“Ah, my artistic sister,” Jean said, “and Lucie, her unusual friend…” As always when he talked to me, his tone of voice was affectionate but condescending.
Patrice asked if I would be coming to the dance at the weekend. I told him I wasn’t sure.
Jean spoke to Lucie. “Patrice has taken a fancy to Suzanne. I think he wants to marry her.”
“Shut up, Jean, for God’s sake.” Patrice was blushing.
“Maybe Suzanne has other plans,” Lucie said.
Jean smiled. “Like what?”
But Lucie had already turned away, and was seemingly engrossed in my work.
Later, Lucie and I put on coats and scarves and left the house. The streets were cold and still, the sky a soft yielding gray that seemed to promise snow. As a rule, Lucie did most of the talking. That afternoon, however, she stared at the ground, two frown lines between her eyebrows, as if she had been set a riddle she couldn’t solve. We crossed the railway tracks near the Gare de la Bourse and sat on a bench under the lime trees, overlooking the slow-moving river.
“What do you think of Patrice?” she said eventually.
“He’s all right. I don’t know him very well.” I paused. “Why do you ask?”
She shook her head. “No reason.”
“So what are these other plans,” I said a few moments later, “that I’m supposed to have?”
Lucie reached down and tied her shoelace.
“All in good time,” she said.
Spring came again. We cycled south, over the bridges and out of the city. Fog had rolled in from the coast, and a stealthy silence enveloped us. The creak of Lucie’s back wheel, the crunch of our tires in the dust and grit. My breathing. Sometimes a house loomed out of the murk—the sharp angle of a roof, the low, mournful barking of a dog. We passed a row of poplars—elegant gray shapes, barely suggested. The landscape was subtle and elusive as a Japanese watercolor.
After riding for two hours, we left our bicycles in a ditch, and I followed Lucie along a track that curved between two hedgerows. Sometimes she glanced at me over her shoulder, and there was tension in her face, and also a kind of wonder. A dark wood rose ahead of us. She found a path that led off into the trees. A new silence, even stealthier. The floor of the wood was ankle-deep in mauve-blue flowers, their bitter, milky smell so strong that it brought me to a standstill.
“The first time I saw bluebells was in England,” Lucie said. “After Easter, they were everywhere. In France, they’re much more rare.”
“I’ve never seen them before.” I knelt down and touched one of the flowers. Its thick green stalk, its cluster of bells. “There are so many. It’s as if the ground’s covered with smoke.”
Lucie smiled.
We sat under a tree, our backs against the trunk. I asked her what England was like.
“I love the English,” she said. “They’re so tolerant. They allowed me to be myself.” She gazed up into the foliage. “I think they have more imagination than the French.”
“Are you sorry to be back?”
Her eyes slid sideways, finding mine. “Not any more.”
It was hard to know how to interpret what she had said. I was aware of her presence, like a sort of heat.
Later, as we moved deeper into the wood, she told me she had decided to change her name. From now on, she would be called Claude. She hadn’t told her father. It would only worry him. There wasn’t much, she said, that didn’t worry him.
“Claude,” I said, looking at her.
“You don’t like it.”
“I do. It’s just—”
“It sounds like a man.”
“Well—yes.”
“That’s the whole idea. It’s important to challenge people’s preconceptions.”
The fog had thinned, but the light was fading. The scent of bluebells, already dense, seemed to have intensified.
Your identity should not be imposed on you, Lucie told me as we walked back through the trees. You have to create it yourself. Her cheeks had flushed, and her hands made star shapes in the darkening air. You have to make yourself, she said. You can’t let anyone else make you, least of all your family.
“But they did make you,” I said.
“That”—and she had a triumphant air, as if I had just fallen into a trap she had prepared for me—“is the savage irony of our predicament. That is the great paradox.”
She had a new surname as well, she went on—Courlis, like the bird—but she wasn’t happy with it. She would need another one. She would choose it soon. Stopping in her tracks, she looked at me. It might be good if I thought of a new name too, she said. Something that came from inside. Something I could properly inhabit. Something genuine.
