I take my ease upon our private beach. ‘Relax Bella,’ I tell myself, ‘you’re among friends.’ That’s not quite true – but then if you can’t tell yourself stories, who is there to talk to? You should know!
Although it’s called, rather grandly, a plage privée it’s really a semi-circular wooden platform, or jetty, by the lakeside, specially reserved for guests of the Priory Hotel. A notice warns trespassers to keep away. The wooden slats are grey with age, warm and deeply grooved, and through them I can see the baize-green water, striped with dusty silver where the sun falling between the slats strikes the surface. In the shade the green blackens and thickens but in the shallows where the sunshine pierces to the sandy floor, the water is brilliantly clear. Over to my right is a mountain covered with trees and scrub through which the grey rock shows. Rearing several hundred metres above the lake, it is part of the chain of mountains curving behind the hotel and the village of La Frisette. Jutting out into the water, this natural headland forms a small bay where the weekend yachts ride at anchor, stripped of their sails, each wagging a naked mast like a warning finger. To my left the lake opens up, stretching to the further shore and the distant mountains with which this vast reservoir is ringed, and behind those mountains are greater mountains still. Alps. In the distance power-boats rip the lake to tatters with skiers criss-crossing the foaming wakes. Closer to shore the windsurfers lean back pulling on the wishbone spar of the bellying sail, keeping their difficult balance; backwards and forwards they ride, displaying the remoteness of ploughmen. Nearest of all float the severed heads of the swimmers. With the hazy glitter of mid-morning the further shoreline vanishes and the mountains beyond are a smudged outline. This great stretch of water is a thoroughfare where all traffic rides, including the big ferries connecting the little towns around the lake.
Our corner of the lake is a backstreet, a parking lot, quiet and secluded. These qualities undoubtedly led the monks to found their monastery in the village of La Frisette. From its high point, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the village curves delicately down the mountainside to the water’s edge where the Priory stands looking out across the lake. All roads lead to the lake dipping between crumbling walls held together by climbing roses. Once it would have been difficult to reach this spot, except by water, in the days before the little road ran the length of the lakeside as it does now. Mountains behind, water before, a fine defensive position. The little road divides the hotel behind me from the wooden plage privée, continuing around in a curve which ends abruptly when it comes up against the rocky lower slopes of the headland. The little lakeside road gives access to the big houses carved into the mountainside, neighbours of the Old Priory, which was so fabulously wealthy before the Revolution that it took the wrecking parties, chosen from amongst the peasantry, three days and nights to burn its manuscripts, brocades, miniatures, its silver candlesticks and golden chalices. They spared the Priory, though, and allowed an empty house swept clean of monks and vanities to fall into gentle ruin. It must have made the rich really sad when the Priory closed down. All their pretty things were burnt. They had invested so much in the monks’ house. It was like money in the bank, only it was better than money in the bank because it stored up treasures in heaven. The rich are still here, in their triple-storeyed summer houses set well back from the little shore road, with wonderful views across the lake. But the monks are long gone.
The Priory’s the grandest hotel hereabouts. There has been a church on the spot since the ninth century when an unhappy queen, deserted by her husband, settled here and devoted herself to good works. At least that’s the contention of André, its owner, who loves it like a mistress. Perhaps, considering its origins, it would be better to say he loves it like a wife. Or a sister. Or a madonna. For the Priory is after all holy ground and retains something of its odour of sanctity, thanks to André who has spent years preserving and refurbishing it. He wants to retain its monastic qualities, eased, but not overwhelmed, by certain comforts. Clearly this is an impossible task since there are demands made by guests who come to a luxury hotel groggy with dreams from the glossy magazines – which centrally heat the minds of the rich – stoking up expectations which the fabric of a sixteenth-century Carthusian Priory cannot provide. And it costs him too much.
André has fought off several attempts by Monsieur Cherubini to buy the Priory as a home for his political party, the Parti National Populaire. André’s answer has been one stiff finger, an astonishingly violent gesture in a gentleman. Monsieur Cherubini’s paper, La Liberté, has run hostile stories headlined: what aliens bloom in the garden of the carthusians? This despite the fact that the Priory has no gardens unless you count the inner courtyard with its old well and statue of a mother and child. But La Liberté has never let facts spoil a good story and, between you and me, it’s an attitude I rather like.
