The French Duke's Daughter

No sex in this chapter, or for a few chapters yet. We old men take a while to get started. However, I hope it is not entirely unerotic, in its setting and in the flirtation of two awkward young people.

I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1

In the summer of 1983, having fallen out with my father's girlfriend, whose interest in me had moved beyond playful, and lacking the courage to seek refuge with my mother, her husband and my step-siblings, I emptied my savings account and took a ferry to France. I hitch-hiked south, avoiding cities, and found work on an estate near Veroix, in Poitou-Charentes, where I spent three magical months that changed the course of my life.

The estate belonged to the celebrated writer, Marc Cannot, whose long, slow novels endeared themselves to French intellectuals by depicting sexual behaviour as a dreary farce that enslaved the human potential for transcendence. He was at the height of his fame that year, having given a series of lectures at the Sorbonne on the illusory nature of meaning. The fashion for celebrating futility which marked the death of the left in French political thought a few years later, can be reliably credited, in no small part, to his vapid influence.

He was drinking coffee with his wife and step-daughter outside the cafe in the square when I sat down at the table beside them. I took no particular notice of them. I had just walked from the edge of the town, where my lift had dropped me at a junction on the main road. I was tired, and the sense of freedom with which I had begun my adventures had, after a few weeks of travelling, worn thin. I was glad of a seat, and of the shade of the two beech trees that marked that edge of the square. Besides, a middle aged man and his family were unlikely to catch my eye in those days: I was eighteen, young and conceited, but also introverted and lonely. Maria, his step daughter, although within the age range I would consider relevant to me, was wearing a vast, silly hat and large dark glasses, and was not immediately eye-catching. Her beauty, that I soon came to appreciate, was a beauty of composure: regular, rather than perfect features; demure, rather than inviting, and in that first view, I missed it. His wife; his third, younger wife, Yvette, was, in a Parisian way, a lovely-looking woman, but she dressed and sat and spoke with such a pronounced self regard that I took an instant dislike to her. It was not only her aloofness or the stupid eighties fashions she favoured that made her ugly to me; she had a selfishness and conceit that seemed to be inflamed by being in her husband's arrogant shadow.

I caught their eyes, however. I was slender then, which would surprise you if you were to see me now, and at the height of my youthful good looks. I had played rugby, swum and boxed at my awful boarding school, and my arms, chest and shoulders were sufficiently well developed to stretch my long sleeved rugby shirt in a flatteringly artless way, and my muscularity was accentuated by my slim hips. My face, far from being disfigured by the broken nose I had suffered in the boxing ring the year before, had been improved by the injury, giving my late-teenage insipidity a spurious look of brooding intensity, which was exaggerated by my slight short-sightedness: I had a tendency to frown, which made me look as though I was deep in thought, when I was really just myopic.

I was aware of their attention as I ordered my coffee. The waiter was a classic provincial French server, wearing too-tight jeans and behaving rudely, though he thought he was being cool. I had become used to the type already, and was not offended, but I didn't know then that his pose was not for my benefit, but for the local celebrity at the next table.

Marc heard me order in my reasonable schoolboy French and, after the waiter had returned to the café, spoke to me in English.

"You are English?"

It is a loaded overture in France: I had already endured some aggression from people whose contempt for my nationality (a feeling I shared) slipped over into antipathy. This family, though, looked middle class, respectable in a bohemian way. He had long, wavy hair, with grey beginning to lighten the black, and was expensively dressed. His wife did not look over, and seemed to have tensed, but the girl, who was, perhaps, in her early twenties, stared at me with frank interest. I glanced at her, but her eyes were hidden and her figure, smothered in a loose sweat shirt and with a light scarf covering her neck and chest, seemed unprepossessing.

"I am," I replied, in French.

"A student?" He, too reverted to his native tongue.

"Not at the moment."

Something about me must have interested him. He asked me a few questions, and, almost immediately, offered me a job at his country house.

"Our gardener, Jacques, is getting old. He has been thinning the woods, and I hired foresters to do the felling, but we have half a barn of logs that need cutting and splitting..."

I was intrigued, but also suspicious. It seemed strange that he should invite a perfect stranger into his home. I asked him whether he was sure, and he shrugged, in a theatrically Gallic way, and said,

"Yes, sure. Why not?"

Veroix was a small town, he explained and, although his family had lived in the area for many generations, he was more of a Parisian, having studied and worked there since he was ten. The inward looking community was suspicious of him, and he grew tired of their judgement, their sense of owning him.

