Montreal Stories (38 page)

In the nineteen-sixties, a worldwide tide of euphoric prosperity and love of country reached Osier, dislodging the British. When the tide receded, it was discovered that their places had been taken by teachers from Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, who could stand the winters. By the seventies, Osier had buried Nutrition and Health (Miss MacLeod was recycled into Language Structure), invented a graduate-studies program, had the grounds landscaped—with vast undulating lawns that, owing to drought and the nature of the soil, soon took on the shade and texture of Virginia tobacco—ceased
to offer tenure to the foreign-born, and was able to call itself a university.

Around this time I was invited to Osier twice, to deliver a guest lecture on Talleyrand and to receive an honorary degree. On the second occasion, Lapwing, wearing the maroon gown Osier had adopted in a further essay at smartening up, prodded my arm with his knuckle and whispered, “We both made it, eh, Burnet?”

To Lapwing I was simply an Easterner, Anglo-Quebec—a permanent indictment. Like many English-Canadians brought up to consider French an inferior dialect, visited on hotel maids and unprincipled politicians, he had taken up the cause of Quebec after nationalism became a vanguard idea and moved over from right to left. His loyalties, once he defined them, traveled easily: I remember a year when he and his wife would not eat lettuce grown in Ontario because agricultural workers in California were on strike. With the same constancy, he now dismissed as a racist any Easterner from as far down the seaboard as Maryland whose birth and surroundings caused him to speak English.

Our wives were friends; that was what threw us into each other’s company for a year, in France. Some of the external, convivial life of men fades when they get married, except in places like Saudi Arabia. I can think of no friendship I could have maintained where another woman, the friend’s wife or girlfriend, was uncongenial to Lily. Lapwing and I were both graduate students, stretching out grants and scholarships, for the first time in our lives responsible for someone else. That was what we had in common, and it was not enough. Left to ourselves, we could not have discussed a book or a movie or a civil war. He thought I was supercilious and rich; thought it when I was in my early twenties, and hard up for money, and unsure about most things. What I thought about him I probably never brought into focus, until the day I felt overburdened by dislike. I had been raised by my widowed aunt, cautioned
to find in myself opinions that could be repeated without embarrassing anyone; that were not displeasing to God; on the whole, that saved wear.

In France, once we started to know people, we were often invited all four together, as a social unit. We went to dinner in rooms where there were eight layers of wallpaper, and for tea and drinks around cracked ornamental pools (Rivebelle had been badly shelled only a few years before), and Lapwing told strangers the story of his life; rather, what he thought about his life. He had been born into a tough-minded, hardworking, well-educated family. Saying so, he brought all other conversation to a standstill. It was like being stalled in an open, snowy plain, with nothing left to remind you of culture and its advantages but legends of the Lapwings—how they had studied and struggled, with what ease they had passed exams in medicine and law, how Dr. Porter Lapwing had discovered a cheap and ready antidote for wasp venom. (He blew cigar smoke on the sting.)

We met a novelist, Watt Chadwick, who invited us, all four, to a concert. None of us had known a writer before, and we observed him at first uneasily—wondering if he was going to store up detractory stuff about us—then with interest, trying to surmise if he wrote in longhand or on a typewriter, worked in the morning or the afternoon, and where he got his ideas. At the back of our wondering was the notion that writing novels was not a job for a man—a prejudice from which we had to exclude Dickens and others, and which we presently overcame. The conflict was more grueling for Lapwing, whose aim was to teach literature at a university. Mr. Chadwick’s family had built a villa in Rivebelle in the eighteen-eighties which he still occupied much of the year. He was regarded highly in the local British colony, where his books were lent and passed around until the bindings collapsed. Newcomers are always disposed to enter into local snobberies: the invitation delighted and flattered us.

“He finds us good-looking and interesting,” Lily said to me, seriously, when we talked it over. Lapwing must have risen as an exception in her mind, because she added, “And Harry has lots to say.”

