‘I am such a different man today. For to wed a woman you must wed her God.’
While we were at Montpalais Oncle Charles came to us on his annual visit: pilgrimage to the Brahmins, he called it. This sounded all the more absurd as we were on the main route to St Jacques de Compostella, and down below in the Val de Biran you could see many a black cross of pilgrims who must have lost their lives with the fever of the marshes, or from hunger; or even the wolves might have jumped on them and eaten them for Friday lunch, as the curé would say. The whole district was filled with little chapels, opened but once a year when the curé brought the chalice and the cross, and clothed Ste Elise or Ste Rosalie for another year. Old peasants from the country, with lace bonnets and beards on their faces — one woman was ninety-seven years old — came murmuring things to the patron goddess of their fields. Under the loop of sky that covered the yellow of the land and the snow on top of the mountains, ran a series of small pogs—as they call little hills in those parts — and by tree and rivulet goats browsed as the prayers were said. We would take fresh-cut grass and a few violets to Ste Rosalie. Oncle Charles was to be with us at the fête du pays.
‘We leave Place St Nicolas at nine in the morning,’ he had written, ‘and the house will be in charge of Catherine this time. She has to finish her exams the coming year — she is twenty-three, and she cannot go on studying any longer. She never looks at a man; she never looks at a thing; everything is jurisprudence for her. She loves to look after my work so she will manage the office while I am away. She’s happy Madeleine will come back with us. Though Madeleine is just five years older, Catherine talks of her as if she were her mother.
‘Strange, sensitive child. That she should be mine…
‘Well, as for our arrivals and departures, we leave Place St Nicolas, as I said, at nine in the morning. Zoubie may make it a little late — you know what she is like. By one o’clock anyway we should be at Angoulême. And by four or half past, you should see our “angel of resurrection” mount up your puy. I am excited to be back in clear pure sunshine again, with the smell of mountain all about one. Tell Madeleine if she’s not more beautiful this time Oncle Charles will make her eat a foie-de-veau—the veau slit in the garden, under her nose. Oh, la Brahmine…! Zoubie and I kiss you both tenderly. Charles.’
He is the whole of himself, is Oncle Charles, whatever he does. Pity he did not take more to music, for they say even today he could go and sit in the cathedral and play the organ, if the organist were ill. He was always dressed impeccably; and for his age — he was fifty-seven then — he looked clearly fifteen years younger. Zoubie was a fat, big bunch. She was called Zoubeida because her father, an employee in the railways, had gone to Paris for his honeymoon, and that was in the curious nineties of the last century; he chanced on an operetta called Zoubeida ou l’Esclave de Perse, and it was about a slave girl, Zoubeida, who wished to wed the Prince Soulieman one day — and she did.
Zoubie was a great lady, once divorced, for her husband had run off with someone much younger. He was seven years younger than herself. Oncle Charles was a timid widower. He courted Zoubie for five or six years before she yielded to his requests and married him. But Tante Zoubie had such fantasy, such generosity. It was she who welcomed Madeleine back to the family, not Oncle Charles. He was always afraid of what his old crone of a mother in Arras would say.
‘She will never understand this, never. And after all she’s so near the grave. Let her die in peace.’
Though this was partly the truth, Madeleine once said to me, ‘You will never understand us, the French. There is piety, of course, and compassion. But Lord, there is so much calculation. I tell you, virtue is a part of French bourgeois economy.’
Oncle Charles knows well, for that is his job, how some old women when the fear of death comes nearer simply transfer their ‘goods’ to the holy Church; just to make sure, not only that Paradise awaits them on the other side, but also that there will be a nice sermon pronounced at their funeral, and the right novenna said in their name ever after. Whether this be true or not, Oncle Charles was frightened to hurt his old mother. Whatever happened and wheresoever he might be, on September the twenty-eighth, Oncle Charles had to be in Arras to kiss his mother and spend a week in her company. During that week she would never mention her daughter-in-law, and all letters to Oncle Charles from Zoubie had to be addressed poste restante. Strange the way Oncle Charles — he who held such an important position in Haute Normandie — should tremble as he talked of his mother. How different, I thought, was Grandfather Kittanna.
Of course ‘the dark angel of resurrection’—that huge Citroen quinze-chevaux—sang herself up the hill before Madeleine had had time to dress. She had become so beautiful, had Madeleine, as though you could pluck riches out of her face, that had I been superstitious I should have been afraid to take her out of an evening. She was so childlike that no sooner did she hear the car outside than she ran to the window, pins in hand, and her golden hair actually fell out of the window like a bunch of grapes. For an Indian this golden hair seemed always something unearthly, magical, made of moonbeam and of raven silver.
Once the vegetables and honey and butter of Normandy were spread out on the kitchen table — the kitchen being on the ground floor was the coolest room in summer — and while Marie was taking up the luggage, Oncle Charles told us of family matters.
‘Mother thinks you’ve married a Maharaja, Mado,’ he said, looking at me, ‘else there were no reason why you should marry a man from les Indes. “Mon auteur dit,” she would say, and then go on to tell me about the castes and the kings, and of the Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva that some school books of the fifties of the last century had taught her in her convent. But she cannot believe India is no more British India, nor you, Rama, dark as a Negro, and that you will not make Madeleine one of your concubines — for you must have a palace — and then make her mount your pyre and be burnt with your dead body. She’s not so much worried about the marriage, but she’s worried about burial and resurrection. Poor woman! Let her be what she is.’
Oncle Charles was not a man to say things inconsequently: he was too much of a notaire to say the first thing that came to his tongue. There was much in his mind that Madeleine started guessing almost immediately.
In the afternoon, when the sun was already slanting towards the Pyrénées, we took our hats and our country canes and walked down the hill to the cool of the river. Oncle Charles, as he walked in front of me with Madeleine, talked of many things. He was anxious about her future: whether she would stay in France or in India. Now that my father was dead it seemed inevitable to him that she should go back with me. True, of course, now with the air services distances were abolished; ‘… but yet, a heart is a heart, and there’s Grandmother at Arras. She’s been asking strange questions too. Before she dies, she wishes for the peace of her soul to know many, many things. And she wants to make a gift to us all, Madeleine. The curé has been worrying us a great deal about the growth of the city. He says that since the cemetery of St Médard is so near the city, the Government is bringing in all sorts of restrictions. Before the Municipality brings the new law into action land must be bought. They are damn’ Socialists, you know, at St Médard. The Municipality is playing on speculation. Prices are going up. So far, there have been only seven places in the caveau,’ said Oncle Charles, and suddenly added, ‘Look at the swallows, I never saw such beautiful blue wings ever in my life.’