The Cost of Living (44 page)

Like everyone else in Lucie's family, Gilles believed that Jérôme's relations had engineered the marriage because Jérôme had had a breakdown and Lucie was a nurse. As for Jérôme, said Gilles silently, he may have seemed like an intellectual pioneer all those years ago, but now there were crowds of younger men with degrees every bit as good as his, and all of them waiting for the handful of prestigious titles Free Quebec would throw out: Minister of Culture, Minister for the Restoration of Historical Monuments, Ambassador to the United Nations, to Unesco, to France, to London, to Rome, to the Vatican. Minister of Protocol. Minister of the Armed Forces. Minister in Charge of other Ministries. Minister in Discreet Control of the Self-Perpetuating Revolution. That was what Jérôme had been waiting for. It wasn't a breakdown he'd had. It was a sulking fit.

Well, just wait. Wait until it happens and there are one hundred and thirty candidates for the Ministry of Culture but not even one bright young man asking to be Minister of Potatoes. I never wanted that, Gilles thought, forcing his way back into southbound traffic. I was never sullen. I never had to be humored and led around like a blind man by my wife. I only wanted to be what I am now—one of the top three or four in my field. I support five people and a dog. I have beautiful homes in two countries. My education is a match for Jérôme's any day. I don't create social problems. I am on the side of life, not of failure. I am the equal of my wife, not her dependant. I shall never be poor.

“What do you live on, Lucie?” said Gilles. “How could you afford this trip?” He knew what Jérôme was said to have done with his money. Among other things, he had financed a string quartet and actually started it on tour before his trustees stepped in and left the musicians stranded in Rimouski. After five or six ventures of that kind Lucie had gone back to work as a private nurse.

“We have to be, well, careful,” she said. Her attention was very much on the three hundred francs Gilles had pocketed. Sixty dollars mattered. In the Girards' life every dollar had a destination. “As for the trip here, he suddenly wanted it. He can't plan, you see. It's one of his…anyway, I was so glad when he said he wanted something.”

“I never, never plan,” said Gilles. “I never think farther ahead than five years. You don't believe me? Ask Laure.” He forgot about Jérôme, which was easy, because Jérôme had never really been on his mind. Gilles suddenly said, “The girls in the nineteen-fifties—you know? No, you don't know. They were made out of butter. They had round faces and dimples and curly hair. Bright lipstick. They smiled. They wore these stiff petticoats. They could have fallen in the Seine and never drowned—they'd have floated downstream on their petticoats. They wore Italian shoes that were a disaster. All those girls have ruined feet now. They looked like children dressed up—too much skirt, mother's shoes. They smiled and smiled and wanted to get married. They were infantile, underdeveloped. Retarded. All except Laure. I married Laure.”

“My sisters weren't retarded,” said Lucie.

“There is a very important railway bridge named for Laure's family,” said Gilles. “You and your sisters are peasants compared with Laure. She went to Vermont every summer. Her English was perfect. I took her to Venice for our honeymoon. In forty-eight hours she could order breakfast in Italian. I've got a picture of her in Venice feeding the pigeons. Skirt spread out. Big smile. We'd been married eleven days and she still didn't know what was what. Insisted on the dark. Married four weeks before she'd keep a light on. And then she kept her eyes shut.”

“
I
knew what was what,” said Lucie.

“You were a nurse,” said Gilles. “Laure's upbringing—it was delicate, different. After we had Sophie and Chantal, she said to me, ‘I don't want any more pregnancies, isn't there something I could be doing?' A doctor's wife! ‘Isn't there something I could be doing?'” His voice rose to a squeak because he was trying to imitate a woman's. He was not mocking Laure; on the contrary, he seemed filled with awe in the face of her opaqueness, or obtuseness. It was proof of Laure's quality. “Training is everything,” he said. “Training. The right word for every situation. She can tell where people come from before they open their mouths. The girls owe Laure every advantage they have. Looks. Brains. They play with the Ruwenzori children, the little princesses. Their mother—”

“You said that,” Lucie reminded, wanting only to save her cousin the bother of repeating himself.

