Celestine (41 page)

So-and-so ‘speaks ill of others'.

Such-and-such is ‘as lazy as a dormouse'.

‘He favoured the girl too much.'

‘That woman never ought to have married him.'

In a society where a forebearing tolerance of others' weaknesses, vanities or eccentricities has important survival value, such judgements are not passed lightly, but once they are they become part of a moral construct, epitaphs on a whole lifetime.

‘What the father built, the son wasted.'

‘The daughter-in-law was the ruin of that family.'

*   *   *

In autumn, the vibrant wild life of the high season is retreating into death or hibernation. A vivid stillness possesses the landscape, a breath drawn in before the November storms. Transfigured by the first night frosts, the red and yellow leaves hang as brilliant as those of the New World against a high, mild sky. It is as warm as an English summer. The wood behind the Domaine is particularly golden, for it consists almost entirely of Spanish chestnuts. Bicycling through it, I come upon Madame Bernardet; her own sit-up-and-beg bike is parked in the ditch, there is a cloth bag on her arm. She is in conversation with a middle-aged man, similarly equipped, whom I vaguely recognize. They greet me cheerily but with a slightly self-conscious air: could they possibly – at their age? But no, of course, I realize they are gathering chestnuts, and that the appearance of conspiracy is because the trees actually belong to the Domaine … But no one from there is going to bother to gather them … Pity to let them go to waste … The habits of their own youth and of all the generations lying behind them are impossible to resist. One does not, if one is wise, refuse nature's bounty. So chestnuts and walnuts are picked, even if they are not strictly needed, just as huge quantities of vegetables and fruit are harvested even when there is a glut and firmly bestowed on acquaintances too old or too urban to have a glut of their own. ‘Harvest' and ‘picking time' –
la récolte
– are words with a moral glow surrounding them. The fact that the most important harvest of all, that of the wheat, is so highly mechanized these days has not dimmed this aura: rather, it is as if people feel obscurely cheated by the speed and sureness of combine-harvesting and therefore transfer their necessary emotion to other crops. Enjoyable crises develop over the exhausting need to pick, prepare and freeze the haricot beans before they swell too far, or the obligation to get the damsons in before the wasps descend.

In the old tradition of the villager doing well, as distinct from merely scraping a living, Bernardet maintains his own vineyard, in the favoured place on a well-drained southern slope towards Le Magny. There, very early one Sunday at the beginning of each October, the Bernardet clan gather
pour les vendanges,
the numerous descendants of the hard-pressed Paul justifying their existence. Many of the younger ones are builders, electricians, mechanics and even teachers: they enjoy the day's labour in Uncle Georges's vineyard, punctuated as it is by a hearty picnic breakfast and lunch, but they enjoy it consciously as a ritual belonging to a way of life they themselves are leaving behind. When Bernardet is gone, the vineyard will go too, and with it the little wooden barrels of purplish wine with its own distinctive taste. Looking after a vineyard, keeping it weeded and sprayed and trellised, is labour-intensive; economically it can hardly be worth it today, with
vin ordinaire
in every supermarket at a few francs the litre, though Bernardet himself swears his own wine is healthier than ‘all this treated stuff'.

The old subsistence economy, with its procession of duties that become rituals, forms a calendar that is distinct from the official one but cohabits with it, so that an old seasonal marker may reappear under a new guise. One year, on the eve of 11 November, when the church bells are tolling cheerfully for men dead sixty years and more, I go down to the Bonnins. Old Monsieur Bonnin is there, more talkative than usual, indeed positively jolly, making lunges at the stomach of a frequently pregnant neighbour. Another moustached old man breezes in – ‘I hear tell there's some new cider going!' The remains of the apple crop have just been pressed and bottled. We all have a glass of this volatile liquid, still fermenting in its own sweetness. An atmosphere of discreet celebration reigns. Although both men are old soldiers, and will stand at agèd attention by the war memorial the following day, well wrapped up in scarves, I sense that something older than Armistice Day is being marked here. By and by it comes to me that 11 November is also the Feast of St Martin. Since St Martin's Day was always a quarter day when bills were settled and employments entered into or terminated, it is also therefore far older than St Martin himself. It is the autumn solstice, one of the four natural turning-points of the ancient world, a time for purificatory bonfires that were once sacrificial in intent. Here in the warm kitchen with the glasses of apple juice and the jokes about the pregnant neighbour, something very old is being subliminally recalled.

