A Fairly Good Time Page 4

  3

  SECALG was what Shirley could read on the wrong side of the awning at Pons. Beyond SECALG were plane trees and a Sisley sky.

  “I’ve just this second remembered something,” said Shirley. “Oh Jesus. Sorry, Mrs. Castle. But it’s come back to me. I’m supposed to be having lunch at Philippe’s mother’s today.”

  “Call ’em up and say you’ll be late,” said Mrs. Castle. Ignoring all that her travels must have taught her by now, she said, “Tell that waitress to bring you a phone.”

  “I remember now. That’s where Philippe is. He went to collect his sister at the airport early this morning. She’s been in New York. They must have gone straight from the airport to his mother’s. I was supposed to join them there. They’ll say I forgot on purpose. He’s at his mother’s . . .”

  “Bad place for a man,” said Mrs. Castle, drumming her ring on the table for a waitress. “What’ll it be, Shirl?”

  He had not been trying to frighten her. If she had looked carefully instead of mooning over Geneviève, she would have found a note. She imagined his writing on the pad beside the telephone: “Colette is back, with a lady wrestler from Hamburg she met in the Museum of Modern Art. Maman hopes the wrestler has a brother and that this strange adventure will lead to marriage. We are expecting you for lunch.”

  Yes, they were expecting her for the Sunday roast veal and to hear Colette’s contemptuous account of the meals, clothes and manners of another city. They would wait for Shirley and then, having made up face-saving excuses in aid of Philippe, begin Colette’s favorite hors d’oeuvres of egg in aspic. “This is the worst thing I could be giving my liver,” Colette would remark, mopping up the yolk with a bit of bread. They would eat sparingly of the veal, for meat created cancer in Madame Perrigny’s anxious universe. Much of the conversation, once New York had been disposed of, would center on the danger of food, of eating in restaurants, of eating anywhere but here, and finally of what even this luncheon would cost in terms of languor, migraine, cramps, insomnia and digestive remorse. Philippe’s mother cooked well but only because she could not cook badly: she did not know how it was done. Yet the fact of eating alarmed her. Peristalsis was an enemy she had never mastered. Her intestines were of almost historical importance: soothed with bismuth, restored with charcoal, they were still as nothing to her stomach in which four-course meals remained for days, undigested, turning over and over like clothes forgotten in a tumble dryer.

  Colette sympathized with her mother’s afflictions, often shared them, and added to them one of her own—a restless liver. If Colette’s quiescent liver were suddenly roused by an egg, an ounce of chocolate, a glass of wine, or even one dry biscuit too many, it stretched, doubled in size, and attempted to force its way out through her skin. By locking her hands against her right side, just under the ribs, Colette would manage to snap it back in place. Shrinking the liver was something else again: this meant lying down and drinking nothing but unsalted water in which carrots and parsley had been boiled for two hours, until the enraged liver subsided. Every second weekend as a matter of course, Colette went to bed for forty-eight hours, drank her broth and got up with a liver considerably weakened though never permanently vanquished.

  Soon after she met Philippe, Shirley invited his sister and mother to dinner. She had not known the degree of involvement this invitation suggested or even that only uneducated persons entertained on a Saturday night. Curiosity goaded the Perrignys across Paris on a common evening. They arrived twenty-five minutes too soon. Colette bore a ritual bunch of carnations strangled in wire and wreathed with asparagus fern that shed fine green needles all the way up the stairs. Goya people, Shirley had thought when she saw them grouped together on her landing—the frail, arthritic woman with her dark gypsy’s eyes, and Colette, carved and fringed and dipped in gold, like an antique armchair, and there, behind them, a new, watchful Philippe. Fifteen minutes before their arrival, if only they had been punctual, Shirley would have made her bed, emptied the ashtrays and cleared the living room of its habitual scruff of scarves, newspapers, coat hangers, rainboots and dying flowers. She was barefoot, dressed in a towel bathrobe she held shut with her left hand. She knew that this meeting was irreparable. She remembered how the parents of her first husband had looked at her and how she had seen herself in their eyes.

  “Philippe, give them a drink, will you?” she said in English. “This damn robe hasn’t got a belt and I can’t let go.”

  “They don’t drink. Don’t worry but please, please put some clothes on.”

  She heard them murmuring as she dressed. The tone was only of small talk. She said to the no one in particular she named St. Joseph, “Do something. Help me out.”

  She made them sit around her living-room table and she solemnly lighted candles, which led them to feel, she learned later, that her notions of elegance had been obtained in Latin Quarter restaurants. They then looked at the large dish in the center of the table and said this of it:

  The Mother: “What is there on that dish that could harm us?”

  The Daughter: “Everything.”

