One by one, she picks up the rejected prints where they have dropped. She tears each in half and bundles it into the wooden box that is the room’s repository for wastepaper. Then she examines one of the. suspended sheets, holding it obliquely against the light to see if it has wholly dried. Satisfied that this is so, she releases the pegs and trims the paper in her guillotine. She signs it and writes in pencil 1/50, then places it in a pale green portfolio. She repeats all this with each remaining print, then loosely ties the folder’s tattered ribbons.
‘To look at, there is l’église St Cérase,’ Monsieur Langevin said, that first Wednesday afternoon. He stopped the car in the Place de la Paix and pointed out the way. There was nothing much else in the town, he warned. A park beside the Maison de la Presse, tea-rooms and cafés, the Hostellerie de la Poste. But the church was quite impressive. ‘Well, anyway, the façade,’ Monsieur Langevin added.
Charlotte walked to it, admired the façade and went inside. There was a smell of candle grease and perhaps of incense: it was difficult precisely to identify the latter. Charlotte was seventeen then, her presence in the Langevin household arranged by her father, who set great store by what he referred to as ‘perfect French’. Some acquaintance of his had a connection with a cousin of Madame Langevin; an arrangement had been made. ‘I’ve been good about your drawing,’ her father had earlier claimed, in the parental manner of that time. ‘I’m only asking in return that you acquire the usefulness of perfect French.’ Her father did not believe in her talent for drawing; a businessman himself, he anticipated for his only child a niche in some international commercial firm, where the French she had perfected would float her to desirable heights. Charlotte’s father had her interests – as he divined them – at heart. A prosperous marriage would come latter. He was a conventional man.
In the church of St Cérase she walked by confessionals and the Stations of the Cross, taking no interest at seventeen, only wishing her father hadn’t been insistent on sending her to Massuery. She had every Wednesday afternoon to herself, when Madame Langevin took her children riding. She had Sunday afternoons as well, and every evening when the children had gone to bed. But what on earth could she do on Sunday afternoons except go for a walk in the woods? And in the evenings the family seemed surprised if she did not sit with them. There were in all five children, the youngest still an infant. The twins were naughty and, though only six, knew how to tease. Colette sulked. Guy, a dark-haired boy of ten, was Charlotte’s favourite.
This family’s details were recorded in an unfinished letter in Charlotte’s handbag: the sulking, the teasing, Guy’s charm, the baby’s podginess. Her mother would read between the lines, winkling out an unhappiness that had not been stated; her father would skip a lot. Madame Langevin’s sister is here on a visit. She is tall and languid, an incessant smoker, very painted up, beautifully dressed. Madame Langevin’s quite different, smartly dressed too, and just as good-looking in her way, only nicer in the sense that she wants people to he all right. She smiles a lot and worries. Monsieur Langevin does not say much.
Outside a café in the square she completed the letter, pausing often to make the task last. It was July and necessary to sit in the shade. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky since I arrived. She drank tea with lemon and when she’d sealed the envelope and written the address she watched the people going by. But there were few of them because of the heat of the afternoon – a woman in a blue dress, with sunglasses and a poodle, a child on a bicycle, a man delivering shoe-boxes from a van. Charlotte bought a stamp in a tabac and found the park by the Maison de la Presse. The seats were dusty, and whitened with bird droppings; sunlight didn’t penetrate the foliage of the trees, but at least the place was cool and empty. She read the book she’d brought, The Beautiful and Damned.
Twenty-two years later Charlotte sees herself sitting there, and can even recall the illustration on the cover of the novel – a girl with a cigarette, a man in evening dress. Madame Langevin’s conscientious about speaking French to me, a line in her letter reported. Monsieur practises his English. Charlotte was timid then, and innocent of almost all emotion. In her childhood she’d been aware of jealousy, and there’d always been the affection she felt for her father and her mother; but she had no greater experience of the vagaries of her heart, or even of its nature, and only loneliness concerned her at first at Massuery.
In the room set aside for her work Charlotte slips a green Loden overcoat from a coat-hanger and searches for her gloves, the park at St Cérase still vividly recurring. She might have wept that afternoon, protected by the human absence around her; she rather thought she had. After an hour she had gone to the museum, only to find it shut. Beneath a flamboyant female figure representing Eternal Peace she had waited in the Place de la Paix for the bus that would take her back to the gates of Massuery.
‘Describe to me England,’ Madame Langevin’s sister requested that evening, practising her English also. ‘Describe to me the house of your father. The food of England is not agreeable, n’est-ce pas?’
Replying, Charlotte spoke in French, but the tall, beautifully dressed woman stopped her. She wanted to hear the sound of English, it made a change. She yawned. The country was tedious, but so was Paris in July.
So Charlotte described the house where she lived, and her mother and her father. She explained how toast was made because Madame Langevin’s sister particularly wanted to know that, and also how English butchers hung their beef. She wasn’t sure herself about the beef and she didn’t know the names of the various joints, but she did her best. Madame Langevin’s sister lay listening on a sofa, her cigarette in a black holder, her green silk dress clinging to her legs.
‘I have heard of Jackson’s tea,’ she said.
Charlotte had not. She said her parents did not have servants. She did not know much about the Royal Family, she confessed.
‘Pimm’s Number One,’ Madame Langevin’s sister prompted. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’
The Massuery estate was extensive. Beyond the gardens there were fields where sheep grazed, and beyond the fields there were plantations of young trees, no more than a foot high. On the slopes beyond them, firs grew in great profusion, and sometimes the chain-saws whirred all day long, an ugly sing-song that grated on Charlotte’s nerves.
In front of the house, early every morning, gardeners raked the gravel. An old man and a boy, with rakes wider than Charlotte had ever seen before, worked for an hour, destroying every suspicion of a weed, smoothing away the marks of yesterday’s wheels. The same boy brought vegetables to the house an hour or so before lunch, and again in the evening.
Marble nymphs flanked the front door at Massuery. A decorated balustrade accompanied the steps that rose to the left and right before continuing grandly on, as a single flight. The stone of the house was greyish-brown, the slatted shutters of its windows green. Everything at Massuery was well kept up, both inside and out. The silver, the furniture, the chandeliers, the tapestries of hunting scenes, the chessboard marble of the huge entrance hall, were all as lovingly attended to as the gravel. The long, slender stair-rods and the matching brass of the banister were regularly polished, the piano in the larger of the two salons kept tuned, the enamel of the dining-room peacocks never allowed to lose its brilliance. Yet in spite of all its grandeur, Massuery possessed only one telephone. This was in a small room on the ground floor, specially set aside for it. A striped wallpaper in red and blue covered the walls, matching the colours of an ornate ceiling. A blue-shaded light illuminated the telephone table and the chair in front of it. There were writing materials and paper for noting messages on. Madame Langevin’s sister, with the door wide open, sat for hours in the telephone room, speaking to people in Paris or to those who, like herself, had left the city for the summer months.