It seems a long time before the local brigade arrives, because I suppose, at half-past ten in the evening people are hard to find and the firemen have to be summoned from nearby villages. They are a scratch crew pulled from their homes, and out of bars and cafés, dressed in a variety of outfits ranging from smart blue serge to denim jeans, and a few of them are wearing helmets. First comes the advance guard in a little truck which has to fight its way past the cars parked outside the gates of the Priory and it’s at least another ten minutes before they can get their water tender through. The firemen have literally to bounce several cars out of the way and they are helped by the watchers in the Citroën, the Renault and the Deux-Chevaux, though as soon as they have done this, I notice, they go back to their cars and lean on the door jambs, put their elbows on the roofs as if they have come to an election rally, or a bullfight, or the scene of some ghastly accident, and like everybody else they stare. Everyone stares. By the time the big hoses are connected to the main water supply from the lake, the fire is raging in the kitchens and lower floors of the Priory. Smoke pours from the windows and hangs in the sky. The guests scream and run into the garden. Tertius has been burnt, his hair is alight and he has to be sprayed with water by the firemen. Hyppolyte and Armand stand shaking with fear, never has reality brushed so close. They were in the kitchen when the fire started and a sheet of flame leapt at them as they stood peeling potatoes. This seems particularly to have enraged them, the fact that the fire broke out while they were working, really working! It’s as if they think the fire has waited until they were genuinely busy before attacking them. They feel that they have been doing their duty and have been endangered. I get the impression that this is a mistake they will not be making again. Last night they were pretending to be waiters, tonight they are pretending to be chefs – and tomorrow night? For them there will be no more nights. Armand puts it for them all:
‘We might have died. The bastard’s got no concern for his staff!’ He holds in his hand a peeled potato and with a sudden movement turns and hurls it behind him, curving upwards and into the water.
People are sitting out at the cast-iron tables under the trees, watching the progress of the fire. People will watch a fire. And there seems little else to do after the first panic is over; perhaps the guests are now beginning faintly to relish the relief that comes when danger is past and, feeling that they can now be quite safe, they sit back and look at things objectively. I can hardly blame them. There is always an element of carnival in a fire, particularly when you have the knowledge safe and sure that however fiercely it burns, beside you lie several million litres of water. Little boys begin to form a crowd around the fire-fighters who have now put on breathing apparatus and are preparing to enter the hotel. Suddenly Gudrun leaps to her feet and begins screaming. Her anguish is terrible. She runs to the front doors but the firemen turn her away and so she begins walking up and down the path in front of the hotel weeping and gnawing her knuckles and calling for her children, though as far as I can see all of them are here. Her husband is at a loss and he goes and speaks to the pompiers who tell him that nothing can be done until they enter the hotel and begin to search the rooms. Gudrun weeps bitterly and covers her eyes. Then, suddenly, around the corner there appears Raoul, or, as I suppose we must now call him, Dupont, the accountant from Grenoble. His face is sooty and he is carrying on his hip the little blond boy. Gudrun screams ‘Francois! Francois!’ and runs and snatches the child away and hugs him frantically. Raoul/Dupont beams as the Dutch girl runs to him and embraces him.
I really can’t look. That’s why I turn around and it’s because I turn around, away from the fire, that I see Clovis. He’s up on the headland that forms the right-hand arm of the little bay. He is on his motor-cycle. The last of the evening light glints on something – of course, the glass boot. As I watch, the bike shoots forward and Clovis soars into space. For a long moment he stays on the bike, riding it through the air, Hermes flying through the heavens, but then the machine, being heavier, begins to fall away beneath him and both of them twist and turn through the air as they drop towards the water. One force in the Grand Unification Theory we can absolutely rely on: gravity. It’s over very suddenly, there’s no noise, they’re too far away for that, not even a splash, boy and machine simply aren’t there any longer. I turn back to the fire and the guests at the tables. Am I the only one who saw Clovis fly? Certainly no one else gives any sign of it, they have eyes only for the fire. I want to do something. Of course I want to do something but Clovis is too far out, no one can reach him in time, even by motor-boat, and, besides, the surface of the water where he disappeared is as clear and as clean as a newly swept floor.
