The Foundling Boy (39 page)

‘You un’erstan’,’ he would say to his friends, ‘I pu’ up with it for my love of art. For my work! But I will smash him in his crooked face if he ask me to put a few mo’ hairs in the bums of the girls if I wan’ to sell them. Hairs in the bums, I say to him, hairs in the bums, Monsieur, my models don’ have them! They are too poor to pay for some with the money zat I give them, an’ you know wha’ he say to me. “My boy, you only have to give them yours” …’

He opened his shirt to expose his well-muscled chest bristling with its thick, black curly growth. Chantal wept with laughter, and Jean loved to watch her listening to Jesús’s obscenities without blushing.

Where was the future in all of this? A long way off, and the time to worry about it was when it came over the horizon. Sufficient unto the day were the pleasures of love and Paris which opened up to them when in the afternoons they came down from the Butte Montmartre to go to the cinema or the theatre, to walk in the Cité or on the Île Saint-Louis, to buy books from the booksellers along the
quais
and then go home and read them, lying together on the bed until it was time for Jean to leave for Match.

Apart from Jesús Infante, the building housed only shuffling,
bad-tempered
pensioners, two tarts who worked Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and a dirty old man constantly on the lookout for skirts walking up the steep staircase. They were a long way from the Parisian society of which Balzac had made himself the chronicler. Chantal spoke
to no one, except at the market from which she returned with their shopping twice a week. She waited for Jean, without impatience, because everything seemed new to her, putting up with the crudity of Jesús’s conversations and the whiff of stewed meat that permeated the building, and had not even seen him dressed in his hireling’s uniform because he changed when he got to the club. One day, when she was feeling particularly happy, she sent her mother the cruellest card imaginable in the circumstances. ‘Am very happy. Warmest wishes.’ To her father she sent nothing, not a word. The days passed, distancing her from Malemort and the massive boredom that seeped from its walls. She also thought about the one who had come before Jean and had rehearsed her so well in the drama of love. From that point of view she had no remorse, no regret. She had discovered the pleasure of living life in the instant, and there was no one there to reproach her for her failure to behave properly or her breaches of respectability. To tell the truth, she did not really care in the slightest what people had thought of her after she left.

And so she and Jean came through the dark and freezing winter that preceded, like an omen, the even darker and more freezing winters of the war and occupation. Jesús, frantically filling his
coal-fired
stove to keep his models warm as they posed in the mornings, nearly set fire to the building. Waking with a start, Jean refused to comply with the fire brigade’s evacuation instruction and went back to sleep, watched over by an amazed and impressed Chantal. She feared nothing as long as he was there. A girl who had scampered from Jesús’s apartment when the alarm was raised sat with them until it was over. She was naked underneath her robe. At Pigalle they called her Miranda. In private, far from her clients, she liked to be called by her real name, Madeleine. She began to come over after lunch to have coffee with them and tell the story of her night. Jean marvelled at the indulgent warmth Chantal displayed in listening to her. How could the Malemorts’ daughter entertain such a friendship?
No two women could be more disparate. Jean pricked up his ears when he heard Miranda-Madeleine say a few words of English. She had spent two years in London around 1932, which put her there at the time of his first visit. He recounted the story of his meeting with Madame Germaine.

‘Did I know Madame Germaine?’ she said. ‘Course I did! She taught “French” to masos; she was a funny old girl, needed no encouragement to get her whips out. She ended up with her throat cut but her stash wasn’t touched, a nice little nest egg she left to her nephew, an invalid who went around in a little car. Her pimps found the bloke who did her in, a French waiter, a casual, jealous and nasty. He turned up a week later on a pavement in Soho, bleeding like a pig, his femoral artery cut, nice bit of specialist work. How old were you then?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘You’re not telling me that at thirteen you were going round looking for tarts!’

‘No, I was looking for my friend Salah.’

‘Salah! You know Salah! The Negro with the Hispano.’

‘What do you know about him?’

