The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  We raised our glasses to the proprietor, who was at a table across the room, having a late supper with his mother and his wife. They raised their glasses in return and we exchanged compliments.

  When it came time to go I found it hard to get out of my chair. I was heavy with the tears of Christ. We scrambled for our coats and the staff lined up to see us off. We shook hands down the line. There was a plump waitress who had urged me to eat my scampi with my fingers. ‘When one is in France,’ she’d said, ‘one must eat like a marquis.’ In an excess of I don’t know what I kissed her on both cheeks.

  The proprietor opened the door for us. He had to wrestle with it. I’d been half conscious of a roar, like the noise of heavy traffic. A big wind had come up. Across the street the canary palms were tossing violently. The masts of the little fishing boats were dancing up and down, swishing left and right, crossing one another against the night sky. The sea was beginning to surge against the breakwater. Out in the bay I could just make out the hulking shape of the warship, leaning, hauling on its anchor chain.

  The captain came out behind me. He looked about him, suddenly alert, asking was it an onshore wind.

  I made some kind of drunken non-answer and was knocked into the gutter by a sudden gust. The Scarfs stood over me, deciding I couldn’t be safely left to drive myself home. So I allowed myself to be helped into their car and driven to Garavan. The wind seemed to be rising every minute. In the lovely garden of the Scarfs’ apartment palms and cacti were flicking and snapping, the bigger trees groaning. There was a continuous rush and roar through the olive grove that ran along one side of the building.

  Clifton bundled the babysitter into the car and drove her off home. In the kitchen I tried unsuccessfully to kiss Katy. ‘Here, drink this,’ she said, offering me black coffee. It was a very dark brew and I could only drink it by disguising it with milk and sugar.

  She pointed me to the bathroom, and when I returned she had spread a sleeping bag out for me on a divan-bed in the sitting room. I lay down, fell asleep at once, and when I next woke all the lights were out, the wind outside was howling through the olives, and I was sober.

  I slept again but later was woken by a crash and a roar. I staggered out and along the tiled corridor towards the noise. Something had burst open in the wind. A shutter was banging violently. In the half-light I could see sheets of paper blowing from an open folder. Up and round the ceiling they went and past me along the corridor. A child’s truck moved towards me over the parterre. I turned into the big room at the end of the corridor. Windows had blown open and Katy was wrestling with shutters. I could see her silhouetted against the steel-grey half-light that was steady until wiped out by a white flash of lightning, followed only seconds later by a thunder crack that seemed to come from directly overhead. The wind poured through the gap, over and around her in a continuous on-rushing flood, while out beyond I could see the olive trees with their massive trunks and groaning boughs and tossing heads. Now Clifton moved into the square of light. It seemed strange that they were talking to one another while they battled with natural forces. It was as if the blowing in of the shutters had come in the midst of a conversation which wasn’t to be interrupted—so Clifton went on with it, panting, while they fought to get the windows in and the shutters back in place. He was telling her (shouting above the noise of the storm) that Shelley had drowned in a sudden violent Mediterranean storm like this one, and that when they’d recovered the body his friends had made a pyre and burned it on the beach.

  All this while the wind rushed through and past them.

  ‘Byron was there,’ he panted.

  ‘Byron. Heavens!’

  They seemed to have the shutters locked in place now. They hadn’t noticed me, and I turned away and went back to my bed, thinking Shelley? Byron? What a weird couple they were.

  IN THE MORNING the wind was still blowing. The bay was a strange agitated blue, so pale it was almost white, but with long patches of dirty brown where mud had been stirred up. The warship was still anchored, leaning, pulling slowly on its chain. Now and then you could see spray caught by the wind and driven in a great shower as a wave broke over its side. Clouds of spray flew from the far side of the breakwater too. Fabrice phoned to say the promenade for a kilometre on either side of the Casino was covered in debris and waves were still breaking over it.

  The Scarf kids wanted to go out of doors. Katy bundled them up in coats and boots and they went out into the olive grove. Little Hermi was blown over and had to be brought in crying. By the time she was pacified and ready to go out again the other two wanted to come in. Hermi couldn’t be out there alone and there was a quarrel about whether they were to be in or out.

