Mrs. Benjamin Harrower: I still owned books with “Lily Burnet” on the flyleaf. Once, some twenty years ago, I had received a Christmas card signed “Ken and Lily Peel.” Peel was second consort, companion to Lily’s middle reign. He must have taken over some of the Christmas grind that year, using an old address book of Lily’s, so dazed and uninterested he no longer recognized “Steve Burnet” as a chapter heading in Lily’s life. I had examined his handwriting, which I was seeing for the first time. It was stingy and defensive, nothing like his face.
My mind, as a rule shut against Lily’s fortunes, let in remembered chitchat about the way Peel was supposed to have died. They say he got up on a dark winter morning, still drunk from the night before, stumbled, hit his head on a rocking chair, died at once. It is hard to die by falling on a chair. He must have died on his feet and keeled over. Harrower was edging his way out of Lily’s kingdom, too, if one could trust Carlotta’s register of events.
“Ben’s got this nonfunctioning spleen,” she had told me during the drive. “He’s a very sick man. His father made a lot of money, in scales, but Ben knew the whole personalenterprise thing was over, so he didn’t carry on the business.” I supposed I was hearing a new jargon, with “in scales” replacing “in spades.” Was that it? “No, Steve,” said Carlotta, giving me a firm, governessy look. “Scales. What you weigh yourself on. Anyway, he made a good banker. But his spleen was overmedicated, and it just ran down.”
“The man in Monaco,” I said, “the one who works in a bank. Is he an associate of Ben’s?”
“He reports to Ben,” she said, using the diffident tone reserved for a royal connection. I was surprised at how quickly she’d picked up a European mannerism. “It’s not really a bank, more an investment thing. Ben took early retirement so he could write a book about his experiences. Like, how he was born in the middle class and just stayed there. It’s a question of your own individual will power. I can’t explain it like he does. He’s very, very convincing. But now he’ll never write that book. He depends on my mother for everything. She has to keep track of what he eats and drinks—how many Martinis, at what time of day. He drinks Martinis. He’s that generation.”
So was I, but I did not want to engage a topic as intimate as age. Carlotta was fifteen, the product of some mindless flurry on the part of Lily before entering the peace of the menopause. During her Burnet epoch, she had avoided even conversation about having children. She was afraid any child of hers might take after her own parents, the one slit-eared, the other a destroy-the-heretics-and-let-God-sort-it-out Inquisitor.
Ben Harrower, his father in scales. From his tone of voice, I’d guessed a liberal clergyman with a working fireplace in his study. He’d bought the house in Vermont after Canada adopted the metric system, Carlotta said. He believed metric was an invention of the K.G.B. The minds of Russians could not adapt to miles, pounds, Fahrenheit temperature; for that reason, the Soviet Union was unlikely to invade the United States. “He could hardly believe it when China went metric,” said Carlotta. “Last winter he and Mummy went to England and the BBC was giving the temperature in Celsius. He was born over there, so you can imagine how he felt.” She was utterly free from malice or mockery, saying this; at such a remove from the Quales, even from me, that the distance could not be measured under any system.
“Who does this whole place actually belong to?” said Carlotta. We stood in the last thin patch of shade at the end of the road. Before us, in white sunlight, a drawbridge stretched over the dry bed of a moat. “Does it belong to France? I mean, the state?” She edged a dented Pepsi can aside with her shoe, and shifted her light weight to the other foot—Lily’s old sign of concentration.
“Some part of the state,” I said. “Some ministry or other. It used to be owned by a family who had a sardine-canning monopoly.” I was not making fun of her; it was so.
She took this for a fair answer, remarking only that her mother would not let them eat tinned fish.
“So you do eat some fish at home? Meat, too?”
“Ben got poisoning in Hong Kong,” she said. “So now we’re careful.”
