The Foundling Boy (15 page)

After the Tower of London, Jean insisted that they go to Hyde Park. They bought spongy sandwiches and bottles of lemonade that they ate and drank on a bench facing the Serpentine, which ran gently between two banks of lawns. At lunchtime the young secretaries left their offices and came to stretch out on the grass and eat a packet of biscuits, pecked by pigeons. At least a hundred Eliza Picketts walked past them, in three-cornered hats and buckled shoes. Salah explained that the English loved two things more than anything: lawns and animals. Apart from that, nothing, or almost nothing. He also mentioned that the prince had been very tired for a number of months and now rarely left his country house in Oxfordshire, and that Madame could not stay in one place. She drove in her Bentley coupé from one grand house to another, came back to dine at Chelsea, left again the next morning at dawn, always full of vigour and happy to be alive. Yet people said that she had been ill like the prince and that they had met in a nursing home.

Two three-cornered hats stopped in front of them, stared at them in astonishment, and said something before continuing on their way.

‘What are they talking about?’ Jean asked.

‘The first one,’ Salah explained, ‘said, “There’s a Negro”, talking about me, obviously, and the second one said, “I didn’t know they were allowed to sit next to children in Hyde Park.” Do you think I should have said something to them?’

‘Yes, but what?’

‘Something like, I’m really just rather suntanned, and in a generation half of London will be black-skinned. But they would not have believed me.’

‘It would have been funny.’

‘Yes, but you have to keep your mouth shut and know your place. I’ve learnt that. As I have learnt the scorn of the scorned.’

‘You speak really cleverly for a chauffeur, Salah.’

‘My father is a proper Egyptian, a minor provincial aristocrat, if you like, pale-skinned, and I’m the son of a Sudanese mother, a sort of slave girl. They sent me to a school run by the Lasallians, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, but I only ever had one thought: to escape from Egypt and see the world. The prince took me with him. I respect him because he speaks to me like a human being. You’ll see him: he is an immensely good man, a very rare thing among Arabs, especially Muslims. I say that as a Muslim myself, who never eats pork or drinks alcohol and respects Ramadan.’

‘You’re a very good friend to me,’ Jean said.

Salah smiled, half-opening his wide, scored lips and showing his yellow teeth. A Semitic nose inherited from his father clashed with his black skin and frizzy hair. His long, fine hands lay on his knees. Jean was impressed by their grace and by the care with which he looked after his nails. He was more familiar with Albert’s rugged hands or with the abbé Le Couec’s big paddles or Monsieur du Courseau’s paws. Somehow Salah’s hands reminded him of Chantal and her long, fine fingers and fresh, pink rounded nails, as if these two beings, so different in their skin, habits, sky and God, had some mysterious common origin.

Opposite where they were sitting, on the other bank of the Serpentine, a girl sat down on the grass, crossed her legs and started to read a book that she had placed on her lap. Her tow-coloured hair framed a plump, rather round face. She was chewing a bar of chocolate, oblivious – in reality or just pretending, it was impossible to say – of the sight she was offering the man and boy facing her: a panoramic view beneath her dress of sturdy thighs of a sugary whiteness and a pair of screamingly loud pink knickers. Salah and Jean both fell silent, fascinated by her immodesty. They had finished their sandwiches and lemonade. The day was wearing on, and they would have stayed talking to one another a while longer if this obscene
apparition had not come to disturb the friendship that had suddenly grown up between them on a calm English afternoon animated by swans, old ladies in three-cornered hats and daydreaming couples lounging on the grass. Salah was the first to rouse himself. Getting to his feet, he put his chauffeur’s cap back on, pulled on his gloves, and bowed.

‘Where would sir like to go?’ he asked with exaggerated deference.

‘Wherever you like, Salah.’

The Egyptian looked at his watch.

‘I have a suggestion: we shall keep Westminster Abbey for tomorrow, and if it doesn’t bore you too much, we’ll go to the British Museum instead, where I’ll leave you for a moment to go and have a French lesson with my teacher who lives very close by, in Soho.’

‘But you don’t need any lessons, you speak very good French.’

