Fascination (23 page)

Walking home at night I reflect that there are few places quite so firmly closed and shuttered to the traveller as a French village after hours. Even the hotel front door is locked and it takes half
a dozen rings to summon the amiable patron from his flickering TV.

I stand in my room and look down at the silent street, the shine of the street lamps picking out the dead cars in dewy, night-time monochrome. I have that sensation – you must know that form of self-consciousness that comes from being strangely alone – when every gesture, every scratch of the head, every throat-clearing acquires a curious, mannered significance. I feel I am performing, I feel I am being filmed. I feel I am playing out an abandoned scene from
Visions Fugitives
.

INTERIOR. ROOM. DAY.

The man sat in a wooden chair, smoking, and watched the girl sleeping. Birdsong, morning light squeezing through half-open shutters. The man was clothed but the girl – most of her beneath a sheet – was plainly naked. Irène Golan’s face. The man picked through the girl’s clothes searched her fringed suede handbag went through her coat pockets lit another cigarette sat down stood up walked round the bed. Smoking his cigarette walked round the bed and crouched down staring at her. The girl’s face. The man’s face. Irène Golan turned through ninety degrees. The man stood by the closed window. Stood by the open window. Two gendarmes in the street below. The man recoiled, turned and kicked the leg of the bed. ‘Hey, get up. I’ll bring the car round.’ The girl woke and sat up in bed, slowly. Her right arm gathering the sheet to her breasts, modestly. She looked as if she had really been sleeping. The man left the room and the girl sighed – bored, irritated. With her free hand she pushed strands of hair back from her slumped and sleepy face. She yawned and a corner of the sheet slipped and nearly fell free. You wondered if they had made love the night before. There was the sound of the key locking the door. The girl did not even turn her head.

‘… John was lying on the ground in the gap between the farmhouse and the barn. He was rolled on to his side. And he was very pale,
white as chalk. But there was no mark on him, not a drop of blood. It must have happened instantly – I was told that concussive force of certain explosions can do this to you. There appears to be no evident cause of death, apart from this unnatural pallor, as if the blood as well as the breath has been driven from you. We pulled him into the lee of the barn wall and we waited until dark, at which point we made our way back to the lower town. I am sure it happened in a split second and it is inconceivable that he knew a thing. This is exactly as I remember it. I hope this is of some comfort. I should only add that he seemed very peaceful. The next morning our battalion was withdrawn from St Julien and we remained in billets at Verdun until the armistice.

Yours sincerely,

J. Robert “Bob”Quentin.’

Visions Fugitives
(1961). Un film de Jean-Didier Mavrocordato. Avec la participation d’Alain Hoffman et Julienne Jodelet…
I remember the poster. I remember the revival house in the Village running a season of ‘
nouvelle vague
’ films from the ‘60s. I remember certain scenes in the movie with the recall of the the most pedantic cineaste. But the rest of it remains opaque. It was not that long ago, either. Twelve years, thirteen. I have never made any attempt to see the film again. The memory, with all its gaps, remains sharp, perfect but fragile, and I do not want it disturbed, do not want to shatter its perfect fragility.

‘Mavrocordato is Swiss. I am Swiss. I think he used a village in Switzerland for this film which I know. St Julien, it’s not far from my home.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Near Lausanne.’

The lights dimmed. The film began. On the screen the credits rolled and the abrasive, badly recorded jazz score filled the cinema. Tinny trumpet blare, hiss and tap of wire brush on snare drum. I don’t think I had seen a black and white film in the cinema for over
a decade. I watched, with the curiosity of an anthropologist, as Alain Hoffman and Julienne Jodelet strolled hand in hand along a promenade. Nice? Villefranche? Beaulieu? Juan les Pins? I find it hard to recall much more of the opening sequence of the film. In the shifting silver of the semi-dark I felt Irène gently take my hand.

Who was this Irène Golan? Why did Mavrocordato use that old photograph in his film? Cutting back to it repeatedly? As if it was a vision of absolute torment to taciturn Alain Hoffman, on the run with the exquisite Julienne Jodelet…I lie in my lumpy bed in the Hôtel du Cygne, my head resting on the solid bolster that passes for a pillow, and shuffle the images that slip into my mind. I will not sleep, I know, my mind going now in the perfect shuttered blackness of the room, in that dead calm of hotel noiselessness – which is not noiseless at all. A distant lorry changes gear on the
route nationale
, the chuckling of the central heating, the unexplained creaks and thuddings of an old building, the confessional whisper of a toilet flush somewhere below. Shhhhh.

