Chapter Three THE PRICE OF IMAGINATION

 

I bolt upright in bed.

Harry Lime was right about Switzerland. It’s quiet out there. Too quiet. My New Yorker’s subconscious can’t stand this tranquility. I miss the comforting clatter of the garbage truck on 80th Street.

I hear sniffles next door. Eva-Marie is crying through her bandages in the dark. Stupidly I assume that what upsets me—the broken leg, the facial wounds and the painful, inconvenient months to come—are the cause of her sleeplessness.

As usual with my third child, I’ve got it all wrong.

‘I don’t want to grow old,’ she sobs. ‘Next February, I’ll be seven, and that’s so old. That’s the limit. Six is best. After six, it’s, it’s . . . ’

‘What?’

‘Over. Seven is the last time you have imagination.’

I embrace her tightly, the edge of her plastered hip cutting into my side. I croon into her ear, ‘No, no, look at me, I’m forty-nine and I still have imagination.’

She closes her eyes, wrinkling the bandages around her temples. ‘You’re different.’

I haven’t forgotten Saturday night’s departure from lucidity, but everything was back to normal on Sunday—no apparitions in knee breeches—just hours of tedious unpacking. Having an imaginary friend at age four or even six is right on schedule. Having one at forty-nine is worrying. I fish around for more reassuring examples.

‘Well, then, take Theo. He’s eight and—’

‘Right! And he doesn’t believe in anything anymore—not even unicorns!’

This diagnosis of Theo’s senility strikes me as a tad premature. He spent most of the weekend before the asthma attack playing I, Claudius, his beloved ‘blankie’ draped over one hairless, pudgy shoulder. I hold to one hard and fast rule: they must not watch the episode where Caligula disembowels his sister pregnant with his love child. The boys might find this too inspiring.

‘Playing I, Claudius takes imagination, doesn’t it?’

‘No, Mama. That’s acting. Roman senators were real. I mean imagining real magic things.’

I sigh, recalling when a five-year-old Singaporean visited Alexander in Manhattan for a play-date. He marched into my bedroom at 3:58 pm, announcing it was time to watch Batman.

‘We don’t watch TV during play-dates,’ I told the visitor firmly. ‘In this house, we play with our imagination.’

The child shook his head. ‘My mother hasn’t bought me one of those yet.’

Peter and I immediately disconnected the kids’ TV from the cable feed and bought Broadway musicals, old-fashioned swashbucklers, the old Robin Hood black-and-white series—anything with more acting and imagination than special effects. I’ll have to order more. Can videos keep them speaking decent English for the next decade? Or will they start slipping into French with a backwoods Vaudois dialect? Given a few more years on this Swiss mountain, where will they fit in? Where will I?

‘My leg hurts,’ says Eva-Marie.

I give her a painkiller and soon she falls asleep, stringy hair pasted to her cheeks. The garish pink cast is propped up on a doll’s bed at the foot of her mattress. I ache at the sight of those tiny toes, painted blue with washable marker. She won’t be able to touch them until after Christmas.

I tiptoe downstairs across the ground floor of our Grit Palace, kicking aside scraps of wall trim. It’s still too soon to say how well our Hong Kong furniture will go with a low-ceilinged stone farmhouse. Suzy Wong meets Heidi.

The silence is broken by the rustling of paper packaging. Oh, God, is the loony back? I creep across the dining room and peer into the kitchen, hoping it’s something I can handle, like rats.

‘Hi, Mama.’

‘Oh, Alexander.’ I take a deep breath. ‘You’re up early.’

‘I want more reading time before the train leaves.’ He pours himself a second bowl of cereal.

‘Alexander?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Who reigned in France between Louis XIV and Louis XV?’ He glances at me over a thick history book. ‘Louis XIV and a half.’

‘Your mother is not that stupid.’

‘The Moon King.’

‘Yuk, yuk. Okay, you don’t know.’

‘I know,’ he says, putting the book down with feigned reluctance. ‘The Regent, Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, a nephew of the Sun King.’

‘Was that a period of mayhem and dissolution?’

‘I’m not sure,’ my skinny pedant weighs this question. ‘Depends on what you call dissolution.’ He gives his eyebrows a lusty Groucho Marx twitch.

‘Who are his teachers?’ a French voice butts in.

‘Oh my God!’ I cry.

‘Sit on something?’ Alexander hardly glances up from his tome.

Our ghost saunters into the kitchen from the living room. I see he has been busy near the fireplace. On the coffee table sits one of my mother’s porcelain coffee cups. Somehow, he has excavated this delicate vessel from a newspaper-wrapped jumble of jelly-jar glasses, cheap Hong Kong dinnerware, and kid-proof plastic cups.

‘I spent Sunday warming up my physical capacities,’ he explains. ‘I’ve moved on from cannibals.’

