FRENCH NIGHTS
Monsieur’s garden is well advanced into springtime, though we left home this morning still in the bitter purview of winter. Here the trees are in leaf and there are flowers in the beds. We have been forwarded like clocks by a whole season.
But it is April, and spring, in England too. The sullen English skies seem unkind from the sanctuary of Monsieur’s garden, and intentionally cruel; as though the wind and rain that did not modulate by day or night but persisted week after week through February and March, like irreconcilable grief or anger, were the product of temperament rather than latitude. But it is not warmth that I expect from my parent nation: it is beauty, and distinctness. It is delicacy I require and feel cheated of, the delicacy of poets; not warmth, which is for babies. In January, meeting a friend at Bristol airport, I stood at the arrivals gate and watched as people poured in from the Canary Islands, from Tenerife. Back they came, in their shorts and string vests and sombreros, in their tanned orange skin; back they came to the bad-tempered homeland and went whooping out through the automatic doors into its dark and inhospitable evening. In a way I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so, with human beings or with anything else. There has to be a reckoning, an accounting. There has, at some point, to be the truth.
Monsieur answers the door himself, apparently alone except for a proud white stiff-haired little dog that might be Tintin’s Snowy in his comfortable dotage. Who are we, Monsieur wants to know. He stands in the doorway of his château, diffident in scuffed deck shoes and faded canvas shorts that show his weathered knotty legs from the knee, while Snowy struts with arthritic dignity among the flower beds. Monsieur is in his late fifties or so, slightly wild-haired and abstracted but not unkind-looking. He has little fiercely glittering eyes whose irises are a benevolent sky blue. He advertised his château as offering bed and breakfast, though perhaps he has forgotten it. I tell him we have come to stay the night. Les Anglais, I add. Ah oui, he says at last, Les Anglais! He surveys the two children with an eye that expresses a well-bred tolerance for certain weaknesses. Perhaps when we have unloaded our bags we will be so kind as to put our car in the field. Then he will show us to our rooms. He points to the field, which lies just beyond the avenue of trees through which we came. I wonder whether we constitute an affront to his domain, with the unaestheticism of our arrival. Our car is dusty and litter strewn: we ourselves are stiff and crumpled and white-faced, and though there is no way it can be proved, Monsieur seems to know that we spent the last hour of our journey singing from one end to the other of the repertoire of The Sound of Music.
He slips lightly back through his doorway while the car disgorges its unsavory contents on the graveled drive. The children awkwardly probe the near shores of the front lawn, aloofly observed by Snowy. They look backward, almost physically illiterate, as if they have never seen a garden before in their lives. In the car they were reading The Cat in the Hat. They read it aloud: it made me laugh. I have always found Dr. Seuss’s world to be a place in which adults may satisfy to the full their unacknowledged need for surreality. When they were small, a friend of mine once dramatized The Lorax for them in its entirety, and as she came to the felling and extinction of the trufula trees, dignified tears rolled steadily down her cheeks. They watched her reverently; for them, too, books are the highest reality. They were different in those faroff days: more distinct and compact, entire unto themselves. They had not yet gone to school. They burned with autonomous life, with a force that had not yet been catalogued and named, like Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat in the Hat. Now they are more like the children in the story, neat and combed, anxious because their mother is out. The Cat is the mother’s antithesis, anarchic and free, available, unscheduled. And though they might forget it, those storybook children were bored before the Cat in the Hat came; bored to tears with that life of order and responsibility, in which nothing ever happened, until one day it did.
When we have our bags and the car is in its field, we present ourselves again at the front door in a straggling group. Monsieur immediately manifests himself from an inner chamber. In his hand are two large old-fashioned iron keys. He leads us into a pale paneled hallway with glass doors to either side, through which I can see long perspectives of light-filled rooms like galleries, with floors so varnished that they shimmer like the surface not of wood but of water; rooms full of paintings and mirrors, a grand piano, sculptures and oriental rugs, great fronded plants in china pots, chairs and tables with elaborately scrolled legs, a vast pale marble fireplace and great numbers of tall windows with folded shutters, on the other side of which stands the garden again, so that the whole place has an appearance of transparency, as if it were made of glass.
Monsieur noiselessly ascends a broad stone staircase that rises through the center of the house and we follow, turning through regions of mysterious, untenanted elegance, past glimpses of arched doorways and distant, glimmering windows, of vanishing hallways and furniture in a sleep of antiquity, up and up until we come to the top, where the windows look out at the fat golden hills of Burgundy and Monsieur finally engages his key. We stand behind him on the painted floorboards of a large landing in the eaves. Under the window an ancient rocking horse with a coarse, mellifluous mane and tail and fiery black nostrils waits on its curved runners, as though for some remembered childhood rider to come again. There is a little toy carriage too, rickety and antique, and a doll with pale ringlets and staring china eyes in a tiny chair. Monsieur opens a door and shows us into a low, large room with red walls. It is the nursery, he explains: the toys outside once belonged to the children of the house. I had not suspected Monsieur of sentimentality, and indeed it is sentimentality of a rigid and proprietous kind, for the same force that requires the children to sleep in the nursery dictates that their parents should spend the night in a room far away, a grand room on a lower floor with window seats and a balcony and a view of the park, where they might never be found. I wonder what became of the aforementioned children of the house, and their mother, for Monsieur seems unflinchingly alone. The color of the nursery, cozy as it is, brings to mind the Red Room in Jane Eyre, in all its punitive reputation. But Monsieur is not to be offended: we put our bags in the appropriate places and regroup on the stone staircase, where with the tolerant look again in his eye, as if he knows of our mildly regrettable English weakness for breakfast, he informs us of the hour at which he serves it.
Outside, the trees in the park cast sharp-edged shadows; the pale-colored château stands in its own deepening aura of obscurity, seeming to grow paler as evening advances, as though it might finally dissolve. The air is warm and stilclass="underline" only the pallor of the sky and the sharpness of the shadows betray the fact that it is not yet summer here, in these benignant rolling fields with their foliage already lush. We are south of Paris, north of Dijon, and a few miles west of Auxerre and the river Yonne, whose landscapes Françoise Sagan describes as representing the eternal boredom and beauty of the French paysage. This is the heartland of fine wine and fine food: satisfaction and plenty seem to roll off its plump yellow hills. Nearby lies the village of Noyers, in whose soft golden buildings the fat, rich, productive spirit of the soil makes itself fully manifest. In a little bar on the main square we play babyfoot and drink wine from tulip-shaped glasses while boys on bicycles and scooters whir up and down the pavements outside. The bar is full of men, who look at us with brazen, friendly curiosity, and indeed there must be something extruded and untranslatable about us, beset as we are by the joy of escape and by the knowledge that we who consumed porridge in a Sussex village that morning have found our way, by a mixture of randomness and design, here.