environmentally unfriendly Mercedes with two of the mechanics. I peered more closely, and he looked up. He recognised me instantly, which was odd as we had only met once or twice, and that was a few years ago, back when I had only just left university. I barely remembered him; in those days I was young and full of energy, and my mind was generally on lower things.
He has, however, an unsettling, heavy-lidded way of smiling at you, as though he is the only one present who has seen the joke, and I recognised that instantly. I ambled over and we made vague well-fancy-that noises at each other. Despite the name he is not French, though he doesn't look especially English either, if it comes to it. He’s too feline. He can be charming and witty when he feels like it - about 1/5th of the time, perhaps. We chatted a little longer, but it was freezing outside and he politely invited me for dinner at a restaurant nearby. He always had strangely formal, diffident manners, a bit like a Japanese exchange student. We headed off into the gathering fog.
Did you know that Swinburne had a little Breton cottage called Dolmancé? It’s true; I read it in a book. It was the first time I had ever visited Brittany in winter, and suddenly I understood a great deal more about the man’s poetry than I’d ever really wanted to. I was already starting to feel the all-pervading icy damp that is such a feature of the place. It worked its way into my bones like a kind of full-body trench foot. Being an optimist by nature, I presumed that it would disperse once I was indoors. We wound our way down little lanes between grim, silent pines and empty fields. The fog had really settled in by the time we arrived, and without Estrade’s rear lights to follow I would have been hopelessly lost. The restaurant was a little haven of light, warmth and civilisation in all this, and the food wasn’t all that bad either. I can’t remember the name or I’d tell you. I had no great wish to return to my lonely journey and Estrade seemed happy to sit and amuse me, so we had a coffee or two.
At some point I mentioned my reason for being there – a tip-off I had received from a friend in London. He had suggested that I take a look at a collection of religious bric-a-brac belonging to a Carmelite convent, which, according to him, might possibly contain something that I might possibly be interested in. Having nothing better to do, I had arrived at Dinard airport that morning, hired a car, and spent the day failing to find the fucking convent in a maze of identical country lanes.
“Notre-Dame-de-Pitié?” Estrade asked. “It's about ten minutes down the road; we passed it on our way here.” I looked at my watch.
“Reckon I've got time to get there and talk to whoever's in charge before they're all in bed?” Estrade smiled slightly, and lowered his eyes in mock modesty.
“You're asking me whether I know what time the nuns go to bed?” I ignored the comment. It was pitch black outside. I had been intending to find a hotel for the night, but Estrade assured me that everything would be closed for the winter and offered me one of his spare rooms, from whence I could go and call on the nuns the following morning. I wasn't particularly keen to return to my weary wanderings, and accepted with just a token demurral for politeness' sake.
His house turned out to be just over the departmental boundary in the commune of Saint-Aignan, near Lake Guerledan. It is surrounded by the forest of Quénecan, part of the remains of the ancient, fabled and terrible Brocéliande, which was once King Arthur’s stomping ground. There are also quite a lot of fields of wheat and cows and GM maize and things, tended by farmers who look like they were probably in their late twenties when Arthur shuffled off. You must have the precise address on your files somewhere; I don't know it.
The lake is artificial and was created to supply hydroelectric power. The locals will try to tell you that a village was sunk to make it and that, in the best traditions of the thing, it is sometimes possible to hear ghostly bells ringing in the night. Because it was created before the great tourist invasion of Brittany there are only three proper beaches, though I’ve been told frequently that motorboats make summer horrible for those living on the banks these days. In winter it is dour, grey, hostile and strangely overbearing. It looks somehow as if the landscape had been too big to fit the space allotted to it, but had been crammed in anyway, if you understand what I mean.
We wound our way down the gravel path by the lake, finally swinging into a long, rutted driveway. As we passed through the gate a pair of halogen lamps high up in the trees illuminated the scene. The house itself was built in a mixture of French and Breton styles by someone who had obviously heard of architecture but never actually seen it done. It sprawled across the bottom of a valley leading down to the lake, a mass of yellow-brown granite under a slate roof. There were no neighbours. It was far too big for someone Estrade's age to be able to afford on his own, and I wondered briefly how on earth he had acquired it.
Inside it was shabby and messy, but evidently well decorated once upon a time in sombre, burgundy-ish colours. Such furniture as existed was rather a random assortment, and boxes and crates sat everywhere. Estrade offered no explanation for this and I was too polite to ask. We were obviously alone in the place. He showed me up to a spare room and disappeared discreetly. I peered out of the window. What I could see of the garden was dank and dripping, fading into the grey-blue darkness beyond the limit of which anything may have been lurking. I shivered and yanked the curtains closed.
When I came down, the sitting room was lit with a diverse selection of table lamps propped on different surfaces, long drapes hiding the cold and unfriendly world outside. Somewhere in the house In Questa Reggia was playing. Estrade returned after a while, wiping his hands on a cloth – the kitchen fire had gone out in his absence and he had been relighting it. We chatted a little longer. After a while he brought out a bottle of brandy and some old books that he had found in the attic, and I spent a happy hour or two going through them, blathering vaguely as I dated and priced them for him (probably wrongly in many cases, for I am an Orientalist first and foremost, and this is not really my speciality). Mostly they were the sort of thing that Edwardian gentlemen used to buy to furnish their libraries and which go for about seventy euros at old book markets, depending on content and quality. Less if you know your subject and can haggle. Two caught my eye, however. The first was an early edition of Baudelaire (I’ve never been able to understand the enthusiasm for him personally) in excellent condition. The other was a magnificent little pornograph, obviously self-published by some fat-arsed, lecherous old soak round about the start of the Third Republic. With illustrations. Honestly, I’m not making this up. Unpleasant gilt-edged paper and a green morocco binding. I wanted it there and then, and offered fifty euros for it. (A dealer would probably have offered nothing at all, because the vast majority of clients would take one look at the thing and place it fastidiously back on the shelf, looking at him as though wondering whether he was still in possession of a full complement of marbles. I, on the other hand, have a weakness for this sort of kitsch.) Estrade refused adamantly; it had been sitting in the attic, obviously disregarded for many years previous to his arrival, and besides I was doing him a favour by valuing the collection in the first place. I could hardly reject a gift, could I?
We pored happily over the extravagant filth for a while, and did some serious damage to the brandy. Estrade is one of those people who just seem to soak up alcohol without it having any effect; a question of metabolism, I suppose. How sorry I feel for them, purblind race of men.
I presume that I shambled pathetically up to bed after that, as I clearly remember that I slept very badly: a combination of the brandy, the knocking pipes and the hideous shrieks from outside, where the owls were hunting maternal rodents and their furry brood. I was also wondering about my host. I only act stupid enough to fit in with the people around me, and I certainly didn’t believe that in the three or four years since I had seen him last, Estrade had turned from a London crook into a Breton landowner. What, in that case, was he doing here? I finally fell into oblivion around 4am, still wondering.
Read on…
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