A Burnt Out Case (9 page)

‘We were talking about Querry,
the
Querry,’ Rycker explained. ‘A man in that position burying himself in a leproserie, spending a night praying with a leper in the bush – you must admit, Monseigneur, that self-sacrifices like that are rare. What do you think?’

‘I am wondering, does he play bridge?’ Just as the Governor’s comment had given administrative approval to Querry’s conduct, so the Bishop’s question was taken to mean that the Church in her wise and traditional fashion reserved her opinion.

The Bishop accepted a glass of orange juice. Marie Rycker looked at it sadly. She had parked her Perrier and didn’t know what to do with her hands. The Bishop said to her kindly, ‘You should learn bridge, Mme Rycker. We have too few players round here now.’

‘I am frightened of cards, Monseigneur.’

‘I will bless the pack and teach you myself.’ Marie Rycker was uncertain whether the Bishop was joking; she tried out an unnoticeable kind of smile.

Rycker said, ‘I can’t imagine how a man of Querry’s calibre can work with that atheist Colin. That’s a man, you can take it from me, who doesn’t know the meaning of the word charity. Do you remember last year when I tried to organize a Lepers’ Day? He would have nothing to do with it. He said he couldn’t afford to accept charity. Four hundred dresses and suits had been accumulated and he refused to distribute them, just because there weren’t enough to go round. He said he would have had to buy the rest out of his own pocket to avoid jealousy – why should a leper be jealous? You should talk to him one day, Monseigneur, on the nature of charity.’

But Monseigneur had moved on, his hand under Marie Rycker’s elbow.

‘Your husband seems very taken up with this man Querry,’ he said.

‘He thinks he may be somebody he can talk to.’

‘Are you so silent?’ the Bishop asked, teasing her gently as though he had indeed picked her up outside a café on the boulevards.

‘I can’t talk about his subjects.’

‘What subjects?’

‘Free Will and Grace and – Love.’

‘Come now – love . . . you know about that, don’t you?’

‘Not that kind of love,’ Marie Rycker said.

II

By the time the Ryckers came to go – they had to wait a long time for Mme Cassin – Rycker had drunk to the margin of what was dangerous; he had passed from excessive amiability to dissatisfaction, the kind of cosmic dissatisfaction which, after probing faults in others’ characters, went on to the examination of his own. Marie Rycker knew that if he could be induced at this stage to take a sleeping-pill all might yet be well; he would probably reach unconsciousness before he reached religion which, like the open doorway in a red-lamp district, led invariably to sex.

‘There are times,’ Rycker said, ‘when I wish we had a more spiritual bishop.’

‘He was kind to me,’ Marie Rycker said.

‘I suppose he talked to you of cards.’

‘He offered to teach me bridge.’

‘I suppose he knew that I had forbidden you to play.’

‘He couldn’t. I’ve told no one.’

‘I will not have my wife turned into a typical
colon
.’

‘I think I am one already.’ She added in a low voice, ‘I don’t want to be different.’

He said sharply. ‘Spending all their time in small talk . . .’

‘I wish I could. How I wish I could. If anyone could only teach me that . . .’

It was always the same. She drank nothing but Perrier, and yet the alcohol on his breath would make her talk as though the whisky had entered her own blood, and what she said then was always too close to the truth. Truth, which someone had once written made us free, irritated Rycker as much as one of his own hang-nails. He said, ‘What nonsense. Don’t talk like that for effect. There are times when you remind me of Mme Guelle.’ The night sang discordantly at them from either side of the road, and the noises from the forest were louder than the engine. She had a longing for all the shops which climbed uphill along the rue de Namur: she tried to look through the lighted dashboard into a window full of shoes. She stretched out her foot beside the brake and said in a whisper, ‘I take size six.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

In the light of the headlamp she saw the cage strutting by the road like a Martian.

‘You are getting into a bad habit of talking to yourself.’

She said nothing. She couldn’t tell him, ‘There is no one else to speak to,’ about the
pâtisserie
at the corner, the day when Sister Thérèse broke her ankle, the
plage
in August with her parents.

