Celestine (36 page)

‘But you can. Go and look at it!'

‘It's not there any longer,' I and Mademoiselle Pagnard, also present, spoke in unison. Mademoiselle Pagnard, disapproving of such a lapse – lets the side of the elderly down – went on sternly.

‘You saw it demolished yourself, when Mesmin Chauvet renovated the place.'

‘Really?'
A rapt, disbelieving look came into Madame Caillaud's near-sightless eyes. Presently she said, with dismissive dignity:

‘Nevertheless, I can see it absolutely clearly.'

Of Anatole Gonnin himself, the helpless author of her long-term destiny, Madame Caillaud speaks little, and there is only one picture of him. By comparison with his all-present son, this lost husband seems shadowy, too remote now in time to raise many echoes within her. Or it may be that she never knew him well: as people say, she never lived with him.

This, indeed, is the peculiar poignancy that attaches itself to the names of the young men in the war memorial.
Enfants de Chassignolles,
in French parlance, born out of the very earth of the place, flesh of parents and grandparents raised on its produce, many of them were wiped out before anyone could know them as adults, before they could even know themselves. When people still alive claim ‘that first war changed everything … the village was never the same after that', I have come to believe that the removal of the young men, their subjection to an alien and terrible dimension of experience, is a large part of what is being indicated. Even those who did come back were not the same; they had been changed. Since they were the chief inheritors and perpetuators of village life, that life could not be the same either. In comparison, the social effects of the second war and France's defeat, however far-reaching, are perceived in Chassignolles as having been much less devastating. The annual ceremony by the memorial each 11 November, though ostensibly a remembrance for both wars, is really concerned with the first one. The roll call is read, and this is known as the
Appel des Morts,
as if the intention were indeed to call up again those children of Chassignolles to their own territory. The impression is reinforced by the deployment of the present-day schoolchildren, lined up with combed hair, to repeat after each name the refrain
‘mort pour la Patrie'
– ‘died for France'.

I have known several village survivors of the First World War. One liked to mention to us regularly his voyage to the Dardanelles – ‘You come from across the sea too, I believe … But perhaps not the same sea?' Another, Denise Bonnin's husband, was celebrated for having been for forty days in the charnel-house of the Fort of Douarmont, by Verdun, and having escaped ‘without a scratch'. But such oft-reiterated facts form, after decades, their own carapace, a barrier against real memory rather than a continuing key to it.

They are all gone now, these old soldiers, at last joining friends who could, in age, be their great-grandsons. Only in written accounts, today, can one hope to recover some authentic breath of what Anatole Gonnin and his generation experienced.

‘At the front, Robert had seen many of his comrades fall, but not till he came back on leave [to his own farm] and saw the snow lying on the meadow did he feel their deaths pressing on his mind.' (
Campagne,
Raymonde Vincent)

Robert thinks of the sown wheat beneath the earth, and of how long it will be till it is grown and harvested. Will he ever enjoy that harvest? And his girlfriend – is she too ‘something good that he will never have'? In any case, he himself cannot take things as he did before. He struggles to explain:

‘“When I came home, I thought I'd find the house, the fields, the animals and the people as well, all just the same to me as they were before. But it hasn't turned out like that, none of these things have the same weight for me…”'

It is as if he has left the place spiritually even before his physical departure. He is sure now that he will not return again, and he is right. When the news of his death inevitably comes, even his father's suffering ‘was hardly greater, because he had envisaged the loss of his son so acutely even before it took place.'

The final chapters of the novel are more cheerful. The war is over, the younger daughter marries. The aunt comforts herself with a notion of the circularity of time, which owes less to any Christian doctrine of survival than to an older perception based on experience of the natural cycles – ‘Everything comes back, everything begins again. A bad winter never prevented a fine spring.'

In her dreams, Robert's sister goes on expecting him to come back.

‘Again and again she thought she saw him. He would arrive on foot, always as the night was falling, so that she never quite managed to see his face.' Sometimes she catches sight of him in the distance, in the avenue of chestnut trees; sometimes he doesn't recognize her; sometimes she is outside and sees him go into the house, but when she runs in the place is empty – or full of people she has never seen before.

