Sabine (3 page)

Imagine Cassandra saying something on these lines: Cheer up, Trojans, don't ask me how or when but I have a kind of inkling this dreary deadlock is not going to last. Would it have earned her the same status as a prophetess? I doubt it: when issuing a warning, understatement is further off the mark than no statement at all.

Probably a good thing, then, that I kept my premonitions to myself. It must have been early to mid October when the pattern broke. (Although the days swam past us identical as tadpoles, making it hard to give even a vague date. Lounge-about lessons with Marie-Louise till lunchtime; loll-about disc-session afterwards; a few stabs at homework between tea and dinner, and then an orgy of smoke and rock and chocolate to round it all off – even Kant would have had trouble with his time-keeping on a schedule like that.)

The telephone started ringing at breakfast, which in itself was unusual. Aimée hurried out of the room to answer it, her face still blank and doughy from
sleep – it never took on much character till she got around to pencilling in the eyebrows – and came back transfigured. Her face full of character now. Full of mischief again too. Imagine,
petits lapins,
imagine the good news. The de Vallemberts had arrived, ten days earlier than planned, and had asked us over that very afternoon. For tea, a proper English tea, in our honour. And for cards as well, and maybe (twinkle, twinkle, little browless eye) a spot of dancing. Young Hervé de Vallembert, she seemed to remember from last year's outings, was a very keen dancer. Château Vallembert was well worth a visit too, we would see, one of the oldest châteaux in the region. It had a moat and dated back to the twelfth century in parts.

So there were outings, plural, regular ones. Ah. Had been last year and presumably would be this. Ah. The prospect didn't galvanise us – another bumpy white-knuckle drive, another moat, another historic building with the parts that Aimée mentioned almost certainly unconnected to one another: we were beginning to know what to expect of these privately owned châteaux – but as departure time came nearer it set us stirring none the less.

Sabine used to maintain that preparation for a dance is comparable to what goes on in the back room of a butcher's shop: the meat for consumption is sliced and dressed and put in nice little paper packages, ready for the kitchen. But I hadn't yet learnt to see things through her fiery Jansenist eyes, I
was still with Tolstoy and Natasha and the thrill of a young girl's first ball, so I remember getting caught up in a frivolous, light-hearted activity that early afternoon. I remember the bathroom and the ubiquitous smoke, compounded by steam from the bath water, and the musky smell of Omy, which was the fashionable bath essence of the time. It came in spherical capsules, if my memory is correct, a bit like outsize cod liver oil pills. Omy balls, Omy balls, sang Christopher, swooping around, trying to avoid being evicted on grounds of gender. He wasn't gay but he had a strong feminine streak in him, or else was stuck in a puppy stage – pre-pubertal – and he liked all the things we liked, and liked to take part in them. Dear Christopher, poor Christopher, I still see him around occasionally in some of the usual haunts but we never talk now – what is there to say?

Well, I suppose I could ask him to refresh this next set of memories for me for a start. See if his have weathered the scouring of time any better than mine. And the scouring of shame as well. It's strange, when the backdrops to most of my early sexual experiences are practically hard-wired into me, so clear and durable is their trace, that all I should have left of these – these
soirées,
these
visites
or whatever Aimée used to call them – is a jumble of images of moats and towers and salons and fountains and mirrors and dusty wooden floors, and a jumble of faintly cheesy-sounding names to go with them, like de Roquefort and du Boursin and de Brie,
all crammed higgledy-piggledy into my storage cells, with no way of sorting them out. Maybe it's another defence mechanism like the curtain, or maybe it's a bit of Sabine, lodged fast inside me, marching furiously up and down the way she used to during lesson times when we were inattentive, cuffing the memories on the head one by one and flinging scraps of
argot
at them.
Fous-moi le camp, salaud, tu m'emmerdes, tu m'emmerdes.

