The Blessing Read online

  She lived in a dream of Charles-Edouard, so that as the years went on he turned, in her mind, into somebody quite divorced from all reality and quite different from the original. And the years did go on. He came back for three hectic days in July 1940 which hardly counted, so little did Grace see of him, and after that seemed to go farther and farther away, Fort Lamy, Ceylon, and finally Indo-China. When the war ended he was not immediately demobilized, his return was announced again and again, only to be put off, so that it was more than seven years after their wedding when at last the telephone bell rang and Grace heard his voice speaking from Heath Row. This time he was unannounced; she had thought him still in the East.

  ‘Our Ambassador was on the plane with me, and he is sending me straight down in his motor,’ he said. ‘It seems I’ll be with you in an hour or two.’

  Grace felt that, whereas the seven years had gone in a flash, this hour or two would never never end. She went up to the nursery. Sigi was having his bath before bedtime.

  ‘Don’t let him go to sleep,’ she said to Nanny. ‘Guess what, darling – his father will be here presently.’

  Nanny received this news with the air of one resigned to the inevitable fact that all things, especially good things, have their term. She gave a particularly fearful sniff and said, ‘Well, I only hope he won’t over-excite the poor little fellow. You know what it’s like getting him off, evenings, as well as I do.’

  ‘Oh, Nanny, just for once, darling, it wouldn’t matter if he stayed up all night.’

  She left the nursery and wandered down the drive to the lodge, where she sat on one of the stone stumps that, loosely chained together, enclosed grassy mounds on either side of the gates. There was no traffic on the little road outside the park, and beyond it, bordered by clumps of wild rose bushes, the deep woods were full of song. It was high summer now, that week when cuckoo and nightingale give their best, their purest performances. The evening was warm, but she felt glad of a cardigan; she had begun to shiver like a nervous dog.

  At last the motor drove up. Charles-Edouard sprang out of it and hugged her, and then she remembered exactly what he was like as a real person, and the other, dream Charles-Edouard, was chased into the back of her mind. Not quite chased away, she often thereafter remembered him with affection, but separated from reality.

  They got back into the motor and drove up to the house.

  ‘You are looking very beautiful,’ he said, ‘and very happy. I was afraid you might have become sad, all these years and years down here, away from me.’

  ‘I longed terribly for you.’

  ‘I know. You must have.’

  ‘Don’t tease, Charles-Edouard. But if we had to be separated I would rather have been here than anywhere. I love the country, you know, and besides, I had plenty to do.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Oh, goats and things.’

  ‘Goats must be very dull.’

  ‘No, really not. Then of course there was Sigi. Are you excited for him?’

  ‘Very very much excited.’

  ‘Come then, let’s go straight up to the nursery.’

  But outside Grace’s bedroom Charles-Edouard caught her hand and pointed sternly to the door. ‘I must see if the archduke is still there,’ he said, and they went in.

  Grace said presently, ‘If you had been killed in the war, it would have finished me off.’

  ‘Ah! Would you have died? That’s very nice.’

  ‘Yes, I couldn’t have gone on living.’

  ‘And would it have been a violent death by poison or a slow death by misery?’

  ‘Which would you prefer?’

  ‘Poison would be very flattering.’

  ‘All right then, poison. Now come on, let’s go to Sigi.’

  In the day nursery Nanny’s face was a picture of disapproval. ‘Funny thing,’ she said, ‘I thought I heard a car quite half an hour ago. Time he went off to sleep, poor mite.’

  They went through into the night nursery. Sigi was standing on his bed. He had black, silky curls and clever little black eyes, and he was always laughing.

  ‘Have you ever seen me before?’ he said to his father.

  ‘Never. But I can guess who you are.’

  ‘Sigismond de Valhubert, a great boy of nearly seven. Are you my papa?’

  ‘Let me present myself – Charles-Edouard de Valhubert.’ They shook hands.

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘I am a colonel in the French Air Force, retired. And what are you going to be?’

  ‘A superman,’ said the child.

