Cross Channel (14 page)

For her, now, the view back to 1917 was uncluttered: the decades were mown grass, and at their end was a row of white headstones, domino-thin. 1358 Private Samuel M. Moss East Lancashire Regt. 21st January 1917, and in the middle the Star of David. Some graves in Cabaret Rouge were anonymous, with no identifying words or symbols; some had inscriptions, regimental badges, Irish harps, springboks, maple leaves, New Zealand ferns. Most had Christian crosses; only three displayed the Star of David. Private Andrade, Private Levy and Private Moss. A British soldier buried beneath the Star of David: she kept her eyes on that. Sam had written from training camp that the fellows chaffed him, but he had always been Jewy Moss at school, and they were good fellows, most of them, as good inside the barracks as outside, anyway. They made the same remarks he’d heard before, but Jewy Moss was a British soldier, good enough to fight and die with his comrades, which is what he had done, and what he was remembered for. She pushed away the second war, which muddled things. He was a British soldier, East Lancashire Regiment, buried at Cabaret Rouge beneath the Star of David.

She wondered when they would plough them up, Herbécourt, Devonshire, Quarry, Blighty Valley, Ulster Tower, Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley; Maison Blanche and Cabaret Rouge. They said they never would. This land, she read everywhere, was ‘the free gift of the French people for
the perpetual resting place of those of the allied armies who fell…’ and so on. EVERMORE, they said, and she wanted to hear: for all future time. The War Graves Commission, her successive members of parliament, the Foreign Office, the commanding officer of Sammy’s regiment, all told her the same. She didn’t believe them. Soon — in fifty years or so — everyone who had served in the War would be dead; and at some point after that, everyone who had known anyone who had served would also be dead. What if memory-grafting did not work, or the memories themselves were deemed shameful? First, she guessed, those little stone tablets in the back lanes would be chiselled out, since the French and the Germans had officially stopped hating one another years ago, and it would not do for German tourists to be accused of the cowardly assassinations perpetrated by their ancestors. Then the war memorials would come down, with their important statistics. A few might be held to have architectural interest; but some new, cheerful generation would find them morbid, and dream up better things to enliven the villages. And after that it would be time to plough up the cemeteries, to put them back to good agricultural use: they had lain fallow for too long. Priests and politicians would make it all right, and the farmers would get their land back, fertilised with blood and bone. Thiepval might become a listed building, but would they keep Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s domed portico? That elbow in the D937 would be declared a traffic hazard; all it needed was a drunken casualty for the road to be made straight again after all these years. Then the great forgetting could begin, the fading into the landscape. The war would be levelled to a couple of museums, a set of demonstration trenches, and a few names, shorthand for pointless sacrifice.

Might there be one last fiery glow of remembering? In her own case, it would not be long before her annual renewals ceased, before the clerical error of her life was corrected; yet even as she pronounced herself an antique, her memories seemed to sharpen. If this happened to the individual, could it not also happen on a national scale? Might there not be, at some point in the first decades of the twenty-first century, one final moment, lit by evening sun, before the whole thing was handed over to the archivists? Might there not be a great looking-back down the mown grass of the decades, might not a gap in the trees discover the curving ranks of slender headstones, white tablets holding up to the eye their bright names and terrifying dates, their harps and springboks, maple leaves and ferns, their Christian crosses and their Stars of David? Then, in the space of a wet blink, the gap in the trees would close and the mown grass disappear, a violent indigo cloud would cover the sun, and history, gross history, daily history, would forget. Is this how it would be?

G
NOSSIENNE

L
ET ME MAKE IT CLEAR
that I never attend literary conferences. I know that they’re held in art deco hotels close to legendary museums; that sessions on the future of the novel are conducted with
Kameradschaft
,
brio
and
bonhomie
; that the impromptu friendships always endure; and that after the work is done you may savour hard liquor, soft drugs and a fair slither of sex. Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another. I also know that literary conferences are held in mafia-built blocks whose air-conditioning throbs with typhoid, tetanus and diphtheria; that the organisers are international snobs seeking local tax write-offs; that delegates covet the free air-ticket and the chance to bore their rivals in several different languages simultaneously; that in the presumed democracy of art everyone acknowledges and consequently resents their place in the true hierarchy; and that not a single novelist, poet, essayist or even journalist has ever left that mafia hotel a better writer than he or she entered it. I know all this, as I say, because I have never attended a single literary conference.

My replies are sent on postcards free of my own address:
‘Sorry, no’; ‘Don’t do conferences’; ‘Regret travelling elsewhere in the world’; and so on. The opening line of my reply to French invitations was not perfected for some years. Eventually it became: ‘
Je regrette que je ne suis conférencier ni de témperament ni d’aptitude
…’ I was rather pleased with this: if I pleaded mere incapacity it might be read as modesty, and if I pleaded temperamental unsuitability alone, conditions might be improved until it would be too difficult for me to refuse. This way I had rendered myself invulnerable to any comeback.

It was the sheer amateurishness of the invitation to Marrant that made me read it twice. Perhaps I don’t mean amateurish; more old-fashioned, as if it came from a vanished world. There was no municipal seal, no promise of five-star accommodation, no menu-list for S&M devotees of literary theory. The paper was unheaded, and though the signature looked original, the text above it had that faded, blurry, purply look of the Roneo machine or pre-war carbon paper. Some of the letters on the original typewriter (clearly an old manual, with sticky-up keys for a single-finger operator to peck at) were cracked. I noted all this; but what I most noted - what made me wonder briefly if I might for once have the temperament and the aptitude - was the sentence which stood by itself above the signature. The main text explained that the conference would take place in a certain small village in the Massif Central on a particular day in October. My presence would be welcome but a reply was not expected; I merely had to arrive by one of the three trains listed overleaf. Then came the statement of intent, opaque, whimsical, seductive: ‘The point of the conference consists in being met at the station: attendance is performance.’

