One more river, p.2
One More River, page 2
A drink, definitely. There is some single malt in the cellar, and he was not going down there to root about. Kitchen whisky and glad of it.
And pick up a pen. That will oblige the hand to stop trembling. Now—was there or wasn’t there a second shot?
Or am I imagining that, too?
By tomorrow, I’ve no doubt, I’ll be feeling extremely cross. Right now there’s no room for anything but fright.
I’ve noticed this often enough. I’m old, damn it, and when I get an upset it gnaws at me, and it takes a night’s sleep to put me to rights. Saying which I hope I do sleep. It doesn’t alter the fact. I write rude letters and in the morning I tear them up. I don’t feel humiliated by my fear. Somebody, possibly Napoleon, said one was no good for war after the age of thirty. Meaning bullets, quite true. That was a bullet, even if my shirt wasn’t ripped. That whupping sound has been described often enough in fact as well as bad fiction. I am wondering about the second shot. We all think of our own reactions as fast, and driving the second car when the light goes green is a simple demonstration that they aren’t. I curse the fellow in front for sleeping and no doubt the man behind curses me. I thought my reactions tumbling off the terrace pretty smart but feel sure that whoever it was had plenty of time for a second shot.
He missed; does that prove him incompetent? I wouldn’t want to feel sure of that. From what I know of shooting, which is not a great deal, aiming downhill is tricky. A foreshortening effect; the slope from the woodland is steeper than it looks. One could look for signs whether anyone had got through the fence. Or rather, one will get the père Poirier to look. I can trust him.
These are notes. Obviously, writing things down has a calming effect, and an organising effect. But I am only following a life-time habit. A third reason occurs: if so be I get shot, there will be a police investigation. They’ll find my notebook, which goes everywhere with me, and they’ll read it, and I must do my best to make it useful reading.
Surely when I knew why I’d know who?
I have no idea. It ought to be obvious and perhaps it is. Now that I think a little, could be a dozen things and none perhaps more obvious than the others. Should I put it that I deserve no better? I am confused. This needs a lot more thought. One must try also to be logical, even if a lot of these people are extremely illogical, and will shooting at me solve their problems?
First things first. There’s a man (?) outside there with a gun. Well he won’t do anything tonight; I got away and now I’ve closed and barred all the shutters. Remains the attic, where I have an errand, for which I have to turn lights on. One has a view of this from up the hill. But the skylights are double glass, and my impression is that you couldn’t shoot through those without a lot of distortion; your bullet would go awry for sure. It’s ridiculous I know, but I’m still going to hunt for the armoury. Serves no purpose but will make me feel better? If no braver.
There’s the twenty-two rifle: as I have often remarked, is there in France a single house without one? Formidable thing it is too; not a toy by any means and kills a great many people in the hands of French man, woman and child. I taught the children to shoot with it, never allowing them to be in front of it, never allowing them to use the magazine: never more than one cartridge at a time. I’ve never used it since and that’s twenty years at the inside. It still stands in the corner of the bedroom where la mère Poirier treats it with respect when dusting: it will have gathered a great deal of dust. On the top shelf of the press behind hats is the cleaning rod, some soft rags and some three-in-one. Not all rusted I hope. No, just dirty; the boys put it away oiled.
No cheap job; a Walther, an excellent weapon, beautiful balance even for a ten-year-old. Why on earth has one kept it? One tells oneself there might be rats or marauding cats. There are the deer which have on occasion got in and chewed maple leaves. Do you remember the old Typhoo-Tea advert?—’the tiny tip of the tender leaf’. Until Peartree mended and heightened the fence. I got very angry but never had the heart to shoot them. The worst ravages were made by a doe and two fawns. Stood there placidly gazing at me. I gazed back, trembling with violence and yelling. I never even thought of the gun. I do now, though. With the rags there’s a half-used box of ‘reduced-charge’ ammo. Target stuff good only up to twenty-five metres. But a barely-used box of Russian high-speed, dangerous at several hundred. What kind of gun did my unknown friend have? A deer rifle, medium calibre Remington or Winchester, is common form around here.
I have really no idea what use this object can be. I have the vaguest possible notion of frightening someone off. Preposterous.
