by Michel Déon
Katie was married at eighteen, divorced at twenty. Wartime doesn’t suit reunions. And time passes: fifteen years, twenty perhaps. One day, or rather one night, very nearly one morning, in Rue du Bac in that smoky bar where, standing proudly behind her counter Madame Blanche, her eyelashes black with kohl, Cupid’s bow of a mouth pouting, welcomes the cream of Paris’s nightlife, among them more often than not those writers Blondin, Vidalie, Marvier, Déon and from time to time Jean-Louis Curtis, all night owls terrified by the prospect of going home before dawn, a woman of around forty, dressed a bit carelessly but with an elegance that is not easily learnt, and perched on a stool that teeters along with her, is drinking a glass of white wine and repelling the wandering hand of a long-haired young man in overalls. The hard neon light accentuates a fatigue in her face that is not far from complete collapse; she is a stranger, a foreigner, adrift among the workers at L’Officiel, the journalists downing their last glass after the paper is put to bed, and Édouard, who, as he habitually does, lingers to get the better of an anxiety that on some evenings he is hard put to articulate.
‘Teddy! Let me buy you a drink!’
Without the little blemish by her left eyebrow he would not have recognised her, much fatter as she is now, with her lovely green eyes clouded by alcohol and her voice husky from cigarette smoke. He is ashamed of himself and ashamed of a world that can wrong-foot his stubbornly boyish dreams and riddle them with nightmares. And because she sees him suddenly disconcerted, lost in thought at those scraps of the past and assailed by their images, she sits up straight and stops wobbling on her stool, and her face, by a kind of miracle, regains its youthful cheekiness, a sudden flash of saucy innocence, all its charming spontaneity. Or is it he who, in an irresistible rush, corrects with his memory the faded degraded portrait of a being whose decline he wants desperately to deny, whose image he so badly wants to save, a being he loved, even if she was loved with something other than love.
‘Do you remember our last game of cards?’ he says.
Does she ever! She smiles and starts to laugh, then, nearly choking with laughter, dabs a trickle of saliva from the edge of her lip where her lipstick has feathered, and shuts her eyes for an instant, as if she is about to fall asleep. Her eyelids are heavy with silver eyeshadow. Édouard moves between her and the over-friendly long-haired young man posing as the accursed artist, takes her by the arm and waist, and steers her towards the door and out of the smoke-filled bar. The room falls suddenly silent as they go. He guides her towards his open-topped sports car, folds her gently into the passenger seat, and brushes her forehead with a calming kiss. He drives carefully towards Passy, where day is breaking at last.
‘I’d like to go for a drive around the Bois,’ Katie says.
They drive as far as Longchamp and back via the lake and Ranelagh. The morning air has woken her up and she lights a cigarette.
‘Let’s go round again, can we?’
They retrace their steps. At the lakeside a man in a woolly hat is throwing bread to the gathered swans.
‘He’s there every morning. Shall we go back?’
At the door of her apartment, she says, ‘That did me so much good. I’m not going to suggest I show you my tits again. You wouldn’t believe what they look like now! You know … that old bitch who told on us … she died in a fire. Burnt to a crisp. There is some justice. If she hadn’t done what she did, we might have stayed friends till the day we died. You might even have been my lover for ever. Goodbye, sweet Teddy. You can’t know how wonderful it was for me to bump into you tonight, of all nights … That’s enough! No, no questions! Goodbye, sweet Teddy.’
Of the rest of the story, the vanished pages between the beginning and their meeting at the Bar-Bac, and between the Bar-Bac and the end, have never been found.
Teddy suffered from repeated throat infections. Vile beasts roamed and multiplied behind his uvula, robbing him of his voice and preventing him from swallowing anything except warm liquids. The advantage was that each attack confined him to the apartment, where he spent days in his dressing gown, his neck wrapped in a silk scarf, his throat stained with methylene blue. When both parents were out, he went straight to the forbidden books in his father’s library. By the time he was twelve he had already read Francis Carco (Perversity), Maurice Dekobra (The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars), Marcelle Tinayre (The House of Sin), Maurice Magre (Priscilla of Alexandria), Renée Dunan (The Jersey Silk Knickers), Marcel Prévost of the Académie Française (The Half-Virgins), and several other novels whose names have sunk into oblivion.
