The Flying Goat (7 page)

‘Cosmo,' he says at last, ‘you bin a long way and you've heard a tidy bit, but you ain't seen much. Don't you know there ain't a castle at Stoke? Nor a river?'

Uncle Cosmo did not speak.

‘And don't you know where you was in the winter o' 'ninety-three?'

Uncle Cosmo did not speak.

‘Didn't you tell me only yesterday,' Silas said, with his hand on the wine, ‘you was in Barbadoes that year, a bit friendly with a bishop's daughter? Now ain't that a funny thing?'

The headland was like a dry purple island scorched by the flat heat of afternoon, cut off from the mainland by a sand-coloured tributary of road which went down past the estaminet and then, half a mile beyond, to the one-line, one-eyed railway station. Down below, on a small plateau between upper headland and sea, peasants were mowing white rectangles of corn. The tide was fully out, leaving many bare black rocks and then a great sun-phosphorescent pavement of sand, with the white teeth of small breakers slowly nibbling in. Far out, the Atlantic was waveless, a shade darker than the sky, which was the fierce blue seen on unbelievable posters. Farther out still, making a faint mist, sun and sea had completely washed out the line of sky.

From time to time a puff of white steam, followed by a peeped whistle, struck comically at the dead silence inland. It was the small one-line train, half-tram, making one way or the other its hourly journey between town-terminus and coast. By
means of it the engaged couple measured out the afternoon.

‘There goes the little train,' he would say.

‘Yes,' she would say, ‘there goes the little train.'

Each time she resolved not to say this stupid thing and then, dulled with sleepiness and the heat of earth and sky and the heather in which they lay, she forgot herself and said it, automatically. Her faint annoyance with herself at these times had gradually begun to make itself felt, as the expression of some much deeper discontent.

‘Je parle Français un tout petit peu, m'sieu.' In a voice which seemed somehow like velvet rubbed the wrong way, the man was talking. ‘I was all right as far as that. Then I said, “Mais, dites-moi, m'sieu, pourquoi are all the knives put left-handed dans ce restaurant?” By God it must have been awfully funny. And then he said – '

‘He said because, m'sieu, the people who use them are all left-handed.'

‘And that's really what he said? It wasn't a mistake? All the people in that place were left-handed?'

‘Apparently,' she said, ‘they were all left-handed.'

‘It's the funniest thing I ever heard,' he said. ‘I can't believe it.'

Yes, she thought, perhaps it was a funny thing. Many left-handed people staying at one restaurant. A family, perhaps. But then there were many left-handed people in the world, and perhaps, for all you knew, their left was really right, and it was we, the right, who were wrong.

She took her mind back to the restaurant down in the town. There was another restaurant there, set in a sort of alley-way under two fig-trees, where artisans filled most of the tables between noon and two o'clock, and where a fat white-smocked woman served all the dishes and still found time to try her three words of English on the engaged couple. From here they could see the lace-crowned Breton women clacking in the shade of the street trees and the small one-eyed train starting or ending its journey between the sea and the terminus that was simply the middle of the street. They liked this restaurant, but that day, wanting a change, they had climbed the steps into the upper town, to the level of the viaduct, and had found this small family restaurant where, at one table, all the knives were laid left-handed. For some reason she now sought to define,
this left-handedness did not seem funny to her. Arthur had also eaten too many olives, picking them up with his fingers and gnawing them as she herself, as a child, would have gnawed an uncooked prune, and this did not seem very funny either. Somewhere between olives and left-handedness lay the source of her curious discontent. Perhaps she was left-handed herself? Left-handed people were, she had read somewhere, right-brained. Perhaps Arthur was left-handed?

She turned over in the heather, small brown-eyed face to the sun. ‘Don't you do anything left-handed?'

‘Good gracious, no.' He turned over too and lay face upwards, dark with sun, his mouth small-lipped under the stiff moustache she had not wanted him to grow. ‘You don't either?'

For the first time in her life she considered it. How many people, she thought, ever considered it? Thinking, she seemed to roll down a great slope, semi-swooning in the heat, before coming up again. Surprisingly, she had thought of several things.

