The Last Supper (3 page)

We are barrelling towards Paris now, which sits on the map like a great glamorous spider in its web. The road has become crowded. There are old, slouching cars with winking indicators and big glittering ogre-like cars with black windows, tiny battered cars with frantic plumes of smoke fluttering from their exhausts and cars towing enormous caravans. There are
trucks and lorries and untidy vans of every description, all blaring their horns. The children play Sweet and Sour out of the window. They wave and smile at everyone who passes. The Sweets wave and smile back. The Sours don’t. The children keep a tally on a piece of paper. As we near the Paris
périphérique
the road becomes a torrent, an onward rush of roaring, barging traffic all hurtling with carefree ferocity towards the centre. In a way I would like to join it: I don’t know, perhaps it would be easier. Always the effort of resistance, of counter-motion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility. Overhead the sky has come apart in great fraying scarves of pale grey and blue. Bursts of soft sunlight fall and fade and bloom again on the windscreen of the car. The temperature rises another notch. On the back seat, the census of the human disposition finds that people are in general more sweet than sour. Weaving and hesitating and being abused on all sides we swing gloriously south, on to the Autoroute du Soleil.

Monsieur’s garden is well advanced into springtime, though we left home this morning still in the bitter purview of winter. Here the trees are in leaf and there are flowers in the beds. We have been forwarded like clocks by a whole season.

But it is April, and spring, in England too. The sullen English skies seem unkind from the sanctuary of Monsieur’s garden, and intentionally cruel; as though the wind and rain that did not modulate by day or night but persisted week after week through February and March, like irreconcilable grief or anger, were the product of temperament rather than latitude. But it is not warmth that I expect from my parent nation: it is beauty, and distinctness. It is delicacy I require and feel cheated of, the delicacy of poets; not warmth, which is for babies. In January, meeting a friend at Bristol airport, I stood at the arrivals gate and watched as people poured in from the Canary Islands, from Tenerife. Back they came, in their shorts and string vests and sombreros, in their tanned orange skin; back they came to the bad-tempered homeland and went whooping out through the automatic doors into its dark and inhospitable evening. In a way I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so, with human beings or with anything else. There has to be a reckoning, an accounting. There has, at some point, to be the truth.

Monsieur answers the door himself, apparently alone except for a proud white stiff-haired little dog that might be Tintin’s Snowy in his comfortable dotage. Who are we, Monsieur wants to know. He stands in the doorway of his château,
diffident in scuffed deck shoes and faded canvas shorts that show his weathered knotty legs from the knee, while Snowy struts with arthritic dignity among the flowerbeds. Monsieur is in his late fifties or so, slightly wild haired and abstracted but not unkind looking. He has little fiercely glittering eyes whose irises are a benevolent sky blue. He advertised his château as offering bed and breakfast, though perhaps he has forgotten it. I tell him we have come to stay the night.
Les
Anglais
, I add.
Ah oui
, he says at last,
Les Anglais!
He surveys the two children with an eye that expresses a well-bred tolerance for certain weaknesses. Perhaps when we have unloaded our bags we will be so kind as to put our car in the field. Then he will show us to our rooms. He points to the field, which lies just beyond the avenue of trees through which we came. I wonder whether we constitute an affront to his domain, with the unaestheticism of our arrival. Our car is dusty and litter strewn: we ourselves are stiff and crumpled and white faced, and though there is no way it can be proved, Monsieur seems to know that we spent the last hour of our journey singing from one end to the other of the repertoire of
The Sound of
Music
.

He slips lightly back through his doorway while the car disgorges its unsavoury contents on the gravelled drive. The children awkwardly probe the near shores of the front lawn, aloofly observed by Snowy. They look backward, almost physically illiterate, as if they have never seen a garden before in their lives. In the car they were reading
The Cat in the Hat
. They read it aloud: it made me laugh. When they were small, a friend of mine once dramatised
The Lorax
for them in its entirety, and as she came to the felling and extinction of the trufula trees dignified tears rolled steadily down her cheeks. They watched her reverently; for them, too, books are the highest reality. They were different in those far-off days: more distinct and compact, entire unto themselves. They had not yet gone to school. They burned with autonomous life, with a force that had not yet been catalogued and named,
like Thing One and Thing Two in
The Cat in the Hat
. Now they are more like the children in the story, neat and combed, anxious because their mother is out. The Cat is the mother’s antithesis, anarchic and free, available, unscheduled. And though they might forget it, those storybook children were bored before the Cat in the Hat came; bored to tears with that life of order and responsibility, in which nothing ever happened, until one day it did.

