The Greengage Summer

by Rumer Godden

  The meshes of the veil made Joss’s hair look even finer and shadowed her face so that it seemed mysterious; her skin looked more ivory than ever, and Eliot kept glancing at her. I went and walked by myself, trying not to feel the hot sharpness in my heart.

  Inside, the cathedral, with its wide doors opening on the sunlit square, was light, not dim. The long nave was of pale stone cut like huge bricks; the floor was stone, too, and worn. Why was it so worn?

  “This is the old floor. The walls are newer. Soissons cathedral was knocked down in the war. They built it up,” said Eliot.

  “What! This great thing?”

  We had to tilt our heads back to look up at the vaulted roof with its flutings of stone, at the huge rose window in the transept, the long windows below with their amber and red and brilliant blues that sent coloured light down to the floor stones. It was all vast, sealed in quiet. “This great thing,” said Eliot softly.

  ‘Il est interdit de circuler dans la cathédrale durant les offices,’ said notices on the walls, and “What offices?” we asked, looking round for desks and telephones.

  “Divine Offices: Lauds, Vespers, Compline,” said Eliot. We still looked blank and he laughed and said, “You little English ignoramuses.”

  Madame Corbet said often, “The English have no religion,” and with Eliot and us as the only English people at Les Oeillets she might have been pardoned for thinking that. “What, no church?” she had asked us on our first Sunday; and on the second, “Do you never go to church?”

  “At Christmas and at Easter,” I told her.

  “And when we were christened, of course,” said Hester.

  “The English have no religion,” decided Madame Corbet.

  We had not been in a Catholic church; it was interesting, from the massive stone pillars to the gilt stations of the Cross along the walls. We looked at the rows of chairs. “Do all those people come?” “They come,” said Eliot. There was a smell of incense that made us sniff, and we liked the candles that gave a warm light to the small side chapels. “Who puts them there?”

  “People,” said Eliot. “Watch.” People were coming in and out all the time though there was no service. They came and prayed on their own, some of them with beads; some brought flowers and some lit candles. They were not dressed up. Some even had shopping bags or tools; one of the women was wearing slippers as if she were at home; indeed, they all seemed comfortably at home. I had not imagined one could feel at home in a church.

  In the Chapel of the Resurrection the flowers and candles were white, but, to our intense astonishment, the Virgin was black. “Isn’t she beautiful?” said Eliot.

  Can a black person be beautiful? Such an idea had not occurred to our insular little minds. “Why is she black?”

  “She often has a black statue in France,” said Eliot.

  “The guidebooks say the very first sacred statues were carved from bog oak, which is black,” said Joss and she asked, “Would this one be as old as that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eliot, “but she is very, very old.”

  “How old?” asked Hester.

  “Hundreds of years, I expect,” said Eliot; “and she is supposed to be miraculous.”

  “Miraculous?” Hester was puzzled.

  “She can work miracles.”

  “Really?” We all gazed at the statue.

  “They say so,” said Eliot, “and so thousands and thousands of candles have burnt in front of her and the smoke has turned her even blacker.”

  “Her cloak is beautiful,” said Willmouse in a whisper. It was white brocade with a pattern of blue keys, and he put up a finger to touch it. Both she and the Holy Child had on small crowns set with jewels. “Rubies and turquoise,” said Eliot.

  “Real?” breathed Willmouse and gazed at them, rapt, as Eliot nodded. Hester, who always wanted to test things, held her hand over a candle flame and, sure enough, it made a black mark. Vicky tugged at Joss’s arm. “Let me see the rubies,” she whispered and Joss lifted her up.

  As she held Vicky up to see the crown, Joss’s face was lit by the candles so that it was gilded, framed by the black lace. Mother had said Joss was beautiful ‘just now’, but in this moment I knew it was more than that; my sister’s beauty was real, for always . . . like a painting, I thought, marked out, and then Eliot’s hands gripped my shoulders. They hurt and I craned my head back to look at him and saw what I had guessed from the hardness of his hands; he did not even know he had touched me; he was looking at Joss as Willmouse had looked at the jewels.

