A Possible Life (22 page)

Everything she does seems heavy with loss. Often, her voice seems to have an echo, as though she is speaking into emptiness. The lines of her desk and screen suggest, by their rectangular edges, the absence of the human, of the random. There is nothing fissile in the room, nothing unknowable. At lunchtime she avoids anything that might perturb her heart. She takes pumpkin-seed oil on her avocado salad and eats fresh orange and banana slices with a handful of grains. Dear me, she thinks, I’m like some witless hominid plodding over the Serengeti.

She asks herself if this denial means she really wants to live. Why should she wish to prolong the time allotted to her, to check the coil of death unwinding in her genes? Perhaps, she thinks, as she sits back at her desk, she does not mind being unhappy. The idea that humans can capture a mere mood – ‘happiness’ – and somehow preserve it seems absurd. As an aim for a life, it is not only doomed but infantile. Yet she would prefer to carry on – living what she thinks of as a death-in-life – than not to live at all.

When she returns to her apartment in the evening, lies down on the deep brown sofa with a glass of Tuscan wine and watches the telescreen slide up from the floor, Elena admits that after a lifetime of scientific research she understands nothing at all.

She will watch an old film from 2029 – a story of other people running round, falling in love, chasing one another, making jokes. She drinks more of the wine from Montalcino. Then she closes her eyes and sinks deeper into the cushions. She is filled with memories of places she has never been – of a monastery in France
with
cloisters and a tolling bell; of a cabin up in the hills of California where there is music; of a house in England with smooth green lawns where boys play a strange game with sticks and a red ball.

She wonders if, when she awakes, she will feel as mystified as she feels now; or whether the hard edges of fact, of history, of her own past – of every cell that makes her what she is – are in truth as flexible as time itself.

PART IV – A DOOR INTO HEAVEN

1822

JEANNE WAS SAID
to be the most ignorant person in the Limousin village where she had lived most of her life.

The house she lived in belonged to Monsieur and Madame Lagarde; she had been there since she was a young woman, though no one had known her exact age when she arrived. The place was built of local stone with a tile roof and grey shutters; it stood on a bend where the road began to go uphill. On one side there was a path that led down to a few remote houses and then to the river where the local youths went to fish; on the other side there was an orchard that fell to a deep ditch as the road curved and carried on downhill.

The village was spread out, having started life as no more than a farm with some outbuildings and cottages; it was only in the last fifty years that it had gained an inn for coaches, a baker’s and then a weekly market. With them had come some newer houses further down the hill, and these had been built round a square with cobbles. The Lagardes’ house was of the ‘old’ village and the rooms inside were panelled with dark oak; they were connected by dingy corridors and single steps of stone to allow for its different levels.

Jeanne’s room was on the ground floor at the back, overlooking the fields. It had a grey stone chimneypiece and a wooden prie-dieu as well as the bed, washstand and cupboard. The cost of logs for burning in the fireplace was taken from her wages, though there was no shortage of wood in the oak-covered countryside. Her job
in
the house was to clean and cook and look after the place as well as an old woman could; for mending fences or heavier work Monsieur Lagarde reluctantly brought in Faucher, the local handyman.

Lagarde himself had been bedridden for ten years following a stroke. He spent most of his time looking at his accounts and working out ways of making his savings go further. His wife brought him books, papers and pens each morning with his bowl of coffee and some bread and butter. The Lagarde family came from Ussel and had once owned several farms, but had lost most of its money during the Revolution. While he was little more than a second-generation bourgeois, Lagarde had cultivated a dislike of the ‘rabble’ – a term that for him took in anyone from a tax collector to the new mayor, and always included the village youth.

Partly as a compensation for his family’s loss of property, Monsieur Lagarde had as a newly married man turned himself into a philosopher. He had boxes full of books delivered from sales in Limoges and Brive with impressive titles such as
On the Understanding of Human Nature
or
Essays on the Principles of Reason
. The bookcase in the parlour held leather-bound editions of the works of Montaigne, Pascal and Descartes, while in his bedroom there were translations of Seneca and the Greeks. It was thought that he alternated his reading of the philosophers with his work on the family accounts.

