reclining since Canova gave her form, and the other slim, dark, bread-crumbling, and quicker to lift her glass of champagne than her fork. It was clear that Jamie’s diplomatic French wasn’t up to dinner-table conversation. As for Eddie, his lousy Frog was proving no handicap, though it was a plump yellowish man sitting opposite him in a ruffled shirt, looking as far as features went in fact extremely like a frog, who had engaged him in conversation, rather than either of the unremarkable ladies who flanked him. I could see Eddie sparkle, as he did when people chaffed him, and three or four times the yellowish frog broke out in laughter. There wasn’t in fact much laughter at the table, and this made Eddie’s success all the more remarkable.
The champagne and the foie gras were succeeded by a fish and some white burgundy. The fish – a sole – was cooked with a simplicity that I ignorantly thought of being defiantly English, but which was actually of the purest French. Situated as I was, near Mrs Fernie’s end of the table – we were, I think, sixteen – I found myself envying those at the other end where the Colonel presided and the frog laughed and Eddie displayed his naivety and charm. For Mrs Fernie kept things serious. Her conception of dinner-party conversation was lofty and old-fashioned. She had an elderly man with a goatee beard on her right, whom I identified to my own satisfaction as an Academician, and a very dark, very thin man with a pencil moustache on her left, who was laying down the law in precise terms about the relation of art to experience. It was not awfully exhilarating, and yet one couldn’t help but listen. He was making it clear that though France might be in dire straits politically and economically, the French nation had already resumed the cultural dictatorship that was its due. I was bored, but most awfully impressed. It seemed to me that this was the authentic voice of France that had been buried under failure, defeat and recrimination; and I could see that Mrs Fernie thought so too. She was indeed lapping it up, while at the same time, every now and then at least, she stuck in a delicate and even fragile oar of her own; her line was that, although she came from a nation that could only be considered barbarian by those fortunate enough to be French, she had nevertheless somehow escaped contagion, and even, by her own efforts and the gift of her serene intellect and fine sensibilities, contrived to aspire to be treated as an honorary Frenchwoman. The thin man declined to admit that such a being was possible – not of course in so many words, but by his terse dismissal of her proffered wares; while, from the depths of his vast civility, conceding that, if the unthinkable could indeed have been thought, then, in that case – mutatis mutandis, as you, or rather he, might say – she would be wearing the white robe of a candidate.
If my language seems mandarin – and absurd – it is because I am trying exactly to reflect my sensations.
Their conversation was a little comedy, and these imp
ressions of it which have remained with me could not have found just this verbal expression at the time. I was only conscious of the falsity of the conversation, and of its fundamental absurdity.
I had however plenty of occasion to observe, for I had, despite my proclaimed mastery of the demotic, had no more success than Jamie in arousing the interest of the ladies on either side. To my left, a woman with short spiky grey hair had first resolutely tried to engage the Academician in talk – a task in which she failed because he was fretting to supplant the thin man and capture Mrs Fernie’s attention. While on my other side I had been landed with a very tall woman wearing a monocle who told me only that her father had been the ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor to France and that she bred and showed Arab horses, an activity which the war had seriously and unforgivably disturbed. There wasn’t much I could say to that. It would have been ridiculous to commiserate with her grievance; at the same time I didn’t see how, at Mrs Fernie’s table, at which the sole had been succeeded by duckling so tender and tasty that it seemed an insult deliberately levelled at the starving people of Europe – which thought I do remember as a measure of my boredom and disaffection – how, as I say, at Mrs Fernie’s table, I could have told her that her complaint disgusted me. So I sat silent, and ate the duckling, which despite my moment of priggish repulsion was so delicious as to disarm any criticism, and drank the claret which accompanied it, and listened with rather more than half an ear to the thin man telling Mrs Fernie that the novel was finished, superseded by criticism and the journal; fiction had become impossible because the artificiality of the construct was now inescapable; reality had rendered the imagination superfluous, just as psychology had made the whole Victorian concept of characterisation an activity suited only to moral imbeciles and mental defectives.
‘But what is reality?’ Mrs Fernie advanced. Her eyes shone very blue, as Jamie’s did when he felt that he was not appreciated.
‘It is because you can still ask such a question,’ the thin man flung his hand out, perilously close to the rim of his wine glass, ‘because you do not see that it is itself quite superfluous, …’
‘And yet,’ Mrs Fernie pursued, ‘we must surely have some framework within which …’
‘My dear lady,’ the thin man said, ‘all we have is experience. We are that, and nothing else. Our only knowledge is what happens to us, and what we feel …’
The lady on my left sighed, and abandoned her attempt on the Academician.
‘I always think,’ she commanded my attention, ‘that there is something sad about a mixing of generations. I like the seasons to be distinct.’
‘In South Africa,’ I said, ‘where I have been living …’
‘But you live in England,’ she said, ‘you are a friend of Jamie’s at Cambridge.’
It was at that moment, more from a peculiar note of regret in her voice than from her accent, that I realised she was English herself; and it seemed to add to the absurdity of the evening that we should be engaged in French conversation, while a debate on the nature of reality went on around us. I asked her if she had lived long in France.
‘Oh dear me yes,’ she said, in English. Then, reverting to the house rules, she returned to French and told me she was a sculptor who had come to Paris in the 1920s to study under a pupil of Rodin and remained here ever since.
‘Even under the Occupation?’
‘There were difficulties, but yes.’
