Sabine (6 page)

No question, my place was on the outside, with Sabine. But no question, either, that my new address took some time to filter through to me. I was in the swim that day and might as well go with it. Even Saint Augustine, I seem to remember, took a bit of time over his conversion, hedged a bit, dawdled a bit over his parting with his pagan mistress. So, one last hunt,
ma copine,
if you don't mind, and let it be a good one.

The hunt was not a good one, it was a disappointment, and serve me right. I did the same with childhood – tried to stay there just that little bit longer than I had a right to, and as a result my games went dead on me.

The hunt went dead on me too – not stone-cold dead but steaming dead, like the flayed body of the stag, ready for partition: Mane, Thekel, Uphares. Some critic, comparing French to English poetry, once said that the first is like a well-schooled horse going through its paces, while the second is a horse that bolts and then takes wing. Well, if my brief experience is anything to go by, you could say the same for French hunting. And possibly for their gardens too.

Not that I want to defend blood sports – how could I? From the position I'm in now sport and blood can't even be spoken of in the same breath – but in every hunt I had taken part in thus far, the adrenaline rush had always been sufficient to sweep the mind clean of other considerations. One little
quick natural death – what was that when set against the waxing bliss of the pursuit? To merge with another animal, to be a centaur again, to have the acumen of a human and the strength of a horse, and to focus these powers on the attainment of a single, simple goal: to follow the chase, to follow the chase. I had first felt this atavistic rapture as a toddler, my mount attached to my mother's by the umbilical cord of a leading rein, and it had never failed me since, not till this day with the de Vibrey deer hounds.

There was no chase, you see, no call for strength and still less for acumen. Everyone knew from the outset exactly where the stag would make for: the river had been made inaccessible to him, so he would head instead for the only expanse of water at his disposal: a small artificial lake, triangular in shape and trap-like in position, situated in a clearing at the centre of the forest. Once he got there, unless they muffed it badly, his escape would be blocked by the hounds on the hypotenuse and by cliffs of tufa on the other two sides, lowish but too high for him to clear. Leaving the narrow circumference of the huntsman's bullet as the only exit.

Knowing this, what need was there for us ladies to sully our velvet habits in the mire or tear them to shreds leaping over hedges and ditches and other obstacles? And what need for the horses to strain their tendons, or the gentlemen to risk a fall and a return to their Paris offices in Paris plaster? None at
all. Naturally, everyone was anxious to show off a bit, do a little cavorting around, sail over a few docile fences (else what was the point in swapping the Citroen for horseback in the first place?), so to this end several long straight avenues had been cut through the forest, each one presenting, to the right, a row of brushwood-covered hurdles about the height of a coffee-table, and to the left, a chequered sward of new-laid tufted grass. The direction of the avenues led inexorably lakewards: all that was missing were the signposts.

Hoppity, hoppity, hop. Over the hurdles we went in a tidy cavalcade and made for the next lot. Those who were less athletically inclined loped along on the grass carpet, parallel to the jumpers, making conversation. A salon in the saddle. A mounted minuet.

Where were the hounds all this leisurely while? Loping through a smaller set of avenues, no doubt. On the sound assumption they knew the measures as well as the riders did. And where was the huntsman? Would he have bothered to go with them? Well, perhaps yes, just in case they took a short cut and ended up in the local butcher's shop before the stag did, but probably no: having seen his pack safely off on the scent, he was cutting comfortably through the forest by his own route. Direct to the place of rendezvous, no coffee-table obstacles for him. Wiping the spit from his horn, maybe, in order to get it to sound – the French hunting horn looked
to be an admirably designed spit-trap – or loading his gun in preparation for the
coup de grâce.

For the kill, to give it its more fitting name, since grace hardly came into the picture. In Suffolk, in Somerset, in Ireland, in all the places I had hunted before, the kill had been an adjunct, significant but at the same time dispensable, like the coda to an already finished and well-rounded piece of music. Here, on the other hand, it was the centrepiece. In its absence our dainty little suite of caprioles would have had no sense at all. Instead of getting things over swiftly, therefore, in a low-key fashion in front of the few spectators who had managed to keep his pace, the huntsman postponed his task until the arrival of the entire field. Piling artifice on artifice, and creating a long interval between grab and strike, which is not a good thing, either for prey or predator. Judges know this. I know it too.

