Valley of grace, p.10
Valley of Grace, page 10
Nevertheless, Fanny felt sure that Luc’s family secretly, deeply, devoutly hoped for a cure. It would have to be a miracle. She didn’t have any faith in miracles. She remembered the print of the pilgrim she’d bought as a present for Gérard. It seemed in another life. It was in another life. It was put away in a drawer somewhere, she should look for it.
CAN YOU PLANT
A CABBAGE RIGHT?
LUC’S ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSHOP WAS a very good bookshop. The clients knew it, and the customers; Luc knew it, the books knew it. The distinction between clients and customers was Luc’s idea. Customers bought books, they paid for them and took them away, wrapped in acid-free tissue paper and placed in a brown paper bag with a red wax seal. Clients enjoyed them, in one way or another, perhaps fondling them, or sitting at one of the tables turning the pages, or wandering along the shelves browsing. At the beginning Fanny had remonstrated with him; you shouldn’t let them do it, she said, they should be buying, but Luc always shook his head, and smiled, and after a while she understood that he saw the shop as a temporary or even a permanent haven for the books, a place where they alighted and sometimes stayed. He had a superstitious view of them, she realised, for a man who made so much of rationality; he believed that he didn’t own them but just minded them, for other people to enjoy, whether by buying or just looking didn’t much matter.
Except of course that the shop didn’t make very much money. It turned a small profit, but wouldn’t have survived without the family pharmacies in Lyon. Luc told Julien that it was lucky for him his younger brother was a pharmacist with a wife and two little boys. And there was his sister who was a doctor married to a lawyer and mother of a daughter so there were heirs to the business as well as grandchildren and that took the pressure off him. The dynasty, both family and business, was safe. The pharmacies did well (they’re a goldmine, the lawyer son-in-law told his wife), Luc’s father Maurice thought it was only fair that Luc should have a share of the income they engendered—smaller than his brother’s since the brother did the work but still substantial enough—but he also thought that the bookshop should be a more businesslike business, no reason why it shouldn’t make some money; he had conversations with Luc along these lines. What about the rent, said Maurice, and Luc admitted it was high, but it was a good space and an excellent address, right in the middle of the Latin Quarter. You could relocate to the suburbs, said the old man, but Luc not hiding his horror said no, its reason for being was its address, which gave the shop its name, Le Vieux Latin, he couldn’t move, it would make a nonsense, this was where it belonged. In the old Latin Quarter, centre of intellectual life and scholarship.
The customers would follow, the serious ones, said his father, but the idea so distressed Luc that the father didn’t pursue it. Instead he bought the building, wincing at the exorbitant price of Paris property, but assuring himself it was a good investment. He didn’t tell Luc he’d done this, he allowed him to go on paying a considerable part of his allowance back to him in rent, at least for the time being. Occasionally he came to Paris and inspected his purchase with secret pleasure.
It was a narrow tall building, not particularly old, no more than middling nineteenth-century, with a small paned window and a massive door a step below the pavement outside. The woodwork was painted a dark red colour, rather like Chinese lacquer that has darkened with age, also like the wax that sealed the paper book bags. Inside was a very tall room, with a wide mezzanine halfway up, made of iron, with a staircase and elaborate balustrades of metal. That belonged to the time Eiffel was building his iron apartment houses in Paris. It was painted the same aged lacquer red and so were the bookshelves. The space was lit by a number of dim yellow lamps. The father imagined needing a lantern to browse along the shelves, peering at worn leather bindings with faint gilt lettering. There were spindly tables at intervals along the mezzanine, each with a lamp, and these were where the clients sat, turning the pages with careful fingers, the lamplight pooling as it has done ever since there were books to read, candles and oil lamps and electric lights casting the same dim circles of brightness, making an intimate enchanted space in a gloomy world; so Luc put it to himself when he gazed round his shop. He wasn’t entirely fey, clients who were careless or clumsy were quickly moved on. But there weren’t many of those, clumsy careless people didn’t have an interest in antiquarian books. More problematic was a tramp, in battered clothes and unravelling half-mitten gloves. He had a strong dry foxy smell, not unpleasant exactly, natural as well as feral. Luc imagined that quite a lot of old scholars would have smelled just so. He did wonder if he came in mainly to escape the cold, but he treated the books with reverence; so what, Luc said, if it was for the warmth he came. Not that it was all that warm, too much heat was bad for the books. Whereas fondling from clean but naturally oily hands was good. The tramp held his out for inspection as he came in, he probably washed them in the nearby Wallace. That was another reason Luc liked the shop’s address; its proximity to one of these green iron fountains set up to provide clean drinking water for the people of Paris, thanks apparently to an Englishman, Mr Wallace, whose memorial they’d become. There was a book about them, with black and white photographs. The shop had several copies.