We are not always there ourselves in autumn. The grapes over our door are eaten by blackbirds, much to Bernardet's justified disgust.
‘Les merles les auront … C'est dommage.'
One year, knowing that I am due to come, he cuts them for me and strings them up in the house complete with their leaves, where they greet me with a Bacchic air, musky, just beginning to bruise. With laborious care I transport a few bunches back to London: bounty must not be rejected. But even Bernardet can see that when we come without a car we cannot carry apples home across the sea. Most years our apples fall with soft, unregarded thuds on to the composted earth of the vegetable patch, which they enrich further in their turn.

But then the bounty of acorns falls unregarded in this century from the oak trees all round, and even Bernardet does not try to harvest these. Once eagerly snuffled up by the pigs that wandered free in the villages, they now just drop with a tiny crack on to the tarmac roads. One buries itself in the hedge between us and the neighbouring chicken run, and takes root. It is four foot high before Bernardet and I discuss it, and we decide to leave it there. It flourishes year by year, it is taller than our growing son, then taller than any of us. Bernardet says several times, ‘That tree will live longer than me.'

‘It'll live longer than me too, I hope. Longer than anyone now alive. Much longer.'

But Bernardet still wears an elegiac expression.

‘I've had a good life. But just now I'm old [
Je suis vieux à présent
].'

I tell him he surely has years of health and strength ahead of him yet, partly because that is what I want to believe myself and partly because I assume that this is what he wants me to say. He looks gratified but shakes his head – ‘No, no, my place is in the cemetery now.'

‘Oh, I expect he just says that to keep the bad spirits away [
pour conjurer le mauvais sort
].' Mademoiselle Pagnard, in placid amusement. She, in any case, is seven years older, and looks death in the eye unafraid.

Bernardet's concern for the oak is unusual in a farmer. One winter morning in the early days, the first time I ever stay at the house on my own, I wake with a jump in my cocoon of blankets. There has been a great thud that leaves the earth vibrating. The air feels threatening. I dress hastily and go out, to find that big trees that must have taken several hundred years to grow have been felled in the copse at the end. Why? I ask the woodcutters, hoping that some special purpose lies behind this slaughter. They are vague. ‘Oh – for repairs.'

A couple of the inevitable old men in striped trousers have come down to look too. They gaze at the fresh stumps with the brutal appreciation of huntsmen admiring a quarry. One is Monsieur Chezaubernard, old soldier, owner of Barbary ducks. The other, an elderly clog-maker known as ‘La Gazette' from his aptitude in passing round village news, has generously shaken his plum tree for us the summer past, scattering ripe fruit at the feet of our delighted child.

They opine that that's what trees are for – cutting down as needed. Always have been.

Another night at this same time I am asleep near the embers of the fire and wake with a start. An oak log shifts in its ashes, sending up a small spurt of flame, and it seems to me in that moment that a short, stocky old man in a cloak has crossed the floor, glancing at me as he goes with a shrewd amusement.

A trick of the firelight.

‘An old man covered with a mantle', as in the Book of Job.

Our house was called ‘the Pope's House'…

Another time, the ghosts I momentarily see are not men but the vanished pigs who once consumed the acorns. One evening at Les Girauds, as dark is coming down, I suddenly glimpse these antique pigs, hairy and long-snouted as in
Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
Great boars, sows and little ones are together in a herd, rooting under the trees of a small copse. I make for home by an uneasy wind and a rising moon, seriously wondering if, for a moment, I have seen through a rift in time. Suppose it should happen again? Rags of black clouds transform themselves ahead into George Sand's cavalcades of unearthly huntsmen. The road seems solid enough beneath my feet. But suppose it should disintegrate into a muddy track, and the lights of the village ahead reduce themselves, as I approach, to weak pinpoints of candle flame …

A few days later I learn that a new enterprise has recently been established at Les Girauds. It rears wild boars, free-range, to sell their meat as a delicacy for Christmas and the New Year.

