Aurora sat by Sobran for more than an hour. The noise in the street increased as people hurried home to dinner. She thought the bustle might wake him. The house, on the clock of the conscious, began to quicken. Lessons had finished, the front door opened and closed as Sabine’s youngest came in from his day school, and then her husband from his place of business. Aurora heard Paul’s voice – he and Agnès had arrived from their hotel and were to dine with Sabine and family.
In rehearsal for his own funeral her friend didn’t stir. The light faded. Aurora turned her head to the window, and her earrings tickled her neck, lively, a little momentous, on an afternoon that was like a stilled pendulum. The twilight caught whitely in small dishes of the patient’s urine that, for some reason unknown to Aurora, Sobran’s physician had left drying along the windowsill.
Céleste came in with a lamp. Its pink, frosted glass chimney lit her face, which was serene, smooth-skinned for a woman nearly seventy. Sobran looked ten years her senior now, a mottled, desiccated old man, and so still.
Céleste set the lamp down and came to the bed.
‘Our children are here with Iris,’ Céleste said, and it was the first thing she had ever said to Aurora that acknowledged the connection between them as a connection rather than as an area of dispute. ‘Antoine has come and the house is bursting at the seams. Sabine’s boy has collected his clothes and books and has gone to stay at a friend’s house. Baroness, you should go down. If my husband wakes up while I’m watching I’ll send for you.’
Aurora got up. ‘How is he? I can’t tell how he is.’
‘He has spoken twice today, each time asked a question. I nursed his father and, shortly after we married, the uncle everyone says died too young. These Jodeaus don’t go till they stop asking questions.’
Downstairs Paul kissed Aurora. There weren’t enough chairs in the parlour, and Baptiste, Martin and Antoine were leaning on the mantelpiece, their bodies forming a fence that kept the heat from the room. Aurora told them to move.
‘Thoughtless lumps,’ Agnès said, but when Antoine sat on the floor by her chair she put her hand in his hair.
‘Couldn’t possibly eat,’ Iris said at the sound of the dinner bell.
‘You could,’ Paul told her.
Sabine appeared. ‘Please come through. What a crush.’
‘Sabine tells me Father has improved,’ Agnès said to Aurora.
‘Yes, your mother thinks so too.’ Aurora didn’t want to move. She felt paralysed by the bustle, the brittle cheerfulness around her. She shook her head at Paul, who had Agnès on one arm and the other held out to her.
‘You feel bad because you need to eat,’ Antoine said, with an intrusive simple frankness that he had picked up from his tutor.
‘I’ll bring her in,’ Baptiste said. ‘Tell Sabine to start. The Baroness is composing herself, or collecting her wits – whatever seems the more dignified excuse.’
Baptiste and Aurora were left alone.
‘He won’t die this time,’ Baptiste said.
‘When he does I’ll be widowed, without a widow’s claims.’
‘We all know that, Baroness.’
‘Our friendship was all on his terms.’
Baptiste smiled. ‘His children have similar complaints. He was always either preoccupied, or pushing us about. That’s the kind of man he is. Whenever any of us did something unexpected he would look at us as though we’d just jumped out on him, as if we were playing that game children play after dark – actually, we did play that game, when I was very small, before my other older sister died. Anyway, Father looks at us as if to say he is most definitely not playing.’
‘You put it well, Baptiste. He was frosty to me whenever I trespassed. It was as if I was presuming on my title and wealth. And, whenever Sobran “fell ill” he would carry all his power, intact, into either impenetrable sorrow, or silence. Now it’s fever and sleep.’
Baptiste leaned a little closer, said in the tone of a conspirator, ‘Shall we go upstairs and pull his beard?’
Aurora considered. ‘I think I’d rather have something to eat.’
The following day Aurora was able to reassure the invalid, who wanted to know whether he looked like a corpse.
‘No,’ she told him.
His eyes brightened, but only with shrewd humour. ‘Do I look like a yellowed, withered old man?’
