‘The staff’ sounds pretty grand; Dr Barbour speaks of ‘my people’ and every secretary is now a personal assistant: they speak of him and the word ‘parano’ is often used. These overblown expressions are a way of simplifying complicated structures. PermRep like all politicians lends himself to caricature but the reality is a bundle, complex and devious and tortuous, like most people. He’s stiff with employees, talks about precision, exactitude. ‘Don’t ever use a phrase like round-about-midnight, he’ll ask whether you mean ten to or a quarter past.’ He runs a tight ship; is rigid, fussy, suspicious, authoritarian. Paranoid is a silly word because it’s lazy.
Partly it would be his upbringing, and schooling. Fifty years ago he would have been given to Latin quotations, and still corrects the punctuation in written reports. Partly it’s an inheritance of moral principles and political certainties. He has an annoying way of always being in-the-right, and rubbing-it-in. Being without humour is no help. Recently he seems to have been unusually tetchy. He hasn’t been feeling very well, and hasn’t made up his mind what to do about it.
It would be useful to consult a doctor but there are difficulties. He hadn’t thought of it when last on leave and has at present no good reason nor even pretext for making the trip. In European medicine he has no great confidence; has heard of a good man in Heidelberg but there’s a language problem. In England they speak English of a sort, but he doesn’t like the fuss involved. To minimize the feeling that this is all too much ado he went to see a man locally, making the appointment himself. Dr Roger (whom he has met socially) is well thought of in the Community and there’s no ice to break. A wide general-practice among the diplomatic crowd; an easy-smiling cheerful man and the great advantage is that he speaks English. He has a nice duplex in the Contades, is experienced with the Community’s little ailments (epidemics of laryngitis. Carpal-tunnel Syndrome), makes little jokes, gives good parties, plays a lot of golf and tennis: small wonder that though his name is Pilkington he’s always known as Blessington. But he’s a careful man too, and serious.
Listens to PermRep, examines, writes prescriptions, would rather like a blood test. Dr Barbour jibs a bit at that; rather too public in his view (Eleanor can be sent to the pharmacy). Dr Roger understands diplomats; he’s one himself. It is always good sense to have a second – a specialist – opinion. He suggests an eminent and excellent Professor in the Faculty. In this confidential consulting-room sphere his patient allows himself to pull a face; unenthusiastic. Dr Roger isn’t a fool by any account. Man shares a widespread view; that the French are brilliant but unreliable.
“I do know a man, speaks excellent English, regarded as good if unconventional; does a lot in close harmony with colleagues in the States: suppose I were to give you a note for him?”
This would be comic but for Dr Barbour’s obsession with never being indiscreet: the name Valdez means nothing to him. Crystal has spoken, too much and too often until she learned better, about her ‘onetime’ eccentric in the research institute. The name ‘Ray’ had been dropped, but not listened to. In community circles, for Strasbourg is a gossipy town, in this respect much like Bonn, Raymond’s reputation begins to be known to a few people, such as Dr Roger, but hasn’t reached the Permanent Representative, who allows himself to prefer a man in private practice to haughty specialists who speak a humiliating technical French and are arrogant, condescending…
Madame Bénédicte who never mentions a name if it can be avoided, and pretends not to know anyone’s occupation, did not go into details. ‘Young Mireille has been silly enough to form an emotional attachment.’ The permanent representative of a Power has weight in Community circles and draws a lot of water in her book. If he expresses a violent dislike for anything within her sphere of activity, she does not ask whether this is rational behaviour; it so seldom is. Something will be done, and he has the right to know nothing about it: that’s what he pays for. Success in business depends upon getting other people to do the work for you. She wants a customer to feel comfortable.
It isn’t a coincidence either that Dr Valdez knows nothing about PermRep; a scrap or two of Community hearsay – this isn’t Brussels but it’s just as gossipy. Janine’s demeanours, maybe misdemeanours in the past had never interested him much: everyone has things in their life they prefer not to talk about. She had floated into his and at ‘the bottom of his heart’ (wherever that is) he had known that she would float out. Such things are painful when they happen. William had a notion that it was on her account someone took an acute dislike to his nose; a good job of surgery that had been – painful, very, but pain is not a punishment handed out for sleeping with Janine. You accept it. Pain is one of the world’s basic realities. William is an ex-security-guard and sees things under the bed. People use the most brutal violence to man, as to tree, earth or water, for the basest of motives. A man, a woman, a small child – such are the ways of the Crab. There’s nothing to say, beyond Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, I beg your pardon for the kitchen Latin.
“Felix qui potuit,” said Raymond sententiously, putting Joséphine instantly on her mettle. School Latin.
“Happy is he – I hope I may be allowed to say she – who can, perhaps could? – understand the causes of things. Rather a trite remark, not? Who’s that, Aristotle?”
“Henri Fabre, a very great saint. Marvellous writer, wonderful scientist, the bastards in the Sorbonne wouldn’t give him a job, he spent his savings on a little cottage in Provence with a bare patch of ground, made the greatest entomological study ever known and while he was at it filled the garden with flowers and rare plants for his beasts to feed on.”
“You could do the same here.” August is the month of many many sorts of spiders and the house is full of them, giving pleasure.