When his sore throats proved persistent, he was taken to Nice to be seen by a well-known ear, nose and throat specialist. Dr V. was a handsome man, elegant and decisively authoritative. In his opinion a tonsillectomy was the answer: there was nothing simpler. Teddy would spend two days in the clinic. Papa, who had gone with him, used the occasion to mention the headaches he was having in the area of his left frontal lobe. The doctor examined the back of Papa’s eye with a magnifying glass and an electric light, asked him to elaborate on his symptoms, and diagnosed common sinusitis. He suggested that, using a probe, he could scrape Papa’s sinus, which was blocked with fluid. The two procedures could be carried out on the same day. Teddy and Papa would share a room on the first floor. An appointment was made for the following week. It was all organised at great speed, but Papa was convinced. As they drove home he told Teddy, ‘We must put our faith in experts.’
Even allowing for the fact that this was the 1930s, the ‘clinic’ hardly resembled a genuine clinic. It was an old, grand private house, and when they arrived a male nurse led them to a bedroom with a four-poster bed and another bed – a camp bed – next to a double-width window with heavy curtains held back by gold tie-backs. The furniture was more than antique. The walls were covered in a tired damask fabric, and from his bed Teddy could study at length the engravings that had been hung on them: they were a series of illustrations from La Fontaine’s Fables. He saw that Papa was taken aback by the room, which hardly conformed to the conventional image of a room in a clinic, an impression reinforced by the nurse, Auguste, who told them solemnly (not quite dabbing a tear from the corner of his eye) that the doctor’s grandmother had died there a month ago.
‘I can still feel her presence,’ he added.
It was true that the room gave off a waxy smell, a lingering odour of infusions and unguents, and possibly even incontinence. Fortunately Papa was as much a practised exponent of the art of making unpleasant situations bearable as he was of expressing his pessimism about promising ones.
‘Everything that might remind us that we’re both about to go under the knife is blotted out by this ugly bedroom,’ he said. ‘We’ve just come to spend a very brief weekend with some provincial relations instead.’
Dr V. arrived in his white coat. He wore his stethoscope the way others wore the broad sash of the Légion d’honneur. His self-confidence was contagious. Teddy and his father would eat a light dinner, and the procedures were arranged for eight o’clock and eight thirty the following morning.
‘Above all, there’s no need to worry,’ he said as he left.
Papa, visibly offended, did not answer. Not long before, he had refused to let himself be anaesthetised for an operation on his elbow. He liked to tell the story of the Spartan boy who stole a fox and, hiding it under his tunic, let it eat his stomach rather than reveal the theft. Dinner was frugal and served by Auguste, who had put on a striped waistcoat for the occasion. Between the soup (disgusting) and the dessert (a biscuit of uncertain age) they found out that Auguste had spent ten years in the colonial infantry. As a medical orderly, he added, to justify his current role. He was a tall man with a handsome moustache, a crew cut and an Alsatian accent.
He gave both patients a pill to help them sleep, and the next morning Teddy struggled to open his eyes when Auguste brought him a glass of mineral water, which was all he was allowed for breakfast. He followed the nurse downstairs to the operating room
in his pyjamas, with Papa’s encouragement ringing in his ears. Papa himself had decided to take his time washing and getting ready.
‘Operating theatre’ was a flattering description of the big white room he was taken to. A number of details pointed to its having been the kitchen, now equipped with a sink, an autoclave, an almost empty pharmacist’s cabinet and an operating table. Teddy was not asked to lie down. Auguste, in a tunic less white than it might have been, sat on a chair and instructed him to sit on his lap, where he wrapped him tightly in a sheet as though he was in a straitjacket. Dr V. had put on an odd round white cap that sat precariously on his head.
