The Folding Star (52 page)

It was a gate into a wood. I pulled over on to the grassy halfcircle in front of it and sat looking for a minute – it was clear no one had been here, at least not by car. A heavy chain lay slumped round the central uprights, but when I got out I found that it wasn’t locked. In the middle of each gate a roundel like a battered hubcap was fixed to the flaking wrought iron and on it I could just make out in rust-blurred relief the monogram TA. Oh, they left their mark on things. I peered through into a pine avenue, where it was still dark.

We agreed that they weren’t here, but both pandered to the other’s half-hidden desire to see the place. Mrs Altidore had had it in mind from the start – Luc had talked of it so much of late, she said; he had got out the original plans and a book in which the architect had bound water-colour imaginings of the décor. There had been something of an argument because Luc wanted to ask his father to do it up and his mother had been against encouraging him in any more extravagance. I uncoiled the chain and bumped and shouldered the gates back. Then I brought the car in, gingerly, along the track, brushed and knocked about the roof and windows by the crowding lower branches. On either side of our headlights the plantation stretched away in exaggerated darkness. I thought Luc would have needed to be quite brave to come here alone.

We came out into a wide tussocky field, the drive remembered and rutted by farm machinery, and juddered over a dully chiming cattle-grid. In front there was a high silhouette, a bulk of grey, that I steered towards, the car’s underside slithering over long grass. Then there was a paved court stacked with farmer’s hurdles and fuel-drums and a mossy, moping statue peering down: it could have been anyone, a shepherd, a prophet, even Aurora herself. Beyond it a few steps rose to a padlocked steel door. This was better, it was adventure in a recognisable form – we clambered out and sniffed the air.

On the far side of the little château stretched a ravaged lawn, marked out by the bloated thriving forms of what must once have been pyramids of yew. From the slippery elevation of the terrace I could see a pond, a lake, beyond it, choked with reeds and fallen branches. The light rose steadily, there were bars of orange above the tops of the firs, a blackbird started up, clear and unconcerned. It was just the time to see the place, not the kind of dawn Luc’s grandfather had named the house for or would ever have witnessed there, cold skies above a drenched wilderness; though there were hints of classic pleasures, a cloud on the lake just big enough to clothe a god in a fresco stooping on a sex-quest. I’d lost Marcel; I wandered down towards the water, reluctantly moved by the relics of all this fake galanterie, my mind vaguely in summer, though a cold gust insisted it was December and made me twitch up Luc’s jacket-collar. I turned back and saw the tiny top windows of the tower colour in the early sun, as though lanterns burnt in them.

The main part of the Pavillon de l’Aurore was a French-looking villa with long windows boarded up and stucco that gaped here and there on to cheap red brick. One end of it had sunk and opened a wandering crack in the upstairs wall; above it the roof was hidden under a canopy of rusting corrugated iron that the wind had loosened and buckled – from time to time it gave a squawk.

Marcel was quite excited. ‘I think he could be here,’ he said. He’d been exploring the garages and the kitchen-yard – apparently a window had been forced, but he wouldn’t be able to get through it without a leg-up and a push from me. He took me round to show me and I peered in at a derelict pantry, the door at the back half-open on to pale gloom. Well, it could have been Luc, but I played down the likelihood. ‘Thieves always break in at the remotest part of a house,’ I said, alarmed for a moment that Marcel might dare me to go in. I poked at the mossy sill as if I knew what to look for. ‘It’s probably not that recent.’ He leant in and called ‘Luc’, then jumped back when there was a distant scuffling and the creak of a pigeon’s wings.

I laughed nervously and Marcel gripped my arm. ‘I do have the keys to the front door,’ I said, and he gazed at me as if I might unlock his first grown-up experience; he was shrinking from it already. I thought how later I would tell Luc about this – then remembered that he might actually be here, might have heard the car ticking over and taken it for steady rain on the laurels, might have heard our voices beyond shuttered windows, might be roused from shivering runaway sleep by the key in the lock and the scrape of the heavy door.

The air inside seemed to wake reluctantly, to turn and eddy in the light and draught after years of accumulated stillness. Dust climbed and spun on the edge of the bright threshold; the hall smelt musty but obscurely alive, as if animals tunnelled and marked their territories in it. I groped and found a stiff old metal light-switch and forced it till it gave out a dead click.