Now the front door of the hotel opens and two firemen carrying a stretcher come down the steps. One blue espadrille protrudes from beneath the white sheet and I know at once it’s André. Tertius, Hyppolyte and Armand jump to their feet as the stretcher is carried down the slate path between the tables towards the ambulance. They stare, and point, but there’s no sign in their faces of grief or concern. Shock, yes, disappointment certainly, and more than a touch of anger; they’re watching the one person to whom they wish bitterly to complain being carried past insensible, quite possibly dead.
The crowd outside the main gates of the Priory where the ambulance waits is even bigger now. There are many people from the village but they still don’t come into the garden because it is, after all, private property and even though the property in question looks as if it is about to be razed to the ground the people of our village always observe the proprieties.
‘Is he bad?’ someone asks.
The fireman turns to the questioner the great goggle-eyes of his monster face in its breathing apparatus, and very slowly lifts the mask. He shrugs hopelessly. ‘He is hot to the touch.’
Hot to the touch!
The words sink into my head where, despite their meaning, they fail to warm. Quite the opposite. I believe everyone who hears them shivers. To the villagers gathered around the front gates of the hotel the menus upon the gateposts speak from behind their polished glass frames of Veal Soup with Pasta and Cheese, of Paupiettes de Sole Déglère, the dishes for the day, the specialities of the house; they speak, in fact, of another cooler, happier period when fire and smoke and ambulances were unknown. The ambulance accepts the still figure on the stretcher and speeds away up the winding hill, its siren wailing. I begin to recognise people: old Laveur, the drycleaner along with the two De La Salle sisters who run the pizzeria and the florist at the top of the village; young Brest, the butcher, who must have been working because he’s still in his apron with blood in the creases across his belly; the entire family Gramus are here, father and mother and several children as well as the granny with the warts and the pointy chin. Because the Gramus family in years gone by had provided all the undertaking services in the village, their presence in any number, even today, is regarded as a bad omen.
The works of man are insensible to his grief. Several of the villagers studying the menus give low whistles over the prices of the dishes. They do this sort of thing across the way at Les Dents Sacrés. The air of festival is growing.
‘He smelt like burnt biscuit,’ says the younger of the De La Salle sisters, a lady of about seventy who wears strings of dark metal jewellery around her thin throat and wrists (it makes a harsh crunching sound when she moves, like the clash of boots on gravel). The other sister smells always of cold flower water from her florist’s shop.
Hot to the touch!
The Angel, Uncle Claude and Father Duval arrive in the big Mercedes which should not be here. The watchers at the gate, who had been standing guard over the Redeemer, become quite excited at the sight of the Mayor although they still do not leave their cars but stand beside them in an attitude of patient expectation, feet on the bumpers, hands hooked into waist-bands. For the first time I see their guns visible beneath their jackets and for the first time it is as if they do not care who sees them. The unexpected has broken in on routine and its reward is this revelation of metal in trouser waist-bands and in holsters under the arms.
The Angel, seeing the assembled crowd, and still smarting from the major interruption of the rally, climbs onto the bonnet of his car and begins addressing the onlookers:
‘My friends, we meet in unhappy circumstances. One of the monuments of La Frisette is engulfed in flames. Our ancient Priory stands gasping for breath! For hundreds of years it has endured in holy tranquillity, a hospice for weary travellers, a refuge for the sick, a light to passing ships on the lake. Who knows if we are not today here present at its death? You have seen, I believe, its owner and its dearest friend, carried away on a stretcher, overcome no doubt by smoke and flames as he fought to contain the blaze. Our valiant fire service are risking life and limb to bring this catastrophe under control and we are proud of them. But this is not the time for words. However, let me say that I give you my pledge – and I know that Monsieur Dresseur, the Mayor, who is also here to comfort his young niece, will support me – the Priory will not die! No matter what the damage, no matter what the cost, it will rise again from the ashes. No part of our beloved village of La Frisette is disposable, or dispensable. Its fabric is as precious as our bones! Be it our little church on the hill, or the old Mairie, we fight to preserve them.’
