The Last Banquet (35 page)

Last night’s letter was addressed to Citizen Aumout. No title, no particule to link my name to the land, no politeness. It simply says my chateau is confiscated in lieu of unpaid taxes judged by the local assembly to come to the chateau’s worth. I have a day to make alternative arrangements and hand over the building. There is no mention of my cat. And now Georges’ men are at my door. I doubt he’s with them. He’s probably in Bordeaux, Limoges or Paris doing something important and has delegated my ruin to his subordinates. Georges would regard overseeing my fall as vulgar, an indulgence. What is being done is done in the people’s name his message tells me. This is not a matter of old enmities or even older friendships. It is a matter of justice and historical necessity.

I have no doubt he believes it.

My chateau is old and looks new. This makes it different from most other chateaux in this part of France, many of which are new and designed to look old. Four turrets guard the corners and a curtain wall wraps the chateau and the inner garden. The roofs are slate and the windows glass, the lead flashing is new and the mortar sound. A moat around the chateau itself is filled with carp and has bloomed green with summer algae.

Its official name is le Chateau d’Aumout.

Everyone within a hundred miles calls it
Where the Tiger Lives
.

Soon it will have another name. It has stood against the French army when this part of France was English, and against the English when the lands returned to us. It has stood against heretics and neighbours and the jacqueries that swept through this area five hundred years ago. But tonight it will not stand, because what comes against it is not armies of the rich or the starving; what comes against it is history itself. And what can stand against the waves of history?

I read my words and wonder at their truth. If the
sans-culottes
beyond the walls merely represent a modern jacquerie then my words will be regarded as grandiose and my fears absurd, which would not be the first time. If I am right then the wave of history will roll right over me and I will be forgotten. The thought bears its own comfort.

We seek the immortality of fame around the same time our bodies begin to seek the sweet peace of oblivion. Such is the contradiction of being human.

I look at those words and like them even less. Men hope to leave some record behind them. A country conquered, a culture changed, some great work that even the simplest can see has been built on a lifetime’s striving, perhaps even a lifetime’s pain. At best, I leave my recipe book and this journal. The heart and the soul can change. Manon showed me that. The angels scratch at my door. Walking through the corridors, with my eyes staring back from every tarnished glass I can no longer believe the mirrors lie. These are the last days of my life. Masters say to children start at the beginning. When writing stories people say begin where it begins. François-Marie Arouet, who wrote as Voltaire, began his
Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations
by tracing human development from its earliest days. But how does anyone know where anything really begins? Did this story begin the day I met Virginie, the day I arrived at the military academy to be greeted by Jerome and Charlot, that day, years before, I first met Emile, or did it begin with the dung heap, when I sat in the sun eating beetles? Looking back on the days of my life, I can’t think of any time I was happier.

So let me say it began there, as good a place as any.

Barbarians at the Gate

I
say my prayers before a second-rate painting of a messiah with the face of a tortured Spaniard against a backdrop that looks as if the artist simply looked from my study window and painted what he saw. Perhaps he did: the landscape is dark, the lighting on the Messiah’s face bad enough to have been done by a local or a jobbing artist passing through this area when times were simpler.

I say the creed and the pater noster, the prayers we say without thinking about the words.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
I wonder what chance there is of that being true. Realising now is not a good time for doubts. Tigris obviously feels the same because she nudges me from my knees.

‘Time to go?’

Her milky eyes say yes and she does that big cat smile which bares her teeth and always sends a shiver down my spine. We leave the altar candles burning for whoever comes to find them. A moth flies into one and falls, singed and wounded. It tastes of burnt hair, bitterness and a sharp need for light. Tigris’s nose wrinkles at the smell.

‘Our turn soon, big cat . . .’

The beast flicks her ears at the sound of my voice as we head for the stairs. She is old now, almost ancient. I have found no authority to tell me how long tigers live but her age shows in the grey of her muzzle and the yellowing of her teeth. She stinks of cat and being caged inside the chateau for the last few days. I’ve thrown sand across the floor of a room behind the kitchens and she uses that for her duties. She stinks of urine and discontent and I hate to see her so unhappy. Dropping to a crouch, I stroke her head until it arches back under my touch and a low purr begins deep in her throat.

