Evangelista's Fan (10 page)

The Dauphin is at lunch with his favourite counts and dukes. They're eating blackbirds.

‘God, Montjoy,' says the Dauphin, ‘you've been an age. What happened?'

Montjoy is very hot after his ride. He can feel sweat in his hair.

‘I'm sorry, sir,' he says. ‘I explained to the King how far he's outnumbered, but—'

‘But what?'

‘He refuses to be ransomed. He seems willing to fight.'

The Dauphin picks up a blackbird and bites it in half, crunching the little bones. He speaks with his mouth full. ‘Did you explain it properly? Five to
one.
Did you show him?'

‘There wasn't an opportunity to show him, sir. His mind is made up.'

‘Well then, he's a fool,' says the Dauphin. ‘A bumptious fool. It means that he's now going to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them is going to die.'

The Dauphin eats the second half of his blackbird. He spits out a piece of bone and wipes his mouth. ‘Get me the Constable of France, Montjoy,' he says. ‘We'll get all this over with tomorrow. I'm tired of being here. And the food's ghastly. Off you go.'

Montjoy backs out of the Dauphin's tent. He feels tired. He feels he could lie down anywhere and sleep.

Out of politeness, he had to pay his respects to Cecile's parents before he could leave. They told him that Monsieur de Granvilliers had hinted at his intention to marry Cecile back in January. Cecile's mother said: ‘We're very flattered. This is a very good match.'

Montjoy wanted to say: I love her better than Granvilliers. She alters my earth. I'd sleep with her in my arms. I'd buy her any number of pairs of shoes.

But he kept silent and only nodded.

Then he rode back along the way he had come. The sun was going down and glinted red in the fast-running stream. He tried not to think of anything at all. When he got to the clump of yellow flowers, he looked the other way. His horse stumbled on a stone and he wished he could become that stone and feel nothing.

Montjoy's parents were eating dinner when he arrived back at the house. They looked up expectantly from their soup and put down their spoons.

Montjoy stood in the doorway and looked at them. For the first time in his life, he envied them with an aching, fathomless envy. They had lived side by side contentedly for thirty-one years. They still shared their bed.

He put a fist up to his mouth. Through the clenched fist, he said: ‘Cecile's not in my life any more. So please don't mention her again. She's in the past and I don't want to speak about it. It or her. I don't want to talk about any of it. Ever.'

He turned and left the room before either his mother or his father could say a word.

He has been summoned by the English King, three years his junior.

It's getting dark. The rain that came in the early morning has stopped and a white moon is rising. And under the white moon lie the French dead.

He and his horse have to pick their way among corpses. There's a shine on them and on the fouled earth where they lie.

For the second time in Montjoy's life, he asks himself, as he rides on into a gathering dusk: ‘Why was something as terrible as this not foreseen by me?'

He remembers the Dauphin's mockery: ‘They won't last half an hour!' He remembers his own imaginary words to Roland: ‘You couldn't call it a great battle. It was too one-sided.'

He's a herald. Heralds ride in the vanguard of events they announce. They watch and assess. They bring the expected after them. But not him. Despite his eminence, despite his optimistic name, the unimaginable follows him like a shadow.

He doesn't know precisely how this day was lost. He tried to follow what was occurring. He kept weaving in and out of the wood, trying to see, trying to get a picture. He heard the English arrows fly. He saw a cloud of arrows fall on the first line of cavalry, heard them clatter on helmets and backplates, like hailstones on an army kitchen. He saw some horses go down and their riders fall, helpless as saucepans in their armour, kicked or trampled by hooves.

Then he saw, as the first line rode on, the English men-at-arms fall back. They fell back in a ghostly way, just as, before, they emerged from the wood – one moment there and the next moment not there. And where they'd been standing, facing the French cavalry, on the very place where they'd been, now there was a line of stakes, newly sharpened, pointing out of the ground. There was a thick fence of them, a thousand or more, three or four deep with room in between them for only the most insubstantial men.

