The Blessing (8 page)

Madame de Valhubert’s black eyes went with a question mark to Charles-Edouard. Madame Rocher and M. de la Bourlie exchanged glances of mournful significance; M. le Curé and M. l’Abbé gazed at their plates and Charles-Edouard looked extremely put out, as Grace had never seen him look before. At last he said to his grandmother, ‘Freemasons are quite different in England, you know.’

‘Oh! Indeed?’

‘The Grand Master, there, is a member of the Royal Family – is that not so, Grace?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t really know much about them.’

‘With the English anything is possible,’ said Madame Rocher. ‘What did I tell you, Sosthène?’

‘Oh no, but all the same,’ muttered the old man, ‘this is too much.’

There was another long silence, at the end of which Madame deValhubert rose from the table, and they all went into the little salon. The evening dragged much worse than usual, and the party dispersed for the night very early indeed.

‘What have I done?’ said Grace in her bedroom.

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Charles-Edouard, crossly, for him, not knowing that it was entirely her fault for neglecting the information Sir Conrad had put at her disposal, ‘but I must beg you never again to speak of Freemasons before French people. Take a lover – take two – turn Lesbian – steal valuable boxes off your friends’ tables – anything, anything, but don’t say that your father is a Freemason. It will need ten years of virtuous life before this is forgiven, and it will never be forgotten.
La fille du francmaçon!
Well, I’ll see my grandmother in the morning and try to explain –’ He was laughing again now, but Grace saw that he was really very much embarrassed by what she had done.

Madame de Valhubert having rushed to the chapel, Madame Rocher went down with M. de la Bourlie to his motor, and they stood for a moment on the terrace together.

‘You see!’ she said, ‘daughter of Freemasons! What did I tell you? No wonder she was married by a mayor, all is now plain as daylight. Can they, I wonder, really be considered decent people in England? I must find out. Poor Charles-Edouard, I see his path beset by thorns. Terrible for the Valhuberts, especially as they have had this sort of trouble in the family once – well not freemasonry, of course, but that dreadful Marshal. All so carefully lived down ever since. No wonder Françoise is upset – she will be on her knees all night, I feel sure.’

M. de la Bourlie was greatly shocked at the whole affair. Even were he not over eighty, even were Madame de la Bourlie not still alive, a beautiful English wife now ceased to be any temptation to him. He had learnt his lesson.

Grace’s blunder had one good result however. Sigi got back into the Canari set, from which he had been expelled, had he but known it, on grounds of clericalism. His adherence to M. l’Abbé had been doing him no good among the
maquisards
.

M. le Curé was unable to keep the extraordinary pronouncement of young Madame de Valhubert to himself; he told one or two gossips, and the news spread like wild-fire, causing the greatest possible sensation in the village. The Catholics, adherents of the M.R.P. and so on, were very much shocked, but the rest of the population was jubilant. The daughter of a Freemason was an unhoped-for addition to the Valhubert family. Nanny, whose resistance to M. l’Abbé stiffened every day, came to be regarded as the very champion of anti-clericalism. The position of Charles-Edouard remained anomalous, a certain mystery seemed to surround his opinions, and nobody knew exactly where he stood. On one hand there was the Freemason wife, on the other it was he and nobody else who had summoned M. l’Abbé to teach his child. Since he was popular, jolly, and a good landlord, since his war record was above reproach, and they knew, from his own voice on the radio, that he had been one of the very first to join General de Gaulle, he tended to be claimed as one of themselves by all sections of the community while they awaited further evidence from which to draw further conclusions.

Charles-Edouard did manage to convince his grandmother that freemasonry in England was regarded by decent, and even royal, families as perfectly correct. It took some doing, but finally he succeeded.

