The Closed Harbour (27 page)

"I would have paid for a room for us both—but no. One gets used to things and life here is levelled flat. It is peaceful, what more does one want. Soon I shall get so cushioned in this peace that I know I will once more take up my knitting and my embroidery, something I have not done for a long time."

In the corridor one morning she had passed Sister Therese, the head of the laundry and had spoken to her.

"You think my daughter is content, Sister, happy I mean?" she asked.

"She's very quiet, barely speaks, she works well."

"She was always like that."

"It's difficult for anybody to say what happiness really is," Sister Therese replied. "But she is a good worker, Madame Marius."

"In the end" the old woman told herself, Madeleine would forget.

"And I will forget. I have shut the world clean from my mind. And I will keep it out. But I will hold tight in me what I have been, such things mean much."

"Here they are now," she exclaimed, as through the window she saw the quartette returning. As they advanced, she studied them.

The crippled Madame Berriot, the foreshortened right foot, heavy and clumsy and burdensome to so slight a body, which seemed to Madame Marius to have been bent double from birth. The bland features. The arms that never swung freely, but were held always in front of the body, and giving the impression that at any moment she might embrace you. The shoddy coat and skirt, the tiny gold ear-rings, the mouse-coloured hair, perilous as fluff, the whole might blow away at any moment, leaving her bald. Always on top of Madame Berriot's locker there lay a motley heap, beads, holy pictures, pamphlets, blessed flowers, a crucifix, Madame Marius had already christened it "the sprite's little mountain of prayer".

And Mademoiselle Gilliat, so tall, so terribly lean, with her curious hunted-looking expression that seemed graved upon the face, the eyes like beads, small and hard and black.

Taller than her companions, she moved quickly, lightly, she might have been the possessor of wheeled feet, moving on oiled springs. Periodically Mademoiselle Gilliat would burst into song, for no reason at all, and always they were snatches of song, they had neither beginning nor end. She sang in a high, penetrating, flute-y soprano, a razor-edged voice that cut through the air like a knife. These bursts came suddenly, wildly, as though they had been forced from her body by sheer pressure, yet never once did the pale face light up, take colour from words or melody.

Sitting beside her at the lunch table, at the close of a hot morning, Madame Marius had been struck by the fact that Mademoiselle Gilliat was wholly odourless, she seemed non-human, she had no animal smell.

She could now hear the sound of their feet upon the gravelled path. And wasn't that Madame Bazin on the outside? Of course. Always on the weather side, a buffer. But what a fool she looked, and at her age, with her grey mass blowing about her ears, that terribly induced hardiness, that, thought Madame Marius, would end up in one, quick, final shudder.

"And serve her right. Older even than I am, and imagining she's a young girl. Factory written all over her. Look at the hands. Leather."

Their voices broke on the air, but Madame Marius could not catch the gist of their conversation, and they were all looking inwards, towards each other, all smiling, except of course that Gilliat creature.

A sudden loud laugh broke in upon Madame Marius's ears as a cruel reminder that Madame Lescaux was still here, and still had to be lived with. Yes, she could see her now, that short, sturdy, thick, emboldened body, that large head that seemed to rest on no neck at all, but weighed heavily entirely upon shoulder, those short legs that were shapeless.

"I will," she thought, "get used to them all. I must learn to live with others. It will be hard, but I will do it, I have not come here without using my intelligence.

"Madame Lescaux laughs at nothing at all."

She heard the door opening, the voices in the hall, the approaching footsteps, then the room door burst open and they came in together, their closeness at an end, they broke as waves break and scattered to their various beds. They did not speak to Madame Marius, did not even notice her, each was preoccupied with her own thoughts. And they sat on their beds and they waited for the bell to ring.

Madame Marius looked up. There was Madame Bazin, actually throwing that awful shawl over her shoulders and saying to nobody in particular, "if there's anything that comforts me at all, then it's a good shawl, I've had it years, it was a present from my poor daughter, God help her."

