The Janeites (12 page)

Now that seemed worth following up.

Monsieur Philippe felt wary about the woman; she looked too sharp. Carting rather fast in the little car; baronial disregard for speed limits. One would take a look, but definitely, at the house ‘up yonder’: found with some difficulty. Isolated too, one couldn’t hang about up here. Nice house all right. Very much barred and barricaded; that would be the loneliness, off the beaten track. Somebody lived there – car outside. Little Opel, a woman’s car. There might be a Porsche and it might be in that underground garage. This façade hadn’t any face, told him nothing and better not hang about. Stick to the other end, see if the woman turned up again.

She did, oh yes, and this is lovely – she stayed the night. Better, and it got better still, because the Doctor dragged his car out (likely
to try and get into someone else’s dirty old VW, wondering why his key doesn’t fit), so he risked following that, and where d’you think it led him? Curiouser and curiouser. This would build into something and he’d have to think about it. Can’t stay in ambush on this damn path which doesn’t lead anywhere.

A nice thing about Joséphine; she doesn’t ask silly questions. Especially not that one about are you happy? Ray whose life is the asking of questions also avoids this one. One knows the answer; there isn’t any, and if there were, one would prefer not to know it. Like that other, of who hit him on the nose and why? William had wanted to ask that, and it hadn’t done any good. Something to do with Janine’s disappearance: let her worry about it.

Happier than before? Happier than he ought to be? About as happy as one ever can be; look, one just gets on with living, okay? There isn’t any vaccine against misery. Nobody can slip a needle under your skin and there now, you’re immunized. The Research Institute thinks about the physical world. We don’t hunt madly for new antibiotics, or old pals staph and strep showing themselves so naughtily immune to all those in current use. Other people do that. We get a bit metaphysical about living and dying. Sure. Violence, or getting married, or the tango – all of them metaphysical subjects.

Joséphine complains about the flat. Yes, it is squalid.

He’s not getting away with that! A tirade develops; this awful building is due to be knocked down anyhow. Move before somebody demolishes it over your head. Nasty little spaces. That electric wiring is a perfect menace. Suddenly the fast ball.

“That revolting alleyway is dangerous. You could just as easily have lost your life.”

“Po po po. Old stories, long forgotten.” She just looks at him, more devastating than words. As though she knew all about it. Perhaps she does. Perhaps she has talked to William; he wouldn’t know. She hasn’t said so (and neither has William) but she doesn’t pretend that William doesn’t exist.

“I might get a cancer. So might you!”

“And then we do whatever we find possible,” said Ray peaceably.

She is not one for beautiful phrases, for the garden of lovely thoughts: she finds these in the births-and-deaths column of
Le
Monde.

“It’s all right to die on the street when not on purpose – who said that?”

“Stendhal. He did too.” She is still worrying about him.

Joséphine loves eating. After laughing heartily at his antique gas stove she has taken with enthusiasm to cooking on it.

“Well made. They didn’t cut corners then, look at the thickness of this metal. And properly designed.”

“Yes but one can’t get spare parts any more, so that when it wears out, which it will…” she has got reconciled to Arab ways. ‘Modern equipment’ would mean a new set of cables, a new meter. The electricity company would have a fit. There’ll be a ghastly fire one of these days.

“This living as though you were poor is pure hypocrisy.”

“I suppose it is, yes.” She never has been poor. But she loves his spaghetti; introduces variations of her own. There’s this advantage to living in the old town; the little shops (where Arabs go) which have fresh vegetables, proper fruit. Supermarket once a week, a suburban couple pushing the trolley, ferrying large packets up the stairs. The butcher is a mortification.

“But surely you knew about that from before?”

“True. Geoffrey has a man in the country, trained to hang meat.” She has moved in, is now used to the oddities – the pull-and-let-go in the lavatory.

She held up a round of bread with a bite out of it, took another and said, “Look, a map of France”, with her mouth full.

“Very bad manners,” said Raymond austerely.

“Yes, we did this as children. That’s Bretagne. German bread, good for our teeth. Got tremendously beaten.”

“For bad manners?” Hers are terrible…

“Of course. But still more, because bread is a symbol. The greatest there is. The body of Christ. You ought to know that.”

“I do… It’s the same in Poland.”

