A Place in Normandy (13 page)

During the Second World War, after he came back from the sea, Alain had told us, when the house Thérèse and I now sat in was occupied by the Germans, he had kept a clandestine radio at his house in Mesnil, using, for an aerial, a metal clothesline. What did Thérèse remember of this?

Thérèse looked blank and slightly uncomfortable, as if the specifics of her father's tale had some negative impact on her view of the big picture. She dodged. There was so much war, she said, in the region's history. After the Romans, and following several centuries of something like peace (albeit a chaotic and dangerous one), Viking river boats of shallow draft, like the flatboats or
gabarres
used by local traders, had penetrated the land of the Pays d'Auge by way of the River Touques, which meandered northward through broad marshes and welcomed the raiders at its mouth, emptying into what English-speakers called the English Channel at what was now Deauville. In 1944 the German forces of occupation had manned a large gun emplacement in the same spot, overlooking what French maps used to refer to as Le Canal de France but now termed La Manche (the sleeve). That battery had been part of the defense of the Seine estuary, across from Le Havre.

“But your father?” I pressed her.

As far as what her father had done during the war … Thérèse could not recall anything about a secret radio in Mesnil.

“During the war,” I continued, “at the time of the D-day invasion, when the bombing was widespread—I've heard that forty bombs fell just in this commune—the citizens of Mesnil, with their cows, according to your father, took refuge in a cave in the hill across the valley.…”

Thérèse looked more uncomfortable. Even seated next to the fireplace she was tall, and she was sweet, with her father's warmth and wit. But she was also as pious and as devoted to the truth as had been her mother before her. She said, “You know, my father … unfortunately, my father really enjoyed a good story.”

FOURTEEN

“But I've been in the cave,” I protested. “Your father crammed a bunch of us into his ‘Deux Chevaux' one afternoon twenty years ago, with Julia's mother next to him up front, and took us across the valley. We went up through woods and fields until we got to the mouth of a limestone cave hidden among nettles and brambles. When we went down into it, it seemed easily large enough for the population of the town. I remember galleries, and a ceiling supported by columns, and that limestone smell like my downstairs kitchen. We walked around in that cave. The children shouted for the echoes. I've been there. No doubt about it,” I insisted.

Only reluctantly, and briefly, did Thérèse pull her mind out of the more interesting ancient past. “Maybe. That would be where they mined the stone for the church,” Thérèse said. “A quarry. The first church in Mesnil—you can still see one arch of it—was built in the tenth or eleventh century, when William the Conqueror's family was covering the country with what historians call a ‘white mask of churches.' Most of the present building dates from the thirteenth century, after the first church was torn down. Who knows why? The tower came later. Anyway, I suppose the quarry could have been a refuge for the townsfolk of Mesnil when Edward III of England swept through, looting and pillaging, on his way from the Cotentin to Crécy and Calais, which those Rodin Burghers turned over to him in 1347. Edward had to pass through Lisieux, not all that far from here. It's interesting that you should mention your mother's birthday, because Lisieux fell to Edward III on that same day. He and his troops liked it here and didn't leave Normandy until they were driven out by the Black Plague of 1348. All this will be in my history of Mesnil.”

She took a sip of her tea and looked at me happily, as if to measure my endurance, like an actress wondering if the moment had arrived when she'd do well to show a little leg.

“I have to admit, I never understood even one year out of the Hundred Years' War,” I confessed. I offered her a little of the calvados I had found remaining after the O'Banyons' summer, but she had no need of it.

“You'll find the whole thing in my book, but from the point of view of Mesnil. During the second half of the fourteenth century, between a third and a half of Normandy died, what with the war and the
peste.
The population fell from a million two hundred down to six hundred thousand souls. If Mesnil had consisted of thirty hearths, it now dropped to fifteen—which meant there was a lot of wasteland between firesides. Then, in 1416, the year after the big win at Agincourt that made him a movie star, Henry V of England came.”

“I'm with you now,” I said. “But of course our reading of those events is all based on English propaganda.”

