A Good Death Read online

  In the meantime, he had written long letters of condolence to Micheline and Florence, but had had no reply, nor had he expected any. It occurred to him that he should announce his return, his resurrection, to his daughter, and so he wrote to explain his disappearance four years ago, his eagerness to see her again, ‘when the war is over, as it soon must be.’ He wrote to his great-aunts; when time permitted, he would give himself the pleasure of visiting them at Bonnemort. From them he received letters of joy at his return from death and exile, with no reference to Ariane. No sign of any kind had come from his wife.

  It was one of the commonest situations in the world, he told himself: the husband away at the wars, the wife finding solace for loneliness and hardship. It happened all the time, on every side, in every war, in all ages. But its being usual did not make it forgivable. This was the result of marrying someone he hardly knew, from an alien background. It could only lead to disaster, as his family and friends had warned him at the time. She was everything he was not: urban, Protestant and rich. He would have said, until he met her, that she was everything he disliked in a woman.

  * * *

  When he left for London in July 1940, they had been married for a year, and had not lived together since the start of the war in September ’39. The war that had separated them had originally brought them together. They had met in ’38, just after Munich, in that odd period when, for an instant, those holding opposing political views were united in shame. He had been prepared for war, at last, and was infuriated at having it torn away from him, with a dishonourable peace offered as a triumphant alternative. His reaction cut him off from many of his friends, whose passionate relief he could not share.

  ‘Life’s so simple for you, Theo,’ they said, forgetting, as he often did himself, his daughter’s existence. ‘You have no family, no responsibilities. You’re just a soldier.’

  One evening that autumn at a dinner of anti-Munich sentiment, he joined a group of people who would never normally have met around a table, to lament and foretell disaster. There he had met Ariane Wolff.

  His world had not included unmarried women like her, whose wealth gave her enough power to count, almost, as a man. Certainly she was deferred to, not with gallantry, but with respect, and not only for her money. He was used to women who were smiling and complaisant, who did not discuss politics or contradict men. No woman that he knew would have telephoned a man to arrange a lunch, as she did the following day, with the excuse of introducing him to a friend, a certain Socialist, anti-Munich member of the National Assembly, who wanted a military light thrown on the situation. After that, things moved with such speed that they were married within seven months. He had never been so happy.

  * * *

  He turned from the view of the oily water and his shoes rang on the cobbles, slicked with the mild rain. He felt he could not wait until he returned to Bonnemort; he must do something even at a distance; he would speak to his father-in-law.

  Although they could not have been more different in their characters or backgrounds, Theo had always found Ariane’s father a sympathetic figure. When they had announced their marriage, his own family had been horrified. Pascal Wolff, on the other hand, had made no protest, even though, on material grounds, he had every reason to question the choice of his only child. He was an immensely rich industrialist, inhabiting a huge villa in the XVI arrondissement, amid hideous and valuable collections of Compagnie des Indes porcelain and baroque bronzes. What had become of them, of him, Theo wondered.

  He telephoned one evening. A maid answered. He was put through and heard the dry familiar tones, ‘Pascal Wolff.’

  Theo spoke formally, as to a stranger. ‘Theo de Cazalle speaking.’

  A pause before the old man said, ‘Welcome back to France and welcome back to life, which is more or less the same. It must have been deathly, I imagine, living for four years in London.’ Theo laughed. ‘We were in Algiers for some of the time.’

  ‘A different climate, not much better.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’d better meet, eh?’

  ‘Whenever you’re free.’

  ‘We can meet tomorrow for lunch. One has to eat, after all.’

  They met at a cafe near the Ministry and sat down at one of the small tables in the room behind the bar. Around them clerks from neighbouring offices were eating the plat du jour.

  ‘What is it today?’ Pascal Wolff asked the waiter. Then, turning to Theo, ‘You know already the condition we have sunk to here, but perhaps you have access to all sorts of good things, to make up for our deficiencies.’

  Theo denied any privileges. ‘It was just as bad in England,’ he said. ‘And there they couldn’t make good food even when they had everything.’

  ‘The misfortunes of others are always a comfort,’ Wolff said. ‘To know that someone is worse off has kept many of us warm in cold weather.’ They handed over their ration coupons for the meal.

  His father-in-law had aged by more than the four years that had passed. His face was grooved rather than wrinkled, and these crevasses had deepened; the faintly pigmented skin around his eyes had darkened in contrast with his pale cheeks. The silver hair smoothed back from his high forehead was sparser, but his detached, observant humour remained.

  Neither of them knew how to broach the subject of Ariane.

  ‘Wonderful news about Strasbourg,’ Pascal Wolff said. Alsace had been liberated by General Leclerc two days earlier.

  ‘Yes, we should drive them out of France completely in the next month or so.’

  The waiter slapped down in front of them two plates: a stew of beans and cabbage. Pascal Wolff picked up his fork and spoke quickly, as if to get it over. ‘You want to know about Ariane.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She won’t see you.’

  ‘Oh.’ This did not surprise him.

  ‘I didn’t tell her I was meeting you today.’

