Valley of Grace Page 2

  As she is not listening to what they are talking about. Something about finishing the job earlier, borrowing a couple of André’s workmen, reinforcing the structure, needs modern engineering principles, all formally done of course. Fanny sits not drinking her Orangina and imagines holding Gérard in her hands as she would a rare book.

  André Picart says he will have to think about it. They will talk further. There needs to be more precision about figures. Of course, says Gérard.

  André Picart is wrong about the unprofitability of Gérard’s work. Gérard knows exactly what it costs him to restore his buildings, the money borrowed, the interest rates, the labour of his team, the raw materials, the time. He factors in a considerable return on his own expertise. The resulting figure is a large one, but his apartments are so desirable he has no trouble finding clients. Certainly not at so good an address as the rue St Jacques. The building will have a large apartment on each floor, with the main room running from front to back, so there are windows at both ends. Had Fanny stood at the first floor windows of the building opposite she would have been able to look across and see the trees in the garden behind. There will be a shop on the ground floor. Gérard plans to rent out all the floors except the top one, where he will live.

  What will be worth a lot of money in these apartments is the light, because of the long main rooms being lit on two sides by the high paned windows. Enough of the original windows remain, in good enough order, to make all seem original; and even where they will be newly constructed he will use old glass, which is thick, uneven, sometimes ribbed, sometimes warped, with whorls and knots. The light shines sweetly through such windows, and the view the other way is subtly strange. It might be the eighteenth century out there, as it is inside. Clients won’t necessarily work any of this out, they will simply covet it.

  Gérard’s apartment on the top floor is the finest and lightest of all, which is unusual in such buildings. It is usually the first or the second storey that is the best, the piano nobile. He is planning to make a secret staircase to the attic, in a cupboard, so there will be unexpected rooms. When on his top floor he removes mouldering partitions the ceiling falls in, and there, much higher, is a plaster ceiling, dingy, dusty with the long-hidden dust of decades, but almost intact. It has a central oval, domed, like a little cupola, with cupids, fat winged baby creatures, looping ribbons around it.

  It’s at that moment Gérard decides it is time he got married. He’s thirty-eight.

  And he’ll find space for a lift. A wife cannot climb to the top floor of an eighteenth-century building on an old steep turning staircase.

  Fanny is in the shop dreamily holding the pale brown calfskin of a nineteenth-century account of the Luxembourg Gardens, discovering that in the thirteenth century the area was inhabited by a devil which had to be exorcised. In summer she and Séverine take Sylvain there to sail his boat on the pond. She hadn’t realised the place’s antiquity. The book with its fine etchings will fetch a lot of money if ever somebody buys it. She is gazing at a painting like a pattern of a vegetable garden belonging to the monks who cultivated the area for some centuries when Gérard comes in. This is shortly after the false ceiling fell in and he discovered the precious plaster mouldings above it. Although he paid little attention to Fanny in her father’s house he recognises her with no trouble, and is pleased to see her. Hi, he says, looking round, and back at the young woman in a plain jumper and skirt of caramel-coloured cashmere that is like a second sinuous skin to her slender body. Hi, he says, do you work here?

  He tells her about his ceiling. Maybe there is a book with his house in it? Or something like it? He’s never much bothered with old books before, just worked by instinct, but this ceiling’s something special.

  He looks at Fanny. His ceiling has fat cherubs on it, and she is slender, but somehow she seems to go with it. He looks at her again. There’s something eighteenth-century about her, her paleness, her elegance, the elegance that goes with tall pale rooms where the light falls in subtle if not ambiguous ways.

  And so he falls in love with her, and she with him. His request needs a good deal of searching out, he has to call in often to see how it is going. Her father is still not certain that the restoration business is all that viable, whatever the figures say, but there is no doubt that Fanny isn’t getting any younger, and she seems keen enough on the chap, and he on her. And it’s certainly the case that young Gérard is an interesting fellow. What do you think, my angel? he asks his wife, and she says, They are in love, how can we not agree? And what if we were not to? They’re old enough to decide.

