The Chateau (47 page)

The children were about four and six. Both were blond and sturdy. The little girl looked like a doll, the boy reminded Harold of those fat Salzburgers whose proud stomachs preceded them and whose wives followed two steps behind, carrying the luggage. It was partly the little boy's costume—he had on what looked like a cheap version of Bavarian lederhosen—and partly his sullen expression, which might have been nothing more than the light the picture was taken by or a trick of the camera, but it made him look like a Storm Trooper in the small size. The children's feet were partly covered by a large square block of building stone. It could have been ruins or a neglected back yard. The little boy's hands made it clear that he was only a child and that there was no telling what kind of German he would be when he grew up.

“I don't feel like being their uncle,” Harold said as he put the letter back in its envelope. “ ‘A strong government of experts, assisted by a parliament with consultative rights only …' It's all beyond me. It depresses me.”

“Why should it depress you?” Barbara said. “It's a truthful letter.”

“But they haven't learned anything—anything at all. He feels
sorry for the German women but not a word about the others, all over the world. Not a word about who started it. Not a word about the Jews.”

“What can he say? They're dead. Maybe he doesn't speak about it because he can't bear to.”

“He could say he was sorry.”

“Maybe. But you aren't a Jew. What right have you to ask for or receive an apology in their name? And how do you know they would accept his apology if he said it? I wouldn't—not if it was my relatives that were sent to the gas chambers.”

“I don't know,” he said sadly. “I don't know anything. All I know is I'm tired, and I guess I'm ready to go home.”

She looked at him, to see if he really meant it. He didn't. But she was ready to go home, and had been for some time. In Beaulieu her period was five days late. This disappointment she was not able to leave behind her in the South of France. She woke to it every morning, and it confronted her in the bathroom mirror when she washed her face. For his sake she concealed the weight on her heart and did not allow herself so much as a sigh. But more and more her pleasure was becoming second-hand, the reflection of his.

J
UST WHEN
they had got used to the idea that they had been cast out, and had managed to accept it philosophically, they discovered that they were not cast out; there had been no change in the way that the French felt about them.

Sabine was the first to call. Harold asked about Alix, and Sabine said that they were back too—they had all come up from the country together.

And while he was out doing an errand, Alix called and asked them to tea on Monday.

“What did she sound like?” he asked.

“Herself,” Barbara said.

“You didn't hear anything in her voice that might indicate she was hurt or anything?”

“No. She was just affectionate, as always.”

“Perhaps we imagined it,” he said. “It will be so nice to see them and the apartment again. Did she say Eugène would be there?”

“She said he wouldn't be there.”

The next morning, Barbara heard him say: “ ‘My dear little friends, do not come to Le Mans,' ” and called out from the bathroom, where she was brushing her teeth: “It's too far!”

“Nobody's going to Le Mans,” he said, and doubled over with laughter.

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Mme Straus. She's coming after all. Just listen:
‘Tuesday … Mes petits amis chéris, Do not come to LeMans'
—underlined—
‘It is I who will arrive in Paris Saturday evening, Gare Montparnasse, at six o'clock. I have arranged all in order to see you
 …
”

In the same mail, there was an invitation from Jean Allégret, who had been in the country, and had just returned to Paris and found their note, and was inviting them to have dinner with him at his club on Friday.

“Do you want to?” Barbara asked dubiously.

“It might be interesting,” Harold said.

His pajamas had split up the back and, later that morning, he went out to buy a new pair. When he came back, he showed them to her and said: “Look—they're made of parachute cloth.”

“Not really?”

“So the clerk said. I guess they don't have anything else. Anyway, something wonderful happened. I asked him if they weren't too large and he looked at me and said no, they were the normal size.… In France I'
m
the normal size.
Not
football players. The first time in my life anybody has ever said that.… It's so beautiful out. No matter which direction you look. The clerk was the normal size too. Everything in France is normal. It doesn't seem possible that Tuesday morning we're going to get on a train and— Except that maybe we won't. The railway strike is supposed to start Monday or Tuesday.”

“What will we do if there are no trains?”

“There probably will be,” he said.

“Would you like to stay?”

“A few days longer, you mean?”

“No, for good.”

“We can't,” he said soberly. “There is no way that it is possible, or reasonable. And besides, they tried that, in the twenties, and it didn't work. In the end they all had to come home.”

He read in
La Semaine de Paris
the plays that were to be
performed at the Comédie Française and the Odéon, the movies, the concerts, for the first three days after they would be gone. Like a man sentenced to execution, he had a sudden stabbing vision of the world as it would be without him. The day after they left, there was to be a performance of
Louise
at the Comique.

And he was haunted by that book he felt he shouldn't buy—the book of photographs of the old houses on the Ile St. Louis. And by the Ile St. Louis itself. Every time he went across the river, there it was, in plain sight, just beyond the Ile de la Cité. He kept trying to get there, and instead he found himself going to the American Express, getting a haircut, cashing traveler's checks, standing at the counter at the Cunard Line. These errands all seemed to take more time than they would have at home, and time—time running out—was what he kept having to deal with.

It did not interest him to wonder if he could stay, if there was after all some way of arranging this, because he did not want to stay here as an observer, an outsider, an expatriate; he was too proud to do that. He wanted to possess the thing he loved. He wanted to be a Frenchman.

