Under the Rose Page 21

  ‘Crotte,’ you’d mutter, ‘crotte de bique.’

  So I didn’t ring. I’ll just come.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ you’ll say. First thing. Braced, Anne-Marie means trouble, you think, has no sense, no head on her shoulders; sometimes you add ‘No brains!’

  This shouldn’t annoy me but does. Every time. I was the only one in a family of seven sisters and one brother to pass the Baccalauréat – but somehow none of you was impressed. I am a paragraph-reader too and that counts against me. ‘Skims the surface,’ you say as you thumb your own laborious way down the columns of La Croix. When I do a long-division sum in my head, you react as though I’d done a conjuring trick: something not in the best of taste and whose reliability had better be checked. ‘Remember’, you say ungenerously, ‘the hare and the tortoise!’ Haven’t you heard, Kiki, this is the jet-age? Hares have been rehabilitated. Tortoises are out! Your yardstick is obsolete – not that I’d care, if only you wouldn’t beat me with it. If only you wouldn’t keep on about hoping I’ll settle down to a ‘normal’ life. God, that dictatorial word. It’s going to get between us, Kiki. It’s going to make it hard for me to stay. Because I’m not going to sit around wearing penitential sackcloth admitting that every last thing I ever did was aberrant and that my failure confirms the authority of your norm.

  Because, darling, there are more norms in the hexagon of France than you or I could imagine. Everyone thinks theirs is best. My ex-husband, Jean-Louis, couldn’t see for a minute what I found wrong with his. As a prof de philo, he should, one might have thought, have known about relativities and things looking different from different angles and in different temperatures. I always felt he had a band of cold air around him and his tempo was decidedly not mine. I have a high metabolism which means I do things fast. I get bored fast too, but while I’m with a man I’m totally involved. Frighteningly: I have an impulse to die when I make love. That’s why I keep the Nembutal in the garage. These impulses wilt in the time it takes to get downstairs. I said this to Jean-Louis and he thought it in terrible taste. I remember him switching on the light and pulling away from me. He had a look of someone who’s smelled gas and is worrying about the leak. He liked things mashed up in wordy abstractions. Then he could cope. He could cope with the most extreme notions once he’d put them into his abstract jargon, but by then I’d be bored. Besides I never did learn his vocabulary. I remember complaining – jokingly – to our local grocer that I couldn’t understand my husband’s philosophisms. The grocer was very quick-witted and a whizz at crosswords. He had a café in his grocery and I used to sit there when I’d finished my shopping and we’d race each other through the day’s crossword. He had a dictionary of philosophical terms which he’d got for doing this and he gave it to me to help me understand my husband. ‘To promote understanding in family-life,’ he said. I told Jean-Louis and he was furious – said I was making a fool of him in the village, that the grocer’s nephew was in his class and that now all the pupils would be laughing behind his back. I couldn’t see this at all. But then I never could see things Jean-Louis’s way even after I had the dictionary. We moved to Grenoble shortly after that and he began teaching at the university and bringing a brilliant female student of his home for meals. She had very little money and needed feeding, he said. While I cooked, she and he used to talk about Althusser and Husserl and épiphénomènes and épistémologie and épi-this and épi-that and, though I kept the dictionary in the kitchen drawer, I could never remember which was which and used to get so furious that I would find myself putting sugar in the stew and chopping my finger into the parsley. He was sleeping with her of course and when I found out and said: OK, I hoped they’d enjoy each other and I was leaving, he couldn’t understand at all. It was quite normal, he said, for me to be annoyed, but it was normal for him to have been drawn to her as a fellow searcher in the same field and really the carnal thing between them had been just a moment of tenderness, a kind of seal on their friendship and no more and his long-term commitment was to me and it was not normal for me to fail to see this or to throw all up for a moment’s pique. Then he used one of his épi-words and I saw that the whole point of the jargon was to make very ordinary thinking seem grand and to camouflage the mean caution of his commitment to life in general and to me in particular. His favourite ordinary – non-jargon – word, Kiki, was ‘normal’. I’ve been suspicious of it since. I met him some years later in a street in Saint Tropez and we had a drink for old time’s sake. He said he had almost not recognized me and I, as one does, asked had I got so old and he said no but that in the old days I used to dress in a normal way whereas now … I roared with laughter.