Marcel said there was a torch in the car and ran out to get it whilst I stepped timidly into the near-darkness, following the wall around with a squeamish hand. I came to an opening, the moulded edge of an archway, and registered as a blind person might an impending change of scale; I slid my feet forward over the gritty flags, thinking there might be a step; when I coughed the echo climbed and dropped through a hidden vastness, like a chapel. Too scared to go on, I slunk back into what seemed the dazzle of the hall, the spotlight of the winter morning through the open door, along which Marcel stepped like a comedian. ‘Come on, there’s nothing to be scared of,’ I said – then he switched on his own strong beam.

Away to the right a succession of rooms opened out. We went through them as if Marcel were my guide to an ancient tomb, I was itching to seize the lamp off him. He played it about solemnly but without interest over bare walls, high coved ceilings, the battened-up embrasures of the windows. The place had been abandoned but wasn’t quite empty – in one room there was a trio of gilt ballroom chairs, in another the bench-seat of an old car where vagrants might have drunk and slept. High up on the walls ran the brass rods for hanging tapestries, bare plaster below them never meant to be seen. The torch came back and steadied on scrawled lettering: KRIS and a spouting cock and balls.

The final room was the grandest and most ruinous. Here the floor had dropped, and with it a pair of pillars which leaned apart, showing iron spindles which ran up through their wooden cores. It was all trumpery, up to the café-rococo of the ceiling, where a naked woman hovered in the blue. Perhaps she really was Aurora, faded and leprous, with a chalky beard where the plaster was rifted with damp. One eye was lost, the other large and inviting. The chains of a massive lamp descended from her feet – it hung in a dangerous canopy above the great slate slab of a billiard-table. Marcel was astonished by the table – the vanished baize, the few rotted strings of the pockets; he pushed the tabs back and forth on the scoreboard’s rusty rails.

‘We’d better look out the back,’ I said, and he swallowed with fright and swung the light about again, over the pillars and the sylph of the cold ceiling. Since I was in charge I was resolute – it happened like that; and he came along trustingly. I was talking to Paul in my head and didn’t get the feeling he minded what we were doing. It wasn’t like the time I had followed Matt into the Rostands’, though that distant episode seemed to haunt this one, rather as one place in a dream becomes another.

We had nothing to fear beyond birds and rats along the kitchen corridor. In a dank larder the shelves of a dresser were piled with straw and shit like some old
colombier
; the boards had been ripped from the windows, brambles quested in. The kitchen range held a nest that took me back for a second to the drawings of a childhood nature-book – auburn fieldmice perched on ears of wheat. There were bottles and cans and cigarette-butts of temporary residents, as there must once have been cases of champagne empties and the ash of gaming parties that went on till dawn. KRIS was commemorated here too, with the same phallic totem; I wondered if he was the object of fantasy or the boastful vandal-artist himself. We went down a passage where the paint on the wainscot had shrunk and cracked like the glaze on an old dinner-service: at the end a door with a splintered upper panel swung open on to a descending stair and a shallow cellar full of water.

We came back through a side-door into the entrance-hall. It was time for the echoing room – I knew what it must be, the rotunda of the tower. I took charge of the torch at last – just borrowed it a moment and swivelled the beam up the dark walls. The stairs rose from here and were glimpsed again higher up, pausing at an opening with a balcony. The light swept over a cupola and down, and there on the other side the faces were waiting.

The artist had painted another balcony for them, cunningly shadowed, and the revellers lounged along it, some gazing upwards, as it might be at stars or fireworks, others leaning on the rail to peer down at new arrivals, whose imagined lanterns charmed and dazzled them. Some of the men had high white collars, buttonholes, cigarettes, the blank sheen of a monocle – supercilious but impassive under the torch’s challenge. The women had fans and mantillas or cloaks and tricorn hats; one raised a gloved arm and opened her mouth to sing. Two or three children were dressed as playing-cards, like the gardeners in
Alice in Wonderland
, and pointed gleefully through the wrought-iron banisters.