  A few minutes earlier I should have jerked away, hurt and angry, but now I stood quietly, letting myself be used. Perhaps the Black Virgin had worked another of her small miracles, because I did not struggle any more: Joss was beautiful and I was not; she, not I, was marked; Eliot looked at her and did not even notice me and yet I was not jealous. I was sad, but it was a contained, secret sadness and I was not jealous.

  When we came out of the cathedral it was good to feel the sun again, warm on our arms and heads. Hester and Willmouse went back with the veil, and Eliot made them rehearse what they would say: ‘Mille remerciements, Madame’, and ‘Merci pour votre bonté’. When they came back he took us all into a pâtisserie for coffee, chocolate and cakes. Since the shop in Vieux-Moutiers that morning Joss and I had been haunted by visions of babas and meringues, ‘And those pears’, Joss had said longingly, and we took a long while to choose; for Vicky it was the most earnest moment of the day, but Eliot was patient. He ordered chocolate for us, and for himself and Joss iced coffee, which came in tall glasses with thick straws and long silver spoons. The pâtisserie was, if anything, more elegant than the one in Vieux-Moutiers, and Joss must have been feeling what I felt, for presently she said to Eliot, “I am sorry about our clothes.”

  “Your clothes?”

  “Yes,” said Joss briefly.

  “I like your clothes,” said Eliot.

  “You couldn’t possibly.” I could tell by the way she said it, her nostrils pinched in, that she was suffering.

  “I like them,” said Eliot and put his hands over hers on her knee, “I like everything about you.”

  Again that momentary stillness; then she took her hand away.

  The colour of that day was gold, but the next was green, for Eliot took us and our picnics to the forest of Compiègne.

  All day we wandered and walked in the long avenues and glades of beech trees. In that high summer the forest was intensely green, laced under the trees by green-white cow parsley, with sturdier shapes of bracken and, underfoot, white shamrock-leafed wood sorrel. We found honeysuckle, and Hester twined it into wreaths for the Littles. “Willmouse looks like a faun,” said Eliot, pointing at Willmouse running in the bracken with his shirt off, the wreath of flowers on his head. Hardly anybody was in the forest. We came upon two deserted lakes, reflecting the green and the stretches of blue from the sky where there was not a cloud; white water lilies rocked a little when Hester and Vicky splashed sticks in the water, making ripples; that and the clucking of a disturbed moorhen were the only sounds. “People forget about Compiègne,” said Eliot.

  When we were tired we got back in the car and drove; the Rolls seemed to go soundlessly down the long avenues, and everywhere was the same filtering green, sunrays coming through branches, flickering gently on the ground. We came to a village, grey in the trees, and it had a château, a castle with turrets and walls. “Like the Sleeping Beauty’s,” said Hester.

  I said prettily, “It’s a fairytale day.”

  “It isn’t. It’s true,” said Joss. She said it vehemently, and vehemence was so unlike Joss that we all looked at her.

  “It is true,” said Eliot. He drew her arm through his, but I could see it was not possible for Joss to walk arm in arm with him, and as soon as she could she took her arm away.

  I do not know what time we ate our luncheon, perhaps three o’clock, and afterwards we lay in the warm grass and slept. Then we met a French family picnicki
ng too; the children were Raoul, Elisabeth who was called Babette, and Jeanne; their names belong for ever to that enchanted day. I remember they were playing pat-ball, but we taught them rounders, playing England against France. They gave us lemonade, and we drank their health before we drove away.

  Towards evening we got out of the car and walked again. The sun was lower now, and the light slanting down the glades and through the trees was deeper, richer . . . and heavier, I thought. We were heavy too, surfeited with happiness. Vicky dragged her feet, Joss looked pale. “I think we had better have some dinner,” said Eliot.

  “Dinner?”

  “Yes. Do you remember that little restaurant on the lake? Let’s go and dine there.”

  “In a restaurant?” Joss and I said it together. We had forgotten about trying to be sophisticated.

  “Why not?” asked Eliot, and Hester promptly exposed us.

  “We have never been in a restaurant,” she explained. “Only in Violet Tearooms or the Oriental Café.”

  “Would you like to go in one?”