Rivebelle was a sleepy place that woke up once a year for a festival of chamber music. The concerts were held in a square overlooking the harbor, a whole side of it open to a view of the sea. The entire coastal strip as far as the other side of Nice had been annexed to Italy, until about a year prior to the shelling I’ve mentioned, and the military commander of the region had shown more aptitude for improving the town than for fortifying its beaches. No one remembers his name or knows what became of him: his memorial is the Rivebelle square. He had the medieval houses on its south boundary torn down (their inhabitants were quartered God knows where) and set his engineering corps to build a curving staircase of stone, mosaic, and stucco, with a pattern of “V”s for “Viva” and “M”s for “Mussolini,” to link the square and the harbor. In the meantime children went down to the shore and paddled in shallow water, careful not to catch their feet in a few strands of barbed wire. The commander did not believe an attack could come from that direction. Perhaps he thought it would never come at all.

On concert nights Lily and I often leaned on the low wall that replaced the vanished houses and watched, as they drifted up and down the steps and trod on the “V”s, visitors in evening dress. They did not look rich, as we understood the word, but indefinably beyond that. Their French, English, German, and Italian were not quite the same as the languages we heard on the beaches, spoken by tourists who smacked their children and buried the remains of pizzas in the sand. To me they looked a bit like extras in prewar films about Paris or Vienna, but Lily studied their clothes and manner. There was a difference between pulling out a mauled pack of cigarettes and opening a heavy cigarette case: the movement
of hand and wrist was not the same. She noticed all that. She once said, leaning on the wall, that there was something unfinished about us, the Burnets and Lapwings. We had packed for our year abroad as if the world were a lakeside summer cottage. I still couldn’t see myself removing my squashed Camels to a heavy case and snapping it open, like a gigolo.

“You’ve never seen a gigolo,” said Lily. And, almost regretfully, “Neither have I.”

She dressed with particular attention to detail for Mr. Chadwick’s evening, in clothes I had never noticed before. Edie gave her a silk blouse that had got too tight. Lily wore it the way Italian girls did, with the collar raised and the sleeves pushed up and the buttons undone as far as she dared. I wondered about the crinoline skirt and the heart-shaped locket on a gold chain.

“They’re from Mrs. Biesel,” Lily said. “She went to a lot of trouble. She even shortened the skirt.” The Biesels were an American couple who had rented a house that Queen Alexandra was supposed to have stayed in, seeking relief from her chronic rheumatism and the presence of Edward VII. Mr. Biesel, a former naval officer who had lost an arm in the North Africa landings, was known locally as the Admiral, though I don’t think it was his rank. Mr. Chadwick always said, “Admiral Bessel.” He often had trouble with names, probably because he had to make up so many.

The Biesels attracted gossip and rumors, simply by being American: if twenty British residents made up a colony, two Americans were a mysterious invasion. Some people believed the Admiral reported to Washington on Rivebelle affairs: there were a couple of diplomats’ widows and an ex-military man who had run a tin-pot regiment for a sheikh or an emir. Others knew for certain that Americans who cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency were let off paying income tax. Mr. Chadwick often dined and played bridge at Villa
Delizia, but he had said to Lily and me, “I’m careful what I say. With Admiral Bessel, you never can tell.”

He had invited a fifth guest to the concert—David Ogdoad, his part-time gardener, aged about nineteen, a student of music and an early drifter. His working agreement with Mr. Chadwick allowed him to use the piano, providing Mr. Chadwick was not at the same moment trying to write a novel upstairs. The piano was an ancient Pleyel that had belonged to Mr. Chadwick’s mother; it was kept in a room called the winter salon, which jutted like a promontory from the rest of the house, with shuttered windows along two sides and a pair of French doors that were always locked. No one knew, and perhaps Mr. Chadwick had forgotten, if he kept the shutters closed because his mother had liked to play the piano in the dark or if he did not want sunlight further to fade and mar the old sofas and rugs. Here, from time to time, when Mr. Chadwick was out to lunch or dinner, or, for the time being, did not know what to do next with “Guy” and “Roderick” and “Marie-Louise,” David would sit among a small woodland of deprived rubber plants and labor at getting the notes right. He was surprisingly painstaking for someone said to have a restless nature but badly in need of a teacher and a better instrument: the Pleyel had not been tuned since before the war.