André has the cheeks of a shelled boiled egg, full fleshed, tightly gleaming. His eyelashes are long and lovely. Although he modernises the interior little by little, he insists on preserving the spirit of the place. This is contradictory, as I’m sure he realises, yet he persists, giving that soft apologetic smile to all objections. André’s need to avoid giving pain is so deep and genuine it actually encourages the feelings it is supposed to prevent: it makes you feel bad when you realise how hard he’s trying to spare your feelings, and how many feelings there are to spare. For example, the old cloisters are glassed-in against the wind and dust so that the guests look out on the wild green courtyard in the centre of the building as if peering into a glasshouse. Here the priors of the monastery were buried though their graves have vanished. An old well, overgrown with climbing roses, stands in the corner. In the Priory’s heyday it was the vegetable gardener’s privilege to grow the roses. On a low wall, the life-size stone madonna presides with the sacred child. The baby redeemer plays with her rosary and she looks down at his foot which she holds in her hand – it’s a fond yet professional glance. She might be examining it for injury or deformation – in fact the foot is very beautiful – or she might be a saleslady assessing his shoe-size. It would have been more sensible to cover the open courtyard, to put a roof on it, but that, says André, would have been to damage the architectural unity of the Priory. And this he will not have, he declares in the same quiet, sorrowful tones in which he told me he was once a Parisian stockbroker.
‘I was a monster of the Bourse.’ And if that was not enough to shock a girl, he added, ‘With offices in Lyons.’
There was no mistaking the wistful note of regret, of shyness, of shame, with which this very ordinary statement of fact was offered. Please note: he said ‘offices’. At first I thought he must mean branches, and said so. But he was gently adamant.
‘With offices in Lyons,’ he repeated.
These dread offices lay heavily on his mind. Did he mean perhaps that the geographical location of the offices reflected badly on the status of a Parisian stockbroker? Or was it because, though claiming Parisian attachments, in fact he had been based at Lyons and was forced to commute? That seemed unlikely. After thinking about it for some time it appeared more probable that André had, in his Parisian days as a monster of the Bourse, possessed offices in both Paris and Lyons and for some inexplicable reason the second set of offices caused him agony and humiliation. For the life of me I cannot think why this should be so. Does it mean that although he had turned away shuddering from his old life in Paris, he was always haunted by the knowledge that it had not been enough for him to yell, grab, stuff his pockets on the Market, that so great had been his greed and ambition that he had flung his net over half of France? Perhaps it is memories like these that make him confess: ‘I was a terror, once.’ And then with a quiver of downcast lashes which give his face that eggy, Humpty Dumpty about-to-fall look, he adds, ‘Of course, you’re too young to understand. I don’t mean you’re at all immature, quite the contrary. You’re a young woman now, Bella –’
In my experience a middle-aged man who couples confessions of his former terrorism with compliments on my maturity is usually being dead bloody boring and is at the mercy of his erectile tissue. But there is nothing of this in André’s pale blue eyes. He smoothes his hand across the few crispy grey hairs remaining on his shell of a head and looks at me as if I were the Virgin descending. Ferocity seems very unlikely in one such as André in his pink shirt and midnight-blue pants, his espadrilles and his gentle, apologetic smile. Indeed, he is so self-effacing and shy that he is frequently taken to be a member of the staff by guests visiting the Priory for the first time and is to be seen cheerfully carrying suitcases up the great stone staircase, passing the weeping wooden Nereids who guard the front door, with eyes averted. I shall also say it’s probably unavoidable since the young cretins he employs as bellhops, baggage carriers and waiters have only the wispiest idea of their responsibilities and no great desire to sweat for their wages. The big, heavy suitcases having been unpacked from the boot of the Mercedes or the BMW in the dusty parking lot behind the hotel, the astonished guest will find the bellhop apparently inviting him to divide the load between them – always of course offering the guest first choice.
