Sabine (2 page)

He was a little swarthy spotty fellow but he snapped his heels together and kissed Aimée's hand, proffering a surname with a ‘de' in it, and I think this was what earned him his entrée and his invitation to dinner and the rest. Serena and I notched up a couple of pick-ups too, a little later on, on a shopping expedition: two wondrously beautiful employees of the chocolate factory who you'd think would have suited Aimée's books far better, but, no, the moment she saw them she chased them away like a bulldog – English, not French – and then turned an isolated flare of rage on us. How dare we behave so brazenly? How dare we bring such people into her house? It was a question of caste, you see, and that was a lesson: one of the few canonical ones she ever imparted and one of the very few that stuck. It's not what you do, it's who you do it with.

But Matty's
militaire,
no, he passed muster all right on the strength of a hand-kiss and a syllable. Smarmy little twerp. During dinner nothing particular happened, not that I remember, anyway. Did Aimée seat him to her privileged right? I think she
did. I think she chatted mainly to him too, quite a lot, quite graciously; maybe it came as a relief to have someone to talk to, Marie-Louise being such a dead weight, and we being so impeded in our French. I seem to have a picture of her in my mind's archive, smiling at her unlovely guest and grating nutmeg over his plate of Brussels sprouts. At last, someone who shared her tastes. Filling him up with wine, too, pampering him, making him feel at ease.

Did I catch her looking at Matty? No, I didn't. No, she didn't look at Matty, hardly at all.
I
looked at Matty. I know this for sure because I remember noticing how pleased with herself she looked – at having made this conquest, and having the conquest so unexpectedly approved. She was as sleek and wriggly as a retriever that's brought back a pheasant. Or, let's say, a stoat. And I remember how this fact amazed me and shamed me, because, I mean, Matty – OK, she was foreign and had failed her O levels and had to wax her arms, but there was something attractive about her all the same. The bell of red hair was stunning, for one, and her eyelashes were Disney-long, and, oh, various things, various things she had going for her. Not least her fortune. Whereas the
militaire
had nothing. Except acne, and a hideous uniform that made you itch just to look at it, and teeth coated in tartar (visible, I swear, from my place on the other side of the table), and that miserable rag of a prefix. And yet here was Matty wriggling, and here was Aimée smiling, and
here was a bottle of wine going round instead of the usual carafe, and here were Marie-Louise's cheeks turning to fuchsia, and Mme Goujon, who did the cooking, swanning in with an emergency pudding when ordinarily we never had puddings, except at weekends. It was embarrassing, it was uncomfortable, it was humiliating. It was downright wrong.

The stage direction of the latter half of the evening – if there was any on Aimée's part, and you can bet there was – was finely done. Afterwards I tried to piece together how it was that the rest of us went to bed so early, leaving Matty and her prize alone together in the salon, but everyone was vague about their reasons, myself included. Was it connivance? Was it disgust? Or did Aimée somehow manage to make us feel it was the right thing for us to do – just to slope off and leave them to it? Somehow, none of us could say. Marie-Louise complained of a headache, that I do remember, and was the first to go. A real headache or a diplomatic headache? No telling. But the others? Which of us left last? And who second last? Or did we all go pretty well together? And where was Aimée and why didn't she stop us? No one said goodnight to her – that came later. So? Where was she? And why were the shutters not shut, when the gardener latched them up every evening like a prison warder, punctually, at half past five, and they were never open that wide anyway? Why? Or had they been shut and had someone then opened them later?

It was Serena who called us, Tessa and myself; we were asleep already. And it was Christopher who had called Serena. But who called Christopher? No one, according to him: he just heard noises and went to investigate. First inside, and then, in a moment of great inspiration, out. But who made the noises? The snoggers themselves, or Aimée, or someone else, and if so, who?