  Charles-Edouard was much gratified by this reply. ‘Always the same old story,’ he said, ‘l’ Empereur, la gloire, hommage à la Grande Armée. I shall have a lot to tell you about the Marshal of France, your ancestor. Do you know that at home we have a standard from the battlefield of Friedland?’

  Sigi looked intensely puzzled, and Grace said, ‘I’m afraid his superman isn’t Napoleon, not yet at least, but Garth.’

  ‘Goethe?’

  ‘Oh dear – no. Garth. It’s a strip – I can’t explain, I’ll have to show you some time. It’s rather horrible really, but we don’t seem able to do without it.’

  ‘Garth, you know, in the Daily,’ Sigismond said. His grandfather had forbidden him to call it the Mirror so he compromised with the Daily. ‘When I’m big I’m going to have a space ship like Garth and go to the –’

  ‘But what do you know, Sigismond? Can you count? Can you read, and can you name the forty Kings of France?’

  ‘Forty?’ said Grace. ‘Are there really? Poor little boy.’

  ‘Well eighteen are Louis and ten are Charles. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I always forget the others myself.’

  ‘Isn’t he a darling?’ said Grace, as they went downstairs.

  ‘A darling. Rather dull, but a darling.’

  ‘He’s not dull a bit,’ she said indignantly, ‘though he may be a little young for his age. It comes from living all alone with me in the country, if he is.’

  ‘So perhaps tomorrow I take you both home to France.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Oh no, Charles-Edouard, not –’

  ‘We can’t stay here. I’ve seen all the leaning towers and pavilions and rotundas and islands and rococo bridges, I’ve moved the furniture and rehung the pictures. There’s nothing whatever to do, and we have our new life to begin. So –?’

  ‘Oh darling, but tomorrow! What about the packing?’

  ‘Don’t bother. We’re going straight to Provence, you’ll only want cotton dresses, and you must have all new when we get to Paris, anyhow.’

  ‘Yes, but Nanny. What will she say?’

  ‘I don’t know. The plane is at twelve, giving us time to catch the night train to Marseilles. We leave here at nine. I’ve arranged everything and ordered a motor to take us. I suppose you’ve got the passports as I told you to last year?’

  ‘But Nanny –’ wailed poor Grace.

  Charles-Edouard began to sing a song about sardines. ‘Marinées, argentées, leurs petits corps decapités…’

  4

  Charles-Edouard, Grace, Sigismond, and Nanny arrived at Marseilles in a torrid heat wave. Grace and the child were tired after the night in the train, but Charles-Edouard and Nanny were made of sterner stuff. His songs and jokes flowed like a running river, except when he was actually asleep, and so did Nanny’s complaints. These were a recitative of nursery grievance in which certain motifs constantly recurred. ‘No time to write to Daniel Neal – all those nice toys left behind – the beautiful rocking-horse Mrs O’Donovan gave us – his scooter with rubber tyres and a bell – poor little mite, grown out of his winter coat, how shall we ever get another – what shall I do without my wireless? – the Bengers never came, you know, dear, from the Army and Navy – shall we get the Mirror there and my Woman and Beauty? Oh, I say, I never took those books back to Boots, what will the girl think of me – that nice blouse I was having made in the village –’ Then the chorus,
much louder than the rest. ‘Shame, really.’

  They were met at the station by Charles-Edouard’s valet, Ange-Victor, in a big, rather old-fashioned Bentley. Ange-Victor was crying with joy, and it seemed as if he and Charles-Edouard would never stop hugging each other. At last they stowed the luggage into the motor, Grace and Sigi crammed into the front seats beside Charles-Edouard, with valet and nurse behind, and he drove hell for leather up the narrow, twisting, crowded road which goes from Marseilles to Aix.

  ‘I’m a night bomber, have no fear,’ he shouted to Grace as she cringed in her corner clasping Sigi. The hot air rushed past them, early as it was, the day was already a scorcher. Charles-Edouard was singing ‘Malbrouck s’en va’-t-en guerre et ne reviendra pas.’

  ‘But I am back,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Never never did I expect to come back. Five fortune-tellers said I should be killed.’