‘Will Monsieur take this case, and I the other? Or does he prefer the other?’
These boys, Armand, Tertius and Hyppolyte, are hired (need I reveal it?) in Lyons in the summer months when the hotel is full and the permanent staff cannot manage without extra help. They’re not bad, if somewhat loutish and far too young to be really interesting. But what can André do? Though I know it embarrasses him horribly to see his guests treated in this cavalier fashion, he has no option but to run along behind the perspiring arrival, snatch the heavy case from him and glower at the young idiot so lacking in grace and consideration.
And yet he considers himself guilty of monstrous crimes. He seeks forgiveness for wolfish deeds. He shudders to think of himself in the days when he was a beast on the Paris Bourse, with offices in Lyons. He must have ravaged his private clients, or his clerks, or the buyers from the big institutions, or terrorised his staff in the office in Lyons and done something so horrible that it caused him burning shame. But what these crimes were, what blood was spilt, what scalps taken, what hideous dreams disturbed his sleep, no one can tell. He seeks salvation, he goes about in pink and blue, all gentleness and humility. He wishes to repent; the deeply appealing and sympathetic thing about André is his need to make an act of public contrition. Naturally this is virtually impossible in our age. What is one supposed to do if one wishes to proclaim one’s penitence? Go on a pilgrimage, or fight in the crusades, or endow a monastery?
Well, not quite. But in taking over the old priory and converting it into a hotel, André has done the next best thing. And by being always so humble and self-effacing, talking as little as possible, eating sparingly, tolerating the whims and excesses of his guests and dealing with such exemplary kindness with his novice baggage boys, he does his best to reflect, in a modest way, the lifestyles of the former inhabitants of this old grey-stoned Carthusian retreat under its roof of pale red tiles. The milky flagstones of the cloisters are worn smooth by generations of patrolling monks.
‘I was a terror once.’
How those words of André’s haunt me! What does he mean, terror? And where is it now? When you stop being its possessor or its victim what happens to this terror? Does it die? Or go into hiding? I know about terror in books. The Terror of Robespierre and Marat. Blood and more blood. I remember the leg of Princess Lamballe, after her body was ripped to pieces, stuffed in a cannon, her head on a pole, and her heart roasted and eaten. That was the official Terror – written up – from the books we knew it, always from the books. You visit it like a public monument. You walk around it. When you’re tired you go home. Only when I begin to think, when I feel for the people pulled from their houses and accused by the Committee of Public Safety, when I hear their cries and screams as they were dragged to the guillotine, then I begin to be frightened. That was the Reign of Terror. How strange that there should be a reign during a revolution which killed a king! It’s as if other people’s terror is not open to us. We all need our own.
But first we must hear the call, and wake, alone, to face our fear. Through the wooden slats I can see shoals of tiny fish darting past. These little silver fish teem in the lake and are a local delicacy, fruit of the lake, fried and eaten sprinkled with lemon juice and black pepper. The shoal flicks this way and that, nervous, forever vigilant. No doubt they are programmed for this anxious slipperiness. At every moment extinction threatens. A state of useful terror developed by nature preserves the group. Quite right too. For at this moment they are being watched by one who would kill them and eat them. Cheerfully.
On this warm, wooden, private island human sun-lovers have no such fears. These naked, oily, delectable morsels of flesh fry gently. They know nothing will fall on them and tear their livers. No plague or brimstone will strike. No eagles will drop from the sky. The modern human animal is blithely self-confident. I must say too that the guests of the Priory this summer are more than usually fearless. They are healthy, they are enjoying themselves, they are on holiday and of course they’re rich. They could not afford the Priory otherwise. Two elderly French lizards sit in deckchairs, facing one another, their heads thrown back, eyes closed. They are both excessively burnt and I suspect they have come on here from Sardinia or Monte Carlo. They know the tricks. They apply oil liberally to each other every hour or so. He even rubs some on his bald spot. Clever touch that. Their bodies are almost blue-black and deeply wrinkled after many summers spent tanning their hides. They must be in their late sixties, possibly in their seventies, though it’s hard to tell for they have good crops of blue-white hair. Well versed in this pursuit they constantly move their chairs to catch the full force of the sun, then settle back again and close their eyes. They’re awaiting the call, but it’s only the call to lunch, a buffet in the garden beneath the chestnut trees, pink tablecloths and bottles of chilled rosé …
I heard the call, just as St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century heard a voice saying to him: Tolle lege, ‘Take up and read!’ Well, maybe it didn’t say exactly that to me because I mean – who uses Latin any more? Except possibly that mega-super group Giuseppe and the Lambs who were so big a few years ago with their reworking of Virgil, a great mix of a capella and skate-punk and wah-wah guitars – ‘Electronic Bucolics’ – in the original Latin, of course. They followed it up with a real winger. You remember. Of course you do!
