by Allan Massie
‘I have fallen,’ she said, ‘into the way of speaking so as not to be understood. An elliptical manner, the use of irony. Your Uncle Armand chides me for it. He says it is arrogant. Perhaps I am arrogant. But it comes perhaps from living alone and talking only to fools. And not even many of them, for I have never been able to abide fools around me. It is a great relief, Etienne, that you are not a fool. Armand himself is a fool of course, though a clever one. He is only interested in making money.’
She paused and looked out of the window at the hills, which were now purple. The trees below the terrace were swathed in black. The shadows cast by the fringed shade of the lamp over the table made her face look like an ancient and ravaged landscape; one where seams of some mineral had been exhausted and which the exploiters had abandoned. How, I wondered, did she get through the day? What drove her to rise in the morning? The tenacity, even the heroism, of the old, of this particular old woman, appalled me. I couldn’t imagine, then, how anyone acquired the ability simply to go on. It didn’t occur to me that it is the young who kill themselves.
‘Jacques,’ she said … and paused. ‘To cure myself of this habit of irony, or at least to set it aside for a moment, let me tell you straight out, this little Jacques is your half-brother. He doesn’t know it himself of course, and you, I think, are the only person who has the right to tell him.’
‘Surely, his mother …’
‘Marthe has no rights … it will be a question of property of course … you may wish … but no one will exercise any persuasion on you, rest assured of that.’
Having read over my reconstruction of these first weeks in Provence I realise not only that there is no narrative – and yet what is life but narrative? – but that I have signally failed to bring my grandmother to life. That is inescapable; could hardly be otherwise. I couldn’t understand the spark of life persisting there. Even when she dropped this monstrous revelation on the dinner table between us – and it was, it seemed, only at the table that we met, so that I am driven to wonder how in fact she passed the days – even then, she did it without animation, without any sense that what she was saying was actually staggering, that it is not every day that one is suddenly presented with a brother; even a half-brother. And yet I couldn’t question her either, I couldn’t ask for the circumstances.
I could look at Marthe in a new way, could summon up the imagined picture of her in my mother’s bed, or in a dusty corner of the hayloft, or had my father crept like a thief up the back stairs to the garret where Marthe lodged? – if she did indeed lodge in a garret; could ask myself how he had felt at taking his place in that long line of men, whom, in the circumstances as I apprehended them, I could not really bring myself to think of as lovers. I visioned instead Marthe’s copulations as things of the field, mere brute necessity – without joy, for I could not in any way associate Marthe with joy. (And yet there had been nothing but joy, and perhaps surprise, in the actual moments of my own sexual cavortings.)
And there is too much ‘I’ in this motionless narrative, and yet ‘I’ is the essence of autobiography if that is what I am struggling, like a rough beast, to bring forth.
Yet the next morning I confronted Marthe with my knowledge, straight out, like a newspaper revelation in the headlines.
‘My grandmother told me last night about Jacques.’
‘She said she would.’
‘I wish I had known while he was here.’
‘Understand, Monsieur Etienne, we ask for nothing. Jacques doesn’t know who his father was. There’s no reason why he should, unless some day you choose to tell him. But that’s not necessary. He’s a clever boy who can make his way in the world, and may do so more easily without the burden of such knowledge.’
She didn’t look at me while she spoke, but kept her face lowered over the basin in which she was scrubbing at a pan, and I had to strain to hear what she was saying.
‘Indeed, Monsieur Etienne, I would rather he remained ignorant, and I told your grandmother so. “Better they both remain ignorant,” I said to her, “it will only fill their heads with nonsense if you tell them.” But she would have it that you should know.’
‘Why do you call it a burden, Marthe?’
‘It was when war was coming, your father was at home. He was desperate and unhappy and I thought to comfort him. But it brought no comfort, and I can’t see that the knowledge of his birth would do anything for Jacques …’ She straightened her back and began to dry the pan she had been washing.
