Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

‘Also known as the Demigod,’ interrupts Blanche.

Pauline smiles. ‘Why?’

‘In honour of Loge in Das Rheingold , of course — the demigod of fire. You must see the resemblance, my dear? Look at that passion! Captain Lallemand is the Demigod, and Georges is the Good God.’

‘I don’t know very much Wagner, I’m afraid.’

Lallemand, the keenest student of music in our circle, affects shocked disbelief. ‘Don’t know very much Wagner! Colonel Picquart, you must take Madame Monnier to Bayreuth!’

Curé asks, a little too pointedly for my liking, ‘And does Monsieur Monnier enjoy the opera?’

‘Unfortunately my husband dislikes all forms of music.’

After they have moved off, Pauline says quietly, ‘Do you want me to leave?’

‘No, why would I want that?’ We are drinking orangeade. The great stink has lifted in the last day or so; the breezes of the faubourg Saint-Germain are warm and blossomy with the scent of a summer evening.

‘Only you seem very uncomfortable, my darling.’

‘No, it’s just I wasn’t aware that you and Blanche were acquainted, that’s all.’

‘Isabelle took me to tea with Alix Tocnaye a month ago, and she was there.’

‘And where is Philippe?’

‘He’s out of Paris tonight. He doesn’t get back until tomorrow.’

The implication, the offer, hangs unspoken in the air.

‘What about the girls?’ Pauline’s daughters are ten and seven. ‘Do you have to get back to them?’

‘They’re staying with Philippe’s sister.’

‘Ah, so now I know what Blanche meant by my “surprise”!’ I am not sure whether to be amused or annoyed. ‘Why did you decide to confide in her?’

‘I didn’t. I thought you had.’

‘Not I!’

‘But the way she spoke — she led me to believe you had. That’s why I let her arrange this evening.’ We stare at one another. And then, by a process of intuition or deduction too rapid for me to follow, she says, ‘Blanche is in love with you.’

I laugh in alarm. ‘She is not!’

‘At least you must have had an affair with her?’

I lie. What else should a gentleman do on these occasions? ‘My darling Pauline, she’s fifteen years younger than I am. I’m like an older brother to her.’

‘But she watches you all the time. She’s obsessed with you and now she’s guessed about us.’

‘If Blanche was in love with me,’ I say quietly, ‘she’d hardly arrange for me to spend the night with you.’

Pauline smiles and shakes her head. ‘That’s exactly what she would do. If she can’t have you, she’ll have the satisfaction of controlling whoever does.’

Instinctively we both check to see we are unobserved. A footman is doing the rounds, whispering to the guests that the concert is about to resume. The garden is beginning to empty. A captain in the dragoons stops on the threshold and turns to look at us.

Pauline says suddenly, ‘Let’s just go now, before the second part. Let’s miss the dinner.’

‘And leave two empty places for everyone to notice? We might as well put an announcement in Le Figaro .’

No, there is nothing for it but to endure the evening — the string quartet in the second half, the two encores, the champagne afterwards, the lingering goodbyes of those who have not been invited to dinner but hope for a last-minute reprieve. Throughout all this Pauline and I carefully avoid one another, which is of course the surest sign of a couple who are having an affair.

It is after ten by the time we sit down to eat. We are a table of sixteen. I am between Aimery’s widowed mother, the dowager comtesse — all black ruffled silk and dead white skin, like the ghost in Don Giovanni — and Blanche’s sister, Isabelle, recently married into an immensely wealthy banking family, proprietors of one of the five great vineyards of Bordeaux. She speaks expertly of appellations and grand crus, but she might as well be talking Polynesian for all I am taking in. I have an odd, almost dizzying sense of disconnection — the sophisticated talk is just a babble of phonemes, the music mere scrapes and twangs of gut and wire. I look down to the far end of the table, to where Pauline is listening to Isabelle’s banker husband, a young man whose pedigree breeding has given him an appearance so refined that it is almost foetus-like, as if it were an error of taste even to emerge from the womb. I catch Blanche’s eye in the candlelight, glittering out at me from within her game-bird plumage, the woman scorned, and I look away. We finally rise at midnight.

I am careful to leave the house before Pauline, to preserve appearances. ‘You,’ I say to Blanche at the door, wagging my finger, ‘are a wicked woman.’

‘Good night, Georges,’ she says sadly.

I walk up the boulevard searching for the white light of a cab heading home to its depot at the Arc de Triomphe. Plenty of blues and reds and yellows bob past until eventually a white appears, and by the time I have stepped out into the street to hail it, and it has clattered to a halt, Pauline is already coming along the pavement to join me. I take her arm and help her up. I tell the driver, ‘Rue Yvon-Villarceau, the corner of the rue Copernic,’ and then I haul myself in after her. She lets me kiss her briefly then pushes me away.

‘No, I need to know what all that was about.’

‘Surely not? Do you really?’

‘Yes.’

I sigh and take her hand. ‘Poor Blanche is simply very unhappy in her love affairs. Whichever man in the room is the most unsuitable or unobtainable, you may be sure that he is the one whom Blanche will fall for. There was quite a scandal a couple of years ago, all hushed up, but it caused a lot of embarrassment for the family, especially to Aimery.’

‘Why especially to Aimery?’

‘Because the man involved was an officer on the General Staff — a superior officer, recently widowed, a lot older than Blanche — and it was Aimery who brought him into the house and introduced them.’

‘What happened?’

I take out my cigarette case and offer one to Pauline. She refuses. I light up. I feel uncomfortable talking about the whole business, but I guess Pauline has a right to know, and I trust her not to spread the tale.

‘She and this officer had an affair. It went on for some time, a year perhaps. Then Blanche met someone else, a young aristocrat her own age and much more suitable. This young man proposed. The family were delighted. Blanche tried to break off her relationship with the officer. But he refused to accept it. Then Aimery’s father, the old comte, began receiving messages from a blackmailer, threatening to expose the affair. The comte ended up going to the Préfecture of the Paris police.’

‘My God, it’s like a story out of Balzac!’

‘It gets better than that. At one stage the comte paid five hundred francs for the return of a particularly compromising letter Blanche had written to her widowed lover, which was allegedly in the hands of a mysterious woman. The woman was supposed to have turned up in a park wearing a veil in order to return it. The police investigated the matter and the blackmailer proved to be the widowed officer himself.’

‘No? I don’t believe it! What happened to him?’

‘Nothing. He’s very well connected. He was allowed to continue with his career. He’s still on the General Staff — a colonel, in fact.’

‘And what did Blanche’s fiancé make of it?’

‘He refused to have anything more to do with her.’

Pauline sits back in her seat, considering all this. ‘Then I feel sorry for her.’

‘She is silly on occasions. But curiously good-hearted. And gifted in her way.’

‘What is the name of this colonel, so I can slap his face if I ever meet him?’