The Last Supper (22 page)

We follow our directions: at a junction where four narrow white roads depart in four different directions across the flat fields, and where a few stone houses stand at the crossroads displaying pots of red geraniums but no people, we turn left. The road goes straight, into the yellow distances. Now and again there is a right angle, and then a straight section, and then another right angle. We are driving around the perimeters of fields. Sometimes we pass a small white house, sitting behind its fence. After a while we come to a dip, a kind of ripple in the earth. The lines of trees go down and come up again. The expanse of yellow grain describes it with its level, brush-like fibres, this perfect concavity. It falls and rises; it rolls like the sea. How strange and mysterious the world is, describing itself with such rigorous perfection: it is as though description is its ambition, its only purpose. The road enters the dip, descends and comes up again. In front of us there is a screen of dark-green trees. The light is chalky, faintly unreal. It gives a kind of flatness to everything, like paint; it describes them, the green trees and the white road, the undulating yellow field. We
pass through a pair of stone gates and along a driveway of pale, fine dirt. At the end there is a house. It is a grand house, long and low, light grey, with two rows of shuttered windows. The white, bleaching light is full on its face. The glass in the windows is dark. It is like something someone is remembering. To the left there is a long stone building with high-up windows, like a barn. The terrain is so flat that nothing is visible beyond the screen of trees.

We get out of the car and knock at the door. After a while a girl opens it. She is twenty or so, fine-skinned and tousle-haired, cheerful. She has an air of casual sophistication, of groomed self-absorption, like someone who has returned for the holidays from her small, elite university. She shows us inside: her aunt is not here, she has gone shopping in St-Jean. She will be back in an hour. In the meantime she will show us to our rooms. She consults a vast ledger with yellowed pages that stands on a wooden bureau in the hall. She chews her clean fingernail: she is not entirely certain where her aunt intended to put us. She will go and ask Hélène. We will do her the kindness of waiting in the salon for a moment.

We pass through a doorway into a large, low-ceilinged room. It is dark: the shutters are closed against the afternoon sun. Seams of white light show around their edges. The room is full of furniture. There are antique dressers and cabinets, desks and ornamental tables, a grand piano, bookshelves with glass-fronted doors. On every surface there are great numbers of things: dancing china figurines, items made of bronze and silver and glass, bowls and boxes and lamp-stands, glass paperweights with tiny flowers imprisoned in their depths, goblets of coloured crystal, tapestries and sprays of silk roses, sea chests full of old lace, clocks and bells and a music box beneath a glass dome, faded photo graphs, tea sets, books with threadbare spines, hats and tiny pairs of pearl-buttoned gloves, and in a corner a mannequin, an antique dressmaker’s headless dummy with a rope of beads around her amputated neck. These things are not here by chance: there is no disorder, no
element of chaos in this curious spectacle. Everything has been arranged, that much is clear. There is no dust on the dome of the music box; the velvet-upholstered chaise and chintz-covered armchairs are in their proper places in the gloom. There is no one sitting in them, but they have an atmosphere of animation. An invisible presence animates them. It is like a room in a doll’s house: at any moment, it seems, a large hand could descend, pluck something from its place and rearrange it, in order to further the game.

The girl returns. She has a woman with her, a smooth, rounded, thickset woman in her thirties, with sallow skin and fair hair in two thick plaits. She emanates a stormy kind of vitality. Her powerful eyes are long and dark and heavy lidded; her mouth is large and plastic. She is like one of Picasso’s colossal, Hellenic women who run by the blue water with uplifted arms. She looks at us, unsmiling. She speaks in a low voice to the girl. Then she vanishes again through the doorway.

We are led upstairs, up a creaking staircase and into a room with windows to the front and dark-red wallpaper and a four-poster bed with white curtains. There is another room adjoining it; it is all perfectly pleasant. We thank the girl and she goes away. I sit on the bed. There is a book on the table beside it. I pick it up: it is a small paperback book, very old and faded. The spine crackles when I open it. It is in English. It is a handbook of advice issued by the War Office for soldiers departing for the Western Front. There is a man’s name, written inside the front cover in ink, and a date, 1917. I read a section on the care and maintenance of your rifle and uniform in the trenches. I read about what to do if you encounter your enemy in the road. How will you know he is your enemy? I read instructions for bravery. How will you know how to be brave? To be brave, it is necessary to place a restraint on your self-love. Love has left few traces in this world. Instead: courage, honour, duty. Without love there would be no tragedy. That would be easier, would it not? One might deny the existence of love, for this
reason. I look at the man’s name again, at his handwriting. It is very sad, this book. Why has it been left beside my bed? There is something a little barbed, a little ironic, in its placement. It wishes, almost, to laugh at the quaintness of male valour. It wishes to conjure up the rigidity, the conservatism, the compliance of the male soul.

The children want to go out to the garden. There is a lawn, with winding paths and bushes and trees that mass and obscure one another, so that it is impossible to see where the garden ends. We go down, and out through a pair of glass doors. A warm, dry wind is blowing. I sit on the grass, and the children run away down the paths and disappear. I watch the tops of the trees, turning and bowing in the wind. I watch the grass, its dry shifting filaments electric in the sunlight. Suddenly I am cold: I feel a prickling of the skin, a sense of exposure. I go back upstairs to get a jacket. Passing the bed, I notice that the soldier book is no longer on the table. A different book is there. Someone has come in and changed it. It seems that I am being directed. I do not like being directed. I do not touch the book: I do not want to know what it is. The room is silent, full of white light. I get my jacket and quickly go back outside again. I sit on the grass, and then lie down, on my side. I am very tired. I close my eyes. The white light and the wind feel as though they are in my head. I only know that I have gone to sleep when the sound of a bell wakes me up. It is ringing in the garden, somewhere nearby. It is a handbell: it makes a loud, sonorous, clanging sound. I can hear a woman’s voice calling.
Les enfants!
she shouts.
Les enfants!
I wonder which children she is calling: I haven’t seen any here. I sit up, and observe the fair-haired woman with the strange eyes striding down towards the end of the garden. It is she who is ringing the bell, and calling.
Les
enfants! La maison de jeux est ouverte! La maison de jeux est
ouverte! Les enfants!
A while later she returns, with my daughters running behind her. They stop to speak to me. They are excited. They say that the lady is going to show them the house of games. She has walked on ahead and vanished through the
glass doors. They run after her, and I get stiffly up to follow.

