Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “Claude?”

  “Lucie. She has changed her name to Claude.”

  “That’s a pen name, isn’t it?”

  I thought it wise not to add that Claude would soon be taking her grandmother Mathilde’s maiden name, Cahun. In fact, it was possible I had already said too much, since my mother’s gaze rested on me for longer than was usual or necessary, but then something in her seemed to resolve itself, and she stood up and moved towards the window. She had more energy, more purpose. Perhaps she felt a weight had lifted.

  “This rain,” she said brightly. “Will it never stop?”

  Since both the bride and the groom had been married before, their wedding was a discreet affair. Only immediate family and a few close friends were present. Claude’s brother, Georges, attended with Madeleine, his wife, but he had vehemently objected to his father’s divorce—he had sided with Toinette—and he made no attempt to conceal how he felt about the marriage. After the ceremony, he refused to shake hands with the newlyweds, and when he spoke to me at the wedding party his voice was strangled. The whole thing was a travesty, he said. A farce.

  His face, with its brooding eyebrows, loomed in front of mine. “You’re not in favor of it, are you?”

  I had just as good a reason to feel betrayed, since it was possible that my mother and his father had become involved even before my father’s death, but Georges’s self-righteousness and self-absorption annoyed me so much that I found myself speaking in their defense.

  “What if they love each other?” I said.

  “Love.” He looked around, full lips twisting in horror and disgust. “This isn’t love, it’s lack of principle. It’s weakness.” He turned his back on me and went in search of Madeleine.

  The couple took their leave soon afterwards.

  “Has Georges left?” Monsieur Schwob asked me when I walked up to him.

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “He’s so busy these days.” Beneath Monsieur Schwob’s mustache, his smile was small and brave.

  When I offered him my congratulations, he took both my hands in his. “You’re a dear girl, Suzanne,” he said, “and I’m delighted you’re now part of the family.” He beamed at me. “Well, perhaps you always were. I’m only sorry Jean couldn’t be here. How is he?”

  “No better, I’m afraid.”

  He shook his head. “This wretched war.”

  Among the guests that day was the actor Édouard de Max. He had arrived with an American woman called Constant Lounsbery, who was a playwright, Claude told me, and a Buddhist. They had both been close friends of Marcel Schwob, her favorite uncle. In his late forties, and a leading man at the Comédie-Française, de Max was at the pinnacle of his fame. His black hair had the purple glint of a crow’s wing, and his leather gloves were an ostentatious yellow. Though Claude had assured me that he was homosexual, he spent his entire time talking to the female guests, and there came a moment, inevitably, when he turned his gaze on me.

  “Maurice tells me that you’re quite an artist.” His voice was smooth as honey poured over the back of a spoon.

  I told him I was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, and that drawing was my passion.

  “Not your only one, I hope,” he said with a smile that was at once provocative and playful. “Would you perhaps consider drawing me?”

  “It would be an honor.”

  Constant came over and took de Max’s arm. “Terrorizing the ladies,” she said, “as always.”

  “I don’t think this young woman is frightened of anyone.” De Max pushed a stray lock of hair back off his forehead.

  “Really?” Constant considered me, her eyes a stringent green, like gooseberries. “And what about romance, Suzanne? Will we be hearing wedding bells again before too long?”

  De Max was also watching me.

  “There must be a young man,” Constant said, “surely—a lovely girl like you…”

  Just then, the speeches began, and I saw that the playwright had taken my discomfort for coyness. Of course there was a young man. There always is.

  Later, champagne was served, and Claude, who seldom drank anything but whiskey, swallowed three glasses in quick succession. In front of everyone, she put an arm around my waist and tried to kiss me, her hot breath in my ear.

  “Lovers first,” she said in a loud whisper. “Now sisters!”

  Luckily, nobody seemed to hear.

  I ushered her outside, into the garden. Dusk was coming down. Warm yellow lamps hung from the trees.

