The Foundling's War (15 page)

Jean shrugged his shoulders. What was the point of reminding La Garenne of the truth? Especially as a customer had just arrived, a tall, thin young man whose deep, dark gaze settled on those present with a gentleness that was too earnest to be genuine. Michel du Courseau was honouring Paris with a visit. Blanche thought he looked distinguished, but Louis-Edmond, scenting an artist in the gallery, prudently vanished into the ‘bosom of bosoms’. Michel favoured Jean with a rather formal hug and these words, which seemed to encapsulate an affection of long standing: ‘Dear old Jean!’

‘Steady on, people are going to expect us to start weeping in each other’s arms.’

‘I’ve found you again!’

‘And it’s not over yet.’

‘You’re still my little brother, you know.’

‘Your nephew, you mean.’

‘Ah yes, of course, you know the truth now: Antoinette told you everything.’

‘Antoinette has never kept anything from me.’

He almost added, ‘not even her bottom’, but managed to stop himself, reining in his feelings of aggression in Michel’s presence; his uncle was, after all, his mother’s brother and Antoinette’s.

‘I don’t know that she should have!’ Michel said. ‘I hope you don’t find it painful being Geneviève’s son.’

‘Not a bit. I think she’s wonderful. Oedipus’s dream woman. Every chap would love a mother like her: her beauty, her charm, the pathos of a life threatened by tuberculosis. In short, an awfully modern story, a slightly muddled version of
The Lady of the Camellias and The Bread Peddler
. It’s a shame that she’s so elusive and maternal feelings aren’t her strong point, but you can’t have everything.’

‘One mustn’t blame her,’ Michel said sententiously. ‘She was left to
her own devices. Maman was torn between Geneviève and us. In the end she chose us.’

‘I can’t quite see my mother sitting darning socks by the fire.’

‘Listen,’ Michel said. ‘We’ll talk about it another time. Now’s not the moment. Shall we have dinner this evening?’

‘I can’t. I’m busy.’

‘Tomorrow then?’

‘I’m busy every evening. We can have lunch if you like. The gallery’s closed from midday till two. Will you excuse me for just a moment?’

Two German officers who had just walked in were asking to visit hell. They left swiftly, their choices made, concealing their Alberto Senzacatso prints under their arms. Michel had remained with Blanche de Rocroy, who had naively tried to interest him in a series of horrors: fishing boats against a setting sun, Parisian girls on a swing, flowers in a vase – paintings for innocent tourists.

Seeing her look discouraged, Jean said, ‘There’s no reason you should know, but Michel is a real painter.’

‘Oh … in that case I’ll leave you alone.’

She was not cross; she made mistakes all the time. The name meant nothing to her and all painters were real painters. Some just grabbed their chances better than others.

As might have been imagined, Michel du Courseau’s visit was not without motive. After abandoning a singing career he had returned to Grangeville to devote himself to painting, though without an audience or friendly voice to encourage or guide him.

‘Solitude is very necessary for my work, but I need warmth too, particularly as I’ve started on a risky path: religious inspiration, you see, is the only kind that moves me. Secular subjects leave me cold. Art has lost its faith. I want to give it back …’

‘Listen,’ Jean said, ‘this gallery isn’t really the kind of place you need. I tremble at the thought that you might discover what we have for sale back there …’

‘You mean that old spinster—’

‘She’s not so old … only just forty. And it’s not her who sells the stuff in what we call hell, it’s me. The owner, Louis-Edmond de La Garenne, is a crook. Paris is a cut-throat place. Everyone’s on the fiddle. Only idiots don’t make anything. In this city honesty is an unforgivable sin.’

Michel looked genuinely shocked. He had never come across anything like the situation Jean was describing.

‘I see now the terrible isolation our family has lived in. If I’m honest, all we know is our little Grangeville world, satisfied, happy, hiding its little wounds. If what you tell me is true, and if in coming to Paris I have to fall in with your pessimism, then it’s Maman who is guilty for having made me live too long in a state of innocence. What is so special about this hell of yours?’

Jean supplied a full account, with a vulgarity we shall not venture to repeat. He enjoyed seeing Michel’s reaction.

‘Someone like that Italian,’ Michael said, paling, ‘should be denounced, and arrested instantly. He’s a criminal. He’s contaminating a society that he lives from by perverting it.’

