The Foundling Boy (33 page)

‘Aren’t you going to tell me what they are?’

‘No. Later.’

His refusal was terse. The matter was not for discussion. Jean wondered whether it would not be more prudent to leave there and then, the way he had left Mireille’s. But what was he going to do with two thousand francs in his pocket? Get another job as a labourer? Scrub pans, deliver parcels, open doors? Watchful as a cat, Palfy sensed his hesitation.

‘You can say no,’ he said. ‘I shan’t hold it against you. I’ll even drive you back to Newhaven.’

‘I’m staying.’

‘In that case, let’s make a start.’

For a month Jean spent six hours a day following an intensive English course. He realised he had some basic knowledge, some ideas and even a vocabulary, without ever having established the connection between its constituent parts. The suits were finished. Palfy asked for the bill to be sent. The tailor exclaimed that there was all the time in the world. In the evenings Palfy hosted dinners at his club or at home. Never more than two guests, whom he chose carefully and whose background and what they represented he explained to Jean beforehand. Jean understood English better and better and was able to follow a conversation. No one paid much attention to him, and that left him free to observe as much as he wished. The following day Palfy would question him.

‘What do you imagine Jonathan Sandow does for a living?’

‘I’ve no idea, really. He didn’t give a single clue.’

‘For the very good reason that he doesn’t do anything. He has a private income that is diminishing by the year. He’s a complete fool and has a seat in the House of Lords. His wife left him for two years to go and live with a fisherman on Ischia. She came back last Christmas, and Jonathan pointed out to her that she was late for dinner.’

‘I’ll never understand anything about the English!’

Palfy was exultant: it was exactly what he was meant to say. Besides, there was nothing to understand. Jean was progressing by leaps and bounds. Palfy’s own plans, however, remained secret. He regarded questions of money with as much contempt as ever. Suppliers, the garage, restaurants sent their bills to Eaton Square. Someone must have paid from time to time, otherwise Palfy would not have been able to disport himself like a lord for very long. Jean noticed how easily and quickly one picked up the habit of living without cares. He noted in his moleskin notebook,

Palfy declined several invitations to the country.

‘We must think carefully,’ he said to Jean. ‘You’re not quite ready yet. It would be a disaster.’

One day, instead of having lunch, Jean left his English lesson and found his way to the Chelsea street where he thought he might find Salah. The Hispano-Suiza was not in front of the house. He plucked up his courage and pressed the bell. A valet in a striped waistcoat, who was not the strange and obsequious Baptiste, opened the door.

‘Mademoiselle du Courseau?’

‘Oh, Mademoiselle isn’t here,’ the valet answered in French. ‘Mademoiselle is in Scotland. She will be back on Monday next.’

‘And Salah?’

‘Salah is with Monseigneur on the French Riviera, at Cannes. If Monsieur would like to leave a message for Mademoiselle …’

‘Will you tell her that Jean Arnaud is in London? I’ll telephone her when she comes back.’

‘Very good, Monsieur.’

It had certainly been a mistake to have asked for news of the chauffeur too – a mistake that could have roused the new Baptiste’s suspicions – but Jean noticed that for the first time a servant’s prejudice had judged him favourably on his outward appearance.
That evening he mentioned this to Palfy, telling him the story of his first meeting with the prince, and he was surprised to see his friend paying close attention.

‘How dramatic! Very few people know him. He’s thought to be fabulously rich, and no one knows where his fortune comes from. As for her … mmm …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve missed her twice at weekends with friends. She is the darling of bohemian, super-rich London. Very pretty, I’m told. You
must
see her …
we
must see her …’

Palfy’s eyes lit up, and Jean realised that in the situation in which he found himself he had just been slipped a trump card: Mademoiselle Geneviève. He would not disregard it.

