The Portrait

by Antoine Laurain

  Praise for French Rhapsody:

  ‘Beautifully written, superbly plotted and with a brilliant twist at the end’ Daily Mail

  ‘The novel has Laurain’s signature charm, but with the added edge of greater engagement with contemporary France’ Sunday Times

  ‘Anyone who enjoyed Laurain’s previous novels The President’s Hat and The Red Notebook will doubtlessly enjoy this new romp’ Portland Book Review

  ‘Witty, nostalgic – I was completely charmed’ Woman and Home

  ‘This gem blends soft humour and sadness with the extraordinary’ Sainsbury’s Magazine

  ‘A tale of dashed dreams, lost love and rediscovered hope that is also an incisive state-of-the-nation snapshot’ The Lady

  Praise for The Red Notebook:

  ‘This is in equal parts an offbeat romance, detective story and a clarion call for metropolitans to look after their neighbours … Reading The Red Notebook is a little like finding a gem among the bric-a-brac in a local brocante’ The Telegraph

  ‘Definitely a heartwarming tale’ San Diego Book Review

  ‘Resist this novel if you can; it’s the very quintessence of French romance’ The Times

  ‘Soaked in Parisian atmosphere, this lovely, clever, funny novel will have you rushing to the Eurostar post-haste … A gem’ Daily Mail

  ‘An endearing love story written in beautifully poetic prose. It is an enthralling mystery about chasing the unknown, the nostalgia for what could have been, and most importantly, the persistence of curiosity’ San Francisco Book Review

  Praise for The President’s Hat:

  Waterstones Spring Book Club 2013 • Kindle Top 5 • ABA Indies Introduce Choice • Shortlisted for the Typographical Translation Award 2013

  ‘A hymn to la vie Parisienne … enjoy it for its fabulistic narrative, and the way it teeters pleasantly on the edge of Gallic whimsy’ The Guardian

  ‘Flawless … a funny, clever, feel-good social satire with the page-turning quality of a great detective novel’ Rosie Goldsmith

  ‘A fable of romance and redemption’ The Telegraph

  ‘Part eccentric romance, part detective story … this book makes perfect holiday reading’ The Lady

  ‘Its gentle satirical humor reminded me of Jacques Tati’s classic films, and, no, you don’t have to know French politics to enjoy this novel’ Library Journal

  The Portrait

  Antoine Laurain

  Translated from the French by

  Jane Aitken and Emily Boyce

  Gallic Books

  London

  Sic luceat lux

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I. THE MAN WHO LOVED OBJECTS

  II. THE ABSENTEE

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I.

  THE MAN WHO LOVED

  OBJECTS

  It sits at the bottom of a field: a windowless shed of corrugated iron a hundred metres square, with lights that stopped working some time ago. Each summer the metal walls heat up in the sun, making the temperature inside almost unbearable.

  I could have hooked a lamp up to the electricity but I prefer candles. One by one I light twenty of them, which are arranged at random. Then I smoke a cigarette and pour myself a glass of whisky. It’s a ritual. Behind an industrial-sized petrol can I keep an excellent Bowmore, still young. Like all great whiskies, its flavour has overtones of leather and peat, and its colour is light like chicken broth, not the amber of revolting bourbons. I drink it from a silver Louis XV mug that sits waiting for me on an old wooden workbench each time I visit. The metal walls have never been painted, but they have gradually rusted to that hue artists call burnt sienna. A brown so vibrant it is almost red.

  I come here once or twice a month and spend a good two hours contemplating my collections, as I used to do in my study. I have many snuffboxes, some gold, some tortoiseshell, and wrought-iron keys decorated with dolphins or mythical beasts, glass paperweights with multicoloured patterns locked inside them, smelling-salts bottles made of the yellow fluorescent glass known as uranium glass, Dieppe carved-ivory virgins, haute époque ruby goblets and so many other objects. They are displayed on an old workshop table where I also have a cabinet with many compartments. I have stored various things in each of the twenty-four pigeonholes. It’s a bit like those advent calendars I used to open as a child. There was a door for each day, and behind every door a little compartment containing a plastic toy. I went from day to day and from surprise to surprise right up to Christmas Eve when the real presents arrived.