  ‘Jean-Louis,’ I said. ‘Look around you. This is the normal way. It’s what everybody’s wearing.’

  It was summer and I was wearing a cheesecloth caftan and sandals. He looked around and most women were indeed wearing something like it. He kept looking and then, finally, a look of relief spread over his face. ‘There’s a normally dressed woman,’ he said, nodding at a very provincial-looking girl in a pleated tartan skirt which was the wrong length for that year, a saddle-stitched bag and imitation-Gucci moccasins: the very sort of outfit I used to wear when I lived with him. I was suddenly very moved. My throat closed up with emotion and I wanted to put my arms around old Jean-Louis. I couldn’t be sure: was I feeling this way because he’d made his ‘norm’ out of his memory of me and would be expecting brilliant philo students to conform to it forever more or because I realized that if I’d stayed with him I’d have gone on being a different person to the one I am now? I don’t know. Anyway, a strong nostalgia for things past seized me and I felt quite lustful towards Jean-Louis, so I got up and left. I was living with someone else at the time and, as I’ve said, I am quite scrupulous about keeping my polyandry serial rather than simultaneous.

  As for your norm, Kiki, it upsets me to think of it. But I do. I constantly think of you and our sisters mending your gumboots with bicycle-repair kits, hair scrunched into rain-bonnets, hands, stumpy as feet, reddened and ruined from trying to raise cash by selling chicken-shit, fruit and battery-hens. I see it all through a black frame like the edge on the mourning-cards you send me with such regularity that I could paper the loo with them: ‘Pray for the soul of Aunt Madeleine-Sophie who died on this day fifteen years ago. RIP.’ All our older relatives are dead. The younger and more robust left years ago for Egypt, Algeria or Indo-China, moved on when those places proved inhospitable, then failed to keep in touch. You are left with your commemorative cards and a few nuns who come out of their convents on name days and holy days to eat. As monastic rules relax, they come oftener, eat more and take back scraps in bags for friends less well provided for. They never bring you anything. I see you cooking for them, making meals from scratch – no meat-cube ever entered your kitchen. Labour has no value. Jean-Luc is set to churning the old ice-cream bucket, cranking it by hand for maybe an hour, then to pick flowers for the aunts to take back to their convent altars. Jean-Luc is fourteen now: the last surviving male in a family of females, the last child in a house whose ways were set when we were all in the nursery. Only he justifies them now. Your norm, my poor Kiki, will soon be quite bizarre. Norms, you see, are shifty.

  I AM NORMAL!

  I once typed that out on a postcard I’d happened to find in a drawer and considered sending you. The card was one of those plump, embroidered ones with a pressed edelweiss stuck on it and I must have bought it from a beggar at some resort. You might even have liked it although it had picked up a smell of stale cosmetics from lying so long in the drawer. But when I re-read the words they looked silly. The longer I looked, the shiftier they got. In the end the type seemed to be twitching like flies getting ready to do a bunk. Would anyone normal write such a thing?

  Probably, I decided, it was the baldness of the statement that undermined it. It needed context, a bit of clutter. Like my life.

  Clutter is ballast. You and my other sisters know that. You weig
ht your lives with balls and bales of string, old knives, invitations to and reject gifts from other people’s weddings. Do you remember, Kiki, that you kept every scrap of plate and silver I got for mine? For my first wedding which may well – brace yourself – be my only one. Admit that it provided a good haul! The family had been marriage-shy for so long that a fund of repossessed gifts had accumulated: objects whose owners had been removed by death or a monastic vocation. They were trotted out for my benefit, gift-wrapped with some flourish, presented with relief. Who can be bothered nowadays to clean silver? Answer: Kiki can.

  ‘You keep it,’ I told you. I knew you wanted it, had seen you touch the stuff as a timid shop-lifter might: fingers poised then retreating in an empty, hankering clench.

  ‘Keep it all!’ I said.

  ‘You’re mad!’ you said, ‘these are your wedding presents!’

  ‘But I don’t want them. Really. Sell them if you like, Kiki. They’re yours.’

  ‘But that’s not normal!’

  ‘I think it is. It seems quite normal to me.’

