Burger's Daughter (43 page)

When I saw you plucking the cruel beard from your soft chin, I should have come to you and kissed you and put my arms around you against the prospect of decay and death.

A
fter a short trip to Corsica in pursuit of research for his thesis, Bernard Chabalier put his mind to discovering some sound reason why he should need to go to London, as well. He was good at this; extremely skilful and practised, beginning by convincing himself. Once this test was made—his face that habitually flickered with ironic scepticism and amusement at doubtful propositions accepted this one as passable—he was confident he could convince whoever was necessary.—I ought to spend a few days in London to talk to a British colleague—yes, of course the LSE—he's doing the same sort of research. The influence of the counter-emigration in Britain. Not bad, ‘Counter-emigration'. I think I've invented it. The settlers who returned from Kenya, the Rhodesians who have been slipping back since UDI, Pakistanis, that goes without saying, West Indians. As a comparison: a short chapter for purposes of comparison. The mutation of post-colonial Anglo-Saxon values as against... Such things are good for a thesis. Erudite touches. Impress the monitors.—These points would scarcely need to be led before his wife (Christine is her name) and his mother for whom the demands of the thesis come before everything. —If sitting on top of a pillar in the middle of the desert was the best way to get my doctorate, they would send me, no mercy, a bottle of Evian to make sure if I was dying of thirst I wouldn't drink water with germs. Ambitious for me, oh, I can tell you! They make sacrifices themselves, it's true...—

Four days and three nights together in Corsica had given Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier a taste of the experience of being alone, a couple in the pure state, the incomparable experience they were in no danger of losing in the attempt at indefinite prolongation that is marriage. But the joy without demands—because the night-and-day presence of the other, sensation and rhythm of breathing, smell, touch, voice, sight of, interpenetration with was total provision—becomes in itself one single unifying demand. Of the couple; upon the world, upon time: to experience again that perfect equilibrium. A wild, strong, brazen, narrow-eyed resoluteness, cast in desire, treading on the fingers of restraint, knocking aside whatever makes the passage of the will improbable and even impossible. Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier would not have many opportunities to live together whole days followed by nights when their bodies kept vigil over one another in sleep like the side-by-side tomb effigies that stand for loving bodies left deserted by death. If days and nights are going to have to be counted on the fingers, the score is important. Rosa found London a brilliant idea because ideas in this urgent context have only to be practicable to be brilliant. She herself had some complementary to his essential basic one, the reason for him to go to London. A hotel was risky; no matter how obscure, someone who knew him or her might be staying there; after all, there are many reasons for seeking obscurity. A flat was available to her—a key to a flat in Holland Park was always available to her, she had never used it. Never been to England, to London—was Holland Park all right? Bernard was charmed by the idea of showing the
jeune anglaise
(French people in the village where he had met her made no fine distinctions of origin between English-speaking foreigners) round London. Holland Park was ideal! A short ride on the Underground to the West End.

How far from the London School of Economics ?

Laughter and words capering—Ah that's right off our route, we'll never find that, don't worry—But my colleague, now,
he
lives in Holland Park, he's going to get me a room in the house of some friends, êh, it's cheaper than staying in an hotel...and if there's a phone-call (Rosa already understands the pause, the inference, old Madame Chabalier has had an ‘infarctus'—heart attack—twice, and there must always be a means of reaching her son) there's nothing remarkable about someone else in the house having answered the phone, no ?—

Yes. And yes again. Yes to everything, as what can't be done begins to be achieved with the zest of practical solutions following step-by-step, carefully planned, because carelessness costs wounds, no one must be hurt if Bernard Chabalier and Rosa Burger are to remain intact and unreachable.

