The Rich Are with You Always (20 page)

  The southern face of the house, away from the road, had less pomp and more charm. Three large semicircular bays projected onto, and framed, a broad flagstone terrace. On two floors the bays were linked with wrought iron balconies, so that even when it was too breezy to sit on the terrace you could find a sunny, sheltered spot against the house.

  As the carriage lumbered through the gate, Nora had the impression of a vast edifice, much larger than the Adelaide hotel, with floors of lighted windows rearing above her and the huge dark expanse of roof above that. The slates glistened royal blue in the moonlight. Monsieur and Madame Rodet stood ready to welcome them, one in each archway. They looked so like the man and woman in a weather house that Nora found herself watching them and wondering which would step forward first.

  It was Madame. Now did that mean rain or shine? In fact, it meant a torrent of welcome, with "my dear, my dear, my dear" and "so 'appy" as its constant theme. Nora said
"bon…"
five times before she completed
"Bonsoir, Madame"
and
"Je suis très heureuse."
It stopped Madame in mid-flow. Then she clapped her hands and said "
Merveilleux!
Now we speak only French. You see."

  She barely left Nora time to greet Monsieur Rodet before she swept her indoors and up the grand staircase, and up and up, giving brief thumbnail sketches of the characters in the portraits on the walls—all spoken, of course, in English. "Alain Rodet. Not good. His wife. Poor woman, so sad. Oh and this one, Hercule. Rodet's uncle. Very old now, of course. But a mind like a—razor,
razeur
? Yes? You understand anyway. You will meet. He will come. Very good. Gustave, I mean. Did I say Hercule? This is Hercule. A fool. Pay no attention. You like this candlestick? It's of Sèvres where our Paris house is. Oh I have much things— many things?—from there. You will see. Sèvres, it's so beautiful, you will think. And your wedge foot too." (Nora had no idea what that meant.)

  The litany went on until they were halfway up the last flight of stairs, the dark and dusty flight that led only to the top windows and the roof space. "Too far," Madame said, her bewildered eyes scanning the walls empty of portraits. "Oh!' She struck her brow with the back of a crooked hand, laughed, and grasped Nora's arm with that familiar intense clutch.

  She took Nora all the way down again to the top of the first flight of stairs and then led her along a passage to the right of the stairwell. The first door was, she said, M'sieu Jean's dressing room; the second, which she also passed unopened, was their bedroom. "Oh, your baggage is arrived," she said. "Safe and well." The third door she opened and, with mock-courtliness, ushered Nora through. "The boudoir for Milady."

  "Not 'Milady'!" Nora laughed.
"The Three Musketeers.
You know? I have just read it. I didn't like Milady."

  "Oh! I have it. You had not needed to buy it. Tskoh!" She shrugged.
"Eh bien,
Madame.
You like your boudoir?"

  It was exquisite. The walls were lined with moiré silk, printed with little posies of pastel-coloured flowers. The wainscot was of ivory-painted wood with gilded rococo panels that were repeated on the doors and the furniture. A fire burned in a delicate marble fireplace, carved without a single straight line, except for the intersection of mantelpiece and wall—and even that line was broken by a gold clock under a dome of glass, flanked by a smiling nymph and a brooding faun in porcelain.

  "Forgive this." Madame Rodet pointed to a group of Empire-style chairs and a chaise longue, all liberally endowed with sphinxes' heads. Every sphinx had that chubby, worried-about-my-liver look which is a sure mark of authenticity in any French carving. "One day I change these."

  The tall French window was open a crack and near it Nora caught that same fragrance which had eluded her on the diligence near Abbeville.

  "What is that, Madame?" she asked. "That…perfume."

  Madame Rodet sniffed. "Ah! It is—I do not know—
le chêne.
A tree."

  Above the fireplace hung a sketch by Watteau for his
Embarkation for Cythera.

  "It's beautiful, Madame Rodet," Nora said, awed by so much magnificence and aware suddenly of the poverty of her vocabulary. "Exquisite."

  "Yes, it
is
," Madame said, as if she had waited for Nora's confirmation of her opinion. "And the paintings. Not like those—
meubles,
how d'you say— furnitures—on the stairs." She began a slow tour of the room. "Watteau, of course. And Fragonard."

  The Fragonard was a little still life of wallflowers, violets, and wild roses. Then there were two by Corot, a view of Dijon, and an unidentified landscape. In this room and this company their colour seemed dull and heavy.

  Madame pointed to a tree in one of them.
"Le chêne,"
she said.

  "Ah, oak," Nora said and looked toward the window. "Of course. It's the smell of oak."

  "The smell of Normandy in spring."

  Finally there was a Millet. "He is very good," Madame Rodet said. "A friend from Rodet, only it's not right, 'ere. Not this room." It was a study of a peasant girl.
"Une rose de Picardie.
Oh, and one more!" Laughing, she pulled Nora two paces sideways until they stood before an oval rococo mirror, wide enough for each woman to see herself and the other reflected. "It's the most nicest," she said. "It's called
Les deux roses.
You understand?"

Nora laughed.

"Yorkshire," Nora said.

"Oh! English! It's impossible. Yokeshire!"

They both laughed.

  
"Eh bien,"
she challenged.
"La rose de Normandie."
She waited for Nora's repetition.

  Nora almost managed to get her tongue around the sounds, it was halfway between Miss Woods and perfection. Madame Rodet, not realizing what progress that marked, laughed again and waved a hand as if Nora's failure proved some point. "We manage," she said. "You will see."

An hour or so later, while Honorine, the maid, was helping her to dress after her bath, she heard John taking his bath in the dressing room. Shortly after, when she was almost ready, he joined her.

  "Did they tip your bathwater out the window too?" she asked.