“A century ago Provence was not polluted. Somebody in England looked in a rockpool at low tide, said never again will man see what I now see. We’re losing biological species a thousand a day. I can call spirits from the vast deep, though precious few of them will do as I say.” It has been raining hard for several days and there isn’t much to do but drink and talk.
Of the very essence of romanticism is the truth so often trivialized into cliché, that the adventure begun in sunlight ends in humid, chilly shadow. Marie has awakened the sleeping Manda in the field by the river by tickling him with a grassblade. He opens his eyes and her smiling face close to his own is haloed by the dazzle of the sunlight directly behind her. Jacques Becker’s film is well known to both because Casque d’Or is a classic of the cinema and there is nothing in it that is not perfect, necessary: it walks the tightrope of talent stretched taut, flowers into miracle.
Those two have one weekend. As they come out of the dark little church where Marie has watched the comic, touching peasant marriage, the chill strikes her and she draws her shawl closer. Round the corner innocently wheeling his bicycle, is the traitor, and that evening, sitting on the doorstep of the little shack, Manda knows what he has to do, and that he has no choice in the matter. To die is nothing much but to renounce the easy path makes a man.
Neither Raymond nor Joséphine will speak of this. He has little experience of life, though much of death, but his instincts are fortified by the discipline he has chosen to follow, and – allegro vivace – to disregard. She in a shortish time has known something of the world, but a woman is born to understanding. The hair’s breadth between pleasure and pain is her biology.
Nothing chillier than a chilly August. But the house is dry and warm; Ray has learned the art of a log fire. The last time down-the-hill Joséphine had bought beef, and to save this from going off had put it in a bowl with a bottle of wine poured over it. There are some bacon scraps, and one day they had picked a basket of mushrooms, so that she has made a bourguignon stew, which has been all night in the oven and now it smells heavenly: the biggest potatoes had been put in the woodashes, and a field salad made of ‘the weed from the garden’. Here recollections of children’s botany are better than his, since he has none at all. She has promised him (‘is this mushroom an amanita?’) that ‘we won’t die poisoned’. Another bottle, an extravagant one, Brother Gorenflot’s favourite Romanée, is taking the air, not too close to the embers.
“‘Als ik kan’” said Raymond watching the play of the little green and blue flames: “it was the motto of the painter Jan van Eyck.” Joséphine has less trouble with Flamand (she is Alsacienne born) than with Latin.
“When I can? If I can? As long as I am able?”
“It has to be stronger than that, I think. ‘To my limit’? ‘To my last limit’. Or perhaps it is humble. ‘Knowing my limit’.
“Ours is awful. ‘We keep faith’ – one wonders how often they did.”
“I had the Van Eyck picture once, cut out and pasted up. Chancellor Rollin praying to the Madonna. In every line of him a frightful crook but his prayer is utterly sincere.”
“Perhaps he says ‘I will always be faithful to you darling in my fashion’.”
“Yes, probably that’s the best we can do,” looking after her with love. “But you mustn’t be cynical, my darling. ‘To our utmost’ and we make that ours.”
“At school they went on no end about honour. There was an Irish girl called Honour. We used to tease her. She said it was quite a common name, there.”
“Not a bad one, either. I had a book once of American history – Indians. A Century of Dishonour – one of the best titles I know.
Joséphine is remembering.
“There were things for which we had to give ‘our word of honour’ and one had to think carefully, before one did so. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid.”
“It is what we lose. It can also be what we win back.” She stretched out her hand, and put it in his, as she had done in the restaurant, in Paris.
They’ve gone and modernized Gitanes! One of the last remaining symbols of la-belle-France… which should have been eternal, and a national monument like Guimard’s Métro entrances. Joséphine’s cigarette-packet was on the kitchen table; the petrol blue now a chaste Madonna colour, the neon-green lettering a slimmed and sobered white. The Gitana herself still danced the tarantella in her swirl of smoke, defiant as ever, but she seemed smaller, less robust; the famous black silhouette now a stage-lit sweetheart about to take a bow, as though knowing the performance is over. As a doctor Raymond is bound to disapprove of her but his affections remain intact. She is no pasty-faced Marianne smirking in the mayor’s office but the France which always somehow survives, loathed by all and still inspiring love.
Joséphine came in upon the wool-gatherer from outer space, picked up the packet, put a cigarette in her mouth in a challenging way (she’s not supposed to go over three a day but it was plainly his fault for standing staring) and said abruptly,
“How is William?”
“No means of knowing.”
“Dammit, you’re the doctor,” snapping the lighter like the lock of a pistol.
“Quite right. He’s a lot better. Beyond that, you may as well go to the casino, take a hand at blackjack. Give me a card, whoops it’s a deuce, another, it’s a trey, yay, one more I’ve got a five-and-under. Go for it and shit, it’s a knave and I’m busted. A cancer can go coy, playing footsie, now you see me now you don’t. Been known to turn back, don’t like it here, I’m going on holiday. But one never can say, Right, you, you’re paid off, goodbye.”
(Just the odd time, a year turns into ten, the ten into twenty, fellow goes out on the street and is blown up by a bomb. The Crab had lost interest, went to play with a little girl of nine.)
Joséphine has listened to Doctor-Valdez-playing-cards; one couldn’t for a moment guess whether she was interested.
