Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety

Sometimes when he is faced with a mendacious opponent or a pompous magistrate, he fights the impulse to drive a fist into the man’s face; fights it so hard that his neck and shoulders ache. Every morning he opens his eyes and says, ‘Dear God, help me to bear this day.’ And he prays for something, anything, to happen, to deliver him from these endless polite long drawn-out recriminations, to save him from the dissipation of his youth and wit and courage. Max, you can’t afford to return that man’s fee. He’s poor, I must do it. Max, what would you like for dinner? I haven’t an idea. Max, have you named the happy day? He dreams of drowning, far far under the glassy sea.

He tries not to give offence. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.

LUCILE has not said yes. She’s not said no. She’s only said, she’ll think about it.

ANNETTE: her first reaction had been panic and her second rage; when the immediate crisis was over and she had not seen Camille for a month, she began to curtail her social engagements and to spend the evenings by herself, worrying the situation like a dog with a bone.

Bad enough to be deemed seduced. Worse to be deemed abandoned. And to be abandoned for one’s adolescent daughter? Dignity was at its nadir.

Since the King had dismissed his minister Calonne, Claude was at the office every evening, drafting memoranda.

On the first night, Annette had not slept. She had tossed and sweated into the small hours, plotting herself a revenge. She had thought that she would somehow force him to leave Paris. By four o’clock she could no longer bear to remain in her bed. She got up, pulled a wrap about her shoulders, walked through the apartment in the dark; walked barefoot, like a penitent, for the last thing she wanted was to make any noise at all, to wake her maid, to wake her daughter – who was sleeping, no doubt, the chaste and peaceful sleep of emotional despots. When dawn came she was shivering by an open window. Her resolution seemed a fantasy or nightmare, a monstrous baroque conceit dreamed by someone other than herself. Come now, it’s an incident, she said to herself: that’s all. She was left, then as now, with her grievance and her sense of loss.

Lucile looked at her warily these days, not knowing what was going on in her head. They had ceased to speak to each other, in any sense that mattered. When others were present they managed some vapid exchanges; alone together, they were mutually embarrassed.

LUCILE: she spent all the time she could alone. She re-read La Nouvelle Heloïse . A year ago, when she had first picked up the book, Camille had told her he had a friend, some odd name, began with an R, who thought it the masterpiece of the age. His friend was an arch-sentimentalist; they would get on well, were they to meet. She understood that he himself did not think much of the book and wished a little to sway her judgement. She remembered him talking to her mother of Rousseau’s Confessions , which was another of those books her father would not allow her to read. Camille said the author lacked all sense of delicacy and that some things were better not committed to paper; since then she had been careful what she wrote in her red diary. She recalled her mother laughing, saying you can do what you like I suppose as long as you retain a sense of delicacy? Camille had made some remark she barely heard, about the aesthetics of sin, and her mother had laughed again, and leaned towards him and touched his hair. She should have known then.

These days she was remembering incidents like that, turning them over, pulling them apart. Her mother seemed to be denying – as far as one could make out what she was saying at all – that she had ever been to bed with Camille. She thought her mother was probably lying.

Annette had been quite kind to her, she thought, considering the circumstances. She had once told her that time resolves most situations, without the particular need for action. It seemed a spineless way to approach life. Someone will be hurt, she thought, but every way I win. I am now a person of consequence; results trail after my actions.

She rehearsed that crucial scene. After the storm, a struggling beam of late sun had burnished a stray unpowdered hair on her mother’s neck. His hands had rested confidingly in the hollow of her waist. When Annette whirled around, her whole face had seemed to collapse, as if someone had hit her very hard. Camille had half-smiled; that was strange , she thought. For just a moment he had held on to her mother’s wrist, as if reserving her for another day.

And the shock, the terrible, heart-stopping shock: yet why should it have been a shock, when it was – give or take the details – just what she and Adèle had been hoping to see?

Her mother went out infrequently, and always in the carriage. Perhaps she was afraid she might run into Camille by accident. There was a tautness in her face, as if she had become older.

MAY CAME, the long light evenings and the short nights; more than once Claude worked right through them, trying to lay a veneer of novelty on the proposals of the new Comptroller-General. Parlement was not to be bamboozled; it was that land tax again. When the Parlement of Paris proved obdurate, the usual royal remedy was to exile it to the provinces. This year the King sent it to Troyes, each member ordered there by an individual lettre de cachet . Exciting for Troyes, Georges-Jacques d’Anton said.

On 14 June he married Gabrielle at the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. She was twenty-four years old; waiting patiently for her father and her fiancé to settle things up, she had spent her afternoons experimenting in the kitchen, and had eaten her creations; she had taken to chocolate and cream, and absently spooning sugar into her father’s good strong coffee. She giggled as her mother tugged her into her wedding dress, thinking of when her new husband would peel her out of it. She was moving on a stage in life. As she came out into the sunshine, hanging on to Georges’s arm harder than convention dictated, she thought, I am perfectly safe now, my life is before me and I know what it will be, and I would not change it, not even to be the Queen. She turned a little pink at the warm sentimentality of her own thoughts; those sweets have jellified my brain, she thought, smiling into the sun at her wedding guests, feeling the warmth of her body inside her tight dress. Especially, she would not like to be the Queen; she had seen her in procession in the streets, her face set with stupidity and helpless contempt, her hard-edged diamonds flashing around her like naked blades.

The apartment they had rented proved to be too near to Les Halles. ‘Oh, but I like it,’ she said. ‘The only thing that bothers me are those wild-looking pigs that run up and down the street.’ She grinned at him. ‘They’re nothing to you, I suppose.’

‘Very small pigs. Inconsiderable. But no, you’re right, we should have seen the disadvantages.’

‘But it’s lovely. It makes me happy; except for the pigs, and the mud, and the language that the market ladies use. We can always move when we’ve got more money – and with your new position as King’s Councillor, that won’t be very long.’