Overhead in a Balloon (17 page)

“I haven’t made a formal will yet,” he said, quite as though he had anything to leave. “But there’s one particular thing I want
you
to have. It’s a painting of me. I sat for it here, in Paris, before the war. Around 1912. I don’t remember the artist’s name, but he was big in those days. If you ever have a son, I want him to have the picture. Promise me you’ll come and get it no matter where you happen to be when I go.”

He helped himself to a drink and, as though no answer from Larry were needed, began to talk about something else he owned – an ancient hookah, a museum piece. Maggie would appreciate having it, he thought.

Larry noticed that their drinks were leaving rings on the inlaid table. He rubbed them with a corner of a dust sheet, but it was too late.

T
he next day, while he was trying to sandpaper the stains, Larry remembered the portrait. It showed his father wearing a hat at a jaunty angle, his hands clasped on a walking stick. He appeared to be elegant and reliable, the way things and people are always said to have been when one looks back at them across a war.

When Larry’s father left Larry and his mother, he took the portrait with him. It must have been hanging in a dining room, because Larry saw him taking it down, and then tossing a bundle of money, cash, on a polished table. His mother sat in
profile, turned away, arms folded. She looked toward, but not at, the little glass shelves at the window, where she kept her collection of miniature cacti in pottery dishes. She wore the look of dark grieving no child can enter. When he saw that she was not going to turn back his way or say something to him, Larry’s father secured the portrait under his arm and walked out. There was a blank place on the wall, and on the table, deeply reflected, a packet of bills that seemed a lot but that never was or could be enough.

Over the next few days and until the end of August, when it was time for Larry to move on, he continued to work on the inlaid table, repeating the operation of sandpaper and wax until the rings showed but palely, and only under direct, strong light. Except for those faint circles, and a few sheets of hotel stationery and a few ounces of whiskey gone, he left no other trace behind him of loss or mischief.

T
he project for a three-volume dictionary of literary biography,
Living Authors of the Fourth Republic
, was set afloat in Paris in 1952, with an eleven-man editorial committee in the same lifeboat. The young and promising Henri Grippes, spokesman for a new and impertinent generation, waited on shore for news of mass drownings; so he says now. A few years later, when the working title had to be changed to
Living Authors of the Fifth Republic
, Grippes was invited aboard. In 1964, Grippes announced there were not enough living authors to fill three volumes, and was heaved over the side. Actually, he had just accepted a post as writer-in-residence at a women’s college in California; from the Pacific shore he sent a number of open
letters to Paris weeklies, denouncing the dictionary scheme as an attempt to establish a form of literary pecking order. Anti-élitism was in the air, and Grippes’ views received great prominence. His return to Paris found a new conflict raging:
two
volumes were now to be produced, under the brusque and fashionable title
Contemporary Writers, Women and Others
. Grippes at once published a pamphlet revealing that it was a police dodge for feeding women and others into a multi – national computer. In the event of invasion, the computer would cough up the names and the authors would be lined up and marched to forced labour in insurance companies. He carried the day, and for a time the idea of any contemporary literary directory was dropped.

Grippes had by then come into a little money, and had bought himself an apartment over a cinema in Montparnasse. He wore a wide felt hat and a velvet jacket in cool weather and a panama straw and a linen coat when it was fine. Instead of a shopping bag he carried a briefcase. He wrote to the mayor of Paris – who answered, calling him “Maître” – to protest a plan to remove the statue of Balzac from Boulevard Raspail, just north of the Boulevard du Montparnasse intersection. It was true that the statue was hemmed in by cars illegally parked and that it was defiled by pigeons, but Grippes was used to seeing it there. He also deplored that the clock on the corner near the Dôme no longer kept time; Grippes meant by this that it did not keep the same time as his watch, which he often forgot to wind.

In the meantime the old two-volume project, with its aging and dwindled editorial committee and its cargo of card-index files, had floated towards a reliable firm that published old-fashioned history manuals with plenty of colour plates, and
geography books that drew attention only to territories that were not under dispute. The Ministry of Culture was thought to be behind the venture. The files, no one quite knew how, were pried away from the committee and confided to a professor of English literature at a provincial university. The
Angliciste
would be unlikely to favour one school of French writing over another, for the simple reason that he did not know one from the other. The original committee had known a great deal, which was why for some thirty years its members had been in continual deadlock.

It seemed to the
Angliciste
that the work would have wider appeal if a section was included on British writers known for their slavish cultural allegiance to France. First on the list was, of course, Victor Prism, lifelong and distinguished Francophile and an old academic acquaintance. He recalled that Prism had once lived in Paris as the protégé of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh, a patroness of the arts; so, at about the same time, had the future novelist and critic Henri Grippes. “Two golden lion cubs in the golden cage of the great lioness,” as the
Angliciste
wrote Grippes, asking him to contribute a concise appreciation of his comrade in early youth. “Just say what seemed to you to be prophetic of his achievement. We are in a great hurry. The work is now called
French Authors, 1950–2000
, and we must go to press by 1990 if it is to have any meaning for our time. Don’t trouble about Prism’s career; the facts are on record. Payment upon receipt of contribution, alas. The Ministry is being firm.”

Grippes received the letter a week before Christmas. He thought of sending Prism a sixteen-page questionnaire but decided, reasonably, that it might dull the effect of surprise. He
set to work, and by dint of constant application completed his memoir the following Easter. It was handwritten, of course; even his sojourn in California had not reconciled Grippes to typewriters. “I feel certain this is what you are after,” he wrote the
Angliciste
. “A portrait of Prism as protégé. It was an experience that changed his external image. Miss Pugh often said he had arrived on her doorstep looking as if he had spent his life in the rain waiting for a London bus. By the time he left, a few weeks later, a wholehearted commitment to the popular Parisian idols of the period – Sartre, Camus, and Charles Trenet – caused him to wear a little grey hat with turned-up brim, a black shirt, an off-white tie, and voluminous trousers. At his request, Miss Pugh gave him a farewell present of crêpe-soled shoes. Perhaps, with luck, you may find a picture of him so attired.”