Which one
was
Château Camembert,
pardon,
Vallembert? And which, of the many young men with V-necked sweaters and hedgehog hair and corduroy trousers with stifled erections inside them, was Hervé? Was he the tall, good-looking one with the rather foppish hair that flopped instead of sprouting? No, that was Hervé Someone-else – an Italian name: Minucci, Carlucci – the one Tessa pretended to be keen on when she could be bothered; the one who came to her coming-out dance later and whom she treated like shit and serve him right. (But, no, I'm unkind: our hosts were just as much pawns on Aimée's board as we were.) Was he the lame one, then, the nice one who liked to talk because he didn't like to dance, and didn't dare smooch for fear of rebuff? No, that was Armand, Armand de la Brioche or whatever. So was he perhaps the one with the beautiful eyes, hampered in his advances by the Down's syndrome brother who tagged along behind him everywhere, even on the dance floor, even to the slowest of slows?
Que
fais tu?
What are you doing with your hands like that? What are you doing to that girl? Show, show.
Fais voir, fais voir.
No, that was Régis. I remember Régis somewhat more clearly than the others, and I remember his family's château, too, because of the tower with the bolted door and the Mrs Rochester cackle we heard coming from the other side. Another sibling, we surmised, Serena and I, product of inbreeding, sins of the fathers, and doubled up laughing.

Château de Vallembert. Château de Vallembert. The first of the venues and in its unexpectedness the worst. It must be there somewhere and so must its owners and so must the happenings of that late autumn afternoon, blueprint for so many that followed: a chill lemony cup of tea in a room the size of a rugby pitch, some chill lemony conversation with the adults –
Oui, j'habite à Cambridge. Oui, Monsieur,
the seat of the famous University.
Non, Madame,
the Cambridge accent is not all that fancy, it's the Oxford one I think you have in mind – while their gangling scions stood around on the sidelines, sizing us up, making their choices; and then the tumbling over ourselves as, released, we raced through flights of similar rooms, aiming for some gramophone-equipped den where the scrum could begin.

Begin but never end, because that was the nature of Aimée's game. At some point – a carefully calculated point, you could be sure, honed to the
nanosecond by years of practice – creak would go the door and on would go the lights and there she would be, hands raised in token horror. Pencilled eyebrows too. But beneath them the telltale glitter of her greedy, naughty, lonely eyes. Oh, what were her bunnies up to? Turn her back for a moment and look what happened. No, no, she didn't want to hear any excuses, whose idea it was, who started it, we were all equally to blame. Straight into the car with us, and no more parties until we learned to dance nicely, to nice music, with the lights on.

Cruel? Yes, cruel, slightly, but in a natural way, a bit like dog-fighting only without the violence. Put them in a pen together and see what they get up to. My brief against Aimée has nothing to do, really, with this teasing little hobby of hers. Despite Sabine's lambastings. After all, we enjoyed it too, didn't we? Our blood hummed just as fast as Aimée's did, the rushes of unsated yearning swirling through it were every bit as sweet. Nobody but nature forced us to tart ourselves up punctually every weekend, Friday after Friday and Saturday after Saturday, and pile into the Peugeot and make for another trysting place and start all over again. And stop all over again, and start and stop, and start and stop, until not only our knickers, but, Christ, every fibre of our clothing, and of our bodies too for that matter, were in a twist. Years later I saw a film – poignantly sad, and for me unbearably so – about a scientist who had invented a kind of total
sense recorder, not just video but audio and smellio and touchio and the rest, which he set to play every afternoon in a given place at a given time, for as long as the mechanism lasted. The scene he projected was that of a dozen or so young couples dancing on a terrace in the same holiday house, on the same island, where the recorder itself was kept. Then this young man comes across it while it is playing and at first is convinced he is watching a real occurrence: he sees this beautiful girl, in her slinky 1930s outfit, dancing and laughing and chattering with her friends, and he falls in love with her on the spot. Second day, second time around, he comes to the island at a slightly different time so he sees a slightly different excerpt, and still doesn't twig and falls deeper in love. And so on and so forth for various days until he happens on a duplicate bit and realises something is wrong. But by then, of course, he is irretrievably hooked. So what does he do? He digs out the machine, fiddles with its insides until he has grasped its workings, and then sets it up in recording mode and records himself into the scene in a desperate last-ditch attempt to join the dancers. Which works, and there he stays: trapped there amongst them in a virtual dimension, forever young, forever re-enacting the same little loop of life, over and over.

