Caravaggio's Angel (11 page)

11

La Jaubertie, August

The day’s events, already dreamlike, now took on the differently unreal quality deception adds. I told Delphine I’d twisted my ankle; and although (given that I was clearly able to walk) this couldn’t have been very serious, she insisted I take it easy. On no account was I to go out for dinner, as I’d intended: this evening I would eat with the family. In the meantime I pleaded exhaustion, which was real enough, and retired to my room, where I fell into a deep sleep.

By the time I awoke, it was after seven. I lay with my hands behind my head, wishing I didn’t have to get up. The last thing I felt like was an edgy evening of pretence. Abstract moral rules have never been my thing, but I do have one or two, and the first is: in a conflict between sex and sisterhood, sisterhood wins. Which, translated, boils down to: keep off your friends’ husbands. It seemed a little soon to count Delphine as a friend. But between her and Olivier – no contest. Friendship wasn’t his forte – he was too ambitious, too driven, for that. Perhaps that was one of the things that so irresistibly drew us together – like calling to like.

I showered, put on a long-sleeved shirt and trousers to ward off hungry insects, and sallied forth. Delphine was in the kitchen, cutting the small, sweet local melons in half. I asked if I could help, but she shook her head. ‘Why don’t you sit down and talk to me? Olivier took the kids swim-ming and they’re not back yet. They love it when he’s home. We’re hoping he won’t need to stay in Paris too much longer.’

I couldn’t help wondering whether Olivier hoped this as much as Delphine did. ‘Would he be able to get the right sort of job near here?’

‘He keeps looking. Something’s sure to turn up some-time.’ She smiled her mischievous, thin-lipped smile and nodded towards the fridge. ‘Drink? There’s some cold white wine in there. Why don’t you pour us a couple and tell me about this project of yours?’

As we sat and chatted in the shady kitchen amid the heavy perfume of ripe melons, I thought again how much I liked Delphine. I should find some excuse to leave – now. Olivier and I would simply have to call off our collaboration, and pursue our stories without each other’s help.

I stayed.

At five to eight, the Peugeot drew up in the court and the children, still in their bathing suits, rushed into the kitchen. They’d been to swim in the local river, where the water always stayed cool however hot the weather; tomorrow they planned to take the boat and spend the day there. Delphine packed them off to put some clothes on, and dispatched Olivier to lay the table in the garden. By eight fifteen we were seated around it
en famille
.

After we’d finished eating, the grown-ups sat on drink-ing a last glass of wine and picking at strawberries while the children rushed off to play. We didn’t say much, enjoy-ing the balmy evening while Olivier and I did our best not to catch each other’s eyes. At ten, when the children were packed off to bed, I too took my leave. The pretence of normality, with its attendant side-games, was too exhaust-ing. In any case, it had been a long day. With any luck tomorrow should be less exciting; even so, it promised to be effortful in other ways.

I was tired out, but sleep did not come quickly. The day’s events replayed endlessly in my head: Juliette and Rigaut, the crash of the tile, the bizarre encounter in the wood. And then those minutes – or hours – on the hillside, the feel of Olivier’s arms, his taste, his tongue on mine, the smell of his hair. I told myself it wasn’t just wrong, it was ridiculous – he was ten years younger than me, he wasn’t an impulsive man, he must have something else in mind. But then I remembered him in the restaurant saying ‘Marriages end’, and Delphine’s evident dissatisfaction with his constant absences. I wondered whether he’d creep round to see me now. He shouldn’t – it would be too demeaning, too squalidly deceitful – yet at the same time I wanted him to, so much that my body actually ached. However, he didn’t appear. And eventually I fell asleep, awaking only when sunlight on my face told me it was morning, and that last night I’d forgotten to close the shutters.

I’d been alternately dreading and longing for the moment when I’d see Olivier again, but when I went in to breakfast, he was not there. Delphine ran breakfast on a buffet system – a comprehensive array of yoghurts, fruit, cheese, ham, cereals, hardboiled eggs, bread, butter, jam, croissants, thermos jugs of coffee, hot milk, and hot water, and a variety of teabags laid out on a sideboard. By the time I arrived, used cups and plates showed that most of my fellow guests had already been and gone. Only the Dutch couple were visible, eating cheese. They nodded politely and chewed on while I helped myself to corn-flakes, greengages, a croissant and milky coffee. After yesterday’s experience, I wasn’t going to leave without stoking up.