The mare the Marquis had lent me was fast and willing and knew the route by heart, so we were among the first to reach the clearing and I was granted a ringside view of everything that followed. I watched the whippers-in struggle with the hounds, trying to leash the bossier and more obstreperous first so as not to lose control of the rest and spoil the huntsman's timing. I watched the stag, sealed off from the world already by his fear, stand in the shallow water that had betrayed him and observe incuriously his fate approach. I watched the huntsman board a tiny flat-bottomed coracle, armed with
a knife and a gun that he kept switching from hand to hand as if undecided about which to use. Or which to use first. I watched him, after a few vain attempts to lasso the stag by the antlers, settle for the gun. Then, with his weapon at the ready, I watched him glance at the Marquis, who nodded, as much as to say, Yes, we are all assembled, go ahead, and I watched the huntsman nod in reply, take aim and fire, and I watched the stag start and buckle and sink into the water with barely another sound.

I felt nothing all this time – why should I, a hunt veteran like myself? No dismay, no repugnance, nothing save the awareness of an empty space inside me – a new space which one day feeling might occupy. Almost as if the stag had snagged my heart with his wide antlers when he fell and made it larger. I was relieved, but in a conventional way, because good marksmanship was a thing to admire and bungling a thing to deprecate, that the huntsman had wielded his gun better than the rope. As yet it went no further than that.

Or did it? The kill signalled a pause, a shift in group behaviour. From silent spectators everyone turned chattery. People dismounted, cigarettes were lit, and backs were courteously turned on the next part of the proceedings: the retrieval and dismemberment of the carcass. Every back, that is, except mine. I don't know why but I went on watching, still in this vacant-minded spirit: no emotion, just a moral question mark or a row of moral dots. I
watched the flaying of this prey that had cost us zero skill and effort to capture, and I watched the dismemberment and I watched the dressing. I saw the skin and head and antlers being severed from the body, and the hooves, or slots as they're called in hunting jargon, being struck off neatly at the bone but with little strips of skin left floating, ready for plaiting into trophies later; and I saw the meat parts being removed and piled into the wagon. Then I watched as the offal and leftovers were heaped into a steaming pile and covered with the carpet of the skin, to which the head and antlers remained attached, giving the impression there was another animal – an ugly lumpish one of human manufacture – in place of the graceful natural creature that had stood there so shortly before.

Obscenity is a function of culture – a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends. Once the covering up of the entrails was completed the audience swung round again, almost of one accord, and took up its attentive stance. Cigarettes were stamped out, conversations halted, horses remounted. Butchery was something to avert the eyes from but the next item on the programme was evidently not. It was ceremony again, it was a time-honoured part of the show.

(But does time honour things? Sabine would teach me to ask. How? Why? And if it does, ought it to go on doing so? And for how long?)

The huntsman stepped proudly forward, straddling the stag's neck, or where its neck would have been had it still had one in its clumsy new version, and blew his spit-free horn. The horn blast touched something inside me, some old-fangled switch responsive to its old-fangled sound, and I felt right again. Then, putting away his horn, the huntsman seized the antlers with both hands and whisked the skin aside to reveal the glistening pile of offal. At the very same moment the whippers-in slipped the hounds they had been restraining, and the whole pack surged forward and plunged onto the booty in a tugging, growling, slurping, yelping, struggling, slavering mass.

Fragments of the hounds' meal and the deer's earlier meal flew everywhere. The Marquise, who was standing close by me, prudently replaced her goggles. But not before I'd caught a look of most unladylike relish cross her face: three parts Schadenfreude, one part greed. She gave a slight start when she saw I was observing her and hastily hitched her mouth into a far politer type of smile. Mademoiselle, she confided to me with frosty archness, I shouldn't go spoiling my husband's surprise, but unless I am mistaken I think there is a great honour in store for you in just a little moment. When the trophies are distributed,
vous savez.
(No, I didn't savvy anything, but I bet Aimée did; I bet Sabine was right and she and the Marquis had arranged the whole thing beforehand. That was
why she was so keen I should take part in the
chasse.)
If I were you I would dismount now and let my groom here hold your horse for you. Like that you will be free to cross over on foot – she pointed knowledgeably to a knoll on the far side of the canine banqueting floor, where the Marquis and the huntsman were now standing together, sorting through various choice pieces of deer anatomy – to receive your prize. Horses are so silly that way. It's the smell, you know, they don't like it.

