House of All Nations (71 page)

‘You say?' Jules was impatiently counting on his fingers.

‘Well—that doesn't interest you. You're right. You're interested in making money …'

Jules had half-forgotten the violent interest he had taken in him down on the Côte d'Azur. His impulses were veering. He dismissed Bomba, who sulked cautiously for half an hour and then disappeared.

Jules pressed a button and called William. William appeared, pale skin, pale shirt, gray eyes, gray-shadowed eyes, gray suiting, immaculate, unmoved, satiric.

‘Go on: don't tell me you want to hear something about your business!'

‘Stop fooling, William. What's been going on here while I've been away. Have you made any money?'

‘All the goings-on have been elsewhere. What's the idea of the janissaries. Are you going to run for king in the Vendée in the next elections? Why don't you come to earth and realize you're a ham like the rest of us and that you've got to work. Daddy goes to work and bacon grows in the pantry. Kid notions. Forget to be a genius, will you? You made your money giving fair exchange rates when everyone else only dreamed of gypping. Did that teach you anything? No! Alphendéry and I slave here—we never leave the bank, we meet everybody, get everybody's troubles. And you spend your time with the choicest bouquet of hand-picked hallelujah men I ever saw in my born days. I'm sorry if you're sick, Jules, but no one else is. These fellows are only using the crutch you just threw away to climb into your pocket. Jules, have I ever deserted you? I felt miserable when you were lying there on the Côte d'Azur. But how could I get away? And my gorge rose at the idea of elbowing my way in past your handout men to say, “How d'ye do.” Now will you come to your senses? Sack them and let's start with a clean sheet.'

Jules listened with downcast eyes, tapping slowly on the blotter. ‘You can't blame me. I can't make any money when I'm with psychological
saboteurs
like you and Michel. Besides, you didn't write to me once while I was in bed. You let a type like Raccamond look out nurses for me. Why, even Daniel Cambo came to see me.'

‘Yes, and you let Daniel Cambo deposit a postdated check in sterling for his balance in the hope that the pound will go off and we'll only get eighty per cent of the money he owes us, maybe less. And this with talk of a frantic loan from Paris, going on. I say, out of what fairy-tale book did you get the idea that people are
in love
with you? Let them be in love with you, but you sing them to sleep.'

The two brothers faced each other with a certain repose now. Jules wanted to keep up a pretense of anger but had no heart for it. William's apology had healed the rankling hurt. William saw it and pressed home. ‘Another thing. Alphendéry. What's the idea of writing to everyone that he was no good. You're so clever that you can't get your bus off the grass without smashing yourself up and yet you know what's going on up here, by second sight. You know Michel is loyal and you damn well know how hard he works. We all do. Now, he wants to resign.'

‘Let him resign. He nearly ruined me, with his despair philosophy.'

‘Said Mr. Richard Plowman. What's the use of talking to you?'

‘I want to see the position of the clients.'

‘O.K. Come and see them. Michel's in there making up margin calls. You've scarcely seen him since you came back.'

‘Shut up! Leave me alone. You give me a headache.' The brothers were silent for a minute. Jules said in a lower tone, ‘Who's talking about either of you leaving me? They pestered me down there. You don't know what a hole I was in. I suffered too. Don't tell anyone that. If you or Michel had come down they wouldn't have been so thick around me. Blame yourselves.'

During the next few days Jules was cold to Bomba, who slavered round till he found out that William was asking for his dismissal. Then he got up a mental card index on William. He came round one day, in a humble way to ‘borrow' 12,500 francs. Jules gave it to him gloomily and suddenly told him to go to Oslo and help old Dannevig in that branch.

* * *

Scene Fifty-nine: Time Forward, Time Abolished

J
ean Frère had a stew on the fire in his workshop-flat and they walked that way. It was in an old house looking on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, at the corner of the Rue du Pont de Lodi, near the Pont Neuf. It was twilight and they, like the macadam and the buildings, were coated with that faint lucent ghostly gelatine light that makes Paris-real so like Paris-graved and Paris-memoried. There was a great atelier with one or two bench rooms leading off it, that Jean lived in at night when he stayed in town. It was used by young art students and their teacher in the daytime. The stew greeted them in the slimy bricked courtyard. Jean took a key of medieval proportions from the rack, and a letter, and showed them the way up the worn wooden staircase. They sat down in the angles of the workshop, angles made by walls, tables, cupboard, a bookpress, a stove, chairs, and sat on all sorts of things the natures of which were concealed in the thickening night.