It was quite an eyeful. With the three sets of French windows ablaze with light, and the sofa placed parallel to the bookcase at the back of the room, the scene was like the stage of a theatre at which we had a private box. A programme of Feydeau with a pinch of porn. We crept across the gravel in our pyjamas, already clutching our stomachs with giggles and excitement – there was no one else around then, I'm sure (unless you count the cat, Aimée's familiar, which was sitting in front of the furthest window, licking its loathsome paws) – and settled ourselves in the shadows on either side of the first window, just outside the trapezoid of light. Serena had mimed the scene for us already, to put us in the party mood: You must
see
this, she implored as she dragged us protesting from our slumbers. You have to
see
it. Oh my God, oh my God, it's so incredible, and she's got her period too.

It wasn't incredible, that wasn't the right word at all, but it was riveting, mesmerising entertainment, impossible to forgo. On the sofa, on his back, lay the soldier, his itchy jacket discarded, his shirt
rucked up to armhole level, his trousers down to knee, revealing a white cotton vest and underpants, separated in their turn by an interesting gap of pallid, slightly freckly flesh. We could only see a sectional side view of him because on top, closing him like a sandwich filling between her and the cushions, lay Matty.

I say, lay, but her position was more of a crouch. I had no idea at the time that real-life sex was so ungainly. That was part of the fascination, I think: the sheer absurdity, both of the act and the performers. It was what held us there, what permitted us to go on watching. Had the spectacle been pretty, we would have been ashamed because our prurience would have had no cover, but as it was we could go on gaping and giggling ad libitum. (And ad nauseam, because it caused a mixture of both.)

Matty's bum was perched much higher than the rest of her body, taking on a kind of airborne, independent look. Stealing the show, as far as we were concerned. The
militaire
was working on it, blind, with his visible hand, trying to negotiate a whole interconnected web of obstacles which reformed and regrouped the moment he got past one of them. He would pull aside the knickers, for example, managing to lay bare a buttock, and as he did so the girdle surmounting the other buttock would snap back into place. So then he'd lock furiously with the girdle, while the knickers would recover their lost territory. And as if these weren't
fronts enough to cover, there was also Matty's skirt to contend with, which kept on coming loose from its rolled-up position at her waist and slithering down over the field of operations like a safety curtain; plus the lining, which did much the same; plus a layer of petticoat, also proving troublesome, being silk; plus the sturdiest obstacle of all: the last-ditch bulwark of her sanitary pad wedged into the crack of her rump. Kapok in those days, and thick cotton net, and anchored firmly in place like a storm-mooring by hooks and loops and a tight elastic belt.

I stole a quick glance at Christopher, embarrassed more on my own account than Matty's by this revelation. Men shouldn't be let in on such things. If she wasn't careful the bloodstained side might show any minute. The
militaire
didn't matter so much because he couldn't actually see the thing, only feel it, but Christopher could. I don't know how Matty could have managed otherwise, given that Tampax was out for us Catholics, but I felt it was a gross betrayal of our sex to flaunt this intimate object in the air, uncaring, like a mandrill its blue stripes.

As if to prove me right, Christopher grimaced back at me and gave a delighted shudder. Aren't they awful? he whispered. Isn't it awful?

It was. And yet it wasn't. We lingered. We looked and went on looking. I hadn't even bothered to put on my dressing gown and the night air was making
my teeth chatter, but I couldn't afford to go and fetch it for fear of what I might miss.

There were heavings going on now. Matty's face was red from the rubbings of the
militaire'
s stubble, and her backside was as high as a puppy's when it invites another dog to play. The obstacles seemed to have been overcome, most of them, and it was her hand that was constituting the last. Her hand against the
militaire's
hand, her strength against his. Fascinating.

Group sex, even if it's only vicarious like this was, binds tighter than a lynching. I felt a great sense of closeness to my co-spies all of a sudden. I couldn't communicate this to either Tessa or Serena by touch because of the window between us, but I laid my head on Christopher's shoulder and he put half his jacket round me to warm me, and together we smiled fondly at the other two, who smiled just as fondly back. Moment of weird tenderness before the giggles took hold again.

It might have been then, I think, that I saw the other figure, standing by the far window where the cat had been, gazing into the room just as we were, feeding on the same spectacle. Or maybe it was a few minutes later, when an owl hooted in the forest, and we all jumped and looked around in fright. Anyway, I was the one who saw it first, and recognised it first, and the only one who realised what it was up to.

