Читать книгу The Last Banquet - Jonathan Grimwood - Страница 9

My next real memory is a year later. What happened between leaving my parents’ house and joining St Luce was too predictable to make firm memories. The sun rose and the sun set and an old woman who lived in the school’s gatehouse fed me twice a day in between, once in the early morning and once before dusk, and in return I fed her chickens and took care of myself during the day. The meals were poorly cooked and monotonous but filling and frequent enough to keep me fed and my body growing. Tossed corn brought the cockerel and chickens running. The cockerel was old and vicious and soon for the pot. The hens were safe so long as they kept laying and I lied occasionally, saying I’d tripped and dropped this one’s egg or forgotten to put out the previous night’s food, which was why that one had not laid. Maybe the old woman even believed me.

When eggs were plentiful I took the occasional one and let the richness of its yolk run down my chin before wiping the yellow away with my hand and licking my fingers. Winter yolks tasted sourer than summer ones. Autumn yolks were rich with burnt earth and sunshine. Spring yolks tasted different again. They tasted of spring. Everything caught and killed or plucked from the ground or picked in spring tastes of spring. You can’t say that for the other seasons.

She called me her strange one, barely slapped me when she found me stealing food. What tastes the old woman’s cooking didn’t provide I found for myself. The crab apples growing up the side of the gatehouse were sour, the grubs that bored through them sourer still. The beetles in her yard were less sweet, the cheese in her shabby kitchen hard and waxy, without the imperial blue veins of roffort or its rottenly glorious smell. In my days at the St Luce gatehouse I tasted whatever I had not tasted before: cobwebs and earwigs (dusty, and spit), spiders (unripe apple), dung, the chickens’ and my own (bitter, and surprisingly tasteless). I ate new laid sparrow’s eggs and tadpoles from the brook. Their taste was less interesting than their texture. Both were slimy in different ways. The old woman helped look after the boys at St Luce and had the task of fielding me until I was old enough to go myself, which moment soon arrived.

There were men who liked small boys more than they should, she warned me. And boys could be cruel to boys in that way and others. I would have to stand up for myself. She could look out for me but I would have to be brave. There had been discussion about making me wait until I was seven. But almost seven was fine the headmaster said. I should call him sir. I should call everyone bigger than me sir, except the servants; they should call me sir. ‘You understand?’

She had wiped my face and washed my clothes and forced me to eat a bowl of porridge. It was only when I saw the bundle with my other clothes, a slightly smarter jacket, a different pair of breeches, that I realised this was my last morning feeding chickens. Tonight they would have to wait until she could feed them herself.

‘Courage,’ she said. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Her face wobbled as she looked at me and she paused as if she might kiss or hug me goodbye. She spoke well and knew her letters, but was poor enough to need to work and the gatehouse was small for all it was clean. And the food . . . Perhaps she didn’t care for food; the same dishes again and again, the same tastes. She looked at me and I looked at her and eventually I understood I was to walk to the school on my own.

Picking up my bundle, I headed down the drive and found it was further to the school than I’d thought. After a few minutes I turned to discover she was still standing in the gates at the top of the road, so I waved and she waved back and then I turned my face to the school and kept walking, with my bundle swinging at my side.

The wind was warm for early autumn and the track dry and the grass slightly yellowing. The cow parsley was bare, waiting to be made into whistles or blowpipes, both of which I’d discovered for myself. The chestnuts on both sides of the drive were rich with conkers and I took the largest I could see and polished its gleaming swirls before dropping it in my pocket. Another and another fat conker lay on the road in front of me and I took those as well, stuffing my pockets until they were bulging.

The boy who came towards me had his hand out. ‘Give,’ he demanded sharply.

Such was my greeting to a school where I knew no one; after a year in a gatehouse with a woman who was neither family, friend, servant nor mistress. I was to learn later that the drive was out of bounds and a dozen pupils had watched me approach, dressed in clothes that I didn’t know represented their school uniform, and wondered where I’d come from and how severely I’d be punished for going beyond the courtyard. For now there was the outstretched hand.

‘I’ll hit you.’

Silence, while I looked at him.

He was my species but the only boys I’d seen were at a distance. I played by myself from necessity, and sat alone when I couldn’t be bothered to play. The woman in the gatehouse hadn’t suggested I find friends and I’d felt no need of them. The idea I might want to share my conkers with him was absurd.

