Fascination (22 page)

ALEXANDER TOBIAS
. He was so clever, Rory/Frank. He had an answer for everything. It was as if he’d brainwashed Anna. Poor, sad Anna. Love is blind, they say. Rory had sunk all his money into Marchmont, she said: if the family went down he would lose everything. She knew all about his life as ‘Frank’. He was young, he was wild, stupid – we all were. He was reconciled with the Stavordales. Richard was a damaged, sick person who leant on Rory for all emotional support. It was Rory who monitored his medication, and was weaning him off his anti-depressants, etc., etc. It made me sick. And I saw suddenly how I’d been used. The first major repayment of the loans fell due the following week. They were in hock up to their armpits. The bailiffs were at the gates, the banks poised to seize the estate. Do you happen to know any rich suckers? Rory must have said. Wasn’t it curious how Lady Marchmont just happened to be in the food hall? I never go to Harrods, so somebody must have been following me. Do come down for the weekend, Alex, Anna would love to see you…

I remembered I stopped the car before I reached the south lodge and had a look back at the park and the lake. The day’s promise had never materialized and the sky was filled with mousegrey clouds and the lake appeared cold and brackish, with a surface of tarnished steel. God, I thought to myself, what a farce. They can all rot in hell. I hope they lose every last penny. Rory and Anna and their brat. I drove back to London with the night coming on.

‘Keep straight on, and shortly
St Julien
(St Julien-sur-Meuse) comes into view. The village (completely ruined) is reached after crossing first the railway and then the small River Andon. Motor cars can climb as far as the church. Turn to the right after passing the church. Numerous German dug-outs and gun emplacements can be observed here. Down the lane about three hundred yards from the village there comes into view on the side of the hill
a very large American cemetery containing some 28,000 graves
. There is a fine view from here of the lower town and the valley of the Meuse (photo pp. 12 and 13).’

Paris. Yesterday. Watery November sunshine on glossy cobbles. A rime of sleet melted by breakfast. With sullen aplomb the waiter scooped our plates and coffee cups from the table. My daughter’s hands were raw and scraped from shucking four hundred oysters the night before, her knuckles freckled with tiny, brilliant, forming scabs. I saw, as she handed me back the letter and the old guidebook, that her fingernails were bitten half way down to the cuticle. She looked beautiful, I thought, but deadly tired, her beauty draining from her.

‘Who’s the little girl with Grandma?’ she asked. ‘No, Great-grandma.’

I took the photograph from her. ‘You look malnourished, Millie,’ I said. ‘It’s your Great-aunt Sarah.’

‘Malnourished… All chefs are malnourished,’ she laughed. My daughter had been working in Paris since the summer. ‘Do you know where you’re going?’

‘I’m heading for Metz.’

‘Well, drive carefully. What’s gotten into you, anyway? I thought you were on holiday. Is this wise?’

‘I am on holiday. I’m seeing you. And I’m going to St Julien. I have to be there on the 4th.’ I handed her a cutting from a French newspaper. ‘This was what inspired me.’

She read the cutting: MAVROCORDATO S’EST SUICIDÉ.

‘I still don’t get it, Dad. Who’s Mavrocordato?’

‘He’s a film director. Was a film director.’

INTERIOR. CAR. DAY
.

The man lit his cigarette from the butt of the one he had just smoked. The girl reached across and lifted his sunglasses from his face and put them on. Lifted the sunglasses from his face and put them on. She stared sulkily through the windscreen, making a moue with her lips. ‘I’m tired,’ she said, ‘I want to stop.’ ‘OK,’ the man said, ‘we’ll stop at the next town.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Baby.’ ‘Never call me Baby,’ the girl said, ‘never.’ ‘OK, Baby,’ the man said. From the car a roadside indicator could be seen flashing by: it read ‘St Julien 3 kms’. Through the windscreen there was a hazy view of a town ahead. A small town on a hill. An ancient church surrounded by cypresses. The man glanced over at the girl. (The naked woman is standing in what looks like an artist’s studio, one knee, her right, resting on a
chaise longue
. Some sort of ornate wall hanging behind her. She is completely naked, her upper body turning slightly towards the left. In her left hand she holds a looking glass into which she stares. The fingertips of her right hand touch the underhang of her left breast, gently. She has bobbed, badly permed hair and the heavy makeup and dark lips of a soubrette. 1920s, definitely, perhaps earlier. Her shoulders are thin, girlish, and her head seems ever so slightly too large for her body. At the foot of the picture someone has written her name in a bold, cursive hand: Irène Golan.) ‘OK, Baby,’ the man said. He threw his cigarette out of the window. Exterior, day: the car turned off the
route nationale
and made briskly, at a careless lick, for St Julien, snare
drum on the soundtrack going
tssssss-tup-a-tssssss
,
tsssss-tup-a-tssssss
,
tssssss
,
tssssss
,
tssssss
.