“You remind me of Geoffrey saying ‘he calls the knaves jacks, this peasant’. Oh well, I’m a very old-fashioned girl myself. There was one the other day – she’s modern, you understand – got herself raped in an underground parking, said she wasn’t at all bothered since her cunt was an underground parking. The more the merrier.”
Raymond, straightfaced: “My dick when fully erect measures twenty-two centimetres.” Joséphine has an acute sense of the ridiculous, bless her.
“My fan – the name of the rose is the Rose. Won’t be rose-like without the help of Monsieur Saint-Laurent. Fresh sea water any good? The Aphrodite Anadyomene did no better.” she sat down and started to peel potatoes… he could see her looking for a ‘tactful formula’. They aren’t any, but she tries to soothe – down, dog – her dreadful habit of being blunt. Can one put a thing like this on a rational footing?
“What’s it like, being a Jesuit?” It is like, he thinks, the clerihew about a well known French philosopher.
‘D’you know the creeda
Jacques Derrida?
There ain’t no reada.
There ain’t no writa
Eitha.’
“It’s no different to being any other kind of man. Now and then it’s exceptionally disciplined, like being in the Foreign Legion. Betimes they tell you do some weird things. One they sent to Seven Hills, that’s somewhere near Adelaide. ‘Make wine’. He didn’t know a damn thing about it, makes now the best wine in Australia. But the Legion looks after its own you know, they have a home for the aged cripples. Meantime, can’t you tell? I’m like the one in the Piaf song. You smell good of sea water, I smell good, of the Hot Sand.” She bursts out laughing, lovingly.
“Mon Légionnaire…”
It went on raining, Phrases wore thin, wore out. Hung be the heavens with black gave way to never-seen-anything-like-it; the roof started to leak, so that one put buckets under drips, or one would have, if there were any buckets, and jokes about Sadie Thompson never had been that funny: when the battery of Joséphine’s little radio failed, the Let’s get the hell out of here became overmastering. Down-the-hill might be a startling new inland lake but who knows? – maybe the sun is shining. Throw everything into the Land Rover and make a dash for it; nothing could be easier. What is going on in the world? This elemental violence appears excessive. Floods here and forest fires elsewhere. Tornados. The polar ice is melting. Krakatoa has erupted, very likely. Joséphine who is easily given to drama is working herself into a lather.
When violence gives way again to the humdrum, the banalities of being wise after the event appear in deepcut relief upon the frontal, still intact, of bombed temples. It could be something pompous about Look on my works ye mighty, but it’s more likely to be ‘I did tell you you were driving too fast.’ Not that she’ll admit it, or allow herself to believe it. She knows this path by heart. It’s impossible to capsize a Land Rover anyhow. He did say ‘Slow down’; at least, he always claimed he had.
Fifty years ago the woodcutters looked after the paths in the hills. They split logs lengthways and laid them diagonally, primitive but efficient drains; they cleared boulders from eroded slopes and packed them to reinforce soft shoulders. Some of these paths have been carved out wider, brutally, for the passage of today’s heavy machinery: on others, no longer used, the housekeeping has been neglected. Heavy rain starts a hundred little springs and streams across the face of the mountain; torrential rain may be expected to start torrents, which wash the subsoil out into deep gullies. On the path down to the forester’s house there was a kink which had originally been quite a long way from a steep slope, but over the years erosion brought it much closer. Quite large stones had tumbled into the valley; roots and stubs of long-ago trees had been uncovered, loosened, carried away in their turn. One would not notice, until the last minute, that what had seemed a big bank of moss and grass held together by a tangle of heather and bilberry was in fact a fraud; the topsoil had leaked away progressively because under it the sand layer had been carried off. This storm had sent the whole bank down a steep and nasty drop. Once the offside wheels of – even a Land Rover – go past the point of balance you are teetering on the edge of what will kill you very easily.
Sitting on the off side, which was beginning to sag slowly at first, but the momentum piles up, Raymond could get the door open but underneath him was a horrible yawning chasm.
“Jump girl – jump.” No time for polite injunctions or pious ejaculations. Could be described as a bellow, a yap, a howl. He was ejected, in not even three syllables and what the Army used to call ‘without vaseline’.
For Joséphine it was a lot more difficult, sitting on the near side. The door began facing upward; the driver’s seat doesn’t help matters; there are complications like steering-wheels, all sorts of fucking hazards. She’s an athletic girl. Fear, which according to cliché lends wings, is more apt to paralyse, so she’s lucky to be fearless. It took a very long time to scramble, and a bunch of muscles such as one doesn’t think of using as a rule, and some luck. Donkeys are patient, obstinate, sturdy, tenacious. Brit virtues, these. The Land Rover was obstinate before tumbling, and that helped save her life, very likely.
She pulled herself clumsily to her feet: if camels are that awkward she’s sorry for them too. Without any notion of speaking aloud she said, “I’ve probably sprained my wrist. Or my ankle. Or both.” Oh shut up, ninny. Looked around in a drunken way. Oh God where is Ray? Limped to the edge, heart banging; this horrible slidy lip with water trickling over.
“Ray. God. Ray.” She knelt down in the water and sicked up. Then she saw him, ten metres down, a rag, clinging.
