Your Father's Room

by Michel Déon

  Praise for the Foundling novels:

  ‘Remarkable … deserves a place alongside Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Le Grand Meaulnes’ New Statesman

  ‘A big-hearted coming-of-age shaggy-dog story … [Déon’s] novel leaves you feeling better about life’ The Spectator

  ‘It is shamefully parochial of us that this eminent writer has been so ignored by the anglophone world’ Sunday Times

  ‘Quiet, wryly funny prose … a delight’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Déon is an outrageous storyteller, a most engaging tease and the result is a splendid mixture of acerbic asides and bright invention which reads admirably in Julian Evans’s excellent translation.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Michel Déon is a storyteller par excellence’ Irish Times

  ‘As witty as its English forebear [Tom Jones] but with French savoir-faire, The Foundling Boy may win new readers for books translated from French’ New York Times

  ‘Our lives would be all the richer if we read a Michel Déon novel’ William Boyd

  ‘I loved this book for the way, in its particularities and its casual narration, it admitted me to a world I knew nothing about and the many ways it made me care. It is not just a glimpse into the past, but the study of the heart of a man and his times’ Paul Theroux

  Praise for The Great and the Good:

  ‘A wonderfully well-crafted and moving essay on the enduring and often illogical pain of first love.’ Daily Mail

  ‘Déon creates characters of quirky depth … slyly funny, yet still touching’ Sunday Times

  ‘Déon … channeled F. Scott Fitzgerald for this sunny, urbane love story … Julian Evans’s translation brings out the story’s easy elegance … Like the novel’s glamorous bygone world, [Arthur’s] love affair is a beautiful illusion.’ Wall Street Journal

  Your Father’s Room

  Michel Déon

  translated from the French by Julian Evans

  Gallic Books

  London

  After all these general remarks,

  I shall now be born.

  Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard

  Contents

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Your Father’s Room

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  His parents would tell him, ‘You can’t possibly remember. You weren’t even a year old when we moved from the apartment in Rue de la Roquette.’ But he was adamant, and even now, at his very great age, the perfection of the image remains. He can still see himself sitting in a pram at the foot of a winding staircase lit by a window on the landing. The carpet is bright red. Under the stair, a frosted glass door opens and a short woman dressed in black, neither young nor old, looks at him. He remembers the name of the concierge who came over to talk to him only because he was told what it was when he recalled the memory later. Her name was Madame Lebas. She looked after him when his parents went out for the evening, which they did often.

  Later, although he wondered about the scene so precisely etched in his memory, he refused to see a psychiatrist specialising in infantile recall. He merely accepted it as a flash of clarity that for some unknown reason had embedded itself in his baby memory, imprinting an indelible colour image there, an image that, incidentally, was completely unimportant and one he would have loved to replace with another – of his mother and father bending over his cradle, for example, or kissing each other. As the years went by, following several dreams in which he seemed to split in two and be able to watch himself, he conceived a theory that might have been plausible: that the soul – or in any case the immaterial, impenetrable thing that stands in for the soul – likes to divest itself of the body it inhabits occasionally and to contemplate its empty physical form, either out of impatience at being held captive by a child whose speech, sight and physical coordination are still in a larval state, or because that same physical form, despite being grown-up and perfectly comfortable with itself, is immersed for several hours in the torpor of sleep, which prevents it from reacting, other than by moans and groans, to the incoherent, absurd language of dreams. It should be added that the soul never goes far away, two or three metres at most, for fear that in its absence the sensory life of its protégé might suddenly be extinguished, a phenomenon that does sometimes occur in the course of such separations, to the bafflement of medical science. So wasn’t it possible that the soul might exist from birth onwards in a perfectly functioning state, in possession of all its faculties, knowledge and memory, and sometimes go off on a short adventure to breathe the air of freedom and gain the necessary distance to perfect its awareness of things? That little adventure out of the way, it can then resume, in a baby’s case, the process of educating the body it has been entrusted with, or the simple path of an existence that is already fully developed but perhaps just a touch monotonous.

