The Chateau (2 page)

T
HE CABIN STEWARD
knocking on their door woke her.

“Thank you,” he called. Then to his wife: “We're in France. Come look. You can see houses.” He was half dressed and shaving.

They stood at the porthole talking excitedly, but what they saw now was not quite what he had seen. The mist was gone. The sky was growing much brighter. And they had been noticed; two tenders were already on their way out to the liner, bringing more gulls, hundreds of them.

“So beautiful!” she said.

“You should have seen it a few minutes ago.”

“I wish you'd wakened me.”

“I thought you needed the sleep,” he said.

Though they had the same coloring and were sometimes mistaken for brother and sister, the resemblance was entirely a matter of expression. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his features, nothing ordinary about hers. Because she came of a family that seemed to produce handsomeness no matter what hereditary strains it was crossed with, the turn of the forehead, the coloring, the carving of the eyelids, the fine bones, the beautiful carriage could all be accounted for by people with long memories. But it was the eyes that you noticed. They were dark brown, and widely spaced, and very large, and full of light, the way children's eyes are, the eyebrows naturally arched, the upper eyelids wide but not heavy, not weighted, the whites a blue white. If all her other features had been bad, she still would have seemed beautiful because of them. They were the eyes of someone of another Age, their expression now gentle and direct, now remote, so far from calculating, and yet intelligent, perceptive, pessimistic, without guile, and without coquetry.

“I don't remember it at all,” she said.

“You probably landed at Le Havre.”

“I mean I don't remember seeing France for the first time.”

“It could have been night,” he said, knowing that it bothered her not to be able to remember things.

Mr. and Mrs. Harold Rhodes
, the tags on their luggage read.

A few minutes later, hearing the sound of chains, he went to the porthole again. The tenders were alongside, and the gulls came in closer and closer on the air above the tenders and then drifted down like snow. He heard shouting and snatches of conversation. French it had to be, but it was slurred and unintelligible. A round face appeared, filling the porthole: a man in a blue beret. The eyes stared solemnly, unblinking, without recognition
as the face on the magic-lantern slide moved slowly to the left and out of sight.

O
N SHORE
, in the customs shed at seven thirty, they waited their turn under the letter R. She had on a wheat-colored traveling suit and the short black cloth coat that was fashionable that year and black gloves but no hat. He was wearing a wrinkled seersucker suit, a white broadcloth shirt, a foulard tie, and dusty white shoes. He needed a haircut. The gray felt hat he held in his hand was worn and sweat-stained, and in some mysterious way it looked like him. One would have said that, day in and day out, the hat was cheerful, truthful, even-tempered, anxious to do what is right.

How she looked was, Barbara Rhodes sincerely thought, not very important to her. She did not look like the person she felt herself to be. It was important to him. He would not have fallen in love with and married a plain girl. To do that you have to be reasonably well satisfied with your own appearance or else have no choice.

He was thin, flat-chested, narrow-faced, pale from lack of sleep, and tense in his movements. A whole generation of loud, confident Middle-Western voices saying:
Harold, sit up straight … Harold, hold your shoulders back … Harold, you need a haircut, you look like a violinist
had had no effect whatever. Confidence had slipped through his fingers. He had failed to be like other people.

On the counter in front of them were two large suitcases, three smaller ones, a dressing case, and a huge plaid dufflebag.

“Are you sure everything is unlocked?” she asked.

Once more he made all the catches fly open. The seven pieces of luggage represented a triumph of packing on her part and the full weight of a moral compromise: it was in his nature to provide
against every conceivable situation and want, and she, who had totally escaped from the tyranny of objects when he married her, caught the disease from him.

They stood and waited while a female customs inspector went through the two battered suitcases of an elderly Frenchwoman. Everything the inspector opened or unfolded was worn, shabby, mended, and embarrassingly personal, and the old woman's face cried out that this was no way to treat someone who was coming home, but the customs inspector did not hear, did not believe her, did not care. There was the book of regulations, which one learned, and then one applied the regulations. Her spinsterish face darkened by suspicion, by anger, by the authority that had been vested in her, she searched and searched.

“What shall I tell her if she asks me about the nylon stockings?” Barbara Rhodes said.

“She probably won't say anything about them,” he answered. “If she does, tell her they're yours.”

“Nobody has twelve pairs of unused nylon stockings. She'll think I'm crazy.”

“Well, then, tell her the truth—tell her they're to give to the chambermaid in hotels in place of a tip.”

“But then we'll have to pay duty on them!”

He didn't answer. A boy of sixteen or seventeen was plucking at his coat sleeve and saying: “Taxi? Taxi?”

“No,” he said firmly. “We don't want a taxi. One thing at a time, for God's sake.”

The wind was off the harbor and the air was fresh and stimulating. The confusion in the tin-roofed customs shed had an element of social excitement in it, as if this were the big affair of the season which everybody had been looking forward to, and to which everybody had been asked. More often than not, people seemed pleased to have some responsible party pawing through their luggage. In the early spring of 1948 it had seemed to be a question of how long Europe would be here—that is, in a way that was recognizable and worth coming over to see. Before
the Italian elections the eastbound boats were half empty. After the elections, which turned out so much better than anybody expected, it took wire-pulling of a sustained and anxious sort to get passage on any eastbound boat of no matter what size or kind or degree of comfort. But they had made it. They were here.

