The Greengage Summer

by Rumer Godden

  “But books like that cost a fortune!” cried Madame Corbet.

  “Not a fortune, just a bit,” said Eliot.

  “But for a child!”

  “This child needs it.”

  Hester did not say what she felt, but she had used up the last film in her Brownie on Eliot. Too shy to ask, she had crept up on tiptoe and taken a snapshot of him as he slept in his deck-chair and spent the last of her travelling francs on having it developed at La Maison Kodak. She had shown the photograph to no one but stuck it on cardboard, with a cardboard stand, and made a frame of the dried white shells we found along the river; it stood on her chest of drawers, though she hid it while Toinette cleaned the room, and, in a chipped liqueur glass begged from Mauricette, a tiny bouquet of flowers was always put in front of it. I was too old to show what I felt or even to say it . . . and I would not have dared to ask Joss.

  With Eliot, as if under a spell, we accepted everything, trusted everything, but when he went to Paris, as he often did, we became suspicious and very critical indeed.

  If Mademoiselle Zizi had known that gallery of hard young eyes was watching her I wonder if she would have been different. From morning to night at Les Oeillets we sat in judgment on her, and the judgments were severe. “Well, none of it is true,” said Hester.

  That was not quite fair. In everything there was a grain of truth.

  Take her name: Zizi, we knew now from Paul, was a little girl’s name, “And she is not a little girl,” said Hester. She told lies about Les Oeillets too. “It was my father’s house, my grandfather’s and great-great-great-grandfather’s,” Mademoiselle Zizi used to tell the visitors, “The de Presles have lived here since 1731.”

  “Is it as old as that?” asked the visitors.

  “It has seen ten wars,” said Mademoiselle Zizi. It had been the headquarters of the American Army; the holes in the staircase were from machine-gun bullets; in the cupboard in my room was a stain on the floor; the stain was blood, from the American soldier who had been shot there. On our second day Rita and Rex dug up a skull in the garden.

  “Poor house!” Mademoiselle Zizi would say pathetically. “After each war it has healed, but now I am the only one left. I never thought to see my home an hotel!” She looked at the conservatory bar with its tables and chairs. “When I was a little girl it was full of carnations, such carnations, with a vine across the roof.”

  When she said this, if Paul were near, he spat. He beckoned me and showed me a date under the wistaria above the front door. The date said 1885. “M’sieur Presle était boucher,” said Paul.

  “Un boucher?” I said, disappointed. It did not seem possible that Mademoiselle Zizi was the daughter of a butcher but Paul went on, prodding me with his finger as if he would push the words into me, and reluctantly I relayed what he said to Hester. “The butcher bought Les Oeillets as an hotel with money he got from selling bad meat to the soldiers.”

  The bulletholes were real, but when the staircase was painted they were not closed up but picked out again; the stain in the cupboard was made freshly every now and then by Paul with blood from the kitchen; and one day, when a char-à-bancs party was coming, he beckoned me out into the garden and showed me what he had in his hand, the skull. It was gruesome, with its eye-sockets and long cheekbones. Paul laughed and made the broken jaw move so that it looked as if it were talking. He had to shut Rita and Rex in the kennel or they would have dug it up at once; he buried it under the urn in the middle flowerbed and with it put a piece of raw liver. “Le pourboire, “he said and laughed again.

  I did not laugh. I was thinking how impressed we had been the first day, how war and death had seemed so close that we had felt almost as Mother had wanted us to feel—ashamed and . . . holy? I thought. Now I felt a fool and I did not like Mademoiselle Zizi or Madame Corbet or Paul; they made Les Oeillets horrid, I thought; but the skull was a man’s skull, probably a soldier’s, that had been found in the garden. There was a grain of truth.

  It was, oddly, Madame Corbet who came best out of our scrutiny, “Because she doesn’t pretend,” said Hester. She was always Madame Corbet, uncompromising, with her black blouse and skirt, stifling shawl, heavy skin, moustache, hard black beady eyes, topknot and all. There was no mistaking Madame Corbet; the sound of her voice, perpetually raised in scolding, haggling, objecting, had at least the sound of honesty; with Mademoiselle Zizi, even more than with the house, nothing was what it seemed.

