The Colonel's Daughter (8 page)

The wine is gone. Doyle goes to the kitchen, hauls out an opened bottle of cheap retsina. With this beginning to slide through his excited blood, he returns to his description of Charlotte. After a while, he abandons it again, continues his note-making, then stops suddenly and looks up. He reminds himself that all,
all
that is now taking place is taking place because of the interception of Julietta Annipavroni, once beautiful Italian girl, now struggling through middle age ‘saving the lives' of those rich enough to pay her two pounds an hour. He smiles, remembering the flowers he has sent; Julietta Annipavroni arranges them in a vast green vase, won at a funfair. The blue of the cornflowers reminds her of the sky above Naples. ‘Don't touch them!' she yells at her children.

Like Charlotte, prisoner, Doyle sleeps at dawn. The sun comes up on London. The same sounds of blackbirds trilling in cherry trees, so lately heard by Jim Reese in a basement flat, begin in the street, but Doyle is dreaming of fame and money and does not hear them.

Wedding Night

At the time of my father's second wedding, we lived in Paris, in a house a little grander than we could afford. It was the kind of house, in the Avenue Foch, which is today divided up very profitably and let as luxury flats. It seems astonishing to me now that our family once owned the whole of it. The drawing room, I recall, was on the first floor. Two sets of French windows led out from it onto small balconies. On these extremely pretty balconies my mother had always placed stone pots of geraniums. Well, in summer she had, I suppose. Geraniums don't survive winters, do they? It was high summer when my father got married for the second time, and I know that, by then, there weren't any geraniums on the drawing-room balconies.

I have always remembered the details of things, especially of rooms where I've lived. My brother does this too: together, we can reconstruct places, object by object. I think this gift or skill of ours is not really a gift or skill at all, but merely a habit into which, as soon as we could talk, we were obliged to fall: because our father was blind. He was blind by the time we were born and he never saw us. He saw our mother for one year of their married life, and I must say that she honestly was, at that time, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Well, according to the photographs she was. We, her sons, never recognised beauty (or what I now, as a man, think of as beauty) in her. We were too young, too close to her. We loved the smell of her, especially when she wore furs, but the fact that she was a beautiful woman entirely escaped our understanding. What we did understand, however, from the moment we could read and converse and were taken travelling, was the difference between our mother's background and culture and our father's background and culture. Our father was French, the son of a colonel in the French army who was in turn the son of a colonel in the French army, and so on. His side of the family won so many medals, you could start a medal shop in the Rue des Saints Pères with them. Anyway, we are descended from a line of brave men. (The ribbon attached to medals is of a quality that I find very pleasing to handle: ribbed, silken and heavy. My father's hands have the feel of medal ribbon, wrinkled and silky.)

Our mother was English. She was born Emily Tregowan, the daughter of a self-educated Cornishman who made a respectable name in publishing. Though she spent almost all her married life in France, she never, I think, immersed herself in it, so that you could always perceive her Englishness sticking out like a flower too tall for the arrangement it's set in. And we, sent to an English boarding school, taken on visits to our Cornish grandfather in blustery summers, spent our childhood trying to decide what we were. At our boarding school, we were known as the Frog Twins. In Paris, neighbours referred to us as ‘les gosses Anglais'. We preferred Paris to boarding school, as any boy would, but we liked the wildness of Cornwall. We knew that our father and all his ancestors had been brave, but Cornwall seemed to tell us that our mother and all hers had been wild, and we were inclined to prefer wildness to bravery. We are twins. We are now forty-two and both of us have lived, married and worked in France only. We never visit England, except occasionally on business, so time, you might say, has decided what we are: we are French. Yet our mother, and Cornwall, and what we once recognised was wild in a world of tame things have never passed out of memory and never will.

