Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “I’ve been thinking that we should live somewhere else,” Claude announced one warm May afternoon.

  We were sitting in a café on Place Blanche, one that Breton frequented, though he hadn’t arrived as yet.

  “Where would we go?” I asked.

  “We could emigrate—to Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  “Why not? We have the money now.”

  My mother had died the month before, after a long, slow decline. As a result, we would no longer have to rely on monthly allowances. From now on, we would have complete financial independence.

  Canada, though…

  I remembered Bob enthusing about the country, and wondered if his dreams had lodged in Claude, become her own. Though she did her best to conjure up the place for me—the gritty, French-speaking cities, the wide wheat prairies, the tall blue skies—the whole idea began to seem exaggerated and absurd, and by the time Breton appeared we were both laughing at a vision of ourselves in Stetson hats and jeans.

  “What’s so amusing?” Breton asked as he mopped the sweat from his forehead and took his place at the table.

  “Canada,” I said.

  The look that rose onto his face confirmed a feeling I had often had about him. For all his brilliance and authority, there was something preposterous about André Breton. No wonder Robert Desnos called him “the Pope.” One couldn’t help wanting to prick the bubble of his self-importance. Decades later, when I visited Paris for the last time, someone told me about Breton’s trip to Mexico, when he stayed with Diego Rivera and collaborated on the famous Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art with Rivera’s house guest, Leon Trotsky. When Breton had departed, Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, was asked what she thought of him. “Pompous, arrogant, and boringly intellectual,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the old cockroach.” Anyone who had spent time with Breton would know what she meant, even if they didn’t agree with her.

  But if not Canada, Claude said that night, then where?

  It was still hot outside, and we were lying in bed with the windows open. The air stood solid and unmoving in the room.

  “Do we have to leave?” I said. “I like it here.”

  She walked to the window, the sheet twisted round her waist and trailing behind her. She looked like a ravaged bride, her wedding dress in tatters, half torn off.

  “What about Jersey?” she said.

  I thought once again of Bob, though we hadn’t seen or heard of him in at least ten years, not since he got married. But Claude was talking about the heat, the sea. All the summers we had spent, our bodies rocked by the waves, then drying in the sun. Our skin slowly turning brown. Cycling down green lanes, reading in the shade. The taste of farm butter, studded with tiny chips of sea salt. The goat cheese, the blackberry jam. The eggs. When we were on the island, we were accepted for who we were, she said, and no one interfered. In recent years, it was the place where we had been happiest.

  “We feel at ease every time we go,” she went on. “It’s like one of those smooth stones you keep in your pocket because it feels so good in your hand. Also, it’s positioned between France and England, without belonging to either. It’s independent and awkward and oddly fierce. It’s an anomaly. Like us. Why didn’t we think of it before? Everything we want is there.” She turned to face me. “Why are you smiling?”

  I was smiling because she had said “we,” even though the whole thing was so clearly her idea. I was also smiling because I could feel myself beginning to give in. It was the kind of speech I might have made. I was the practical one, the sensible one. I was the rock. Sometimes, though, just sometimes, Claude would become me and I would become her—while making love, for instance, or dancing—and it was unforced and seamless, it was comfortable, this reversing of our roles, this intermingling of our attributes and our desires. I had seen acquaintances of ours notice this capacity in us, and I had watched it arouse their jealousy, despite the fact that they were richer than we were, and more celebrated, and despite the fact that they were not, as a rule, people for whom a feeling like jealousy was either natural or valid. But they realized that they didn’t have anything we wanted, and they took our self-sufficiency as a kind of rejection, or even as an expression of contempt. If money, beauty, and fame aren’t coveted by the people who don’t have them, they lose their value for the people who do. Perhaps that was why we had been sidelined. Since you want for nothing, the world had said, I will give you nothing. See how you like that. For all Claude’s talk about the irrelevance of recognition and success—she maintained they were bourgeois preoccupations—she still felt she had been excluded, and that exclusion hurt. I would tell her not to listen to the world. She should only listen to herself. Easy to say, but not so easy to achieve. If we removed ourselves, it was not because we had been vanquished, but because we were complete.

  “Jersey,” I said at last. “It would be like being on holiday, only all the time.”

  She came towards me, skin gleaming in the half-dark. “So you agree with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t think we’d be playing safe?”

  “Only on the surface.”

  She laughed. “You’re more than I deserve.”

  I reached for her, our bodies locking into place. We would move to Jersey, with its idyllic beaches, its green gullies and ravines, its delicious isolation. Friends would visit from time to time, but we would have privacy and peace. We would live quietly, take photographs.

  Love each other.

  SELF-PORTRAIT IN NAZI UNIFORM

  1937–1944

  The moment we set foot on the island in May 1937, things seemed to spring into motion, almost as if our arrival had been anticipated, or as if we had responded to a summons. Bob Colley had taken over as proprietor of the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel—his mother had retired—and he greeted us with his customary warmth and humor. The Colleys were like family, as Claude was fond of saying, but without any of the complications or disadvantages. We had been staying at the hotel for no more than a few days when Bob approached us at breakfast. Leaning over the table, he told us in a low voice that there was a property for sale that might be of interest.