“Taxi?”

“I wish I hadn't brought them now,” she whispered.

Tired of hearing the word “taxi,” he turned and drove the boy away. Turning back to her, he said: “I think it would probably look better if we talked out loud.… What has she got against that poor woman?”

“Nothing. What makes you think exactly the same thing wouldn't be happening if the shoe were on the other foot?”

“Yes?” he said, surprised and pleased by this idea.

He deferred to her judgments about people, which were not infallible—sometimes instead of seeing people she saw through them. But he knew that his own judgment was never to be trusted. He persisted in thinking that all people are thin-skinned, even though it had been demonstrated to him time and time again that they are not.

In the end, the female customs inspector made angry chalk marks on the two cheap suitcases. The old woman's guilt was not proved, but that was not to say that she was innocent; nobody is innocent.

When their turn came, the inspector was a man, quick and pleasant with them, and the inspection was cursory. The question of how many pairs of stockings a woman travels with didn't come up. They were the last ones through the customs. When they got outside, Harold looked around for a taxi, saw that there weren't any, and remembered with a pang of remorse the boy who had plucked at his coat sleeve. He looked for the boy, and didn't see him either. A hundred yards from the tin customs shed, the boat train stood ready to depart for Paris; but they weren't going to Paris.

Two dubious characters in dark-blue denim—two comedians—saw them standing helplessly beside their monumental pile of luggage and took them in charge, made telephone calls (they said), received messages (perhaps) from the taxi stand at the railroad station, and helped them pass the time by alternately raising and discouraging their hopes. It was over an hour before a taxi finally drew up and stopped beside the pile of luggage, and Harold was not at all sure it hadn't arrived by accident. Tired and bewildered, he paid the two comedians what they asked, exorbitant though it seemed.

The taxi ride was through miles of ruined buildings, and at the railway station they discovered that there was no provision in the timetables of the S.N.C.F. for a train journey due south from Cherbourg to Mont-Saint-Michel. The best the station agent could offer was a local at noon that would take them southeast to Carentan. At Carentan they would have to change trains. They would have to change again at Coutances, and at Pontorson. At Pontorson there would be a bus that would take them the remaining five miles to Mont-Saint-Michel.

They checked their luggage at the station and went for a walk. Most of the buildings they saw were ugly and pockmarked by shellfire, but Cherbourg was French, it had sidewalk cafés, and the signs on the awnings read
Volailles & Gibier
and
Spontex
and
Tabac
and
Charcuterie
, and they looked at it as carefully as they would have looked at Paris. They had coffee at a sidewalk café. They inquired in half a dozen likely places and in none of them was there a public toilet. The people they asked could not even tell them where to go to find one. He went into a stationery store and bought a tiny pocket dictionary, to make sure they were using the right word; also a little notebook, to keep a record of their expenses in. Two blocks farther on, they came to a school and stood looking at the children in the schoolyard, so pale and thin-legged in their black smocks. Was it the war? If they had come to Europe before the war, would the children have had rosy cheeks?

He looked at his wrist watch and said: “I think we'd better not walk too far. We might not be able to find our way back to the station.”

She saw a traveling iron in a shop window and they went in and bought it. They tried once more—they tried a tearoom with faded chintz curtains and little round tables. The woman at the cashier's desk got up and ushered Barbara to a lavatory in the rear. When they were out on the sidewalk again, she said: “You should have seen what I just saw!”

“What was it like?”

“It was filthy. And instead of a toilet there was a stinking hole in the floor. I couldn't believe it.”

“I guess if you are a stranger, and homeless, you aren't supposed to go to the bathroom in France. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I'm perfectly all right. But it's so shocking. When you think that women with high heels have to go in there and stand or squat on two wooden boards.…”

They stopped to look in the window of a bookstore. It was full of copies of “Gone With the Wind” in French.

T
HE LOCAL TRAIN
was three coaches long. At the last minute, driven by his suspicions, he stepped out onto the platform, looked at the coach they were in, and saw the number 3. They were in third class, with second-class tickets. The fat, good-natured old robber who had charged them five hundred francs for putting them and their luggage in the wrong car was nowhere in sight, and so he moved the luggage himself. His head felt hollow from lack of sleep, and at the same time he was excited, and so full of nervous energy that nothing required any exertion.

The train began to move. Cherbourg was left behind.

The coach was not divided into compartments but open, like
an American railway car. Looking out of the train window, they saw that the sky was now overcast. They saw hedgerows enclosing triangular meadows and orchards that were continually at a slant and spinning with the speed of the train. House after house had been shelled, had no windows or roof, had been abandoned; and then suddenly a village seemed to be intact. They saw poppies growing wild on the railroad embankment and could hardly believe their eyes. That wonderful intense color! They were so glad they had seen them. They saw a few more. Then they saw red poppies growing all through a field of wheat—or was it rye? They saw (as if seeing were an art and the end that everything is working toward) a barn with a sign painted on it:
Rasurel
.