The Foundling's War (28 page)

‘You have a contract!’

‘I’m throwing it away.’

‘Find a very good lawyer then.’

He went out, slamming the door.

Nelly stroked Jean’s cheek.

‘Well! That’s much better for both of us.’

‘Yes, much better.’

She replaced her astrakhan hat and re-applied her lipstick in front of the mirror. A secretary knocked and entered. She brought an envelope and a typewritten letter.

‘Monsieur Duzan asked me to give you this cheque. He’d like you to sign your letter of resignation.’

‘What about me?’ Nelly said.

‘He didn’t give me anything for you.’

‘Shame.’

Jean read the letter of resignation and signed it.

‘Shall I throw his cheque back in his face?’ he asked Nelly.

‘No. Keep it. His money’s as good as anyone’s.’

Jean put the cheque in his pocket and asked the secretary, if anyone telephoned him, to redirect the call to Rue de Presbourg.

‘No,’ Nelly said. ‘To me. Today I’m keeping you with me. I’m inviting you home for lunch. My Uncle Eugène, who has the incredible good fortune to live in the Vire, has sent me an
andouillette
you’ll still be talking about when you’re sixty.’

If she had offered him a herring bone, he would have followed her wherever she told him to go. She was there, she existed, she understood everything. He desired her while Claude, under arrest somewhere in Paris, in isolation, was asking herself whether those who loved her had abandoned her. Unless she was not sitting alone on a hard wooden bench but being questioned, slapped, beaten and humiliated into admitting she had met Georges Chaminadze.

They reached Place Saint-Sulpice by Métro. Passengers recognised Nelly. A little girl with a lisp held out an autograph book. Nelly took Jean’s arm to cross the square. A man with a red nose who looked numb with cold and had a haversack on his back was attracting pigeons with breadcrumbs. A bird pecked at his palm. He grabbed it by a claw, wrung its neck and stuffed it into his haversack. The other pigeons flew away, then came back. He waited calmly for them, not moving, his arm extended, showing neither pleasure nor boredom. The brim of his homburg hat was pulled down over his eyes. All that was visible was his really very red nose and the stubble on his badly shaven chin.

‘I should like to find a poet who talks about Saint-Sulpice and pigeons and people going hungry,’ Nelly said. ‘But … it’s difficult. Of course there’s Ponchon: “I hate the towers of Saint-Sulpice – whenever I see them I piss on them …” I can’t promise that’s it exactly, but Ponchon’s a real poet.
22
He wrote about black stockings and virtuous maidens. Do you like black stockings?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Notice that I didn’t ask you what you thought about virtuous maidens.’

‘I haven’t known one. They’re a rare breed.’

‘That’s a shame. If you had, you could have recited Ponchon’s excellent speech to her. “Now we know on what a fat purse, Mademoiselle, you mount your horse …”’

He laughed. Nelly dispensed gaiety. These days gaiety meant hope and courage. She was making the waiting and uncertainty disappear with a discretion he would not forget.

The studio was icy. Jean lit a fire of logs while Nelly changed her dress for a pair of trousers and a roll-neck sweater. But for her slight bust, she would have looked like a beautiful young man. Even her voice could have been a boy’s. She chattered incessantly to Jean, to herself, even briefly to a cat slinking across the balcony on the other side of the street. Opening the window she called out, ‘Marc-Adolphe Papillon, you shouldn’t be out in weather like this. You’ll catch cold and your papa’ll get worried.’

She closed the window. The cat did not move, staring at her, its back arched.

‘Funny name for a cat!’ Jean said.

‘It’s not any old cat, it’s Maurice Fombeure’s cat. In the morning when Marc-Adolphe comes home, Fombeure tells him:

‘So you can see he’s not any old cat.’

‘Do you know any other poems of Fombeure’s?’

