21

ON THE JETTY

Frontiers seem to melt before my father. Now we’re in Ostend, Belgium, and I hadn’t even noticed. When we reach the coast, it’s raining. The light, grey veil grows on me, covering everything before I realise it’s pouring down. He stops the car and stands on the jetty like a Carthaginian general. The waves chase me up and down the stone steps descending to the sea. He never says: Careful, don’t slip or It’s too dangerous. Nothing is ever too dangerous. Then I run to his side again and we walk hand in hand along the freezing jetty, always close to the edge, ‘to feel the horizon,’ he says. We are not cold because his hand is so warm – the hand of a marcou. As he gazes over the slate-coloured waters, he’s reminded of the first big trip of his life.

‘When I got off the boat, my brothers got me a job in a factory in New York. Then one day I was invited to a tea party. At first, I ate as much as I could because I was so hungry. Then I saw there was a piano. I sat down and played a tune because I was bored and didn’t know anyone. A woman pressed herself against me from behind, lacing her arms around my neck. “Oh, isn’t he cute!” she said. I had never heard the word “cute” before. I couldn’t breathe. Her enormous bosoms were smothering me. I was only fifteen. That may seem old to you, but it’s still very young. You see, I had not touched a woman yet. I was very innocent.’

He may be exaggerating, I feel, for he must have touched his mother and his little sister. But I don’t say anything. In a way we are as horrified as each other – my father, retrospectively, and I, because I can’t imagine him disappearing into enormous bosoms, but rather, looming over them. The memory is there, between us, on the cold quay, as sharp as the wind, as strange as the first day of school. As if he were small all over again in my company, his childhood slaps us in the face.

‘The only women I knew were my mother, my cousins, my little sister. I wasn’t like my brother Bernard.’

‘What did he do?’

‘At thirteen, he slept with a peasant girl in the hay and she had a baby.’

I feel a tinge of pride in my father’s voice.

‘Did he get into trouble?’

‘I don’t know. Your grandfather dealt with it. You know, a Saint Phalle can’t look at a woman without making her go up like a balloon. Look how many children I’ve had.’

I think of my mother. She hasn’t produced any other children – only me. Once, I misguidedly begged her do to so. Horror spread across her face. Slowly, she shook her head as if I were proposing to invite a medieval torturer to tea. My father glances at me and, as so often happens, reads my mind.

‘Your mother is different.’

He doesn’t explain anything else. He doesn’t need to. My mother resembles no one at all, no one with a name. She’s an educated giraffe, a dressed gazelle, a rare artefact, unearthed and dusted, in pristine condition. She’s a bottle found in the sea – its message intact but unreadable.

‘What happened to the peasant girl?’

He looks at me as if he were counting my eyelashes.

‘Catherine, it happened about half a century ago. Men have done things like that forever and women have suffered. It’s unfair and sad, but it has always been and always will be.’

I stare at him.

‘Men are predators, Catherine. You must imagine them like tigers in the jungle or hovering night owls that fall like a stone on a mouse or a rabbit. Fashions and morals change superficially, but men, real men, are hunters and women are their prey. You can write a hundred poems around it, but that’s the bottom truth.’

I am digesting this.

‘Did you fall like a stone on my mother?’

He smiles.

‘I did.’

His eyes are holding mine gleefully.

‘She was so unsuspecting. She didn’t stand a chance.’

I study his features as I would a mysterious rock face. My father is a man. I suddenly realise that. I didn’t before. He was always a gigantic best friend, a shelter, an abode, a shining laugh. But now, as I stare at his Roman emperor nose, his thin lips, his blue, blue eyes, I realise with a shock that he’s not handsome. He’s powerful. Something emanates from his daring, his absence of fear: the stuff of generals, eagles, musketeers – people who took what they wanted, who paid the price, sometimes, but not always. Women become animated in his presence – all women: nuns, secretaries, aunts, teachers, grandmothers, maids, schoolmates, wives. I always noticed their tremor without understanding it. I do now. They have suddenly become rabbits. They have suddenly become prey.

