He talks of so many things with me but has never mentioned his family. This is a private area and out of bounds. Abundant conversations about women, books, friends. But nothing about what lies beyond, that is deep, constant and enduring in the spirit of his family, who have long been settled in Paris, yet remain Bretons. For all his apparent cordiality, his terrible discretion, his passion for conversations and ‘cases’, Buret is still a private, self-possessed and reserved individual. I’ve never caught him in a moment of depression or joy that has caused him to speak imprudently, or even freely and without reserve. What is called ‘the need to open oneself up’ is completely foreign to him. He doesn’t experience outpourings of emotion. At most he has considered sympathies. Somewhere, in his private life, a censor checks every word, suspects every impulse, cools every enthusiasm. A ring of steel protects his strictly personal secrets from attack.
Last week, out of the blue, he said to me: ‘I’ve moved. I live on my own now. I’ve decided, with Mama’s agreement, for us to live apart.’
I was taken aback. Less by the news itself than the fact that he was sharing it with me.
‘Why?’
(I had asked out of politeness, for the sake of a response, not believing he’d give me the reason. I’ve no particular talent for extracting confessions. But, to my surprise, he responded in some detail.)
‘I don’t know how it happened. For some time I’ve felt it’s no longer right. There’s a silent pressure that exerts itself, more upon my thoughts than upon my personal affairs. Anybody who says they’re free in their parents’ house is fooling themselves.
‘You know, I think I could live easily enough with Father. He’s a cold person and that doesn’t bother me. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken more than five words to him at a time. I’m indifferent to him. We don’t love each other. But with Mama it’s endlessly difficult. We love each other, and that’s intolerable. I’m good at dealing with adversity, but I can’t stand strong affections. Adversity forces me to define myself. Love, on the other hand, is indulgent, ready with sentimental transactions, ready with false amenability. Love in families, in particular, where the bonds are old, durable and invisible. I explained all this to Mother. I don’t know if she understood, but she accepted it anyway. We’ve concluded a treaty of mutual understanding: we’ll see each other twice a week.’
Maurice Buret, without his physical presence, his modest and attentive smile, without the intelligence that enables him to simulate sensitivity and emotion, would be a horrible character. Clarity, order … Is that enough to make a person? God knows how long I’ve stumbled after such order, how many shadows I’ve wrestled with for such clarity. But isn’t this kind of victory too sterile, too arid?
I take my revenge by transcribing Descartes:
… ne recevoir jamais aucune chose pour vraie que je ne la connusse évidemment être telle, c’est-à-dire éviter soigneusement la précipitation et la prévention et … ne comprendre rien de plus en mes jugements que ce qui se présenterait si clairement et si distinctement à mon esprit que je n’eusse aucune occasion de la mettre en doute.
What a miserly rule.
4
In Boulevard Haussmann, at the Rice offices, I was met by an extraordinary character: Phillip Dunton. I had to embrace him. He was unprepared for such a show of feeling and was rather taken aback, standing there with his pipe in his mouth.
‘Forgive me, Phill, it’s just I’m so glad to see you …’
He’s straight in from Romania and his arrival has somehow awoken in me a thousand images of over there — of people, streets, newspapers, cafés, the whole thing, everything that slowly faded away here, where I’ve been subject to so many new impressions. Phillip Dunton is a meticulous, slow-talking fellow (a habit I’d say he has picked up from chess, where you need a quarter-hour to consider each move). I bombarded him with questions and he didn’t know which to answer first.
He’s going to spend a few days here until old Ralph turns up, as he soon must.
He doesn’t really know what he’ll do after that. He’s certainly not going back to Uioara, where there’s no longer any work for him. He’s going to try to get a year’s leave from Rice Enterprises so he can go to America to complete some laboratory experiments and personal observations. Possibly to publish there the study which he completed a draft of in Uioara. When the year’s up he’ll go to any place Rice sends him. Anywhere: but he’d prefer Russia.
We lunched together, me impatient to hear him talk, he as calm and relaxed as I remember him. I could hardly restrain myself from asking about Marjorie, but I feared opening a well-guarded wound. My fears were unfounded. He spoke about Marjorie when he remembered her, effortlessly and without embarrassment. He considers what has happened to be straightforward. They’ve separated as good friends. He attended her civil marriage ceremony and she, three weeks later, saw him to the station.
‘It never for a moment occurred to me that I might have trouble with Marjorie. She truly is intelligent and, really, that’s what allowed us to stay married so many years. We couldn’t have asked for more. I knew she’d leave one day and for a long period the only question for me was with whom it would be. When we met at Uioara, I thought you might be the one. I watched you with a fair degree of interest and — please believe me — a fair degree of sympathy. I don’t know why, but nothing happened. Then, when Pierre Dogany appeared, I thought it would be him. I confess, it didn’t cross my mind once that it could be Marin Dronţu. I laughed when I realized: it seemed grotesque. Now, though, with the passage of time, I see it was a piece of luck. Poor Pierre Dogany has the great disadvantage of being in love with Marjorie, but what she needs is to love, not to be loved. And she loves Dronţu. You should have seen her leaving the Town Hall on his arm: she was radiant.
‘She’s a good partner. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her and I wouldn’t swear that I won’t ever go back to Romania to see her and talk of all that’s passed.’
*
Old Ralph T. Rice came for a couple of days and brought the master’s response to my report. In theory, my viewpoint has been accepted. If work starts, it will be in Dieppe. The advantages of the site are obvious, and there are no commercial disadvantages over Le Havre. But will work start? Hard to say. The Crash has given him a bad fright. What scares him even more than the Crash is the mood in Romania.
‘You’ve only been away a year,’ he said, ‘but if you went back now there’s much you’d no longer recognize. Something’s going on over there. Something’s brewing.’
A final decision on the fate of the French project won’t be taken until later, towards autumn, when I hope the situation will be clearer. But the decision to scale back the project from what was originally planned seems already to have been taken. Possibly a network of small sales and distribution points will be set up throughout France and an attempt made to promote Rice petrol and oil in the motoring world. Modest enough, compared to what we once wanted to do.
I tried to get a clearer idea of why the old man — usually so calm and strong-willed — is alarmed. I inquired at length, but he was unable to tell me much. Not even Phillip Dunton, so nonchalant and sceptical about ‘serious events’, knew very much.
It seems Uioara has experienced some trouble over the past year: a number of small strikes, not serious in themselves but recurrent, as well as tussles between workers and management and a series of negotiations about wages. Along with the eternal outbursts from the people of Uioara concerning their eternal plum trees whenever a new well is sunk and yet another wave of drilling mud is misdirected. But Ralph Rice isn’t the kind of man to be rattled by such trifles. There must be something else lurking in the background. I’m going to write to the master to ask.