Anyway, so I heard this voice and it said something like, ‘OK, what’s the story, baby?’ though not in so many words, and even if sixteen hundred years have passed since the Tolle business back in Hippo, the upshot’s the same when you hear something like that – when the call is for more than lunch.
It is on this authority that I name the people around me. For instance I name these elderly lizards Alphonse and Edith. Do you approve? It really doesn’t matter. I have named them and the names will stick, not for ever, but for as long as is necessary to make the world make sense, the little world of the private beach. Make is the operative word here. You know that, you who have made us in your image and likeness, you will not mind if I take a leaf from your book. Thus I baptise them Alphonse and Edith in the name of the author of us all, we who populate this little wooden world by the lake for a few weeks each summer.
Naked we came into the world, naked we go out. Once that was a threat, now we’re just talking suntans. All, that is, except for he who arrived weeks ago and has still to be seen to be believed, but is said to be black! Black as a coal-hatch, according to Father Duval, black as night says my Grand-mère, black as the dark matter which is said to hold together the universe, according to my Uncle Claude, black as the words on the page, say I. Seeing is believing said doubting Thomas, or words to that effect. But between seeing and believing comes saying. You see, I say, they believe. So I say that the elderly lizards turning their leathery skins to the sun are called Alphonse and Edith. Who do you say that they are?
And I am Bella. Who do you say that I am? In the absence of an answer, I will just have to continue to say I am little Bella, always big for her age, fifteen last September and when I look into the water I see her looking at me: there is a shine to her face that reminds me of cheap plastic: she has reddish hair (not really visible in the water), eyes like hot slate, a whitish grey (also not well reproduced in her watery reflection), good legs, ugly knees, racking period pains and a heavy menstrual gush in one so young (really, it’s a virtual geyser once a month). The hair around my ankles rather worries me. For some reason it grows rather heavily on the lower parts of my legs. I’m scared to shave it in case it encourages growth. From the onset of puberty I have been – well – rather tufty. I always shave before wearing a bikini – even then it’s awkward. I am wearing a pair of headphones which gives her (the Bella I see) a slightly scientific look she certainly doesn’t deserve or want. And she is listening to – but you guessed it! – Giuseppe and the Lambs in their chartbuster from a few years back called – see, you do remember! – simply ‘Blood!’
In six chairs against a low wall that divides our wooden beach from the lakeside road running behind us, sit the family of Germans. The father is very tall with a substantial belly which he wears proudly. His name is Wolf. He is reading Charlemagne; yesterday it was Frederick the Great. His wife is half his age and looks Scandinavian. She wears her dark hair in a plait and has a square handsome face. I’ve decided her name is Gudrun. Their three daughters sit beside her, surprisingly pale, thin and nervous little girls to come from this confident, wide-hipped young woman and the big man. These little girls, as yet unnamed, do not leap and shout like the other children who come down to the platform and swim and dive. They sit quietly, often wearing blouses or even jerseys over their swimming costumes despite the heat, and they gaze anxiously across the lake. There’s a little boy, as well. He can’t be more than two, very beautiful with thick golden curls, who sometimes sits on the sixth chair and sometimes on his mother’s lap. When she wishes to swim she passes the boy to one of the little girls and he sits on her lap. Then the mother in a solid and stately fashion descends the iron steps into the water and pushes out gracefully. The girls watch their mother unhappily. The father turns the pages of his book and ignores them all.