‘Plenty. But let’s go gently. You shouldn’t stuff yourself with poets. Very indigestible. I’ll teach you to cherry-pick …’

He recounted to her how, as a boy of thirteen, he had met two Breton separatists on the run and how one of them, Yann, had recited Victor Hugo to him in a voice he had not forgotten and how a few hours later the second separatist, Monsieur Carnac, had ridiculed the poet’s flight of fancy by quoting the lines that were missing from the stanza: ‘Love each other! ’tis the month when the strawberries are sweet.’ What had become of Yann and Monsieur Carnac? The Germans, having envisaged backing the Breton Liberation Front, had given up the idea under pressure from Vichy. Were Yann and Monsieur Carnac continuing the struggle, pursued now by the police on both sides? But someone else had offered him a poet too. He spoke of his fabulous meeting with the prince and his chauffeur, the enigmatic Salah who had slipped a copy of Toulet’s
Counter-rhymes
into his haversack. The copy had been left behind at his last billet. Jean remembered how, during his long marches, staggering under the weight of his kit, full cartridge belts and the machine gun biting into his shoulder, he had recited to himself, without moving his lips, the thrilling lines that conjured up a naked woman and the fragrance of the Indian Ocean.

‘I wouldn’t say them well. I’d like to hear you read them.’

On a shelf Nelly had a copy of
Counter-rhymes
. Together they searched, like a pair of schoolboys, for the poem Jean had liked so much for its contrast and the escape it had offered from the stubborn stupidity of army life. Nelly recited:

The telephone rang. Nelly sprang to answer it.

‘Oh, it’s you … No, leave me alone. Listen, Dudu, I’m expecting a very important call. You have to leave my line clear … Yes … of course … I’ll see you on one condition … that
you hang up
. And do it now. Jean? Of course he’s here. I’m in the middle of photographing him quite naked on a tiger skin. You cannot imagine how delicious he looks. Hang up and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

She replaced the receiver and smiled.

‘He’s not as bad as he seems. You have to treat him a bit meanly. I can’t always do it. I’m too weak …’

She made lunch on the table covered with oilcloth in the kitchen, where there was barely room to move.

‘I’m turning into my mother. She has a dining room, but it’s only for family occasions. Otherwise it’s in the kitchen. Near the pans. She claims you eat better with an oven behind you. Papa wipes his knife, fork and glass before he starts. He’s never been able to lose the habit. It annoys Maman. He doesn’t care. Oh blast, I haven’t got any red wine.’

‘We’ll do without.’

‘No, I’ve got champagne. Julius and Madeleine sent me some Dom
Pérignon 1929. A case. Do you think it’ll be enough?’

‘I think it’ll be enough.’

‘Sit down then. And tell me the stories about the prince again. I’m like a little girl. I love princes and fairy tales. You said he was the lover of your real mother?’

‘Whether he is or was, I’ve no idea. When I last saw him in August 1939, before he left for Lebanon, he was dying slowly … I’ve had no news since then.’

‘And of her?’

‘None of her either. Why would she send me any? She doesn’t know I’m her son.’

‘Will you tell her?’

‘Palfy says I shouldn’t. He feels it wouldn’t be good manners.’

‘Your friend’s awfully funny. I’ve never met anyone as cynical as him. Don’t you like it?’

‘Palfy? Of course—’

‘No. I mean the
andouillette
.’

‘At least as much.’

‘Have some more then.’

After lunch they lay stretched out on the rug in front of the log fire, another bottle between them.

‘You’re not too sad?’ she asked.

‘Sad? No, that’s not the word. I’m waiting. I can’t do anything. I’m waiting. It’s easier with you.’

She held his hand and shifted closer to him. He wanted to undress her. She stopped him.

‘No. Let’s keep our clothes on. When you’re naked, pleasure goes everywhere. I want you just to be inside me. Everything should happen there. You’ll see, it’s much more intense.’

She took him out and loosened her clothes just enough. He felt so good when he was inside her that he stopped moving and closed his eyes. Their pleasure intensified, gently, without their saying a word. They stayed like that for a long time, before they finally came together.

