At the grocery store that served as theater bar, wine and French gin and whiskey and soft drinks were being dispensed, at triple price. The wine was sour and undrinkable. David asked for tonic; Lily and I usually had Cokes. The French she had learned in her Catholic boarding school allowed her to negotiate this, timidly. She liked ordering, enjoyed taking over sometimes, but Mr. Chadwick had corrected her Canadian accent and made her shy. David, merely impressed, asked if she had been educated in Switzerland.
The possibility of becoming a different person must have occurred to her. She picked up the bottle of tonic, as if she had never heard of Coca-Cola, still less ordered it, and demanded a glass. No more straws; no more drinking from bottles. She then handed David a tepid Coke, and he was too struck by love to do anything but swallow it down.
Lapwing in only a few minutes had managed to summon and consume large quantities of wine. His private reasoning had Mr. Chadwick paying for everything: after all, he had brought Lapwing up here to be belabored by Mozart. Edie, who had somehow lost Mr. Chadwick, was drinking wine, too. I noticed that Lily wanted me to foot the bilclass="underline" the small wave of her hand was an imperial gesture. Distancing herself from me, the graduate of a Swiss finishing school forgot we had no money, or nearly none. I fished a wad of francs out of my pocket and dropped them on the counter. Lapwing punched me twice on the shoulder, perhaps his way of showing thanks.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m one of those people for whom music is wave after wave of disjointed noise.” He made “those people” sound like a superior selection.
Mr. Chadwick, last to arrive, looked crumpled and mortified, as if he had been put through some indignity. All I could do was offer him a drink. He looked silently and rather desperately at the grocery shelves, the cans of green peas, the cartons leaking sugar, the French gin with the false label.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said.
Lily and Edie linked arms and started back toward the church. They wanted to see the musicians at close quarters. Mr. Chadwick had recaptured David, which left me saddled with Lapwing.
“I don’t have primitive anti-Catholic feelings,” said Lapwing. “Edie was a Catholic, of course, being a Pole. A middle-class Pole. I encouraged her to keep it up. A woman should have a moral basis, especially if she doesn’t have an intellectual one. Is Lily still Catholic?”
“It’s her business.” We had been over this ground before.
“And you?”
“I’m not anything.”
“You must have started out as something. We all do.”
“My parents are Anglican missionaries,” I said. “I’m nothing in particular.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lapwing said.
“Why?”
I hoped he would say he didn’t know, which would have raised him a notch. Instead he drank the wine left in Edie’s glass and hurried after the two women.
In the bright church, where every light had been turned on and banks of votive candles blazed, our wives wandered from saint to saint. Edie had tied a bolero jacket around her head. The two were behaving like little girls, laughing and giggling, displaying ex-Catholic behavior of a particular kind, making it known that they took nothing in this place seriously but that they were perfectly at home. Lapwing responded with Protestant prudence and gravity, making the remark that Lily should cover her hair. I looked around and saw no red glow, no Presence. For the sake of the concert the church had been turned into a public hall; in any case, what Lily chose to do was her business. Either God existed and was not offended by women and their hair or He did not; it came to the same thing.
Mr. Chadwick was telling David about design and decoration. He pointed to the ceiling and to the floor. I heard him say some interesting things about the original pagan site, the Roman shrine, the early Christian chapel, and the present rickety Baroque — a piece of nonsense, he said. Lapwing and I, stranded under a nineteenth-century portrayal of St. Paul, given the face of a hanging judge, kept up an exchange that to an outsider might have resembled conversation. I was so hard up for something to say that I translated the inscription under the picture: “St. Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, put to death as a martyr in Rome, A.D. 67.”
“I’ve been working on him,” Lapwing said. “I’ve written a lot of stuff.” He tipped his head to look at the portrait, frowning. “Saul is the name, of course. The whole thing is a fake. The whole story.”
“What do you mean? He never existed?”
“Oh, he existed, all right. Saul existed. But that seizure on the road to Damascus can be explained in medical terms of our time.” Lapwing paused, and then said rather formally, “I’ve got doctors in the family. I’ve read the books. There’s a condition called eclampsia. Toxemia of pregnancy, in other words. Say Lily was pregnant — say she was carrying the bacteria of diphtheria, or typhoid, or even tetanus.…”
“Why couldn’t it be Edie?”
“O.K., then, Edie. I’m not superstitious. I don’t imagine the gods are up there listening, waiting for me to make a slip. Say it’s Edie. Well, she could have these seizures, she could hallucinate. I’m not saying it’s a common condition. I’m not saying it often happens in the civilized world. I’m saying it could have happened in very early A.D.”
“Only if Paul was a pregnant woman.”
“Men show female symptoms. It’s been known to happen — the male equivalent of hysterical pregnancy. Oh, not deliberately. I’m not saying it’s common behavior. I don’t want you to misquote me, if you decide to research my topic. I’m only saying that Saul, Paul, was on his way to Damascus, probably to be treated by a renowned physician, and he had this convulsion. He heard a voice. You know the voice I mean.” Lapwing dropped his tone, as though nothing to do with Christianity should ever be mentioned in a church. “He hallucinated. It was a mystical hallucination. In other words, he did a Joan of Arc.”
It was impossible to say if Lapwing was trying to be funny. I thought it safer to follow along: “If it’s true, it could account for his hostility to women. He had to share a condition he wasn’t born to.”
“I’ve gone into that. If you ever research my premise, remember I’ve gone into everything. I think I may drop it, actually. It won’t get me far. There’s no demand.”
“I don’t see the complete field,” I said. That sounded all right — inoffensive.
“Well, literature. But I may have strayed. I may be over the line.” He dropped his gaze from the portrait to me, but still had to look up. “I don’t really want to say more.”
I think he was afraid I might encroach on his idea, try to pick his brain. I assured him that I was committed to French history and politics, but even that may have seemed too close, and he turned away to look for Edie, to find out for certain what she was doing, and ask her to stop.
Mr. Chadwick had found the evening so successful that he decided on a bolder social move: David must give a piano recital in the villa, with a distinguished audience in attendance. A reception would follow — white-wine cup, petits fours — after which some of us would be taken to a restaurant, as Mr. Chadwick’s guests, for a dinner in David’s honor. The event was meant to be a long jump in his progress from gardener to favored house guest.
He was let off gardening duty and spent much of his time now at the Biesels’, where they offered him a cool room with a piano in it and left him in peace. Meanwhile the winter salon was torn apart and cleaned, dustcovers were removed from the sofas, the windows and shutters opened and washed and sealed tight again. The expert brought in from Nice to restore the Pleyel had a hard time putting it to rights, and asked for an extra fee. Mr. Chadwick would not give it, and for a time it looked as if there would be no recital at all. Mrs. Biesel quietly intervened and paid the difference. Mr. Chadwick never knew. One result of the conflict and its solution, apart from the piano’s having been fixed, was that Mr. Chadwick began to tell stories about how he had, in the past, showed great firmness with workmen and tradesmen. They were boring stories, but, as Lily said, it was better than hearing the stories about his mother.