  "Aye," he said. "There's a little, lead-roofed awning runs along under the balcony. It makes a sort of gutter. I've been talking with Rodet, who's very worried about our mutual friend Sir G.B. It seems he's been over here on a visit and is showing an unnatural interest in properties in Normandy."

  Nora said at once, "Before or after we gave him ten per cent of the company stock?"

  "Oh, before."

  She smiled then. "Still," she said, "he did begin to twitch. So he has some instinct for self-preservation. I wouldn't call his interest in property here at all unnatural."

Impressions of those first weeks in Normandy soon merged in Nora's mind, making it impossible later to separate one day from the next.

  Standing on the balcony one morning, she discovered that not only the bathwater was emptied into the gutter formed by the awning and the southern wall of the house, the water closet on the floor above discharged there too. And the force of its water did not always carry the solids as far as the downpipe; they lay stranded on the lead roof, seething with blue-black flies, and making it difficult to enjoy standing on the balcony—or to sit at total ease on the terrace below. Later, when Madame Rodet came into her boudoir, Nora walked casually out onto the balcony and pretended to discover in passing the imperfections below their feet, while ostensibly admiring the garden. Madame smiled proudly. "We have the English water civilisation now," she said. "Even when I was young… oh! Terrible. But in my grandmother's time. We must have many houses. To move, you understand?" She drew horizontal circular itineraries in the air.
"Affreux!
And now—
la civilisation
." She gestured at the drainage and the gardens with a grandiloquent sweep of her arm, as if both were part of the same great plan.

  The gardens, which sloped away from the terrace, were laid out in absolute symmetry. The gardeners, Nora thought, must spend most of the winter indoors playing with rulers, compasses, and squared paper. The effect was incomplete though, because no one had first tried to level or to balance out the wrinkles of the natural landscape. A formal bed on a small eminence was thus "balanced" by another in a hollow, which then meandered on, more or less diagonally, across a large octagonal lawn. It did not even look like an idea half-achieved, Nora thought—more like one three-quarters obliterated.

  Sam wrote to say that he would, at Nora's suggestion, take the diligence from Abbeville all the way to Lisieux and that he would ride up in the banquette "like most solitary Englishmen." He would then take a fly up the valley of the Tocques to Trouville, arriving at about half past five on the afternoon of Thursday 29 May, almost exactly halfway through Nora's visit.

  John wrote from Rouen to say that Hogan had not passed his test and that Flynn, the man who had creatively ruined six hydraulic presses at Penmanshiel, would go to Dublin instead for the GS&W contract.

  After lunch each day, Madame and Nora would go out driving in the britzka if the weather was fine, usually going down to Trouville and then inland to the hilly country of the pays d'Auge. "It's not typical for Normandy, you know," she would assure Nora. "Not at all. It's very characteristic for itself. And these people—you will never, never,
nevair
know what they are thinking. Oh, they are so…" She clenched one fist around another.

  Once Nora admired a peasant girl as they passed, saying what lovely costumes they all wore. Immediately Madame Rodet stopped the carriage and beckoned the girl toward them. Then, to Nora's surprise, she used the girl as a sort of living, life-size fashion doll, making her turn up the hem of her apron, open out the pleats of her dress, show the tapering of the bodice into the small of her back, and many other details of her costume. Her tone was kindly, matter of fact, and not the least bit commanding. The girl, too, treated the whole event as if nothing could be more natural. It was Nora who was embarrassed—and the fact that she alone felt that way only intensified it.

  "You did not like it?" Madame Rodet asked when they were moving again.

  "Of course," Nora said. "It was beautiful. A lovely costume. I envy her. But…"

  "But? But what?"

  "Well. She was a person. Did she not mind being told 'turn round…show this…open that'?"

  Madame looked puzzled. It was plain that the very idea had not crossed her mind, and that even now it was proving hard to grasp. "She enjoyed it," she said, talking to herself from uncertainty into conviction. "She is a young woman, with beautiful cloths. And she meets two other young women in a carriage, who admire. And so, of course, she will display her cloths. It's very natural she will enjoy it."

  The difference in outlook was so basic that Nora, for a while, could only shake her head in amazement. "You simply couldn't do it in England," she said at last.

  Madame Rodet became very scornful at that. "In England, of course not. In England, that girl is in used cloths from an upper-class home,
démodé,
twenty years' old. But for her in France—it's impossible she should wear cloths from me from ten, twenty years old. She is too…" Madame sat upright. "Too…"

  "Too proud?" Nora prompted.

  She accepted the word grudgingly. "Proud," she sighed. "It's not at all the same. She is
fière.
More than proud.
Fière!"
She sat like a warrior queen, eyes aglow, and Nora understood that there was, indeed, a difference.

  She also began to understand how men could stand for hire among cattle in a market without feeling degraded. It was because they were not proud; they were
fièrs,
instead. She enjoyed the distinction; and there was satisfaction at having achieved the insight herself.

  It was also the first time in her life she accepted that the English custom, the English viewpoint, the English method, was not automatically the best.

  On another occasion, it must have been the first Saturday of the visit, Madame Rodet stopped the carriage at the gate of a church and took Nora inside to show her a new stained-glass window. As they went through the porch, Madame angrily snatched at her bonnet and, holding it in one hand, began to pluck small bits of straw, or something small—Nora could not actually see what—from it. The fact that she was now hatless did not stop her continuing into the church.

  At first Nora took this as an oversight. She herself, feeling that her little lace cap did not provide enough covering, raised her shawl over her head. She had not even settled it before Madame Rodet pulled it down again and said severely, "No, no. It's not necessary." And with her own hat still in her hand, she strode across the nave to the farther aisle without a glance at the altar.