Captive in Fairyland

DU COTE DE CHEZ IRMA

A memoir of my paternal great-grandmother, Irma Bos, nee Mazars

First published in Quadrant magazine, Australia, 1998

The rock crystal necklace best shows its sheen and beauty on the skin, glittering in the hollows of the neck like raindrops lace the grass. A hundred years ago when it was new, there were little shards of bright bronze set in between the crystal stones, but these have long since dropped off, leaving patches of moss-green verdigris so subtly worked in that they look as if they were always meant to be there. When I take the necklace off at night, the skin-warmed stones run through my fingers, cooling as they splash into my palm: the lucent streamings of memory.

Once, the necklace had lain against the violet-scented, rice-paper neck of my great-grandmother, Irma Mazars, and I loved it much more than the diamonds she wore on her fingers. She had been given the necklace by my great-grandfather Louis Bos, long ago when she was young and he was her older, married lover. There was something rarer, more precious about the string of crystal than the harshly-sparkling rings: I called it "le collier de pluie", to myself; "the necklace of rain." Unlike the banal diamonds, which had no imprint of time, it seemed to speak of its vanished age, the shining age spoken of so longingly by my haunted father; Irma's world, the world known as la Belle Epoque.

La Belle Epoque: the words themselves, in their nostalgic closure, made of that period an era beyond history, somehow: the last beautiful, stifling gasp of the nineteenth century before the dark twentieth had yet made its presence really felt. A luminous bubble, we imagined it as; a time when neither national nor personal hatreds marred the steady harmony of people's lives.

There was never any fighting at Irma's place, nor any reheating of the high-smelling old quarrels which for several generations had made of my father's paternal family history a space of Racinean tragedy and Molierean comedy. Irma's family, her space, seemed different: neither comedy nor tragedy, but something solid, well-planted, yet not smug or even respectable. There was peace and a kind of predictability, but of the kind that exists in enchanted places. It did not matter if we arrived early or late at her apartment; always, waiting for us on her nests of little tables would be pastel paper-lace boxes of sugared violets, candied roses, tiny icing-gilt cakes and syrupy sweet marrons glaces; and tin cups for us children, standing by slender-throated bottles filled with grass-green Sirop de Menthe and scarlet Grenadine cordials. For my parents and Irma herself, there would be the indulgences of eternal summer:either a potently home-made cherry Ratafia, a peach Rinquinquin or her favourite, Confiture de Vieux Garcon, Old Boy's(or Bachelor's) Jam: a layered confection so sugar-heavy with summer fruit and fiery brandy that the adults moved like stunned bumblebees after just a whiff of it.

Her Toulouse apartment, bought with her own money and shrewd business sense, was full as a Faberge egg: deep gold and scarlet curtains, comfortable furniture upholstered in fabric that seemed both old-fashioned and curiously modern; paintings of voluptuous deities and dark pictures of unknown harbours; lampstands shaped like flower-slim dancers, varnished mahogany beds with naked cupids carved into the bedheads, and naked nymphs of all sizes on every available surface .In fact, there was more nakedness in her apartment than I'd ever seen anywhere, even in the museum: blandly beautiful limbs sculpted in the fine-grained white material Irma called ‘biscuit’. It rang like baked glass when you rapped a knuckle against a bare white thigh or surreptitiously slapped a smooth cold bottom. Our father would frown at us if he saw us lack in such respect; but Irma would smile, and tap his punitive hand with a bejewelled finger, especially if it was the boys doing it: "Georges, they're children, after all!"

There were more nymphs in the attic, packed away in boxes. Ah, the attic! Home not only of nymphs but troves of vanished splendour: camphor-and-lavender-scented chests full of hobble-skirted muslin dresses and rustling evening gowns, pale pink high-heeled kid shoes, silk stockings and cartwheel hats in round boxes, and we stared and laughed with excited joy as we rummaged through them and tried them all on. They might just as well have been relics from the age of Louis XIV, for all their exotic, strange magnificence; we simply could put no imaginative boundaries to a period when such fancydress was commonplace. In the chests were also menus and dance lists and old letters, done up in bundles with fine lacy ribbons tying them; the others ignored them,finding them dusty and dull, beside the rutilant rivers of rags, but I pored over them, imaginining I would find an old ticket for the Titanic's maiden voyage, or a secret letter from a lovesick prince. Once, I found Louis' elegant sepia recipes for cordials and tonics and punches: his family had made their solid fortune from the making and selling of drinks of all kinds, and in one corner, shrouded in dust, was a collection of engraved soft-drink bottles from the Bos factory. In another chest was a collection of old L'Illustration magazines: the first ones bought in 1901 for their fashion plate daughter by my great-great grandparents, the last just before the First World War. I savoured them all: the fashion parades, the travel notes from far flung colonies, the reports of train crashes and automobile shows and aeroplane trials, the excited reports on cinema and phonographs and electric light and forensic detection. L'Illustration was sure that progress was inevitable; it also showed me why Irma loved technology and gadgets, devoured articles on the space race and watched television devotedly. She loved industrial civilisation much more wholeheartedly than my grandparents, and certainly much more than my parents; for her, modernity was not associated with chaos and decay, as it was for them, but with the optimistic dawn of her own and the century's youth.

