by Michel D
Palfy made an irritable gesture.
‘No. I’ve turned the problem around: first you sell, then you manufacture.’
‘That’s dangerous!’
‘Yes, if it gets out of control it’s fraud, pure and simple, and if I succeed it’ll be glory, profits and respect.’
‘What’s my job in all of this?’
‘The initial subcontractors to bring me their money against x amount of merchandise are Peter Ascot, Jonathan Sandow and Rory Afner.’
The truth began to dawn on Jean. On their country weekends he had slept with the wives of all three of these dupes.
‘They’ve nearly signed up,’ Palfy went on. ‘A word from their wives will make sure they don’t shillyshally too much.’
‘If I understand you correctly, you took me on as your gigolo.’
‘Oh, at your age you’d make love to a goat, wouldn’t you?’
‘Lily Sandow and Marina Afner are not goats.’
‘No, but Jane Ascot—’
‘She raped me. She threw herself at me and I didn’t know how to say no. Palfy, you’re a dreadful cynic.’
‘Not at all, not at all. I’m enjoying myself.’
‘And what’s my share if I help you?’
‘Nothing. I take all the risks, so I take all the profit. You’ve been living with me for six months. I’m presenting you with the bill.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Oh no you don’t. You shit or you get off the pot, here and now.’
‘And if I get off the pot—’
‘Impossible. So we agree. It’s late. I’m going to bed.’
He stood up, and Jean grasped his arm.
‘One last question. Where did the money come from that you’ve been spending so lavishly for the last few months?’
Palfy affected the expression of a man grieving, lowering his dancing-girl’s lashes over his dark eyes.
‘I am going to disappoint you, dear Jean. I neither stole it nor fiddled it. It’s my uncle Thomas’s inheritance, my mother’s brother. He worked for forty years to amass a decent lump sum to leave to me, and I’ve spent it in eighteen months. Quite moral of me, don’t you think? I’ve always been against inheritance.’
Alone in his room, Jean opened the notebook he had started at Roquebrune, noting down reflections inspired by his life at that time. Months had passed without him having the urge to reflect on what he had discovered. He wrote:
h) I’m just a plaything in the hands of all those who possess a bit of personality: Antoinette, Mireille, Constantin. I may have succeeded in extricating myself without too much difficulty from the clutches of Antoinette and Mireille, but with Constantin the stakes are higher. Obviously I’m not going to run out on him. He’s right. I shall help him as much as I can, despite the self-disgust I know I shall feel, but maybe you have to reach the point of self-disgust to start to know yourself at all. i) Despite the promise we exchanged, I haven’t written to Chantal. It’s not an omission, it’s an admission. How dare I speak to her without embarrassment, after what’s happening to me and my accepting it? The same feeling as after my return from Roquebrune, when I still felt ‘dirty’ from Mireille, and I avoided her.
Inevitably, in the days that followed, he spoke to Lily Sandow, Marina Afner and Jane Ascot, and it was they who convinced their husbands. Constantin was exultant. He entrusted the devising of the toothpaste to a small East End chemist, found a laboratory and produced a batch of samples that made the business plausible. The start-up was stunning. The sales technique, which excluded wholesalers and resellers, attracted a large number of women. Before it had manufactured any product at all, the company had a million pounds of capital in the bank. Palfy operated skilfully. Jean scarcely saw him. He smoked cigars as long as his forearm and employed a chauffeur to drive the Rolls. Jean had lunch with Geneviève at a French restaurant in Soho. He felt that the intimacy between them had gone. She seemed cold, condescending and almost – the mortification! – charitable towards him. Prince Ibrahim and Salah were expected back in a few days. His room for manoeuvre was limited. As they were saying goodbye on the pavement, he decided to throw himself on her mercy.
‘I’m very young. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say …’
She stepped into her Bentley convertible and started the engine.