The morning was exquisite. The previous evening there had been another electric storm, and although once again it hadn’t rained the air was no longer so heavy, and the sun shone from a clear sky of deepest blue. I could hear the sounds of children playing in the orchard, and eventually went out there myself. The trees were loud with wasps and bowed down with plums, a small, black variety that Delphine had told me were mostly used to make
eau de vie
de prune,
the honey-sweet green Reine Claudes I’d sampled at breakfast, and tiny pinkish-yellow mirabelles. The children – Magali, Fabien, and the two English children, who had finally lost their shyness – had left the swing where they’d been playing earlier and were now concentrating hard on something they’d found near the back hedge. How delightful it would be to spend the day in the orchard, to loll in a hammock watching the sky while greengages fell into my mouth! And how deeply I didn’t want to set foot in La Jaubertie again!

I was thinking this when Olivier appeared. Despite the untoward ending of our unexpected afternoon, I hadn’t been able to stop myself wondering if there might be a sequel, and if so, what it might be. My heart somersaulted; I smiled politely and said, ‘
Bonjour
.’

He replied equally politely and went straight over to the children. For a minute I felt irrationally hurt. Then he turned and gave me a brilliant, conspiratorial grin, and I was happy again.

Feeling ashamed on many counts, I went into the house. Delphine was in the breakfast room, clearing up. She looked up, smiled, and said, ‘Régine, don’t think I’m try-ing to get rid of you or anything, but I was wondering – do you have any idea how long you’ll be staying?’

‘I’ve got an appointment at La Jaubertie this morning,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how long it’ll go on. Would it be OK to stay tonight? I’ll take myself out, obviously.’

She nodded. ‘That’s fine. Just so I know.’

‘Are you full for the rest of the week?’

‘Absolutely, and the tourist office just rang with more people. That’s why I need to know.’

‘That’s excellent,’ I said politely.

‘It is good, though I sometimes think it’d be nice not to work so hard when Olivier’s here. Still, I like to be inde-pendent. And this was my idea, after all.’ She gave a wry little smile. Evidently it wasn’t the first time she’d rehearsed this argument.

When I got to La Jaubertie Juliette was sitting out on the lawn under the big cedar tree, in a high-backed wooden chair at a slatted teak table; another chair stood vacant – presumably for me. Apart from the builders, who were still pushing out tiles this Saturday morning, she seemed to be alone in the house – neither the Renault 4 nor the BMW was there. She was reading a paper with the aid of a magnifying glass and, until my shadow fell across the page, had not registered my presence.

‘Régine! You gave me a fright.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘Well. Now you’re here, why don’t you go in and get us some water? I get so thirsty in this heat. The kitchen’s to your right when you go in.’

‘What about Amos? Will he let me in?’

‘He’s not here, he belongs to Babette and she’s having a few days off while her son’s home.’

The kitchen was cool, small and comparatively modern, with a white ceramic double sink, a small gas stove and a big larder fridge containing several bottles of Perrier and a number of labelled plastic boxes presumably left by Babette:
Déjeuner samedi, Diner samedi, Déjeuner dimanche
. . . Armed with a bottle and two glasses I returned to the lawn and poured us each some water.

‘You don’t mind being all alone?’

‘I can manage. Babette leaves me plenty of food, and the bar will send something if I phone. Jean-Jacques wanted to send someone, but I prefer to manage by myself.’

For whose benefit, exactly, the ‘someone’? I wondered if her thoughts were the same as mine.

‘Did you know your son had written to me about the picture?’ I asked her.

‘He mentioned something . . . What did he say?’

I held out the letter. She took it and read it, again using the magnifying glass, then handed it back, shaking her head. ‘He’s always so obstinate,’ she said irritably, as though we were discussing a problem child. ‘He gets an idea into his head . . . I told him I’d do what I wanted with my own property, but he’s too used to getting his own way, that’s the trouble. So when I wouldn’t agree with him he tried something else. It’s rubbish, take no notice.’ I must have looked sceptical, for she added: ‘He’s a bully, always has been. He relies on intimidating people into doing what he wants. Just ignore him. It’s the only way. Do you have a pen?’

I nodded, mystified, and held it out. Below Rigaut’s signature she wrote:
This is a lie. I alone own the picture and
the loan will go ahead.
She signed and dated it, and handed it back. ‘There.’

I took it gingerly, as one might a stick of dynamite. ‘Are you really sure this will be all right?’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t want to make trouble.’

‘With Jean-Jacques,’ she said, ‘you can’t avoid trouble. He searches it out. Always has. All one can do is ignore it or stand up to him.’

