Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 40

Smoke

The louvers of the windows in the study were set aslant. Shafts of light divided the cigar smoke into bands as it curled up towards the ceiling where it gathered in a murky cloud. The icy drink the women had pressed into his hand was taken from him, replaced by a neat whisky.

“I keep telling the girls that those chilled drinks only make one hotter in the long run—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve explained this to us before. The body’s response to cold, etc.” The headmaster did little to hide his tetchiness.

“Ah, but M. Melville hasn’t heard this before, and it’s knowledge that will prove useful.”

“Our guest has only just arrived. Let him relax a bit before we offer our ‘Things the Newcomer Needs to Know’ lecture.” With this the headmaster put his hand on Jacques’ shoulder, adding, in a meant-to-be-overheard voice, “Some of your new colleagues over here I’d like you to meet,” and then, in a confidential whisper, “Didn’t want you to get stuck with that tiresome fellow…Perhaps I’m being harsh, we tend to know one another’s faults and foibles all too well.”

The circle the headmaster led him to opened all too eagerly to let him in. “Got bivouacked all right, I hope.” “Digs okay for you?” Jacques took note of their tendency to use slang which was slightly out-of-date—words and expressions that had been current in the year they had left France—and moreover to pronounce those words distinctly, with inverted commas around them.

“I remember my bachelor days, that single room chez Mme. Maurice. Fifteen years ago—where does the time go? Had a little spirit lamp, so I could brew my own coffee—an excellent landlady, Mme.

Maurice, but a bit of a penny-pincher, and I’ve always been most particular about my—”

“He won’t stay there long. When he’s got a semester or two under his belt, I’ll write to the Ministry, saying if we want to keep hold of this excellent man, we’d better increase his housing allowance.”

“Yes, and a man doesn’t stay a bachelor forever.”

“Our headmaster, by the way, has some very charming daughters.”

“Ah, come now, lads,” the headmaster said, “we mustn’t make poor Melville feel he’s being married off in his very first week.”

“Save it for the second week, shall we?”

Jacques discerned the pecking order of this place, as rigid a hierarchy as had existed amongst the hens in his mother’s backyard coop, albeit one enforced by verbal rather than physical jabs.

“Lefort! At last!” A rumpled man in his thirties, with a dark splotch on his suit jacket, arrived, bumbling apologies.

Jacques did not like to think of himself as a snob, but when he sat down to dinner he could not help noting that while the table was set with crystal and fine china, the cutlery gave itself away as being plate on account of its heft.

In Jacques’ boyhood home, there had been mismatched genuine silver, handed down by the ancestors who were from the petty nobility—his parents no more hid their existence than they did the other progenitors who had been shopkeepers. The door of his family home was open to anyone—even Jews and pieds noirs—with the sole proviso that after they left, a comment would be made, almost ritual in nature, fond and derisive at the same time, about the visitor’s tendency to remark on the price of objects or his distinctive accent.

The Oriental carpets on the floor of the headmaster’s house revealed themselves as parvenus by their garish colors, not muted as they should have been by decades of being walked upon, and the common rooms of the house seemed to have been cobbled together by someone who had studied photographs of drawing rooms in the homes of the prestigious. Back in France, with their mediocre exam results from provincial universities, the masters at this school would have been village school teachers, living in rented rooms, taking their meals in mean cafés where the landlord, taking pity on them for their worn suits and grateful for the effort they made with the town’s youths, would have poured them a glass of the house wine, gratis. The headmaster would have had at most a single servant, a woman who did the work of both laundress and cook, a char who came in once a week to do the heavy cleaning, while here the headmaster and his wife lorded over a whole staff.

A dish called coq au vin was served, made with guinea fowl rather than chicken, followed by a beouf en daube, made with meat from the zebu: he wished for something frankly foreign, rather than these dishes which, purporting to be French, only awoke his longing for home. Did the kitchen staff really add vanilla and chilies to these dishes or was it only that these odors, wafting through the air, found their way into everything?

(Later, he would learn the flesh of Malagasy women tasted of cloves and pili-pili.)

A woman’s stockinged foot, slipped free from her shoe, caressed his ankle. He deliberately dropped his napkin, bent to retrieve it, and set her foot back on the floor. When he sat back up, he saw the headmaster’s wife shooting him a glare: he had made an enemy.

Like the belle of the ball, he found his dance card filled up. His vague mention of a hot springs turned into a fixed invitation. “Yes, we must go there. How would next Saturday afternoon be for you?” “Come now, you mustn’t keep him all to yourself…”

Jacques felt as if he had found himself on stage, in a drama entitled “The Dinner Party” or “The Colonial Outpost,” put on by an amateur provincial theater company with more enthusiasm than talent. This was only intensified when, after dinner, he took a leather bound volume down from a shelf which held Diderot, Molière, La Fontaine, Balzac—and discovered its pages uncut. A cursory examination showed nearly all the books were in that same condition.

The next day he wrote to Sala: In the center of Antananarivo, one could swear one was in Paris—a newer, cleaner Paris as it must have looked before the grit of centuries settled on it—save for the smell of spices—anise and pink pepper and nutmeg, and of course vanilla, which underlies everything, that and the palm trees and the torpid heat. He did not tell her of his terrible homesickness or that he couldn’t shake the sense that these buildings were false fronts, that he would someday duck behind them and see they were made of plaster-covered chicken wire, propped up by shafts of lumber.