You know those unhindering hours of the night when your thoughts will wander free, sometimes freighted with despair, but sometimes inspired and almost miraculous – this is one of those nights. And just before I begin to doze I think I have it, my Theory of Everything. It is to do, I decide, with mysterious parabolas – as if an event, a moment, is launched at your life like a projectile – a stone, a dart, an arrow – sent soaring in the direction of your life. One day it will descend, following its parabolic curve and hit you, or glance off you, or near-miss. It seems to me in the dazzle-dark of this shuttered hotel room that at times our individual lives are peppershot with these mysterious comings-to-earth. Much of the time they pass unacknowledged – or, if we do, we are only half aware of something happening to us. We stop and turn and take our bearings – we shiver, we ponder, we forget – but do not really understand that we have just intersected with a mysterious parabola. Even if we do, even if we grant that something has
happened, something has changed, we do not understand because we cannot trace that parabola back to its starting place. We all know these moments of fleeting significance that touch our lives. The great problem, the abiding problem is to make some sense of them…

The bizarre death of John Culpepper in St Julien on 4 November 1918. Brahms’s ‘Variations on a Theme of Haydn’. Jay turning into Irène. (There’s one: she recognized Brahms. What if she had not?)
Visions Fugitives
. Jean-Didier Mavrocordato’s decision to film his
nouvelle vague
masterwork in the small town on the Meuse where my grandfather had died. Irène’s misconception that it was filmed near Lausanne provoking our argument. Mavrocordato’s suicide (that touched me, glanced off me, that one, but only because I am here in France). I would not be lying in my unyielding bed in the Hôtel du Cygne if John Culpepper had not pushed his friend Bob across the gap between farmhouse and barn first, instead of going himself.

‘Brahms chose something deeply obscure and through the special alchemy of his genius transformed it into one of the best-known tunes in the orchestral repertoire. The melody he chose has nothing to do with Haydn, it forms the second movement of a
Partita
, probably by one Ignaz Pleyel, which may in turn come from some older, even more forgotten source…’

Irène stopped reading. She was sitting at the desk in my hotel room, my typescript in front of her. She was leaning forward slightly, resting on her elbows, and one could imagine, from the convexities and concavities of her dress bodice, that her breasts were just touching the desk top, that the underhang of her breasts was just grazing the desk top.

‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Keep going,’ I said. ‘It sounds better when you read it. Your accent makes it sound more intelligent.’

‘I’m thinking of Brazil,’ she said. ‘I really think I should go to Brazil next.’

I poured some more whisky into her glass and added some ice cubes. My throat felt thick; I could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, to say. She put my typescript down and picked up the leather-framed photograph of my wife and children, my travelling photograph.

‘What are your daughters called?’

‘Millie. And Lucy. Lucy and Millie.’

‘How old are they?’

‘Six and four. Millie’s the oldest.’

She stood up, her eyes distant, and strolled round from behind the desk, coming over towards me to collect her drink.

‘It’s wonderful that, no?’ she said. ‘To take something so obscure and make it so memorable.’

‘What? Oh, you mean Brahms, the “Variations”.’

‘But we all do that, I suppose, don’t we? In our own lives, in our own way. Or at least sometimes we try. We should try, when we have that chance, to do what Brahms did.’

‘Yes. It’s not so easy. I suppose we –’

‘– Or maybe I should go to Mexique. What do you think, Brazil or Mexique?’

I took a few steps away from her, I had to, just at that moment.’You know,’ I said, ‘there’s no way that village was in Switzerland. That village was not in Switzerland, that St Julien. That was France, definitely.’

She laughed. ‘Shall we have a row?’ she said. ‘How can you be so sure? Prove it.’

The man locked the girl in the room and she did not even look round at the sound of the key turning in the lock. When the man returned and opened the door again, the girl had gone. I can’t remember if we saw her leave. I can’t remember how the girl got out of the room.

