The Last Banquet (30 page)

I said, ‘You know I love you.’

‘How would I know? When have you ever said it?’

Remembering the number of times I’d said it to Virginie long after it stopped being true, as if hoping the saying could make things better, I wondered what had happened to me. I was a man waking to find myself ashamed of what he’d done in his dreams.

Manon hiccupped. ‘Wait there,’ she told me.

So I waited in my own bedroom, on the first night of my return, until she came back a few minutes later with an embroidered silk banyan I didn’t recognise thrown over her nightgown and, hidden beneath it, the silver-tipped crop I’d given her when she began to learn to ride. It was the first year of our marriage. I’d been so proud of myself for thinking of the present.

‘Three strokes,’ Manon said.

‘Why three?’

Sliding the over gown from her shoulders, Manon folded it neatly across a chair. She didn’t look at me as she said, ‘Work it out.’ By then she’d turned her back on me and was bent over the end of our bed with her nightdress round her hips. I didn’t know if she meant they’d gone to bed three times, or had gone to bed once and that was the number of times they coupled, nor could I bear to ask. The more I thought about it the sicker I felt.

‘Jean-Marie. Do it. This is cruel.’

She was still waiting, bent over the bed I’d intended us to share, her bare buttocks sharper than I remembered, her sex a shadow below. If I whipped her things would be different forever, and if I did not . . . How could I guarantee things would not be different anyway? Tossing the crop onto the bed, I slapped her arse so hard she rocked forward, then steadied herself as I slapped again and again, my slaps explosively loud in the silence. Later, with Manon in my arms, my seed spilling from between her thighs, and her hand cupped lazily over me, she asked why I hadn’t used the crop and I lied, saying that if I’d started I would never have stopped.

She kissed my ear and told me I was a good man, a better one than I knew, and I was flattered and wanted to believe her. Before dawn, hesitantly, she told me something I made her say twice, to ensure I’d understood it. Charlot had said – drunk and in the darkness probably, because this is not the kind of thing one says sober, clothed or in daylight – that he wondered how his life would have turned out if Jerome had been with Virginie in the boat that capsized. If I’d been the one to take him downriver that day in the forest when we were almost still children. From this I understood Manon now knew about that day.

Yes, Charlot was very drunk when he said this, she admitted. Drunk enough to tell her he’d always loved me better than his sister ever could, and her love had cost him ours although he’d done his best not to mind.

‘Manon . . .’

‘That was what he said.’

‘He meant the love of friends.’

She kissed my ear. ‘Of course he did.’

1771
The Proposal

‘A
re you happy?’ I asked Manon at the end of the month.

Smiling, she nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Because if you’re not . . .’

Her mouth twitched in amusement. That look I knew so well.
If I’m not, what . . . ?
her eyes asked.
Which bit of what happened can you change?

‘Were you happier when . . . ?’

‘Of course not,’ she said crossly.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m glad.’ Mostly to be spared asking the full question. Were you happier when I was captive? Were you happier with Charlot? Where you happier when you were simply my mistress, before Virginie died? My fear was not of framing the questions but of hearing her answers.

‘I’m happy.’ Manon leant her head into my shoulder. ‘Happier than I’ve ever been. You should believe it.’ I knew little enough of her life while I was in Corsica, and even less of her life before we were together, and nothing about Manon invited questions. I knew she’d lost a husband, and later a daughter – and since her daughter was recently born when she first came to the chateau, she’d lost her husband no more than a year before. Had she loved him, feared him, married him out of convenience? I knew no way of asking and, more than this, knew the memories on which she drew for an answer would be tinged by being seen through the lens of what had happened since.

She came unasked to my bed every night in the month of my return; and took me in her mouth and let me taste myself on her lips and mix that taste with the taste of her other lips until salt and saliva mixed with olives, anchovies, pears, garlic, fresh bread, a black-pepper-and-butter sauce. What we’d eaten made our humours what they were. She laughed when I said that and accused me of wanting to be an alchemist, not understanding why I was offended. I had a hard time explaining I didn’t want to change what was into something else. I wanted to record what was so it could be tabled.