‘I believe you’re mistaken,’ she said. ‘Come and have dinner tomorrow with your friend
Palfy.’ Palfy was anxious: would she have the nerve to invite them on their own? What an insult! She would have to answer for it. Jean shook with nerves and only calmed down as he counted the other guests: ten people who ignored them to begin with, as only artists know how, but by the time the dessert arrived Palfy, with his diabolical skill, had turned the situation around. All heads were turned to him, and Jean realised that everyone was wondering who this man with the long nose was, who was so good at making Geneviève laugh. After dinner, Jean found himself at her side for a moment and brushed her hand.
‘No,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You’re being indiscreet.’
His heart sank. For the rest of the evening he could not take his eyes off her, and he left the house with feet of lead. In the Rolls, as it glided silently along the Kings Road, Palfy sighed, ‘You’re feeling bad about something, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, very.’
‘I would willingly warn you but—’
‘But what?’
‘It’s difficult … just an impression … I’ve seen the two of you together … There is something—’
‘You’re not going to lecture me.’
‘No, no, no. It’s something else entirely …’
Jean could not get another word out of his friend, and so did not confess that he and Geneviève were going to the theatre the following day. When the time came, he had to lie, without knowing whether Palfy had been taken in. He met Geneviève outside the theatre. The play was uninteresting or hard to follow or both, but at one of its infrequent amusing moments Geneviève leant towards him to share her gaiety and he took her hand which he then refused to let go, despite her pretending to pull away at the start. As they left the auditorium she said simply, ‘I don’t like restaurants after the theatre. Come back to the house, there’s bound to be something in the refrigerator.’
How simple everything would have been if she hadn’t been French! She laid two places in the kitchen and served cold chicken with a bottle of Bordeaux. As if to avoid anything embarrassing being said, she did not let Jean get a word in. He for his part was not listening to her but counting the minutes as they slipped by, despairing of his indecision and his awkwardness, gazing at her animated, gracious, thoughtful and lovely face.
‘Have you finished?’
He had not touched his chicken. She cleared his plate away and served him a Turkish coffee.
‘Salah taught me how to make them, but I’ll never do it as well as he does. What were you muttering?’
‘Did my lips move?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I must have been repeating to myself that I’m a fool.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because things are the way they are, and I’m not going to change my life for anything in the world, and Ibrahim is arriving tomorrow. Goodnight, dear Jean. Go home and go to bed.’
On the doorstep her lips brushed his and she pushed him gently away from her.
‘I’ll telephone you.’
He walked home in pouring rain, soaked to the skin, his trouser bottoms splashed with mud as though he had crossed a ploughed field. Palfy was waiting for him in an armchair, reading a medical encyclopaedia.
‘I’m improving my mind, as you can see,’ he said. ‘Looking for angles for our advertising.’
‘Your toothpaste hasn’t even been manufactured yet.’
‘Therein lies a difficulty, it must be said. It appears to be impossible to find a single factory able to satisfy the fabulous growth in demand.’
&n
bsp; ‘So?’
‘So we are possibly looking at catastrophe within three weeks to a month. Let us give ourselves a moment’s respite. Where have you come from, Don Juan?’
‘From Geneviève du Courseau’s.’
Palfy leapt up.
‘You haven’t slept together, have you?’
‘Why are you asking me? Are you afraid that I’m going to let my charms go to waste, without being useful to your plans?’
‘No, you fool … Answer me! You haven’t slept together?’
Jean would happily have lied for the sake of boasting a little, but honesty won out.
‘No. And it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.’
Palfy fell back into his armchair.
‘Oof! Pour me a brandy.’
‘When you tell me why you said “oof ”!’
‘No conditions between us! Absolute rule.’
Jean, resigned, poured the brandy.
‘So?’
‘Well, dear boy, there are sometimes hypotheses that are better left untested. Geneviève and you are definitely related in some way.’
‘Because of her sister, Antoinette?’
‘No, double fool … The other evening I was watching you … But I’m telling you: it’s only an impression. I may be mistaken.’