He seats himself unobtrusively next to Alexander who doesn’t blink an eye. My child is already dressed in his jeans and sweater and in a few minutes he’ll head out into the pre-dawn chill. Gone are the days of the Jamaican nanny laying out his St. Boniface uniform in time for the private yellow bus service.

What do I smell? A trace of carnation?

‘Alexander, do you smell something?’

‘I took a bath last night. Theo didn’t.’

‘My toilet water, Madame.’

The ghost is not only freshly perfumed, he looks as perky as if he’d been up for hours. He’s wearing a floppy red velvet cap over thick brown curls tied loosely at the nape of his thin neck with a black ribbon. His face is scraped clean of whiskers. His dressing gown of green brocade reaches below his stocking’ed knees. His rather bony feet are encased in needlepointed slippers. In a word, gorgeous.

‘History student?’ he asks casually, glancing at Alexander’s book.

I nod slowly. Are there any English-speaking shrinks closer to us than Geneva? This’ll take more than one consultation, for sure.

Alexander goes upstairs to brush his teeth.

‘History is often just a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of other people,’ the phantom quips. ‘Or a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.’

‘Why have you come back?’ I whisper. ‘Your birthday’s over. My little crisis is over. I’m fine. You’re fine. Goodbye.’

‘You’re fine, Madame? Well, we’re all contented! As for me, I hardly slept last night for working my way through your books. It was good lifting practice, but such a disappointment! Not a single edition of Locke or Newton! On the other hand, no Descartes or that rubbishy Pascal. Some books of philosophy, literature, and history. And most wonderfully, anthologies and biographies pertaining to your modern theater.’

‘Those were my mother’s books,’ I whisper through my teeth. ‘Those theater anthologies are fifty years old.’

‘The theater is éternal, Madame. A passion that knows no bounds. I recall a certain Mr Bond in London—a very wealthy man. He loved my play Zaïre so much he produced it only so that he could star in the leading role. Well, on opening night, Mr Bond was so enthusiastic about his death scene, he actually dropped dead on stage!’

‘In front of the audience?’

‘Now there’s someone who appreciated drama! I tell you, the audience went wild.’

‘What did you do?’

He shrugs. ‘I was only sad that the performance couldn’t be repeated. Ticket sales flew heavenward.’ One elegant digit points at my low ceiling beams.

‘My mother never took her love of theater that seriously,’ I reflect.

The ghost is practicing moving Corn Puffs into the shape of a fleur-de-lis. ‘In one of your boxes I found nothing but factual books on Asiatic subjects and slim little novels about murder and death—a morbid obsession!’

‘So they did send some of my books. I’ve given up journalism. I’m trying a new career as a mystery writer.’

‘Your husband’s bibliothèque was more rewarding—Goethe, Schiller, and an encyclopedia, unreadable of course, as it’s in German. Frederick the Great and I corresponded in French for forty-two years. You and I can manage in English very well until you learn French. My dear friend Madame du Châtelet learned English in about six months. You’ll just do the same, but in reverse.’

‘You can’t stay here for six months!’

He scrutinizes his surroundings. ‘Now, I look forward to hearing the boy’s lessons.’

‘He can’t see you—I hope?’

‘I said I’ll listen. Who’s his tutor?’

Where to begin? Peter and I had looked forward to an escape from patronizing New York private school ‘educators’ dripping phrases like ‘the gift of time,’ ‘age-appropriate,’ and ‘reading readiness.’ Now we find that Swiss youngsters learn by filling in worksheets as if they are all training to be clerks. Given Switzerland’s fame for banking secrecy and hotel management, perhaps that’s not far off.

Worse, in Switzerland, the sixth-grade teachers decide who will go to college. Is this some kind of scholastic homage to Genevan Calvinist theories of predestination? Alexander is already terrified by next year’s ‘cut.’ You’d think his lack of French was the first concern, but no. His new teacher warned us he might not make university-track because his backpack is too messy.

Alexander, now transformed into a huge wad of Gore-Tex, shuffles through the kitchen into the laundry room. He never gives Monsieur Arouet a glance, although he stuffs the Corn Puff fleur-de-lis into his mouth. In a second, we hear him rummaging around for his snow boots.

‘He doesn’t have a tutor. He goes to public school by train.’

M. Arouet is astonished. ‘No tutor? By train? Alone? It’s black as a Jesuit’s cassock out there. Well, it was five minutes ago.’

Dawn’s pink rays are just cresting the Alps across the lake, waking a pack of huskies caged next door. Their howling fills the neighborhood and wakes up the second team down the road.

My skittish companion jumps in alarm. ‘A royal hunting pack?’

‘Sled dogs. Big winter sport around here.’

M. Arouet recovers, but is still astonished at my callous maternal behavior. He wags one of his skinny fingers in my face.

‘And you’re sending your son to the dogs! I know this part of the world. A boy who reads such books deserves better! Madame, as the son of a mere Parisian notary, I was tutored at home by the Abbé de Châteauneuf, a man of wide culture and blessedly broad views.’

