by Michel Déon
Arthur enjoyed ‘the man who interested me’, though he found it hard to believe her.
‘I can still hear all of you saying, “She’s unique!”’
‘Who said it?’
‘Getulio, Concannon, Porter, you, everyone who watched her as she went by, like a star: Mrs Paley, Mandy, Cliff. On the Queen Mary no one had eyes for anyone else. At Beresford, the night of the Thanksgiving Ball, she wasn’t allowed to sit down for a second.’
‘Yes, but it was in your arms, in the back of Getulio’s car, that she went back to the hotel.’
‘At Key Largo Mandy and Cliff looked at her as if she was from another planet.’
‘But you were the one who slept with her. Pretty enviable, don’t you think?’
‘Why did you lend us Key Largo?’
‘An irresistible urge to self-sacrifice.’
‘You mean—’
Elizabeth shrugged.
‘What I mean, and you heard what I said.’
‘You talk in too many riddles. I can understand your invitation to Saint-Laurent better. I passed the test, apparently. What if I’d failed?’
‘There wasn’t much chance of you failing, but I wanted to be sure. Anyway it was fun, wasn’t it? And you couldn’t know me properly if you didn’t know Madeleine. I must admit that arriving by bicycle was a stroke of genius. You’d passed before you opened your mouth. If you’d come in a Rolls you wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
A car stopped at the door of his building.
‘That’s your taxi. I’ll see you to Roissy.’
‘Absolutely not. We’re starting the first day of a long-distance life together. Very long-distance. It needs careful thought, tact, and a long learning process. But I’m not afraid any more, not of anything.’
He went to pick up her overnight bag.
‘Leave it, it doesn’t weigh a thing. I travel light. You’ll be light with me too, won’t you? I’ll give you, and you’ll give me, the lightest and happiest of what we both have to give.’
‘By which you mean that we’re both promising to be perfect …’
She stroked his cheek affectionately.
‘Of course there’ll be the occasional row, but we’re not children any more, and as you saw in New York I’ve lost my taste for revolution. I loved these two days with you. Oh, not just for the pleasure, which isn’t new, and which was very nice, just the way it always was.’
‘Your productions are always excellent.’
She laughed with a laugh full of sweetness, her head on one side, as though he had caught her out.
‘Thank you for not overdoing the praise. I was furious with you and so I decided our falling-out had to be spectacular. And you went along with it, so much that you exceeded all my expectations. For far too long!’
She lowered her head, refusing to look at him. With his finger he lifted up her chin and bent forward to kiss the lids of her eyes, which were clouded with tears.
‘Get some chalk, mark the position of your feet,’ she said. ‘Make a note that you’re wearing tan-coloured corduroy trousers, a brown sweater and a pink shirt. When we see each other again, we’ll take exactly the same marks again. Next time you come to New York, we’ll do the same with me. So there’ll be parallel lives: one when we’ll live together, and another when we’ll be apart and supposed to be asleep, with nothing happening at all. You’ll see: life is a fairy tale, and lovers live for ever. Now, don’t move till you hear the cab drive away.’
Later she phoned from the airport.
‘I’m boarding an hour late. Just when I most wanted to stay. I’m the last one. I just rang to blow you a kiss.’
‘Wait.’
‘Hurry, they’re going to leave without me.’
‘I found a quote by Stendhal in a collection of his sayings, which you can think about during those six hours in the air that are going to steal you away from me so cruelly. Listen. “Love is a delicious flower, but you have to have the courage to go and pick it on the edge of a precipice.”’
*
He wasn’t certain she had heard the end. The public address system at Roissy was repeating with desperation, ‘Miss Murphy! Miss Elizabeth Murphy!’ Poor Stendhal. He had rarely been happy himself, but he could teach others how to be.
About the Author
Michel Déon is a member of the Académie Française and the author of more than fifty works of fiction and non-fiction. He lives in Ireland with his wife and has many horses.
Julian Evans is a writer and translator from French and German. He has previously translated Michel Déon’s The Foundling Boy and The Foundling’s War.
Copyright
This book is supported by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni as
part of the Burgess programme.
www.frenchbooknews.com
A Gallic Book
First published in France as La Cour des grands
by Éditions Gallimard, 1996
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1996
English translation copyright © Julian Evans, 2017
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Gallic Books,
59 Ebury Street, London SW1W 0NZ
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention
No reproduction without permission
All rights reserved
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-910477-40-3
Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books
Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4TD)
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