The Colonnel’s Daughter

At the time of my father’s second wedding, we lived in Paris, in a house a little grander than we could afford. It was the kind of house, in the Avenue Foch, which is today divided up very profitably and let as luxury flats. It seems astonishing to me now that our family once owned the whole of it. The drawing room, I recall, was on the first floor. Two sets of French windows led out from it onto small balconies. On these extremely pretty balconies my mother had always placed stone pots of geraniums. Well, in summer she had, I suppose. Geraniums don’t survive winters, do they? It was high summer when my father got married for the second time, and I know that, by then, there weren’t any geraniums on the drawing-room balconies.

I have always remembered the details of things, especially of rooms where I’ve lived. My brother does this too: together, we can reconstruct places, object by object. I think this gift or skill of ours is not really a gift or skill at all, but merely a habit into which, as soon as we could talk, we were obliged to fall: because our father was blind. He was blind by the time we were born and he never saw us. He saw our mother for one year of their married life, and I must say that she honestly was, at that time, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Well, according to the photographs she was. We, her sons, never recognised beauty (or what I now, as a man, think of as beauty) in her. We were too young, too close to her. We loved the smell of her, especially when she wore furs, but the fact that she was a beautiful woman entirely escaped our understanding. What we did understand, however, from the moment we could read and converse and were taken travelling, was the difference between our mother’s background and culture and our father’s background and culture. Our father was French, the son of a colonel in the French army who was in turn the son of a colonel in the French army, and so on. His side of the family won so many medals, you could start a medal shop in the Rue des Saints Pères with them. Anyway, we are descended from a line of brave men. (The ribbon attached to medals is of a quality that I find very pleasing to handle: ribbed, silken and heavy. My father’s hands have the feel of medal ribbon, wrinkled and silky.)

Our mother was English. She was born Emily Tregowan, the daughter of a self-educated Cornishman who made a respectable name in publishing. Though she spent almost all her married life in France, she never, I think, immersed herself in it, so that you could always perceive her Englishness sticking out like a flower too tall for the arrangement it’s set in. And we, sent to an English boarding school, taken on visits to our Cornish grandfather in blustery summers, spent our childhood trying to decide what we were. At our boarding school, we were known as the Frog Twins. In Paris, neighbours referred to us as ‘les gosses Anglais’. We preferred Paris to boarding school, as any boy would, but we liked the wildness of Cornwall. We knew that our father and all his ancestors had been brave, but Cornwall seemed to tell us that our mother and all hers had been wild, and we were inclined to prefer wildness to bravery. We are twins. We are now forty-two and both of us have lived, married and worked in France only. We never visit England, except occasionally on business, so time, you might say, has decided what we are: we are French. Yet our mother, and Cornwall, and what we once recognised was wild in a world of tame things have never passed out of memory and never will.

I shall describe us, not as we are now, but as we were at the time when our mother died, and our father – five years younger than she was – decided very quickly to remarry. Our mother died on a January Sunday near to our fifteenth birthday. Our English headmaster summoned us to his smokey study to unfold this colossal tiding. He stood up behind his oak desk and stared at us over his pipe: sallow, dark-haired boys with a dusting of pimples, thin hands, legs thinner than the gym master would have liked, an identical tendency to glower. We glowered, however, out of eyes the colour of scabious flowers – an extraordinary feature in us that has conquered any number of women, and which, among the traits which made up her beauty, we inherited from our mother. The rest of us is, and was already at fifteen, recognisably our father’s: his thick hair, his small limbs, his yellowy complexion.

The news, I suppose, travelled round the school in delicious whispers: ‘the Frog Twins’ mother just died!’ Boys squirmed with horror and delight. But we were snatched away and put on trains and freezing steamers till we reached Paris and the house in the Avenue Foch and our blind father fumbling round it. Nobody wept. When told of the death, my brother had started to hiccup violently and he hiccuped for three or four days, waking and sleeping. I picked my spots and knew that I wasn’t ready for what had happened; death was too adult for me. And our father? He tried to bear himself like the soldier he was. But he became clumsy: he spilt food down his expensive clothes, he dropped and broke things. He also began to burble bits of poetry to himself, a thing which was absolutely uncharacteristic of him. I don’t know what poetry it was that he burbled (I was more familiar, at fifteen, with Keats and Shelley and Tennyson than with Victor Hugo or Rimbaud) but I had the impression that he was muddling one poem with another and getting lots of words wrong. It was a very peculiar time: the hiccuping and the poetry and my own unreadiness for grief.