Above the mezzanine were the rooms for living in: a sitting room, a kitchen, with further up again bedrooms, and further up still a tiny attic guestroom. One of the bedrooms was Julien’s but he mostly slept with Luc in the big bed of the main room, except when he was working odd hours and didn’t want to wake him; he was a nurse specialising in intensive care. All the rooms had bookshelves, they doubled as store rooms as well as for living and sleeping. So many books, but Luc knew where they all were.
Downstairs was a mahogany table that had been made a century or more before for cutting out patterns in a grand dress-making establishment. There were always interesting books open on it. As well as a candle in a pewter candlestick with a little lever to slide the candle up when it burnt down; this was for melting the wax for the seals. Fanny had a high stool beside it, she sat there in her clothes of mouse and mole and dim black with her fine legs crossed and her fair hair luminous in the light of the yellow lamps. An extravagance, Fanny, mumbled the father, but not critically, he could see how she and the shop fitted together. And Luc was away a lot, looking at collections or even libraries that people wanted to sell. He tried to do the big trips on Monday which was his closing day but that wasn’t always possible. There were still grand houses in the country with forgotten old books that brought gleams of avarice to their inheritors’ eyes. Besides, even a small and homely shop needs to be reliable, people make a trip, they are irritated if the place is arbitrarily closed. And the thing about the shop was, if you allowed for the subsidy from the pharmacies, that it functioned perfectly well, it did its job excellently, it made some money, it allowed Luc to live a good and happy and comfortable life.
He is like somebody running a dogs’ home, said his father, only his is for books. I don’t suppose you expect a dogs’ home to make money.
Luc’s mother didn’t care for going to Paris but after her husband bought the building she did make a trip to see the bookshop. He didn’t tell her that he had bought the building, only that it would please her son if she visited him. She rang him up often and talked to him at length, was he eating properly and did he go to Mass and was his flatmate comfortable to live with, but Maurice said it would be a good idea if she could picture him in his surroundings. They came by the Very Fast Train and stayed in a pretty hotel in the rue Jacob, quiet, with a courtyard planted with chestnut trees separating it from the street and a view of the spire of the church of St Germain des Prés reflected in the mirrored wall of the breakfast room. Handy that it is so close, said his mother.
She was very taken with Fanny, who showed her the church of Sainte Geneviève, her birth day saint, and told the story of how she saved Paris from invaders, one slight girl defeating Attila and his Huns. Delphine admired the pink and blue and gilt statue and took one of her little prayer cards.
Luc doesn’t like it, Fanny said, he thinks it’s a travesty, he only likes Gothic.
Luc doesn’t understand the meanings of things, said Delphine.
After that she started to tell Luc that he ought to marry Fanny. She is just the girl for you, she said on the phone. So elegant. So diligent. So calm. Now I have been to the bookshop, and can picture you, where you work. And I have seen Fanny too. Fanny understands the business, she said, and that’s important in a wife. Look at me and your father. Every time she rang him up she managed to tell him what a good girl Fanny would be for him to marry.
Luc said, I am sure she has her own life, Mama. Why would she want to marry me?
Girls need to be asked, said Delphine.
