The Destiny of Nathalie X (7 page)

Georg’s cell was very cold, and dark, the only illumination coming from an oil lamp in the corridor. Georg needed a shave but otherwise he looked much the same as he had on my two previous encounters with him. He was wearing a curious oatmeal canvas uniform, the jacket secured with strings instead of buttons. With his big head and thin eyes he looked strangely Chinese. There was one other patient in his cell with him, a major in the cavalry who was suffering from delirium tremens. This man remained hunched on a truckle bed in the corner of the room, sobbing quietly to himself while Georg and I spoke. He did not recognize me. I merely introduced myself as a friend of Ficker’s.

“Ficker asked me to visit you,” I said. “How are you?”

“Well, I’m …” He stopped and gestured at the major. “I used to think I was a heavy drinker.” He smiled. “Actually, he’s being quite good now.” Georg rubbed his short hair with both hands.

“I heard about what happened,” I said. “It must have been terrible.”

He looked at me intently, and then seemed to think for a while.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, yes. All that sort of thing.”

“I completely understand.”

He shrugged uselessly. Certain things can only be shown, not stated.

He smiled. “You don’t have any cigars on you, by any chance? They haven’t brought me my kit. One longs for a decent cigar.”

“Let me get some for you.”

“I smoke trabucos—the ones with the straw holder.”

“They’re very strong, I believe. I don’t smoke, but I heard they can burn your throat.”

“It’s a small price to pay.”

We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the major’s snufflings.

“It’s very cold here,” Georg began slowly, “and very dark, and if they got rid of the major the conditions would be perfect.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Actually, I have several boxes of trabucos in my kit,” he went on. “If you could get a message to my orderly, perhaps he could bring me a couple.”

“Of course.”

“Oh, and would you ask him to bring me my green leather case.”

“Green leather case.”

“Yes,” he paused. “That is essential …” He rubbed his
face, as if his features were tired of being eternally composed. “I think with a good cigar I could even tolerate the major.”

I found Georg’s orderly in the Medical Corps’ billet in a small village on the outskirts of Cracow. The city was clearly visible across the flat cropped meadows where a few piebald ponies grazed: a low attenuated silhouette punctuated by a few domes and spires and the odd factory chimney. In the indistinct grainy light of the late afternoon the bulk of the Marienkirche had the look of a vast warehouse. I passed on Georg’s instructions: two boxes of trabuco cigars and his green leather case.

“How is the lieutenant?” the orderly asked.

“He’s very well,” I said. “Considering … Very well indeed.”

Georg died that night from a heart seizure brought on by a massive intravenous injection of cocaine. According to his orderly, who was the last person to speak to him, he was “in a state of acute distress” and must have misjudged the dose.

 … The simplest way to describe the book of moral philosophy that I am writing is that it concerns what can and cannot be said. In fact it will be only half a book. The most interesting half will be the one that I cannot write. That half will be the most eloquent.

It is springtime. After a shower of rain we take tea on the terrace of the big house at Neuwaldegg. Me, my mother, my sisters
Helen and Hermine—and Paul. I am on leave; Paul has just been returned from captivity as part of an exchange of wounded prisoners. He sits with his right sleeve neatly pinned up, awkwardly squeezing lemon into his tea with his left hand. I think of Georg and I look at Paul. His hair is graying, his clothes are immaculate.

Quite suddenly he announces that he is going to continue with his career as a concert pianist and teach himself to play with the left hand only. He proposes to commission pieces for the left hand from Richard Strauss and Ravel. There is silence, and then I say, “Bravo, Paul. Bravo.” And, spontaneously, we all clap for him.

The modest sound of our applause carries out over the huge garden. A faint breeze shifts the new spring foliage of the chestnut trees, glistening after the rain, and the gardener, who has just planted a bed of geraniums, looks up from his work for a moment, smiles bemusedly at us, clambers to his feet and bows.

Thursday, 26 July 1928

P
ARIS
. Boat train from London strangely quiet. I had a whole compartment to myself. Fine drizzle at the Gare du Nord. After breakfast I spent two hours trying to telephone Louise in London. I finally got through and a man’s voice answered. “Who’s calling?” he said, very abruptly. “Tell Louise it’s Logan Mountstewart,” I said, equally brusquely. Longish silence. Then the man said Louise was in Hampshire. I kept telling him that Louise was never in Hampshire during the week. Eventually I realized it was Robbie. He refused to admit it so I called him every foul name I could think of and hung up.

Lonely bitter evening, drank too much. A protracted street prowl through the Marais. The thought of Louise with Robbie made me want to vomit. Robbie:
faux bonhomme
and fascist shit.

More rain. I cabled Douglas and Sylvia in Bayonne and told them I was driving down. I then hired the biggest car I could find in Paris, a vast American thing called a Packard, a great beast of a vehicle, with huge bulbous headlamps. I set off after lunch in a thunderstorm, resolved to drive through the night. The south, the south, at last. That’s where I will find my peace. Intense disgust at the banality of my English life. How I detest London and all my friends. Except Sholto, perhaps. And Hermione. And Sophie.

Crossed the Loire and everything changed. Blue skies, a mineral flinty sun hammering down.
Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde moi qui change
. Opened every window in the Packard and drove in a warm buffeting breeze.