My brother, whose name I should have told you is Paul (mine is Jacques, a name I couldn’t stand at the English school because even the masters nicknamed me ‘Frère Jacques’, just as if this wretched song was the only bit of French anyone English could be expected to understand), quite often tried to cry. I suppose he recognised, as I did, that we had not merely lost our mother, but the whole half of us that was Cornish and Anglo-Saxon. We remembered her stately walk in galoshes over the sandworms of Constantine Bay, her fondness for the sound of the seagulls. ‘We may never see or hear another seagull,’ my brother whispered one night, in search of tears that refused to come. ‘Imagine poor Grandpa banging the seagull tin and remembering his dead daughter . . .’ We waited anxiously for the first sob to break through. (Mourning only needs one; the others follow obediently.) But he couldn’t cry. He masturbated till he fell asleep, leaving me wide awake with the images of our mother he’d successfully summoned.

Grandpa’s seagull tin was one that I have never forgotten. I can see my mother sitting on the wall at the end of his garden, smiling as Grandpa came out of the house. In an old washing bowl, Grandpa collected all the bread crusts and the leftover toast and stale cake. He came and stood in the middle of the lawn and banged loudly on the bottom of the tin with a wooden spoon. He’d done this twice a week for several years. Every seagull from Padstow to Trearnon seemed to know the signal. In seconds, even before he began to scatter the bread and cake, they’d come flapping in, hungry, unafraid, noisy with their cry which, even when it’s near you, conjures distant oceans and faraway voyages. My mother sat on the wall and swang her legs and shrieked at them. Grandpa yelled, ‘Go on! Go on!’ as they came pecking and fighting. Paul and I ran up and down flapping our arms, as impressed by Grandpa as by a conjuror. We never knew Grandpa very well. Our father told us he was a reserved and self-disciplined man. But this is how I always remember him: surrounded by the seagulls, by the chaos he had caused.

We didn’t go back to our English school after the funeral. We wondered if we would be sent back at all. Nobody said what was being planned for us. Our father stayed in his room, listening to the radio. Army friends called and the wives of army friends, who sometimes took him out for walks. He had an old manservant we called Blochot (I don’t know whether Blochot was his real name, or just some family invention) who did for him all the things he couldn’t do for himself. He seldom sent for us or wanted to be with us. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten us. We had one or two friends in the neighbourhood and we saw more of the parents of these friends than we did of our father. We spent weekends in the country with them. We went riding in the Bois. Now and again, we’d be taken to a meal in a restaurant.

The rest of the time we were in our room at the top of the house, reading the ‘dirtiest’ books you could get hold of at that time: The Thousand and One Nights, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, soothing colossal, inarticulate yearnings with solitary orgasms in crumpled handkerchiefs. As my life has gone on, it has occasionally hurt me – yes, hurt me – that I have known so little about my brother’s sexuality. He has married two vain women in quick succession and kept his life with them secret from me. I remember the months in the room at the top of the house in the Avenue Foch, when every stirring of his penis and of mine was part of our shared grief, our shared confusion, our shared existence. And I remember of course the night of our father’s second wedding, the night we decided to grow up. We parted soon after that. Now we meet for dinner and our wives bicker about the price of clothes. If I dared to ask Paul about his cock, he would get up and storm out of the restaurant.

It must have been in the spring that Pierrette arrived. She was a penniless person from a bourgeois family in Bourges. She had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. She spoke a little very bad English. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her philosophy degree except teach. She came to our house on a four-month contract to coach us until the end of the school year, at which time our father would decide what to do with us – send us back to our English school or to some new school in France. Nowadays, of course, an arrangement like this would never apply. In the event of the death of a parent, a child might expect a week off school and it would then be deemed ‘in his best interests’ to send him back to endure the gleeful pity of his friends. We were lucky, then, I dare say. We were allowed to stay in Paris – and at home. We forgot the cold English school.

