A Life (6 page)

Soon they were crossing open countryside; and from time to time the blurred outline of a rain-drenched willow could be seen through the watery murk, its branches dangling like the limbs of a corpse. The horses' hooves splashed through the puddles as the four wheels span sunbursts of mud.

No one spoke; their spirits seemed as thoroughly dampened as the waterlogged earth. Mama leant her head back and closed her eyes. The Baron gazed out gloomily at the unchanging, sodden landscape. Rosalie, nursing a parcel on her knees, was sunk in the animal-like rumination of common folk. But beneath this warm, streaming rain, Jeanne felt as though she were coming back to life, like some indoor plant which has been returned out of doors; and the fullness of her joy sheltered her, like foliage, from despondency. Although she said nothing, she felt like singing, like putting her hand out of the window to fill it with water and drink; and she delighted to be thus borne away at the trot, to see the desolation of the countryside and to feel surrounded and protected in the midst of this deluge.

And beneath the relentless rain a cloud of steam rose from the gleaming hindquarters of the two horses.

Gradually the Baroness dropped off to sleep. Her face, framed by six dangling corkscrew curls of hair, grew progressively slack, gently propped upon the three great billows of her neck whose nethermost ripples merged into the broad ocean of her bosom. Her head rose and sagged with each breath; the cheeks filled, and then a rasping snore would issue from between her parted lips. Her husband leaned towards her and gently placed a small leather wallet in her hands where they lay crossed upon the amplitude of her stomach.

This contact woke her; and she considered the object with a misty gaze, in the dazed stupor that follows upon the interruption of sleep. The wallet fell to the floor and came open.

Banknotes and gold coins scattered through the carriage. She awoke completely; and her daughter's gaiety exploded in a burst of laughter.

The Baron picked up the money and placed it on her lap:

'There, my dear, that's all that's left of my farm at Életot.
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I sold it to pay for the repairs at Les Peuples. We'll be spending a good deal of time there from now on.'

She counted out six thousand four hundred francs
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and calmly put them in her pocket.

This was the ninth farm sold out of the thirty-one which they had been left by their parents. Nevertheless they still owned enough land to bring in twenty thousand francs a year, and which could easily have brought in thirty thousand if it had been well managed.

As they lived simply, this income would have sufficed if their household had not contained a bottomless well upon which they never ceased to draw: generosity. It made the money evaporate off the palm of their hands as surely as the sun removes the water from a marsh. It simply flowed away, leaked from them, vanished. How? Nobody quite knew. Time and again one or other of them would say: 'I just don't know how it's happened. I've spent a hundred francs today, just on little things.'

Moreover, this readiness to give was one of the great joys of their life; and they were magnificently, touchingly, of one mind on the subject.

'And is my house beautiful now?' asked Jeanne.

'You'll soon see, my child', replied the Baron cheerfully.

Slowly, however, the violence of the downpour began to abate; and eventually it was no more than a sort of misty drizzle, the finest spray of rain dancing in the air. The vault of cloud seemed to be lifting and paling; and suddenly, through some invisible gap, a long, slanting ray of sunlight fell upon the pastures.

The clouds having now parted, the azure reaches of the sky appeared. The gap grew bigger, like a veil being rent in two, and a beautiful, pure sky of clear, deep, blue, covered the world.

A cool, gentle breeze wafted by, like a happy sigh from off the land; and whenever they drove along the edge of a garden or a  wood, they could hear the brisk song of a bird drying its feathers.

Evening was approaching. Everyone in the carriage was asleep now, except Jeanne. Twice they stopped at wayside inns to allow the horses to rest and be given some oats and water.

The sun had set; church bells tolled in the distance. In one little village they were lighting the lamps; and the sky began to shine with a swarm of stars. Here and there the lights from a house would pierce the darkness like pinpricks of fire; and all at once, from behind a hillside, through branches of fir, the moon rose, red and huge, like a bleary eye roused from sleep.