  She had a habit when Eliot was away of leaving the door of her room open and talking across the landing to Madame Corbet in the office while she, Mademoiselle Zizi, was dressing. We could see in and, “Her face is mostly powder,” said Hester.

  “And do you know,” said Vicky in astonishment, “Mademoiselle Zizi’s eyelashes take off!” We did not believe that was possible until, spying, we saw it with our own eyes.

  “She does that with her bosoms too,” said Willmouse.

  “Bosoms? Do you call them bosoms?” asked Hester doubtfully.

  “I saw them lying across a chair,” said Willmouse. He was calm, but the rest of us were shocked. “I have made bosoms for Miss Dawn and Dolores,” he said: “I never thought of that before.”

  It was all very odd; Les Oeillets was Mademoiselle Zizi’s hotel, yet she asked Madame Corbet for money. “Mais il faut que je m’achète une chemisette,” Hester might have pleaded like that, “une petite chemisette.”

  I translated that for Hester, who nodded, full of sympathy; she was always on the side of the oppressed. But who was the oppressed one here? “A little House.”

  “Pour lui,” Madame Corbet spat out the word. We had long since learned that “lui” was always Eliot.

  ‘I wonder why he chose that hotel.’ Uncle William wondered that afterwards, ‘It seems so unsuitable.’ Then he answered himself, as he often did, ‘But was it? Comfortable, unostentatious, enough foreigners to make him inconspicuous, midway between Paris and the border, and a silly woman who would do anything for him.’

  “He is ruining the business,” Madame Corbett often said that to Mademoiselle Zizi. “Always you tell every client we are full up.”

  “Not always,” said Mademoiselle Zizi.

  “And this is the season. All those empty rooms!”

  “I do not want to have strangers here with us.”

  “You are mad.”

  “Because I do not want to have talk?”

  “Talk! The whole town is talking. Someone will report us. In the end we shall lose our star.”

  I knew what star she meant, the star before Les Oeillets in the guide-book. It seemed to be very important, but Mademoiselle Zizi only shrugged.

  “Ten years,” said Madame Corbet in a low, thick voice as if it were choked with anger or tears. “Ten years I could have been a nun, but no, I have worked here, to get that star, to pull this hotel up, put myself aside for you. And you will not listen. You throw it all away.”

  Once we saw Madame Corbet slap Mademoiselle Zizi. The sound of it rang across the hall. It was a slap in the face and Mademoiselle Zizi stumbled against the desk, holding her cheek with her hand.

  It was very quiet in the hall after the slap and we held our breath; presently there was a new sound, of sobbing, but it was not Mademoiselle Zizi who sobbed; it was Madame Corbet.

  Mademoiselle Zizi took her hand down and knelt by Madame Corbet, holding her, rocking her. Little words, in French, broken, reached us, whispered words, “Chérie . . . Jamais, jamais . . . Oubliez ça . . . N’y pensez plus . . . Chérie . . .” We tiptoed away.

  It was not often we went away; in fact I do not think we should have left the house at all if we had not been turned out.

  That was Eliot’s doing. “It’s very well for you,” I heard Mademoiselle Zizi say to him. “You go off to Paris. I had fifty-eight people for lunch today and these children to see to as well.”

  “Don’t see to them,” said Eliot. “Give them some food and turn them out.”

  “Can I?”
/>   “Of course you can. Children like picnics.”

  We should have liked it, even preferred it, had it not been for what we missed.

  “What did you miss?” asked Uncle William. “A lot of trippers.”

  “Were they trippers?” asked Hester dazed. “But . . . we have trippers in Southstone.”

  The Les Oeillets ones, we were sure, were quite quite different. They came almost every day. It was the season, ‘la grande saison,’ said Mauricette. They came in cars and chars-à-bancs. “Then it isn’t so queer to visit battlefields,” I said. There were no battlefields now, only fields where corn and grass grew, and thousands of poppies and marguerites. We saw pictures of them in the guidebooks. “Do the soldiers come up in the corn?” asked Hester, but of course the soldiers were not there, except those who had been blown to pieces or rotted where they fell, “like the soldier in the garden,” said Hester. They were laid in neat rows in the war cemeteries, with crosses for Christians and stars for Jews. There were pictures in the guidebooks of these too. Hester studied them and said, “I would rather have a star, they are prettier.” Paul looked over her shoulder and made his rude noise. “Mr. Stillbotham says the cemeteries are beautiful, like gardens,” Hester reproved him. “Comme les jardins,” she said.

