“She can’t spell,” said Simone, examining the letter again. “If Luc marries her, he will have to write all her invitations and her postcards.” What else did women write? She paused, wondering.
“Her journal?” Roger said.
In Cassandra’s journal Simone read, “They expect such a lot from that poor clod of a Luc.” That night at dinner Simone remarked, “My father once said he could die happy. He had never entertained a foreigner or shaken hands with an Englishman.”
Cassandra stared at Roger as if to say, “Is she joking?” Roger, married twenty-three years, thought she was not. Cassandra’s pale hair swung down as she drooped over her plate. She began to pick at something that, according to her diary, made her sick: underdone lamb, cooked the French way, stinking of garlic and spilling blood.
At dawn there was a spring thunderstorm, like the start of civil war. The gunfire died, and a hard, steady rain soaked the tennis court and lawn. Roger got up, first in the household, and let the dog out of the garage, where it slept among piles of paperbacks and rusting cans of weed killer. Roger was forty-eight that day; he hoped no one would notice. He thought he saw yellow roses running along the hedge, but it was a shaft of sunlight. In the kitchen, he found a pot with the remains of last night’s coffee and heated some in a saucepan. While he drank, standing, looking out the window, the sky cleared entirely and became soft and blue.
“Happy birthday.”
He turned his head, and there was Cassandra in the doorway, wearing a long gypsy skirt and an embroidered nightshirt, with toy rings on every finger. “I thought I’d dress because of Sunday,” she explained. “I thought we might be going to church.”
“I could offer you better coffee in the village,” said Roger. “If you do not mind the walk.” He imagined her diary entry: “The Baron tried to get me alone on a country road, miles from any sign of habitation.”
“The dog will come, too,” he assured her.
They walked on the rim of wet fields, in which the freed dog leaped. The hem of Cassandra’s skirt showed dark where it brushed against drenched grasses. Roger told her that the fields and woods, almost all they could see, had belonged to his grandparents. Cousin Henri owned the land now.
Cassandra knew; when Simone was not talking about Luc and Katia and the government, she talked about Cousin Henri.
“My father wants to write another book, about Torquemada and Stalin and, I think, Cromwell,” Cassandra said. “The theme would be single-mindedness. But he can’t get down to it. My mother doesn’t see why he can’t write for an hour, then talk to her for an hour. She asks him to help look for things she’s lost, like the keys to the car. Before he retired, she was never bored. Now that he’s home all day, she wants company and she loses everything.”
“How did he write his other books?” said Roger.
“In the minstrel he had a private office and secretary. Two, in fact. He expected to write even more, once he was free, but he obviously won’t. If he were alone, I could look after him.” That was unexpected. Perhaps Luc knew just how unexpected Cassandra could be, and that was why he stayed away from her. “I don’t mean I imagine my mother not there,” she said. “I only meant that I could look after him, if I had to.”
Half a mile before the village stood Cousin Henri’s house. Roger told Cassandra why he and Henri were not speaking, except through lawyers. Henri had been grossly favored by their mutual grandparents, thanks to the trickery of an aunt by marriage, who was Henri’s godmother. The aunt, who was very rich as well as mad and childless, had acquired the grandparents’ domain, in their lifetime, by offering more money than it was worth. She had done this wicked thing in order to hand it over, intact, unshared, undivided, to Henri, whom she worshiped. The transaction had been brought off on the wrong side of the law, thanks to a clan of Protestants and Freemasons.
Cassandra looked puzzled and pained. “You see, the government of that time …,” said Roger, but he fell silent, seeing that Cassandra had stopped understanding. When he was overwrought he sounded like his wife. It was hardly surprising: He was simply repeating, word for word, everything Simone had been saying since they were married. In his own voice, which was ironic and diffident, he told Cassandra why Cousin Henri had never married. At the age of twenty Henri had been made trustee of a family secret. Henri’s mother was illegitimate — at any rate, hatched from a cuckoo’s egg. Henri’s father was not his mother’s husband but a country neighbor. Henri had been warned never to marry any of the such-and-such girls, because he might be marrying his own half sister. Henri might not have wanted to: The such-and-suches were ugly and poor. He had used the secret as good reason not to marry anyone, had settled down in the handsomest house in the Yonne (half of which should have been Roger’s), and had peopled the neighborhood with his random children.
They slowed walking, and Cassandra looked at a brick-and-stucco box, and some dirty-faced children playing on the steps.
“There, behind the farmhouse,” said Roger, showing a dark, severe manor house at the top of a straight drive.
“It looks more like a monastery, don’t you think?” said Cassandra. Although Roger seemed to be waiting, she could think of nothing more to say. They walked on, toward Cassandra’s breakfast.
On the road back, Roger neither looked at Cousin Henri’s house nor mentioned it. They were still at some distance from home when they began to hear Simone: “Marry her! Marry Katia! Live with Katia! I don’t care what you do. Anything, anything, so long as you pass your exam.” Roger pushed open the gate and there was Simone, still in her dressing gown, standing on a lawn strewn with Luc’s clothes, and Luc at the window, still in pajamas. Luc heaved a chair over the sill, then a couple of pillows and a whole armful of books. Having yelled something vile about the family (they were in disagreement later about what it was), he jumped out, too, and landed easily in a flower bed. He paused to pick up shoes he had flung out earlier, ran awkwardly across the lawn, pushed through a gap in the hedge, and vanished.
“He’ll be back,” said Simone, gathering books. “He’ll want his breakfast. He really is a remarkable athlete. With proper guidance, Luc could have done anything. But Roger never took much interest.”
“What was that last thing he said?” said Cassandra.
“Fools,” said Simone. “But a common word for it. Never repeat that word, if you want people to think well of you.”
“Spies,” Roger had heard. In Luc’s room he found a pair of sunglasses on the floor. He had noticed Luc limping as he made for the hedge; perhaps he had sprained an ankle. He remembered how Luc had been too tired to walk a dog, too worn out to feed a goldfish. Roger imagined him, now, wandering in muddy farmyards, in shoes and pajamas, children giggling at him — the Clairevoies’ mooncalf son. Perhaps he had gone to tell his troubles to that other eccentric, Cousin Henri.
Tears came easily since Roger’s last attack. He had been told they were caused by the depressant effect of the pills he had to take. He leaned on the window frame, in the hope of seeing Luc, and wept quietly in the shelter of Luc’s glasses.
“It’s awfully curious of me,” said Cassandra, helping Simone, “but what’s got into Luc? When he stayed with us, in England, he was angelic. Your husband seems upset, too.”
“The Baron,” said Simone, letting it be known she had read the diary and was ready for combat, “the Baron is too sensible. Today is his birthday. He is forty-eight — nearly fifty.”
Roger supposed she meant “sensitive.” To correct Simone might create a diversion, but he could not be sure of what kind. To let it stand might bewilder the English girl; but, then, Cassandra was born bewildered.