The phantom turns reflective, ‘Ah, the Abbé ! He was the last love of the great courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos, who seduced even Cardinal Richelieu in her time. In 1704 the Abbé took me to her house in Paris and there she was at eighty-four, still swathed in fine satins and lace.’ He leans over the table and giggles, ‘She was dry as a mummy.’

‘You don’t say!’ I too, leaning forward, repress a smile.

‘Yes, but she bequeathed me 2,000 francs for book money—by the way, don’t you drink coffee?’

This morbid picture of a desiccated courtesan makes me think Alexander might be just as well off with Swiss worksheets and neat backpacks.

‘Did the Abbé introduce you to anything besides prostitutes?’

He straightens in indignation. ‘Mais oui! He taught me that religion was a device used by rulers to keep the ruled in order and awe. For saying that, Madame, he could be hung from the gallows! And he prepared me well for seven more years with the Jesuits in Paris, men who trained the mind of Descartes, and all the great dissenters of France.’

He adds, ‘Although those damned Jesuits buggered me to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live.’

He gazes longingly at the coffee machine. ‘Perhaps some coffee flavored with cloves, the way they serve it in Versailles?’

Alexander returns from the laundry room and dons gloves and scarf I have no wish to see him raped by priests, but I do wish he were going off to sharpen his wits on Aristotle, Epicurus, and Descartes. I kiss my first-born and pull his balaclava down over his forehead in a maternal gesture bravely borne.

Monsieur Arouet appears beside us in the doorway, struggling with a heavy woolen coat that covers his dressing gown and changing into hand-cobbled shoes. It seems he’s come equipped with his own wardrobe.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To the train, Mama. Bye.’ Alexander kisses my cheek and opens the kitchen door, shooting a blast of frozen air straight up my Japanese yukata.

‘To the train! You are a careless woman, I vow. When nine-year-old Zozo Arouet left for the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand, he did not walk alone. I was accompanied by a man-servant as well as my tutor.’

‘Well, as you may have noticed, Zozo,’ I retort, ‘we don’t have any servants at all. The station’s just down the hill. This isn’t Paris or, for that matter, New York. He’s perfectly safe.’

But l can see it is more than concern for Alexander’s physical welfare that is drawing this will-o’-the-wisp’s attention. ‘Which train, Madame?’ Out of his pocket, Monsieur Arouet takes an enormous jewel-encrusted watch on a gold chain.

‘7:12. Why bother if he can’t see you?’

‘I’ll be back tout de suite for coffee. Maybe mixed with champagne, or mustard, the way Frederick the Great served it? Or with a touch of ginger, Dutch-style?’

‘How can you drink—?’ I protest, but the Phantom of the Overcoat’s already scurrying after Alexander. Amazed, I watch my son’s slender form, bent over with the weight of his backpack, trudging past the pines at the end of our property and down the shoveled path between the snow banks. He never glances at the reedy figure dancing lightly at his side.

The winter sun rises behind them in a blood-red sky to the east of Europe’s tallest mountain, Mont Blanc.

As the two of them turn at our gate, I hear the ghost’s breathy voice in the morning air like an actor declaiming to an unseeing audience. ‘I may have fought the Jesuits’ doctrines all my life, but I never forgot what they taught me. The most industrious, frugal, regulated life possible . . . Nothing will ever erase in my heart the memory of Father Porée. Never did a man make study and virtue so pleasant . . . ’

Alexander is oblivious to this flow of advice, but something has communicated itself to the child. A more positive breeze in the air? The rousing sight of a blazing sky? He straightens his shoulders as he disappears from my view.

My bones have felt chilled since I got off that plane, but now, thinking of Monsieur Arouet at my son’s side, my heart feels a welcome warmth. So what if Alexander can’t see his talkative escort? I guess this lunacy is all mine to enjoy. Maybe I’ll hold off the appointment with a shrink. This eighteenth-century blabbermouth has brought an unexpected perspective to all the newness of our life here by talking of things even stranger. His withered whores and buggering Jesuits pour balm on my panicked soul.

I’m shivering in my cotton wrap. I’ll have to order one of those ugly duvet bathrobes from a catalogue—the kind that makes you look like a rolled-up mattress. Any pretense at being fashionably dressed is going down the tubes in this rustic setting. Since we left New York, I’ve piled on clothing without regard for cut or color, skipped my make-up, and scraped my hair into a careless ponytail.

Wait. This house ghost’s got more style than me—and he’s dead. I better slap on some blusher. I just hope he won’t want to borrow my face powder.

I relinquish the bathroom to Peter, in a hurry to ferry our daughter in his arms to the clinic. Upstairs, I hear Theo starting up his asthma machine. It’s at least comforting to know that when I packed up all our worldly and spiritual goods to come to Switzerland, my imagination came with me.