  “But . . . can we?”

  “Of course we can,” said Eliot.

  Joss looked at her watch. “It’s nine o’clock!” She sounded a little alarmed.

  “All the more reason to dine.”

  “Won’t . . .” I could see Joss did not want to mention Mademoiselle Zizi, “. . . they be cross?”

  “We shall telephone,” said Eliot; but when we came to the chalet restaurant, La Grenouille, its walls painted with frogs, other real frogs sounding from the marsh, there was no telephone. “They will guess,” said Eliot. “Come along.”

  At first we were disappointed. The word ‘restaurant’ for us meant places like the glimpses we had taken into hotel dining-rooms as we walked along the promenade at Southstone, the hotels Hester admired. We had thought of waiters, white table-cloths, shaded lights, silver, flowers, napkins cocked into shapes better even than Mauricette made them. La Grenouille was a holiday restaurant, a chalet in a garden where a notice board said, ‘Jeux divers’, and there were croquet hoops, see-saws and swings. The dining-room was pitchpine wood, with glassed-in side walls. It was used for shooting parties in the autumn, the patron told us, and on the wooden walls, above the frog paintings, were stuffed heads, a boar, foxes and chamois, while antlers were made into electric lights. The tables had paper table-cloths in green and red plaid—“Paper?” whispered Hester unwilling to believe it—and the chairs were folding wooden ones. The patron came to meet us in his shirt-sleeves and wearing checked cotton trousers and old espadrilles; nor had he shaved. Our eyes examined him disapprovingly while he and Eliot talked. “He can give us soup,” said Eliot, “fillet steaks, tarte and cheese. Will that do?” Distantly, because we did not want to show we were disappointed, we said of course it would do. “Thank you,” added Joss, and we chorused, “Thank you.”

  The soup and the yard-long bread from which we broke off pieces as we needed them were good, and as the patron cooked our steaks in front of us and dusk came down, shutting the little glass-sided restaurant into a world of its own, the disappointment went. Eliot gave us vin rosé, and the rose-coloured wine, the réchaud flame, the lights were reflected in the windows over and over again, shutting us into a warm lit world. Eliot talked to the patron and his wife, and we began to talk too; then we were laughing, and soon our laughter could have been heard the other side of the lake. Everything made us laugh, for this was better, happier than anything we had imagined.

  As we waited for the steaks we read aloud the menu and all the dishes on it, “that are not there,” said Eliot, and we bantered the patron about that.

  “Is andouillette a lark?” I asked.

  “That’s alouette, duffer. Andouillette is a kind of sausage,” said Eliot and translated for the patron. I felt I had been witty as they laughed again. The steaks were cooked with field mushrooms and served with fried potatoes; after them was a salad, and when the great tarte was brought, its apple filling glazed with apricot jam, even Vicky thought the dinner complete.

  Eliot’s face looked calm and happy. He is happy with us, I thought, and when at last we got up to go it was nearly eleven. “We shan’t get back till twelve o’clock,” said Joss.

  “Well, what of it?” asked Eliot. He sounded a little defiant and we looked at one another, our faces scared.

  The evening before, when we came back from Soissons, Mademoiselle Zizi had joined us for drinks; we had the pink grenadine sirop we liked while she and Eliot drank martinis. We had told her about the cathedral, the cakes, of all we had done and seen. She had sat next to Eliot, with Willmouse on the arm of her chair; Joss, on the far side of Eliot, mending a rent in Vicky’s scarecrow, had been so quiet that she was almost outside the circle; it had all been pleasant and easy, but we guessed it would be different tonight.

  Mademoiselle Zizi was waiting when we got in. Eliot had taken Vicky asleep from the car and, as he carried her in, she still slept soundly against his shoulder, while his other hand held up the stumbling Willmouse. The honeysuckle wreaths were crooked now, Hester and Joss and I had our hands full of flowers and ferns, our dresses were crumpled, our hair had leaves in it, and our faces were flushed. “So! You had a good time!” said Mademoiselle Zizi.