The violet luminosity, like a distant glow from some giant blue-printer's hole, stole in through the upper panes of five windows, one on the courtyard, three on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, one in a bench room with no door and the only other light came from a few embers in the stove. Jean got out four soup plates, talking about his stew, meanwhile, and served out the stew to Adam Constant, Michel Alphendéry, and Charles Lorée, a physicist, issued from one of the ‘grand families.'

Charles Lorée was already known all over the Latin world. He was a giant, ‘six feet four,' he explained carefully, ‘but only six feet three when I take my shoes off,' and weighed ‘two hundred and eighty-nine pounds and five ounces, on the average.' He wore a cloth cap usually over his bald pate and its size was seven and three-quarters, he told them confidentially. He was a great physical phenomenon: his brain box was immense, completely overshadowed his eyes, so that no one ever saw them, unless they looked very close, through his eyebrows: his nose was great, his chin great and powerful, his biceps were great, he was powerfully ventripotent, he walked with a slight stoop, like most tall men: when he sat down with his legs outstretched like pine logs the whole company was in danger of somersaults and broken crowns.

The stew was remarkably good. Charles Lorée himself ate four soup-plates full and then stopped with a foxy glance at the rest of them, as if he had calculated their stomach capacity. He took a whole bottle of Jean's light wine to himself and kept taking a pull at the bottle mouth. He said little. The night fell completely and the street lamps shone yellowly in across the benches under the windows, showing all the paraphernalia of the studio, pencils, chisels, hammers, a gluepot, drawing paper.

Alphendéry made one or two attempts to bring in a political discussion, but after some ragged, distrait responses, they died in his throat, and he settled with the others, into the blood-warm silence of the evening. Someone moved—it was Jean. He opened a cupboard and got out something. He came back and sat down. The lamplight laid a golden thread down the outline of his wild curls, short neck, and bowed shoulders in a blue workshirt. They heard the first reedy sounds of his accordion, and he began a recital for them—for himself—in the dark, and presently broke into song. They heard the clink of Charles Lorée's bottle on the floor and then he broke into a vast, sweet baritone humming. Jean's selection was simple—street songs, family songs, movie theme songs, famous national ditties—
Auprés de ma blonde
,
Ma Normandie
,
Les Filles de la Rochelle
,
Ma Femme est morte
,
Sous les Toits de Paris
,
Annie Laurie
,
Black Eyes
,
Old Man River
,
The Varsovienne
,
Di provenza il mar
,
il suol
,
Ecco ridente
,
The Internationale
,
Marching through Georgia
—people's tuneful songs.

Alphendéry spent the time falling deeper in love with Jean Frère and conscientiously picking out grains of pedantry in himself, for he had been brought up to sing (in his flawed and untrained voice) themes from Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, and Mozart. In fact, he never allowed himself to hum, even to himself, any popular tunes—strange results of having Dutch uncles! But Jean and Charles Lorée went on singing away in their two beautiful and blended voices and Jean urged softly once or twice, as he drew breath, ‘Sing, sing.' Alphendéry sat there, turning large, soft, defenseless, black eyes on the outlines of things in the dark. He was not used to sitting in the dark: he always sat in the brightest lights possible and thought and talked in the most brilliant manner possible. It unnerved him to sit with the ‘great people's leader' Jean Frère and the ‘famous physicist' Charles Lorée in the dark and hear them singing
Old Man River
. His world swiftly dissolved and slowly rose up again from cells.

At home, they had sing-songs, when he was a boy, but they were the great themes from ‘the great masters,' trumpeted, droned, double-bassed, celloed in his uncles' great Rhineland pipes; there were orchestration, a conductor, and the devil to pay if you went out of tune or forgot the score. It was not really singing: it was a concert under an iron conductor, with the regulation jokes at certain passages, and three or four or even a crowd of passers-by listening intently outside the window. And bright lights, Heine, Goethe, Racine, Corneille, Molière, Shakespeare, Pushkin on the library shelves, works of philosophy and medicine and endless coffee and apple cake. If Michel had at that time ever forgotten himself and fallen into
Ecco ridente
he would have had a lecture on culture beginning with Alaric (at the latest) and ending with barbarians yet unconceived even of fascist poets … So there he sat and thought of the great lover of culture he was and the great oddity he appeared in the company of Jean and Charles and Adam, and he sweated. ‘But happily, happily,' his lips moved, ‘I know now—oh, thank God, they never got me to take a professor's job. Happily—' Shades of his uncles Guillaume and Robert arose and he saw their heads together with his mother's over the long waxed table.