  They picked their way through the four kinds of herring and the potato salad dressed with dill. Glasses of aquavit remained untouched before their plates. Philippe was courteous but bewildered: Whatever had possessed Shirley? What had made her think they would enjoy an outlandish Scandinavian meal? He had told her about his sister and mother: Shirley had listened, but had she understood? She caught these questions across the table, or thought she did, and signaled, “I am sorry,” which it seemed she had always been saying and would say forever. The Perrigny women in the meantime tried to eat some of the pork and prunes. They looked at the pastries and looked away. They nibbled black bread and pretended to sip the Danish beer. They were not shocked or offended; they were simply appalled, distressed and terrified of being poisoned.

  The disastrous first meeting had not prevented the marriage but merely made the Perrigny women prudent. When they came to visit now, they accepted nothing but china tea. They bowed their heads and exchanged looks Philippe never saw and murmured opinions he never intercepted. For Philippe the sole result of the Scandinavian dinner was his fear that after he and Shirley were married they would never be able to invite normal people to share a meal: their guests would go away anxious and hungry or else stricken with colitis and botulism. He began her education. He taught her not to serve spaghetti because it was messy to eat and made it seem as if they could not afford to pay a butcher. He discouraged any dish in the nature of a blanquette or a bourguignon partly because he did not trust her to prepare it and because it might seem to others that the Perrignys were disguising second-rate cuts of meat. As he took his place at the head of the table and watched the passing round of the approved anemic veal and the harmless sugary peas he would say, “My wife is a North American, but I taught her about food.”

  •

  Discreetly, so that Mrs. Castle would not misunderstand and be offended, Shirley stole a look at her watch. Fifteen used plates were now rinsed and stacked in her mother-in-law’s kitchen. Boiling water dripped through coffee grounds into a china pot. If Shirley hurried she might arrive in time to be forgiven. She imagined herself here, in Pons, summoning a portable telephone. There was no such thing; nevertheless, clean, light, a new sort of foreigner, it circled the table and alighted between Mrs. Cat Castle’s two guidebooks and her tapestry-covered handbag. She saw herself dialing her mother-in-law’s number, listened to five or six shrill signals, and gave it up. She was afraid of the Perrignys; that was the truth of it. The Perrignys, when they fixed their sceptical brown eyes on Shirley, were like the people in Italy who long ago had stared because Shirley was wearing shorts. She saw today’s sun shooting straight over Paris. It missed Madame Perrigny’s dining room, which remained dark as the sea, and bathed instead the houses across the square in a wash of yellow-gray. The Perrigny windows were shut against drafts and the noise of traffic, and their white net curtains were drawn tigh
t lest someone flying low in a helicopter try to peer in and see what the Perrignys were having for lunch. The phantom telephone on the table at Pons dissolved. Shirley said to herself, I tried to call them but they wouldn’t answer. That was the way to disburden oneself—to move away from guilt and disaster! Her mother-in-law’s dining room at once became sweetly sunny, as friendly as Pons. Shirley put together the bunch of flowers she would dispatch by way of apology. Freesias, daisies, primroses and white violets were borne to their destination by a boy on a bicycle; they were lifted out of crackling paper by Madame Perrigny herself, who then, while thriftily trying to save the three pins that kept the paper fast, ran one into her thumb. She was rushed to the police station, from there to a hospital, and given anti-tetanus serum. Shirley’s excuses were disposed of: she was free to obey her mother’s letter and pay attention to Mrs. Castle, who had known her forever—had known her before she was born.

  Poor odd old Mrs. Castle had undergone a European tour with all its discomfort and loneliness in order to show her children back in Canada she did not need them. She had acquired a Salzburger cape and hat. Beneath the hat, butterfly spectacles flashed. She dropped the menu, which she had been studying as if it were in code, adjusted the hat so that it sat jauntily, tucked back her sleeves, and said on a long Western note and in a single breath, “Well, Shirl, I am surprised a smart young lady like yourself had never heard about Pons Tearoom, the best pastry in Paris.”

  “I’ve heard of it. I’ve even been here. I just didn’t know it was so famous.”

  “Let’s hope it meets your standards.”

  Sarcasm made the old woman familiar; her voice might have risen out of this morning’s letter.

  “We are from Canada,” said Mrs. Castle, preparing to turn the waitress to stone should she attempt to deny it. “Tell her what you want,” she said to Shirley. She opened a notebook, spread it on the table and wrote “Pons.” When she had completed the word she drew a line through it, saying, “That’s done.”

  “Coffee!” she shouted suddenly.

  She continued writing: “Went there seventh Sunday after Easter (Pentecost) with Shirl.” Looking up, she said to the waitress. “Have you got any of those Scotch pancakes? It so happens I’ve been in Scotland.” She spoke sharply to Shirley, “Translate that, will you? Don’t be shy. Never be shy about who you are or what you might want.” She wrote: “Green walls. Wicker. Red plush seats. Red carpet, pattern Prince of Wales feathers (or ferns?). Morning sun does not come from park. Comes from entirely opposite direction. Fielding wrong. Satin shades on wall brackets. Like my bedroom. Geraniums—kind of peaky. Artistic tables. Mirrors look like old silvering.”

