The Chateau (22 page)

He listened to the pitch, the intonations, of Mme de Boisgaillard's voice as if he were hearing a new kind of music, and decided that there were as many different ways of speaking French as there were French people. Because of her voice he would have trusted absolutely anything she said. But he trusted her anyway, because of the naturalness and simplicity of her manner. Looking at her, he felt he knew her very well, without knowing anything at all about her. It was as if they had played together as children. Her husband's voice was rather high, thin, and reedy. It was also the voice of someone who knows exactly what to respect and what to be contemptuous of. So strange that two such different people should have married …

Mme de Boisgaillard spoke English fluently. In an undertone, with a delicate smile, she supplied Barbara, who sat next to her, with the word or phrase that would limit the context of an otherwise puzzling statement or explain the point of an amusing remark. Harold clutched at these straws eagerly. When Mme Viénot translated for them, it was usually some word that he knew already, and so she was never the slightest help. He watched M. de Boisgaillard until their eyes met across the table.
The young Frenchman immediately looked away, and Harold was careful not to look at him again.

Mme Viénot was eager to learn whether her nephew thought the Schumann cabinet would jump during September. The young man and M. Carrère both thought it would—not because of a crisis, easy though it was to find one, but because of political squabbles that were of no importance except to the people directly involved.

“Why would they wait until September?” Harold asked. “Why not in August?”

“Because August is the month when Parliament takes its annual vacation,” Mme Viénot said. “No government has ever been known to jump at this time of year. They always wait until September.”

The joke was thoroughly enjoyed, and Mme Straus-Muguet nodded approvingly at Harold for having made it possible.

After the dessert course, napkins were folded in such a way as to conceal week-old wine stains and then inserted in their identifying rings.

Barbara saw that Mme Straus was aware that she had been looking at her, and said: “I have been admiring your little diamond heart.”

“You like it?” Mme Straus said. From her tone of voice one would almost have supposed that she was about to undo the clasp of the fine gold chain and present the little heart, chain and all, to the young woman at the far end of the table. However, her hands remained in her lap, and she said: “It was given to me by a friend, long long ago,” leaving them to decide for themselves whether the fiery little object was the souvenir of a romantic attachment. Mme Viénot gave her a glance of frank disbelief and pushed her chair back from the table.

The ladies left the dining room in the order of their age. Harold started to follow M. Carrère out of the room and to his surprise felt a hand on his sleeve, detaining him. M. de Boisgaillard drew him over to the other side of the room and asked him,
in French, how he liked it at the château. Harold started to answer tactfully and saw that the face now looking down into his expected a truthful answer, was really interested, and would know if he was not candid; so he was, and the Frenchman laughed and suggested that they walk outside in the garden.

He opened one of the dining-room windows and stepped out, and Harold followed him around the corner of the house and through the gap in the hedge and into the potager. With a light rain—it was hardly more than a mist—falling on their shoulders, they walked up and down the gravel paths. The Frenchman asked how rich the ordinary man in America was. How many cars were there in the whole country? Did American women really rule the roost? And did they love their husbands or just love what they could get out of them? Was it true that everybody had running water and electricity? But not true that everybody owned their own house and every house had a dishwasher and a washing machine? Did Harold have any explanation to offer of how, in a country made up of such different racial strains, every man should be so passionately interested in machinery? Was it the culture or was it something that stemmed from the early days of the country—from its colonial period? How was America going to solve the Negro problem? Was it true that all Negroes were innately musical? And were they friendly with the white people who exploited them or did they hate them one and all? And how did the white people feel about Negroes? What did Americans think of Einstein? of Freud? of Stalin? of Churchill? of de Gaulle? Did they feel any guilt on account of Hiroshima? Did they like or dislike the French? Had he read the Kinsey Report, and was it true that virtually every American male had had some homosexual experience? And so on and so on.