  “Jardins!” said Paul, and in English he piped mockingly, “Be good boy, get killed in war, Papa and Mama come see you in pretty garden.”

  There were papas and mamas, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, even a few grandparents; they all seemed to be having a good time, but I could not help thinking of the skull, and the bulletholes; I wondered what it was like to be buried and not to be sitting in this pretty satin-papered dining-room, eating the things the visitors ate, hors-d’œuvres and pâté, poulet à l’estragon, veal and steaks, salads and greengages, and I hoped I need never be dead.

  Most of the visitors were American; we became used to seeing the far-away place names in the desk book, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, but there were Canadians, Australians, people from South Africa, New Zealand, and some, not many, from England. In the few times we met any of them, on the landing or on the stairs, they would ask us in French the way to the lavatory; they took it for granted we were French, which flattered us, and in their efforts to speak to us called the lavatory many strange things. We would listen and ask gravely, “Le pissoir?” and watch their faces as we showed them the Hole.

  “But we have modern cloakrooms downstairs!” Mademoiselle Zizi would cry when she heard the chain go. She guessed that it was we who had shown them and made our going out more strict.

  Just when things were getting interesting, and at Les Oeillets they were interesting indeed, we were sent away. In the mornings everyone was busy. Madame Corbet would put on a black apron; if Eliot were in Paris Mademoiselle Zizi would attend to the bar, but if he were with us Madame Corbet had to do that as well; Mauricette would be in the dining-room spreading clean tablecloths, polishing glass and silver; Paul would wipe the little tables under the vine arbour outside and open the umbrellas on the terrace. Monsieur Armand would call him away all the time, and Madame Corbet would call him back. Madame Corbet gave out stores and unlocked the fish tank that stood in the shade of the arbour outside the kitchen and would let Monsieur Armand choose the fish that were swimming in it alive—Hester shuddered when she saw them. “And the snails,” cried Hester in agony. We could not bear the snails. “Except to eat,” said Vicky. They were supposed to come from Burgundy, but Monsieur Armand would take the hotel car, go out in the fields and gather them in a sack. When he brought them in he would put them in a great tin box full of salt which made them spew and gradually they seasoned themselves ready for eating. It was cruel, but Vicky was right; when they came bubbling in their shells on their especial silver dishes, with the smell of garlic we were learning to like, we forgot the box of salt. Vicky had had more of them than we, but Paul slipped one or two on to our plates when someone ordered them and showed us how to dig them out with the small snail fork. We ate the fish from the tank, the snails . . . ‘and the chickens,’ Vicky was to tell Uncle William. The chickens were cruel too; they were left in a cage so that they would not walk and spoil the tenderness of their flesh.

  As the morning went on Monsieur Armand would grow more loud and more red; beads of sweat ran along the ends of his moustache and dripped off, though he wiped them with the end of the cloth he wore tied round his neck. Paul worked like a machine, and the dining-room began to look elegant, with its flowers and tables gleaming with linen and silver. Mauricette shouted to Madame Corbet to come and see, Madame Corbet shouted back that she was coming. ‘Un instant!’ she would shout. Everyone shouted. Monsieur Armand shouted to Nicole and Toinette to hurry up and finish the rooms, Mademoiselle Zizi shouted to Monsieur Armand not to shout, while Nicole and Toinette shouted downstairs that they could not do everything, that they had only two arms each and two legs. Sometimes Mauricette, if she were in a good mood, let us count out rolls or pleat napkins or snip the brown edges off the carnations so that they looked like fresh ones; but when the first people were almost due to come Madame Corbet would march out of the office and into the kitchen, come back and set out, on a table in the hall, the packages Paul had made ready after breakfast. If we were not there she would send him to fetch us, and would needle looks at us if we did not collect our picnics at once and go towards the door.