  Fanny and Gérard get married, and invite guests afterwards to the apartment. It isn’t furnished yet, so it can be filled with round white-clothed tables for the luncheon of the wedding guests. The rows of wineglasses, the fishbowl vases full of pointed yellow roses refract the light almost as cunningly as the windows, and Fanny, in her silk dress that flows like cream and is of the same luminous colour as the tall panelled walls and the high patterned ceiling with just a touch of pale blue on its ribbons, seems so utterly to belong that people blink their damp eyes and say, a marriage made in heaven.

  Gérard supposed that Fanny would stop work when she was married, since his wife doesn’t need to work, but Fanny cannot bear to leave the bookshop. Just part-time, she says, and he agrees, Gérard doesn’t want to refuse Fanny anything. Just until the babies come, anyway. Don’t they make a lovely couple, said everybody at the wedding, and indeed they do, he so dark and vigorous and glowing with sun-browned health, she so slender and fair and radiant. Now she is married and beloved, words like pale and smooth are not enough, she is fair, radiant, luminous, still gentle, still delicate, but strong in her beauty. She’s quite a gorgeous girl, really, isn’t she, says her father to her mother, I never noticed. The mother smiles, as she often does with her husband. You can show him things, but he takes his own time to see them.

  Luc in the bookshop doesn’t notice this, but other customers do, and Gérard, who has taken to dropping in and browsing, marvels at the way she shines in the dim shop. He’s become fascinated with the books which have pictures of his kind of building; he loves to look at them, not so much because he learns things, what he needs to know about buildings he learns from them, from the nails and screws and dovetails, the joints and joists, the beams, the levelling and planing and piecing together. It’s as though the work and the skill and the passion of the hands that made these things is still present in them, and his hands can feel them there. It’s not information he gets from these books so much as recognition, and satisfaction. It’s like being with a lover and knowing her in more and different ways. Of course Gérard doesn’t say any of these things, not even in his head. Fanny guesses some of them, watching his reverent receptive hands holding the books. She marks things for him, with slips of paper, puts books aside on a back shelf. Luc seeing them together says to himself, how wonderful to see two people so much in love. He and his friend are still in love, still full of the delight of living together, but he does not imagine it shows with them as it does with this couple, so transparently glowing for all the world to see. He thinks that he and Julien are discreet, that they appear to be just good friends.

  Gérard begins to buy books. He becomes a good customer. He puts them on the bookcases set in alcoves either side of the pale marble fireplace in the sitting room. How well they go there. Old books in an old room. He has a joyous overflowing sense of rightness. Everything is beginning to be complete. He looks at the cherubs looping their ribbons round the small cupola of the ceiling and thinks of this as a talisman. He has some stationery made, thick and cream-coloured, and when you look at it closely you see that it is printed with the image of this ceiling. It pleases him, the hard dealings of business overlaying this charming image of a folly.

  The children’s wear shop on the ground floor, Plaisir d’Enfant, does not need all the space so he sets up an office in one of the back rooms, which has French windows opening on
to the garden. His desk is a long wooden refectory table, seventeenth-century and marvellously battered, and he takes a couple of books down and leaves them open on it. Customers admire them. From the Vieux Latin, he tells them, they have terrific stuff. Between Gérard and his clients Luc is starting to do quite profitable business. Quite a surprise for Luc’s father, who had his reasons for wondering if he would ever make the rent.

  The apartment is beginning to be furnished. Gérard takes Fanny shopping for necessary things. He isn’t purist about it. They have an early twentieth-century carved walnut chest of drawers that’s a Picart family piece, and several armoires from his aunts. They buy sofas in pale yellow leather to catch and replicate the light in the room. And there are mirrors. No curtains, the shutters are enough. They go to flea markets and find candlesticks, old pewter plates, a seaman’s chest that might have sailed with La Pérouse. Not too much, they don’t want clutter. The floors are honey-coloured wood, wide boards, some original, some from demolished buildings. There is an Aubusson rug in ancient worn golden colours with a bit of red that has faded to brownish pink. Is it all a bit too pale, do you think? Fanny asks Gérard, and he says, No, that is exactly how it should be, it suits you perfectly. He likes her to wear the pale colours, camel, fawn, caramel, the beiges that he first saw her in. And occasionally plain black, that delineates her in the mysterious shifting light of the rooms.