  “Where is it,” Claude asked, “this property?”

  “That’s the wonderful thing.” He pointed past me, through the window. “It’s just over there, on the other side of the road.”

  “The church?” Claude said.

  “No, not the church…” Bob’s eyes squeezed shut and his mouth opened wide and a rhythmic creaking or wheezing emerged, as if something deep inside him needed oiling. “Oh, you do make me laugh,” he said when he had himself under control again. He shook his head. “It’s a house,” he said. “I think you should take a look.”

  La Rocquaise was a long three-story residence that dated from the fourteenth century, with walls built from granite and dormer windows set in a roof of reddish-orange tile. One room opened onto the next through what the estate agent called “Jersey doors,” leading at last to a drawing room with a large stone fireplace that felt almost baronial. The upstairs rooms were darker and more cramped, but most of them had sea views. What made the house irresistible to us, though, was the way it turned its back on the land and gathered protectively around a garden that overlooked the beach. The tide was high that day, and the sea and sky were the same fuzzy shade of eggshell blue in the heat haze, a rocky headland framing the view to the southwest, the horizon faint as the crease in a folded sheet of writing paper. Standing on the bright grass, surrounded by dwarf palms and exotic shrubs, I felt I had been transported to Jamaica or Singapore.

  “What animal is it,” Claude asked, when the estate agent was out of earshot, “that uses urine to mark its territory?”

  “Cats maybe,” I said. “Why? Is that what you’re about to do?”

  “If necessary.” She turned and looked up at the house. “I
love this place, Suzanne. I feel it should be ours.”

  I felt the same.

  The asking price was considerable, but we had plenty of capital at our disposal, and this, coupled with our status as honorary locals—Bob Colley’s words—guaranteed that our offer was accepted. We returned to Paris at the end of the summer with the title deeds in our possession.

  It was during one of Robert and Youki’s famous Saturday gatherings in their apartment on rue Mazarine that we finally revealed what we were planning. That afternoon Philippe Soupault had appeared with a brace of freshly killed guinea fowl, and we had eaten at a long table, nine or ten of us, in a room with a chessboard-tile floor. After dinner, more people arrived. It was a wild fragrant October evening, low ragged clouds sliding past the rooftops, the air filled with whirling yellow leaves.

  On hearing our news, Robert lowered his eyes and was silent, and I had the feeling he was discarding any reactions that might seem flippant or self-interested. Wax dripped from the tall church candle that stood between us. The black cloth that covered the table gave the glass of red wine at his elbow a vampiric look.

  “You won’t miss all this?” He glanced away from us, into the next room, where a bearded man in a military-style jacket was dancing a rumba with a woman half his size.

  “Not really,” Claude said. “But I will miss you.”

  Shortly after they met, Claude had offered to organize Robert’s papers for him, as a secretary might, not, I suspected, because she needed the work, but because she was looking for an excuse to be close to him, and when she wrote to him, she often signed the letters “Love, Claude,” something she didn’t do with anybody else. Robert was one of the few men she felt attracted to, both mentally and physically, though she had come to realize that her feelings would never be reciprocated.

  Robert was smiling, and nodding to himself. “Jersey, it’s not so far.”

  “It isn’t,” Claude said, “is it.”

  “You probably take a train, and then another train. Then something else…” He fell quiet for a few moments. “Actually, where is Jersey?”

  We all laughed.

  Later, when most people were gone and we were sitting close to each other on a deep sofa, Claude asked Robert who the dancers were.

  “The woman with the lovely eyes was Damia,” he said. “She’s a singer. She has been in films as well. The man was Ernest Hemingway.”

  “That was Hemingway?” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’d like to have met him,” Claude said.

  “Well, you’ll have to come back and visit us,” Robert said. “And we’ll visit you too, in Jersey.” He ran a hand through his swept-back hair and turned to Youki. “That’s a promise, isn’t it, my love.”

  Youki reached for her drink. “Of course.”

  But he didn’t come, and nor did she. None of us realized, at that point, how close we were to war, or which of us it would take.

  We didn’t move into La Rocquaise until the following spring. Claude left it to me and our Northern Irish housekeeper, Nan, to do the unpacking. I didn’t mind. It allowed me to bed myself in, to convince myself that I was somewhere I wanted to be. Slowly, we redecorated rooms, put books on shelves. Slowly, we hung the paintings. Blue mornings, cool wood floors. Afternoons in the garden, or by the sea. In the evenings, after a glass of whiskey on the terrace, Claude and I would light a fire in the big room. We were so lucky to have bought the place. It was lush and private—an Eden with two Eves, no Adam. Sometimes we visited Brown’s Café, which was run by a widow from Manchester. Mrs. Brown wore a long black dress with a high collar, and her features were permanently set in a mask of disapproval. We would also meet up with Vera, the young Englishwoman who had tried to attach herself to us at the beginning of the twenties. Like us, she had bought a house on the island, and though Claude had once pointed out that she had an eager quality that seemed to invite cruelty, a remark I remembered every time I saw her, a friendship had gradually grown up between us. That year Claude began to call me Suzanne again, as she had when we first met. I had always signed my work “Marcel Moore” or “Moore,” but the name had fallen away towards the end of the twenties, when I stopped drawing. My middle name was Alberte, after my father, and some local people called me Bertie. Claude found this highly entertaining. She said it made her feel as though she was living with an English gentleman. She rechristened our house La Ferme sans Nom—The Farm without a Name—since its previous existence was no longer relevant. We needed a blank slate, she told me, on which we could write our own history. It was also a homage to the house with the black chandelier, where we had found refuge when we were young.