‘Now I come to think of it, I comb my hair left-handed. I always pick flowers left-handed. And I wear my watch on my left wrist.'

He lifted steady, mocking eyes. ‘You sure you don't kiss left-handed?'

‘That's not very funny!' she flashed.

It seemed to her that the moment of temper flashed up sky high, like a rocket, and fell far out to sea, soundless, dead by then, in the heat of the unruffled afternoon. She at once regretted it. For five days now they had lived on the Breton coast, and they now had five days more. Every morning, for five days, he had questioned her: ‘All right? Happy?' and every morning she had responded with automatic affirmations, believing it at first, then aware of doubt, then bewildered. Happiness, she wanted to say, was not something you could fetch out every morning after breakfast, like a clean handkerchief, or more still like a rabbit conjured out of the hat of everyday circumstances.

The hot, crushed-down sense of security she had felt all afternoon began suddenly to evaporate, burnt away from her by the first explosion of discontent and then by small restless flames of inward anger. She felt the growing sense of insecurity physically, feeling that at any moment she might slip off the solid headland into the sea. She suddenly felt a tremendous urge, impelled for some
reason by fear, to walk as far back inland as she could go. The thought of the Atlantic far below, passive and yet magnetic, filled her with a sudden cold breath of vertigo.

‘Let's walk,' she said.

‘Oh! no, it's too hot.'

She turned her face into the dark sun-brittled heather. She caught the ticking of small insects, like infinitesimal watches. Far off, inland, the little train cut off, with its comic shriek, another section of afternoon.

In England he was a draper's assistant: chief assistant, sure to become manager. In imagination she saw the shop, sun-blinds down, August remnant sale now on, the dead little town now so foreign and far off and yet so intensely real to her, shown up by the disenchantment of distance. They had been engaged six months. She had been very thrilled about it at first, showing the ring all round, standing on a small pinnacle of joy, ready to leap into the tremendous spaces of marriage. Now she had suddenly the feeling that she was about to be sewn up in a blanket.

‘Isn't there a castle,' she said, ‘somewhere up the road past the estaminet?'

‘Big house. Not castle.'

‘I thought I saw a notice,' she said, ‘to the château.'

‘Big house,' he said. ‘Did you see that film, “The Big House”? All about men in prison.'

What about women in prison? she wanted to say. In England she was a school-teacher, and there had been times when she felt that the pale green walls of the class-room had imprisoned her and that marriage, as it always did, would mean escape. Now left-handedness and olives and blankets and the stabbing heat of the Atlantic afternoon had succeeded, together, in inducing some queer stupor of semi-crazy melancholy that was far worse than this. Perhaps it was the wine, the sour red stuff of the
vin compris
notice down at the left-handed café? Perhaps after all, it was only some large dose of self-pity induced by sun and the emptiness of the day?

She got to her feet. ‘Come on, m'sieu. We're going to the castle.' She made a great effort to wrench herself up to the normal plane. ‘Castle, my beautiful. Two francs. All the way up to the castle, two francs.' She held out her hand to pull him to his feet.

‘I'll come,' he said, ‘if we can stop at the estaminet and have a drink.'

‘We'll stop when we come down,' she said.

‘Now.'

‘When we come down.'

‘Now. I'm so thirsty. It was the olives.'

Not speaking, she held out her hand. Instinctively, he put out his left.

‘You see,' she said, ‘you don't know what's what or which's which or anything. You don't know when you're left-handed or right.'

He laughed. She felt suddenly like laughing too, and they began to walk down the hill. The fierce heat seemed itself to force them down the slope, and she felt driven by it past the blistered white tables of the estaminet with the fowls asleep underneath them, and then up the hill on the far side, into the sparse shade of small wind-levelled oaks and, at one place, a group of fruitless fig trees. It was some place like this, she thought, just about as hot and arid, where the Gadarene swine had stampeded down. What made her think of that? Her mind had some urge towards inconsequence, some inexplicable desire towards irresponsibility that she could not restrain or control, and she was glad to see the
château at last, shining with sea-blue jalousies through a break in the mass of metallic summer-hard leaves of acacia and bay that surrounded it. She felt it to be something concrete, a barrier against which all the crazy irresponsibilities of the mind could hurl themselves and split.