We climbed onto our bicycles and set out for the city. The evening felt still. Becalmed. Lucie’s hair streamed behind her as she rode, brown against the deep green of the trees.
As we approached the outskirts of Nantes, a woman in a black dress rushed out of the gloom towards us. I pedaled faster, but she ran after me and gave me such a shove that I lost my balance and fell onto the road, my bicycle landing on top of me. I called out to Lucie, but she kept going. I watched, astonished, as she disappeared into the dark. The woman stood over me and laughed. It was peculiar laughter, like a series of inhalations. Beneath her dress, her feet were bare.
A man came up and took the woman by the arm. She offered no resistance. He said he was sorry, then asked if I was hurt. There were lines of worry round his eyes, and I knew this wasn’t the first time the woman had run out into the road.
I stood with my bicycle between us, like a barrier. One of my knees was grazed, the stocking torn, and my dress was covered with dust.
He apologized again, then spoke quietly to the woman and led her away.
Though shaken, I mounted my bicycle and rode on. I caught up with Lucie a few minutes later. She was sitting on a grass verge, hugging her knees.
“You could have waited,” I said.
She looked past me, down the road. “I’m sorry. I was frightened.”
“So was I.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I thought it was my mother.”
On a warm summer afternoon, Claude took me to Place du Bouffay, and we stood exactly where the guillotine had stood. During the Revolution, more than five thousand people had been executed in the square. Though the sun was pressing on our heads and shoulders, we shivered a little at the thought. An interesting fact about the guillotine, Claude said. The authorities had it painted red in an attempt to render the bloodshed less disturbing for those who came to watch. She spun in a slow circle, arms outspread. Three hundred years earlier, she went on, Gilles de Rais had been hanged and burned in the very same place. Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as Bluebeard—guilty of the mutilation, rape, and murder of one hundred and fifty children. A small bone stood out on her wrist, and her left eye flickered. Her neck was like a stalk. I asked if she had lost weight, and she said she had.
“I’ve been starving myself,” she told me.
“What?”
“I’ve not been eating.” Her chin tilted upwards a little. “I like the feeling. Also, it helps me with my writing.”
I felt as if somebody had taken hold of my heart and squeezed. I hadn’t known Claude for much longer than a year, but to me she looked ill.
Later, in a dark corner of our favorite buvette, I asked if her father knew.
“He hasn’t noticed,” she said. “He’s too busy, with the newspaper. But I think he smelled ether on me the other day. I’ve been inhaling ether.” Her pupils dilated so suddenly that I seemed to be off balance and rushing towards her. “Have you ever done that?”
I shook my head.
“I think I might be an etheromaniac. Isn’t that a wonderful word?” She laughed one of her small, dry laughs. “The trouble is
, it’s not very good for you, and your breath smells afterwards, sometimes for days.” She made a face. “Paracelsus used it on chickens, apparently, as an anesthetic.”
I glanced sideways, through the window. A black barge heaped with sand slid past. The barge had a name, but I couldn’t make it out. Gulls jostled in its wake.
“You want to know what it’s like, Suzanne?” she went on. “You float backwards, out of yourself—not smoothly, but jerkily, as if you’ve become mechanical. I saw my body from the outside. It looked like a doll that wasn’t being played with, a doll that someone had thrown down. All the life was with me, where I was. And that was all I was—pure energy.
“Then I was adrift on a dark sea. The water was thick, like oil, and the waves were luxurious, hypnotic. Not waves at all, really, but undulations, like a sheet shaken out over a bed, or a curtain billowing, and there were waves inside me too, a welling of contentment, all my troubles gone…”
I brought my eyes back from the window.
“Sometimes you pass out.” Claude reached for my hand. “Do you want to try?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps.”
When she took her hand away I could feel the imprint of her, a warm shape cooling.