He had slid, scorched, down hillsides on his arse and his elbow, but the several tons of hurtling metal had missed him. Perhaps it hit a rock; it must have bounced a bit. He was hanging on to a root, bramblebush or something. He waved arms and legs about; they seemed to work. He tried for a toehold. Under all this loose soil and scree there must be something solid. The distance back to the road was immense; also looking nastily smooth. Maybe one could sort of scrabble sideways. The ten metres of climb turned into thirty, of fearful work. Clothes sticking to him, what’s left of them. Both the arse and elbow in a sad state but don’t seem busted. When he got his face up over the edge he saw Joséphine kneeling there staring at him: she had followed every step from up above, too frightened to speak or even cry. They stood there tottery, holding on to one another. He said something silly. She began to laugh and cry and be sick, all together. Poor girl, she had nothing left to be sick with.
“Oh dear,” wiping a wet dirty face on a wet dirty sleeve. “Geoffrey’s good Land Rover!” Then she had to laugh again. That’s shock, of course. “Thank you, Brits.”
“What Brits?”
“If it had been Japanese I’m sure it would have gone over quicker.”
“What do we do now?”
“We walk. Can’t be all that far.” Not too sure she could. Valdez is supposed to be a doctor. Useless in the circumstances.
“Don’t think it’s sprained, just a bad wrench.”
“Perhaps it’ll get easier as I go along.”
It didn’t take much over an hour: they were soaked through anyhow.
The forester made little of it. To hear him such things happened every day. Occasion for a good guffaw. Even his wife, dry clothes and hot coffee, aspirin, disinfectant, sticking plaster, was pretty unperturbed. Sepp’ll drive you down to the hospital. Nothing very terrible, not as though a tree fell on you.
Good grief – townspeople would have been screaming for the helicopter. Sepp was even jaunty about the Land Rover. Ach what, we’ll bring the hauler up, once we get the cable hitched on she’ll wind back up nice as Nelly. Bring her down here for the insurance.
His own (Japanese) four by four was surprisingly warm and well padded. Outpatients were thorough but undramatic. Radios showed no bone damage. A tetanus shot would be no bad idea; that’s a lot of skin missing off your backside, mate, but the rest is only cuts and bruises. Extensive, but there’s nothing internal. You’ll be pretty sore for a few days. Some delayed shock, the young lady, but she can go home if she feels up to it.
“Oh dear,” said Silvia. “You’ve been in the wars again.” Raymond’s hateful colleagues were downright hilarious; a week’s supply of jokes about Shortarse Valdez. He went gratefully to bed with some hot cocoa. There was a long but unanguished phone call from Joséphine. Geoffrey had screamed a bit but come round to a fairish level of equanimity. The insurance company will just jolly well stump-up. He’d been thinking of a new one anyhow.
Monsieur Philippe goes about his business but he seethes now and then; feelings of irritability that he wants to scratch. He had gone to a lot of trouble and it had sort of caved in on him. That pair, the doctor and the woman, whom he had counted on, seemed to have disappeared; gone on holiday very likely, it’s the season for holidays, he’d like to get away himself. The man Barton was at home all right, glimpsed from afar a couple of times but caution, caution, it didn’t do to be seen. He felt a standstill. He wanted to find some way of hitting the fellow direct, something that would hurt, damage.
He was reading the paper when the idea came to him. Simplicity and force, how had he never thought of that before? Some of these imbecile independence-warriors in Brittany had stolen industrial explosive from a quarry; dynamite, gelignite, whatever it’s called. He knows nothing about the subject but it sounds quite simple. The stuff is easily placed without attracting attention, can be detonated at a comfortable distance. They’d blown up – at least, created a lot of damage – a tax office, a sub-prefecture. Symbols of authority to cock a snook at. Works very well. You create fear, uncertainty, apprehension, as well as the physical damage you cause. And you can be anonymous or not, exactly as you please. The more he thought about it the more he liked it. But how do you get hold of explosives? Not his field. .
The man-at-arms will know; sort of thing he does know. Monsieur Philippe is not keen on taking a lout like that into his confidence but has quite enough of a hold upon him to ensure that his mouth stays shut. A large noisy pub is easily found, where the company one keeps is unnoticed by anybody. Outline the notion after a few drinks.
“Explosives I wouldn’t know. Sure I know how to do it, goes back a long way that, during the war, railways or whatever, stick of the whosit in the crankshaft. But that stuff’s pretty closely guarded, sure, mines, quarries, demolition job on old buildings, but not sure I can get you that. Be pretty pricy too. I got a better idea. Gas tank, ordinary butane cylinder, countryside’s full of them, that’d be easy. Disadvantage though, weighs a bit and bulky, can’t just put it in your pocket.” Yes indeed. Open it, light it, you’ve plenty of time to get away.
“The price would be right.”
“Mate, the price comes in two halves. Getting it, yes, I reckon that could be managed. I know of a village, up in the hills, the shop keeps them in the shed, haven’t much more than a padlock to bust.”
“No no, that makes it too obvious. But getting a key to fit this padlock…”
“Maybe. He might have twenty tanks there, the truck doesn’t come round that often and one less might not be missed for a week or two. Would cost you though. But placing it, that’s another ball game. No no, Nelly, there you’re on your own.”
“I daresay the principal might be expected to throw in a decent bonus.”
