by Michel D
He was woken by the noise of wirelesses. He was alone in bed, in an unknown bedroom, an unknown town, on the brink of discovering London, the home of Scrooge and Jack the Ripper. Grey daylight filled the window. He got up and went into the corridor with the firm intention of fleeing Mrs Pickett, who would surely be ashamed to see him, but the sizzle of frying greeted him, and as he came into the hall Eliza Pickett appeared in her dressing gown, made up like a china doll, bright-eyed and every inch the happy hostess. Breakfast was waiting in the kitchen. He thanked her in French and she looked at him, astonished.
‘I don’t understand French!’
He attempted to explain to her that the previous evening she had expressed herself perfectly in that language, and in a charmingly superior manner she responded that he must have been dreaming. Jean’s vocabulary was too limited for him to argue. Breakfast was there, he was hungry, and before he set off he needed to build up his strength. Without too much disgust he ate a fried kipper, Brussels sprouts, toast and marmalade in the time it took Mrs Pickett to polish off two cans of beer.
Half an hour later he rode out of Newhaven on the London road, making sure that he kept to the left. I shall not linger on his long ride through the countryside and small towns of Sussex and Surrey, during which he did his best to keep up a solid average so that he would arrive in the capital before it got dark. The English roads were easy, well surfaced and used by streams of high-bodied cars that swayed through the bends like Madame du Courseau’s old Model T Ford. On the other hand, he met few cyclists, except around the villages he passed, and when he did they were usually girls perched on antediluvian machines. Their sit-up-and-beg riding position forced them to show their legs, which they did with a charming immodesty and, it seemed, inconsequence. Towards the end of the afternoon he arrived at the outer suburbs of London and, believing that it was the city itself, was horribly disappointed. Everything was ugly, and appallingly monotonous. He asked the way to Kings Road, and was directed to a narrow street where children were playing among the rubbish. Mademoiselle Geneviève could not live there, she who had departed from La Sauveté in a prince’s Hispano-Suiza. He retraced his steps and looked for a policeman whom he eventually found, very preoccupied, at a crossroads. The policeman studied the address Antoine du Courseau had written down and mumbled something incomprehensible. However, his gestures indicated that Jean should follow the cables of a trolleybus. Jean obeyed and pedalled on over oily and slippery roads until he saw signposts pointing towards Chelsea, Westminster and the City. It was already dark when he cycled over the Thames at Battersea Bridge and finally discovered the Kings Road and, off it, a lovely street lined with pretty houses painted in a motley of reds, whites and greens. Geneviève lived in Chelsea’s artists’ quarter.
And here I would be glad to be allowed a small digression about Geneviève, a character who remains minor and intermittent so far, but whom we will see more of later. If, despite the temptation I have felt on several occasions, I have forced myself only to talk about her when she actually appeared, Geneviève is none the less one of the keys to this story. In 1932 she is about thirty years old and at the peak of her beauty, a beauty of the kind that nowadays makes us smile affectionately: shingled hair, dripping with real and paste jewellery, eyes made up from the moment they open in the morning, short skirt, and oversize sweater on a bust that might belong to a boy. She speaks English and Italian and occasionally swears in Arabic. In London she could easily live in Eaton Square or the nicer parts of Kensington if she chose, but she knows that it would not be appreciated, because she is a kept woman. Judicious, intelligent, perfectly in tune with her times, she surrounds herself with actors, painters, musicians, writers. In the more chic districts she would be snubbed for her pretension. In Chelsea people beat a path to her door precisely because, absurdly, they want to slum it, to meet some real artists who dare to despise the gentry and their boring dinners. Her house in Chelsea is a witness to the Thirties. In it you could see, hanging on exposed wires from the picture rails, the same painters as those at Chez Antoine at Saint-Tropez, a drawing room strewn with black and white furs and no other furnishings, apart from a red Steinway and Negro masks under glass globes placed directly on the rugs. Guests sat Indian-style on the floor, and Salah, the black Egyptian in a black and white boubou, passed around coffee, cigarettes, sweetmeats and a hookah.
