The Chateau (23 page)

They were in plenty of time for Mass, but instead of going directly to the little church she went to Mme Michot's, where she stood gazing at the fruit and vegetables, her expression a mixture of disdain and disbelief, as if Mme Michot were trying to introduce her to persons whose social status was not at all what they pretended. Madame Michot's tomatoes were inferior and her plums were too dear. In the end she bought two lemons,
half a pound of dried figs, and some white raisins that were unaccountably cheap.

As they came out of the little shop, she explained that she had one more errand; her seamstress was making her a green silk dress that was to have the New Look, and it had been promised for today.

At the seamstress's house, Mme Viénot knocked and waited. She knocked again. She stood in the street and called. She stopped and questioned a little girl, who told her reluctantly where the seamstress had said she could be found. Mme Viénot looked at her wrist watch. “I really don't see why she couldn't have been home!” she exclaimed. “We are already quite late for church, and it means going clear to the other side of the village.”

Once more they got on their bicycles. As they were riding side by side over the bumpy cobblestones, she remarked that the village was older than it looked. “There is a legend—whether it is true I cannot say—that Jeanne d'Arc, traveling toward Chinon with her escort of three or four soldiers, arrived at Brenodville at nightfall and was denied a lodging by the monks.”

“Why?”

“Because of her sex, no doubt.”

“Where did she go?” Harold asked. “She slept in a farmhouse, I believe.”

He looked around for Gothic stonework and found, here and there, high up out of harm's way, a small gargoyle at the end of a waterspout, a weathered stone pinnacle, a carved lintel, or some other piece of medieval decoration, proving that the story was at least possible. The houses themselves—sour, secretive, commonplace-looking—said that if Jeanne d'Arc were to come again in the middle of the twentieth century, she would get the same inhospitable reception, and not merely from the monks but from everybody.

The house where the little girl had said the seamstress said she could be found was locked and shuttered, and no one came
to the door. At five minutes of twelve, they arrived at the vestibule of the church. Mme Viénot genuflected in the aisle outside the family pew and then moved in and knelt beside her mother. Harold followed her. Half kneeling and half sitting, he tried not to look so much like a Protestant. The drama on the altar was reaching its climax. A little silver bell tinkled. The congregation spoke. (Was it Latin? Was it French?) Mme Viénot struck her flat chest three times and seemed to be asking for something from the depths of her heart, but though he listened intently, he could not hear what it was; it was lost in the asking of other low voices all around them. The bell tinkled again and again, insistently. There was a moment of hushed expectation and then the congregation rose from their knees with a roaring sound that nobody paid any attention to, filled the aisle, streamed out of the chill of the little church into the more surprising chill of a cold gray July day, and, pleased that an essential act was done, broke out into smiles and conversation.

Harold waited beside the two bicycles while Mme Viénot went into the stationer's for her mother's
Figaro
. He looked around for Mme Straus-Muguet, not sure whether she had meant them to meet her here in the village after church or where. And if he saw her beckoning to him, how would he escape from Mme Viénot? Mme Straus was nowhere in sight now, and he had made two trips downstairs after breakfast without encountering her.

When Mme Viénot took a long, thin, empty wine bottle out of her saddlebag and went into still another shop, he followed her out of curiosity and was introduced to M. Canourgue, whose stock was entirely out of sight, under a wooden counter or in the adjoining room. She counted out more ration coupons, and explained that Harold was American and a friend of M. Georges who was so fond of chocolates. The wine bottle went into the back room and came back full of olive oil. Mme Viénot bought sardines, and this and that. When they were outside in the street again, Harold saw that the canvas saddlebag of her bicycle
was crammed, and so he took the bottle from her and placed it carefully on its side in his saddle bag, which was empty.

As they rode home, he asked where she had learned English and she said: “From my governess … And in England.”

Her education had been rounded off with a year in London, during which she had lived with a private family. She admired the British, she said, but did not particularly like them. “They dress so badly, in those ill-fitting suits,” she said. He waited, hoping that she would say that she liked Americans, but she didn't.

They dismounted in the courtyard and wheeled their bicycles into the kitchen entry, where Mme Viénot let out a cry of distress. He saw that she was looking at his saddlebag, and said: “What's the matter?” She pointed to the wine bottle lying on its side. “The cork has come out,” she said, in the voice of doom.

He started to apologize, and then realized that she wasn't paying any attention to what he said. She had picked up the bottle and was examining the outside, turning it around slowly. It was dry. They examined the saddlebag. Not a drop of oil had been spilled! He learned a new French phrase—“une espèce de miracle”—and used it frequently in conversation from that time on.

Mme Straus-Muguet was in the drawing room, with M. and Mme Carrère and Mme Bonenfant and Barbara and Alix and Eugène. They had all been invited to take an apéritif with her on Sunday morning. An unopened bottle of Martinique rum stood on the little round table. Thérèse brought liqueur glasses and the corkscrew. The rum loosened tongues, smoothed away differences of background, of age, of temperament, of nationality. The conversation became animated; their eyes grew bright. Thérèse removed the screen, and they all rose and, still talking, floated on a wave of intense cordiality through the hall and into the dining room, where the long-promised poulet awaited them. As Harold unfolded his clean napkin, he decided that life in the country was not so bad, after all.

