On Green Dolphin Street (28 page)

The house was certainly traditional. It dated from a time when Bretons regarded “France” as an invented novelty that would not catch on; it had been unaltered since before the Revolution and had resisted all incomers from the threatening Republic, particularly cleaners. There was fresh linen on the beds and the bare floorboards had been perfunctorily swept, but there were cobwebs in the corners and the bedrooms gave off a dry, exhausted smell. There were two bathrooms whose giant cast-iron tubs had rusted water stains, while, through connections to its unknown burial place outside, the septic tank had left a reminder of its proximity. As Mary made her quick inspection, she thought of a farmer’s daughter drawing up her knees for warmth and holding on as the telegram boy brought news from Verdun, a French hell in which her brothers and lovers were so reluctantly engaged. She pictured earlier inhabitants, Bovary-type girls wandering through the orchards in their dreams of desire, aching to be free of the anonymous countryside where even Quimper and Vannes and Concarneau seemed unreachably distant. This desire to be loved, without which they would not be alive … Silly girls, she thought, folding Louisa’s clothes into the drawer of a walnut chest.

Mary’s unhappiness at being separated from Frank took the form of anger. She was impatient with the children and found that she disliked the dirty rustic house—miles from America, pointless. She had an aching wish to be back in the United States, to taste cheeseburgers made from grain-fed cattle that gave them that loose texture, to drink a cold martini with an olive; to sit at her corner table in Fiorello’s and look down at Teddy Roosevelt’s island while she ate the chocolate dessert with a large espresso in which floated a twist of puckered lemon peel.

The owners of the Breton house had assured them that Madame Bobotte, a neighbor, would have called round in the afternoon to leave them milk, bread and some emergency supplies until they could get to the shops the next day, but a thorough search of the kitchen showed that
Madame Bobotte had failed to oblige. There was no address or telephone number for her and it was now too late to find anywhere open, so Mary went through the various cupboards to see what she could find. Behind a floral curtain on a wire, she discovered a fridge with a levered handle like those on the door of a butcher’s cold room. It was admirably cold inside, but empty except for a swollen ice tray dusted with frost crystals of an age to grace a mammoth’s tomb. In the dresser were many china dinner services, lidded soup tureens and piled plates of every size, but no food. A pine corner cupboard disclosed some packets of rat poison, a few bottles of dried herbs and a brush made of tied twigs.

Charlie rummaged at the back of his case for his emergency fifth of Wild Turkey. The water in the bathroom ran cloudy in the toothglass, which he cleaned and rinsed with a practiced forefinger. Bourbon was the finest disinfectant known to him, and he had no scruple about draining a glass of half whiskey and half warm
eau de robinet
, with which he swilled down three aspirin from his washbag.

He went downstairs to find Mary struggling over the gas in the kitchen. After he had discovered the butane cylinder on the floor, concealed behind another floral curtain on a wire, and spent some time turning the tap this way, that way and halfway, the burner eventually ignited with an explosive thump, causing Mary to leap backward with a squeal. Charlie resumed his search for liquor, while Mary lifted down a blackened skillet from its hook.

Eventually she was able to offer a dinner that consisted of last year’s walnuts fried in nut oil with anchovies, accompanied by most of a week-old baguette sliced and fried, for variation, in olive oil with pepper. There was half a bar of chocolate in the car. Mary drank water, the children drank a diluted grenadine cordial, both chilled with the slightly defrosted and rinsed mammoth’s ice, while Charlie drank something he had found at the bottom of a cupboard in the sitting room. It was a pure spirit, but with an oddly viscous surface and some sprigs of herb or plant in the bottle.

“It’s rather good actually,” he said. “Some sort of
eau de vie
, apple or prune or something. You want to try some?”

Mary shook her head. “It looks disgusting,” she said.

She watched the children’s faces as they ate. There was just enough food and it was just sufficiently edible to pass for dinner; together with the sugar of the grenadine and chocolate, it lifted their spirits.

Charlie lit a cigarette, drained his glass and smiled. “Marvelous supper,” he said. Mary noticed that he had not actually eaten it, but then he hardly ate at all anymore.