G
rippes’ memoir was untitled.

“ ‘The drawing room at the Duchess of B—’s overlooked a leafy avenue and a rustic bandstand in the city of O—. There, summer after summer, the Duchess had watched children rolling their hoops to the strains of a polka, or a waltz, or a mazurka, or a sparkling military march, remote indeed from the harsh sound of warfare that assailed her today.’

“Would anyone believe, now, that Victor Prism could have written this? That Prism could have poured out, even once, the old bourgeois caramel sauce?

“He did. The time was soon after the end of the Second World War. They were the first words of his first unfinished novel, and they so impressed Miss Mary Margaret Pugh, an
American lady then living in a bosky, sunless, and costly corner of Paris, that she invited Prism to complete the novel in her house.

“His benefactress, if extant, would be well over a hundred. In his unpublished roman à clef,
Goldfinches Have Yellow Feathers
, Prism left a picture of Miss Pugh he may still consider fair: ‘Miss Melbourne, from a distance, reminded Christopher of those statues of deposed monarchs one can see at seedy summer resorts along the Adriatic. Close up, she looked softer, middle-class, and wholly alarming. Often as Christopher sat across from Miss Melbourne, trying to eat his lunch and at the same time answer her unexpected questions, he would recall a portrait he had seen of a Renaissance merchant’s shrewd, hardy wife. It had something to do with Miss Melbourne’s plump shoulders and small pink nose, with her habit of fingering the lockets and laces she wore as though drawing the artist’s attention to essentials.’

“Miss Pugh had spent most of her life abroad, which was not unusual for rich spinsters of her generation. She seldom mentioned her father, a common fortune hunter, soon shed by her mother – tactful hostess, careful parent, trusted friend to artists and writers. The ash tree whose shade contributed no little to the primeval twilight of the dining room had grown from a sapling presented by Edith Wharton. As a girl, Miss Pugh had been allowed to peer round the door and watch her renowned compatriot eating sole meunière. She had not been presented to Mrs. Wharton, who was divorced.

“What constituted the difference between Mrs. Pugh, also divorced, and the novelist? It is likely that Miss Pugh never asked herself this question. Most of her interesting anecdotes
drifted off in this way, into the haze of ancient social mystery.

“The house that was to be Victor Prism’s refuge for a summer had been built in the eighteen-fifties, in a quiet street straggling downhill from the Trocadéro. Miss Pugh had inherited, along with the house, a legend that Balzac wrote
Cousine Bette
in the upstairs sitting room, though the prolific author had been buried a good three years before the foundation was dug.
Madame mère
probably bought the house in the eighteen-eighties. Soon after that, the character of the street changed. A considerable amount of low-value property changed hands. Most of the small houses were destroyed or became surrounded by seven-story apartment buildings made of stone, sturdily Third Republic in style. The house we are speaking of was now actually at the heart of a block, connected to the world by a narrow carriage drive, the latter a subject of perennial litigation. Tenants of the apartments could look down upon a low red-brick dwelling with a slate roof, an ash tree that managed to flourish without sunlight, dense thickets of indeterminate urban shrubbery, a bronze Italian birdbath, and a Cupid on tiptoe. The path from gate to door was always wet underfoot, like the floor of a forest.

“Inside, the rooms were low and dim, the floors warped and uneven. Coal fires burned to no great effect except further to darken the walls. Half the rooms by the nineteen-forties were shut off. Miss Pugh was no stingier than any other rich woman, nor had there as yet been an appreciable decline in her income. She was taking it for granted there would soon be another war, followed this time by the definitive revolution. Her daydreams were populated by Bolsheviks, swarming up the Trocadéro hill, waving eviction notices. Why create more comfort than one could bear to lose?

“ ‘To enjoy it, even for a minute’ would have been the answer of a Victor Prism, or, for that matter, of any other of the gifted drifters for whom Paris had become a catchall, and to whom Miss Pugh offered conversation and asylum. Some were political refugees of the first postwar wave, regarded everywhere with immense suspicion. It was thought they should go back to wherever they’d come from and help build just, Spartan societies. Not so Miss Pugh, who thought they should sit down in one of the upstairs rooms and write about their mothers. Some were young men on the run from the legend of a heroic father, whose jaunty wartime face, smiling from a mantelshelf, was enough to launch any son into a life of firm and steady goldbricking. Some, like Prism, were trying to climb on the right American springboard for a flying start.

“ ‘What is your ideal?’ Miss Pugh liked to ask. ‘At your age, you can’t live without one.’

“Thirty, forty years ago, ‘ideal’ opened the way to tumbledown houses like Miss Pugh’s that were really fairy castles. The moat was flooded with American generosity and American contrition. Probably no moat in history was ever so easy to bridge. (Any young European thinking of making that crossing today should be warned that the contrition silted up in the early nineteen seventies, after which the castle was abandoned.) Miss Pugh did not expect gratitude for material favours, and would have considered it a base emotion. But she had no qualms about showing a stern face to any protégé who revealed himself to be untalented, bereft of an ideal in working order, mentally idle, or coarsely materialistic. This our poor Victor Prism was to learn before the summer was out. Miss Pugh belonged to a small Christian congregation that took its substance from Buddhism. She treated most living creatures
equally and made little distinction between man and worm.