On the 7th of September Bernard Chabalier assembled the type-written pages and hand-written notes scattered in coded disorder round the room where he had worked and made love, both well—he paused to grant it; a remarkable witness, that room he would not wish to be confronted with again, under changed circumstances, ever—and went back to Paris. It was one week before the re-opening of the lycée where he was, like all French schoolmasters, a professor. That was reasonable enough. It was one week before the re-opening of his children's schools; that was the reason. He could return one day and walk into his classrooms the next—he had taught what was to be taught many times, but his own children liked him to go along when pencils and exercise-books and new shoes were to be bought in preparation for the school year. He had talked to Rosa about his awareness that he did not know, beyond a certain elementary level, how one would have to behave to be what he called a ‘continuing' father, equal to needs one would have to divine; for the present he simply did what seemed to please the children most obviously ? He did not tell her that the date he and she agreed upon for his departure was a specific instance. That was the sort of thing she had, would have to divine in the kind of life he and she were living and going to live; no need to lift the fact clear of supposition that a ‘professor' needs a week to assume that identity. Loving the girl, anywhere outside the pure state, the principle that no one must be wounded reversed her position from possible perpetrator to possible victim. If nothing were said, and yet she understood why he was committed to himself to leave on that day, this would be another of the unspoken facts that would graft Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier closely upon one another.

He left on a day that denied the date on the airline ticket. Holiday crowds had gone but the ancient stone bones of the village held the marrow of summer. The blue of the sea, triumphant over its pollution, was solid. By contrast the mountains powdered away into delicate haloes of sun-gauze; no memory of snow, it would never come back. From Madame Bagnelli's car, a smell of geraniums through the windows instead of petrol fumes, and the old men playing their ball-game under the olive trees in the parking ground empty of cars, as Rosa saw him doing there when he grew old. She drove, and perhaps her concentration (still not able to trust her reflexes to keep to the right side of the road instead of the left—which was the rule where she came from) held at bay the desperation that attacked him, so that beside her his hands shook and he breathed with open mouth.

But he was coming to meet her in London in a few weeks. In the meantime he would look for the small apartment for her in Paris in the
quartier
of the lycée; she would go to London and install herself, waiting for him, in the flat that was available to her always. He would take a week's leave—he had not had a day's sick- or study-leave in ten years, he did not care a damn if the term had only just begun—and then they would come back to Paris on the same day, if not the same plane, which is to say, together. It was no parting; it was the beginning of commitment to being exactly that: together. They were no longer one of the affairs of the village. He would telephone her every day; once again, they discussed the best times —she, too, was very good at the connivance of privacies. She did not cry but he was in awe of all she had known in order to learn not to weep; and could not unlearn. It took over again, now; but suddenly she turned from her tight little profile as the angle of a mirror is changed to present full-face and the big calm lips and eyes the colour of the lining of black mussel shells (it had taken him weeks, more than somewhat influenced by the surroundings in which he moved with her and even—at last!—he acknowledged himself as an example of the French preoccupation—the things they ate, to decide the colour).—You are the only man I've loved that I've made love with. So I feel you can make everything possible for me.—

—What things ?—

She took the tongue of ticket stuck out by the meter at the barrier to the airport parking ground, and did not react the moment the gate lifted. He watched her mouth with the passionate attention of the pleasures he found there. That jaw was almost ugly; she attempted as little to disguise the unbeautiful as to promote the beauties of her face. Her lips moved to find shapes for the plenitude struck from her rock—pleasure in herself, the innocent boastful confidence of being, the assurance of giving what will be received, accepted, without question. Before she drove on she tried.—I can't say. Things I didn't know about. I find out. Through you.—

—Through me! Oh my darling, I can tell you—sometimes with you I feel I am that child sent out of the room while the adults talk, now grown-up—lived my whole life—out there...

How much his turn of phrase delighted her! They laughed together at him, in Madame Bagnelli's old car that brought them to a stop; to the destination of the day. Laughter became embraces and in a state of bold intoxication with each other, totally assuring, they parted, for a short while—less than two hours later, from Charles de Gaulle airport where he had just landed, Bernard Chabalier, having found some excuse to get away for a few minutes from whoever it was (Christine with or without children, aged mother) who had met him, telephoned Rosa Burger. He said it this time with blunt wonder: You are the dearest thing in the world to me. She cried in some unrecognized emotion, another aspect of joy; a strange experience.

