Montreal Stories (30 page)

“Who do they belong to?”

“The trees? I’ve never thought about it. The state, I suppose.”

“Which state?”

“France. You’re still in France.”

“I know
that
. Only France isn’t a state. It’s a country. Vermont is a state. Florida’s a state. They ought to be fined for not looking after their trees. The French, I mean.”

The castle, which we could now see clearly, had died long before, gutted by neglect. Then, restored, its spirit had been gutted, this time by the presence of tourists. Every stone in the tower and battlements had been quarried early in this century, when an American couple had bestowed imagination and money on a ruin. I wondered if I had a duty to inform Carlotta, for whom the whole of past time could be contained in a doll house, immeasurable periods crammed under a small roof. “It hasn’t the charm of the lovely places along the Loire,” I began, as though Carlotta might care; as if she knew where the Loire was. I was leading round to the tricky question of fakery; tricky because Carlotta was young. I wondered if, in dealing with the young, illusion wasn’t safer ground. “Here in the South, castles were really fortresses. When there was no more need for a fortress, it was allowed to crumble. Villagers hauled the stones away and stabled their goats in whatever remained.”

She took off her sunglasses, perhaps to make sure I was telling the truth. I had treated her to a two-hour drive over terrible roads, with the Mediterranean revealed in greens and grays rather than shades of sapphire as we climbed. She could have been at the beach, learning from Irma. She said, “Who built this one?”

I gave up on restorations and said, “The Saracens.”

“They should have paved their driveway. You could twist an ankle.”

“Your mother liked the view.” What else? “We came up by bus, I recall. We were too broke to rent a car.” I said this, I hope, not sentimentally. By no means did I ever wish to visit anything with Lily again.

Mrs. Benjamin Harrower: I still owned books with “Lily Burnet” on the flyleaf. Once, some twenty years ago, I had received a Christmas card signed “Ken and Lily Peel.” Peel was second consort, companion to Lily’s middle reign. He must have taken over some of the Christmas grind that year, using an old address book of Lily’s, so dazed and uninterested he no longer recognized “Steve Burnet” as a chapter heading in Lily’s life. I had examined his handwriting, which I was seeing for the first time. It was stingy and defensive, nothing like his face.

My mind, as a rule shut against Lily’s fortunes, let in remembered chitchat about the way Peel was supposed to have died. They say he got up on a dark winter morning, still drunk from the night before, stumbled, hit his head on a rocking chair, died at once. It is hard to die by falling on a chair. He must have died on his feet and keeled over. Harrower was edging his way out of Lily’s kingdom, too, if one could trust Carlotta’s register of events.

“Ben’s got this nonfunctioning spleen,” she had told me during the drive. “He’s a very sick man. His father made a lot of money, in scales, but Ben knew the whole personalenterprise thing was over, so he didn’t carry on the business.”
I supposed I was hearing a new jargon, with “in scales” replacing “in spades.” Was that it? “No, Steve,” said Carlotta, giving me a firm, governessy look. “Scales. What you weigh yourself on. Anyway, he made a good banker. But his spleen was overmedicated, and it just ran down.”

“The man in Monaco,” I said, “the one who works in a bank. Is he an associate of Ben’s?”

“He reports to Ben,” she said, using the diffident tone reserved for a royal connection. I was surprised at how quickly she’d picked up a European mannerism. “It’s not really a bank, more an investment thing. Ben took early retirement so he could write a book about his experiences. Like, how he was born in the middle class and just stayed there. It’s a question of your own individual will power. I can’t explain it like he does. He’s very, very convincing. But now he’ll never write that book. He depends on my mother for everything. She has to keep track of what he eats and drinks—how many Martinis, at what time of day. He drinks Martinis. He’s that generation.”

So was I, but I did not want to engage a topic as intimate as age. Carlotta was fifteen, the product of some mindless flurry on the part of Lily before entering the peace of the menopause. During her Burnet epoch, she had avoided even conversation about having children. She was afraid any child of hers might take after her own parents, the one slit-eared, the other a destroy-the-heretics-and-let-God-sort-it-out Inquisitor.

