The Janeites (13 page)

“Stable,” she said welcoming it as one does something long lost. “Haybarn, woodshed. Gamekeeper lived here in my grandfather’s day. It’ll be almighty damp so the first thing is to bring in logs.” The housekeeper took command. The airing of mattresses, the punching at the kitchen stove, ‘grille’s a bit rusty’, the opening of sticking windows. “I don’t know what birds there are now but I hope there will be owls.”

The well filled him with joy. The source underground filled a stone trough, lipped over a worn flag, lost itself in red sand. The water was cold, rich as a white wine, tasting of black earth, dead leaves.

Fire on the hearth burned well; old silvered beech logs. Mattresses steamed happily until he had to turn them. Then he could open quite a nice Côtes de Nuits. Watch her cooking.

“Lara,” he said after searching for the name. “She lives with Doctor Thingummy in an isba with icicles all over it.”

“I can only remember the tune, unspeakably sentimental. It was in all the music boxes which used to play ‘Für Elise’. I had one – greatly cherished. What do you suppose they ate – Russian porridge?” There are two rings on the kitchen stove, and a little oven below. The top is rusty, but will shine with a bit of emery paper. She draws water to clean the table, hangs a kettle above the big fire on the notched bar the French call ‘
la
crémaillère
’.
“For the washing-up,” sternly. “Your turn tomorrow.” Romantic, is it? It’s only risotto. Of course there is no fridge, but there is a larder, delighting him, with stone shelves and mosquito-wire on the window. A high point was reached when she put a zinc tub of water on the stove, and from the outhouse dragged in a hipbath. ‘To this my father was greatly addicted.’ Romance centres upon Joséphine’s shell-pink – Aphrodite-pink – behind; lessens when he has the awkward job of ferrying the damn thing out without spilling to be emptied in distant bushes; mounts when he comes back puffing to find her in a long white nightie wielding a hairbrush. It’s an illustration from Dickens – ‘The lovely lady has her fortune told.’ But the mattresses are dry by now, and unexpectedly comfortable. He can be romantic then, if a bit damped by ‘Wait till you have to empty the earth closet and you’ll see how they grew wonderful vegetables here.’

Still, the morning was all he had hoped for, outdoing imagination built upon ‘You’ve never smelt an August dawn’. With this go two astonishing visuals. One is the filigree silver magic woven by more spiders than he knew existed. The other is the August harebell. That there is also a light grey drizzle cannot bedraggle the spirit, cannot alter nor dilute the flavour. Has he never before tasted the true juice? Once or twice (since medical conferences are very insistent upon creature-comforts) he has been handed a glass of ‘good’ champagne. Far outdone as he has been assured by the stuff which costs a thousand francs a bottle. And outdoing that by just as far is the glass of
water kindly handed to him here by the Djinn. The difficulty with djinns is known: you can’t get them back into the bottle.

Reaction set in around midmorning. He had explored the long neglected garden, in hopes of perhaps-a-few potatoes; maybe a vegetable marrow (hostile animals have left nothing for mere humans). One must also learn the patterns of grisly trenches where the shit-bucket is disposed of: Humus is more than composting dead leaves. A facetious American word attacks him; he is discombobulated. Depersonalized, dissassociated, decomposed. Like the compost which had gone to the making of the vegetable patch. Reality had disintegrated. He trails back to Joséphine who is peeling potatoes on the stoop: the rain has lifted and perhaps this afternoon there might be a glimpse of sun.

“I know,” she says with the maturity he has not expected in a young woman: his experience is so small. “For a start, there’ll be plenty of work. Any number of things forgotten which we’ll have to go down the hill to find. There are no guns up here. The forester will lend you one, but we’ll have to buy cartridges.” He wasn’t listening.

“Food for worms,” he said. “Bury me in the compost heap. Bacteriological nuclear pile. Have me down to bones in no time at all.”

“I know,” she said again. “It’s not romantic up here a bit. No sunset, no cascade, no blue lagoon. It’s violent.”

“It’s good.” He sat down beside her. “I’m glad you brought me here. I’m overtired and hadn’t realized it.”