Nonetheless I have gone to rummage in the attic. Lots of fumbling about even if I have got rid of so much. It was still there. From forty years ago. Pot-Valiant bought that one day in Belgium. Wanted to have it, the way boys do. Never touched it since, it has never even been fired. Brand-new in the box; a simple—no, not foolproof—but very well made, like the Walther, nine-millimetre automatic pistol, Fabrique National de Herstal. Magazine separate so as not to weaken the spring. One box of twenty-five nice shiny copper—they’re very old. Will they still go? Will I find out? Look, I’m not going to indulge in this going round in circles. Load the magazine, clip it in. Yes, I know how. Put on your corduroy jacket which has big flapped button-down pockets, and you put it in one of those. Leather button—yes, button it. I am aware that I feel the most awful fool. Tomorrow morning I’ll think again about this.
Meanwhile; have you now got the courage to go down the road? To talk to Peartree?
It was eight o’clock. The time was important. First, the Peartrees would be finished with dinner. That much he knew, for it has happened that they say ‘I’ll be up after dinner’ upon some small errand. It has meant that the meal was over, the dishes washed and the kitchen, where (as far as he is concerned) they have their being, has been tidied. That he knows also, for it has also happened that at this time he has visited them with some message as ‘I’m off tomorrow morning’ with whatever discussion of this fact might be called for. It would be bad manners, and thought so too, to intrude upon them at table. It would be bad manners to telephone. They are old-fashioned people (isn’t he, also?) and like to be face to face with people they are talking to. He would phone of course from a distance, to say ‘I’ll be home tomorrow’. ‘Home’? Perfectly good word; nothing wrong with it.
Eight o’clock is twenty hundred: the time of the ‘sacred’ evening news bulletin, the television’s Vingt Heures. It means that nobody, at least in a French village, is on the road (and the fact, this minute, has some weight): they are all in front of their bright-lit box, and all with their mouths full. Not the Peartrees, who have not only no television, in a French countryside unheard of, but have and express forcibly an open contempt for this invention. ‘For children. And nasty brats at that.’ Thus, other people’s conversation seems largely confined to last-night’s-film: not theirs.
It would raise the question of what they do in the evening. They say to be sure that like their grandparents they go to bed with the hens. He has noticed them to be singularly well-informed about the world. The absence of television will itself account for that? They read to be sure the local paper, whose print gets larger as the news in it gets smaller, but that is to know who in the locality is dead.
He suspects that they read. People do, even now. Fewer, as he notices from his bank statements, but it goes on still. Might they read his own books, even? It would be bad manners to enquire and worse, in their view, to comment. What do they read? History? Biography? It is hard to tell with country people of their age. Their remarks are acute, and salty. They are intelligent, ordinarily so. Their schooling was short but thorough; scanty is not the word and neither is summary; they are both instructed and educated. Further they are highly articulate (the young are not). It remains something of an enigma.
He opened the door and for a moment he paused. The night was particularly black, with neither moon nor stars. He had turned out the lights; he wanted none behind him. He would in any case stand awhile to let his eyes grow used to darkness, always less black than it seems. When here, before going to bed, he does as a rule step outside and walk around the house. To take a sniff of the air. To see that there is nothing untoward: to let as it were the dog pee. So that he was used to blackness: cloudy nights are frequent. There are scattered houses further up the valley, but widely spaced. In the village are a few (feeble-minded) street lights but the Peartree house is itself well outside the village, and round a bend of the hill, and it is a hundred metres, perhaps two, down the road. To be out at night in the countryside is alarming. It could be perfectly still and one hears a scuffle; there might be a fox on the road. One hears footsteps and they turn out to be those of a deer. The trees talk among themselves. One could and would normally take a torch or a bike lamp: this, tonight, did not seem a good idea. He did, despite himself, feel pleased with the weight and shape and feel of the pistol in his pocket.
This is all the home he has. He was not there always, nor even very often. Two or three times a year, and he might stay a month or more; he did work there. Governments, meaning people who want forms filled in, for their comfortable livelihood depends upon it, get edgy if one isn’t domiciled somewhere. They are contented if you give them stuff (doesn’t have to be exact or even accurate; as long as it’s a lot) to feed into their computer. They aren’t much concerned at what comes out, for that is for other gentry to waste their time upon.