  ‘Oh you!’ You laughed. But you kept the silver.

  Darling. I’m being querulous, fighting with you already in my head – and so why then am I coming back? Because, Kiki, I’m at my lowest ebb, lost, lonely, maybe mad. Maybe. For the first time I could believe it.

  ‘You’, said Sam yesterday, ‘are a double nut …’

  It appals me to think of his saying that. I told Rosemary – the girl I stayed with last night. She’s known Sam for years.

  ‘I thought’, I told her and kept crying as I tried to tell her, ‘that it was a joke! You know the way Sam horses around!’

  ‘Anne-Marie,’ she said, ‘he was trying to warn you. Sam’s devious. Proud. He had to make a joke of it but you should have known it wasn’t one. Anyone else would have! I mean – how long have you two lived together? Eight months? Well, surely then – I mean you must have wondered sometimes at his behaviour?’

  ‘I thought he joked a lot.’

  ‘Well he did,’ said Rosemary, ‘but nobody jokes all the time!’

  Kiki, I’m trying to find ways to tell you – hell, there’s no good way.

  What about a telegram: Engagement broken Sam gaoled. Stop. Arriving tonight. Stop. Anne-Marie.

  And stop and let me off. Sam drove through a red light yesterday shortly after telling me of his and my nuttiness. We were on our way to the country to stay with Rosemary and her husband whose name is Dirk and who was at Johns Hopkins with Sam. Sam was in a chatty mood.

  ‘Weddings’, he told me, ‘are a collective celebration of blood-letting, human sacrifice and the offering of virgins – en principe, virgins,’ here he pinched my crotch with his gear-shifting hand, ‘so as to further the increase of the clan. Barbarous survivals. White veils, for God’s sake! Rice! Old shoes. Will you wear a white veil, Anne-Marie, to commemorate all the white lambs sacrificed to the rite? Or a black one? Let’s make our wedding recognizably monstrous. Let’s invite the world’s worst monsters.’

  ‘Who are they?’ I was looking out the window at a passing turnip field.

  ‘Nixon, Ron Reagan, Shirley Temple Black.’ Sam reads the Herald Tribune every day and his hell is entirely North American.

  ‘Where will you get them? From the waxworks?’ A Citroën raced past slick as a wet cockroach. The whole of the Route Nationale 7 was slick. I was only half listening but could tell that Sam was still sounding off in some abstract way. I turned to look at him.

  He’s twenty-nine and I’m thirty-five and my mind tends to get stuck in the implications of that. Worry about my shortcomings – cellulite in the thigh, morning puffiness about the eye – kept me from wondering was there anything the matter with him. You see I’m used to being the flawed one, the one on trial and this time I was supposed to be the judge – naturally, I never realized it.

  ‘Will you get your monsters from the waxworks?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m going to invite the originals,’ he said and put his foot on the accelerator. It was a good road but we were already going too fast. ‘I’m inviting Nixon and Spiro Agnew to our wedding,’ he said. ‘Colonel Amin and Roman Polanski. Oh and the Chilean junta.’

  I was tired of the joke. Maybe because the speedometer was still climbing. ‘Don’t you think’, I suggested, ‘that they might be too busy to attend?’

  Something hard and heavy landed on my mouth. It was his fist which he’d flung sideways. His ring split my lip. My neck wrenched backwards and I saw everything dark for moments with two swoops of concentric circles like luminous eyes – my own I suppose – glaring at me out of the blackness like flicked-up headlights.

  ‘Don’t contradict me!’ yelled Sam.

  The speedometer was at a hundred. The car wove across a miraculously empty road.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologized swiftly. ‘I was joking.’

  ‘Don’t you joke with me!’

  ‘No,’ I gabbled cravenly, ‘no, no I won’t.’ There was blood in my mouth. I tested my teeth. They seemed steady. However, my tongue felt odd and my lip was swelling. I tried to think of something soothing to say. He was, it came to me in a lucid flash, a Super-Maniac. A joker in the pack, he had appeared as King of Hearts but instead was the Knave: kinkiness itself, the epitome of all male trickery. I’d known other freaks but Sam was the worst. He had given no warning. After eight months as the perfect lover, he was now, like a flipped card, showing his other face. I knew. At once. People find this odd – Dirk and Rosemary did – that I should have gone on so long having no suspicion of him then have realized at one blow. But I did. It was like that. He was, I knew then, Nemesis sent by some Dark Venus to punish me.