‘He is a born lawyer: that's it.'

‘Yes, Michel will become a judge, no doubt whatever.'

But now there he sat, the brilliant polemic orator of the past and felt mellow; his anxiety was dissolving, and he had no right, he felt, to expound anything whatever, out of all he knew and had stored up in all these years. He studied the golden thread on the back of Jean Frère with ardent, silent attention. Adam Constant broke the enchantment by saying, ‘By the way, Michel, a friend of yours is coming in a little while—Henrietta Achitophelous.'

‘Oh, is there any stew left?' cried Alphendéry. ‘Old Achitophelous, moved by some mysterious superstition, wants Henrietta to learn cooking and scrubbing—when Henrietta gets her portion she'll only be able to hire twenty servants!—I must introduce Achitophelous to you, Jean. He'll certainly try to find someone with a million francs for you to marry, on your culinary accomplishments …'

‘In the country,' said Jean, ‘my mother fed us entirely off the soil, meat, poultry, herbs, and she cured our sicknesses, too, out of the fields and woods. My mother was a wonderful woman: I am not half like her. I was lazy. I regret it now. One day—no, this is really funny—a schoolteacher saw me dawdling round the village and gave me a book, saying, “You ought to read this book, Jean: you're a boy who could do something for France.” After that I got to like reading. If not for her—I would be soling shoes now, I suppose.' Jean shook his head. The room was invaded with the smell of paddocks, and sunlight on distant wild banks and rutty roads, on copses shading milch cows, boundary stones, straggling apple trees and madly obstinate little bull calves straddle-legged and loud-voiced, on their way to market. ‘My father makes his own furrow still,' pronounced Charles Lorée, with the idiosyncratic warm rush in his voice, as if he defied the world to say the opposite. The telephone rang. ‘Yes?' said Jean in his warm, lingering voice in which was always an enchanting touch of self-deprecation, ‘Yes, Suzanne: I have seen him. In fact, he is here now, Suzanne. A moment. Adam—' he whispered, ‘your wife!' Jean turned on the light. Adam got up with a set, sober, little face.

‘Yes, Suzanne,' in that dead tone of the man haunted by the wailing ghost of a love affair. He listened for a few moments and answered, ‘Why don't you come over here to Jean's? No, I have no other engagement, Suzanne. Come over, do please, yes, do please.' He put the phone down and came back to them. ‘She's coming over: she's just through a meeting.' There was the silence accorded to a man's troubles by his intimate friends. Adam explained, ‘Sometimes the impulse gets too strong for Suzanne and she has to come and look at me across a room, or in the company of some woman I like. A sort of need for the convulsions of love. She's not getting so many naturally, as I live with her again.' He turned his head aside, to indicate that the conversation was at an end.

But Jean said, ‘She's a great worker, excellent comrade. Gets violent at times, that's the only thing but—she'd—h'm—make a good commissar. A woman of destiny—unhappy destiny.'

Adam shook his head. ‘She wants to let me go but she can't: poor Suzanne!'

‘Strange in a communist woman … relics of the property sense,' sighed Alphendéry.

Jean shook his head slowly. ‘No, no,' he laughed broadly but with a faint embarrassment, he shook himself in his overlarge clothes, laughed again: ‘Poor girls! They have been after me with a knife too.' He sheepishly held out his white muscular arm with two great crisscross scars on it and pointed to a scar on his forehead. After a moment, he said, ‘Wonder where Judith is? I'd better get out the cups: we'll make coffee.' He got up and wandered to a broken-down, chiseled-off, rat-bitten, much-painted closet door. On the shelves inside were assorted bits of china, a man's emporium, and on the three others, brushes, little bottles of oils and acids, dirty plates, a glue boiler. Jean threw a cloth over the deeply incised bench and put five assorted cups and saucers on it, and a plate of honey cakes. He went and smelled the steaming copper saucepan. ‘Judith and I put it on this morning and I tested it this afternoon and just put in anything I could think of,' he said with shy vanity. ‘My mother—I like going out getting the herbs. Some they haven't heard of round here. If Judith wants anything she says, ‘You go and get it: you shop better than I do.' I like housekeeping, do you, Michel?'