  And he turned right round, in the teeth of an enormous lorry, to ask Ange-Victor if Madame André, in the village, still told the cards.

  ‘Shall I tell your fortune now?’ said Grace. ‘If you don’t drive much more carefully there will soon be a widow, a widower, an orphan, and two childless parents in this family.’

  ‘Try and remember that I am a night bomber,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘I have driven aeroplanes over the impenetrable jungle, how should I have an accident on my old road I’ve known from a baby? Here we turn,’ he said, wrenching the motor, under the very bonnet of another lorry, across the road and down a lane to the left of it. ‘And there,’ he said a few minutes later, ‘is Bellandargues.’

  The Provençal landscape, like that of Tuscany which it so much resembles, is marked by many little hills humping unexpectedly in the middle of vineyards. These often have a cluster of cottages round their lower slopes, overlooked by a castle, or the ruin of a castle, on the summit. Such was Bellandargues. The village lay at the foot of a hill, and above it, up in the blue sky, hung the castle, home, for many generations, of the Valhubert family.

  As they drove into the village it presented a gay and festive appearance, all flags for the return of Charles-Edouard. A great streamer, with ‘Vive la Libération, Hommage à M. le Maire’, was stretched across the street; the village band was playing, and a crowd was gathered in the market-place, waving and cheering. Charles-Edouard stopped the motor. M. Mignon, the chemist, made a long speech, recalling the sad times they had lived through since Charles Edouard was last there, and saying with what deep emotion they had all heard him when he had spoken on the London radio in July 1940.

  ‘Hm. Hm.’ Charles-Edouard had a certain face which betrayed, to those who knew him well, inward laughter tinged with a guilty feeling. His eyes laughed but his mouth turned down at the corners. He made this face now, remembering so well the speech at the B.B.C.; how he had been exchanging looks as he delivered it with the next speaker, on the other side of a glass screen. She was a pretty little Dutch girl, and he had taken her out to tea, he remembered, before going back to Grace. M. Mignon made a fine and flowery peroration, Charles-Edouard spoke in reply, the village band then struck up again while he and Grace shook hundreds of hands. Great admiration was lavished upon Sigi, pronounced to be the image of his papa; he jumped up and down on the seat, laughing and clapping, until Nanny said he was thoroughly above himself and pinned him to her lap.

  ‘Well,’ said Grace, when at last they drove on, ‘if you never thought you’d be son-in-law to the Allingham Commission, it certainly never occurred to me that I should marry a mayor.’ She turned round and said, ‘Wasn’t that delightful, Nan?’

  ‘Funny-looking lot, aren’t they? Not too fond of washing, if you ask me. Fearful smell of drains, dear.’

  The road up through the village got steeper and steeper, the side alleys were all flights of steps. Charles-Edouard changed down into bottom gear. They bounced through a gateway, climbed another slope, came out on to a big, flat terrace, bordered with orange trees in tubs, and drew up at the open front door of the castle. The village was now invisible; far below them, shimmering in the heat and punctuated with umbrella pines, lay acre upon acre of vivid green landscape.

  As she got out of the motor Grace thought to herself how different all this was going to look in a few weeks, when it had become familiar. Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings. As with human beings, you can have an impression, that is all. Her impression of Bellandargues was entirely favourable, one of hot, sleepy, beautiful magnitude. She longed to be on everyday terms with it, to know the rooms that lay behind the vast windows of the first floor, to know what happened round the corner of the terrace, and where the staircase led to, just visible in the interior darkness. It is a funny feeling to visit your home for the first time and have to be taken about step by step like a blind person.

  An old butler ran out of the door, saying he had not expected them for another half-hour. There was more hugging and crying, and then Charles-Edouard gave him rapid instructions about Nanny being taken straight to her rooms and a maid sent to help her unpack.

  ‘And Madame la Marquise?’ he said.

  The butler replied that Madame la Marquise must be in the drawing-room. He said again that they had arrived before they were expected.

  ‘Come, then,’ Charles-Edouard said, taking Sigi by the hand. ‘Come, Grace.’