Madeleine’s expression turned stony. She pulled her peignoir close across her drooping breasts and made her excuses to leave. It was impossible to get another word out of her, however circumspectly on subsequent occasions Jean brought up the subject of London and Salah. Only once did she talk to Chantal, one morning at the market when it was just the two of them.

‘I’m saying nothing. I want to stay alive. Maybe Madame Germaine deserved the big grin. Not for me.’

She put her hand protectively up to her throat.

In March, walking past the Salle Pleyel, Chantal and Jean saw the poster announcing Michel’s recital, accompanied on the piano by Francis Poulenc.

‘I’d really like to go,’ Jean said, ‘if only to see him puff out his
chest and purse those terribly red lips of his. Too bad! I’ll be working. And of course all of civilised Dieppe and Grangeville will be there. It’s not really the time or place to show ourselves off.’

A few days later Chantal suggested that she could go to the recital on her own.

‘Of course you can go if you want to.’

Jean was upset that she had thought about it without talking to him, as though she were afraid of him.

‘You will be seen. Antoinette will be there with her mother, and there’ll be plenty of others you won’t be able to avoid.’

‘I’ll keep away from them.’

‘Not so easy as you think.’

‘I’ll wear dark glasses.’

‘Do you really want to go?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then go.’

He woke her at six a.m., as he came in from work. Or rather he thought he had woken her up, because she was pretending to be asleep. Her eyelids opened to a terribly urgent and inquisitorial look. She did not ask him why he was looking at her that way, and she did not want him to ask her any questions either.

‘What was it like?’ he asked finally.

‘Oh, it was very good … Michel is really talented. Apart from his friends and family, everyone had come for Poulenc. But at the end they were applauded the same.’

‘Did anyone see you?’

‘No, nobody.’

She turned towards the wall. Jean undressed, reflecting that he himself had met someone that evening, that everything had happened without a word, without a look, so that he could not even
be certain that the moment could be real. An English car had stopped outside Match, and he had opened the door for Peter and Jane Ascot. Of course Peter had not recognised him, he never recognised anybody, but Jane had paused, and when they left two hours later she had looked straight at him, without registering any surprise. The encounter had lasted no more than a few seconds, but long enough to leave him feeling disconcerted. Jane had not counted in his life in London, even though she had played, thanks to him, a decisive role in Palfy’s business plans. He could not remember having had the slightest feeling for her. Yet he had been flattered by her attention and the way she had been attracted to him. She had revealed to a young man still clumsy and unrefined, dazzled at the world he was discovering, that a woman of her background could show herself to be not just attainable but full of initiative. She had also unconsciously given him his revenge on Peter’s snobbish disdain. That she was no Aphrodite was hardly important, for she more than compensated by her experience for her lack of beauty. What would she tell Palfy when she got back to London? If she said a word, he would either explode with fury or scorn Jean for ever more. Doorman and bouncer at a nightclub: that was all the use he had made of his initiation. He could already hear his friend’s heavy sarcasm.

He thought he must have woken up earlier than usual. Chantal was not yet back from the market. Opening the curtains, he saw Paris gilded in a lovely mix of pastels, of blue roofs, grey smoke rising from their chimneys, and green spaces. His watch said one o’clock. He leant out to catch sight of Chantal, who would be coming back up Rue Lepic with her bag of shopping in her hand. She had probably got up later than usual after her evening at the Salle Pleyel. The breeze blew into the room, fresh and as if filled with a smell of spring. Jean walked to the sink and took his toothbrush from the glass in which it stood. His hand stopped in mid-air: there was only one brush. There was no tortoiseshell comb on the glass shelf, no make-up remover; the hand cream Chantal used when she had done the dishes was gone.
In the wardrobe there remained only English suits, an overcoat, his two cases. He began to tremble, then went through both rooms looking for a letter, anything scribbled on a piece of paper. Nothing. He had to stay very calm, not panic, examine carefully all possible clues, imagine the most simple and natural explanation, a telegram summoning her to Malemort to look after her sick father, something, anything serious and therefore comprehensible, that would explain everything. Above all he must not stay like this, his face stinging, hair tangled, in rumpled pyjamas. Must be a man, a real man, smile, laugh at himself. An intense fatigue was crushing his temples. His heart was thumping so hard he thought he could hear it. He experienced the most appalling difficulty in pulling himself together, then crossed the landing and knocked at Jesús’s door. Jesús opened immediately. Jean realised straight away that he knew.