Over to the right the Dutch people have their little colony. Father, called Willem but known to his friends as Wim, never swims. He sits in his chair smoking his pipe and reading his paper. His wife, Magda, and daughters, Beatrice and Ria, have beautiful breasts which they display proudly. Watching the girls is a young man with dark greasy hair and an old-fashioned bottle-brush moustache. He has big muscles in his forearms and rather short, thin legs; at least this is so below the knees although they widen beefily and, I must say, rather unpleasantly, around his thighs. The pair of grey trunks he wears are clearly army issue. I have decided that he has escaped from the Foreign Legion. His name is almost certainly Raoul. His eyes are hungry and seldom leave the breasts of the Dutch girls. He pretends to be watching the water-skiers ploughing their watery furrows but I can see through that. Of course he’s wasting his time. Those breasts are not available. They are not for handling, or motherhood or even for show. They are exposed in the interests of uniformity; in order that the upper half of the body may be evenly browned. The young man is barking up the wrong tree, as my poor father once told me. The fashion for going bare-breasted in Europe is cosmetic. It is not derived from any wish to be free.
‘Do you see women removing their brassieres in libraries? Of course not! Bear my advice in mind, Bella. If ever you have breasts do not expose them in the presence of the printed word.’
It set me thinking. Papa was right. You did not see bare breasts in libraries. What could be more provocative than unclothed flesh among books? Words and flesh do not mix. However, in Africa, my father said, many women still uncover their breasts quite naturally. But then, he added, ‘However, though their breasts are free, everything else is in chains.’
Papa knew about these things. Not even Grand-mère quarrelled with his knowledge of Africa. Papa died in Africa three years ago. He’d always wanted to end his life in Africa. So that was lucky, but then I suppose he was a fortunate man. People do not choose where they are born. That’s common enough. What is perhaps not realised is that they seldom choose where they die. I was put in mind of this when we were summoned, Mother and I, to the Foreign Ministry in Paris to be told of Papa’s accident.
‘Who are you and what is your function?’
That was the question I threw at the horrid official who saw us, a sleek robot with a face that showed about as much animation as a shoehorn, with the same smooth sheen. I should add that I wore that day a little black dress and long black lycra gloves, an ensemble suited to the occasion, I thought, enlivened by a choker of amethysts and emeralds (a present from Papa), and that my appearance threw the downstairs flunkies, who took us perhaps for a visiting starlet and her chaperone, into considerable confusion. People do tend to stare at me. A lot. I think it’s the way I walk. The civil servant ignored my challenge and concentrated his attention on my mother.
‘I am afraid, Madame, that I must confirm the death of Monsieur Dresseur. He died somewhere in Central Africa. There’ve been political disturbances. Details are sketchy.’
‘Philippe?’ My mother shook her head as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Gone?’
The shoehorn nodded and the light skidded off his cheap plastic forehead.
Then, still insisting she hadn’t heard: ‘Completely?’ She opened and closed her hands as if to grab hold of something. Then again: ‘Utterly?’ as if the nothing my father had suddenly become was unthinkable. ‘There were absences. He travelled. But we met later, always. Isn’t that so, Bella? We have our own professions, you see.’ She displayed her cameras hopelessly. ‘My subjects are often old; they fade like fruit left too long in a dish.’ A look of panic-stricken cunning appeared in her eyes. ‘There will be a funeral – soon?’
But he was too smart for this. ‘Utterly,’ he repeated.
‘Bella don’t cry,’ my mother said. ‘There must be something still.’
‘You will be informed if anything comes to light,’ said the plastic man. ‘He was attacked, we understand, somewhere in the bush. There were dissidents in the area. Soldiers. The new regime had severed relations with France. Communication is difficult. We will know more in a week or so. Perhaps.’
‘I might be in Chicago,’ said my mother vaguely, ‘or L.A.’