I showed her my newest chart where I’d grouped foods into sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savoury the way chemists had begun to group the elements into gases and metals, not-metals and earths. I talked of how eggs coagulated, sugar caramelised, how one taste added to another synthesised a third that could be sweet and sour or savoury and salt. How these could be used to change people’s humour. A woman could be brought to bed, a man made to fight, quarrels forced or mended simply by selecting the right foods.

Give me Jerome and Pasquale Paoli, and with the right cook and the recipes I’d prepared I could have brought both to a treaty faster than any periwigged and be-stockinged diplomat. Laughing, Manon reminded me that I habitually wore both wig and silk stockings and suffered me to slap her behind for the insolence. We made love after that and fell asleep in our own rumpled stickiness like bears in some cave.

Laurant adored Manon. Why wouldn’t he? She’d fed him at her breast and brought him up as if he was her own. Better than if he was her own, to be truthful. And though Hélène was trickier she trusted Manon more than she trusted me, and somehow that brought them together. That year’s seasons blended into each other the way they do as one begins to grow older. And, as they did, the grounds of Chateau d’Aumout filled again with animals too old or too ill to live at Versailles. Some survived and others died, to be fed to those who lived. We acquired pelicans for the lake and a stunted hippopotamus that spent its hours skulking in the shallows, eating grass and leaves rather than the fish I’d imagined. The lion died and tasted stringy as old saddle. I began to think there must be a better way to preserve meat than wind-drying or salting . . . Tigris retook her place as my most constant companion, walking at my side as I made my way round the gardens, my hand resting on her shoulder. She turned from a cub to a young tigress and then to a queen.

Hélène did the same but I was slow to notice.

It was the end of 1770, perhaps the start of 1771, around seven years after Virginie’s funeral, that Georges Duras arrived on my steps and begged leave to speak to me alone. His coat was well cut but sensible, his breeches flattering without being vulgar, his hair combed back, arranged in curls around his shoulders and dusted with powder in the modern style. He rode a hunter as good as any in my stables and carried a silver-topped whip. His bow was almost courtly and he hovered nervously on the stone steps as he waited for permission to come in.

‘We can talk in my study.’

The boy followed me up the stairs and along the landing, his hat in his hand and his steps confident. If he let himself look at the portraits lining the walls and the huge Chinese vase on the half landing he kept his gaze to a skim. I’ll admit I was impressed with his blend of confidence and vulnerability, which is always endearing to women and respected by men who recognise it from their younger selves. The only sour moment came when Tigris raised herself from the study floor and Georges stepped back and raised his whip.

‘Lower it,’ I said sharply.

‘My lord . . .’

‘She won’t harm you if you don’t show fear.’

I had no idea if that was true but Georges was persuaded to lower his whip and stand still while she sniffed at his boots and then his breeches and his crotch. She looked at me with blind eyes, wrinkled her nose to say if you insist, and returned to the exact spot she’d been curled on when I opened the door. ‘Well done,’ I said.

He smiled nervously and took the chair I suggested. Out of kindness I took the chair between the tiger and where he sat, so that what he wanted to say wouldn’t be hindered by nervousness – at least no more so than that of any young man sitting silently in the study of a girl’s father awaiting permission to begin what he wants to say. I recognised the situation for all I’d had the luck to avoid it.

‘Let me get you something . . .’

‘My lord . . .’

Our words collided and he reddened, upset to be denied his chance to make the speech he’d no doubt prepared, and rehearsed a dozen times on his ride from town.

‘Georges, how old are you?’

‘Nineteen, my lord.’

‘So soon. One loses track of time.’

He smiled uncertainly. I wondered if he wanted to say only some people had the luxury of losing track of time . . . Except that I believe it’s true for all of us. Taking a decanter from the side I poured him a dry and fortified wine and then one for myself, uncovering a dish of salted almonds and spooning some into two smaller dishes. I put a glass and one of the dishes on an occasional table beside him and settled myself with my own dish and glass, which I sipped from slowly. He took that as permission to sip his own.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s dry, my lord. Also well fortified.’

I waited. He swirled the liquid round his glass in a way that said he knew a little of what he was doing and sipped again, sucking air through the wine in his mouth. He identified it as Spanish and aged in oak.