“My father keeps looking at me,” she said. “Staring—”
The words flew out of her, one sentence tumbling over another. I worried she would spin out of control and break apart. I wasn’t supposed to worry, though. She hadn’t come to me for that. She had come to me for something else, something her family couldn’t give her.
But she was still talking.
“—afraid I had to exaggerate—you know, about how sensible you are. I had to make you sound—well—a bit boring, actually—”
“Thanks very much.”
She grinned. “It’s not what I think. It’s just for him. I told him you steady me. Keep me level. I said that you were my salvation.” She gave me an anxious look. “I hope I didn’t go too far.”
“Salvation,” I said. “It’s a big word.”
“When it comes to you, no word is big enough.” Her face acquired a sudden, strange nobility, as if she were about to sacrifice herself on my behalf. “There’s no world unless you’re in it.”
I didn’t speak, but a thought rose into my head, as hard to miss as a full moon. That’s how I feel too. About you. Sitting by the window, I seemed to experience Claude’s ether dream. I was cast loose on dark waters, powerful and unafraid. I floated free. And then, in a finger snap, my new name came to me, the name that would be mentioned in the same breath as hers, and it flew straight from my brain into my mouth and out into the air.
“Marcel Moore.”
“What?” Claude too, it seemed, had been in something of a trance.
I repeated what I had said. Marcel, after her uncle. I had never met him, but I admired him, both as a writer and as a spirit. And there was another factor. Marcel was a man’s name, and yet it sounded feminine. I liked the way it loitered between the genders, as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind.
Claude was nodding. “And Moore?”
“It’s an English name.”
“You wanted to set yourself apart…”
“Yes.” Though the truth was, I had chosen the name to appeal to the Anglophile in her. Also, she claimed she was related to George Moore, the Irish novelist.
“How did you think of it?”
“I don’t know. It just arrived.”
Claude leaned her elbows on the table, her slender forearms upright, and considered me. “Marcel Moore,” she said. “That sounds like someone I could love.”
Claude’s family owned several properties, one of which was on the Atlantic coast, in Le Croisic. A traditional Breton house, with solid stone walls and pale-blue shutters, it stood on the quayside, overlooking the harbor. From the wrought-iron balcony on the first floor you could watch the sardine fishermen unloading their catch or mending nets. In 1910, Claude and I went to Le Croisic on holiday. My brother Jean had been in the same class as Claude’s brother, Georges—their friendship was the reason our two families had become so close—but they chose not to come with us. Jean was intent on following my father into the medical profession, and he was busy studying. As for Georges, he had often cared for Claude when she was young—he had been like a mother to her, she told me, when their mother first fell ill—but he was about to be married, and no longer had much time for her. Their absence was a blessing. In Le Croisic, Claude and I could be alone together. If the sky was cloudy, I drew or painted at the kitchen table, while Claude curled up in a chair with books about Buddhism, or practiced yoga on a reed mat in the yard. I tried to prepare food that she would eat. I cooked pale omelets, using the whites of three eggs and only half a yolk. I steamed spears of asparagus. I made cups of hot chocolate, sweetened with muscovado sugar. When the weather was fine, we spent whole days sunbathing on secluded beaches. We turned a deep, dark gold. As I stretched out on the sand, the world shrank to a fragment of itself. All I was aware of was Claude beside me, her right hand resting on the hollow of her belly. The delicate mole near her armpit. A twist of wet brown hair…One afternoon, as I lay next to her, I turned my head until my lips almost touched her shoulder. Was she asleep, or was she only pretending, waiting to see what I would do? I longed to go further, but didn’t dare. Instead, I drew the smell of her skin into my lungs. I breathed her in. My heart rocked like a small boat caught in the wake of a larger one.
That winter, after days of heavy rain, the Loire burst its banks. Nantes had always been at the mercy of the river—there had been flooding in 1904, when I was eleven—but according to my father it felt more destructive than usual. A bridge was swept away, and since many of the city’s streets were underwater the tram service had to be suspended. A drowned goat washed up on a neighbor’s doorstep. This was proof, my grandmother Olympe remarked, if proof were needed. The devil was at large. My father, a man of science, looked at me and rolled his eyes.