  Séverine comes to visit Fanny. Thank god for the lift, she says. I wouldn’t fancy lumping this heavy boy up all those stairs. Séverine is pregnant again. She is quite envious of Fanny. The pink and gilded apartment she lives in above the chocolate shop is certainly vast, but it is not hers, it belongs to her mother-in-law who runs it with a firm hand. She dotes on Séverine, and on Sylvain, and doubtless will on the new baby, but it is still not Séverine’s house.

  I keep wanting Thierry to get us a place of our own, but he says why should we bother? All that extra expense and so much less convenient—as it is it’s down the stairs and he’s at work—and of course he’s right. But still.

  You’d miss your mother-in-law, Fanny says. Passing the baby over any time you feel like it.

  Not any time, says Séverine. But yes, sometimes.

  Her belly is enormous, she suffers from the heat, is always tired. You’ll feel better when the baby’s born, says Fanny. Sylvain the beautiful godchild sits on her lap and strokes her cheeks. He smooths his fingers over her eyelids as though tracing the solid shape of the eyeballs underneath. Fanny shivers with delight at this questioning delicate touch. She loves the way small children make you look at the world as though you, like them, have never seen it before.

  The wedding was in late spring. In August the Vieux Latin closes and Gérard’s business takes its holidays. They spend some time in the house on the Mediterranean coast near Marseillan which belongs to Fanny’s family, on a property where André’s brother grows grapes and melons, and in the country behind St Tropez where Gérard’s family has a place. There is a lot of family stuff with Gérard’s brothers and sisters and their children who are just about teenagers and Fanny’s cousins who all seem to have babies. They come back to Paris in mid-September to days beginning to turn cool and a city energetic and ready for a new start after the lassitude of summer and the dusty tourist-infested heat of the dog days. The chestnut trees in the garden are beginning to change colour. The apartment waits, serene and welcoming in its cool manner.

  They are really married now. There has been the wedding, and the honeymoon. The ordering of the apartment. The summer holiday, with family. And now it is the rest of their lives. Coming home, putting away the summer clothes, back to work: this now will be the pattern of their days. Of course a baby will change things, but it will also be fitting into the mode of life Fanny and Gérard are creating in their handsome apartment in the rue St Jacques. Gradually the light takes on the silveriness of winter, as the trees lose their leaves and the sun doesn’t shine. Grey the light may be, but the creamy yellow colours of the apartment prevent the bleakness this suggests. Outside there is the tracery of bare branches against the colourless sky, inside is warm to the eye and the skin.

  Séverine’s baby Ghislaine was born late in August. Séverine is very clever: a pigeon pair. Her mother-in-law dotes more than ever. Sylvain goes several mornings to nursery school, and often on those occasions Séverine comes to see Fanny with just the baby. Ghislaine’s head is covered with a dark fuzz that everybody says will soon turn into black curls like her mother’s. Her body is covered with a dark down, almost fur; Fanny finds this attractive in a rather shameful way. She strokes the small furry body with shivery fingers. She is not so sunny a child as her brother. She yells when things are not to her liking and needs a lot of amusing, doesn’t sit quietly in friendly arms like Fanny’s but arches her back and crumples her face in what seems like rage. Fanny takes this as a challenge, and holds her over her shoulder and soothes her and murmurs, and is very pleased when the child relaxes and is still. Feeling her small violently beating heart grow calm against her own breast gives Fanny sharp little twisting pulling feelings in her stomach. She walks about the apartment. See Ghislaine in the mirror, she says. Look at the trees, the branches are bare. And down there, see, a man sweeping the gutter. The baby cannot look at any of these things, but she seems to like Fanny talking about them. She curls up, almost dozing. Taking an angry or maybe anguished baby and changing it from a stiff protesting awkward bundle into a relaxed kitten-like creature seems to Fanny as important a thing as anybody could ever do.