“We must never cut bread, once it was sliced. Break it before buttering – and if we dropped it, get down and ask forgiveness.” Taking another large bite … “Look – Pyrenées.”

Yes. This is ‘the upper classes’. She has never made any other reference to his ‘being a Jesuit’. Adultery is for the poor. Arabs have scruples about it. Are very strict about it. Exact blood for it.

‘Aristocracy.’ He had noticed these habits in the Marquis. Amazingly scrupulous in all sorts of small ways, and no manners at all. Utterly ruthless.

William to be sure had lived with the old man for many years.

Raymond now understands William better.

William’s grand life-style has been lowered, but the reader’s maintained: as Raymond remarked, ‘We’d never get that past the Social Security office anyhow’. Dolores herself said she likes to finish what she began. Admits to enjoying herself.

“It’s totally different to reading it by oneself.”

This peaceful countryside, which she doesn’t even describe. The social fabric – of which she says nothing. Mr Knightley has farms and works at them, but where does the Woodhouse money come from? Are they landowners? Never a word about the ordinary people, who must have been bitterly poor. You wonder about the price of food, about taxes, oh, all the things that we worry about. Never mentioned, any more than war, or Napoleon, or the world outside.

“That’s the point,” said William, serious. “It seems deathly dull, and then I’m drawn in, and it becomes exciting and I’m listening with all my nerve-ends.”

“But why?” asked Dolores. “I suppose because leaving all that out she concentrates one upon the real essentials.”

“Which are what?” asked Raymond. Wasn’t this exactly what he was after.

“Well, not just who loves who, and who’s going to marry who.” Dolores a little defensive, nervous of sounding ridiculous.

“Things everyone cared about. Miss Bates too, and the workers even if we never hear about them. Pride, and honour, and pain.”

“Exactly.”

“She wrote about what she knew. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’”

It’s a Valdez hobbyhorse. The world is like William, in total disharmony with itself. What the woman called the social fabric was more closely knit. They were in harmony with themselves and one another, and the land they lived on. They had friends. Look at today; nobody even knows their neighbour.

They died of course – but I’ll make you a bet, not of cancers and not of heart diseases. In the cities of course, tuberculosis, typhus, dirt, malnutrition. Plague to be sure, since the rats were always with us; cholera. You notice nowadays that the plagues take a subtler form, attack the nervous system, where the immunity has broken down. Rather well suited to peoples who have forgotten their own purpose. Television, or the internet – these are plague-epidemics.

Ray’s colleagues listen indulgently. You’ve got to remember, Valdez is a bloody Jesuit when all is said – sees God all over the shop.

“What did you think”, William had asked, “about having your head bashed in?”

“I didn’t think at all. Things like that can happen to anyone, and frequently do.”

William is a great deal better. Proof, if you like, is that he’s going to school to learn carpentry. Craftsmanship. As for the technical details, Dr Valdez takes no credit. Internal cancers have been known to stop, even to go away. The patient’s own interior resources are the key. As for Jane – he’s taken to reading them himself. Why shouldn’t it work for me too?

Living with Joséphine has a good rich texture. Coarse now and then, gritty. She was eating Serrano ham on her bread and butter.

“What happens to the rest of the pig? Why can’t we get Serrano sowbelly?”

“Have you ever read
Emma
which he is working at?”

“Of course I have; I was well brought up. Mr Woodhouse could never believe that anyone would think differently to himself.
My brother Geoffrey’s exactly like that. But a kindhearted polite old man while Geoffrey is so conspicuously neither. That and the appalling vulgarity of Mrs Elton. This seems to be all I can remember.”

“A searching analysis,” lovingly.

“There’s a great deal of irony,” with just a small flash of lightning, “and a lot about elegance and delicacy. Soeur Marie-Thérèse came down heavily on both, since the great aim was to turn out well-bred girls even with nothing at all between their ears.”

Joséphine has had a number of jobs. Doesn’t believe in them much, unsurprisingly: the girls at that convent would have felt sorry for poor Jane Fairfax obliged to go out and earn her living as a governess. Well-bred young ladies – elegant – were sometimes persuaded into secretarial work for politicians. With a little seasoning, press attachée to a publishing house. Worlds which William got to know.

