Some of Pierre’s friends said it was impossible to tell whether the house reflected the way his mind worked or whether his mind had been conditioned by the house.
He was a person of some elegance and presence: a nervous, lean man whose avocation of playing the piano might have been guessed even without seeing the handsome instrument occupying the best-lit corner of the room. Further, one might have predicted his actual preference for Debussy and Satie without exploring the rack of recordings flanking the narrow screen of his early-model holographic reproducer. His black hair was beginning to recede a little. For a while when he was younger he had conformed to the current tendency of beardedness, but a few years ago he had shaved his chin and cheeks, leaving only a neat moustache to stress the sensitivity of his mouth.
What in him emerged as handsomeness of a refined, rather intellectual and potentially weak kind, was recognisable in his sister Jeannine as something marginally less than beauty. Like him—and both their parents—she was thin and dark, but with paler complexion, lighter bones and larger eyes. At forty-one the only clue to her actual age lay in the lined skin around her eyes and at the base of her throat; otherwise she might have passed for thirty.
Rosalie, on the other hand, was a total contrast: buxom, plump-cheeked, with bright china-blue eyes and fair brown hair. Normally she was a cheerful person, but—for some reason she wished she could discover, because she hated it as an intolerable failing—the presence of her husband and her sister-in-law in the same room at the same time made her vacant and gloomy.
With a desperate effort to restore gaiety, she said, “Jean-nine! May I make you some coffee, or would you rather have liquor?”
“Coffee would be excellent,” Jeannine said.
“And some kief?” Pierre suggested. He took up a chased silver box from the nearest of the many low coffee-tables, releasing as he lifted the lid the curious fragrance of the best Moroccan hashish.
Bustling, Rosalie left the room, unable to disguise her eagerness to be gone. When the door had closed Jeannine looked at its old-fashioned moulded panels, barely inclining towards the light Pierre was offering.
She said, “I hope you’re not finding life as difficult as I am.”
Pierre shrugged. “We get along, Rosalie and I.”
“There must be more to be had than simply ‘getting along’,” Jeannine said with a kind of obstinacy.
“You’ve had a quarrel with Raoul,” Pierre said, naming the latest of his sister’s many lovers.
“Quarrel? Hardly. One doesn’t quarrel any longer. One lacks the energy. But—it’s not going to last, Pierre. I can feel the disillusionment gathering.”
Pierre leaned back on his couch. He preferred couches to the big armchairs, though the latter were better scaled to his length of leg. He said, “I can almost measure the progress of your affaires du coeur by the number of times you come to call on us.”
“You think I treat you as a wailing wall?” Jeannine gave a bitter little chuckle. “Perhaps so—but can I help it if you are the only person I can talk to openly? There’s something between us which outsiders can never enter. It’s a precious thing; I’m sparing with it.”
She hesitated. “Rosalie senses it,” she added finally. “You can see the effect on her when I arrive. That’s another reason why I come only when I need to very much.”
“Do you mean she makes you feel unwelcome?”
“That? No! She’s the soul of courtesy. It’s only that she like the rest of the world cannot understand what she has never experienced.” Jeannine straightened, stabbing her kief cigarette through the air as though it were a teacher’s pointer indicating words on a blackboard. “Consider, chéri, that we are not unique, being expatriates! Since they cut down the barriers between the countries of this tired old continent there must be fifty nationalities in Paris alone, and not a few of them—such as the Greeks—are better off than they would have been at home. As we are.”
“At home?” Pierre echoed. “Our home is nowhere. It never existed except in father’s and mother’s minds.”
Jeannine shook her head. “I don’t believe they could have been discontented in a fine city like Paris unless they had been truly happy in a real country.”
“But they grew more and more to talk only of good things. They forgot about the bad. The Algeria they imagined has gone forever under a wave of disorder, assassinations and civil war.”
“Yet it made them happy. You can’t deny that.”
Pierre gave a sigh and a shrug.
“In short, we’re not expatriates, you and I. We’re extemporates, exiled from a country that vanished even before we were born, of which our parents made us citizens without intending to.” She paused, searching her brother’s face with sharp dark eyes. “I see you understand. I never knew you not to understand.”
She reached over and gave his hand a squeeze.
“You’re not discussing Algeria again, are you?” Rosalie said, entering with the handsome coffee-jug that matched the tray of cups on permanent display. She sounded as though she was trying to make a joke of the question. “I keep telling Pierre, Jeannine—it may have been fine to live there in the old days, but I wouldn’t care to live there now.”
“Of course not,” Jeannine said with a forced smile. “Life in Paris is bad enough—why should anyone wish to go and live under the even grosser mismanagement of a native government?”
“Is life in Paris so bad, these days?”
“Perhaps you’re lucky and don’t notice it so much as I do, having this fine quiet home and nothing to do except look after it while Pierre reaps his fat salary from the bank! But I work, and in fashion advertising life isn’t so secure as in banking. There are more salauds to the square metre and they wield far more power!”
Pierre gave his sister a look of alarm. When she was in a particular mood kief sometimes loosened her tongue more than politeness would permit, and more than once—not with Rosalie but with his first wife—he had to smooth over serious rows based on something she let slip while she was high.
“But even salauds have their uses,” she continued. “That was what I came to tell you, Pierre. You’re aware that Raoul works for the Common Europe prediction department?”
Pierre nodded. The prediction department was a building at Fontainebleau that had once housed a NATO detachment; now it was filled with computers to which intelligence reports, commercial as well as military, were daily fed for trend analysis.
“Something rather interesting…” Jeannine went on. “You know, too, that the prediction department processes not only European material but also what our former colonies send, giving a discount rate for old times’ sake? And you’ve heard of the underwater mining project sponsored by the American corporation General Technics?”
“Naturally.”
“The Americans have been sending agents to price the cost of transporting bulk raw materials from Port Mey, in Beninia. Also the same company is conducting inquiries among former colonial administrators in London. Raoul tells me that the computers foresee a great new company being launched in Port Mey to handle all these minerals.”