The Last Banquet (22 page)

My wife certainly did.

‘My lord . . . ?’

‘Jean-Marie. You can call me Jean-Marie when we’re alone.’

She smiled and her eyes went bright. Amused, I thought, remembering her wry expression the day I employed her as Laurant’s wetnurse. I realised it was more than that. Manon was touched by my words, and I was touched by that fact. We’re animals, I know we’re animals. As caged by our lives as those in the royal zoo. But the look in Manon’s eyes made me wonder, just for that moment, if we weren’t also something more.

‘Please, my lord . . .’

She shook her head but by then I’d begun unbuttoning her blouse and didn’t stop until it was open to the waist and her breasts exposed. Gently, I opened her knees, but only so I could kneel between them and put my mouth to her breast and suck. In my mouth her nipple turned from strawberry to deep raspberry but the taste I wanted was missing. I had sweat and what had to be soap from washing her dress or herself. Reaching behind me, I found the Brie and broke off a fragment, sucking her nipple through it. She tasted almost as she had the day I took the drop of milk on my finger.

Manon smiled when she realised what I was doing. You know the peasant saying? If you can’t imagine how neighbouring vineyards can produce such different wines put one finger in your woman’s quim and another up her arse, then taste both and stop asking stupid questions . . . My fingers found both vineyards. At the front, she tasted salt as anchovy and as delicious. At the rear, bitter like chocolate and smelling strangely of tobacco. My tongue explored each and she shivered at one and giggled with embarrassment at the other. ‘My lord, please . . .’

‘Call me Jean-Marie.’

Perhaps I was unfair, with her face-down on the table, her skirt drawn up at the back, to expect her to call me that so soon. ‘You like me?’ she asked.

I stilled, wondering at her question. I’d always liked her. But there was more to her query than that. I could have had her years before. I could have had any one of my servants. I knew men who would have taken all of them without thinking. ‘Since I first saw you,’ I said. Manon had her own bed in Laurant’s room but I scooped her up in my arms and took her to mine. The heavy oak frame supporting the horsehair mattress had probably seen its share of couplings, although few as hungry as ours. Before we began, I ripped away her skirt and, having stood her naked in the middle of my bedroom floor, examined her by the light of a candle. So young, so perfect. At last I put the candle down and slid two of her fingers inside her, tasting them afterwards. The second time I took her fingers, she slipped free and took two of my fingers in turn, slipping those inside her and locking her thighs. What I remember at this distance is the taste of her nipples, the richness between her legs and the bready sweetness of her breath as I slammed into her and heard her gasp. ‘My lord, if I get pregnant . . .’

‘I’ll acknowledge the child.’

I rode her hard, ploughing deep and savouring the feeling of myself inside her. The heat was incredible, the sense of flesh dizzying. After a few moments, Manon’s legs hooked over mine and she ground herself against me, her grinding ever more urgent. She spent fiercely, bucking beneath me with her nails in my back to hold me still while she wrung the last from her moment.

Taking her arms, I put them flat above her and held Manon down as I took my turn, coming with a fierceness beyond anything I could remember even when young. She let me sprawl on her a while, then shifted as if to say I should move as she wanted to sleep, which she did with her back to me, her buttocks against my thighs, and a warning that I should be careful where I jabbed that thing of mine. At dawn, I remembered to ask about the daughter who’d gone to live with her mother the day she came to the chateau to look after Laurant.

‘She died that first winter,’ Manon said.

Her one remaining link with her old life had succumbed to fever and been buried in the village churchyard. I felt ashamed I didn’t know that, and hadn’t thought before to ask. She heard out my muttered apology and her reply was sharp. Why would I know? Why would she expect me to ask? She dozed for an hour in my arms, her body soft under my hands and her rebuke sharp in my mind.

I didn’t know it then but Manon changed me that night. Whether she changed me into something better rather than something simply different is hard to say. I would tell you if I knew how to judge the change. I was too drunk on the sweetness of her body and what I saw as the rightness of her rebuke to do more than concentrate on the mechanism of re-making myself in the years that followed. As if an architect decided to replace one bridge with another without first asking if the bridge had ever been needed . . . All I knew was that I liked her honesty. I liked the way Manon looked me in the face and spoke her mind. All the careful courtesies with which I approached Virginie were missing. It was as if that night with Manon had removed a veil and let me see another person for the first time. There was a fierceness to this gaze. An animal rawness to life that some might prefer to keep hidden.

