Sobran pressed his mouth against the angel’s neck. There was a pulse; he remembered the pulse. ‘I want you to hold me when I’m happy, too. I love you.’
A wing came between them; Xas raised it like a cold shoulder. Sobran felt the wing graze his leg, hard, and heard a pinion burst. ‘I respect your wife – her rights,’ Xas said, without, Sobran thought, any great conviction. ‘Céleste should be sufficient for you.’
Sobran saw that the angel’s mouth had colour, more than a wine stain on marble now, an internal nectar, ripe blood. The angel said, ‘Besides, Sobran, do you even know what you want to do with me?’
In answering, Sobran’s words were oddly broken up, not into clauses but pauses for breath. He was short of breath. He’d considered this. He knew better than the angel. It was time for him to teach the angel how to feel.
‘Shut your mouth. You’re acting outside your own laws.’ The angel seemed to plead with him.
‘What has law to do with what I want? This isn’t wrong.’
‘This – imposition?’
‘I want you.’
‘One night a year?’
‘If that is all I can have.’
Xas looked angry but sounded compassionate. He began to say, ‘I’m an angel –’
Sobran interrupted with his own plea or revelation. ‘I love you because you’re an angel.’
Xas simply erupted from where he sat, opened his wings so that they knocked Sobran back, and was upright and lifting off in a moment. The dust was like smoke. Sobran was on his feet shouting, ‘Don’t go!’ in time to leap to catch one great wing in its second downbeat. Sobran’s weight falling back to the ground, and his unrelenting grip on the wing, made a pivot on which Xas swung around, his free wing knocking down a hailstorm of cherries. He crashed on to his back. Sobran heard the breath slammed out of the angel’s body. He knew only a short moment of very mixed feelings: shame, triumph, concern, amazement – then Xas was up, vaulting from the ground with hands and wing tips and feet. The angel hit Sobran in the jaw and Sobran tumbled down the slope. He lay stunned, bleeding at the mouth. As he drew his teeth from the live meat of his own tongue Xas landed on him, like an eagle with its wings arched away from the teeth or claws of prey it isn’t wholly confident it has killed. Xas put his face close to Sobran’s and said, soft and succinct, ‘Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: “Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.” So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.’
Xas sprang off him, straight up, and the first three wingbeats kicked up so much earth that Sobran was partly buried. He watched that part of the sky from which he thought the sound of wings came. He saw a ripple against the stars, far away now. Then he closed his eyes.
The widowed Aurora de Valday, her son and her uncle were on their way back to Château Vully from Chagny in a cavalcade of carriages, attended by four footmen, two grooms, the Comte’s valet, Paul’s nurse, and Aurora’s maid Lucette, when, within a mile and a half of home, the Comte decided he wanted to stop and look in on Father Lesy. Aurora couldn’t imagine what her uncle was so pressed to confess. She was alarmed by his sudden need to see a priest. Perhaps her uncle anticipated a decline, thought he might fall ill, despite the return of mild weather – perhaps he planned to leave her.
Aurora watched her uncle and his manservant go through the low, heavily decorated arch of the church doorway. For a moment she stared at the darkness as though it were the surface of a pond into which someone she loved had disappeared, head to heels. Then she seized her son by the hand and got out of her carriage, too fast for the footman to fold down the steps. She jumped onto the road and lifted young Paul down after her. They were pursued by the nurse and Lucette, who broke into a run in the churchyard, to catch up with her mistress and position a parasol between the hot sun and Aurora’s gleaming crown of dark braids.
Aurora followed her uncle into the church. Just inside Paul saw some stairs, yanked his hand out of his mother’s grasp and ran away up them. The women followed him, calling out, ‘Come back, Master Paul’, ‘Be careful, please!’ or, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ – as the position or personality of each dictated.
Once up in the gallery, Aurora recognised, under dust, a place she had come one Easter Sunday with her uncle and her parents to celebrate Mass. Paul had found a carved hawk, a crest broken off the end of one of the pews. He played with it for a moment, then he discovered a knothole in the floor.