  He has never been able to call to mind the hall, the staircase with the red carpet, and Madame Lebas the concierge without a completely different scene following immediately – different because this time he is nearly two years old. They are living in a middle-class house in Châtenay (that detail filled in some time later), and, in a room that has its curtains drawn, a white sheet has been hung over a big Norman wardrobe. A copper-and-gold magic lantern stands on a console table; Papa is selecting coloured glass slides that he slips into the machine’s innards. And who appears on the white sheet? Pulcinella himself, with his hunchback, his beak-like nose and his extravagant hat sewn with bells. The scene is as sharp as it was nearly eighty years ago. There must have been other performances, other glass slides, showing the wicked fairy Carabosse, the wizard Merlin, and Sleeping Beauty, but Pulcinella is the only one whose grotesque figure, imprinted on his memory as he leant back into a large bosom, has remained. A warm hand had clasped his tightly. Later, photographs provided the round face, pulled-back hair and solid frame of his nanny: Madeleine Schmidt.

  From Châtenay he also has, from what must be around the same time, the image of his father naked to the waist, face covered with lather, shaving himself with a cutthroat razor and singing off-key a tune of Paul Delmet’s, ‘Sending Flowers’. The little boy takes hold of the razor, lying on the rim of the basin, and slashes his left hand deeply at the base of his thumb. Blood spurts from the cut. Papa lifts the boy, who neither shouts nor cries, onto his shoulders, dashes out into the street in his pyjama bottoms and races in the direction of the chemist’s, where he bursts through the door with blood running through his hair and down his face. Only now does the little boy, thinking his father has been hurt, start shouting and burst into tears.

  At this point the memory box closes shut, but to prove that it is all true he still has, just at the base of his thumb, the scar that for the rest of his life he cannot see without also seeing his father’s bloodied head as he ran at breakneck speed down the empty street with him on his shoulders.

  There are no more memories of Châtenay, apart from those that can be re-assembled from sepia photos: of him standing on a round table in the garden, and of Madeleine holding his hand. He wonders whether in those early years he really loved anyone but her. Or snapshots, still relatively sharp despite their age, of his parents, his father in white trousers with shirtsleeves rolled up and a sleeveless cardigan, racquet in hand on the tennis court with her, Blanche, and two extremely pretty friends wearing the black headbands that were fashionable at the time, a detail memorialised in a pastel drawing of Blanche that still hangs on the wall in his study. During one of his moves the drawing, carelessly packed, had been damaged, and afterwards the picture framer had only been able to save her head, but her son has not forgotten her posing with bare shoulders wrapped in a gauze scarf which scarc
ely hid her breasts.

  Although he was four years old by the time they moved to Rue Henri-Heine in Paris, he hasn’t a single memory of Madeleine there. She must have taken him to Ranelagh, carrying him up the stairs of the footbridge over the ‘Little Belt’ circular railway, watched him making his first mud pies, and picked him up when he fell off his scooter. But no. Nothing. Everything has been erased, until with a click the shutter opens again: leaning on the balcony with his mother and looking down, he sees Madeleine getting into a green Renault taxi with its hood down. She is going back to Alsace. Blanche says, ‘Look at her. You won’t see her again.’ As the driver signals with his left hand to indicate that he is turning into Avenue Mozart, Madeleine turns round on the back seat and waves a handkerchief. He is sure she is crying.

  His mother was wrong. Almost as soon as the war was over, in 1945, he had travelled to Alsace, going from parish to parish to find Madeleine, now married, with five children, of whom the eldest had recently died, clearing the road of landmines. She had recognised him instantly. They cried together. She was a solid woman in a grey smock with a gentle face that radiated such calm goodness, such clemency and generosity that later he put her into several of his books, under her real name or different names, but recognisable to him alone.

