Sabine (7 page)

I had no time to appreciate these great astronomical developments, however, because at this point,
to the surprise of us both, Sabine suddenly snatched the hoof from me and lashed its ribbons of skin across my face.

Hey! That hurt! Why did you do that?

I don't know. My hand did it for me. Why did
you
take part in that absurd masquerade ? Why did you let Aimée talk you into it? She does it every year – gets one of her pupils to fill the part, wear the costume, act all simpery with the Marquis:
‘Moi? Oh, merci, Monsieur.'
‘But not at all,
Mademoiselle,
you deserve it: so plucky, so
capable.'
And all for this … this miserable piece of deer flesh that'd have been better left where it was. I bet he called you his
belle amazone anglaise,
eh? That's his usual line. And he generally says it with a leer, too, and a look that goes through all that velvet like it was fishnet. Oh, he gives me the creeps, that man, with his hand-kissing and his phoney Maurice Chevalier smile: Zank Heavens for Leetle Girls. Lucky the son wasn't there today, or he'd probably have invited you to …

Jealousy. Oh, jealousy in a partner is wonderful. It wraps round you like a fur coat, warm and protective. And all the time our eyes are having quite a different conversation from the one we speak aloud. Will the two eventually blend? Will we have the guts to blend them? I can't help laughing. Happiness is bubbling up in the bottom of my stomach; it'll come out eventually, like a belch – I shan't be able to control it. She is so fierce, so stern; will she take it amiss?

The son? I ask. I didn't know there was a son. Have we met him yet? Is he one of the snogging group?

You'd know right enough if he was. I'm not sure he isn't worse than the father. Worse because not so bad, if you know what I mean, not so obvious, subtler. Roland. Roland de Vibrey. Everything going for him, everything on a plate since the moment he was born: looks, brains, charm, smarm, the lot. And money like it shouldn't flow with aristocrats. Fountains of the stuff. Waterfalls. I am poor, you know that.

Is it possible that I pay attention only to the last part of what Sabine says? Is it possible that that name passes me by like any other, I who pride myself on my receptive antennae? I'm afraid it is. I hardly hear it, I go straight to the money question.

I am rich. My father is rich. What does that mean?

Nothing. It means you're freer, that's all. I don't object to money, I just object to aristocrats having it, because with them it's been purified by time. The stink's gone off it. They think it's theirs by right. They forget what their ancestors had to do to get it – how many people they bled and pushed around.

That's a pretty grim view. Maybe they earned it.

Yeah. Maybe they won it in a medieval lottery. You've got a lot to learn, little
amazone anglaise.

OK, Sabine, I think to myself. Grumpy, gold-dusted Sabine who for some weird reason seems to
have taken charge of my heart. You're the teacher, no? Go ahead and teach.

You're not one of them, though, are you? she goes on. To begin with I thought you were. Despite the hunt and everything, and those clothes you're wearing and that idiotic boat affair you've got on your head, you're not one of them.

Not one of what?

Not a prisoner. Not a puppet. Not one of those who dance when the dancing master says ‘Dance,' and stops when he says ‘Stop.' To the music he chooses. Always the same tune, always the same steps. What do you want from life, Viola?

I don't know.

And it is true, I don't. I suddenly realise I haven't a clue. My father wants me to marry. Marry well. With him it is a self-evident goal. The stink-free money that Sabine has just mentioned is the very thing he wants for me. Not so much out of snobbery or greed; it is more that this quick route to power and status fires his romantic imagination. So far I have unquestioningly gone along with this view, but now I know that I don't share it and never have done. So? Where does that leave me? What roads are open to me? Which, if any, beckon? Total fog. I have no road map, no one has ever thought to hand me one.

Sabine's face brightens. You don't know. That's good. That's still more proof you're not one of them. If you were, you would know, you'd have
it all clear in your head: success, money, children, friends, luck, health, happiness, comfort, a nice home, a nice car, a clear conscience on the top of it. All the bourgeois idols – all the pretty little porcelain knick-knacks to set out on your shelf. I've got that, I've got that, now all I need is that. And when you've got them …

I wouldn't mind being healthy and happy, I tell her, and having lots of friends.