Paul’s mother had found two views, one of the church, from font to altar, the other, through a modest rose window, of the sunny churchyard.
There were two girls by the font, heads together and their shawls raised to make a black tent above them. Both were in mourning. They had joined their shawls to block the light, the better to see their reflections in the font’s water. As they jostled Aurora saw that one girl was dark while the other was very fair. They looked to be of a similar age, perhaps fifteen.
At the door of the sacristy Aurora’s uncle had paused. Father Lesy appeared, following a woman whom Aurora recognised as Madame Jodeau. Céleste Jodeau stopped on seeing the Comte, then dropped into the kind of curtsey Aurora was taught by her dancing-master but was never able to perfect. The Comte took her hand as she came up, and held it as they exchanged a few words. Father Lesy stood by and manifested what Aurora had heard her uncle describe as his ‘fussy manners’, usually in statements beginning, ‘Despite Father Lesy’s fussy manners …’
A cart had stopped at the gate to the churchyard. Three men were perched up on its seat. The one with very fair hair had to be a Lizet. The tallest, the one at the traces, was Sobran Jodeau. He no longer wore a beard, and Aurora recognised him first by his gait rather than his face. She watched him put his hand on the cart’s side and vault down. A sturdy brown boy followed him. Man and boy went over to a grave near the wall – one with a wooden marker – and began to groom the weeds from among the flowers planted on its mound. The two men left in the cart sat facing away from each other as though they had quarrelled.
Aurora turned from the window to see Paul crouched by the knothole. He had been chewing a strip of paper torn from a cornet of sweets she had given him, and now pulled a spitball from his mouth and dropped it through the knothole. Below, Madame Jodeau was now alone – for Father Lesy and the Comte had gone into the sacristy. She stood completely still some distance from the girls at the font and watched them. Watched with the oddest expression, Aurora thought. She looked coldly alert like a dangerous animal keeping its eye on other dangerous animals. Just then one girl, seeing someone outside, exclaimed happily and ran out. The other was about to follow when the woman near the altar raised her voice. ‘Sabine,’ she called. Sabine turned, and closed her black shawl around her face. Céleste Jodeau walked along the aisle, unhurried, her eyes on her daughter. When she came near she said, ‘Must you always be running after her.’
‘Aline, Mama?’ Sabine was confused.
Aurora faced the other way to seek out Aline Lizet who had stopped to speak to Sobran Jodeau. The sturdy boy offered her a cornflower, and then the man followed suit. He was already on his knees, so lifted the flower to Aline with teasing gallantry. She laughed and took both offerings.
Aurora met the gaze of her maid. She whispered, ‘This is very diverting.’ Lucette nodded.
Below, Sabine said, ‘I see Uncle Léon beside Christophe Lizet.’ She hesitated.
‘Go on, then,’ her mother said.
Aurora turned again. Beside her Lucette craned too. Framed in the rose window Sabine Jodeau joined Aline and the boy in tending the grave. Sobran Jodeau was just passing in under the feet of maid and mistress, who looked the other way, to see Jodeau step up to his wife and take her hand.
Céleste said, ‘What a picture.’ Then, ‘Hasn’t she grown beautiful?’
Sobran joined her, looked out of the shadow of the church. ‘Yes,’ he s
aid.
‘I mean Aline Lizet.’
‘Yes, Aline has too.’ There was a pause then Sobran said, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t remarked who’s with me.’
‘Oh?’
‘I mean, I’m surprised at your lack of interest.’
‘Why are you being so indirect, Sobran? All right, I see Léon. Have you chosen to forgive him?’
‘It’s only fair to offer him my trust again.’
Madame Jodeau shrugged. She followed his gaze, he was again watching the three by the grave. She seemed to weigh and measure his brief smile. And when the smile faded and the skin creased between his brows, she watched even more keenly.
Aurora also followed his gaze. She saw Aline Lizet go to her brother, saw Aline greet Léon Jodeau who might have answered her, but didn’t face her. When Aurora turned, her eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. They had lost their point of reference, Céleste Jodeau’s immaculate white lace collar. Céleste had left the church.