  She couldn’t believe how convenient the marriage of our parents was, and how unlikely. It was as if they had entered into a conspiracy on our behalf. She saw them as naive, almost childlike, since our knowledge exceeded theirs, but perhaps that is always the way, she said, when you’re in possession of a secret.

  She walked through a flower bed, her new dress catching on a rose and tearing. Then she was noisily sick behind a tree.

  Later still, when we were in a carriage, traveling back to the Schwobs’ family home, she took my arm and drew me close. “You know what I think, Marcel? I think we made this happen.”

  “Being sisters, you mean?”

  She nodded. “We’re powerful, you and I, and the world has woken up and taken notice. It has molded itself to our desires.” She looked out at the dark streets of the town. “Our parents’ love will make our own invisible. It’s the disguise that we’ve been looking for.” She smiled. “It’s our painted guillotine.”

  A few weeks after the wedding, Monsieur Schwob suggested we take over the apartment on the fourth floor of the building on Place du Commerce. We had always dreamed of living together, and Monsieur Schwob seemed once again to be unconsciously colluding with us. Only later did it occur to me that his offer might not be as altruistic as it appeared to be. Perhaps the newlyweds wanted to have the second-floor apartment to themselves. If Claude no longer lived with them, they would be spared any embarrassment or awkwardness. Moreover, if Claude and I shared lodgings, it would be easier for me to discharge my duty of care. Monsieur Schwob might even be hoping that I would keep him informed on the state of her health. A photograph taken not long after we moved in was revealing about our mood. Claude’s face was half turned away, but her eyes were locked on the camera, as if it was a predator and she was cornered, unable to defend herself. Though I tried, as always, to cook food she liked, she had started eating less, and the weight loss showed in her cheeks, which were hollow, pinched. As for me, I had a look of grim determination. I was worried Claude might once again fall seriously ill, and that her father would carry out his threat to have her incarcerated. It’s for the best, Suzanne, he would say in his reasonable voice. He would be persuasive. He would be firm. As a woman, I would lack the power to stand up to him, and Claude and I would be separated again, for longer this time. Perhaps even forever.

  But the threat came from a different quarter, one I hadn’t had the foresight to anticipate. Early one morning, during our second summer on Jersey, Claude returned from a walk in a state of excited agitation. She had met a man, she said. He had been mending nets at the foot of the slipway, below the church. His name was Robert Steel, and he was a fisherman, though he also worked on his family’s tomato farm in the hills above the bay.

  “He has the body of a statue,” she told me, over breakfast.

  “You said that about me once—” The moment the words left my mouth I wished I hadn’t spoken, but Claude only smiled.

  “This is different,” she said.

  With me, she had been talking about my presence. It was my air of stillness and gravity, apparently, that made me statuelike. But Bob—she called him Bob—conformed to a physical archetype, a kind of erotic ideal. The statue he reminded her of was that of Antinous. Did I know it? I shook my head. Antinous was a Greek youth who had been the lover of Emperor Hadrian, she told me. He had wide shoulders a
nd a narrow waist. Long thighs. After his death, a cult had been established in his name.

  “Bob also has something of Rimbaud about him,” Claude added.

  “Really?” I poured myself more coffee. “Does he write poetry as well as grow tomatoes?”

  Claude sighed. “The Rimbaud who gave up writing when he was twenty-one. The Rimbaud who became an adventurer.” She reached for a bread roll and began to butter it. She had an appetite that morning, something that was almost unheard of. “Bob dreams of going to America—or Canada.”

  “Will you go with him?” I asked.

  “Of course not. I have to complete my studies.” She looked at me across the table. “You’re in a funny mood this morning.”

  That summer, she saw Bob nearly every day. Inevitably, I came to know him too. He was patient and well-meaning. He would be loyal. He was like the ground on which you might choose to build a house.

