by Jon Cleary
‘And do you?’
‘Yes. One does not leave one’s friends, even when they are dead.’
Prue turned her head away, looked out the car window. She tried to remember her history: Americans, she was sure, had died with the same sense of honour. But America had never known the disgrace that had overwhelmed France in 1940; the French could not be blamed if they set a certain quiet grandeur to the small beaux gestes such as those of Colonel le Comte de Belfrage and his young cavalry students. She was moved by what Guy had told her and she had no words, English or French, with which to reply
The day was hot and the Loire, glinting like a broken wine glass, looked inviting. Impulsively she grabbed Guy’s arm. ‘Let’s stop for a swim!’
‘No. We have no bathing suits. One doesn’t swim nude in the river, not here. Not us.’
‘We could swim in our underwear. Don’t be so stuffy, Guy – ’
‘No.’ He increased the speed of the car. ‘We have to get home.’
She settled back, hot and irritated. The Citroën had no air-conditioning; the chateau had neither air-conditioning nor central heating. Stephane de Belfrage, though she did not live a Spartan life, was set against comforts that she considered were coddling. It suddenly struck Prue, her irritation from the heat and the revelation of the manner of Guy’s father’s death coming together in her mind, that Stephane, after all these years, still saw herself as a soldier’s wife. A certain discipline had to be maintained, a degree of self-sacrifice practised.
‘What’s the matter?’ She looked sideways at Guy. ‘You’ve had something on your mind all day.’
‘Business.’ His tone was almost curt. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’
She spoke in French, to suit him. ‘Don’t leave me out, Guy.’
He slowed the car, put out a hand and clutched her wrist. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ His voice was gentler, a lover’s voice. ‘I’ll see that from now on you are left out of nothing.’
She felt ashamed that, for some strange reason, she did not quite believe him.
She pleaded a headache because of the heat when they reached the chateau and she went upstairs to their bedroom and lay down. It was a large, high-ceilinged room, elegantly furnished in the Empire style, with glass doors that opened out on to a tiny balcony that faced south towards the vineyards. She knew nothing of wine or wine-growing, but already she had been impressed by the mystique of it. Here among the vineyards there was none of the exaggerated homage to the grape that she had found with wine buffs she had met in Paris and London, drinkers who had amused her with the veneration of their own palates. Guy and his mother and the workers in the St Cast vineyards did not go in for worship of their product but they left no doubt that they considered they were doing more than just producing something to drink. St Cast wines were a beverage not to be spoken of in the same breath as Coke, Australian sweet sherry and other bottled burlesques. The grape-pickers were out among the vines now and Guy had told her that this year’s vintage was expected to be a very good one but not a superb one. She began to wonder what the rest of her own year would be like.
She loved Guy and the love was not all sexual. She had an almost overpowering need for sex; she had been only half-joking when she had told Sally she was a controlled nymphomaniac. But so long as one man could satisfy that need, she would be faithful to him; and Guy did satisfy her. But that was not all: he satisfied her emotional needs. She was not as self-contained as her sisters and other women thought; some of the more sensitive men she had slept with had realized that she wanted more than they could offer with their bodies. She wanted emotional security; never having known loneliness she was, paradoxically, afraid of it. She wanted protection, but she was prepared to give all her love, physical and emotional, to that end. Love, she knew, was a mutual selfishness, but if both lovers realized that and accepted it, then it could endure. She began to wonder for the first time if she was asking too much of Guy.
She dozed off and was wakened by Guy’s kiss. ‘What time is it?’
‘Six o’clock. I have to go out. I’m bringing an old friend back for dinner.’
‘Someone I know?’
‘No. I knew him in Algiers when I was a boy.’ That was the first time she had heard he had spent time in Algiers. ‘It’s years since I’ve seen him. I’ll be back in an hour.’
At seven, after she had bathed and changed, she went downstairs. Stephane was sitting in the big drawing-room, the doors to the terrace wide open to the still-warm evening. This part of the house faced north, above a long slope of yellow-green grass that ran down to the river. On the far side of the river a long low bluff stood like battlements, topped by a line of poplars that were as still as furled flags. At the water’s edge a lone fisherman waited patiently for some sign of life at the far end of his rod.
‘One would think that nothing has changed.’ Stephane could speak English, but with Prue she never used the language; her daughter-in-law had to speak French or be excluded from any conversation with her. ‘I sometimes like to think that before Henry the First left here for England he might have gazed out on a scene exactly like this.’
‘You sound as if you wished you had lived in those times.’
‘I am a romantic. One always wishes for more than one has at the moment.’
‘I’m a romantic, too. At least I think I am. But I’m happy with the moment.’
‘But then you have lost nothing, have you?’
Stephane had not turned her head till this moment to look at her daughter-in-law. She was a beautiful woman, at fifty looking no more than forty, only a faint trace of grey in her dark hair; but there was an air of almost too much perfection about her, as if she controlled her beauty in the same way as she controlled her behaviour. She was capable of temper, bias, hate and love; but all those emotions were strained through a cool exterior that chilled everyone but her son. She lived in a past that had not yet been confided to Prue and she would have disappointed Edith, because she had no perspective at all. She hated the present and all that it stood for.