Jean grabbed Palfy by the silk lapels of his smoking jacket and forced him to his feet.
‘Tell me, or I’ll beat you to a pulp.’
‘Let me go. You’ve lost your senses.’
‘I want to know.’
‘Do some calculations, work it out, dig around in your past. I’m suggesting, that’s all. For my money, you’re one of the du Courseau family. Perhaps you’re Antoine’s son or Marie-Thérèse’s, in other words the half-brother of Antoinette and Geneviève and Michel. It needs to be gone into more deeply: in your position I’d go back to France and pump those who know. I’ll pay for the trip. Incidentally, thanks so much for letting me go; I was about to knee you in the balls and put you out of action for a fortnight. A sad injury for a man of your calibre.’
‘My calibre is as good as your calibre.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry, Constantin, I don’t know what I’m doing any more, or what I’m saying.’
‘You are forgiven, my son.’
He vaguely sketched the sign of the cross and drank his brandy.
‘Our lives are fragile. Let’s not shatter them for reasons of vanity. In any case, quite sincerely, I’m very fond of you. I think of you as the younger brother I wanted and never had. Go. But you do need someone to shout at you sometimes. Price will pack a bag for you and the chauffeur will drive you to Newhaven tomorrow. Goodnight.’
11
Chantal was waiting for him in the rain at the landing stage. From the gangplank he recognised her slim outline, wearing a white hooded raincoat. She had answered his telegram, she would help him. With the hand she had pulled from her pocket she waved back. Six months had passed without altering their tacit agreement, even though Jean had not written. Would she guess everything, and would he be able to explain that certain things that had happened on a distant planet had nothing to do with their unconfessed feelings in any way? He felt, even at this distance, that he could already smell her fresh smell, awakened by the rain. She was flesh and blood too, and a disturbing oneness radiated from her body, her eyes, her voice, something he knew he would never find in his life again. His certainty of this was so acute that it was like a sharp, incurable pain in his chest. Everything would be spoilt if he opened his mouth. Where Chantal was concerned, a single truth mattered: that of their childhood, which they had to continue, protecting it from the compromises he had so easily accepted when he was away from her. His passport was stamped, after which he had to go through customs, where he was met by a suspicious official who demanded an explanation for his English suits. Their quality, and the Savile Row labels, roused all the spitefulness of a miserable mean-minded employee whose sartorial prospects would never rise higher than the Nouvelles Galeries’ menswear department. Envy and stupidity are two ideas so powerful that, once they have established themselves in a man’s head, they are impossible to get rid of. Jean was asked for a receipt. How could he explain that he had not paid for them? And that the tailor would probably never be paid by Palfy. Other passengers passed through unhindered, as a plump female customs officer with an impressive bosom, the seams of her uniform stretched to breaking point, inventoried his underwear. On the other side of the door Chantal must be getting tired of waiting, or perhaps she was beginning to worry. He asked if he could go through for a moment and come back. His request was refused, and he felt as if he was trapped in a net, in the corridor and box-rooms of the customs post, a grey maze that smelt of coarse damp blankets and unwashed feet. The last passengers were ushered out almost eagerly, as though they were attempting to distract the Republic’s representatives from their true mission. The entire customs post was now savouring a victim. One from every ferry was the rule. This preoccupied young man, a little cocky, anxious to get away for a reason they were not aware of but felt they could easily guess, was hiding something he was unable or unwilling to admit to, some irregularity that their mediocrity immediately elevated to criminal status. Officers fell upon his two cases, counting his underwear, his trousers, jackets, drawing up a long inventory that seemed beneath contempt to Jean, so much did he feel that his one and only crime was to have been the agent of a diabolical Palfy. As a result he started to lie, to contradict himself, to get muddled, digging himself ever deeper, to the rabble’s great delight. With such people there was no negotiation: the bill Jean was presented with swallowed every franc he had left. When he finally emerged, dispossessed and humiliated after six months away, he saw Chantal leaning against a pillar. The rain had soaked through the shoulders of her raincoat. She was shivering, despite it being May. Cars driving along the quay had already switched on their yellow headlamps, pairs of seeking eyes reflected in the shining asphalt. The sea smelt of fuel oil. Chantal smiled.
