In the summer of 1920 an elderly man called Arthur Friedmann came
to Oriol, on the north coast of France, to attend the consecration of
the British cemetery, in which his only son was buried. The service
over, he went for a walk alone in the deserted pine-forest.
He came upon a wide clearing, covered with Army huts no longer occupied,
the gunnery camp where his son had been trained. His son had
loved Oriol; “after the war” he had once written, “we must turn it into
something.” In many letters he had described its quiet and lonely enchantment;
and now the father began to understand what he had meant.
Between the forest and the Channel straggled a soft wilderness of dunes,
thick with clumps of esparto grass and sprawling shrubs, out of which the
sand emerged in smooth curves, like flesh from rags, white and silken to
the touch. When there were storms the sea could be heard in the forest,
above the creaking trees; now only a light breeze blew off it, lifting into
the air the sticky scent of the pines. The dark trees spread for many kilometres;
the branches grew at the tops, leaving bare the tall trunks, which
the sun turned gold and copper and bronze. So many winter winds had
swept them that not one tree seemed to grow upright; they were like copper
ladders left resting against the sky.
Arthur Friedmann lit a cigar and went further. The forest floor of pine-needles,
speckled with sunlight, looked like innumerable sleeping lizards.
The sand slipped into his pointed shoes, under the spats, and the
pine-scent mingled with the aroma of his cigar, the first ever to be smoked
there. He was unused to walking; he liked, and owned, a large car, and
now and then took a constitutional on foot along a boulevard or a promenade,
or in a garden. He was an entrepreneur and a speculator, who envisaged
all that he saw as something more or something different. He was
ready to leave people, but not things or places, as he found them, and in
changing the things he changed the people, not always for the better. The
impulse was not avarice, though he had made several fortunes, but a restless
creativeness which had no other outlet.
Between two dunes, about a mile away, glittered a strip of sea, and invisible
beyond was England, fenced in with a rim of hotels and boardinghouses
nearly all hideous to him; even after forty years of living there the
absence of desire in England either to woo or be wooed still amazed him.
He took from his wallet a letter of his son’s, dated June 1917, written perhaps
near this very point, and full of projects for building and development.
The boy had had ideas; perhaps, he thought, I will carry them out
myself. He climbed a sandhill, and looked across a dark swath of tree-tops
at the blue slope of the Channel.
There was a cabin on the hill-top with a corrugated-iron roof and a
chimney from which smoke was rising. It had a garden with roses and
marigolds and hollyhocks, all very unexpected. He did not want to interrupt
his mood, half reverie, half prospectus, and was about to move on,
when a woman dressed in black came out, followed by a girl of about nineteen,
also in black. He remembered having seen them at the cemetery the
same morning. The coincidence was too striking; several of his greatest
successes had sprung from the recognition of coincidence. He took off his
grey Homburg hat and said “Good day.”
The older woman replied; her voice, her looks, the kind of garden, suggested
that she was English. He went on: “Did I not see you this morning?”
“I remember seeing you.”
“I came to visit my son’s grave. He was killed at the Marne.”
“My husband was wounded there. My husband is also buried in the
cemetery.”
She opened a small white gate leading from the loose sand into the garden
and said: “Won’t you come in? My daughter and I live here. Perhaps
you would like some tea?”
The cabin was simply and pleasantly furnished, with a wood fire burning;
a number of pictures hung from the walls and others were stacked
against them, and an empty easel stood in one corner. While the daughter
made tea Mrs. Weatherby introduced herself and explained that her
husband had been a painter, had come to Oriol several years before the
war, and built the cabin himself.
“He showed excellent judgment,” said Arthur Friedmann. “It is the
first time I have been here, but my boy often spoke of Oriol. It has great
charm.”
“Anne and I are very happy here. We could not live anywhere else, even
now.”
With reticence and sympathy he asked a question or two about her husband,
to which she replied calmly, interweaving similar questions about
his son. She and Anne had worked in the hospital during the war, and she
had been nursing her husband when he died. Apologetically she confessed
that she had not known his son; the two of them sat for a time without
speaking, while the girl brought in cups and plates and looked with
curiosity at the dapper stranger. She was pretty and fair; he liked her
quietness and her friendly smile.
They spoke of the morning’s ceremony and agreed that beautiful ground
had been chosen for the soldiers’ graves, over-looking the estuary of the
river Oriol.
