Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘I’m not laughing. I like you a lot. And everything you love belongs to me too.’

She had never said so much, and with such gentle honesty, before.

‘The Boches?’ she asked.

‘I don’t like the term. But they’re not involved yet. Palfy’s doing his best to step in before she’s handed over to them.’

She sat on the corner of his desk and looked thoughtful.

‘You’re unhappy.’

‘Yes.’

‘The ghastly Dudu’s on first-name terms with them.’

‘Don’t get mixed up in this.’

‘Anyway he wouldn’t lift a finger, not even to help his mother. He’s such a creep. Listen, Jules-who …’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like me to sleep with Julius or Rudolf?’

‘I don’t think so. There’s enough of us in your bed already.’

‘Don’t be mean.’

‘Sorry.’

‘There’s you. And sometimes there’s Dudu. That’s all. It helps me wait.’

‘Wait for what?’

‘Until I stop. Feeling bored.’

Her lovely dark eyes glistened and her lip quivered. He hugged her, pressing her to his chest. How could he explain that he loved her too, and that in the impasse of a life so pointless for a man of his age she represented a different kind of friendship? Jesús, Palfy, Nelly: he reminded himself of his extraordinary good fortune.

Duzan entered, blushing furiously. He put up with what the eye did not see, but physical evidence was too much.

‘In my offices!’

Nelly disentangled herself.

‘Listen to me carefully, Dudu. One wrong word and you’ll be free of me for the rest of your life, which incidentally is going to be short, because you eat and drink much too much.’

‘Drinking too much is rich coming from you! Only yesterday—’

‘Your unbelievably ghastly aristocratic friends were driving me mad. I drink when I’m with creeps. Ask Jean. I never drink when I’m with him.’

‘In other words I’m a …?’

The word would not come. Relenting, Nelly came to his aid.

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Without me, darling, you’d just be some minor thespian doing nothing but rep.’

‘Yes, and it would be Corneille, Racine, Marivaux, Cocteau, Anouilh, Claudel and Giraudoux instead of your shitty screenplay writers. My poor Dudu—’

‘Don’t call me Dudu!’

‘My poor Dudu, it’s not even smoke and mirrors, what you do. There. I refuse to sign another—’

The producer prevailed over the outraged lover.

‘You have a contract!’

‘I’m throwing it away.’

‘Find a very good lawyer then.’

He went out, slamming the door.

Nelly stroked Jean’s cheek.

‘Well! That’s much better for both of us.’

‘Yes, much better.’

She replaced her astrakhan hat and re-applied her lipstick in front of the mirror. A secretary knocked and entered. She brought an envelope and a typewritten letter.

‘Monsieur Duzan asked me to give you this cheque. He’d like you to sign your letter of resignation.’

‘What about me?’ Nelly said.

‘He didn’t give me anything for you.’

‘Shame.’

Jean read the letter of resignation and signed it.

‘Shall I throw his cheque back in his face?’ he asked Nelly.

‘No. Keep it. His money’s as good as anyone’s.’

Jean put the cheque in his pocket and asked the secretary, if anyone telephoned him, to redirect the call to Rue de Presbourg.

‘No,’ Nelly said. ‘To me. Today I’m keeping you with me. I’m inviting you home for lunch. My Uncle Eugène, who has the incredible good fortune to live in the Vire, has sent me an andouillette you’ll still be talking about when you’re sixty.’

If she had offered him a herring bone, he would have followed her wherever she told him to go. She was there, she existed, she understood everything. He desired her while Claude, under arrest somewhere in Paris, in isolation, was asking herself whether those who loved her had abandoned her. Unless she was not sitting alone on a hard wooden bench but being questioned, slapped, beaten and humiliated into admitting she had met Georges Chaminadze.

They reached Place Saint-Sulpice by Métro. Passengers recognised Nelly. A little girl with a lisp held out an autograph book. Nelly took Jean’s arm to cross the square. A man with a red nose who looked numb with cold and had a haversack on his back was attracting pigeons with breadcrumbs. A bird pecked at his palm. He grabbed it by a claw, wrung its neck and stuffed it into his haversack. The other pigeons flew away, then came back. He waited calmly for them, not moving, his arm extended, showing neither pleasure nor boredom. The brim of his homburg hat was pulled down over his eyes. All that was visible was his really very red nose and the stubble on his badly shaven chin.

‘I should like to find a poet who talks about Saint-Sulpice and pigeons and people going hungry,’ Nelly said. ‘But … it’s difficult. Of course there’s Ponchon: “I hate the towers of Saint-Sulpice — whenever I see them I piss on them …” I can’t promise that’s it exactly, but Ponchon’s a real poet.22 He wrote about black stockings and virtuous maidens. Do you like black stockings?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Notice that I didn’t ask you what you thought about virtuous maidens.’

‘I haven’t known one. They’re a rare breed.’

‘That’s a shame. If you had, you could have recited Ponchon’s excellent speech to her. “Now we know on what a fat purse, Mademoiselle, you mount your horse …”’

He laughed. Nelly dispensed gaiety. These days gaiety meant hope and courage. She was making the waiting and uncertainty disappear with a discretion he would not forget.

The studio was icy. Jean lit a fire of logs while Nelly changed her dress for a pair of trousers and a roll-neck sweater. But for her slight bust, she would have looked like a beautiful young man. Even her voice could have been a boy’s. She chattered incessantly to Jean, to herself, even briefly to a cat slinking across the balcony on the other side of the street. Opening the window she called out, ‘Marc-Adolphe Papillon, you shouldn’t be out in weather like this. You’ll catch cold and your papa’ll get worried.’

She closed the window. The cat did not move, staring at her, its back arched.

‘Funny name for a cat!’ Jean said.

‘It’s not any old cat, it’s Maurice Fombeure’s cat. In the morning when Marc-Adolphe comes home, Fombeure tells him:

‘My cat coming back from his rambles

He smells of the earth and sun’s heat

He smells of Calabria and Puglia

He smells of opossums and feet,

He smells of bollocks and palavers

With hefty and bewhiskered toms

And of the bitter bark of the trees

He smells of Bantus and drums

‘So you can see he’s not any old cat.’

‘Do you know any other poems of Fombeure’s?’

‘Plenty. But let’s go gently. You shouldn’t stuff yourself with poets. Very indigestible. I’ll teach you to cherry-pick …’

He recounted to her how, as a boy of thirteen, he had met two Breton separatists on the run and how one of them, Yann, had recited Victor Hugo to him in a voice he had not forgotten and how a few hours later the second separatist, Monsieur Carnac, had ridiculed the poet’s flight of fancy by quoting the lines that were missing from the stanza: ‘Love each other! ’tis the month when the strawberries are sweet.’ What had become of Yann and Monsieur Carnac? The Germans, having envisaged backing the Breton Liberation Front, had given up the idea under pressure from Vichy. Were Yann and Monsieur Carnac continuing the struggle, pursued now by the police on both sides? But someone else had offered him a poet too. He spoke of his fabulous meeting with the prince and his chauffeur, the enigmatic Salah who had slipped a copy of Toulet’s Counter-rhymes into his haversack. The copy had been left behind at his last billet. Jean remembered how, during his long marches, staggering under the weight of his kit, full cartridge belts and the machine gun biting into his shoulder, he had recited to himself, without moving his lips, the thrilling lines that conjured up a naked woman and the fragrance of the Indian Ocean.