‘What have you lost, Stephane?’ Up till now Prue had been deferential towards her mother-in-law for Guy’s sake; but upstairs in the past hour she had decided to assert her independence. ‘Except your husband and that was a long time ago.’
There was no time for Stephane to answer, if indeed she intended to answer. There were voices out in the hall, then Guy came into the room with his old friend. He was a short, very muscular man with black hair cut en brosse and one side of his face disfigured by what might have been the scars of a bad burn. Prue’s first thought was that, even allowing for the scars, he looked much too old to have been a boyhood friend of Guy’s.
The newcomer went straight to Stephane, bowed and kissed her hand. Prue, all at once alert though for no reason she could name, saw that the meeting had a formality to it that seemed to go beyond the mere greeting of the mother of an old friend. For a moment Stephane was almost regal in her acceptance of the stranger’s acknowledgement of her; Prue wondered if, in her romantic mood, she saw herself as the ghost of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Then, like a queen unbending, she took the man’s hand, held it tightly and smiled at him.
‘Henri, you look so well.’
‘I shall look even better very soon, madame.’ Then he turned and waited to be presented to Prue.
Guy introduced him. ‘Darling, this is our old friend Colonel Henri Raclot.’
He bowed, kissed Prue’s hand: but there was less deference to Guy’s wife than to his mother. ‘Madame, it is a pleasure.’
But Prue knew at once that he was lying: he was not interested in her, wished instead that she was not here. She looked at Guy for support, hoping he would show hurt or indignation at his friend’s dismissal of her; but there was no reaction at all from Guy on her behalf. Instead he seemed to have nothing but admiration for Raclot, smiling at the older man with what looked to be nothing less than hero worship.
‘I think we should eat at once,’
said Stephane. ‘Just in case.’
Just in case what? Prue looked at Guy for an explanation, but he offered none. He took her arm and they followed Stephane and Raclot across the hall and into the dining room. She could feel the tension in his hand and she looked at him, but he was staring straight ahead, as if ignoring her. Or not wanting to be asked any questions.
The talk at dinner was desultory, not what one would have expected at the reunion of old friends. Prue, the outsider, sensed that the others seemed to be waiting for something. Raclot made a complimentary remark about the de Belfrage wine, but it seemed an afterthought: he was already on his third glass. Once he looked out the window and said, ‘It is getting dark.’
‘Not really,’ said Prue, more to be included in the conversation than for any other reason. ‘Where I come from we’d be glad of these European twilights.’
Raclot smiled, for the first time seemed to take an interest in her. ‘I am a soldier. No soldier, even your American ones, likes twilight. Or dawn for that matter. They are times when one can be attacked.’
‘Not here, surely?’ Prue waved at the peaceful dusk settling beyond the windows.
‘Ah no, not here.’
‘Henri was at Dien Bien Phu,’ said Stephane.
‘Not just there,’ said Raclot and he sounded regretful. ‘There were other places.’
Several times Prue had seen him glance at his watch; he did so again now. She looked at her own watch: it was 8.30. Then, on the moment, the phone rang across the hall in the drawing-room. Stephane rose at once, not hurriedly; but Prue, watching her closely, could see the control that held her back from hurrying. It suddenly struck her that she had never seen Stephane go to answer the phone until one of the servants had first taken the call. She saw Stephane turn left as she went out into the hall, which meant she was going to take the call in the library and not in the drawing-room. It was to be a conversation she did not want overheard.
Prue looked at Guy and Raclot. Guy was sitting stiffly in his chair, his forearms flat on the table on either side of his plate; he held a dessert knife in his right hand, turning it slowly round and round with nervous fingers. The colonel looked more relaxed, but that was because he was more experienced in hiding tension. He moved his wineglass slowly in circles, gazing at it as if it were some sort of crystal ball. Then he seemed to become aware that it was empty; he reached for the decanter and poured himself some more wine. He reached across and poured wine into Guy’s empty glass, then looked up in surprise as Prue pushed her own glass towards him.
‘Pardon, madame. My manners are unforgivable.’
‘Are we waiting to drink to something?’ she said.
Guy and Raclot looked sharply at each other. Then Guy said, ‘What makes you say that?’
She shrugged, wishing now she had said nothing. ‘I don’t know. I just had the feeling we were going to drink to something. A toast of some sort.’
‘We’ll try and think of something.’ Raclot sat back, relaxing. ‘To your President perhaps, madame?’
‘We don’t seem to drink to our Presidents. I understand it’s thought un-American. You probably feel that’s strange?’
‘Not at all,’ said Raclot. ‘We Frenchmen don’t always drink to our Presidents.’
Then Stephane came back, sat down. She took a sip of wine from her glass, wiped her mouth carefully with her napkin. ‘That was from a friend in Paris. There has been an attempt to assassinate the General. It failed.’
