‘I never saw her again. I’ve no idea where she is.’
A silence.
‘If you want, I could try to find her for you.’
‘No, Max, this is my business, if I’d wanted to I’d have already found her, I think about her every morning and that’s enough, I’m waiting, I really wish I had changed.’
‘So you’d find the same woman again? If you aren’t the same man, she won’t love you any more.’
‘She didn’t love me anyway, in Switzerland we parted company over something very painful, such stupidity, she behaved extremely well, I’m utterly useless, I’m going to change.’
Hans’s chin has started behaving itself. Hans laughs softly, he will become irresistible, he will go to America, Max will come with him, but Hans will not go, all I’m good for is letting my mind wander, it’s what I like best, I have a reputation for being a hard worker but in reality I spend hours and hours daydreaming, Hans’s dreams are the dreams of a shop girl, of a megalomaniac, of revenge, this morning I dreamed that as I was on my way to the Jardin du Luxembourg, I was stopped by ticket-collectors on the underground, they called the police although I hadn’t done anything wrong, I reminded them of my rights, the police were there, my German accent, I dreamed I got beaten up by the police, I was taken to the police station, an inspector who reads books sized up the situation, I’d been roughed up by the police, I got even, I demonstrated that what they’d done was totally and utterly wrong, the inspector talked to me about my books, in the end I got my own back, and quite right too, I dream daily, a vivid dream life, I see Lena again in my dreams and while I’m doing that I get older sitting at my desk, I am soluble in the air of my office, and also I dream because feeling guilty about dreaming gives me the strength to work. But for the moment, Max, I have to avoid saying ‘contralto voices’, so this girl of yours from the Valais will have to have a higher voice, but one just as good, which will easily rise above the noise of the traffic and the waves from the lake which sometimes beat against the embankment, wavelets.
In fact, according to Max, it was Thomas who did most of the talking. ‘Max, I can hear him from here! This Thomas de Vèze talks like he’s never talked before, either to other people or to himself, he has just had the encounter of his life, his own words sound strange to him, more indulgent about things in general, hesitant, he doesn’t know anything any more, and at the same time he has the feeling that he is about to discover everything, he gets confused, keeps glancing at her breasts, she doesn’t seem to mind, sometimes the gap in the material widens, he gets a glimpse of her collarbones, there is ten times less to see than there is of the women walking here in these gardens today, but for him it’s a continent, such things could give a man a thrill back then in 1913, a glimpse of a collarbone. Look Max, since I am responsible for the props in your story, am I allowed to place a very fine chain around her neck, a brief mention, not one of those meandering sentences?’
‘Very well, but no crosses or medallions, she doesn’t believe in God and she’s guessed that he’s a Protestant from the way he sees things, by his clothes, a Protestant who does not hate himself and finds it difficult to pretend to be innocent, just like me. And towards the end of the afternoon
‘One moment, Max! Leave them to me for five minutes, after all this is Lake Geneva! What is it about Thomas that caught the woman’s eye?’
‘Maybe my ears,’ says Max, ‘I think I’d like to lend him my ears.’
‘Some people might think you’re too sensitive about your ears, I know what they’re like, I can see them!’
‘You can see my ears?’
‘Don’t go on, I can see Thomas, and Hélène, they’re walking along the side of Lake Geneva, they’re pretending to identify the trees on the embankment or in the gardens of the houses, they’re sauntering, the branches of some trees hang so low that the leaves kiss their own shadows on the ground, others still have just a soft dusting of buds, she knows that they are thuyas, she knows far more about all this than yon Thomas, some gardens are virtually well-tended parks, with whole expanses of violets or dahlias, or form large-scale arrangements in which the yellow of the hydrangea rubs shoulders with the pale blue of the asters, and the eye skips away only to alight for a moment on the musky orange, old-gold, ochre and burned-toast of a clump of helenium, the hardest ones to grow are the ochre, the trick is how to preserve that warmth without letting it turn shrill.’
With his hands, Hans traces a circle in the air, the warmth of the ochre, what Lena said about singing, smuggle ochre into the voice, a round voice, full, ochre is a colour which has retained a degree of chiaroscuro in its warmth. He resumes:
‘Ochre is more difficult than the red you get in those poker-shaped flowers that stand on tall stems, Knophofia.’
Hans is getting heated, he always gets heated when he’s speaking French, the names of flowers, the pleasure of manipulating rare words, lush flora, of course he has been cheating, Max points to beds full of flowers spread out before them, all labelled, the meticulous labours of the squad of gardeners responsible for the Luxembourg. Hans adds: ‘I’m sure they have the same flowers in Geneva.’
Now and then Thomas and Hélène hear, in the bushes, a flutter of wings, or the raucous, caressing cry of the crows as they fly up into the oaks.
‘No, Hans, in France the caressing cry of crows doesn’t work, it sounds pretty but the word crow has been tainted by our anti-clerical battles and has never been the same since, so not easy to use it as a sound effect for a lover’s tryst.’
‘All right I’ll make it blackbirds,’ says Hans, ‘males or maybe females, I need something to liven up the background.’
‘Use rooks, I’ve no idea why but rooks seem to me to be more noble than blackbirds. Hans, we’re not getting anywhere.’
‘Did you or did you not put me in charge of sets and props? Right then. So what jobs do they do?’
‘She’s a nurse and midwife and he’s a schoolteacher.’
‘You’re full of surprises.’
‘He quickly realises that she is drifting.’
‘Max!.. And does he already know that she has just been left badly shaken by a first love affair?’
‘He’ll soon find out.’
‘Yo! An affair with a married man…’
‘I can’t hide anything from you.’
There’s only one way for Max to get out of this corner, and that is to ensure that the rest follows plausibly from this start which you might call novelettish, the only drawback being, if it’s true, that people always guess everything, but maybe they’ll like it even so. So how does the rest go?
‘The rest? Thomas will take Hélène back home with him where they need someone just like her, this won’t happen without the cat being set among the pigeons, a Swiss woman in the middle of Haute-Savoie.’
‘She’ll be terrified by your Savoyards, Max, she’ll want to bring hygiene to the natives, to those one-room mountain hovels, cow on one side, humans on the other, a channel in the middle for the slurry, and the cow’s tail attached with a line to ensure she doesn’t spray too much, they’ll have to wash, so there’ll be confrontations in the offing, and the sheep sleeping under the bed, and the empty racks where they put the hay, and all those wonderful objects…’