The Great and the Good

by Michel Déon

  The Queen Mary was due in the Hudson at ten o’clock. The previous day Getulio had played a last game with the three Americans, who, becoming over-confident, had let their concentration slip. Arthur stayed for a while to watch the game. Getulio dealt and shuffled the cards with professional verve. Reassured of the result, Arthur went back to his cabin to pack. He had just started when the phone rang. It was Augusta.

  ‘Where have you been? I’ve been calling you for ten minutes! Do something for me … go and see if Getulio’s started playing yet.’

  ‘I’ve just come from there. He’s playing.’

  ‘I’m frightened to death. If he loses, we won’t even have enough for a cab to the hotel.’

  ‘He won’t lose … Anyway, you’ve got Elizabeth …’

  ‘I know … but in France we already … Let’s just say that, like the fabled ant, she’s little given to lending. I’m scared.’

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  There was a silence. She was looking in her dressing-table mirror. He could see her gestures, her hand tousling the hair at her temples, her wet finger smoothing the line of her eyebrows, her tongue flicking across her lips.

  ‘I’m in bed, in my nightdress.’

  ‘Madame Récamier received visitors in her nightdress, reclining on her chaise longue.’

  ‘Listen … I’m horribly worried … someone has to hold my hand. But swear to me you won’t take advantage of me.’

  ‘With deep regret, I swear.’

  ‘And don’t let anyone see you. If a steward or a maid notices you, walk past my door as if nothing’s happening and wait five minutes.’

  She had pulled the sheet up to her chin, leaving her arms and shoulders bare.

  ‘Did anyone see you?’

  ‘No one saw me.’

  ‘Bring the armchair over, hold my hand, and think as hard as you can, “Sleep, Augusta, sleep.”’

  She closed her eyes. Arthur openly studied the pure oval of her face, in which only her lips gave away the faint trace of her black and Inca ancestors. Across the olive skin of her cheeks and forehead and over her dark brown eyelids there passed brief shivers, like the ruffled surface of the sea, that reached her lovely shoulders and arms and the hand Arthur was holding. An unfamiliar emotion took hold of him. To take a woman in your arms is to deprive yourself of seeing her, to condemn yourself to know only fragments of her, which your memory will later reassemble like a puzzle to be pieced together from scattered images: her breasts, her mouth, that curving dip at the base of her back, the warmth of her underarms, the palm of her hand that you pressed your lips against. But because she lay in front of him like a statue, turned to stone but for those fluttering tremors beneath her skin, Arthur saw her as he felt he had not seen her before. He no longer saw the delicate figure with her unsteady walk on deck, her balance threatened by the rolling of the ship or the fierce gusts that flew into its gangways when you opened the deck doors into the wind. Instead of an Augusta who had fallen from grace in a world of dreadful, vulgar heaviness, he saw a defenceless woman lying in front of him whose body, as far as he could tell, radiated harmonious well-being. In short, she was also infinitely desirable, which was something he had thought very little about since their first meeting. Even more surprising was her rapid and complete descent into sleep, as if just the pressure of Arthur’s hand had released a torrent of dreams.

  In the minutes that followed, two Augustas occupied Arthur’s thoughts: one, the living Augusta who dazzled him and who, he knew perfectly well, whatever happened in future, would mark him for ever; and the other, the almost lifeless Augusta stretched out in front of him, her breath hardly perceptible across her half-opened lips, her body shuddering with those spasms that testify to the ferocity of nightmarish images, the other Augusta who was flying somewhere out in deep space, light years away. Like the shroud a sculptor throws over a still damp statue, the lightly draped sheet outlined her secret contours: her barely rounded stomach, the dip between her thighs, her flattened breasts. Her jugular veins beat at the rhythm of her heart, just beneath the transparent skin of her neck, paler than her face. Arthur leant over this impassive mask, as you would lean over an open book without being able to understand what it is saying. A terrible fear gripped him. Was she about to leave this world, which until this moment, by controlling her revulsion, she had confronted with all the panache of a pure and noble soul? Suddenly the idea that Augusta might die there, right in front of him, because he had heard her cry for help too late, made him throw himself onto her sleeping body. Clasping her in his arms, he would wake her and recall her to earth, drive away the cold that was overtaking her, before she cooled and stiffened for ever.

  But instead of an icy body he felt her deliciously warm cheek against his, her exquisitely cool neck against his lips.