Pierrette was twenty-three. Our father at that time must have been forty-two – the age we are now. Paul and I thought the name Pierrette was terrible. We couldn’t imagine that anyone with a name like Pierrette could teach us anything at all. ‘We’ll teach her!’ my brother crowed, ‘we’ll just speak English and confuse her and tell her the wrong meanings of words.’

She was a neat woman, very much a woman at twenty-three and not a girl. She spoke precisely and ate tidily. Her belongings were sparse and plain. She had a white, intelligent face and wispy, rather colourless hair. Her eyes were black and small and she had a black mole on her upper lip. Her hands were also white and neat and ringless. She wore tweed skirts and plain jerseys and her winter coat was ugly and unfashionable. ‘Politeness!’ growled our father from the depths of his favourite armchair, ‘if you boys are not polite to this woman, there will be no summer for you!’ No summer? Simultaneously, our minds flew to the seagulls and our mother on the wall. Of course there would be ‘no summer’, whether or not we decided to be polite. Summer as we had experienced it could no longer exist.

It never occurred to us, until we saw it happen, that Pierrette would fall in love with our father, and he, supposedly, with her. We thought Pierrette was just an episode in our lives, quickly gone and forgotten, like German measles. She was unsuitable as our teacher because she knew little Latin and her maths were second rate. She adored Pascal. She rubbed our noses in the Pensées of Pascal. All I can remember about Pierrette’s lessons is Pascal: ‘Jésus dans l’ennui . . .’

Her arrival coincided more or less with Blochot’s illness. Blochot had glandular fever and though he struggled on, doing chores for our father, he was weak and silent and had to be encouraged to stay in bed. We tried to take his place, helping with tie-pins and bootlaces, searching for objects lost, tuning the radio, reading out wine labels, dialling telephone numbers. But I suppose we were clumsy and idle and impatient. Our father couldn’t bear the way we did things. He used to push us away and whimper with frustration. And into the gap left by Blochot’s glandular fever and our adolescent incompetence slipped Pierrette. Her careful hands and her quiet voice must have begun to press like a comforting little weight on father’s sightlessness, reassuring him that life and order still existed, reminding him that only one woman had died, not the whole of womankind.

I can say this now. I am able to understand, now, how people may recover from tragedy. At fifteen, I couldn’t understand. From the day when I walked into the first-floor drawing-room and saw my father reach out fumblingly for Pierrette, gathering her head in one hand and pressing her bottom towards him with the other, I understood only one thing: betrayal. I stood and stared. Pierrette saw me, but didn’t pull away. Her face was pink with embarrassment and excitement. Her upper lip with its blemish of a mole was quivering out my father’s christian name, his face was puckered, searching for those quivering lips. They kissed. My father’s hand hitched up Pierrette’s skirt and began scrabbling for the flesh above the stocking top. Pierrette turned to see if I was still there. I ran away.

Paul said he knew how to put an end to it. We lay in bed and planned how we would tell father that Pierrette was cross-eyed and horse-toothed and that her stocking seams were always crooked. We would also remind him of his military name and reputation, of our mother’s beautiful laughter . . . As the traffic ceased and we half slept, my brother murmured, ‘Perhaps there’s nothing serious in it. Perhaps he’ll just fuck her and she’ll leave.’ But I had seen the frantic hands, the searching lips; these seemed betrayal enough. ‘He’s got no loyalty,’ I whispered, ‘for all that he’s a military man.’

I stole Pierrette’s leatherbound edition of Pascal. I took it to the Quai St Michel and sold it. With the few francs I got for it, I bought roses and a pewter vase and lugged these to my mother’s grave. In this futile action, I found some relief from my own incomprehension. Pierrette began to fret about the lost Pascal and the more she fretted the more I felt triumphant. But from this time on, we knew that something irreversible was growing between Pierrette and our father. Not caring what we thought, he’d come tapping up to the top floor where we had our so-called lessons and ask her to come down to him, ‘to help me answer some letters’, or to continue the mighty task he had invented for her – the re-cataloguing of his military history library. She would set us an essay to write, or some research to do and not return to us that day.

