The Collected Stories

would be known as her husband. That was how people would refer to him, and in the end it wouldn’t matter when she talked about Coddy Donnegan, or lowered her voice to mention the priest’s cousin. It was natural that she should do so since she had gained less than he had from their marriage.

The Printmaker

In the large room Charlotte hangs her prints to dry, like clothes on clothes lines. Three crows, framed by the legs and belly of a cow, have rested for an instant beneath its udder: all over the room this stark image is multiplied, in black and white and tones of green.

The reality was years ago, in France: Charlotte senses that confidently, without being able to recall the moment of observation. Familiar to her is the feeling that a glance from the window, or from a motor-car, has been retained for half a lifetime. ‘This is still the Langevins’ land,’ Monsieur Langevin said in English, the first time he drove her in his white Citroen the fifteen kilometres from Massuery to St Cerase. Obediently she inspected the fields to her right, treeless and uninteresting, cattle grazing. Perhaps there were three crows also.

In the room the suspended sheets are scrutinized, and one in every seven or eight rejected. Fragile, tapering fingers loosen the tiny, variously coloured pegs that hold the prints in place; each inferior reproduction floats softly to the bare-wood floor. Intent upon her task, Charlotte moves silently in the room, seeming almost a ghost among the ubiquitous repetition of what she has created. At thirty-nine she is as slender as ever, her bones as apparent as her flesh. Bright azure eyes illuminate a face that is still a girl’s. Shattered only twice in Charlotte’s appearance is the illusion that time has been defeated; grey strands creep through hair that once was as pale as corn, and on the backs of her hands are the reminders that sun and weather do not pass gently by.

One by one, she picks up the rejected prints where they have dropped. She tears each in half and bundles it into the wooden box that is the room’s repository for wastepaper. Then she examines one of the. suspended sheets, holding it obliquely against the light to see if it has wholly dried. Satisfied that this is so, she releases the pegs and trims the paper in her guillotine. She signs it and writes in pencil 1/50, then places it in a pale green portfolio. She repeats all this with each remaining print, then loosely ties the folder’s tattered ribbons.

‘To look at, there is l’eglise St Cerase,’ Monsieur Langevin said, that first Wednesday afternoon. He stopped the car in the Place de la Paix and pointed out the way. There was nothing much else in the town, he warned. A park beside the Maison de la Presse, tea-rooms and cafes, the Hostellerie de la Poste. But the church was quite impressive. ‘Well, anyway, the facade,’ Monsieur Langevin added.

Charlotte walked to it, admired the facade and went inside. There was a smell of candle grease and perhaps of incense: it was difficult precisely to identify the latter. Charlotte was seventeen then, her presence in the Langevin household arranged by her father, who set great store by what he referred to as ‘perfect French’. Some acquaintance of his had a connection with a cousin of Madame Langevin; an arrangement had been made. ‘I’ve been good about your drawing,’ her father had earlier claimed, in the parental manner of that time. ‘I’m only asking in return that you acquire the usefulness of perfect French.’ Her father did not believe in her talent for drawing; a businessman himself, he anticipated for his only child a niche in some international commercial firm, where the French she had perfected would float her to desirable heights. Charlotte’s father had her interests – as he divined them – at heart. A prosperous marriage would come latter. He was a conventional man.

In the church of St Cerase she walked by confessionals and the Stations of the Cross, taking no interest at seventeen, only wishing her father hadn’t been insistent on sending her to Massuery. She had every Wednesday afternoon to herself, when Madame Langevin took her children riding. She had Sunday afternoons as well, and every evening when the children had gone to bed. But what on earth could she do on Sunday afternoons except go for a walk in the woods? And in the evenings the family seemed surprised if she did not sit with them. There were in all five children, the youngest still an infant. The twins were naughty and, though only six, knew how to tease. Colette sulked. Guy, a dark-haired boy of ten, was Charlotte’s favourite.

This family’s details were recorded in an unfinished letter in Charlotte’s handbag: the sulking, the teasing, Guy’s charm, the baby’s podginess. Her mother would read between the lines, winkling out an unhappiness that had not been stated; her father would skip a lot. Madame Langevin’s sister is here on a visit. She is tall and languid, an incessant smoker, very painted up, beautifully dressed. Madame Langevin’s quite different, smartly dressed too, and just as good-looking in her way, only nicer in the sense that she wants people to he all right. She smiles a lot and worries. Monsieur Langevin does not say much.

Outside a cafe in the square she completed the letter, pausing often to make the task last. It was July and necessary to sit in the shade. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky since I arrived. She drank tea with lemon and when she’d sealed the envelope and written the address she watched the people going by. But there were few of them because of the heat of the afternoon – a woman in a blue dress, with sunglasses and a poodle, a child on a bicycle, a man delivering shoe-boxes from a van. Charlotte bought a stamp in a tabac and found the park by the Maison de la Presse. The seats were dusty, and whitened with bird droppings; sunlight didn’t penetrate the foliage of the trees, but at least the place was cool and empty. She read the book she’d brought, The Beautiful and Damned.

Twenty-two years later Charlotte sees herself sitting there, and can even recall the illustration on the cover of the novel – a girl with a cigarette, a man in evening dress. Madame Langevin’s conscientious about speaking French to me, a line in her letter reported. Monsieur practises his English. Charlotte was timid then, and innocent of almost all emotion. In her childhood she’d been aware of jealousy, and there’d always been the affection she felt for her father and her mother; but she had no greater experience of the vagaries of her heart, or even of its nature, and only loneliness concerned her at first at Massuery.

In the room set aside for her work Charlotte slips a green Loden overcoat from a coat-hanger and searches for her gloves, the park at St Cerase still vividly recurring. She might have wept that afternoon, protected by the human absence around her; she rather thought she had. After an hour she had gone to the museum, only to find it shut. Beneath a flamboyant female figure representing Eternal Peace she had waited in the Place de la Paix for the bus that would take her back to the gates of Massuery.

‘Describe to me England,’ Madame Langevin’s sister requested that evening, practising her English also. ‘Describe to me the house of your father. The food of England is not agreeable, n’est-ce pas?’

Replying, Charlotte spoke in French, but the tall, beautifully dressed woman stopped her. She wanted to hear the sound of English, it made a change. She yawned. The country was tedious, but so was Paris in July.

So Charlotte described the house where she lived, and her mother and her father. She explained how toast was made because Madame Langevin’s sister particularly wanted to know that, and also how English butchers hung their beef. She wasn’t sure herself about the beef and she didn’t know the names of the various joints, but she did her best. Madame Langevin’s sister lay listening on a sofa, her cigarette in a black holder, her green silk dress clinging to her legs.

‘I have heard of Jackson’s tea,’ she said.

Charlotte had not. She said her parents did not have servants. She did not know much about the Royal Family, she confessed.