‘This isn’t a time for denunciation.’

What was Jean saying? He was still unaware of what had already started to happen, too rarely among his fellow Frenchmen to grasp the purulent frenzy of denunciation that had erupted in a country still stunned by the blow it had received. It was a shame he had not read Céline, who was hunched over a manuscript that very day, that very moment, writing, all illusions abandoned, with the penetrating acuity of the visionary: ‘Censors and informers are at every corner … France is a pitiful donkey, the Kommandantur stuffed with people who have come to denounce each other.’ He was heedless even of the gnawing unease corrupting a population tempted by an authority known for its prompt reactions; yet Michel’s threatening words chilled him. Denounce? Who to? How?

‘There is no right time for denouncing or not denouncing,’ Michel
went on agitatedly. ‘Evil is evil, whether France is occupied or free.’

‘Now you’re annoying me,’ Jean said. ‘Go and enjoy your painting and leave me alone.’

Michel flinched, wounded, cross and surprised. He had arrived with good intentions, wanting to bury an awkward past. Why was Jean unwilling to take the olive branch he was offering?

‘You sound bitter,’ he said.

‘Bitter? Well … now you mention it … I am. And it’s a very mediocre emotion. So forgive me. Did you bring any of your canvases?’

‘Five. Not enough for an exhibition, but I’ve several pictures in progress: a Last Supper that’s nearly finished, a “Suffer the little children …” I’ve just started. Nothing but sacred subjects. A great Christian revival has taken hold in France. Artists cannot stand idly by.’

Jean suppressed a shrug of his shoulders. Generalised ideas like Michel’s bored him to death. He found his pompousness beneath sarcasm.

‘I’ll ask who you should introduce yourself to,’ he said. ‘La Garenne knows all that sort of thing. But don’t say he was the one who sent you. He’s a crook.’

‘In that case I don’t want to have anything to do with him.’

‘Save your fine words for later. At the moment he’s the only possibility I can offer you.’

‘I’ll leave it to you in that case.’

Jean walked a short distance down the street with Michel, and in doing so learnt that Antoinette had been ill with a stubborn bout of influenza that she could not shake off, that Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was astonishing Grangeville with her energy, and that there remained, as expected, no news of Antoine.

‘I suppose he’s in the southern zone,’ Michel said. ‘Antoinette knows his address, but she’d let herself be cut into little pieces before she’d tell Maman or me. Anyway, neither of us is insisting. Papa has gone from our life. Now that he can’t get hold of petrol to keep his Bugatti on the road, he must be a shadow of his old self. He’s one of those men who only have a personality when they’re behind the wheel. If you’d known Gontran Longuet better, you’d understand why I put them both in the same boat, or rather car. Did you know Gontran is currently impressing the Norman coast with a wood-gas car …’

‘You’re unkind and unfair about Antoine. He was my only friend. It makes me happy to know that he got away from you both.’

‘Oh, I know you’ve always had a soft spot for him, and more than ever now you know you’re his grandson.’

Jean thought about this.

‘Actually you’re wrong. It makes me uncomfortable more than anything else. I feel tempted to believe in blood ties now, whereas before it felt like something more noble, an affinity between two men, which is something so rare it doesn’t happen more than once in a lifetime.’

Michel suggested they might agree to differ on the subject of Antoine, without coming to blows. Like a coward, Jean accepted the offered platitude, which got them both out of a situation that left them feeling awkward. They stopped on the forecourt of the Sacré-Cœur, turning their backs on the hideous basilica, looking out over an impassive Paris, a sea of roofs glittering in the cold winter sun. Children were playing on Square Willette and soldiers in green uniforms seated on the steps contemplated the El Dorado of a city below them, which in truth looked from this height like almost any other city, as long as they could not put names to the church steeples, domes and palaces. The absurd Eiffel Tower was the only landmark that wholly reassured them, and perhaps the wavering line of the Seine. Jean pointed, lower down, to Rue Steinkerque and a small bistro there.

‘Second on the left as you go down. I’ll meet you there tomorrow at
one. It’s Wednesday. There’ll be black pudding. I hope you like black pudding?’

‘I’ll make do.’

‘See you tomorrow.’

