At the grocery store that served as theater bar, wine and French gin and whiskey and soft drinks were being dispensed, at triple price. The wine was sour and undrinkable. David asked for tonic; Lily and I usually had Cokes. The French she had learned in her Catholic boarding school allowed her to negotiate this, timidly. She liked ordering, enjoyed taking over sometimes, but Mr. Chadwick had corrected her Canadian accent and made her shy. David, merely impressed, asked if she had been educated in Switzerland.
The possibility of becoming a different person must have occurred to her. She picked up the bottle of tonic, as if she had never heard of Coca-Cola, still less ordered it, and demanded a glass. No more straws; no more drinking from bottles. She then handed David a tepid Coke, and he was too struck by love to do anything but swallow it down.
Lapwing in only a few minutes had managed to summon and consume large quantities of wine. His private reasoning had Mr. Chadwick paying for everything: after all, he had brought Lapwing up here to be belabored by Mozart. Edie, who had somehow lost Mr. Chadwick, was drinking wine, too. I noticed that Lily wanted me to foot the bill: the small wave of her hand was an imperial gesture. Distancing herself from me, the graduate of a Swiss finishing school forgot we had no money, or nearly none. I fished a wad of francs out of my pocket and dropped them on the counter. Lapwing punched me twice on the shoulder, perhaps his way of showing thanks.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m one of those people for whom music is wave after wave of disjointed noise.” He made “those people” sound like a superior selection.
Mr. Chadwick, last to arrive, looked crumpled and mortified, as if he had been put through some indignity. All I could do was offer him a drink. He looked silently and rather desperately at the grocery shelves, the cans of green peas, the cartons leaking sugar, the French gin with the false label.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said.
Lily and Edie linked arms and started back toward the church. They wanted to see the musicians at close quarters. Mr. Chadwick had recaptured David, which left me saddled with Lapwing.
“I don’t have primitive anti-Catholic feelings,” said Lapwing. “Edie was a Catholic, of course, being a Pole. A middle-class Pole. I encouraged her to keep it up. A woman should have a moral basis, especially if she doesn’t have an intellectual one. Is Lily still Catholic?”
“It’s her business.” We had been over this ground before.
“And you?”
“I’m not anything.”
“You must have started out as something. We all do.”
“My parents are Anglican missionaries,” I said. “I’m nothing in particular.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lapwing said.
“Why?”
I hoped he would say he didn’t know, which would have raised him a notch. Instead he drank the wine left in Edie’s glass and hurried after the two women.
In the bright church, where every light had been turned on and banks of votive candles blazed, our wives wandered from saint to saint. Edie had tied a bolero jacket around her head. The two were behaving like little girls, laughing and giggling, displaying ex-Catholic behavior of a particular kind, making it known that they took nothing in this place seriously but that they were perfectly at home. Lapwing responded with Protestant prudence and gravity, making the remark that Lily should cover her hair. I looked around and saw no red glow, no Presence. For the sake of the concert the church had been turned into a public hall; in any case, what Lily chose to do was her business. Either God existed and was not offended by women and their hair or He did not; it came to the same thing.
Mr. Chadwick was telling David about design and decoration. He pointed to the ceiling and to the floor. I heard him say some interesting things about the original pagan site, the Roman shrine, the early Christian chapel, and the present rickety Baroque—a piece of nonsense, he said. Lapwing and I, stranded under a nineteenth-century portrayal of St. Paul, given the face of a hanging judge, kept up an exchange that to an outsider might have resembled conversation. I was so hard up for something to say that I translated the inscription under the picture: “St. Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, put to death as a martyr in Rome, A.D. 67.”
“I’ve been working on him,” Lapwing said. “I’ve written a lot of stuff.” He tipped his head to look at the portrait, frowning. “Saul is the name, of course. The whole thing is a fake. The whole story.”
“What do you mean? He never existed?”