  ‘She’s here, in Paris?’

  ‘For the last two months. Didn’t you know? She’s living with me.’

  ‘No. I had no way of knowing.’

  Silence. Finally Wolff spoke. ‘I don’t know what happened down there. I don’t ask. She certainly won’t tell me. I don’t know what happened between the two of you. All I can say is she is my daughter. I have to support her.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not well. She doesn’t eat and she doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t talk. I’ve tried to send her somewhere out of the war, where she can have a complete rest and recover her equilibrium. She won’t go. I’ve called the doctor. She won’t see him. I’ve called a psychologist. She won’t see him either. Good thing. He would say it was all my fault.’

  * * *

  Perhaps it was all his fault. He had made Ariane his companion and friend since she was five years old, when her mother died. Wolff had little need for the company of women. His sense of self-esteem needed no reinforcement from their admiration and he was too busy to require their skills of making time pass pleasantly. He had married the daughter of a Protestant banking family and handed over to her the care of running their houses and organising their domestic life. When she died, he rapidly discovered that these tasks could be as well fulfilled by good staff and there was really no need for a wife. A year or so after her death, he began a discreet liaison, and continued it for many years, with the widow of an old friend who had no wish to remarry because of the terms of her husband’s will. The relationship, paradoxically intermittent and passionate, suited them both. Nothing about his chilly personality or in his rationally ordered life suggested that he would be a doting father, yet Ariane became more and more necessary to him as she grew older.

  He loved her all the more because, unlike her mother, she was not beautiful. She was dark, like him, with heavy eyebrows, a prominent nose, a purposeful chin. Large, both in height and strong build, she was full of energy. She rode and shot and skied and sailed,
without fatigue. She was clever, too, and just as with all sports she had a passion to win, so at school she had a drive to excel. She was always among the first in the class and after her baccalaureat, instead of doing what the daughters of all his friends did: tea parties, good works, balls and marriage, all within the tight circle of the Protestant haute bourgeoisie, she entered the Ecole Normale Superieure.

  He should have made a stand then. After that, what followed was inevitable, as he was warned by the grim smiles of the older women who knew about these things. She was not going to marry suitably, they predicted; she would choose for herself and the man would be an outsider. Marriage was not in question for a long time. She completed her degree, then her agregation, coming second in her year, worked for a time in a school in Lille, discovered she was a hopeless disciplinarian with no gift for teaching, resigned, and returned to Paris, to write and to study.

  With this background, how had she managed to meet and fall in love with a widowed, aristocratic, Catholic, conservative army officer, ten years her senior, with a seven-year-old daughter and no money? The psychologist might have made imaginative hypotheses about guilt and self-worth and father-fixations. In the furious reaction of the two families to the wedding in May 1939, her father had thought that she must have chosen Theo in order to cause the maximum uproar. The real reason for the marriage was obvious: passion. This was probably why both sets of relatives were so furious. All the proper considerations for the foundation of a family on which they were united, Protestant and Catholic alike: compatibility of fortune, status, religion and milieu, were being ignored in favour of overwhelming sexual attraction. The fuss was compounded by the haste of the marriage, driven by the sense of impending disaster. Wolff had made no objection and indeed he found his son-in-law an agreeable, well-read, amusing companion, although he seemed neither sufficiently intellectual nor sufficiently worldly for Ariane, to counterbalance his other qualities, or defects. They had had a civil ceremony only and Wolff had taken good care, in the light of all that militated against the success of the marriage, that Ariane’s property was well protected. What else could he do to save her in her happiness, he had thought with a parent’s helpless anguish, looking at her radiantly ugly face.

  Where had it gone wrong? Perhaps all the disapproving cousins were correct; sexual passion was a bad basis for a marriage. At all events, a husband who pretends to die and disappears for four years can hardly expect to find his wife unchanged at the end of that time.

  ‘It’s certainly not your fault,’ Theo said.

  ‘Yes, let’s leave blame aside, shall we?’

  ‘Yes. It would be wisest, certainly.’

  ‘You want to see her?’

  Theo surprised himself by saying, ‘I want to hear …’

  ‘It won’t be soon. She hardly talks, even to me. She only concentrates on the child.’

  ‘The child? Sabine?’

  ‘Sabine? Oh, your daughter. No. She’s still at Bonnemort with your aunts, didn’t you know?’

  Theo’s relationship with his daughter was evidently not what Wolff’s had been with Ariane, if he did not know where she was living. ‘No, the other one, Suzie they called her.’

  ‘Who is Suzie?’

  ‘Don’t you know about her? No, how could you? So much happens in four years.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of her before now.’ But he recalled Florence’s words, The children are asleep, of course. I didn’t wake them. ‘She’s the daughter, or rather the granddaughter, of a friend of mine. Her grandfather was one of our suppliers for years; he was in metallurgy in Düsseldorf. His son became a prof at the university, and in thirty-three or thirty-four, right at the beginning of Hitler, he was sacked. He left Germany altogether, came to Paris and worked as a journalist. So when the Germans arrived here, he sent his wife and child to the free zone, where he thought they would be safer, to Clermont Ferrand, for some reason. In forty-two he came to see me, to ask if I knew anyone in the Auvergne who could help his wife who was sick. There were money problems, too. He was desperate, but he didn’t want to bring her back to Paris. The only person I could suggest was Ariane. She went there and brought the child back to Bonnemort.’

