‘Mon Dieu!’ Monsieur Langevin would sometimes murmur, passing the open door. Monsieur Langevin was grey at the temples. He was clean-shaven, of medium height, with brown eyes that became playful and indulgent in his children’s presence. But the children, while agreeable to their father’s spoiling of them, were equally fond of their mother, even though it was she who always punished them for their misdemeanours. There was the day the twins put the cat in the chimney, and the day the bough of the apricot tree collapsed beneath their weight, and the morning old Jules couldn’t find his shoes, not a single pair. There were occasions when Colette refused to speak to anyone, especially to Charlotte, when she lay on her bed, her face turned to the wall, and picked at the wallpaper. Monsieur Langevin was as angry about that as he was about the cat in the chimney, but in each case it was Madame Langevin who arranged for whatever deprivation appeared to her to be just.
Madame Langevin’s sister was having an affair. Her husband arrived at the house every Thursday night, long after dinner, close on midnight. He came on the Paris train and remained until Sunday evening, when he took a sleeper back again. He was a vivacious man, not as tall as his wife, with a reddish face and a small black moustache. After his first weekend Madame Langevin told Charlotte that her sister had married beneath her, but even so she spoke affectionately of her brother-in-law, her tone suggesting that she was relaying a simple fact. Madame Langevin would not speak ill of anyone, nor would she seek, maliciously, to wound: she was not that kind of woman. When she mentioned her sister’s love affair, she did so with a shrug. On her sister’s wedding-day she had guessed that there would be such a development: with some people it was a natural thing. ‘Le monde,’ Madame Langevin said, her tone neither condemning her sister nor dis-paraging her brother-in-law in his cuckold role.
Charlotte descends dimly lit stairs from her flat to the street, the green portfolio under her arm. The chill of a December morning has penetrated the house. The collar of her Loden overcoat is turned up, a black muffler several times wound round her neck. Does it happen, she wonders in other people’s lives that a single event influences all subsequent time? When she was five she was gravely ill, and though she easily remembers the drama there was, and how she sensed a closeness to death and was even reconciled to it, the experience did not afterwards pursue her. She left it, snagged in its time and place, belonging there while she herself went lightly on. So, too, she had left behind other circumstances and occurrences, which had seemed as if they must surely cast perpetually haunting shadows: they had not done so. Only that summer at Massuery still insistently accompanies her, established at her very heart as part of her.
‘It is the yellow wine of the Jura,’ Monsieur Langevin said, in English still. ‘Different from the other wines of France.’
From the windows of Massuery you could see the mountains of the Jura. Spring and early summer were sometimes cold because of wind that came from that direction. So they told her: the Jura was often a conversational topic.
‘Is there a doctor at hand?’ Madame Langevin’s sister inquired, quoting from an English phrase-book she had made her husband bring her from Paris. ‘What means “at hand”? Un médian sur la main? C’est impossible!’ With the precision of the bored, Madame Langevin’s sister selected another cigarette and placed it in her holder.
‘The lover is a younger man,’ Madame Langevin passed on in slowly articulated French. ‘Assistant to a pharmacist. One day of course he will wish to marry and that will be that.’
First thing in the morning, as soon as I open my eyes, the smell of coffee being made wafts through my open window. It is the servants’ breakfast, I think. Later, at half past eight, ours is served in an arbour in the garden, and lunch is taken there too, though never dinner, no matter how warm the evening. On Sundays Monsieur Langevin’s mother comes in a tiny motor-car she can scarcely steer. She lives alone except for a housekeeper, in a village thirty kilometres away. She is small and formidable, and does not address me. Sometimes a man comes with her, a Monsieur Ogé with a beard. He speaks to me in detail about his health, and afterwards I look up the words 1 do not know. Other relations occasionally come on Sundays also, Madame’s cousin from Saulieu and her husband, and the widow of a general.
During the war, when there were only women and children at Massuery, a German soldier was discovered in the grounds. He had made himself a shelter and apparently lived on the remains of food thrown out from the house. He would not have been discovered had he not, in desperation, stolen cheese and bread from a larder. For more than a week the women lived with the knowledge of his presence, catching glimpses of him at night, not knowing what to do. They assumed him to be a deserter and yet were not certain, for he might as easily have been lost. In the end, fearing they were themselves being watched for a purpose they could not fathom, they shot him and buried him in the garden. ‘Ici,’ Madame Langevin said, pointing at a spot in the middle of a great oval flowerbed where roses grew. ‘C’était moi,’ she added, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. On a wet night she and her mother-in-law and a maidservant had waited for the soldier to emerge. Her first two shots had missed him and he’d advanced, walking straight towards them. Her third shot made him stagger, and then she emptied both barrels into his body. She’d only been married a few months, not much older than Charlotte was now. She seems so very gentle, Charlotte wrote. You can’t imagine it.
On 14 August, a date that was to become enshrined in Charlotte’s consciousness, she was driven again to her Wednesday-afternoon freedom by Monsieur Langevin. But when they came to the Place de la Paix, instead of opening the car door as usual and driving on to his mid-week appointment, he said:
‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’
He spoke, this time, in French. He smiled. Like her, he said, he had hours on his hands. He had driven her to St Cérase specially, she realized then. On all previous Wednesday afternoons it had been convenient to give her a lift and, now, when it was not, he felt some kind of obligation had been established.
‘I could have caught the bus at the gates,’ she said.
He smiled again. ‘That would have been a pity, Charlotte.’
This was the first intimation of his feelings for her. She didn’t know how to reply. She felt confused, and knew that she had flushed. He’s such a charming man, she’d written. Both Monsieur and Madame are charming people. There’s no other word for it.
‘Let me drive you some place, Charlotte. There’s nothing to do here.’
She shook her head. She had a few things to buy, she said, after which she would return to Massuery as usual, on the bus. She would be all right.
‘What will you do, Charlotte? Look at the front of the church again? The museum isn’t much. It doesn’t take long to drink a cup of coffee.’
The French her father wished her to perfect was far from perfect yet. Haltingly, she replied that she enjoyed her Wednesday afternoons. But even as she spoke she knew that what she’d come to enjoy most about them was the drive with Monsieur Langevin. Before, she hadn’t dared to allow that thought to form. Now, she could not prevent it.