One Sunday in December, Claude picked me up from my house and we walked south, towards Quai de la Fosse. On Île Feydeau, we had to use the rickety wooden walkways that had been erected as temporary pavements. She was in one of her heightened moods. Wild, vivid talk spilled out of her. She had been writing all night, she said. She’d hardly slept. In the middle of Pont Maudit, we stopped and leaned on the parapet. Bending round the stone stanchions of the bridge, the brown, swollen river bristled with snapped-off branches and other debris. As I watched, a table floated past, legs in the air.
“I almost died the other day,” Claude said. “Our housekeeper found me on the bathroom floor.”
My breath caught in my throat. “What happened?”
“I put some drops of ether in a glass of Château d’Yquem,” she said, still staring at the swirling water. “I took too much.” She gave me a look that was defiant and accusing. “It was deliberate.”
“You tried to kill yourself?” I found it hard to say the words.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“But why?”
“There’s not enough to keep me here.”
Turning away, she moved on across the bridge, towards Île Gloriette. I remained motionless for a few moments, then I ran after her.
“You’ve got so much to look forward to,” I said. “All your dreams—”
“If only it was that simple.”
Île Gloriette was an industrial zone, its narrow high-sided streets lined with warehouses and factories built from smoke-blackened brick. There was floodwater here too, but fewer walkways. Sometimes they gave out, and we were forced to double back. On rue Pélisson we came across a rowing boat tethered by a frayed rope to an iron ring in the wall. Claude looked both ways to see if there was anyone about, then stepped down into the boat. It tilted sharply, and she nearly overbalanced. Small waves fled towards the row of houses opposite.
She beckoned to me. “What are you waiting for?”
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll bring it back.”
I untied the rope and climbed in.
We rowed east, Claude sitting in the stern. When we spoke, our voices seemed to fill the empty streets, amplified by the water that surrounded us. Sometimes I saw a face in an upstairs window, pale as a lily trapped under a bell jar. The island felt abandoned, sinister.
We passed a sign that said rue Monteil. Up ahead was the Lefèvre factory, where the famous biscuits—Petit-Beurre—were made, and the air was heavy with the sweet smell of wheat flour and evaporated milk. I wanted to know more about what Claude had told me. I wanted to believe she had been exaggerating, and that the whole thing had been an accident. I couldn’t find a way of asking, though. Instead, I resorted to a question that ran parallel.
“What’s wrong with your mother?”
Claude squinted at the tapering brick chimneys of the factory. “They think she’s schizophrenic.”
I had never heard the word, even though my father was a doctor. Claude said it was relatively new. First used in a lecture by a Swiss psychiatrist called Eugen Bleuler, she said, “schizophrenia” was derived from the Greek words for “to split” and “mind.” If she understood the condition correctly, schizophrenics were people whose thinking had become fragmented, and who tended to suffer from severe delusions and hallucinations.
“Is it curable?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” She flung a fast, anxious glance in my direction. “You don’t think I’m like that, do you?”
I pulled on the oars. The water was black, and light from the setting sun broke up on the surface, like bits of a smashed red plate.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Good.”
There was a whirr and clatter of wings as a pigeon flew low over our heads. We ducked down, our hands around our ears, then we looked at each other and laughed.
Some months later, when summer came, Claude and I took a train down to the Côte d’Azur. Claude’s grandmother, Madame Courbebaisse, lived in a village a few miles outside Toulon, and Claude had written to her, suggesting that we visit. Anything to get out of Nantes, she told me, what with her father constantly worrying about her, and Georges having moved into their apartment with his pregnant wife. I would like Le Pradet, she said. The house stood on five hectares of terraced land that was planted with oaks and pines, and the beach was only a short walk away.
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