When we have our bags and the car is in its field, we present ourselves again at the front door in a straggling group. Monsieur immediately manifests himself from an inner chamber. In his hand are two large old-fashioned iron keys. He leads us into a pale panelled hallway with glass doors to either side, through which I can see long perspectives of light-filled rooms like galleries, with floors so varnished that they shimmer like the surface not of wood but of water; rooms full of paintings and mirrors, a grand piano, sculptures and oriental rugs, great fronded plants in china pots, chairs and tables with elaborately scrolled legs, a vast pale marble fireplace and great numbers of tall windows with folded shutters, on the other side of which stands the garden again, so that the whole place has an appearance of transparency, as if it were made of glass.

Monsieur noiselessly ascends a broad stone staircase that rises through the centre of the house and we follow, turning through regions of mysterious, untenanted elegance, past glimpses of arched doorways and distant, glimmering windows, of vanishing hallways and furniture in a sleep of antiquity, up and up until we come to the top, where the windows look out at the fat golden hills of Burgundy and Monsieur finally engages his key. We stand behind him on the painted floorboards of a large landing in the eaves. Under the window an ancient rocking horse with a coarse, mellifluous mane and tail and fiery black nostrils waits on its curved runners, as though for some remembered childhood rider to come again. There is a little toy carriage too, rickety and antique, and a doll with pale ringlets and staring china eyes in a tiny chair. Monsieur opens a door
and shows us into a low, large room with red walls. It is the nursery, he explains: the toys outside once belonged to the children of the house. I had not suspected Monsieur of sentimentality, and indeed it is sentimentality of a rigid and proprietous kind, for the same force that requires the children to sleep in the nursery dictates that their parents should spend the night in a room far away, a grand room on a lower floor with window seats and a balcony and a view of the park, where they might never be found. I wonder what became of the aforementioned children of the house, and their mother, for Monsieur seems unflinchingly alone. The colour of the nursery, cosy as it is, brings to mind the Red Room in
Jane Eyre
, in all its punitive reputation. But Monsieur is not to be offended: we put our bags in the appropriate places and regroup on the stone staircase, where with the tolerant look again in his eye, as if he knows of our mildly regrettable English weakness for breakfast, he informs us of the hour at which he serves it.

Outside the trees in the park cast sharp-edged shadows; the pale-coloured château stands in its own deepening aura of obscurity, seeming to grow paler as evening advances, as though it might finally dissolve. The air is warm and still: only the pallor of the sky and the sharpness of the shadows betray the fact that it is not yet summer here, in these benignant rolling fields with their foliage already lush. We are south of Paris, north of Dijon and a few miles west of Auxerre and the River Yonne, whose landscapes Françoise Sagan describes as representing the eternal boredom and beauty of the French
paysage
. This is the heartland of fine wine and fine food: satisfaction and plenty seem to roll off its plump yellow hills. Nearby lies the village of Noyers, in whose soft golden buildings the fat, rich, productive spirit of the soil makes itself fully manifest. In a little bar on the main square we play
babyfoot
and drink wine from tulip-shaped glasses while boys on bicycles and scooters whirr up and down the pavements outside. The bar is full of men, who look at us with brazen, friendly curiosity, and indeed there must be something extruded and untranslatable
about us, beset as we are by the joy of escape and by the knowledge that we who consumed porridge in a Sussex village that morning have found our way, by a mixture of randomness and design, here.

There are one or two restaurants nearby. They have an appearance of Masonic discretion. We peer into their dimly lit interiors from the pavement. We scan their uncompromising menus. We have been awake a long time. Is it possible that this same day will oblige us to scale the treacherous peaks of
haute
cuisine
, with the children roped to our backs? We recall that Monsieur suggested the pizzeria: at the time this seemed a form of veiled insult, but his economy of manner proved again deceptive. The pizzeria is perfectly correct: Monsieur could have told us it would be so. This is not the moment to induct minors in
spécialités du terroir
, no, no! They must eat simple food and be hurried back to the nursery
tout de suite
! And indeed they take to their beds in the Red Room with unwonted gratitude and remain there all night, under the bridled eye of the rocking horse and the wide-awake gaze of the china doll.