Aurora hesitated, then told him yes, he did. And watched him laugh, laughed with him – conservative, close-mouthed laughter, but carefree, because something that Sobran had held on to tightly and jealously had finally been taken out of his tired grip.
Sobran was at Vully again for the harvest, on his feet with the aid of a stick. Xas reappeared and showed every sign of winding himself around Sobran permanently, like – Sobran complained – some parasitic vine. ‘I won’t die,’ Sobran promised. ‘You are breaking your own heart. Go away for a while. Come back soon.’
And, of course, there was no love-making.
1861 Vin diable (a bottle of champagne that bursts through too much pressure)
When Bernard visited in the new year he brought with him a copy of The Origin of Species. Bernard had heard of Charles Darwin’s heretical work and had ordered a copy upon publication. Two arrived. One from his German bookseller, and another from Leeds in the north of England.
‘Look at the address on the wrapper. I know that hand. It was Niall Cayley sent me this. I know it. But there was no letter. I wish I hadn’t lost sight of him, Father, he really was a wonderful teacher. And an original. When I matriculated at the Sorbonne I thought I’d enter a wide world of fine and unusual minds, more people like my tutor. I have met men, and several women, with fine minds, but no one like Cayley.’
Sobran put out his hand for the book. ‘I suppose I should read it.’
1862 Vin des Dieux (wine of the Gods, sweet botrytised wine)
For a whole year Xas didn’t visit or write. In that year Antoine the stonemason was carried off by a series of strokes, and Christophe Lizet finally succumbed to a tumour that stopped up his stomach so he wasn’t able to keep down what he was able to swallow. Sobran didn’t visit his neighbour as he lay dying, although his wife, sons and daughters did. Sobran did not want to hear Lizet voice his lifelong regret – that no one had discovered who it was murdered his sisters, Geneviève and Aline.
Aurora was in Rome for the Easter Benediction, 1863.
She sat in a cab that had its glossy black leather top raised against the fine rain. The cab was in the first of four circles of cabs at the edge of the square, parked facing Saint Peter’s. The square was packed with soldiers, priests, seated officials and the populace, their heads already bare, though the Pontiff had not appeared. Between the huge statues of saints on the Vatican roof people leaned, arms slung in a friendly fashion about stone knees.
Someone who passed paused to look into Aurora’s cab, then got into it and sat beside her.
She asked Xas, ‘Where have you been?’
He shook his head. He wore shabby clothes and was carrying a string bag of carrots and onions. His neck was grey with dirt, and grime defined all the whorls of the skin on his wrists. Inside his open shirt Aurora saw the gleam of the pearls, as alien and acute as the eyes of a live octopus she had once seen in an aquarium in a fancy Parisian restaurant. The angel was too unexpected and too lovely; for a moment Aurora had to shut her eyes.
‘You don’t believe in return addresses.’ She was scolding again.
‘Protestant by temperament.’ With a wry look around the field of the faithful. ‘What I don’t believe in is intermediaries.’
‘You’re tiresome.’ Aurora was tired, so got down to business. ‘Sobran is very old and ill.’
‘I suppose he must be.’
It was a hard-hearted reply, but his voice was edgy, close to panic. He took Aurora’s hand and caressed it with his thumb, rolled the tendons inside her loose skin. Through her lace glove she could feel that the angel’s hand was colder than hers.
He said, ‘I’ll come. I have to make some provisions. There’s a woman I’m keeping.’ He smiled at Aurora’s expression. ‘I’m working as a public scribe. I come home from my place of work, in the Piazza Montana, with a bag of vegetables or ham bones and this old woman cooks me soup, which I don’t eat, so she “finishes it up” for me. She lives in a small room under the stairs. I pay her to cook and clean my room. I’m not sure she’d make do without doing for me. I suppose I can leave her my writing desk and pens and other possessions to pawn or sell.’
‘I’m pleased to hear you are making new friends. But Sobran –’ Aurora stopped speaking because the angel’s lips had lost their colour.