Jeanne had never heard the word ‘philosophy’, but always feared that her employer’s careful housekeeping would sooner or later lead to his concluding that he could not afford her. Through decades of thrift she had managed to save a small sum of money, which she kept in the cupboard, but she had no idea where she might live if the family asked her to leave. One day when the mutterings from Lagarde’s room sounded ominous, Jeanne went to find Madame Lagarde and told her that she would be prepared
to
work for no more than lodging and food; she would become one of the family.

Jeanne’s life had not always been lived on such a low flame. Once she had had the lives of two children in her hands – Clémence and Marcel, the girl and boy born two years apart to Madame Lagarde when she was still in her twenties. The births had both been difficult, and Madame Lagarde had suffered from a sort of madness after each one. She said she felt as though she was falling from a cliff or riding a horse at speed into a stone wall; but she felt this moment of terror all the time. A doctor from Ussel gave her some sedative powders and advised her to hire a nurse or housekeeper to do some of the heavy work.

Monsieur Lagarde looked over the land his family still owned and went to the dairy where six young women were employed as milkmaids. He asked the dairyman about the personal history of each girl and discovered that the small, thickset one called Jeanne was an orphan who had simply arrived one day in search of work. She said she had been walking for four days after leaving a monastery where she had worked as a laundress. She had been at the dairy for three years and it was possible to make her work for nothing more than a bed of straw in the barn, with bread, cheese, milk and apples to eat. Unlike the others, she seemed glad of the work and didn’t make eyes at the men who came to visit. She was also, the dairyman said, astonishingly strong for one so small.

‘Let me speak to her,’ said Lagarde.

He took Jeanne to one side of the farmyard and asked her if she liked children.

Jeanne squinted in suspicion. ‘I don’t know, Monsieur.’

‘Did you have a younger brother? Or a sister?’

‘I don’t know, Monsieur.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I remember nothing before the orphanage. That’s the first thing I know about.’

‘And did you look after any younger children in this orphanage?’

‘Sometimes. When I was older. On a Sunday.’

This qualification was all that Lagarde seemed to require. ‘I’m going to offer you a position as nursemaid and housekeeper. How much do you think you should be paid?’

‘That’s not for me to say, Monsieur.’ Her accent was so strong that he could barely understand her.

‘I’ll send a horse and cart for your belongings.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said the dairyman. ‘All she owns can be put in a bag.’

Monsieur Lagarde gave the dairyman a few coins for his trouble, remounted his horse and told Jeanne to walk behind him. An hour later they arrived at the village house and Jeanne was shown to a room at the back. At this time it had only a bed and a small table with a wooden crucifix.

‘Come down the corridor to the parlour when you’ve unpacked your things,’ said Monsieur Lagarde. ‘You can meet the children, then my wife will instruct you in your duties.’

Jeanne’s bag had a rosary that had been given to her by a nun at the orphanage, a single change of clothes, some grey woollen stockings and a shawl for winter. Finally, there was a plaster Madonna that was so badly chipped that the nuns had been on the point of throwing it away; they disliked its one-eyed, minatory stare, finding it alarming and comic in equal amounts.

She arranged these things on the stone windowsill and knelt down on the floor to say a prayer. Her prayers were always the same. She humbled herself before the Almighty, confessed her sins, thanked Him for His mercy and asked that the next day might bring no more hardship than the last. Sometimes she remembered to add that her final request was to be granted only if it was His will, as well as hers.

* * *

Jeanne was a steady nurse to the children. She was careful of their small bodies and aware of their social standing, but when it came to giving them instructions she knew no way but firmness. They profited from her certainty more than from their parents’ vague ambitions. By the time they reached the age of eight and six, Clémence and Marcel were frightened of Jeanne, but they also laughed at her coarse voice and her face with its watery, short-sighted eyes. They feared her stern sayings, such as ‘Tell the truth and shame the Devil’, but noticed that the way she pronounced certain words showed she did not know what they really meant.