  All the presents I have given myself throughout my life as a collector are gathered here. It is my cabinet of curiosities, hidden from the prying eyes of others like secret rooms filled with fabulous objects should be, jealously guarded for their one true master. My cabinet of curiosities, tucked away as it is at the bottom of a farmer’s field in the heart of Burgundy where there is no mobile phone signal, is particularly curious.

  The summer heat is suffocating and the bales of hay that have been piled up to the roof of the shed for years and years are so dry that they could spontaneously combust at any moment. At the back, on the right, resting on bags of out-of-date fertiliser, is my portrait with its coat of arms. Today I think I understand what really happened with that picture.

  Now I sit down on the little rattan chair and, taking the first mouthful of whisky, ask the usual question, out loud. It makes me smile every time: ‘Pierre-François Chaumont, are you there? Knock once for yes, twice for no.’

  Then as I put my silver mug smartly down on the workbench, the ring of metal on wood produces the answer.

  It all began a little more than a year ago. Far from Burgundy, in Paris.

  It was late spring, and for several weeks I had been trying to make modest inroads into the living room. Bit by bit, over several years, my wife had succeeded in exiling my fabulous collections to one room of our apartment and now the ‘study’ was where all my treasures were stored. But I had recently broken through enemy lines in order to return a few Saint-Louis paperweights to the coffee table. Not long before, a terrible accident had seen a Baccarat crystal piece fall against the side of a bronze mortar and break clean in half. Two thousand euros up in smoke. The financial damage persuaded Charlotte to grant the remaining paperweights a safe haven. We agreed on the coffee table.

  The following day, I fetched my matching burgundy Gallé vases with a moth motif and placed them either side of the fireplace, as my wife looked on disapprovingly.

  ‘Break these and that’ll be a hundred grand gone,’ I told her, anticipating any snide remarks, and quoting the value in francs to ensure the already-inflated price tag had maximum effect.

  The money argument clinched it, and I wondered what else I could claim was priceless and thereby bring back to the living room.

  I had not bid for anything at Drouot Auction House for some time. Auctions are more intoxicating than any drink and, in contrast to a casino, even when you lose you still somehow feel like a winner: the money you had set aside for the lot you’ve missed out on is magically returned to your bank account; in your mind you had already spent it, so when you leave the auction house you feel richer than when you walked in. It sometimes seemed to me that I might do well to get myself barred from Drouot, the way some gamblers have themselves banned from casinos. I pictured a big, burly bouncer, dressed like the doorman of a luxury hotel, letting everyone past until he caught sight of me.

  ‘Maître Chaumont,’ he would say politely but firmly.

  ‘Sorry, I think there’s some mistake. My name is Smith, Mister Smith …’ I would reply in my best English, hiding behind dark glasses and a scarf.

  ‘Game’s up, Maître Chaumont. We kn
ow who you are. Off you go.’

  A few hours later I’d be back with my hair dyed blond. No sooner would I approach the door than the bouncer would shake his head, closing his eyes. Never again would I step inside the auction house.

  For several weeks, I had spent every waking hour on Durit BN-657. A key component in the development of Formula 1 engines, this one small part would – so its inventor said – be the making of future Schumachers, Häkkinens and Alonsos. Two teams were disputing ownership of Durit, each claiming it had come out of its own research lab, and once again Chaumont–Chevrier legal partners had been drafted in to help. Since there was a fair bit of money at stake, Chevrier had shelved a more run-of-the-mill logo infringement case to provide back-up on Durit.