Now that he thought of it, this was the address given in reference books. So that anyone unknown to him, not too sure where to find him, would come looking for him here. There was a doorbell, mostly unanswered; a phone, still more frustrating for the intrusive. People try to sell one things. Quite often he rewinds the tape without listening. A phone ringing in an empty house is a temptation and perhaps a challenge to breakers-in; he has no poppers-in. Whatever the pest, the père Poirier will deal with it. He is paid for that, and enjoys it; has not all that much to do. One closes the eyes to still anxieties at the prospect of there being no père P. There might be no himself, either. Of the two, le Padre Pipi which is what la Mère calls him when in a bad mood, is the more solid. Which means nothing; it never does.
Pa Peartree, irresistible name for one good with gardens, is retired on a small pension, happy with John’s contribution to ends-of-the-month the year round. Tall dignified man, wears a beret (which few do nowadays) of immeasurable antiquity; never seen without it; could be bald as an egg but the features go somehow with straight fine grey hair. There is generally a flavour of pastis about him, but not showing in his eyes or nose. One may believe it is kept under strict control by Ma Peartree, a rangy rawboned woman with a powerful stride and feet to match, and who has been pretty. Still is, I suppose, since unlike most countryfolk of her generation (and his own) she has good teeth.
There are also Poirier dogs, which live in a woodshed between the two properties. They are well trained but ferocious; cannot be handled by anyone else; nor would they accept food but from their masters. They know him, and do not bark. They are loosed night and morning for half an hour, and scour around. It occurs to him that no one would get closer than the woodland outskirts without their setting up a racket: there is good protection there.
Like all French people anywhere they hate persons in the house. They are free of his own, so that they are formally polite. Chair offered, a ‘little glass’; he is ‘always welcome’.
“Sorry to be dropping in” (faces of ‘no no’) “wished only to know whether you had noticed any strangers, hanging about at all.” He felt embarrassed by his own terror and suppressed telling him of the shot. “Would have remarked,” said Peartree with perfect certainty; the English word ‘remarkable’ belongs to this pattern. If the Peartrees hadn’t, the dogs would. A suspicious watchfulness is ingrained in this people. Not long ago a parcel service had appeared (proofs, for correction, from a publisher) insisting naturally on a signature for delivery, given in his absence by Pa Peartree after a good long look.
‘Red Fiat wagon,’ he had reported, ‘didn’t get the number but registered in the Seine-Maritime.’ When you take a responsibility for others … “No.” But think about it “No.”
‘Thought maybe some loiterer.”
“But will keep the eye open,” offered Marie-Madeleine briskly.
Whether he is home or not she comes once a week ‘to do the house’, accounting for every penny spent on cleaning materials, striding on her long legs, flinging open windows to air. He wouldn’t even know her name but for Peartree (when in a bad mood) spitefully whistling
‘Marie-Madeleine a
Une petite chose en laine,
Marie-Madeleine a
Un petit garçon.’
Brazen aspersion upon her morals that ruffles the respectable lady’s feathers. In an unusually good frame of mind, when working, he will whistle the song about the little girl who was teased by the fishermen and got sadly vexed about it.
‘A la pêche-e de moules-e
Je ne veux plus aller, Maman.’
It is likely that neither of them has ever seen the sea. They are French in ways drat have become a rarity. A cleanliness of spirit; he’d no more covet his neighbour’s wife than steal from a supermarket, because meanness isn’t in him. Her—the moon would turn to cheese, she’d cut a slice and eat it too, first. While the State! The Church! Either will give a look—as though you suggested they swallow a dirty dishclout. A proud, and humble scepticism that in others is shallow, cynical and egoist. A President is only a mayor in a palace and whatever the others call themselves it’s only greed and greasy vainglory. In agglomeration the State is a bureaucracy whose arrogant lethargy is checked only by built-in imbecility. Their love is given to the poor; the pursued and the persecuted; the lost, and the hopeless. The afflicted-by-God (whose purposes are unknown to us); this can cover a great deal, is mysteriously more widespread among Arabs or Jews, can never quite make out at what point Allah and Jehovah formed a disagreement.