The author has already regretted on several occasions not being able to speak at greater length about Geneviève du Courseau. We have seen her appear on the balcony outside her room when her father visited her just after the war. She was nineteen years old. Let us add up the years: she is thirty-six now and her beauty has grown and matured. But perhaps it is excessive to talk of beauty when one thinks of her face. Vivacity is more accurate. This young woman brushed by death, who carries a weakness that she carefully conceals, has been playing a wonderful part for fifteen years: she is the delight, the reason for living, the most admired object of a reserved and generous man who makes no demands and maintains her in splendour. She has freed herself completely from the milieu in which she was born, which is now no more than a distant memory. We have already noted this: she came back to La Sauveté only once, and then doubtless because it was on her way to Deauville. A visit that would have lasted ten minutes, if the Hispano-Suiza had not broken down on the hill up to Grangeville. In short, Geneviève has created herself from scratch.
Her French elegance is out of place in London, where she is always ahead of the latest trends in fashion, the theatre and film, and knows about all the budding actors, writers, painters and sculptors, to the point where people have started to take it as gospel that she is the true creator of new talents. She enchants by her intelligence, she surprises by the loyalty of her friendship, and no one can claim to have seen her make a mistake in love: her life contains only the prince. So no one can understand why that person, who shows (when he appears, which is becoming increasingly rare) an almost royal benevolence and total absence of prejudice, why that man does not marry the woman he loves. Geneviève herself never raises the question, and it is perfectly possible that she prefers being a kept woman to being a morganatic princess. The society in which she has elected to live has taken her side: Geneviève is untouchable. Whoever ventures a word against her will find themselves positively excluded from her circle. So, protected by some, ignored by others, she is one of the queens of London.

Jean telephoned the following week. She urged him to get in a taxi and come immediately, because she had guests for dinner shortly. Jean slipped out of the Eaton Square flat, leaving Price a message for the absent Palfy, jumped in a cab and, despite traffic jams, was at the house ten minutes later. The new Baptiste led him to the drawing room, whose decoration had been changed: there were seats now and a long sofa of black leather, and an entire wall panel lit by spotlights concealed in the ceiling was hollowed out with niches containing modern sculptures: serene ovoid forms, tormented abstract mechanisms. Was one of them his bicycle that Geneviève had given to John Dudley? Dudley had had no success with his crushed objects. He was twenty years ahead of his time, and while he waited for others to plagiarise him and be hailed as innovators by amnesiac critics, he was designing body shells for a large car maker. Jean walked around,
studying the strange shapes on show. They surprised him, without his being able to analyse their meaning. When Geneviève came into the room, her knowing smile made him feel he had been caught out. She was dressed in an Indian sari, her hair held smoothly in place by a black headband that intensified her pallor. Shorter than he was, she put her hands up on his shoulders and gazed at him for a moment.

‘I’m trying to see in you,’ she said, ‘what I remember about your dear maman, whom I love so much.’

‘Maman died in June.’

‘Oh goodness … it’s happened … it’s my fault. I didn’t see enough of her.’ Tears welled in her eyes, and she smiled a melancholy smile.

‘How sad you must be! What about Albert?’

‘Since they sold La Sauveté, Papa’s been living with Uncle Cliquet.’

‘La Sauveté has been sold?’

Jean reminded himself that nobody wrote many letters in her family, and that Geneviève had not even been told about his birth. He found her womanly open face beautiful, and so close that he leant forward impulsively to kiss her proffered cheek, fresh and without make-up.

‘What are you doing in London?’

She possessed a rare gift: people who had known her for less than five minutes found themselves recounting their life story. Jean was startled to find himself almost telling her everything. The ‘almost’ is only to make clear that he did not recount Palfy’s French villainies. He painted his friend as he presented himself in London: a fashionable man who seemed to know everyone. Geneviève interrupted him to ask him frankly, ‘Dearest Jean, this … what do you call him … Balfy … or Malfy … isn’t he a little bit homosexual around the edges?’

‘It’s odd you should say that about him. I hadn’t thought of it, and then one day he assured me he wasn’t.’

‘Oh well … To tell the truth, I think I know something about him, but what? I’ve forgotten. Anyway, it doesn’t matter … Bring him to dinner on Thursday. I’ll be happy to meet him.’

