Overhead in a Balloon (13 page)

There had been no coaxing Luc, no pleading; no threat was strong enough to frighten him. They could keep the
BMW;
they could stop his allowance; they could put him in jail. He would not come to Paris to welcome Cassandra. He was through with England, through with the Brunts – through, for that matter, with his mother and father. Katia had taken their place.

“We’ll have her in Paris for a week, alone,” Simone had wailed. Luc’s argument was unassailable; alone, he could study. Once they were all there, he would have to be kind to Cassandra, making conversation and showing her the village church. Simone put the blame on Mrs. Brunt, who had insisted in a wholly obtuse way on having her rights.

“How are your delicious parents?” she asked, turning as well as the seat belt allowed, seeming to let the car drive itself in Paris traffic.

“Daddy’s at home now. He’s retired from the minstrel.”

“The ministry,” said Simone deeply. Cassandra’s was the only English she had ever completely understood. “My husband has also retired from public service. It was too much
for his heart. He is much younger than Mr. Brunt, I believe.”

“Daddy was a late starter,” said Cassandra. “But he’ll last a long time. At least, I hope so.”

Like the dog bought to improve Luc’s arithmetic; like the tropical fish Simone had tended for Luc, and eventually mourned; like the tennis court in which Luc had at once lost interest and on which Roger had had his first heart attack, so Cassandra fell to Luc’s parents. With Simone, she watched television; with Roger, she walked uphill and down, to parks and museums.

“What was your minstrel?” she asked Roger, as they marched towards the Bois.

“Years ago, when there was a grave shortage of telephones, thanks to President de Gaulle –” Roger began. “Do you recall that unhappy time?”

“I’m afraid I’m dreffly ignorant.”

“I was good at getting friends off the waiting list. That was what I did best.”

He clutched her arm, dragging her out of the way of buses and taxis that rushed from the left while Cassandra looked hopelessly right.

“You like the nature?” he said, letting Sylvestre run free in the Bois. “The trees?”

“My mother does. Though this is hardly nature, is it?”

Sylvestre loped, snuffling, into a club of dusty shrubbery. He gave a yelp and came waddling out. All Roger saw of the person who had kicked him was a flash of white boot.

“You have them in England?” said Roger.

“Have what?”

“That. Male, female. Prostitutes.”

“Yes, of course. But they aren’t vile to animals.”

“You like the modern art?” Roger asked, breathless, as they plodded up the stalled escalators of the Beaubourg museum.

“I’m horribly old-fashioned, I’m afraid.”

Halfway, he paused to let his heart rest. His heart was an old pump, clogged and filthy. Cassandra’s heart was of bright new metal; it beat more quietly and regularly than any clock.

Above the city stretched a haze of pollution, unstirring, all of an even colour. The sun suffused the haze with amber dye, which by some grim alchemy was turned into dun. Roger saw through the haze to a forgotten city, unchanging, and it was enough to wrench the heart. A hand, reaching inside the rib cage, seemed to grasp the glutted machine. He knew that some part of the machine was intact, faithful to him; when his heart disowned him entirely he might as well die.

Cassandra, murmuring that looking down made her feel giddy, turned her back. Roger watched a couple, below, walking hand in hand. He was too far away to see their faces. They were eating out of a shared paper bag. The young man looked around, perhaps for a bin. Finding none, he handed the bag to the girl, who flung it down. The two were dressed nearly alike, in blue jackets and jeans. Simone had assured Roger that Katia was French, but he still saw her Russian. He saw Katia in winter furs, with a fur hat, and long fair hair over a snowy collar. She removed a glove and gave the hand, warm, to Luc to hold.

“I’m afraid I must be getting lazy,” Cassandra remarked. “I found that quite a climb.”

The couple in blue had turned a corner. Of Luc and Katia there remained footsteps on lightly fallen snow.

“This place reminds me of a giant food processor,” said Cassandra. “What does it make you think of?”

“Young lovers,” Roger said.

Cassandra had a good point in Simone’s eyes: she kept a diary, which Simone used to improve her English.

“The Baron has sex on the brain,” Simone read. “Even a museum reminds him of sex. In the Bois de Boulogne he tried to twist the conversation around to sex and bestiality. You have to be careful every minute. Each time we have to cross the road he tries to squeeze my arm.”