I sympathised with the feeling of being an outsider in your own community. I, too, had been sent away to school when I was young (younger, in fact, than he had been), and that seemed to make a connection for him. He dropped any pretence of reserve and began to tell me about himself, in tones of slightly rehearsed confidence.

He talked about his writing and boasted about how busy he was. Because of his success, he was away from the estate for most of the summer, in Paris, giving appearances and interviews, gracing television discussions with his leonine, languid presence. He had, however, managed to make a short visit, this weekend, at the beginning of June. His wife and step-daughter had come with him and would remain in the country. He seemed to lay particular emphasis on this information, and I felt a charge between them all, but I was unable to understand it.

His portentousness added to my impression that he was not as self-assured as he pretended to be. I felt a sense of suspicion towards this clearly unhappy family; a tickle of possible danger, but I was tempted as well. Besides, I was running short of money. I had been putting off contacting my father for more: the thought of it was like a shadow over my freedom, and the promise of being able to continue for a while longer on my own resources was appealing.

Mme Cannot did not seem pleased about the arrangement, and barely acknowledged me beyond the briefest of greetings when her husband introduced us. She sat in stiff silence in the front of their elegant vintage Citroen saloon as he drove us out of the town. Marie, however, seemed to relax. I was beside her in the back seat, my backpack between us, and we made awkward conversation, although I can't now remember how it began. I noticed, for the first time, that she had a lovely mouth; broad, with well-defined, full lips, and that her eyes were brown. Over the purr of the engine, her voice was soft, and I had trouble following some of her French. She was a student in Paris, at the Ecole Normale Superiere, although she called it ENS, which I didn't immediately understand. She rolled her eyes when I asked for clarification, but it was done with a slight artifice, as though she enjoyed correcting my ignorance.

We travelled through glorious country, along roads that became increasingly narrow. Marc drove carefully, treasuring his car, and I could relax and enjoy the French summer landscape. At a turning perhaps half a mile beyond a hamlet of half a dozen stone-walled houses, we entered an unpaved road that ran into a large wood. Marc, who had been silent in the front of the car, called back to me, telling me that these were the woods of his estate, and that they had been in his family since the revolution. I thought I should ask for more, prompt a story, but didn't wish to feed his vanity. I was already developing a bit of a dislike for my benefactor.

The track was pitted and winding, and with each swing of the elegant car's lush suspension we were thrown around the plush leather seating. I held on to the handle in the roof above the door, and braced my hand against the seat.

Around another turn, we came to a high wall up which undergrowth, brambles, ivy and even small trees had grown. Grass grew along its tiled top, but the great archway across the track, enclosing a pair of spiked iron gates, was clear and looked well tended for. Marc asked me to open the gates and I got out of the car and went to them. In the centre of each was an enamel shield, divided into three sections, bearing a red field of castles, a blue field of fleur-de-lis and a red lion rampant. They were crested with a simple crown, which, thinking back to a childhood interest in mediaeval warfare, I recognised as ducal.

The gates were well maintained. The latch slid up without resistance and they swung open easily on oiled hinges. I secured the left hand one and held the right open as Marc drove through, and then closed them and got back into the car. I was struck, as I closed the gates, by a sense of having passed through more than a physical boundary: there was a stillness to this place, even with a slight breeze blowing through the treetops. The leaves on the trees had not yet lost their spring freshness, but everything I saw seemed settled, tangled, contented.

With a muttered thanks, Marc drove on. The woods ended abruptly, and from their shade we were back in bright sunlight, looking at several acres of parkland, in the middle of which stood a glorious, slightly dilapidated, French manoir, much, much older than I had expected; a cross between a low castle and a farm settlement. I had been expecting something grander, perhaps an eighteenth century manor, as I had realised that Marc was clearly a very wealthy man, and I was disarmed by the charm of the building. It was built in an L shape around a cobbled courtyard that had a stone well, topped by a vast manual pump, in the centre. As we passed behind the house, I saw a large walled garden, a lawn that lay between the house and a hedged swimming pool and a small orchard of ancient, pollarded apples and pears. At the far end of the house were various outbuildings, including a large barn, that seemed in better repair than the rest of the estate.

We parked by a stable filled with the junk of decades: bicycles, prams, furniture, a plough; old tin advertisements for cigarettes, petrol, Pernod; all lit by bars of sunlight through dust-dimmed windows. Mme Cannot got out immediately and headed for the house; Marc told Marie, in stiff tones, to make me at home and put me in the attic room. I thanked him, and he shrugged, his earlier garrulousness seeming to have dissipated on the ride. I felt he might be regretting his impulsive invitation.

