The French story - 1
There is no working title....yet. Would love your views on this draft opening.
One
Somehow I managed to survive. That may seem an obvious thing to say considering I’ve had the time to lay it all out here, but for a while my survival was — on one level at least — far from certain. Nor did I realise what the eventual cost would be: the pain, the sacrifices made, the difficult decisions taken. But then do we ever know? When we’re in the midst of things, it’s only later we give events context and shape; they cease being a continuous stream of episodes and become something more akin to history. Sitting at home in forced Covid isolation just like everyone else, I had been given the opportunity to reflect. In the perverse reality of our masked lives what else was there to do? Endeavouring to be a good citizen I tried and shop once a week, my only excursion. Other than that I’d rise early and, if it was not raining, swim in the pool before breakfast — and sometimes even if it was raining. Then later, often on the patio with my second coffee of the morning, open my laptop and continue to recreate that year, the year before Covid. It may have been no more than a few months ago, but it now feels a world away. A different sort of lockdown.
There is surely a journey undertaken from history to memory; they are created in parallel, but the latter comes after. Even when it is our own history, as soon as we’re able to stand back from it we find memory offering us a new perspective, a new angle, as if someone has finally given us the bi-lingual dictionary needed to aid reading something written in a foreign tongue. But actually that’s not it either — the dictionary metaphor, I mean. It’s more like a thesaurus because there are so many interpretations of words, and from words, actions — and almost always no one right answer.
Which is what each of us longs for I suppose, right answers. Wrong ones are so prevalent, they outnumber their counterparts by such a ratio that we prize a right answer above all things. And the ability to recognise one at the moment it is needed even more highly than that. Yet whichever answers we choose as we navigate through our daily lives, making decision after decision, are we ever in control; we bounce haphazardly from one failure to the next, always wondering what the outcome might have been if we’d gone the other way, right rather than left, said ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’. Who doesn’t know that feeling — the instant after the die has been cast — of wanting to take something back, to have ‘pause’ and ‘replay’ buttons at our mercy to give us the chance to rewrite history, to actually doing something right for once?
Or maybe that’s just me. Is it possible that everyone else gets on with things, muddles through in the best way they can, happy to leave their future to fate? I can’t believe it. As I ride the bus across town (a post-pandemic journey all the more remarkable now) I look at my fellow travellers and imagine them with the same dilemmas as me, thinking the same things, frustrated by the same minutiae; and all of them wanting to take something back, to do something better, to right a wrong or undo a mistake. But if we could do that — all of us, I mean — can you imagine the chaos that would ensue? There would be no certainty, nothing would be linear or stable; people would be reverting timelines all over the place. Yesterday’s wrong decision could suddenly have been the right one because of what some unconnected other decided to do — or not do — a thousand miles away. We would find, wouldn’t we, that we weren’t separated by six degrees of separation (or whatever the number is) but by none, or an infinite many, however you chose to measure it. That guy in the grubby fleece across the aisle might ruin my life through an un-mappable chain of people and events and not even know it. Even pausing to let me off the bus before him, what if he hadn’t done that? What if he’d had a replay button and done exactly the opposite? Never mind his, how would my journey, my day, my life have panned out then?
Best not to think about it.
Two
I had been down at the harbour watching a catamaran leaving the marina to head out to sea. It hadn’t been a large vessel, but that didn’t matter. I have always liked catamaran; there’s something confident and secure about them. They seem to possess a poise and balance that other boats do not. I suppose it’s the double hull that gives them that quality. Once, in the West Indies a number of years earlier, I had been out on ‘The Barracuda’. She had been a much, much larger cat, converted to take rich or bored tourists for a day out to some of the smaller islands not far from Grenada. People would swim and then lunch where she anchored before heading back to St George’s. I had been both: rich and bored.