‘A lot of it is my own fault,’ Rycker said, reaching his second stage. ‘I realize that. I have failed to teach you the real values as I see them. What can you expect from the manager of a palm-oil factory? I was not meant for this life. I should have thought even you could have seen that.’ His vain yellow face hung like a mask between her and Africa. He said, ‘When I was young I wanted to be a priest.’ He must have told her this, after drinks, at least once a month since they married, and every time he spoke she remembered their first night in the hotel at Antwerp, when he had lifted his body off her like a half-filled sack and dumped it at her side, and she, feeling some tenderness because she thought that in some way she had failed him, touched his shoulder (which was hard and round like a swede in the sack), and he asked her roughly, ‘Aren’t you satisfied? A man can’t go on and on.’ Then he had turned on his side away from her: the holy medal that he always wore had got twisted by their embrace and now lay in the small of his back, facing her like a reproach. She wanted to defend herself, ‘It was you who married me. I know about chastity too – the nuns taught me.’ But the chastity she had been taught was something which she connected with clean white garments and light and gentleness, while his was like old sackcloth in a desert.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You are not even interested when I tell you my deepest feelings.’

She said miserably, ‘Perhaps it was a mistake.’

‘Mistake?’

‘Marrying me. I was too young.’

‘You mean I am too old to give you satisfaction.’

‘No – no. I didn’t mean . . .’

‘You know only one kind of love, don’t you? Do you suppose that’s the kind of love the saints feel?’

‘I don’t know any saints,’ she said desperately.

‘You don’t believe I am capable in my small way of going through the Dark Night of the Soul? I am only your husband who shares your bed . . .’

She whispered. ‘I don’t understand. Please, I don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘I thought that love was supposed to make you happy.’

‘Is that what they taught you in the convent?’

‘Yes.’

He made a grimace at her, breathing heavily, and the coupé was filled momentarily with the scent of Vat 69. They passed beside the grim constructed figure in the chair; they were nearly home.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

She had been back in the shop in the rue de Namur watching an elderly man who was gently, so gently, easing her foot into a stiletto-heeled shoe. So she said, ‘Nothing.’

Rycker said in a voice suddenly kind, ‘That is the opportunity for prayer.’

‘Prayer?’ She knew, but without relief, that the quarrel was over, for from experience she knew too that, after the rain had swept by, the lightning always came nearer.

‘When I have nothing else to think of, I mean that I
have
to think of, I always say a
Pater Noster
, an
Ave Maria
, or even an Act of Contrition.’

‘Contrition?’

‘That I have been unjustly angry with a dear child whom I love.’ His hand fell on her thigh and his fingers kneaded gently the silk of her skirt, as though they were seeking some muscle to fasten on. Outside the rusting abandoned cylinders showed they were approaching the house; they would see the lights of the bedrooms when they turned.

She wanted to go straight to her room, the small hot uninviting room where he sometimes allowed her to be alone during her monthly or unsafe periods, but he stopped her with a touch; she hadn’t really expected to get away with it. He said, ‘You aren’t angry with me, Mawie?’ He always lisped her name childishly at the moments when he felt least childish.

‘No. It’s only – it wouldn’t be safe.’ Her hope of escape was that he feared a child.

‘Oh come. I looked up the calendar before I came out.’

‘I’ve been so irregular the last two months.’ Once she had bought a douche, but he had found it and thrown it away and afterwards he had lectured her on the enormity and unnaturalness of her act, speaking so long and emotionally on the subject of Christian marriage that the lecture had ended on the bed.

He put his hand below her waist and propelled her gently in the direction he required. ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we’ll take a risk.’

‘But it’s the worst time. I promise . . .’

‘The Church doesn’t intend us to avoid all risk. The safe period mustn’t be abused, Mawie.’

She implored him, ‘Let me go to my room for a moment. I’ve left my things there,’ for she hated undressing in front of his scrutinizing gaze. ‘I won’t be long. I promise I won’t be long.’

‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ Rycker promised.