The bell ringing, it shut off Madame Bazin's threatened reminiscences.

It was at the ringing of this bell, when Madame Marius rose from her bed, that a silence grew within the long, low-ceilinged, and narrow room, with its bone white walls, broken only by the hard black of crucifix and its polished wooden floors. As one after another they rose and approached the table, the old woman towered above them, by physical height, by a certain grossness of presence, by the carriage of the head. The features, thrown into profile for a moment and catching the direct light of the sun, showed the greater encroachment of marauding lines. The fine nose, the well shaped nostrils were menaced.

Madame Marius dominated yet without being aware of it. And as she sat down to table, and made herself easy, the quartette seemed to be sitting very uncomfortable indeed. They said the grace.

There was a moment when the old woman withdrew into herself, when the door opened and the beautiful young novice, over-burdened by her heavy tray staggered into the room, and the steaming soup, the bread and the water was laid out upon the table. The air shook with a spontaneous chatter, reminding Madame Marius of a sudden descent of sparrows, a group of close-headed children pressing against a window, anxious to catch a sight of the procession that was passing. In this rapid fire exchange of opinions and observations the old woman was just a silent listener. And not always did she understand.

Their pleasantries struck oddly upon her ear, it was like endeavouring to catch, to understand the words of some new language, outside her own, somehow she had not the key to this. Sometimes she would ask herself where these women came from, tried to envisage the kind of life they had left, wondered about their characters, their families, their histories, what substance lay behind these outer masks. She had noticed a certain deference, and, even in Madame Bazin's case, a certain wheedling. How ready that Madame Berriot was to rush and open or shut the door for her whenever she came into the room. And that Madame Lescaux who seemed right behind her whenever she dropped her handkerchief, or forgot her spectacles, even Mademoiselle Gilliat would hurry to open or shut the window. Madame Marius was graceful with her thanks, these things appeared quite natural to her.

She missed her daughter. Sometimes in the evening she would go along to the tiny room shared by her daughter with a Madame Straumer, whom Madame Marius thought the largest human creature she had ever seen. Taller than she by three inches, great of girth, the old woman was appalled by such weight of flesh, and the horse-like strength.

The huge woman would make a stiff bow whenever the old woman came into the room. And promptly enough she would go out and leave them.

"How are you getting on, Madeleine, child. Do you find the work hard? I miss having you near me, especially in the night, sometimes I reach out a hand to touch your hair and I'm only touching that bony Mademoiselle Gilliat. Tell me what you are thinking?"

"I am all right," Madeleine said.

"Is that all you have to say to me?"

"Sometimes I think of Eugene. We should never have left him like that."

"You suppose he is thinking of us? What rubbish. But for myself, I am beginning to like this place and I am glad I have come. I never want to journey any more. It makes me realize what a lot of journies are un-necessary. Do you still go to the early mass."

"I always go to the early mass."

"What kind of woman is that who shares this room with you?" she asked, and Madeleine said, "she is good, companionable, helpful
...
"

"Does she ask questions?" asked the old woman.

Madeleine shook her head.

"Nothing."

"You mind this laundering, perhaps you would like the cookhouse?"

"I am so used to both, why should I mind?"

"Put your arms round me, child, sometimes I am so terribly alone, I cannot explain it—I…"

"Here, one accepts everything, one does not think."

"We do not even sit in the window any more," said Madame Marius.

"I cannot always manage to come, mother."

"Well—no matter."

And, walking back to her room, she said to herself, "It is hard to know
what
she is thinking, sometimes I feel her mind is like a canyon, her thoughts drop to the bottom of it like stones, and lie there, hidden and undisturbed, locked away—no, I never know what she thinks. It is always a distance between us. She is like an ox that one has struck with a hammer. I shall not forget that terrible night when he returned, I saw her clearly then. One batters in vain against a shutter she seems to drawn down upon her feelings."

