Sabine (4 page)

Was that the reason, Aimée? Was that how it was? Have I figured it out at last? I reckon I have. Bit late in the day, OK, but I reckon I figured most things out in the end. What do you say, eh, you evil old sprite?

Sabine's arrival among us is another thing I don't remember with the clarity I'd like. The first image of her that ever hit my retina, for example. I'd love to have conserved that because then I could use it as a cardiologist does a base scan: hold it up to the light and check it against later images, and measure, from the changes in the way I see her, the day-by-day changing of my heart. How long, for example, did it take me to register that rare contrast between the darkness of her brows and eyelashes and the blondeness of her hair? A week? Less? More? And the honey-coloured bloom on her skin – how long for that to strike me? And the smoothness of the skin itself? And the long tanned legs, and the wide straight shoulders, and the graceful neck with its deep salt cellars at the base, and the little hollow in the middle that I've never known the name of? How long? How long? And how long before that hollow began to captivate me, before I began to have a secret urge to touch it, just briefly, just lightly, maybe without her even noticing?

Sadly, though, there is no first image of Sabine, and the second and third and so on are missing in consequence, so I shall never be able to chronicle precisely my growing awareness of her presence. She just emerged at some point out of the smoke. (Much of it contributed by her, since in the Gitanes stakes she beat us all, even Tessa; small wonder the visibility was bad.) But if the missing picture should ever turn up, with its missing caption underneath, probably what it would show is a shapeless, ageless, sexless figure, not so much dressed as covered in a slightly conventy garb – navy-blue pleated skirt, white shirt, navy-blue cardigan – and the caption would say simply: ‘Grumpy butch French frump'. Such was my perceptive flair.

However, I remember Marie-Louise's departure, which was the cause of Sabine's coming, because it was the evening of the stag party. Not to be confused with the other kind of stag party, definitely not, because, far from being an all-male gathering, that evening several French girls joined our ranks as well, including Marie-Louise herself, bringing the female component up to at least nine if not more. Unlike the dance parties, the outing was for some curious reason considered by Aimée's circle to be safe and
comme il faut,
indeed instructive and singular and not to be missed.

When do stags bell, or roar, or whatever it is they do in the breeding season? Can it possibly be late autumn? I just can't credit it somehow, late autumn
is surely an off season for reproduction among all dignified mammals, I think the whole thing was a hoax.
Allons écouter bramer les cerfs.
One of the boys made it up as a ruse to get beyond the range of the light switch, I bet, and no one thought to question him. And the ruse worked, it was a right bacchanal: plenty of
braming
to be heard but none of it from the deer as far as I could tell.

Perhaps, though, looking back on it, we afforded rather a pretty spectacle: the night, the forest, the pairs of young people sloping off into the undergrowth in search of a – what would be the word for it? – a bower, a glade, a clearing, and, once they had found it, spreading out their overcoats and tangling there together on the ground. Perhaps Aimée's prurience had an aesthetic side to it, which was gratified each time her searching torch picked out a couple. Unfettered now by the moral pickiness that made me scoff at Matty and her soldier, I can visualise the scene as not unlike the set of a Shakespeare play.

My Orsino was no great performer, nor his Viola for that matter, but in the dark (a favourite saying of Aimée's, this, and she should know) all cats are grey. His name was Aymar and he had the cleanest breath I have ever tasted. He must have been very young, and very unenterprising too, as all he did, and all we did together, was kiss and groan and slaver for the best part of an hour. Beyond unbuttoning my coat and running his finger round the
outline of my bra through my jersey in a rueful way, he didn't even engage with my clothing at all. Matty drew Michel – one of the older and more sophisticated boys, from a slightly
déclassé
family with no ‘de' and a château full of rotting apples – and she and he moved much faster, earning themselves a right blasting from Aimée when her relentless beam swung over them and caught them out.