I shall describe us, not as we are now, but as we were at the time when our mother died, and our father – five years younger than she was – decided very quickly to remarry. Our mother died on a January Sunday near to our fifteenth birthday. Our English headmaster summoned us to his smokey study to unfold this colossal tiding. He stood up behind his oak desk and stared at us over his pipe: sallow, dark-haired boys with a dusting of pimples, thin hands, legs thinner than the gym master would have liked, an identical tendency to glower. We glowered, however, out of eyes the colour of scabious flowers – an extraordinary feature in us that has conquered any number of women, and which, among the traits which made up her beauty, we inherited from our mother. The rest of us is, and was already at fifteen, recognisably our father's: his thick hair, his small limbs, his yellowy complexion.

The news, I suppose, travelled round the school in delicious whispers: ‘the Frog Twins' mother just died!' Boys squirmed with horror and delight. But we were snatched away and put on trains and freezing steamers till we reached Paris and the house in the Avenue Foch and our blind father fumbling round it. Nobody wept. When told of the death, my brother had started to hiccup violently and he hiccuped for three or four days, waking and sleeping. I picked my spots and knew that I wasn't ready for what had happened; death was too adult for me. And our father? He tried to bear himself like the soldier he was. But he became clumsy: he spilt food down his expensive clothes, he dropped and broke things. He also began to burble bits of poetry to himself, a thing which was absolutely uncharacteristic of him. I don't know what poetry it was that he burbled (I was more familiar, at fifteen, with Keats and Shelley and Tennyson than with Victor Hugo or Rimbaud) but I had the impression that he was muddling one poem with another and getting lots of words wrong. It was a very peculiar time: the hiccuping and the poetry and my own unreadiness for grief.

My brother, whose name I should have told you is Paul (mine is Jacques, a name I couldn't stand at the English school because even the masters nicknamed me ‘Frère Jacques', just as if this wretched song was the only bit of French anyone English could be expected to understand), quite often
tried
to cry. I suppose he recognised, as I did, that we had not merely lost our mother, but the whole half of us that was Cornish and Anglo-Saxon. We remembered her stately walk in galoshes over the sandworms of Constantine Bay, her fondness for the sound of the seagulls. ‘We may never see or hear another seagull,' my brother whispered one night, in search of tears that refused to come. ‘Imagine poor Grandpa banging the seagull tin and remembering his dead daughter . . .' We waited anxiously for the first sob to break through. (Mourning only needs one; the others follow obediently.) But he couldn't cry. He masturbated till he fell asleep, leaving me wide awake with the images of our mother he'd successfully summoned.

Grandpa's seagull tin was one that I have never forgotten. I can see my mother sitting on the wall at the end of his garden, smiling as Grandpa came out of the house. In an old washing bowl, Grandpa collected all the bread crusts and the leftover toast and stale cake. He came and stood in the middle of the lawn and banged loudly on the bottom of the tin with a wooden spoon. He'd done this twice a week for several years. Every seagull from Padstow to Trearnon seemed to know the signal. In seconds, even before he began to scatter the bread and cake, they'd come flapping in, hungry, unafraid, noisy with their cry which, even when it's near you, conjures distant oceans and faraway voyages. My mother sat on the wall and swang her legs and shrieked at them. Grandpa yelled, ‘Go on! Go on!' as they came pecking and fighting. Paul and I ran up and down flapping our arms, as impressed by Grandpa as by a conjuror. We never knew Grandpa very well. Our father told us he was a reserved and self-disciplined man. But this is how I always remember him: surrounded by the seagulls, by the chaos he had caused.

We didn't go back to our English school after the funeral. We wondered if we would be sent back at all. Nobody said what was being planned for us. Our father stayed in his room, listening to the radio. Army friends called and the wives of army friends, who sometimes took him out for walks. He had an old manservant we called Blochot (I don't know whether Blochot was his real name, or just some family invention) who did for him all the things he couldn't do for himself. He seldom sent for us or wanted to be with us. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten us. We had one or two friends in the neighbourhood and we saw more of the parents of these friends than we did of our father. We spent weekends in the country with them. We went riding in the Bois. Now and again, we'd be taken to a meal in a restaurant.