On my return I had silt dug from the stagnant river that gave rise to the poisoned air that infected Manon’s daughter. I had the roads widened from the chateau to the village and from the village to the town beyond. I gave the town the right to hold its own markets every second Friday, I issued licences for more mills and reduced
banals
, the duties peasants paid to have their flour ground by my miller and their bread baked in one of the communal bakeries. I also opened the forest to scavenging for wood and mushroom. I reserved the right to the boar and the deer, and when they took those anyway I let it pass, unless the act was contemptuously open and thrown in my face. There were riots in Normandy that summer, which spread south to Bordeaux. They never reached Chateau d’Aumout.

Things at home were less happy.

Virginie disliked my tiger cub and had tried to ban Laurant from playing with the animal. He ignored her. She cried when a cart arrived from Versailles with half a dozen sad flamingos, which can be found in this part of France anyway but had obviously hated life at court. Within a month they lost their ghost-white hue, began to regain their pink and no longer looked like moth-eaten relics dragged down from an attic. Four lived, and I ate the others, cooking their tongues in the Roman style, using a recipe from Apicius. The fat, which was rich as goose fat, I drained into a bowl, let set and kept for special occasions.

Virginie made clear she had no interest in roads or river flows, in improvements to our estate, the animals that now arrived every few weeks or so, or my recipes. After I began telling her how I planned to adapt the Apicius recipe, she turned on me. ‘What you fail to understand is I have no interest in
any
of your hobbies.’

I cooked the dish all the same.

To cook flamingo tongue

First a note – the tongue is fat and runs along a deep central groove in the bird’s heavy lower bill. This plumpness is what makes it attractive to cooks. Take one tongue per guest and scrub well with a mixture of equal parts salt, water and white wine vinegar. Soak the clean tongues in fresh water overnight and then boil in new water for at least an hour. Let cool and carefully strip away the outer skin. Slice each tongue diagonally into finger-width sections and braise in freshly made butter over a high heat. Serve with an alreadyprepared leek and date sauce that has been flavoured with coriander, mint, cumin, crushed black pepper and good wine vinegar. (Adjust quantities based on the number of tongues, but allow at least eight dates per tongue and replace leek with onion if preferred.) As an alternative, fry one red onion per guest in a shallow pan with cumin, ginger, saffron, a little crushed dried chilli and crushed black pepper, until onion is clear. Add cubes of tongue and braise well, along with three diced tomatoes per tongue, and one large wine glass of water. Now add twelve dried dates and eight dried apricots per guest and cook very slowly for at least an hour. Serve a la Indien (over rice).
Tastes like chicken
.

After this meal my wife withdrew into herself until she was a ghost of the woman she’d been, and that woman was already a ghost of the girl I first met. Becoming more worried than ever, I wrote to Charlot, who wrote to his sister, who wrote a polite and distant reply that read as if addressed to a passing acquaintance. Charlot quoted extracts in his return letter.

Life continues as it always has,
she wrote.
When not scribbling his recipes, Jean-Marie works incessantly for the good of others, Laurant continues to grow . . .
The only time Virginie seemed animated was when she mentioned Hélène, who had grown pretty and remained as clever and industrious as she’d always been. She hoped Hélène had a happy life and Charlot and I read her own unhappiness in that line. What was to follow came as no surprise to Charlot and that was a huge help to me. He turned aside the gossip and kept rumour at bay. The fact he came to see me, stayed with me and left reluctantly, swearing his friendship, helped protect my good name.

On a Sunday afternoon, after her usual attendance at mass in the morning and a light lunch alone in her room, Virginie took a book of poems to a bench by the lake where Tigris was not allowed. She disliked Tigris and resented my having made such a fuss of burying Felis, the cub’s mother, the previous week. I had my reasons, of course. The cooks were used to my peculiarities and thought little of my retiring to the smallest of the kitchens to work on a sauce. Obviously, it was not the sauce that interested me but what it covered. Tiger meat turned out to be sour and stringy. Well, meat from this one did. But it tasted well enough fried with onions and seasoned with black pepper and turmeric. I chose the spices for the colour of her coat obviously.