It was so mild that they had left the carriage-windows down. Jeanne was dozing now, exhausted by her fantasies and replete with visions of happiness. Occasionally, when the numbness that came from adopting one position for too long caused her to open her eyes, Jeanne would look out and see the trees of a farmstead passing in the luminous darkness, or even a few cows lying here and there in a field, who raised their heads. Then she would shift in her seat and try to recover the thread of some dream; but the constant rumble of the carriage filled her ears and defeated her thoughts, and she would close her eyes again, feeling as though her mind were as stiff as her cramped body.

But stop they did. Men and women were standing by the carriage-doors bearing lanterns. They had arrived. Jeanne, suddenly awake, leapt down from the carriage. Father and Rosalie, their path lighted by a farmer, almost had to carry the Baroness, who was exhausted and groaning in distress, constantly repeating in a low, weak voice: 'Oh, good heavens! My poor dears? She did not want anything to drink or eat, but went to bed and at once fell asleep.

Jeanne and the Baron had supper alone.

They smiled at each other and clasped one another's hands across the table; and then, both of them filled with childish excitement, they began to tour the refurbished manor-house.

It was one of those vast, tall Norman residences, half farmhouse, half chateau, built of white stone that had turned grey, and spacious enough to accommodate an entire clan.

A huge hall ran right through the house, dividing it in two,  with large doors that opened to front and back. A double staircase seemed to bestride the entrance, leaving the centre empty, with its two flights joining at the first floor like a bridge.

On the ground floor, to the right, stood the door into the enormous drawing-room, which was hung with tapestries on which birds strutted against leafy backgrounds. All the furniture was upholstered in petit point and depicted scenes from the fables of La Fontaine;
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and Jeanne gave a start of delight to see a chair she had loved as a small child, which showed the story of the Fox and the Stork.

The drawing-room gave onto the library, which was full of old books, and onto two further rooms, which were unused. To the left was the dining-room with its new wooden panelling, then the laundry room, pantry, and kitchen, and a small closet containing a bath.

A corridor ran lengthwise along the middle of the first floor. The ten doors of the ten bedrooms were lined up along the passage. At the far end, on the right, was Jeanne's bedroom. They went in. The Baron had had it entirely redecorated, simply using draperies and furniture which had been lying untouched in the attic.

Tapestries of Flemish origin and some considerable antiquity filled the room with strange figures.

But on catching sight of her bed, Jeanne shrieked with delight. At its corners four large birds carved in oak, all black and shining with polish, served as the bed's supports and seemed to be its guardians. The sides bore two broad garlands of carved fruits and flowers; and four delicately fluted columns, surmounted by Corinthian capitals, supported a cornice of roses and cupids entwined.

There it stood, at once monumental and yet thoroughly graceful, despite the severity of the wood which had darkened with age.

The counterpane and the bed's canopy sparkled like two starry firmaments. Made of antique silk, they were dark blue in colour and studded with large fleur-de-lis embroidered in gold.

Having admired the bed at length, Jeanne lifted her lamp to examine, the tapestries and discover their subject.

A young nobleman and a young lady both dressed in green, red, and yellow, and in the strangest garb, were conversing beneath a blue tree on which some white fruits were ripening. A large rabbit of the same colour was nibbling at a tuft of grey grass.

Just above these figures, and supposedly in the distance, could be seen five little round houses, with pointed roofs; and above them, almost in the sky, a bright red windmill.

Large floral patterns swirled through the scene.

The other two panels were very similar to the first, except that four little men in Flemish costume were to be seen coming out of the houses and raising their arms to the sky in utter consternation and fury.

But the last tapestry depicted a moment of drama. Beside the rabbit, which was still nibbling away, the young man lay stretched out on the ground and appeared to be dead. The young lady, her eyes on the young man, was driving a sword into her breast, and the fruits on the tree had turned black.

Jeanne was about to give up trying to make sense of the story when in one corner she spotted a tiny little animal which in real life the rabbit could have eaten as easily as a blade of grass. But it was a lion.