Refuse littered the ditch: crumpled bags, bent straws, stubs of entry tickets. There was a child’s toy monkey and a toothbrush. I wondered if the sardine connection had anything to do with a large fish someone had drawn on the planks of the bridge. Perhaps there was a more subtle reason for it, a revival of early Christian symbolism, a devious way of saying, “Pagans, go home.” But as we drew nearer I saw that it was the approximate representation of a phallus. In the north of Europe, a graffito of that sort would indicate defiance and unrest; in the south, it probably signified the hope of a steady birth rate. Or just somebody boasting, I decided, noticing a chalked telephone number.
“They ought to arrest all those people,” said Carlotta, looking where I looked.
“The sardine canners bought the castle from the de Stentor family,” I said, glad to have a ready topic. “Victor is a connection of theirs, much removed. A junior branch. I’ve often wondered if he has any real claim on the name. You met him at dinner last night.”
“He’s fat,” said Carlotta. “Victor. He wanted to take me to a casino, but you have to be eighteen to get in. They ask to see your passport. I wouldn’t have gone with him anyway. He’s a very old man. He shouldn’t be running round to casinos. He might have a stroke, or something.”
“He had no business inviting you anywhere.”
“I know. I was still tired after the movies in Nice, and then Irma gave me an art lesson.” I was silent. “So?” she said. “Victor lived up here?”
“Some of his relatives. Before them, there was a Cuban. He gave extravagant masked balls and parties. There are people still living down here who can remember the music, the dancers, the thousands of candles.”
“Where does a Cuban get that kind of money?” She answered her own question: “Vice.”
I started to say, “Long, long before Fidel Castro,” but to Carlotta no such time existed. The repeated collapse and inflation of events continued to perplex me, even though I had once written a thesis on Talleyrand and published a number of afterthoughts. Since the arrival of Carlotta, the flattened present, the engorged past had scarcely quit my mind. They were like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has swallowed history whole. I said, “Before the Cuban, an American couple named Primage paid for extensive repairs. They didn’t own the place and never lived here. One wonders how they got up the hill. Mules and a guide, I suppose.”
“Why did they bother?” said Carlotta. “It came off their taxes?”
“Income tax barely existed. Americans were like that. They loved France and wanted the French to love them. They hadn’t yet worked out that France and the French are entirely different.”
“The state wouldn’t get a cent out of me,” said Carlotta. “You saw those trees?”
The cost of admittance was seven times greater than in Lily’s day. “You could get in cheaper,” said Carlotta. “Have you got a senior card?”
“I am not sixty-five.”
“I’m sorry. I thought Mummy said you’d retired.”
I wondered where Lily picked up her information. For years I had been turning my back on anyone likely to say, “I’ve met your ex-wife.” Sometimes I still came across a couple by the name of Lapwing, Harry and Edith, who had been young and hard up in France with Lily and me. Edie and Lily had gone to the same Catholic school; that was the connection. It was a wives’ story, with the women (“the girls,” we had said then) whispering and laughing and trading stories about the men. The Lapwings now lived out West and were entirely taken up by their own affairs—university machinations, mostly.
Carlotta stopped to consider four rusted cannons in the flagged courtyard. She said, “They ought to be boiled down, or whatever it is you do with weapons. My mother’s a committed pacifist. She won’t even let Ben keep a gun in the house.”
“They were brought here during the French Revolution,”
I said. “Never used. They can’t hurt anyone.” She still seemed troubled. Revolution? Soviet walkabout? Will miles, gallons, Fahrenheit temperature hold the line? “Long before that time,” I said—thinking, The vaguer the better; less alarming for the child—“the castle belonged to the tax collector for a powerful local count. There was an ancient line of counts in the region, older than the French royal family. They spoke a dialect you can still hear in one or two villages.”
“I guess it’s a pretty old place,” said Carlotta neutrally.
