Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘I’m saying nothing. I want to stay alive. Maybe Madame Germaine deserved the big grin. Not for me.’

She put her hand protectively up to her throat.

In March, walking past the Salle Pleyel, Chantal and Jean saw the poster announcing Michel’s recital, accompanied on the piano by Francis Poulenc.

‘I’d really like to go,’ Jean said, ‘if only to see him puff out his chest and purse those terribly red lips of his. Too bad! I’ll be working. And of course all of civilised Dieppe and Grangeville will be there. It’s not really the time or place to show ourselves off.’

A few days later Chantal suggested that she could go to the recital on her own.

‘Of course you can go if you want to.’

Jean was upset that she had thought about it without talking to him, as though she were afraid of him.

‘You will be seen. Antoinette will be there with her mother, and there’ll be plenty of others you won’t be able to avoid.’

‘I’ll keep away from them.’

‘Not so easy as you think.’

‘I’ll wear dark glasses.’

‘Do you really want to go?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then go.’

He woke her at six a.m., as he came in from work. Or rather he thought he had woken her up, because she was pretending to be asleep. Her eyelids opened to a terribly urgent and inquisitorial look. She did not ask him why he was looking at her that way, and she did not want him to ask her any questions either.

‘What was it like?’ he asked finally.

‘Oh, it was very good … Michel is really talented. Apart from his friends and family, everyone had come for Poulenc. But at the end they were applauded the same.’

‘Did anyone see you?’

‘No, nobody.’

She turned towards the wall. Jean undressed, reflecting that he himself had met someone that evening, that everything had happened without a word, without a look, so that he could not even be certain that the moment could be real. An English car had stopped outside Match, and he had opened the door for Peter and Jane Ascot. Of course Peter had not recognised him, he never recognised anybody, but Jane had paused, and when they left two hours later she had looked straight at him, without registering any surprise. The encounter had lasted no more than a few seconds, but long enough to leave him feeling disconcerted. Jane had not counted in his life in London, even though she had played, thanks to him, a decisive role in Palfy’s business plans. He could not remember having had the slightest feeling for her. Yet he had been flattered by her attention and the way she had been attracted to him. She had revealed to a young man still clumsy and unrefined, dazzled at the world he was discovering, that a woman of her background could show herself to be not just attainable but full of initiative. She had also unconsciously given him his revenge on Peter’s snobbish disdain. That she was no Aphrodite was hardly important, for she more than compensated by her experience for her lack of beauty. What would she tell Palfy when she got back to London? If she said a word, he would either explode with fury or scorn Jean for ever more. Doorman and bouncer at a nightclub: that was all the use he had made of his initiation. He could already hear his friend’s heavy sarcasm.

He thought he must have woken up earlier than usual. Chantal was not yet back from the market. Opening the curtains, he saw Paris gilded in a lovely mix of pastels, of blue roofs, grey smoke rising from their chimneys, and green spaces. His watch said one o’clock. He leant out to catch sight of Chantal, who would be coming back up Rue Lepic with her bag of shopping in her hand. She had probably got up later than usual after her evening at the Salle Pleyel. The breeze blew into the room, fresh and as if filled with a smell of spring. Jean walked to the sink and took his toothbrush from the glass in which it stood. His hand stopped in mid-air: there was only one brush. There was no tortoiseshell comb on the glass shelf, no make-up remover; the hand cream Chantal used when she had done the dishes was gone. In the wardrobe there remained only English suits, an overcoat, his two cases. He began to tremble, then went through both rooms looking for a letter, anything scribbled on a piece of paper. Nothing. He had to stay very calm, not panic, examine carefully all possible clues, imagine the most simple and natural explanation, a telegram summoning her to Malemort to look after her sick father, something, anything serious and therefore comprehensible, that would explain everything. Above all he must not stay like this, his face stinging, hair tangled, in rumpled pyjamas. Must be a man, a real man, smile, laugh at himself. An intense fatigue was crushing his temples. His heart was thumping so hard he thought he could hear it. He experienced the most appalling difficulty in pulling himself together, then crossed the landing and knocked at Jesús’s door. Jesús opened immediately. Jean realised straight away that he knew.

Jesús knew, so everyone knew. To the physical, almost intolerable suffering that Jean was feeling was added something he would perhaps be even less able to forgive Chantal for than her betrayal: the wound to his pride. But men have those foolish ways of behaving that save them from disaster. He spent several days completely shut off from life, out of time, registering neither darkness nor light. Madeleine came in around lunchtime, in her robe, without make-up, offering to an indifferent gaze a complexion eroded by years of powdered and rouged somnambulism. She made lunch, pulled back the curtains, opened the windows to let the sometimes cotton-cloudy, sometimes clear-skied city in, talked with a certainty that he wasn’t listening to her but that the monotonous murmur of her voice would distract him from his fixation. Madeleine displayed seniority as well as authority the day she arrived and found, grouped around the table in their hats and with their hair done and looking very respectable, the three bar girls from Match who had come to find out what had happened to Jean. Needless to say, he had been sacked and a new doorman and bouncer now wore the menial uniform, an ex-wrestler named Bobby la Fleur.

‘No style when he opens a car door,’ Fanny said.

‘Much too rough too,’ Suzy added. ‘The day before yesterday he chucked out a client who asked a married woman for a light.’

‘He hasn’t a mean bone in his body,’ Dolly said. ‘He’s just very thick.’

Madeleine made it clear that their chitchat was out of place at a moment such as this. Fortunately Jesús took over in the afternoons and worked in Jean’s apartment. Jean did not ask him how he knew, nor how long he had known. Some matters that cause too much pain need to remain in the dark, and that real friends, of however short a duration, will keep from each other.

‘I like wha’ I do,’ Jesús said. ‘One day they will lick my boots. I’m not a nasty man an’ I keep my fee’ nice an’ clean so they don’ feel too ashame’. Don’ you think I’m righ’?’

Jean nodded. In a way his own situation was similar. Art and love both suffered ignominious defeats when they started out. When dealers began to recognise the genius that was in Jesús’s collages, Chantal would realise her lover’s feelings for her. Keeping one’s feet clean? Yes, it was not a bad idea. At any rate Jean was aware that he was undergoing his first great disappointment in love, and hated it slightly less than he had expected. There would never be another one, and by its suddenness and depth this one even managed to seem quite noble, since he had survived Chantal’s offence. He wrote to Antoinette.

Chantal has run off! Who with? That is the question. Or perhaps not. Not at all. The important thing is that she’s no longer here. One day I’ll recover, and you’ll see me stronger than death itself.