Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘Let’s leave it here.’

‘I really wanted to ride around London a bit. Apparently it’s very flat.’

Salah scratched his head.

‘We can put it in the boot, and when you want to ride it you can take it out and I’ll follow you.’

Reluctantly Jean accepted. The bicycle did not completely fit in the boot and they had to resign themselves to leaving a wheel sticking out. Despite Salah’s formal protests, Jean sat next to him in the front.

As night had fallen the previous evening, he had only seen an indistinct grey, rather dirty mass. In the morning light he discovered another city altogether, joyfully coloured, white, pink, red and olive green, full of beautiful balconies in wrought iron; a very gay city, which caught the slightest light, held it in its streets, and shone with pleasure. Obviously I shall not recount Jean’s sightseeing, his surprises, and his sudden and intense friendship for the chauffeur. Salah was Egyptian. He spoke French and English. He had travelled all over Europe and the Middle East with the prince and often Madame too. He seemed very attached to both of them, but was more attached still to the Hispano-Suiza. It was his thing, his baby, an enormous machine whose size simply crushed the little English cars, the sparkling yellow of its coachwork creating a respectful gap around it. Silent, but responsive too when it was called upon, it drank fabulous quantities of petrol. Jean was careful not to say that deep down, and by a long way, he preferred Monsieur du Courseau’s Bugatti, which was a real plaything, noisy and highly strung, that would fly down any road you pointed it at.

After the Tower of London, Jean insisted that they go to Hyde Park. They bought spongy sandwiches and bottles of lemonade that they ate and drank on a bench facing the Serpentine, which ran gently between two banks of lawns. At lunchtime the young secretaries left their offices and came to stretch out on the grass and eat a packet of biscuits, pecked by pigeons. At least a hundred Eliza Picketts walked past them, in three-cornered hats and buckled shoes. Salah explained that the English loved two things more than anything: lawns and animals. Apart from that, nothing, or almost nothing. He also mentioned that the prince had been very tired for a number of months and now rarely left his country house in Oxfordshire, and that Madame could not stay in one place. She drove in her Bentley coupé from one grand house to another, came back to dine at Chelsea, left again the next morning at dawn, always full of vigour and happy to be alive. Yet people said that she had been ill like the prince and that they had met in a nursing home.

Two three-cornered hats stopped in front of them, stared at them in astonishment, and said something before continuing on their way.

‘What are they talking about?’ Jean asked.

‘The first one,’ Salah explained, ‘said, “There’s a Negro”, talking about me, obviously, and the second one said, “I didn’t know they were allowed to sit next to children in Hyde Park.” Do you think I should have said something to them?’

‘Yes, but what?’

‘Something like, I’m really just rather suntanned, and in a generation half of London will be black-skinned. But they would not have believed me.’

‘It would have been funny.’

‘Yes, but you have to keep your mouth shut and know your place. I’ve learnt that. As I have learnt the scorn of the scorned.’

‘You speak really cleverly for a chauffeur, Salah.’

‘My father is a proper Egyptian, a minor provincial aristocrat, if you like, pale-skinned, and I’m the son of a Sudanese mother, a sort of slave girl. They sent me to a school run by the Lasallians, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, but I only ever had one thought: to escape from Egypt and see the world. The prince took me with him. I respect him because he speaks to me like a human being. You’ll see him: he is an immensely good man, a very rare thing among Arabs, especially Muslims. I say that as a Muslim myself, who never eats pork or drinks alcohol and respects Ramadan.’

‘You’re a very good friend to me,’ Jean said.

Salah smiled, half-opening his wide, scored lips and showing his yellow teeth. A Semitic nose inherited from his father clashed with his black skin and frizzy hair. His long, fine hands lay on his knees. Jean was impressed by their grace and by the care with which he looked after his nails. He was more familiar with Albert’s rugged hands or with the abbé Le Couec’s big paddles or Monsieur du Courseau’s paws. Somehow Salah’s hands reminded him of Chantal and her long, fine fingers and fresh, pink rounded nails, as if these two beings, so different in their skin, habits, sky and God, had some mysterious common origin.

Opposite where they were sitting, on the other bank of the Serpentine, a girl sat down on the grass, crossed her legs and started to read a book that she had placed on her lap. Her tow-coloured hair framed a plump, rather round face. She was chewing a bar of chocolate, oblivious — in reality or just pretending, it was impossible to say — of the sight she was offering the man and boy facing her: a panoramic view beneath her dress of sturdy thighs of a sugary whiteness and a pair of screamingly loud pink knickers. Salah and Jean both fell silent, fascinated by her immodesty. They had finished their sandwiches and lemonade. The day was wearing on, and they would have stayed talking to one another a while longer if this obscene apparition had not come to disturb the friendship that had suddenly grown up between them on a calm English afternoon animated by swans, old ladies in three-cornered hats and daydreaming couples lounging on the grass. Salah was the first to rouse himself. Getting to his feet, he put his chauffeur’s cap back on, pulled on his gloves, and bowed.

‘Where would sir like to go?’ he asked with exaggerated deference.

‘Wherever you like, Salah.’

The Egyptian looked at his watch.

‘I have a suggestion: we shall keep Westminster Abbey for tomorrow, and if it doesn’t bore you too much, we’ll go to the British Museum instead, where I’ll leave you for a moment to go and have a French lesson with my teacher who lives very close by, in Soho.’

‘But you don’t need any lessons, you speak very good French.’

‘Yes, I speak, but unfortunately I write very badly. Mostly phonetically. If the dear Brothers read my writing, they would blush to their roots. I’ve found an excellent teacher, a grammarian. Her lessons don’t last longer than half an hour, and in the evening I do the homework she gives me.’

‘The British Museum it is, then.’

At Piccadilly Jean asked who the statue was, balanced on its pedestal.

‘Eros!’ Salah said, grinning. ‘This is his spiritual home, everywhere around here.’

The god of love! Jean’s thoughts went straight back to Chantal. Their first journey would be to London and their first visit to this statue. The Hispano-Suiza turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, which bore no resemblance at all to the clean and fashionable London of Chelsea or Kensington. All along the grimy pavements were cinemas with garish posters, theatres with jangling bells, Italian cafés whose proprietors took your money as you went in, cigars clamped between their teeth. A pervasive smell of vanilla, dust, chip fat and petrol hung in the air, as if everything had been gathered up together, stirred and cooked in desperation, and finally exhausted.

The British Museum belonged to another, more reassuring district. Jean had never seen anything quite so impressive when Salah set him down at the main entrance.

‘I’ll pick you up in an hour,’ he said. ‘In any case, I’m not going far. Odeon Street is just around the corner.’

Jean was not passionate about museums. Painting quickly bored him, especially the official kind of painting that glorified British victories in Portugal, in Spain, at Trafalgar and Waterloo. These British devils had always won everything. William the Conqueror was the only one who had taught them a lesson, and as a Norman himself Jean was proud about that. He turned his back on these disagreeable reminders and headed for the sculpture rooms. Greek history and Roman history were still fresh in his mind. There, at least, in those vast halls you could still dream, even if it was permissible to doubt Lord Elgin’s right to take down half the surviving friezes of the Parthenon and enrich his country with their incomparable sculptures.