One can imagine Jean Arnaud’s disorientation when, with his knapsack on his back, he knocked at the door and it was opened by a servant in frock coat and white gloves. The Ali Baba’s cave that he was entering bore no resemblance to anything he had known. He had landed on another planet from the one inhabited by Jeanne and Albert, or even the du Courseaus and the Malemorts in their antiquated luxury. Here everything was new and scary, including this valet who immediately turned out to be French. Yes, he had been waiting for Monsieur Arnaud, but Madame was not in London. She had telephoned to ask that her young guest be looked after. After his first astonishment, , Jean grew anxious about his bicycle. He could not leave it outside the front door. The valet picked it up with infinite delicacy and parked it between two statues of Negro boys in polychrome wood, bearing gilded candelabra.
‘Madame’s guests will like that very much,’ he said. ‘If Monsieur would care to give me his luggage and follow me.’
‘Oh no, that’s all right. I’ll carry it myself.’
‘In that case, if Monsieur would be very careful on the stairs where there are many pictures!’
Jean carried his haversack in his hand and was shown to a small bedroom which had green-lacquered Cubist furniture and walls overloaded with naïve paintings. The window looked out onto a charming garden, in which the greenish beam of a spotlight illuminated a spherical head that was eyeless and had an only just discernible nose.
‘Would Monsieur like me to run him a bath?’
Jean thanked him with a certain embarrassment. He found the haste of this servant in wanting to wash him rather suspect, but when he looked closely at himself in the bathroom mirror he realised that after more than a hundred kilometres of riding through the dust, heat, and lorry exhausts, a bath was a far from indecent suggestion. Unfortunately, all he had to change into afterwards was a pair of trousers that had been crushed in his haversack, a short-sleeved shirt Jeanne had bought for him in a sale at the Nouvelles Galeries at Dieppe, and a sweater she had knitted. After he had amused himself with the bath salts, shampoo, moisturising cream, perfume for men, and other beauty products that were lined up on a glass shelf, he washed himself conscientiously. A ringing telephone summoned him from his bath, and he ran to pick up a strangely baroque instrument apparently made of shells.
‘Monsieur’s dinner is served.’
Jean promised that he would come down immediately. His heart beat faster. Perhaps Madame Geneviève had come back from the country. But he was disappointed: the valet was waiting for him in the hall where his bike was still parked amidst the Venetian sculptures and amorphous metallic objects. He ate alone in a candle-lit dining room, a low-ceilinged room with no other decorations apart from the table silver. Because he was hungry he couldn’t feel intimidated. He gobbled his dinner and let himself be served as if he had had a footman standing behind him since he was a baby. He nevertheless felt his thoughts wander to Chantal de Malemort: why was she not there, at the other end of the table, her sweet face lit by the candelabra’s unsteady glow? She was made for luxury like this, and one day he would offer it to her, in a brilliant existence among foreign lands. They would only – when there was no valet with them – have to reach out their hands to touch each other’s fingertips and reassure and repeat to each other that they were quite alone in the world. Jean’s heart sank from anxiety. Where was she at this moment? Madame du Courseau was closing her net. Michel could see Chantal any day he wanted to …
Jean did not refuse the crème au chocolat. The valet disappeared and came back with a telephone.
‘Madame wishes to speak to Monsieur.’
/> Jean picked up the receiver. A young and dulcet voice, slightly breathless at the start, said, ‘Dear Jean, I’m so desolate not to be with you. I hope they’re looking after you.’
‘Oh yes, they are, Madame.’
‘I’ll be back in town tomorrow. Make yourself comfortable, and treat the house as if it were your own. In the morning the chauffeur will drive you to the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, if you’d like that. Or you can jump on a riverboat and go to Hampton Court. It’s delightful and awfully relaxing. How is my father?’
‘Very well, Madame. He’s at La Sauveté.’
‘And my dear Jeanne, your maman?’
‘She gave me some jams to give to you.’
‘That’s so thoughtful. Till tomorrow, dear Jean. Lots of love.’
She hung up. Jean tried to go on listening, but the crackle on the line separated him from the lovely dulcet voice. The valet took back the telephone and it disappeared as if by magic. Everything seemed enchanted in this house: thick carpets muffled the sound of footsteps so that you could never be sure you were alone, you could shine a bright light on an object and turn it into a transparent ball; walls slid back and forth to reveal or conceal rooms that were either bare or packed with paintings. So far Jean had only seen the valet. Was he alone, assisted by robots, or was there, behind these magic partitions, a magic people making sure that the house worked magically?