  I went to bed earlier than I had in Paris. I got up earlier too. In the summer I often swam at dawn, when the sea itself seemed only half awake. Claude kept different hours. She wrote at night, or read, or played her beautiful Pleyel, which had been shipped to the island along with everything else we owned. She would come to bed at four or five in the morning, still trembling at the feelings she had found inside herself, feelings she hadn’t known were there. Sometimes she would wake me and we’d make love. Her body cool, mine warm. Daybreak gradually revealing us to each other, as if love brought light. We were like a photograph developing. Later, while Claude was sleeping, I would have breakfast, my hair damp from my first swim of the day, the prickle of salt on my skin. Black coffee, fresh bread. The doors and windows open, and shadows angling across the garden. The house motionless and quiet, only the soft jolt of Kid throwing himself down in a patch of sunlight and the steady breathing of the waves.

  Later still, I would hear the bus arrive from town.

  On mainland Europe things were volatile. The French government had resigned, leaving no one to oppose Hitler’s annexation of Austria.

  “What if the Nazis look westwards?” Claude said one day. “If they threaten France, we might have to consider leaving.”

  My response was immediate and fierce. It had taken years for us to think of a place where we could be happy, and I couldn’t believe she wanted to throw it all away. La Ferme sans Nom was our fortress and our sanctuary, I told her, and I would never leave.

  “If you really think it’s dangerous,” I went on, “then you should go. I’ll wait here till you return.”

  She let the subject drop.

  That summer Nan departed for Canada, where she would be starting a new life with her second husband. Before she left, she suggested that her daughter, Edna, should take over from her. Edna, who was twenty-two, had been working at the lunatic asylum in St. Helier, as a nurse. She was a bundle of contradictions—loyal, reckless, impudent, and kind—and she liked to drink to excess, but we warmed to her liveliness and took her on. She would be with us for almost ten years.

  In late August, when the first storm blew in, we found that the house was protected by the headland and by the concrete pier that reached sideways into the bay. We stood at the bottom of the garden and watched huge waves curl from right to left and thump against the hard sand farther down the beach, spray catapulting into the air and resolving itself into an eerie, drifting mist.

  “You see?” I had to shout to make myself heard. “We’re safe here.”

  The next morning, the lawn was crusted with salt, each blade of grass edged in white and oddly crisp. We walked on it barefoot, as children might. It was a new beginning, a second innocence. We were both already in our forties, but we felt ageless. Blessed.

  In November, only a few months after we moved in, Michaux came to visit. We caught a bus to St. Helier and met him off the boat. He appeared on the walkway in a brown jacket and pale trousers, a leather suitcase in his hand. As if in answer to his wishes, his parents had died in 1929, and within a couple of weeks of each other too, and he had been traveling ever since—to India, China, Japan, North Africa. In the harsh winter sunlight his high forehead and dark eyes stood out. We hadn�
�t seen him for at least a year, and he looked more vulnerable than I remembered.

  That month, he had exhibited at the Galerie Pierre on rue des Beaux-Arts, and had been described in the press as “poet turned painter,” and less flatteringly as “the bizarre Michaux.” Exhausted and contemplative, he was glad to be away from it all, he said, in what he only half-jokingly called our “little paradise.” Over dinner we asked about his alleged transformation. What did it feel like? We were eager to find out.

  “You and half Paris…”

  His voice was jaded and sardonic, but we knew he was pleased we had asked. In an attempt to explain, he read us an excerpt from “Painting,” an article he had written. The word-factory disappears…You locate the world through another window. Like a child, you have to learn to walk. You don’t know a thing…New problems. New temptations.

  Claude admired his clarity, but he was frowning.

  “Words are a compromise forced on us by reality,” he said. “When we put something into words, we break faith with an inner communication that transcends language.” He took out his cherrywood pipe and turned it in his hands. “Words are approximate. The more capable a writer is, the less approximate they are, but there will always be a gap. Always. It’s unbridgeable.”

  Sipping her whiskey, Claude said nothing.

  “That’s why I love the dictionary,” he went on. “The words are in their virgin state—pristine and immaculate. They have yet to be corrupted or enslaved by being placed next to other words.” He paused again. “The dictionary is pure. It’s the only true book.”

  Claude smiled. “The bizarre Michaux.”

  He let out a soft but corrosive laugh, then shook himself, like a yacht changing tack. “What about you, Claude? Have you been writing?”

  “Not a thing,” she said. “Well, some music…”

  “You have your piano here?”