Jesús knew, so everyone knew. To the physical, almost intolerable suffering that Jean was feeling was added something he would perhaps be even less able to forgive Chantal for than her betrayal: the wound to his pride. But men have those foolish ways of behaving that save them from disaster. He spent several days completely shut off from life, out of time, registering neither darkness nor light. Madeleine came in around lunchtime, in her robe, without make-up, offering to an indifferent gaze a complexion eroded by years of powdered and rouged somnambulism. She made lunch, pulled back the curtains, opened the windows to let the sometimes cotton-cloudy, sometimes clear-skied city in, talked with a certainty that he wasn’t listening to her but that the monotonous murmur of her voice would distract him from his fixation. Madeleine displayed seniority as well as authority the day she arrived and found, grouped around the table in their hats and with their hair done and looking very respectable, the three bar girls from Match who had come to find out what had happened to Jean. Needless to say, he had been sacked and a new doorman and bouncer now wore the menial uniform, an ex-wrestler named Bobby la Fleur.

‘No style when he opens a car door,’ Fanny said.

‘Much too rough too,’ Suzy added. ‘The day before yesterday he chucked out a client who asked a married woman for a light.’

‘He hasn’t a mean bone in his body,’ Dolly said. ‘He’s just very thick.’

Madeleine made it clear that their chitchat was out of place at a moment such as this. Fortunately Jesús took over in the afternoons
and worked in Jean’s apartment. Jean did not ask him how he knew, nor how long he had known. Some matters that cause too much pain need to remain in the dark, and that real friends, of however short a duration, will keep from each other.

‘I like wha’ I do,’ Jesús said. ‘One day they will lick my boots. I’m not a nasty man an’ I keep my fee’ nice an’ clean so they don’ feel too ashame’. Don’ you think I’m righ’?’

Jean nodded. In a way his own situation was similar. Art and love both suffered ignominious defeats when they started out. When dealers began to recognise the genius that was in Jesús’s collages, Chantal would realise her lover’s feelings for her. Keeping one’s feet clean? Yes, it was not a bad idea. At any rate Jean was aware that he was undergoing his first great disappointment in love, and hated it slightly less than he had expected. There would never be another one, and by its suddenness and depth this one even managed to seem quite noble, since he had survived Chantal’s offence. He wrote to Antoinette.

Jean felt that from this moment on, he no longer gave a damn. Chantal had gone off with that swine? She would soon regret it. Jesús confirmed it.

‘I di’n’ wan’ to say to you, but I saw him. She has gone away in a red Delahaye what was waitin’ ou’side the door. I saw the man: a very strange funny-lookin’ face.’

Thus everything was illuminated. At the concert she had been unable to resist the little world of Grangeville, and Gontran had used the opportunity to reclaim his property. Disgust works like medicine. Jean got very drunk in Jesús’s company and went out to look for work and new lodgings where the location of every missing object would not remind him of Chantal. He also wrote to Antoinette.

He had just sealed the envelope when there was a knock at the door.

Palfy was there, his foot across the threshold so that Jean could not slam the door in his face.

‘Hello, dear boy. You’re not at all easy to track down. If not for Jane Ascot, we might have lost sight of each other for good. Fortunately I found your lovely girlfriends at Match. Delightful! Especially Fanny, who more than deserves her name. I’ve always been rather partial to that sort of girl. Me and the women of the world … you know. Yes, quite true. Anyway, a little pillow talk and I got your address and discovered your lady love had ditched you.’

‘Come in.’

Palfy inspected his lodgings.

‘Perfect for a gay
grisette
. Alas, young ladies who grow up in châteaux quickly tire of the bohemian life.’

‘I’m obliged to you for your sarcasm. I inflict more than enough of it on myself already. How are your affairs progressing?’

‘What? Haven’t you heard?’

