‘I have heard of Jackson’s tea,’ she said.
Charlotte had not. She said her parents did not have servants. She did not know much about the Royal Family, she confessed.
‘Pimm’s Number One,’ Madame Langevin’s sister prompted. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’
The Massuery estate was extensive. Beyond the gardens there were fields where sheep grazed, and beyond the fields there were plantations of young trees, no more than a foot high. On the slopes beyond them, firs grew in great profusion, and sometimes the chain-saws whirred all day long, an ugly sing-song that grated on Charlotte’s nerves.
In front of the house, early every morning, gardeners raked the gravel. An old man and a boy, with rakes wider than Charlotte had ever seen before, worked for an hour, destroying every suspicion of a weed, smoothing away the marks of yesterday’s wheels. The same boy brought vegetables to the house an hour or so before lunch, and again in the evening.
Marble nymphs flanked the front door at Massuery. A decorated balustrade accompanied the steps that rose to the left and right before continuing grandly on, as a single flight. The stone of the house was greyish-brown, the slatted shutters of its windows green. Everything at Massuery was well kept up, both inside and out. The silver, the furniture, the chandeliers, the tapestries of hunting scenes, the chessboard marble of the huge entrance hall, were all as lovingly attended to as the gravel. The long, slender stair-rods and the matching brass of the banister were regularly polished, the piano in the larger of the two salons kept tuned, the enamel of the dining-room peacocks never allowed to lose its brilliance. Yet in spite of all its grandeur, Massuery possessed only one telephone. This was in a small room on the ground floor, specially set aside for it. A striped wallpaper in red and blue covered the walls, matching the colours of an ornate ceiling. A blue-shaded light illuminated the telephone table and the chair in front of it. There were writing materials and paper for noting messages on. Madame Langevin’s sister, with the door wide open, sat for hours in the telephone room, speaking to people in Paris or to those who, like herself, had left the city for the summer months.
‘Mon Dieu!’ Monsieur Langevin would sometimes murmur, passing the open door. Monsieur Langevin was grey at the temples. He was clean-shaven, of medium height, with brown eyes that became playful and indulgent in his children’s presence. But the children, while agreeable to their father’s spoiling of them, were equally fond of their mother, even though it was she who always punished them for their misdemeanours. There was the day the twins put the cat in the chimney, and the day the bough of the apricot tree collapsed beneath their weight, and the morning old Jules couldn’t find his shoes, not a single pair. There were occasions when Colette refused to speak to anyone, especially to Charlotte, when she lay on her bed, her face turned to the wall, and picked at the wallpaper. Monsieur Langevin was as angry about that as he was about the cat in the chimney, but in each case it was Madame Langevin who arranged for whatever deprivation appeared to her to be just.
Madame Langevin’s sister was having an affair. Her husband arrived at the house every Thursday night, long after dinner, close on midnight. He came on the Paris train and remained until Sunday evening, when he took a sleeper back again. He was a vivacious man, not as tall as his wife, with a reddish face and a small black moustache. After his first weekend Madame Langevin told Charlotte that her sister had married beneath her, but even so she spoke affectionately of her brother-in-law, her tone suggesting that she was relaying a simple fact. Madame Langevin would not speak ill of anyone, nor would she seek, maliciously, to wound: she was not that kind of woman. When she mentioned her sister’s love affair, she did so with a shrug. On her sister’s wedding-day she had guessed that there would be such a development: with some people it was a natural thing. ‘Le monde,’ Madame Langevin said, her tone neither condemning her sister nor dis-paraging her brother-in-law in his cuckold role.