W
hen Cassandra had been shown enough of Paris, Simone packed the car with food that Luc liked to eat and drove south and east with the dog, Roger, and Cassandra. They stopped often during the journey so that Cassandra, who sat in the back of the car, could get out and be sick. They found Luc living like an elderly squatter in a ground-floor room full of toast crusts. It was three in the afternoon, and he was still wearing pajamas. Inevitably, Cassandra asked if he was ill.

“Katia’s been here,” said Simone, going round the house and opening shutters. “I can tell. It’s in the air.”

Luc was occupying the room meant for Cassandra. He showed no willingness to give it up. He took slight notice of his parents, and none whatever of their guest. It seemed to Roger that he had grown taller, but this was surely an illusion, a psychological image in Roger’s mind. His affair, if Roger could call it that, had certainly made him bolder. He mentioned Katia by name, saying that one advantage of living alone was that he could read his mail before anyone else got to
it. Roger foresaw a holiday of bursting quarrels. He supposed Cassandra would go home and tell her father, the historian, that the French were always like that.

On the day they arrived, Simone intercepted and read a letter. Katia, apparently in answer to some questioning from Luc, explained that she had almost, but not entirely, submitted to the advances of a cousin. (Luc, to forestall his mother, met the postman at the gate. Simone, to short-circuit Luc, had already picked up the letters that interested her at the village post office.) Katia’s near-seduction had taken place in a field of barley, while her cousin was on leave from military service. A lyrical account of clouds, birds, and crickets took up most of a page.

Roger would not touch the letter, but he listened as Simone read aloud. It seemed to him that some coarse appreciation of the cousin was concealed behind all those crickets and birds. Katia’s blithe candour was insolent, a slur on his son. At the same time, he took heart: If a cousin was liable for Army duty, some part of the family must be French. On the other hand, who would rape his cousin in a barley field, if not a Russian?

“You swore Katia was French,” he said, greatly troubled.

He knew nothing of Katia, but he did know something about fields. Roger decided he did not believe a word of the story. Katia was trying to turn Luc into a harmless and impotent bachelor friend. The two belonged in a novel of the early nineteen-fifties. (Simone, as Roger said this, began to frown.) “Luc is the good, kind man she can tell stories to,” he said. “Her stories will be more and more about other men.” As Simone drew breath, he said quickly, “Not that I see Luc in a novel.”

“No, but I can see you in the diary of a hysterical English girl,” said Simone, and she told him about Cassandra.

Roger, scarcely listening, went on, “In a novel, Katia’s visit would be a real-estate tour. She would drive up from Biarritz with her mother and take pictures from the road. Katia’s mother would find the house squat and suburban, and so Luc would show them Cousin Henri’s. They would take pictures of that, too. Luc would now be going round with chalk and a tape measure, marking the furniture he wants to sell once we’re buried, planning the rooms he will build for Katia when the place is his.”

All at once he felt the thrust of the next generation, and for the first time he shared some of Simone’s fear of the unknown girl.

“The house is yours,” said Simone, mistaking his meaning. “The furniture is mine. They can’t change that by going round with a piece of chalk. There’s always the bank. She can’t find
that
suburban.” The bank had recently acquired a new and unexpected advantage: it was too small to be nationalized. “Your son is a dreamer,” said Simone. “He dreams he is studying, and he fails his exams. He dreams about sex and revolutions, and he waits around for letters and listens to old men telling silly tales.”

Roger remembered the hole drilled in the wall. An
au pair
girl in the shower was Luc’s symbol of sexual mystery. From the great courtesans of his grandfather’s time to the prettiest children of the poor in bordellos to a girl glimpsed as she stood drying herself – what a decline! Here was the true comedown, the real debasement of the middle class. Perhaps he would write a book about it; it would at least rival Mr. Brunt’s opus about the decline of French officers.

“She can’t spell,” said Simone, examining the letter again. “If Luc marries her, he will have to write all her invitations and her postcards.” What else did women write? She paused, wondering.

“Her journal?” Roger said.

In Cassandra’s journal Simone read, “They expect such a lot from that poor clod of a Luc.” That night at dinner Simone remarked, “My father once said he could die happy. He had never entertained a foreigner or shaken hands with an Englishman.”