The crowd hear him in silence and applaud politely. Old mother Gramus speaks for many when she asks: ‘Did he start the fire on purpose, patron? For the insurance? This place must be costing him a packet and we all know it.’
And young Brest, yellow-haired in his white plastic apron, calls out, ‘What about the black fellow – the one with the disease? Is he also burnt?’
‘You are referring, of course, to the hotel’s foreign guest,’ the Angel observes.
‘To the dictator,’ says old Laveur. ‘The one they call the King of the Caramel Islands. Where is he?’
The Angel shrugs. ‘Who knows? You see the firemen entering the hotel. Perhaps they will find him.’
‘If he’s still there he’ll be all melted by this time,’ suggests the elder of the De La Salle sisters, throwing up a hand to her mouth, pale and transparent and delicate as a blue-veined leaf.
She is renowned for her salty humour and the crowd love the joke. There’s no doubt that there is now a real carnival atmosphere and it’s not just the exhilarating effect of the fire that brings it on. There’s another reason for this festive mood. I see it now, all the village people are taking part in an old ritual, something they surely remember in their bones because it was in just this place that the villagers would have once gathered in the middle of the seventeenth century, and again early in the eighteenth during the Revolution when the last remaining monks were expelled by the Revolutionary Council.
On June 30th, 1793, all the village came down to the lakeside, summoned by drum and trumpet to a kind of people’s free rock concert. It must have been, in a way, just as if a group like, say, Neanderthal were playing a waterside gig, you know the lot, pretty good on bangs and brass and a soul-scouring synthesiser (I’m thinking especially of their all-time smash ‘If I Had Double Barrels Would You Press Me To Your Heart?’). Because that’s how it must have seemed, two hundred years ago on this spot with the crowds and the music and the flames, everyone pushing and shoving under the chestnut trees to get at the wine the monks had left behind them when they fled. All the officials were here, the municipal officers with boots up to their thighs and coats picked out in dazzling designs, red, white and blue belts, hats tufty with feathers. And of course there were the flames, the big bonfire they made to receive the treasures of the Priory, the vanities which were pitched into the fire, the maps, the paintings, books, scrolls, statues. I could hear them cheering, the ancestors of Laveur and the De La Salle sisters and, yes, of my own family, the Dresseurs, as they snatched up the wooden madonnas, the painted Christs, the canvasses and the priceless brocades, eight centuries of treasure, sacred and profane or simply silly, saints’ molars, the crutches of visiting cripples who had put up in the Priory for a few nights and had been miraculously cured of their afflictions, chalices, silks, croziers, all pitched into the flames.
Quite a night it must have been. They also set fire to the Priory itself but the blaze was doused by municipal officials using a chain of wine skins passed by hand from the lakeside. This was mainly due, the old story goes, to the fact that they feared that the mounting hysteria of the crowd might make them start raising fires all over the place and a horrid conflagration would consume their beloved village.
From that time on it was expected that the ruin would stand, blackened and empty, as a warning to succeeding generations about the idiocy of the Church and the terrific cleansing and destructive power of the Revolution; all was to endure until Kingdom come. In fact this state of affairs lasted only until André arrived on the scene, kissed the old ruin awake and breathed life into it. It must annoy the various gods, the God of the Bible, or of history, that Man is such an incorrigible optimist, well-meaning interferer, short-term artist incapable of taking a long view, must always be up and doing, fixing and refurbishing, never heeding the warnings, never letting well alone, always having to be stopped and warned and, when he won’t be warned, destroyed … Only for him to get up out of the ashes and try again.
Hot to the touch!
‘Come into the garden with me, Bella. We get a good view from there. The firemen are inside the house now, searching room by room.’
My Uncle Claude takes my arm and leads me over to one of the tables under the chestnut trees where, like all the other guests, we sit as if waiting for service.
‘You did this, didn’t you? You set fire to the hotel.’