The rest of the time we were in our room at the top of the house, reading the ‘dirtiest' books you could get hold of at that time:
The Thousand and One Nights
, the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, soothing colossal, inarticulate yearnings with solitary orgasms in crumpled handkerchiefs. As my life has gone on, it has occasionally hurt me – yes,
hurt
me – that I have known so little about my brother's sexuality. He has married two vain women in quick succession and kept his life with them secret from me. I remember the months in the room at the top of the house in the Avenue Foch, when every stirring of his penis and of mine was part of our shared grief, our shared confusion, our shared existence. And I remember of course the night of our father's second wedding, the night we decided to grow up. We parted soon after that. Now we meet for dinner and our wives bicker about the price of clothes. If I dared to ask Paul about his cock, he would get up and storm out of the restaurant.

It must have been in the spring that Pierrette arrived. She was a penniless person from a bourgeois family in Bourges. She had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. She spoke a little very bad English. She didn't seem to know what to do with her philosophy degree except teach. She came to our house on a four-month contract to coach us until the end of the school year, at which time our father would decide what to do with us – send us back to our English school or to some new school in France. Nowadays, of course, an arrangement like this would never apply. In the event of the death of a parent, a child might expect a week off school and it would then be deemed ‘in his best interests' to send him back to endure the gleeful pity of his friends. We were lucky, then, I dare say. We were allowed to stay in Paris – and at home. We forgot the cold English school.

Pierrette was twenty-three. Our father at that time must have been forty-two – the age we are now. Paul and I thought the name Pierrette was terrible. We couldn't imagine that anyone with a name like Pierrette could teach us anything at all. ‘We'll teach her!' my brother crowed, ‘we'll just speak English and confuse her and tell her the wrong meanings of words.'

She was a neat woman, very much a woman at twenty-three and not a girl. She spoke precisely and ate tidily. Her belongings were sparse and plain. She had a white, intelligent face and wispy, rather colourless hair. Her eyes were black and small and she had a black mole on her upper lip. Her hands were also white and neat and ringless. She wore tweed skirts and plain jerseys and her winter coat was ugly and unfashionable. ‘Politeness!' growled our father from the depths of his favourite armchair, ‘if you boys are not polite to this woman, there will be no summer for you!' No summer? Simultaneously, our minds flew to the seagulls and our mother on the wall. Of course there would be ‘no summer', whether or not we decided to be polite. Summer as we had experienced it could no longer exist.

It never occurred to us, until we saw it happen, that Pierrette would fall in love with our father, and he, supposedly, with her. We thought Pierrette was just an episode in our lives, quickly gone and forgotten, like German measles. She was unsuitable as our teacher because she knew little Latin and her maths were second rate. She adored Pascal. She rubbed our noses in the Pensées of Pascal. All I can remember about Pierrette's lessons is Pascal: ‘Jésus dans l'ennui . . .'

Her arrival coincided more or less with Blochot's illness. Blochot had glandular fever and though he struggled on, doing chores for our father, he was weak and silent and had to be encouraged to stay in bed. We tried to take his place, helping with tie-pins and bootlaces, searching for objects lost, tuning the radio, reading out wine labels, dialling telephone numbers. But I suppose we were clumsy and idle and impatient. Our father couldn't bear the way we did things. He used to push us away and whimper with frustration. And into the gap left by Blochot's glandular fever and our adolescent incompetence slipped Pierrette. Her careful hands and her quiet voice must have begun to press like a comforting little weight on father's sightlessness, reassuring him that life and order still existed, reminding him that only one woman had died, not the whole of womankind.

I can say this now. I am able to understand, now, how people may recover from tragedy. At fifteen, I couldn't understand. From the day when I walked into the first-floor drawing-room and saw my father reach out fumblingly for Pierrette, gathering her head in one hand and pressing her bottom towards him with the other, I understood only one thing: betrayal. I stood and stared. Pierrette saw me, but didn't pull away. Her face was pink with embarrassment and excitement. Her upper lip with its blemish of a mole was quivering out my father's christian name, his face was puckered, searching for those quivering lips. They kissed. My father's hand hitched up Pierrette's skirt and began scrabbling for the flesh above the stocking top. Pierrette turned to see if I was still there. I ran away.