Guides and touring groups packed the stone entrance hall, which was brighter and cleaner than I remembered. The guides wore badges—“English,” “Français,” “Deutsch,” “Italiano”—and looked, to me, too young to know about anything. As for the visitors, they resembled nothing so much as migrant labor waiting to board one of those long trains with dirty windows. Like migrants, they hung on to radios, cameras, extra clothes for a change of weather, plastic bags of fruit and chocolate, newspapers. Most of these articles had to be left at a cloakroom, after fierce argument. A “No Tipping” sign stood propped behind a saucer set out for tips. Tourists responded by unloading small change from foreign countries. Carlotta’s shoulder-strap bag held only Kleenex and her passport. During the drive, she had got out her passport and examined it, frowning over the facts of her birth date and height. She was dressed in white shorts, a blue shirt, running shoes, and wore around her neck a gold heart on a chain.
In Lily’s day, women tourists had dressed in flowered nylon blouses, pleated white skirts, white nylon cardigans with pearl buttons. I recalled a man in a gleaming white shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal a tattoo of peacock blue—a long number, like the number of a freight car. Outside, he and his wife took pictures of each other, then asked me to take pictures of them. They sat down on the dry grass, after searching in vain for a sign saying they mustn’t. They put their heads close together and smiled up at me. The moat was fed by a shallow stream. Some people sat along the edge, which was high and straight, like the bank of a canal, and let their legs dangle. The legs and thighs even of young people looked veined and pale. Everyone over here had seemed like that, to me—bruised, pallid, glancing around to look for rules and prohibitions.
Carlotta said, “Let’s stay with the French group. We’ll learn more.” I wondered if it would be interesting or instructive to describe my tour with Lily, and the man in the white shirt, and how it had been thought bad taste to flaunt that kind of tattoo. The sight affected people; some young men and women had had their tattoo effaced by means of plastic surgery, out of regard for the feelings of strangers.
“Steve,” said Carlotta. “I want to ask you something. Why wasn’t Irma at that dinner last night?”
“Miss Baes doesn’t know many people. This is her first summer down here.”
“All the more reason to ask her. She’s nice. We talked a long time. She showed me her work.”
“You could hardly fail to see it.”
“She’s got some little stuff inside. She makes things out of paper.”
“We don’t seem to know many artists.”
“You could know her.”
“We are probably too old to interest Miss Baes. You made the remark that Victor was an old man.”
“You’re around the same age as Ben and Mummy,” said Carlotta. She may have thought I was feeling hurt over the business of the senior card.
Lily had wanted to know if the fee went to the sardine canners. She had soft fair hair, pale skin; was allergic to sunlight; wore a limp straw hat tied on with a colored scarf. She had on that day new rope-soled shoes, bought at a local market.
Half the fee went to the canners, half to the state, said the guide. He was a veteran of the First World War, wore all his ribbons. Lily said that seemed reasonable. Some tourists nodded, agreeing. Sharing was a popular concept. A woman with a Central European accent said, quite loudly, that the whole thing should go to the state, thus to the people. The man with the tattoo whispered something to his wife. They seemed troubled. They had known at least one state that deserved absolutely nothing.
Swallows darted round the tower at the time of Lily. The moat, brown and still, reflected long flanks of stone, threw sparks of reflected sunlight on dark portraits and tapestries. The canning family kept a suite of private rooms, one or two of which could be inspected from the doorway. Chain ropes prevented visitors from wandering inside. Lily slipped to the front line of tourists, without actually pushing, as artlessly as a child. She saw a television set and one book, a paperback about flying saucers. It was quite tattered, as if every fish canner in the world had read it in turn. This was a rich period for space apparitions. There was an uneasy feeling—not quite a fear; something more prickly and insistent—that superior creatures were on their way to judge us and might go back with a poor report.
I peered in over heads and shoulders. The visitors were looking hard at the television set; there were only a few around. This one was fitted into a walnut cabinet, both doors of which stood wide. Upon the glassy screen shone a square of yellow light, the reflection of the west window. I had not made up my mind about television. Lily knew that, and wondered what she should think. Was it a legitimate household object? Should it be left naked, or concealed in some other piece of furniture, brought out when there was ballet dancing to watch? As there was a ballet program on television about once a year, and a short one at that, perhaps to have a set of one’s own was a selfish extravagance—especially now, when there was so much talk about sharing.