‘For the moment,’ says my uncle with hateful, heavy calm, ‘your chocolate friend is in the position of the cat in the paradox to which the physicist Schrödinger gave his name over half a century ago. This paradox goes as follows. The cat (for which in this case read Redeemer) is put into a sealed box (for which read Priory Hotel). No one can see inside the box or open it, or in any way affect what will happen when the pellet of poison drops (for which read fire).’
‘Poison?’
‘Yes, a pellet of cyanide is suspended above a beaker of hydrochloric acid inside the box.’
‘With the cat?’
‘Exactly. Also inside the box is a radioactive element which, within the hour, may or may not send out a signal. If it does the pellet drops and the cat dies. If it doesn’t, the cat lives.’
‘Two worlds?’
He nods. ‘Parallel worlds. If our observer discovered a dead cat then he and the late pussy constitute one possible world. This is what we call the observer effect. Quantum mechanics means that things keep flowing until we look at them, and when we look at them they stop. The host of possible universes simply flows on and the flow is everything until it’s arrested by the observation of the enquiring human.’
‘So in another world the cat may live happily ever after?’
‘Yes.’
‘In other words we only find out about something when we interrupt?’
‘Quite so. But when we interrupt, the experiment is over. We’ve painted ourselves into the picture.’
I can see the firemen moving about through the smoke. They have broken a window on the second floor and a stream of smouldering, charred debris rains down. Chairs, books, pictures spattered with mud, sodden with water. The leather-bound books have a greasy brown look to them, like smoked mackerel, their pages licked into charred solid blocks and yet I recognise them easily despite this disfigurement. Here are the lives of the great dictators, Caesar, Hitler, Alexander the Great and Mussolini. And here also are the pictures of his musical wives: Viola, Tympany, Harp and Dulcimer, smiling bravely through cracked, seared, mud-flecked glass.
‘Have you found anything?’ I call to the fireman at the window.
‘Nothing yet.’
‘They’re all naked,’ old Laveur whistles as he inspects the Redeemer’s wives. ‘Come here Etienne,’ he calls the butcher Brest, who splashes through the puddles and whistles his astonishment. ‘I think the monster enjoyed white meat,’ Laveur says.
‘Pork above chicken if you ask me,’ is Brest’s opinion.
Old Granny Gramus, with the pointy chin and the copper sulphate eyes, speaks for all when she observes, ‘I believe it’s an affliction of savages to be haunted by human flesh.’
The De La Salle sisters say nothing but I think they ought to pull their skirts over their heads and give way to wailing and keening.
‘These are pictures of his wives,’ I explain carefully. ‘What you are actually looking at are photographs based on paintings by famous artists. French artists, some of them!’
Uncle Claude stands beside me and begins turning over the pictures and books with his toe as if they are little corpses, small dead bodies of squirrels or gophers or rats. ‘Yes, it does rather look as if these pictures are influenced by a number of European artistic styles. Isn’t this Degas? This lady with her cheek turned to us while she dries herself with a towel?’
‘Yes, that’s his first wife, Viola, posing in the manner of the Degas painting of a woman drying herself after her bath. You must have seen it on postcards. He has even gone to the trouble of getting an old tin bath. Next to her is Tympany, she’s portrayed as a Roman Venus.’
We all look down on Tympany.
‘She looks more of a stocky German type, to me,’ says the butcher Brest. ‘There are several hectares of flesh.’
‘At least she uses her hand to cover herself,’ says Granny Gramus.
‘She’s modelled on what was called the Venus Pudica.’
‘Pudica? I’ll say.’ Laveur laughs and the others join him. ‘Obviously some kind of African joke! Who would have thought that the chocolate one kept all this in his little room. I must say his taste is not bad, if somewhat florid. I prefer my cheese a little firmer than this.’
‘The word Pudica means “modest” – in Latin,’ I tell Laveur.
‘Oh yes? Doesn’t look very modest to me,’ says Laveur.
‘It’s very interesting. What we have here is a copy of a copy of a copy,’ says Uncle Claude. ‘We see a photograph of a modern woman posing for a painting in the attitude of an idealised Greek goddess.’ He turns another picture with his delicate little toe. ‘And who’s this? She’s more modest.’