Jérôme, in the backseat, had suddenly become active. She had a special ear for him, as a person conscious of mice can detect the faintest rustling. He took a letter out, unfolded it, spread it on the suitcase, ran his thumbnail along the creases. With the letter was a hand-drawn map. He looked at Henriette Arrieu's instructions and then, without the slightest comprehension, out the window.

“We had better have that map up here,” said Lucie, reaching for it.

“Laure says we have paid too much attention to beautiful objects that have no meaning,” said Gilles. “She says the children will sell the silver for a pound of rice after our class has been reduced to begging.”

“Is Laure a revolutionary?” said Lucie.

She had not seen Laure in Paris. One of Gilles' brilliant daughters had caught an ear infection in a selective swimming pool. Lucie had not understood why this should bar the apartment at Neuilly to herself and Jérôme. Perhaps Gilles and Laure had a rule about visiting Canadians. Perhaps Laure had been told cruel stories about Jérôme. It was possible that in a family with a bridge named after it no one worried about trouble with life from morning till night; perhaps it was not essential to understand other people or even be decent to them. And then Gilles could not leave the matter quiet, but had to keep adding new excuses. Laure was having the drawing room restyled; the place looked like Verdun after the battle. Also—he made it sound incidental—Laure suffered from a skin disease. It took the form of great patches of pigmentation, like freckles; the skin around the patches was drained of color, albino-pale. Gilles told Lucie the name of this ailment and said there was no cure for it. Laure had been told so too, but she would not listen; she had tried a new quack treatment in secret, a lotion you were supposed to dilute with mineral water one to twenty. Too highly bred for patience (think of racehorses, he said), she had used the stuff straight out of the bottle, dabbing poison around her mouth and eyes, burning the skin, raising blisters.

“She wouldn't consult me, of course,” he said, still declaring his pride in her. “I'm only one of the world's top dermatologists—that's all I am. Is Laure a revolutionary? Is she a revolutionary? Let me consider that. She won't live in the States. Is that political? I'm not a dominating male. I don't ask questions.”

Lucie considered what Gilles might be like as a husband. He was never moody or silent. He could jabber on for hours about anything. Whatever devils beset him he got rid of with words. Perhaps he did not object to living alone in the New Haven house and seeing his clever family only sometimes. Laure was certainly remarkable too, though she did have some lapses, such as using that powerful lotion just as it came from the bottle.

“We are not in Burgundy,” Gilles presently said. “Though Jérôme can think so if he likes. What does your map say? Are you sure that is the house?” He was looking at a sandy ruin partly covered with tarpaulin. A sign near the road explained that restoration of this wreck was proceeding under the guidance of the Central Direction of Architecture and Historical Monuments of the Ministry for Cultural Affairs. “There, a job for Jérôme,” said Gilles.

She was sure the remark was innocent. The question was, where were they?

“I know the site,” said Gilles. “It was bought by a dentist in Paris. He will never live here, but it gives him prestige and something off his taxes.”

“The house is across the road,” said Jérôme, not only bringing them to their senses but showing that he could, sometimes, move the pinpoint of concentration away from himself and feel compassion for Lucie's anxious daisy-face, tenderness for the fair hair that stuck out in uncontrollable wisps like flower petals. She sensed that; smiled; and then all three saw with sudden shyness the unknown spiked fence with a low wall behind it, the shut gate, the dangling bell cord one of them would have to pull. Gilles was the first to move. He gave the bell a contemptuous look and pushed the gate open. They drove in over a curve of hissing gravel, under lime trees.

Lucie had never seen a house quite like this one. For one thing it had no door, but only four pairs of French windows. These stood open, allowing four pairs of streaked and faded red silk curtains to billow gently. The lawn was of scythed grass, like a pasture. Along a whitewashed wall trees had been trained flat to a lattice. Lucie knew an apple leaf when she saw one, but she had not seen trees crucified before. The emergence of two new persons, a girl of about eighteen and a slow old woman, out of separate windows at opposite ends of the house, turned her attention to herself. She saw everything she was wearing and had packed in the suitcase. This was a country weekend, but what is “country” when you are a total stranger? She could not grasp the meaning of this house, which was neither farm nor mansion; did not see why a scythed field required a fence and a wall around it; did not understand the running, breathless, scowling girl with her long cotton frock, bare arms, bare feet, flying hair; even less the plodding old woman who had a white mustache. The heels of Lucie's shoes sank into the loose gravel of the drive. Her ankles would not hold her. She felt herself clutching her white handbag. The dog had got out and was digging at the lawn: she saw that in white, as under lightning.

