Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “Damn,” I said again.

  This time Claude looked round. “What’s the matter?”

  When I told her about the shadow, she stood up and walked over.

  I pointed to the corner of the image. “It’s my head and shoulders. At least, I think that’s what it is.”

  “I like it,” she said.

  “But it’s a mistake.”

  “It’s a good mistake.” She paused. “There are all sorts of ways in which the shadow completes the picture.”

  I shook my head. “I’m a terrible photographer.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m going out for a while.”

  On leaving the hotel, I took the path that climbed through the trees behind the church. If I walked fast, I thought to myself, I would be able to watch the sun setting from the rocky outcrop west of Beauport.

  That evening, over dinner, Claude returned to the subject of our earlier conversation. What I had succeeded in doing—and she used the word advisedly, she said, since the picture was without doubt a success—was to create a portrait of our relationship. I stood between her and any other viewer, my presence binding as a signature, a ring. I was watching over her, she told me. We couldn’t be separated, not even in a photograph.

  “Is that all I am to you?” I said glumly. “A shadow?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” She sipped her whiskey. “It even works aesthetically. Didn’t you notice how the rounded shadow of your head offsets the triangle of shadow between my ankles and my thighs?”

  “That’s unintentional—”

  But “unintentional” was a word we tried not to use. It was a word people hid behind. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. There was no such thing. Every accident contained an element of the deliberate. This was the principle that lay behind André Breton’s concept of déambulation: you had to accept—or even own—that which you came across by chance. Was it also Breton who had insisted that one should always leave a window open for the visitations of the unconscious and the unexpected?

  I took out Claude’s camera and turned it in my hands. A Kodak Type 3 Folding Pocket model with red bellows and a spirit level, it had belonged to her father, though he had never used it with any great enthusiasm. There were very few pictures of Claude as a child. “You don’t think it’s time we invested in a new model?”

  “What’s wrong with that one?” Claude asked.

  “It’s twenty years old—at least.”

  She gave me a swift, sly look. “You’re not blaming the camera, are you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Don’t worry about the shadows,” she said. “They’re hard to avoid if the light’s behind you—”

  “I forgot to tell you,” I said. “Something happened—on my walk.”

  While I was on the headland, between Beauport and Fiquet, clouds surged up from the northwest, and a strong wind that smelled of rust tugged at my clothes. The light faded rapidly. That was when I saw him, in the long grass next to the path. At first I took him for a child, since his head was no higher than my shoulder. As I drew nearer, though, I realized it was a man on his knees. He had his back to me, and his right elbow was moving rhythmically. His head turned when he sensed my presence. We were close enough to speak to each other, despite the wind, but he said nothing. He just watched me, over his shoulder. His right arm had fallen still. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to move.

  At last, he rose to his feet. He was huge, with hands that hung against his thighs like tools. Since he stood with his back to the setting sun his face was in shadow, and when he finally spoke he used Jèrriais, a language I had seldom come across, and didn’t know.

  “You have no place here, not alone.”

  That was what I thought he said, though I couldn’t be sure. Did he think the darkness would envelop me and I would lose my way? Did he think I might fall to my death? Or was he warning me against himself—what he was capable of, what he might do?

  “I was about to turn around.” I gestured behind me. “I’m staying at the hotel. Over there.”

  He still hadn’t moved.

  “Go back,” he said.

  I obeyed.

  “It sounds like one of the Raymond brothers,” Claude said.

  She told me there were three or four of them, and that they were all enormous men. Though they couldn’t read or write, they were astonishingly good with numbers. She had watched them once, playing darts in the hotel bar. They would come down from the hills to drink.

  “Where was I?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I think it was the summer you were nursing your brother.”

  “You must have been with Bob.” I knew he liked a few pints after work.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  She talked about inbreeding on the island. There was a mental hospital in St. Helier, she claimed, where the products of all the incestuous relationships ended up. She was looking past me, into the night.

  “This is a wild place,” she said.

  “May I join you?”

  We looked round. It was Vera, the Englishwoman.

  Claude pushed her chair back. “We were just going to bed,” she said. “We’re very tired.”

  It wasn’t true. We hadn’t even ordered coffee.

  “Oh.” Vera looked at the floor.

  “I’m sorry, Vera,” I said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  Like the Raymond brothers, Bob’s family were island people. They had never had anything to do with artists or intellectuals—or with anyone from Paris, for that matter. That was not their world. Once or twice, I caught Bob’s relatives laughing at Claude behind her back, and though it hurt me to see them mocking her I couldn’t help but find it reassuring. They didn’t approve of Bob’s interest in Claude. They saw no future in it.

  If Bob’s mother began to confide in me, it was perhaps because I seemed capable and solid—more like one of her own, in other words—and since I viewed her as an ally when it came to Bob and Claude, sensing that she might be against the relationship, I tended to encourage her. One morning, we visited the Steel family’s farm up on La Moye. Bob had told Claude that he wanted to show her the greenhouses where they grew tomatoes. As I had no particular interest in greenhouses, I offered to help Mrs. Steel with her chores. We were seated at the kitchen table, shelling peas, when she suddenly asked me why my sister’s hair was so short.