‘Monsieur,’ Jean began.
The servant interrupted him in a superior tone. ‘My name is Baptiste, Monsieur.’
‘Baptiste? Gosh, that’s not a name I’ve heard very often.’
‘And nor is it my name, Monsieur. Baptiste is the name Madame gives to all her butlers. I accepted the post and the name. I shall have my own name back when Madame no longer has need of me.’
Jean went back to his room. Someone had turned down his bed and laid out his striped cotton pyjamas next to the pillow. In the garden the spotlight still lit up the golden head. Jean opened empty drawers and a wardrobe in which there hung a silk dressing gown. He read the spines of some cloth-bound books on a bookshelf: Daniel Defoe, Dickens, Ruskin, Joyce, Pound, and a signed copy of Paul Morand’s Londres: ‘To Geneviève, in London when the £ was at 28 francs, her friend Paul.’ He began reading, and only stopped hours later, far into the night, his eyes blinking. So that was what this great city that encircled him was really like, the city that he would see tomorrow, before he had even been to Paris? He experienced a vague fear at the extent of his discovery, his solitude, and his ignorance; but helped by the tiredness he felt from his long ride, despite the excitement of so much novelty he fell asleep the second his head hit the pillow and opened his eyes again to see a white and blue silhouette and a pink face with a forehead topped by a starched cap.
‘Madame!’ he said, thinking this was Geneviève.
‘I am Mary!’ the young woman said, opening the curtains and letting in the light of a radiant September sun before pushing a trolley to his bedside.
Mary smiled at him and lifted the silver dome from a plate to reveal fried eggs and bacon and a grilled tomato. She was far prettier than Eliza Pickett, and as she bent over to pick up Jean’s shirt and lay it carefully on the armchair she also revealed the pretty backs of her knees and the beginnings of soft thighs. He hoped she didn’t drink beer in the morning, like the only English woman he had met so far and who – no, really, it was impossible – could not be the paragon of all other Englishwomen.
‘What luxury!’ he said out loud when she had gone.
The day was just beginning. Going downstairs, Jean was thrilled to catch sight of his bicycle, carefully restored to a brilliant shine. His heart leapt, and he stroked its saddle, its handlebars and its shining red frame. He and it would visit London together. Refusing Baptiste’s help, he tucked it under his arm and walked down the front steps to come face to face with the black chauffeur whom he recognised and who immediately also recognised him. In the rain, on the hill up to Grangeville, this same chauffeur had borrowed his bicycle to fetch a mechanic. The yellow Hispano-Suiza with black mudguards and white wheels was waiting, parked by the pavement. In the narrow street it seemed even bigger, excessive, with its long bonnet whose radiator cap was in the shape of a silver arrow, perhaps the very silver arrow that had struck Haroun, the king’s enemy, in the heart. Things were becoming clearer: the prince and Geneviève enjoyed a close relationship, probably a very close one.
‘Hello!’ Jean said. ‘We’ve met already.’
The chauffeur laughed and raised his cap.
‘My name is Salah, and I have been ordered to show you around London.’
‘What about my bicycle?’
‘Let’s leave it here.’
‘I really wanted to ride around London a bit. Apparently it’s very flat.’
Salah scratched his head.
‘We can put it in the boot, and when you want to ride it you can take it out and I’ll follow you.’
Reluctantly Jean accepted. The bicycle did not completely fit in the boot and they had to resign themselves to leaving a wheel sticking out. Despite Salah’s formal protests, Jean sat next to him in the front.
