I rang up my aunt, Just to say good night and make sure that all is well.
The apartment, she told me, seems a little solitary without Wordsworth.
I am feeling lonely too without you and Tooley.
No news when you came home?
Only a letter from a friend. She seems lonely too.
I hesitated before I spoke again. Aunt Augusta, I have been thinking, I dont know why, of my father. Its strange how little one knows of ones own family. Do you realize I dont even know where he is buried?
No?
Do you?
Of course.
I would have liked, if only once, to visit his grave.
Cemeteries to me are rather a morbid taste. They have a sour smell like jungles. I suppose it comes from all that wet greenery.
As one grows old, I think, one becomes more attached to family things to houses and graves. I feel very badly that my mother had to finish like that in a police laboratory.
Your stepmother, my aunt corrected me.
Where is my father?
As a half-believing Catholic, Aunt Augusta said, I cannot answer that question with any certainty, but his body, what is left of it, lies in Boulogne.
So near? Why wasnt it brought back?
My sister had a very practical and unsentimental side. Your father had gone to Boulogne without her knowledge on a day excursion. He was taken ill after dinner and died almost immediately. Food poisoning. It was before the days of antibiotics. There had to be an autopsy and my sister didnt like the idea of transporting home a mutilated corpse. So she had him buried in the cemetery there.
Were you present?
I was on tour in Italy. I only heard about it much later. My sister and I didnt correspond.
So youve never seen the grave either?
I once suggested to Mr. Visconti that we make a trip, but his favourite Biblical quotation was, Let the dead bury their dead.
Perhaps one day we might go together.
I am strongly of Mr. Viscontis opinion, but I am always ready for a little travel, my aunt added with unsentimental glee.
This time you must be my guest.
The anniversary of his death, my aunt said, falls on October second. I remember the date because it is the feast day of the Guardian Angel. The Angel seems to have slipped up badly on that occasion, unless of course he was saving your father from a worse fate. That is quite a possibility, for what on earth was your father doing in Boulogne out of season[176]?
Chapter 17
Chapter 17
Strangely enough, I felt almost immediately at home in Boulogne.
As the direct boat from Folkestone no longer sailed, we took the Golden Arrow from Victoria, and I was relieved to notice that my aunt had not brought with her the red suitcase. The English side of the Channel lay bathed in a golden autumn sunlight. By the time we reached Petts Wood the buses had all turned green, and at Orpington the oast-houses began to appear with their white cowls like plumes in a medieval helmet. The hops climbing their poles were more decorative than vines, and I would gladly have given all the landscape between Milan and Venice for these twenty miles of Kent. There were comfortable skies and unspectacular streams; there were ponds with rushes and cows which seemed contentedly asleep. This was the pleasant land of which Blake[177] wrote, and I found myself regretting that we were going abroad again. Why had my father not died in Dover or Folkestone, both equally convenient for a days excursion?
And yet when at last we came to Boulogne, stepping out of the one coach from Calais reserved for that port on the Fleche dOr, I felt that I was at home. The skies had turned grey and the air was cold and there were flurries of rain along the quays, but there was a photograph of the Queen over the reception desk in our hotel, and on the windows of a brasserie[178] I could read GOOD CUP OF TEA. EAST KENT COACH PARTIES WELCOME HERE. The leaden gulls which hovered over the fishing boats in the leaden evening had an East Anglian air. A scarlet sign flashed over the Gare Maritime saying CAR FERRY and BRITISH RAILWAYS.
It was too late that evening to search for my fathers grave (in any case, the next day was his true anniversary), and so my aunt and I walked up together to the Ville Haute and strolled around the ramparts and through the small twisted streets which reminded me of Rye. In the great crypt of the cathedral an English king had been married, there were cannon balls lying there shot by the artillery of Henry VIII, and in a little square below the walls was a statue of Edward Jenner[179] in a brown tailed-coat and brown tasselled boots. An old film of Treasure Island with Robert Newton was showing at a small cinema in a side-street not far from a club called Le Lucky, where you could listen to the music of the Hearthmen. No, my father had not been buried on foreign soil. Boulogne was like a colonial town which had only recently ceased to be part of the Empire, and British Railways lingered on at the end of the quay as though it had been granted permission to stay until the evacuation was complete. Locked bathing-huts below the casino were like the last relics of the occupying troops, and the mounted statue of General San Martín[180] on the quay might have been that of Wellington[181]. We had dinner in the restaurant of the Gare Maritime, after walking over the cobble-stones and across the railway lines with no one about. The pillars of the station resembled the pillars in a cathedral deserted after dark: only a train from Lyon was announced like a hymn number which no one had bothered to take down. No porter or passenger stirred on the long platforms. The British Railways office stood empty and unlighted. There was a smell everywhere of oil and weed and sea and a memory of the mornings fish. In the restaurant we proved to be the sole diners: only two men and a dog stood at the bar and they were preparing to go. My aunt ordered soles à la Boulonnaise for both of us.