Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

He was amazed how at certain moments she could reason with such logic and imagine practical solutions to the situation they found themselves in. There was no doubt that Marie-Dévote and Antoine du Courseau would welcome them with open arms. He had thought of it himself. But Claude’s mental fragility made it too great a risk.

‘We’ll go swimming,’ she said. ‘The sea’s always blue and warm. Cyrille can play on that lovely sandy beach. Your grandfather can start up his Bugatti, and at night we’ll make love, lots. I’m dying to make love to you, Jean. Here I dream you’re inside me, everywhere inside me, and then I wake up crying because I’m empty …’

She squeezed his hand with the force of desperation. The man in the shantung jacket stopped in front of them and raised his panama.

‘What a glorious June we’re having, don’t you think?’

‘Glorious,’ Jean said.

‘Not too hot, not too cool. The Île-de-France is paradise. Our kings should have left it at that. Why make it bigger? Ambition is the mother of all misfortune. Napoleon should have stopped at Austerlitz. He’d beaten the two emperors of Russia and Germany, taken forty thousand prisoners, including twenty Russian generals, captured forty flags and a hundred cannon. Why go on? He was master of all Europe … I bid you a very good day.’

He went on his way, panama raised.

‘You see …’ Claude said. ‘Now you understand.’

‘I didn’t hear him say anything rude.’

‘Because you’re here …’

A maid appeared at the doors of the home pushing a trolley laden with a tea urn and cups. There was no need to summon the residents. They had seen her. Leaving their benches and interrupting their strolls, they converged on the trolley, producing momentary confusion around it.

‘Don’t push, don’t push,’ the woman huffed, as if she were talking to spoilt children. ‘There’s enough for everyone.’

Claude stayed sitting with Jean. The man in the panama walked past them again, raising his hat and leering.

‘There’s tart today,’ he said. ‘It’s Sunday.’

The supervisor’s head and shoulders appeared at a first-floor window, looking down at the group massed around the trolley. A patient caught sight of her. Word went round and the impatience subsided. Her voice nevertheless rang out.

‘Monsieur Trouleau! Don’t push. I can see you pushing! You’ll be served along with everyone else. And you, Madame Chaminadze, you must have your tea.’

Claude got up meekly, joined the group and waited patiently to be served with the liquid they called tea. Jean watched her from a distance and tried to rekindle the extraordinary emotion that had swept over him at Clermont-Ferrand when, as the regiment marched past, he had seen her standing between himself and the light. Her body was as firm and willowy as it had been then, but the rough dress she was wearing made her look heavier. The residents dispersed into the garden with their tasteless slices of tart on the rim of their saucers.

The supervisor shouted again, ‘And remember when you’ve finished to bring back your cups.’

Claude returned to Jean, smiling, her face suddenly enlivened by pleasure.

‘We’ll share,’ she said. ‘I asked for some tart for you, but there’s just enough for the residents. The cooking’s awfully good here.’

He doubted it, and was startled, too, to see Claude obeying the commands of the virago on the first floor so readily, and docilely parroting the glowing reports the nursing home gave itself. She was in their power and, despite a few timid outbreaks of revolt, had surrendered to the regulations laid down by the management with the distressing resignation of a being who places her life permanently in the hands of a nameless power. She began to talk about going away again, but now with a fearful indirectness.

‘They’re talking about shutting down the clinic,’ she said. ‘The doctor wants to go on holiday. He’s entitled to a holiday like everyone else, isn’t he?’

‘Of course.’

‘The supervisor and the nurses too. I could come and live with you in Paris. Or at Quai Saint-Michel if you like …’

He had enquired: there was no question of the clinic shutting for the summer. Claude had made it up. The resident psychiatrist lived on the top floor, avoiding patients’ families and friends as much as he could. Jean had seen him twice in six months. With each monthly bill he included a medical report couched in sufficiently cautious terms for it to be impossible to draw any precise conclusion. Claude was ‘making progress’, an ambiguous phrase that was not to be construed as meaning recovery. For as long as they could pay, the patients remained helplessly in the hands of this occult power lurking under the eaves in a book-crammed apartment. His name was Dr Bertrand, and he had been working on a thesis on the madness of Gérard de Nerval for the last ten years.

Claude took her cup back and returned to sit next to Jean.

‘You don’t tell me anything about Nelly,’ she said. ‘Do you still see her?’

He preferred to lie, though Claude never showed any jealousy.

‘Less than I used to. She’s working hard and she was a terrific Pauline in Polyeucte . It’s a pity you can’t see her. We’ll go as soon as you’re better. She’s always asking for news of you.’

‘I’d like to see her again. It was so strange living at her place and knowing she was your girlfriend too. Do you still sleep with her?’

‘No, of course not.’

The man in the panama paused in front of them.

‘How did you like the tart?’

‘Excellent,’ Claude said.

‘Wasn’t it? There are so many residents who’ve come here to treat their nerves, but I’m here to treat my stomach … I’m on a gastronomic cure. The world’s going to pieces and we’re eating our fill. It’s the survival of the fittest. See you soon, I hope.’

He raised his hat and immediately went to sit on a garden chair next to the young woman who was unpacking and repacking her bag of rags. She paid no attention to his conversation, her face tense with anxiety, counting the rags in her long skinny fingers. The man stood up, shrugging his shoulders, and walked back past Jean and Claude.

‘She’s not normal,’ he said.

Claude smiled and whispered to Jean, ‘Am I normal?’

‘Perfectly. You’re just tired.’

‘You haven’t given me any news of Madame Michette.’

‘Oh, she’s all right, I think. Always very busy.’

‘Cyrille infuriated her.’

‘She got over it.’

A cloud covered the sun. Faces looked up and walkers paused as if the mechanism that regulated the peaceful scene and its movement had been thrown out of gear. The supervisor appeared in the doorway, looking up to squint at the sky. The cloud went on drifting, a single formless mass in the infinite pallor. The sun was already coming out again and the cloud was passing. The supervisor walked towards Jean and Claude.

‘The doctor would like to see you.’

‘Now?’

‘If possible.’

He squeezed Claude’s hand.

‘Wait for me.’

She looked up at the supervisor, who stood watching her and saying nothing.

‘Jean, I think I’m going to go back to my room.’

‘She’s very sensible,’ the supervisor said. ‘Very. If only all the patients were like her.’

Jean’s heart ached. Claude drifted at the mercy of any will stronger than her own. The supervisor’s face displayed a kindness and indulgence that froze his soul. Claude followed her, turning at the door of her room to kiss Jean before walking over to her chair by the window. He would have wept, had it not been for her radiant smile as the door closed on his past.