Theo Altidore stood in the middle, hand on hip, turbaned and robed in red, a scimitar in his belt. I couldn’t tell if his rajah’s moustaches were real or part of the costume. He was stout and high-coloured, with the irritable glare of the determined pleasure-seeker, handsome, young still, but already the man he would become. The brilliant picture, untouched by smoke or rain, could only show, like the Pavillon itself, how far he had wandered from Guillaume’s austere refinement. He reminded me of bankers at Glyndebourne pretending to be aesthetes (betrayed by drink) or
Tatler
spreads on charity balls – the Duke of Somewhere, a frightful old monster, got up as a sheik or an Indian prince, never anything less than his own status. And it was notable how Theo had chosen the glamour of another empire than the one that was to ruin him. I could see why he’d frightened little Luc with his sword and his stare and his party of idlers.

But then the whole place spoke of adult pleasures and delusions – it was mad to think that Luc would ever have wanted to come here. His mother and I revealed some romantic failing of our own, poetic suppositions that had nothing to do with the boy’s troubles and discoveries, the hidden upheavals of love. I was such a bad teacher. I stood for a while at the open front door, feeling tired and dirty. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t found Luc there in person. He wasn’t there in other ways I’d hoped for: I’d dreamt of the house as a means of possessing him, of entering his past at a deep and early level, but the jumpy ten minutes inside gave me nothing but a lonely shell. I started to snivel pathetically and turned away in case Marcel should see me. Then I heard the dull report of a car on the cattle-grid.

The mauve Mini was coming over the field, bouncing and struggling on the rutted track. That terrifying little car. I waited for it shiftily, trying to make out if it contained one, two, or even three people – perhaps they’d all come to tell me the game was over, they would get out and lean on the open car door and marvel at my folly. It buzzed on to the mossy flagstones and stopped dead in front of the statue. There was only Sibylle inside – she sat for a while glaring out. It was clear to me she’d been sent by Luc to deliver some ultimatum and was working herself up to it and concentrating her anger at me and my blind interventions. Then she spotted Marcel, who was standing away to my right, frowning, head on one side in one of his gawky ‘grown-up’ attitudes.

She got out and hurried over to him, kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Mm, you need to shave,’ she said. Marcel giggled and fell silent; they stood blinking at one another, as if each trying to formulate an explanation of how they came to be here.

‘There’s an amazing billiard-table inside,’ said Marcel.

‘Is there?’ She smiled encouragingly and sauntered towards me, unnervingly calm, like a trained nurse approaching a violent patient. I came down the steps apologetically. Then we too looked at each other.

‘That’s a very nice jacket,’ she said. I nodded and rubbed the cloth of the lapel between forefinger and thumb. ‘I hope it kept you warm out in the car all night.’

‘Yes, thank you’ – foolish, not wanting to add being cold to my other weaknesses.

‘Yes, it is a warm one, isn’t it? I’ve worn it myself a few times, when Luc thought I might be getting chilly – it was like an overcoat on me.’ I saw her shrugging it on, his arm brusquely round her shoulder to shiver her. She looked down, piqued, as if she thought I too might offer it up. His other clothes went without comment, they were perhaps anonymous enough not to speak clearly of their owner. And that of course was all I longed to do, to speak of him but not to give him away, not to seem to share him with her, to be proud in defeat. I started obliquely:

‘You must have left very early.’

But she was on her own fuse. She looked at me blankly. ‘You’ll never have him,’ she said.

‘Then you don’t know …’ I didn’t say that, but a kind of stifled smugness like heartburn must have crossed my features and shielded me from her brutality. ‘All I want to have’, I said, ‘is the chance to talk to him and help him if I can. His mother’s dreadfully worried, she wants – well, she wants to do what’s best for him.’

She gaped at me as if I were a total idiot: I had never imagined such disrespect, but I was too raw for the usual prickle and bluster at the outrages of the young. ‘His mother.’

‘So why don’t you just tell me where he is? No one’s trying to come between you. He thinks of me as a friend.’

‘How on earth would you know what he thinks. You haven’t got a clue what goes on inside his head. He thinks of me as his best friend.’

‘Yes,’ I said disarmingly, ‘he told me he did.’

She wandered off in a circle, hands in pockets, pink-cheeked with anger and cold. Marcel leant against the Renault and scuffed the ground – he hadn’t known what a terror she was.