‘I’ve watched you since you arrived, Monsieur Etienne, and I know that you have been burrowing into the past, wondering about what is over – in your father’s manner – and it did him no good and can do you none. I’m an ignorant woman, but I know that. You’re like your father, and that is not good. He was a man marked for sorrow. That’s all I have to say on the matter except that I’ll thank you, if you have a care for the boy, and I think you have, not to burden him with knowledge that can only be useless and painful.’
What could I say to that?
‘I wish you would tell me more about my father.’
‘It’s not for me to do so. Besides, if you think I know anything simply because I happened to let him into my bed one night, you’re mistaken. He thought too much, that’s all I can tell you, and you know that already. It’s not the way to get through life. We must take what comes, and he never knew that.’
It was the sort of remark which passes for peasant wisdom, useless unless you happen to be a peasant. The Bible tells us that no one can add cubits to his stature by taking thought, and Jesus tells us to consider the lilies of the field, but the habit of thought cannot be broken by such advice.
So both women left me more disturbed. It was as if contact with them had only given me an itch. I wrote to Eddie about my brother. ‘Lucky you,’ he sighed when we met in the autumn mists of the Fens. He didn’t mean anything except the absurdity of fancy.
My Uncle Armand arrived in a flash of shiny Citroën, that longnosed car which in old gangster movies sets off a throb of nostalgia for a vanished France. He withdrew himself from it, tall, beaky, crinkling with suppressed laughter; embraced his mother and held me off a moment, his eyes dancing, enfolded me in his arms, and said,
‘It’s not possible, the resemblance. As soon as I learned from Maman that you were indeed here – I have been away from home, you understand – I leapt into my car and sped south. It’s remarkable,’ he repeated, ‘I could never have mistaken you, it’s like seeing Lucien again, like wiping off the years.’
Armand changed everything. The silent house was full of chatter and movement. All the shutters which enclosed it were thrown open. He talked a faster French than I had ever heard, from the corner of a twisted mouth, which, all the time, even while he spoke, retained a Gauloise. He was a frenetic smoker. As soon as he sat at the dining table, he would lay the packet and an onyx lighter at his left side, and he would continue smoking until Marthe had placed his food before him. It wasn’t exactly with reluctance that he then stubbed out a cigarette in the capacious ash-tray which he had himself brought to the table, but that was only because it was inconceivable that Armand could ever be brought to do anything with reluctance.
And he talked all the time, mostly about people of whom I was naturally quite ignorant. His conversation was laced with jokes which I couldn’t understand, and which his mother only rarely acknowledged with a slight slow movement of the lip. This didn’t disconcert him, he was always ready to laugh at his own humour, though, unlike many who have this habit, he never did so uproariously; it was as if he couldn’t spare the time to give vent to a thoroughgoing laugh – it was more a light trill which was scarcely allowed to break the flow of his sentence, and then he was off again. I had never encountered such a stream of perpetual gaiety.
After he had been there three days, he said to me,
‘I must go tomorrow and you must come with me. I revere my mother, but she is low-spirited, and frankly two days of her c
ompany is all I can normally manage. How you have stood it for so long I can’t imagine. Perhaps you are a saint. Your father, my poor, poor brother, had of course always aspirations to sainthood, which was perhaps why he loved Provence and was able to abide in his mother’s house, but, though you resemble him, I have been watching you, you see, and there are significant differences. After all, you are also your mother’s son – I adore her by the way, so sad to think of her exiled in South Africa, you must give her all my love and lots of brotherly hugs and kisses when you see her next, or when you write – do you write? I have never been able to write to my mother of course, but then there is no comparison, is there? What a silly thing to say, there is always comparison between people, I think. We all love X better than Y, and what is that but comparison? So give my adored Polly all my love and tell her not to stay in South Africa, she must be tired of her pilot now, mustn’t she – pilots are all very well in wartime when they can be heroes, but tiresome in peace, I think. War and peace are very different, you know, and so different types flourish. I was no good in the war, they gave me medals of course, but I was no good, it was the wrong ambience, that’s all. I am a man of peace and affairs.’