Now, of course Mr. Chadwick could have managed all this differently. He could have made David an allowance instead of paying token wages; introduced David to his friends as an equal; found him a teacher, had the piano restored, or bought a new one; built a music studio in the garden. Why not? Male couples abounded on this part of the coast. There were distinguished precedents, who let themselves be photographed and interviewed. Mr. Maugham lived not far away. But Mr. Chadwick was smaller literary stuff, and he didn’t want the gossip. The concert outing was a social trial balloon. Any of Mr. Chadwick’s friends, seeing the six of us, were supposed to
say, “Watt has invited a party of young people,” and not the fatal, the final, “Watt has started going out with his gardener.”

Mr. Chadwick had not been able to book six seats together, which was all to the good: it meant there was no chance of my having to sit next to Lapwing. He was opposed on principle to the performance of music and liked to say so while it was going on, and his habit of punching one in the arm to underscore his opinions always made me feel angry and helpless. I sat with Lily in the second row, with the Lapwings and Mr. Chadwick and his gardener just behind. The front row was kept for honored guests. Mr. Chadwick pointed them out to Edie: the local mayor, and Jean Cocteau, and some elderly Bavarian princesses.

People applauded as Cocteau was shown to his seat. He was all in white, with bright quick eyes. The Bavarians were stout and dignified, in blue or pink satin, with white fur stoles.

“How do you get to be a Bavarian princess?” I heard Edie say.

“You could be born one,” said Mr. Chadwick. He kept his voice low, like a radio announcer describing an opera. “Or you could marry a Bavarian prince.”

“What about the fantastic-looking Italians?” said Edie. “At the end of the row. The earrings! Those diamonds are diamonds.”

Mr. Chadwick was willing to give the wearer of the earrings a niche in Italian nobility.

“Big money from Milan,” said Lapwing, as if he knew all about both. “Cheese exporters.” His tone became suspicious, accusing almost: “Do you actually know Cocteau?”

“I have met M. Cocteau,” said Mr. Chadwick. “I make a distinction between meeting and knowing, particularly with someone so celebrated.”

“That applause for him just now—was it ironic?”

I could imagine Lapwing holding his glasses on his blob of a nose, pressing his knuckle between his eyes. I felt responsible, the way you always do when a compatriot is making a fool of himself.

Of course not, Mr. Chadwick replied. Cocteau was adored in Rivebelle, where he had decorated an abandoned chapel, now used for weddings. It made everyone happy to know he was here, the guest of the town, and that the violinist Christian Ferras would soon emerge from the church, and that the weather could be trusted—no mistral, no tramontane to carry the notes away, no threat of rain.

I think he said some of this for David, so that David would be appreciative even if he could not be content, showing David he had reason upon reason for staying with Mr. Chadwick; for at any moment David might say he had had enough and was going home. Not home to Mr. Chadwick’s villa, where he was said to occupy a wretched room—a nineteenth-century servant’s room—but home to England. And here was the start of Mr. Chadwick’s dilemma—his riddle that went round and round and came back to the same point: What if David stopped playing gardener and was moved into the best spare bedroom—the room with Monet-like water lilies on three walls? What would be his claim on the room? What could he be called? Mr. Chadwick’s adopted nephew? His gifted young friend? And how to explain the shift from watering the agapanthus to spending the morning at the piano and the afternoon on the beach?

“Do you know who the three most attractive men in the world are?” said Edie all of a sudden. “I’ll tell you. Cary Grant, Ali Khan, and Prince Philip.”

None of the three looked even remotely like Lapwing. I glanced at Lily, expecting a flash of complicity.

Instead she said softly, “Pablo Picasso, Isaac Stern, Juan Fangio.”

“What about them?”

“The most attractive.”

“Who’s Fangio? You mean the racing driver? Have you ever seen him?”

“Just his pictures.”

“I can’t see what they’ve got in common.”

“Great, dark eyes,” said Lily.

I suppressed the mention that I did not have great, dark eyes, and decided that what she really must have meant was nerve and genius. I knew by now that nerve comes and goes, with no relation to circumstance; as for genius, I had never been near it. Probably genius grew stately and fat or gaunt and haunted, lost its hair, married the wrong person, died in its sleep. David Ogdoad, of whom I was still barely aware except as a problem belonging to Mr. Chadwick, had been described—by Mr. Chadwick, of course—as a potential genius. (I never heard his name again after that year.) He had small, gray eyes, and with his mouth shut looked like a whippet—something about the way he stretched his neck.