  Theo’s mind had not engaged with this story and he could not understand why his father-in-law was telling it in such detail. Then he grasped that this child was a witness, had been at Bonnemort, had seen everything.

  ‘And she’s living with you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, we put her into the lycee around the corner. I found out that she hadn’t been at school the whole time she was down in the country. God knows why, Ariane taught her and Sabine herself.’

  Theo imagined questioning the child, then realised that there were some things he could not do. Wolff was standing up.

  ‘It’s been good to see you, Theo. My advice about Ariane, for what it’s worth, is to leave her alone for a while. As the President says, we have to learn to forget.’

  He shrugged on his old Burberry and stepped out of the restaurant, bidding his son-in-law goodbye with a wave of his folded newspaper.

  Theo made his way back to the rue St Dominique. The important information that he had gained from this encounter was that he was free to return to Bonnemort. Ariane was not there; he could go home without having to confront her.

  Chapter Four

  This time he arrived at Bonnemort before dusk and saw the golden stone of the walls glowing in the winter sunshine. January had come before he could leave Paris. His prediction to Pascal Wolff that the Germans would have been driven out of France before the end of the year had been proved wrong, and Strasbourg itself had come under renewed threat in December. He had spent Christmas with the Big Man in Alsace and only well into the new year could he obtain a few days’ leave of absence.

  His home had been built in the eighteenth century as a hunting lodge, on the site of some minor medieval fortification. The fortress had disappeared, leaving only its little Romanesque chapel abutting the newer dwelling. At the other end of its regular facade rose a large square tower and from it sprang an archway leading into the farmyard. In front of the house the land spread out as far as the cliffs edge, at the foot of which lay a lake reached by a steep and rocky path. Below the water the land fell again, less abruptly, to the valley of walnut orchards. In the field he could see Ariane’s two horses grazing with the aunts’ apricot-coloured donkeys.

  In the summer of ’39 they had spent their honeymoon here. They had ridden for miles over the hilltop pastures, through the chestnut and oak woods, while he persuaded her that this would be the place for her to come if, or when, war broke out. He never expected her to obey orders like a good army wife; she was too used to her independence. She would live at Bonnemort, or not, as she pleased. And it must have pleased her, for although she went there reluctantly in September ’39, she had stayed. During the phoney war she had sent for her horses and with her car, driver and maid she had established a life of urbs in run. Her chauffeur was soon called up, and the maid, terrified by the filth and savagery of country life, left within weeks. Yet Ariane had remained.

  * * *

  He had taken the precaution of phoning Micheline to warn her of his arrival. The aunts, with Sabine in attendance, waited to greet him beside the fire in the library. As he embraced them, he saw how much they had changed. A thousand years old when he was a small boy, they had, if anything, grown younger as he grew up. Now he realised that Madame Veyrines, Aunt Odette, must be over eighty, and her sister-in-law, Madame de Cazalle, Aunt Marguerite, in her mid-seventies. Although he always thought of them as a pair, ‘the aunts’, they were in truth very different both physically and in character.

  Aunt Odette, his grandfather’s sister, was a gentle, accommodating woman with white hair ingeniously constructed into a roll around her head. She had the figure of a feather pillow, sagging and downy; the skin of her cheek as he kissed it had the texture of cashmere, infinitely soft and faintly furred. Aunt Marguerite, Madame de Caza
lle, widow of his grandfather’s brother, Geoffroi, was thin and fragile with cropped iron-grey hair and a gentle face, which belied her energetic and managing disposition.

  And Sabine was unrecognisable. He had last seen her at Easter 1940, when he had visited her at her convent. She had been a withdrawn and unattractive child, rejecting his inexperienced attempts at arousing her interest. Now she was tall, already developing and obviously uncomfortable with her new body, lumpily crouching by the fire.

  His family had always dealt with facts that they did not like by ignoring them. As he had expected, they made no mention of his delay in coming to visit them, nor of the absence of his wife. What happened here? Tell me about my wife, he wanted to say. He could ask the question and knew that they would not be able to reply. The reticence of good manners was as difficult to break through as the deliberate refusal to speak of the political prisoner. He imagined their skulls cracked open to his view, like a walnut shell, to reveal the intricate whorls of the nut inside. But to see inside the shell would not reveal what the brain knew. That was secreted in another form, like the taste of the nut, which could not be sensed by the eye.

  He was the centre of their attention, recounting his adventures, his flight, London and Algiers, life with the Big Man.

  ‘We suspected that you might be in London,’ remarked Aunt Odette, ‘although Ariane never told us. But we didn’t know until the Germans left.’

  ‘She wasn’t sad enough. She tried but she’s not an actress. Henri knew something. He was even worse at acting than Ariane.’

  ‘They were not so bad at hiding some things.’

  What things? Her lover?