The Foundling's War (33 page)

‘Leave me with your maman. I can cheer her up better if I’m on my own.’

Cyrille for once obeyed without protest.

Her head buried in a pillow, Claude was sobbing. Jean covered her bare shoulders and moved his hand towards her neck, which cried out its innocence, almost a child’s neck attached to a lovely woman’s body. He told himself that a man could fall in love with Claude just by glimpsing that soft space of downy skin under her hair. A vulnerability was hidden there, but it was also the secret of her graceful way of carrying her head. For the first time he felt its tension, contracted by fear, by a quivering terror that only subsided when he placed his lips at the hairline of her ash-blond hair. She turned over and sat up in bed, her cheeks shining with tears, with such a sudden intent in her eyes that he was afraid in turn and stepped back.

‘I’m getting up,’ she said. ‘I’ll get dressed and go down. Tell them to wait!’

He held her by the shoulders and shook her.

‘No. I’m here.’

She smiled and did not stop him when he bent forward to kiss her unfeeling lips.

‘Jean, are you certain that Lieutenant Bruckett’s dead? Over there. In Russia. That he’ll never rise up from the snow and curse us with his frozen arm? You have to tell Laura it wasn’t me who killed him.’

‘No, no, it wasn’t you.’

‘The Russians kill all lieutenants. Cyrille’s never going to be a lieutenant. Promise me.’

‘I promise you.’

His heart aching with a deep and terrible anxiety, Jean released her shoulders.

‘Darling, get dressed. It’s cold.’

‘You know they held me down in a freezing bath?’

He hugged her tightly to stop her seeing his own tears and begged her, ‘Wake up!’

‘But I am awake!’

She pushed him away and made a pout of reproach as though he did not understand her.

‘Oh Jean, Jean, don’t leave me, I love you, I love you …’

She laughed through more tears, tears of happiness now, like a lover choking with joy at the beloved’s return. Night was filling the sloping-roofed room, but neither thought of lighting a lamp.

‘Where’s Cyrille?’ she asked.

‘Downstairs with Jesús. Perhaps we should join them.’

He picked up Claude’s underwear from the floor, her corduroy trousers and the sweater she had worn at lunch. She ignored her underwear.

‘Aren’t you putting anything on underneath?’ he asked.

‘No, it’s nicer being like this.’

They went downstairs. Jesús was drawing on a big piece of paper. Cyrille, sitting on the table, was watching him.

‘Maman,’ he called, ‘Jesús is doing the man in the woods for me, the way Jean saw him this morning. You’re not crying any more?’

‘No, my darling. You can see I’m not.’

‘Then why were you crying?’

‘I can’t remember.’

He lost interest in the question and leant over towards Jesús.

‘Is Laura still in her room?’ she asked.

‘Laura’s gone to see her parents.’

Claude threw two logs on the fire and slumped into an armchair. Jean opened a book he had borrowed from Nelly’s shelves. Where else? The people he spent time with didn’t read. Even Claude possessed only Russian authors she hadn’t opened for a long time. Palfy was happy with his newspapers and Madame Michette devoured spy novels. Only Madeleine was deep into Proust, but she hired her
Proust from a reading room, the idea of buying a book having never occurred to her and Blanche de Rocroy not being the type to suggest it to her. He opened the book Nelly had lent him and heard her cheeky, husky voice.

‘You want a book, Jules-who? Why? You won’t read. You don’t read when you’re in love. Take this anthology. You can recite some poems to yourself and try to hear my voice. If a poet bores you, try another one, then another one, till you’ve found the one who talks to you best about yourself. Then you’ll be much happier than with a big fat novel about an illicit love affair between a man on the night shift and a woman on the day shift …’

It was a thick volume in a sandy-coloured binding that called itself an anthology of new French poetry. He opened it at random.

The date of the poem was 1917. The author was called Drieu la Rochelle. Jean turned to Claude; her lips were quivering. She stared at him.

‘Do you think they’ll punish them?’ she asked.

‘I’m sure they will.’

‘That’s all right then.’