‘Breathe very deeply into the mask and you’ll go to sleep. Auguste will be holding his hand over your heart to make sure everything’s all right. Don’t be scared!’
Teddy was as cross as his father had been the previous evening.
‘I’m very brave.’
‘That’s good!’ Auguste said. ‘You’ll make a good soldier.’
Dr V. picked up from the table what looked like a pair of secateurs made of chromed steel. Teddy boldly filled his lungs with ether and instantly fell into a savage darkness, where men in white writhed and yelled. He woke up before it was over. A pair of pliers was still carving up his throat and he vomited a stream of blood onto the sheet he was wrapped in. It was over. He continued to vomit into a bowl, blood clots, lumps of something else that was foul and stinking; perhaps they were alive, perhaps they were those famous microbes with feet covered in tiny hairy hooks that had been marinating deep inside his throat for months. Auguste held the bowl firmly under Teddy’s chin as it filled with blood and vomit, while Dr V. carefully put his tonsils in a bottle of alcohol, like two shrivelled kidneys, red and brown and greenish.
‘There you are,’ he said, ‘guard them with your life and don’t let them escape. They ruined your life, and if they get out they could climb back into your throat. Or your girlfriend’s,’ he added.
Teddy, outraged that the man should treat him like an idiot, could not think of anything to say. He was racked with spasms, and sweat poured off him. He had nothing left in his stomach to throw up. This was easily the worst part. Auguste released him from the straitjacket and tried to make him stand up, but realised he would have to carry him to his room.
Halfway up the stairs they met his father, in pyjamas.
‘Did it hurt?’
Teddy shook his head and threw up into the towel that covered his mouth. In bed he went back to sleep, nauseated by a smell of ether that he couldn’t get away from. He woke up when his father returned, pale and with a bloody plug of dressing in his left nostril. Papa leant over him and stroked his forehead.
‘Maman’s coming to visit this afternoon. Go to sleep.’
The drawn curtains plunged them into darkness. They were both too wounded to sleep deeply, and were kept awake by car horns, the calls of people passing in the street, a door that banged on the floor below. Teddy had waking dreams. His throat burnt as if someone was lighting a fire in it every time he swallowed some saliva. Papa slept, whistling gently, his wheezing muffled whenever his breathing got blocked. Hours passed. How many? Neither of them could have said. Blanche appeared, tiptoeing into the room. She smelt deliciously good, with that faint scent that followed her like a shadow from the moment she appeared in the morning and accompanied her poise and the slightest of her movements like background music. A bedside light went on. She opened a box of chocolates. Teddy shook his head. Her husband looked tenderly at her and said, ‘He can’t talk or eat, except for ice cream.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me? I’m extremely well! And I loathe chocolate, as you know.’
His face moved as he spoke and the dressing fell out of his nose. Blood ran into his mouth. Blanche looked frantically for a bell, couldn’t find one, and ran out of the room. She came back with Auguste. There was nothing to be alarmed about. Everything was normal. Teddy would be served his ice cream, and Monsieur could have his dinner in bed. The nurse-attendant drew back the curtains. The sun was red in the late afternoon. Blanche opened the window and fresh air streamed into the room, chasing away the medicinal smells. There was a rattle of corrugated iron, followed by an altercation in dialect.
‘Close it!’ Papa said.
‘But it smells disgusting!’
‘Just close it!’
‘It’s better for resting,’ Auguste said, shutting the window and drawing the curtains.
‘What flavour ice cream do you want, Édouard?’
He started chanting like an ice-cream seller: ‘Strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, lemon, chocolate.’
Teddy was unable to respond, except with a gurgle. Blanche knelt next to her son’s bed and slipped her arm under his head. He opened his mouth and showed a tongue that was so bloody his mother began to panic.
‘We must do something. Call Dr V. at once. This child isn’t well.’
‘Oh, the doctor can’t do anything,’ Auguste said authoritatively. ‘Édouard woke up suddenly before the operation was over. The pliers slipped and cut his throat a little. Tomorrow you won’t know it happened … If you’d seen what happened last week, that was much worse …’
Blanche became enraged.
