Your Father's Room

by Michel Déon

  A tall, bony woman answered the door. She had rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and was wearing a blue apron that looked as if it was wet through. Her hair was pushed up into a hairnet, and Teddy noticed that the shadow of a moustache darkened her upper lip. But the most noticeable thing about her was that she smelt strongly of Father Chomet’s scented soap.

  ‘Oh, you’re the one who’s come to apologise …’

  Blanche had told him, drilling it into him: ‘Don’t say you’re apologising, say you’ve come to ask the priest to forgive you.’

  He corrected her. The ‘housekeeper’ was above such subtleties.

  ‘Come in, I’ll let him know you’re here.’

  She strode quickly away and stopped at a glazed door. When she opened it, Teddy saw a bathroom and a blurred form in a bathtub. The housekeeper came back, drying her hands on a towel.

  ‘Monsieur l’abbé is having his bath. He says it’s all right, you’re forgiven.’

  Teddy recounted the visit to his parents, not omitting the housekeeper and the horrible smell of scented soap.

  Papa could not help laughing. Blanche was indignant.

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Oh, the world’s much too small for some things not to be known.’

  ‘And we entrust him with our children?’

  ‘They’re no angels either. I’d rather like to meet this chaplain. Man to man, I’ll bet he’s much more easy-going.’

  A meeting was arranged at the lycée’s chapel for the following Monday, after the confirmation class. Father and son held hands. The priest, not very sure why they had come, opened the attack.

  ‘Édouard was rude.’

  ‘Monsieur l’abbé, I believe that matter is over and done with. Édouard came to ask your forgiveness. You were having your bath and, as I understand matters, your housekeeper passed on the message. You were generous enough to forgive Édouard for a misdemeanour the implications of which I’m certain he was unaware of. What makes me most happy about meeting you now is that it gives me the chance to say that I am really the one responsible for my son’s free thoughts. He’s rather too good at listening to adult conversations for a boy of his age, and he remembers the words more than the spirit in which they’re said. I, and a number of my friends, happen to blaspheme rather lightly. We are not a good example for Teddy. He knows perfectly well that I have no faith, which is perhaps what has led me to become passionately interested in Renan …’

  The priest started. He had never expected this dreaded name to be mentioned, when the ostensible reason for the meeting had simply been Teddy’s rude and sacrilegious comments.

  ‘Monsieur l’abbé, Ernest Renan is not the devil himself. Yes, he turned away from the sacraments, but all of his work is that of an exegete who has never abandoned the search for irrefutable reasons to believe. You must know the famous passage from Memories of Childhood and Youth. I always keep a copy with me in my wallet, and if you have no objection, I’d like to read you these few lines: “Merely because a lad from Paris can deflect with a joke beliefs from which the reasoning of a Pascal cannot succeed in disengaging itself does not mean that Gavroche is superior to Pascal. It has taken me, I freely admit, years of study to reach the conclusion that that funny little fellow came to straight away. Few people have the right not to believe in Catholicism, for the threads woven by theologians are strong and it is difficult to unstitch them … I sometimes reproach myself for having contributed to Monsieur Homais’s victory over his parish priest. But what can one do? It is Monsieur Homais who is right. Without Monsieur Homais we would all be burnt alive—”’

  ‘Monsieur, I don’t understand what point you wish to make. The incident for which Édouard was responsible is closed.’

  Papa assured him that he also considered it closed and that he had only come to say how much he shared the chaplain’s feeling that children’s souls were fragile organs of which their guardians, humble moralists all, could never take enough care.

  ‘Having said that,’ Papa added, when he and Teddy found themselves alone again, ‘I grant you that the scented soap he uses is truly nauseating.’

