Memories of a Marriage Read Online Free Page B

She was due to sail a week later, from Cherbourg. First-class on the
France
, he told me. Lucky Lucy! But they got back together in Bristol, at her brother’s wedding. Then she left for Paris and Geneva.
    I asked what news he had from her.
    She’s still in Geneva, he told me. I’ve been getting letters, but we’ve only spoken a couple of times. The difference in time zones seems to get in the way. She didn’t come homefor Christmas. I’m worried about her. She’s never explained what she’s doing there. If I can swing it, I’ll go over right after school ends. I’ll have too much work to do it over the spring break.
    In May of that year, not long after my return to Paris, my friend Guy Seurat and his doctor wife, Elsa, invited me to spend the long Ascension weekend with them at their house in the Vaucluse, a couple kilometers from the little town of Camaret-sur-Aigues. Standing in a large garden, it had been in Guy’s family until the 1880s, when it passed into the hands of a rich industrialist from Marseilles and his heirs, who had inflicted on it the sort of improvements that have defaced so many similar French residences. The family bought back the property in the 1930s, and Guy, ever since he inherited it from a bachelor uncle, had been engaged in a heroic and not-inexpensive effort to restore its exterior, including removing the modern stucco and replacing it with a
crépi
—slaked-lime plaster—of a color typical of the region. He and Elsa did much of the work themselves, enlisting friends whenever they could, and I had myself spent one Easter vacation sanding and painting window shutters and uprooting grass from the front courtyard so that it could be replaced, in the eighteenth-century manner, by fine gravel.
    When I arrived by car from Avignon in the late afternoon, Guy and Elsa’s other guests were already there, a couple I didn’t know: a black-haired, pale-complexioned young woman of stunning beauty and a large man dressed in anoutfit—lime linen slacks and a red silk shirt worn with a silk paisley ascot—that his kind of French bourgeois considered appropriate for weekends in the country and shopped for at Sulka’s on rue de Castiglione. They were, I learned moments later, Bella and her husband Marc de Clam. Ascension was late that year, and a dry very warm day was followed by the sort of Provençal night that makes you wish dawn would never come. A late dinner was served on a trestle table under a moonless sky by the Seurats’ combination housekeeper and cook, who together with her husband also watched over the property in the Seurats’ absence, a not-inconsiderable responsibility in a part of the country plagued by burglaries. I found myself seated next to Marc. He talked volubly. The failed Generals’ Putsch, an attempt by disaffected high-ranking officers to overthrow General de Gaulle, had taken place a mere three weeks ago; and OAS, the clandestine arm of Algérie Française, the Algeria-must-remain-French movement, had begun its campaign of assassinations and violence. His sympathies clearly lay, if not with OAS itself, then with the
pieds-noirs
, the non-Muslim population of Algeria in part descended from French colonists, who refused to give up the country they considered theirs. My views were diametrically opposed to Algérie Française and everything it stood for, but I didn’t contradict him. Nor did I ask what kind of link of ancestry there was between him and Armand du Paty de Clam, who would have surely approved of his tirade. I hardly spoke. My thoughts and gaze were fixed on Bella; it was a
coup de foudre:
lightning had struck, I had fallen in love.
    Dinner ended very late. Another couple, Bernard andFrancine Bruneau, had joined us. The housekeeper had gone to bed, so we all cleared the table and scraped and rinsed the dishes before stacking them in the sink and on the kitchen table. As I watched the Clam couple say good night and disappear, I was gripped by envy, precise and