Palfy sat down, pulled off his gloves, and calmly filled his pipe and lit it, imbuing the room with a comforting smell.

‘Bust!’ he said, smiling. ‘One fool took fright and immediately found plenty of other fools to follow his example. Front-page news for a week. Worth at least a hundred thousand sterling, publicity like that. My picture splashed all over the papers. They even published pictures of the Rolls, which I sold straight away to Lord Donovan, and the Morgan – Lady Quarry bought that. Price took a job with the Ascots. Ruin, dear boy, magnificent ruin. In the eyes of the law anyway, because you’ll remember that the idea was spectacular … The only problem was that it was unusable in Europe. So …’

He raised his right hand, pointing his finger.

‘… so I sold it to an American consortium. Three of them came over from New York, and I spent a week explaining my system to them. In their opinion it ought to be workable in New York. They offered me a percentage, but I went for ten thousand dollars deposited at a bank in Paris instead. Enough to live like a prince for six months. And when it runs out I’ll get a job digging roads …’

‘What about England?’

‘I am the subject of an arrest warrant. So why don’t we head south instead, both of us? My treat.’

‘I couldn’t possibly.’

‘Why not?’

In reality there was no serious reason not to. By the time they had finished lunch at a restaurant in the Place du Tertre, Palfy had his way. Afterwards, as they walked past the gallery that Jesús
supplied with his vulgar daubs, Jean stopped. In the middle of the window stood a canvas of a naked young woman, standing in a tub and showering herself with the rose of a watering can. It was not Chantal’s face, but it was her body without a shadow of doubt: the pretty buds of her hardly ripe breasts, the downy hair of her belly, her long, slender horsewoman’s legs: and behind her the curtains of blue and white gingham.

‘Jesús too!’ Jean said.

Palfy put on his most compassionate expression.

‘Do I guess correctly?’

‘Yes. It’s getting comical.’

‘Let’s not delay, in that case. This district is bad for your health. I was intending to buy a car –’

‘You don’t steal them any more?’

‘It’s been a bit dangerous for the past six months. No. Let’s catch the Blue Train. At Cannes we’ll be able to pick up something nice and inconspicuous. We’ll go and fetch your case now. On one condition.’

‘Which is?’

‘No punch-ups with the aforesaid Jesús. I caught a glimpse of him. He’s built like a fairground wrestler. Anyhow, I cannot stand brawling.’

They met him on the stairs, carrying a canvas under his arm.

‘I’m leaving,’ Jean said. ‘No regrets.’

‘Ah, I un’erstan’. You’re right. Forget ’er.’

‘You too. Forget her. She made you suffer, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, listen, Zean, I’m a bastar’. Your Santal, I –’

‘No explanations. She cheated on us both, and now that there are two of us it should make us less sad.’

‘S’e enjoy’ posin’ nude—’

‘Let’s not talk any more. Goodbye, Jesús.’

He stopped at the second floor to kiss Madeleine.

‘You’re looking better,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see it. You see, the sorrows of love, you get over them faster than you think. I’ve lived
through all sorts, for blokes who weren’t worth my little finger, and I’m no worse off today. What are you doing with your two rooms up there?’

‘Nothing. Take anything you want. Here’s the key.’

‘I’m going to ask the landlord if I can swap. I’m fed up with my window overlooking the courtyard, and you arranged your place so nicely. It’s just my style. But take your stuff with you.’

‘No. There’s nothing I want to see again. Not even the books.’

‘Books? Now there’s an idea. I’ve been telling myself I ought to start reading. I’ll give it a go, it might be fun. But send me some postcards.’

Jean kissed her, and in the commotion Palfy followed suit. He thought she was charming and would willingly have delayed their departure to spend some time with her.

And so Jesús Infante drops out of our story for a few years. The author would not like to spoil the story’s suspense by relating too soon how and in what circumstances Jean will see him again, or what will have become of him. His appearance here is fleeting and of minor significance at this moment, but he is still young: thirty at the most. His fate is not yet sealed. As for Madeleine, she will not stay far away.