Sobran Jodeau was alone and walking towards the altar. He stopped beneath it, stood still, gazing with meditative penetration at the racked statue. Then he hung his head, came about, and left the church. All without the customary genuflection.
Aurora realised she had a hand on her maid’s arm, and that Paul’s nurse was frowning at them. She became aware that she was showing herself in a discreditable light. Calling Paul away from the knothole she led him downstairs. Her servants followed. As they emerged they met the Comte and Father Lesy. The priest was distressed to see where the women had been. He apologised. ‘Countess! I’m afraid it’s very grimy up there.’
Aurora reassured him, closed her hands to hide her palms, her blackened gloves.
They went out into the sunshine, where again Aurora was pursued by Lucette and a small halo of shade.
The Jodeaus had taken their cart one way, and were nearly out of sight. Christophe and Aline Lizet were on foot going in the opposite direction. The Comte took this in, said, ‘Hmmm,’ to himself, and looked at Aurora.
‘God’s architecture lends itself to eavesdropping,’ Aurora explained.
‘Of course,’ said her uncle.
1823 Vin de goutte (free-run wine)
The new dog wouldn’t put her head down, though Sobran had come downstairs early and petted her as she lay on her rag bed by the stove. Sobran sat still and dull for an hour while Josie blinked, then wavered. Yet as soon as he got up to go out the dog was awake, shaking herself. Her big feet hit the floor and her short, tapering tail waved.
‘All right,’ Sobran said. He opened the door and they went out.
Josie followed him up the slope between the vines, made water beside a corner post, sniffed at this and that, pursued a toad and took it in her mouth – then dropped it, drooling and whimpering.
‘Have you not yet learned?’ Sobran asked the dog.
Sobran was afraid of this meeting. All year he’d been low – so that Céleste had asked, when he hadn’t made love to her for weeks – what the matter was, who it was he longed for when he lay awake half the night, eyes on the ceiling and hands behind his head. She wept and he told her there was no one. He stroked her round flanks in pity, his hand busy but his body still turned away.
His wife looked about them on Sundays at church – followed his eyes, then proposed to Sobran who it might be. The widow Blanchard? The stonemason’s sister? And, when the Jodeau family went with other local vintners to help with the harvest at Vully, Céleste came home asking about Aurora de Valday.
‘Stop it,’ Sobran said when Céleste questioned him. ‘It’s your imagination – again. There’s no one.’
In every other way it had been a good year. The Comte said, ‘Jodeau, I admire your wine. You have your father’s knowledge, Kalmann’s vines, summer as a partner and, I swear, God as your sponsor.’
Sobran made his peace with his brother, and the whole family travelled to Nantes to see Léon off when he sailed for St Lawrence. On the return journey the family stopped at a place where the road touched the coast and went down to bargain for some fish, then lit fires and baked it. Sobran took a walk along the shore. The surf was unfamiliar to him, and the steady, unimpeded wind. Deafened by it, he expected to be ambushed, stalked, some such. Twice he turned and saw only his family at the fire. He felt as he had at midsummer in 1812, when the fires had begun to reach out to dissolve the gold stars on the blue domes of the Kremlin, when he dropped what little money he had into the bowl by the Russian woman’s bed and felt – between the room, and street, church, street, room again – shadowed by his invisible, pitying, reproachful angel.
This summer’s night Sobran waited, stood with the dog at his feet. He made plans. Planned to take up pipe-smoking, feeling the need of that ritual – cutting a plug, filling the bowl, striking a flint while sucking the sparks down into the tobacco. Many of Sobran’s friends had the habit, he would ask them a question, or propose a bargain, then have to wait through the ritual for their reply.
When the angel arrived, the dog jumped up, barking. Sobran crouched, put his arm and all his weight across Josie’s neck and muzzled her with his hands. She lunged, then subsided, trembling, her eyes starting out of her head in fury and terror.
