The Blessing (3 page)

‘Where are they to be married?’ she asked. ‘Shall I come?’

‘I hope so indeed, and to luncheon afterwards. Twelve o’clock at the Caxton Hall.’

Mrs O’Donovan, who was, of course, a Roman Catholic, was shocked and startled. ‘A civil marriage only? Conrad, is that wise? The Valhuberts are an intensely Catholic family, you know.’

‘I know. I did think it rather odd. But Grace is not a Catholic yet, though I suppose in time she will become one. Anyway,’ he said, getting up to go, ‘that’s what they’ve arranged. Nobody asked my advice about any of it, naturally. When I think how I used to turn to my dear old father – never moved a step without his approval –’

‘Are you sure?’ she said, laughing. ‘I seem to remember a river party – something about the Derby – a journey to Vienna –’

‘Yes, yes, I don’t say I was never young. I am speaking about broad outlines of policy –’

Grace went out and bought a hat, and dressing for her wedding consisted in putting on this hat. As the occasion was so momentous she took a long time, trying it a little more to the right, to the left, to the back. While pretty in itself, a pretty little object, it was strangely unbecoming to her rather large, beautiful face. Nanny fussed about the room in a rustle of tissue paper.

‘Like this, Nan?’

‘Quite nice.’

‘Darling, you’re not looking. Or like this?’

‘I don’t see much difference.’ Deep sigh.

‘Darling! What a sigh!’

‘Yes, well I can’t say this is the sort of wedding I’d hoped for.’

‘I know. It’s a shame, but there you are. The war.’

‘A foreigner.’

‘But such a blissful one. Oh dear, oh dear, this hat. What is wrong with it d’you think?’

‘Very nice indeed, I expect, but then I always liked Mr Hugh.’

‘Hughie is bliss too, of course, but he went off.’

‘He went to fight for King and Country, dear.’

‘Well, Charles-Edouard is going to fight for President and Country. I don’t see much difference except that he is marrying me first. Oh darling, this hat. It’s not quite right, is it?’

‘Never mind, dear, nobody’s going to look at you.’

‘On my wedding day?’

But when Charles-Edouard met them at the registry office he looked at her and said, ‘This hat is terrible, perhaps you’d better take it off.’

Grace did so with some relief, shook out her pretty golden hair, and gave the hat to Nanny, who, since it was made of flowers, looked rather like a small, cross, elderly bridesmaid clasping a bouquet.

They went for their honeymoon to Sir Conrad’s house, Bunbury Park, in Wiltshire, and were very happy. When, during the lonely years which followed, Grace tried to recall those ten short days, the picture that always came to her mind was of Charles-Edouard moving furniture. The central block of the house having been requisitioned by soldiers, he and Grace occupied three rooms in one of the wings, and Charles-Edouard now set himself the task of filling these rooms with objects of art. He seemed not to feel the piercing cold of the unheated hall, with its dome and marble floor, where most of the furniture had been put away, but bustled about in semi-darkness, lifting dust sheets, scrambling under pyramids of tables and chairs, opening cupboards and peering into packing cases, like a squirrel in search of nuts. From time to time, with a satisfied grunt, he would pounce upon some object and scurry off with it. If he could not move it alone he made the soldiers help him. It took eight of them to lug the marble bust of an Austrian archduke up the stairs into Grace’s bedroom. Nanny and the housekeeper clearly thought Charles-Edouard was out of his head, and exchanged very meaning looks and sniffs while the archduke was making his painful progress. One of Marie Antoinette’s brothers, bewigged and bemedalled, the Fleece upon his elaborately folded stock, he now entirely dominated the room with his calm, stupid, German face.

‘He looks dull,’ said Grace.

‘But so beautiful. You look too much at the subject – can’t you see that it’s a wonderful piece of sculpture?’

‘Come for a walk, Charles-Edouard, the woods are heavenly today.’

It was early spring, very fine and dry. The big beeches, not yet in leaf, stood naked on their copper carpet, while the other trees had petticoats of pale green. The birds were already tuning up an orchestra as if preparing to accompany those two stars of summer, the cuckoo and the nightingale, as soon as they should make their bow. It seemed a pity to spend such days creeping about under dust sheets.

