A Question of Loyalties

by Allan Massie

  ‘Oh now, Guy is very balanced. That is why he has survived. He has an icy balance.’

  ‘Then …’

  ‘I said he disliked your father. That’s not true. He hated him. He could never allow Freddie to marry you.’

  ‘But Freddie is not his possession …’

  ‘Of course not, but, Etienne, France is, despite everything, still a civilised country. Nice girls like Freddie don’t marry against their father’s wishes. Especially, they don’t choose someone who merely by being who he is will hurt their father. That’s all there is to it, and I am afraid I should have told you some time ago, but I did hope it was only a summer affair.’

  She began packing our few picnic things into her basket.

  ‘We’d best get home. There’s going to be a storm. Now that you know, I think it would be better if you leave, don’t you? Less painful for both of you.’

  I nodded.

  ‘But I must speak to Freddie first.’

  ‘Of course you must, my dear. This isn’t a melodrama. I’m not throwing you out or expecting you to leave first thing in the morning. We’ll all be sorry to see you go, we’ve loved having you here, and grown to love you for yourself. The whole thing is wretched, an absolute shame. An absolute shame.’

  We scudded through the villages, scattering chickens, which fled squawking in response to Tante Berthe’s strident horn. The sky was darkening, the predicted storm racing in from the sea and flinging the tops of the poplars around like angry hair.

  ‘Stop a moment, please,’ I said. And when she had done so, ‘You must tell me now, now that I know all this, how did my father die?’

  ‘Oh, you poor dear, someone must tell you. He killed himself, nobody knows precisely why. From misery, I think, sheer misery,’ and she leaned across and kissed me.

  ‘Where did it happen?’

  ‘In a prison.’

  The storm had driven everyone indoors, and the house, which had seemed so charming when life spilled out of it on to the terrace, into the garden and down to the sea, now appeared like an overloaded and leaking ark, in which it was impossible to be alone. And if it was impossible, it was yet absolutely necessary. I lay on my bed only too aware of how full the house was. Music came from a wind-up gramophone immediately below my room; a tinkling piano playing Paris street-songs that bore up to me all the yellow-leaved melancholy of the abrupt arrival of autumn.

  Tante Berthe had said there was no need to leave at once, but it was clear to me that departure was inevitable: ‘Suddenly comes over one the absolute necessity to move.’ Tante Berthe had thrust the apple of knowledge between my teeth.

  Someone knocked at the door, and I was tempted to pretend to be asleep, as one may when waking from drunkenness and unable to tolerate company. But the door opened nonetheless, and Armand stood there. He carried a bottle of wine and two glasses, the stems between his fingers and the bowls inverted, rather than the flaming torch with which the angels guarded the gates of Eden, and yet I knew that he came to confirm the expulsion order.

  ‘We should have talked before,’ he said.

  ‘We should have talked before you brought me here. Then I would never have come.’

  ‘But we wanted you here. We have all grown so fond of you.’ He poured wine, murky in the half-light that entered the room through the closed and slatted shutters, and handed me a glass.

  ‘Berthe had to speak to you. That’s the way she is. I wouldn’t have done so. I would have let things take their course.’

  ‘I’m glad she spoke.’

  ‘Well, that’s something.’ He sat down on the bed. He sipped his wine and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Freddie wants to see you.’

  ‘Has Tante Berthe been speaking to her too?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, it was necessary.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing to be said, is there? I think I’ll leave in the morning.’

  ‘I suppose you feel a victim.’

  When he said that, I burst into tears. It was, I’m sure, the first time I’d cried since I was a child, and I was ashamed of myself. I wouldn’t be ashamed now, when middle age has made tears seem natural again, and, in retrospect, I even acquit myself of self-pity. I wept, I think, because life refused to take on the pleasing shape of art, because it had torn the canvas of the Impressionist painting of that summer. He let me weep without telling me it would pass or advising me to buck up. I was grateful for that.