Cassandra stared at Roger as if to say, Is she joking? Roger, married twenty-three years, thought she was not. Cassandra’s pale hair swung down as she drooped over her plate. She began to pick at something that, according to her diary, made her sick: underdone lamb, cooked the French way, stinking of garlic and spilling blood.

At dawn there was a spring thunderstorm, like the start of civil war. The gunfire died, and a hard, steady rain soaked the tennis court and lawn. Roger got up, first in the household, and let the dog out of the garage, where it slept among piles of paperbacks and rusting cans of weed killer. Roger was forty-eight that day; he hoped no one would notice. He thought he saw yellow roses running along the hedge, but it was a shaft of sunlight. In the kitchen, he found a pot with the remains of last night’s coffee and heated some in a saucepan. While he drank, standing, looking out the window, the sky cleared entirely and became soft and blue.

“Happy birthday.”

He turned his head, and there was Cassandra in the doorway, wearing a long gypsy skirt and an embroidered nightshirt,
with toy rings on every finger. “I thought I’d dress because of Sunday,” she explained. “I thought we might be going to church.”

“I could offer you better coffee in the village,” said Roger. “If you do not mind the walk.” He imagined her diary entry: “The Baron tried to get me alone on a country road, miles from any sign of habitation.”

“The dog will come, too,” he assured her.

They walked on the rim of wet fields, in which the freed dog leaped. The hem of Cassandra’s skirt showed dark where it brushed against drenched grasses. Roger told her that the fields and woods, almost all they could see, had belonged to his grandparents. Cousin Henri owned the land now.

Cassandra knew; when Simone was not talking about Luc and Katia and the government, she talked about Cousin Henri.

“My father wants to write another book, about Torquemada and Stalin and, I think, Cromwell,” Cassandra said. “The theme would be single-mindedness. But he can’t get down to it. My mother doesn’t see why he can’t write for an hour, then talk to her for an hour. She asks him to help look for things she’s lost, like the keys to the car. Before he retired, she was never bored. Now that he’s home all day, she wants company and she loses everything.”

“How did he write his other books?” said Roger.

“In the minstrel he had a private office and secretary. Two, in fact. He expected to write even more, once he was free, but he obviously won’t. If he were alone, I could look after him.” That was unexpected. Perhaps Luc knew just how unexpected Cassandra could be, and that was why he stayed away from her. “I don’t mean I imagine my mother not
there,” she said. “I only meant that I could look after him, if I had to.”

Half a mile before the village stood Cousin Henri’s house. Roger told Cassandra why he and Henri were not speaking, except through lawyers. Henri had been grossly favoured by their mutual grandparents, thanks to the trickery of an aunt by marriage, who was Henri’s godmother. The aunt, who was very rich as well as mad and childless, had acquired the grandparents’ domain, in their lifetime, by offering more money than it was worth. She had done this wicked thing in order to hand it over, intact, unshared, undivided, to Henri, whom she worshipped. The transaction had been brought off on the wrong side of the law, thanks to a clan of Protestants and Freemasons.

Cassandra looked puzzled and pained. “You see, the government of that time …” said Roger, but he fell silent, seeing that Cassandra had stopped understanding. When he was overwrought he sounded like his wife. It was hardly surprising: he was simply repeating, word for word, everything Simone had been saying since they were married. In his own voice, which was ironic and diffident, he told Cassandra why Cousin Henri had never married. At the age of twenty Henri had been made trustee of a family secret. Henri’s mother was illegitimate – at any rate, hatched from a cuckoo’s egg. Henri’s father was not his mother’s husband but a country neighbour. Henri had been warned never to marry any of the such-and-such girls, because he might be marrying his own half sister. Henri might not have wanted to: the such-and-suches were ugly and poor. He had used the secret as good reason not to marry anyone, had settled down in the handsomest house in the Yonne (half of which should have been Roger’s), and had peopled the neighbourhood with his random children.

They slowed walking, and Cassandra looked at a brick-and-stucco box, and some dirty-faced children playing on the steps.

“There, behind the farmhouse,” said Roger, showing a dark, severe manor house at the top of a straight drive.