Celestine (42 page)

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We were not to pay our respects to Bernardet at the last. We were not there. I regret that.

Jeanne Pagnard reported that he ‘looked handsome in death [
Il faisait un beau mort
]'.

In 1988, the same spring in which he had written to me ‘Your primroses are a marvel to see', he planted forget-me-nots and marigolds near our front door. Though he maintained that he had handed everything over to his son now, and worked less and less, he seemed to us as busy as ever. As always, each time we returned our garden was neat, weeded, clipped or dug according to the season. Only the grass caused a perennial difficulty, because lawn-mowing did not enter into Bernardet's concept of good maintenance. Grass was hay to him, and therefore should be scythed, but only at long intervals. And in any case, he explained, scything tired him inexplicably these days.

‘My place is in the cemetery now.' Jovially.

‘No, no, Monsieur Bernardet, not yet. Fine chance!'

Over the scythe, he experienced a revelatory moment. It quite often occurred, when I was talking to him, that I would hesitate about the gender of an unfamiliar word such as ‘scythe' (
une faux
) and ask him if it was masculine or feminine? He always politely supplied the correct gender, but with slight puzzlement. Finally he conveyed to me that he did not understand why I did not know, since it must be the same in my own language?

When I explained that gender is attached to the word, not the object – that it varies from one language to another, and does not anyway exist in the same way in English, he looked thoughtful. Later he said to me, ‘You've made me realize words aren't what I'd always taken them for.'

I think he enjoyed his last summer. The weather was very good, which in farmer's terms meant hot sun punctuated by providential showers of rain. He even swapped his cap, habitually worn indoors as well as out, for a straw hat, and his much-mended black alpaca for the blue dungarees of his son's generation. We talked often, about our children, about his own childhood.

That autumn, a roofer was supposed to come and mend a leak round the chimney of the kitchen stove. There had been some difficulty about the roofer not knowing what was wanted so I telephoned Bernardet to ask him to sort it out. (The telephone had been installed at Les Béjauds about five years earlier.) He listened attentively, assured me, ‘I will do my very best, Madame', playing trusted old retainer. It was, intermittently, one of his favourite roles, though at other times he could be unyielding and it did not do to presume on him.

‘Will you be coming after Christmas?' he then asked.

‘Not this year, Monsieur Bernardet, no, because my husband will be in India for two weeks then.' (He always liked to hear of our travels. It made him feel glad that he did not, himself, have to make such traumatic journeys to such savage places.) ‘We'll be back in Chassignolles in March.'

I sensed obscurely that he was disappointed. This was exceptional; he had a countryman's patience, the knowledge that things happen when they happen and cannot be forced. But the reason for his anxiety to see us was not clear to me at the time, so we did not change our plans as we should have done.

At the New Year I received, again exceptionally, a little note from him on squared exercise book paper.

‘Wanting to wish you and all your family a good and happy year. In Chassignolles, for the moment, everything's going on nicely and the weather is very fine. Please accept my best wishes, and I look forward to seeing you soon.'

‘It was his goodbye to you, Mum,' said our son when, only a few days later, we received a written
faire part,
the traditional French notification of a death:

‘Madame Bernardet et ses enfants vous font part du décès de M. Georges Bernardet survenu le mardi 3 janvier décedé à la suite d'une très courte maladie.'

‘He knew he was ill and he wouldn't do nothing about it. Wouldn't even see the doctor.' Madame Bernardet in March, tearful, still shocked.

‘Georges Bernardet was always tough with other people and tough with himself too.' Mademoiselle Pagnard, to me. ‘And Madame Bernardet's the same. Look how hard she's always worked herself. She wasn't the person to persuade him to stop in bed. Look at me – I had my operation and it's been worth it. But Georges didn't see things like that. He wouldn't go to hospital and that was that.'

I learnt later that during the autumn Bernardet had lost weight and often complained of a pain in his side.

‘He was tired.' To Madame Bernardet, as to many of her generation, all illness is fatigue. ‘He didn't really do much any more. Just the gardens.' Theirs, ours and another one near ours belonging in theory to his Parisian daughter.