He began to speculate on the people who lived there, their observation of obscure saints’ days, the pious names of their numerous children, their repudiation of alcohol and their fanatical dislike of food. “We never eat in any month that has a vowel in its name. Which particularly rules out
août.
”

The light was on behind his eyes, Mary saw, and Louisa’s extraordinary laugh was gurgling up like water from an unblocked drain. It was almost like the old days and she had to look away.

It was a beautiful morning, cool and fresh, with air that no one, since the Atlantic rocks were formed, had breathed before, and the promise of sunshine to come. Charlie rose early and drove into Saint Brioche, as he now called it, to buy supplies, which included a plastic paddling pool and water pistols. When he returned to the house, he saw Mary in her white nightdress boiling water in the kitchen. She gestured to him to be quiet, miming that the children were still asleep.

The Williamses arrived shortly before noon with their twins, Douglas and Elliot, and Marie-Laure, the girl from Vannes. Vernon Williams was a bespectacled, unathletic man in his late forties who worked at the State Department. He climbed out of the car and shot his hand out at Charlie to be shaken; Lauren offered her cheek, which, Charlie noticed, was fragrant and freshly powdered even after the tiresome journey.

Mary took the Williamses upstairs to show them where they were sleeping; the children greeted one another with muted hostility, then ran off wordlessly into the garden where there were two barns in states of
dangerous disrepair. Charlie slunk down to the orchard with a book and did not return until summoned for lunch, which Mary and Lauren had laid out beneath some pear trees at the back of the house.

Vernon Williams folded away his copy of the
Herald Tribune
and helped himself to cold chicken. “I can’t believe they don’t have a shower here,” he said.

His wife laughed. “It’s Europe, honey. Things are a little different.”

Marie-Laure, the mother’s help, piled her plate with chicken legs, pâté and salad and lowered her head to the task with small grunts of appreciation. Charlie poured some wine.

Mary said, “We thought we’d stay in tonight. I’ll make dinner, so you can all just relax.” It was the kind of thing Charlie had heard her say a hundred times: helpful, accommodating, selfless. But was he imagining it, or was there an edge of sarcasm, almost of despair, in her voice?

He looked at her, in her navy cotton shirt, white slacks and loafers; she looked a little tired, he thought, but the good thing about Mary was that you never really had to worry about her.

In the course of lunch Charlie was able to disengage his mind and drift. He generally knew what people were going to say from the first few words of their sentences; after that it was a question of keeping an appearance of interest as they struggled on toward the end or, in Lauren’s case, were sidetracked before they reached it.

“You look so remote, Charlie,” people used to tell him, which was true, but a quarter of an ear was enough to keep up with what was being said; the remaining part of his attention searched for something else to occupy it, and it was the opinion of his psychoanalyst in Bethesda that this was the root of his problem: that he could not find a constructive or creative outlet for the rest of his mental activity, because he had no talents. So he drank to kill it off. He drowned it.

“Shouldn’t I be a repressed homosexual at least?” Charlie had said. “Or the victim of some forgotten childhood cruelty?”

The analyst did not smile. “Would you like to be?” he said.

Charlie drank enough wine at lunch to make it possible for him to
sleep through the hours from three till five, a time of the day he particularly disliked.

It grew hot in the afternoon and Mary changed into her bathing costume. It was a bikini, the first she had ever owned, black, with trunks that stretched to a squared-off end a little way down the thigh; when she lit the gas to boil water for tea, she felt the warmth of the flame against the bare skin of her belly. Despite being called Sir Winston Churchill Five O’Clock, the tea was too weak to restart Charlie’s day with the jolt it required, and he spent another hour on the bed doing a two-day-old
Times
crossword.

Mary labored alone over dinner. Cooking on holiday, with no guests and worries about time, was normally something she enjoyed, but she felt angry with the recalcitrant stove and annoyed at the stupid Williamses with their gormless children. She could not explain her frustration to anyone, but the pressure of it mounted so much inside her that she had to find some way of venting it. She let out shuddering sighs and swore at the kitchen implements, at Brittany, at the girl from Vannes and at her mother for dying.