My grandfather, from the European side of the family, had initially made his fortune in paper, and then later in reinforced materials for cartons and ‘paper’ cups. At one time, if you were drinking a take-away coffee almost anywhere in France or Spain there was a fifty-fifty chance you were drinking from one of his. He had come out of the war relatively unscathed and tried to find a trade that would suit him. He settled — more by luck than judgement — on paper, and, having majored on some branch of science before the conflict, found he could put that to good use. He had a knack for invention and a head for business. Actually invention is too strong and precise a word; he could sense an opportunity, back a hunch. His gut instinct — about almost anything — was better than anyone I’d ever met. I used to spend time with him and my grandmother when we came from England to visit; long summer holidays during which my mother would revert to being more and more French, so much so that I used to doubt she would ever return to London and my stilted-seeming father. Which would have been fine for me. But we always did go home, though in my case ‘home’ was always a very loose concept.
Perhaps it was my continental upbringing and the difficulty I had knowing what to do with myself that made conforming to a conventional middle-class life a challenge. I managed to bluff my way through University — changing courses twice — before emerging with a degree in nothing-very-special and an ambition which had no focus. I was bumming my way around the low countries for something to do when the news of grandfather’s death reached me; that and the fact he’d left me a considerable legacy: more money than I knew what to do with and a small villa on the west coast of France in La Rochelle. Hence the rich and bored tourist in the West Indies a couple of years after his death, and later still the early-thirties version of me sitting watching a small catamaran leaving harbour.
“Monsieur Rose?”
His voice accosted me from slightly behind and to my left, breaking into whatever reverie I might have been enjoying at the time. From those two words I could tell his English was very good — as it seemed to be for so many people in the town — and that he wasn’t from around here. There was something of the Parisienne in his accent. When I looked at him his eyes were focussed on the catamaran.
He was ‘dapper’. Rarely had I known that rather archaic English word fit a Frenchman so well. Neat, pristine, tidy; all which applied to him. But what impressed me the most was his sense of colour, the way everything he wore seemed to come from a single harmonious palette. By that point I had taken it into my head that I should be an artist; after all, I had no real financial worries, so why not try and find something I actually enjoyed doing? The rich-and-bored phase had not lasted very long — primarily because it was, in itself, boring — and I had decided to spend some time in my villa to ‘find myself’. Habitually I had previously rented it out, usually to my fellow countrymen (I considered myself English in the main — except when it didn’t suit me), yet now felt it was time for me to take up a more permanent residency, for a while at least. I had been working at the facade of being ‘an artist’ for a small number of years, and had first dabbled at painting. I wasn’t very good, but sold the odd thing. I had been told I had an eye for colour — which was something — hence my assessment of Hergé. For that was how he was to introduce himself. One word only.
“They are very elegant, are they not?” he asked, his eyes still on the boat. I sensed it wasn’t an empty gesture. Indeed, I was to learn that Hergé did nothing at all which could be considered ‘empty’. “My employer has one a little like that. Larger, you understand.”
He had said it with such utter conviction that my reply — “Of course” — was delivered without any irony at all, as if I was fully acquainted with the person concerned.
“I may call you Monsieur Rose?” he asked somewhat belatedly. We had already shaken hands.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I said, choosing to speak English if only through some vague notion that by doing so I might be able to maintain an ‘edge’. I felt I needed one. Though burdened with an unavoidable English twang, my French had become perfectly serviceable though I tended to reserve it for evenings spent with friends or to surprise British tourists when they accosted me with flaccid attempts at fitting in. Mostly — and entirely in caricature — these involved shouting more loudly in their native tongue rather than trying the local patois. It was, I suppose, my mother’s French side coming out in me.
That she had died not long after I left University — and just a few short months before grandfather — had been one of the reasons for the tailspin into which I had started to fall, and which — perhaps paradoxically — had then been exacerbated by the arrival of my inheritance. There was a suggestion among the family that grandfather’s demise had been accelerated by the loss of his daughter, but this notion had more to do with folklore than medicine. The dull matter of fact was that they had both been unlucky. It was a concept — that of being lucky or unlucky — which had fuelled my short period of dissolution and then my subsequently taking up residence in France. I was convinced that at some point my own luck would run out, so I might as well make the best fist of my life as I could.
I wonder how much of that Hergé could see — or already knew — when he addressed me that morning. I now suspect a great deal.