The running girl did not see anything, certainly not Lucie. She made for Jérôme; stopped; remembered her manners. It was Lucie who received her French coldness, her French handshake (a newborn white mouse was what it felt like). She said in delicate, musical English, “I am Nadine Besson, Madame Arrieu's granddaughter. My grandmother regrets endlessly, but she had to be in Paris for a memorial service today. A Resistance thing. They are old and keep on dying. Your telegrams kept arriving but no telephone number. We called the residence of your ambassador, but the ambassador…” (suspicious but sorry) “…had never heard of you. As for the embassy, no one could be obtained except a young girl who did not speak any known language at all, but who seemed to be in charge. She—when she could be understood—had never heard of you either. You neglected to tell my grandmother where you would be staying in Paris. She leaves you a thousand apologies and she will be here tomorrow.”

Gilles at once detached himself from the Girards. They were peasants, he was only their cousin. “Someone slipped up on the arrangements,” he said. He looked at Lucie with great good humor and all but slapped her on the back.

It was Jérôme who had been in constant touch with Madame Arrieu, who had received her instructions, her map. He had been incapable of booking seats on a flight to Paris, but he had known with exactitude where and when he was expected for lunch on a Saturday in June. The old woman meanwhile was circling the motor car, looking for luggage. Gilles made a tally of the entire situation. He added up the mown hay (these people must keep rabbits), the rows of salvia indifferently bedded out, the sun-bleached curtains, the barefoot girl. The house might have done, but it needed Laure, Laure's decorator, Laure's ideas on landscaping. Houses like this one were often on the market and sold like groceries.

“I remember everything here,” said Jérôme.

“Are you sure you're all right?” said Gilles. “I can leave you?” He continued his sums: the servant in carpet slippers. The granddaughter, a Latin Quarter leftover. Café student type. Probably sleeps with Arabs. My daughters play ping-pong with princesses. My wife knows the smartest people in Paris—dressmakers, the best hairdressers. Lucie looks like a farmer's wife got up for church. Well, she asked for it; she wanted Jérôme. “I'll pick you up on my way back to Paris on Monday,” he said. “Ten, eleven. Try to be ready.”

Both Girards looked at him. Lucie's round daisy face had gone narrow, as dark as Jérôme's. Gilles experienced a second of prophetic vision: under hostile pressure, felt equally, the Girards might grow to be alike. They could become savage, two wolves. One would need to speak softly to them, move cautiously, never make a move that might seem threatening. Having grasped this, having seen not only through layers of time but through walls of people, Gilles did not know if it was of any use to him. He did not know if understanding of people could be used, if the knowledge was good for anything, if it was even worth keeping in mind. “Does that plan suit you?” he said, which was not the kind of thing he usually said to anyone.

“Not the morning,” said Nadine. “My grandmother will want her visitors to stay to lunch. Come for them in the afternoon—say, around three o'clock.” Gilles was not included in that Monday lunch. Lucie noticed, Gilles noticed. As for Jérôme, he had taken the suitcase from the slippered old woman and was halfway to the house.

2

It would have been clear to the meanest intelligence that Nadine had no interest in the Girards. She had been ordered to entertain them. She was her grandmother's victim and by extension theirs. She was disappointed because they had spoken French to her: she had been hoping to show off her English.

Lucie could not sit still. She wanted a way through to Nadine's friendship, and the path she chose was to comment on everything she noticed in Henriette Arrieu's drawing room. After mentioning the loose white slipcovers, a fireplace with a jar of peonies standing in the grate, a series of six English hunting prints on one wall, she picked up a photograph in a silver frame and said to Nadine, “Is that your father?”