Ben Harrower, his father in scales. From his tone of voice, I’d guessed a liberal clergyman with a working fireplace in his study. He’d bought the house in Vermont after Canada adopted the metric system, Carlotta said. He believed metric was an invention of the K.G.B. The minds of Russians could not adapt to miles, pounds, Fahrenheit temperature; for that reason, the Soviet Union was unlikely to invade the United States. “He could hardly believe it when China went metric,”
said Carlotta. “Last winter he and Mummy went to England and the BBC was giving the temperature in Celsius. He was born over there, so you can imagine how he felt.” She was utterly free from malice or mockery, saying this; at such a remove from the Quales, even from me, that the distance could not be measured under any system.

“Who does this whole place actually belong to?” said Carlotta. We stood in the last thin patch of shade at the end of the road. Before us, in white sunlight, a drawbridge stretched over the dry bed of a moat. “Does it belong to France? I mean, the state?” She edged a dented Pepsi can aside with her shoe, and shifted her light weight to the other foot—Lily’s old sign of concentration.

“Some part of the state,” I said. “Some ministry or other. It used to be owned by a family who had a sardine-canning monopoly.” I was not making fun of her; it was so.

She took this for a fair answer, remarking only that her mother would not let them eat tinned fish.

“So you do eat some fish at home? Meat, too?”

“Ben got poisoning in Hong Kong,” she said. “So now we’re careful.”

Refuse littered the ditch: crumpled bags, bent straws, stubs of entry tickets. There was a child’s toy monkey and a toothbrush. I wondered if the sardine connection had anything to do with a large fish someone had drawn on the planks of the bridge. Perhaps there was a more subtle reason for it, a revival of early Christian symbolism, a devious way of saying, “Pagans, go home.” But as we drew nearer I saw that it was the approximate representation of a phallus. In the north of Europe, a graffito of that sort would indicate defiance and unrest; in the south, it probably signified the hope of a steady birth rate. Or just somebody boasting, I decided, noticing a chalked telephone number.

“They ought to arrest all those people,” said Carlotta, looking where I looked.

“The sardine canners bought the castle from the de Stentor family,” I said, glad to have a ready topic. “Victor is a connection of theirs, much removed. A junior branch. I’ve often wondered if he has any real claim on the name. You met him at dinner last night.”

“He’s fat,” said Carlotta. “Victor. He wanted to take me to a casino, but you have to be eighteen to get in. They ask to see your passport. I wouldn’t have gone with him anyway. He’s a very old man. He shouldn’t be running round to casinos. He might have a stroke, or something.”

“He had no business inviting you anywhere.”

“I know. I was still tired after the movies in Nice, and then Irma gave me an art lesson.” I was silent. “So?” she said. “Victor lived up here?”

“Some of his relatives. Before them, there was a Cuban. He gave extravagant masked balls and parties. There are people still living down here who can remember the music, the dancers, the thousands of candles.”

“Where does a Cuban get that kind of money?” She answered her own question: “Vice.”

I started to say, “Long, long before Fidel Castro,” but to Carlotta no such time existed. The repeated collapse and inflation of events continued to perplex me, even though I had once written a thesis on Talleyrand and published a number of afterthoughts. Since the arrival of Carlotta, the flattened present, the engorged past had scarcely quit my mind. They were like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has swallowed history whole. I said, “Before the Cuban, an American couple named Primage paid for extensive repairs. They didn’t own the place and never lived here. One wonders how they got up the hill. Mules and a guide, I suppose.”

“Why did they bother?” said Carlotta. “It came off their taxes?”

“Income tax barely existed. Americans were like that. They loved France and wanted the French to love them. They
hadn’t yet worked out that France and the French are entirely different.”

“The state wouldn’t get a cent out of me,” said Carlotta. “You saw those trees?”

The cost of admittance was seven times greater than in Lily’s day. “You could get in cheaper,” said Carlotta. “Have you got a senior card?”

“I am not sixty-five.”

“I’m sorry. I thought Mummy said you’d retired.”

I wondered where Lily picked up her information. For years I had been turning my back on anyone likely to say, “I’ve met your ex-wife.” Sometimes I still came across a couple by the name of Lapwing, Harry and Edith, who had been young and hard up in France with Lily and me. Edie and Lily had gone to the same Catholic school; that was the connection. It was a wives’ story, with the women (“the girls,” we had said then) whispering and laughing and trading stories about the men. The Lapwings now lived out West and were entirely taken up by their own affairs—university machinations, mostly.

Carlotta stopped to consider four rusted cannons in the flagged courtyard. She said, “They ought to be boiled down, or whatever it is you do with weapons. My mother’s a committed pacifist. She won’t even let Ben keep a gun in the house.”