“I understand,” Hergé continued, impervious to my futile attempt to establish any kind of superiority, “that you have taken to attempting sculpture of — shall we say — a modest scale.”
There was no point denying it — though it all depended on your interpretation of the word ‘modest’. Given my relative lack of success as a conventional artist, I had begun to dabble in other mediums and had settled — for then at least — on what I hoped might prove a niche. With the world seemingly obsessed with the recyclable, I had become fascinated with those objects that could not — in practical terms — be recycled; whose materials and components could not be re-used to make something else. I was absorbed with the idea that these single-use, un-recyclable things might yet be transformed into something else — namely sculptures of some kind or another — thereby disproving the idea of them being throw-away. Yes, the majority of things I had begun to construct were abstract monstrosities, yet I began to find a form, a meta-language if you like, which seemed to make sense. To me at least.
“And you know this how?” I asked, deliberately keeping to an unusual sentence construction, just to test him out.
“My employer has a number of your works,” he said, following along smoothly, unflappable, “paintings mainly, but they have also seen one or two of your sculptures. At that little open exposition at the Porte Royale, for example.”
Bizarrely, his use of the French word for ‘exhibition’ in the midst of an entirely English sentence felt like a minor triumph, but it was a sensation immediately dwarfed by the concept that someone had actually bought more than one of my paintings.
“You’re joking,” I said, allowing my non-Gallic roots to show.
“I never joke, Monsieur.”
And I believed him. He was also correct about the scale of my pieces. I cold manage only smallish things in the garage at my little villa (though ‘villa’ is misleading nomenclature in itself, believe me!) and had wanted to expand to take in things like heavy plastic drums, broken electronics. I had no idea what I’d do with them other than some vague notion about the ‘fusion’ between what could be recycled and what could not. I sensed the need for more space.
“My employer has a large outbuilding which is currently not being used, and they would like to offer it to you as a” — here he hesitated slightly over the word — “workshop. It has power and light, is warm, secure; in fact, all you could wish for. It is almost entirely empty, so you could do with it what you wish.”
He paused as if it were the simplest transaction in the world, one in which his statement was all that could possibly needed to form the basis of a contract.
“At what cost?” There is no deal without a quid-pro-quo. It was one of grandfather’s favourite sayings.
“Perhaps it might be better to discuss that with them.” Here he hesitated for the first time. I sensed he knew the answer to my question perfectly and explicitly.
“And yet?” I prompted.
“I believe they would like to be able to keep the odd piece — if they deem it suitable.”
I knew very well what ‘suitable’ meant: commercially viable. This was to be a financial transaction after all.
“Of their choosing?”
Hergé inclined his head in the affirmative.
“And that’s it?”
Even after those first few minutes of our interaction, his hesitation — so obviously a display of uncertainty and therefore also so out of character — should have alerted me more than it did, should have triggered alarm bells somewhere.
“There may be ‘other requests’.”
The words, so heavily encased in apostrophes — even in his excellent English — struck me as so deliberate, yet so imprecise, that I found myself needing to validate not the words but their application. And to do so in French.
“‘Other requests’?”
Hergé smiled. It was to be one of the few times I saw him smile. Although thin, it was neither an unpleasant nor superior gesture. Yet, as I came to know him better, it proved to be about as warm as he could ever be. His subsequent nodding, a circumspect and subtle gesture confirming the obtuse nature of the deal, should have sent me scurrying for cover. But I was on the hook, and Hergé knew that too.
“Then I suppose I should meet your employer,” I said, trying desperately to make it sound as if the deal hadn’t already been struck.
“She will be delighted,” he said.
And had I not blocked them out, I would have heard the alarm bells ringing even more deafeningly.
Hi Ian,
I agree re starting from part 2. If there is any criticism, then I'd say the text is a bit too wordy and 'explanatory' when describing the interaction between Mr Rose and Hergé, and I wonder if more direct dialogue and less inner musing/explanation to the reader might move the action along better? Do continue with the story, it has me eager to see what the 'alarm bells' turn out to foretell.
Greta