In the house, in the gloom of the salon, there is a woman. She is tall, erect, grey-haired. She has a broad, bare face that is full of creases. She has small, penetrating, merciless eyes. She holds out her hand to greet me. She is Madame, the mistress of this faintly unsettling domain. She is the third and, I can see, the most powerful of the household triumvirate. While she speaks, I calculate: she is the aunt of the young girl, and the mother of the saturnine Hélène, the fair-haired woman who was ringing the bell. I see that they are a caucus, a set. I compliment her on her house, her wondrous collection of
objets
, and she eyes me, smiling like a snake.

The children have gone to the
maison de jeux
, she says. My daughter has opened it for them.

I say that it is very kind of her: the children will be pleased to find some toys to play with. It is very sensible, I say, to have such a facility. It might stop them trying to play with her antiques.

They can touch whatever they like, she says, smiling, as long as they do not break it.

Unexpectedly, the children return. I hear them running down the hallway. They fly into the salon: their faces are strange. I ask if they have seen the house of games. Yes, they say. Why did they not stay there? They do not reply. Madame is looking at them. She wears an expression of cold amusement on her face. I sense that she is offended, or disappointed: I sense that they have failed. I take their hands and ask them to show it to me, and they lead me through the hall and out across the white light of the drive towards the barn. At the door, they stop. It’s in there, they say. They do not want to come in. They have seen it already.

I go through the door, out of the white light. The barn is dark. There is music playing. It is piano music, Debussy, coming from somewhere in the middle of the large, open room. I am in a kind of tunnel of black draperies. I push my way through and find myself face to face with a mannequin. She is
tall and flaxen-haired, and she wears a long sequinned gown. For a moment I am startled: I thought she was real. Her hand is outstretched, fingers splayed, as though I might be expected to bend down and kiss them. But her eyes – her eyes are so large and liquid, so intricate in their irises, so filled with expression. In the end it is her hair that gives her away. She wears a beaded headdress with a blue feather stitched in the band, and her yellow synthetic hair curls stiffly around it. Beside her there is a wardrobe with its doors open. Inside there are many shelves. They are crammed with female finery, with delicate shoes and evening bags, with fans and feather boas and costume jewellery. It is a little sinister – it is a kind of mausoleum: there is something of the bureaucracy of death about the rows of old handbags, the neatly stacked pairs of worn shoes.

I move on, along the black-draped corridor. There are two more mannequins, a man and a woman. They are in wedding clothes: the woman wears a ruffled white dress with a big, bell-shaped skirt, and a veil in her hair. The man is in morning dress. They are arm in arm, looking ecstatically into each other’s eyes. Next there is a whole scene, lit with bright electric stage lights. There are children, and a baby in a cradle. There is a little dog, and a cat playing with a ball of wool. It is a room in a family house: there is a man sitting in an armchair and a woman in an apron, and a table with a cloth and plates laid out. They are so strange, so lifelike. They have such a touching air of mortality: they seem more mortal than people of flesh and blood. I pass a woman in silver lamé, two children ardently holding hands, an aviator with a stricken, ghastly face. Then more women, delicate, with tapered fingertips and fronded eyes, with slender necks and heads inclined, all clad in chiffon and satin and silk. They stand on every side, in attitudes of tragic modesty, so beautiful and forlorn; and everywhere there are cupboards of clothes and hats and jewellery, gorgeous and redundant, in whose arc of possibility, of destiny, their frozen plastic forms are contained. It is their atom of life, of art, that
imprisons them. They are like painted women, sealed in their instant of reality. Is it so brief, so fleeting, the moment of perception? How is the world to be comprehended, described, if instants are all there can be?

I turn a corner and there is the woman, Hélène, sitting on a red velvet sofa. She has been waiting. She looks at me with her strange, slanting eyes. Her face is defiant and vulnerable. She reaches next to her to adjust the volume of the piano music. She tells me that the
maison de jeux
is all her own work. She created it herself, the whole spectacle. She has been collecting clothes and mannequins since she was a child. Her mother allowed her to use the barn: she made her first model when she
was sixteen. Since then it has been her life. She has always lived here, with her mother. She has collected mannequins from many different periods, in order to demonstrate historical variations in the perception of the female form. For her, women are the victims of perception. In the mannequins she has found a new means of expressing the reality of the female body.

I say that she has painted their eyes beautifully. It is incredible: they almost seem to be alive.

She looks at me eerily. I see something in her expression, a flash of lawlessness, almost of violence. I see the soul of the artist open briefly before me like a chasm and disclose its dark and pagan power.

I didn’t paint their eyes, she says. They came with their eyes like that. That is just how they are.

Outside the light is so strong that for a moment the world is all white, bleached of its content. I call the children. I try to summon them out of this emptiness. It is like the first stroke of the brush on a clean canvas: my voice, causative. In a minute they will come. I want them to. I want there to be something where now there is nothing.