There was silence for a moment, then Raclot sighed, put down his glass and sat back. Guy, too, seemed to relax; he picked up the peach from his plate and began to peel it. Prue looked at the wine in her glass, then said, ‘Perhaps we should drink to that.’
‘To what?’ said Stephane.
‘That General de Gaulle escaped being assassinated.’
Stephane stood up, stiff and haughty. ‘Perhaps you had better explain, Guy. Not everything, but enough to let her know how we feel. Come, Henri.’
She went out of the room and, after a warning glance at Guy, Raclot got up and followed her. Guy stopped peeling the peach, put it down on his plate, the skin still hanging from it like pink crêpe. Prue sat waiting, knowing already that she was about to be told, or half-told, something she would rather not hear.
‘You said not to leave you out.’ Guy stared at the knife still in his hand. ‘I think it would be better if you were.’
‘No.’ She was in mid-air, had taken the plunge.
He put down the knife carefully, as if laying a place setting. ‘My mother is from Algiers. I was born there. My mother’s family had a large property there, but no longer. When de Gaulle gave Algeria to the nationalists, we lost everything.’
Everything but what surrounds us now: but evidently that did not count. ‘Did the – the nationalists take it away from your mother’s family?’
‘Not exactly.’ He seemed to resent the question; as if she should have no questions but just listen to him without comment. ‘But my grandparents had to leave the country – their lives would not have been worth a centime. The Algerians had already killed my uncles and cousins.’
‘Where are your grandparents now?’ They had not been at the wedding.
‘They both died within a year of moving here. My mother will never forget or forgive what caused their death. Or who caused it.’
‘The Algerians? I don’t know much about it, Guy, but I thought that all they wanted was their independence – ’
He shook his head sadly: but she had the feeling he would have been angry with anyone else but her. ‘You Americans. You think independence is holy, an excuse for everything done in its name.’
‘What about Colonel Raclot?’
‘His family had been there even longer than my mother’s. He went back there to settle soon after Dien Bien Phu. That was till 1958 when de Gaulle gave everything away.’
‘What has the colonel been doing since?’
‘The only thing he knows – soldiering. For anyone who will hire him.’
‘Is someone hiring him now?’ Your mother, for instance? But she dared not say that.
‘No!’ He was angry now. ‘He believes in what he is fighting for. He is a man of honour – ’
Twice in one day: she seemed to be surrounded by men of honour. Or anyway the ghost of one and the physical presence of – how many? She wondered if Guy saw himself as one.
‘Are you one of them, too, Guy? A man of honour who seems disappointed because his President has just escaped assassination?’ They were speaking in French and this time she was glad; somehow she felt more at ease in it in the circumstances. The subject was too bizarre for the commonplace of her own language: you didn’t discuss the pros and cons of a Presidential assassination in Kansas City. ‘You’re involved in that, aren’t you? All of you.’
He slumped in his chair. All at once she saw a weakness in him that had not been apparent before. But then, she asked herself, what had there been up till now to test him?
‘I told you it would have been better if you had been kept out of this. It’s not for you, darling. You will never understand how we feel.’
‘Guy – ’ She had to know this: ‘Were you and your mother and Colonel Raclot actually involved in the planning of this – this attempt to kill General de Gaulle?’
‘No.’ But he sounded regretful, as if somehow he had missed out on something. ‘Mother and I only learned about it this morning, just before you and I went out to lunch. Henri got in touch with me, to ask us to provide a safe house if some of the men had to hide. There wasn’t time for me to get you out of the way, to take you up to Paris. We were afraid you’d be suspicious, acting so suddenly.’
‘Oh Guy, don’t you know me better than that? I love doing things on the spur of the moment.’ But she couldn’t laugh at the irony. ‘Are the men going to come here?’
He shrugged. ‘How does one know? They may all be dead by now.’
He stood up, took her arm and they went across to
the drawing-room. Stephane looked up from her coffee. ‘Well? Do you understand how we feel?’
‘A little,’ said Prue, hedging.
‘A hundred years ago your Confederate soldiers felt the same, perhaps.’ Raclot was sipping cognac. ‘After they had been betrayed.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Prue, suddenly conscious of American history.
Raclot drained his goblet and looked at it; Stephane leaned across and poured more cognac from a decanter. Raclot nodded to her: she was a woman who understood there were times when a man had to drink. To Prue it looked as if Raclot intended doing a lot of drinking during the rest of the evening.
‘I understand that you met Guy in Germany at the home of Count von Schnatz. You may have met my late employer there. M. Onza.’
‘Yes.’ What was it Sally had said about the world being only a collection of small parishes?
‘Were you there to buy arms, too?’ He laughed, shook his head at the warning glance Stephane gave him. He seemed less deferential towards her now, as if failure of their hopes had reduced them all to the same level. ‘Ah, but then Americans don’t need to buy arms, do they? Every American has his own gun, isn’t that so?’
‘Only every second one,’ said Prue coolly.
Guy made a belated effort to defend his wife. ‘Prue was there with her sister. They were old friends of Madame Onza.’