“Right,” Thérèse said. “Once more unto the breach: Olivier and Branagh and that Thompson woman doing her Inspector Clouseau imitation. Anyway, Henry V and his brother the Duke of Clarence landed near Deauville on Sunday, August first. By the next day—I'll remember it as your mother's birthday from now on—they were attacking the castle of Touques, and then Henry sent Clarence upriver along the same road on which Guillaume Apollinaire had his flat tire. They planned to winter in the area. Lisieux fell to Clarence on August fourth, and for the next thirty years, like the rest of Normandy, it was administered by a different pecking order because the top cock had been changed. Everyone was fine so long as they agreed with the new arrangement, did their jobs, and paid taxes to the new boys.

“Now this is interesting, and we're getting closer to Mesnil.” She fished into her bag again and pulled out some notes to read from. “On February eighteenth of the next year, five months after the English landed, our enemy Henry V decreed that by the twenty-seventh of the same month,
‘sub pena et periculo quod si quis eorum ad diem illum in domo sua hujus non inventus, extra protectionem nostram ponatur et tamquam brigans et inimicus noster teneatur et puniatur'
—meaning, essentially, that all who refused to return to their dwellings would be declared brigands and punished as such. The punishment for brigandage was death, as well as the confiscation of all worldly goods for the benefit of the offended party—i.e., Henry V. Some did not obey, of course, and the countryside was filled with looting bands of soldiers who had not been paid, and troublemakers, and Norman holdouts who took to the woods, leaving their homes and properties to the English or to other, collaborating—that is to say, ‘obedient'—citizens.”

I said, “You must write this book.” I was thinking that one happy thing about a book was that you could put it down after a few hours, or minutes. But then you would lose the passion in the author's delivery.

“So if you think of this as peaceful country,” Thérèse said, “you must think again. Peace is a luxury we don't get very much of around here. Not in my history. Uprisings and wars of attrition finally drove the English out, but at considerable expense to us. Pont l'Evêque, held by the English but hard to defend, fell to the French in 1440, but only for long enough for the homes of the Anglophiles to be looted. Joan of Arc's infamous judge, Pierre Cauchon”—whose name rhymes with “pig”—“was made Bishop of Lisieux under the English, and his acquiescent administration was ruthless: it suppressed two uprisings during the troubles, in which thousands of persons from the countryside, branded as bandits because they disagreed with the invaders, were hanged and disemboweled, and their separated parts exhibited everywhere so as to encourage their neighbors.”

Thérèse started putting her notes back into her bag and fidgeting, no doubt thinking of the next day's trip and her life class, maybe a new model to draw or paint. She stood and was about to leave when her eye fell on something else in her notes that she had to tell me about.

“I haven't found Mesnil mentioned in the records of properties transferred by confiscation during this period, but neighboring Blangy shows up often, as does Eparfontaines (now Fierville), three minutes down the road by car, where you remember the train used to stop.” She pointed through my library to the south. “Look, in Fierville, in 1434, John Chamberlain, an English knight, was awarded in fief (meaning that he got to collect taxes on it and pay the next man up the line) land that had been confiscated from Guillaume le Gris (absent, and therefore disobedient), along with goods formerly in the possession of Raoul and Edmond de Tournay, knights, and other property that had belonged to Jacques Advisse, and to Jean Séguin, all of them absent and disobedient. He also received part of the heritage of Jean des Chesnes, knight, in the successions of his father and mother, as well as the goods of Jean le Forestier and his squire, who had been executed at Lisieux as ‘adversaries of the king our lord.' By now our so-called king and lord was Henry VI of England, Henry V having died—a tragedy, according to the English and anyone else who lets Shakespeare be his guide to all this history. My own history of Mesnil will correct such misapprehensions. I have to go. I like to get to class first so I can pose the model.”

We went downstairs and I helped Thérèse into her coat, thinking to myself,
She's worse than I am.
I was on the point of projecting that idea across the Atlantic toward my wife when I heard Julia's instant and obvious rejoinder:
Yeah, and nobody's trying to live with her.