Clémence was a diffident girl who cried easily and hated the darkness on the crooked stair when she took her candle up to bed. She seemed always to be cold and had an exaggerated fear of insects; she was in fact scared of all animals, including dogs and horses, though this was so inconvenient for a country girl that she tried to conceal it.

Jeanne knew that her own upbringing had been unusual but presumed that the lessons she had learned from it would apply to any child. So Clémence and Marcel were scrubbed in cold water morning and night and made to say their prayers; they never ate until everyone was seated and never spoke unless addressed. As for their lessons, Jeanne, who could not read, was happy to see them go off to school in the next village.

She had never met either of her own parents and was told by the nuns that they were dead. One lesson had burned itself into her mind: that a child’s happiness depends on the goodwill of strangers – in her case, Sister Thérèse, who supervised the cold dormitory where she had slept; and in the case of Clémence and Marcel, it depended on her.

Marcel was a simpler case than Clémence. While his sister was always struggling to make her natural inclinations bend to what the world required of her, Marcel had a temperament that
fitted
him for living. Cold water made him laugh, prayers made him hopeful and food made him content. He liked to ride the pony his father had given him, and the long walk to school each day was a chance to play games with the other children who journeyed to the next village. He was no scholar, but learned the essentials with only the occasional rap over the knuckles from the schoolmaster.

When she brushed Clémence’s hair at night, Jeanne was touched by an emotion she did not understand. ‘There, there, Ninou,’ she used to whisper as she brushed, ‘there, there.’ She recognised it as a virtuous feeling, however; it made her want to protect the child from whatever lay ahead. What she felt for Marcel was fiercer. She had an urge to squeeze his shoulders in her arms and kiss the brown curls of his head. But she never allowed herself such liberties, and when they were safely in bed she took a candle to light her way downstairs, pausing at the parlour door to tell Monsieur and Madame Lagarde that the children were asleep.

Jeanne lived her life from one minute to the next, with no plan for the future and no sense that she would one day grow old or weak. By rising an hour before anyone else in the house she felt she stayed ahead of the others and that her disadvantages would not bring her to grief for at least another day.

She continually talked to God, her lips moving silently as she cleared the ashes from the grate in the parlour or scrubbed the front step. This was not prayer so much as putting her thoughts into words, but she had a clear picture in her mind who the listener was. He was the wooden figure on the cross in the village church where the children of her orphanage had gone every Sunday – a half-naked, bearded man with a wound in his side and a rough coronet of thorns on his head. Her time at the orphanage had given her a fierce sense of the supernatural. God
had
not only created the world and all that was in it, He was preoccupied with Jeanne for each moment of her waking day. He watched and judged her every action and unvoiced thought; he knew if her intentions were pure and if she told the smallest lie. She had no difficulty in believing in an invisible being. She understood so little of the material world – how water boiled, why a walnut fell from the tree – that she had had to take almost everything on trust. For her to believe that the organising power of the universe had chosen to make Himself invisible required less than to accept that – as Marcel had once tried to persuade her – the tides of the sea were drawn by the power of the moon. Of course God watched her and loved her; she felt Him near. Of course she could not see Him – otherwise there would be no need for Faith! And of course there were saints whose lives were an example, and naturally there was damnation for sinners; that was fair and just. And what was there in all this that was hard to believe?

From time to time Madame Lagarde thought she should try to educate her servant, though she lacked the stamina to carry out her good intentions in person. She had recovered from the mania that followed the birth of her children, but still suffered periods of melancholy during which she could barely stir from her room. The priest told her that she should busy herself with good deeds among the poor; the local doctor bled her with leeches. Eventually her husband paid for a well-known physician to come from Limoges.