“You tell him from me, pad his figure with a few zeroes, still won’t give me the horn. I drive trucks, I have some nice stuff inside these trucks, pay my holidays in Bermuda, blowing up houses is too rich for my blood. Just for getting it – cash up front, and no credit cards. Liquid, mate, in the bank in Luxembourg.”
The bargain was too steep, but Monsieur Philippe feels a raging thirst there’s no quenching until that fancy palazzo goes up skywards.
All very well for him! – sparing a spiteful thought for Terry-the-Trucker, rolling in the profits from cigarettes, probably illegal immigrants, in fact you-name-it: muscles like Popeye and the brains of a black beetle. Monsieur Philippe is prudent. Stops the car a long way back: this hillside ground is dry and drains well but it won’t do to leave any tell-tales behind. There’s a bit of a slope down to the courtyard and just as well; carrying this gas tank is impossible. Brains are better than muscles. If the tank makes tracks that’s unimportant; he is wearing an old wornout pair of canvas sneakers he’d found in the dustbin, and ancient gardening gloves. Thus equipped Minnie Mouse crossed the courtyard with his burden. That was scary but he’s pretty sure that bedrooms are at the back and nobody comes along the path which is a dead end and marked as such a long way back. Where to place his bomb? Not going to risk climbing steps – under the steps is surely best. The screw of the valve is hideously tight; he had to wrestle with that, sweating like a pig in a monsoon, what seemed a good five minutes. Once he had the thing lit, scramble all aircraft; he fair scuttled, backing the car till he could turn it, sweating, it’s a Turkish bath inside, he’s making enough noise to waken the entire village. He hears no bang but the whole idea is to be well out of the way before there’s any bang. He was back out on the main road thinking of where to dump the shoes and the gloves before there was a distant whump, so unimportant one wondered whether that was It. And now there is traffic again so concentrate on driving rather slow and cautious. His mouth of course was cinder-dry and he’d thought of everything except water to drink.
“Well,” said the gendarmerie brigadier, “you were lucky in a way. Pretty amateurish, if he’d known how to direct a charge like that in a confined space… not been getting on the wrong side of any Corsicans, have you?” William’s friends in the PJ aren’t greatly excited either.
“Impelled by vulgar curiosity,” said Xavier. “Not exactly hotfooting it out there with the technical squad. Know better than to tread on the gendarmerie’s toes. Of course, if the insurance people were to book a formal complaint, and if an investigating magistrate were to refer that to us, be a different pair of shoes. I can do a bit of discreet eavesdropping. What d’you make of this yourself? This your little pallywally or have you got some more funny friends?”
“I’m just an innocent householder,” said William. “They’ve been very busy all morning collecting little bits of débris. A gas tank like this was stolen up in the hills and they may get somewhere with that. I know who and so do you, and where’s the direct proof? Not perhaps a characteristic approach, which I suppose he thinks clever, and he must have an accomplice, like who punched Doctor Valdez in the eye, huh?”
“So patience; he’s getting bolder; one of these days he’ll trip and we’ve got him. I’ll have a quiet collegial word with the gendarmerie lieutenant.”
“Leaving me out of it.”
This is the way it works, thought William. I surprise myself; I become indifferent to the petty ways of the world. The insurance man, chicanery personified, the explosives man from the City fire department – the man from the local paper (but Geoffrey is quite friendly with his editor; three or four lines in the country edition). Quite right; all this is so unimportant. I was a Janeite without knowing it. Knowing it, one enjoys it more.
He has been reading Pee and Pee, supplied by Dolores. Not at all like her reading aloud, but she has explained that.
Addicted he is; this one hooked him too, but ‘not the same’. She’s very funny but in a spiteful acid fashion he found himself liking less. Reminding him of the Marquis, to who indeed Mr Collins had been the bread-and-butter of Ministries, while Lady Catherine was a phenomenon one met with daily in the sixteenth arrondissement and around the Parc Monceau. Mr Darcy he had met with in many antechambers, while Mr Bennet was a well known and extremely cynical Academician who hadn’t written anything in the last twenty years but made a very nice living for all that.
Dolores, appealed to, said that this was Jane when very young and alarmingly clever. He could agree that it was extremely brilliant but he didn’t believe that Elizabeth Bennet would be so quick and so brave at answering-back. But never mind, said Dolores, this prepared you for the mature and beautiful Jane. Persuasion next and that is the best of all.
As he got further, yes; were they even so exaggeratedly ridiculous? Politicians’ wives, every scrap as talkative as Miss Bates but far less kindhearted (indeed a great deal less sensible, and really quite as silly and as snobbish as Mrs Bennet.) Pillars of party-politics as vulgarly on-the-make as Mr Elton, especially with a Mrs Elton to push them. Worthies, as wearisomely in the right as Mr Knightley (to whom he had taken an instant and durable dislike.) And be honest, at the time when the Marquis had been a sought-after television personality, interviewers had often been the Reverend Mr Collins in spades. He had stood in the shadows, behind the lights of the ‘plateau’, unable to believe his own eyes and ears. An excessively brilliant Minister, dyed-in-the-wool National School of Administration, had turned out gentle – and charitable – in private life, and that shed some light upon Mr Darcy. In England as in France – or anywhere at all.