  ‘We’ll invite Solzhenitsyn,’ Sam yelled.

  ‘OK,’ I shouted. ‘As you like. Anything.’

  The speedometer dropped and we made it to Dirk and Rosemary’s. Thank God it was them. Half an hour after we’d sat down to drinks and chat, Sam – I can remember no provocation leading up to this – put down his vodka, walked to where I was sitting, knocked me out of my chair and began to kick me. Dirk was on him in a second. He’s stronger than Sam and had him off me at once. It was all suspiciously smooth.

  ‘You knew!’ I challenged Rosemary in the bathroom.

  She handed me cold-cream and tissues. ‘What?’

  ‘Sam’s a nut-case! Dingue! Why did nobody tell me?’ I was crying.

  ‘It wasn’t our business to tell you, but, yes, he’s been committed several times. His mother …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She hoped you’d cure him. He’s been all right for a long while.’

  ‘You mean nobody would have told me? At any point?’

  Rosemary managed to look conniving but remote. She and Dirk are Sam’s friends. After all. Fellow-Americans in France. To them I’m the foreigner.

  ‘Look,’ she excused, ‘we supposed you’d guessed. Something … Besides, we weren’t sure you really meant to marry him. You might have been playing along with his fantasies – joking.’ Conciliatingly, she offered me a packet of Wash ’n’ Dries.

  Later she said, ‘You’d better spend the night here.’

  She went off to cook. Dirk had managed to get Sam out of the house. I’d heard the car leave. For where? I suppose I was only now feeling the shock. I sat in Rosemary’s drawing-room and drank Kirs. One Kir after another, mixing them solemnly myself, pouring the clammy red drops of Cassis in various doses into glasses of cold white wine. Blood-thick at first, they dissolved in a faint blush, a memory of sweetness in the dryness. I hadn’t drunk Kirs since leaving Jean-Louis. It had been our drink. In England I got onto Scotch. With Sam – oh shit and merde! I smashed down a glass and two pink drops jumped out of it.

  ‘I’m sending you’, you wrote last year, ‘two cases of Papa’s 1952 wine. His own. We found it in the lower cellar behind a vat which had got stuck and …’

  I knew you wanted something from me. Of course.

  ‘Poor Lucette’s boy, Jean-Lu
c, is thirteen. He’s running wild’, you wrote, ‘around here. I’m afraid he’ll end up like poor Jacques …’

  Poor, poor, poor. Do you say ‘poor Anne-Marie’? Or not? Probably not. The injured are ‘poor’. Only they. Or the dead. ‘A gaggle of spinsters,’ you joked, bravely facing your condition head on, ‘the unwise virgins, you might call us, are hardly the people to bring up a boy. You …’

  I?

  More Kir. I sent you an expensive cashmere sweater and thanked you for the wine. Not wishing to feel obligated.

  ‘I think of him’, your letter had astonishingly gone on to say, ‘as more your son than Lucette’s. She was so briefly married, after all. Poor Gérard …’

  ‘Poor’ again. Think of Gérard so as not to think of Sam! Gérard married my sister, Lucette – the only one of you all who managed to have a date or get a man. Well, how could you, living up the mountains where the few middle-class males around were intent on showing the place a clean pair of heels as soon as they could pass their Bac? Lucette snatched Gérard during a six-week trip to Pau where she was taking the waters with an invalid aunt. She didn’t do too badly, considering. He was reasonable-looking, a lawyer, and the fact that he would slip down a crevasse in our mountains could neither be foreseen nor held against him. I remember her triumph and the jealousy of everyone else, including our brother, Jacques, who had failed his exams that summer and thought he was stuck on the farm for life. As it happened, the Algerian war broke out and he joined the paratroopers. Another mourning card.

  ‘I feel’, you write, ‘that our family has a jinx on its men.’

  Have I jinxed Sam? No, he was mad before. But maybe our two jinxes flew together like magnets. Clang! What’s ‘mad’?