“Oh, he existed, all right. Saul existed. But that seizure on the road to Damascus can be explained in medical terms of our time.” Lapwing paused, and then said rather formally, “I’ve got doctors in the family. I’ve read the books. There’s a condition called eclampsia. Toxemia of pregnancy, in other words. Say Lily was pregnant—say she was carrying the bacteria of diphtheria, or typhoid, or even tetanus.…”
“Why couldn’t it be Edie?”
“O.K., then, Edie. I’m not superstitious. I don’t imagine the gods are up there listening, waiting for me to make a slip. Say it’s Edie. Well, she could have these seizures, she could hallucinate. I’m not saying it’s a common condition. I’m not saying it often happens in the civilized world. I’m saying it could have happened in very early A.D.”
“Only if Paul was a pregnant woman.”
“Men show female symptoms. It’s been known to happen—the male equivalent of hysterical pregnancy. Oh, not deliberately. I’m not saying it’s common behavior. I don’t want you to misquote me, if you decide to research my topic. I’m only saying that Saul, Paul, was on his way to Damascus, probably to be treated by a renowned physician, and he had this convulsion. He heard a voice. You know the voice I mean.” Lapwing dropped his tone, as though nothing to do with Christianity should ever be mentioned in a church. “He hallucinated. It was a mystical hallucination. In other words, he did a Joan of Arc.”
It was impossible to say if Lapwing was trying to be funny. I thought it safer to follow along: “If it’s true, it could account for his hostility to women. He had to share a condition he wasn’t born to.”
“I’ve gone into that. If you ever research my premise, remember I’ve gone into everything. I think I may drop it, actually. It won’t get me far. There’s no demand.”
“I don’t see the complete field,” I said. That sounded all right—inoffensive.
“Well, literature. But I may have strayed. I may be over the line.” He dropped his gaze from the portrait to me, but still had to look up. “I don’t really want to say more.”
I think he was afraid I might encroach on his idea, try to pick his brain. I assured him that I was committed to French history and politics, but even that may have seemed too close, and he turned away to look for Edie, to find out for certain what she was doing, and ask her to stop.
Mr. Chadwick had found the evening so successful that he decided on a bolder social move: David must give a piano recital in the villa, with a distinguished audience in attendance. A reception would follow—white-wine cup, petits fours—after which some of us would be taken to a restaurant, as Mr. Chadwick’s guests, for a dinner in David’s honor. The event was meant to be a long jump in his progress from gardener to favored house guest.
He was let off gardening duty and spent much of his time now at the Biesels’, where they offered him a cool room with a piano in it and left him in peace. Meanwhile the winter salon was torn apart and cleaned, dustcovers were removed from the sofas, the windows and shutters opened and washed and sealed tight again. The expert brought in from Nice to restore the Pleyel had a hard time putting it to rights, and asked for an extra fee. Mr. Chadwick would not give it, and for a time it looked as if there would be no recital at all. Mrs. Biesel quietly intervened and paid the difference. Mr. Chadwick never knew. One result of the conflict and its solution, apart from the piano’s having been fixed, was that Mr. Chadwick began to tell stories about how he had, in the past, showed great firmness with workmen and tradesmen. They were
boring stories, but, as Lily said, it was better than hearing the stories about his mother.
It seemed to me that the recital could end in nothing but disgrace and ridicule. I wondered why David went along with the idea.
“Amateurs have a lot of self-confidence,” said Mrs. Biesel, when I asked what she thought. “A professional would be scared.” I had come round to her house to call for Lily: she was spending a lot of time there, too, encouraging David.