‘I warned you.’ Watched by his friends, he made good his promise and I rocked back, hands to my already bleeding nose as someone started laughing.

‘You want the conkers?’

‘Uuu wan da conkers . . . ?’ His voice mocked the pain in my nose, my split lip, the trouble I had speaking.

‘Have the conkers.’

Closing my fingers round a handful, I threw them as hard as I could straight into his face and then punched him hard while his eyes were still shut. He rocked back as I’d done and I punched again, harder, splitting my knuckles. The boy was some inches bigger and obviously older but he sat down hard on his bottom and cowered back to stop me hitting him again.

St Luce had rusting wrought-iron gates to the forecourt, with an arch through the main building that led to a courtyard beyond. ‘You, boy, your name . . . ?’ I turned to see an old man shambling from a door that had been shut seconds earlier. ‘Well?’

‘Jean-Marie.’

A boy laughed, a different boy from before, falling into silence when the old man glared at him. ‘He’s young. He doesn’t know our ways. You will give him two weeks’ grace. You understand me?’

‘Yes, headmaster.’

‘Your family name?’ He said kindly.

‘D’Aumout, sir . . . Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout.’

He was asking so the others would learn it, I realised many years later. Dr Morel was the old headmaster and the new headmaster’s father. In his seventies, and looking impossibly old to me then, he put an arm around my shoulders and steered me under the arch through the school and into a dark courtyard overlooked by rooms on all sides. A smaller arch led through to whatever was at the back of the building. ‘You’d better come too,’ he said over his shoulder to my attacker, who followed after us like an unwilling shadow. ‘Duras,’ said the boy, sticking out his hand.

I stared at it.

‘You have to shake.’

‘You hit me.’

‘You still have to. That’s the rules.’

I took his offered hand and he nodded. ‘Emile Duras,’ he said. ‘I’m in the second class.’ The old man chose that moment to turn and smiled to see us shaking.

‘Don’t be late,’ he told Emile. ‘But first show him to class.’

‘Which one, sir?’

‘You can read?’ the man asked me.

‘Yes, sir.’ The old woman had taught me the rest of my letters.

‘What’s fifty minus twenty?’

‘Thirty, sir.’

The old man looked thoughtful, then decided. ‘You can be in my class. I’m putting you in Emile’s care. His punishment for what happened.’

‘Sir . . .’ Emile protested.

‘You expect me to believe he punched you first?’

‘What you believe and what can be proved are different.’

Dr Morel sighed. ‘Leave the law at home, Duras. Leave it to men like your father.’ Taking the other boy’s face in his hands he turned it sharply until they met each other’s eyes. ‘Now, the truth. Did you hit him?’ The boy’s face narrow and watchful, his curls dark and his nails clean. I was surprised by that. I hadn’t met anybody whose nails were clean. He seemed to be considering what it would cost him to admit this.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

So I first met Emile Duras, son of a lawyer and here because his father paid for him to come here to be educated. He went home at the weekends, which made him an outsider. His father was a rich lawyer and as St Luce was for the sons of destitute nobles, of whom there were enough to fill five classes of forty boys each, that also made him an outsider. But the biggest thing that set him apart, the thing that sent him out to punch me when other boys told him that was what he must do, was his name. Had he been de Duras, should such a family exist, his life would have been easier. The lack of the particule, the de in his name, set him apart from the others and from me, although I was too young to realise it.

My first day was simple. I trailed behind Emile and sat quietly at the desk I was given and answered the three questions the old headmaster asked me. Luckily I knew the answers to those, because there were others to which I did not. When Emile dipped his head for silent reading I did the same, looking over to see which page he read and fumbling to find my place. I read the page three times – and, though it made little sense, when asked to read a line I did in as clear a voice as I could manage. ‘The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it . . .’

Emile’s sentence came from further down the list of quotations because he sat two desks away. In the weeks to come we managed to sit side by side, when it became obvious our brief fight had made us friends. Emile’s sentence read, ‘Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us consider how happy those are who already possess it.’

Later I learnt the name Rochefoucauld, later still who he was and why his maxims were famous. His name reminded me of the cheese I’d eaten with le Régent and Emile brought me a sliver from home, wrapped in paper. It tasted as I remembered, of mould and horses’ hooves clipping on brick and dung beetles and sun.