Charlotte descends dimly lit stairs from her flat to the street, the green portfolio under her arm. The chill of a December morning has penetrated the house. The collar of her Loden overcoat is turned up, a black muffler several times wound round her neck. Does it happen, she wonders in other people’s lives that a single event influences all subsequent time? When she was five she was gravely ill, and though she easily remembers the drama there was, and how she sensed a closeness to death and was even reconciled to it, the experience did not afterwards pursue her. She left it, snagged in its time and place, belonging there while she herself went lightly on. So, too, she had left behind other circumstances and occurrences, which had seemed as if they must surely cast perpetually haunting shadows: they had not done so. Only that summer at Massuery still insistently accompanies her, established at her very heart as part of her.
‘It is the yellow wine of the Jura,’ Monsieur Langevin said, in English still. ‘Different from the other wines of France.’
From the windows of Massuery you could see the mountains of the Jura. Spring and early summer were sometimes cold because of wind that came from that direction. So they told her: the Jura was often a conversational topic.
‘Is there a doctor at hand?’ Madame Langevin’s sister inquired, quoting from an English phrase-book she had made her husband bring her from Paris. ‘What means “at hand”? Un médian sur la main? C’est impossible!’ With the precision of the bored, Madame Langevin’s sister selected another cigarette and placed it in her holder.
‘The lover is a younger man,’ Madame Langevin passed on in slowly articulated French. ‘Assistant to a pharmacist. One day of course he will wish to marry and that will be that.’
First thing in the morning, as soon as I open my eyes, the smell of coffee being made wafts through my open window. It is the servants’ breakfast, I think. Later, at half past eight, ours is served in an arbour in the garden, and lunch is taken there too, though never dinner, no matter how warm the evening. On Sundays Monsieur Langevin’s mother comes in a tiny motor-car she can scarcely steer. She lives alone except for a housekeeper, in a village thirty kilometres away. She is small and formidable, and does not address me. Sometimes a man comes with her, a Monsieur Ogé with a beard. He speaks to me in detail about his health, and afterwards I look up the words 1 do not know. Other relations occasionally come on Sundays also, Madame’s cousin from Saulieu and her husband, and the widow of a general.
During the war, when there were only women and children at Massuery, a German soldier was discovered in the grounds. He had made himself a shelter and apparently lived on the remains of food thrown out from the house. He would not have been discovered had he not, in desperation, stolen cheese and bread from a larder. For more than a week the women lived with the knowledge of his presence, catching glimpses of him at night, not knowing what to do. They assumed him to be a deserter and yet were not certain, for he might as easily have been lost. In the end, fearing they were themselves being watched for a purpose they could not fathom, they shot him and buried him in the garden. ‘Ici,’ Madame Langevin said, pointing at a spot in the middle of a great oval flowerbed where roses grew. ‘C’était moi,’ she added, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. On a wet night she and her mother-in-law and a maidservant had waited for the soldier to emerge. Her first two shots had missed him and he’d advanced, walking straight towards them. Her third shot made him stagger, and then she emptied both barrels into his body. She’d only been married a few months, not much older than Charlotte was now. She seems so very gentle, Charlotte wrote. You can’t imagine it.
On 14 August, a date that was to become enshrined in Charlotte’s consciousness, she was driven again to her Wednesday-afternoon freedom by Monsieur Langevin. But when they came to the Place de la Paix, instead of opening the car door as usual and driving on to his mid-week appointment, he said:
‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’
He spoke, this time, in French. He smiled. Like her, he said, he had hours on his hands. He had driven her to St Cérase special
ly, she realized then. On all previous Wednesday afternoons it had been convenient to give her a lift and, now, when it was not, he felt some kind of obligation had been established.
‘I could have caught the bus at the gates,’ she said.
He smiled again. ‘That would have been a pity, Charlotte.’
This was the first intimation of his feelings for her. She didn’t know how to reply. She felt confused, and knew that she had flushed. He’s such a charming man, she’d written. Both Monsieur and Madame are charming people. There’s no other word for it.
‘Let me drive you some place, Charlotte. There’s nothing to do here.’
She shook her head. She had a few things to buy, she said, after which she would return to Massuery as usual, on the bus. She would be all right.