  “I think it suits her,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”

  Mrs. Steel’s mouth widened and narrowed, and she shook her head. “She looks like a man. It isn’t right.”

  I remembered the young woman whose father had killed her because she’d cut her hair in the style of Joan of Arc.

  “She’s not like the rest of us, is she,” Mrs. Steel said.

  She leaned towards me, and a smell came off her, rancid as butter left in the sun. She seemed avaricious, as if the information she was seeking might provide her with some form of nourishment.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I could see all the questions circling inside her.

  “Was she ever—you know—put away?”

  This was the moment I had been waiting for. You might even say I had engineered it. I hesitated, as if unsure whether I should speak. But I was sure. I’d never been more sure.

  “No.” Eyes lowered, I split a pod open and used my thumb to send the peas tumbling into the bowl that stood between us. “Her mother was, though.”

  “I knew it.” There was a coarse, almost sensual thrill to Mrs. Steel’s voice.

  “Please don’t say anything to Claude,” I said, “or to your son.”

  If Claude found out, she would never forgive me for revealing her family secret, or for interfering in her life.

  “Don’t you worry,” Mrs. Steel said. “I won’t breathe a word.”

>   But she knew what I had done. I saw a shrewd light in her eyes, and also, I thought, a glimmer of respect. I had showed myself to be ruthless, as she was. If I wanted something I would fight for it, and I would use whatever ammunition came to hand.

  Some months later, back in Paris, I went to see Édouard de Max in Georges Rivollet’s Les Phéniciennes. Since meeting de Max at the wedding, I had made many drawings of him, one of which I had given him as a fiftieth birthday present. More recently, I had designed posters for several of his productions. I admired his work, both in the theater and in film. He was one of the great actors of his age.

  That night, he was playing Créon, a role ideally suited to his powerful and brooding presence, and once the curtain had fallen I went backstage. After a show, he was generally surrounded by admirers, and I would have to push my way through the crowd just to offer a few words of congratulation, but when I walked into his dressing room I was surprised to find him alone. His satin robe was half undone, revealing gray chest hair. He had yet to remove his makeup. His eyes were rimmed in black.

  “Suzanne,” he said in his rich, doomed voice. “How very good of you to come. Is Claude here too?”

  “She sends her apologies. She’s not well.” I had left her at home, complaining of stomach pains.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” de Max said.

  His performance had been a tour de force, I told him, as always.

  “As always.” He let out a morbid, fatalistic laugh. “That’s precisely the feeling I had this evening. I’m just repeating myself, over and over. Everything I do, I’ve done before. There’s nothing new.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Forgive me, Suzanne. I’m not myself.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No, no. Just weary…” He paused. “I’m fifty-three. Can you imagine?”

  Sweat had mingled with his makeup, tiny white grains lodging in the lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. He was beginning to detach himself from the role he had played that evening. It was eerie, and slightly disturbing, like watching a snake cast off its skin; there was the actor, and then there was the man. I felt the transformation was sacred, and shouldn’t be witnessed, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “Would you join me in a drink?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he reached for the bottle on his dressing table and poured me a glass of something clear.

  “Schnapps,” he said. “A present from a German critic.” He shrugged, then gulped from his glass.

  I sipped from mine. “Do you mind if I draw you while we’re talking?”

  “Oh Christ. Do you have to? I’m a complete wreck.”

  “I like wrecks.”

  “Suzanne,” he said, “you have no mercy.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” I reminded him of the lithograph I had given him.

  “Ah yes. On the occasion of my unmentionable birthday.” He let out a sigh. “So very kind of you.”

  I remembered how he had held my picture away from his body, his head cocked. My God, he had said, I look as if I’m about to pounce on something and devour it. It was true. I had portrayed him in bloody crimsons and inky blacks, his face distorted as he glanced over his shoulder, his upper body hidden by a swirling cloak. I look oddly hungry, he added, and it was clear that he was pleased. He liked to think of himself as dangerous.

  He pushed his hair back from his forehead and nodded gloomily. “You have a real gift. I should be honored to be drawn by you.”

  “You don’t object, then?”

  “Not so long as I can drink.” When he had refilled his glass, he held the bottle out to me.

  I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

  “I hear Claude’s been acting…”

  “She has, yes.”

  Since our move to Paris, Claude had taken part in a number of experimental productions. She had grown up surrounded by actors—Marguerite Moreno, Constant Lounsbery, and de Max himself, of course—and it was inevitable, perhaps, that she would be drawn to the theater.