‘Very well then,’ she said. ‘I believe you, my child. But as we are on disagreeable topics, why this marriage by a mayor? Why not a priest?’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘You know?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘The fact is I was not quite sure. I married this foreign woman after a very short courtship, I was off to the war, perhaps for years, she was engaged to somebody else when I first met her, and might have – I didn’t think so, but there was no proof – an unstable character. And she was a heathen. The English, you know, are nearly all heathens, like freemasonry, it is a perfectly respectable thing to be, over there. Should she have got tired of waiting and gone off with somebody else, I didn’t want to be debarred for ever, or at any rate for years, from a proper marriage. If she, or her father, had made the least objection to the civil marriage, if they had even mentioned it, I would have got a priest, but the subject was never raised. It was very odd. They regarded the whole thing as perfectly normal and natural. Sigismond has been baptized, by the way. I wrote and asked for that, and it was immediately done, just as if I had asked for him to be vaccinated.’

‘And now?’ said Madame de Valhubert.

‘Grace is still a heathen, but you can see for yourself that she is a soul worth saving. In due course we shall convert her; it will be time enough then to be married in church.’

‘Charles-Edouard, you have brought home a heathen concubine instead of a wife! You are living in mortal sin, my child.’

‘Dearest grandmother, you know me well enough to know that I am generally living in mortal sin. We must trust, for my soul, to the mercy of God. As regards Grace, all will turn out for the best, you will see.’

Grace would have been intensely surprised if she could have overheard this conversation. They both spoke as if he had picked up the daughter of a cannibal king in darkest Africa, whereas she thought of herself as a perfectly ordinary Christian. Something of this occurred to Charles-Edouard.

‘Please, grandmother, if you speak with Grace about this, don’t say that she is only a concubine. She wouldn’t like it. Trust me – I’m sure everything will be all right, meanwhile you can look upon us as fiancés.’

‘Very well,’ said the old lady. ‘I won’t say a word on any religious subject. It is your responsibility, Charles-Edouard, and you know as well as I do where your duty lies in this matter.’

‘But,’ she thought to herself, ‘there are other things I must have out with her before they go back to Paris.’

‘I suppose Charles-Edouard must seem very English to you, dear child,’ she began, next time she found herself alone with Grace.

‘English?’ Grace was amused and surprised. For her Charles-Edouard was the forty kings of France rolled into one, the French race in person walking and breathing.

‘Indeed at first sight he is very English. His clothes, his figure, that enormous breakfast of ham and eggs, his aptitude for business. But you know him very little, dearest, as yet. You have been married (if one can call it a marriage) for seven years and yet here you are, strangers, on a honeymoon, with a big child. It’s a very odd situation, and not the least curious and wonderful part is that you are both so happy. But I repeat that so far you have only seen the English side of your husband. He is getting restless here (I know him so well) and very soon, probably at a day’s notice, he will take you off to Paris. When you are there you will begin to see how truly French he is.’

‘But he seems so French to me already. How can he seem even more so in Paris? In what way?’

‘I am giving you a word of warning, just one. In Paris you and he will be back in his own world of little friends all brought up together. I advise you to be very, very sensible. Behave as if you were a thousand years old, like me.’

‘You think I shall be jealous. Tante Régine thinks so too, I can see. But I never am. It’s not part of my nature. I’m not insensitive, it isn’t that, I can mind things quite terribly, but jealous I am not.’

‘Alas, my dear child, you are in love, and there is no love in this world without jealousy.’

‘And I may not have known Charles-Edouard for long, but I do know him very well. He loves me.’

‘Yes, yes, indeed he does. That is quite plain. And so do we all, dear child, and that is why I am talking to you like this, in spite of everything. I tell you too that if you are very sensible he will love you for ever, and in time everything will be regulated in your lives and you will be a truly happy couple, for ever.’

‘That’s what Charles-Edouard tells me. All right, I am very sensible, so he will love me for ever. Don’t I look sensible?’

‘Alas, I know these practical, English looks and how they are deceptive. So reassuringly calm on the surface, and underneath what a turmoil. And then the world reflected in distorting glasses. Latin women see things so clearly as they are; above all they understand men.’

‘I never know quite what it means, to understand men.’

‘Don’t you, dear? It’s very simple, it can be said in a few words. Put them first. A woman who puts her husband first seldom loses him.’

‘Well I daresay,’ said Grace with some indignation, ‘that a woman who lets her husband do exactly as he likes, who shuts her eyes to every infidelity, and lets him walk over her, in fact, would never lose him.’