  ‘I know it must seem to you,’ he said at last, ‘that Lucien has destroyed your life. And it can be little consolation that he destroyed his own more thoroughly.’

  ‘Why was he in prison? Why did he kill himself?’

  ‘Well, I could answer that, but the words I would have to employ would be misleading. They always are. I could talk of honour, I could say he killed himself because he had been betrayed and had betrayed himself too. But in the end, you know, all that is meaningless unless you understand his whole life. I don’t know if you want to do that. And ultimately you know people kill themselves for a very simple reason: because they have come to the end of the road, and discovered it’s a one-way street. They missed the sign “sens interdit”.’

  The rain hurled itself against the shutters. Thunder, distant now like the memory of war in peace, grumbled in another valley. A dog howled.

  ‘I’ve been all wrong about him, haven’t I?’

  ‘Probably not, though importantly yes.’

  ‘I don’t understand anything.’

  ‘Your grandmother calls him a hero. She’s not wrong, you know.’

  I put my glass to my mouth. It was a northern wine, tasting of flowers.

  ‘I don’t think I can bear to see Freddie,’ I said. ‘Can you just say I want to sleep?’

  ‘I’ll leave you the wine then.’

  And in fact I did go to sleep. I had not thought it would be possible. I was sure – it was perhaps the only thing of which I was sure, except for the certainty that I would adore Freddie till the day I died and that my life was ruined by Fate – that I would lie tossing and questioning, given up to anger and grief; but emotion must have exhausted me, and my sleep was abrupt and dreamless.

  The night was still when I woke, but for the murmur of the sea. Moonlight slanted through the shutters in broken patterns, and then, as if I had woken in expectation of the event, the door opened. There was a shimmer of white nightgown and Freddie slipped into bed beside me. Our arms enfolded each other, our mouths met. We kissed long and hard and when we withdrew my lips felt bruised and my tongue explored the sticky residue of lipstick which she had left on them.

  ‘I couldn’t bear to think of you and not come,’ she whispered.

  I ran my fingers over her face like a blind man and touched a single tear that had escaped her eye.

  ‘You’ve been crying,’ I said, and kissed her again. ‘It’s as bad for you as it is for me, isn’t it?’

  ‘I feel as if my heart is breaking,’ she said, and the romantic commonplace, evidence of how in the most sincere moments of emotion we fall back on words that one might have thought so shop-soiled as to have lost all meaning, which nevertheless strike the lover who hears them as absolutely fresh and authentic, touched me more than the most original and brilliant lines of poetry have ever done. She leaned over and kissed my eyes, her lips soft and light.

  We were both unpractised and without skills, and our means of expressing what we felt were crude and tentative. Our movements were hesitant and, because we were so inexperienced and profoundly fearful of any sort of damage we might do the other, our love-making scarcely advanced beyond kissing, hugging, stroking and murmurs of adoration; and yet every moment has been with me in imagination ever since. And I have had no regret as to its inconclusive nature, not even when I have wondered, as of course I have, if things might, somehow or other, have turned out differently if I had forced the issue and possessed her. But, hardly possessing myself, I could not think of it. Freddie had not been given me to possess, and even thou
gh she was in a sense offering herself, I do not believe that she was offering what any robust interpretation of her behaviour would insist she was presenting to me, though that same robust interpreter would mock me for my restraint. Yet that restraint was not an act of will. It was natural.

  In a little she slept in my arms, and I lay happy as a child whose teddy bear has been restored to him, my happiness sharpened by her confidence and my fear, by my knowledge nevertheless that I had been given what not even Time could take from me.

  I woke to find her stroking my cheek. Seeing my eyes open, she rested her finger on my lips.

  ‘S-sh.’

  It was half-light, blue-grey and cool.

  ‘It was so nice watching you asleep.’

  She leaned down and kissed me.

  ‘Let’s go swimming,’ she whispered. ‘Give me a moment. Meet me downstairs.’