‘Nature I hate,’ said Charles-Edouard, as he went on with his self-appointed task. So she walked in the sunny woods alone, until she discovered that if she could propose an 18th-century mausoleum, Siamese dairy, wishing well, hermit’s grotto or cottage orné as the object for a walk, he would accompany her. He strode along at an enormous speed, often breaking into a run, seizing her hand and dragging her with him.
‘Il neige des plumes de tourterelles’
, he sang.

Her father’s park abounded in follies, quite enough to last out their visit. What did they talk about all day? She never could remember. Charles-Edouard sang his little songs, made his little jokes, and told her a great deal about the objects he found under the dust sheets, so that names like Carlin, Cressent, Thomire, Reisener and Gouthière always thereafter reminded her of their honeymoon. Her room became transformed from a rather dull country house bedroom into a corner of the Wallace Collection. But he hardly talked about himself at all, or his family, or life in Paris, or what they would do after the war. A fortnight from their wedding day he left England and went back to Cairo.

Grace soon realized that she was expecting a child. When the air raids began Sir Conrad sent her to live at Bunbury, and here, in a bedroom full of works of art collected by his father, Sigismond de Valhubert opened his eyes upon the calm, stupid face of an Austrian archduke.

3

‘He is a little black boy – oh, he is black. I never expected you to have a baby with such eyes, it doesn’t seem natural or right.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘I think one gets tired of always gazing into these blue eyes. I like this better.’

‘Such a funny sort of name, too,’ Nanny went on, ‘not like anything. If he’d had been called after his father he could have been Charlie, or Eddy, but Sigi –! Well, I don’t care to say it in the street, makes people look round.’

‘But you’re so seldom in streets, darling.’

‘Salisbury. People stop and look at him as it is.’

‘That’s because he’s such a love. Anyway, I think he’s a blessing.’

And so of course did Nanny, though she would have thought him an even more blessed blessing had he resembled his mother more and his father less.

Grace stayed on at Bunbury. She had not meant to, she had meant to go back to London and the A.R.P. as soon as Sigi was weaned, but somehow, in the end, she stayed on. She fell into various country jobs, ran a small holding, and looked after the baby as much as Nanny allowed. Sir Conrad went down to see her at week-ends, and sometimes she spent a few days with him in London. So the years of the war went by calmly and rather happily for Grace, who never much minded being alone. She had a placid, optimistic nature, and was never tortured by anxious thoughts about Charles-Edouard, or doubted that he would return safely in due course. Nor did she doubt that when, in due course, he had safely returned, their marriage would be one of Elysian happiness.

Her father and Mrs O’Donovan selected many books for her to read, in preparation for a French life. They told her she ought to be studying the religious writings of the 17th, the drama and philosophy of the 18th, the prose and politics of the 19th centuries. They sent her, as well as quantities of classics and many novels and
mémoires
, Michelet in sixteen morocco volumes and Sainte-Beuve in sixteen paper ones; they sent her Bodley’s
France
and Brogan’s
Third Republic
, saying she would feel a fool if she did not understand the French electoral, judicial, and municipal systems. Grace did make spasmodic efforts to get on with all this homework, but she was too mentally lazy and untrained to do more than nibble at it. In the evenings she liked to turn on the wireless, think of Charles-Edouard, and stitch away at a carpet destined to be literally laid at his feet. It was squares of petit point, in a particularly crude Victorian design of roses and lilies of the valley and blue ribbons. Grace thought it too pretty for words.

She lived in a dream of Charles-Edouard, so that as the years went on he turned, in her mind, into somebody quite divorced from all reality and quite different from the original. And the years did go on. He came back for three hectic days in July 1940 which hardly counted, so little did Grace see of him, and after that seemed to go farther and farther away, Fort Lamy, Ceylon, and finally Indo-China. When the war ended he was not immediately demobilized, his return was announced again and again, only to be put off, so that it was more than seven years after their wedding when at last the telephone bell rang and Grace heard his voice speaking from Heath Row. This time he was unannounced; she had thought him still in the East.

‘Our Ambassador was on the plane with me, and he is sending me straight down in his motor,’ he said. ‘It seems I’ll be with you in an hour or two.’