‘Dulcimer, wife number two. She’s a copy of St Ursula, a carving made by somebody called the Master of Elsloo in the early sixteenth century.’
‘A saint? In a blouse like that?’ Now it’s the turn of the elder of the De La Salle sisters, a woman so frail and thin, dressed in white lace which shakes when she speaks like the feathery, flimsy wings of flying ants.
‘I like the detail on this one,’ says the butcher Brest as Uncle Claude unearths another picture. ‘I think her wings are actually very good. They look like real feathers. Are they real feathers? I’d guess at goose though of course they may be duck. Who is she, Bella?’
‘That’s Harp, his third wife. She’s seen here as Venus, after a painting by Correggio called Mercury Instructing Cupid Before Venus.’
‘Hey, that’s him, the one in the funny hat, the jockey hat, that’s the black fellow!’ says old Laveur in astonishment. ‘And who’s the little kid also with the wings?’
‘That’s one of his sons. Playing Cupid,’ I tell him.
‘I think it’s the flesh that really catches your eye,’ says the younger of the De La Salle sisters to the butcher Brest. ‘Let’s be frank about this. We’re all grown people. These so-called classical poses that painters talk these girls into are nothing more than disguises through which the audience of males look on. Voyeurs! That’s what they’re meant for! By dressing up a whore as the goddess Venus you can gape all you like under the cloak of culture.’
The butcher Brest has gone a muddy brown colour and is breathing hard. ‘I’d like you to know, Mademoiselle De La Salle and Monsieur le Maire, that what interests me about this picture is the question of accuracy – is it goose feathers or duck? I take pleasure from the accurate identification of such things, feathers, fur, flesh. It’s my trade. I handle them daily. The very last thing to arouse me is the sight of flesh. A moment’s thought will show you why. Butchers are like mortuary attendants. I suppose like painters too. They look on things in death all the time and death is cold and naked. I have a professional interest! May I take another look at the Venus? I think now they are probably duck feathers.’
But my uncle isn’t listening, he is pulling at his lips as if he has swallowed something acid and it won’t go down, or it has gone down and threatens to come straight up again.
‘Bella, what does this mean?’
And there in the mud I lie, at the end of Uncle Claude’s pointed toe. It’s the photograph the Redeemer took of me on the hot afternoon, when, despite the heat, he’d insisted on making a fire in the grate. I recline on the little green chaise longue. To my left the window with the curtain drawn back lets in the fierce lake light. At the corner of the window stands a small brown table carrying a white basin. My right arm drops over the edge of the chair, fingers extending almost to the green carpet. I can feel it now under my fingers as I look at myself, I can feel it like a skin or a fur, it is almost as if I can touch the short woollen hair of the green carpet straining upwards the way real hair does when it’s charged with static electricity. My uncle and the others are staring at my open dress, at the bodice cut low, falling off the right shoulder. They’re staring as well at my raised left knee climbing from my skirt. How flat my shoes look, and white. The fire warms my legs. I remember feeling the heat along the insides of my thighs. The little mirror I hold in my hand shows me the clouds drifting past the open window behind me, drifting past my face which is quiet and composed. Over to my right, kneeling on one leg before the fire which he is working up into a terrific blaze, is the Redeemer. He has his back to me and he ripples inside his dark red shirt as he feeds the flames with his left hand. His right hand holds the edge of the mantelpiece for support.
‘Always use your left hand to feed yourself,’ I remember him telling me. ‘That at least is the custom in my country.’
And he uses his left hand to feed the fire.
Hot to the touch!
My uncle’s voice is a wounded bellow:
‘Four wives he has – Viola, Tympany, Harp, Dulcimer – and now Bella! Wife number five!’