  There were touches of strawberry-pink in the eastern sky, but the sun was still below the line of the little hill. The morning air was sweet with the scent of wild thyme, cut grass and awakening flowers. The long-parched ground had swallowed up all the night’s rain but the darker green of the trees showed how the storm had refreshed the summer. The pink and yellow roses that clambered over the trellis were opening to the morning, and Freddie slipped on to the verandah wearing a dark-blue dressing-gown and sandals. Her legs were bare. The spaniel Henry galloped past, disappearing into the shrubbery and, as we walked, not touching each other, to the garden gate we could hear him snuffling among the bushes.

  I took her hand as we slithered over the rocks, and then we were on the beach; I stripped off my jersey and flannels, and Freddie let her robe fall to the sand, and, without saying anything we swam, racing each other, to a large rock which stood three or four feet out of the water at low tide, about fifty yards from the shore. We climbed on to the rock and looked back. The sun stood, a red ball, on the fringe of the world and Henry was planted on the beach, gazing after us, like one neglected.

  ‘Oh, the poor love,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised he had followed us to the beach, he so hates being left alone.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s Jeanne-Marie. Perhaps you woke her when you were changing. You don’t think she knows, do you?’

  ‘She was asleep when I left, but it’s a regular habit of hers, this. She loves the beach in the early morning. Besides, if she did know, it wouldn’t matter. She’s good. I wish I was good like her.’

  ‘You don’t have to be good, you’re perfect.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you say that because you’re in love with me, but really I’ve a terrible character. That’s what I’m afraid of, that I won’t be able to be faithful to you. Do you think you … no, it’s not fair to ask …’

  ‘Freddie,’ I said, ‘we don’t have to accept. We don’t have to let our lives be ruled by what other people have done in other lives.’

  ‘Oh, darling, you don’t understand …’ She laid the back of her hand against my lips, knowing how I loved to taste it when it was cold and salty from the sea.

  ‘No, you don’t understand. Perhaps after all that is why I love you so much.’

  And of course she was quite right. He didn’t understand – I see now – understand anything, that young man. He didn’t understand how Freddie was preparing herself to play the renunciation scene, even while she was sincere in saying she loved him and, with one part of her being, was unwilling to give him up without a fight.

  ‘If the world was like this rock, just the two of us,’ she said, ‘but, don’t you see, there’s Jeanne-Marie on the shore and Henry with her, and they both love us too. They have rights too. Oh, how sweet,’ she said, ‘isn’t that sweet and tactful of her?’

  And looking up, he saw that his cousin had turned away. As she did so, her arm moved in a benign and generous wave, to let them know that she respected their desire to be alone together and that she wished them well.

  (I put it like that, in the third person, because the scene remains framed in my memory like a film sequence: the two doomed lovers on the rock, and the large fair girl turning away on the beach, walking with a resolute and lonely benevolence away from intimacy, the spaniel at her heels, his nose to the ground. The dog stopped every now and then to investigate a rockpool or twist of seaweed, but the girl, having ascertained where the lovers were, and assured them of her sympathy, neither paused nor looked back. Then the dog would be after her in a busy shambling trot. And the rising sun picked out rainbow colours on the wet beach.)

  So I didn’t leave that day, because departure was impossible in the state of exhilaration I felt as a result of my certainty that Freddie loved me, but it was never as good again. Prudence kept her from my bed, prudence and fear; she must have known it could not be as innocent a second time. It is easy now to suppose that she played with me – and for a time I tried to tell myself that – but in reality she was as confused as I was. She had warned me not to trust her resolution. She was far more aware than I of the weapons which a well-organised family could bring to bear. That was natural; my own family wasn’t organised at all.

  But hers was different. What did it consist of? Surely, I said, remembering what Tante Berthe had told me, there was only her father.

  ‘Oh no, my father and a weight of aunts and uncles and grandparents. Moreover, my father has married a second time, and my stepmother is very severe.’

  ‘She couldn’t dislike you.’