He knew the horses would rear, would try to turn, would do all that they could not to be thrown onto the stakes. But many of them couldn't turn because in their massed charge, flank to flank, they were coming on too fast and so they exploded onto the fence and their riders were pitched forward into the enemy's arms.

One of the other heralds had told him at dawn: ‘The English are eating handfuls of earth. This means they accept their coming death and burial.' And he'd felt pity for them, as violent as love. Now, Montjoy's horse carries him awkwardly, slipping and staggering in the mud, through the field of the French dead. The dead appear fat with this white moon up, casting bulky shadows. Montjoy covers his mouth with his blue glove and tips his head back and looks for stars. There is one in the west, yawning, and he thinks again of Roland in his tree-house and then of all the souls of the French struggling to cross the chasm of the sky.

He won't give an account of the battle to Roland because then he would have to answer too many unanswerable questions. Why did the first line of French cavalry turn round and collide with the men-at-arms coming forward? Does this mean that some of the French foot soldiers died before they even reached the English line? And then, when they reached the line, what happened that so many died so quickly? Were they packed together so tightly in a mass that they couldn't fight properly? Was the mass, shouting and pushing and afraid and confused, soon walled up behind its own dead?

It had rained so hard all through the battle, the heralds' task of seeing had been impeded.

All Montjoy can hope now, as he nears the English camp and hears voices singing, is that time will bring him understanding.

He rides on. He must make a formal acknowledgement of defeat to King Henry. He hopes that his voice is going to be strong, but fears that it may sound weak and small, like the voice of a stag beetle in an ivory box.

He feels exhausted. In his exhaustion, he aches to be no longer a man apart, but a man going home to his wife with a gift of crimson shoes.

The Unoccupied Room

  

Marianne is walking home through the wet dusk of the city. She wears an expensive grey mackintosh with the collar turned up, but she has no umbrella and her hair is cobwebbed with rain.

Marianne is forty-eight. She's an almost-beautiful woman who doesn't look her age. She has pale skin and a gentle laugh. She's a doctor specialising in geriatrics and her career is what matters to her now. She's divorced and unattached and certainly isn't looking for a new husband. Her only child, Nico, lives in another city. He's a radio DJ. Though affectionate to her always, she's heard him being condescending to phone-in listeners and she means to question him about this sometime: ‘Why be cruel, Nico, when this isn't your nature?'

She carries a smart brown leather briefcase, inside which are her conference notes. This has been the final day of an international colloquium on geriatrics entitled ‘Redefining the Seventh Age' and Marianne is aware, as the city traffic whispers by her on the damp cobbles, that she is, suddenly, exhausted. There's an ache in her thighs. Her eyes feel sore. She hasn't much further to go to her apartment, but she realises that she's been walking a long time and is surprised by the decision she must have made, but doesn't remember making, not to take a taxi home from the conference centre. She could have afforded a taxi. Her ability to afford taxis now is one of the modest pleasures of her independent life. So why didn't she take one? She's walked at least a mile and her smart shoes are spoiled. Was it that she looked for a taxi and none came by? She doesn't remember looking for a taxi. All she remembers is that she was at the plenary session of the conference but said very little, or, perhaps, nothing, at it and that she is now here, three blocks or so away from her street. Her longing to be home, to make tea, to sit down, to warm her feet, has become overwhelming. She feels as though she could sleep for several days. She wants to lie down and not move and let nothing move within her sight or hearing, unless it might be a light autumn breeze at her window or the sound, far off, of the children's carousel in the park – familiar things that wouldn't disturb her peace. She sighs as she tries to hurry on. Her elderly patients have just such a longing for rest. ‘I tell you, doctor,' says one old man, who sits at his window all day, counting aeroplanes, ‘the best bit of the day is the night.'