“Politics! Just the thing for crooks like Geoffrey.” When young she’d wanted to be a sculptress, in rather a clean overall. After, that is, her National Velvet years. “The extremely severe discipline of a racing stable isn’t that different to life among the holy nuns. Adolescent female sexual desires thoroughly well channelled.” Or perhaps a poet… Not having a job is so much more elegant; didn’t go much on up at seven and shaving clean at a quarter past. Working for Médecins-sans-frontières was all right – and of course unpaid; the paperwork is simply shocking. Being able to read and write is an advantage since so very few can.

A Jesuit education, thought Raymond, has its points: you progress from grammar to syntax, and long hours of the dirtiest work uncomplaining. Joséphine scrubs a floor as though her life depended on it.

As we were taught, mankind is different to beasts. At some point in development this was borne in upon us; that we laugh and can inhibit defecation. That we have a soul had also to be learned. (Poor George Orwell’s lasting experience of the civil war in Spain was that his pathetically primitive boys walked out and had a shit
absolutely anywhere.) History… he’d had a good professor, fond of really sadistic illustrations from the dreadful fourteenth century – ‘that’s yesterday’. The condition of the poor. Meanwhile, learning absolutely nothing from Crécy, Poitiers, nor even Agincourt the landowning aristocracy of France, with a vanity and imbecility you’d scarcely credit, got itself slaughtered. And serve it right. While the poor suffered, here is where you learn about the basic economy of the countryside, and how taxation pays for the rich. The rich! (warming to his theme). They are only to be stopped with a scythe to the hamstrings or a bellyful of buckshot.

Those knights – deserving all the man said of them – had very likely included forebears of Joséphine’s. Had they learned anything at all in the few hundred years between? Vanity, disregarding all else, still characterizes their behaviour. The ruling caste, be it military (Dien Bien Phu was Crécy all over again), medical (the mandarinat; of elderly professors), bureaucratic or intellectual (never do anything simple when you can make it complicated) – all of it the utter ruin of an endlessly abused and plundered people of great worth and merit.

Not at all surprisingly Joséphine got cross and there was a huge blazing row. He learned something then which touched him. This woman who had been taught so much nonsense in childhood had also been taught a dogma. Never let the sun go down upon your anger. Like a child she came and said that she was sorry, and put her arms round him. “I was in the wrong and I know it.”

Given a lesson, Raymond was ashamed of himself.

Dr Valdez is tired, edgy, ragged; short of ideas; no fun to be with. Needs a holiday.

“Yes indeed. We’ll fly to Miami, preferably in the Concorde, and get carried by cruise liner to glamorous places in the tropics never before glimpsed.” Especially in August.

Joséphine has been thinking.

“I might be able to borrow the Land Rover, Geoffrey is greatly taken up with his vines.”

“Why do we want it?”

“Because there’s no other good way of getting there. As children we rode but there are rough places where we had to get off and lead our horses.” Recognizing that she has got it back to front –

“We have a cottage, officially a shooting lodge, high in the hills. I don’t think anyone’s been up there for years. The local forester, from time to time. It’s highly ruritanian, earth closet and all. Nothing but trees for miles. Be fearfully musty, I shouldn’t wonder. No electricity. But when the sun shines, which very often it doesn’t…” Dr Valdez is an instant convert.

“I’ve had leisure to regret this. I packed enough for a bus load, had to throw half of it out. Geoffrey said I was insane, the fraidycat.” Roads, increasingly potholed, led to a village – “there’s a shop, there”, gave way to woodcutters’ tracks and the ‘Maison Forestière’; the intoxicating Vosges smell which he has never experienced, of a stone-built house, a flagged kitchen and wood fires. The Verderer’s wife, amused, gave them coffee, glasses of ferocious schnapps, a bunch of keys, adding ominously, “You can always telephone from here if anything goes amiss.”

“The worst is to come,” said Joséphine with relish. “The valley goes up steep. I hope I can find the way…” The track hereabout was overgrown with moss and the fluid mountain grass. Twice they had to pull aside broken trunks, rotted and fallen across. Obscure streams made for boggy patches. Quite large stones abounded. Until they reached a plateau and a space cleared for a cottage surprisingly large if only a log cabin of one storey.