I learnt a lot from Emile in my first two weeks at St Luce, which boys and which masters to avoid and which could be trusted, and at the end of that I discovered what two weeks’ grace meant and that Emile had truly become my friend. A boy – older and bigger, because all the boys were older and bigger, since I was the youngest and smallest in the school – walked up to me and tried to take my work book, having had his own stolen, the loss of which was punishable by beating. And instead of letting it happen, Emile stepped up beside me and together we saw off the would-be thief.

It was a friendship that was to last for years and only be broken by something bigger than friendship and fiercer than shared bonds. That was so far into the future we could barely imagine it from a world of small boys where days stretched for ever and our memories hungrily swallowed every detail of the world around us.

‘You can be good at sport, you can be good at learning, you can be good with your fists . . .’ Emile grinned ruefully and touched the yellowing fringes of the black eye I’d given him a few weeks earlier. Out of friendship I touched my lip, although the scab was mostly off and the swelling long gone. The written rules were on a board in the main hall. They were few and easy to understand. The unwritten rules more numerous and more complex. In the school as in the later world I was to find: but like the rules of the later world they could be simplified and reduced to those that really mattered. That was what Emile was doing, while standing with his legs apart and his hands behind his back as his father might do in court. ‘You should punch, but you should also read to yourself.’

I looked at him.

‘The masters will leave you alone.’

He seemed to be saying that Dr Pascal and the other masters should see me read books and the boys above should see me punch people. I checked, and that was exactly what he meant. I was six and he was nearly eight, older and worldly wise. I did my best to obey his suggestion. The result was the masters liked me, and my friends grew in number. Those I hit wanted to be friends so I didn’t hit them again, and their friends wanted to be my friends so I didn’t hit them to start with. Inside a year I stopped having to hit people and stopped worrying about being their friends. They were still friendly to me but got little in return. Emile was the exception.

We played together and he got permission from his father to bring me home for a weekend. I arrived in near rags and left wearing Emile’s old clothes. More to the point, I left fed and with my pockets filled with slivers of five different cheeses. Emile’s mother thought my passion for Roquefort funny and asked who’d given it to me.

‘Monsieur le Régent.’

She looked at her husband, who looked at Emile, who shrugged slightly to say he didn’t know if it was true but it was possible. And so I came to tell them about the day the duc d’Orléans rode into my father’s courtyard and left a row of kicking villagers strung from the trees behind him. I left out eating beetles.

Emile told me later what she said. Sometimes life is kinder than one thinks. Sometimes it is even kind to those in desperate need of kindness. I adored her and she became the mother mine had never bothered to be. This amused Emile as his possessiveness of me extended to expecting his mother to like me also. An only child, in his home he was as spoilt and cosseted as a dauphin. Even the prickly Maître Duras approved of my friendship with his son.

A small man with expensively tailored clothes and a jewelled ring on one finger, his coat was buttoned tight to the neck and his nails always clean. Occasionally I would find him staring from me to his son as if considering the difference. Emile was cleaner and still taller, although I was catching up. My appetite was bigger and I ate everything put in front of me, which endeared me to Madame Duras, a large woman fond of her gold bracelets, her supper parties and her garden. Maître Duras acted for the school, and for baron de Bellvit, which was how Emile came to be at the school and why the school agreed when Maître Duras suggested I might come to his for a few days over the holiday since I had nowhere else to go.

I was noble and instinctively polite and treated his son as an equal because no one had suggested I shouldn’t. Later, other boys became my friends. Some of them in the first few terms suggested Emile was too common to be friends with people like us. And I looked at them and I looked at myself and I looked at Emile and wondered what the difference was. We wore the same uniform and went to the same school, we ate the same food and attended the same classes. The only difference was that Emile looked a little cleaner and had clothes that were a little neater and slept at home rather than in the dorms. To me that made him luckier than us not worse. All of us knew we were different from the peasantry.

That sullen indistinguishable mass who stared at us with flat eyes from the fields on the two occasions a year we were allowed to leave the school grounds: once to visit the fair at Mabonne and again to be fed by the baron de Bellvit, our local landowner and titular master, under its founding articles, of our school. The peasants dressed in rags and dirt and lived in hovels – it was hard beneath the mud and sweat and stink to tell the men from the women. And though we might see a wide-eyed boy only a little younger than we were, or a girl pretty enough to make us notice her, we knew what they would become. It had always been this way and we believed it always would. More to the point, they believed it and so it was.