In her
voyeuse
guise, Aimée reminds me of this melancholy young man. How many times, and for how many years, must she have watched the same
short take repeat itself, with only the most minor of minor variants? It is depressing merely to hazard a guess. Though the music, I suppose, must have changed a bit – the music and the clothes. Young couples dancing, clinging to one another, swaying to the beat almost imperceptibly, their feet hardly moving, while on the microscopic scale their bodies whirl. The males maybe a little more groggy than the females when the lights go on, but not necessarily so. And how many stills has she got in her mental album of a roomful of bemused, embarrassed
interruptus
faces and blinking eyes and mussed-up hair? (Which also must have changed a bit in style before reaching the Juliette Greco theatre-curtains that we strove to achieve.) And how long and how badly must she have yearned for her face to be one of them again? What iron-bound impulse drove her to the gaming board, time after time, to set out her compliant pieces? Bad Aimée but in this respect poor Aimée: for her there was no time machine, no recorder, total or otherwise, no way, except by proxy, of worming herself once more into the scene.

And yet she had no resentment against us for being young, that was one endearing thing about her. Even when, after the hunt, I returned her beautiful costume stained with underarm sweat marks, all she said was,
Ah, jeunesse,
with a sigh. She liked her bunnies, she truly did. She cared for us, and for me and Christopher in particular. Naturally
she had her reasons. But I think in this case reasons and inclinations went together. There were plenty of grander pupils she could have boasted about – judging from the photos on the clapped-out grand piano, the cream of the British shires, from the Cornish and Devonshire variety to the Highland, had poured through her establishment at one time or another, and even among the present bunch Tessa was an Hon, and Matty had a brother who claimed to be screwing Princess Alexandra – but no, whatever praise Aimée chose to utter, and whoever she chose to utter it to, it was nearly always us, Viola and Christopher, she pinned it on. Viola the eclectic and Christopher the droll. Christopher the pragmatist and Viola the dreamer – maybe,
on ne sait jamais,
the one-day poet. Just look at this little bit of Lamartine she has translated, and without the dictionary too. And just look at Christopher doing his de Gaulle imitation,
Oh, le méchant,
where did he find that hat? He would never have taken it from the de la Gruyère's hat stand, would he?
Would
he? Perhaps she had better ring the general and check.

I have a suspicion that her stopwatch calculations were based on the exact state of Christopher's and my entwinements rather than those of the others. Which boiled down to mine really, because Christopher hardly ever got entwined at all, there being so few available girls; he just danced around alone, the way he always did, or flopped down beside the
gramophone and scanned through the records by the light of his cigarette. I have no proof of this of course, and, as I said, we spoke to one another less and less the longer the gaming continued, but I know for a fact – from the way they fumbled with handkerchiefs and things – that Matty and Serena and partners sometimes managed to go a bit further than Aimée would have sanctioned, had she noticed; and I know that Tessa, who was slow in everything, often complained, vice versa, that her partners never got going at all. Whereas with me the interruption always came at that exact moment when desire was at its keenest: when all was still in the head zone – eyes and mouth and nothing further – and the rest of the body, sprung tight as a golf ball, was crying out for some kind – any kind – of release action. Touch me here, touch me there, Guillaume or Guy or Geffroy or whatever your name is, I beg, I beg.

Chance? Deliberate malice aimed at me? No, nothing of the kind. I think I was Aimée's hourglass, that is all, her monitoring device. In part for convenience's sake, but mainly on account of the special responsibilities she had towards my father regarding my precious virginity, I think she used me as her timer. I think, as she lurked there in the shadows, getting whatever surrogate kicks came her way, I was the one she kept her chary little eye on. What is Viola's partner up to? Kissing her neck still?
Bon,
then we can wait a little while. And where are
his hands? Ah, there they are, pressing her to him, linked behind her back. Wait a moment, is the left one perhaps sliding downwards a bit, edging its way towards the buttock? Well, buttocks are on the safe side, let it slide. (Oh, this music, how can young people nowadays stand it so loud?) And now? Now where is the hand going? Ah, where indeed? Now I can't see it any more. What a pity,
quel dommage,
that means we must call a halt to things for this evening: hidden hands are busy hands. Now where's that
sacré
light switch …?