In the morning I walk across the fields in a bright, arid light. When I return I can hear the grand piano being played through the open windows. I stand in the garden and listen. The lucidity of the sound seems more real to me than anything we have left behind us, than home, than the days whose repetition had laid a kind of fetter on my soul. In its solitariness it speaks to my own single nature. It startles me to be spoken to; as though I have been silent, absent, unconscious; as though my life, the life of home, were a fake, and the real life was roaming somewhere in the world, fleet-footed, unique, uncapturable, to be glimpsed sometimes through an open window, and then to vanish again.

By afternoon we are down in the Rhône valley, west of the Rhône Alps, east of the Ardèche. Lyons lies behind us, and the Saône. The temperature gauge is singing like a canary; the clear light of the Mediterranean is filling the dry green basins of
Montélimar. It is five o’clock. We are searching for the establishment where we are to spend the night, the house of a man named Bertrand. Bertrand’s domain is at once more
outré
, more esoteric, and more aesthetically confounding than Monsieur’s. It takes a long time to find it; and when we do it is as thick in its own enchanted slumber as Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

There are strange pelted hills that rise like a dromedary’s humps from the plain. We wind around them, asking directions of everyone we see. The hills are fragrant, forested with brittle chestnut trees and herbs and carpeted with twigs and dried leaves that crackle underfoot. At the very end of a narrow road that twirls abstractedly upwards through the wilderness and is then extinguished, we find a potholed track traversing the hillside. At the end of that is a very high stone wall with a pair of giant doors in it that are resolutely closed. There is no doorbell or knocker; there isn’t another house for miles around either. But our directions were increasingly clear; there can be no mistake: we are certain Bertrand is in there somewhere.

Presently we try one of the doors and its great iron handle turns, admitting us into a large stone courtyard. The courtyard is completely enclosed: the wildly forested hillside grows up all around its perimeter. Yet inside it is spacious, orderly, well tended. There are no weeds in the borders: the flowers spill from their stone urns by intention, not neglect. They have recently been watered: bright beads still tremble on their petals. Yet everything is silent: there is no one here. In fairy tales, such places are the deepest emanations of magic: the castle in its forest of thorns, the mountain room unlocked by a keyhole in the ice, the lake with its pleasure boats that lies beneath the floorboards. It is in the elision of the human hand that the magic expresses itself. A fire burns with no one to stoke it; a meal stands hot on the table in an empty house. Here, there is a room, not inside but out: it stands in the right angle of the courtyard, two sides of which, I now see, are formed by an old house. It has a large low roof supported by a
pillar on its far corner. Under it there are beautiful rugs, and an arrangement of furniture. There are two long sofas, an armchair, a baroque standard lamp, a mahogany coffee table, a bookshelf, and a parrot in a cage hanging from the rafters. We cross to the front door and ring the bell, which unexpectedly makes the noise of a croaking frog. Then we sit down on the sofas: they are extremely comfortable. Ten minutes pass, perhaps more. At last the door quietly opens and a man slips out of the shadows of the house and into the sun. This is Bertrand. A squat little dog with a bunched-up face like a boxer’s fist slowly follows him. Bertrand greets us with quiet sincerity. He is sorry he took so long to come: he was asleep.

Like Monsieur, Bertrand is in his late fifties, or perhaps a little older; and like Monsieur he appears to operate alone. He wears the same outfit of canvas shorts and scuffed deck shoes. But he has something delicate and hopeful about him, something of the choirboy or cherub; something childlike, with his full curving mouth and large tremulous eyes and soft fine white curling hair, with his inconvenient afternoon nap. An enormous white cat has followed the little dog out into the courtyard. These are Pollux and Nestor. Bertrand excuses himself: he must make a small adjustment to our rooms. One of the beds he has made up for the children will be, he now sees, too small. He must
aménager
. We will do him the kindness of waiting.

My tutored female soul is alerted by the prospect of Bertrand, white-haired and eminent as he seems,
aménaging
alone. I am even a little outraged on his behalf. What English male of nearly pensionable age bestirs himself to ensure that children are in beds of the proper sizes, even for a modest fee? Bertrand reappears and we are ushered inside. The house is as puzzle-like and perplexing inside as out. Its rooms all face different ways and seem to live in distinct eras. There is a kitchen out of a Victorian novel, with copper moulds and saucepans on the walls and an iron range in front of which I expect to see Mrs Beeton in a white apron and cap. There is a large, light,
high-ceilinged room full of paintings and modern furniture like a Parisian atelier. There is a library like a cabinet, with a door concealed behind the shelves.