That evening on the train Palfy and Jean went to the dining car and drank champagne. Nothing, clearly, would ever stop Palfy leading a life of delights and comforts. He loved himself with a candour stripped of all artifice, and not for a second did the idea of the ruin he was piling up in his wake disturb him. Jean nevertheless found his mood tinged with melancholy, for the most unexpected reason.

‘Delightful, your Madeleine,’ he said as he raised his glass. ‘Let us drink to her. Deep down, it’s a woman like that I’m in need of. Where can one find tenderness, except with creatures whose profession it is? Hello, goodnight, no regrets. Life’s too short, there are too many
things to do, and anyhow no one could love my little manias. Oh, we are going to have fun, dear boy. I’ve had a splendid idea. It will need some sun to ripen it. Hooray for Cannes!’

Jean felt that he had been taken captive once more, having thought he had escaped Palfy for good, but in the distress that still held him in its grip he accepted that it was the only way out. In Paris he would have been miserable. At Cannes he would find a job, any job. The night in the sleeping car seemed endless to him. The rhythmic panting of the train paused only for a few minutes when they stopped at stations where announcers with robot-like voices chanted their names. From Montélimar onwards these voices spoke with southern accents, and his mind went back to Mireille and Tomate and the waitresses at Roquebrune. A different suffering had had him in its grip then, and he had escaped it by running away. Would it be the same with Chantal? ? But his affair with Mireille had been nothing like the love he had just lost. She had been a terrible habit that could eventually be shaken off. Chantal had encompassed the memories of childhood and the promises of womanhood. He had overcome the pain of his first night at Malemort, and afterwards they had been happy. She would never be happy the way she had been with him. There, at least, was a comforting thought he could stir up like a sort of curse on Chantal.

Once they were past Marseille, Palfy knocked on his door.

‘Get up, you idler, and have some breakfast.’

From the window of the dining car they could see the Mediterranean, pale blue in the morning sun, and the palm trees of Hyères and the lazy coast.

‘However you look at it, it’s easier to be happy here,’ Palfy said. ‘Obviously it’s a little soporific, but we shall triumph over our laziness.’

‘I’m not lazy.’

‘And how wrong you are not to be.’

At Cannes they booked into the Carlton, where Palfy filled out his registration form without hesitation: ‘Baron Constantin Palfy’.
Jean performed a rapid calculation: the money Antoinette had sent him would pay for his room for a week.

‘Don’t worry,’ Palfy said, ‘we’re using my seed capital. Now we have to find ourselves a vehicle worthy of our talents.’

They spent the day doing the rounds of the town’s garages. All they could find were mass-produced French saloons or Cadillacs that looked like hearses. Palfy wanted a convertible.

‘We shall be spending the summer here, remember. We may as well make the most of the fresh air. You need sun and wind, your face makes you look like a man who was recently exhumed. You don’t imagine we’re going to be nightclub doormen, do you?’

At the last garage, Palfy took a step back in admiration of an undeniable monster: an Austro-Daimler roadster, forty horsepower, garnet-red, and six metres long. The endless bonnet and enormous boot left barely enough space in between for two or three passengers to squeeze onto a bench seat of white leather. The salesman opened the bonnet to reveal an engine big enough to power a ferry: eight cylinders in line and quadruple carburettors. Palfy fell instantly in love with this behemoth, which had languished for a year at a knock-down price: no one wanted a car that did nine miles to the gallon. What tipped the balance for him was that the Austro-Daimler had belonged to a grand duke who had married a Texan and gone to live in the USA. It was a one-off that would never be built again, an absurd, pointless folly, the sort of car that had already earned its place in a museum. Although he was of average height, Palfy looked like a dwarf behind the steering wheel. Despite the power of its eight cylinders, its chassis and coachwork were so heavy that it could only reach 100 kilometres an hour, then 120 and finally 140 on very long stretches of road where it could be pointed straight ahead. In other words, in the Alpes-Maritimes and through the Esterel the best that could be said for it was that it would be stately. Palfy could not care less. He loved cars for their looks – as he had his elderly Mathis and his Rolls in London – not for their engineering.