  ‘No, not that at all. But she adores my father and is fiercely protective of him. He is rather a great man in his way, you know, and she trembles in case either I ormy half-brother and half-sister should do anything that would displease him. Though they are babies, they don’t have much chance yet.’

  ‘And I would?’

  ‘It never occurred to me. How could it? I was a child in the war, and it isn’t real to us, is it? But to Papa, it’s quite different. The war and everything that happened then, in those terrible years, is, well, it’s like the clothes he wears.’ He was a writer, she told me, and a politician.

  ‘Like all French writers,’ I said.

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ she smiled, and in that smile acknowledged a distance between us; it told me that, though I was French, yet I could not be said wholly to belong, even though it was the French side of my inheritance which came between us. And, as she spoke, I realised how much her father mattered to her, how important it was to her that they should be at ease together.

  ‘I am all he has left of Mama – except for memories.’

  In my imagination I saw myself confronting her father. I would speak out to him. I would say that the sins of the fathers should not be visited on their children. But, even as I prepared speeches – and I lay abed, while the night scents drifted in from the garden, running through a succession of rhetorical pleas – even as I did so, I knew it was no good. The past had divided us as surely as if a drawbridge had been raised. Resentment swelled within me. I conceived a disgust for everything French.

  *

  The crossing was satisfyingly rough. Along the rail of the boat men and women spewed out the last of the Continent. Others lay on the deck, in the passageways, and moaned; it might have been a refugee ship, or one of those allegorical representations of a vessel laden with the damned.

  With the self-conscious swagger of the good sailor I brushed passed the sufferers and settled myself in the bar. I ordered brandy and ginger ale, defiantly English.

  ‘You look a bit low, young fellow,’ said a tweedy man who had settled himself next to me. ‘Not suffering, are you?’

  ‘Not in body,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, love, I suppose. It’s an awful business.’ He shook his head, pursed his lips, flickered his eyelids. ‘Thank God I’m beyond all that. Still, it’s always nice to meet another good sailor. We should stick together. What’s yours?’

  ‘Brandy,’ I said, confident of my ability to handle his ineffective and old-fashioned approach. ‘With ginger.’

  ‘What a very goo
d idea. Just the right drink for a rough crossing. Been in France, have you? What a mess they’re in. Mind you, I’m fond of the Frogs, which is more than most Englishmen would admit. But if ever a people could do with a dictator, it’s our poor friends across the Manche. Steward, two big brandies, please.’

  In those days my grandparents, who had sold their town house before the war, retained a flat in Hyde Park Gardens, where I was accustomed to stay while in London. I parted from my new friend at Victoria, resisting his invitation to accompany him to the Savoy Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street. (‘Cheaper than a hotel, awfully useful place to know, and they ask no questions. Often stay there when passing through the old Metrop or up on business. What do you say?’ ‘I’m afraid I’m expected at my grandparents.’ ‘Too bad. Some other time, perhaps.’)

  Waiting for Higson, who had been my grandfather’s batman in the First War and now cared for the flat, to make his slow way from the basement (it was a double flat) to answer my ring, I looked back across the road towards the park, but the trees were no more than dark shapes looming out of a thick darkness. There was a whiff of autumn in the air. I shivered, shifting my feet. At last, with an almost inconceivable slowness, Higson unbolted the door. His wizened face peered into the dim streetlight. He looked like the reluctant denizen of some unknown underworld, summoned to the surface by a power he could not quite bring himself to resist.

  ‘You should have let me know you were coming. Your bed’ll be damp.’

  I heard him bolt the door behind me and his slippered feet followed me through the cavernous hall.

  ‘And what would you have done if I had been away?’

  ‘But you’re never away, Higson, are you?’

  ‘Might be in hospital. You can switch on the electric fire in His Lordship’s library. You won’t be staying long, will you?’

  ‘No, Higson, I don’t expect so. Is there any brandy?’

  ‘Brandy, is it. No, there’s not a drop. You know his Lordship’s forbidden it.’