‘No explanations. She cheated on us both, and now that there are two of us it should make us less sad.’
‘S’e enjoy’ posin’ nude—’
‘Let’s not talk any more. Goodbye, Jesús.’
He stopped at the second floor to kiss Madeleine.
‘You’re looking better,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see it. You see, the sorrows of love, you get over them faster than you think. I’ve lived through all sorts, for blokes who weren’t worth my little finger, and I’m no worse off today. What are you doing with your two rooms up there?’
‘Nothing. Take anything you want. Here’s the key.’
‘I’m going to ask the landlord if I can swap. I’m fed up with my window overlooking the courtyard, and you arranged your place so nicely. It’s just my style. But take your stuff with you.’
‘No. There’s nothing I want to see again. Not even the books.’
‘Books? Now there’s an idea. I’ve been telling myself I ought to start reading. I’ll give it a go, it might be fun. But send me some postcards.’
Jean kissed her, and in the commotion Palfy followed suit. He thought she was charming and would willingly have delayed their departure to spend some time with her.
And so Jesús Infante drops out of our story for a few years. The author would not like to spoil the story’s suspense by relating too soon how and in what circumstances Jean will see him again, or what will have become of him. His appearance here is fleeting and of minor significance at this moment, but he is still young: thirty at the most. His fate is not yet sealed. As for Madeleine, she will not stay far away.
That evening on the train Palfy and Jean went to the dining car and drank champagne. Nothing, clearly, would ever stop Palfy leading a life of delights and comforts. He loved himself with a candour stripped of all artifice, and not for a second did the idea of the ruin he was piling up in his wake disturb him. Jean nevertheless found his mood tinged with melancholy, for the most unexpected reason.
‘Delightful, your Madeleine,’ he said as he raised his glass. ‘Let us drink to her. Deep down, it’s a woman like that I’m in need of. Where can one find tenderness, except with creatures whose profession it is? Hello, goodnight, no regrets. Life’s too short, there are too many things to do, and anyhow no one could love my little manias. Oh, we are going to have fun, dear boy. I’ve had a splendid idea. It will need some sun to ripen it. Hooray for Cannes!’
Jean felt that he had been taken captive once more, having thought he had escaped Palfy for good, but in the distress that still held him in its grip he accepted that it was the only way out. In Paris he would have been miserable. At Cannes he would find a job, any job. The night in the sleeping car seemed endless to him. The rhythmic panting of the train paused only for a few minutes when they stopped at stations where announcers with robot-like voices chanted their names. From Montélimar onwards these voices spoke with southern accents, and his mind went back to Mireille and Tomate and the waitresses at Roquebrune. A different suffering had had him in its grip then, and he had escaped it by running away. Would it be the same with Chantal?? But his affair with Mireille had been nothing like the love he had just lost. She had been a terrible habit that could eventually be shaken off. Chantal had encompassed the memories of childhood and the promises of womanhood. He had overcome the pain of his first night at Malemort, and afterwards they had been happy. She would never be happy the way she had been with him. There, at least, was a comforting thought he could stir up like a sort of curse on Chantal.
Once they were past Marseille, Palfy knocked on his door.
‘Get up, you idler, and have some breakfast.’
From the window of the dining car they could see the Mediterranean, pale blue in the morning sun, and the palm trees of Hyères and the lazy coast.
‘However you look at it, it’s easier to be happy here,’ Palfy said. ‘Obviously it’s a little soporific, but we shall triumph over our laziness.’
‘I’m not lazy.’
‘And how wrong you are not to be.’
At Cannes they booked into the Carlton, where Palfy filled out his registration form without hesitation: ‘Baron Constantin Palfy’. Jean performed a rapid calculation: the money Antoinette had sent him would pay for his room for a week.
‘Don’t worry,’ Palfy said, ‘we’re using my seed capital. Now we have to find ourselves a vehicle worthy of our talents.’
They spent the day doing the rounds of the town’s garages. All they could find were mass-produced French saloons or Cadillacs that looked like hearses. Palfy wanted a convertible.
‘We shall be spending the summer here, remember. We may as well make the most of the fresh air. You need sun and wind, your face makes you look like a man who was recently exhumed. You don’t imagine we’re going to be nightclub doormen, do you?’
At the last garage, Palfy took a step back in admiration of an undeniable monster: an Austro-Daimler roadster, forty horsepower, garnet-red, and six metres long. The endless bonnet and enormous boot left barely enough space in between for two or three passengers to squeeze onto a bench seat of white leather. The salesman opened the bonnet to reveal an engine big enough to power a ferry: eight cylinders in line and quadruple carburettors. Palfy fell instantly in love with this behemoth, which had languished for a year at a knock-down price: no one wanted a car that did nine miles to the gallon. What tipped the balance for him was that the Austro-Daimler had belonged to a grand duke who had married a Texan and gone to live in the USA. It was a one-off that would never be built again, an absurd, pointless folly, the sort of car that had already earned its place in a museum. Although he was of average height, Palfy looked like a dwarf behind the steering wheel. Despite the power of its eight cylinders, its chassis and coachwork were so heavy that it could only reach 100 kilometres an hour, then 120 and finally 140 on very long stretches of road where it could be pointed straight ahead. In other words, in the Alpes-Maritimes and through the Esterel the best that could be said for it was that it would be stately. Palfy could not care less. He loved cars for their looks — as he had his elderly Mathis and his Rolls in London — not for their engineering.
They took delivery there and then, drove up and down the Croisette, and parked outside the Carlton, where they went straight up to Jean’s room to admire from above the garnet-red roadster, its white leather seat and the glittering chrome of its headlights and bumpers. They were standing on his balcony, Palfy as excited as a child with a new toy, when a yellow Hispano-Suiza, old-fashioned but with an immutable elegance and majesty, parked behind the Austro-Daimler, driven by a white chauffeur in a blue uniform who opened the door for a dark-skinned man in a plain grey flannel suit. Salah, for he it was, vanished with a rapid step into the hotel.
‘Fantastic!’ Palfy said. ‘I’ve always thought that when a black man prospers he ought to take on a white chauffeur.’
‘It’s Salah, the prince’s old chauffeur! I mean, old because he looks as if he’s been promoted. A wonderful man. The prince must be staying at the Carlton. He always comes to the Riviera in spring!’
‘Luck smiles on us, does she not, dear boy? I know now why I came to prise you from your garret in Rue Lepic. You were the very man I needed. You can’t believe how much you were … You must introduce me to the prince.’
Jean did not reply. He now knew that he would not escape Palfy and his grand schemes as easily as he had thought. He was a devil incarnate, and for the moment also a saviour without whom he, Jean, might well have drowned. He nevertheless promised himself to be more circumspect this time, and not end up having to pay with his body for Palfy’s squalid enterprises.