She left for London ten days later by train because this was the cheapest way. She had earned a little money practising her old healing profession on people to whom she had been recommended, at the yacht harbours; but the folder of traveller's cheques she had brought to Europe was almost empty. She felt no particular concern. She had telephoned Flora Donaldson in Johannesburg and explained that after spending the summer in France she now wanted to visit London. A normal sort of itinerary for a holiday abroad; Flora, as Rosa knew she could expect of any one of her father's associates and/or friends, asked no questions that would suggest anything otherwise and expressed no surprise at or reproach for his daughter having gone abroad without telling anyone of the intention, explaining in what possible manner it could have been realized, or saying goodbye to someone who regarded herself, with justification, as the closest of family friends, who had stood outside the prison door with the girl when she was fourteen and suffering her first period cramps. She did not tell Flora with whom she was staying or where, in France. Flora told her from whom to ask the flat key in Holland Park and found a way to indicate that if money were needed, that could be arranged too. Her voice sounded, out of the past, very close, and soprano with excitement as it always became at the prospect of involvement with problems of evasion and intrigue. Rosa found a way to thank her but explain money was not needed. Flora Donaldson suddenly began to ring out as if she could not be heard properly:—But how are you ? How are you ? Really all right ? How are you ?—

The little Rôse left behind the summer dresses Gaby Grosbois had made her because English autumns were known, in the South of France, to be like winter elsewhere, and she would be returning to stay with Madame Bagnelli next summer. Oh and long before; —You will come for Christmas, or Pâques—at those times Bernard—it can be a bit difficult for you in Paris. Any time, this is always your home. The mimosa is already out, Christmas week, here—The warm cheek-kisses, the hug smelling of delicious soup vegetables and wood-varnish. And the nightingales ?—Of course! In May, you come in May and they'll be here.—

The London street was not tunnelled through dirty rain and fog they had told about. The trees were a heavy quiet green. Rugs of sunlight were laid by the long windows across Flora Donaldson's Spanish matting. A ground-floor flat with a shared strip of garden sloping down towards it from the plane trees. Black birds (magpies ? Christmas-card birds of the Northern Hemisphere) called sweet exclamations from a soft domestic wilderness of uncut grass and daisies.

More like a house! She was excited, on the telephone. A kind of wooden clock-face with a movable cow-tail to indicate how many pints the milkman should leave outside the door. A wall of books and a freezer full of food; one could withstand a siege. But the French did not know what England was like—England was the sun, and birds and lovers hidden in the grass. She was indoors hardly at all. She walked in the parks and took the boat to Greenwich. She knew no one and talked to everyone. Bernard Chabalier had to postpone his arrival for another two weeks because one of his fellow professors developed
oreillons
and the lycee was short-staffed. (What on earth... ? He did not know the name of the illness in English but described the symptoms—mumps, that's what it was, mumps.) He not only telephoned every day except Sundays at home but also wrote long letters; the delay merely gave her longer to enjoy the anticipation of their being together, alone, among all these gentle pleasures. She was taking an audio-visual French course at a student centre—it cost little and was excellent. She had been to the French Consulate and was awaiting information about the validity of her BSc. physiotherapy degree in France. He had spoken confidentially to the Anti-Apartheid Committee chairman in Paris about arranging permanent residence and a work permit for her, probably using some such terms as ‘an unnamed member of a white family of prominent victims of apartheid'. Even between Paris and London, on the telephone or in letters, he was not more explicit than simply to let her know he had ‘talked to friends', as if —another lover might pick up tics from his mistress in a desire to identify with the way of life that formed her before he knew her—he had taken on the customs of a country he never knew.