• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2820 0

letter, scales fell from my eyes. Everything was transformed. It all came back – like the tea-soaked madeleine itself – in a torrent of memory … Cabourg … We had just driven out of Cabourg … out of Proust’s Balbec. Only a few minutes before, I had been standing on the esplanade along which, wearing her polo cap and accompanied by the little band of girls he had supposed the mistresses of professional bicyclists, Albertine had strolled into Marcel’s life. Through the high windows of the Grand Hotel’s dining-room – conveying to those without the sensation of staring into an aquarium – was to be seen Saint-Loup, at the same table Bloch, mendaciously claiming acquaintance with the Swanns. A little farther along the promenade was the Casino, its walls still displaying tattered playbills, just like the one Charlus, wearing his black straw hat, had pretended to examine, after an attempt at long range to assess the Narrator’s physical attractions and possibilities. Here Elstir had painted; Prince Odoacer played golf. Where was the little railway line that bad carried them all to the Verdurins’ villa? Perhaps it ran in another direction to that we were taking; more probably it was no more.

‘And the name of the brigadier at the Battle Clearance Group?’ asked Cobb. ‘The tall one who took us round those captured guns?’

He wrote down the name and closed the notebook.

‘You told me, Major Jenkins, that at the beginning of the war you yourself saw a Royal Engineer colonel wearing a double-breasted service-dress tunic. You can assure me of that?’

‘I can, sir – and, on making enquiries, was told that cut was permitted by regulations, provided no objection was taken by regimental or higher authority.’

Proustian musings still hung in the air when we came down to the edge of the water. It had been a notable adventure. True, an actual night passed in one of the bedrooms of the Grand Hotel itself – especially, like Finn’s, an appropriately sleepless one – might have crowned the magic of the happening. At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.

Now, looking north into the light mist that hung over the waves, it was at first difficult to know what we were regarding. In the foreground lay a kind of inland sea, or rather two huge lagoons, the further enclosed by moles and piers that seemed exterior and afloat; the inner and nearer, with fixed breakwaters formed of concrete blocks, from which, here and there, rose tall chimneys, rows of cranes, drawbridges. The faraway floating docks delimited smaller pools and basins. Within the two large and separate surfaces, islands were dotted about supporting similar structures, the outlines of which extended into the misty distances as far as the horizon. What, one wondered, could this great maritime undertaking be? Was it planned to build a new Venice here on the water? Perhaps those were docks constructed on an unusually generous scale to serve some great port – yet no large area of warehouses was at hand to suggest commerce, nor other signs of a big town anywhere along the shore. On the contrary, such houses as were to be seen, near or further inland, were in ruins, their extent in any case not at all resembling the outskirts of a city. The roadstead itself was now all but abandoned, at least the small extent of shipping riding at anchor there altogether disproportionate to the potential accommodation of the harbour – for harbour it must certainly be. There was something unreal, ghostly, even a little horrifying, about these grey marine shapes that seemed to have no present purpose, yet, like battlements of a now ruined castle, implied a violent, bloody history.

‘Tiens,’ said General Philidor. ‘C’est bien le Mulberry.’’

The Mulberry it was, vast floating