‘And my father,’ I said, ‘was he a man of peace or war?’
‘Ah, my poor Lucien, I adored him, you know; perhaps we should have some champagne. Let’s go and look for some, shall we?’
I hadn’t even known there was a cellar below Marthe’s kitchen. Only our own wine of the last year’s vintage appeared on my grandmother’s table. By the look of the cobwebs over the cellar door no one had entered since Armand’s last visit home, which – he had told me – had been the previous summer.
‘You may wonder,’ he said, unlocking the door, ‘how any wine survived the visit of our German friends. It is curious that it did, sheer chance. They had a gentlemanly Commander, who was also, uniquely perhaps, a teetotaller.’
‘And after the war, or,’ I paused, ‘during the épuration …’
‘That is odder still, yes, you are right, perhaps the saints interceded for our wine, if not for anything else. I don’t know … Of course it is not much of a cellar now …’ he waved the torch he had brought with him, ‘as you can see, most of the vaults are empty, your poor father was not interested in fine wine … but there should still be some, though I confess that I usually remove a few bottles whenever I visit.’
The cellar must have stretched half the length of the house, and deep into the hillside behind. Most of the bays near the door were empty, though here and there a few bottles, swathed in cobwebs, lay, like driftwood on a beach, eloquent of the rule of chance.
I might have indulged further in such reflections, but my Uncle Armand was hardly the companion likely to respond to them.
‘Come, come,’ he cried, waving the large torch he had brought with him, ‘champagne to the rear.’
He drew out a bottle.
‘Perrier-Jouet, ’34. ’34, ah, Etienne, in ’34 I was in love with an actress and we drank this wine’s older brother. Perrier-Jouet. ’34, was that the last year before the abyss was visible, or could we already see it? It is a lovely pun anyway, though joué et peri would of course be more precise. Come, we’ll take a few of these …’
The second half of the second bottle induced even in Armand a melancholy mood. I had been talking of Polly, of Cambridge and then at last of my father – all in response to his questions, and his statement of the urgent requirement that he should get to know this nephew of his at once – and I said I had been spending hours in my father’s study, trying to understand him.
‘But though I feel I am getting to know him I still don’t know how he died, and no one seems willing to tell me. I don’t understand that, especially as my grandmother assures me he was a hero.’
And I repeated what the curé had said: that there were no simple deaths in France then.
‘I don’t really understand what he meant by that either.’
Armand turned his glass upside down and allowed the last few drops of wine to run down to the tiled floor.
‘It was a shambles,’ he said, ‘France, a shambles, where killing and humiliation were the delight of many. Poor Lucien was a victim, of circumstance and human nature; not his own nature. I’ve always believed that. Beyond that, I’d rather not talk of it. It’s too painful. I say, let’s open the next bottle, and talk of women … you’re not a virgin, are you? If you are, that’s something we shall have to remedy, don’t you think?’
When we left the next morning, I was surprised that my grandmother made no attempt to delay us, just as she had made no objection to my announcement that I would like to go off with my uncle. I had expected her to protest, and was indeed rather hurt that she didn’t. Perhaps she enjoyed having me there less than I was encouraged to suppose? Now of course I know that was not the case, but that it was more important for her to have seen me, to have had me to stay, than to prolong the visit. No doubt she had been apprehensive all the time I was there that I would suddenly turn against everything she longed for me to love. But she also experienced the weariness of the old, which is often so easily satisfied by something less than the presence of those they love, who live at least as warmly in memory as across the dinner table. My weeks there – I say this with no personal complacency, you understand – had given my grandmother sufficient store of memories. This was not something I could possibly have comprehended then; it has taken the development of my own relations with Sarah to open my eyes to it.