  One lunchtime as he was getting his head around the case, I took a break to do what I liked best: taking a stroll around the exhibition halls at Drouot. Our office was fifty metres from the auction house – a deciding factor in the choice of premises. After wolfing down a sandwich and a bottle of lemonade, I headed inside. I glanced around a sale of Asian art. The sole lot consisted of a single erotic print showing a woman on very intimate terms with a giant octopus. Not being much of a one for bestiality or cephalopods, I moved swiftly on.

  The first floor was overflowing with porcelain and rosewood chests of drawers. A weaponry sale was also taking place, drawing interest both from curious laymen and specialists in gunpowder and flintlocks. I headed to the basement. The sales down there were never hyped up in the way those held on the first floor were, and I had heard of people who bought exclusively from those auctions, reselling their purchases upstairs a few months later and living off the profits.

  I ambled into a room where a collection of stamps was being exhibited ahead of a sale. My gaze wandered over depictions of the multicoloured feathers of tropical birds, the Italian lakes and profiles of the saviours of various countries. Having no great love of stamps, I carried on to the next room, which was devoted to taxidermy. From the hummingbird to the zebra, virtually the entire animal kingdom was represented here. An anteater caught my eye, but I sensed that to take such a thing home might not be the path to domestic harmony. And yet even if I had bought the entire collection and filled every room in the house with stuffed animals, the consequences would still have been far less than what was to come.

  With weary eyes, dragging my feet, I entered room eight. Wardrobes, dressers, console tables and mirrors were piled high. The assorted collection of items resembled a jumble sale or a furniture clear-out, and contained nothing of style or value. I had almost reached the back of the room and was casting my eye over a display of cheap trinkets and ugly paintings on the walls when I saw it.

  Sixty centimetres by forty. An eighteenth-century pastel in its original frame, of a man wearing a powdered wig and blue coat. In the top right-hand corner, a coat of arms I couldn’t make out. Yet it was not the coat of arms that grabbed me, but the face. Transfixed, I could not tear my eyes away from it: the face was my own.

  That portrait of me, painted two and a half centuries ago, which I came across in my forty-sixth year, was to turn out to be the high point of a collection I had been adding to for years. Each successive year, each successive object, and each successive docket had been leading me here to this late morning in room eight of Drouot Auction House. But it is to the very beginning of my life as a collector that we must return, to my very first purchase. I was nine years old and, being the good lawyer I am, I shall name that episode the ‘Eraser Affair’.

  Arthur, our faithful old basset hound, had died in his sleep from a massive heart attack. Two weeks later my mother bought an identical dog, but smaller. I found this attempt at replication tasteless and an insult to the memory of the first dog. I had suggested getting a black Dobermann, as a change from the basset hound, and had gone as far as to suggest a name, ‘Sorbonne’, in homage to Jean Rochefort’s dog in Angélique, Marquise des Anges, which I had watched avidly in the Easter holidays. But my suggestion found no favour and my parents indulged their chronic lack of imagination and called the new dog Arthur as well.

  Not long after, my mother dragged me with her on one of her afternoon shopping trips. Her favourite haunt was Old England on Boulevard des Capucines, an old-fashioned luxury department store where she insisted on buying me grey flannel trousers and navy-blue blazers. Ever since then I have had a horror of mouse grey and dark blue. I would not now wear a jacket in that shade of blue for anything, and I would rather go to work in my boxer shorts than in grey trousers. At that time, all I wanted was jeans, but denim was forbidden at the Cours Hattemer, the private school I attended. When she had tortured me by forcing me into hideous, outdated garments, my mother pressed on to the other department stores. There she tried on various outfits which, as usual, did not suit her. Then we went down to the stationery department; it was the beginning of the school year and I needed supplies for my pencil case. My mother bought me a yellow, banana-scented eraser, with the face of a panting Dobermann printed on it. No doubt followers of Freud would detect a hidden meaning behind this act: my mother was buying me an eraser in the image of the dog I had wanted so that I would forget all about my unfulfilled desire. I, on the other hand, only saw a lovely-looking scented eraser. A beautiful object that I had no intention of using – I would keep it. The next day after school I went off to look for another eraser with a dog’s face on it. I found a green one decorated with a husky’s head, in a little tobacconist’s in the same road as the school. This one was apple-scented.