At seven o’clock she called Charlie to the kitchen to help her light the oven. Twenty matches later, Charlie summoned Vernon Williams.

Vernon lay on his back on the red tiles of the kitchen floor.

“There’s a little hole, just there.”

“Maybe you should light the element on the top.”

“Or is that the grill?”

“Are you sure the gas is on, Charlie?”

“Do you have another match?”

“Is that a pilot light? That’s working anyhow.”

“Well, that argues that at least the gas is connected.”

“Didn’t they teach you anything at Harvard?”

“Have you tried that little hole up there?”

“This is the last match.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I just banged my head on the door trying to get out of the way.”

“Made a hell of a bang.”

“Still, at least it’s working.”

“Yes. What exactly did you do?”

“I’m not too sure.”

Normally this holiday ritual delighted Mary, but she could see no charm in it this time. She banged the cast-iron lid on the casserole and shoved it into the feeble oven. Lauren took the children off for a bath and Charlie poured drinks in the living room. He carried a glass of whiskey, Lord McGregor Genuine Scottish from the épicerie in Saint Brioche, through to Mary in the kitchen and, to her irritation, put his arms around her as she stood at the sink. She turned to him and forced a smile, pushing a strand of dark hair back from her eyes. He helped himself to one of her cigarettes, which lay in their usual place, next to the cooker.

“Since when have you smoked Chesterfield?”

“I … I don’t know. They didn’t have any Winston. By the way, there’s no washing machine here. I’ll have to take the clothes to a laundry. Did you see one this morning?”

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

Mary cooked a large dinner for them all to make up for the privation of the night before: eggs with homemade mayonnaise and the last of the anchovies, a beef bourguignon with mashed potatoes, and apple pie from the patisserie. Lauren told a long story about Kelly Eberstadt’s first husband.

“And what do you think, Mary?” said Vernon Williams. “You’ve been very quiet.”

“What do I think about what?”

“About Kelly’s husband and her remarriage.”

“I don’t have a view. I don’t know any of the people. What does it matter anyway? You mate, you die.”

Charlie glanced at her and dismissed Richard and Louisa with a nod. Mary drew up her bare feet beneath her on the chair and lit a cigarette.

“Well,” said Vernon Williams patiently, “I guess it matters to Kelly.”

“Jesus,” said Lauren, “these bugs are regular man-eaters.”

—

The next day, after the early run to Saint Brioche, Charlie took a pile of books to a deck chair he had installed in a quiet part of the garden, beneath an apple tree, next to a low brick wall with a long view down toward the sea. He was not concerned about Mary; her sharpness was no less than Lauren Williams’s conversation deserved, and privately he was pleased by it, wondering if it would allow him to say something similar when Lauren next dilated on her nanny’s family’s holiday arrangements. It was true that it was unprecedented for Mary to behave in such a way, but the cause of it was clear: her mother. It would pass, and, in any event, worry about Mary was a feeling that the years had removed from his emotional repertoire.

He began to read. These days he could seldom summon the concentration necessary to get through a book and he took it as a good sign that he had managed a hundred pages the day before.
Ars longa, vita brevis
, his father used to warn him, but over the years Charlie had discovered that
ars
was not as
longa
as people made out. Provided you had done the classics young and could clear a couple of youthful summers for Tolstoy, Proust and some of the longer-winded Americans, there was not that much bulk to be afraid of; most of the rest could be taken piecemeal over twenty years. His tolerance had very greatly diminished with age, however, and he reviewed the contents of his teenage shelf—Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Fielding, André Gide, Zola, Dostoevsky and Dorothy L. Sayers—with incredulity. He had no desire to reopen a single volume. He disliked all Greek literature, all travel writing, most biography, all narrative poetry, all detective stories, Jane Austen, Trollope, Browning, in fact all Victorian writers except Dickens; also Shaw and anything written in England since the war. His positive canon, a small and shrinking one, included most things Latin, Rilke (though he had read only translations), some of Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy (not
Resurrection)
, Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse (but only Jeeves), Montaigne, Emily Dickinson and recent American poetry, particularly Wallace Stevens and the promising Robert Lowell.