Joséphine was reading Persuasion which she said she’d found ‘at home’, to the accompaniment of some doubt ‘how it had got there’. Her claim that Geoffrey had never opened a book in his life was certainly an exaggeration: the cliché of hard-riding claret-swilling wooden-headed barons is one she likes to promote. Raymond’s acquaintance among barons is not large. He supposed there would be more like the Marquis, immensely civilized, widely read; as many no doubt with no great taste for the printed page. Given a guess he would suppose that by and large a country gentleman living in an ancestral château thinks of the library as an essential attribute of his home even when he spends more of his time in the gunroom. At the least there’d be collections of classics, calf bound, in the major European languages. Didn’t the women read? Of course they did, and does one have to say ‘also’? All over north-eastern France you find ruins, where the battlefields of ’14–18 left quite often no stone standing above ground of these country châteaux, just as, throughout central Europe, you hear fearful stories of Russians burning all the books to keep themselves warm; of drunken Americans wreaking equal havoc: châteaux had also well-stocked cellars. Favoured billets for the licentious conquerors. And under all régimes widespread pillaging was the rule. However, Joséphine’s home has not been attacked since the seventeenth century. You would have to go back to ‘Les Suédois’ – in Alsace legendary figures of dread – to find this sort of destruction. Both French and German troops were generally kept in better order. It is true that the famous library of Strasbourg burned during the siege of 1870; true too that the Kaiser was horrified to hear of this, and ordered all the universities of Germany to do what they could to make good Christendom’s appalling loss. One way or another there isn’t anything extraordinary about finding quite a nice little edition of Jane Austen – lacking to be sure modern critical apparatus and commentary by the likes of Dr Chapman – in the library of a European country baron. Some grandmother or great-aunt of Joséphine has left pressed country flowers between the pages as a bookmark.
She is enjoying Persuasion – now this is ‘adult art’. Vague school-girl recollections of Mr Bennet being witty about that ludicrous Mr Collins had left no real mark. But Anne Elliot is nearly thirty. The bloom is off. In fact she is described as thin, nigh haggard, and slightly faded: now who does that remind Joséphine of?
Doctor Valdez is catching up on recent medical literature. The room, which is always full of books, lying about everywhere as well as in shelves up to the ceiling, has a pleasant literary feel of peace and quietude. Two people reading, and not much conversation to break a blessèd silence. In the silence, a small noise, definable as a chuckle.
“You’re enjoying that… It was my friend Mr Kipling’s favourite… I don’t think I’ve ever read it.”
“It was the last she wrote; seems generally acknowledged the best. There’s a very dramatic Happening, as near as Jane will allow herself to get to Violence.” Yes, Joséphine is also ripe to enter the Society of Janeites (playing a bigger role in Raymond’s recent life than the Society of Jesus).
“What’s that?” Bored anyhow with Americans being extremely earnest about diabetes.
“Stupid Louisa acting the goat, falls off the step of the pier, hits her silly nut and they all think she’s DEAD.”
“Like me tumbling into the ravine.” Raymond is carrying a fine collection of half-healed cuts and bruises. “Good God. But she isn’t…”
“Of course not. But makes I can tell you one hell of a stir.”
We speak of a kindly silence. Generally, I think, we mean that our hearing is not – for a blessed moment – assaulted by the bawling of the world. There is another sort; the silence that obtains between two people in kindness with each other.
This was interrupted by Raymond yawning, at first imperceptibly but gathering momentum as is the way of yawns until it splits one.
“Is that a dog outside?” asked Joséphine, “or is the lighthouse sending fog signals?” It was nowhere near so late but
“One, two, three; Time, time.”
It might have been three; far into the night; when the phone rang. Since Doctor Valdez is not in general practice this is a rarity. And probably a wrong number but he still has to get out of bed (having it next door one only encourages the thing).
“Yes, Valdez,” and then he listened for a long time but Joséphine has woken, has even switched a light on. To help him listen? Or to watch his face. Sometimes it can be like a burglar alarm ringing in some office.
“You have to tell me, you know.” He looks constrained, not to say embarrassed. He had said very little.
“You’re not in any way hurt?… That will be my affair… I’ll be along. Do nothing before then.” He sighed and said, “I have to get dressed. Hazard of this business.”
“I’m waiting.”
“It was William. Someone seems to have put a bomb. No very great damage.”
“Then what are you doing?” At that, a flash of sarcasm.
“I’m going to sit on the café terrace, drink Pernod and listen to the band.” A Bogart line and rather a good one.
“Exactly,” getting out of bed. “Order one for me.” Ray looking for his shoes and wondering what to say. Whatever – it would be of no use.
Joséphine, equally, appears concentrated upon not getting her trousers on back to front.
“Darling there’s no possible point. This may take me some time.”
“I haven’t bothered with a clean shirt. I’d better have a jacket, seems it might be chilly out.”
One faces the music, as they say. Likewise, firing squads. Marshal Ney, it’s said, took off his hat, said “Soldiers!” – hadn’t time for more. Raymond has much too much time.
“I don’t think this is the moment for discussion. Where are the car keys, bonjour?”
“There isn’t going to be any discussion.”