She was fond of saying how pretty Fanny was, so slender, so gentle, so calm. Luc found the repetition of this strange. His mother was a stumpy woman, quite tiny, with thin legs and a very large bosom. She made a lot of noise as she walked. It was as though her weight came extra heavily through her thin legs and pounded the floor. The iron staircase thundered when she walked down it. She was wearing her mink stole over a navy blue suit with a straight skirt so she appeared to be a large furry top on a slender stem.
She always wore expensive fine stockings and her legs were pale and very elegant. You look like a flower, said Luc, a lovely furry silver mink flower, and she gave him a strange look. He loved his mother and thought she was beautiful, but Delphine did not understand that. She was a wife and a mother and a grandmother and knew that she was valued. Maurice never told her that she was beautiful; it did not occur to her that he might.
Fanny indeed was calm, and gentle, and diligent. A benign presence in the shop. All good qualities in a wife. But Luc had a lover, he would have liked to say to his mother, a lover is different, calmness and diligence are not what count, but even in a sly and teasing way he could not manage to say these words. Chemistry, sex, this is why we fall in love, not diligence and goodness. Though of course with luck these things may come too. A body that intoxicates may also be virtuous.
Such class that girl has, said Delphine. Such breeding. Luc was surprised that she should say this. She knew that Fanny’s father was a builder, quite a smart and prosperous builder but not, he’d have thought, to compare with the pharmacy dynasty of her own family. Delphine was proud of this high bourgeois standing, built up over generations, expressed in the grand Lyon mansion, and the central pharmacy, with its nineteenth-century cabinets, carved and glass-doored, its sets of painted faience vessels with Latin inscriptions, its old yellowish bottles with ground-glass stoppers, its great curved glass jars that now held only coloured water.
Someone will snap her up, said Delphine. She is a perfect little madonna. She did not go so far as to say she would make a good mother to his children but he knew that’s what she meant. He’d thought she’d given up on him and children and was disturbed to see that she hadn’t. Luc liked talking to his mother on the phone. But all this about Fanny was becoming tedious. Give it a rest, Mama, he said. Tell me how you are.
I’d like to see you settled before I go.
Go? What do you mean, go? Is this that trip to New Zealand you’re always talking about?
Delphine had had an au pair girl from that part of the world and often spoke of going to visit her now she was married with children, and of course the country too, its mountains and boiling lakes and the whiff of sulphur in the air.
Luc! You know what I mean. We have to be prepared. None of us knows the moment of our going.
We do if we’ve booked the tickets, said Luc to himself. Aloud he said, Mama, you’re a young woman. I expect you to see your great-grandchildren grown up before there’s any talk of that kind of going.
Maybe grandchildren should be enough. She paused. And, there’s you, Luc.
Mama.
Your sister’s pregnant again.
That’s good. Great news.
One day when Delphine asked, How’s my lovely Fanny, Luc could reply, She’s just got engaged. He took pleasure in saying this. To a builder, very handsome. Southern looking. Dark, with black curls.
Delphine sighed. Oh dear. You won’t find anyone as lovely as Fanny in a hurry.
Luc knew his mother knew he was gay. Of course it was never mentioned. She knew he lived with Julien. His flatmate, she called him, as though that would set him in the right place.
Well, he said, luckily she’s not going to give up work. She’s cutting down, but not giving up.
Good, said his mother vaguely.
He does fancy renovations of old buildings, said Luc. Really grand restorations. You know, he came and courted her here, in the shop. He was looking for a book that would show how to restore an eighteenth-century plaster ceiling and then he kept coming back to see her.
He told Julien about his mother’s plans for him to marry Fanny. Now they were safely thwarted. Lying with his head on Julien’s chest, languid and full of love-making.
What! said Julien. But she knows . . .
Yes. Of course she doesn’t like it; the Church, you know. Maybe she thinks I’ll grow out of it. Maybe she thinks it’s like sowing wild oats, you’re allowed so long and then you have to settle down.