Maybe Virginie did read poems for a while. I’m not sure when she took Laurant from the nursery but it was Manon who told me she’d sent him up for an afternoon’s rest and he was missing. Maybe I knew. The bench by the little lake was certainly the first place I went looking. I went alone, having told Manon to search the house without alarming the servants. There would be time enough for that later if necessary. I saw the splash of white in the water before I was halfway along the path. I ran, what man wouldn’t, recognising his wife’s dress rippling like weed on the surface of a lake? Of Laurant there was no sign.

‘Here, Papa,’ he called when I shouted his name.

By the time I reached him he’d scrambled to his feet, but he’d been sat on the far side of a beech tree peeling the nuts that littered the ground around him, discarding the husk of the nut he’d chosen before finding another. ‘You’re meant to be resting.’

‘Mama said . . .’ he protested, lip quivering.

Scooping him up and keeping his head turned away from the lake I carried him back through the formal gardens and up the stone steps to the chateau. Manon stood near the top, one hand on a balustrade, her other against the base of one of the urns that broke up the balustrade. She must have seen what was in my eyes because she took him without being told and carried him inside. I could hear her chatting as they disappeared through a salon door towards the hall and the main stairs up to the nursery.

Virginie hung face-down in the water, her arms limply at her sides, her back bobbing with the waves that the wind made and her hands and feet slightly below the surface, one shoe missing. I found it on the lake’s edge, which was where I dragged her, surprised at how heavy the water in her dress made her. I was trying hard to avoid the unthinkable but then found myself thinking it anyway. I was lucky to find Laurant still alive. Perhaps she’d taken pity; perhaps she simply wanted him close so she could say goodbye. He’d told me as I carried him that she’d said he should wait behind the tree.

She knew what she was doing.

The little lake at the end of the formal gardens was reserved for family, a place where we could go to be out of the gaze of those who kept the chateau functioning. It had once been one of Virginie’s favourite spots . . . The sun was hot and the afternoon young and the idea came to me as I struggled to lift her. Virginie believed, which was more than I did, and if the Church knew she’d taken her own life they would refuse to bury her in hallowed ground. For her sake, for Laurant and Hélène . . .

Removing my shoes and stockings, I slipped into the water and unbuttoned her dress. My fingers shook and the buttons were slippery but in the end it was done. Her chemise was easier to remove. Her body was unchanged by motherhood. Her hips no thinner or thicker than the first time I saw her. She bobbed in the tiny waves, her legs trapped by the shallows, her hips and back and shoulders free floating. She’d come to the lake with her hair undressed and it spread across the water as if she slept on a pillow. I felt the tears well up and wondered how much of this was my fault. There would be time for that later. For now, I needed to hurry.

Leaving Virginie where she floated, I took her dress and wrung it out as carefully as I could, removing most of the water. I was afraid the stitches at the hems would burst with my twisting but they held and when I shook the dress out to remove the creases it was already halfway dry. I spread the dress on a bush in direct sunlight, as I had done once before many years before on a river’s edge. Having wrung out her chemise in the same way, I hung that beside her dress and went to wash the mud from her shoes. Our last hour alone was spent with me sat on the bench where my wife should be sitting, while her clothes dried in the sun and she floated in the water, as much in the shade as I could manage. The lake did more than hide her from idle gaze; it cooled her body and kept it from spoiling. I rolled her over once, knowing how blood could pool in resting meat, and wondered at my coldness. I should be weeping or on my knees and yet my initial tears were already drying and my main concern was how fast the dress would dry.

It was late afternoon before her dress and undergarments and shoes were ready and I could pull Virginie from the lake and rest her in the shade of the bush on which her clothes had been drying. I drove what water I could from her lungs by pressing on her back, and then dressed her clumsily, pulling the chemise over her head and buttoning the dress. Her shoes were clean enough for my servants not to notice one had been in the water and the other lost in mud at the edge of the lake. I wrung out her hair and dried it with the inside of my jacket, combing it with my fingers as I’d done when we were young. Finally, I sat her on the bench and took the upturned book of poems and rested them on her lap, folding one arm across the book. The sadness took me then. This was the Virginie I knew, sat with her book on a bench in the gardens. Tears rolled down my face and I knelt beside her, drying my tears in her lap.