Then she recognized the sorry tale of Pyramus and Thisbe;
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and although she smiled at the crudity of the drawings, she felt happy at the thought of being enclosed within the confines of this love story which would forever speak to her of the hopes she had nurtured, and that each night this ancient legend of tender devotion would look down upon her as she slept.

The rest of the furnishings brought together the most disparate of styles. There were items of furniture such as each succeeding generation keeps in the family and which make old houses rather resemble museums by containing a selection of everything. A superb Louis XIV commode, plated with dazzling brass, was flanked by two Louis XV chairs which still had their original upholstery of floral silk. A rosewood writing-table stood opposite the fireplace, while on the mantelpiece was an Empire clock beneath a glass globe.

It was a bronze beehive, suspended by four marble columns  over a garden of gilt flowers. A thin pendulum protruded from the hive through a wide slit and transported a tiny bee with enamel wings endlessly to and fro above the flower-bed.

The clock face, of painted porcelain, was set into the side of the beehive.

It began to chime eleven o'clock. The Baron kissed his daughter goodnight and retired to his room.

Then, reluctantly, Jeanne went to bed.

After one last look round her room, she extinguished the candle. But to the left of her bed, of which only the head was placed against the wall, there was a window, and through it the moonlight flooded in, casting a pool of brilliance across the floor.

This light was reflected back onto the walls, where pale gleams played wanly over the motionless romance of Pyramus and Thisbe.

Through the other window, opposite the end of the bed, Jeanne could see a tall tree suffused in so light. She turned on her side and closed her eyes, but then, after a while, opened them again.

She felt as though she were still being jolted by the carriage, and its rumbling seemed to be continuing inside her head. At first she lay there without moving, hoping that repose would eventually make her go to sleep; but the restlessness of her mind soon communicated itself to her whole body.

She could feel the muscles twitching in her legs, and she was beginning to grow feverish. So she got out of bed and, with feet and arms bare, looking like a ghost in her long nightdress, she crossed the patch of moonlight that lay across the floor, opened the window, and looked out.

It was such a bright night that she could see as clearly as though it were daylight; and Jeanne recognized the countryside she had once loved so dearly during her early childhood.

Immediately facing her was a large lawn, as yellow as butter in the nocturnal light. Two huge trees stood in front of the house like ballet-dancers on their points, a plane-tree to the north and a lime to the south.

On the far side of this great expanse of grass, a small copse of trees marked the boundary of the area sheltered from the sea gales by five rows of ancient elms: gnarled, stripped bare, and half eaten away, they had been shaped into a roof-like slope by the ceaseless action of the wind from the sea.

What thus constituted a kind of park was bounded to right and left by two long avenues of enormously tall poplars, called
peuples
in Normandy, which separated the landlord's residence from the two dependent farms which abutted it, one of which was lived in by the Couillard family, the other by the Martins.

These
peuples
had given their name to the chateau. Beyond this enclosed space stretched a vast, uncultivated plain, dotted with gorse-bushes, where the wind whistled and chased throughout the day and night. Then the land came to a sudden halt at a sheer, white cliff which dropped a hundred metres to the waves breaking at its foot.

In the distance Jeanne gazed at the broad expanse of the sea, rippled like moiré silk and seemingly asleep beneath the stars.

In the stillness left by the departed sun, all the different smells of the land filled the air. A jasmine clambering round the ground-floor windows gave off its steady, pungent scent that mingled with the fainter perfume of its newly unfolded leaves. Slow eddies of breeze brought with them the reek of the salty sea-air and the oozing slime of seaweed.

At first Jeanne simply yielded to the pleasure of breathing in the air: and the peace of the countryside soothed her like a cool bath.

All the animals that bestir themselves at dusk to carry on their obscure existence under cover of the tranquil night filled the semi-darkness with their silent bustle. Large birds flitted past, without a cry, mere blotches, shadows; the murmur of invisible insects barely caught the ear; while noiseless errands were accomplished across the dewy grass or the sand along the deserted paths.