This last dream seems to reach beyond the specific losses of war, into the wider territory of time that, in the end, does the same work. It is as if the young girl who later became Raymonde Vincent the novelist had momentarily visited the long future. We all of us, if we live to be old, find the places of our youth are empty, or full of strange faces. For the individual who lasts as long as Madame Caillaud, every single person who surrounded his or her youth has gone, ‘ghosts at cockcrow'. I try a tentative question on her.

‘Yes, well I have a lot of time these days … I quite often catch myself thinking, I haven't seen so-and-so recently. I wonder how he's doing? And then I think, Oh. If I'm the oldest person, he must be dead at present.'

‘Mort à présent'.
Such is Madame Caillaud's phrase. Others too use this formula, a technically correct but slightly archaic French which seems to replace the definite concept of ‘now' with the suggestion of a more temporary state. Bernardet in his last years, complaining of ageing, used to say
‘Je suis vieux, à présent.'

Again, that sense of time's circularity, a hint that youth and vigour, the Cavalcade of 1912, the recruits of 1914, the mythic Golden Age, have simply gone for a long winter season, as plants do under the cold earth, and will one day return.

Chapter 16

Three years after the First World War ended, twenty-year-old Denise Apaire married. Her sister and brother-in-law were dead; their parents, left late in life with an orphaned granddaughter to rear, were old and weary. But Denise's wedding cheered everyone up.

She was a pretty girl, and she was also rather lucky. With so many of the younger men gone for ever from Chassignolles and all the other villages, many of her generation remained single. A daughter of a well-established local family, whom I only knew when old age had converted her into a substantial personality, physically and mentally, used to proclaim that she could have married if she'd wanted but husbands weren't worth the bother – ‘what with having to do their washing. I'd like one at night, now, to keep me from being scared, but for anything else – pough!' Even Anatole Gonnin's attractive and well-off widow, who had her own reasons to appreciate the power of ‘anything else', did not remarry till late in life. But Denise, who had been just too young in the war to mourn a dead suitor, was marrying handsome Georges Bonnin from St Denis de Jouhet, six years older than herself, he who had a fine singing voice and had survived unscathed at Verdun and indeed for an entire four years of war.

I know they made a handsome couple, as I possess a copy of their wedding photo. Like most of those taken in Chassignolles in the 1920s, this one was done by the war widow of a La Châtre photographer, intrepidly carrying on the business. It was rather a new departure then for a family like the Apaires to have a photo taken: the fifty-odd family and guests, carefully rigid on chairs and trestles at the side of the church, seem poised too between rusticity and gentility, and between past and future. In the front row Denise's parents gaze warily out of the past. Little Jean Beaumont, his carpenter's hands uneasy on his knees, wears a stiff, high-buttoned jacket of antique cut, and his thin old wife (who must once have had beautiful eyes) is dressed in the crêpe-trimmed jacket, floor-length skirt and black, ribboned cap of a nineteenth-century bereaved matron. On the other side of Georges, his mother wears the white peasant cap of the region, and another old lady, similarly capped, sports a many-tiered Victorian pelisse and a rolled parasol as an accessory. Meanwhile, up in the back row, young nephews and uncles play it cool in soft felt hats, double-breasted suits and striped ties that could be worn today. One has a cigarette in his mouth; another, who looks about fourteen, holds one nonchalantly between his fingers: the habits acquired in the trenches had percolated through French society. The much-booted and ringletted children look like illustrations from E. Nesbit books of twenty years earlier; while many of the younger women, bareheaded, in dresses run up by Jeanne Pagnard's grandmother and her assistants, seem to belong less to a stereotype of ‘The Twenties' than to a timeless near-present. Just one Beauty, in a large-brimmed hat and feather boa, is clearly on her way into a more leisured existence.