‘This woman is more like a pet,’ he said, coldly. ‘But among the poor and weak and old my strength is obscene. How can I live without a commitment to help at least some poor creature? It’s pity someone or pity everyone. And, because it is impossible to act on universal pity, my pity is liable to evaporate. I keep the stopper in. For without pity, and among you, what would I be?’
‘Forgive me,’ Aurora said. To her he had become just the one whose absence caused her friend pain. She had forgotten him – his moments of awful swooping certainty.
Xas got down from the cab and held up his own hand in a quick mockery of a benediction, and she saw the lines from the handle of the string bag red on his pale palm before the blessing became a closed fist which he lowered slowly. ‘I’ll come on the 27th of June,’ he said, and walked away through the crowd.
1863 Vinifié (made into wine)
Sobran got what he had bargained and bullied and begged for. At sunset, despite the fact that movement tended to shake him out of consciousness, three men and a youth – his sons Baptiste, Martin and Antoine, and Martin’s son – carried him out of his house on a stretcher. He saw the stars, clear in a cooling sky, clamped his mouth in a lipless line when the stretcher tilted and his feet, fat with fluid, pressed against the tight package of covers. The sheets of his makeshift bed were so secure it was as if his sons had him already sewn into half his shroud.
Sobran thought, ‘I’ll feel let down if I’m alive tomorrow.’ That struck him as amusing, but he hadn’t the energy to report his thought to Antoine, whose arm he held as the stretcher jostled. A joke would be gallant. A joke would help them. But he couldn’t speak.
The procession passed through the rows of vines up Jodeau South and stopped on the ridge, where Sobran got one look at the far hills, outlined by a rind of gold light.
Céleste said, ‘Now you must all go. Get to bed early, please.’
Martin’s son set down the chair he’d carried up the hill for his grandmother, and Céleste posted herself by Sobran. She rearranged her shawl, nodded at the men, dismissed them.
Martin pulled the blanket up around his father’s neck. Sobran shook his head slowly. He wanted to sit up, and began to cough. He required help to lean forward and clear his windpipe. Martin and Baptiste raised him, and he trembled against their strength as though he fought them. He coughed, pulled in enough air to expel the phlegm. Baptiste held a cloth under Sobran’s mouth, then wiped the thick mucus that dripped from his lower lip; refolded the cloth, dabbed again, till Sobran’s mouth was clean. They laid him back down. Martin restored his nightcap and pulled the blanket up again. ‘You know what I think, Father? That this is sheer folly with your cough.’
‘You are not going to die tonight,’ said Baptiste. ‘However tidy that would be. Only last week you were offering us all your opinions about – I don’t even remember what it was about. Uncle Antoine was silent in company for half a year before he died, he only spoke when spoken to, and without any show of emotion.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Sobran didn’t want to be lectured. His sons were having their revenge – but he would rather they were abusive than nagged.
‘Go now,’ Céleste told them.
One by one they kissed him – his grandson dutiful, a little fastidious, which let Sobran know how unappealing he was.
He slept for a time, woke as Céleste lit a lamp. He watched her strike a match, stoop, keeping her balance, remove the chimney on the lamp, hold the flame to the wick, replace the chimney. In the yellow lamplight she looked girlish and untouched and her hair had the sheen of spun sugar. As she sat down again Sobran asked her if she had the laudanum.
Céleste fished for the bottle in her pocket – held it to the light and shook it. The resinous brown liquid clung to the glass as it slopped.
Again Sobran slept, was roused in the dark of night by the urge to cough. He tried to roll on to his side, was prevented by the barrier of his own arm, like the side of a cot. Someone came to his aid. He coughed, hacked, cleared the blockage, spat on to the ground. It was one of his sons returned – and dressed for a town outing, in a suit, hair short and oiled. Once Sobran’s throat opened he could smell the scent of the pomade – and something else. Snow. Sobran kept the hand that held his own, closed his hand on it.
