He raised his hat and immediately went to sit on a garden chair next to the young woman who was unpacking and repacking her bag of rags. She paid no attention to his conversation, her face tense with anxiety, counting the rags in her long skinny fingers. The man stood up, shrugging his shoulders, and walked back past Jean and Claude.
‘She’s not normal,’ he said.
Claude smiled and whispered to Jean, ‘Am I normal?’
‘Perfectly. You’re just tired.’
‘You haven’t given me any news of Madame Michette.’
‘Oh, she’s all right, I think. Always very busy.’
‘Cyrille infuriated her.’
‘She got over it.’
A cloud covered the sun. Faces looked up and walkers paused as if the mechanism that regulated the peaceful scene and its movement had been thrown out of gear. The supervisor appeared in the doorway, looking up to squint at the sky. The cloud went on drifting, a single formless mass in the infinite pallor. The sun was already coming out again and the cloud was passing. The supervisor walked towards Jean and Claude.
‘The doctor would like to see you.’
‘Now?’
‘If possible.’
He squeezed Claude’s hand.
‘Wait for me.’
She looked up at the supervisor, who stood watching her and saying nothing.
‘Jean, I think I’m going to go back to my room.’
‘She’s very sensible,’ the supervisor said. ‘Very. If only all the patients were like her.’
Jean’s heart ached. Claude drifted at the mercy of any will stronger than her own. The supervisor’s face displayed a kindness and indulgence that froze his soul. Claude followed her, turning at the door of her room to kiss Jean before walking over to her chair by the window. He would have wept, had it not been for her radiant smile as the door closed on his past.
‘Is it really necessary?’
‘The doctor will tell you, Monsieur. We’re responsible for Madame …’
The psychiatrist’s apartment was reached by a spiral staircase that ended in a door with double locks. The doctor himself opened it, in shirtsleeves, a man in his fifties whose Freud-like goatee beard failed to conceal the innate cheerfulness of a face whose eyes sparkled with amused curiosity. He wore dark lenses whenever there was a pessimistic diagnosis to be delivered to a patient’s relations. Yet, as we have noted, this man was not fond of external contacts, of anything in fact that disturbed his closed universe in the nursing home, and considered the explanations he was obliged to supply in order to keep his patients there as a distasteful chore.
‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting you twice, and to be honest, though I know many things about Madame Chaminadze I know nothing about you. Forgive me for asking you up here. I should have come down to my consulting room to meet you there, but it’s Sunday — I deserve a little rest too, and I thought an informal meeting in my apartment would be more pleasant and relaxed, that you’d find my curiosity less oppressive and that we might even have a drink together, though my drinks cabinet is very modest: a brandy and water as Mr Pickwick preferred it, or a bootleg pastis the way Marius liked it. What’s your choice?’
‘Nothing,’ Jean said. ‘I’m listening.’
He did not like to be talked to, by an intelligent man, in language that indicated he was thought to be an idiot, unable to work out the most elementary aspects of life. Dr Bertrand annoyed him, and Palfy had taught him how to cut short such false chumminess.
‘Oh, well … you’ll allow me not to follow your example.’
He poured himself a cognac and water. Jean relaxed: there was nothing sinister about this Freud lookalike, he was simply cultivating an attitude, as shown by his evident awkwardness when he was not addressing a mental patient, or perhaps he had got into the habit of considering all his interlocutors as grown-up retarded children, to whom it was necessary to explain the most ordinary facts.
‘I know how concerned you are by Madame Chaminadze’s condition …’
He had sat down at his desk, piled with documents and files, a sheet of paper half covered in handwriting in front of him. The shelves on the walls were sagging under the weight of books. A voice rose from the garden.
‘Monsieur Draguignan, can I remind you that there are lavatories on the ground floor. If you don’t mind …’
The doctor smiled.
‘She’s a dragon, I know, but without her the patients would do exactly as they pleased. She’s especially interested in your relation’s case, you know …’
‘She’s not my relation; she’s the woman I love.’
‘Oh, I know, I know, but we are sometimes obliged to maintain a certain fiction. Where the mentally ill are concerned the family are all-powerful and can forbid the visit of someone who isn’t a family member.’
‘I don’t really see how Claude’s mother could forbid me to see her daughter. Putting it rather vulgarly, Doctor, I buy the right to see her by paying your monthly bills.’
‘I know, I know …’
His embarrassment was growing. He swallowed a mouthful of brandy and put the glass down in front of him. A mad thought crossed Jean’s mind: a plan had been hatched against him, and they were going to prevent him from seeing Claude. He was gripped by a terrible anxiety and the thought that he still loved her as much as before, even in her present condition. If he had doubted it in recent months, the threat he faced reminded him of his attachment.
‘I’d be happy to have a brandy and water like you, Doctor.’
‘Ah, now we’re being sensible … Good sense always wins out.’
As delighted as if he had just won a personal victory and made a wayward patient see reason, Dr Bertrand put on his glasses and fetched the bottle of cognac.
‘It’s not easy to lay your hands on good cognac at the moment,’ he said. ‘I had some put by, but it quickly ran out. Fortunately I have relations in Charente. Do you know Charente, Monsieur Arnaud?’
‘No, I don’t know Charente. War and defeat haven’t really favoured my appetite for travel.’
‘Fancy that! But I hear you often go abroad.’
‘I’ve been to Portugal three times since the beginning of the year, but not for tourism, for business.’
‘You’re a very young businessman.’
‘I have a feeling it’s a profession I’ll do well not to grow old in.’
Anna Petrovna was the only person who could have told the doctor, and even she could only have known of his journeys via Cyrille, who Jean had answered carelessly about one of his absences. He began thoroughly to detest Claude’s mother, who had clearly mounted an undeclared war against him. Dr Bertrand sat down at his desk.
‘Yes,’ he said, as though resuming after a digression a train of thought interrupted by small talk, ‘yes, I get the impression that your visits, despite the desire she expresses for them, are upsetting Madame Chaminadze. You know that she is suffering from an obsession triggered by physical mistreatment, the nature of which I don’t need to elaborate on. She used to be, I believe, according to what you and her family have told me, a balanced person, very much in control of herself. Is that correct?’
Jean, resolved not to come to his aid, nodded in confirmation. Dr Bertrand compressed his lips purposefully. Once more he had let himself get carried away by long phrases that reassured him of his own subtle understanding of psychology, but this laconic interlocutor whose irritated gaze he felt settling on him, this boy whom Anna Petrovna had claimed was involved in shady business dealings, disconcerted him.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he went on, ‘that you should space out your visits … Just an experiment, you understand, a simple experiment, but we need to try everything in the case of a sensitive patient such as this, in which science only has formulas to offer, when what we really need are intuition and psychology.’