‘I’m jealous!’ he burst out.
She smiled, reassured and reassuring.
‘Well, that’s something new, and on the whole rather nice to hear. I was a bit afraid you might not be. Although I know someone else who has much more reason to be jealous of you. But why talk about it?’
He knew she was thinking of Georges Chaminadze, whereas he was simply suffering from not knowing who had smoked two cigarettes in her apartment that afternoon. Curiously he had to acknowledge that the idea of a husband aroused no animosity in him. There were few signs of Chaminadze’s former presence at Quai Saint-Michel, as if time had already erased this man of whom only a snapshot remained, a photograph of a tall, blond man with a rugged face and short hair in tennis whites. The picture could not come to life; it fixed its subject for ever as someone who would never grow old, a tennis player who had not even met Claude when it was taken, who spoke Russian and French, who, born at Makhachkala on the shore of the Caspian Sea in 1910, had fled to France in 1919 in the great Russian emigration. That was all Jean knew; he had no idea how Georges and Claude had first met, where they had got married and Cyrille had been born, what Georges did. They had apparently lived without material hardship, but not in any luxury either, and Claude knew how to do everything for herself. Jean had found her several times with a pattern on the table, a dress she was cutting out and sewing from pieces of cloth she had kept from before the war, a precaution that had appeared full of foresight since rationing had been introduced. She made Cyrille’s clothes too. When she cooked she had that discreet, subtle way of making ingredients go a long way that has to be admired for its dignity. Jean remembered his adoptive mother’s exhausting attitude to thrift: matches split in two, one lamp for the whole house every evening, the leftovers from Sunday lunch served up cold two or three times on Monday and Tuesday, socks darned to death, bed sheets sewed edge to middle (how that seam in the middle of his bed had rubbed him!), and yet they could have lived better, but Jeanne went without from a feeling that she ought to, saving up her sous at the savings bank the way people did when a lifetime’s thrift guaranteed one’s old age. She had not understood or even noticed how money had collapsed, and had been distressed by what she had called the ‘folly’ of her little Jean when he had bought himself a bicycle with the prince’s first postal order. Albert, with the soul of a contrarian, though at heart he lived by the same strict principles of ‘a sou is a sou’, let Jean spend his money, recognising perhaps unconsciously that the younger generation no longer relied on the same values to ensure their future. In the era ushered in by their defeat in June 1940 the French were about to rediscover Jeanne’s virtues, the stubs of candles, the meanness of locked cupboards. Claude had adapted without complaint to privations that her grace dispelled. She was a strange person; her character appeared too simple and too decent for one to dare believe that she was real. Yet there were those two cigarettes in the ashtray, which, by the way, she made no attempt to hide as she emptied it after dinner.
With the butts out of sight Jean felt calmer. They belonged to a bad dream, whose scenes Claude had swept away in a single gesture. Her power was very great.
‘It’s over!’ Jean said. ‘You’re with me again.’
‘Was I not with you?’
‘No. I’m an idiot, aren’t I?’
She was silent for a moment, absorbed in thought that she tried, as she always did, to articulate with a precision and clarity that gave her more serious conversations a faintly bookish tone.
‘Do you somehow imagine,’ she said at last, ‘that this situation is only hard for you?’
It was true that he had never thought about it from her point of view. In fact the truth seemed to him so glaring and his egotism so awful that he felt ashamed and threw himself at her feet, burying his face in her lap. And could she have made a sweeter indirect confession? He looked up at her. Her eyes were wet with tears, and she smiled with the same indulgence she showed when Cyrille had done something silly.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I truly don’t know what we should do. Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other any more.’
There was so little conviction in her voice that Jean regained his courage and the sense of humour that had saved them from awkward situations before.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s definitely the solution. It’s such a clever idea, only you could have come up with it. I suggest we put it off a bit — only because to start this evening would be too easy — and definitely start in ten years’ time, when we’re completely used to each other and the separation would be really heart-rending … yes, heart-rending … and so romantic it would make a gravedigger weep.’
She offered him her cheek, laughing.
‘Go and sleep!’
In the stairwell, happy again, he ventured to ask the question.
‘Who came to see you this afternoon?’
‘My brother!’ she said. ‘How do you know?’
‘He smokes, doesn’t he?’
‘Ah, that’s what it was about, was it? Well, you’ll meet him one day.’
He jogged as far as Place Clichy before slowing down. His fitness was returning. Jesús had lent him his weights. They had a punchball and took turns at it, ten minutes each, wearing wool vests. Jesús insisted that it allowed him to do without women. There were, of course — at least for others if not for them — a variety of ways of solving that particular problem. La Garenne, seeing the fame of his gallery spread far and wide as whole coachloads of uniformed tourists began arriving to visit, intended to satisfy every taste, but despite his best efforts had not been able to find a painter who knew his way around homosexual subjects. A hissed word from a diminutive, baby-faced major with a glass eye had put him on the right track. ‘Photos!’ Why had he not thought of that? He instantly set about adding the new line to his gallery.
‘Photography is an art!’ he explained to Jean. ‘A new art. The only new art invented since Phidias’s time. Yes indeed, Monsieur Arnaud, Nicéphore Niepce is as great an artist as Phidias, the divine Leonardo and the genius Picasso. The philistines think you just have to press a button, click! and there’s a photo of Grandpa and Grandma and little Zizi with his hoop. The morons! When I say “morons” I’m being polite. As much composition goes into a photograph, Monsieur Arnaud, as into a still life by Chardin, and light plays as important a role in a photograph as it does in a Rembrandt. There is no phrase more absurd than the term “objective lens” when applied to the eye of a camera. Nothing is less objective than an objective lens. That transparent glass, which one imagines to be inert, is both a third eye and a brain but that eye, that brain must have a spiritual motor, which is the genius of the photographer, his vision of the world, his culture, his sensibility, his responsiveness. Painting is perhaps an expression of the human; photography is an expression of life …’
Jean assumed that this speech was a prelude to some new mischief-making by La Garenne, who always felt the need to dignify his muckiest transactions with the name of art. Thus his erotic drawings became, as he saw it, a means of psychological liberation for sexual misfits. He was even armed with a fine quote on that very subject by Freud that made of him, the purveyor, a benefactor of humanity, a saviour of inhibited couples and a generous supplier to lonely masturbators. His glibness, which never lacked conviction, was in every respect a match for his greed. The only question that remained was how he would spend the piles of money he had been amassing since the beginning of the occupation. There was no danger of it being wasted on women. Blanche de Rocroy was enough for that very restrained libertine, too stingy even to treat himself to a tart. He was not a betting man and he spent nothing at his tailor’s, being always dressed in the same black suit of the tenth-rate painter who has called himself a bohemian for far too long, on top of grubby shirts that he wore until they fell apart with, for a necktie, a greasy black ribbon that might once, in its long-distant youth, have been an ascot. In the mornings he would appear in his shiny, crumpled, dust-flecked suit as if he had slept under a bridge the night before. In his office, on the door of which he had inscribed in large capital letters the only play on words he had ever deserved credit for — ‘The bosom of bosoms’ — he would remove his trousers and throw them at Blanche, who piously set to ironing them in the stockroom, as if this garment, rigid with unnameable grime, represented some sort of thaumaturgical vessel for the Holy Grail, while her master (what other word can we use?), in his long grey-coloured cotton drawers, scratched his crotch and explained his grand designs to Jean. No one knew where he called home. Did he even have one? It was doubtful.