He took the hand she had let fall. For an instant he recalled the blissful moments, gathered one by one, before Claude had been his. How could he get them back? Stroking her knee in the train that had
brought them from Clermont-Ferrand, the way they kissed on the cheek every time they met or parted, her dressing gown falling open to reveal her breast, her nakedness in the mirror in their hotel room at Saint-Raphaël. Did all that have to lose its meaning, just because they had made love? Did a single act reduce to childishness all the feverish, intense emotions that had fired your imagination? From the age of thirteen until he was twenty he had written down in an oilcloth notebook his reflections and impressions of the life that was opening up before him. The notebook had got left behind in the tankette they had abandoned in the village square. Monsieur Graindorge, the surveyor, had doubtless picked it up and had a good laugh reading it. Jean felt he would have liked to add another entry to his old notebook that evening: ‘One sort of love, the most beautiful and the only really precious sort, comes to an end the moment you sleep with the woman you love for the first time. The stolen kisses, her half-glimpsed body, become childish things. An enormous, superb, intoxicating but obscene adventure begins. An immense amount of tenderness is needed to stop it degenerating into debauchery. Only in idealised romantic novels is the act of love portrayed as a marvellous levitation, the earthly flight of two bodies. The reality is not so magical, and that less magical element makes everything scary. Two bodies fall to earth, suffering the vertigo of emptiness, the return to oneself, a moment of appalling indifference. Sounds, smells, precautions can ruin everything. I’d be wiser never to make love to the woman I most care for, and instead to do it very often with women I’ll never be attached to. If I’m honest, the most balanced period of my life was the time between my first night with Nelly and my first afternoon with Claude. I didn’t realise it. Now I know it. My pleasure with Nelly may be over for good. With Claude, it’s perhaps the start of a long and difficult road to the prize …’

Claude’s hand squeezed his hard, as if reminding him to protect her, but her gaze remained turned to the fire.

‘Jean … There’s someone watching us.’

‘There’s only Jesús and Cyrille.’

‘No, someone else. Behind my back.’

Later – wrongly, because she was right – Jean remembered that it was this fear of Claude’s that had aroused his first suspicions. Before, she had (he thought) just been talking nonsense, floating in a
semi-comatose
sea of sedatives.

But Jesús looked up, stared at the window, and leapt to his feet to run to the front door, which he threw open. The fire crackled, spitting a ball of smoke.

‘Maman, it’s snowing!’ Cyrille shouted.

Jesús came back in, holding a whitish form tightly by the arm, a man covered in snowflakes. Claude wailed and threw herself into Jean’s arms.

Jesús closed the door behind the figure, who shook himself and took off his hat, leaving the top of his head and upper part of his face free of snow.

‘Why was you spyin’ on us be ’ind the window?’

‘I am sorry, so sorry. Deeply sorry, Madame.’

There was nothing frightening about him: he was more comic than anything else, twisting in his hands (in white leather gloves) a
silk-brimmed
hat of the sort known as an Eden. Jean recognised him more from his voice than his dress. The man from the woods had gone to considerable trouble. The melting snow already forming a pool at his feet revealed him dressed for polite society: a soberly elegant pinstriped navy-blue suit, black pointed shoes and in his hand a cane with an ivory knob.

‘Maman, Maman!’

Cyrille was crying, clinging to his mother’s legs as she, shaking convulsively, hid her face on Jean’s shoulder.

‘It’s nothing!’ Jean said. ‘It’s just a visitor.’

‘Yes, I came to wish you a happy Christmas. We’re neighbours, are we not? I had no wish to disturb you. Having lived as a savage for some time, I’ve rather lost the habits of society …’

He must have made an effort to wash himself and to run the scissors over his beard and hair, but the smell of dirt still hung around him, a tenacious tramp’s smell. He was so outlandish and unexpected that Jean would have burst out laughing if it had not been for Claude’s trembling. He gently pushed her down into the armchair so that her back was to the visitor. Cyrille, regaining his courage, peeped at him.

‘Jean, is it the man in the woods?’

‘Ah, so I am known to this young man!’

Blaise Pascal – it was he – coughed to clear his throat, hoarse with emotion. The hand clasping the knob of his cane went to his beard to restrain possible germs.