Strangely, I don’t think about my mother – about her being prey. Maybe because she always seems prey to me – prey to everyone – to the aunts, to the concierge, to the nuns, to the cook, all except to strangers, with whom she gets on in a flash: strangers on the bus, in the Metro, in shops, in the street. They seem to recognise her, honour her for what she truly is – someone straight from the moon.

Once they both descended into my bedroom in the middle of the night. Sylvia was out somewhere. Their chattering in the semi-darkness woke me. Half-asleep, I could see them moving in and out of scenes on the wallpaper. My mother had chosen a blood-red toile de Jouy depicting Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s characters, Paul and Virginie, struggling against dreadful circumstances. In my sleepy mind, my parents were the ones who seemed to be lost in forests, shipwrecked, separated and reunited over and over again. Until, suddenly, my father swooped on Poum and twirled her around in a silent swish. I could see her hands fluttering behind his head before he carried her off. She didn’t stand a chance.

But his mind is on other things now. His face has lost its victorious aura. He just squeezes my hand and I can feel his sigh despite the wind.

‘Your brother found it difficult after the war …’

Something in me knows it’s the brother who walked in front of the tanks with a machine gun in his hand. It’s not so much the description as the tone that I recognise, for my father’s voice plucks a different chord for each of his sons.

‘He wasn’t made for peace, for towns, for jobs, for a normal, steady life. He came back, ready for more of the same. But there were no tanks in Paris, no sudden attacks, no enemy – or no immediate enemy.’

He shakes his head.

‘He had serial weddings. To the point where I asked him: “Why do you need to marry them every time?”’

‘Did he love one especially?’

My father shakes his head.

‘No, it was restlessness. He was the kind of man who was good at war but not good at peace. His captain explained a lot to me when I went to see him, but it was too late – too late for me to understand my son.’

He frowns.

‘I did all the wrong things. I was not helpful. I asked too much. And he broke away.’

I wait.

‘Something snapped between him and me. We are very different men. But I didn’t try to understand him enough.’

His eyes slightly glazed, he looks at me hungrily as if I, or someone right behind me, could provide him with an explanation. The wind is becoming colder and colder; it wrenches itself from the clouds and takes swipes at us. We just walk and walk on the jetty. My father’s sadness is a physical thing, a dark room we have to walk through, right there, on the stone above the grey sea. He sighs again.

‘I was so proud of him. But when he came back, it was just one thing after the other. Did I tell you about the little Beuniot?’

I shake my head, but he doesn’t even look. Sometimes I think he forgets who he’s speaking to.

‘Your brother came to me. This girl was expecting his baby and he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t love her anymore.’

‘Did he sleep with her in the hay?’

‘No, Catherine, not the hay.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I got him to give me her name and address. I went to see her.’

His face is sad.

‘Was she a nice person?’

He turns round gently towards me and looks through me as he so often does, but without shutting me out either, as if he were including us both in something wider, wilder, more wilful, more independent than anything we could be on our own.

‘She was a lovely person. She was short, fair, with blue eyes. A little plump maybe, with an honest face – she could have been quite ordinary, but she wasn’t. There was only charm, only beauty, only sweetness there to see.’

‘What did she say?’

‘We didn’t say much. She knew he didn’t love her anymore, even while she was still desperately in love with him.’

‘Did you help her?’

‘Yes, I helped her. I had her stay in a very comfortable place to have her baby. I talked to her father, to her mother. It was just after the war. Everybody was very impressed by your brother.’

‘But wasn’t what he did … wrong?’

He looks at me sharply.

‘Men do these things.’

‘But he must have loved her at one time.’

‘Yes. I tried to convince your brother to marry her, but he refused point blank. He was already interested in someone else.’

‘Someone not so nice?’

‘Yes, Catherine, someone not half so nice. The little Beuniot was a beautiful person altogether. Even though she wasn’t from the kind of family I wanted for him, I would have loved to have had her as a daughter-in-law.’

‘Can we go and have lunch with her?’

‘No.’

‘Did you not see her again?’