Because, at my horrified whisper of, Aimée! It's
Aimée, don't you see? the other three lost their heads entirely. Instead of hearing a cautious call for their attention they took it as an outright warning. Or, worse, as a signal we'd been caught – in the act of watching the act. Christopher, with one of his gawky, crane-like movements, raised his arms in the air, causing the loose half of the jacket to flap free like a wing, and let out a kind of Indian war cry – Wooo, oooh, oooh! – before totally succumbing to laughter. Serena said, Fuck, under her breath but stood her ground, not laughing at all; Tessa fled, leaving a Cinderella slipper on the gravel; and I just blushed over my entire skin surface; I wasn't quite sure why or for whom.

There were rapid cover-up movements inside the room at this point, but I didn't follow them: I was too intent on watching Aimée – trying to read from her expression, as she drew closer, how long she'd been there and whether she was surprised to see us or had known about our presence all along. She too was in her night attire but had had the forethought to don a dressing gown. It was a shabby tartan wool dressing gown, mannish in cut, and underneath you could see the collar of a heavy flannel nightshirt. (Maybe these garments had belonged to her dead husband, maybe she wore them in remembrance?) Her hair, wispier than ever, had been unwound from the knot she usually wore it in by day, and dangled over her shoulder in a loose, thin plait, like a frayed bell-rope. She cut such a forlorn figure,
walking towards us, flicking her fingers and smiling slightly – not scolding at all, just shooing us away – that instead of fearing her or despising her, I felt intensely sad on her account.

Allez! Allez dormir
! she called out to us softly. We were her good little rabbits, she was not angry with us at all, only with the naughty Matilda and the soldier, and she would deal with them in a moment as they deserved. Matilda was her first South American charge: she would think twice before taking on another one. Hot blood, she added, more softly still, and the smile broadened and took on a mischievous twist at one corner, Hot blood. Little English bunnies were
tout autre chose.
Off with us now, little English bunnies, leave the culprits to her. Goodnight and sweet dreams.

I'm not sure about my compatriot bunnies – we discussed these matters less and less often the grubbier our collective conscience became – but for me, yes, the events of that evening rang in my ears like a prelude, and a puzzling, disquieting one at that. You know the overture to Mozart's
Don Giovanni?
Those hellish opening bars that are swept away so soon you hardly remember hearing them, but which linger with you all the same, affecting all the other music, darkening the gay bits, weighing down the light? Well, that was more or less the effect that that night had on me: it tinged all the normal days that followed with a streak of the bizarre. My mind
soon mislaid the cause – it had no knowledge, really, to fix it to: I doubt
voyeur
was in my lexicon yet, let alone
voyeuse,
let alone
respectable middle-aged voyeuse responsible for my education
– but the effect remained.

Boredom returned, innocence (of a rather studied kind) returned: we went back to our fatuous lessons, put on an Anouilh play, pruned Aimée's fruit trees for her and lit a bonfire with the prunings, round which we danced like children, and then stood, with glowing cheeks, roasting chestnuts in the punctured lid of a biscuit tin, presenting an image of wholesomeness that we were the first to try to believe in.

On peut offrir un marron, Tante Aimée?

She smiled and stayed with us and guzzled a whole handful. She liked us in this girl-guide mode. That other evening might never have happened; Matty's trespasses might never have been.

We went on visits to some celebrated châteaux, in a different league from ours. Most of them – and it was practically all we were told about them, certainly all we retained – beginning with a C. At another, a non-C, which had some link with Diane de Poitiers (famous frog tart, so Christopher dismissed her), we sat through a freezing
Son et Lumière.
We read, we smoked ourselves to haddock-point, we fiddled with translations set us by Marie-Louise, doing a bit each so as to spread the load. Tessa trimmed her cuticles tirelessly, Serena made
herself a circular skirt under the supervision of Mme Goujon and flounced around in it like an osprey in a cage. Matty penned lovesick messages to the
militaire
in his barracks. Christopher jived alone. And all the while I could feel, as Aimée did behind the wheel of her car, this insidious
courant d'air,
blowing changes our way. Something was riding on it, something new, something different. Trick or treat, impossible to tell.