Hah, she scoffs. Nor would I. But there's more to it than that. We should want everything, is my theory, everything there is on offer. Knowledge, knowledge above all of course, but then that's how you get it. By tasting everything, cramming everything into you that you come across. Pain, longing, suffering, fury, humiliation – we've got to learn about these things too, or we seal ourselves off from the rest of humanity in a soap bubble – a perfumed soap bubble. Which is going to burst anyway in the end, so what's the point? You can't grow properly in a soap bubble. You can't breathe. You stay small and damp and stunted and wheezy, and you're so scared of breaking it yourself you hardly dare move. That's not the way to make friends,
ma mignonne.
Nor the way to stay happy and healthy either, nor …

Learn about them or experience them?

What?

These things you mentioned. Pain, longing, suffering. Learn
about
them, or experience them?

Tiens,
you have a finicky mind, Viola, you could study law with a mind like that. At university too, with proper teachers, instead of just fiddling around like you're doing now …

Which: learn about or experience?

She shrugs. I don't know. Whichever it takes, whichever it takes to stay out of the suffocating bourgeois bubble – out of the gas chamber of the soul.

Heavens, she's earnest. And so different from me it makes me boggle. Love is that as well, I was forgetting: it is taking a huge gamble, staking your all on a single improbable throw, jumping off a cliff and trusting an unknown person to catch you before you hit the ground. Myself, I long to live in a bourgeois bubble. With Sabine, and puff cigars if need be and crop my hair and raise Alsatians – there is nothing I'd like better, but I can't tell her that yet. Nor can I tell her that she's all I'll ever want in the way of a teacher. All I can do is go and have my Omy bath and macerate in my good fortune. I'm hurtling downwards fast but so is she: nothing to fear, we'll do a double catch act and sweep each other up in our arms to mutual safety well before we crash.

I have often wondered if any of my skin particles came off during that lashing? I wonder if any are still attached to the stag's, clinging to the plait after all these years? The impact was sharp, it's quite probable a few cells changed places: deer to me, and
vice versa. I like this thought: in the end we are all one – prey, predator, victim, aggressor, all one huge jam roll of matter. So it doesn't matter, Viola, doesn't matter …

At Christmas we went back to England – all except for Matty who spent the fortnight in Paris with her parents.

I don't remember whether we trained it or flew, or whether we went all four together or separate. I travelled like an object – a fragile object in a packing case, insulated in the wadding of my love. If the others were with me they took care not to interfere with the wrappings. Young people respect each other that way far more than older ones do: it must have been fairly obvious there was what Aimée called
du tendre
between me and Sabine – we neither of us took steps to hide it, why should we? – but there had been no more talk of lesbians in my hearing. Nor had I taken any further part in the smooching sessions, but no one seemed to pay particular attention to this or even notice. Except for Tessa, who was quick to nab my winkle-pickers, seeing as I didn't need them for sitting home reading with Sabine, and Aimée, who viewed this sudden bookish turn of mine with her usual weird relish for
all things innocent.
Charmant
to see two young girls bent over their studies. The de Reblochon boys would miss us, they had arranged a firework display, but there, culture must come before fireworks. Now, look after the cat, please, let it in if it wants, and into the Peugeot with the rest … (Let the cat in? Old hoodwinker, she knew darn well it couldn't come back till she did. Or could it? That was one little detail I never really fully worked out.) In fascist Italy, said Sabine in a musing voice as the car drove off, they used to have travelling brothels. Wonder if that's where she got the idea from?