“They were brought here during the French Revolution,” I said. “Never used. They can’t hurt anyone.” She still seemed troubled. Revolution? Soviet walkabout? Will miles, gallons, Fahrenheit temperature hold the line? “Long before that time,” I said—thinking, The vaguer the better; less alarming for the child—“the castle belonged to the tax collector for a powerful local count. There was an ancient line of counts in the region, older than the French royal family. They spoke a dialect you can still hear in one or two villages.”

“I guess it’s a pretty old place,” said Carlotta neutrally.

Guides and touring groups packed the stone entrance hall, which was brighter and cleaner than I remembered. The guides wore badges—“English,” “Français,” “Deutsch,” “Italiano”—and looked, to me, too young to know about anything. As for the visitors, they resembled nothing so much as migrant labor waiting to board one of those long trains with dirty windows. Like migrants, they hung on to radios, cameras, extra clothes for a change of weather, plastic bags of fruit and chocolate, newspapers. Most of these articles had to be left at a cloakroom, after fierce argument. A “No Tipping” sign stood propped behind a saucer set out for tips. Tourists responded by unloading small change from foreign countries. Carlotta’s shoulder-strap bag held only Kleenex and her passport. During the drive, she had got out her passport and examined it, frowning over the facts of her birth date and height. She was dressed in white shorts, a blue shirt, running shoes, and wore around her neck a gold heart on a chain.

In Lily’s day, women tourists had dressed in flowered nylon blouses, pleated white skirts, white nylon cardigans with pearl buttons. I recalled a man in a gleaming white shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal a tattoo of peacock blue—a long number, like the number of a freight car. Outside, he and his wife took pictures of each other, then asked me to take pictures of them. They sat down on the dry grass, after searching in vain for a sign saying they mustn’t. They put their heads close together and smiled up at me. The moat was fed by a shallow stream. Some people sat along the edge, which was high and straight, like the bank of a canal, and let their legs dangle. The legs and thighs even of young people looked veined and pale. Everyone over here had seemed like that, to me—bruised, pallid, glancing around to look for rules and prohibitions.

Carlotta said, “Let’s stay with the French group. We’ll learn more.” I wondered if it would be interesting or instructive to
describe my tour with Lily, and the man in the white shirt, and how it had been thought bad taste to flaunt that kind of tattoo. The sight affected people; some young men and women had had their tattoo effaced by means of plastic surgery, out of regard for the feelings of strangers.

“Steve,” said Carlotta. “I want to ask you something. Why wasn’t Irma at that dinner last night?”

“Miss Baes doesn’t know many people. This is her first summer down here.”

“All the more reason to ask her. She’s nice. We talked a long time. She showed me her work.”

“You could hardly fail to see it.”

“She’s got some little stuff inside. She makes things out of paper.”

“We don’t seem to know many artists.”

“You could know her.”

“We are probably too old to interest Miss Baes. You made the remark that Victor was an old man.”

“You’re around the same age as Ben and Mummy,” said Carlotta. She may have thought I was feeling hurt over the business of the senior card.

Lily had wanted to know if the fee went to the sardine canners. She had soft fair hair, pale skin; was allergic to sunlight; wore a limp straw hat tied on with a colored scarf. She had on that day new rope-soled shoes, bought at a local market.

Half the fee went to the canners, half to the state, said the guide. He was a veteran of the First World War, wore all his ribbons. Lily said that seemed reasonable. Some tourists nodded, agreeing. Sharing was a popular concept. A woman with a Central European accent said, quite loudly, that the whole thing should go to the state, thus to the people. The man with the tattoo whispered something to his wife. They seemed
troubled. They had known at least one state that deserved absolutely nothing.

Swallows darted round the tower at the time of Lily. The moat, brown and still, reflected long flanks of stone, threw sparks of reflected sunlight on dark portraits and tapestries. The canning family kept a suite of private rooms, one or two of which could be inspected from the doorway. Chain ropes prevented visitors from wandering inside. Lily slipped to the front line of tourists, without actually pushing, as artlessly as a child. She saw a television set and one book, a paperback about flying saucers. It was quite tattered, as if every fish canner in the world had read it in turn. This was a rich period for space apparitions. There was an uneasy feeling—not quite a fear; something more prickly and insistent—that superior creatures were on their way to judge us and might go back with a poor report.