‘Yes, I saw her several times. I saw her child and held him in my arms – my own grandson. But a man who loved her and respected her came into her life and married her and adopted her son, too. So we have to leave them in peace.’

Maybe the little Beuniot, as he called her, was my brother’s soul – the one he had lost in the war. I know what the soul is. It’s when you feel you are really there, and not in some other place, quite separate from your life. In the war, my brother was with his lack of fear. In his element every time he moved, his soul smiling hard. Everything he did had meaning. In the war, his soul was a fine thing, as blond, as honest, as free and pure as the little Beuniot. When he came back it was no longer like her at all. This is what my father’s words say – between the lines.

‘It made me feel very bad, Catherine. I felt I had betrayed her myself.’

I turn then and hug his big tummy and we stand there above the sea until he feels better. Then he takes my hand again and his other hand flies out above the waves.

‘Do you know, that woman at the party was my introduction to America!’

‘The one with the big bosoms?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you like it when she squashed you?’

He smiles.

‘Not really. I was too innocent.’

‘Like the little Beuniot?’

‘Yes, Catherine, like the little Beuniot.’

He sighs.

‘What happened next?’

‘I worked in the factory. Then I caught jaundice because I worked too hard and ate too little. Maybe that’s why I’m always hungry today.’

He looks around as if hoping to find a boulangerie on the stone pier.

‘Then I went into banking. I started at the lowest level, bringing coffees to the employees, and I got to the top. Your grandfather’s lessons stood me in good stead. I found I had an instinct for the American stock exchange. People fought each other to give me their money. Then came the Crash.’

‘The Crash?’

‘Yes, the Crash of Wall Street. I lost everything. People threw themselves out of windows, just because they had lost all their money.’

He laughs.

‘What did you do?’

‘I had five children by then. I went back to another bank and they asked me what I wanted, explaining they couldn’t give me what I had before. I said: “Any job at any salary.” Within a year I was back at the top.’

He shakes his head.

‘I got on with Americans. I nearly became American. If the war hadn’t happened …’

‘Would you have stayed there with Marguerite?’

He doesn’t answer, chewing his toothpick. He frowns inside himself and I know he’s trying very hard not to think of Marguerite. We are pacing the jetty now, as if it had suddenly become too small. He clears his throat.

‘The America I knew is not the America of today. It was the time of innocence. Now, because of the Vietnam War, they are losing the very quality which seems to define them.’

I’m still thinking of Marguerite and trying not to. I can see her flat, the pot plants she grows by the window, the shelves of books, the yellow light, not too bright or too dark, just nice. I can see the design in the old kilim carpet near the front door. It’s welcoming and careful, as if each object had a life of its own and really wanted to be there. I can’t see Marguerite herself but I can feel her warm smile, her quiet and calm. I know she must like to read and doesn’t have any old aunts. Out of focus, she remains just on the edge of my mind. My father is frowning again. Suddenly he starts talking and I’m not surprised it’s about a war.

‘Those poor Americans GIs are suffering so much in Vietnam. When one of them is caught and tortured by the Vietcong, he will repeat his name, his rank in the US Army and his serial number, over and over again. They are trained to do this.’

‘Are many being tortured?’

‘Many. They are very brave. But this war is a terrible mistake. When a foreign country invades your country, every man, woman and child becomes a soldier. All you can think of is kicking them out. The Americans will lose in the end, just like the Germans in Paris, just like Napoleon and Hitler in Russia.’

I ask him if he misses America. He looks out to the sea.

‘It’s a fantastic country.’

Sometimes he doesn’t answer me directly. Sometimes he has no real answer. Then he turns spontaneously and stares at me fair and square.

‘Just before leaving for America, I was in a field walking with my cousin Jeanne and her sister. I think I was in love with my cousin Jeanne, obscurely – I didn’t even realise it then. Suddenly a bull came at us at a full gallop. Before I could think, I told them “Run!” and pushed them away towards the fence. The bull was distracted. In that second, I squeezed my elbows against my ribs, bent my head and ran towards him. He stopped, surprised, and then swung round and ran the other way.’

His face is happy and relaxed.

‘I think I left for America a few days later.’