The gaiety did not quite last out the meal. The nine people around the table sank back, one after another, into their ordinary selves. There had been no real, or at least no lasting, change but merely a sleight-of-hand demonstration. As some people know how to make three balls appear and disappear and a whole flock of doves fly out of an opera hat, Mme Straus-Muguet knew how to lift a dead social weight. Out of the most unpromising elements she had just now constructed an edifice of gaiety, an atmosphere of concert pitch. Shreds of her triumph lasted until teatime, when Mme Viénot surrendered the silver teapot to her, and she presided—modestly, but also as if she were accustomed to having this compliment paid her.

Sitting with the others, in the circle of chairs at one end of the drawing room, Barbara listened to what Alix and Eugène were saying to each other. His train left at six, and there were last-minute instructions and reminders, of a kind that she was familiar with, and that made her feel she knew them intimately merely because the French girl was saying just what she herself might have said in these circumstances.

“You know where the bread coupons are?”

“You put them in the desk, didn't you?”

“Yes. You'll have to go and get new ones when they expire. Do you think you will remember to?”

“If I don't, my stomach will remind me.”

“I have arranged with Mme Emile to buy ice for you, and butter once a week. And if you want to ask someone to dinner, Françoise will come and cook it for you. She will be there Fridays, to clean the apartment and change the linen on your bed. Can you remember to leave a note for the laundress? I meant to do it and forgot. She is to wash your dressing gown. Is it late?”

“There is plenty of time,” Eugène said, glancing at his wrist watch.

“If it should turn hot, leave the awning down at our window and close the shutters, and it will be cool when you come home
at night. It might be better to leave all the shutters closed—but then it will be gloomy. Whatever you think best. And if you are too tired after work to write to me, it will be all right. I will write to you every day.… ”

A few minutes more passed, and then he stood up and started around the circle, shaking hands and saying good-by. His manner with M. and Mme Carrère was simply that of a man of breeding. And yet beneath the confident surface there was something a little queer, Harold thought, watching them. Was Eugène trying to convey to them that his father would not have permitted them to be introduced to him?

When he arrived at Harold and Barbara, he smiled, and Harold said as they shook hands: “We'll see you on Friday.”

Eugène nodded, turned away, and then turned back to them and said: “You are coming up to Paris—”

“Next Sunday.”

“Good. We will all be taking the train together. That is what I had hoped. And where will you stay?”

Harold told him.

“Why do you spend money for a hotel,” Eugène said, “when there is room in my mother-in-law's apartment?”

Harold hesitated, and Eugène went on: “I won't be able to spend as much time with you as I'd like, but it will be a pleasure for me, having you and Barbara there when I come home at night.”

“But it will make trouble for you.”

“It will be no trouble to anyone.”

Harold looked at Barbara inquiringly, and misinterpreted her answering look.

“In that case—” he began, and before he could finish his sentence she said: “Can we let you know later?”

“When I come down next week end,” Eugène said, and bent down to kiss Mme Bonenfant's frail hand.

Harold thought a slight shadow had passed over his face when
they did not accept his invitation, and then he decided that this was not so. The relations between them were such that there was no possibility of hurt feelings or any misunderstanding.

Later, Barbara said that she would have been delighted to accept the invitation except for one thing: it should have come from Alix's mother. “Or at least he should have made it clear that Mme Cestre had been consulted before he invited us. And also, perhaps we ought to be a little more cautious; we ought to know a little more what we're getting into.”

“E
UGÈNE ENJOYED TALKING
to you so much,” Alix said, in the petit salon after dinner. “It was a great pleasure to him to find you here. He learned many things about America which interested him.”

“The things he wanted to know about, most of the time I couldn't tell him,” Harold said. “Partly because nobody knows the answer to some of his questions, and partly because I didn't know the right words to explain in French the way things are. Also, there are lots of things I should know that I don't. Sometimes we couldn't understand each other at all, and when I was ready to give up he would insist that I go on. And eventually, out of my floundering, he seemed to understand what it was I was trying to say. I've never had an experience quite like it.”

“Eugène is very intuitive.… I have been telling him that he ought to learn English, and until now he hasn't cared to take the trouble. But it distressed him that I could speak to you in your language, badly though I do it, and he—”

“Your English is excellent.”

“I am out of the habit. I make mistakes in grammar. Eugène has decided to go to the Berlitz School and learn English, so that when you come back to France he will be able to talk to
you. So you see, you have accomplished something which I try to do and couldn't.”

She turned away in order to repeat to her mother a remark of M. Carrère's that had pleased the company. Mme Cestre's face lit up. She was reminded of an observation of her husband's that in turn pleased M. Carrère. Alix waited until she saw that this conversation was proceeding without her help and then she turned back to Harold. “Eugène was so excited to learn that you have been married three years. We thought you were on your wedding journey.”

“How long have you been married?”

“A little over a year. Eugène thought that in marriage, after a while, people changed. He thought they grew less fond of one another, and that there was no way of avoiding it. When he saw you and your wife together, the way you are with each other, it made him more hopeful.”

“Where did you meet?” Harold said, to change the subject. He was perfectly willing to discuss most subjects but not this, because of a superstitious fear that his words would come back to him under ironical circumstances.

“When the Germans came,” she said, “my father was in the South, and we were separated from him for some time. We were here with my grandmother. But as soon as we were able, we joined my father in Aix-en-Provence, and it was there that I met Eugène. He was different from the boys I knew. I thought he was very handsome and intelligent, and I enjoyed talking to him. At that time he was thinking of taking holy orders. I felt I could say anything to him—that he was like my brother.”