Mrs. Biesel had a soft Southern voice and was not always easy to understand. (I was amazed when I discovered that to Mr. Chadwick all North Americans sounded alike.) I recall Mrs. Biesel with her head to one side, poised to listen, and her curved way of sitting, as if she were too tall and too thin for most chairs. I could say she was like a Modigliani, but it’s too easy, and I am not sure I had heard of Modigliani then. The Biesels were rich, by which I mean that they had always lived with money, and when they spent any they always gave themselves a moral excuse. The day Lily decided she wanted to go to London without me, the Biesels paid her way. They saw morality on that occasion as a matter of happiness, Lily’s in particular. Any suggestion that they might have conspired to harm and deceive was below their view of human nature. Conversation on the subject soon became like a long talk in a dream, with no words remembered, just an impression of things intended.
Mr. Chadwick pored over stacks of yellowed sheet music his mother had kept in a rosewood Canterbury. He wanted David to play short pieces with frequent changes in mood. “None of your all-Schubert,” he said. “It just puts people to sleep.”
Mrs. Biesel supplied printed programs on thick ivory paper. We were supposed to keep them as souvenirs, but the printer had left off the date. She apologized to Mr. Chadwick, as though it were her own fault. (It is curious how David was overlooked; the recital seemed to have become a social arrangement between Mrs. Biesel and Mr. Chadwick.) Mr. Chadwick ran his eye down the page and said, “But he’s not doing the Debussy. He’s doing the Ravel.”
“It’s a long, hard program,” said Mrs. Biesel, in just above a whisper. “It might have been easier if he had simply worked up some Bach.”
At three o’clock on one of the hottest afternoons since the start of recorded temperatures, David sat down to the restored Pleyel. On the end wall behind him was a large Helleu drawing of Mr. Chadwick’s mother playing the piano, with her head thrown back and a bunch of violets tied to her wrist. The winter carpets, rolled up and stacked next to the fireplace, smelled of old dust and moth repellent. Still Mr. Chadwick would not let the room be aired. To open the windows meant letting in heat. “You must all sit very still,” he announced, as David got ready to start. “It’s moving about, stirring up the atmosphere, that makes one feel warm.”
Who was there? Mr. Chadwick’s friends and neighbors, and a number of people I suspect he brought in on short acquaintance. I remember his doctor, a dour Alsatian who had the complete confidence of the British colony; he had acquired a few reassuring expressions in English, such as “It’s just a little chill on the liver” and “Port’s the thing.” People liked that. When I think of the Canadians in the winter salon—the Lapwings, and Lily and me, and Fergus Bray, and an acquaintance of Lapwing’s called Michael Hagen-Beck—it occurs to me that abroad, outside embassy premises or official functions, I never saw that many in one room again. Hagen-Beck was an elderly-looking undergraduate of nineteen or twenty, dressed in scant European-style shorts, a khaki shirt, knee socks, and gym shoes. Near the end of the recital, he walked out of the house and did not come back.
Lily mooned at David, as she had at Christian Ferras. I supposed it must be her way of contemplating musicians. There was nothing wrong with it; I had just never thought of her as a mooner of any kind. Once she sprang from her chair and pushed open a shutter: the room was so dim that David had to strain to read the music. Mr. Chadwick left the shutter ajar, but latched the window once more, murmuring again his objection to stirring up the atmosphere.
During the Chopin Edie went to sleep, wearing one of those triangular smiles that convey infinite secret satisfaction. Her husband wiped his forehead with a cotton scarf he took out of her handbag and returned carefully, without waking her up. I had the feeling they got along better when one of them was unconscious. He adjusted his glasses and frowned at a gilt Buddha sitting in front of the cold fireplace, as if he were trying to assess its place in Mr. Chadwick’s spiritual universe. During the pause between the Chopin and the Albéniz, he unlocked the French doors, left them wide, and went out to the baking terrace, half covered by the branches of a jacaranda; into the hot shade of the tree he dragged a wrought-iron chair and a chintz-covered pillow (the chair looked as if it had not been moved since the reign of Edward VII), making a great scraping sound over the flagstones. The scraping blended with the first bars of the Albéniz; those of us in the salon who were still awake pretended not to hear.
