The Foundling's War (40 page)

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.

‘Is it really necessary?’

‘The doctor will tell you, Monsieur. We’re responsible for Madame …’

The psychiatrist’s apartment was reached by a spiral staircase that ended in a door with double locks. The doctor himself opened it, in shirtsleeves, a man in his fifties whose Freud-like goatee beard failed to conceal the innate cheerfulness of a face whose eyes sparkled with amused curiosity. He wore dark lenses whenever there was a pessimistic diagnosis to be delivered to a patient’s relations. Yet, as we have noted, this man was not fond of external contacts, of anything in fact that disturbed his closed universe in the nursing home, and considered the explanations he was obliged to supply in order to keep his patients there as a distasteful chore.

‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting you twice, and to be honest, though I know many things about Madame Chaminadze I know nothing about you. Forgive me for asking you up here. I should have come down to my consulting room to meet you there, but it’s Sunday – I deserve a little rest too, and I thought an informal meeting in my apartment would be more pleasant and relaxed, that you’d find my curiosity less oppressive and that we might even have a drink together, though my drinks cabinet is very modest: a brandy and water as Mr Pickwick preferred it, or a bootleg pastis the way Marius liked it. What’s your choice?’

‘Nothing,’ Jean said. ‘I’m listening.’

He did not like to be talked to, by an intelligent man, in language that indicated he was thought to be an idiot, unable to work out the most elementary aspects of life. Dr Bertrand annoyed him, and Palfy had taught him how to cut short such false chumminess.

‘Oh, well … you’ll allow me not to follow your example.’

He poured himself a cognac and water. Jean relaxed: there was nothing sinister about this Freud lookalike, he was simply cultivating an attitude, as shown by his evident awkwardness when he was not addressing a mental patient, or perhaps he had got into the habit of considering all his interlocutors as grown-up retarded children, to whom it was necessary to explain the most ordinary facts.

‘I know how concerned you are by Madame Chaminadze’s condition …’

He had sat down at his desk, piled with documents and files, a sheet of paper half covered in handwriting in front of him. The shelves on the walls were sagging under the weight of books. A voice rose from the garden.

‘Monsieur Draguignan, can I remind you that there are
lavatories
on the ground floor. If you don’t mind …’

The doctor smiled.

‘She’s a dragon, I know, but without her the patients would do exactly as they pleased. She’s especially interested in your relation’s case, you know …’

‘She’s not my relation; she’s the woman I love.’

‘Oh, I know, I know, but we are sometimes obliged to maintain a certain fiction. Where the mentally ill are concerned the family are all-powerful and can forbid the visit of someone who isn’t a family member.’

‘I don’t really see how Claude’s mother could forbid me to see her daughter. Putting it rather vulgarly, Doctor, I buy the right to see her by paying your monthly bills.’

‘I know, I know …’

His embarrassment was growing. He swallowed a mouthful of brandy and put the glass down in front of him. A mad thought crossed Jean’s mind: a plan had been hatched against him, and they were going to prevent him from seeing Claude. He was gripped by a terrible anxiety and the thought that he still loved her as much as before, even in her present condition. If he had doubted it in recent months, the threat he faced reminded him of his attachment.

‘I’d be happy to have a brandy and water like you, Doctor.’

‘Ah, now we’re being sensible … Good sense always wins out.’

As delighted as if he had just won a personal victory and made a wayward patient see reason, Dr Bertrand put on his glasses and fetched the bottle of cognac.

‘It’s not easy to lay your hands on good cognac at the moment,’ he said. ‘I had some put by, but it quickly ran out. Fortunately I have relations in Charente. Do you know Charente, Monsieur Arnaud?’

‘No, I don’t know Charente. War and defeat haven’t really favoured my appetite for travel.’

‘Fancy that! But I hear you often go abroad.’

‘I’ve been to Portugal three times since the beginning of the year, but not for tourism, for business.’

‘You’re a very young businessman.’

‘I have a feeling it’s a profession I’ll do well not to grow old in.’

Anna Petrovna was the only person who could have told the doctor, and even she could only have known of his journeys via Cyrille, who Jean had answered carelessly about one of his absences. He began thoroughly to detest Claude’s mother, who had clearly mounted an undeclared war against him. Dr Bertrand sat down at his desk.

‘Yes,’ he said, as though resuming after a digression a train of thought interrupted by small talk, ‘yes, I get the impression that your visits, despite the desire she expresses for them, are upsetting Madame Chaminadze. You know that she is suffering from an obsession triggered by physical mistreatment, the nature of which I don’t need
to elaborate on. She used to be, I believe, according to what you and her family have told me, a balanced person, very much in control of herself. Is that correct?’

Jean, resolved not to come to his aid, nodded in confirmation. Dr Bertrand compressed his lips purposefully. Once more he had let himself get carried away by long phrases that reassured him of his own subtle understanding of psychology, but this laconic interlocutor whose irritated gaze he felt settling on him, this boy whom Anna Petrovna had claimed was involved in shady business dealings, disconcerted him.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he went on, ‘that you should space out your visits … Just an experiment, you understand, a simple experiment, but we need to try everything in the case of a sensitive patient such as this, in which science only has formulas to offer, when what we really need are intuition and psychology.’

‘If you’d talk to me openly, Doctor, we’d understand each other, and I’d answer you.’

The doctor again compressed his lips, which were full and sensual in his round, happy face. It was a tic that had been commented on sarcastically at his oral examination and he thought he had succeeded in suppressing it, but the slightest difficulty made it reappear. It embarrassed him horribly.

‘Nothing is ever quite as “open” as you think, my dear Monsieur. The psychology of a human being who’s been disturbed by a violent event is a delicate mechanism that in reality we don’t know how to repair, because we know nothing about the brain, the brain being, of course, the vulgar term that scientists use to speak of the soul.’

Jean emptied his glass and got to his feet.

‘Thank you very much, Doctor, goodbye.’

Dr Bertrand paled. He could get angry too. He felt wounded by this young man’s disrespectful behaviour. He stood up, his two fists on the table, leaning forward.

‘I regret to inform you, Monsieur Arnaud, that Madame Chaminadze’s mother and uncle wish you to desist from further visits to see your girlfriend.’

‘Ah, so Claude has an uncle now? That’s news to me.’

‘The family, which was decent and united before your arrival, did not judge it necessary to include you …’

Jean had sworn to himself that he would stay calm. He took a moment to collect himself, glimpsed a possible way out and, deciding to pursue it, smiled.

‘Doctor, I respect your profession too much not to consent to your experiment. I agree to abstain from further visits for the necessary period. Nevertheless, if you have any humanity you will understand that that comes at a price. I therefore wish to discuss it with Claude. Perhaps not today. Tomorrow or the day after. Give me some time to think, to weigh my words so as not to disappoint her. I’ll confess it to you again: I love Claude. And she loves me. No one is going to separate us: not a foolish mother nor a brother who lives from gambling nor an unknown uncle, nor even you, who knows exactly what I’m talking about.’

‘Of course, I entirely understand, even though I’m not certain that Madame Chaminadze is in a fit state to answer you. If you telephone me before you come, we shall arrange matters so that there is no disagreeable meeting with the family.’

‘One more thing, Doctor. Up till now I’ve paid the clinic’s monthly bill. I wanted to say that I’ll continue to do so.’

Dr Bertrand took off his glasses, revealing a victorious and amused look.