  Once, when I was left alone with him, he told me Claude was a mystery to him. He couldn’t make her out.

  “You’re nineteen,” I said.

  He was bouncing a small gray pebble on the palm of his hand. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  We were sitting in the shadow of the cemetery wall, on an upended rowing boat. It was low tide, and Claude was over by the rocks, collecting strands of seaweed for a photograph she wanted me to take. The seaweed, she had told me, was all that she’d be wearing.

  “Do you think she likes me?” Bob said.

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “You’re her sister.”

  I sighed. “Who knows what she thinks? She lives in a world of her own.”

  “Sometimes I think she does. Like me, I mean.” He flung the stone in the direction of the sea, then pushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned. He seemed to find Claude amusing. It didn’t bother him that he didn’t understand her. It wasn’t relevant.

  I worried that Bob might take her away from me. I worried that I only appealed to the tortured Claude, the Claude who had been twisted out of shape. I suspected—no, feared—that there might be another Claude who longed to be conventional. It was an incarnation that had been buried deep, but it could be unearthed. The love of a straightforward person like Bob might undo all the harm that had been done to her, restore her to how she was supposed to be. Was my love capable of that? I wasn’t sure. In any case, I wanted her to remain the odd, skewed girl who I had fallen for. I wished she had never met Bob Steel. I wanted him gone. I fantasized about him lying at the foot of a cliff with a broken neck. I fantasized about him drowning. He would be hauled to the surface, tangled like a fish in one of his own nets. If he were to die, I thought, he could have a cult.

  Like Antinous.

  July 1918. An ordinary weekday morning in our apartment in Nantes. I went to the box-room I used as a studio, and was about to start work on a fashion illustration when Claude appeared in the doorway.

  “This came in the post,” she said.

  She handed me a letter.

  Earlier that month, she had been rejected by an American university, since she lacked the necessary qualifications, but as I scanned the letter she had given me I saw that she had enrolled instead at the Sorbonne, where she would study philosophy and literature. As I stared at the matter-of-fact, typewritten lines, she told me she would be moving to Paris in September. Her father had agreed to give her a modest allowance, and she would be staying with friends of the family, in their apartment on avenue de Suffren. My mind had jammed. I couldn’t speak.

  “I thought you’d be proud of me,” she said.

  “I am proud of you,” I said. “But I’m still at art school, and I don’t finish for another eighteen months.”

  “I know. The only option is to live apart—for now.”

  To live apart. After we had fought so hard to be together.

  “I’m going to miss you terribly,” she went on. “We can visit each other, though, and we can write. It’s not that long.”

  “Eighteen months…” I stared at my hands. They were stained with ink, just as they had been on that dark rainy morning nine years before.

  Claude said something about our love being too strong to be destroyed by something as petty and mundane as distance. My patience came apart like wet paper.

  “Is that what you tell Bob as well?”

  Her mouth tightened. She disapproved of jealousy—on ideological grounds. She thought it was bourgeois, demeaning. Primitive. She seemed to have forgotten that she had also once been jealous.

  “Will you still see him?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Probably. From time to time.”

  “He’s so unlike you. He isn’t interested in any of the things you’re interested in.” I grappled for something I could use against him. “He doesn’t even read.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I find that quite refreshing.”

  I had been mean-spirited, and she had outwitted me—she nearly always got the better of me in arguments—but I found out later that my remarks had had an effect. While in Paris, she sent Bob at least one parcel of books. Along with the collected works of Oscar Wilde, she included something by her uncle—and Rimbaud’s poetry, of course…

  Paris. We had already visited the city several times. During the early years of the war it had felt feverish, unreal. The restaurants and cafés were crowded, and the women were arrayed in all the latest dropped-waist dresses and cardigan suits, but sometimes, if you looked up, a huge, ghostly zeppelin slid past the rooftops, and if you left your bedroom window open at night you could hear shells exploding on the battlefields to the north and east. Once, in Le Dôme, we sat next to Apollinaire, the poet who had coined the word “surrealism.” Wearing a sky-blue army uniform, he was dark under the eyes and his shoulders sloped, but a smile flickered at the edge of his small mouth, barely visible, like a lit match in a shaft of sun. He had been wounded in the head while fighting in the trenches, and Claude wondered whether he was taking opium for the pain. It would explain his distracted air, she said. It would explain that smile. He died two years later, just days before the Armistice, but at least we had caught a glimpse of him.