‘Dear Mrs Culpepper –

Thank you for your letter. I do not know if I can be more precise but I will try. The village was in near complete ruins and was called St Julien, I think. I remember we crossed a railway line and then a small stream. There was a lower town and up on a hill beyond there was a church and other buildings, all fairly knocked about. I remember three fine ancient cypresses all broken down from artillery. The lower town was quiet, a few bodies here and there, but well cleared out. Captain Shaw sent our platoon forward up the road to the church. It was about three in the afternoon, quite mild, with a light rain falling. This was November 4th 1918…’

In the photograph my grandmother is standing holding her daughter’s hand in front of the sign. ‘St Julien’ stands out starkly, black on white, in what is a rather fogged, sun-faded print. All around them lie the ruins of the lower town. On the hill behind is the church with its shattered cypresses. My grandmother stands stiffly (I wonder who took the picture?), her daughter (my aunt Sarah) has turned her head slightly in her direction, as if to ask her a question. The date is 1920, some two years after my grandfather died.

I deduced that the noise must have been caused by a spontaneous rally of fifty dumpster trucks deciding to have a revving competition on Seventh Avenue, many floors below, true, but the sonic vibrations were palpable up here. Incredible. I was trying to listen to ‘Variations on a Theme of Haydn’ on my tape recorder and at the same time was going through my notes of the previous night’s concert. The effort it was costing reminded me forcefully of the main reason why I left New York. I had just turned up the volume when my breakfast arrived. ‘It’s open,’ I called, not looking round, hearing the metallic rattle of the room service trolley and the clink
of glass and silverware as it made its shuddery, percussive way over to the window.

‘Ah, Brahms,’ said the waiter, organizing the table setting (now I did look round). His voice was light, the ‘r’ rolled slightly, in the French way.

He turned. That is,
she
turned. She was in full waiter’s rig: starched bum-freezer jacket, black trousers, lace-up shoes, a black bow tie. Blonde hair held back in a taut chignon. Late thirties, I calculated, older than me.

‘
Aimez-vous Brahms
?’ she said with a smile, holding out the slim folder with the check for me to sign.

‘I’m writing a book on him,’ I said, noticing simultaneously the sudden hollowness in my chest and the fact that her name tag said ‘Jay’. Odd name for a woman.

‘I love Brahms,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘More than life.’

‘… We were almost up to the church when the shells started exploding on the road. A whole bunch of us took cover in the graveyard but they had that targeted too. Lieutenant Povitch shouted at us to head back to the lower town. John and I with a dozen others had jumped over a low wall that bounded the cemetery. Ahead of us up the hill to the left we could see a ruined farm house and a big stone barn. It made more sense to take cover up there than risk the descent to the lower town. We set off, John was right behind me…’

My grandmother and her daughter Sarah stayed at the Hostellerie du Coq Hardi in Rochette, ‘the original kitchen of which’, according to their guidebook, ‘has preserved its ample proportions and innumerable copper utensils’. My guidebook makes no mention of this establishment but I have decided to stay in the town anyway, if only to approximate to the spirit of this impromptu pilgrimage. The road from Paris is quiet and I am finding, to my vague surprise, that I am actually enjoying driving. I will stay somewhere in
Rochette and proceed to St Julien tomorrow, taking my time, making sure that as I walk up the hill from the lower town it will be around about three o’clock in the afternoon. If a light rain happens to be falling, so much the better.

That Haydn did not write the melody that inspired Brahms’s celebrated ‘Variations’ is well known, but the designation is firmly established and so – So what? So we might as well stick with it. How to express that more elegantly? How to say that the notion that this fool has found a ‘missing’ variation is a crock, a brimfull, steaming, grade-A crock of –

Jay came into the bar and I put down my notes with barely a tremble, scarcely a rustle of paper. She was wearing a short black dress and her hair was still up, but more loosely, the result of some artful manipulation of pins and tortoiseshell combs.

