“In the next room.” She crushed out her cigarette. “It’s exactly as you say. New problems, new temptations.”
There were our photographs, though, which Michaux admired, and Claude had also been making small figures that were part sculpture, part collage, which she showed him later that evening.
“How strange,” he said, “that we should both be moving in the same direction…”
He talked about the difference between reading a text and looking at an image. In a book, he said, the path was already laid out. It was a gradual, linear experience, and he had begun to find it laborious, even dictatorial. With a painting, there was no one single trajectory. You saw the whole thing at once. You were free to choose. As he bent over one of Claude’s photographs to illustrate his point, his shoulder almost touching hers, I thought about the many levels on which they appeared to coincide. Michaux had told Claude, in strictest confidence, that his mother had not wanted him. I would have preferred it if you’d never been born, she had said to him when he was nine. Like Claude, Michaux had been wished out of existence. They were both rejected children. Claude had sworn me to secrecy on the subject, since Michaux was intensely private, and tended not to reveal too much about himself. His relationships had always been a mystery to us. A source of fascination too. When Claude and I first met him, it seemed to us that he operated in a different dimension, where sex had no place, but over the years he had proved us wrong. There had been a woman in Montevideo, for instance—a poet called Susana—and he had also become involved with Marie-Louise, the wife of our friend Gaston Ferdière.
One evening, when Michaux had settled in, Claude asked if he was seeing anyone.
“Seeing anyone?” Both eyebrows raised, he tinkered with his pipe, pretending not to understand the question.
“Are you in love with someone?”
“Ah. Well.” He sipped from his glass of lemonade. He didn’t touch wine or spirits. He had experimented with various substances, usually while abroad, but he believed alcohol was hazardous. “It’s quite complicated,” he said at last.
“We have all night,” Claude said.
He sighed. “There’s Marie-Louise, of course…”
Some years before, in the mid-thirties, we had introduced Gaston and Marie-Louise to Michaux at a dinner in our apartment on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. To our astonishment, Michaux and Marie-Louise fell for each other. We had never imagined that such a thing might happen.
“How is Marie-Louise?” Claude asked.
Michaux knocked the dead ash out of his pipe. “I’m hoping she will come to Brazil with me next year.”
I looked at the floor. In the spring of 1937 Michaux had tried to bring his affair with Marie-Louise to an end, not because he didn’t love her, but because he felt his freedom was being compromised. She promptly swallowed half a bottle of barbiturates. Michaux found her in time—he had saved her life—but Gaston had been furious with him. The situation was certainly “quite complicated.”
“What drew you to her in the first place?” Claude asked.
Michaux peered into the corner of the room, as if Marie-Louise was standing in the shadows and he was trying to make her out. “Her legs are very elegant,” he said. “When she dances, she tends to bite her bottom lip.”
Claude said she hadn’t noticed that.
A few weeks after the dinner party, Michaux told us, he had been in a club in Montparnasse when Gaston and Marie-Louise walked in. He was sitting in a booth. They didn’t notice him—at least, not at first.
“Did you dance with her that night?” Claude asked.
He shook his head. “She danced. I watched her dance. I think she knew I was watching. There were moments when I felt she was dancing for me.”
“But Gaston was there,” Claude said.
“He was watching her as well.” Michaux opened his pouch of tobacco and started to refill his pipe. “He looked dispirited.”
“Perhaps he sensed he was losing her…”
Michaux tried to affect his usual diffidence, but I saw a flicker of excitement in his face, and longing.
“You make her sound exotic,” Claude said, “like someone we have never met, but should.” She gave me a wink, then turned to Michaux. “We might have to lure her away from you. Enlighten her.”
“Show her the true path,” I said.
“The true path?” Michaux reached nervously for his lemonade.
“We all remember Helen,” Claude said, “who left her family / Her child, and royal husband / To take a stranger’s hand / Her beauty had no equal / But bowed to love’s command.”
Claude’s face was glowing. She liked to say she didn’t need anyone apart from me, but she often burned more brightly if we had company, especially if it was one of our old friends from Paris.
Michaux lit his pipe. “I think I should warn Marie-Louise about you two.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Claude said. “It will only make her curious.” She paused. “Anyway, she already knows the worst.”
“Who wrote those lines?” Michaux asked.
“Sappho,” Claude said.
Michaux smiled. “I should have guessed.”
Later in Michaux’s visit, the conversation turned to politics, as it was bound to, perhaps, given the times. He was concerned about the effect Hitler’s policies might have on us.
“I’m thinking of leaving France,” he said. “You should too. It’s not just the chaos and destruction war will bring. It’s Hitler’s attitude to anyone who’s Jewish.”
“Charles-Henri Barbier is worried too,” Claude said. “He wrote me a letter.” She paused. “Our housekeeper, Nan, has moved to Canada.”
“Sensible,” Michaux said.
I spoke to Michaux. “You don’t think we’ll be safe?”
“If Paris falls, these islands will fall too.” He paused. “At the very least, consider the idea.”