Disgust is a wonderful diversion. At first Uncle Claude doesn’t notice the chattering, smoke-stained firefighters heading for their engine, stowing their hoses, gathering equipment. Only a few are left in the house punching holes in the windows. But clearly the worst is over. They’re not looking for anyone. The people at the gate are moving off. Now the Angel and Father Duval are conferring anxiously with the firemen. The people in the Renault, the Citroën and the Deux-Chevaux have noticed. Look at the way they’re yelling down their radios which, for once, they don’t bother to hide. It’s really exciting. I put on my earphones and stick a tape in the cassette, one of those dreamier numbers from an outfit called Jurassic, they’ve got these lovely, sliding, sucking rhythms that make you think of, oh, Father Christmas in petticoats, or the Pope in drag. And I’m so happy! It’s at times like this when I can profess my love for you! It’s miracle time. Do you hear? I can say now that there is you and only you and never a stand-in. You alone – you do all your own stunts!
Uncle Claude’s noticed at last. He begins yelling at the firemen, ‘What do you mean he’s not here? Are you telling me he melted maybe – and slipped through the cracks and disappeared? He has to be here. He can’t be anywhere else!’
In the midst of all this the De La Salle sisters and the butcher Brest continue to argue.
‘The trouble with the women in these paintings,’ complains the older De La Salle sister, ‘is that they know they’re being looked at.’
‘You mean they want to be looked at?’ Brest rejoins.
‘I mean they’re painted by men for men. They show so much of themselves. If this weren’t art, it would be disgusting.’
‘You are among nature’s natural killers, Madame,’ says Brest.
‘By men for men,’ the De La Salle sister repeats.
This brings out the worst in Brest, or perhaps the best. He looks down at the portrait of the Redeemer and Harp as Mercury and Venus, and he licks his lips. ‘Do you know what this picture makes me feel, Madame? It makes me hungry, look at that flesh, the texture, it’s like milk – you want to taste it!’
I think I’d like to record just what I told my uncle on this score. You’ll see the particular advances I’ve been making in my study of particle physics, now that I’ve got the hang of it, now that I realise that the point about it is to make predictions which later experimental evidence will confirm. I offer the following on the subject of Schrödinger’s cat, as explained to Uncle Claude:
‘Perhaps we’ve just added something to the history of particle physics. Maybe there are not just two parallel worlds with the cat and the observer alive in one world and dead in the other. Perhaps today we’ve stepped through a hole into a third world, a new dimension. Because when you think about it there aren’t just two possibilities facing the cat, are there? It’s not just a question of whether the radioactive element fires, the cyanide pellet drops into the acid and you get one dead cat – or if it doesn’t, you don’t. That’s to say it’s not a question of either/or, either the cat’s alive or it’s dead. There is another alternative which I’m surprised nobody’s thought of until now: when the scientists inspect the box maybe there’s no cat at all.’
‘Bella,’ says my uncle speaking through his teeth. ‘There is always a cat. The only question is – alive or dead?’
‘Or escaped?’
Axe blades smash through wood and glass with a dry coughing sound and the splinters of glass land on the pavement below. Wherever a hole appears in a window, smoke pours out while we wait and watch. Many of the tables still have drinks on them, cocktails smelling slightly of peppermint, doubtless Emile’s coupe maison, now returning to its original constituents which show up as different bands of colour in the large beakers Emile favours for his evening libations.
We suffer and our works look on; these drinks, the menus at the front gate, the very appearance of the tables beneath the trees all insist on business as usual. We make our engines and set them going. But when disaster strikes and removes the makers our works continue as if nothing has happened, go on inviting us to pleasure, or advertising happiness, mocking our expectations, our sheer bloody nerve. You started this, they say. Don’t you still want to play? And this will happen on a much bigger scale one day, when our sun runs out of fuel and expands and roasts us all. Our engines will go on running, powered by varieties of energy as yet unthought of; they will play our tunes and show our pictures and talk to each other along their super-cooled ceramic synapses, telling the time, checking our credit ratings, measuring the weather which, by then, will have proved terminal. Even our cheapest music will survive us because it will doubtless have been taught to compose itself and will go on doing so; there will be singing robots, and brighter versions of groups like Oedema and Giuseppe and the Lambs will go on belting out their stuff to the stars as the noisy planet, lights blinking, floats through space like some deserted ship, a Marie Celeste of the solar system, music blasting out, television on and the trains still running for years, decades, after we have departed.