We shook hands – it seemed unduly formal, but she was foreign, remember, she was not American – and she sat down beside me. She smiled at me as I
Sieg-heiled
through the gloom at the idle waiter.

‘How’s the demolishment going?’ she said.

‘The stiletto has been inserted between the seventh and eighth rib. We are half way to the hilt.’

‘This new variation was meant to go where?’

‘Another vodka martini and – ‘I said to the waiter and glanced round at Jay.

‘– And another vodka martini, on rocks.’

‘Between two and three. Variation 2 (a), I suppose. Absurd.’

‘Obscene. May I?’ She took one of my cigarettes from the pack on the table, broke off the filter tip and put the shortened filterless cigarette to her lips, a little off centre. I reached for my lighter but she was there first. But she frowned, not lighting her cigarette, thinking (thinking about Brahms?), the cigarette between her lips, slightly off centre, three uneven creases between her fine, dark blonde, frowning eyebrows. This is how I will always remember her, frowning, trying to imagine what possible kind of variation
could have gone between number two and three. This is one of the ways I will remember her.

INTERIOR. ROOM. NIGHT.

The man leant against the window frame of the hotel room and placed his forehead against a cool pane. There was a flushing of water on the soundtrack (over) and the man did not look round. Irène Golan’s round, impassive face, then the camera tracked down her body. Her small breasts, the swell of her stomach, her neat divot of pubic hair, her knees, her feet. Her name. Irène Golan. The man in profile: he closed his eyes. The girl was in the room, now, a stronger light coming through the left-ajar bathroom door. She wore a loose white t-shirt (the man’s?) and black panties that did not quite conceal the cleft between her buttocks. The man moved away from the window. ‘How many times did you sleep with Urbain?’ he asked, in a reasonable voice. ‘You can tell me, I don’t particularly mind.’ The girl was sitting down at the room’s solitary table. Leaning forward slightly. From the configuration of the folds of her t-shirt, the convexities and concavities, it was possible to imagine that, beneath her t-shirt, her breasts were just resting on the table top – the underhang of her breasts just grazing the table top. She had an unlit cigarette in her mouth, just off centre, and had frozen in the act of removing a match from a book of matches. She frowned, possibly, you imagined, considering a response to this question. She looked directly at you, looked directly at you, and with two fingers took the unlit cigarette from her mouth, and said, ‘France is really a beautiful country.’ Cigarette from her mouth, turned and looked at directly at you, and said, ‘France is really a beautiful –’

Jay carefully picked a shred of tobacco from the pink point of her tongue.

‘Do you want to –’ I cleared my throat, ‘Eat, stay here, try –’

‘– I’d like to go to a movie,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see, more than anything,
Visions Fugitives
. It’s playing downtown.’

‘Anything you say, Jay,’ I said.

She looked curiously at me. ‘Why do you call me Jay?’ she asked. I explained.

She chuckled. ‘Oh, that. I was only helping Jay out. I forgot to take his name off the jacket.’

I felt that slipping and sliding inside me once more.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you have me at a disadvantage. You know my name. I thought I knew yours.’

‘It’s Irène,’ she said.

‘… All the way up to the farm building John was right behind me. He was saying, “Come on, Bob, let’s go, let’s go, Bob.” When we reached the farm we could see that it was in full view of the trench lines and gun emplacements in the upper town. Other men who had run up from the churchyard had taken shelter behind the barn whose walls were three feet thick, an ancient building. “Over there, Bob,” John said to me. “That’s for us, buddy.”I can hear his voice in my ears as I write this. There was a four-yard gap between the end of the farmhouse and the gable end of the barn. John pushed me in the back and I hightailed it, ran round the corner of the barn and fell over. That’s when I heard the explosion. Some tiles were blown off the roof and there was a lot of smoke. There were some hens inside the barn and they set up a mighty squawking…’

According to my grandmother’s note in the margin of the guidebook she and Sarah ate ‘some kind of stew’ the night they stayed in Rochette, but neither of them had much appetite. I find a room in the Hôtel du Cygne (two stars) in the Place des Halles and, dutifully, eat a cartilaginous
daube de boeuf
in the Brasserie Centrale, five minutes from the hotel, an overlit establishment as doggedly functional as its name.