‘What will you do, Charlotte? Look at the front of the church again? The museum isn’t much. It doesn’t take long to drink a cup of coffee.’
The French her father wished her to perfect was far from perfect yet. Haltingly, she replied that she enjoyed her Wednesday afternoons. But even as she spoke she knew that what she’d come to enjoy most about them was the drive with Monsieur Langevin. Before, she hadn’t dared to allow that thought to form. Now, she could not prevent it.
‘I’ll wait,’ Monsieur Langevin said, ‘while you do your shopping.’
When she returned to the car he drove to a country hotel, almost fifty kilometres away. It was ivy-covered, by a river, with doves in the garden and a stream near by. They sat at a table beneath a beech tree, but nobody came hurrying out to ask them what they’d like. The garden was deserted; the hotel seemed so too. Everyone was sleeping, Monsieur Langevin said.
‘Are you happy at Massuery, Charlotte?’
She was three feet away from him, yet she could feel a fondness that made her faintly dizzy. Her flesh tingled, as though the tips of his fingers had touched her forearm and were sending reverberations through her body. Yet they hadn’t. She tried to think of his children, endeavouring to imagine Colette and the twins at their most tiresome. She tried to think of Madame Langevin, to hear her soft, considerate voice. But nothing happened. All there was was the presence of the man she was with, his white car drawn up in the distance, the small round table at which they sat. A deception was taking place. Already they were sharing a deception.
‘Yes, I am happy at Massuery now.’
‘You were not at first?’
‘I was a little lonely.’
Charlotte walks swiftly through the grey December streets with her port-folio. There was another print, a long time ago, of that round white table, and two faceless figures sitting at it. There was one of three women blurred by heavy rain, waiting among the dripping shrubs. There was one of Massuery caught in dappled sunlight, another of children playing, another of a white Citroën with nobody in it.
They like you, Charlotte. Guy most of all perhaps.’
‘I like them now too.’
They returned to the car when they had talked a while. Only, perhaps, an hour had passed: afterwards she calculated it was about an hour. No one had served them.
‘Everyone is still asleep,’ he said.
How had it happened that he put his arms around her? Had they stopped in their walk across the grass? Afterwards she realized they must have. But in her memory of the moment she was only aware that she had murmured protests, that the palms of both her hands had pressed against his chest. He hadn’t kissed her, but the passion of the kiss was there. Afterwards she knew that too.
‘Dear Charlotte,’ he said, and then: ‘Forgive me.’
She might have fainted and, as though he sensed it, he took her arm, his fingers lightly supporting her elbow, as a stranger on the street might have. He told her, as he drove, about his childhood at Massuery. The old gardener had been there, and nothing much had changed in the house. A forest of birches that had been sold for timber after the war had been replanted. In the fields where sunflowers were grown for their oil now there had been wheat before. He remembered carts and even oxen.
The white Citroën turned in at the gates and glided between the plane trees on the drive, its tyres disturbing the gravel. There’d been an oak close to the house, but its branches had spread too wide and it had been felled. He pointed at the place. They walked up the steps together, and into the hall.
That evening at dinner Madame Langevin’s sister tried out a new phrase. ‘My friend and I desire to attend a theatre,’ she repeated several times, seeking guidance as to emphasis and pronunciation. No one remarked upon the fact that Charlotte had returned in the car with Monsieur Langevin, when always previously on Wednesdays she had arrived back on the bus. No one had noticed; no one was interested. It had been just a moment, she told herself, just the slightest thing. She hadn’t been able to reply when he asked her to forgive him. He hadn’t even taken her hand.
When Sunday came, Monsieur Langevin’s mother brought the bearded Monsieur Ogé who talked about his health, and the widow of the general was there also. The deceived husband was in particularly good spirits that day. ‘Mow chéri,’ Madame Langevin’s sister murmured on the telephone after he’d left for the railway station in the evening. ‘C’est trop cruel.’