I envied Lapwing, settled comfortably in iron and chintz, in the path of a breeze, however tepid, with trumpet-shaped blue flowers falling on his neck and shoulders. He seemed to be sizing up over the chalkier blue of a plumbago hedge the private beach and white umbrellas of the Pratincole, Rivebelle’s only smart hotel—surviving evidence that this part of the coast had been fashionable before the war. In an open court couples were dancing to a windup gramophone, as they did every day at this hour. We could hear one of those tinny French voices, all vivacity, but with an important ingredient missing—true vitality, I think—singing an old American show tune with sentimental French lyrics: pour toi, pour moi, pour toujours. It reminded me of home, all but the words, and finally I recognized a song my aunt had on a record, with “She Didn’t Say ‘Yes’ ” on the other side. Perhaps she used to dance to it, before she decided to save her energy for bringing me up. I remembered just some of the words: “new luck, new love.” I wondered if there was any sense to them—if luck and love ever changed course after moving on. Mr. Chadwick was old enough to know, but it wasn’t a thing I could ask.
Lapwing sat between two currents of music. Perhaps he didn’t hear: the Pratincole had his whole attention. Our wives longed to dance, just once, in that open court, under the great white awning, among the lemon trees in tubs, and to drink champagne mixed with something at the white-and-chromium bar, but we could not afford so much as a Pratincole drink of water. I don’t know how, but Lapwing had gained the impression that Mr. Chadwick was taking us for dinner there. He sat at his ease under the jacaranda, choosing his table. (A later review of events had Lapwing urging Hagen-Beck to join us for dinner, even though his share of the day was supposed to end with the petits fours: a story that Lapwing continued to evoke years after in order to deny it.)
The rest of us sat indoors, silent and sweating. We seemed to be suffocating under layers of dark-green gauze, what with the closed shutters, and the vines pressing on them, and the verd-antique incrustation in the ancient bronze ornaments and candelabra. The air that came in from the terrace, now that Lapwing had opened the French doors, was like the emanation from a furnace, and the sealed windows cut off any hope of a crossbreeze. Mrs. Biesel fanned herself with a program, when she was not using it to beat time. Fergus Bray slid from his sofa to the marble floor and lay stretched, propped on an elbow. I noticed he had concealed under the sofa a full tumbler of whiskey, which he quietly sipped. Once, sinking into a deep sleep and pulling myself up just in time, I caught sight of Lapwing leaning into the room, with his eyes and glasses glittering, looking—in memory—like the jealous husband he was about to become.
If a flash of prophecy could occur to two men who have no use for each other, he and I would have shared the revelation that our wives were soon to travel—his to Madrid with one of that day’s guests, mine to London on the same train as our host’s gardener and friend. (It was Mrs. Biesel’s opinion that Lily had just wanted company on the train.) Mentioning two capital cities makes their adventure sound remote, tinged with fiction, like so many shabby events that occur in foreign p
arts. If I could say that Lily had skipped to Detroit and Edie to Moose Jaw, leaving Lapwing and me stranded in a motel, we would come out of it like a couple of gulls. But “Madrid,” and “London,” and “the Mediterranean,” and a musician, a playwright, a novelist, a recital in a winter salon lend us an alien glow. We seem to belong to a generation before our own time. Lapwing and I come on as actors in a film. The opening shot of a lively morning street and a jaunty pastiche of circus tunes set the tone, and all the rest is expected to unfold to the same pulse, with the same nostalgia. In fact, there was nothing to unfold except men’s humiliation, which is bleached and toneless.
The compliments and applause David received at the end of the recital were not only an expression of release and relief. We admired his stamina and courage. The varied program, and David’s dogged and reliable style, made me think of an anthology of fragments from world literature translated so as to make it seem that everyone writes in the same way. Between fleeting naps, we had listened and had found no jarring mistakes, and Mr. Chadwick was close to tears of the humblest kind of happiness.
Montreal Stories Page 31