  “Don’t read upside down,” she said, flashing the maniac glasses. “If you’re interested in what I’m writing, speak up and say so. It happens to be for a long story I’m going to tell into a tape recorder once I get home. I’ll put the whole thing on tape and I’ll get my family together and they can spend a Sunday listening and then they’ll have had it. Nobody looks at pictures and even with pictures I’d have to talk. I’ve thought it out. What’d she say about the Scotch pancakes? Never mind. I eat any old thing. This is my third breakfast today.”

  Eclairs replaced Scotch pancakes in the visitor’s memory. She recalled having been told to try the éclairs at Pons. She chose the two that had the thickest and glossiest icing and began to eat them at once, remarking to Shirley that she had always sacrificed herself for others. She had put her own wishes low on the list. Her children understood that now and they were remorseful. The boys were married to selfish little snobs, and Phyllis hadn’t done all that well either.

  Shirley, drinking black coffee as if it were black poison, saw the panic of old age and the need to eat everything soon.

  “There’s only one mother in anybody’s life,” said Mrs. Castle. Her triumph sounded slightly mournful: Would Mrs. Castle’s children love her better because she was unique? “Your mother has been dragging around the whole winter, Shirl,” she said. “Only stomach flu—so she said. Nine times out of ten, stomach is cancer. What do you hear from her?”

  “I’ve just had this long letter.”

  “Speak up, child. I can’t hear when I’m chewing.”

  “I’ve had this long letter. It came yesterday but I didn’t get a chance to read it until today. It’s about bluebells, all the history of bluebells. I don’t know why. She says she can’t make out my handwriting.”

  “She’s great on botany,” Mrs. Castle said.

  “I told her I thought I was messing up my marriage, doing all the wrong things. I can read her writing but I don’t always know what she’s driving at. One time she asked me to mark the Grandes Rousses on a map and send her the map airmail. Who was to know they were mountains? They could have been nude dancers. Philippe knew but he was away on an assignment, and by the time he came back and said they were mountains she said it was too late. Too late for what? Another time she wanted a picture of the castle and dungeon at Nogent-le-Rotrou. Philippe knew about that too, or he found out, and he did get a picture for me. But it was a couple of weeks later and she didn’t even thank us. She may have been looking for Jericho again. The original Jericho, the one that was destroyed, well, she says it was really in Europe. She didn’t say, so I never knew.”

  “You shouldn’t have mentioned that part about marriage,” Mrs. Castle said. “Margaret wouldn’t like that. She’s a spiritual kind of person. She wouldn’t appreciate it at all. Your father was a very affectionate man. He’d try and hold her hand and that at the beginning, and she’d stare him down and say ‘Teddy, don’t be dirty.’ She’s more for the spiritual side of things. Teddy got used to her. I think he even got so he liked her.”

  “I never heard her being like that,” said Shirley. “She was sensible about everything, except England, and she’d talk about anything I wanted so long as it wasn’t personal.”

  “Why didn’t you bring him along?” said Mrs. Castle. “I invited the two of you, as I remember.”

  Shirley tipped her cup back and forth. She said, “I forgot to tell him.” Before she could be asked to repeat she shouted, “FORGOT! He couldn’t have come anyway because of meeting his sister. Anyway I didn’t know where he was. When I got home this morning he wasn’t there. He’d left a light on, as if he’d gone out before daybreak, and there were two sleeping pills for me. When we have a fight he never fights. He just listens and corrects my French sometimes and then he gives me a couple of phenobarb. When I saw them there in a saucer I knew he meant there was no fight, or else the fight was over.”

  “What do you mean, when you got home this morning? What do you do all night—ride round in buses? Put your cup down. If you want more coffee say so, but don’t play with cold food.”

  “It was so simple, Mrs. Castle. It was simple for me but I’ve made a mess of it. I’ve got this friend by the name of Renata. She’s not Italian. That’s just her name. She had to have this abortion so I got her the address and I went with her. Don’t tell Mother, by the way. That was Friday. Next day, which was yesterday, she called up and said she needed me and to tell Philippe anything, to say I was going to a party, anything at all. You see, the person involved, the person responsible, I mean . . .”

  “I can safely say that I don’t want to hear about him. From the word go, Shirl, what did it have to do with you?”

  “To do with me? Nothing, except she said she needed me. She tried to kill herself and all that. Not very hard, but still . . . it might have surprised her and worked. I couldn’t tell Philippe anything because abortion is serious here. You can be in trouble just for knowing about it. I wouldn’t ever want him to guess I was the one who got her the address. I’m never quite sure just how Catholic he is. I know one thing—he thinks Renata is a pest and that I waste my life and my time over people who aren’t worth a thought. But how can you tell what somebody’s worth? What’s the measure?”

  “All this is your mother’s doing,” said Mrs. Castle. �
��Her whole family was like you. Honest to God, any old bum your grandfather could pick up off the street he’d bring home. There was always some deadbeat eating fried eggs in your grandmother’s kitchen. And your grandmother used to read the Word of God at them till there wasn’t a Christian left among the unemployed. Well, you’d better tell your poor dumb husband something.”