The Point by Marion Halligan

Author:Marion Halligan [Halligan, Marion]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781741152111
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2004-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

In the end no curtains are washed, no grass scythed, no jam thrown out. Marie-Claude’s energy seems to have drained away. She does not buzz round in her usual fashion, putting things to rights. She sits in the window and gazes across the valley, in between reading but not so severely as usual the pile of medical journals she has brought with her. She walks. She drives them down to Séverac Gare and they buy good things to eat from the butcher who makes them, foie gras, brandade, aligot, and the coarse meaty specialities of the region. And afterwards they sit under the bosomy plane trees in the cafe opposite the railway station (whose nineteenth century architecture recalls the handsome buildings of the sewer farm, several valleys down the coast from Elinor’s childhood home, where her family used to go blackberrying when she was small) and drink kir, white wine with blackcurrant liqueur, with the local shopkeepers and farmers perhaps and a few tourists, and on Thursday the market people. They wash their dishes, sweep the floor, take drives in the late afternoon to look at dolmen. Elinor gluts herself on detective stories – old-fashioned ones, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, someone called Cyril Hare she’s never heard of, a pseudonym for somebody else she doesn’t know either – and ready to be serious starts on La Nausée which she’s never read, even in English. She walks too, up to the castle, but now you have to pay to get in, because of the restoration work, and it has lost its old melancholy power, when the Renaissance wall trembled and you thought of mutability and squinted the mind’s eye to catch a glimpse of its ancient splendour. The rubble of the great double horseshoe staircase, with its ramps for driving a horse and carriage up to the first floor, has been cemented into place, but the staircase is no more perceivable. Now the castle is all fixed up it could be a new ruin, built yesterday. The stone is remortared and rooms have been reconstructed with doors that lock. Cheerful tubs of flowers stand about.

She told Flora that she’d do some thinking about their book while she was here but it doesn’t work. The castle with its heavy weight of grim old stories is become a historical exhibit, safe, tidy, under control. You can no longer fall in the well or off the wall-less towers and down the cliff. In one of the empty shops of the old town is a display of pictures, illustrations for a comic strip of Gloriande’s adventures. It looks like a vampire comic, heavily black and white with lots of red gashes in clothes and cloaks and wounds, and evil men with fangy teeth in a Transylvanian decor of coffins and castles. Gloriande has become a hectic gypsy, with wild black hair and mouth in a permanent soundlessly screaming 0.

She reads in La Nausée: The past does not exist. Not at all. Neither in things nor in my thought.

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