We’d tiptoe to our father’s study, carrying our shoes. Pierrette and my father would be talking in whispers. We’d press our ears to the door. Very often, they seemed only to be talking about books. We’d stay hunched by the door till our feet grew numb, and they would simply talk on and on, quietly, intimately, like people who have loved each other for years.

One night, we saw Pierrette go to our father’s room. We crept to his door, but all we could hear was laughter. Paul hated this. He went very white and led me away. ‘I’m going to put a turd in her bed,’ he announced, as we crept along the passage. I felt frightened: frightened by change which is final and irrevocable, frightened by the whiteness of my brother’s face. We went to the bathroom. I sat on the bath edge and rocked to and fro to calm my fear and Paul sat on the lavatory, straining to produce the offensive offering he would stick between Pierrette’s sheets. But my fear wouldn’t go and Paul’s bowels wouldn’t move. Status quo . . . I repeated over and over, status quo.

One part of me wanted to be back at school. At least in England, in that jungle of rule and counter-rule, we would be away from what was happening. We could grieve for our mother in her own country and have no part in this hothouse betrayal. But we knew we wouldn’t be sent back until the autumn. Easter came, and Pierrette went home to her family in Bourges. We cheered up. Blochot recovered and started work again. We were given money for spring clothes. Our father resumed his walks with the army wives. Pierrette was not mentioned. We were invited to an uncle’s house in the Loire valley. We left Paris with relief and our father stayed behind. When we returned, Pierrette was back.

We had never done any of the things we’d planned. We’d never tried to pretend to the blind man that Pierrette had flat feet or buck teeth. I had sold her Pensées, but she never knew it was me. At lessons, we were sulky and uncooperative and made snobby remarks about the bourgeois of Bourges, but to our father we were polite in a cold kind of way. He didn’t seem to notice any change in us.

It was an extraordinary spring in Paris. The railings outside our house were warm; the magnolia tree pushed out its showy blooms into an air of utter stillness. We strode around in our new clothes and thought of the long summer. At the end of May, we were summoned to the drawing room and told by our father that he was going to marry Pierrette. Pierrette wasn’t there. He had granted us this courtesy; he knew we would require an explanation. ‘Never doubt,’ he said, ‘my love for your mother. She was a remarkable woman and I trust that you may be so fortunate as to have inherited some of her qualities. But when you grow up and become men, you will, I hope, understand that a man of my years cannot content himself with a celibate life. It is not in a man’s nature. And Pierrette and I have found in each other an affinity I never thought I would be lucky enough to feel. I may as well admit to you that, much as I admired your mother, we were never sexually compatible and our marriage was not successful from this point of view.’

I got Paul up to our room, where he lay on the bed and sobbed and shook. I stole a bottle of brandy from Blochot’s pantry, took this upstairs and tried to dribble some into Paul’s runny mouth. In the end, he gulped quite a lot of brandy down, I covered him with my eiderdown and he went to sleep, still shuddering.

We were fifteen by then, not obviously tall or strong or handsome, yet, being twins, we enjoyed attention from people which, singly, neither of us would have earned. It was as if the two of us equalled one very striking person. We are not identical, yet have a strong resemblance. At forty-two, I know that I look older than Paul. At fifteen, our experience of life had been in every way identical and neither we, nor people we met, could separate us out. And over the question of father’s marriage, we acted of course as one. We offered Pierrette glacial felicitations; we told our snobby Parisian friends that father was marrying ‘an ugly bourgeoise from Bourges’; we fuelled Blochot’s sense of something done too hastily by reminding him constantly of all the years we had been ‘one family’, with our mother, nostrils flared as if breathing the air of the sea, in her place at the helm. We did everything we could, in fact, to wreck the coming marriage, by insinuation, by sulking, by discourtesy, and by downright lies. Yet we knew it would happen. One morning we’d wake up and that would be the day, and after it what? After it, what? We asked each other that question very often: what happens when it’s over?