I checked the letter again. No, I wasn’t being asked to
give a paper, sit on a panel, fret about Whither the Novel. I wasn’t being wooed with an A-list of fellow
conférenciers
. I wasn’t being offered my fare, my hotel bill, let alone a fee. I frowned at the looping signature untranslated into type. There was something familiar about it, which I eventually located, as I did the insouciance and cheeky familiarity of the invitation, in a particular French literary tradition: Jarry, pataphysics, Queneau, Perec, the OULIPO group and so on. The official unofficials, the honoured rebels. Jean-Luc Cazes, yes, surely he was one of that gang. A bit of a surprise that he was still alive. What was that definition of pataphysics? ‘The science of imagining solutions.’ And the point of the conference consisted in being met at the station.

I didn’t have to reply: this, I think, was what enchanted me. I didn’t have to say whether I was going or not. So the letter was lost and rediscovered among that sticky scatter of bills and receipts, invitations and VAT forms, proofs, begging letters and PLR print-outs which habitually shrouds my desk. One afternoon I got out the appropriate yellow Michelin map: no. 76. There it was: Marrant-sur-Cère, thirty or forty kilometres short of Aurillac. The railway line from Clermont-Ferrand ran straight through the village, whose name, I noticed, wasn’t underlined in red. So no listing in the Michelin guide. I double-checked, in case my yellow map was out of date, but there was no entry, nor one in the
Logis de France
either. Where would they put me up? This wasn’t a part of the Cantal I was familiar with. I grazed the map for a few minutes, making it work like a pop-up book: steep hill,
point de vue
, hikers’ trail,
maison forestière
. I imagined chestnut groves, truffle-hounds, forest clearings where charcoal-makers had once practised. Small mahogany cows jigged on the slopes of extinct volcanoes to the music of local bagpipes. I imagined
all this, because my actual memories of the Cantal reduced to two items: cheese and rain.

The English autumn succumbed to the first spiky prod of winter; fallen leaves were sugar-dusted by early frost. I flew to Clermont-Ferrand and stayed the night at the Albert-Elisabeth (
sans restaurant
). At the station the next morning, I did as I had been told: I booked a ticket to Vic-sur-Cère without mentioning to the clerk that my actual destination was Marrant. Certain trains - the three listed on my invitation - would stop at Marrant, but they would do so exceptionally, and by private arrangement with certain individuals connected with the railway. This touch of mystery pleased me: I felt a spy’s relish when the departures board showed no intermediate stop between Murat and Vic-sur-Cère. I had only hand-luggage anyway: the train would slow as if for a routine red light, would pause, squeak, exhale, and in that moment I would make a goblin disembarkation, shutting the door with a sly caress. If anyone saw me get off, they would assume I was an SNCF employee being done a favour by the driver.

I had been imagining some old-fashioned French train, the ferrovial equivalent of the Roneoed invitation, but I found myself in a smartly-liveried, four-carriage job with driver-controlled doors. I updated my descent at Marrant: I would rise from my seat as we left Murat, stand casually close to the door, wait for the conspiratorial humph of compressed air and be gone before the other passengers could miss me. I managed the first part of the manoeuvre without trouble; ostentatiously casual, I didn’t even look through the glass as the anticipated deceleration finally took hold. The train stopped, the doors opened and I got off. To my surprise I was hustled from behind by what logically I took to be other
conférenciers
- except that they were two broad-hipped, headscarfed women
of uplands rubicundity whom you would expect to see behind a trestle table selling twelve eggs and a skinned rabbit rather than signing copies of their latest novel. My second surprise was to read the words
VIC-SUR-CÈRE
. Shit! I must have been dreaming - my station must be after Vic, not before. I scooted back between the humphing doors and pulled out my invitation. Shit again! I’d been right the first time. So much for private arrangements with certain individuals. The bloody driver had gone straight through Marrant. Obviously no taste for literature, that fellow. I was swearing, and yet in a remarkably good mood.

At Aurillac I hired a car and took the N126 back up the Cère valley. I passed through Vic, and began looking out for a D-road east to Marrant. The weather was closing in, a fact I noted with benign neutrality. Normally I’m intolerant of fuck-ups: I find that enough things go wrong at my desk without more going wrong in all the contingent aspects of the literary life. The inert microphone at a public reading; the self-erasing tape-recorder; the journalist whose questions fail to fit any of the answers you might be capable of fabricating in an entire lifetime. I once did an interview for French radio in a Paris hotel room. There was a sound-check, the recordist pressed the switch and, as the spools began to circle, the interviewer shaved my chin with the microphone. ‘Monsieur Clements,’ he asked, with a kind of intimate authority, ‘le mythe et la réalité?’ I stared at him for quite some time, feeling my French evaporate and my brain dry. Eventually, I gave him the only answer I could: that such questions and their appropriate responses no doubt came naturally to French intellectuals, but that since I was a mere pragmatic English novelist, he would get a better interview out of me if he perhaps approached such larger matters by way of smaller,
lighter ones. This would also, I explained, help warm up my French for me. He smiled in concord, the engineer wound back the tape and the microphone was placed again like a tear-glass to catch my drops of wisdom. ‘Monsieur Clements, we are sitting here in your hotel room in Paris one afternoon in April. The window is open, and outside is unrolling the daily life of the city. Opposite the window is a wardrobe with a tall mirror in the door. I look in the wardrobe mirror and in it I can almost see reflected the daily life of Paris which is unrolling outside the window. Monsieur Clements,
le mythe et la réalité?’