  When had he realised he was called Teddy? For a long time it was just a sound that could mean either him or the dog who belonged to their neighbours across the landing. Sometimes he would answer with a bark, which at first made his parents laugh, then annoyed them so much that they smacked him, putting an end to his first attempt at humour. For some reason they did not appreciate humour where their son was concerned, and considered it to be a disappointing sign of idiocy. When the day came for him to go to school, he of course had to be told that outside of family and friends his name was Édouard, which was what his schoolmistress would call him. He discovered himself in a new incarnation, and that, by alternating his names, he changed his world. The mistress at the Petit Cours La Fontaine found that he had a talent for drawing straight lines, either vertical or leaning, with which he filled several exercise books. Indulgently she suggested he copy the alphabet that she had printed on the blackboard, which he obediently did with such ease that she wondered how much he had been making fun of her. One day the class was asked to learn a poem, and he missed out the first two lines:

  Little schoolboy a-going to school,

  Think how you are becoming time’s fool…

  The mistress summoned the recalcitrant pupil’s mother.

  ‘This child has memory lapses. I recommend he sees a doctor.’

  Standing between the two women in the small courtyard, Teddy-Édouard, looking up, watches a gutter along which a male pigeon is pursuing a female. He claps his hands and gives a war cry. The pigeons flap away. Interrupting his mother, who is upset and cross, he says ‘a-going’ is a mistake and if he’s a fool, time’s an even bigger one. Her brief humiliation avenged, Blanche takes him to a sweet shop and buys him a bar of Nestlé chocolate. If you take the bar carefully out of its wrapper and fold up the silver paper neatly ‘for the little Chinese children’,1 when you’ve collected fifty wrappers you can send off for a coloured illustration of one of Monsieur de La Fontaine’s fables. The sweet-shop lady has beautiful black eyes, a streak of white in her light-brown hair, and – a detail that does not escape Teddy’s attention and even obsesses him mildly – a swollen index finger with a black nail that is peeling off. ‘It happened drawing the curtains,’ she says. Fifty times a day she has to reassure her customers, who are worried that she has some strange ailment. Maman retells the story of the poem at least as many times. Édouard is relegated to the back of the class, where he learns to read by himself so well that he brings his own book to school: Memoirs of a Donkey.2 Outraged, Mademoiselle confiscates the handsome volume (a Bibliothèque Rose edition), but when she finds out what it’s called she starts to laugh and holds it up for the rest of the class.

  ‘Édouard has already written his memoirs!’

  The class hoots with laughter and he cries a little, but not much, because there’s a girl waiting for him at the gate: Yolande, who is studying for her baccalauréat in another class. He looks up to her admiringly, partly because of her height, but also because she holds his hand to walk him home to Rue Henri-Heine. He hears people say she is very pretty, and, studying her, he begins to develop his first idea of female beauty, even though many years later he is unable to remember anything about the way she looks. On the other hand, he can still conjure up quite clearly Yolande’s mother, Madame N., the owner of their apartment in Rue Henri-Heine and of several buildings in Avenue Mozart. In a huge sitting room with scented oil lamps burning all around, a languid-looking woman is half lying on a sofa overflowing with damask cushions, a Pekinese on her knees, toying with an amber necklace and smoking mauve cigarettes with golden tips. She kisses him and lets him plunge his hand into a crystal bowl filled with chocolates. An aura of mystery surrounds her.

  One day, when Maman is quarrelling with Papa, Maman says, ‘Don’t forget the reason we were able to get this apartment is because Madame N. was my brother’s mistress.’

  Yet the brother was a well-known man in Paris and in other countries, and often busy travelling, and you really couldn’t see how someone like Madame N. would have been his teacher.

  Why would Édouard remember so precisely the face of the sweet-shop lady at the corner of Rue du Ranelagh and Avenue Mozart, and not Mademoiselle’s at the Petit Cours La Fontaine? He has even forgotten her name. In the subterranean activity that can wipe clean whole tracts of the past (and occasionally even of the day before), an obscure score-settling takes place: there are humiliations to be avenged, not to mention Papa’s bad mood on discovering that his offspring has been answering his teacher back and correcting her.

  ‘He’s going to be a pedant! A bore!’ he says.