“Sometimes in Paris I thought about this place. Where I had been happy.” She dropped the last potato in the pot, threw the peeler in after it. “Sitting with friends at a café table. After being at the cinema, maybe. People who are secure and comfortable and who prate about violence. Namby-pamby and niminy-piminy. Idiots.” He can feel thunder building up inside her. She wants to talk. “For years I… I knew nothing. I thought it was great. This is the life, this is where it’s at, they know everything here. Sex all the time, sex all day, it got like it was something that walked around with you, sat at the table, applauded at pop concerts, you couldn’t shake it off. I got so when I heard the word I went cold and clammy. Up till now.” She turned and put her arms round him. “Thank God for you. Sex is you.”

“Let’s go for a walk while it’s fine.” Narrow shafts of sunlight came filtering through the trees, bundles of arrows hitting the bracken and the moss and the needle-fine clumps of mountain grass. “Comes on to rain we’ll whip back to the cabin and make love and play cards and drink a lot of coffee.”

She showed him how it had been well thought out, and cleverly made. They were at the very edge of a steep valley. That is the gully down which they throw dirty water. Along the flank of the hill is the path along which they had come, mounting to the plateau where the stumps had been cleared for the house and the garden. This was ‘Camp Five’, for above them the height rose steep and rough to the summit, looking so smooth and easy from a plane; fierce afoot. “We could climb it in mountain boots. I’ve only once been all the way up.”

Animals, by the score. You’d want to go out early in the morning the way we did sometimes. I doubt there being any rabbits – fox would get them. Predators; pine marten, there was a polecat once, they like buildings. Lynx? “The forester tried, I think, but you know how peasants are, never happy till they’ve shot it.” Hawks, wild cats.

“What do they prey on?”

“Mice, voles, shrews; they abound, or would if it weren’t for the bloodthirsty. Deer the forester has to shoot to keep the numbers down. You might try for a few pigeons – think of pigeon pie. There isn’t any live and let live up here. My grandfather claimed he’d seen blackcock, had fantasies about pheasants; I don’t think that lasted long.”

Yes: it didn’t do, to upset the natural balance.

“There’s a brutalist school in biology, popular with your friends in Paris, believes everything revolves round sex. Some of these people try to claim that the entire development of human behaviour is explainable by predatory sexual instinct. Rape is natural, justifiable, desirable.”

“Oh yes, I’ve met a few of those.”

“A depressingly simplistic viewpoint. The strongest and most successful genes, surviving and evolving from the stone age, are those of the most vigorous rapists. The whole structure of society is of no further interest. A sort of nihilism. You the woman make
yourself attractive to be available to the biggest dick, which is the greediest dick, and help me first.”

“It sounds familiar. I thought like this for a while. Do you want to try to get to the top?”

“No, I’ve blisters on my heels already; wait until these boots are properly broken in.”

“Don’t sit down there, that’s an ants’ nest.”

“I wouldn’t have got far, would I, in stone age circles? Get stamped out, pretty smartish.”

“Gains ground, this theory.”

“Sure it does. Natural resources are running short. Water. Top-soil. Good places to go on holiday – the unspoilt beaches. So grab. Brutalist logic – the successful grabbers are the rich.”

“I like you the way you are.”

“A shrinking minority. God. Civilization. Iphigenia. Antigone. They were due for the chop. So are we.”

“What did Antigone do?”

“She went out at night to pay the last rites of religion to her dead brother, against the king’s express order. He caught her and had her buried alive.”

“She knew, and she did it.”

“Yes. That is the Spirit.”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know, you see, and I’m very much afraid of being asked to find out.”

This thin sandy ground dries out quickly, which is an advantage when walking home in one’s socks.

“The Volk,” she said, making coffee. “Give it a jig or a tale of bawdry and it’s happy.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Mustn’t hate it, or it would be
A
la
lanterne
with me, pretty quick. But I feel something pretty close to contempt. Harlotry is the only thing that sells. The rapists – yobs one and all.”

“Yes, it isn’t so much they’re being unchristian that offends me but the Ignorance. No letters and no history, no art and no manners, and above all no humour – what am I getting Heated for?”

“Bernard of Clairvaux scourging the infidel,” bringing him his cup. “You see? – you can laugh. We’re on holiday. We love each other.”

Yes, that’s what worries him, but he keeps quiet about that.

“I keep thinking about pigeon pie,” Joséphine went on. “I must have a word with the forester, see if he can get us some.”