Lunch in Angoulême. Ham and Moselle. I had a sudden urge to take Douglas and Sylvia some sweet Monbazillac as a present. Drove on to Libourne and then up the river to Saint-Foy. I turned off the main road, trying to remember the little château we had visited before, in ’26, near a place called Pomport.

I must have missed a sign because I found myself in a part of the countryside I did not recognize, in a narrow valley with dark woods at its rim. Blond wind-combed wheat fields stirred
silently on either side, the road no longer metaled. And that was when the clanking started in the Packard’s engine.

I stopped and raised the bonnet. A hot oily smell, a wisp of something. Smoke? Steam? I stood there in the gathered, broiling heat of the afternoon wondering what to do.

A goatish farmer in a pony and trap understood my request for a “garage” and directed me up a dusty lane.

There was a village, he said, Saint-Barthélemy.

Saint-Barthélemy: one street of ancient shuttered houses, with pocked honey-colored walls. A church with a hideous new spire, quite out of proportion. I found the garage by a bridge over the torpid stream that wound around the village. The
garagiste
, a genial young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, looked at the Packard in frank amazement and said he would have to send to Bergerac for the part he needed. How long would that take, I asked. He shrugged. A day, two days, who knows? And besides, he said, pointing to a glossy limousine up on blocks, he had to finish Monsieur le Comte’s car first. There was a hotel I could stay in, he said, at the other end of the village. The Hôtel des Voyageurs.

Dinner in the hotel last night. Stringy roast chicken and a rough red wine. I was alone in the dining room, served by an ancient wheezing man, when the hotel’s other guest arrived. A woman. She was tall and slim, her dark brown hair cut in a fashionable bob. She wore a dress of cobalt blue crêpe de chine, with a short skirt gathered at the hips. She barely glanced at me and treated the old waiter with brutal abruptness. She was French, or else completely bilingual, and everything about her was redolent of wealth and prestige. At first glance her face seemed not pretty, a little hard, with a slightly hooked nose, but as I covertly gazed at her across the dining
room, studying her features as she picked at her meal, her face’s shadowed planes and angles, the slight pout of the upper lip, the perfect plucked arcs of her eyebrows, began to assume a fascinating worldly beauty. She ordered a coffee and smoked a cigarette, never once looking in my direction. I was about to invite her to join me for a
digestif
when she stood up and left the room. As she passed the table she looked at me for the first time, squarely, with a casual candid curiosity.

Slept well. For the first time since leaving London did not dream of Louise.

Encountered the woman in the hotel’s small garden. I was sitting at a tin table beneath a chestnut tree, spreading fig jam on a croissant, when I heard her call.

“Thierry?”

I turned, and her face fell. She apologized for interrupting me, she said she thought I was someone else, the linen jacket I was wearing had made her think I was her husband. He had one very similar, the same hair color too. I introduced myself. She said she was la Comtesse de Benoît-Voulon.

“Your husband is staying here?” I asked. She was tall, her eyes were almost on the same level as mine. I could not help noticing the way the taupe silk singlet she wore clung to her breasts. Her eyes were very pale brown, they seemed to look at me with unusual curiosity.

She told me her husband was visiting his mother. The arc of an eyebrow lifted. “The old lady and I …” She paused diplomatically. “We do not enjoy each other’s company so, so I prefer to wait in the hotel. And besides, our car is being repaired.”

“So is mine,” I said with a silly laugh, which I instantly regretted. “Quite a coincidence.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, frowning. That curious glance again. “It is, isn’t it?”

To fill my empty day I walked to the next village, called Argenson, and lunched on a tough steak and a delicious tangy
vin rouge en carafe
. On the way back I was given a lift in a lorry piled high with sappy pine logs. My nose prickled with resin all the way back to Saint-Barthélemy

The hotel was quiet, no one was in the lobby. My key was missing from its hook behind the desk so I assumed the maid was still cleaning the room. Upstairs, the door was very slightly ajar, the room beyond dark and shuttered against the sun. I stepped inside. La Comtesse de Benoît-Voulon was lifting a book from my open suitcase.

“Mr. Mountstewart,” she said, the guilt and surprise absent from her face within a second. “I’m so glad you decided to come back early.”

I must make sure I have this right. Must make sure I forget nothing.

We made love in the cool afternoon darkness of my room. There was a strange relaxed confidence about it all, as if it had been prefigured in some way, in the unhurried, tolerant manner our bodies moved to accommodate each other. And afterward we chatted, like old friends. Her name, she said, was Giselle. They were going to Hyères, they had a house there. They always spent August in Hyères, she and her husband.

Then she turned to face me and said: “Logan?… Have we ever met before?”

I laughed. “I think I would have remembered.”

“Perhaps you know Thierry? Perhaps I’ve seen you with Thierry.”

“Definitely not.”

She cradled my face in her hands and stared fiercely at me. She said in a quiet voice, “He didn’t send you, did he? If he did you must tell me now.” Then she herself laughed, when she saw my baffled look, heard my baffled protestations. “Forget it,” she said. “I always think he’s playing tricks on me. He’s like that, Thierry, with his games.”

I slept that afternoon, and when I awoke she had gone. Downstairs, the old waiter had set only one table for dinner. I asked where the lady was and he said she had paid her bill and left the hotel.

At the garage the limousine had gone. The young
garagiste
proudly brandished the spare part for my Packard and said it would be ready tomorrow. I pointed at the empty blocks where the count’s car had been.

“Did he come for his car?”

“Two hours ago.”