But on the morning of New Year's Day he was up before dawn, helping his son with a calving cow in difficulties. The calf was safely born. He breakfasted as usual, then rode his mobylette over to our side of the Commune. He spent the morning tidying, snipping, hoeing: a last look round. The winter sun, bright in a blue sky, melted the hoar-frost, but to each of the several neighbours who saw him at work that morning and passed the time of day, he complained of feeling unaccountably cold.

‘Ah, you want to take care, then,' they said comfortably. ‘You never know…'

As always, when the church clock struck midday, he cleaned his hoe and spade, got on his machine and rode back to Les Béjauds. But for once in his life he refused his dinner. ‘Not hungry. Don't feel too good.'

Nonplussed, Madame Bernardet suggested he might take the unprecedented step of lying down for the afternoon.

In the evening, she roused him.

‘You ought to get up and try to eat something now. Keep up your strength.'

He got to his feet. As he reached the kitchen an explosion, expressing itself as a massive haemorrhage all over the floor tiles, felled him to the ground. He did not get up again. Although an ambulance was called and he was carried off to the hospital he had so far avoided, he did not know it. He never regained consciousness.

In the village, where the unexpected death carried small shock-waves of fear and self-reproach, younger people said: ‘Of course, if only he'd seen the doctor earlier…'

‘They can do a lot now. Look at Mademoiselle Pagnard.'

‘Dreadful that he wouldn't look after himself, when you think…'

But I thought that it was Bernardet's own conscious decision. Once again, from within the context of a life apparently circumscribed, he had acted with foresight, independence, and his own sense of priorities. It wasn't just the idea of going to hospital. He hadn't hesitated, a few years earlier, to have a cataract operation, which had been successful. He was quite informed enough to know that an operation and treatment for his growing malaise might prolong his life. But he had evidently determined in his own mind that the life of a frail old man, doing well all things considered, was not for him. His inherited lack of sentimentality over the worn-out horse, the old cow gone dry, the useless mouth to feed, was consistent. Since he felt as he did, one cannot say that the choice was anything but clear-sighted and right.

Il est mort – à présent.

He has his own place in the cemetery now, a new grave, one of the line of glossy granite bedsteads that have filled up the western side in the last twenty years and are due to invade the field next door. He has simply his family name on the stone, along with Madame Bernardet's awaiting her tenancy: on tombstones as in letters the French are more formal than the English. He has a fine array of memorial plaques from relatives, friends and neighbours, testifying to his standing in the community. He has mop-headed chrysanthemums each 1 November – All Saints, a major day for family reunions, when even unbelievers docilely visit their dead and make offerings that cut through fifteen hundred years of Christianity to an older set of beliefs. For the rest of the year he has plastic flowers, which I cannot feel he appreciates. Indeed the whole cemetery seems physically so alien to the values and habits by which his life was lived that I have difficulty in believing he lies there. With his cap, as ever, on his head? I suppose not. With a rosary, then, between his finger bones? Even less suitable: he did not set any store by such things.

Il faisait un beau mort …

For me, he is far more present in the night sky over the house opposite ours, the house where he grew up, when the Plough stands low and clear above the roof-tree. And he is present in all those other roofs he helped to raise including our kitchen one, and in all the gates, ladders, outhouses, racks, handles and wheelbarrows he has left behind.

Once, finding the remains of an old stool and what seemed to be part of the shaft of a wooden plough among a load of mixed firewood, I pointed them out to him.

‘Ah, people have laboured over those,' he said nostalgically (
des gens ont peiné là-dessus
). ‘What can you do, they're only bits? But I agree, I don't feel right either, putting on the fire something someone has taken trouble over.'

Bernardet's going brought home to me that a culture of conservation we had taken as part of the basic fabric of Chassignolles was in inexorable decline. Fewer and fewer people were replacing broken fence palings with carefully whittled new ones, patching worn clothes, mending bicycles with string, laying windfalls out in attics, carefully fixing padlocks to small stables and byres for which they had no real use. Fewer people now thought grass was for hay, or that the roadside verges were the natural habitat for chickens, or that there's nothing like a few sheep in an orchard to keep it tidy.