At the corner, a hundred yards before the entrance gates, a notice, of which one end had been cracked off by a passing lorry, pointed upwards like a tilted telescope. They read the word ‘château', the rest of the name gone.

‘You see,' she said, ‘château.'

‘What château?'

‘Just château.'

‘You think we'll have to pay to go in?'

‘I'll pay,' she said.

She walked on in silence, far away from him. The little insistences on money had become, in five days, like the action of many iron files on the soft tissues of her mind: first small and fine, then larger, then still larger, now large and coarse, brutal as stone. He kept a small note-book and in it, with painful system, entered up the expenditure of every centime.

At the entrance gates stood a lodge, very much
delapidated, the paintwork of the walls grey and sea-eroded like the sides of a derelict battleship. A small notice was nailed to the fence by the gate, and the girl stopped to read it.

‘What does it say?' he said. ‘Do we pay to go in?'

‘Just says it's an eighteenth-century château,' she said. ‘Admission a franc. Shall we go in?'

‘A franc?'

‘One franc,' she said. ‘Each.'

‘You go,' he said. ‘I don't know that I'm keen. I'll stop outside.'

She did not answer, but went to the gate and pulled the porter's bell. From the lodge door a woman without a blouse on put her head out, there was a smell of onions, and the woman turned on the machine of her French like a high pressure steam-pipe, scrawny neck dilating.

The girl pushed open the gate and paid the woman the two francs admission fee, holding a brief conversation with her. The high pressure pipe finally cut itself off and withdrew, and the girl came back to the gates and said: ‘She's supposed to show us round but she's just washing. She says nobody else ever comes up at this hour of the afternoon, and we must show ourselves round.'

They walked up the gravel road between sea-stunted trees towards the château. In the sun, against the blue sky above the Atlantic, the stone and slate of it was burning.

‘Well,' she said, ‘what do you think of it?'

‘Looks a bit like the bank at home,' he said. ‘The one opposite our shop.'

Château and sky and trees spun in the sun-light, whirling down to a momentary black vortex in which the girl found herself powerless to utter a word. She walked blindly on in silence. It was not until they stood under the château walls, and she looked up to see a great grape vine mapped out all across the south side, that she recovered herself and could speak.

‘Its just like the châteaux you see on wine-bottles,' she said. ‘I like it.'

‘It doesn't look much to me,' he said. ‘Where do we get in?'

‘Let's look round the outside first.'

As they walked round the walls on the sun-bleached grass she could not speak or gather her impressions, but was struck only by the barren solitude of it all, the arid, typically French surroundings, with an air of fly-blownness and sun-weariness.
To her amazement the place had no grandeur, and there were no flowers.

‘There ought to be at least a bougainvillaea,' she said.

‘What's a bougainvillaea?'

Questioned, she found she did not know. She felt only that there ought to be a bougainvillaea. The word stood in her mind for the exotic, the south, white afternoons, the sea as seen from the top of just such châteaux as this. How this came to be she could not explain. The conscious part of herself stretched out arms and reached back, into time, and linked itself with some former incarnation of her present self, Louise Bowen, school-teacher, certificated, Standard V girls, engaged to Arthur Keller, chief assistant Moore's Drapery, sure to become manager, pin-stripe trousers, remnants madam, the voice like ruffled velvet, seventy-three pounds fifteen standing to credit at the post office, and in reaching back so far she felt suddenly that she could cry for the lost self, for the enviable incarnation so extraordinarily real and yet impossible, and for the yet not impossible existence, far back, in eternal bougainvillaea afternoons.

‘Let's go inside,' she said.

‘How they make it pay,' he said, ‘God only knows.'

‘It has long since,' she said mysteriously, ‘paid for itself.'