  Fanny and Gérard don’t go to church in any regular way but sometimes on her way home from the bookshop she calls into the church of Saint Etienne du Mont which is given over to the cult of her birth day saint. Luc is very critical of the pink and blue statue of Sainte Geneviève. Decadent nineteenth-century Gothic piety, he says. She looks such a wimp, he says, when the real woman, you know, she got out there breaking blockades to bring back corn for the starving people of Paris, she persuaded the conquerors not to kill their prisoners, she stopped the Parisians leaving the city when the Huns were just about at the gate. She would save them, she said, and she did. Whereas your creature looks about as saintly and courageous and powerful as a garden gnome.

  Nevertheless, Fanny thinks, she is Sainte Geneviève and her birth day saint, and if her job is curing the blind and chasing off demons and looking after the sick, the poor, the lonely and the unemployed, none of which conditions Fanny suffers from, that is her luck.

  She’s the patron saint of security men, you know, says Luc. He seems to think this pretty funny. I should get a statue of her over the door.

  You could get somebody to make you a saintly courageous and powerful contemporary version, says Fanny.

  Find a medieval one, I’d rather. Gothic, real, not pseudo, is the only thing in churches and holy statuary. The earlier the better.

  I thought you were keen on Romanesque.

  Yes, well, Romanesque of course. I said early.

  One day after she’d bought the bread at the bakery in the little place which was hardly more than a bulge in the rue St Jacques, she went into the church of the Val de Grâce. She’d often looked at it, its pillars and dome. A solid baroque edifice, its bowl-like curves and virtuous straight pillars anchoring it to the ground. A building haughty, confident, supercilious even. Not soaring, a rocket ready for heaven, like a Gothic church, a rocket fuelled by faith and the aerodynamics of its shape to lift its mighty weight into the air. The Val de Grâce presses its weight into the earth. It’s beautiful, with its pale intricate stone, its charming repetitious symmetry, and it’s the grand relation of the building she lives in.

  Inside it is full of cherubs, fat babies. Flocks of the gilded creatures swing from the baldaquin. There are twisted dark marble pillars garlanded with gilt foliage and others in paler marble round the dome. Wherever there’s space there’s a fat cherub. Not babies exactly though that is the shape of their limbs, their plumpness, but their heads are t
oo small, their proportions are wrong. They are like men who have kept their baby chubbiness of long torsos and short limbs. Rather sinister if you look too closely. And there is the Christ Child, solemn little manikin, subject of prayer by his mother and amazement by his father.

  Quite often, after that, when she goes to buy the bread she visits the church. Often outside the bakery there are two men sitting drinking on the pavement, beggars, vagrants, their clothes and beards and bodies all ragged, but they talk and laugh and enjoy themselves. It’s a party they are having over their wine on the edge of the pavement. She puts money in the ancient cap placed for that purpose, they bow elaborately and go on drinking. She knows the money will be spent on more drink. But she is glad to help people who have nothing, yet seem . . . She can’t say happy, who knows what anguish lies underneath, but she can say, seem to get so much pleasure out of their situation. Then she crosses the road and goes into the church and sits for a moment in this great humming space. She looks up at its immensity of pale grey stone. Even with all the decoration, the cherubs, the frescos, the marble and gilt columns, it has a bareness, a coldness. It’s the colour of concrete. There’s no stained glass. The light is silvery; when the sun shines, lemony. There is no comfort in it, as there is in her house. It is splendid, but God does not love her in this church.

  Time passes. Gérard prospers. Fanny blooms, as young women do who make love very often. Gérard likes to come home for lunch, Fanny wears a skirt and stockings so she doesn’t have to take her clothes off and they lie on the Aubusson rug. Or she will sit on the edge of the table with her legs round his waist. Or stand leaning against the window while the street below goes about its business. It’s fun, fully clothed like this, it feels illicit, they laugh breathlessly. Then she will have some favourite thing of his to eat. Not difficult, Gérard has a lot of favourite things to eat. At night in bed there is time for languor and play. Both marvel at this unexpected gift of sex that just goes on getting better. Who would have thought, they say, Fanny out of innocence, Gérard out of experience, as their hands touch each other’s bodies, who would have thought, and they gaze into one another’s eyes with shameless delight.