Both Peartrees have also all the usual French targets for an inimical attitude: Foreigners, Blacks, Parisiens; Curés, Officials, Tourists.
How does he himself escape hanging?
I felt better, going back up the hill. A baddish moment there only where the house wall forms a deeper shadow upon the darkness; the hand once unclenched from the pistol butt was, distinctly, sweaty. Turn key, push bolts; both could do with a drop of the three-in-one and so could wrists and elbows. Shoulders knees and ankles too; take a bath in the stuff why don’t you? Total illogical anxiety then about that stupid ammunition. Went into the second cellar which is full of junk (the first is the wine-cellar; nothing very grand but deserving of respect) and found a piece of insulating material, is its silly name expanded-polystyrene, then no sillier than I feel. Prop it up, stand five metres off. Took two pops, satisfying bang, in the cellar made my ears ring for a good five minutes. Two holes quite small and comfortingly close together, hold it fairly low because a nine-mill tends to jump and will throw high; don’t aim but hold banger naturally like extension of own hand; as though pointing forefinger. Remove poly-thing. Shots knocked off a lot of saltpetre and took a nice clean chip off stone. Went upstairs, ejected magazine, pulled-through-banger, cleaned and reloaded. Felt lots better. The night air outside, ever since the twilight has made me think of childhood, of the most purely wonderful twilight an English child can know.
Do children still sing?
‘Please to remember
The Fifth of November’?
One can’t surely ask ‘Fifty Pee for the guy, Mister’; apart from sounding so silly it has no rhythm. I’m bleeding internally, Mister, since of all my English childhood this has been among the most painful of losses. Light the blue touchpaper, and stand well back. Preferable to the nine-millimetre (leaving the pistol at bedside).
John did not sleep well; fever-frets at three in the morning. The bad time, said Kipling, when the cattle wake for a little. Do they? It makes an effective phrase, which a writer applauds. Mr K was at his best, he tells us, around five, and with a south-west wind blowing. But not—as now—if he shot upright, hearing ‘a funny noise’.
I am a rogue and peasant slave. The word got me out of bed, a good word trivialised. Roguish little fellow. Etymologies are my bread and butter, and dictionaries a substitute for sleep.
Concise Oxford, rarely much use. ‘Idle vagrant’—a concise description of oneself. ‘The beast driven apart from the herd, of savage temper’—likewise. Etymology dubious: the lazy buggers.
The ‘Petit Robert’ is a great deal better, as usual. 13th cent. Scandinavian—’arrogant’. Adjective, contemptuous or cutting; rude. This, John, is also close to the target. Let’s have a try at Shorter Oxford.
A bit pathetic this; the elderly gentleman thus mustily employed. Well, what would you do, if you couldn’t sleep; consequence of being shot at? Hillyards’ Flower Catalogue is also a reliable aid.
Shorter is a little help; nothing flamboyant. Possibly the root is the Latin ‘rogare’, to ask or to beg. Not bad: Shakespeare’s Autolycus or Mr John Charles, both sturdy beggars. Pedlars. Village story-tellers, chatting-up the probably neglected, doubtless sexually-deprived village housewife. A perfectly accurate description of the average lending-library novelist. Not at all inapposite.
Rogue—adjective. Uncontrolled, undisciplined—irresponsible. Hum. One wondered why the Scandinavian meaning had got into French and not into English. Into Scottish, perhaps? And had one made any real headway?
But this was surely how the word had got into his three-in-the-morning subconscious. Idle vagrant, well and good. But the solitary beast of savage temper? One did recall that ‘Rogue Male’—wonderful tide, respectable writer—the English gentleman, a big-game hunter out of the Rider Haggard stable, took a pot at Hitler. Splendid stuff. Motivation, he has lost his wife, suppressed (that is rather obscure) by the tyrant. Alas, the admirable Mr Household’s imagination had galloped away with him and it all went downhill after that wonderful start; into childhood memories of Dorset countryside. Were there any clues here for himself?