*   *   *

‘La Gazette' has been gone for many years now. So have Monsieur Chezaubernard and Monsieur Bonnin. Indeed, all three of the husbands in the 1981 diamond wedding photo, Messrs L, Bonnin and Gonnin, were dead by the middle of the decade, leaving their wives as testimony to the superior female powers of survival. The year comes when, on 11 November, there are no men of the first war standing to attention any more: the Old Soldiers are the youngsters of the second war, who are themselves now heavy and grey-haired. A few years later comes the Armistice Day when the mayor announces: ‘For many years, as you all know, it has been Maxime Démeure, in his capacity as a leading member of the
Anciens Combattants
and ex-prisoner of war, who has read out the names of the dead. Since he is now no longer with us, let us remember him, also, in our two minutes' silence.'

I think it was not until then that I realized that the old men in striped trousers, once so numerous, had, like the striped dormice, disappeared quietly from the scene one by one. They had become the past, even as the last old men in smocks did in the 1920s or others in breeches and cloaks did in the 1850s.

Old Norman Lloyd the painter had gone too, sadly separated at the last by debility from the people he had so nearly made his own. With memory loss, his command of French, always self-taught and eccentric, had gone. Now that they could no longer communicate with him, he became even to the kindest villagers something of an object of fear and aversion. A primitive distaste for the old and worn out, whether a tool, a beast of burden or a human being, asserted itself in their voices. Some maintained, according to their own preoccupations, that he didn't eat enough, or didn't keep himself warm, or that it was unnatural to live alone – or again that he'd had some financial blow which had ‘turned his brain' – but all were insistent that he must somehow be spirited off to whatever distant relatives he possessed elsewhere. Ultimately, in France, the family is everything. With a sense of treachery in our hearts, abetted by his disappearance and then reappearance in a state of shock in a Paris hospital, we set this removal in train. For years, the Bonnins in particular would faithfully ask us for news of him, evidently conceiving of the United Kingdom as a fairly small, cohesive place.

Monsieur Chezaubernard, long a widower and used to looking after his own health, lived snug as a dormouse in his own house with a roaring wood stove. Then, one November, he wasn't there. ‘He'll be back in the spring,' people said. ‘He's just in the Old People's Hospital for the winter, because it's difficult for his daughter to get over from Le Magny in bad weather to keep an eye on him.'

In the spring the weather was still bad. Easter came early, cuckoos shouted unseasonably across the cold green fields. On the weekly bus going into La Châtre, well wrapped-up old women assured one another that it was ‘no day for washing shirts outside'. They knew – they remembered. On Good Friday came a sudden fall of thick, wet snow, just as it had fallen another early April, the time of the murder in the Lavoir. At the Bonnins that evening, Georgette said: ‘Have you heard? Le Père Chezaubernard is near the end…' She said
‘au plus mal',
the time-honoured French phrase for announcing an imminent death, the phrase sent in the telegram to Paris when George Sand lay dying in the Berry a hundred years earlier.

Later that night, the hospital sent him ‘home to die'. In reality, he was gone already, but the rural hospitals know that people like their dead to lie in state at home and, since it is theoretically forbidden to transport a corpse anywhere but the morgue, a polite fiction is maintained. All the long weekend, while snow endured outside and the stove made the inside disquietingly warm, Monsieur Chezaubernard lay at ease on his own bed. He was covered with a lace-edged sheet, sprinkled with white carnations as for a country wedding breakfast, and above it his face appeared like the face of a doll, a matchbox propping up his chin. His moustache, the bushy one of a
poilu
of the '14–'18, was the most real and familiar thing about him.

His daughter, till then shy and taciturn with us, never forgot that we came to pay our respects to him. Many years later, if I went on foot through Le Magny's one street, she would pop out of her house like a small, benign witch. ‘It's you! Where's your car – your husband?… Walking on foot back to Chassignolles? All the way from La Châtre?…
Ma pauvre dame!
You must have some coffee to keep you going…'