Xas looked at the dog as if to say: ‘Is this meant to protect you from me?’ His eyes said this, glancing between the dog and man. He stepped closer and put a hand on the dog’s brow; Josie shrank back against the ground, whined, then, when Sobran released her, she licked Xas’s fingers, and the whine lifted in pitch from fear to fearful pleasure. Xas moved his hand likewise to Sobran’s head, touched the hair on his crown. Sobran covered the hand with his own, took the blessing, then got up, so that they stood eye to eye. His blood reversed its flow – but he said what he had to – what he had rehearsed. ‘I will never impose on you again. Please forgive me my offence. I feel that I can’t live if you remain angry with me. I am your servant.’
Xas said, ‘I’ve been angry for a year.’
‘Then you should have come to see me.’
‘And interrupt your journey? Don’t tell me you arrived at this abject contrition three hundred and sixty-four days ago?’
‘When I pulled you out of the air I felt that I could kill you – that it was possible. That alone filled me with terror.’
‘You can’t harm me. You felled me in the same manner Jacob brought down the angel he tackled – you are heavier than me. If I weren’t light how could these wings carry me?’
Sobran remembered a tree limb bent down, as if it were a supple, unresisting sapling.
‘Furthermore,’ Xas said, ‘I don’t believe you can keep that promise. You’re bound to impose on me again – though I hope not in lust.’
Sobran flinched.
‘And you lie when you say, “That alone filled me with terror.” I spoke Satan’s name – by which I have addressed him as a familiar – and yet your eyes, sensitive anemones, shrank when I said “the devil”. Your terror at that was the Church of your Fathers in you, as thorough as the flavour of oak in wine, and so I knew you lied when you said you had no sense of your desire as sin. Once spent you’d remember sin. As for not wanting to live – you remained quite healthy through twelve months of disappointing infatuation, so I can’t believe you mean to die. Finally, as my servant you are an imposition. It didn’t take you long, did it?’
‘Why did you bless me? Why lay your hand on my head?’
‘When you’re in pain I feel tender,’ Xas said. He wouldn’t look at Sobran.
The man had lost his way. He wasn’t sure what he had said wrong. He recognised this painful bafflement from quarrels he’d had with Baptiste as a youth and with Céleste in the early years of their marriage. He took a knife out of his pocket and gave it to the angel. ‘I was going to cut my throat if you didn’t forgive me.’
‘And leave your wife and children? From pique, or spite?’
‘Out of despair, which is a sin. But of course you’ve never despaired.’
‘No,??
? Xas said. He raised the knife and moved it almost aimlessly, as a child fiddles, against the twined signature on his side. As he did so he said, with no expression, ‘Is this friendship impossible?’
Sobran thought: ‘He isn’t speaking to me.’ He seized the hand that held the knife just as that weapon turned to dust, which settled slowly to the ground. One signature was alive – colour in the colourless gloom of a moonless night – awake against skin innocent of injury.
Xas put his forehead down on Sobran’s shoulder.
Sobran put his arms around the angel. He didn’t know what to say. He supposed he’d just witnessed an act of despair and an attempt at self-harm by a holy being. The dissolution of the knife was an act of God, or the pact maintaining itself, for Xas must go, not stop, in order to ‘go freely’. After all these years, contemplating all possible permutations of his restricted knowledge, Sobran had learned to think like a lawyer, and test the meanings of every word. But he was slow, and things had passed him that he hadn’t understood.
The dog, he saw, had draped herself on Xas’s feet, wanting to comfort him too. She sighed twice, as they stood in silence, then finally gave a theatrical moan. Xas laughed.
‘At least we can secure her happiness,’ Sobran said. ‘We could walk.’
Xas nodded.
‘We could go across to Kalmann – there’s a sight.’
And they did, the man’s boots making dents in the dry soil and the angel’s feet only smoother matches in the shape of a whole sole, as unshod feet do on firmly packed fine sand. The dog hared away and sped back. Xas walked as birds at the edge of the sea do when retreating before a tide, or like an owl shuffling along a limb before it swoops, not clumsy, but touchingly awkward. They came over the second ridge, and wandered down. Xas looked at the stone dust in the yard and blank tombstones stacked against the wall; the millwheel and two whetstones.