One morning, as she sat alone in the room, her chair facing the window, enjoying her ceremonial glass of wine, they brought her the letter.

"Thank-you, Sister," she said, taking this, laying it on her knee, "I had begun to think I had finished with this sort of thing," and not until she heard the door close did she pick up the envelope, reach for her spectacles.

"From Father Gerard again, I have no doubt. I know it could not be that Father Nollet, we never agreed upon a matter, but I will not think about that."

"Marseilles," she exclaimed, "then it is not from him. And since we paid our rent to the last minute it cannot be from that Monsieur Hamburger. Who then?"

She tore open the envelope and drew out the sheet of paper. This was thick and crackled and she opened it. The heading caught her eye.

"Office of the Administration, Institute of the Good Shepherd."

"Office of the administration
...
what on earth is this?" She put on her spectacles and started to read.

"Dear Madame,

I wish to inform you that a week to-day there was brought into this Institution a man by the name of Eugene
Marius,
late Captain of the Marine. I had better say at once, that, but for the help of a member of the Saint Vincent
de
Paul Society, you might not yet have received such communication, for he carried no identification and no papers of any kind. But it was seen at once by certain tattoo marks upon the arms, the chest, and the left forearm that he was or had been a sailor. This person was in a condition of great distress, and from Monsieur
Aristide Labiche
I have the following information.

Your son was removed from the pulpit of the bombed church of St. Dominic, where it is understood he was under the impression that he was on shipboard, for it was his shouts that first drew attention to his presence. He is now under observation. I regret to inform you that his is a condition that will deteriorate. His replies to plain questions are garbled and quite incoherent. Asked where he was going at the moment of his apprehension he replied only,
'
Rumania, in ballast.'

He seems to us to be the victim of some aberration. Only studied and careful observation can yield us anything. It is possible that in the near future he will be removed from here to another institution where his condition will be more carefully studied. It is essential that both your daughter and yourself should come here at your earliest, as it is important that we should know whether at this juncture any recognition is possible. Your presence is highly necessary and we shall be glad if you will make arrangements so as to arrive here before half ten o'clock to-morrow morning, Tuesday, and you will ask the receptionist for a Doctor Parette. It is also necessary that you send or bring any of his clothes. Yours faithfully, Anton Duschene, Secretary to the Administration."

The letter dropped from the old woman's hands. It swished away on the highly polished floor, she watched it go. A light breeze coming in through the open window sent it still further away, but her eyes never left it. Finally, it came to rest near a leg of Mademoiselle Gilliat's bed. She continued to stare at it. Then, almost involuntarily she shook herself.

She dropped to her knees. She could feel hardness of wood biting into her old knees, but she remained thus, looking out of the window, her eyes followed the gentle stir in the belt of poplar, their branches waved silently in the warmth of the sun.

"I must go, I must tell her
...
" who could not go, who could not move; something seemed to be pressing her more and more to the floor, this wood had a sudden vise-like grip. She was knelt thus when the door opened and Sister Veronica came in, carrying a great poesy of fresh flowers in one hand, a big water jug in the other. And at first she did not notice the old woman upon her knees. Then, seeing her, she put down her flowers and jug on the table and went to her.

Falling on one knee, she said, "you are not ill, Madame?"

Madame Marius did not turn her head, but continued to stare out at the trees.

"Madame
...
"

This nun was of medium height, dark-eyed, pale of feature, her hands were gentle, her voice so soft as to be almost caressing. The old woman had liked her from the very first.

Feeling the hand on her shoulder she then moved.

"I am not ill, Sister Veronica, thank-you," but the nun immediately saw a change in her, and how the words seemed to drag themselves from the throat.

"You are certain you are not ill, Madame Marius?"

The old woman tried to smile, but could not, she rose slowly to her feet,

"I am not ill, and I may rise of my own accord, thank you, Sister," she said, and walked away, the Sister watching her go, out through the still open door.