  A thickly muffled voice murmured, ‘You swore. Let me sleep.’

  Straightening up, Arthur noticed a half-full glass of water and a box of antidepressants. Romantic compassion overwhelmed him. Nine years after her father’s assassination, she was still struggling with the horror of the event, the driver opening the car door, the minister waving to his wife and children standing on the steps, calling, ‘Adeus, ate sera!’ and at the word ‘sera’ his head exploding like an overripe pomegranate, its pulp and pips splashing the bodywork that had been carefully polished just an hour before.

  From close up, a woman’s forehead can seem like an impenetrable barrier, behind which are hidden anxieties and amazing acts of courage that take men by surprise. And in their surprise is the source of the fear women so often inspire in men and the reaction that fear brings in its wake, of scorn and cruelty, everything that is most cowardly in the male, faced with the threat of an absolute power that he must nip in the bud if he does not want to be its slave. These things are especially noticeable when a woman, giving herself over to sleep, lets down her defences and becomes a child again, capable of inspiring in the most hardened male an immense and urgent desire to protect her from the world’s savagery. Mendosa, the great and powerful Mendosa, who had been widely expected in international circles to be appointed to Brazil’s supreme court, believed he had provided everything his loved ones needed to be happy and perhaps even triumphant in his company, with his protective arms around them, hugging his wife to his chest, his hand resting on Augusta’s black curls, and Getulio standing at his side, straight-backed, arms folded, his gaze filled with extraordinary defiance in one so young.

  Arthur was not making any of this up: on a round table in the middle of the cabin there was a photo in a silver frame, a testament to happier days. In Geneva Mendosa’s widow barely remembered him. In Brazil his political colleagues had shared out his influence between them. He remained alive only in Getulio and Augusta’s memory. His murderers had overlooked that one eventuality: their crime, and its image, engraved for ever on the retina of a daughter who would never come to terms with it.

  Years later, during bouts of exhausting insomnia, Arthur would relive this scene. As so often happens when we dig deep into a memory, in the deluded hope of retrieving some stray detail that will illuminate and complete the puzzle, he began to feel less certain that he was not confusing his regrets and desires with reality. Every young man is a Faust who does not know himself, and if he sells his soul to the Devil it is because he has not yet learnt that the past no longer exists and he has entered into a fool’s contract. Later, when he wakes up to the truth, he will have no alternative but to lie to himself, which is generally easier than lying to others. A conversation, a meeting, a split-second image all stay in our minds with details and brightness that would not admit of any doubt if the person who had experienced them, or sometimes even made them happen, did not insist – with disconcerting insincerity, or with obvious truthfulness – that they have no recall of them at all. So in which of our previous lives did we live or dream that memory? In the here and now, no one knows or is willing to say. Yet Arthur could not have invented the surge of happiness
that crashed over him when, instead of a body he had thought in a moment of panic was already cold, his cheek, lips and hands encountered Augusta’s calm warmth and delicious skin. With the brevity of a lightning flash, and just as blindingly, he knew he would never forget that moment, that no other woman would ever make him feel that particular emotion, unlike the more common experience of joy, unfollowed by anxiety. The memory stopped short then, and Arthur could not have said how long he held Augusta’s sleeping body in his arms: a second, a minute, an hour? Most likely a second, for he could still hear the voice that said, ‘You swore. Let me sleep,’ as the cabin door opened and a shocked Elizabeth cried, ‘Arthur! Arthur, leave her alone!’ while he, on his knees, watched Augusta bury her face in her hands and turn over, curling up in her bunk with her face to the wall, motionless and wrapped tightly in the sheet that was twisted like a straitjacket around her shoulders. The strangest part of the scene, however, was what happened next, when Arthur, despite his strength, found himself on the receiving end of Elizabeth’s fury as she grabbed his hair, dragged him onto his back, and proceeded to kick him energetically and repeatedly in the ribs. Later, when they were able to laugh about it, she insisted she only remembered a single kick and countered by accusing him of tripping her up and sending her flying onto the cabin floor, knocking her half unconscious by the corner of the dressing table. Meanwhile Augusta slept, in another world far away, and his fight with Elizabeth was brought to a sudden halt when they noticed that in turning towards the wall Augusta had uncovered her bottom half and revealed to both of them the sight not of what was most secret but what was most delicious: the dip at the base of her spine, the shaded crack between her generously rounded buttocks that continued into her neatly joined thighs, the pale creases at the backs of her knees, and her feet, which were warmed by a pair of Mickey Mouse-patterned socks. Nothing could have looked less like the sophisticated creature muffled in a coypu coat and cloche hat pulled down to her eyes, who had clung to Getulio’s arm on the promenade deck. It could not be the same woman, and Arthur believed it was a hallucination until Elizabeth rushed to the bed and pulled the sheet over her to cover her.