  Katy had said I was to stay for lunch. I thought I should be making myself useful so I went for a walk with young Luke. The wind had dropped a little. In the garden were broken branches scattered over the beds and paths; fronds hung head-down from palm trees, flicking as if alive but expiring. The mimosa looked shaken to pieces and the ground around was scattered with gold.

  Luke led me out into the avenue Blasco Ibanez. Enormous trees that might have been some kind of fig towered over it. There was a high yellow plaster wall, riddled with bullet holes, and now and then, beyond it, I caught sight of a wall or upper window of the villa it enclosed, also peppered and torn by gunfire. The garden was derelict and the storm had made it look more wrecked than ever. We pushed our way through long grass and fallen branches, the trees still swaying and groaning overhead, until we came to what looked like a shrine. Steps went up to an ornamental pool surrounded by small marble columns. In the centre at the top of the steps a plinth was surmounted by a bust of Cervantes. Behind him, around the pool, hundreds of tiles set in a low wall depicted scenes from Don Quixote. In calm weather, Luke explained, the novelist and the scenes were reflected in the water.

  ‘I come through here on my way home from school,’ he said. He was getting on for nine years old.

  ‘It must be nice in good weather,’ I said.

  ‘It’s kind of creepy, like a graveyard.’ And then he added, ‘I like it.’

  When we got back indoors they were watching television—something about the inauguration of a monument, I think, to President de Gaulle—speeches, bands, military parades and flypasts, and President Pompidou wringing the Gallic rhetoric out of himself. It went on for some time, while the kids sat staring at it. I wondered how much French they knew, how much they understood. Pompidou came on again. Five-year-old Arlene’s big brown eyes were fixed on him as he delivered his speech. Suddenly she jumped from her chair and struck a dramatic pose.

  ‘And there was a scream from the crowd,’ she shouted, ‘as Pumpy-do went farting down the street.’

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when I left. The wind had dropped further and rain had begun to fall. I walked to Javine’s place along the waterfront but she wasn’t there so I picked up my car and drove home. I tried to read the Nice Matin but couldn’t concentrate. I turned the most comfortable chair towards the windows. It was almost dark out there, rain driving against the glass. Faintly, at the other end of the house, I heard my landlady coughing and tried to imagine I was somehow living inside a poem by Rimbaud or Verlaine—one of those French poets who make a landlady’s cough the signal of world’s end.

  Then I remembered Fabrice Laurent’s invitation to meet him at the Casino at Monte Carlo. There was to be some playing at the tables and then a party somewhere nearby. Soon I was driving along the lower coast road, through rain that was falling now in bewildering exhilarating sheets. On the road rising through Carnolès, posters torn from hoardings hung in huge strips, soaked, too heavy for the failing wind to lift. The roads were almost empty.

  At the Casino there were only a few people in the gaming rooms. Fabrice hadn’t arrived. At the table I chose there were only two others, a middle-aged Frenchwoman and a desperate-looking young Italian with an aristocratic face betting with handfuls of the big square chips and losing. I’d broug
ht all the cash I had in my apartment, enough to keep me for two months, perhaps three, and I didn’t mean to lose it. I experimented for a while without success and then I settled on one number, increasing my betting on it when it didn’t come up. I thought that I was being careful; that logic, or probability, or something equally infallible (like the Pope) dictated that if I stuck to one number it had to come up before my money ran out. It didn’t; and it wasn’t long before I was down to my last few chips.

  I was betting one chip at a time now and feeling hopeless. I couldn’t change—if I did, that number was sure to have its turn. But as I went to put one of my few remaining chips down a hand clasped over my wrist. It was Fabrice. He must have been watching.

  ‘Logic doesn’t apply,’ he said. ‘Try something more modest.’

  I hesitated. ‘Faîtes vos jeux,’ the croupier called.

  ‘If your number comes up, I’ll pay you what you would have won,’ Fabrice said. ‘Now put it somewhere else.’

  The wheel was already spinning. I dropped my chip on black. It came up and I left it there. It came up again.