  That evening I wrote in my diary: ‘It’s a collection when you have two and are looking for a third.’

  That phrase was to become my motto.

  ‘Uncle Edgar’s so embarrassing,’ my mother used to say of her father’s brother with a sigh. Then my father would add a few intentionally incomprehensible words from which I could only make out ‘crazy Aunty Edgar’. It was not until many years later that I understood how kind Uncle Edgar, whom, to my regret, I saw only once or twice a year, had come to have his mental health described in this way, and in the feminine.

  ‘You’re far more intelligent than your parents, little one,’ Uncle Edgar once whispered to me.

  I had stayed in the living room with him while my mother went to fetch some pre-dinner snacks. I remember staring into his watery blue eyes; he was in his mid-seventies by then. I found myself noticing his perfectly smooth cheek and the strange sheen that covered his whole face; my father’s complexion was nothing like it. I raised my little hand to my uncle’s elderly face and touched his cheek. A fine flesh-coloured powder came away on my fingertips, slightly shimmery, like the powder the maid, Céline, applied in front of the kitchen mirror.

  My mother must have worn foundation too, but I never saw her put it on. She would shut herself in the bathroom to perform the ritual, despite the fact that little boys, and the men they become (while remaining little boys inside), find the sight of a woman applying her make-up fascinating. Only Céline let me watch her powdering her nose and shading her eyelids.

  My eyes met my uncle’s and I saw that, just like Céline, he had drawn a fine blue line underneath them, bringing out the colour of the iris. He watched me with tenderness as a sad, knowing smile appeared on his face.

  ‘You’ll understand when you grow up,’ he murmured.

  My mother returned with a plate of little biscuits and I closed my fist, rubbing my fingers against my palm as discreetly as possible to hide the secret of the uncle who made himself up like a girl.

  Uncle Edgar brought all kinds of extraordinary things out of his pockets, describing each object in turn in the most wonderful way. I was reminded of that soft, rather camp voice of his years later when I stumbled on a French black-and-white film on cable TV. One of the supporting actors, Jean Tissier, had the exact same look, voice and mannerisms as my uncle.

  As my parents watched with mild concern, Edgar would hand me things and ask me to study them ‘intelligently and logically, my boy’. C
igarette cases, vanity sets, folding mirrors, fans, powder compacts, chocolate boxes and snuffboxes would always reveal some unexpected secret: a hidden mechanism, a dual purpose, or some other disguised use that amazed a little boy like me. Many times I asked my parents if I could visit Uncle Edgar’s house to see his collections; the answer was always categorically no.

  Edgar ‘the crazy aunty’ had scraped a living from writing about ballet and was famous for having penned an ode ‘to the lithe tendons of pretty boys on points’. Edgar ‘the collector’ had been combing flea markets and auction houses for more than fifty years. He came from the poor side of the family and spent all his money on bric-a-brac and gigolos. And as he aged, his funds had dwindled.

  The last time I saw Uncle Edgar, he spent a long time looking through my eraser collection, which now numbered ninety-five pieces of several different varieties including ones decorated with cars, characters and plants. My favourite carried a picture of a giant bean and a smell which was difficult to define, but which I decided to call sweet fennel. With his trademark black cape draped over his shoulders, he stared solemnly down at me from his six-foot-plus height.

  ‘If we’re to make a true collector of you, there’s one thing you must understand: objects, real objects,’ he said, wagging his finger for emphasis, ‘carry the memory of their past owners.’

  I looked up at him in turn, hanging back slightly, awed by the serious tone of the pronouncement.

  ‘Do you understand?’ he went on.

  I nodded.

  ‘What have you understood?’ Uncle Edgar asked, smiling and kneeling down to my level.