Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Provoke, provoke …

Beauchurch shrugged. He took one last look at the tall, sensible, well-dressed reflection of himself in the window and turned toward the hotel. By now Ginette and the man had disappeared. Beauchurch covered the few yards to the hotel entrance rapidly, threw away his cigar, and went in.

Ginette and the man were standing at the concierge’s desk in the lobby. The man had taken his hat off and was turning it slowly in his hands. As Beauchurch came up to them, he heard Ginette saying to the concierge, “Est-ce que Monsieur Beauchurch est rentré?” which was one of the few sentences he could understand in the French language.

“Bonjour, Madame,” Beauchurch said, smiling, and carefully keeping his face normal. “Can I help you?”

Ginette turned. “Tom,” she said, “I was hoping you were back.” She kissed his cheek. To Beauchurch she seemed strained and ill-at-ease. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. Claude Mestre. My husband.”

Beauchurch shook the man’s hand. The fleeting contact gave him an impression of dryness and nerves. Mestre was tall and thin, with a high, domed brow and smooth chestnut hair. He had deep-set, worried, gray eyes and a long straight nose. He was a good-looking man, but his face was pale and seemed tired, as though he were overworked. He smiled politely as he greeted Beauchurch, but there was an obscure appeal buried in the smile.

“You don’t have to go out again, do you, Tom?” Ginette asked. “We can sit down somewhere and have a drink, can’t we?”

“Of course,” Beauchurch said.

“I do not wish to spoil your afternoon,” Mestre said. His accent was strong, but he spoke slowly and clearly, pronouncing every syllable loyally. “You have so little time in Paris.”

“We have nothing to do until dinner,” Beauchurch said. “I’d love a drink.”

They went toward the bar, past a long alley where old ladies were taking tea. The bar was a huge hall, dark, almost deserted, with the tarnished gold-leaf and mahogany elegance of a nineteenth-century palace. Ginette squeezed Beau-church’s arm as they went through the door, which Mestre held open for them. Close to her, Beauchurch was conscious of the strong, pleasing scent of Ginette’s perfume.

“How was your mother?” Beauchurch asked, as they traversed the room, toward the high windows which looked out on the Tuileries.

“Fine,” Ginette said. “She was disappointed you couldn’t come to lunch.”

“Tell her, next time,” Beauchurch said. They gave their coats to the waiter and sat down. Beauchurch handed the package containing the book of prints to the waiter, too, without telling Ginette what was in it.

“This is rather sinister, this bar, isn’t it?” Mestre said, looking around him. “It is rather like a place for ghosts to come and drink.”

“I imagine it was pretty gay here,” Beauchurch said, “in 1897.”

The waiter came and they all ordered whiskey and Beauchurch was conscious again of Ginette’s perfume when she leaned toward him slightly to allow him to light a cigarette for her. He saw, or imagined he saw, a cool, speculative expression on Mestre’s face, as though the Frenchman was trying to judge the nature of the relations between the husband and wife across the table from him, in the moment in which they briefly approached each other over the flare of the lighter.

There were two large Americans at the bar, their voices making a bass background rumble of sound in the room, with an occasional phrase here and there suddenly intelligible across the bare tables. “… The problem,” one of the men was saying, “is with the Belgian delegation. They’re sullen and suspicious. I understand perfectly why, but …” Then the voice sank back into a rumble again.

“Claude is a journalist,” Ginette said, in her hostessy, introducing-the-guests-at-a-party voice. “He’s one of the leading journalists in France. That’s how I found him. I saw his name in the paper.”

“I congratulate you,” Beauchurch said. “On being a journalist, I mean. Like everybody else in America, when I was young, I wanted to be a newspaperman. But nobody would give me a job.” Saw his name in a newspaper, he thought. I was right. She called him. It wasn’t any accidental meeting on the street.

Mestre shrugged. “Perhaps I should be the one to congratulate you,” he said. “For not getting the job. There are moments when I consider the man who gave me my first job on a newspaper as a deadly enemy.” He sounded weary and disabused. “For example—I could never hope to dress my wife in the charming manner in which Ginette is dressed or afford a six-week tour of Europe in the middle of the Autumn like you.”

That’s a damned envious, unpleasant thing for a man to say, Beauchurch thought. “Oh,” he said. “You’re married.”

“Forever,” Mestre said.

“He has four children,” Ginette said. A trifle too quickly, Beauchurch thought.

“I am personally attempting to redress the demographic imbalance that Napoleon left as his heritage to France.” Mestre smiled ironically as he said it.

“Have you seen his children?” Beauchurch asked Ginette.

“No,” she said. She volunteered no further information.

The waiter came and served their drinks. Mestre lifted his glass. “To a happy stay in this happy country,” he said, his voice still carrying the edge of irony. “And a quick return.”

They drank. There was an uncomfortable silence.

“What’s your specialty?” Beauchurch asked, to bridge the silence. “I mean, is there any particular field that you write about?”

“War and politics,” Mestre said. “The prize assignments.”

“That’s enough to keep you busy, I imagine,” Beauchurch said.

“Yes. There are always enough fools and brutes to keep a man busy,” Mestre said.

“What do you think is going to happen here, in France?” Beauchurch said, resolved to be polite and keep the conversation going until he could find some inkling of why Ginette had wanted him to meet this man.

“What do you think is going to happen here?” Mestre repeated. “It is becoming the new form of greeting in France. It has practically replaced Bonjour and Comment ça va .” He shrugged. “We are going to have trouble.”

“Everybody is going to have trouble,” Beauchurch said. “In America, too.”

“Do you think,” Mestre fixed him with his cold, ironic glance, “that in America you will have violence and political murder and civil war?”

“No,” Beauchurch said. “Is that what you think is going to happen here?”

“To a certain extent,” Mestre said, “it has already happened.”

“And you think it will happen again?” Beauchurch asked.

“Probably,” said Mestre. “But in a more aggravated form.”

“Soon?”

“Sooner or later,” Mestre said.

“That’s very pessimistic,” Beauchurch said.

“France is composed exclusively of pessimists,” said Mestre. “If you stay here long enough, you will discover that.”

“If it does come, who do you think will win?” Beauchurch asked.

“The worst elements,” said Mestre. “Not permanently, perhaps. But for a period. Unfortunately, the period will have to be lived through. It will not be pleasant.”

“Tom,” Ginette said, “I think maybe I’d better explain about Claude.” She had been listening intently to Mestre, watching his face anxiously as he spoke. “Claude works for a liberal newspaper here and it’s already been confiscated several times by the Government because of articles he wrote about Algeria.”

“It is getting so that when an article by me appears and the journal is not confiscated,” Mestre said, “that I examine myself for signs of cowardice.”