“And you?”
“I’ll be back… Soon as I can. I’ve only spent one of me nine lives, Miss.” He looked at me and smiled. “You haven’t got rid of me yet… Back to being the press boy. I’ve had my share of shells by now…”
We continued in silence, I liked the nearness of his body, his hip that occasionally touched my trunk, as we adjusted our gait to each other, his arm under my palm.
“I still have to thank you for being such a knowledgeable guide, the other day.”
“I’m sure the pleasure was mostly mine, Miss.”
“Should try it again then…”
“By all means…” His familiar grin reappeared round his mouth. He took a puff on his cigarette, stretched his neck, pursed his lips, blew out the smoke. “I like you, Helen… I really, really do… But I wouldn’t want to hurt you in any way… Can’t see me lingering on a sofa one day, comfy slippers on me feet, the missus boiling the kettle. Know what I mean, love?”
“We have staff to deal with that, don’t we?”
“You know what I mean, Helen.”
I knew. Every minute we had been together I had weighed his soul in my hand, tested its density, tried to detect its lightness, its darkness, and however little I knew of him, I liked his specific gravity.
“We’ll see. One thing at a time. Perhaps one day we’ll discover we’ve silently made our arrangements, without the slightest annoyance…”
He bent his head, lifted my chin with his index finger. Briefly pressed his lips on mine.
“Arrangements, Miss?”
“You know what I mean.”
We turned round and walked back along the beach. In front of us lay the old hotel. The belvedere on the roof, surmounted by a dome. Above the wards at the foot of the building was the windowless side wall, with the lettering “Grand Hôtel de L’Océan. Prix Modérés.”
We both looked at it at the same time, and though we said nothing, we knew we had more or less the same thought: that the price we’d had to pay up to now had been pretty reasonable.
WE WENT BACK regularly later, when the pavilions had been demolished, the doors of the guest rooms had been hung back on their hinges and on the tables silver and earthenware replaced the surgical clamps and trepans. We always went at either end of the season, the loose ends of summer when in most establishments the tables and chairs were under canvas, sunk in their winter sleep, or in the last days of spring, while everything was still waiting a week or two for the great awakening. It seemed to suit him and me, and we became creatures of in-between times.
We said: in a hundred years’ time the war that was ours will have worn away as completely around the monuments, the photos, the diaries, the letters and the tombs as the bones of the dead in the ground, leaving at most a discoloration in the sand. We didn’t yet know that meanwhile the soldiers for the next conflict were sleeping in their cradles and that tomorrow’s cut-throats were hanging on their nannies’ skirts, playing with blocks or in shabby attic rooms licking their wounds and writing bitter treatises in the lethal ink of resentment. We said: if we could come back in a hundred years, we would no longer recognize the war, its elusiveness, its totality which made countless small lives dance like needles in its magnetic field, would meanwhile have been reduced to a handful of images, numbers with no flesh on their bones, place names and data — can’t we ever do anything except sooner or later tell fairy tales burdened by footnotes?
“I don’t know if I’d like to live to be 100,” said my brother, who sometimes accompanied us to the place where my husband and I had stayed; but I was the only one to experience the fact that you don’t even have to grow very old to see the silent erosion spreading, to see the veterans of that time, that ever-thinning row of crutches, artificial legs and wheelchairs, jingling with medals, give a shaky salute around an eternal flame or a cenotaph, while His Majesty, himself wobbly on his feet because of his new plastic hip, lays a wreath of mourning among the names of the dead and missing.
My husband would definitely have put his hand on mine at this point and concluded: “It’s inevitable, love. Inevitable.” On one of those trips we saw Miss Schliess again, at a table by the big window of the restaurant; against a plaster sky she was feeding spoonfuls of pudding to two babies who, with their copper-coloured hair and freckles, seemed to be the spitting image of the strapping fellow next to her, the type of Englishman that radiated the blushing good humour of a good side of roast beef. Obviously she had put her Henry to bed for good, and I never dared ask her if he had a grave somewhere or was one of the others whose names are engraved on a marble wall.
We need tombs, something tangible that covers the dead person, blocks our entry into Hades, a sacrificial table or a dish of incense in which we can burn the feeling of guilt after we, in the caverns of our mind, have shot the dead, who have already died once, in the back, in order to be able to carry on. How many have spent the rest of their days crying in back rooms, while working in the kitchen, in their sleep, surrounded by dead ones without a cradle because the urns burst at the seams and the Dies irae sounded puny in a world which, without help from above, had brought to life with flair the horrific medieval visions of the Day of Judgement? And here I lie, on my back, on the bed, on a slow afternoon, in a distant corner of the globe where for the time being it is sunny, virtually cloudless, the streets cooled by the gentle, refreshing breeze that the weatherman predicted primly this morning, while under my window life goes calmly on somewhere halfway between nine and five — how risky and salutary our capacity for forgetting is. But how many dead people have I myself kept alive for too long and condemned to the twilight? Why are there so many absent people in my dreams? Why do they still not enter the rooms that are waiting for them there?
I hear my mother’s dictates echoing through the void. “For goodness’ sake, cut some Gordian knots, and put a few full stops here and there. A sentence isn’t a sausage. It always takes hours for you to get a story off the ground. If a chicken doesn’t lay, in the pot it goes. We can’t hang about hanging about.” How long do I want to tremble before the last word?
In the late summer before peace she fell ill, the first of many, and one of the lucky ones who survived, but her long sickbed heralded a winter in which in the mornings the tenants of the surrounding farms carried the stiffened corpses of their dead children up the garden path to the gate, where the cart would pick them up because there wasn’t enough wood to make coffins, or time for a funeral service. I thought of Amélie Bonnard in her box of hastily planed planks. At least half the teenagers and giggling girls who a couple of summers before had lured her to the meadow next to the church, that afternoon when she lost her life, now lay in at most a sewn-up sheet around her in the stony subsoil.
My brother, who had returned a few months earlier, still stiff and unsteady, fell ill shortly after my mother, and he also just made it. The aunts got it, too weak with the coughing and the fever to clothe themselves in theatrical nightdresses, as they would doubtless have done otherwise. My uncle and I walked bewildered through the house that was in a delirium around us, coughing up its lungs. The maids criss-crossed the corridors with basins and cold compresses, then the maids also fell ill, one by one, and the youngest died. Only Madeleine was unaffected, her basalt organism obviously indigestible for germs. My uncle said: “What play are we in? What is this, dear niece, a tragedy or a hard-hitting farce? I can understand that those little creatures don’t fancy me or the housekeeper, they like young flesh. Who can blame them, but you, my child…”