‘Yes, I speak, but unfortunately I write very badly. Mostly phonetically. If the dear Brothers read my writing, they would blush to their roots. I’ve found an excellent teacher, a grammarian. Her lessons don’t last longer than half an hour, and in the evening I do the homework she gives me.’

‘The British Museum it is, then.’

At Piccadilly Jean asked who the statue was, balanced on its pedestal.

‘Eros!’ Salah said, grinning. ‘This is his spiritual home, everywhere around here.’

The god of love! Jean’s thoughts went straight back to Chantal. Their first journey would be to London and their first visit to this statue. The Hispano-Suiza turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, which bore no resemblance at all to the clean and fashionable London of Chelsea or Kensington. All along the grimy pavements were cinemas with garish posters, theatres with jangling bells, Italian cafés whose proprietors took your money as you went in, cigars clamped between their teeth. A pervasive smell of vanilla, dust, chip fat and petrol hung
in the air, as if everything had been gathered up together, stirred and cooked in desperation, and finally exhausted.

The British Museum belonged to another, more reassuring district. Jean had never seen anything quite so impressive when Salah set him down at the main entrance.

‘I’ll pick you up in an hour,’ he said. ‘In any case, I’m not going far. Odeon Street is just around the corner.’

Jean was not passionate about museums. Painting quickly bored him, especially the official kind of painting that glorified British victories in Portugal, in Spain, at Trafalgar and Waterloo. These British devils had always won everything. William the Conqueror was the only one who had taught them a lesson, and as a Norman himself Jean was proud about that. He turned his back on these disagreeable reminders and headed for the sculpture rooms. Greek history and Roman history were still fresh in his mind. There, at least, in those vast halls you could still dream, even if it was permissible to doubt Lord Elgin’s right to take down half the surviving friezes of the Parthenon and enrich his country with their incomparable sculptures.

As he was contemplating one of the friezes, a bald man in his fifties, with red lips and dressed in the black suit and white collar of a clergyman, approached him.

‘Are you French?’

‘Yes,’ Jean said, surprised to be so easily identified.

‘I thought as much from the way you look.’

‘The way I look?’

‘Something which is unmistakable and common to every French person. I’ve lived in your country. Are you interested in Greek sculpture?’

‘Er … yes, sir.

‘Do you like Greek history?’

‘It’s very interesting.’

‘It’s much better than that!’ the minister said, raising his finger. ‘It’s the only history that matters.’

He spoke so close to Jean’s face that Jean felt gusts of cold tobacco buffet him. The minister looked into his eyes with chilling insistence.

‘Greek beauty!’ he said again. ‘Impossible to imitate. It has disappeared for ever, corrupted by foreigners. Look at that young athlete, his slender neck and his torso, in which you can follow the play of muscles beneath the skin and even the ripple of the veins in their exertion …’

The man’s hand grasped Jean’s arm and squeezed it with unexpected force, as if to prevent him from running away.

‘And yet … and yet!’ he went on. ‘Yet one does find sometimes, like a gift from heaven, yes, I really mean a gift from heaven, without blaspheming, the trace of Greek beauty in isolated individuals. Its seed has mysteriously come down the centuries, and beauty is reborn, unaccountably, in almost all its purity … You don’t have any Greek ancestors, do you?’

‘No,’ Jean said, trying to disengage himself and distance his face from the other’s with its blue, staring gaze that was making him nervous.

‘I thought so. Well now, come and have a look at this extraordinary coincidence: a young athlete who is twenty-five centuries old and looks like your brother.’

The minister dragged him to the end of the room. A twisting staircase led to a dark room where spotlights illuminated a series of metopes in a line, the metopes of the temple of Bassae.

‘Look! Look!’

Jean saw nothing but some high reliefs of definite grace, but whose faces all looked the same and who, he felt, bore no resemblance to him whatsoever. On the other hand, he definitely felt the minister’s arm slip around his waist and pull him close; and when the
tobacco-breath
mouth tried to press itself against his own he gagged, wrenched himself away and stood ready to defend himself.

‘You horrible pig! Dirty old man!’

‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’ the minister hissed, his cheeks puce.

A couple appeared in the doorway, and Jean dashed away, hurtled down the stairs and ran as far as the museum’s exit, his cheeks burning. He must be as red in the face as the minister. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. He did not actually know what it meant, only having heard about such things in crude conversations between those of his classmates who were always thirsty for smut, but just from the gagging sensation he had had, he was certain he had escaped from something horrible. He should have … oh yes, what shouldn’t he have done! Smashed his fist into the nose of the dirty old swine, called an attendant, got the old lecher arrested. He became ashamed that he had run away. Wasn’t it the churchman who should have run away? If only Salah had been there! But Salah was having his French lesson and would not be back for half an hour. Visitors were coming and going, staring at the tall boy with red cheeks and dishevelled hair. Jean thought that people must be able to read on his face, as clear as day, what had just happened. He had seen the direction the Hispano-Suiza had taken after it left him, and he started walking that way. Odeon Street was difficult to find in the labyrinth of narrow streets lined with pubs, nightclubs and restaurants. By a stroke of luck, and what he considered to be an unheard-of thing, a youngish woman, albeit rather heavily made up, smiled at him. He stopped and asked, ‘Odeon Street, please.’

Expecting not to understand a word of her reply, he was startled to hear her say, with a pretty Toulouse accent, ‘Young man, are you sure you’re old enough to be hanging around here?’

‘You’re French! Oh what luck. I’m thirteen.’

‘Well, at the age of thirteen you don’t hang around in Odeon Street. Do me a favour and go home to maman.’

‘I’m looking for the chauffeur.’

‘What chauffeur?’

‘You haven’t seen a big yellow Hispano-Suiza, have you?’

‘Salah’s Hispano?’

‘Do you know it?’

‘Do I know it … a bit.’

‘It’s time for his French lesson.’

The painted lady raised her black-pencilled eyebrows.

‘Oh … ah, I see, Monsieur. Well, take the second street on the left and you’ll see his Hispano. Good luck, young man …’

‘Thank you, Madame!’

He quickened his step and almost immediately he came upon the car parked outside a fairly run-down house. On the half-open door he saw three printed cards:

Beneath in gothic letters:

The third card must be the one:

The building was wretched. A spiral staircase climbed upwards between walls corroded by saltpetre, but instead of the habitual smell of sprouts that oozes from this sort of building there was a stomach-turning mixture of face powder and disinfectant. On the third floor he stopped outside Madame Germaine’s door. A cord of multicoloured hemp cloth hung above the notice that announced the same
words as on the ground floor, this time underlined: ‘
very strict’
. Poor Salah! Who was this person he trusted to teach him perfect French? Jean listened for the sound of raised voices. All he could hear was murmurs of encouragement, and he pulled on the cord. There were whispers, the sound of steps, then a small panel he had not noticed slid open beneath the printed card and a woman’s voice with a southern accent said, ‘It’s not time yet, love.’

‘Yes I know, but I need to speak to Salah.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Jean. Jean Arnaud.’

From the other side of the door he heard Salah’s voice.

‘Open it, let him in, it’s a friend.’

A chain rattled and the key turned twice. Why did they need to lock themselves in for a French lesson? It was true that the district seemed pretty shady, and there were all sorts and races in the streets and a lot of over-made-up ladies. Eventually the door inched ajar and a woman appeared in the half-open doorway, her black hair loose, her face coated in cream, her lips mauve. She seemed to be wearing a dressing gown or long dress of gold polka dots. Jean couldn’t see all of her, and Salah had already moved her aside to step onto the landing.

‘What’s going on? It was agreed that I would come and pick you up at the British Museum.’

Jean recounted his ordeal at the metopes of Bassae. Salah looked dismayed.

‘I shouldn’t have left you on your own, even for such a short time. It’s my fault.’

‘No it isn’t, it really isn’t. How could you have known?’

‘I should know everything. Would you like me to find him and smash his face in?’

‘Oh no, not a scene, that’s the last thing I want! I want to go back. I’ll ride my bike and you can go in front to show me the way. Have you finished your French lesson?’