My father, although it costs me to admit it, was still close to me at that time; close enough at least to feel – with his nerve-ends, no words needed – that this homecoming daughter was somewhat different from the one he'd seen off. Before, I had always responded to his moods, his rhythms, his whimsical timetable, which decreed no life should assert itself in the house until he gave the signal. A stricture that was all the more easy to enforce now that my grandmother was dead. She used to have blitzes: tea parties, unannounced visits, mornings of potpourri making or sloe-gin brewing, events that called for flurry, which would chase my father, grumbling, into his private retreat on the neglected top floor where only the dogs ventured – dogs and dust and spiders. Since her death, however, the whole house had become his retreat, and he had organised its ways accordingly. Cleaning was done
silently and early by a bevy of old helper-biddies who had never ceased to adore him. (Save for a brief period when my mother had been around, but they had seen him punished for his fecklessness and had since taken him back into their hearts. He had winning ways with females of all ages, oh yes.) Cooking was done a little later, its smells and noises sealed off behind the barrier of a heavy green baize door through which no one was allowed to pass until lunchtime. Only Miss Marklin, the secretary, and myself were exempted from this rule and could come and go at will, but once on my father's side of the barrier another set of sub-rules came into force. Miss Marklin could sit in the office and work, so long as she did so by the light of her green-shaded desk lamp and didn't use the typewriter: sunshine was bad for hangovers and the tapping of the keys went through the sufferer's head like a weevil. I could do anything I liked if I kept to my bedroom, even play that obnoxious Elvis Presley, but if I wanted to sit around elsewhere and read, for example, or write letters, or do anything that called for daylight, it must be in the summer house, and if I wanted music it must be classical. Strictly classical: no Baroque, no romantic, and no bloody modern. Meaning anything written since Brahms.

Lunch was generally a subdued affair but not always, depending on my father's alcohol intake: if low, he could be as remote and silent as he was at breakfast, and the meal likewise; if high, it could
become like a minor version of dinner. Shorter, but dazzling while it lasted. Because dinner was when the lights went on – inside his head as well as out; dinner was a happening, a rite; dinner was when the curtain went up on a world of his creating, and he stepped forward and took you by the hand and whisked you into it.

Often there were guests, sometimes there weren't. I liked the evenings with guests best – they went on longer, they began earlier, with a preparation stage to which, like a trusted prop girl, I was sometimes admitted. Caroline is coming tonight, Viola. You remember Caroline? Teddy's moll. The thin blonde one who models for
Vogue,
who we all got so excited about until we realised it was only hands and legs. Well, tonight I am going to get her to cry. Don't ask me how, when she's tough as they come, but before eleven – no, let's make it harder, let's make it half past ten – I am going to have her in floods. Angry ones, not sad ones, I don't want anyone to be sad except me. You don't believe it's possible? Wait and see. Rosie is coming too. Goody. What shall we do with Rosie? Where shall we put her? And what about old Sir Bas, who she always drags along in her wake? I would like to rattle Sir Bas, oh yes, indeed I would. They say that when he was a diplomat he once drank Mustafa Kemal under the table: what about getting him to show some of his old form tonight? Ply him with the pink gin, lovekin, and we'll have a bash. Remember,
always say to him: Would you like a drink, Sir Basil? Never, Would you like another drink? And that applies to everyone.

Obedient, admiring, attentive, conniving – I was no longer any of these things. And not out of pure rebellious spirit, which he might have liked, might have found flattering, but simply because I was often elsewhere in my thoughts. I ate my meals in England, took my baths in England, but that was about it: the rest of the time, save for brief spells when I was in Luxembourg listening to the radio there, I was in France. I read Saint-Simon and de Montherlant – ostentatiously, not taking in much of either. A snob and a loony – my French would have to progress a lot before I would appreciate why Sabine had recommended them. However, for sheer size they served as a good bulwark against my father's soundings.

What's up with you, Viola? You're so silent. Have you fallen for a frog, or what? Don't fall for a frog. They don't wash enough. And oh, that garlic, you can smell it the moment the porters step on the ferry for your luggage: it rolls before them like a bank of dust before bisons. No, I would hate a French son-in-law. Come on, leave those dreary tomes and let's have a game of chess.

Chess, our old sparring ground. I was no match for him but sometimes, flukily, through sheer stubbornness and refusal to quit, I could give him a bit of a battle. Now I just moved the pieces around,
wondering inside myself what he would make of a French daughter-in-law.