Later the window let in only a vague greyness. The flames from the logs cast flickering orange shapes onto the ceiling. Books, photos and drawings trembled in the fire’s dying light. The building and street were slowly submerged in the darkness. They distantly heard the noisy iron shutter of a shop selling religious objects coming down. The telephone, within reach of their hands on the rug, did not ring. Nelly lifted the receiver to her ear to check the line had not been cut. No. There was a dialling tone. She replaced it quickly. They opened another bottle. The third, or fourth? They weren’t counting any longer, and it hardly mattered. Everything flowed over them. They shut themselves away in a patience that could no longer be distracted by desire. Nelly got up to put another log on the sputtering fire. Burning pine added its sweet smell to the room.

‘Tell me something else,’ she said.

He told her about Chantal de Malemort, the little girl who had taken his hand when they hid in a dark room, the girl who had exercised her horse in the Arques forest, the one who one day in Paris had run away with someone else. Antoinette had written that the hard life at the Malemorts’ since the marquis had become a prisoner of war had transformed the delicate girl into a sturdy countrywoman, her cheeks ruddy from labouring in the fields. Like her father. Like three generations of Malemorts who had defended their property without imagination, with a gruff stubbornness. She refused to see Gontran Longuet. She had turned her back on her past, speaking ruefully and scornfully of her former girlish pretensions to happiness. Malemorts looked down on love. Love was for servants. And as servants became harder to find, so did love. One still saw her occasionally galloping flat out through the forest, followed by a couple of hunting dogs, and never acknowledging a friendly wave. For two years she had spoken to her mother only twice a day: once to say good morning, and in
the evening to say good night. The Marquise de Malemort suffered in silence.

‘You’ll see her again,’ Nelly said.

‘I hardly ever think about her. She’s buried under all sorts of old things now, and under new experiences and other women.’

‘Yes, but it was love. True love. There are only two sorts: the love you feel in childhood, and love at first sight. The rest is just mucking about, and then you add a bit of literature to make it feel like a dream. Claude is love at first sight. If you lost her, you’d never find anything like her ever again. I hope Palfy can save her. If not, little Jules-who, you’re going to turn into – and you’ll have every right to – a dreadful cynic just like your friend.’

‘I’m already—’

Nelly kissed him on the cheek.

‘No. Not with me. You’re not cheating on her with me. We’re friends. We share everything, even pleasure. And we’ve no secrets from each other.’

‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’

‘Thank you. Now that’s a very nice thing to say. Usually men aren’t as nice as that and prefer to tell me that it turns out I’m just like all the others, a bitch who’ll sleep with anyone.’

‘It’s stupid we didn’t get to know each other sooner.’

‘Sooner? Before Claude? Before my first lover? Poor Jules-who, with me you’d have been unhappy straight away. I’m too inquisitive. I always want to know more. I’ll never stop. When I’m old and ugly and ruined like Mercedes del Loreto, I’ll pay for lovers. I will, I’ll have money and I’ll pay for lovers. Beautiful boys, novices, half-boys,
half-girls
. But hung like stallions—’

The telephone rang. She grabbed the receiver.

‘Constantin? Yes, he’s here … What’s happening? Oh, that’s wonderful! I’ll pass him to you …’

Jean grabbed the phone. He was shaking.

‘It wasn’t easy,’ Palfy said. ‘I’ll explain. It’s better if she doesn’t go
home this evening … We could bring her to Rue de Presbourg but that’s not ideal either. Nor Madeleine’s … Any ideas?’

‘No. Not really. Wait …’

He turned to Nelly.

‘It’s better if Claude doesn’t go back to her apartment this evening.’

‘Tell her to come here.’

‘Here?’

‘Why not?’

It seemed perfectly natural when Nelly said it. There was a silence, then he heard Claude’s voice.

‘Anywhere, Jean. Anywhere. I just need to sleep. I can’t go on. They questioned me all night and all day. But I’d like Cyrille with me …’

Everything was settled. The chauffeur would drive Claude to Nelly’s. Madame Michette would accompany her. Then the car would take Jean to fetch Cyrille. Things happened so quickly that there was no opportunity to reflect or find Nelly’s hospitality unusual. She wanted Cyrille to stay too.