Probably this was the sticking point as far as Marie-Louise was concerned. Or maybe it was some other racier sideshow that slipped my notice though not hers. Or maybe it was just the overwhelmingly sensual cocktail of the whole: the darkness of the forest, the earthy smells, the sighs, the rustlings, the musk, the putative rutting deer, the pheromones, animal and human, flying around in the air. Who can say? Aggravated no doubt by the fact that other French girls of her class were present too, witnesses of her degradation. I can't believe the other cause for shock could ever have surfaced in her tidy conventional mind, surely not. But anyway, whatever her grounds, that same night, when we got back to the château, she handed in her notice to Aimée. Publicly, dramatically, in front of us all, with tears and shakings that nobody quite liked to acknowledge the justice of, although deep down we must have sympathised, and how. It was her second year as teacher there – if she hated it as much as she said, and disapproved as much as she said, then why hadn't she left before? Why wait till now? And why
choose this particular moment, when Aimée was all kindness and seriousness, cosseting us with cups of hot chocolate and asking us rectifying questions about the night's outing: Had we felt the cold too much? She did so hope not. Had we heard the roaring? At least in the distance? Did we realise how unusual that was, what a privilege it was to be in on such a happening? Might it not be a good idea to write something about it for our
devoirs?
And then send it to our parents, maybe, to illustrate for them one of the characteristics of the region?

In the wake of Marie-Louise's outburst we were somewhat stuck for answers. It had brought back to us in force our perplexity and guilt. I remember, in the uneasy silence that followed, scanning downwards from her scrubbed puritanical face with its shiny pink nose and Queen Victoria eyes, to the high and defiantly protruding breasts not far beneath and thinking, not without a stab of spite, that they had been set there by a teasing Fate as ballast. Hmmm, yes, I thought, you can run away from this sex thing that you claim to find so distasteful but it will catch you up in the end because you're taking a lot of it with you. You're thwarted, that's what you are, you're not shocked, you're just envious. And she married shortly afterwards and sent us all triumphant little boxes of sugared almonds in silver wrapping, so perhaps I was right. Napoleonic title, the husband's, was Aimée's disparaging comment as she threw her box into the fire.

For a full week after this setback – or maybe it was only three or four days but the pall of boredom was so heavy that they felt like at least seven – Aimée gave us lessons herself. The paradox of her permissiveness, which worked so well on the behaviour front, was for some reason powerless in the field of study. Under her tuition we did nothing, just gabbled away to each other in English and flicked through fashion magazines, right there in front of her nose, planning out loud our weekend wardrobes. Cussed bunnies, stolid Saxon bunnies, unmoved by the stirring rhythms of Racine. Then finally she announced, relieved, that she had found a helper: a girl from a nearby family who,
malheureusement,
had no experience of teaching whatsoever, but who she was sure – this said with a tiny twist of grimness, like a weak-willed ruler announcing the coming of a Gauleiter – would din a little more into our heads than she could.

And it was thus that, bit by bit, from under the pall and out of the smoke, into our lives came Sabine. On a daily basis at first, bouncing in each morning in a disintegrating Deux Chevaux that shuddered and shed pieces of itself when brought to a stop; and then, a few weeks later, when she moved into one of the guest rooms for convenience, on a more permanent one.

No first picture of her, no, but to my delight I find I have a first recording. A cough and a bark, intermeshed. A barking cough and/or a coughing
bark, followed by the single word,
Alors!
as she tears open her teaching book and glowers at us over its pages: Aimée must have warned her we are no picnic. And then a rasping drag on the ever-present cigarette,
Zeeeetttt.
It's not a Gitane, it's a Gauloise, and it comes in a blue packet with … With what on it? A winged helmet? Winged victory? Winged horse? Wings anyway, wings. Wings to escape on, wings to take you places, and wings to give you a sweeping vision of how things look when you can set them in perspective: this is what you are, Viola, this is what has been made of you to date, and this is what you could become, if only you managed to cross that obstacle, and that one, and that other one over there, which may look a bit daunting but is in fact only made of plywood. See?

Why is she so truculent? And from the very start, before she has even had time to sort us out as individuals, let alone dislike us? Well, let's see if I can answer that for her. She tried so hard to get me to see things the way she saw them, let's see if she was successful, let's see if I can – hop behind her eyes for a second and survey the scene as she surveyed it. OK, there's the table, with her on the shady side, her back to the windows, and on the other – on the side where the light filters through the slats, chopping all the objects it rests on into smoky stripes – who sits there? A quintet of spoilt foreign brats, that's what. Christopher, thin, silver-blond and giggling, looks like the worst caricature of an
English public school boy you could ever imagine – as might have been drawn by a Nazi propagandist attempting to portray the enemy's national decline and unfitness for warfare. Upper class, yes, but so upper he topples. And what is he giggling at, the wimp? Why at her, Sabine: he has the cheek, when he is prime giggling material himself, to be giggling at her.