  ‘Go with the butler, Nan,’ said Grace. ‘I’ll be up as soon as I can.’

  ‘Yes, well, don’t keep Sigi too long, dear. He’s filthy after that train.’

  Her words fell on air, Grace was pursuing husband and son into the shadows of the house and up the stairs. Somewhere a Chopin waltz was being played, but Grace did not consciously hear it, though she remembered it afterwards.

  ‘Wait, wait, Charles-Edouard,’ she cried. ‘Who is this Marquise?’

  ‘My grandmother.’

  ‘Charles-Edouard, dearest, stop one minute, I didn’t know you had a grandmother – oh, do stop and explain –’

  ‘There’s nothing to explain. In here.’ He held open a door for her. Grace walked into a huge room, dark and panelled, with a painted ceiling. Furniture was dotted about in it; like shrubs in a desert the pieces seemed to grow where they stood, following no plan of arrangement, and dotted about among them were human figures. There was an old man painting at an easel, an old lady at a piano playing the Chopin waltz, while another old lady, in the embrasure of a window, was deep in conversation with an ancient priest. She looked quickly round as the door opened, and then ran towards Grace.

  ‘So soon?’ she cried, ‘and nobody downstairs to meet you? It’s that wretched stable clock, always slow.’ She kissed Grace on both cheeks, and then again, saying, ‘A beauty! What a beauty! Well done, Charles-Edouard,’ she said, hugging him. ‘This is wonderful happiness, my child.’

  Now there was a perfect hubbub of greetings and introductions. ‘Tante Régine – M. le Curé, how are you? Yes, yes, I quite realized that,’ said Charles-Edouard when M. le Curé began to explain that he had not been down in the village because M. Mignon was in charge of the welcome there. ‘Grace, this is M. de la Bourlie, and this is M. le Curé, Grace, who has been M. le Curé here – for how long?’

  Madame de Valhubert said, ‘M. le Curé arrived here, a young priest, the same summer that I arrived, a young bride. We shall have seen sixty grape harvests together this year.’

  Tante Régine became rather fidgety while her sister was speaking, and said to Grace in an aside, ‘But I am much younger, I was always the baby – fifteen – twenty years younger than Françoise.’

  Their faces were the same, soft, white faces with black eyes, but while Madame de Valhubert’s was framed in soft white hair and her clothes were very much like those of a nun, Madame Rocher, painted and powdered, had her red hair cut in the latest way and wore such a beautiful, simple, desirable cotton dress that Grace could look at nothing els
e in the room.

  ‘Dear Tante Régine, I’m very much pleased to see you,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘And Octave?’

  Octave was her late husband’s nephew, the present holder of his title, whom Madame Rocher had brought up and then, because he bored her, had pushed into the army. The old Marquis had left her every penny of the enormous fortune which came to him through his mother, so she was able to behave in a very highhanded manner with his relations.

  ‘Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual,’ said Madame Rocher. ‘He is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn’t been for this wretched war he would be at least a colonel by now.’

  ‘Hm. Hm,’ said Charles-Edouard, bursting with inward laughter. ‘And I, in spite of this wretched war, am a colonel, do you know that? Grandmother, did you know that I am a colonel?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we know a great deal about you here. Little Béguin, who was invalided home after the Libération, was full of your exploits.’

  ‘Indeed I did splendidly,’ said Charles-Edouard, laughing. ‘I am a colonel and I have a son – where is this son, by the way?’

  He dragged Sigi out from behind a curtain, where he was hiding in a most unusual state of shyness.

  ‘Sigismond, come and kiss the hand of your ancestress. Now that you are a French boy we should like to see some manners, please.’

  Sigi became quite scarlet with embarrassment, but the old lady, taking two boxes of sweets from a table, held them out to him and said, ‘You can kiss my hand another time, darling, but now choose which you’ll have, a chocolate or a marron glacé. A little bribery never spoils anything,’ she said to Charles-Edouard as Sigi carefully made his choice. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, I do love chocolate, certainly I do, but I suppose I ought to choose the one with the silver paper on account of the poor lepers.’

  ‘What, my child?’