‘Well done,’ I said.

He blushed and waited to check that I wasn’t about to speak again. The boy had no wish to have his second go at a speech interrupted as well. I was tempted to let him have his head but raised my hand before he could start.

‘You have a speech prepared?’

He looked confused. ‘Yes,’ he admitted finally.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Tell me simply.’

‘Hélène and I love each other. I would be honoured beyond belief if you would give me permission to court her, under proper supervision, of course.’

I wasn’t sure I intended him to speak quite that simply. ‘You’ve met only once.’

‘Three times, my lord.’ He spread his hands apologetically. ‘The second time two years ago at the Sieur d’Alembert’s party. The third, last month at the wine fair.’

‘Three meetings are enough to produce love?’

‘We write. After the death of . . .’ he hesitated, navigating what he wanted to say. ‘After the funeral of your wife . . . Your first wife. I wrote to offer Hélène my condolences. She replied very sweetly and sadly. I wrote again and she replied to that. We have been writing ever since.’ He shrugged, as if to say this was how love was born. In this he was right. It is shared sadnesses as much as the shared joys that bind men and women together. I tried to think back to the days after the funeral and imagine my nine-year-old daughter, because that’s what she’d been, reading a letter from a twelve-year-old boy she barely knew and sitting down to reply carefully in that beautiful neat writing that was one of the things her mother had left her. I imagined her writing, receiving a reply, writing again, and receiving another reply.

‘How many letters?’

‘Hundreds, my lord. Maybe more.’

All those shared memories. This was going to be more complicated than I suspected. Was already more complicated.

‘She’s young,’ I said, holding up my hand to still his protest. At seventeen she regarded herself as a woman, obviously. And if he regarded her as a woman, and had done more than simply think that fact, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know; for all fathers are meant to demand answers to these kinds of questions. ‘Let me think on it.’

‘My lord . . .’ He stood and bowed.

Maybe I should have rejected him flat out. Perhaps that would have been the fairest response. He certainly read more into my decision to think on it than I intended. Picking up his glass, he gulped his wine, left his almonds and made his farewells with a gaucheness that undid much of the impression he’d made on his arrival. A better-born young man would have known to re-sit himself, finish his wine and make conversation until I let him know he was dismissed.

When Tigris’s hackles rose as he turned in the door, I wondered what she saw with those blind eyes of hers that I missed. Her muscles were tense, her lips drawn back to show a little of her teeth. Georges was too full of the moment to notice.

‘My lord, I won’t disappoint you.’

‘Disappoint me?’

‘I have always admired this family. Have always dreamed . . .’ He stopped, glanced round the room and his gaze locked on a little silhouette of Laurant framed in an oval glass. ‘I’m an only child,’ he said. ‘The son of an only son.’

‘Laurant would be your brother?’

He nodded. ‘Exactly. Laurant will be the young brother I never had.’

His voice was triumphant enough to trouble me. As if he was an officer who’d brought off a daring but risky manoeuvre. Maybe I only imagined this to justify the doubts I felt rising. ‘Say nothing of this to Hélène.’

‘My lord, she knows I’m visiting. She’ll be waiting for news of your answer.’

‘She knows?’

Georges looked surprised. ‘My lord, she suggested I ask. My father thinks I should wait another year and I agree. It’s Hélène who insists she’s ready to marry. I wanted to wait until our new office in Bordeaux was established and I was full partner with my father in the affairs of the firm . . . I have a house,’ he added hurriedly, although I’d cast no doubt on his ability to provide for my daughter. I imagined he knew she’d inherited property from her mother. If he could not provide for her before marriage, he would certainly be able to provide for her lavishly once he had access to this.

‘As I said, I will think on it.’

Recognising his cue to leave, Georges bowed himself from the room. After a second, Tigris stood lazily, arched her back to stretch her spine, then dropped her haunches to the carpet and raised her shoulders to stretch it in the other direction before ambling towards the door and nosing at it until it pushed open. The servants were used to her for all they gave her wide berth and some of the more nervous ones simply hid when they saw her. She followed Georges out of the house. I know this because from my window I saw her appear on the steps just as the young man swung himself onto his hunter.