“But it is dead,” he added. “There should be some living memorial.”
“I would like that, and my husband would have liked that. A garden, or
a park …”
“Or a whole area.”
She did not understand him, and the thought was still only germinating.
He stubbed out his cigar and drank some tea.
“And you’ll be staying on here, Mrs. Weatherby?” He had an old-fashioned
almost pedantic politeness; his voice, though low, was rather
hoarse, as if he had asthma, and still a little guttural.
“Oh, yes. We have many friends here, and very few in England.”
“Aren’t you a long way from anywhere?”
“Not as far as it seems. The road is only five minutes away, and a bus
goes into Oriol. We have neighbours within easy walking distance; they
have been very good to us. My husband was so fond of France.”
She paused, and then asked the question which everyone sooner or
later asked: “Are you English?”
“I am a British citizen. I was born in Czechoslovakia, and my name is
German. I was in business in the City of London when the war broke out,
but being of German origin, I was asked to leave it.”
“But with your son …?”
“My son served in the British Army. He was a major when he was
wounded, though he was only twenty-two. That was not taken into account
then.”
“How shameful.”
He had become quite a connoisseur in the accents of commiseration;
hers sounded sincere. He liked the whole household; the husband a
painter, the level-headed calm woman, the pretty girl, the air of dignity.
The project in his head grew; he skirmished cautiously to discover more
facts. Nearly all the land, she told him, belonged to the Baron de Moutiers,
who spent most of his time in Paris; his château, the Château d’Oriol, was
falling to pieces. Oriol was little more than a fishing village. There was a
wonderful beach, two miles long. The pine-woods were deserted except
for her cabin, a villa or two on the outskirts, “and of course the nightingales?”
“Nightingales? Here?”
“Certainly. Not in the pines, but in the thickets. Our house is called Les
Rossignols.”
Nightingales? They would be an asset. And a beach two miles long, and
a decaying château, and an owner who took no interest in but might be
glad to take some out….
“We had a studio first at Etaples” she went on. “My husband loved to
paint the fishing-fleet. Would you care to see some of his work?”
Friedmann admired the canvases with divided attention, wanting to
know more about the land. They went outside.
“The nightingales are there,” she said, indicating a lighter green among
the pines. Far off the dunes dipped into V’s and U’s that revealed the
Channel.
“What was your husband’s name?” he asked suddenly.
“James” she answered, surprised.
It was strange; that had been his son’s name.
The light was beginning to die along the dunes, the leaning pine-trunks
turned red, and the tops of the trees grew darker.
“He always used to say that this would make a wonderful holiday resort”
said Mrs. Weatherby.
“It will,” he answered.
* * *
Anne had come out of the house at this moment, and it was thus that she
always remembered him. There and then he unfolded for them his picture
of what Oriol would be, improvised, rough, corrected in motion, but in all
the main lines the place that a few years later it became. The village of
Oriol was to be a fashionable plage with a sea-front, swimming-pools, and
a Casino, the decaying château of the decaying Baron a hotel, and the
pine-forests the setting for a golf-course. Napoleon-like he pointed this
way and that, making a gesture as if throwing down a carpet, and finally
turning to their own home and remarking with unforgettable grandeur:
“And here there must be a view. You”-to her mother, the morning’s ceremony
forgotten-“you have been the discoverer of this place. I shall
build you a village. This will be the centre of the golf-course, and the players
shall have their view of the sea from here.”
And a view it became. As there was light when God said so, so there
were greens, fairways, a club, hotels, and finally a Casino, when Arthur
Friedmann said so. Lorries came and went all day, month after month,
year after year. The landscape was invaded, yet never spoiled. Dunes were
levelled and shaped, but the wilderness along the coast stayed wild. Many
of the pines were felled, but the forest stayed forest and the nightingales
still sang, but to an audience. Beyond the swimming-pool and fashionable
beach the golden miles stretched untouched. He built the Pine Hotel on
the forest edge, and beside it the cottage for Mrs. Weatherby and Anne;
and one day workmen arrived upon their little hill, took the cabin to pieces
like a packing-case, carted it away, and built the bits into something else;
and the two of them moved into their new home. In the wings and on the
stage of this vast scene-shifting wandered Arthur Friedmann, known to
everyone as the patron, a rose in his button-hole summer and winter, always
in spats, always in the grey Homburg hat that really had come from
Homburg, bringing the faubourgs into the forest, an elegant restless Jew
with slightly weary eyes, and to Anne Weatherby romantic. He would arrive
in his long open Rolls-Royce at the limit of the half-made road, walk
to some high point and give directions. He understood the atmosphere of
places, of people, of works of art, and was sensitive to moods and possibilities
which most men miss. He had what in women is called instinct, in matters
of taste a flair; in business he had the Midas touch.