The less equipped you are to answer such questions, the more flattering it is to be asked them, but to answer even superficially in a foreign language you need more than a tourist's vocabulary.

“You don't speak German?”

Harold shook his head. They stood looking at each other helplessly.

“You don't speak
any
English?” Harold said.

“Pas un mot.”

A few minutes later, as they were walking and talking again, the Frenchman forgot and shifted to German anyway, and Harold stopped him, and they went on trying to talk to each other in French. Very often Harold's answer did not get put into the right words or else in his excitement he did not pronounce them well enough for them to be understood, the approximation being some other word entirely, and the two men stopped and stared at each other. Then they tried once more, and impasses that seemed hopeless were bridged after all; or if this didn't happen, the subject was abandoned in favor of a new subject.

It began to rain in earnest, and they turned up their coat collars and went on walking and talking.

“Shall we go in?” the Frenchman asked, a moment later.

As they went back through the gap in the hedge, Harold said to himself that it was a different house they were returning to. By the addition of a man of the family it had changed; it had stopped being matriarchal and formal and cold, and become solid and hospitable and human, like other houses.

At the door of the petit salon, they separated. Harold took in the room at a glance. M. Carrère sat looking quite forlorn, the one man among so many women. And did he imagine it or was Mme Viénot put out with them? There was an empty chair beside Mme de Boisgaillard and he sat down in it and tried once more to follow the conversation. He learned that the woman he had taken for the children's nurse or possibly M. de Boisgaillard's mother was Mme de Boisgaillard's mother instead; which meant that she was Mme Viénot's sister and had a perfect right to be here. What he had failed to perceive, like the six blind men and the elephant, was that she was deaf and so could not take part in general conversation. During dinner she did not
even try, but now if someone spoke directly to her she adjusted the pointer of the little black box that she held to her ear as if it were a miniature radio, and seemed to understand.

When the others retired to their rooms at eleven o'clock, Eugène de Boisgaillard swept the Americans ahead of him, through a doorway and down a second-floor hall they had not been in before, and they found themselves in a bedroom with a dressing room off it. They stood looking down at the baby, who was fast asleep on her stomach but escaped entirely from the covers, at right angles to the crib, with her knees tucked under her, her feet crossed like hands, her rump in the air.

Her mother straightened her around and covered her, and then they tiptoed back into the larger room and began to talk. Mme de Boisgaillard translated and summarized quickly and accurately, leaving them free to go on to the next thing they wanted to say.

Unlike M. Carrère, Eugène de Boisgaillard did not hate all Germans. His political views were Liberal and democratic. He was also as curious as a cat. He wanted to know how long Harold and Barbara had been married, and how they had met one another, and what part of America they grew up in. He asked their first names and then what their friends called them. He asked them to call him by his first name. And then the questions began again, as if the first thing in the morning he and they were starting out for the opposite ends of the earth and there was only tonight for them to get to know each other. Once, when a question was so personal that Harold thought he must have misunderstood, he turned to Mme de Boisgaillard and she smiled and shook her head ruefully and said: “I hope you do not mind. That is the way he is. When I think he cannot possibly have said what I think I have heard him say, I know that is just what he did say.”

At her husband's suggestion, she left them and went downstairs to see what there was in the larder, and they were surprised to discover that without her they couldn't talk to each other.
They waited awkwardly until she came into the room carrying a tray with a big bowl of sour cream and four smaller bowls, a sugar bowl, and spoons.

Eugène de Boisgaillard pointed to the empty fireplace and said: “No andirons. Does the one in your room work?”

Harold explained that it had a shield over it.

“During the Occupation the Germans let the forests be depleted—intentionally—and so one is allowed to cut only so much wood,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and if they used it now there would not be enough for the winter. Poor Tante! She drives herself so hard.… The thing I always forget is what a beautiful smell this house has. It may be the box hedge, though Mummy says it is the furniture polish, but it doesn't smell like any other house in the world.”

