‘What about me?’ Nelly said.
‘He didn’t give me anything for you.’
‘Shame.’
Jean read the letter of resignation and signed it.
‘Shall I throw his cheque back in his face?’ he asked Nelly.
‘No. Keep it. His money’s as good as anyone’s.’
Jean put the cheque in his pocket and asked the secretary, if anyone telephoned him, to redirect the call to Rue de Presbourg.
‘No,’ Nelly said. ‘To me. Today I’m keeping you with me. I’m inviting you home for lunch. My Uncle Eugène, who has the incredible good fortune to live in the Vire, has sent me an andouillette you’ll still be talking about when you’re sixty.’
If she had offered him a herring bone, he would have followed her wherever she told him to go. She was there, she existed, she understood everything. He desired her while Claude, under arrest somewhere in Paris, in isolation, was asking herself whether those who loved her had abandoned her. Unless she was not sitting alone on a hard wooden bench but being questioned, slapped, beaten and humiliated into admitting she had met Georges Chaminadze.
They reached Place Saint-Sulpice by Métro. Passengers recognised Nelly. A little girl with a lisp held out an autograph book. Nelly took Jean’s arm to cross the square. A man with a red nose who looked numb with cold and had a haversack on his back was attracting pigeons with breadcrumbs. A bird pecked at his palm. He grabbed it by a claw, wrung its neck and stuffed it into his haversack. The other pigeons flew away, then came back. He waited calmly for them, not moving, his arm extended, showing neither pleasure nor boredom. The brim of his homburg hat was pulled down over his eyes. All that was visible was his really very red nose and the stubble on his badly shaven chin.
‘I should like to find a poet who talks about Saint-Sulpice and pigeons and people going hungry,’ Nelly said. ‘But … it’s difficult. Of course there’s Ponchon: “I hate the towers of Saint-Sulpice — whenever I see them I piss on them …” I can’t promise that’s it exactly, but Ponchon’s a real poet.22 He wrote about black stockings and virtuous maidens. Do you like black stockings?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Notice that I didn’t ask you what you thought about virtuous maidens.’
‘I haven’t known one. They’re a rare breed.’
‘That’s a shame. If you had, you could have recited Ponchon’s excellent speech to her. “Now we know on what a fat purse, Mademoiselle, you mount your horse …”’
He laughed. Nelly dispensed gaiety. These days gaiety meant hope and courage. She was making the waiting and uncertainty disappear with a discretion he would not forget.
The studio was icy. Jean lit a fire of logs while Nelly changed her dress for a pair of trousers and a roll-neck sweater. But for her slight bust, she would have looked like a beautiful young man. Even her voice could have been a boy’s. She chattered incessantly to Jean, to herself, even briefly to a cat slinking across the balcony on the other side of the street. Opening the window she called out, ‘Marc-Adolphe Papillon, you shouldn’t be out in weather like this. You’ll catch cold and your papa’ll get worried.’
She closed the window. The cat did not move, staring at her, its back arched.
‘Funny name for a cat!’ Jean said.
‘It’s not any old cat, it’s Maurice Fombeure’s cat. In the morning when Marc-Adolphe comes home, Fombeure tells him:
‘My cat coming back from his rambles
He smells of the earth and sun’s heat
He smells of Calabria and Puglia
He smells of opossums and feet,
He smells of bollocks and palavers
With hefty and bewhiskered toms
And of the bitter bark of the trees
He smells of Bantus and drums
‘So you can see he’s not any old cat.’
‘Do you know any other poems of Fombeure’s?’
‘Plenty. But let’s go gently. You shouldn’t stuff yourself with poets. Very indigestible. I’ll teach you to cherry-pick …’
He recounted to her how, as a boy of thirteen, he had met two Breton separatists on the run and how one of them, Yann, had recited Victor Hugo to him in a voice he had not forgotten and how a few hours later the second separatist, Monsieur Carnac, had ridiculed the poet’s flight of fancy by quoting the lines that were missing from the stanza: ‘Love each other! ’tis the month when the strawberries are sweet.’ What had become of Yann and Monsieur Carnac? The Germans, having envisaged backing the Breton Liberation Front, had given up the idea under pressure from Vichy. Were Yann and Monsieur Carnac continuing the struggle, pursued now by the police on both sides? But someone else had offered him a poet too. He spoke of his fabulous meeting with the prince and his chauffeur, the enigmatic Salah who had slipped a copy of Toulet’s Counter-rhymes into his haversack. The copy had been left behind at his last billet. Jean remembered how, during his long marches, staggering under the weight of his kit, full cartridge belts and the machine gun biting into his shoulder, he had recited to himself, without moving his lips, the thrilling lines that conjured up a naked woman and the fragrance of the Indian Ocean.
‘I wouldn’t say them well. I’d like to hear you read them.’
On a shelf Nelly had a copy of Counter-rhymes. Together they searched, like a pair of schoolboys, for the poem Jean had liked so much for its contrast and the escape it had offered from the stubborn stupidity of army life. Nelly recited:
‘You whom winter’s hearth inflamed
To a naked carmine
Where the scent of your skin
Your nakedness already framed;
Neither you, of whom a remembered sight
Still captivates my heart
Vague island, flowers’ shadowy art,
Oceanic night;
Nor your perfume, violet-filled,
Beneath the cooling hand
Are worth the rose that grows from burning land
And the midday heat compels to yield’
The telephone rang. Nelly sprang to answer it.
‘Oh, it’s you … No, leave me alone. Listen, Dudu, I’m expecting a very important call. You have to leave my line clear … Yes … of course … I’ll see you on one condition … that you hang up. And do it now. Jean? Of course he’s here. I’m in the middle of photographing him quite naked on a tiger skin. You cannot imagine how delicious he looks. Hang up and I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She replaced the receiver and smiled.
‘He’s not as bad as he seems. You have to treat him a bit meanly. I can’t always do it. I’m too weak …’
She made lunch on the table covered with oilcloth in the kitchen, where there was barely room to move.
‘I’m turning into my mother. She has a dining room, but it’s only for family occasions. Otherwise it’s in the kitchen. Near the pans. She claims you eat better with an oven behind you. Papa wipes his knife, fork and glass before he starts. He’s never been able to lose the habit. It annoys Maman. He doesn’t care. Oh blast, I haven’t got any red wine.’
‘We’ll do without.’
‘No, I’ve got champagne. Julius and Madeleine sent me some Dom Pérignon 1929. A case. Do you think it’ll be enough?’
‘I think it’ll be enough.’
‘Sit down then. And tell me the stories about the prince again. I’m like a little girl. I love princes and fairy tales. You said he was the lover of your real mother?’