He wrote to friends of his dead son’s and told them that if they ever
wished to return to Oriol they were to come to start with as his guests; they
came, and returned later as his clients. Johnny MacManus arrived among
the first. He was a very young cavalry N.C.O., robust and good-looking, the
son of a riding-master. Soon he set up a stable there, grooming the horses
and giving lessons himself, and began to do good business. Anne rode with
him. Beach, sea, forest, all were theirs. Memories of the war, like dark curtains
looped back into the roof of their lives, faded and began to be forgotten.
She fell in love, he was attracted by the idea of marriage, and married
they were, in Paris, in 1921. Arthur Friedmann bought them a suite at the
Crillon Hotel and paid for all the champagne. Looking earnestly at her as
they went away, he warned her, “Be careful of him, my dear”; and she
laughed and replied that she would be able to manage him. Three years
later she was to wish she had asked Friedmann to explain himself.
In 1924 the Pine Hotel was opened with a splendid banquet, attended by
a French Cabinet Minister, the Prefect of the Department, all the local
Mayors, and a number of well-connected Englishmen, as well as Mrs.
Weatherby and Anne and the “old inhabitants” invited as Arthur Friedmann’s
guests. The project turned to gold. Streams of Louis began to slither
across the green tables at the Casino. The Prince of Wales came for a weekend
and the place was made. About this time Mrs. Weatherby died, and
Anne and Johnny moved into the cottage; he enlarged his business and
kept two hirelings specially for the Pine Hotel guests. During the season
he gave lessons all day long, and now the money came in regularly. A son,
Merrick, was born, and it seemed to Anne that they had all they could
want. The cottage was big enough for them; together they pushed back the
dunes and made a garden, hung chintz curtains in the windows and her
father’s painting on the walls; and she saw no reason not to be happy for
the rest of her life.
The change in Johnny came rapidly. As Oriol flourished he deteriorated,
becoming the victim of a vanity and a wilfulness she had hardly
been aware of before. People began to frequent Oriol who flattered, with
more subtlety than Anne had ever shown, his ease, his vigour, and his
good looks. His riding-lessons became popular with women, often many
years older than himself, who did not care about fresh air or horses and
perhaps assumed that a riding-master-elsewhere it might be a ski-ing
instructor or a skating teacher-was thrown in with the hotel bills. They
wore smart jodhpurs and tweed jackets cut by Paris shops, and Johnny
took them for long rides along the beach and in the forest. At first Anne
thought nothing of it; she laughed with him at the stories he told about
some of them. Besides, he charged fifty francs an hour, a good sum then.
He came home later. He had drinks with his clients in the decorative
little bars with window-boxes and striped awnings that enterprising
restaurateurs were building in the village of Oriol, now a town; the Normandy,
the Perroquet, the Matelot d’Or. He began to relish high-sounding
names and titles. He talked aloofly of meeting the Comtesse d’Harcourt,
who entered horses for the big races at Auteuil and Longchamps
and might appoint him to her racing-stable; and of somebody else with a
palace in Italy, and an apartment in Paris, and a villa now building at
Oriol, and of this and that important or wealthy personage, all in a tone as
if it were something out of Anne’s ken. He became a snob; she had deceived
herself into thinking he would be content so long as he had the
open-air life and could be more or less his own master. She grew jealous.
Some of the women he took riding were attractive; and they courted the
side of him to which it was neither her wish nor in her capacity to appeal.
This continued for a while, with awkward excuses on his side, awkward
remonstrances on hers, and long silences. In the end it had not been even
a beauty who took him away from her. There appeared one fine day, in one
of the fashionable magazines that had started to advertise the new resort,
a photograph of a Mrs.
Continues…
Excerpted from Childhood at Oriol
by Michael Burn
Copyright © 2005 by Turtle Point Press.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Turtle Point Press
Copyright © 2005
Turtle Point Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-885586-32-9