To the left of this sorry creature sits the one they call Vaïola. (She is referring to me, of course.) How ugly these English vowels are; the name sounds like a disease. Not so fair-skinned as the other, not so Aryan – the propagandist would have used
her
for quite a different purpose – but every bit as irksome: a pert and self-enamoured little minx, obviously rich and obviously pampered or she wouldn't have all that money to spend on make-up. Why, it's plastered on so thick you could scrape it off with a trowel. Bet that she's the ringleader of this cocky little posse. And bet that on the inside of that head there's far less to scrape.

The redhead? The redhead ditto with a vengeance. What's that she's fiddling with when she ought to be listening? I do believe it's a pair of tweezers. She's plucking the hairs off her arms. Off her
arms,
of all places. Not even legs or face, which is bad enough, but arms. Holy shit, what pathetic geisha behaviour – pain in order to please the male; has no one ever told her she has a right to be hairy if that's the way she's made? Cough, rasp. Well, I
think I shall tell her, right now, and save her from debasing herself any further. Yes, I shall. And
now
what are they giggling about?

Only two more, thank goodness, don't think I could have dealt with more than five. There's that stunning creature stretched out over there at the far end – the only one who isn't giggling but that's because she's half asleep. Another geisha, you can bet, another one whose world revolves around the opposite sex, and who only comes to life when there's testosterone in the offing. The blond boy doesn't really count as male, she looks on him as an honorary female, they all do: and that's probably just what he is, knowing what they get up to in their famous colleges. Doubt if I shall ever get much spark out of her. Fantastic waist, though, you can tell that because she's measuring it now with her hands. Showing off – I'll be darned if her fingers don't touch both ends. What long hands you've got, mademoiselle Tessa. That's settled her. Don't they think of anything but clothes and boys and makeup, these floppy English roses?

And now for number five. The little skinny one with the fidgets and the freckles, what about her? Not such a rose, more of a cactus, but at least she looks a bit more promising. At least she's awake, at least she's got a pen in her hand and a copy book to the ready. Could I see – sorry, what was your name again? Serena?
Quel joli nom
– could I see, then, please, Serena, what you are writing there? More
laughter: what do they take me for – a stand-up comedian? Famous English sense of humour at work, I suppose. Well, who cares, it's a job, it's money. And it's
their
money. If they want to spend it sitting round a table all morning, prinking themselves up and giggling and drawing flick-through cartoons the way we used to in kindergarten, that's fine by me. I've got an exam coming up in March, I think I'll do some studying of my own till they've simmered down. Lucky I brought my anatomy books along.

Yes, I can see through Sabine's eyes here all right. (Or at least illude myself I can, because even though I place myself directly behind her eye sockets, it's always me doing the seeing. Maybe I'm wrong and that wasn't the way she saw us at all, maybe she saw us as glamorous and intimidating, and so woofed at us the way a dog would, to show us her mettle before we showed ours: there were deep layers of shyness inside her under the bluster.) But anyway, illusion or not, I often view things nowadays through her eyes, or try to; it has become a habit, a way of keeping in touch, of not losing her entirely.

Oh, Sabine, Sabine. There's an old Italian folk song I've learnt in my lonely latter years, it's called ‘Lu Cardillo' and is about a parlour game young people used to play in lieu of courtship: ‘Those times when we were so happy', so it goes, ‘if I could bring them back for just one hour …' If only I could. An hour would be enough. An hour with my head on
the pillow beside yours, foreheads touching, eyes locked with eyes (just the two of us, mind you, minus that sodding cat); an hour to smell the smell of you – garlic and all, I wouldn't mind, no, I wouldn't mind. An hour to press you close the whole length of our bodies and feel the shudder of your laugh. An hour to tell you I'm so glad I knew you. An hour, just an hour. I have time now like hedgehogs have fleas: I can lose it, waste it, squander it, kill it, and there will still be more to follow, but that hour I'll never have. Never. Oh, Sabine.