A Question of Loyalties

by Allan Massie

  ‘That was brave of Jamie,’ he said. ‘You know how he hates a scene. And he puked after, he really did. As for you, ducky, what you could do with is a stinger.’

  He snapped his fingers at the waiter and instructed him in the proper proportions of brandy and crème de menthe. Eddie’s French might be as lousy as he promised, but at this stage of life he could usually get what he wanted.

  ‘And I think I’ll have one too, my dear,’ he said to the waiter.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I’m grateful to Jamie, it was brave of him. Sort of Jacobite. All the same I’d rather he hadn’t.’

  ‘Jacobite?’

  ‘Yes, a splendid and useless gesture.’

  We were in a bar in Montmartre. Jamie had declined to come with us. The dinner-party had ended, not exactly in confusion, but in some embarrassment. Mrs Fernie, I felt, regarded me with disfavour and suspicion. I had been transformed from a harmless, possibly even helpful, friend of Jamie into a disagreeable object. The Sicilians have an admirable expression: ‘to swallow a toad’. It means to accept an unwelcome fact. I rather felt that I was a toad in Mrs Fernie’s gullet, and that it wasn’t at all certain that she could get it down. She hadn’t known anything about my father, and she was not the sort of person who could bear with equanimity the finding of herself at a disadvantage at her own table. It was in one sense as simple as that.

  But it was also much more, as indeed it was for me. We like, to put it at its simplest, to be judged for ourselves, as we would like, or think we would. Yet it never of course happens. Our reception is always coloured and distorted by associations, which we are – so often – powerless to protect ourselves against. I used, some twenty years ago, to be friendly with the widow of a famous poet, celebrated as much for his wild and self-destructive behaviour as for his verses. She was proud of him, and in memory had made their marriage perhaps into a finer thing than she had known at the time; and she was jealous to defend him. Yet at the same time she knew that she was diminished by it all too. People came to see her because of the man to whom she had been married. And it was a long time ago; in another country. All the recognition she got was a denial of her own reality. It was as if for so many people her own life had also ended in that New York hospital. Reflected fame subtracts from the identity of the person on whom the reflection falls.

  I couldn’t have elaborated this, as I sipped my stinger with Eddie and watched his eyes rove the little bar, but, looking back, these were the sentiments which disturbed me. And yet I was at the same time awfully curious.

  ‘It’s not working for Jamie,’ Eddie said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our being here. It’s not working. He thought it would help, but it doesn’t.’

  ‘Did he actually say so?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to. I think we should go.’

  ‘Because of this evening?’

  ‘Not just that.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘Well, I don’t understand. I don’t mind going. In fact, I would like to, and anyway, as you know, I have my other plans. All the same, why?’

  Eddie picked up his glass.

  ‘The compartments have got mixed,’ he said. ‘That gets on his nerves. He’s far more nervous and high-strung than you think.’

  ‘You know him better. You probably know him better than he knows himself.’

  ‘Oh yes. Much better. So shall we?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and hesitated. ‘I’m going to my grandmother’s. In Provence. I haven’t seen her in … well, since I was a child, before the war. But you know that.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Eddie said, ‘I’m not suggesting that I should come with you. Compartments are important. Nobody knows that better than me. But I think we should get out soon. If you’ve got a definite date to go there, we could drift about first. That might be fun.’

  ‘This evening,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to at all.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t, do I?’

  ‘So now,’ he said, ‘let us resume the having of the fun. There’s a bar Toby told me about I want to take a look at …’

  But we didn’t go off together, though not because of anything that happened that evening, which led us through a succession of bars till we came to one where Eddie disappeared upstairs with a mulatto sailor, while I sat drinking pinard with his dancing-partner and declining more and more laconically the repeated, but half-hearted, suggestions that perhaps we should go upstairs too. It wasn’t anything to do with that, and I was grateful to Eddie for his lack of curiosity or his self-restraint. But I wondered at my decision even as I boarded the train to the south, and sat back on the hard shiny green leather, and watched the suburbs of Paris slip by. Tears pricked my eyes, tears of loneliness and apprehension. Compartments are important. I had locked one door behind me, and I have often wondered since how different my life would have been if I had not done so.

  There were fewer suburbs then, and no high-rise apartment blocks on the fringe of the city. The train was soon passing through a miniature and scruffy landscape of canals and rivers, cottages crouching by the lines which were flanked with poplars under a heavy grey sky. It started to rain. The occasional clumsy lorry or chugging little car waited at level-crossings, a curé bicycling in his long cassock hung for a moment motionless on the hump of a bridge, a girl drove black-and-white cattle from a water-meadow. It was the landscape of the Impressionists, but diminished and meaner, with a suggestion of attenuation which is absent from their paintings. The rain streamed down the pale green willow that overhung the waters. I looked out of the window and avoided the gaze of my fellow-passengers, and when the call for dinner came made my way to the restaurant car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I WASN’T EXPECTED yet, for the change of plan had been sudden, and I had not been able to bring myself to telephone my grandmother. I wasn’t in fact sure that she had a telephone – certainly I had no number for her. But of course I could have wired; and hadn’t. I was, I suppose, reluctant to commit myself, and I may also have felt that it really couldn’t matter to her just when I did in fact arrive. It wouldn’t have occurred to me then that the old value precision in arrangements. But I don’t think I had any intention to take her by surprise. Which is of course just what I did; and it disconcerted her. And that surprised me for, immediately on disembarking from the express – or what passed for an express in those days – at Avignon, I had felt I was home, as I had not felt in Paris. One symptom was that my English clothes seemed all at once not to belong to me. It was absurd to look like a public schoolboy – as undergraduates still did in the fifties – in Provence. I drank a café crème in the station buffet and left my bags in the station and walked up to the Palace of the Popes to look at the wide valley of the Rhone. The sun was high, the streets smelled of bread and melons and black tobacco, the sweet scent of the drains was growing warmer, and there were flowers everywhere. I was in no hurry to move.