She undressed as slowly as she dared and took a pyjama jacket from under her pillow. There was no room here for anything but a small iron bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a chest-of-drawers. On the chest was a photograph of her parents – two happy elderly people who had married late and had one child. There was a picture postcard of Bruges sent by a cousin, and an old copy of
Time
. Underneath the chest she had hidden a key and now she unlocked the bottom drawer. Inside the drawer was her secret museum: a too-clean missal which she had been given at the time of her first communion, a sea-shell, the programme of a concert in Brussels. André Lejeune’s
History of Europe
in one volume for the use of schools, and an exercise book containing an essay which she had written during her last term (she had received the maximum marks) on the Wars of Religion. Now she added to her collection the old copy of
Time
. Querry’s face covered Lejeune’s
History
: it lay, a discord, among the relics of childhood. She remembered Mme Guelle’s words exactly: ‘His reputation in certain ways is very bad.’ She locked the drawer and hid the key – it was unsafe to delay any further. Then she walked along the veranda to
their
room, where Rycker was stretched naked inside the mosquito tent of the double-bed under the wooden body on the cross. He looked like a drowned man fished up in a net – hair lay like seaweed on his belly and legs; but at her entrance he came immediately to life, lifting the side of the tent. ‘Come, Mawie,’ he said. A Christian marriage, how often she had been told it by her religious instructors, symbolized the marriage of Christ and His Church.

CHAPTER 2

The Superior with old-fashioned politeness ground out his cheroot, but Mme Rycker was no sooner seated than absent-mindedly he lit another. His desk was littered with hardware catalogues and scraps of paper on which he had made elaborate calculations that always came out differently, for he was a bad mathematician – multiplication with him was an elaborate form of addition and a series of subtractions would take the place of long division. One page of a catalogue was open at the picture of a bidet which the Superior had mistaken for a new kind of foot-bath. When Mme Rycker entered he was trying to calculate whether he could afford to buy three dozen of these for the leproserie: they were just the thing for washing leprous feet.

‘Why, Mme Rycker, you are an unexpected visitor. Is your husband . . .’

‘No.’

‘It’s a long way to come alone.’

‘I had company as far as the Perrins’. I spent the night there. My husband asked me to bring you two drums of oil.’

‘How very kind of him.’

‘I am afraid we do too little for the leproserie.’

It occurred to the Superior that he might ask the Ryckers to supply a few of the novel foot-baths, but he was uncertain how many they could afford. To a man without possessions any man with money appears rich – should he ask for one foot-bath or the whole three dozen? He began to turn the photographs towards Marie Rycker, cautiously, so that it might look as though he were only fiddling with his papers. It would be so much easier for him to speak if she were to exclaim, ‘What an interesting new foot-bath,’ so that he could follow up by saying –

Instead of that she confused him by changing the subject. ‘How are the plans for the new church, father?’

‘New church?’

‘My husband told me you were building a wonderful new church as big as a cathedral, in an African style.’

‘What an extraordinary idea. If I had the money for that’ – not with all his scraps of paper could he calculate the cost of a ‘church like a cathedral’ – ‘why, we could build a hundred houses, each with a foot-bath.’ He turned the catalogue a little more towards her. ‘Doctor Colin would never forgive me for wasting money on a church.’

‘I wonder why my husband . . . ?’

Was it possibly a hint, the Superior wondered, that the Ryckers were prepared to finance . . . He could hardly believe that the manager of a palm-oil factory had made himself sufficiently rich, but Mme Rycker of course might have been left a fortune. Her inheritance would certainly be the talk of Luc, but he only made the journey to the town once a year. He said, ‘The old church, you know, will serve us a long time yet. Only half our people are Catholics. Anyway it’s no use having a great church if the people still live in mud huts. Now our friend Querry sees a way of cutting the cost of a cottage by a quarter. We were such amateurs here until he came.’

‘My husband has told everyone that M. Querry is building a church.’

‘Oh no, we have better uses for him than that. The new hospital too is a long way from being finished. Any money we can beg or steal must go to equipping it. I’ve just been looking at these catalogues . . .’