Maybe she thinks you’re bisexual. That it’s just a matter of choosing.
Luc shuddered, his skin sliding against Julien’s.
Some people are, you know. They seem to be able to move between men and women. Women too.
I’m not sure my mother knows that.
Julien’s hands slid over Luc’s body, smooth with the oil he had rubbed into it, that was part of their love-making.
Luc said: I think Fanny’s lovely—Mama’s right. I suppose I love her. But making love . . . no. What about passion? I don’t know what Mama knows about passion. I always wonder if she thinks marriage is about dynasties . . . business. Fanny being good for the bookshop.
We always suppose our parents are ignorant. Or innocent. That they got us by accident. But I reckon . . . I reckon they were as hot in their day as we are.
Not like this, said Luc.
No, not like this.
And what about the virginal Fanny, said Julien later. The diligent madonna and her southern stud . . . what d’you reckon?
Luc pretended to be asleep.
Certain things did change with Fanny’s marriage. She worked fewer hours, and he missed her affection for the books. To Julien a book was mainly its contents but Fanny loved them, she handled them with a kind of respectful passion which was how Luc felt about them. She liked touching them, smelling them, being with them. He imagined a painting of her, on her stool, the madonna of the books. Except she had a husband now. So of course had most of the women whose likeness painters had turned into Our Lady. Husbands, or else lovers. Often the women were the mistresses of the men who painted them. He liked that, the awkward symmetry of it, the whore turned by the painter’s eye into the immaculate mother. The libidinous made virginal by a modest curve to the eyelid. Luc didn’t think it was any of his business to contemplate Fanny’s sex life and anyway marriages are secret even to the most perspicacious observer. But, he thought, she glows with happiness. He caught her in little private smiles to herself, for no reason.
He missed her presence in the shop. It seemed duller without her, less luminous, which was a word he was surprised to find himself thinking. But then there started to be more customers, Gérard’s clients. Rich people who could afford the builder’s extravagantly renovated apartments, and were tickled by the idea of owning an old book which, if it didn’t have their own place in it, had one very like. A beautiful old book is a nice ornament to a beautiful old room.
Luc had mixed feelings about this. Up till now his customers had mostly been book lovers, and his clients certainly so, well maybe not so certainly the tramps. He felt like an adoption agency; were these frail beloved creatures going to good homes? I should be grateful I can nearly pay the rent, he said to himself, and told his father. My god, said Maurice, you’re not getting close to covering the rent! You’ll be making a living wage next. But Luc had lived a long time with his father’s sarcasm and accepted it affectionately. Returned it. It’ll come in handy when I have my ten children, he said.
He was more dependent on Mondays for the buying trips that were at all distant. One such he was planning to make to Troyes, a deceased estate; the widow promised him some interesting things. I wonder, he said to Julien on the Sunday, she might be right but it might be total crap. Isn’t that the fun of the chase, said Julien. Yes, I suppose, said Luc, but it’d be a bit of a bore, all that way and no good. Julien was on the graveyard shift, and slept in his own room so he wouldn’t wake Luc when he got up in the middle of the night. Luc was drinking tea and eating packet toast spread with apricot jam when the phone rang; it was the widow, putting him off. It was not suitable, she said, she’d let him know. He supposed it was a rival book dealer.
It was a fine day, he could see the sun shining in yellow slants between the buildings, making the tubs of shining green plants in the cafe across the square sparkle. He poured away the tea and put the toast into the bin and went down and ate croissants with a big cup of strong milky coffee while the sun fingered the street awake. He closed his pale lashes across his eyes and watched the light iridesce through them. It was irritating to have a plan cancelled but on the other hand he could see the day as a gift, an unexpected holiday. He walked down to the river but most of the book stalls were having a Monday closing day too. So was the flower market. He decided to find a shop to buy something interesting to cook for dinner. The small food shops were shut too and it was the day of no markets, but there was a Monoprix and he managed to avoid anything too industrial.