Lily made her way back to me, stretched to her top height—in new shoes, making an allowance for rope soles, five feet three—and pointed out that these people had not only a fish-canning monopoly and a suite of rooms in a rebuilt Saracen fortress but the walnut cabinet and all it contained. A reproach? I was a graduate student living on a grant and an allowance my Aunt Elspeth gave me. I should not have been married at all. My parents were Anglican medical missionaries in China. They were elderly and poor, had married at an age when they expected to be spared God’s gift of offspring. My mother, delivered of me (God’s last word on the subject), had gone straight back to Shanghai. The first face I remember is my aunt’s.
“This is the long gallery, where the conspirators were hanged.” Our guide spoke to no one but Lily. Her eyes were hazel with golden flecks. The sun shining in at the west window made them look transparent, pale gold. She did not ask about the conspiracy: her whole outlook was naturally conniving. Plots and quiet skirmishes had led to her present state of development. The guide continued to stare at her, helplessly, caught on the rapt, sunstruck way she looked back. The interlaced initials over the fireplace were the count’s tax collector’s, he told her. When the count confiscated the castle, out of greed and envy, he had the tax collector hanged in this room, facing north, so that his cipher, now ruined root and branch, was the last thing he saw before his blood turned dark. “As dark as the blood of a bedbug,” said the guide, as though he had been hanged and revived any number of times.
Carlotta said she could not understand one word our guide was saying. She knew French; she’d had straight A’s in French. But her French was an international, no-accent linguistic utensil. This fellow had an accent. To prove her point, she told me in no-accent French what she thought of four tapestries depicting Wisdom, Virtue, Sobriety, and King Solomon greeting the Queen of Sheba: the colors were like mud, and the whole thing needed to be dry-cleaned.
An English group now crowded into the room, jostling the French and bringing all movement to a stop. We heard, in a tinny kind of English, “The graffiti scraped into the walls are not for the eyes of every member of the family.” Carlotta giggled and covered her mouth with both hands. “However,” the voice went on, exceedingly careful, “the curtain can be drawn aside for a small extra fee.” Through spread fingers Carlotta said to me, “That thing on the bridge? They can see it for nothing.” For some reason the French guide thought that Carlotta was laughing at him. H
e held himself as straight as if he were on review, and spoke coldly: “In the bedroom of the countess, draperies and bed hangings are covered with plastic. Some visitors, in the past, came here with scissors and tried to cut off pieces of silk, for souvenirs.” Carlotta thought she had been criticized, and would not look. “Scissors,” she repeated, just to herself.
Lily had been fast to see that the arms embroidered on the valance belonged to the count’s mistress. “Showing what men can get away with,” she had said. She had marched over to a portrait of the mistress as Artemis, with a breast showing, then examined the countess looking like her everyday self—crabbed, deceived, forty. There should have been a mirror so that Lily could compare her face with the faces of those other two. Instead there was a glass case holding the count’s plans for rebuilding what he was soon, recklessly, to tear down. Unfortunately, he ran out of funds—hadn’t stopped to think that only his dead collector had known how to raise money.
“Who wants to know about these people?” Lily had said. She meant that my subject, history, was just the record of simple-minded careers. Her life, necessarily remote from public interest, would nonetheless be clear, rapid, strong.
Our tickets had allowed a climb to the top of the tower. From a windblown height we looked at a new village built out of the dark stone quarried in the region. The main street was as wide as a square, to allow for tourist cars and buses. Lily struggled to ask me something: The houses were all copies of old houses, weren’t they? Could people live good lives in a false setting?
I watched a truck carrying blocks of stone as it tried to back and turn on a dirt road. “I think most people are pleased just to have four walls and a roof.”
“I know that.”
I tried again. Did she mean that the bareness and coldness of a dead past had no power to comfort the present? This time, I had overshot. Still, I was paying attention, and she leaned against my arm, gratefully—a light, slight pressure. Then she turned and ran down the winding staircase with one motion, like a dancer.
Montreal Stories Page 24