  When I stayed with Claude in the spring of 1919, the first place she took me to was a bookshop and lending library on rue de l’Odéon called La Maison des Amis des Livres. She had become friends with the owner, Adrienne Monnier, a witty, voluptuous blond woman who dressed in waistcoats, silk blouses, and skirts that were ankle-length and full. Adrienne’s clothes were always gray and white, the same color as her shop. Claude couldn’t decide if she looked like a peasant or a nun. She lived with a stick-thin, stylish American called Sylvia. Between them, they knew everyone.

  That night, after the reading, Adrienne introduced us to a slender, mercurial figure, eyes glittering beneath the brim of his black trilby.

  “This is Philippe Soupault,” she said. “He’s working on a book with André Breton.”

  Claude stared at him. “You know Breton?”

  He nodded casually. “I met him two years ago, at the Café de Flore.”

  “Claude writes,” Adrienne said.

  Soupault looked at Claude, a lit cigarette slanting from his lip. “Would you consider contributing to my magazine? It’s called Littérature. I just launched it.”

  Claude frowned and stared at the floor. “I’m not sure I’ve got anything to say.”

  “That’s the kind of writing that interests me most.” Grinning, Soupault pushed his hat to the back of his head.

  But Claude only murmured something about her own incompetence.

  Later, as we waited for a tram to take us back to avenue de Suffren, I asked Claude who André Breton was. She gave a little shrug. She had heard the name, she said. She thought he might be influential.

  “And the man we met—Soupault—he works with Breton?”

  She lit a cig
arette. “So it would seem.”

  “Why didn’t you agree to write for him? I thought you wanted to become part of literary Paris.”

  A tram approached, brakes grinding, but it was going in the wrong direction.

  “I don’t feel ready,” she said.

  She was adamant, but also furious with herself. She smoked one cigarette after another, and tore a fingernail with her teeth.

  I told her not to worry. There would be other opportunities.

  “You think?” The look she gave me was scathing, but also desperate. Her cigarette was trembling between her fingers.

  “You only just got here,” I said.

  One sultry Friday afternoon, my time at the École des Beaux-Arts almost at an end, I climbed the stairs to the apartment on Place du Commerce. On reaching the fourth floor, I saw that the door was open. A bag that looked familiar lay in the hall.

  “Claude?” I called out.

  I found her in the bedroom, packing clothes into a suitcase. She was wearing a simple black vest and a pair of pinstripe trousers, and she had cut off all her hair again. She had cut it for the first time the year before, in Jersey. Mr. Harden and his daughter Helen had noticed—who could fail to notice?—but they had been too discreet to mention it. They probably think I’ve become a Buddhist, Claude said. Or you’ve got lice, I said. I remembered how Claude had laughed at that. Why was she taking her things, though? I leaned my portfolio against the wall. My mouth was dry and my legs felt shaky. I had believed her when she told me that our love couldn’t be destroyed by distance. I had been naive. Complacent. She was leaving me, as I had feared. Backing away, I walked into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. For a few moments that was all I was aware of, that thin cascade of liquid dropping through my body, clear and cool.

  Claude came up behind me. “Are you all right, my love?”

  “I’m hot, that’s all.”

  “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  I turned to face her. “Why are you packing?”

  “We’re moving to Paris,” she said, “both of us.” She kissed my cheek, then swung away from me. “We’re original, unique. We need to live in a place that recognizes that.”