It was a July wedding, held in Paris and not in Bourges in deference to our father’s blindness and Pierrette’s sense of grandeur. The reception took place in the drawing room of our house. Pierrette wore a white coat and skirt and an ugly white velvet hat which made her look like a rich American child. The Bourges relations clearly envied her her new life and wondered (but did not ask) how a philosophy degree had won her a soldier. My father pinned his medals onto his dress uniform. His blind person’s gestures were already the gestures of an old man, yet on that day Blochot had helped him to look resplendent and brave, which, in his way, he was.

Paul and I had been bought identical grey suits. All suits, in those days, seemed to be grey and we wore them obediently, not proudly. The buttonhole carnations we had been given we decided not to pin on. At one time, Paul had wanted to make us black armbands, but these, I calculated, would have been more shocking and insulting in their way than any of the punishments we had thought up. So I suggested instead that we simply get drunk and try to pretend that nothing mattered – life, death, blindness, war, bereavement, marriage, crooked stocking seams – nothing signified. We had seen it all.

By eight or nine, all the reception guests, there since two, had trickled away into the stifling evening. My father stood on one of the balconies, jerking his head in the direction of the sun tumbling straight down behind the Avenue de la Grande Armée, his hand clasping his new bride to him, his body in its dress uniform very straight and proud. We, lolling on sofas, slightly bilious from the quantity of champagne we had drunk, stared at their backs in silent contempt. ‘It’s as if,’ Paul whispered, ‘mother had never existed.’ Pierrette turned and stared at us, her skin blotchy with excitement and alcohol. ‘I suggest,’ she said, in a voice of new authority, ‘that you boys get yourselves some supper and go to bed.’

Father didn’t move. We were dismissed. We slipped sullenly away, carrying our jackets and ties that we had taken off. We climbed the stairs to our room. We didn’t speak. What had invaded us, at precisely the same moment, was a boredom so colossal, so heavy and unyielding that neither of us could utter. Life wasn’t tragic after all; it was dull. In the south of England, an old man banged a washing bowl and greedy gulls began to circle, but there was no magic in it, only boring reflex and tearing, ugly beaks. All was predictable and ignoble and stupid. The roses in the pewter vase had long ago wilted and turned brown. Some old scavenging woman with her savings in a shoebox had stolen the vase, just as the leatherbound copy of Pascal had been stolen. Nothing signified – no gesture or act or artefact or idea. Jésus dans l’ennui . . . No one had redeemed man from his eternal mediocrity.

Urgently then we bundled away the litter of clothes into the wardrobes, put the Thousand and One Nights back into its Jock of the Bushveld dustjacket, and, silently as we could, moved the two beds together and covered them with the satin eiderdowns. Finally, Paul hunted in his chest of drawers for a red paisley silk scarf – a present from our English grandfather – which he draped round the central parchment lampshade. The room was transformed by the light, reddened, ready.

So it was that around midnight I found myself with seven thousand francs in my pocket, carrying my shoes, creeping silently down past our father’s room where the lights were turned out, past the drawing room where the one hundred guests had eaten salmon, down into the hall which had been filled with flowers and out at last into the street.

We knew where the whores congregated. The Avenue Foch was the rather verdant beat of a cavalcade of spikey-eyed women. In gateways and on corners, they stood and waited. Cars drew up. They got in, in ones and twos. Hunched up men steered them away down side streets. I had often passed these furtive stoppings, noted the quick exchange of words, the clacking heels being hurried over the cobbles, little wisps of laughter or anger trailing off into the night.

I felt tiny. The city hummed, like a dome, round me. I walked very slowly, hearing each footstep. The night was superb. I pitied my father who would never see it – the Arc de Triomphe on its hill of light, the glistening foliage of gardens and entrances, a cluster of stars above the tall-shouldered houses . . . I thought of Paul, waiting on the satin eiderdowns and grinned. I have never admired my brother as ardently as I did that night. I admired him firstly for his daring and secondly for the cowardice which had tempered it and which allowed me to be here in the street. I truly loved him.