When Wednesday came Madame Langevin asked Charlotte if she’d mind taking the bus to St Cérase today because her husband was not going in that direction. And the following Wednesday, as though a precedent had been set by that, it seemed to be assumed that she would take the bus also. Had Madame Langevin somehow discovered? Her manner did not suggest it, but Charlotte remembered her philosophical tone when she’d first spoken of her sister’s relationship with the pharmacist’s assistant, her matter-of-fact acceptance of what clearly she considered to be an absurdity.
Sitting at the café where her solitary presence had become a Wednesday-afternoon feature, Charlotte tried to feel relieved that she’d been saved a decision. But would she really have said no if he’d offered, again, to drive her somewhere pleasant, or would her courage have failed her? Alone at the café, Charlotte shook her head. If he’d asked her, her longing to be with him would have quenched her conventional protests: courage did not come into it.
That day, she went again to the museum and sat in the dusty park. She sketched a hobby-horse that lay abandoned by a seat. The deception was still there, even though he’d changed his mind. Nothing could take it from them.
‘Tu es triste,’ Guy said when she bade him good-night that evening. ‘Pourquoi es-tu triste, Charlotte?’ Only three weeks were left of her time at Massuery: that was why she was sad, she replied, which was the truth in part. ‘Mais tu reviendras,’ Guy comforted, and she believed she would. It was impossible to accept that she would not see Massuery again.
The man nods appreciatively. He knows what he wants and what his clients like. The décor he supplies is enhanced by a pale-framed pleasantry above a minibar or a television set. In the bedrooms of fashionable hotels –and in boardrooms and directors’ dining-rooms and the offices of industrial magnates – Charlotte’s summer at Massuery hangs.
While her patron examines what she has brought him today, she sees herself walking in the Massuery woods, a lone, slight figure among the trees. What was it about her that had made a man of the world love her? She’d not been without a kind of beauty, she supposes, but often she’d been awkward in her manner and certainly ill-informed in conversation, naïve and credulous, an English schoolgirl whose clothes weren’t smart, who hardly knew how to make up her face and sometimes didn’t bother. Was it her very artlessness that had attracted his attention? Had he somehow delighted in the alarmed unease that must have been displayed in her face when he said he’d wait for her to finish her shopping? With long hindsight, Charlotte believes she had noticed his attention from the very first day she arrived at Massuery. There was a fondness in the amused glances he cast at her, which she had not understood and had not sought to. Yet as soon as he permitted the frisson between them, as soon as his manner and his words crea
ted it, she knew that being in his company was in every way different from being in Madame Langevin’s, though, before, she had assumed she liked them equally. With that same long hindsight, Charlotte believes she came to love Monsieur Langevin because of his sense of honour and his strength, yet she knows as well that before she was aware of these qualities in him her own first stirrings of emotion had surfaced and, with unconscious propriety, been buried.
Madame Langevin’s sister embraced her warmly the day Charlotte left Massuery. ‘Farewell,’ she wished her, and inquired if that was what was said on such occasions in England. The children gave her presents. Monsieur Langevin thanked her. He stood with his hands on Colette’s shoulders, removing one briefly to shake one of Charlotte’s. It was Madame Langevin who drove her to the railway station, and when Charlotte looked back from the car she saw in Monsieur Langevin’s eyes what had not been there a moment before: the anguish of the sadness that already claimed their clandestine afternoon. His hands remained on his daughter’s shoulders but even so it was as if, again, he’d spoken. At the railway station Madame Langevin embraced her, as her sister had.
Journeying through late September sunshine, Charlotte wept in a corner of her compartment. He respected Madame Langevin too much to betray her in the way her sister betrayed the husband she’d once chosen. Nor was he a man to cause his children pain in order to gratify a selfishness in himself. She knew all that, and in turn respected him. Her resignation was melancholy on that train journey, but with the balm of passing time it became more bearable.