Now Leonora, facing Pizarro who had already raised the arm with the knife, says simply, ‘I am his wife.’ It’s quite all right on the stage. That is what operas are for: to be dramatic. Nobody suggests that Leonora when dressed up as the executioner’s assistant cuts an unconvincing figure. But why is Raymond’s mind running upon midnight assassinations? Baron Scarpia turning to claim the reward of lechery, gets the knife straight up his midriff into the big nerve centre. ‘Here is the kiss of Tosca.’ Follows that heart-wrenching moment – the terrible line ‘And all Rome trembled before you’. The candles on each side of the body; the prayer, kneeling, for a wicked man; the colossal slow exit. The curtain – we’ve had time for the pulse to come down into the low hundreds.
The Beetle is in no hurry to start. Battery rather flat; Wah-wah-wah in a nasty expiring-threatening way before lurching to life.
Leonora’s line turns Pizarro to stone, cues that tremendous trumpet call. Hm, a lot of people have thought that a mistake. Big fluster – ‘The Minister has arrived’ – Pizarro yelling that he’d be there this very second – sad contrivances these. It should end upon those bleak monosyllables. ‘I am his wife.’
Looking at ‘the bombsite’; the house from across the courtyard; Raymond was horrified, stayed so until a long-buried comic memory restored his balance: William was all right and this really was not all that bad.
A harmless old gentleman had the habit of watercolour painting in the open air; set up his easel in the ‘park’: when there was a brief thunder shower the old boy scampered. After it cleared students gathered to discuss ‘whether it was better art than before’.
The bits which had been dry – trees and stuff around the building portrayed – were merely blurry. But the architecture, fresh and still damp, had slid in peculiar ways. Trickled? Tumbled even; whole areas of window and masonry, slate and gutter, had disassembled. Dislimmed is the word. The result (which greatly pleased the students) was very much the sight which now met his eye.
“Superficial really. No very Great harm done.”
Joséphine’s eye, as it were dryer and less romantic, centred upon Dust. Homely household objects like the vacuum-cleaner. Dustbins full of broken glass. Dare one say it? hideously prosaic – dustpan-and-brush. Her concierge in Paris, a grey soul in a grey overall, fond of remarking what good friends she was with her broom. One didn’t have to be Corsican to know that bombs are part of existence, really. A well-built house hadn’t suffered – much – structurally. The essential is that William is unharmed, a bit unkempt but looking on the whole quite chipper.
William was standing there in a formal attitude of welcome, pale in a clean white shirt, upright, face expressionless.
“Not in any pain right now?”
“Not so’s I notice. I might find a symptom or two in an hour’s time.” Joséphine, apparently, didn’t find anything to say; stood looking about her as though she had been here before but couldn’t remember when.
“The police have been?”
“They’ve only just left. That smell of cigars is our local gendarmerie, amiable and helpful as always. They’ll be back in the morning, bustling about with measuring tapes and things, taking photographs. They aren’t greatly impressed with my bomber, who seems incompetent. Mainly interested in where that gas tank came from.”
“William, what the hell is all this about?”
“They think, and I agree, it was more to give me a fright than anything else.”
“Revenge? For something you did?”
“Ray – remember me? Paid-up luminary of SPHP – sorry, acronym for the Service of Protection of High Personalities. That’s largely a matter of being seen but not heard. Before that, some few years a working PJ officer. In either role, main preoccupation is to stay off the shit list. But in the Kripo you get heard as well as seen. You might have to arrest people, get confronted with them, maybe give evidence in front of a tribunal. They might go to prison. It’s been known they feel a grievance, brood on it, have some idea of getting even when they come out. Which might be years later. D’you mind if we sit down? I’m beginning to feel tired.”
And you’re talking too much, thought Dr Valdez. That’s all right, let him have his head, he’s out of practice with violence, feels a scrap of delayed shock, he’ll quieten down and then I’ll take a peek at him.
“This is nothing. I’ll get the police in the local office to look at it. My friend Bernadette Martin has sound advice on this theme – never make complaint. Just like a civil lawyer whose counsel is – if he’s honest – never under any circumstances litigate. Working magistrate, she ought to know! Stay clear of what they call justice, and sit very loose to the world.
“You’re a pretty good friend too, Ray. Came along with your Janeite stuff, I’ve learned a bit about that. Easier for me after years with the Marquis. He had a game too. Called it his Proust game, not that I ever read the stuff but listen to him and I know how Swann said the kitchen maid was like a Bellini picture. All the people he met with were like portraits in fiction. My role was to keep silent, listen, learn.
‘“I had the Marquis to thank, too, for meeting you. You spun me this long tale, about the soldiers in the ’14 war. Chances of survival extremely small, statistical likelihood of getting chopped pretty immediate. Me, only more so. So they played this game. Jane’s world is the base for defiance, platform for enjoying their life minute by minute. I could see the point. Got this cancer, dodgy kind of thing, my age, pretty good way of looking at it. We were trained of course, your number can come up any time but that’s mechanical, what’s the doctor’s word? – functional. You told me, the way to handle a cancer is in my mind. I got into this Janeite world.
“Sink right into that, one does; marvellous stuff. Thought myself observant, I had. See the funny side now, the way Marky did. All true, to our own time just as much. Cruel though, huh? – this perception of what our lives ought to be. Not much use at finding the words, am I? – no, never was. Codes, very sharp, exact definition, no ambiguity, no blurred outline.