As night had fallen the previous evening, he had only seen an indistinct grey, rather dirty mass. In the morning light he discovered another city altogether, joyfully coloured, white, pink, red and olive green, full of beautiful balconies in wrought iron; a very gay city, which caught the slightest light, held it in its streets, and shone with pleasure. Obviously I shall not recount Jean’s sightseeing, his surprises, and his sudden and intense friendship for the chauffeur. Salah was Egyptian. He spoke French and English. He had travelled all over Europe and the Middle East with the prince and often Madame too. He seemed very attached to both of them, but was more attached still to the Hispano-Suiza. It was his thing, his baby, an enormous machine whose size simply crushed the little English cars, the sparkling yellow of its coachwork creating a respectful gap around it. Silent, but responsive too when it was called upon, it drank fabulous quantities of petrol. Jean was careful not to say that deep down, and by a long way, he preferred Monsieur du Courseau’s Bugatti, which was a real plaything, noisy and highly strung, that would fly down any road you pointed it at.
After the Tower of London, Jean insisted that they go to Hyde Park. They bought spongy sandwiches and bottles of lemonade that they ate and drank on a bench facing the Serpentine, which ran gently between two banks of lawns. At lunchtime the young secretaries left their offices and came to stretch out on the grass and eat a packet of biscuits, pecked by pigeons. At least a hundred Eliza Picketts walked past them, in three-cornered hats and buckled shoes. Salah explained that the English loved two things more than anything: lawns and animals. Apart from that, nothing, or almost nothing. He also mentioned that the prince had been very tired for a number of months and now rarely left his country house in Oxfordshire, and that Madame could not stay in one place. She drove in her Bentley coupé from one grand house to another, came back to dine at Chelsea, left again the next morning at dawn, always full of vigour and happy to be alive. Yet people said that she had been ill like the prince and that they had met in a nursing home.
Two three-cornered hats stopped in front of them, stared at them in astonishment, and said something before continuing on their way.
‘What are they talking about?’ Jean asked.
‘The first one,’ Salah explained, ‘said, “There’s a Negro”, talking about me, obviously, and the second one said, “I didn’t know they were allowed to sit next to children in Hyde Park.” Do you think I should have said something to them?’
‘Yes, but what?’
‘Something like, I’m really just rather suntanned, and in a generation half of London will be black-skinned. But they would not have believed me.’
‘It would have been funny.’
‘Yes, but you have to keep your mouth shut and know your place. I’ve learnt that. As I have learnt the scorn of the scorned.’
&nbs
p; ‘You speak really cleverly for a chauffeur, Salah.’
‘My father is a proper Egyptian, a minor provincial aristocrat, if you like, pale-skinned, and I’m the son of a Sudanese mother, a sort of slave girl. They sent me to a school run by the Lasallians, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, but I only ever had one thought: to escape from Egypt and see the world. The prince took me with him. I respect him because he speaks to me like a human being. You’ll see him: he is an immensely good man, a very rare thing among Arabs, especially Muslims. I say that as a Muslim myself, who never eats pork or drinks alcohol and respects Ramadan.’
‘You’re a very good friend to me,’ Jean said.
Salah smiled, half-opening his wide, scored lips and showing his yellow teeth. A Semitic nose inherited from his father clashed with his black skin and frizzy hair. His long, fine hands lay on his knees. Jean was impressed by their grace and by the care with which he looked after his nails. He was more familiar with Albert’s rugged hands or with the abbé Le Couec’s big paddles or Monsieur du Courseau’s paws. Somehow Salah’s hands reminded him of Chantal and her long, fine fingers and fresh, pink rounded nails, as if these two beings, so different in their skin, habits, sky and God, had some mysterious common origin.
Opposite where they were sitting, on the other bank of the Serpentine, a girl sat down on the grass, crossed her legs and started to read a book that she had placed on her lap. Her tow-coloured hair framed a plump, rather round face. She was chewing a bar of chocolate, oblivious – in reality or just pretending, it was impossible to say – of the sight she was offering the man and boy facing her: a panoramic view beneath her dress of sturdy thighs of a sugary whiteness and a pair of screamingly loud pink knickers. Salah and Jean both fell silent, fascinated by her immodesty. They had finished their sandwiches and lemonade. The day was wearing on, and they would have stayed talking to one another a while longer if this obscene apparition had not come to disturb the friendship that had suddenly grown up between them on a calm English afternoon animated by swans, old ladies in three-cornered hats and daydreaming couples lounging on the grass. Salah was the first to rouse himself. Getting to his feet, he put his chauffeur’s cap back on, pulled on his gloves, and bowed.