Don't they really,
Madame,
well,
à chacun son goût.
My prize, my prize. My trophy. I've still got it somewhere: a hoof, a slot, much smaller and daintier than you'd expect from such a large animal, mounted vertically on a narrow wooden base, up which runs the plait of skin with a nail on the top, and then underneath, on a dull brass plate:
Equipage de Vibrey, Hiver 1958.
I don't recall who was responsible for its curing in the end, but anyway it has lasted well. It bears no exact date, but for those most closely concerned none is needed: for the stag it was his death day and for me the birthday of my love for Sabine. I'm sorry for the stag about this conjunction but that's the way it was.

You'd think I'd never be a romantic again, not after what happened and with the life I lead now. You'd think cynicism would be part of my survival kit. But it's not so. I believe in Cupid's darts and Aristophanes' apples and in Once-in-a-lifetime and Till-death-do-us-part and the whole darn caboosh, because that is the bittersweet fruit of my experience.

I've had other passions since, other affections, other ties, other people who've touched my heart and even those who've messed around with it – I'm human in that respect, we all are, despite the image – but I've never had another love. A child might have filled this empty space, which is why I never had one. No one else to really love, ever, after Sabine.

She was there in the château, sitting in the half-light of the salon correcting homework, when I got back from the hunt, trophy still dangling from my hand. To tell the truth I was at a slight loss as to what to do with this trophy affair. Aimée said there
was no taxidermist locally and we'd have to wait until someone going back to Paris was willing to take it for me. The de Vallemberts maybe, or else the Marquis himself: he was always helpful where the needs of a
jolie jeune fille
were concerned. But meanwhile I was stuck with the thing. I felt impeded and ashamed, like a chicken-killing dog whose victim has been hung round its neck as a deterrent to further raids.

So? Sabine said, scarcely bothering to look up from her work. (That fearsome
alors:
capable of acting as goad, gibe or growl, depending. Now it was a growl.) Enjoy yourself, scampering through the woods with all the
beau monde?

The volume of my ‘no' made her check a little and she raised her head and looked at me square.

No?

No.

And that was it more or less. The space of three nos. I looked back every inch as square, and this was when it happened. It was the first occasion, since the start of Christopher's dare, that our eyes had held each other's gaze for any length of time. Up till then it had been grandmother's footsteps: a long hard stare to make the other one look, and when she did – or when I did – a quick turning away before we were caught. Probably we had known all along the effect that prolonged eye contact would have, and probably that was why we had shunned it. Shyness, fear of the thing that would grow into
being between us. No, not grow, that would burst into being between us. Because that's what love is, take note all you parched old fogeys with your evolution theories and your gardening theories and your painstaking Lego constructions, block on piddling little block, that's what love is and that's how it's born: fully grown like Minerva. First sight, maybe not, but first look, first real deep look.

And anguish and happiness are born along with it – quite different from the wishy-washy namesakes you have felt before. You suffer a sky change. Your world switches solar systems, a different sun rises on it, shedding a different light: warmer, brighter, more intense. The rose-pink of tradition, no, that's songwriters' shorthand, but neither was it
la vie en gris
any more: it was the dawn of my brief
vie en or.
I had a much loved pet rabbit when I was little to which I gave the most splendid name I could think of: Goldie. Forbearing smile from my father at this childish choice, but I stuck by it and still do: gold is tops and gold is the colour I will for ever associate with Sabine. Gold hairs on her skin, on her arms and the back of her neck, gold streaks in her hair, gold flecks in those true tortoiseshell eyes of hers that could never lie, never conceal anything, not even with the lids shut. And gold light on everything from that moment on. And all the darker the darkness when the light went out.