  How many mothers can resist the temptation to read a daughter’s diary, to go through a son’s letters? How many wives respect the privacy of their husband’s chequebook and appointments diary? Blanche gave in to such temptations easily and, knowing perfectly well what she was doing, made sure she left no compromising traces. When she discovered a minor secret of Teddy’s, the situation became complicated: anxious to be loved by him as much as she loved him, she was cowardly enough to give Papa the task of taking decisive action. Having extracted from the morning post an apparently salacious letter to her son from a holiday friend, Maurice L., Blanche suspected Teddy of replying in a similarly smutty way. She was wrong; and it was precisely because she was wrong – because Teddy detested anything vulgar and, even though he might have been curious, fled with a disgust that came close to making him physically sick from the experimenting that went on in the lycée’s toilets – that Maurice L. took, from afar, a perverted relish in making him feel uncomfortable. At the beach that August, for example, he had tricked Teddy into going into the bathing hut that his sister Laure used to change her swimming costume, then locked him in. At twelve or thirteen Laure’s figure was beginning to develop: she had small breasts and a shadow of blond down between her legs. Used to her brother’s pranks, she showed no surprise and, ignoring Teddy, dried herself with a big towel and put on a new, dry swimming costume, smiling at a dumbstruck Teddy. The reader will not be surprised that this image should have invaded the dreams of an only child, who had no sister to spy on through the bathroom keyhole. Laure had perhaps even enjoyed seeing herself so admired, at a safe distance. In any case, she had pretended to attach no importance to the episode in the few days before she and her brother went back to Paris. In his letters to Teddy afterwards Maurice carelessly described, with a gusto rare in a boy of his age, Laure’s secrets and the supposed intimacies she enjoyed with Teddy’s rivals at Scossa, the café on Place Victor-Hugo where the pimply flower of the sixteenth arrondissement would congregate after school for cafés liégeois or diabolos menthe. Rivals? Teddy didn’t really see it that way. Laure was just, it seemed to him, deploying her charms, of which the most charming were her innocent laugh, like a cascade of silver bubbles, and her delicate careless gestures to push back the hair that fell forward and hid half her face whenever she leant over. Thinking about Laure long after the incident that brought their games to an end, Édouard wondered whether what was so attractive about her, much more than her physical appeal, wasn’t a disarming naturalness, an innate way of being at ease everywhere, including in the bathing hut where her brother had locked her in, naked, with an admirer whose main reaction had been respect at his first glimpse of that precocious sketch of womanhood.

  *

  What the incriminating letter contained, he never found out. What remained engraved on his memory, however, was the scene with his father, whose aide was waiting for him at the lycée’s gates at lunchtime. ‘The director is waiting for you at his office.’ The office was on the other side of the square. The aide, Émile, was a sort of giant, in other words not really a giant, more an enormous mass of soft flesh that during the day sat behind a table on which he leant first with one elbow and then the other, his chin resting in the palm of his hand, his cow-like gaze staring into nothingness – a metaphysical nothingness, as Papa said – his job being, a variable number of times per day, to push a pad of paper and a pencil towards a visitor. His seated position exacerbated the stiffness in his legs, which carried with difficulty two huge, highly polished shoes.

  The director was on the telephone when his son went into his office. He indicated to him to wait. The window looked out over the port, which was filled with yachts. Édouard remembered two details: outside, the Macumbers’ yacht Crusader, back from Italy, was in the process of mooring stern-to and hard by the Jeannette, which had not left its berth fo
r fifteen years; and inside, in the office, the door of the safe in which Papa kept his most precious files, along with a revolver and two pistols, was wide open, revealing a document folder in red morocco leather marked ‘Special funds’ and a smaller envelope with the words ‘Teddy’s bonds’. For the last two years half of Teddy’s pocket money had gone towards buying him these bonds issued by the City of Paris; an asset that much later, at a time when he found himself extremely short of money as a student, he would try and fail to cash in: they were worthless. From which experience he conceived a lifelong disgust both for saving and for banks.

  But let us stay in the present, as the father talks on the telephone, Teddy stares out of the window, and Crusader throws a mooring line ashore, grabbed immediately by two port workers, and slips carefully into the narrow space left by the Jeannette and a fine black schooner flying a Dutch flag, whose owner, a Falstaffian character with a ruddy complexion and a booming laugh, is another of his parents’ friends. It was he who had given Blanche a pair of silver cufflinks bearing the initials ‘IBF’, the secret badge of those who called themselves members of the International Bar Fly society.