Thérèse took out a flashlight and walked twenty paces into the rainy darkness. Mme. Vera's lights were already extinguished, and only the small pool of light that fell from the dining-room window separated us from the Cretaceous.

“So don't think it's always been quiet like this,” Thérèse called. “Not much, and not often, since the world began.” She turned and came toward me again. “Nineteen forty-four would not have been the first time it made sense to hide the family and the cows in a cave within the commune of Mesnil. But I wouldn't know how to find that quarry,” Thérèse told me. “If it's there.”

FIFTEEN

Thérèse's passion for history put me to shame and reduced the scope of what I was occupied with to almost reasonable proportions. I always brought work with me, and the place was filled with its own projects, as well as the unfinished tasks of other people, and all of that suited me fine once I had adjusted to it—especially given the broader picture Thérèse had painted. But still, there were large, messy, and unexpected structural problems that I had to deal with quickly. That afternoon, after my shower, I had learned from Mme. Le Planquay that nothing could be done about the plumbing until two days later, when M. Le Planquay's people would start to replace the lead pipes in the
sous-sol,
reseal the wastepipe on the upstairs toilet, and, as a bonus, run a pipe for hot water from the electric tank into the downstairs bath so I could dispense once and for all with the propane lottery system. I was permitted to use the electricity in the meantime, she said, so long as I made sure that the hot-water tank was not empty. She suggested that I close the main valve in the downstairs kitchen and open it only when I must have water. So after Thérèse left, it was into a dry kitchen that I carried our teacups.

The telephone rang and “How is everything?” Julia asked.

“Beautiful,” I said.
You know—with one thing and another and all.

“And the house is clean, you said?” Julia continued. “You have water this time?”

“Plenty. Things all right there?”

“Good,” she said, not stopping to answer my inquiry. “Because Margaret called. She and Ben are traveling in England with some friends. She wondered if anyone was in the house in Normandy, and if she could show it to Ben, and I said you'd love to have company. You're going to be there three or four more days, yes? What's the matter?”

“Rough spot on the satellite,” I said.

“I thought you yelped and dropped something. Anyway, I think she said they'd arrive tomorrow night, and I told her there was plenty of room. What's wrong?”

I was in no condition to have guests. What was more, though there was nobody I would rather have a visit from than Margaret and Ben—old friends and pals and colleagues, people from whom I would normally have no secrets—I had inadvertently, a moment before, committed myself to not telling Julia about the state of the plumbing and the bathroom floor until some auspicious if undefined future moment, which plan Margaret and Ben were bound to preempt.

“What's wrong?” Julia repeated.

“Nothing. As Thoreau said, ‘Simplify! Simplify!' I'll just gird my loins and go into bed-and-breakfast mode.”

This, I should have remembered, was a sore point. American friends, visiting us in couples during past summers and wearing different clothes each day, had sometimes looked speculatively at the wholly colorful situation of the house (and of their hosts) and seen the field as almost pure potential. Not only could we do this, and this, and this, they said, to make the house habitable (never mind that each “this” would cost at least twenty thousand dollars), but afterward we could run an outstanding bed-and-breakfast in the showplace that would result.

“Don't talk to me about B and B's,” Julia said. “I'm just back from Waterville, Maine, helping Sally get material for her book. You'd be amazed, all these people who used to live in perfectly good cities going out to lonely but awful places and running bed-and-breakfasts. Waterville's got ten thousand people and there's nothing at all there except twelve B and B's and in every one of them the wives have left. Sally was so busy getting info for the book that she didn't even notice this interesting little social sidelight. I mean,” Julia emphasized darkly, “what can happen. In a lonely place.

“If either of us is going to do breakfast for anybody, it had damned well better be a friend, not somebody who thinks she is paying for the chance to express an opinion about the coffee. Friends like Margaret and Ben. They're good friends, and the only reason in the world I can think of at the moment to even consider having a great huge galumphing place on the other side of nowhere that we don't need is so our friends can visit.”