There didn’t seem much point arguing. Presumably she knew her own son.

I thanked her and stashed the letter safely away in my bag. I’d brought my little tape machine along, and now I pulled it out. ‘I was wondering, since I’m here, if perhaps you could tell me a bit more of your story.’

‘It’s rather long,’ she said drily. ‘Which bits did you have in mind?’

‘What happened after your brother died. And during the war.’ Perhaps we’d get to the bottom of that rumour. Or perhaps she wouldn’t mention it at all.

She sat back in her chair. For some minutes she said nothing, and I wondered whether she’d drifted off to sleep. But then she spoke. ‘So long ago,’ she said. ‘But to me it seems like yesterday.’

After Robert’s death, Juliette said, she collapsed. She knew it was her fault, and she wanted to die too. She refused to go home to La Jaubertie but took refuge with an aunt, her mother’s sister, in Passy. Eventually, however, she began to recover, and the question arose: where would she go? Her aunt and her parents naturally assumed it would be La Jaubertie, but that was out of the question. So was rue d’Assas (which now belonged to her: her parents, on her father’s insistence, had made over their share in it). Emmanuel wanted her to live with him – he was making a good living as a photographer, and had a chic new studio in Montparnasse. But she’d put her parents through so much – to add to their misery after what had happened was more than she could do. And then Emmanuel came up with a solution: they would get married.

That was in the spring of 1938. Then in 1939 war was declared, and Emmanuel was conscripted. When France fell he was near St Quentin, and there was no word to say what had become of him. She refused to leave Paris, but continued with her job as a legal secretary. If he had been taken prisoner, or had escaped, she would have heard, so she assumed he was dead.

One day someone cautiously opened the door and slid into the studio. She cried out in alarm: the intruder swung round: she found herself staring at a pistol. Terrified, she raised her eyes.

Emmanuel.

He wasn’t in uniform, and his clothes were different from the civilian clothes he usually wore. He explained that they were English. He’d come from England – from London. Officially, he didn’t exist.

‘Then how will you eat?’ she asked. Everything was rationed, and without papers there were no rations.

‘I’ve got some papers,’ he said, but did not tell her whose.

Later, she heard his story – or some of it. The armistice had caught his company near St Quentin. In the confusion of the retreat he and a friend had made off, lain low for a while at a farm near the fortress of Ham, then made their way to the coast at Hardelot-Plage near Boulogne. There, one night, they stole a dinghy and rowed across the Channel. They got across against all the odds, only to have their adventure nearly ended when in theory they had finally reached safety. It was four in the morning, first light, and they were beaching their boat, when a patrol of the Home Guard came across them, took them for German spies, and almost shot them. Fortunately they managed to persuade their captors that they were French, not German, and were taken to the local schoolmaster, who was also the commanding officer, and who eventually put them on the train for London, where they joined General de Gaulle. Now Emmanuel had been sent back to France, charged with various missions. He wanted to know who Juliette saw, how she spent her days, whether she knew any Germans, whether she ever came across the Resistance.

He didn’t live at the studio, though he often appeared there, and sometimes stayed the night. She didn’t ask what he was doing, nor where he got the money to live; nor did she mention his presence to any of her friends. She didn’t even know what name he operated under, though she did know that it was not his own, and that he had several sets of false papers. She simply did what she was told, without ever asking why, or knowing whether her action had had the desired effect. If there were others – and there must have been others – she never met them. She took instructions only from him, and only directly, by word of mouth, never in writing. Her life became a series of apparently random encounters. In the galleried café of the Samaritaine department store, with its many exits and entrances, she sat at the table he had specified, beside the wrought-iron balcony railing that overlooked the scurrying ground-floor shoppers, and passed an envelope, concealed in the menu, to a waitress who announced herself by tapping the table twice with her pencil. Another day, in the hat department, when she tried on a small red confection with a pheasant-feather after it had been rejected by a chic blonde woman in her thirties, she found a note behind the feather, which she passed on without reading it to a tailor in the rue Christine. In a little bookshop near the Odéon, she left a parcel in the back room, addressed to a Monsieur Denoyau. Taking her friend Arlette’s little girl Aurélie to a nursery near the parc Monceau, she exchanged the child for a slip of paper with an address, passed on to her by a girl with black curls in a red and white print dress. On these occasions she felt much as she had that April morning in the Louvre – scared, excited, jubilant, defiant, triumphant.