  Papa replaced the receiver and his expression changed: his cheeks flushed, his lips pursed, and his gaze hardened in his sunburnt face, his broad brow crowned by his blue-black hair. He waved a letter at Teddy, who recognised Maurice L.’s handwriting.

  ‘How can you call a dreadful boy like this your friend? I’m going to send this letter back to his father.’

  ‘His father is dead.’

  ‘His mother, then … thank you for telling me … I’m less surprised now that I know that … But in any case I forbid you to see him again, or to write to him or his sister. No tennis for a month. Now go home and have your lunch.’

  The phone rang at that moment, preventing Teddy from responding. But what would he have said? He carried on standing where he was, defenceless and exposed to the worst impulse men have: their visceral need to dominate the weakest. Yet Teddy knew his father was good, that he could show great waves of tenderness (quickly suppressed if his authority was threatened); but most of the time he seemed taken up by an indefinable ‘somewhere else’. Affairs of state, however small the state might be, had enclosed him in a fortress from which nothing that could be communicated emerged. Or perhaps it would just take many years, until long after his death, and the discovery of a secret notebook that escaped Blanche’s destructive rage, to understand that this man was suffering from a sorrow so great that he could not tell anyone. For some time, he had also been regularly prone to pressing his hand to his forehead as he struggled with terrible migraines, which were scoring his brow with its first wrinkles and encircling his burning gaze with tragic dark rings.

  Teddy, not knowing whether he should stay or go, stretched out his hand to the safe and picked up the pistol. The magazine was loaded. All he had to do was cock the hammer. He aimed at the port outside the window. Papa threw down the receiver and grabbed his son’s wrist, twisting the weapon downwards. The bullet lodged in the floor.

  ‘My boy! Oh my lovely boy!’

  He squeezed Teddy in his arms until he was almost suffocating.

  They would never talk about it again, just as they never again talked about his lost friend and the delightful Laure, who both stopped writing eventually, tired of not getting any answer.

  Blanche was late for lunch. Who had she been waiting with to find out the consequences of her rather dishonourable act? She was surprised to see how calm her two men were, although her husband’s hands were still trembling. All her powers of seduction would be needed to regain her son’s love. But the practice of seduction was nevertheless a form of love: the love of being loved. By no means the most insignificant one.

  Katie, Madame Polovtsov’s only rival, was a strong, good-looking, slightly plump girl. At twelve years old she looked at least fourteen, and at fourteen people took her for sixteen, sometimes more. In a way it was a shame that her intellect had not developed at the same rate, but in other ways the discrepancy reinforced her attractions, to which her mother’s friends (or lovers) seemed particularly susceptible. The minute she walked out of the gates of the Cours des Dames de Saint-Maur, gentlemen greeted her. Their keenness was understandable: the white socks, the knees revealed by the short pleated skirt, the blue blazer and the felt school hat with a rolled brim were more than enough to attract attention, even if her green eyes, fleshy mouth, a little blemish over her left eyelid, and her cropped hair made her no match for her mother, Madame H.