  “Thank you, a very good time,” said Eliot. Mauricette was peeping; he beckoned her and gave Vicky into her arms. “Take Monsieur Willmouse as well,” he said. Mauricette would always do anything for Eliot and she obediently took them. “Zizi,” he said, “give me a drink.”

  “You look as if you had had a drink already.”

  “I have had a little vine rosé,” said Eliot. “I want a real drink.” He looked at her face that had strange pouches under the eyes, patches of red on her cheek and neck. “So do you.”

  I did not think she did; she looked as if it were she who had had one already . . . or two or three or half a dozen, I thought. I know now it is children who accept life; grown people cover it up and pretend it is different with drinks, and as Eliot turned her towards the bar he whispered over his shoulder, “Go up to bed.” It was not an order, but said as if in a conspiracy. We silently disappeared and he led Mademoiselle Zizi away.

  “But it was spoilt,” Hester said, and I think she was right. Nothing had that pure happiness again. I wish we had stopped after Compiègne, but the next day Eliot said he must take us to the caves at Dormans. “And it was very spoilt,” said Hester.

  It began with trouble over Paul. Eliot had gone down to the Giraffe for cigarettes after breakfast. When he came back he found Paul in his room.

  “Stealing?” asked Mademoiselle Zizi, frightened.

  “I don’t think so,” said Eliot. “He was just nosing around, but you can’t have that. He must go. At once.”

  “In the middle of our season?” said Madame Corbet dryly.

  “Yes. You can’t employ a boy like that.”

  “Mais, Eliot . . .” pleaded Mademoiselle Zizi, but Eliot would not relent. “I said he must go.”

  Hester tugged at Joss. “Ask Eliot not to,” she said urgently. “Please, Joss. If Paul has to go now he will lose his summer bonus and he will never get his lorry. Ask Eliot, Joss.”

  Perhaps Joss was not unwilling to try where Mademoiselle Zizi had failed. She went to Eliot and put her hand on his arm, looking up at him, and presently we heard him say, “Very well . . . if you will come out with me again today.”

  “Can you spare the time?” said Joss doubtfully.

  “Of course I can. We will go to the caves.”

  “What caves?” we said. It was pronounced ‘carve’ not ‘cave’.

  “The champagne cellars. You can’t be in the champagne country and not see those.”

  “Are we in the champagne country?” asked Joss, startled.

  “I shall show you,” said Eliot.

  In our bones we knew it was better not to go—perhaps our bones were getting wiser as they grew stained—but Eliot was queerly determined that morning . . . as obstinate, I
thought, as Vicky. When one came to know them it was surprising how childish grown people could be. I think, too, he did not mean to take the rest of us. He began by trying to get rid of the Littles.

  “But I need to go,” Willmouse pointed out to him. “I must know about champagne.”

  “We shall leave Vicky, then,” said Eliot, but he did not know Vicky as we did.

  “We are going where we have to walk a long way in the dark,” he told her.

  “I like the dark,” said Vicky.

  “You wouldn’t like this.”

  “I would.”

  “You stay with Monsieur Armand and I will bring you back a doll.”

  “I don’t want a doll. I have Nebuchadnezzar.”

  “If you come to France,” said Eliot, “you must have a French doll.”

  “All right,” said Vicky placidly, but when we were ready in the hall she came downstairs; she had on a respectable cotton, clean socks, her soup-plate hat, and carried Nebuchadnezzar in his basket. “I will help you choose the doll,” she said to Eliot and put her hand in his. “And it was odd,” said Hester. “If he had not taken Vicky he must have been seen.”

  For us champagne will always have a ghost; it can never be a wine for feasts but one for mourning. “Because it made the first crack,” said Hester.

  When we drove in through the important-looking iron and gilded gates at Dormans we had no inkling. It was more magnificent than any place we had seen. There was a lodge by the gates, then a great courtyard laid out with lawns and hot-coloured flowers, red and yellow, and facing the courtyard what looked to us like a palace but Eliot said were packing rooms and offices. As we got out of the car we stopped, not believing our eyes, for wide baskets seemed to be walking slowly past the palace by themselves. “They are bottle baskets on wheels,” said Eliot, laughing at our faces, “running along their own little railway line.”