Back at Eaton Square, Jean passed on the invitation to Palfy, who was exultant.

‘Splendid! At a stroke you open a door that was closed, to a circle that admits practically none of the people I’ve introduced you to. You were born under a lucky star, Jean, dear boy. Well done. Soon London will be ours.’

‘And what will we do with it?’

‘Nothing, as you’ve guessed already. Absolutely nothing. Look down on it from a very high place.’

Jean did not entirely understand a plan that would end in scornful rejection of what had been conquered with such effort. The use Palfy made of his days also seemed singularly relaxed to him, in relation to their stated objective. In the morning his friend read the newspapers at length, walked in Hyde Park for an hour, had lunch at his club, went shopping or paid a visit to his tailor, returned home to change, went back to the club to play whist or bridge, and had dinner at home with friends or took Jean out to the houses of other wholly uninteresting friends. Apparently he was not short of money. In his garage he kept, in addition to the Rolls, a Morgan convertible, the cream of sports cars. If he had not had the means to pay from time to time the bills Price brought to him each morning on a silver tray, the existence of gilded idleness enjoyed by both of them would not have lasted very long. There was some mystery in this somewhere, but Palfy was not the sort of man you questioned with impunity. Jean approached him obliquely.

‘I’m starting to ask myself how I’m going to pay you back for what you’re providing me with so generously. I haven’t got a penny to my name, or a single idea how to earn a living.’

‘I am a philanthropist of the sublime sort. I’m getting ready for
a few personal shows of ingratitude, without which life would be a bed of roses.’

Dinner at Geneviève du Courseau’s was not what Palfy had been hoping for. They were the only guests, as if it was a test. With all the instinct his large nose was capable of, Palfy realised it and deployed his resources intelligently. Jean was surprised to see his friend so well informed about the theatre and cinema, which he never went to, and about exhibitions of painting and sculpture for which he ordinarily professed substantial scorn. He even displayed a certain genius by stopping dead in front of an unusual object, a spade onto which the sculptor had welded two nails. It looked like a praying mantis.

‘Admirable!’ he said, leaning forward. ‘The revenge of the world of things. The beginning of their animation. They will devour us all.’

‘Do you know who it’s by?’

‘In principle I’d have said it was by Natalia, but don’t laugh at me: I’m a complete ignoramus.’

‘It is by her!’ Geneviève said, surprised.

He had passed the test. He would be asked again. Walking back to Eaton Square on a delicious balmy night, Jean expressed astonishment at his knowledge.

‘Why do you think I read the papers with such care every morning?’ Palfy said. ‘You can find everything there. No need to move.’

‘But what about that sculpture you identified?’

‘I’d seen a photo of it in a magazine. No more difficult than that. If you want to know what I think, we went down all right. It’s very important. Next I would like to get to know the prince, about whom I am beginning to have my own theory.’

‘What about her?’

‘A marvellous person.’

Jean felt the same. His very limited experience of women was enlarging slowly. After Mireille, Antoinette and, on a platonic level, Chantal, he had discovered Geneviève, still clothed in the cachet of the du Courseaus, but freed from its bourgeois world. All evening long he had had the impression of meeting someone open, direct and without any false or naïve modesty. She was beautiful when she laughed, her laughter was genuine, and her fine blue eyes examined life with kindness, intelligence and lucidity.

A few days later Jean started to emulate Palfy and read the French daily papers. There was little mention of politics. The race for that year’s literary prizes preoccupied a reading public that was happy to be addressed on any subject except war. For the Prix Goncourt, the name of Joseph Outen was mentioned nowhere. Did this oversight suggest a shock announcement of the prize being awarded to an outsider that Monday at Drouant’s restaurant? When the name of Charles Plisnier was revealed – a forty-one-year-old Belgian novelist, author of a collection of short stories – Jean felt the scale of poor Joseph’s disappointment. What had happened? He wrote to him. A reply came back by return.