‘What now? I ask her.

She looks at me with those blind eyes as if I should have the answer. A man should die on the battlefield or in his study. Somewhere unknown or utterly familiar. That my chateau should be turned into a battlefield I find distasteful, hoping that the mob will spare the paintings and the furniture but knowing they probably won’t. Why should they? The paintings mean nothing to them and the furniture – in many cases – is too refined to do more than support someone who sits quietly. They will smash the windows and steal the curtains and probably end up giving the building to someone who becomes me in all but name. Old age has its advantages and one of those is resignation. My boyhood self would be scared by what is about to happen, my self as a young man outraged and ready to fight, my self when Tigris and I first met concerned with finding a way out of this trap.

I feel none of those things. I feel the weight of history inevitable as a wave that will roll up the beach whether I stand in its way or not. Now here, at the end of my life, I finally understand what I have not allowed myself to understand before this. History will happen. It cannot be denied. Nor would I deny it if I could. There was both beauty and cruelty in the world now dying. There will be beauty and cruelty in the world now being born. If my death is a part of the price, then that is all it is. A small part only.

There are shouts from the courtyard that say the gates have failed and the sans-culottes are inside the walls. The doors into the chateau are locked and barred, the windows locked and shuttered, all of them strong enough to hold a little while longer. I am glad that Virginie is dead, that Manon is gone and my son safe in the Indies. I think of Hélène in London and hope she’ll regret my passing a little. It is too late to say I’m sorry if I was wrong about Georges, or tell her what really happened with her mother; and there are some things parents should not tell their children. It would only be self-justification on my part.
It was more complicated than you knew. There are two sides to every story. I did the best I could . . .
With luck she’ll mourn me in time. And, if not, I doubt my spirit will be there to mind.

Just before we die is too late to start calling on God and hoping for Heaven. But if he does exist, and I somehow find myself in Heaven, then I hope Virginie is there also – for all she shouldn’t have been buried in hallowed ground – and has been reunited with her elder son. I hope she is happy and that she will be glad to see me as an old friend, because we were that once, along with other things. I know I will be glad to see her. I hope in time Manon will join me there too. I do not expect it, though, believing in my heart that we are what we seem, dung for beetles. But I hope. A man may be allowed that.

Taking a bowl from a table I fill it with water from a jug and put it on the floor in front of Tigris, within easy reach. She looks at me with opal eyes and I sigh, lifting the bowl to hold it for her while she drinks, her huge tongue messily splashing liquid across my cuffs. ‘Good girl,’ I tell her. ‘Good girl.’

I’m sure animals learn words, unless they simply recognise the tone of voice or we signal our intentions to them in some other way. She puts her head heavily on her paws and sinks into silence. She is hungry as I am. The food in the kitchens is long gone and I do not dare try to reach one of the storehouses. It is a day since either of us has eaten. I would have liked one last meal. Sitting alone in my dining room, eating from porcelain decorated with my coat of arms and some Chinaman’s idea of a tiger or rhinoceros. The finest wines to go with the finest tastes. Something I’d never eaten before, cooked with complexity or absolute simplicity depending on my whim and what the ingredients demanded. I will say it, what I’ve said or written before. And I can only say it because I suspect the dream of God and Heaven is a fantasy. I’ve always wanted to eat human flesh. That strange monkey Charlot sent me is the closest I ever got. We’re said to taste like pork, but then everything that doesn’t taste like chicken or beef or mutton tastes like pork to those with no palate.