Anatole Gonnin's surviving brother married in Chassignolles that year also. So did Victor Pissavy's youngest granddaughter. Sixty years later the three couples posed outside the church after a Mass to celebrate their collective diamond wedding. Beside the rather elegant figures of the Ls from the Domaine and of Lucien Gonnin, who wore a black patch over an eye kicked by a horse, the Bonnins appear diminutive, portly and, as in their original wedding photo, nervous. In daily life, however, they were quite at ease. Between the 1920s and the 1980s their farm prospered and expanded. Eventually they owned or rented bits of land all over the Commune, eighty-odd hectares in all, one of the largest holdings. They laboured from five in the morning till past nine at night, seven days a week, never counting their own toil as part of the equation, but they saw their lives becoming very gradually easier, and the Common Market subsidy system of the 1960s and '70s appeared to them as an endorsement and just reward for all their efforts. By the time profits began insidiously to fall again and the whole utility of peasant farming began to be seriously called in question, Georges was dead and Denise was too old and deaf to bother herself much about such things.

I knew Georges Bonnin for the last ten years of his life. He and Madame L's husband, wed in the same year, died the same winter. When I was brought up to date on these events by a neighbour on our return in the spring I was told, with a nice discrimination of status, that
‘le père Bonnin'
had died, while Monsieur L was ‘deceased': it is true that the latter august event took place away from Chassignolles. My enduring and rather surprising memory of Georges Bonnin is of him dressed in the regulation black alpaca jacket, striped trousers and clogs, sitting at the kitchen table assiduously reading books. When I was waiting for the milk to be brought in, I would manoeuvre myself behind him to read over his shoulder; it seemed impertinent to question this rather private and authoritative old person outright about his literary preferences. In any case, in age he had become hard of hearing and had reverted in his own speech to the
patois
of long ago. The books were all from the public library in La Châtre, which sends selections to the village Mairies. He seemed to favour popular histories with a military theme and books about explorers, though he was known to try Zola and Dumas. One day I remarked to his daughter, Georgette, how nice it was that he could catch up like this, in old age, on a pleasure he had never had time or opportunity for in youth.

‘Well, it's his heart, you know. He likes to feed the chickens and the dogs still, and keep an eye on the calves, but in cold or windy weather he shouldn't go out at all, Doctor says. Stuck in here by the stove, he has to do
something.
'

Yet Georgette herself has inherited much of her father's submerged intelligence, and probably that of her maternal grandfather also, Jean Beaumont, who ‘could calculate anything in his head'. It is she and her brother René who run the farm now, another of those brother-and-sister couples like the Pagnards, who, in later life, become undistinguishable from a married pair. Georges and Denise had several children, and the youngest is currently head of a College of Further Education. Once or twice a year he visits the home where he grew up for a Sunday lunch. His sister brings out the best china, kills chickens, arranges tomatoes in decorative shapes, buys good wine.

‘He travels the world,' she explains a little sadly. ‘It isn't our kind of life.' (Georgette herself has been once to Paris, but only for a day.) ‘It was his godfather who set him on his way. He paid for him to stay on at school and go to college. We could never have afforded that.'

Georgette has a son, now over forty. That son, in turn, has a son, young Francis (in the now-fashionable
style anglais
), who comes to the farm for holidays. It is as if some centrifugal force has drawn the most loyal members of this family in on one another in an attempt to preserve a way of life and thought, but in practice their actions make the dynasty more vulnerable to extinction. When Georgette and René are laid to rest, how will Georgette's son manage his substantial property without a woman to share the work and do the accounts? Will Francis adopt the land and ways of his forefathers, or will the city of his alien mother, where he spends most of the year, claim him entirely? I am aware, in the cramped, warm kitchen where Apaires have lived and died since before the Revolution, where ninety-two-year-old Denise still prepares the vegetables every day for dinner, and where Georgette lifts the pail of milk warm from the cow to pour it into my can with a generous disregard for measures, that I may be witnessing the last stage of a long story. And who, when Georgette is no more, will be there to bear witness to that story? Traditionally, in this as in most societies, men make a cult of minding their own business: it is the women who are the repository of collective memory, who keep the record.