The layout of the fields and gardens has remained unchanged, since the area escaped the
remembrement
of the 1960s that destroyed so many old hedges on the plains of the northern Berry; instead, the change has been more subtle and recent. The communal grazing field, where Marie D once used to take her goats and where our son and others played football in the evenings under the elms, has sprouted a crescent of council houses and a mown expanse of purely decorative green. Not till about 1990 did the strimmer make its appearance, but when it did an unnerving sleekness began to invade the ditches alongside the farm gates. Pots of flowers have proliferated. The numerous wayside crosses, neglected since the Great War, are now decorously encircled with marigolds and pansies. On the rough expanse where the
alambic
has always stood in autumn, and where Monsieur Chezaubernard used to keep his ducks in a free-range idyll, the young village schoolmaster has organised a nature trail, complete with little labels.

‘When we were young we didn't need to be taught about Nature. We saw it every day, walking to and from school in all weathers.' Thus, anyone in the Commune over forty.

The old conservation habits born of poverty and endeavour are being replaced, even here in the most traditionalist part of France, by Conservation. The castle of Sarzay, which has been falling down for most of the last two centuries, was acquired a few years ago by an impassioned restorer, who realized that he could afford to buy it if he sold his modest house in the suburbs of Paris. Employed by the national electricity company, he drives frenetically round to read the local meters and spends the rest of his time deep in mortar, moat-excavation and wrangles with the bureaucracy of the Heritage industry.

The mill at Angibault has been rescued also. For years a deserted, haunted place, hard to find even as in George Sand's day unless you knew exactly which green lane to take, it has now been bought by its local Commune as a place for
fêtes
and school exhibitions. The rooms have been cleaned of mouldy flour, grain and rubbish and painted white. The wheel has been renovated and turns merrily – at least on Sundays – in the newly dredged stream. When we visit it, a fellow-visitor who worked there as a young man, before the war, can hardly contain his delight. ‘It used to be such a hole. And the man who ran it, he was a hard master, I can tell you. But look at it now. Wonderful!'

Another time, I take Madame Bernardet there. In spite of a work ethic as rigorous as her husband's, she enjoys expeditions and her life has not provided her with enough of them. She was twelve before she even managed a brief train ride into La Châtre – to be presented with her school leaving certificate – although she had seen the trains pass every day as she worked in her father's fields. She confides a wish, never likely now to be fulfilled, to ‘see the great vineyards in the south'. Meanwhile we make do with George Sand landmarks. After Sarzay and the mill, she wonders if we could see ‘La Mare au Diable' – the Devil's Pool. I am afraid that this famous marshy lake, which I have heard is more or less dried up, will disappoint her, but I have a detailed map and we embark on a search. At the junction of two woodland paths we encounter a child; Madame Bernardet, diffident in some societies, feels confident here and is transformed before my eyes into a character from a folk-tale herself.

‘Petit garçon, petit garçon
– can you tell us the way to the Mare au Diable?'

Fortunately he can. He, to complete the picture, is looking for his father in the big wood. Have we seen a man on an orange tractor?

On the way home in the car, Madame Bernardet says: ‘There now, I can say I've actually seen it! I've always wanted to.'

She has spent her entire life about ten miles away from it, but such cultural expeditions did not, till very recently, enter into the Chassignolles scheme of things.

Culture-consciousness has invaded the local fairs too. Twenty years ago, many of the traditional Assemblies where goods and livestock were once traded and where Célestine and her contemporaries danced the evening away to bagpipes and flutes, had descended to canned pop music and drum majorettes. Perhaps the old men in striped trousers liked looking at the majorettes' legs, but this sort of thing is now frowned on as ‘not folklorique'. Instead, medieval jugglers do a turn (‘Lords and Ladies, I last passed by here in 1293 – no, no, I tell a lie: it was 1295') and children have rides on a prototype roundabout that consists of a horizontal wooden wheel turned by real trotting ponies tethered to it. The bagpipes are back; hefty young Berrichons in blue smocks or long skirts and lace caps self-consciously perform traditional measures, while stalls on all sides proclaim old-style Berrichon produce to crowds sated with an even more traditional Sunday lunch. As if the past were all one country, it is also manifested by a row of turn-of-the-century pony traps and gigs, their hoods in tatters, combined with an array of interwar reapers-and-binders and early tractors disinterred from local barns. At one
fête,
a threshing machine is persuaded to function again, disgorging grain into sacks still marked with the name of the miller who went to war in 1914. A team of men all past fifty retrieve without difficulty movements and gestures that have laid dormant within them for thirty years.