Château Bougainvillæa

THE headland was like a dry purple island scorched by the flat heat of afternoon, cut off from the mainland by a sand-colored 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 the 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 placards. 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 in her mind, as the expression of some much deeper discontent.

'Je parle français un petit pen, 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 was n’t a mistake? All the people in that place were left-handed?’

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

‘It’s the damn 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 lefthanded people in the world, and perhaps, for all you know, 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 alleyway 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 for her three words of English on the engaged couple.

From here they could see the lacecrowned 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 lefthanded. For some reason she now sought to define, this left-handedness did not seem funny to her. Arthur had also eaten 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 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, rightbrained. Perhaps Arthur was lefthanded.

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

‘Good God, 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 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 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 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, as if at any moment she might slip off the solid headland into the sea. She suddenly had 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, my God, it’s too hot.’

She turned her face into the dark sunbrittled 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 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.

‘Is n’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 schoolteacher, and there had been times when she felt that the pale green walls of the classroom 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-leveled 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 seablue 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 notebook, and in it, with painful system, entered up the expenditure of every centime.

At the entrance gates stood a lodge, very much dilapidated, the paintwork of the walls gray 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 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 were 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 sunlight, 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 grapevine mapped out all across the south side, that she recovered herself and could speak.

‘It’s just like the châteaux you see on wine bottles,’ she said. ‘I like it.’

‘It does n’t look much to me,’ he said. ‘Where do we get in?’

‘Let’s look round the outside first.’

As they walked round the w alls 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 flyblownness and sun-weariness. To her amazement the place had no grandeur, and there were no flowers.

‘There ought to be at least a bougainvillæa,’ she said.

‘What’s a bougainvillæa?’

Questioned, she found she did not know. She felt only that there ought to be a bougainvillæa. 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, schoolteacher, certificated, Standard V, girls, engaged to Arthur Keller, chief assistant Moore’s Drapery, sure to become manager, pin-stripe trousers, 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 bougainvillæa 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.’

They found the main door and went in, stepping into the undersea coldness of a large entrance hall. Now think that out, now think that out, now think that out. Her mind bubbling with bitterness, she looked up the great staircase, and all of a sudden the foreignness of her conscious self as against the familiarity of the self that had been was asserted again, but now with the sharp contrast of shadow and light. She put her hand on the staircase, the iron cool and familiar, and then began to walk up it, slowly but lightly, her hand drawn up easily, as though from some invisible iron pulley, far above her. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, feeling, without effort of thought, that she did not like and never had liked its mournful collection of cherubim painted in the gold wheel about the chandelier.

For the first time that day, as she mounted the staircase and then went on beyond into the upstairs corridor and into the paneled music room with its air of having been imported as a complete back cloth from some pink-andgold theatre of the seventies, her body moved with its natural quietness, accustomed, infinitely light, and with a sense of the purest happiness. All this she could not explain and, as they went from music room to other rooms, ceased to attempt to explain. Her bitterness evaporated in the confined coolness, as, outside on the hot headland, her security had evaporated in the blaze of afternoon. Now she seemed incontestably sure of herself, content in what she knew, without fuss, was an unrepeatable moment of time.

She did not like the music room, but, as she expected, Arthur did. This preawareness of hers saved her from fresh bitterness. As part of her contentment, making it complete, she thought of him with momentary tenderness, quietly regretting what she had said and done, ready now to make up for it.

‘Shall we go up higher,’ she said, ‘or down to the ground floor again?’

‘Let’s do the climb first,’ he said.

To her it did not matter, and, climbing a second staircase, they came eventually to a small turret room, unfurnished, with two jalousied windows looking across to the two worlds of France and the Atlantic.

She stood at the window and looked, as from a lighthouse, down on to the intense expanse of sea light. Her mind had the profound placidity of the sea itself, a beautiful vacancy, milkily restful.

‘Funny,’Arthur said. ‘No ships. The Atlantic, and not a ship in sight.’

‘You would n’t expect to see ships,’ she said, and knew that she was right.

Looking down from the other window, they saw the headland, the brown-lilac expanse of heather, the minute peasants scribbled on the yellow rectangle of corn, the estaminet, the one-eyed station. And suddenly, also, there was the white pop of steam inland, and the small comic shriek, now more than ever toylike, pricking the dead silence of afternoon.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s the little train.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s the little train.’