  ‘She’s crazy! Two pills after lunch! She’s not supposed to have more than one a day. She’s scared Getulio will lose. Why can’t she get it into her head that he never loses? Arthur, you’re a brute! I could have fractured my skull. What did you think you were doing?’

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s my fault.’

  ‘So what on earth were you doing here?’

  ‘She phoned me. She wanted me to hold her hand—’

  ‘Yes, her hand. Don’t you see that in this state anyone could rape her and she wouldn’t notice? Oh Arthur, I can’t keep watching over her all the time! I’ve got my own life and I need to do something with it; I don’t just want to be an idiot sitting on a fortune and looking like a dummy.’

  ‘Looking like a dummy …’ The scene ended there. What followed was unimportant, not worth dwelling on years later. Elizabeth had a bump on her head, Arthur a bruised stomach. Getulio more than made good the losses of his first few days. He appeared at dinner looking bad-tempered, followed by Augusta in a white gown, a rose pinned between her breasts. As they walked to their table a hush fell in the dining room. Getulio enjoyed the attention. Arthur picked up several whispered comments.

  ‘Handsome couple.’

  ‘They aren’t married.’

  ‘Obviously not, they’re brother and sister.’

  ‘There’s definitely a dose of black or Inca blood there.’

  ‘They’re father and daughter.’

  To which Elizabeth replied, with a sweetly sarcastic smile, ‘That’s right. He had her when he was five. Brazilians get their first boners when they’re awfully young.’

  Arthur pulled her away. Professor Concannon joined them. He had not yet reached that distant frontier beyond which he became incomprehensible. It was always a surprise to see how at a certain moment a single glass would propel him over that ideal limit to a place where his power of speech was no longer reliable, but short of that point, what a marvellous chatterbox! Had he not, since the start of the crossing, written a whole class on the political consequences of Montcalm’s crushing defeat of the English at Quebec in 1759 and his appointment by Louis XV to the title of viceroy of Canada? In 1791 Louis XVI had wisely decided not to follow the advice of the traitor Fersen and, instead of fleeing via Varennes, gone in the opposite direction and taken ship for Canada at Brest. Montcalm was seventy-nine years old; he had relinquished his powers as viceroy and Louis XVI, in an unstoppable assault, had swept the French troops forward and kicked out of North America the only enemy France had ever had, Great Britain. Voltaire, in a pathetic mea culpa, had beaten his chest, regretted his unfortunate phrase about ‘a few acres of snow’, and composed a long, pompous poem to the glory of those acres.

  Arthur interrupted him. ‘If my information is correct, Voltaire had been dead for thirteen years when Louis XVI stepped onto Canadian soil …’

  At this hour Concannon was no longer a man to be halted by mere facts. He dismissed Arthur with a wave of his hand.

  What did Augusta think? She was certainly listening. There was merriment in her eyes, an amused smile on her lips, perhaps even a hint of indulgence, as though, already familiar with this speech, she accepted out of compassion for the charming and inventive drunk in front of her that he should go back to it, embellish it and, borne along by the enjoyment and goodwill of his young audience, supply an unceasing stream of new chapters pouring forth from his delirious imagination. Arthur followed the story intermittently, his attention repeatedly distracted by Augusta, sitting bolt upright on her chair like a perfect pupil, chin up, making sure with a nod to the waiter that everyone’s glass remained full and that when dinner was over champagne was served in flutes that bore the Cunard crest. Their eyes met again and again. She did not blink. Drowning in her gaze, shot through with flashes of mischief, Arthur was unable to reconcile his two images of Augusta: the glamorous creature who dominated the evening by her grace more than her exotic beauty and the other, pathetic creature who that afternoon had been stuffing herself with antidepressants to calm her fears. The natural, not to say guileless, way she had come back from that imaginary journey was profoundly baffling to him. She watched him move his lips in a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to hear his own voice and reassure himself that dinner was real, and leant over to him to murmur in his ear, ‘Don’t you like my dress?’