A few years ago I tracked a ship’s boson down to a squalid inn in Marseilles. The man hadn’t sailed in five years and no captain would employ him. Men muttered that he brought bad luck but the truth was he served on the
Angelique
and was one of the few who survived her sinking and the subsequent sea voyage in the scuttle boat. Fifteen men set off across the Bay of Bengal and seven landed on the beach at Trincomalee in the Dutch colony of Ceylon. The others died, the survivors said, of hunger and fever and were fed to the sharks; but the Dutch doctor who examined them wrote that those remaining were not so ravaged by hunger as they should be. In the monsoon season fresh water is not a problem. It falls from the sky until all you can do is pray that it stops. So Laurant said in a letter I have in a drawer somewhere. Maybe the remaining crew spoke half the truth, and the sharks were fed the scraps. They were ordered to confess by the Dutch governor, a Protestant of foul temper and little vision. They refused and were imprisoned and tortured. All kept to their story, understanding that to admit to eating the flesh meant death.

When I found the man he was drunk and unshaven and smelt as bad as if he slept every night in a midden. For all I know he did. He regarded me suspiciously and stepped back when I called him by his real name. It had taken money and time and the acquaintance of unsavoury individuals to find him. I laid out what I would offer before I told him what I wanted. Enough gold would be his to re-make his life. He would be given new clothes and a berth to Canada or Louisiana, both places where French was spoken and he could start again. A wine merchant from Bordeaux, a ship’s captain from Nice, a fisherman from Brittany . . . He could be any of those things or anything else he chose. Men were less fussy in the colonies about lineage. So long as he didn’t claim to be noble, or pretend he came from one of the richer merchant families, he would be safe.

This drunken man stared at me. In his eyes I saw the horror of his last five years and wondered if he was too deep into degradation to save himself by telling me the truth. He asked, because who wouldn’t, what I wanted in return. I imagine he knew it had to do with the
Angelique
, for there was little else remarkable about him. I explained I wanted to know the truth about his crossing the Bay of Bengal in a tiny boat on raging seas. That I would tell no one else and would bind myself by oath to this. I left my real reason for hunting him down until later and I doubt he ever knew what it was. He simply thought I wanted to know if he’d eaten human flesh.

I wanted to know if it was closer to beef, pork or mutton. The man had eaten human flesh. On the third day, ravaged by hunger, when a ship’s boy died, the remaining men looked at each other and the decision went unspoken. One of them simply pulled out his pocket knife and began filleting. The sharks got the guts and bones but the men ate everything else. That was the only time and the only victim, and since the boy was dead the man asked what harm had really been done? He looked so desperate that I shrugged and said that was a question for the priests but I would have done the same. And he looked at me to see if I was mocking him and then wrung my hand.

He sailed that night, still drunk but now dressed and shaved and with a passport signed by Jerome that made the captain of the ship he took think he was a radical with connections being allowed to go into exile. Before he left he told me his answer. The meat was tender and easily digestible but bland. It could have done with cooking. And it could have done with seasoning. At the very least it needed black pepper. His understanding of food was too crude to tell me if one cut had tasted better than another.

‘Ignore the noise,’ I tell Tigris, who keeps freezing her position every time there is a thud or a crash outside. From the sound of it men are battering at the main door and a couple of the side doors. They’ll find the doors inside locked as well, which will no doubt upset them. ‘Go back to sleep.’ But she is too restless and I have to leave her there twitching her great tail while I go downstairs.

I always knew it would come to this. Well, perhaps I suspected in the darkest part of myself, that part we keep hidden from our lovers and our children, and often from ourselves because who wants to admit to himself that he is a monster? Everything I can eat, I have eaten. Every taste I can find, I have found. My notebooks, like my experiences, are extensive but they are incomplete. The dead boy lies where I left him, under the shelf with the Parmareggio. His body has cooled in the previous twenty-four hours and the stone of the larder floor has kept him fresh. ‘Meat,’ I tell myself, ‘is simply meat.’

The words fill my head but fail to convince. It is with an elemental sense of sacrament that I cut the clothes from the boy’s body and slice strips of flesh from his buttocks and back. The meat from the shoulder is pale like pork, the meat from the buttocks a little darker but not so dark it could be mistaken for venison or beef. I think carefully about how the meat should be cooked, and in the end I opt for simplicity. This is partly out of respect for my ingredients, and partly because, while I can ignore the mob beyond my doors, I’m aware enough of them to know that marinating meat for hours is not open to me.