She's at her street now. She turns off the well-lit boulevard and quite soon the traffic noise becomes faint and all she can hear are her own footsteps and all she can smell is the damp of the cherry trees that line the avenue. She likes this moment, this moving out of the light into the shadows of her street.

It's a street of nineteenth-century houses converted to apartments. Railings and hedges screen the ground-floor flats from the road. Only one house remains a house, containing thirteen rooms, but Marianne can't remember who lives in this grand building.

Her apartment is on the second floor. It has a large living room and three bedrooms, one of which is very small – the room Nico occupied as a child. The floors are polished wood, waxed often and scenting the whole place. It's the kind of apartment, unlike so many in the city, that you feel you can belong to.

Marianne searches in her mackintosh pocket for her keys. She hopes they're in the pocket and not in her handbag, which has so many compartments in it that things lose themselves there. Her hands are soaking. In damp and cold, her nails, which she's bitten ever since she was nine, sometimes bleed. They feel as if they're bleeding now.

The keys aren't in Marianne's pocket, so she stops a little way from her front door, puts down her briefcase and places her handbag on someone's car roof, under a street lamp, to search for the keys.

At once, the contents of her handbag appear odd. She takes out something pale, slightly unpleasant to the touch. It's a pair of surgical gloves. In her day-to-day work, she wears gloves frequently (again and again she reminds the nurses: ‘there must be a sterile barrier between your hands and all internal tissue of the patient's body'), but always disposes of them at the hospital or in the homes she visits. These gloves appear soiled and Marianne has never put a pair of soiled gloves in her handbag. Never.

She lays the gloves on the car roof. It's raining very hard now. She must find the keys, go in, make tea, sit down by the electric fire . . . Then, she will think about how the surgical gloves came to be in her bag.

The keys aren't where she expected them to be. They're at the very bottom of her bag. She has to take out her purse, her chequebook, her credit card wallet, her cigarettes, her tampon holder and her hairbrush before she's able to locate them. There's a label tied to them, on which is written
Keys No. 37
, but, just as Marianne has no recollection of putting the soiled gloves into her bag, so she has no memory of this label attached to her keys.

Her friend and colleague, Petra, reminded her some days ago: ‘Conferences are strange things, Marianne. They're like stepping out of your life.' And now, as she returns her purse and the other items, including the gloves, to her bag, Marianne starts to wonder whether something has happened during the last three days, something she's momentarily forgotten because she feels so tired, that has damaged her.

She leans against the car, noticing that the car is dark red. A Volvo. It might belong to the family in the grand house, or it might belong to a woman on her own, gone shopping in the rain on the boulevard, a woman who found a lucky parking space here under the cherry trees. In one's own street, there are a thousand unknowable connections. Cities express the unknowable. Live your whole life in the same one and you will wind up a traveller in it, an ignoramus.

She's at the door of the building now. She pushes it and enters. The stairwell is massive, poorly lit, always cold. The stairs are stone, very wide, slightly grand. In the middle of this grandeur is an elevator no larger than a confessional, in which it has always been impossible not to feel foolish. Most often, Marianne ignores it and walks up the two flights of stone, but this evening she steps into it gratefully and lets it carry her towards her soft sofa, her fire, and the pot of China tea she's going to make.

It's dark in the apartment. Marianne switches on the overhead light and the hall seems brighter than normal. She rubs her eyes. She lets her bag and briefcase drop. She's aware, in the warmth of the apartment, that she's been enduring a headache for a long time without really noticing it.

Though she's been looking forward to the tea, she now feels too tired to make it. She goes straight to her bedroom. The bright light of the hall still feels uncomfortable, so she leaves her bedroom in darkness. She throws off her wet clothes and, wearing only a slip and a silk blouse, gets into the large bed she used to share with her husband, Paul. For fourteen years, they lay there together. On the living-room mantelpiece were stacked the invitations to conferences and poetry readings and private views and dinner parties: Paul and Marianne, Marianne and Paul.