On old photographs, Irma has a kind of varnished glamour: steady, slightly protuberant blue eyes, heavy resin-gold hair, figurehead bosom under sculpted blouses, the suggestion of a rich waist and thighs under her draped skirts. Not for her the cropped nervous elegance or pyjama suits of my father's other grandmother; Irma is planted solidly on her feet, her trappings firmly those of contemporary womanhood, though there is a tough tilt to her head that tells a different story. There are no photos of her childhood; her parents, Aveyron dairy farmers, never took to photography, although she was their cherished only child. They had ambitions for her that went well beyond the farm; they 'bled their four veins' to buy her off-the-peg versions of Illustration models and braved chilly teachers to get her elocution classes. But she still grew up knowing how to milk cows and stuff geese and sell and buy land as well as powdering her face and showing a trim ankle and speaking in a flutingly vulnerable voice. Much later, she was to slightly shock us children by her readiness to return to peasant skills: I can see her with her soft white arms deep inside the cavity of a chicken, fingers deftly working away, releasing fugitive rumours of violet and lavender fragrance as she moved to and fro between the table and the sink, her rings and jingling bracelets in a glittering pile on the dresser. Her daughter, my grandmother Zou, watched her mother at such tasks in some dismay; she had been kept well away from such peasant occupations by Irma, who was determined her little beauty should contract an advantageous marriage. She never lost ‘le nord’, did Irma; she had no sentimentality and few illusions.

Irma was eighteen when she met Louis. He was nearly thirty years older than her, very much married, very much a paterfamilias : not only prominent businessman but Mayor of the town as well. On one of Irma's walls hung some old tinted photographs of her husband, in large, ornate Second Empire frames, like paintings: Louis as a child, in a velvet suit, by his rocking-horse, his stare imperiously blue, his hair brushed painfully down; and Monsieur Bos, very much the respectable nineteenth century businessman in neat beard and smart suit, but still with that imperious blue gaze, a little more wary, now. Fashionably freethinking, agnostic and a Freemason within his male circle of friends, who met regularly for charged political discussions, Louis also indulged in sentimental Catholicism and a highly burnished respectability within his family. For him, Irma was both a breath of heady new century's air--and the continuation of a well-upholstered tradition. He had soon installed her as his mistress in a smart new apartment in another town and bought her a millinery shop so that she could hold her head high and have no-one gossip about her as a 'kept' woman. We may imagine that single motherhood was a heavy cross to bear in such a time; but Irma never showed any bitterness or indeed any regrets, and there was certainly nothing of the victim or the statistic about her. She accepted her position with humour and practicality; indeed, she took my mother aside, just before she and my father were married, and said to her, "My dear Gisele, you must remember the nature of men, and not see too much!"

Irma's and Louis' daughter, Marie-Louise, known to all as Zou, grew up as the enchantingly pretty blond only child of a union that despite time and Louis' incorrigibly-roving eye, never completely faded away. Louis visited his second family frequently, and idolised his daughter. Every time he came, he brought the child and her mother boxes of pretty dresses and jewellery and flowers and comfits, and paid for dozens of expensive studio photographs of Zou at every conceivable age, sometimes alone, sometimes with her mother, exquisite yet robust decorations that he kept with him. He was rewarded with Zou's letters, written in unsteady curly writing on scented pale paper, which always began: Mon cher petit Papa. . . But all that time, Irma and Louis stayed unmarried to each other; Monsieur Bos, Mayor of Decazeville, had a respectable family and business life to maintain. In fact, some years after Zou's birth, Louis' seventh legitimate child was born! It was not until Zou's marriage to the Canadian grandee, my grandfather Robert-Rene Masson, that Louis was finally forced into dissolving his double life and becoming Irma's husband. And only then because his other family had also served him with an ultimatum and thrown him out of the Decazeville mansion. He died long before his daughter's brilliant marriage shattered into a million wounding pieces, in the Occupation; so that the last years of his life were spent in the sweet protection of Irma. He no longer had any money of his own; that had been the cost of his first family's revenge. So he was dependent on the tidy income Irma had made first from the millinery shop, then, when that was sold, from the cunning real estate investments she made. Louis was proud of Irma, as he was proud of Zou; he recognised in both of them the sound business sense he lacked himself. But he considered himself tamed, not broken; and Irma's final years with him were full of the comfortable irritation of his attempts at further gallant adventures.

Irma's parents had been heartbroken at first by their daughter's state of sin. This was not what they had intended for their golden girl. But they were peasants, not vaporously respectable bourgeois; continuity, whether legitimate or not, was the important thing. So they welcomed first Zou, then Zou's children. My father, escaping from the hideous ambiguities of his parents' later history, for ever after saw the holidays he had spent on the little Aveyron farm as not only his personal golden age, but a glimpse into a vanished national golden age. They were representatives of the true France, for him, eternally patient France, and just as he felt his parents betrayed that image, he aspired to be of the earth, salt of the earth, like Irma's parents. But Irma herself never spoke of them; she did not contradict her beloved grandson Georges when he rhapsodied about the feeling of fresh pump water on his head in the morning, and the warm smell of milking cows, but tilted her head just like in the photos, that look I had thought of as showing the peasant toughness under the sculpted polish. Now, I wonder if it was not that; but a kind of crystalline tenderness that lived a fleur de peau in my great-grandmother: just under the hollows where her raindrop necklace lay.