  De Max began to reminisce about Claude’s uncle, and how Marcel had once adapted a play for him and Sarah Bernhardt. Francesca da Rimini was the title. He had taken the role of Francesca’s lover, Paolo, who was caught in a hurricane made up of the souls of the dead. It had been a sensation—an absolute sensation. This was in 1906, before Bernhardt’s leg was amputated. She was a remarkable woman, he told me. Impossible too. A monster, really. While on tour, she slept in a coffin lined with satin. Her evening gowns had dead bats pinned to them. Her pet alligator drank champagne. Once, she decided to have a tiger’s tail grafted onto the base of her spine, and found a surgeon willing to perform the operation. Her friends talked her out of it. So many stories. Marcel knew Bernhardt, of course. That was why she had agreed to appear in the play.

  “Poor Marcel,” de Max went on. “I saw him two days before he died, in his apartment on Île Saint-Louis.” He poured himself another schnapps. “It was freezing outside, Paris all white and frosted, like a cake. He was in bed with pneumonia, and his tiny red dog—I think it was Japanese—was sitting on his head. And Marcel fighting for air, but weak, so weak…” He sighed again. “It tore me apart to lose him. He was only thirty-six.”

  Though my eyes moved constantly between de Max’s face and the sketchpad on my knee, I was careful to nod or to murmur a few words every now and then, since it was important that he kept talking. I wanted to prolong his transition from actor into man. I wanted to try and capture the moment when he hovered between the two, transparent, spent.

  And then, suddenly, I noticed that his voice had altered.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What was that?”

  “Put down your pencil.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.” He gave me his most seductive look, his chin and eyelids lowered, his black hair falling across his forehead. “I’ve always admired you, Suzanne. You have a certain—nobility…”

  If this hadn’t reminded me of something Claude might say, I might have laughed, but my thoughtful reaction, which took longer than laughter and was less dismissive, must have led him to believe that I was not entirely unreceptive to his admiration, for he moved nearer, his robe gaping open. He took hold of my head, his hands closing over my ears. I felt, oddly, as if I were under the sea. Looking into my eyes, he covered my mouth with his. His tongue, which was hot and acrid, forced its way between my lips. My drawing pad slipped off my knees. As I struggled for breath, a deep note resonated inside him, and one of the lightbulbs that framed his dressing table mirror winked, then blew. Still clutching my pencil, I placed my free hand on his bare chest and pushed back hard. The legs of my chair screeched on the wood floor. I stood up abruptly.

  “I should go,” I said.

  De Max gazed at the floor, grinning foolishly, then turned towards the mirror. His huge, dramatic face was blank, almost astonished. He reached for his glass of schnapps. Was he even aware of what he had done? And if so, would he remember?

  As I backed out of his dressing room he was still staring into the mirror, though he didn’t appear to be looking at himself. I thanked him for the drink. Either he didn’t hear me or he chose not to respond. I found myself in an unlit passageway behind the stage. My lips were stinging. Worried that he might pursue me, I glanced over my shoulder. His dressing room door stood half open, a wedge of bright yellow in the dark, and a stillness seemed to emerge from within, the resonating stillness of a tomb, and him inside, like a rare black beetle trapped in amber. Groping my way to the stage door, I slipped out into the night.

  Once in the cobbled alley that ran down the side of the theater, I wrapped my arms around myself as if I were cold. Nothing had happened, I told myself. Not really. Then it occurred to me that he too might leave by the stage door. I moved out of the alley and onto the street. A black cat ran
past, its tail vertical. Should I avoid him from now on? No, that might arouse suspicion. It would be more elegant if I feigned amnesia. Kiss? What kiss? He had drunk most of the bottle. It seemed unlikely he would remember his momentary indiscretion. He might not even remember that I had visited his dressing room. He would let his heavy head rest on his arm, and when he woke an hour or two later, stiff-limbed and cold, he would think he had dreamt about me. Because no one had come to see him after the show. No one cared. He was finished as an actor. Finished.

  I walked fast. By the time I was halfway home I was sorry I hadn’t been calmer, more understanding. I could have teased de Max affectionately. I could have blamed it on the schnapps. Those Germans, I could have said. If this is what they drink, no wonder they thought they could conquer Europe. But I had been too dull-witted, too slow.

  Soon I was turning the corner into rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. As I pushed through the gate I looked up at our apartment. The lights were all still on. I opened the front door.

  “Claude?”

  There was no reply.

  In the drawing room, a single small lamp burned. The room was crowded with shadows, and I thought I saw de Max over by the window, his broad back hunched, his face turned towards me. As I stared with more intensity into the gloom, my body motionless, my breath jolted by the beating of my heart, the image broke up into familiar components—a partially drawn curtain, a wing-backed chair, a lacquer vase…I remembered the graze of his whiskers, and the pepper smell of his dried sweat. I remembered his fiery tongue. How would it have been, I wondered, if he had taken things more slowly? How would I have felt if he had courted me? If I had been his lover—

  A weak voice called my name. I hurried down the corridor and into the bathroom. Claude was sitting on the tiled floor, against the wall. She looked at me, her face white and strained. “You’re late back.”