Jean watched him go down Rue Foyatier and disappear, swallowed up by this Paris that succeeded, in so many different ways, in cloaking the most singular individuals in anonymity. He did not hate Michel, he had never hated him despite his deviously spiteful behaviour that had dogged his, Jean’s, childhood, despite all the scorn Michel had poured on him because he had thought, in those days, that he was the gardener’s son. The emotion he felt was simpler than hate: he did not understand him and would never understand such gratuitous and spontaneous spite. Michel had arrived in Paris like a provincial youth greedy for conquests. Perhaps it had not even entered his head that the city might not recognise his talent any more than it had the first time at the Salle Pleyel, on the occasion of his recital accompanied by Francis Poulenc. The audience then had not been able to appreciate his quality. Or had he sensed, from a lack of warmth and despite having a fine baritone voice, that he would never, in that sphere anyway, be in the first division? Painting offered him a second chance in a confused era. He was no less talented an artist than he had been as a singer, but would he again have to be satisfied with a
succès d’estime
? With music lovers thinking of him as a gifted amateur, and art critics as a talented dilettante?

Jean returned to the gallery. Blanche, sitting on a stool by the door, was observing the comings and goings of the passers-by through the
window. Her chapped, reddened hands lay on the shiny cloth of her skirt, stretched tight by her bony knees. Rudolf von Rocroy had not appeared at the gallery for a week. The elation of their first meeting and the success of the first sale had begun to evaporate. That same morning La Garenne had reproached Blanche for not looking after her cousin.

‘The idiot’s buggered off! You didn’t know how to keep hold of him. He’s running around the other galleries now, where they’re robbing him and cheating him. And you, Mademoiselle de Rocroy, don’t care. Quite cynically, you do not give a tinker’s cuss. Telephone him.’

‘I have. He’s never there.’

‘Not there for you, perhaps. Because you’re always talking to him about family: Papa Adhémar, Cousin Godefroy, Aunt Aurore and Grandfather Gonzague. He doesn’t care a fig about your family, you goose. He came to Paris on his own, to enjoy himself. Take him to the Folies-Bergère, find him a girl, go to the Bois de Boulogne at night. Show the old aristo a thing or two …’

‘Me?’

‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t be such a bloody goody-goody.’

Powerless, Blanche suddenly came face to face with her failure to help Louis-Edmond. Instead of taking a lunch break, she walked all the way to the Hôtel Continental to deliver a letter. Would he answer? Jean’s return produced a timid smile.

‘Your visitor is absolutely charming!’ she said. ‘Is he a relation of yours?’

‘My uncle.’

‘So young and already an uncle! Your mother must be very young, then?’

‘Yes, very young.’

‘I’d so like to meet her.’

‘Not much chance of that, at this precise moment. She’s in Lebanon.’

‘In Lebanon? How extraordinary! I’ve got a second cousin there. She must know him. Colonel Pontalet. A colonel in the Foreign Legion. Quite an old scrapper.’

‘Perhaps they’ll meet!’ Jean said kindly, doubtful whether the prince and Geneviève spent any time at all socialising with army officers.

At seven that evening Jean walked into the apartment building on Quai Saint-Michel. The concierge appeared from her stew-ridden lair.

‘You’re Monsieur Arnaud?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Madame Chaminadze has gone away. She left a letter for you.’

‘Gone away?’

‘Yes, gone away. Don’t you understand French?’

‘Yes.’

He took the letter. The concierge did not move, perhaps in the hope that he would open the envelope in front of her and tell her what was in it. She had tried hard to steam it open and had not succeeded. But Jean put the letter in his pocket and went out without hearing her affronted mutter. ‘And not so much as a thank you for it.’

He walked a hundred paces before stopping at an illuminated shop window. His hand was shaking. He felt sick and afraid.

‘Already?’ Jesús said when he reappeared at the studio. ‘
Hombre!
You look like you ’as jus’ been to a funeral. Is you angry?’

‘She’s gone.’

‘Ah the bitch!’

‘Just for a few days.’

He held out the letter to Jesús, who held up his arms to heaven.

‘My friend, ’e’s a crazy. Your Claude ’e’s comin’ back. I tell you is true. Is family business.’

‘Do you believe in those sorts of excuses?’