‘Do you have children? I do hope so!’ she innocently exclaimed.
‘Four. Two little Rocroy boys to be on the safe side, and two girls.’
Praise be! The Rocroy line was indeed assured.
‘In that case, come and see me tomorrow at the Continental instead. We’ll lunch together and you can tell me what interesting things you have in your secret reserves … I’ve already forgotten your owner’s name.’
‘Louis-Edmond de La Garenne. He doesn’t awfully look like it, but he’s descended from a crusader.’
Rudolf von Rocroy raised an eyebrow in silent approval. He kissed his cousin, as cousins do in well-born families, and the following day over lunch he even addressed her as tu and Blanche, who had only addressed three people as tu in her entire life, was clearly required to respond in kind. She had brought von Rocroy good news: La Garenne owned a number of paintings of the sort that interested him — Utrillos, Derains, Braques and Picassos — although it would take a little time to have them brought to Paris from the country where they had been stored since the outbreak of war.
‘We are very interested,’ he said, so archly discreet that his interest was glaringly obvious. Even Blanche felt that his royal ‘we’ was a bit too much, and it took her until lunch was over to realise that her cousin was in fact acting on behalf of a German organisation that wished to add to the collections of contemporary painters in a number of German museums. The new Germany, he told her, needed French art just as the new France needed German order. The two countries were bound in a common hope, the birth of a united Europe, which in future would be the only conceivable way to bring peace to the world.
By now Blanche was no longer listening. She was thinking of La Garenne, who, after what she had told him about Rudolf von Rocroy, had scented a big client and big business. But who would ever have imagined that that diabolical man possessed such unexpected treasures? That he had modern masters hidden away that he had never mentioned before? In her blindness Blanche decided it must be because of his genius for discovery, and she rejoiced to think that he would now have a chance to sell at inevitably astronomical prices canvases he had shrewdly bought for peanuts when their artists were unknown names. She made her way back to the gallery, her cheeks flushed after an over-rich lunch that had finished with champagne. La Garenne was waiting impatiently.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Is he serious, your Roc-of-my-arse-roy?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Did you pin him down?’
‘I did not pin him down. He is a Rocroy and his motto is the same as ours: “My word and my God”.’
‘What blasted use is your motto to me? “My word!” Only one? Like the poor! And “my God”! When the ancients had thirty-six …’
‘Your ancestor would not be at all pleased to hear you talk like that, Louis-Edmond!’
‘Well, that twit … instead of copping a dose of the clap in Jerusalem he’d have done a lot better for himself, and made a lot more money, if he’d stayed at court. Then I wouldn’t be here selling filth to perverts and ruining myself dragging artists out of the gutter and having them repay me with their contempt and ingratitude. When does your Rudolf want his paintings?’
‘As soon as you’ve brought them to Paris.’
Louis-Edmond beat the air with his arms, like a wounded duck.
‘Oh I see! I’m at his beck and call, am I? Art on a plate for the Fritzes! They open their mouths, they require, they decide. Monsieur the colonel would like his Utrillo with his breakfast. Thinks we’re at his feet, does he! Well, he can forget it! He can wait, like everyone else. Join the queue, Messieurs Boches …’
‘In that case, perhaps he’ll go somewhere else!’ Blanche said, more mischievously than she would have believed herself capable of.
‘Oh, no! No! No, he’ll be robbed blind if he does. Explain that to him. It’s your job from now on. Go out with him, show him round, talk to him about your family, and make him wait, patiently. He’ll get his blasted pictures.’
*
Jean observed this scene without saying a word. He knew where La Garenne would find his Utrillos and Picassos. It would depend on Jesús’s skill and whether he was in a good mood, but Blanche was not to know that. With a gesture that he considered dashing, La Garenne swept up his battered broad-brimmed felt hat with its grubby ribbon and clamped it on his head, apparently heedless of his wig, though in reality he knew it was in no danger, thanks to a new gum. In his black cape he resembled an elderly portrait photographer, despite lacking any of the courtesy of such a person and gesticulating madly with his arms as if, like some horrible plucked bird, he was trying to take off over Montmartre and dive down onto the city below to peck out its heart with his beak. From the direction in which he strode off, Jean guessed that he was on his way to Jesús, and was sorry he could not be a fly on the wall.
Blanche, left behind, radiated happiness that afternoon: to have, all in the last twenty-four hours, discovered a noble cousin and possibly secured a fortune for her persecutor supplied her with all the reason she needed for existing.
That evening Jesús recounted the arrival of the grotesque but skilful La Garenne, who had come as a supplicant and left with the promise that in a week’s time the Spaniard would deliver a fake Utrillo and two fake Picassos.
‘You understand,’ he said, ‘’e’s more ’ard to make an Utrillo. I ’ave to forget I knows ’ow to pain’. Picasso, ’e knows but ’e doesn’ want, so you make a Picasso the same way you smok’ the cigarette or you fuck the girl. But an Utrillo, an Utrillo …’
To help him make up his mind, La Garenne had also left with one of his canvases under his arm.
‘We goin’ to be rich, my young friend. Rich. And then one day we say fuck to them all, to that crook La Garenne, to the dealers, to the painting. Fuck, you ’ear me, the biggest fuck in the ’istory of the art.’
Jean lamented the disappearance of the canvas La Garenne had taken, a red-brown bull in the Andalusian light, a sublime bull in sublime light, a vision that on the mornings when he woke up in the studio was waiting at the foot of his bed, splendid and overlooked, a door open onto a landscape that gradually, as Jesús talked it into life in his stories, he wanted to get to know. What would La Garenne do with it? The bull was destined for his toilet wall. Jean said nothing. Yet again he had the uncomfortable feeling of being, if not implicated in something crooked, then at least a witness to it in a way that pained him. Was he not making himself an accessory by staying silent? He had to put it out of his mind.
Going to Claude’s that evening, to the taste of her cool cheek and to her mysteriously indulgent smile, put an end to his remorse. He continued to long to take her in his arms and bury his face in her neck so that he didn’t have to think of anything but the smell of her hair and the tang of her skin that drove him mad with hunger. So why did it have to be on this evening that he noticed two half-smoked Virginia cigarettes, stubbed out carelessly or nervously, in an ashtray? Claude did not smoke. Jean was so preoccupied by what he saw that, since he did not dare say anything, dinner passed very glumly, despite Claude’s efforts and Cyrille’s questions.
‘What do you do to earn money? Why don’t you live with us all the time? I’ll tell Papa when he comes home that you’re my best friend.’
The absent husband was suddenly between them. When Cyrille was in bed Jean finally turned to Claude.
‘For the first time since we’ve been together, I’m not happy.’
‘I can tell … Have I said or done something to upset you?’
‘You couldn’t if you tried.’
‘Then it must be because of Cyrille. But I can’t stop him talking about his father. The longer the war goes on, the more he’ll forget him. It’s a horrible situation but it’s not my fault.’