Her mind had the pure loftiness of the tower itself, above all irritation. She felt, as not before in her life, that she was herself. The knowledge of this reincarnation was something she could not communicate, and, half afraid that time or a word would break it up, she suggested suddenly that they should go down.

Arthur remained at the window a moment longer, admiring points of distance. ‘You’d never think,’ he said, ‘you could see so far.’

‘Yes, you would,’ she called back.

Now think that out, now think that out, now think that out. Her mind, as she went downstairs, sprang contrarily upwards, on a scale of otherwise inexpressible delight. Arthur engaged her in conversation as they descended, she on one flight, he on the one above, calling down, ‘It may be all right, but the rates must be colossal. Besides, you’d burn a ton of coal a day in winter, trying to keep warm. A six-roomed house is bad enough, but think of this ’ — but nothing could break, suppress, or even touch her mood.

Downstairs she went straight into the great reception hall, and stood dumb. At that moment she suddenly felt that she had come as far as she must. Time had brought, her to this split second of itself simply in order to pin her down. She stood like an insect transfixed.

Arthur came in. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘The yellow cloth. Don’t do anything. Just look at it. It’s wonderful.’

‘I don’t see anything very wonderful,’ he said.

At the end of the room, thrown over a chair, a large length of brocade, the color of a half-ripe lemon, was like spilled honey against the gray French coldness of walls and furniture. Instantaneously the girl saw it with eyes of familiarity, feeling it somehow to be the expression of herself, mood, past and future. She stood occupied with the entrancement of the moment, her eyes excluding the room, the day, Arthur and everything, her self drowned out of existence by the pure wash of watered fabric.

Suddenly Arthur moved into the room, and ten seconds later had the brocade in his hands. She saw him hold it up, measure it without knowing he measured it, feel its weight, thickness, value. She saw him suddenly as the eternal shopkeeper measuring out the eternal remnants of time—the small tape measure of his mind like a white worm in the precious expanse of her own existence.

‘If you bought it to-day,’ Arthur called, ‘it would cost you every penny of thirty-five bob a yard.’

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

Half a minute later she turned and walked out of the door, Arthur following, and then past the wind-stunted trees and on down the road, past the estaminet. It was not herself who walked, Louise Bowen, — Standard V girls, certificated, deduct so much from superannuation scheme, — tired as after a long day in the crowded, chalk-smelling classroom. As they passed the estaminet, the place looked more flyblown and deserted than ever, and they decided to go on to the station and get a drink there while waiting for the train. As they passed the fig trees her mind tried to grasp again at the thought of the Gadarene swine, her mood blasted into the same barrenness as the tree in the parable.

‘Well, you can have your chateau,’ Arthur said, ‘but I’ve got my mind on one of those houses Sparkes is putting up on Park Avenue. Sixteen and fourpence a week, no deposit, over twenty years. That’s in front of any chateau.’

She saw the houses as he spoke, red and white, white and red, millions of them, one like another, sixteen and fourpence a week, no deposit, stretching out to the ends of the earth. She saw herself in them, the constant and never-changing material of her life cut up by a pair of draper’s scissors, the days ticketed, the years fretted by the counting up of farthings and all the endlessly incalculable moods of boredom and inconstancy.

‘Two coffees, please.’

At the little station café they sat at one of the outside tables and waited for the train.

‘Well, we’ve been to the château and never found out its name,’ he said.

‘It ought to be Château Bougainvillæa.’

‘That’s silly,’ he said. ‘You don’t even know what a bougainvillæa is.’

She sat stirring the gray coffee. She could feel the sun burning the white iron table and her hands. She looked up at the chateau, seeing the windows of the turret above the trees.

‘Now we can see the château,’ she said, ‘as we should have seen ourselves if we’d been sitting down here when — ’

It was beyond her, and she broke off.

‘What?’ he said.

‘I did n’t mean that,’ she said.

‘What did you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, in future,’ he said, ‘mind you say what you mean.’

The future? She sat silent. Inland the approaching train made its comic little whistle, cutting off another section of the afternoon.

And, hearing it, she knew suddenly that the future was already a thing of the past.