‘Why was you lookin’ in the window?’

‘Ah, so you’re the Spanish painter? Your friend told me about you. There was a time when I was very interested in painting. Would those two landscapes on the wall be yours?’

‘Oh, the boy could do jus’ as good …’

‘Don’t you believe it, dear Monsieur. I know that modern painting claims to have rediscovered, via a complicated detour, the genius of childhood, since – as they declare – all children possess genius, except for child prodigies. But allow me to tell you that your painting – in so far as I can judge from these two pictures – displays the very opposite of childishness. You know everything and you have had the strength to harness your ability. Trust me, Monsieur, I am happy to inform you, if no one else has already done so, that you are a great, a very great painter.’

Dumbfounded, Jesús stared at him. It occurred to Jean that this pure spirit with the frame of an ox knew nothing of deceit, and he felt greater faith in the bearded stranger’s measured speech than in La Garenne’s self-interested paeans. Jesús would accomplish his work in solitude, far from sycophants and the most articulate of admirers; in truth, all he needed was friends and love … Claude turned to look at the figure whose pleasant voice, with a nuance of vanity in its assured tone, seemed to have calmed her attack of nerves.

‘Come and get warm!’ Jean said.

The snow had all but melted from the visitor, but he stayed standing in his pool of water, embarrassed, trying to please by his refined politeness.

‘I would not wish to frighten you, Madame.’

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ Claude said.

‘You’ll excuse me for having spied on you at the window for just a moment. The truth is that I couldn’t decide whether to knock at the door or not. You made a delightful, delicate picture. The child is very handsome. Is he your boy, Madame?’

‘Yes, he’s my son.’

‘Come and get warm,’ Jean repeated.

The man did nothing, not from discretion but because he had developed a habit of not accepting any invitation.

‘You’re all wet!’ Cyrille said.

‘Very true, my boy, but I had no umbrella. When I left two years ago I took only this cane with me …’

‘You left your house two years ago? What does your maman say?’

‘I haven’t got a maman any more.’

‘Show me your cane. Is it a swordstick? My father gave me one before he went away. If any thieves come, I’ll kill them.’

‘Now that sounds very brave to me!’ Blaise Pascal said.

Leaning his cane against the wall, he placed his Eden hat on the table and pulled off his gloves. He had washed his hands with their caked fingernails, but greyish traces remained in the places where his skin was cracked from chilblains. These details were at odds with his elegant appearance, or nearly elegant, since his wool suit was flapping around his emaciated body and his grey Eden had yellowed considerably. Somehow the man radiated kindness, perhaps because he was secretly revelling in his hosts’ astonishment or, better still, because after months of loneliness he felt a pleasure that amazed him to find himself among human beings again.

‘As you suspected,’ he said to Jean, ‘my name is not Blaise Pascal
and I do not share his genius. The name was a homage to a product of the Port-Royal schools. As I told you this morning, I live very much with him inside me. The
Pensées
is one of the ten books I took with me when I went into my exile. You are familiar with the parlour game of which ten books you would take with you to a desert island? I actually did it. You know one of them. If we get to know one another a little more, I’ll tell you the others … But I have arrived at a bad moment … You were perhaps about to have dinner?’

‘Stay with us!’ Jesús said.

The man made an embarrassed gesture.

‘You know … I’ve lost the habit of eating meals … You can do without them very easily. There are blackberries, mushrooms and sweet chestnuts … and I’m forgetting watercress, watercress all year round. Very healthy, especially with a few potatoes that I grow. The human organism has no need of abundance.’

Claude got up and walked across the room to fetch some potatoes, which she put to bake in the embers. She had regained her calm, but her fine features still bore a trace of the violent emotion that had overtaken her. More and more, Jean thought, she was closing in on herself. She could be brought back to earth by squeezing her hand, or stroking her hair or cheek. Now, having overcome her fear of Blaise Pascal, she did not give him a second look. As she crossed the room, she brushed past him and he had been profuse in his apologies but Jean wondered if she had actually
seen
him. In any case the man saw her and could hardly take his eyes off her. He spoke for her benefit, caressingly, measuring his words’ pleasure.