A story at odds with the setting, disturbed only by flies, though, whatever its promptings, not unexpected from Nadja, always unpredictable, oblivious to the demands of setting, propriety, social decorum. But Pierre and Marcelline were upon us, with cutlery, napkins, fresh glasses, plates. Daisies covered baguettes, olives were heaped on a black saucer, a wad of creamy butter lay in glass. There followed a stash of prawns, cold trout on lettuce, endives, circlets of radish, beetroot, tomato, sliced egg, crisp tangy chicory, criss-crossed with rivulets of farm mayonnaise. Lastly, a Figaro without guile, Pierre presented a damp luscious brie, a second bottle, a flask of fin.
We exclaimed, we praised, we gloated and we ate. ‘Une Partie de campagne’, if not quite Déjeuner sur l’herbe. I remembered a day on the Surrey hills that had led to so little and hastened to wave a radish and mentioned that our Estonian cook called it Apple of Youth. Dreamily, Nadja was virtually purring, my least action – passing butter, refilling her glass, allowing her the last tomato – eliciting deathless gratitude, my most trivial remark considered witty as Haydn. We were both sunk in exquisite well-being, beguiled by colours, slightly unreal, noises of a horse, an unseen cart, cows theatrical in an amplitude encouraged by the young, strong liquor. A bird, of barely credible blue and red, white tufts at the eyes, alighted on a mossy roof, preened itself as one grossly over-privileged, unfolded, fluttered, squawked some complaint, was gone.
Nadja was talking, as so often, as if not to myself alone.
‘Orinoco, Tashkent, Cathay. Exotic and elusive as Sappho. They were maps of quest and discovery. Hindu Kush, Lands of the Golden Horde, Dome of Mohammed Abdin. Sonorous as orchestras. And Cities of the Dead, empty but with spirits drifting like veils. Bluebeard’s castle was more real than Cracow.’
She herself was more real than these. She tapped my plate, as if to awaken me. ‘I have walked on mountains named the Sorrows of the Retired Ladies. Do not think that I am yet one of them.’
In this sleepy, lolling afternoon, she was still emphatic. ‘I never wanted to know too much. The Exarchate of Ravenna… could this be a ruler, a place, an anthem? I did not care to know, it was exciting as a locked casket. Like Steppes of Central Asia, caravan out of mists, pausing, in sunlight waiting on dull dusty plains, then moving on. But today…’ she shook her head, repentant, ‘I want to know everything. The recesses and confusions of mind. That’s my Fall. Not exactly from Paradise.’
She went into the sadness of last week when, tearful, confessional, she told me of having read of the death of the last of Europe’s court fools, 1763. She had choked in desolation. ‘Once he would have been allowed total immunity. Capering, joking, jeering at great ones. But then, old, exhausted, banished from splendours, coughing life away in a horrid attic. Forgotten. Clutching bells that never sounded.’
Distress had crushed her to trembling eyes, weakened shoulders, before she regained composure, assumed indifference. ‘Enough of this. But cruelty… whaling, circuses…’
Despite the heat and our déjeuner, I was chilled, almost in darkness, until from the farmhouse a man began singing an old Midi melody. Surely not Pierre, whose tone was a tavern growl. The notion restored our buoyancy, as if Laurel and Hardy had surfaced in Wagner.
High and firm, the voice changed to Parisian cabaret, ‘Si tu veux dormir’, then ceased in mid-phrase, a door slammed, a figure slid away, a blur already lost amid poplars, shadows, barns. However, we were facing each other, wavering between doubt and hilarity.
‘It can’t be.’
‘It’s impossible. But it is.’
Despite swiftness, the squarish, tousled head, broad torso, soiled cap were irrefutable, the haystack man, a tiny mystery adding spice to a day almost satiate with gifts.
The singing had recalled Tolstoy and happiness. ‘If there are no games, what is left?’ I hummed:
Over emptied bottles, plundered bowls, black smudges of flies, Nadja lifted her head in some remote satisfaction, musing, ‘I, too, can… someone I knew. He flushed whenever he spoke the truth, red as a stork’s leg. Not often.’
Her gesture as apologetic, fluffy, as if having bumped against a stranger.
We paid, gave and received lavish compliments, a strain on our French, then set face for home. The sun was past its peak. Disliking exact repetition of the morning’s walk, feigning mistrust of the haystack, and choosing a parched mule track, curling over small mounds to the sea. All was mute in afternoon stupor, sheep by a spindly hedge standing like carved, weathered blocks. Still elated, weswung arms like soldiers, parting at a bog, at thistles, rejoining with humorous, ceremonious courtesy. We risked a shaky bridge over a pebbly, dried-up streambed. Occasionally, at a bend, the sea glittered. To the left the white mountains had slightly receded, as if for shade. An Estonian labourer, I told her, had likened mountains, which he had never seen, to a broken, gap-toothed comb. Then Father, comparing irregularly ranked mountains, to his view of history, the constant ascent and decline of civility.
‘You remember so much, Erich. Like a lawyer. But what have I said! Multitudes of apologies. Yet it can alarm.’
She was affectionate, herself remembering perhaps too much.
We are making a short detour, attracted by a grey blob alone in a treeless dip, promising a cool rest. A little chapel, hunched, lichened, without tower or steeple, threatened by ivy, the porch crumbling, cobwebbed, a few gravestones protruding from dock and dandelion, memento of a community long departed.
She hesitates, almost deterred by the cobwebs. A bird croaks, without movement.
I am masterful. ‘We must go inside. A risk but not a grave one. We might, do you think, pray for rain?’
‘But rain is not yet very much needed.’ Good comrade, she echoes my casual manner, adding, ‘We might be interfering. The commune, half swamped, might consider it an offence.’
‘But the garden. One thick soak. Do consider it.’
Her small flourish, quiver of eyes and mouth, make this sound delectably outrageous. ‘At your orders, Erich…’ Determined, she pulls at the knobbed door, eventually triumphant.
All is shadowy, abode of bats, sickly with warmth hanging like a blanket, light squeezing through lunettes and squint-holes. I feel the tinge of lost presences: the hush of the Rose Room, the damp stillness of the Conciergerie. The stone altar is bare save for mouldy droppings and a withered flower. Benches have been torn away; only the base is left of the font. No power remains but blotched traces of a fresco, a hell-wain trundling the dead, all teeth and shrieks. No soul, only extinction and airlessness, in a squalid stone shed.
Nadja, by the door, is abstracted, in some small trance. She may be craning for pre-Christian, Saracenic or Albigensian emblem, mason’s signs, a grinning face on a cornice, a Templar mark. I wait until she steps towards me, slender, almost fragile in the uneven shadow, her face hollowed, though a raised eyebrow invites a question, scholarly or facetious. I can contrive neither, only point at the ruined fresco. She gazes at it, then touches my hand, her own surprisingly cold. ‘A Youngest Son found Hell not a departure from life but a return to it.’
We both need release from this dankness, a foetid cell withstanding summer radiance, in which Sinclair would have been at home, his smile sidelong, his stare eerie, his interest unclean.
Closing eyes, I see a violet haze, then realize that Nadja is at the altar, head bowed, hieratic, hair massed like a black halo in the wispy light. Turning, her high, ridged features have softened to youth. Her shrug is characteristic, when I ask whether she has prayed for rain. Then she laughs, in assumed wonder. ‘Naturally. You demanded, I obeyed. What else?’ In another voice, serious, reflective, ‘I do sometimes pray. No one hears, only myself. But it matters. Concentration. Compression of will. Sometimes answered, usually sarcastically.’