“Know all about codes, learned a lot of them by heart, civil code, crimi code, code of procedure. Bernadette knows stacks more screeds of legislative juridical bullshit. Get tapped for the Protection Service, code of behaviour, personal honour. What Jane calls delicacy, anticipate, respect for the man, he’s everything, you’re nothing, his function in society. As a human being he might be worthless, you’re still bound, pay him his full due.
“Getting tired, I’d like a cup of coffee, don’t want any goddam green tea.”
“I’ll get it,” said Joséphine. “I know where things are kept.”
“Coffee, Ray, and cigars, all the things you told me to lay off. Shook me a bit, this bastard with his bomb, for all that. Pain too, bugger it, here we go again, bloody crab, tickle me up, never really letting go. Thought of ringing you up, my old miracle worker, sorry about it being middle of the fucking night, knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
Dying down, thought Dr Valdez. Quite soon, give him a push and he’ll fall over. Needs a good sleep and then we’ll see. Remarkable recuperation he has. Joséphine’s cigarettes were on the table and William reached over and took one. She brought a tray with three cups, went back for the pot. Needs no telling, knows how much sugar we take, how we like it.
“Thanks, Josie, exactly what I need. And hallo, where do you spring from? Stupid remark; I know. You’re living with my friend Ray, very good idea, better man than I am. Didn’t mind your living in Paris. Screwing the Marquis, no harm in that, old swine but he gave something too, all the women he ever slept with, I’m the one who knows, right? I knew him better than anyone. The great enigma false to all and everyone; to me also but he told me things he’d never said to any living man or woman. I won’t tell, that’s my code, and he trusted me. Keep faith with yourself.
“Didn’t like your friends much, riffraff they were. You’ll do better with Ray. I like it too, you’re coming to tell me. That’s honourable. Courage you always had.
“So here the three of us are, like a thing of La Fontaine, the miller and his son, one of those. The husband, the wife, and the lover. Not like something out of Jane. But are we all three the Janeites? We ought to know, what to do, how to behave, how to be true, ourselves and one another. We’re three friends. Got to rely on each other,” clanking the coffeecup heavily back in the saucer.
“You’ve made a hell of a long speech,” said Joséphine quite tartly. “Better shut up now. Push you off into bed, but you better listen to me first. Make an effort. Won’t take long.” She was at once aware of sounding rough and impatient.
“Quite right, I’m your wife, this is my lover. Made you a promise, be true to you. Broke it. Lost my honour. That’s what it’s about – honour. You’ve understood it, it’s not a game, Jane.” Steadying her voice, making herself breathe slowly.
“Captain Wentworth served eight years for Anne Elliot, never saying, never complaining. All that time, she holds fast, she doesn’t pity herself. She loves him and she allows herself to be over-persuaded, she’s told that he’s not good enough. Comic it all sounds, doesn’t it? She’s made a grave fault and she pays for it. Keeps her honour. Which I didn’t, and you never reproached me. Thought yourself not good enough: there’s your honour.
“While I played the whore. Until I met you,” swinging her gun barrel to point at Ray. “I met you. Come to see me on account of him, he’s ill, and what’s the matter with me, then, that I don’t stand true?
“God I’m hating this. . Need the biggest pastis ever known.”
“I’ll get it for you,” said Raymond. “Have it.”
“No. Do this cold turkey. Sure sound like one, look like one.” Aiming her gun, the slow assassin, taking her time.
“God – I love you so. And to you I promised – when one is gone what’s another’s promise worth? The more I love you the more worthless I become. But if I’ve no honour left I must not destroy yours. I know you. Your promise was to God and you won’t break that. You’ll try to. You’ll seem to. You’d tell yourself you’ll leave everything to keep me. To keep you I’ll steal, I’ll whore, I’ll kill. I have already – all that’s left is to kill you; I’m on the way to that.
“So I must ask you to free me from my promise. Send me back where I belong. If he’ll have me.” Like a child ashamed of itself she had put her hands before her eyes.
“Have you?” said William, puzzled. “What’s that mean, have you? You never went away. I can’t give you away. You give yourself.”
“The way I give you a cancer, yes?”
“Oh, as to that,” said Raymond, “speaking as a doctor, I can’t be sure of taking it away. You can, though. For love’s sake, you can do anything.” She looked at him steadily.
“It’s because I love you, I do this.”
“You are free,” he said. “And with the blessing of God.”
Into this unpleasantly charged silence Raymond brought something he has often been grateful for; isn’t a sense of the ridiculous in horrible moments a precious gift? Joséphine has the consolidation of crying and William is wondering where the next pain is going to come from and Doctor Valdez wishes to jump off the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine.
“I am reminded of the Greek girl who went to the theatre to see Medea and didn’t like the tragic ending, so she said she’d write another, and instead of all the bloodshed they’d go for the day to the seaside.”
In those enormous black cumulus clouds the fearsome build-up of electric current goes crack and discharges itself into the patient earth. Joséphine remembered that one can control oneself. One can stop crying. To hic and snuffle is below dignity. William regained the impassive face which is taught to the Protection Service in public at moments of anxiety such as when the President is shaking hands in a crowd.
“Might be a good idea,” she said, “if we all had breakfast.”