When he got home in the late afternoon, a group of school boys would be having choir practice out of doors under the trees in the school yard. There was no music teacher—only an older boy with a pitch pipe—and the singing that rose from the walled garden was so beautiful that it made him hold his head in his hands. This and other experiences like it (the one-ring circus on the outskirts of Florence; the big searchlight from the terrace of Winkler's Café picking out a baroque church, which they then ran through the streets to, and then moving on to a palace, and then to a fountain—all the churches and palaces and fountains of Salzburg, bathed in lavender-blue light; the grandiose Tiepolo drawn in white chalk on the pavement of the Via Ventidue Marzo in Venice by a sixteen-year-old boy out of another century, who began his work at eight in the morning and finished
at four in the afternoon and was rewarded with a hatful of lira notes; arriving in Venice at midnight, leaving Pisa at six in the morning, taking an afternoon nap in Rome, eating ice cream under a canvas awning by the Lake of Geneva during a downpour; the view from the Campanile at Siena in full sunshine—a medieval city constructed on the plan of a rose; the little restaurant on a jetty in San Remo, where they ate dinner peering out through the rain at the masts of fishing boats; the carnival in Tours, the Grand Entertainment in Beaulieu, dinner at Iznard, dinner at Doney's, the dinner with Sabine at Le Vert Gallant, just before they left for Switzerland, with the river only a few yards from their table, and with their vision concentrated by the candle flame until they saw only their own three faces, talking about what they believed, what they thought, what they felt—so intently that they did not know exactly when it got dark or even at what point the tables all around them were taken by other diners. And so on, and so on)—these ecstatic memories were, he thought, what made the lines in his face, and why he had lost so much weight. He felt that he was slowly being diminished by the succession of experiences that he had responded to with his whole heart and that seemed to represent something that belonged to him, and that he had not had, and, not having, had been starved for all his life, without knowing it. He was being diminished as people are always diminished who are racked with love, and that it was for a place and not a person was immaterial.

J
EAN
A
LLÉGRET'S CLUB
was in a little narrow street behind the Chamber of Deputies, and they did not allow enough time to get there from their hotel, and had trouble finding it, and when they walked into the courtyard, half an hour late, Jean Allégret was standing on the steps of the building. They felt that he felt that
in not being punctual they had been guilty of rudeness, and so the evening began stiffly. Through dinner, they talked about Austria and Italy, and he talked about his farm—about how the people he was living with—the two old gardeners who had been in the family for fifty years—were sick, and would have to go, since they could not help him any longer, and he did not know who he would find to do his cooking, for he could not do it himself; and about the water system, which would be running at the end of the month; and about his efforts to bring a few improvements to his little village. There was no doctor or chemist nearer than four miles, and he had decided that there must be a dispensary. With the help of the men and boys of the place, he had fixed up an old uninhabited house, and got two nuns to come there, and provided them with supplies. The money they needed for this had been raised through benefits—plays given by boys and girls, bicycle races, that sort of thing; and a few days ago they had celebrated the hundredth case treated there. In his spare time he had been drawing, doing sketches of rabbits, pheasants, wild ducks, stags, wild boars, or of people working in the fields or going to market. Someday, perhaps, he would publish some of them in a book.

The club was an army-officer's club, and he had done murals for it, which he showed them after dinner. Looking at the people around them, they thought: This is not at all the sort of place Americans usually see.… Neither was it very interesting. Then they sat down again and, over a glass of brandy, went on talking. But something was missing from the conversation. There were moments when they had to work to make it go. Why does it have to go, Harold wondered.
Because it went before
was the answer. His eyes came to rest on one figure after another at the nearby tables—the neat blond mustache, the trim military carriage, the look of cold pride.

He heard Barbara saying: “They gave Gluck's
Orpheus
in the Riding Academy, and there was a wonderful moment. The canvas roof was rolled back without our knowing it, and as Orpheus
emerged from the Underworld we saw the lights of Salzburg.…”

Jean Allégret nodded politely, and Harold thought: Has she left out something? The music, of course. The most important part of all.

“
Orpheus
is a beautiful opera,” he said, but Jean Allégret's expression did not change.

There is something he's not saying, Harold thought, and that's why the evening has gone this way. Instead of listening, he watched Jean Allégret's face. It told him nothing, and he decided that, as so often happened, he was imagining things that did not really exist.

“In the mountains,” Jean Allégret was saying, “the political struggle and all the unsolved problems of modern life belong to a tiny lost spot over there in the evening fog, miles away in the bottom of the valley … the last village. We slept in any deserted hut or rolled up in our blankets in a hole between rocks. Our only concern was the direction of the winds, the colors of the sunset, the fog climbing from the valley, the bucks always on the top of the following peak …”

“My older brother loved to hunt,” Harold said.

Jean Allégret turned and looked at him with interest.

“He took me rabbit hunting with him when I was about eight years old. It was winter, and very cold, and there was deep snow on the ground. I still remember it vividly. We got up at five o'clock in the morning, to go hunting, and he missed three rabbits in a row. I think it flustered him, having me there watching him. And he swore. And then we went home.”

It seemed hardly worth putting beside a shooting expedition in the Pyrenees, but Harold, too, was holding something back, and it was:
I never had a gun. I never wanted one. I always thought I couldn't bear to kill anything. But once when we were staying in the country
—
this was after Barbara and I were married
—
there was a rabbit in the garden every day, and it was doing a lot of damage, and I killed it with a borrowed shotgun
,
and I didn't feel anything. People are so often mistaken about themselves
.…