  Words that stick. The following year would be very different. The ground-floor classroom at an address in Rue Davioud is dark and there is no playground. Panels that cover the bottom half of the windows shield the pupils from the prying eyes of passers-by who can read in gilded letters the words ‘Mademoiselle de Cordemoy – Private Tuition’. There are no more than a dozen pupils in what must once have been a sitting room from which the furniture has been removed and piled up in the lobby and down a corridor feebly illuminated by a fanlight. Placed in storage or sold, the missing pictures have left hooks and pale rectangles behind them on walls covered with beige crêpe paper that is slowly turning the colour of pee.

  Mademoiselle de Cordemoy is a wizened old nag who wears a long black dress with a lace collar. Her dress is gathered at the waist with a rope belt, from which hangs a reticule in which she rummages nervously to find her handkerchief and dab her nostrils at each of her frequent sneezing fits. From the far end of the corridor in her apartment there comes, from time to time, amplified by the tunnel-like space blocked with chairs and old chests of drawers, the sound of moaning, of an inhuman howling. Putting down her ruler, which like a metronome beats out her lessons and dictations, or points to the map of France pinned to the wall to indicate each of the départements and its prefecture, Mademoiselle orders the children to be good and hurries out. They hear her stomping down the corridor like a policeman, calling out ‘I’m coming!’ They know Mademoiselle has a very sick brother. Their parents say it is her lifelong burden. She had been on the point of marrying a brilliant naval officer when an unknown bacterium paralysed her brother. Mademoiselle has sacrificed her life to save him from going to the paupers’ hospital. He, of course, shows no gratitude for her sacrifice and bellows all day and night.

  One evening at dinner time Papa suggests that this invisible brother might be the Minotaur. Teddy tells his classmates what Papa has said and inevitably there is one stupid boy who immediately puts his hand up in the middle of a lesson and asks, ‘Is it true that your brother’s called Minotaur?’

  ‘No, little one, he’s called Mau
rice. He’s in a great deal of pain and he can’t bear the light. Who told you about the Minotaur?’

  ‘Teddy.’

  Papa was sent a long-winded, half-serious letter in which Mademoiselle expressed herself delighted that, thanks to his parents, Teddy knew some mythology. Teddy was not allowed any pudding that night. Which is how children learn not to repeat the things that grown-ups say. But that was only the beginning.

  Many years later, walking past his old classroom (long gone, the Cordemoys having vanished without trace), Édouard tries to remember the dozen pupils at the school, but can only bring two faces to mind. Girls, perhaps inevitably. The first was unforgettable: Évangeline de Something or other, fourteen or fifteen years old, twice as old as the next oldest pupil. In fact she was twice as much in everything, being so fat that she took up the whole of a double desk and her frame sagged under the weight of a pair of breasts that were phenomenal for her age. When she came to school, as she sometimes did, without her wild, frizzy hair tied under a cotton turban, Évangeline obscured half the class. Her complexion was a little darker than coffee-coloured, and when she opened her mouth she revealed wonderful teeth. When she sat down Mademoiselle would admonish her.

  ‘Put your knees together, young lady!’

  But with thighs the size of hers, she could not.

  Even though she was happy in her body, things did not always turn out so well for Évangeline’s brain. She struggled to retain more than three lines of a poem and was completely unable to remember her times tables. Mumbling, she told people she was from ‘Gua’loupe’. But if she sensed kindness in her listener she expressed herself with an exquisite charm and sweetness in the accent of Creole people. Mademoiselle had a soft spot for her – she was resitting the year for the second time – and congratulated her excessively whenever she answered, more or less at random, a question that only required common sense. Évangeline always had, hidden in her school bag, a big bag of sweets that she would pop into her mouth by the handful as soon as Mademoiselle left the room. She would offer them round the class, and a wave of giggling would erupt when Mademoiselle came back and, knowing full well what was going on, asked her, ‘Nine times nine?’ The answer was inaudible as Évangeline burst out laughing, spitting sweets and disarming Mademoiselle who could only stand, waiting, arms by her sides.