It is almost three o’clock, overcast, with low, packed, mousegrey clouds, but no light rain falls as I walk up the steepish street from
the lower town to the upper, although now all trace of a division has been erased by almost eighty years of building and development. I pass a dry-cleaner, a newsagent, a grocery store, a flower shop, an estate agent and an empty
patisserie
with a ‘For Sale’ sign slipped between the Venetian blind and the dusty window pane.

The church still stands some little way apart, islanded by a wide grass bank and a gravel path and the cemetery wall is high enough to obscure all but the tallest of tombs. I walk around the foot of the cemetery and pause a while in the lee of the wall looking up at the solid stone farmhouse on the hill’s crest and to the left, beside it, a splendid old stone barn. Now there is a single-track, metalled road that winds up between back gardens on one side and a field cropped short by sleek, beige cows. I think of John Culpepper and his friend Bob Quentin sheltering here by the cemetery. In their place I would have made for the farm and those thick stone walls too.

EXTERIOR. STREET. DAY.

The sunlight was bright. The glare was over-bright, fuzzing outlines as if the exposure was wrong. It was difficult to make out the features of buildings in the street. The man stood there, in sunglasses, smoking. He stopped a passerby and asked him a question. It was impossible to hear what was being said because of the noise of the score and of the snare drum’s insistency. The man’s face looking up and down the street. The man walking towards his car. People passing turned and stared: it was clear that they knew this man was an actor (I remember thinking that, I remember noticing their expressions); they were bemused to see a film being made in their small town.

‘You know, I’ve had a disturbing thought: he wasn’t really your grandfather,’ Irène said, moving to the door.

‘No. But we always called him Grandfather Culpepper. I always thought of him as a kind of grandfather. My grandmother always talked about him, how he died in the war, a week before it ended.
That’s how I know about this St Julien place, where he died. I’ve seen a photo. I recognized it.’

‘Your grandmother married again –’

‘In 1927. Had another child – my mother.’

She thought, pushing out her bottom lip. ‘I tell you what, I’ll bring you your breakfast.’

She leant forward and kissed me again, but quickly, on the lips. I reached for her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning. I have to go now.’

‘Black coffee and croissants. For two. What was your disturbing thought?’

‘Oh yes. Do you realize something?’ She was standing in the doorway, leaning back in the doorway, her body canted backward, pleased with herself. I could taste her lipstick in my mouth. ‘If your grandfather Culpepper hadn’t gotten himself killed at St Julien – you wouldn’t be here. Goodnight.’

She straightened, showed me the palms of her hands, shoulders shrugging, eyebrows raised, smiling – the girl who had won the prize with the last question of the quiz show.

‘Black coffee and croissants,’ she said. ‘For two.’

How was I to know I would never see her again?

The duty manager looked at me patiently, and not at all intolerantly, as if his training had prepared him for all manner of bizarre requests, far more bizarre than mine.

‘We do have a waiter named Jay,’ he said, ‘who works in our coffee shop. Jay Duveen. But he’s been on vacation for four days. We have no member of staff with the name Irène. Not on our computer, anyway.’

He pronounced her name ‘Eye-rain’.

He smiled, his smile was not unkind. ‘If you could remember her last name, sir, it would be invaluable.’

Invaluable. It would be invaluable. Indeed.

‘She’s Swiss,’ I said. ‘Mid–late thirties, tallish, blonde. I imagine a friend of this Jay.’

‘There are over five hundred employees in this hotel, sir. And I can’t begin to tell you how many dozens of temporary staff we hire on a day by –’

‘You’ve been most helpful.’

The gap between the gable end of the farmhouse and the corner of the barn is wider than Bob Quentin had remembered. I pace it out – sixteen yards. The farmer and his son stand respectfully some way off watching this strange, middle-aged American investigate a banal angle of their farmyard. ‘Come on, Bob, let’s go, let’s go, Bob,’ John Culpepper had said. I step out from the gable end of the farmhouse and pace out eight steps, stand equidistant between the farmhouse and the big stone barn. Beneath my feet is longish grass, muddied, trampled somewhat. Below me is the cemetery and beyond that the ugly semi-industrial outskirts of St Julien, the garages, the discount stores, the agricultural depots. The railway line is there and the slow-moving Meuse. I suppose, near as dammit, I am standing on the spot where John Culpepper died.