‘Just so,’ said Madame de Valhubert, placidly.

‘And do you really advise that?’

‘Oh I don’t advise, the old must never advise. All I do say is remember that Charles-Edouard is a Frenchman – not an Englishman with a French veneer, but a deeply French Frenchman. If you want this to become a real marriage, a lifelong union (I don’t speak of a sacrament), you must follow the rules of our civilization. A little life of your own, if you wish it, will never be held against you, so long as you always put your husband first.’

Grace was thoroughly shocked. ‘I could have understood it if Tante Régine had spoken like that – would have expected it in fact, but your grandmother!’ she said to Charles-Edouard.

‘My grandmother is an extremely practical person,’ he said, ‘you can see it by the way she runs this house. You can always tell by that, with women.’

The next day Charles-Edouard made one of his sudden moves and whirled Grace off to Paris. Nanny and the little boy were left behind to follow in a week or two, escorted by the faithful Ange-Victor.

7

The Valhuberts’ Paris house was of a later date than any part of Bellandargues, and had only been finished a month or two before the Revolution. It stood on the site of a Louis XIII house whose owner, planning to receive Marie Antoinette there, had pulled it down and built something more fashionable, to be worthy of her. The intended fête for the Queen never took place, and in the end it was Josephine, not Marie Antoinette, who was received as guest of honour in the round, white and gold music room. This was an episode in their family history very much glossed over by future Valhuberts, and most of all by Charles-Edouard’s grandmother. The truth was that the eldest son of Marie Antoinette’s admirer, a soldier born and bred, had not been able to resist the opportunity of serving under the most brilliant of all commanders. He had joined the revolutionary army, had risen to the rank of General before he was thirty, and was killed at the battle of Friedland shortly after receiving his Marshal’s bâton.

‘Most fortunately,’ Charles-Edouard said when recounting all this to Grace, ‘or he would certainly have ended up as a Duke with some outlandish title. I prefer to be what I am.’

‘Perhaps he would have refused.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ve yet to hear of anybody refusing a dukedom.’

The family, after his death, had once more embraced a cautious Royalism, and a veil was drawn over this unfashionably patriotic outburst. Old Madame de Valhubert always pretended that she knew nothing of it, and, if anybody mentioned the Marshal, would say that he must have been some very distant relation of her husband’s. All his relics, his portrait in uniform by Gros, the eagle which it had cost him his life to recapture, his medals, his sword, and his bâton were hidden away at Bellandargues in a little outhouse, locally known as
le pavillon de la gloire
, and even Charles-Edouard would not have dared bring them back into the salon during the lifetime of his grandmother.

‘It will be the same with me,’ he said. ‘Sigi’s great-grand-daughter-in-law will hide away my Croix de Lorraine, my
médaille de la résistance
, and the badge of my squadron, and say that I was some distant relation of her husband’s. They are terrible, French families.’

The house, long, three-storied, lay between courtyard and garden. Old Madame de Valhubert, when in Paris, occupied one of the lodges in the courtyard. ‘She moved in there during the war, after the Germans had looted the main block, and now she likes it so much that she has stayed on.’ The other lodge housed the servants. The ground floor of the house itself consisted of five enormous drawing-rooms leading out of each other, the middle one being the famous round music room, masterpiece of the brothers Rousseau. Over this, the same shape and almost as elaborately decorated, was Grace’s bedroom. These rooms were on the garden side, facing due south and with a wide view of trees.

‘What an enormous garden, for a town,’ said Grace.

‘It used to be three times as long, but some of it was taken, alas, in the time of Haussman to make the horrible rue de Babel, well named. However we can’t complain, many houses in this neighbourhood suffered more – many wonderful houses either lost their gardens altogether, or were even pulled down. Paris was only saved from complete ruination by the fall of Napoleon III. Bismarck really saved us, funnily enough!’

As Charles-Edouard had quite openly joined the Free French under his own name, everything he possessed was confiscated during the war and would have been taken off to Germany had it not been for the initiative of Louis, his old butler, who had piled pictures and furniture in the cellar, built a wall to hide them, and, to make this wall convincing, put a wash basin with brass taps against it.