Grace felt that, whereas the seven years had gone in a flash, this hour or two would never never end. She went up to the nursery. Sigi was having his bath before bedtime.

‘Don’t let him go to sleep,’ she said to Nanny. ‘Guess what, darling – his father will be here presently.’

Nanny received this news with the air of one resigned to the inevitable fact that all things, especially good things, have their term. She gave a particularly fearful sniff and said, ‘Well, I only hope he won’t over-excite the poor little fellow. You know what it’s like getting him off, evenings, as well as I do.’

‘Oh, Nanny, just for once, darling, it wouldn’t matter if he stayed up all night.’

She left the nursery and wandered down the drive to the lodge, where she sat on one of the stone stumps that, loosely chained together, enclosed grassy mounds on either side of the gates. There was no traffic on the little road outside the park, and beyond it, bordered by clumps of wild rose bushes, the deep woods were full of song. It was high summer now, that week when cuckoo and nightingale give their best, their purest performances. The evening was warm, but she felt glad of a cardigan; she had begun to shiver like a nervous dog.

At last the motor drove up. Charles-Edouard sprang out of it and hugged her, and then she remembered exactly what he was like as a real person, and the other, dream Charles-Edouard, was chased into the back of her mind. Not quite chased away, she often thereafter remembered him with affection, but separated from reality.

They got back into the motor and drove up to the house.

‘You are looking very beautiful,’ he said, ‘and very happy. I was afraid you might have become sad, all these years and years down here, away from me.’

‘I longed terribly for you.’

‘I know. You must have.’

‘Don’t tease, Charles-Edouard. But if we had to be separated I would rather have been here than anywhere. I love the country, you know, and besides, I had plenty to do.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Oh, goats and things.’

‘Goats must be very dull.’

‘No, really not. Then of course there was Sigi. Are you excited for him?’

‘Very very much excited.’

‘Come then, let’s go straight up to the nursery.’

But outside Grace’s bedroom Charles-Edouard caught her hand and pointed sternly to the door. ‘I must see if the archduke is still there,’ he said, and they went in.

Grace said presently, ‘If you had been killed in the war, it would have finished me off.’

‘Ah! Would you have died? That’s very nice.’

‘Yes, I couldn’t have gone on living.’

‘And would it have been a violent death by poison or a slow death by misery?’

‘Which would you prefer?’

‘Poison would be very flattering.’

‘All right then, poison. Now come on, let’s go to Sigi.’

In the day nursery Nanny’s face was a picture of disapproval. ‘Funny thing,’ she said, ‘I thought I heard a car quite half an hour ago. Time he went off to sleep, poor mite.’

They went through into the night nursery. Sigi was standing on his bed. He had black, silky curls and clever little black eyes, and he was always laughing.

‘Have you ever seen me before?’ he said to his father.

‘Never. But I can guess who you are.’

‘Sigismond de Valhubert, a great boy of nearly seven. Are you my papa?’

‘Let me present myself – Charles-Edouard de Valhubert.’ They shook hands.

‘What are you?’

‘I am a colonel in the French Air Force, retired. And what are you going to be?’

‘A superman,’ said the child.

Charles-Edouard was much gratified by this reply. ‘Always the same old story,’ he said, ‘
l’ Empereur, la gloire, hommage à la Grande Armée
. I shall have a lot to tell you about the Marshal of France, your ancestor. Do you know that at home we have a standard from the battlefield of Friedland?’

Sigi looked intensely puzzled, and Grace said, ‘I’m afraid his superman isn’t Napoleon, not yet at least, but Garth.’

‘Goethe?’

‘Oh dear – no. Garth. It’s a strip – I can’t explain, I’ll have to show you some time. It’s rather horrible really, but we don’t seem able to do without it.’

‘Garth, you know, in the
Daily
,’ Sigismond said. His grandfather had forbidden him to call it the
Mirror
so he compromised with the
Daily
. ‘When I’m big I’m going to have a space ship like Garth and go to the –’

‘But what do you know, Sigismond? Can you count? Can you read, and can you name the forty Kings of France?’

‘Forty?’ said Grace. ‘Are there really? Poor little boy.’

‘Well eighteen are Louis and ten are Charles. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I always forget the others myself.’

‘Isn’t he a darling?’ said Grace, as they went downstairs.