Marie avoided her step-father's eyes, and didn't acknowledge his instructions, but helped me to get my back pack over my shoulder and led me to a door into a stone-floored kitchen, dominated by a huge, nineteenth-century stove that was pumping out heat, despite the weather. A woman of about forty, dressed in a boiler suit, and another, younger woman, in jeans, t-shirt and an apron, were bottling jam. The smell of the boiling fruit was like a drug in the still air of the shaded room. Marie introduced me to them. The cook's name was Elodie; her assistant, a pretty, plump woman with a dimpled smile, was Laure.

We passed through a passage lined with shelves of pans and crockery, and into a grand square hallway, lit by coloured sunlight that came through the stained glass above the door. The space smelled venerable; of wood smoke and polish and stale tobacco. A large, dark stairway took us up onto a gallery and through, into the right angled corridor of the upper rooms. Half way along, Marie opened a door and showed me a bathroom.

"You share this with Laure. We have our family bathroom." I looked in. It was a large room, tiled on both floor and walls. A huge enamel bath, that looked as though it was at least a hundred years old, had a circular shower rail above it, and a shower head on its wall side. The water closet looked like a comedy Victorian contraption, with a wooden seat and a wall-mounted cistern from which a chain hung, ending in an ornate porcelain handle. Soaps and bottles lined the netted windowsill, and an old enamel mug held a sprig of lavender.

Along the corridor, Marie opened a narrower door, and went through it, up a tight, dark flight of stairs, almost a ladder. At the top was a tiny landing, on each side of which was a door. She opened the right hand one and squeezed, sideways, through it.

I followed her with difficulty, getting caught up with my backpack, so that I had to back out, nervous of the stairs, and take it off my shoulder before I could enter the room. It was not at all what I was expecting.

Long and broad, with a steeply arched ceiling, it spread out to the right of the door across what must have been the full width of this part of the house. In the opposite wall, to my left, the slope of the ceiling was broken by a high pair of heavy, dark curtains. Marie went to them and, with what I thought might have been a slight flourish, drew them, and the room was flooded with light. A pair of French windows, covered with net curtains, dominated that wall. The light gave the room a soft glow, which fell upon the smoothness of her cheek, and highlighted the shape of her small, high breasts beneath her sweatshirt.

Something within me gave way. The journey from Veroix had had a quiet, breathless stillness to it, as if I was truly stepping out of real life, but I felt now, for the first time, that I had entered an experience defined by magic: a region of enchantment. Whenever I have looked back over the years, dreaming of Marie, it is in the memory of that moment that my heart is turned on its moorings.

She turned on her heel, crossing her legs, her hands clasped before her, and then gestured with a straight arm to the window, inviting me to admire the view. Again, I was struck by a slight artifice to her manner, but an artifice of a young woman trying out her power, playing the ingénue, not as a way of puffing herself up, but as a gentle defence: against what, I could not say.

I moved to her side and looked out. The windows opened on to a balcony, recessed into the slope of the roof, so that it was sided by two triangular walls. There were railings of a tulip design across the edge, to waist height. It felt like another magic space; secret, sheltered. Beyond, the view of the park and the woods were framed in its strict symmetry.

"It's beautiful," I said, and she hummed her agreement. We were standing close together; she had not moved to make way for me, and my awareness of her presence sparked within me, at the junction between emotion and physicality. I felt the rush that precedes the swelling, and turned to look at her, my heart pounding, but the words, 'You're beautiful,' stuck in my throat, too significant to escape.

She returned my gaze for no more than a second, and then turned away.

"The closet," she said, unnecessarily, "and, voilà." She pointed towards a narrow wrought iron bed. "Do you have towels?"

I had one, but it had been in daily use for my entire journey.

"I will get you towels. You will want to wash, and change, I think. We eat at seven."

She turned and left, and I stayed still for a moment, listening to her careful footsteps as she climbed down the steep stairs. I couldn't make sense of what had happened to me over the last two hours. Taken off guard, I had responded to an unsought invitation and had, I felt, stepped into a dream, peopled by characters all of whom seemed slightly brighter drawn than was real. Even this room, and the great, settled house of which it was a part, were like an idea of otherness, like the setting of a half-remembered child's book, that I had sleepily read when I was too young to fully understand it.

The air in the room was still and cool and, outside, the sun shone upon the park like a benefaction and, as I looked out across it, I searched for an explanation, but found only the longing that had been smothered beneath my loneliness for most of my life, stirring, as if it felt the hope of an answer.