The two women I stopped at, hesitating, my hand clutching the money in my pocket, looked at me first with the disdain of giraffes, then, seeing me planted in front of them, speechless but earnest, they smiled and made almost identical movements of their hips, shifting weight from one long leg to the other. The thought whizzed through me: will women always be taller than me? I cleared my throat. ‘I didn’t know . . .’ I began, ‘whether one of you might like to . . . come along to my house. I mean, just for half an hour or something . . .’

I remembered Paul’s knowing statement: the oldest are the cheapest. Neither of these women seemed particularly old, nor particularly young. I couldn’t have told whether they were twenty-five or forty. They were just women – available women. I stared up at them, trying to guess which of them might be the cheapest, but I simply couldn’t tell. Nor, I realised, did I want to offend either of them by choosing one and rejecting the other.

Again, they looked at each other and grinned. One of them pulled a silky shawl round her shoulders, touched my chin lightly and tenderly and began to walk away. I watched her go with a feeling of dismay. She suddenly seemed perfect: long, dark hair, swinging as she walked, a fleshy bottom encased in a tight skirt that shimmered. I wanted to call her back, but I felt a gentle hand on my arm and forced myself to look more closely at the woman who was to be ours. She had red hair and a wide smile. She wore a lacy blouse over bunched up, milky breasts. On her upper lip was the dark blotch of a mole.

A light was on under my father’s door now as we passed it. I imagined him hearing our footsteps, feeling his way to the door and opening it – and seeing nothing of course. To live with a blind man is to have the power of invisibility. We hurried on up, me leading, not daring to look behind me. Was the red-haired woman old? How would she seem to Paul in the paisley lamplight? Would he mind the mole on her lip? Old women don’t have red hair or high breasts, do they? I felt absolutely responsible to Paul for my choice. My own daring had only been in recognition of his. We had a perfect sense, in those days, of what each of us owed to the other. Over the years, this sense has clouded, disappeared.

I sat down. I was shaking, not with sexual excitement, but with a sense of absolute strangeness. I thought, the walk out into the night, everything from that moment is a dream and I shall wake up in the morning and life will be precisely as it was, with only the Thousand and One Nights within my reach. There will have been no scarf on the lampshade, no act of daring and maturity . . . I blinked, rubbed my eyes, felt thirsty, stared at Paul, who was unbuttoning his trousers. I longed for a cool drink of milk or lemonade, but I had the notion that time was sliding away from me immeasurably fast; yes, life itself was slipping, altering, as Paul stepped out of his trousers, nervously fingering his penis, already erect, and I had to stay and be part of it, or miss it for ever.

I sat on the bed and watched as Bettina arrayed for us on the satin eiderdowns a body of such white voluptuousness its form has stayed huddled in memory all my life and through all my loving. Flesh has never again seemed in itself so magnificent a thing, so utterly and uncontrollably inviting. All strangeness, all fear vanished. Paul parted Bettina’s legs, and we glimpsed for the first time in our lives the glistening dark channel that puerile imagination never imagines perfectly enough, the deep and private walls of ripeness, where the boy deluges his fountain of dreams.

I don’t remember taking off my clothes, yet I was naked on the bed, my hand on Paul’s buttocks. The motions his body made were tender, unembarrassed, as touching as an animal. His body shone. I was choked by his achievement, his beauty. My head on Bettina’s scented hair, I pressed myself to the one body that hers and Paul’s had become, rocked as they rocked, felt myself move as Paul moved through waves of mounting ecstasy. ‘It’s superb!’ Paul trumpeted as he moved and I moved faster and faster, ‘it’s superb, Jacques!’

I don’t know whether it was my father’s decision or Pierrette’s to separate Paul’s life from mine, but this, at the end of the summer, was what happened. We were taken away from our English school for good and sent to different boarding schools in France. I have never been able to understand the reasoning behind this decision and can only guess at it: if we missed each other enough, we would cease to miss our mother, and thus to talk of her.

The odd thing is that ever since that time, I have, all my life, missed them both. Paul’s life has taken such a different course from my own that I have long ago lost him as a brother. The man he is, the man I meet at restaurants with our wives, is at best an acquaintance – an acquaintance I don’t even like very much.