  ‘I never said that! I like white. White is for the ghosts who come back to haunt us.’

  ‘I always come back.’

  As she spoke, Getulio was noisily rejecting the emblem of the Bourbons. The House of Braganza had repulsed the king of Canada and conquered North America.

  ‘Wrong, quite wrong!’ Concannon cried in a scandalised voice, pointing his finger at the offending pupil. ‘How can you forget the battle of September 1870? Unable to contain themselves at the spectacle of war being declared in Europe between France and Germany, two fraternal nations, ten million South Americans lay siege to the North, defended by three million North Americans. The two armies face each other across a perfect line bisecting the isthmus of Panama along the present-day path of the canal. The southerners, armed only with their machetes, are wiped out by their enemy’s bullets. The northerners do not enjoy their victory for long: mired in the swamps, eaten alive by mosquitoes, they fall in their hundreds of thousands. Dawn rises over a charnel house.’

  Concannon extended his arm, his transparent flat hand describing to his listeners the jumbled, billowing semicircle of piled-up corpses, disembowelled horses, overturned gun carriages and exploded cannons, their yawning muzzles releasing their final wisps of smoke. His audience was there, in the thick of it. However, he skated over the barking of the coyotes attracted by the stench of dead bodies and caked blood, and the sinister chuckling of the vultures as they tore indiscriminately at the flesh of northerners and southerners alike.

>   ‘Capitalising on the shock and horror of the few survivors, the oppressed of the continent rise up, in the North as in the South: Incas, Aztecs, Olmecs form alliances with Sioux, Comanches, Mohicans. They massacre the black slaves or pack them off back to Africa. Very few reach their destination. Meanwhile the Indians of both Americas impregnate the forsaken white widows and found the greatest mixed-race nation on the planet. Can’t you see by my bright-red complexion that I’m the son of a Sioux? Like you, Getulio and Augusta, are little Incas.’

  ‘I rather thought we – you and I – were descendants of Irish pioneers,’ Elizabeth said.

  Concannon was brusque.

  ‘It’s one and the same! No thank you, no champagne. Carminative drinks don’t agree with me. We’ll move straight on to Armagnac if you’ll be so kind.’

  The frontier was approaching. As they left the table Concannon, staggering slightly, held on to Augusta’s arm.

  ‘You four go and dance. Dancing’s your thing. I’m thirty years too old to come with you. I was a great dancer once … back then. Think of the day when that will happen to you. Most importantly, I have an unfinished conversation of the greatest possible interest to wrap up with my friend Paddy at the bar. A very interesting fellow when all’s said and done, a sort of primitive intelligence. His uncharted brain is ideal territory for me to sow new ideas, which thrive admirably … I shall see you in the morning, my child.’

  Five musicians in dinner jackets glossy with age were onstage, playing jazz tunes from before the war. Blissfully happy women, a whisker beyond middle age and held at a perfect arm’s length by their partners, dreamt that nothing had changed since 1939: the same musicians, same tunes, same husbands. With an indulgence it usually refused to show, time had stopped. Six days on board the Queen Mary were six days out of time. Sheer fun. In the final reckoning they didn’t count. And what if we made everything go back to what it had been? What if that handsome Englishman over there, the one whose wife is holding him by the hand and a shoulder from which there hangs an empty sleeve, what if we gave him back his arm, lost in the landings in Normandy? What if we gave that one back the leg that was torn off at Guadalcanal, Minerva her luxuriant black hair that fell out after a tropical fever, her husband his slim midshipman’s figure? They might be dancing for the last time on this liner with its reassuring decor, its triumphant Art Deco style that made everything for ever young. After the great conflagration, the world in which they had lived before resumed its old rhythm, as if it had never tottered. The trumpeter who had once blown his horn almost hard enough to burst a blood vessel in the line’s early days, when the Cunarder had competed so fiercely for the Blue Riband with the Normandie, that same trumpeter, his hair now snowy white and his lips swollen from years of playing, was back onstage, impersonating Louis Armstrong all over again. Peace reigned: the captain inspired the same respect as God; society was divided into three classes: the chosen on A deck; the philosophical on B deck; the huddled masses on C deck who waited their turn impatiently, but feared the captain’s iron rule. The passengers could sleep easy. The revolution was not coming. Augusta danced with Arthur.