The Sun at Night
Tales from the Auvergne- Les Contes Auvergne. Part One. "The only blonde in St. Etienne-sur-Bois"...
He, Monsieur H. was the only honest man in St. Etienne. Everyone who was anyone in the town knew that.
“Anybody who thinks they’re not a snob”, thought Monsieur H, is an even “bigger fool than I am”. He was a snob, and proud of it. Wearing social distinction like a purple birthmark for all the world and his wife to see.
He disliked Outsiders and Insiders equally. Did not care for Jews (who ran the government in Paris), or Blacks either way. The lower orders he despised for their self-defeating behaviour passed down the generations like heirlooms of stupidity. Drunkenness. Congenital Laziness. Debauched, unthought, incestuous breeding.
The Upper Easte Monsieur distained for the crime of complacency. For it surely was a crime to squander the easy, buttery privilege of birth. The supposed creme de la creme at the Sorbonne he had observed. Rich and Thick.
He was tired of egalite; the dishonesty of having to like the unlikeable. He didn’t want Algerians, not even white ones. Baguettes he called them. They were somehow worse than blacks. Let them find their own St. Etienne-sur-Bois.
Snobbery, not money makes the world go around. Not that it went around that much in St. Etienne-sur-Bois. Even that new woman, who called herself Madame Hinkley, (though he doubted she had ever been married to a Mr. Hinkley). Even she failed to lighten up the half-lit place that was St. Etienne. Etienne, in early October, was like… like seeing a woman of a certain age without her make-up.
“Mrs Hinkley”. She was of an un-certain age. Neither young or old. Thin nor fat. Tall or short. Just as Etienne was too hot in Summer and too cold in Winter. Just a little too far from Paris, yet not far enough from the sea to make people give up and stay. Not a village, yet neither a town- despite slapping “Ville” all over the maps and signposts. St. Etienne was a lie. France was a lie. As he was. As we all are.
Appearances. “Mrs Hin-k-ley”, he scoffed into his tumbler. But there was no one to notice. No one to tell him he was wrong, quite wrong. But you know Les Anglais, the English abroad, they would say, and do, anything to maintain appearances. He had imagined Madame Hinkley doing many things since she arrived in nowhere from nowhere. At night, in the lace-and-silk of summer night. Seen her, at the window, long white kid gloves, closing the heavy brocade curtains of her chambre de lit.
Yes he had imagined her. One too many times. But enough was never enough. To drink in her beauty with his half bottle of red as it grew dark, was an insatiable thirst. Even if she were a peroxide blonde. How he hated false blondes. Mother had been the last one in Etienne. False anything. Perhaps he had fallen, fallen short of his promises to himself because he had seen Madame dancing; dancing alone- a cha-cha-cha- on what she called, had he known she was Canadian, her “sun porch”. Perhaps it was hearing "If you were the only girl in the world…” drifting to him like her cigarette smoke, from an old-fashioned wind-up graphophone which, along with some long carving knives hanging forgotten on the back of a door, were the only possessions of the previous owner she had found in the otherwise empty house. “A Garden of Eden, just made for two…“
The falsity of snobbery, its self-necrotising envy, that was the root of it all. So Monsieur H. told himself and anyone who would listen at an empty rattan table, the one with the wonky leg, at the the empty bar. Yes, he could still be charming across a rattan table. When he wanted to. When he wanted something. Offering to take that American visitor to the church. Two miles up hill and damn all when you get there. But the visitor had wanted to remember The War. The War everyone else wanted to forget in the swirls of dust. For the residents of St. Etienne-sur-Bois they were neither Victors or Losers. Lib-er-a-ted from what to what exactly. Still tenants of Le Seigneur, now the son, up in Paris. Whom no one saw, or now would have recognised “The boy” had he walked naked into the Bar Magritte. Naked. He would have recognised Madame Hinkley, naked. He smiled into his glass. And raised it to himself in the frosted mirror behind the counter. Caliban enraged at seeing his reflection for the first time in a puddle of water.
Yes, yes he could be charming. As he had been to the two young ladies last summer. Danish. Flat-chested Sorbonne archaeology students; cycling- “dykes-on-bikes”- as he remembered them. Looking for burial tumuli so they said in the newspaper, after they both went missing. And did they know about the ruins of the amphitheatre in the woods- the “Bois” that gave Etienne its mouthful of a name ? The one that they said did not exist. He accidentally-on-purpose let slip about it, skilfully he had to admit. About finding the red tiles and sugar cubes of mosaics - tesserae- yes, that was the word. And let their arrogance and wetted imagination do the rest, as they knelt in front of him, scrapping back the mushroom-scented earth for Roman bricks, like the pigs they were rooting for truffles.
Charming. But not for too long. Not in one sitting. After desserts and coffee, after that chestnut-hot afternoon he had to go home and throw something at something; the stack of old newspapers scattered onto the flagstones of the hall floor, after he had banged the shin of his leg. Yellowing, half-read, like him. Mocking him. “Too mean to turn on the electric light, I suppose”… “Too lazy to replace the bulb”… That’s what a wife would surely have said. Or his sister, had she lived to be old enough to be as disappointed in the future as he was.
The glass, like Monsieur H, like St. Etienne in early October, was always empty. It, his life, was one bead of that filthy, cheap house wine which he ran round and around the bottom of the glass.
But all this and that still didn’t change the facts- snobbery, made society. It didn’t make capitalism work, it was Capitalism. And he had read Marx and Engels. Well not every word, and even though they were Jewish- and Illuminati- more than probably. Yes, he wasn’t afraid to say he was anti-semite. This had been Vichy France after all. As he would have reminded his wife, had he had a wife to remind what a fool he was. He might not be many things, but one thing he was not, Monsieur H. was not a hypocrite.
If he ever got the chance to actually speak to Madame Hinkley, that was the first thing he would tell her about himself. Perhaps the only thing. And she would think the rumours she had already heard, about his eccentricity, the drink-soaked, sloe-berry infused madness of his family, were all true. No smoke without fire. Isn’t that what they in English. And Madame would decide, with a smile, like the others, not to employ him after all. He would not get the chance see to the leak behind the bath in her bathroom upstairs. Or the odd noise the boiler made under the kitchen trap door; which someone else would discover, behind the copper, hid the mummified body of an unfortunate lost cat of some previous owner. Mother would have told him, he would have been too polite to mention it. Not to an English lady far from home. Even had he had known she was a Canadian and made of sterner hardwood.
Or unblock the cesspit. Madame would not mention it even had she known the word in French. The thingy she could not find at the end of the overgrown garden. It was mentioned in the agent’s particulars. Of that she would be certain. Talking, he imagined, like Like Miranda addressing Caliban in that play he could not the remember the name of; the one he had seen at school in Rouen.
No. Monsieur H, perhaps because he was too honest, too inappropriate, would not be the one to find it for her. That bastard Marron would find it. He would get the work. And she would write back to girlfriends- singular or plural he did not like to think- back home; about how she had found “The perfect man” for her renovations. And the French did work hard, as long as you stood over them after those “interminable” luncheons. But Monsieur H. consoled himself: he wasn’t, did not want to be, “a perfect man”. He may be drunk this evening he thought, raising his empty glass to the empty room: but Marron would still be a bastard in the morning. And he, Monsieur H. would still be honest. The only honest man in Etienne-sur-Bois. Peroxide honest. And she, Madame Hinkley, “Mrs Hinkley”, whatever she was, still the only blonde. Even if she were a peroxide blonde.
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