“Are Alix and Eugène going?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He and Barbara looked at each other, and then Barbara said: “Are you sure it is all right for us to go?”
“Quite sure,” Mme Viénot said. “The Allégrets are a very old family. They are half Scottish. They are descended from the Duke of Berwick, who was a natural son of the English King James II, and followed him into exile, and became a marshal of France under Louis XIV.”
During dinner, Eugène entertained them with a full account of the fall of the Schumann government. Day after day the party leaders met behind closed doors, and afterward they posed for the photographers on the steps of the Palais Bourbon, knowing that the photographers knew there was nothing of the slightest importance in the brief cases they held so importantly. What made this crisis different from the preceding ones was that no party was willing to accept the portfolios of Finance and Economics, and so it was quite impossible to form a government.
“But won’t they have to do something?” Harold asked.
“Eventually,” Mme Vienot said, “but not right away. For a while, the administrative branches of the government can and will go right on functioning.”
“In my office,” Eugène said, “letters are opened and read, and copies of the letters are circulated, but the letters are not answered, because an answer would involve a decision, and all decisions, even those of no consequence, are postponed, or better still, referred to the proper authority, who, unfortunately, has no authority. I have been working until ten or eleven o’clock every night on a report that will never be looked at, since the man who ordered it is now out of office.”
At that moment, as if the house wanted to point out that there is no crisis that cannot give way to an even worse situation, the lights went off. They sat in total darkness until the pantry door opened and Thérèse’s sullen peasant face appeared, lighted from below by two candles, which she placed on the dining-room table. She then lit the candles in the wall sconces and in a moment the room was ablaze with soft light. Looking at one face after another, Harold thought: This is the way it must have been in the old days, when Mme Viénot and Mme Cestre were still young, and they gave dinner parties, and the money wasn’t gone, and the pond had water in it, and everybody agreed that France had the strongest army in Europe.… In the light of the still candle flames, everyone was beautiful, even Mme Viénot. As her upper eyelids descended, he saw that that characteristic blind look was almost (though not quite) the look of someone who is looking into the face of love.
At the end of dinner she pushed her chair back and, with a silver candlestick in her hand, she led them across the hall and into the petit salon, where they went on talking about the Occupation. It was the one subject they never came to the end of. They only put it aside temporarily at eleven o’clock, when, each person having been provided with his own candle, they went up the stairs, throwing long shadows before and behind them.
Chapter 11
AVEZ-VOUS BIEN DORMI?” Harold asked, and Eugene held up his hand as if, right there at the breakfast table, with his hair uncombed and his eyes puffy with sleep, he intended to perform a parlor trick for them. Looking at Barbara, he said: “You don’t lahv your hus-band, do you?” and to Harold’s astonishment she said: “No.”
He blushed.
“I mean yes, I do love him,” Barbara said.” I didn’t understand your question. Why, you’re speaking English!”
Delighted with the success of his firecracker, Eugène sat down and began to eat his breakfast. He had enrolled at the Berlitz. He had had five lessons. His teacher was pleased with his progress. Still in a good humor, he went upstairs to shave and dress.
Thérèse brought the two heaviest of the Americans’ suitcases down from the third floor, and then the dufflebag, and put them in the dog cart. Mme Viénot had pointed out that the trip up to Paris would be less strenuous if they checked some of their luggage instead of taking it all in the compartment with them. Harold and the gardener waited until Eugène came out of the house and climbed up on the seat beside them. Then the gardener spoke to his horse gently, in a coaxing voice, as if to a child, and they drove off to the village. At the station, Eugène took care of the forms that had to be filled out, and bought the railroad tickets with the money Harold handed him, but he was withdrawn and silent. Either his mood had changed since breakfast or he did not feel like talking in front of the gardener. When they got back to the château, Harold went upstairs first, and then, finding that Barbara was washing out stockings in the bathroom and didn’t need him for anything, he went back downstairs and settled himself in the drawing room with a book. No one ever used the front door—they always came and went by the doors that opened onto the terrace—and so he would see anybody who passed through the downstairs. When Eugène did not reappear, Harold concluded that he was with Alix and the baby in the back wing of the house, where it did not seem proper to go in search of him, since he had been separated from his family for five days.
It was not a very pleasant day and there was some perverse influence at work. The village electrician could not find the short circuit, which must be somewhere inside the walls, and he said that the whole house needed rewiring. And Alix, who was never angry at anyone, was angry at her aunt. She wanted to have a picnic with Sabine and the Americans on the bank of the river, and Mme Viénot said that it wasn’t convenient, that it would make extra work in the kitchen. This was clearly not true. They ate lunch in the dining room as usual, and at two thirty they set out on their bicycles, with their bathing suits and towels and four big, thick ham sandwiches that they did not want and that Mme Viénot had made, herself.
The sunshine was pale and watery and without warmth. They hid the bicycles in a little grove between the highway and the river, and then withdrew farther into the trees and changed into their bathing suits. When Barbara and Harold came out, they saw Alix and Sabine down by the water. Eugène was standing some distance away from them, fully dressed, and looking as if he were not part of this expedition.
“Aren’t you going in?” Harold called, and, getting no answer, he turned to Alix and said: “Isn’t he going in swimming with us?”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t feel like swimming.”
“Why not?”
“He says the water is dirty.”
Then why did he bring his bathing suit if he didn’t feel like swimming in dirty water, Harold wondered. Didn’t he know the river would be dirty?
The water was also lukewarm and the current sluggish. And instead of the sandy bottom that Harold expected, they walked in soft oozing mud halfway up to their knees, and had to wade quite far out before they could swim. Alix had a rubber ball, and they stood far apart in the shallow water and threw it back and forth. Harold was self-conscious with Sabine. They had not spoken a word to each other since she arrived. The ball passed between the four of them now. They did not smile. It felt like a scene from the Odyssey. When the rubber ball came to him, sometimes, aware of what a personal act it was, he threw it to Sabine. Sometimes she sent it spinning across the water to him. But more often she threw it to one of the two girls. He didn’t dislike or distrust her but he couldn’t imagine what she was really like, and her gray wool bathing suit troubled him. It was the cut and the color of the bathing suits that are handed out with a locker key and a towel in public bathhouses, and he wondered if she was comparing it with Barbara’s, and her life with what she imagined Barbara’s life to be like.
From down river, behind a grove of trees, they heard some boys splashing and shouting. On the other bank, sheep appeared over the brow of the green hill, cropping as they came. Farther down the river, out of sight, was Chaumont, with its towers and its drawbridge. Then Amboise, and back from the river, on a river of its own, Chenonceau. Much farther still were those other châteaux that he knew only by their pictures in the guidebook—Villandry and Luynes and Langeais and Azay-le-Rideau and Ussé and Chinon. And no more time left to see them.