  Everything would have been perfect if Katie (short for Katherine) had not, from a very young age, been in a state of fury at having been born a girl. So that no one was in any doubt whatsoever, she dragged her feet wherever she went, swaggered as much as possible, smoked eucalyptus cigarettes in the street, called her friends, including Teddy, ‘old thing’, and was occasionally seen kicking a tin can along the gutter and chewing gum. In Teddy she found a defender, an accomplice two years her junior, an equal who accepted her for what she was and enjoyed being with her more than with his classmates or any of the other, rather mannered girls he knew. In the summer the two of them swam at Larvotto, where one day Teddy bought her a pissaladière to make up for not getting into the boys’ water-polo team. In the winter, whenever there was a film on that they were forbidden to see, they would secretly sneak into the Beausoleil cinema. Teddy would never forget a particular Roman epic in which the emperor’s favourite, stark naked (although in those days no pubic hair was shown), was massaged by an enormous African woman. Fifteen years later he did not have the courage to tell a great star of the theatre, Edwige Feuillère, that he had seen her completely naked in her first film, long before The Break of Noon or Eagle Rampant. Another actress they saw was Betty Stockfeld: he would have liked to see more of her films. This curvy blonde Australian appeared regularly in French productions, in which her accent earned her a certain distinction, and on every occasion, whatever the script said, the director took particular pleasure in showing her in a bra and placing her on the edge of a bed where he would lecherously make her take off her stockings, or put them on. A scene that unfailingly slowed down the film, but had its aficionados. For the rest of his life Édouard would have a predilection for women with an English accent and a preference for stockings and suspenders over tights. Katie did not share his tastes, despite being English by her mother and French by her father, who had been killed in the war. Among the actors of the period, she loved Roland Toutain driving a Bugatti in The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Ramón Novarro on his chariot in Ben-Hur. These very different preferences made no difference to a friendship sealed by generous mutual concessions.

  When the Beausoleil was showing a film without either heroic or steamy qualities, Teddy would spend the afternoon at Katie’s. She played the accordion. Her favourite tunes were ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and Lucienne Boyer’s hit, ‘Parlezmoi d’amour’. Madame H., who had heard both songs quite often enough and regretted having let her daughter persuade her to buy an accordion, frequently suggested that they play cards instead. One day she had an appointment, and on her way out, wanting to give the children her instructions, she went into the lounge, where they were sitting cross-legged, playing cards.

  ‘Katie, I can see your knickers!’

  Her tone was sharp enough for Katie to close her legs immediately.

  When Madame H. had left Teddy said, with genuine concern and perhaps equally genuine mischief, ‘What’s so wrong with your knickers that you can’t show them?’

  Katie thought about this, then agreed that, if the sight of her knickers was the reason for her mother’s disapproval, the best thing would be for her to take them off, which she did, and they carried on playing. In reality there was very little to see, no more than a shadow, but it was enough for Teddy to get an instant erection and lose the next hand. He made a strenuous effort to look away and won the next two hands. They were playing forfeits.

  Katie said, ‘Whatever you
want!’

  He had no idea, so she suggested showing him her breasts. As suggestions go, this was not as innocent as it might seem. She was fourteen, her breasts showed promise, and she was proud of them when, in the toilets at the Cours Saint-Maur, she compared them to her girlfriends’.

  ‘But no touching!’

  He promised. She unbuttoned her blouse. Teddy was embarrassed. Statues he had seen in Paris and in public parks had taught him what to expect, but those were marble, standardised, unmoving, and they didn’t make you want to stroke them at all, whereas these flowers, like pink carnations set in soft mounds that disappeared when Katie raised her arms and swelled again when she lowered them, danced harmoniously and were endowed with joyful life, even playful life, you might say. Teddy went home soon after this experience, feeling deeply thoughtful. As did Katie, but more about her own boldness.

  Next day the storm broke. Madame H. knew everything and had phoned Blanche to tell her that Katie might well be a wanton hussy, but Teddy was a peeping Tom. How had she found out what had happened, and from whom? They had been alone in the apartment. No one, absolutely no one could see them, and of course neither of them had said anything. So how? There was nothing magic about it. In the building opposite, on the same floor, lived an elderly gossip who kept watch on everything that happened in the street and in the neighbouring apartments. She loathed Katie, who, each time she found herself being spied on, stood a big piece of cardboard on the windowsill with the word ‘Bitch’ (she wrote it ‘Bich’) on it in capital letters. Lately she had varied her choice of words and started writing, imperatively, ‘Die’. The culprits had not closed the curtains because they had not planned any of it. Punishments came thick and fast: no more cinema, no more swimming at Larvotto, no more games of belote. They would meet in the street, and as they left the Cours or the lycée, and sometimes at friends’ houses, but their mothers kept watch. They had discovered at a young age that no crime – was it a crime? – goes unpunished, especially if you’re innocent. They would see each other again, infrequently, in Paris. But the magic had gone for ever.