William’s day begins, alone in this house built for more people, with green tea. This brew was like Jane; for some time you were unsure, before discovering that you couldn’t do without it. Odd. His little teapot holds three cups (but two will do, the third’s a bit stewed). Disconcerting is perhaps a good word.

His whole life, he couldn’t start without three cups of coffee – the last after a shower, shaving – sliding over clean teeth.

One day in England, accompanying the Marquis on a call upon his opposite number there – Downing Street, an extraordinary rabbit-warren; we know about Number Ten but what are all the others – he had been peeled off by a deft soft-voiced secretary and given a taste of their amused hospitality together with tea; the ‘real thing’. ‘Milk and sugar?’ they enquired blandly. ‘The way you have it’ – not to be outfoxed in diplomacy. Much merry laughter when he tasted it.

‘Now picture yourself’, said his charming host, ‘crouched on some draughty airfield, in a flying-saucer helmet and a nest of sandbags getting strafed by the Luftwaffe, they dug you out of the débris, handed you a mug of this and instantly you grew a new arm and a new leg. Inside there it’s tinkle-tinkle with the Wedgwood and something disgusting like Earl Grey but yours is the real thing – made by the police sergeant, you’re a man now, my son.’ Even the gentleman in question permitted himself a small superior smile.

“You’re looking a whole lot better,” said Bernadette. “Odd job mine,” economically finishing a halfcup of stonecold coffee “see that written on a piece of paper, what do you make of it? Nothing at all. But Orally… a
whole
lot, a whole
lot
,
or a whole lot
better
,
Madame the judge might be let to draw three different conclusions, pity the
poor woman, who knows that all three are lying.”

“All three are telling the truth,” said William.

“That’s this dotty doctor of yours?”

“Haven’t seen him for a while. Away, I think. Don’t want any doctors.” Even the massage sessions were down to twice a week. Only Dolores still, determined to get to the bottom of Emma Woodhouse (not long to go now). He doesn’t know how to explain that. Uh, broadminded woman. Intelligent, experienced woman. A good and true friend. There’d be nobody he’d rather confide in. But dammit, a judge; nothing bleaker than a Judge of Instruction when it comes to that impenetrable maze and quicksand bog which is human behaviour. What words would one adopt? ‘It’s a very select society and you’ve got to be a Janeite in your heart or you won’t have any success.’ She’d think it was a Sect. Judges have a great distaste for sects, which are suspected of preaching subversion, of disobedience to the laws and the rules of the Republic. Bernadette isn’t a candidate for the Janeites: he’s not even sure he’s one himself.

Police training, for one thing. Years in the Marquisate – yes and before that; the private lives of Ministers, and Presidents too, have little enough to do with the official face shown to the world, and their private thinking not very presentable on television either – have loosened and shaken a lot of shibboleths thought of as being as fixed in their orbits as the planets. But in the PJ, when you are a rising young man and they begin to think of picking you for the exacting training that will lead to special duties, they like to be sure that your thinking is sound. It isn’t only medicals and workouts in the gym. There are the political indoctrination classes too. Total loyalty, absolute obedience. (William’s conventions about thinking and doing have interested Ray Valdez.)

The Republic doesn’t like sects. Dotty American groups – all claiming liberty of conscience, tax exemption. And the right to bear arms, under various articles of the Constitution embedded in jurisprudence and frequently upheld by the Supreme Court – are held up as horrible examples: we won’t allow any of this in France. These fixed beliefs of ours go back to Jacobin tenets on which the Hexagon was built. Long before the Republic.

Police instructors lectured bored young men who had forgotten the history lessons they had yawned over at school. You go back before Louis Quatorze, yes even before Cardinal Richelieu, to the times when kings could scarcely call Paris their own, royal authority kicked about by Dukes of Burgundy, of Brittany, of Berry (places one can scarcely find on the map…) Piecing the Hexagon together had been a lengthy, difficult and blood-boltered affair and you had better believe it. Look at Corsica, will you – know how to find that on the map, do you? Nobody wants it and we can’t get rid of it. Forever blowing themselves up – and us too, given half a chance. Independence my foot; can’t you see that this would simply encourage more of those bastards in odd corners who steal explosives from quarries and don’t want to speak French.