That was when I put my question again. ‘Are you a wave or a particle?’ It derived, as I’m sure you know, from quantum theory and the study of the atom. I had stolen it from Uncle Claude who used to pursue me with the question when he still thought there was a chance of my salvation for science. The particles that make up the atom may be thought of as two things at once, points or waves. An atom is composed of a nucleus orbited by electrons. When studied at rest an electron, say, can be thought of as a round little globe, like a ball-bearing or a billiard ball. But when it’s moving we must think of it as a wave, as a little packet of energy, as a field of force smeared around the nucleus. Now that was the purloined thought behind the question I put to the shoehorn. Was he a wave or a point?
‘I am a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Mademoiselle,’ was his wet and boring answer.
It didn’t much matter. I had already marked him down for a particle. He could only be considered a wave if you thought of him as part of the onrushing momentum carrying Mama and I towards our destiny.
‘Then speak to us,’ I demanded.
But the interview was over, though I noticed that he looked at my amethyst and emerald choker with little piggy eyes.
My mother took the news with terrible composure. She was, at the time, about to fly out on a new project in which she would be photographing film stars for an American magazine and her schedule was hectic. Nonetheless she found time to wind up my father’s estate, sell off our apartment in Paris, remove me from the local school and take me with her to England where I was enrolled in the North London Academy for Girls to the great pain and chagrin of my dear Grand-mère, who regarded the removal of a twelve-year-old ‘daughter of France’ to England to be nothing short of kidnapping. She referred thereafter to my mother as the ‘child stealer’. No doubt, she said, this was how Joan of Arc had been stolen by the Goddams. The Goddams was her way of referring to the English.
‘There are mothers walking across Europe who have seen their children stolen by their Algerian husbands. They walk to draw attention to the theft. I will join them to protest at the taking of Bella to England.’
‘But Maman,’ Claude protested, ‘your arthritis!’
‘Very well, I shall go by wheelchair, and you may push me. No, on second thoughts, you are too busy. You are Mayor now – and mayors cannot go walking whenever they please.’
I remember asking Mama if there was to be a funeral and she explained that without a body this was not possible. However, she promised me that on her return from New York she would arrange a memorial service for friends and family. Sadly, she was delayed in the States where her project, brilliantly transformed into a photographic essay on the oldest female film stars in America, ‘The Eye of Aquinas’, was a great success and when she returned to London some months later she confessed that she had forgotten all about the memorial service.
‘Your Papa would have understood, my little Bella.’
We took a flat on the northern heights of London overlooking a square. It went by the name of Pond Square though it was neither watery nor square but was in fact an ovoid of solid earth covered with tarmac and surrounded by elderly plane trees. Boys played football against the wall of the public convenience which stood rather proudly at one corner having about it the air of an old auberge, rather comfortable and welcoming, or perhaps the sort of modest bar you’d find in some small, out-of-the-way French village.
Appearances deceive. That is their function, particularly in England. I have gathered together a number of useful proverbs which attest to this truth during the course of my English classes at the Academy where I have made reasonable progress over the past three years since we moved to London. I know for instance that beauty is only skin deep, that it is in the eye of the beholder; that handsome is as handsome does. I make my annual visit to my grandmother in the thin house at the top of the village of La Frisette, every July. ‘French leave’ Mama calls it. Like many English expressions it disturbs my grandmother. And when I translate these for her she treats them with disbelief and loathing. Her lips tighten and compress into a hard, thin line, a crack so narrow it would not admit even a coin, and when she sniffs, short and hard, her nostrils pinch together. Her skin is very fine and she looks like a delicate creature flinching when she does that. Anemones, or butterflies’ wings, are not more delicate than the little indentations of distaste registered on my grandmother’s nostrils when I come out with such expressions.
Now I’m back in La Frisette for the duration. Ever since Mama disappeared into America. I suppose she must have found herself – and lost me. She communicates regularly; I get dollar bills, sometimes pretty large denominations, from Tampa and Dallas. She used to scrawl a few lines across the notes: ‘Beauty is always so appropriate – but so fast. Must rush!’ Or: ‘We will have the funeral, one day. Promise.’ But soon the messages stopped and just the bills arrived. I keep the money in the silver trunk under my bed, with my chocolate supplies. I’m saving up, for something.