  It was strangely ignominious; we had to keep out of sight; Willmouse and I were not allowed into our bedroom because the bloodstain was on show and we had to tidy away all our things. Every day it was a feeling of soreness and neglect. “And will they remember to give Joss anything?” asked Hester. “I don’t want anything,” Joss said each day, but I felt she should have been asked. This was the time when we missed Mother most and hated Madame Corbet, Mademoiselle Zizi, Les Oeillets, hated them all. “But not Eliot,” said Hester.

  “He does not know what it’s like,” I said. “He isn’t here.”

  Though we were sore, I think now it was those hours by ourselves that kept us sane; they restored us. All the hectic kaleidoscopic bits of this new life, broken up vividly by Paul, came together again in those hours when we had, willy-nilly, to be alone.

  I was often quite alone except for Hester, whom I did not count. Vicky slipped back to Monsieur Armand; there was no need to give her luncheon, she had plenty in the kitchen. Willmouse took his package to the cherry tree where his materials were spread out. “I only have time to snatch a sandwich and a cup of coffee,” we would hear him murmur and know he was being interviewed by Vogue or Le Jardin des Modes or l’Elégance; Miss Dawn and Dolores were on a diet and ate nothing for lunch except fruit juice, “greengage juice,” said Willmouse, and we would give him greengages for them and for himself, putting some in our own handkerchiefs to take away.

  We were told not to come back until four o’clock and the boundary we were set was the box hedge. On one side lay the house and its happenings, a shifting and changing pattern of Eliot, Mademoiselle Zizi, Madame Corbet, Paul, Monsieur Armand, Mauricette, the carloads and chars-à-bancs of visitors; when we were away from it, it was as unreal as the cocktails they all drank or as the top garden with its cut-up flowerbeds of plants Robert brought in boxes, its gravel, its iron urn, the skull buried every day.

  On the wilderness and orchard side was an older, more truthful world; every day, as we passed into it, I caught its older, simpler scents: the smell of box, of mint, syringa, roses, dew on the grass, warm ripe fruit, smells of every summer. There was peace in the overgrown grass walks and heavy bushes, in the long orchard alleys where the greengages ripened in their own time and were neither forced nor pruned; here everything was itself, exactly as it seemed.

  When we went through the blue door we were on the margin of the river and here we would sometimes encounter Monsieur Joubert, though soon he would get up and go in to lunch because the light had grown too hard and brilliant. His stool and umbrella were left for the afternoon, but I like to thin
k we did not dream of shading ourselves or sitting down. We went to the cove or farther along, where the inlet joined the main bank by a plank bridge, and the towing-path ran between the river and the fields. Here and there there was a willow tree, as big as the ones in the garden, its leaves blown silver by the wind; bulrushes grew along the water verges here, great, hot, black-headed, taller than we, and everywhere hung wreaths and cascades of white convolvulus; skiffs were moored to poles dug in the bank, and now and again there was a barge tied up. Other barges passed all through the day and we stood still to look at them; some were towing still more barges behind them, and whole families lived on board, with washing, hens, firewood, and sometimes a garden planted in pots. When a barge passed we sat down on the bank to let the wash splash up on our bare feet and knees, wetting our scarecrows. There were often peasants working in the cabbages or vines, but we did not speak to them or they to us.

  Half a kilometre downstream from Les Oeillets was the town; every evening, after goûter, Hester and I would walk there, crossing the bridge by the Giraffe to leave our notes for Mother. Downstream was for the evening; this empty time of lunch and early afternoon belonged upstream, to the country and the bare river, as we called this long stretch with its empty banks.

  In a way, then, we were bare too; the cocoon of excitement into which we spun ourselves seemed left behind; we went back to being children and that was restful.

  A simplicity had descended on us. Coming to France for only a short time, we had few clothes with us; our coats and skirts hung in the wardrobe with our more respectable dresses. We wore our scarecrows which Mother had brought in case we went picnicking or on a beach, and because we could not be bothered to clean our shoes we went barefoot.

  I do not suppose it occurred to Eliot that we had no money or that we needed any. Madame Corbet had taken Mother’s travellers’ cheques and cash and our finances had been lifted into a region far over our heads; we could not even read the spiky figures in Madame Corbet’s books. “And you are not to bother your mother with anything,” said Eliot; “just write and send your love.” Being unable to have anything, mysteriously we did not need anything, except, “How I wish we could bathe at the Plage,” Hester said often.