It wasn’t the sort of reflection to be made to the man. He did not understand such remarks and was offended by them. He came close to retorting that the devil made work for idle hands, but his pupil interested him; he was a quick learner, almost too quick, as if he might forget the codes and security measures as soon as he had committed them to memory. In mid-August Jean was directed to go to Rouen. He was to spend several hours in Paris between trains. Arriving at Gare de Lyon, he was about to take the Métro for Gare Saint-Lazare when he was suddenly tempted to go to Palais-Royal. He got off there and ran to the Français. The concierge did not want to let him in. There was a rehearsal. Jean asked for Nelly to be given a note. She came running down to see him.
‘I’ve got a break,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to the Régence.’
She was in a sweater and slacks. They ran across the square and found a small table near the window.
‘I didn’t know I loved you,’ she said. ‘I think about you all the time.’
‘What about Jérôme Callot?’
‘Oh darling, you make me so happy! You’re jealous. You stupid idiotic scrumptious darling, your rival didn’t make it past dinner for two. I’m free. Stay.’
It occurred to him that she thought he had left because of the other man.
‘No, Marceline will tell you why I left. Do you see her?’
‘All the time. She has permission from Vaudoyer to watch the rehearsals for Suréna. In the afternoons at home she goes through my lines with me.’
Some German officers sat down at a neighbouring table. They regarded Nelly wolfishly, wondering what she was doing there, in slacks and sweater on an August afternoon. The waiter told them. Nodding, they knowingly pointed out to each other the Théâtre Français, its great grey outline visible through the window.
‘We’ve just got to make love,’ Nelly said. ‘I can’t tell you how much I want it.’
He had an hour till his train. He went back to her dressing room with her and they barricaded the door. The stage manager called her several times, drummed on the door, and went away again, grumbling. Nelly laughed with pleasure.
‘“Love, over my virtue”,’ she said, ‘“hold a little less dominion.”’
He had to admit it: her love was joyful and generous.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ he said.
‘Yes, it’s madness … darling Jules-who. You see how good it is to be together. The truth is that there’s nothing better, and I’m going to cry when you leave me. I adore you, you know … You were so obvious, and now you’re becoming mysterious. It’s magic. Women will love it. I’m going to be cheated on left, right and centre.’
She kissed him on the cheek and vanished down a corridor. He had to ask his way several times before he found the exit. He reached Gare Saint-Lazare on foot. Paris was not a city he could walk around with impunity any longer. In Rouen the following day, having delivered his message, he enquired about the times of trains for Dieppe. As the first one left in the morning, he booked into a hotel and spent the evening reading Lost Illusions.32 Later, when he was asked what he had done during the last two years of the occupation, he always answered with the same sincerity, ‘Nothing. I travelled and I read. Every evening, every night, in trains and cafés during the day. I read and I didn’t think about anything else.’
On 19 August the Dieppe train did not leave Rouen station. The Canadians had landed. We already know how Albert met his end in that bloody adventure and its uncertain lessons. Antoinette told Jean the news by telephone. His last link had been cut. He would have liked to see the abbé Le Couec again, but that saintly man was under house arrest. He could not even go from the rectory to the public telephone at the post office. Jean found that his sadness was leavened by a kind of elation: he was on his own. He weighed no more than his own weight, and he was learning how to be a man by walking on the edge of the chasm, a difficult task that precluded self-questioning. He did not recognise his own reflection: another Jean was being formed in him, a stranger, timid to begin with, then more and more self-confident. The game itself did not bore him, though he brought to it a somewhat limited conviction. He spoke little, kept his doubts to himself, learnt to mistrust everyone and everything. All in all, the short, bespectacled instructor, with his immovable faith and his flow charts, had fashioned a fairly realistic Jules Armand. Jean regretted seeing him only rarely. The rules that governed the network’s security did not allow it, although he stretched them now and then. He likewise met Nelly at the theatre, but their meetings grew more infrequent and Nelly drew away from him, though she was always as tender as before. She explained it to him gently.
‘When I’m not working I need a man beside me. You’re perfect, but you’re never there …’
‘It’s because I’m never there that I’m perfect.’
‘Stop being silly … and understand that I don’t like sleeping on my own. It’s physical.’
‘Get a dog.’
‘I thought of that … and I’d already have done it if it wasn’t for the pee in the morning. Can you see me, eyes swollen, cream all over my face, naked under my coat, bare feet in my pumps, walking my pooch round Place Saint-Sulpice at eight in the morning?’
‘You wouldn’t be the only one. There are plenty of grannies out at that time of morning.’
‘Jules-who, you’re mocking me.’
They skirmished gently and rolled onto the couch. He saw her in Suréna as a Eurydice so passionate he felt she was talking to him, the only spectator in a full house. In the dress circle, between acts, he glimpsed Marceline Michette craning forward, an ecstatic smile on her lips. Having given Nelly her cues for so long, she was starting to think she was part of the company.
In March 1943 Jean passed through Lyon and met his instructor.
‘You’ve been very useful,’ that precise man told him. ‘We can use you a little more effectively now that your probationary period is over. Do you speak German?’
‘No.’
‘But you know a number of Germans.’
‘They all spoke French.’
‘I suppose you haven’t seen any of them for some time.’
‘Since you ask, no. I’m rather keen on staying alive.’
‘Do they all feel the same about you?’
‘All of them.’
‘You couldn’t regain the trust of any of them?’
‘Definitely not, but … wait … I do know a German woman, the girlfriend of a friend of mine.’
‘What does she do?’
‘She works in an important organisation in Paris. I don’t know what exactly, but I should think she’s more than a secretary. She has a good deal of freedom and she even has a car …’
A week later he was at Gif with Jesús, who was repairing the roof after a tree had fallen on it.
‘Jean, you is Providence itself. ’Old my ladder.’
They talked for an hour, Jesús on the roof, Jean holding the ladder. Laura no longer returned every night. Petrol was running short. She stayed only from Saturday morning to Sunday evening. Jesús invited Jean to stay until she came. She would be very happy to see him; well, ‘happy’ was a figure of speech, for she showed her feelings as little as ever. Jesús felt that she lived with the constant memory of her brother’s death in Russia.