‘But they must have been enormous.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I had a brief marriage to a Frenchman. A mistake, but I was grateful. It meant I could get the right sort of papers. But yes, it was difficult, and yet, you know, what they are saying about experience being the only reality, well, we learned something of that. Do you know what I missed most during the Occupation: fish. It was impossible to get a sole or halibut. But you know people did the most surprising things, people really did surprise you, and that’s why Philippe there is quite right about character. Helena, you know – the lady on your other side’ – she lowered her voice – ‘she hates me to talk about it, and herself will speak of nothing now but her Arab horses, so that I could see, for I was listening with half an ear, that you thought her a tiresome and empty woman, she was a heroine of the Resistance, yes, a real heroine. Oh, I know’ – she leaned across me raising her voice – ‘that you don’t care for me to say so, but it’s quite true, you were a heroine.’
‘And you, Judith, are a tiresome gossip. It is over and done with.’
All this was embarrassing in a surprising fashion. We are of course usually wrong about other people. I knew that even then. All the same it is disconcerting when one’s errors are so quickly and publicly exposed. I saw I could only make things worse if I admitted that I had indeed dismissed Helena as tiresome and empty. And yet why shouldn’t I have done so? It was after all the impression that she sought to convey. I might have made things worse and added that I had been quite convinced that she was herself a Vichyiste, even a Fascist. So I muttered something and hoped the subject would pass away. I glanced across the table at Eddie, who, attracted by my attention, whisked up an eyebrow, before leaning over the table and addressing the yellowish frog ment. I wondered when this appalling dinner-party would end, and thought with longing of escaping with him – and, yes, I supposed, Jamie too – on a round of the bars and night spots.
There was a momentary silence: twenty to ten on the Louis Quinze ormolu clock, an angel was passing. Then from the void a harsh voice:
‘Helena is quite right. Her Arab horses are a great deal more important than her experience in the Resistance.’
It was Jamie’s dark companion.
‘How can you say such a thing?’
‘Because the war was odious.’
‘Oh, how glad I am to hear someone say that.’
It was Mrs Fernie who spoke, and for a moment the air seemed to hold those two voices, still and simultaneous, the one harsh and awkward, the double r of ‘guerre’ rasped out, the other mellifluously low, and then the spell was broken.
‘If only we could forget it,’ Mrs Fernie said, her Englishness exposed.
‘Oh, my dear, but that is of course absolutely impossible, I find that sentimental,’ the thin man, Philippe’s, hand again flashed over the rim of his wine glass. ‘We suffered of course, how we suffered is inconceivable for anyone with the innocence of islanders, we suffered treachery, which was worst of all.’
‘And some of us, Philippe, benefited,’ the dark woman said. ‘And we all know that what was destroyed in the war, in the Occupation, in the Resistance and in the épuration’ – a word I must leave untranslated, because ‘purge’, which is its dictionary meaning, lacks the connotations with which history has now encrusted the French – ‘what … what was destroyed was a trust in human goodness.’
‘Oh, but this is naive, my dear. I’m almost ashamed to listen to it. What after all is goodness?’
‘Very well, Philippe,’ the woman lifted her glass and gestured to the butler, who proffered the bottle, but not before – I noticed – exchanging a quick glance with Mrs Fernie, whose nod seemed to suggest that the scene would be worse if he failed to comply with the woman’s request, ‘Very well, Philippe’ – she knocked back the claret as if it had been the roughest pinard, and she in a low bistro – ‘I don’t expect you to know. After all, we are what we experience, that’s right, isn’t it, and so doubtless we are not what we would prefer to forget. But I don’t forget that you were only a provincial schoolmaster back in ’37, and would probably have remained that and nothing more, if Lucien hadn’t seen a vestige of talent in a journal you submitted to him, and, with infinite care, brought it to some sort of birth. It was a thin thing even then in the end, but it offered you your escape and beginning …’
‘No, but this is …’
‘Be quiet …’
‘Monstrous …’
‘A good word. And he published my first poems too, or the first to be published, a
nd encouraged us both. And everything you said, your whole tone of voice, was antipathetic to him, but he discerned talent. That was goodness. To put art above his own ideas of what was moral in ordinary life. Just as it was when … I never knew him other than good, a man of the highest and most generous sentiments, and now you trample on his reputation and spit on his memory and that is why I say war is odious.’
‘Oh, but this is too ridiculous,’ he said; and if it wasn’t just that, we all felt that it was inappropriate. Mrs Fernie’s eyes were opened to her own maladroit social behaviour, and I saw a flicker of pleasure cross Jamie’s face at the revelation. Then she, who was engaged in a long war with her husband, turned to him in appeal, and he rose; putting his arm round the dark woman, he escorted her from the room, as he might on another occasion–and I saw he always would– lead a mourning widow or deprived daughter from a graveside. And the door closed behind them, white, with gold embossed.
‘I am so sorry, Laura,’ said Philippe. ‘That was painful and ridiculous. I did warn you about poor Mathilde. Her talent has quite gone, you see, that is why she is now unbalanced. It is sad, but we have to accept it. And as for the man of whom she spoke, Lucien de Balafré, he was of no account. It is true he published my first things, but to say he helped me is otherwise absurd. We had nothing, I am pleased to say, in common. No, I assure you, a madwoman would now conjure with his name as Mathilde does …’
‘I think you should know, Monsieur,’ Jamie’s careful diplomatic French sounded from the doorway, ‘that his son is my friend, and with us tonight. That’s right, Etienne,’ he said, in English, ‘your father was Lucien wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘my father was certainly Lucien de Balafré.’
Eddie put his arm round me and squeezed.