  So it wasn’t in fact till late afternoon that I reached Carpentras and found a car that would take me to my grandmother’s house.

  If I wasn’t the Prodigal Son, I don’t suppose my feelings were so very different from his. Everything was as I remembered it from childhood, but I was not a child: the vineyards, olive-groves and, in the distance, the mountains, the earth red-gold under the hot sun of June. It was a different and more lucid world; Africa with a past.

  My driver smoked incessantly, but was uncommunicative. When I had asked him to take me to the château, he had given me a long look, shrugged his shoulders and asked whether I minded waiting till he had finished his game of boules. I sat by an oleander aware that I was the subject of glances, and drank a glass of beer. Then he crossed over, opened the back door of his car and himself climbed into the driving-seat, waiting for me to put my bags in. Smoke curled over his left shoulder; the back of his neck shone like burnished copper. When we reached the
château, he didn’t move to help me with the luggage, but took the money and drove off with a jarring of his gears. I was left standing in front of the house; dogs pursued the car with sound. A cock crew, and then there was silence, except for the crickets.

  It is called a château, but the English would think it no more than a manor house, a long two-storeyed yellow building with a single diminutive tower at its east end. The shutters, grey, the paint peeling, were closed. It rested like a mangy lion in the sun, as if it had always been there and was insensible to time and fashion. The main part of the house dates from 1687 when the estate was obtained by my ancestor after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There is a date under the coat of arms above the main door.

  I pushed against that door but it was locked or barred. There was no bell and I was disinclined to make my presence known by banging my fist on the wood. I called out instead and my voice seemed lost in a silence that was suddenly as eerie as it was profound. I had been a fool not to alert them to my arrival. And yet I knew, even as that thought came to me, that I couldn’t have done so, couldn’t, that is, have brought myself to it. So leaving my bags there I walked round the end of the house to the little yard which gave off the kitchen. As a child I had long been wary of it for there was a mastiff chained there, and a white cockerel that would attack anyone who moved at anything more than the slowest pace. You had to deceive him into thinking you were hardly moving. Well, both must be dead long since.

  But in the yard it seemed as if it were the house that was dead. There was not only neither dog nor cock, but no poultry at all, no cats, such as had been used to sun themselves there, while the door to the kitchen was also shut. Weeds grew where none had been permitted once, and the appearance of the yard suggested that life had departed. Yet I knew that this could not be. I had after all exchanged letters with my grandmother, had deciphered her handwriting, and knew that she expected me, even if not for another ten days or so. But she had said: ‘You need have no fear of not finding me. There is nothing now that tempts me to go far beyond the gates of our property.’

  I knocked on the door and fancied I could hear the sound bounce through the house, as in a fairy-tale. Wasn’t it to just such a house – though in Normandy rather than Provence – that Beauty’s father had come, having lost his way, and there encountered the Beast? The swirling mists of Cocteau’s film seemed to hang round me, though the light was lucid and the sun still shone on a quarter of the yard.

  ‘Who are you? And what do you want?’

  The voice came from behind me, and, turning, I saw an old woman, dressed all in black with a shawl round her head. She was carrying a basket containing eggs.

  ‘I have come too soon,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are late. You are several years late.’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You should have been here all the time.’

  She pushed past me and opened the door.

  ‘The hens lay very badly,’ she said, ‘and it takes a long time to find all the eggs. Your grandmother needs you, poor woman, that’s what I mean. You are very like Monsieur Lucien, that’s a relief.’

  She led me into a large dark kitchen. There were stone flags on the floor and the roof was curved. She placed the basket of eggs on a large table in the middle of the room, and wiped her hands on her apron.

  ‘I am Marthe,’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘Marthe? But you were …’

  ‘Yes, I was young, and now I am not. We are none of us young here. You must not wonder at that. Sit down, and I will prepare your grandmother. She has talked of nothing but your coming … when she has talked, that is.’

  She left me alone. Did I indeed remember her? There had been a Marthe, certainly, a peasant girl who swabbed floors, and was permitted to help the cook with the preparation of the vegetables. She had been the cause of scandal – at least two illegitimate children. Though how had that fact come to my knowledge? Or to my memory? Had the babies been brought to the house? But that Marthe had only been a girl a dozen years ago.

