Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Turning to Jean he said, ‘Émile is a splendid chauffeur. My mother called hers “my mechanic”. In those days chauffeurs knew how to keep their cars on the road. Modern engines have killed off the enterprising mechanic. I doubt if Émile knows how to change a spark plug, but he’s like a father to me. Let’s walk, shall we, I could do with some exercise. We’ll talk in vapour bubbles like the heroes of comic strips. But if we meet anyone else, they won’t be able to read them. They’ll be written in invisible ink.’

He wore a fur-lined coat with a black astrakhan collar, and a soft grey hat. His tanned complexion was a sign of wealth in an era of pallor.

‘Where did you get your tan?’ Jean asked. ‘I thought you were in Switzerland.’

‘I was. In the mountains. Wonderful sunshine. Snow and the simple life. Gstaad is a little paradise, despite meeting mostly people who are waiting for the end of the war. Anyway there weren’t only people like that there. I also met a very charming woman and we talked about you.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. I don’t know a charming woman: if I did I’d remember her …’

‘What about Claude?’

‘I’ll tell you later. But you didn’t meet her at Gstaad.’

‘No, you smart alec. I met your mother.’

Jean was silent. An image from the past suddenly came to him: the yellow Hispano-Suiza on the quayside at Cannes. Geneviève, the prince in a wheelchair, and Salah getting out. They were deserting Europe. Geneviève, in a pale dress and wearing a beret, a light coat over her arm and carrying her jewellery bag, had turned to glance at the families and curious onlookers crowding around the landing stage. Jean remembered the sadness on her hardly made-up face. She was already missing Europe, her friends, her sparkling, clever London where she had been so happy. She was leaving, resigned but not yet convinced of the necessity of her going.

‘The prince is dead,’ Palfy added. ‘Geneviève is finding it difficult to obtain a residence permit for Switzerland. But with money everything can be worked out …’

The reader has the advantage over Jean of having known this piece of news for a long time. He or she also knows that Albert Arnaud will die the following summer at Grangeville, during the Dieppe raid. The state of war, Europe’s isolation, and within Europe the isolation of every nation forced back onto its own hardships and hopes, the censorship that weighs on every letter as much as on the press, muddle our chronology. The past, discovered so long after the event, is as hard to understand as the present. It is already hedged around with forgetting, with resignation. Its freshness is suspect; its emotion has lost its savour. It possesses almost no surprise, and to some degree it is not hard to think of it as an importunate interloper, reminding you indiscreetly of his existence. The saddest news comes so late that it is already consigned to history, minor, insignificant, cold, overtaken. The anguished longing to know what tomorrow will bring pushes yesterday back further than it should be. Trifling distances, which yet seem unmanageable, deaden the horror. No one spills old tears. They hold them back with little pity. Life expectancy numbs the most acute notes of the funeral march. The survivors take pride in still being alive when the weakest and unluckiest have vanished. It would not take much for them to accuse the victims of cowardice.

At the moment of hearing of the death of the prince who so influenced his own life, Jean is too obsessed by Claude’s state to feel more than a swift stab of sadness. As for the news of his mother being in Switzerland, it leaves him cold. He has decided that Jeanne was his mother, the housekeeper at La Sauveté, the person who gathered him up in his Moses basket, adopted him, loved and protected him. Geneviève, whatever he feels, is a mother like the one a child creates in a burst of romantic invention: beautiful, charming, intelligent, loved by everyone and more or less virtuous. When they had met in London he had fallen a little bit in love with her, and she too had probably fallen a little for him. It was nothing. Something that did not count, and yet had had some magic and that afterwards — when he had known that she was his mother — he had enjoyed mulling over like the sort of incest to be found in a popular romantic serial.

‘I hope,’ he said to Palfy, ‘you didn’t tell her I was her son.’

‘You and I had already decided that it would be out of place. If she finds out, it won’t be from us. In any case, it would age her overnight. I suspect she has decided that she’ll always be thirty. An excellent age that she’s right to stick to. She hardly looks it. The mountains suit her fragility. She’s remarkably lovely.’

‘I’m wondering how you managed to find her.’

‘It wasn’t too hard. I had dinner one evening with a Lebanese banker. I talked about her to him. He supplied the key: Gstaad. A little bit of heaven on earth!’

Allée des Acacias was almost deserted, its trees frozen, cold and grey on this January morning. Palfy liked this walk. It reminded him of his childhood Sundays, of his father and mother driving there in their Renault open tourer. The car would roll down the avenue, crowded with residents from all over the 16th: young girls in wide-brimmed hats, bare-headed boys, riders and a few remaining carriages conveying old ladies, their faces caked in cream and powder, their laps covered with real or imitation sable. He even claimed to have seen, on one of his last outings around 1921 or 1922, Mercedes del Loreto. His Sunday mornings belonged to the past. The only people to be seen now were women dressed like tramps, in worn greatcoats, stooped, shuffling, grey-faced and guilty-looking as they collected firewood, or riders in uniform, sitting stiffly as if at riding school, their boots black and gleaming. One greeted Palfy with a discreet movement of his hand.

‘You know all the Germans in Paris,’ Jean said.

‘No. A modest few. That was Captain Schoenberg, the blue-eyed boy of one of the generals. He won’t go to Russia. He’s been given the job of overseeing the national stud farms. Pleasure can’t go completely by the board — the French would revolt. By the way, while we’re on the subject, Rudolf von Rocroy’s got problems. The one time he’s ever shown any courage — to help your Claude — and they’re threatening to send him to the Eastern Front. It’s mayhem. Don’t worry, he won’t talk. I’ve got him under control. In any case he only needs to dig himself a tiny bit deeper into his racket to be forgiven …’

Claude. Jean hesitated. He had come to meet Palfy to confide in him, but Palfy’s blithe self-assurance silenced him.

‘It’s bizarre, I can tell you, how far one feels from all that at Gstaad, even though Switzerland’s the only place where rationing is actually enforced. No strawberries and cream. Meat twice a week. The restaurants are quite inflexible and the Swiss are very disciplined. But I didn’t go there to eat …’

‘What did Geneviève say?’

‘She’s bored. She’s rented a floor of a country hotel, brought in a gramophone, made a place to read. She reads all the time when she’s not listening to music. The hotel’s stuffed with foreigners, who play cards while they wait for the motor shows and carnivals by the sea to resume, the selfsame world they knew before the war. In one sense, Geneviève’s isolation and loss of her little train of admirers has done her good. I found her a bit less of a bluestocking. You don’t feel you’re taking an exam every time you talk to her these days. And we talked … oh yes, non-stop. In her room, out walking, or on the sleigh. Ah, the sleighs of Gstaad! I never suspected I’d fall for their romance. A fat driver with a red nose and a leather apron tucks you in like babies. The horse wears ice shoes and trots as if there weren’t any ice. I had the great pleasure of holding Geneviève’s hand to keep it warm …’