  ‘That’s it,’ Fabrice said. ‘Now let yourself float. Relax. Throw them around—but modestly. Forget the single numbers.’

  I did. Soon I was laying chips all over the table, randomly, but it didn’t feel random. It felt as if I was concentrating, aware and yet not aware of what I was doing. I felt inspired. Dimly in the back of my mind was the thought of Dostoyevski, who might have played at this very table. I was conscious of Fabrice standing behind me, a figure with horns and a tail, silent as I stuffed chips into my pocket. At last the number I’d first backed came up. I wasn’t on it and I didn’t need to be. My pockets were bulging.

  But that number confused me. I didn’t know where to lay my bets. ‘I’ve lost it,’ I said.

  ‘Then stop,’ he said.

  I began to count my winnings. Fabrice waited while I took them to the caisse and exchanged them for banknotes. As we walked out into the main foyer I tried to make him take five hundred francs.

  ‘Oh, my dear chap, no,’ he said, waving it away. ‘Buy me a drink one day. Invite me to dinner.’

  Through the glass doors the illuminated gardens shone brilliantly, the wet grass pure emerald, the flower beds impossible splotches of colour, and the leaves in the trees looking as if they’d been modelled in wax.

  I CLIMBED INTO THE FIAT and followed Fabrice’s car up and down the winding narrow streets of the town until we came to a building that was circular and must have gone up at least forty floors. Inside we took the elevator to floor twenty-four. It was a big expensive apartment and there were a lot of people there, most of them, Fabrice told me, from the film studios at Nice where François Truffaut was working on a movie that was to be called La Nuit Américaine.

  Fabrice faded into the group. I didn’t have a lot to drink before it started mixing with my drinking of the night before. I was still affected by the tears of Christ. There was a girl called Giselle and she wanted to talk to me because, she said, we were both colonials. She’d been brought up in Morocco. Her parents were French, her mother a doctor, her father an army officer. Her father had been killed in the Algerian war and after that the mother drank too much and (Giselle said, possibly only for dramatic effect) became a whore. When she was seventeen Giselle married an American soldier and moved with him to the States where the marriage soon broke up. Giselle’s next man was a German diplomat in Washington. Now she had run away from him and come to France where she’d scored work for herself as a sort of clean-up girl and coffee-maker on the Nice movie set.

  ‘That must be fun,’ I said.

  Yes, she was enjoying herself, but there had been a disappointment. Truffaut had asked her to be filmed as herself, the clean-up girl and coffee-maker, walking into a room. The movie was about a movie director making a movie, and this room was his temporary office. On the wall there was a small lithograph Truffaut had bought at a show somewhere along the coast while the filming was going on. It was called ‘Satyricon’ and it was by Jean Cocteau and his pupil Raymond Moretti. Each of the artists had done a part of it, and you could see their two different styles quite clearly. It was very bright and full of action, and Truffaut liked it so much he wanted it to appear in his movie—so he had her walk into the room and for a moment the lithograph appeared behind her. This was very exciting, she said, because it meant she would also appear in the movie. But then when he saw the rushes he cut the scene so that the lithograph appeared but not Giselle.

  ‘So not a movie star after all,’ I said.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But he likes the look of me—I can tell. I’m working on it. Maybe he’ll put me in somewhere else.’

  She’d always thought of herself as French but this was the first time she’d set foot on French soil and after a couple of months she’d decided she didn’t belong. France was too bourgeois. The women didn’t like her and she didn’t like the men—except Truffaut of course, who was gorgeous. After the Truffaut movie, she said, ‘If he doesn’t want to employ me any longer I’m thinking about going to Spain. Spain might be better, d’you think?’

  All I knew about Spain at that time was what I’d read in long-ago Hemingway novels. It sounded pretty good there. ‘Bull fights,’ I said. ‘And wine-skins, and Flamenco dancing.’

  There was a movie director there she had her eye on, but he was some kind of secret Leftist and she thought the Franco regime might be about to move against him.

  ‘What about Italy?’ I suggested. ‘Fellini?’

  ‘Ah oui, La Dolce Vita,’ she said. ‘But he’s tied up with Giulietta.’

  ‘Giulietta?’