Céleste was saying to Xas, as though she was at the end of a long and involving confidence, ‘My angel had wings fledged with feathers like those marigolds.’ She pointed at the lava flow of marigolds surrounding the boundary stone. Then she slapped her knees once and got up. ‘I’ll leave you for a little while. I’ll just sit over there, if you’ll carry my chair.’
Xas took Céleste’s chair and carried it to the flat spur where cherry trees once grew.
‘She chose not to recognise me as Niall,’ Xas told Sobran when he came back. ‘She seemed to be expecting an angel.’
The branches of the shade tree stirred and dropped a confetti of leaves on Sobran’s bed.
‘You smell fruity and sweet,’ the angel said. ‘Your breath.’
Sobran said, ‘Let me look at you.’
Xas put his face near to Sobran’s and they gazed at each other. Then the man drifted. He began to make a slow inventory of the people who he expected to receive him in Heaven. Nicolette and Aline Lizet, his mother and father, Baptiste’s infant sons, his brother-in-law Antoine. Baptiste Kalmann would be in purgatory, unless Sobran’s prayers had bought him out. And where would Aurora go?
‘You’re dying and you fuss about it as if it’s travel arrangements,’ Xas said.
‘Fetch me my wife,’ Sobran told him.
Xas went to get Céleste who, as they came, explained that her husband was really too tired to talk. Yesterday he had said that nothing he thought seemed worth repeating. ‘Baroness Lettelier came out of his room crying because all he’d said to her was that his mouth was dry and could she help him with that glass of water.’
Sobran had freed a hand from the covers. He twitched his fingers at Céleste. ‘The bottle, the bottle.’
‘What part of you isn’t in pain?’ Xas asked. His eyes glimmered. Then he said to Céleste, ‘It’s often like this – they go away to get ready for Heaven.’ His voice was rough; he sounded like a boy.
‘Too much,’ Sobran said. ‘What’s the point.’ He made them wait, held their words back with his eyes, held Xas’s gaze. ‘Of shaking off this cough.’ Then a breath. It was an airless midsummer night. The sky should open a crack, or the great thick fans of wings he remembered propel the air into his lungs as hard as the sea pushes air through a blowhole.
Céleste gave him the bottle of laudanum.
‘I see,’ Xas said.
Sobran said, ‘I wanted you with me.’
He made the angel unstop the bottle, leaned back against the angel’s warm, resilient chest as he sipped the laudanum.
‘It’s not enough,’ Céleste said. ‘Pardon me for being so practical.’
‘Thank you, Céleste. You,’ Sobran said to Xas. ‘You finish it later. Finish me. You haven’t anything to lose.’
He watched Xas, then angry, said, ‘Show that you give your consent.’
‘Yes,’ Xas said.
After a moment Sobran told them that he couldn’t keep his eyes open. ‘I want you to put my hand on your mouth.’ He saw his hand lifted, his clawed fingers and
one damaged nail like a chip of agate. He felt the kiss, the smooth, plump mouth.
‘It wasn’t possible,’ he said. What he had wanted, with all his heart, was to match this being stride for stride over the miles. But a crippled angel will outstrip a man.
His eyes were closed. The bones in his neck were wax, melting, his head settled like a flower on a withered stalk, his throat began to occlude itself, never mind the thick liquids that crept up it from his lungs. He felt a hand on his mouth. They made a mirror, hand to mouth, and for a moment weren’t anywhere particular in their lives, but were together.
Sobran roused himself one last time. He was exhausted, but love was never finished, it had its rights, it had the right of prophecy. He said, ‘I’ll see you on the day beyond days.’ For a long second, like the shock of falling, he waited for the answer he deserved, the aspiration of ‘yes’ on his fingertips.
The angel let Sobran’s hand fall from his closed lips.
‘He’s as good as dead,’ Céleste said. She sounded as though she had been holding her breath. ‘I have something I want you to carry to my husband in Heaven,’ she said.
Xas opened his eyes in time to take the folded page she offered him.