‘Did you hear, Paul? This Dr V., you swore by him … He’s a butcher. A fraud. You call this a room in a clinic? A mortuary, more like …’
She did not know the story about the doctor’s grandmother, but, gifted with flashes of super-lucidity, she had sensed in the ghastly bourgeois room a vengeful presence that intended to harm her son, and perhaps her husband too. Auguste came back with strawberry ice cream in a chipped bowl and Blanche slipped a spoon between Teddy’s dry lips. But he couldn’t taste the cold dessert: all he could feel was a blade of fire that seared his throat, slid down his gullet, and fell into a hollow stomach that sent a jet of strawberry back onto his pillow.
‘Get Dr V. up here now.’
‘Madame, the doctor has gone home. He won’t be back till tomorrow morning.’
Blanche was so furious that Papa had to try to calm her from where he lay in bed.
‘These reactions are perfectly normal. V. warned me. All we need is calm and quiet.’
‘I see! Why not just tell me straight out that I’m not needed here.’
Tears welled in Blanche’s eyes. They had never argued in front of Teddy. Since their quarrel – if it had been a quarrel – an extreme politeness had prevailed between them. In fact they had gone further, becoming attentive to each other in ways they would never have thought of before. This clash briefly lifted a corner of the veil, which was quickly smoothed back into place. Papa asked her to forgive him. Blanche dried her tears (two at the most) and her young face that was so lovely reappeared. Auguste, who had left at the first cross words, came back with clean pillowcases and sheets. Blanche helped him remake the beds. Papa was unsteady on his feet and had to sit in an armchair. Teddy let himself be carried back to bed like a parcel in Auguste’s powerful arms and the nurse tucked him in carefully, threw the soiled bedclothes out onto the landing, refilled their water jugs, and made sure the curtains were closed. He said he would ask Dr V. to make an exception and call back to see them both that evening.
‘There’s no need,’ Papa said. ‘We already feel better.’
Blanche wanted to stay, even if it meant spending the night on a mattress on the floor. He dissuaded her. A good night’s rest was the best remedy. They would both sleep. ‘Won’t we, my big boy?’ Those words, ‘my big boy’, filled Teddy with inexpressible happiness. His father had never spoken to him like that before. In his happiness he tried again to swallow a spoonful of strawberry ice cream, and this time he kept it down and his throat stopped burning for a moment. Blanche decided that this was her doing and walked across to the mantelpiece to look at herself in the mirror. She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and checked her cropped hair that suited her so well.
‘Well, my two men, I think I can leave you now.’
The early evening passed as they drowsed in the faint scent of the perfume Blanche had left behind. Papa breathed noisily and Teddy fought waves of nausea. Auguste came in at intervals to plump up their pillows and take their temperatures, which he noted on a sheet pinned to the door. Isolated noises reached them from outside: tyres squealing on the asphalt, a jammed alarm, the hours chiming on a nearby church. Papa had dinner on his own at a small table and Teddy swallowed another scoop of ice cream with difficulty. Auguste came back to clear away and freshen up their beds. It was only eight o’clock. It would be a long night. They kept a night light burning. Papa tried to read despite a dreadful migraine that aspirin – the only painkiller available at the so-called clinic – did nothing to remedy. He paced back and forth, pressing his hand to his forehead or holding his finger to the plug of cotton wool and gauze that had to be changed every two hours. Teddy followed him with his gaze and blurted out a few words. Papa stopped and bent over him.
‘Does it hurt?’
Teddy shook his head and went back to sleep. He woke up again and saw that his father’s bedside lamp was on and his father was sitting on the edge of the four-poster bed, a book in his hand, but he was not reading. The next thing he saw was the silhouette of his father at the foot of his bed, standing looking at him.
‘Aren’t you asleep, little one?’
Teddy shook his head. Papa put his hand on Teddy’s bed and stroked his foot, which was sticking out from under the sheet.