  ‘Masina. You know—La Strada? Nights of Caberia? Juliet of the Spirits?’ She thought Fellini was married to her, and that, it seemed, ruled him out. Evidently she was planning on a close relationship, and didn’t fancy tangling with Giulietta Masina. I wondered about this, and thought it was amusing and absurd. But then I remembered it was said that T.S. Eliot’s second wife had told her school teacher that she was going to marry him; and that she had got herself first into the post of his secretary, and then, after some years, into his bed. So why not? These days it’s called ‘aspiration’ and said to be a Tory virtue.

  She wanted to know whether I felt about England as she felt about France.

  I began to answer but made the mistake of closing my eyes. Behind them I was still semi-conscious but I couldn’t raise the lids. ‘I see,’ I said to myself silently, solemnly. ‘You’ve been drinking without noticing. Quenching your thirst. When will you learn, Buster?’

  The voices went on around me and I seemed to be on the floor. Someone, Giselle perhaps, put a pillow under my head. Later I half woke feeling myself carried, put down on a bed, my shoes taken off. It was a good bed, and a nice sensation. My limbs were heavy.

  When I woke again a long time had gone by. It was daylight and I could feel the weather had cleared. I could hear Fabrice talking to someone in French. He walked softly up to where I was lying. ‘Pretty boy,’ he said, and I thought he bent over the bed and kissed me.

  I shuddered awake. He wasn’t there. I heard a door shut. The apartment seemed to be empty. Everything was clean and tidy, no glasses, no dirty ashtrays. A sliding glass door was open on to the terrace. The rain had gone, the sky was clearing and the tiles were almost dry.

  Giselle came in from the terrace. ‘So the big gambler is awake.’ She spoke English in an accent that was both French and North American.

  I wanted to know where the crowd had gone. ‘The crowd?’ She laughed, tapping her head as if to suggest I’d only imagined it. ‘Gone. Vanished. Pfut!’

  When she turned her back I checked my wallet. It was still there, still stuffed with all those lovely banknotes.

  I tried to smooth the creases out of my clothes. Giselle brought me a cup of milky coffee and a banana, and I took them out on the terrace and walked up and down among the potted shrubs and vines, fruit trees in tubs, ferns and f
lowers in troughs and hanging from baskets. All the time the sky was clearing, becoming blue and bluer, and the sea with it. The wind had gone, the rain had gone, and now invisible dusters were polishing everything—sky, sea, the city-principality, the surrounding hills and headlands. Minute by minute they came up brighter, especially that cobalt sea—deeper and more extraordinary in its blueness.

  Giselle was standing at the edge of the terrace, looking down. I noticed a bee on a flower—two bees. ‘They work their way up thirty floors,’ she said, ‘going from one terrace to the next, like making their way up a mountain.’

  As I drove along the coast road that morning I was thinking about those bees, and Giselle, and about Katy Scarf and the tears of Christ, and about Javine. I felt good. The storm was over. I had some money. I had new friends, a new car. It was spring, I was in the South of France and I was making ‘a new start’. Who could say I would not one day be able to introduce myself as a writer. I tried it out: ‘Rod Miller—I’m a writer.’

  Strange, but I couldn’t imagine that. It didn’t ring true. I was glad I hadn’t tried it with Giselle.

  … Katy and I clinging to one another in the swinging iron cage that swished down through the pines with the light of the burning car fading up there. And I was trying to put it all together in my sore head, the long day that had begun on Fabrice Laurent’s terrace and was ending in flames. We’d had lunch at Fabrice’s villa. In the afternoon we’d sailed with sinister and power-packed Carlo. He had returned us to the town and sailed on down the coast to prepare a party at his friends’ villa. I’d gone home and changed and found Javine waiting for me. We quarrelled and she ran away, crying, down the steep street under the pepper trees.

  Then had come the drive over the border and down the coast, and at the villa somewhere near Bordighera where the party was to be held Bergen’s Lamborghini was parked in the entrance, blocking our way into the courtyard. So I’d had to turn the Fiat around, backing and filling in the small space, and drive back up the narrow stony road until I found a place wide enough to park.