Armand’s house in Normandy, just east of the boundary that separates that province from Brittany, was delightful. It stood less than half a mile from the sea, but the intervening ground, which belonged to him, was covered with ragged orchard; all sorts of wildflowers which I could not name grew round the trunks of the trees. The house itself was a half-timbered structure with a verandah running round three sides of it. You approached by a winding drive which gave on to a little courtyard, out of the evening sun when we arrived; you were not at first aware of the wide verandah on which so much of the social life of the house was lived. It was a pink and white house – pink bricks and white woodwork which was old and peeling and which any houseproud Englishman would have renewed several summers previously. Honeysuckle straggled over the verandah and yellow tea-roses climbed the pink walls. It looked comfortable and shabby and quite without pretension. There were deckchairs and wickerwork furniture on the verandah.
We had left the car in the courtyard without bothering to unpack anything and had gone round to the front of the house. A girl was lying in one of the deckchairs; she was asleep and did not hear our approach, but a white spaniel with lemon markings came to greet us.
Armand knelt in front of it. The dog – it was an unusually big spaniel – put feathery paws on his shoulders, almost knocking him over backwards with the exuberance of its welcome – and began to lick his face.
‘Yes, boy,’ he said, ‘but we have a visitor, a new member of the family.’
And I felt warm to hear him describe me like that, as if I belonged, and was pleased when the dog turned his boisterous affection on me. Then the girl leapt up, kissed Armand, and extended her hand to me.
‘I’m Jeanne-Marie,’ she said. ‘We’re so glad you have come. And this is Henry’ – she pronounced it with an open ‘e’ and put an equal stress on both syllables. ‘We call him that because he is an English dog. It was an English friend who gave him to us. He’s a love.’ She knelt down beside the spaniel and cradled his head in her arms, and he twisted round and licked her face; the long pink tongue was like a slice of mobile ham.
‘He’s lovely,’ I said, and he was, but I meant more than that. I meant it was all lovely, and so was she. She was big and blonde, like a golden heifer. And I knew at once, in the way that you can immediately, that she was good and someone I would love, in a relaxed, sympathetic and trusting way, all my life. It was a long time before I realised Jeanne-Marie’s capacity for unhappiness, a capacity that derived from he
r profound sense of pity, which would lead her into a lifetime of devotion to causes: for animals, for miserable refugee children, for the old, for all the poor and wretched of the earth; a pity which would deny her any conventional sort of happiness, so that throughout her life there have been many ready to say ‘poor Jeanne-Marie’. If someone had told me then, as I watched this sturdy goddess cradle her dog’s head, that she would be distressed for years over the question of whether she possessed a religious vocation, that it would pain her terribly to decide that she hadn’t, and that she would nevertheless pass her life in service to men and animals without any consolation of faith, what would I have felt? The blank incredulity with which we view the lives of others? The sense of wonder that people so different from oneself can exist? And indeed the fact of the existence of others is one of the hurdles one is continually brought down by.
And suddenly there were more girls, three of them.
‘Are they all my cousins?’
‘No, only two of them, but you’ll be overwhelmed by girls,’ Armand said, ‘lucky man.’ He put his arms round the younger pair. ‘Tot and Toinette.’
It was obvious that Armand adored his daughters and loved to spoil them. Their mother, whom I called Tante Berthe, though I called him simply Armand, tried to exercise ‘a traditional degree of discipline. Else they will be savages.’ But Armand laughed, and denied them nothing, asking only that they should be there, happy and ready to amuse him.
Tot and Toinette were certainly keen to do that. Their conversation was a bubbling stream of jokes, anecdotes and teasing, much of the last directed at their father, whom they obviously adored as much as he did them. Tot was twelve, Toinette fourteen, and they were experimenting with make-up – ‘It is the holidays, Maman’ – and babbling of film stars, but they were still clinging on to childhood. Much of their life centred round their animals. In addition to the Clumber spaniel, Henry, there was a brace of scruffy terriers, which they swore were ‘Aberdeens’ but hardly resembled any Scottie I had ever seen, and there was a big yellow dog which they called a ‘Vendéen hound’, but which looked like a mongrel to me. Cats wandered in and out of the house, were to be found on the dining table and curled against the stove in the kitchen, and in the beds. I never succeeded in identifying all of them, or even in numbering them.