“Have your shoes begun to mildew?” Eugène de Boisgaillard said.

Barbara shook her head.

“They will,” he said.

“You will drive them away,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and then we won't have anyone our age to talk to.”

“We will go after them,” Eugéne de Boisgaillard said, “talking every step of the way. The baby's sugar ration,” he said, saluting the sugar bowl.

Sweetened with sugar, the half-solidified sour cream was delicious.

“Have you enjoyed knowing M. Carrère?” Eugène asked.

Harold said that M. Carrère seemed to be a very kind man.

“He's also very rich,” Eugène said. “Everything he touches turns into more money, more gilt-edged stock certificates. He is a problem to the Bank of France. Toinette has a special tone of voice in speaking of him—have you noticed? Where does she place him, I wonder? On some secondary level. Not with Périclès, or Beethoven. Not with Louis XIV. With Saint-Simon, perhaps … In the past year I have learned how to interpret the public face. It has been very useful. The public face is much
more ponderous and explicit than the private face and it asks only one question: ‘What is it you want?' And whatever you want is unfortunately just the thing it isn't convenient for you to be given.… Do you get on well with your parents, Harold?”

He listened attentively to Alix's translation of the answer to this question and then said: “My father is very conservative. He has never in his whole life gone to the polls and voted.”

“Why not?” Barbara asked.

“His not voting is an act of protest against the Revolution.”

“You don't mean the Revolution of 1789?”

“Yes. He does not approve of it.”

Tears of amusement ran down Harold's cheeks and he reached for his handkerchief and wiped them away.

“What does your father do?” Barbara asked.

“He collects porcelain. That's all he has done his whole life.”

In a moment Harold had to get his handkerchief out again as Eugène launched forth on the official and unofficial behavior of his superior, the Minister of Planning and External Affairs.

At one o'clock the Americans stood up to go, and, still talking, Eugène and Alix accompanied them down the upstairs hall until they were in their own part of the house. Whispering and tittering like naughty children, they said good night. Was Mme Viénot awake, Harold wondered. Could she hear them? Did she disapprove of such goings on?

Eugène said that he had one last question to ask.

“Don't,” Alix whispered.

“Why not? Why shouldn't I ask them?… Is there a double bed in your room?”

Harold shook his head.

“I knew it!” Eugène said. “I told Alix that there wouldn't be. Don't you find it strange—don't you think it is
extraordinary
that all the double beds in the house are occupied by single women?”

They said good night all over again, and the Americans crept
up the stairs, which, even so, creaked frightfully. When Barbara fell asleep, Harold wrapped the covers around her snugly and moved over into his own damp bed and lay awake for some time, thinking. What had happened this evening was so different from anything else that had happened to them so far on their trip, and he felt that a part of him that had been left behind in America, without his realizing it, had now caught up with him. He thought with wonder how far off he could be about people. For Eugène was totally unlike what he had seemed at first to be. He was not cold and insincere but amusing and unpredictable, and masculine, and direct, and intelligent, and like a wonderful older brother. Knowing him was reason enough for them to come back time after time, through the years, to France.…

A
T BREAKFAST
the next morning, Mme Viénot's manner with the Americans did not convey approval or disapproval. She urged on them a specialty of the countryside—bread with meat drippings poured over it—and then, folding her napkin, excused herself to go and dress for church. Harold asked if they could go to church also, and she said: “Certainly.”

At ten thirty the dog cart appeared in front of the house, with the gardener in the driver's seat and his white plow horse hitched to the traces. It had been arranged that Barbara should go to church in the cart with Mme Straus-Muguet and Alix and Eugène; that Mme Bonenfant should ride in the Bentley with M. and Mme Carrère; that Harold and Mme Viénot should bicycle. She rode her own, he was given the cook's, which got out of his control, in spite of Mme Viénot's repeated warnings. Unaccustomed to bicycles without brakes, he came sailing into the village a good two minutes ahead of her.