You get a smile from him, a smile of amused benevolence for your concern about the West as a whole and even the Atlantic Alliance, an acute analysis which in reality boils down to little more than a policy of ‘wait and see’.
‘But as head of state, I have to act, I have to think of the interests of France, not just of the Atlantic Alliance, this time the Russians must not be weakened too much, otherwise you can say goodbye to our national independence, there’ll have to be a painful face-to-face with the hot-dog eaters, the Russians must not be humiliated and made to withdraw, Cuba was lesson enough for them, and that god-forsaken Asian hole can remain within their traditional sphere.’
You tell him maybe he’s right, that you don’t know, you imagined he would be a lot less like de Gaulle, he’s very fond of acting up like an Englishman or a New Englander, and here he is talking about national independence, in the election he stood against a Gaullist who nowadays is reduced to attending parties given by the Marshal’s widow, but once elected he pursued the very policies he had previously denounced and rejected, evidently with forked tongue, he runs a risk in doing so, he loves playing this role when you’re with him, he probably doesn’t do it often, but when you are his audience of one he doesn’t pass up the chance, journalists reckon that this concern with national independence is the product of certain French constants, your man is constrained by history, geography, economics, pommes-frites, but you know that if he’s acting this way now it’s basically because for some time he’s been increasingly drawn to doing things he doesn’t like doing, he feels easier when he’s doing them, it’s a rule of politics: if you choose to do what you don’t like doing it gives you better control, and you aren’t so disappointed.
You reflect that there must be one last Lilstein, the one who anticipated that you would suspect him of having at least four faces, that you would build four hypotheses, and that those hypotheses would eventually lead you to the office of the President, who will eventually tell you that he has opted for a policy of flexible response to the Soviets, that the Germans will follow suit, and then even the Americans have just confirmed that they won’t push too hard on this one.
And you know that you will pass on this intelligence to Lilstein.
The President walks you to the door of his office, his tone is kindly:
‘There’s someone here who would benefit greatly from talking to you, it would do her good, broaden her ideas, she has a difficult, a very wearing job, her horizons are narrow, true she loathes you, I know you never called her Lady Piddle, but I’ve heard about one very coarse word; she deliberately provoked you but it surprised me coming from you, I never realised you had such a short fuse, and now she hates you.
‘She says terrible things about you, though she doesn’t really believe them, I’d like you to have a few sessions with her, I like the people around me to get on with each other, true you don’t come here often anyway, now you mustn’t start taking offence, you know how fond I am of you, I try to keep it simple, you’re the only one who refused to go with me to Africa, I know some who’d strangle their mother and father to go hunting with me, I’m not asking that, and I forbid you to tell Chagrin what you tell me, I want exclusive access to you, or don’t talk to her, that’s all right too, and when you’re next in Switzerland you could try to be a tiny bit less brilliant, is that so hard? Will you come to dinner on Saturday? I command you!’
*
On the quais de Vèze continues his walk, he starts laughing to himself, a memory of that evening in Singapore in 1965, he remembers a gag, a practical joke that was played on him during dinner, he never found out who was responsible, he suspected Jug Ears of setting him up.
But he never succeeded in finding out who had played that damnable trick on him. It might even have been the man whom de Vèze admires, the guest of honour, no, it couldn’t have been. Besides, the man de Vèze admires told the story of that dinner party in 1965 in one of his books, de Vèze was rather put out not to have been mentioned, the book said most about Jug Ears, spoke of him with affection, whereas in fact he had behaved very ungraciously with the man de Vèze admires, at one point they’d been on the verge of having a rather serious incident.
But basically, in the book, Jug Ears and the man de Vèze admires see more or less eye to eye, the man does not actually say ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ but in his introduction he does observe that comedy is as important in history as tragedy, that the presence of comedy is everywhere irrefutable and as elusive as a cat, that the Great Adventure is now just an empty apartment, that thought can never cancel time’s lease, he is on the verge of pronouncing the end of History.
As he turned the pages, de Vèze thought it was all beginning to sound rather grim but here and there he caught echoes of what he had felt that evening in Singapore in 1965, words spoken from sheer enjoyment which buzz like bees in a hedge seen against the sun.
De Vèze continues walking along the quais of the Seine, he is beginning to feel tired, he remembers the Kessel book, just when everything seemed to have sorted itself out, try to find the bookseller again, buy Wagon-lit, he hadn’t been fair, ‘I felt the thrill of the fever’, you can’t get by without clichés and books of that kind have their uses, people say I could write as well as that, that helps, everyone knows what it is to have had the thrill of a fever.
Now Lord Jim or Typhoon are a different kettle of fish, but you feel so slow-witted, that is the paradox of Conrad’s novels, when you’re into them you feel both happy and stupid, and to be happy you forget you’re stupid, it’s only if you, personally, want to write that it comes back and hits you. De Vèze has a great many books, almost as many in Moscow as in Paris, often he has two copies of a book, he’s always taking books to Moscow and when he feels like dipping into any of them in Paris he buys another copy.
And every evening always the same problem, which book to read before he goes off to sleep? Thousands of books within easy reach and not one to suit his mood, to help him make his peace with his own breathing even if it’s only for a moment, something light to read before he drops off, every evening de Vèze runs his eye over the shelves of his library, a friend once told him if you’ve never bought a house in the country it’s because you’ve got one here, on your bookshelves.
A partiality for fiction especially, these last few years, and all this so he can have something he can read or reread, he would hesitate, pick up a tome, read a page, put it back, hum-and-ha for maybe an hour while the moment for sleep passed, comes the evening and nothing takes his fancy, La Route des Flandres for instance, during the day he can get absorbed in it, saying he’s not to be disturbed, but in the evening, he can’t find a thing to read, to be fair he doesn’t know what he wants exactly, one day he made a particular effort with an assistant in a Latin Quarter bookshop who was pressing him.
In the end he said I want a novel full of action with a happy ending, the young woman looked at him with a smile:
‘You want him to get married? Or earn a lot of money? Or both together?’
She answered her own question:
‘I’m afraid we don’t have anything like that, or else if it’s a classic you want, how about War and Peace?’
‘Yes,’ said de Vèze, ‘that ends fairly happily, after twelve hundred pages the heroine has got fat, she has acquired homely tastes, takes up needlework and treats her hubby like her teddy bear, Natasha she’s called, puts on twenty kilos, but all women end up fat, you’re right, I’ll have a copy of War and Peace.’