  ‘The marc is our own,’ my grandmother said. ‘We no longer make it, of course, but there are some bottles left.’

  She poured two glasses and held one out to me.

  ‘You have been a long time in coming,’ she said.

  Throughout dinner – a saucisson d’Arles, followed by an anchovy tart and a basket of strawberries – she had said little, though I was all the time aware of her scrutiny. She picked at her food, made a couple of approving comments on my appetite, once said, ‘It’s fortunate that Marthe had prepared this tart. I’m pleased you like it.’ It was as if the tart had been a sort of test. ‘Your mother dislikes anchovies, I remember. I suppose most English do.’

  ‘There’s a sort of anchovy paste called Gentleman’s Relish, which a lot of Englishmen dote on.’

  ‘Do they?’

  The dining room was at the side of the house. The windows gave on to distant mountains which turned to a dusky grape-purple as we ate. The room was full of heavy sharp-edged furniture, stained a dull shadowy colour. Tapestries depicting hunting scenes hung on the wall to the right of the window; they were faded and the ends frayed.

  ‘You have been a long time in coming,’ she said again. She crooked a twisted finger round her coffee-cup. Her hands were heavy with rings.

  ‘What sort of place is South Africa?’

  ‘My stepfather has a farm there.’

  ‘And you live on it? Your mother hated it here. Paris, it must always be Paris. Now you are the head of the family. All this will be yours one day, except for Armand’s share of course. And he won’t want the land. He prefers to make money.’

  I sipped the marc. Journalists who write about these things use all sorts of adjectives to describe drink. Most are absurd. Really the only epithets that have any meaning identify its effect. The marc made me feel strong, defiant, knowledgeable, bitter, older than my years. Looked at from this distance, the sensation was ridiculous, like smoking a cigarette in the manner of Bogart.

  ‘You know who I’m talking about?’

  ‘My uncle. I remember him well. On a beach and coming to our apartment. He used to lift me on to his shoulders …’

  A snapshot: crinkly dark hair and a smile full of teeth, a laughing face. I saw him more clearly than I saw my father.

  ‘I’m tired.’ She threw down a napkin with which she had been wiping her mouth. ‘There are too many things to talk about, and too much that is too painful. It is good that you have come home.’

  Her back was very straight as she left the room.

  But if there were too many things to talk about, there was too much that was hard to say. I soon realised this. It was not that we had no common ground, but that the ground was a minefield. My grandmother treated me as carefully as if I had been a rare and precious piece of china which, by a moment’s inadvertence, she might let slip from her fingers and shatter on the parquet floor. As for me, I became aware, for the first time in my life, of the power, my power, to wound. There was some pleasure in that knowledge, which even then disgusted me. A few years ago I found it exactly described in a biography of T. H. White, who, brooding on his Arthurian novels, had noted of Lancelot: ‘probably sadistic, or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle’. I scribbled in the margin: ‘this is me; facilis descensus Averni’.

  So for two weeks, possibly more, we circled round each other, endlessly polite and reticent. She was disappointed – she must have been – and yet Marthe, whom I tried to question, would only say, ‘No, she has you here, that’s what is important to her.’

  In the mornings I walked round the estate before the soaring sun made such exercise disagreeable. I had learned enough from Roddy, poor farmer though he was, to realise that its condition was wretched. The vines were ill-tended, the olive-groves neglected, and some fields which had once borne crops had reverted to the wild; they were no more, or would soon be no more,
than maquis. An old man with his son, who was near to being an imbecile, was supposed to care for the land, but it was clear that it had escaped him. Yet at the same time the outlines of the country were so stark and uncompromising that I felt abundantly well. We were quite high up the hill, the soil was parsimonious, everything had to be worked for, there was no lush English deception possible. It was a land to cherish, even in its neglect, and one which stimulated.

  One day, going into the kitchen in the late afternoon to ask Marthe if she would make me a pot of coffee, I found a young man there. He was about my age, wearing Army uniform, and he sat with his back against the wall and his feet, in Army boots, resting on another chair. He made no move when I entered but looked at me from dark eyes under heavy lids. He was chewing a matchstick. There was no sign of Marthe. I asked where she was. He gnawed the matchstick as if pondering his reply.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘We haven’t met.’

  ‘She told me you were here.’

  I sat down and waited.

  ‘Why have you come?’ he said.

  ‘What’s that to you?’

  ‘They’re both mad. You know that? Both the old women. They say it’s because of what they’ve gone through – at least she does’ – he jerked his finger towards the stove – ‘the other won’t talk to me, but I reckon they were always mad.’

  I lit a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ I said. ‘Who are you anyway?’

  He removed the match from his mouth and rubbed what was left of it between his fingers.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sorry I’m sure. I’m one of her brats. As you can see I’m in the Army, National Service, which they don’t approve of, you understand. I’ve come to see her and I’ve brought one of my brothers, my half-brothers that is, one of the German ones, home for his holidays. They go to a church school, a church boarding school down in the city, which the other one pays for, you understand, and all because they won’t have anything to do with the village, as the appearance of the place will have told you. And now tell me they’re not mad.’