‘I thought they were never going to let you out.’
‘They discovered a major criminal: a Frenchman bringing back English suits. National pride was at stake. I had to pay. I don’t have a franc to my name any more. I can’t even take you out to dinner.’
‘You’re having dinner at Malemort. My father’s waiting for us at the Café des Tribunaux. He’s very intrigued about your journey to England.’
‘I wanted to talk to you on your own.’
‘You’ll have to wait till this evening.’
They walked side by side along the main street, Jean carrying his heavy cases, careful not to bang into other pedestrians’ legs.
‘You didn’t write,’ Chantal said. ‘I waited for a long time, then started to tell myself that you had good reasons.’
‘My reasons weren’t very good.’
‘Well, in that case keep them to yourself.’
As they walked past La Vigie’s well-lit front window, the ghastly Grosjean was standing in the doorway, opening his umbrella. Jean’s face reminded him of something, and he brought his fingers up to his cap. Jean shrugged his shoulders.
‘Do you know him?’ Chantal asked.
‘I had him on my back for nearly a year. No one had treated me that way before, and no one will ever treat me like that again. He spoke to me as if I was a dog. Now I’m well dressed, and he raises his cap as I walk past. I’ve booked myself a seat in the front of the grandstand for the day they take him out and shoot him.’
Chantal did not answer. They reached the café, whose windows were misted up. The marquis, a curling pipe in the corner of his mouth, was reading a farming paper. He had not changed: sturdy, solid, his face weathered by country air, his broad hands used to driving his tractor, to fork and reins. He was bursting with robustness. Instead of lamenting an unsalvageable past, he seized life by the scruff of the neck and shook it with a gentleman’s aloofness.
‘Hello, old
boy!’ he said in English, folding up his paper. They were practically the only words he remembered, because, despite having been brought up by English nurses until he was ten, he had forgotten it all, as was proper. The smattering that remained so thrilled him that, whenever he chanced to string three words together, he nearly knocked down his interlocutor with the most enormous thump on the back. Jean was the recipient of the thump this time, and it affected him no less than the sudden attention he found himself receiving from the Marquis de Malemort. He would have sworn that this man, unsophisticated and elegant at the same time, had never noticed him before, had walked past a small boy named Jean Arnaud a hundred times without seeing him. Could it be the same as had happened with Grosjean, who now raised his cap at the sight of his former whipping boy? Jean did not yet appreciate that his journey to England had taken on, in the narrow milieu of Grangeville, the dimensions of an adventure to El Dorado. He had returned like the prodigal son, impecunious and wreathed in glory, full of experience. The marquis gave them a lift in his solid Peugeot 301, more often seen on potholed byroads than on Dieppe’s macadamed streets. It gave off a smell of hay, flax and damp leather, belched like a pig at every gear change, but cantered up the hills in a clattering of old iron. It was a far cry from Palfy’s Rolls! The marquise had cooked dinner. For a long time now, farm girls had ceased to consider it a sign of honour and promotion to empty the château’s chamber pots. Jean faced a string of questions and sat up straighter: dinner at Malemort, served by the marquise and Chantal, seated opposite the marquis whose booted feet stuck out in front of him, was something he could never have dreamt of before his departure. He felt grateful to Palfy. Without him, nothing like this would have been possible. The dull resentment towards his friend that he had experienced since he left, lightened. Unfortunately conversation with the marquis turned out to be difficult. He was only interested in the English countryside, about which Jean had the most superficial idea, after spending several weekends in country houses set amidst romantic gardens, totally ignorant of external realities. However, he collected together his memories of conversations half listened to and realised that he could carry off a pretence of knowledge, that Chantal too was silent and listening to him with interest.