“We have considered it,” I said. “We’re staying.”
Michaux glanced at Claude.
“If we left,” she told him, “I would feel I was deserting. Didn’t I teach you that English phrase about the rats and the sinking ship?”
“The only part of the phrase that feels relevant,” Michaux said, “is the part about the sinking ship. If Germany attacks, France will sink—and you’ll sink with it.”
Michaux’s vehemence surprised me. It was testament to the strength of his feelings for us, I thought, and I was touched.
But he was still wrangling with Claude.
“—and actually, it’s your precious England I was thinking of. You’ve always liked the place. Why wouldn’t you think of going there?”
“Hitler probably has designs on England too,” she said. “I’m not sure we’d be any safer. Besides, you can’t defeat the Nazis by running away.”
“Ah, so you intend to defeat the Nazis. I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized.” Michaux had an ironic smile on his face, but his fingers were trembling as he filled his pipe.
It went on for hours, with Michaux cajoling us, and reasoning with us, and even, finally, pleading, but Claude and I remained calm throughout, and stubborn. No ground was given on either side.
Not long after midnight Claude left the room. Had she decided to go to bed? Surely not. It was too early. Michaux turned to me as he had turned to me so many times that evening, either to put forward a new argument or to communicate the extent of his despair, and claimed, mischievously, that since Claude had beaten a retreat he had triumphed—over her, at least.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “that you should see it as a retreat.”
I was right.
Michaux and I had forgotten all about Claude, and were once again discussing the likelihood of war, when a figure appeared in the shadows at the far end of the room. We held our breath, transfixed, as Claude stepped forwards in a brown s
hirt, breeches, and a pair of tall black riding boots. Her hair was damped down and plastered across her forehead, and a small rectangular mustache adorned her upper lip. Round her right bicep was an armband with a swastika on it. Coming to a halt in the middle of the room, she clasped both elbows, just as Hitler did during his most important speeches.
“Our belief in Germany is unshakable,” she said, her voice dramatic and guttural, but also quavery with emotion, “and our will is overwhelming, and when will and belief combine so powerfully, then not even the heavens can deny you—”
Michaux turned to me. “My God, for a moment I really thought it was him.”
Claude brought her heels together with a loud click and lifted her right arm into the air. “Sieg heil.”
I went to fetch the camera.
Michaux didn’t bring the subject up again, though he did refer to it indirectly, on his last evening.
“I’ve stopped using white backgrounds,” he announced suddenly, at dinner. “I’m using black instead. Or sometimes darkest blue. It represents the night, of course—the night I feel all around me…”
Claude and I said nothing.
“The night,” he continued. “It’s where the mystery comes from—and the vagueness.” He paused. “The monsters too.” He put his pipe on the table and looked down at his hands. “I’m weak,” he said, “and frightened. But most of all I’m tired.”
“They’re your strengths,” Claude said. “You’ve made virtues of them all.”
He shook his head. “I have no backbone, no moral fiber. I’m the kind of person who will go to any lengths to save his own skin.”
Claude gave him a long look, but once again she didn’t speak.
“I admire you both,” he said.
The next day, we stood on the quay in St. Helier and said our goodbyes.
“It has been lovely having you here,” Claude said. “Will you come and visit us again?”
“Of course I will.” Michaux’s face was angled away from us, his eyes fixed on the glittering semicircle of St. Aubin’s Bay.
He didn’t, though.
We never saw Michaux again.
A few photographs remain, some taken in our garden, others in the ruins at Grosnez, but Michaux is always a distant figure, and on his own, or if Claude is in the picture with him, as sometimes happens, there’s always a gap between them, a gap I hadn’t noticed at the time. I remembered his characterization of words in the dictionary, and how he felt they were pure and free because they had yet to be attached to any other words, but he didn’t give off an air of purity and freedom. He seemed lonely. Unengaged. Could that be another way of looking at the dictionary?
Only a few months later, Jacqueline Lamba came to stay. Breton had fallen in love with Jacqueline in the early thirties. At the time, she had been performing naked in a tank of water at a nightclub called the Coliséum. When I met her not long afterwards, all we talked about was the recent art exhibitions she had seen. I asked her if she painted. She said she did, then added, drily, that Breton preferred to think of her as a mermaid. Something about her delivery reminded me of Carole Lombard, the American comédienne, and I told her so. Lombard was one of her idols, she said. She had such deadpan wit, such timing. She’s not bad-looking either, I said. Jacqueline laughed at that.
She had brought her three-year-old daughter, Aube, with her, but Breton had remained behind. When she arrived, I was shocked by how worn she looked, not at all her usual glamorous self. She was recovering from bronchitis, she told us, which was true, though it wasn’t long before she confessed that she and Breton had not been getting on. The sunlight and saltwater did her good, and she soon regained her strength. I was relieved Breton hadn’t come, since I didn’t think he would have understood our new and seemingly limited existence, and I couldn’t have endured the look of baffled distaste that always rose on to his face when he was confronted by a situation or a remark that made no sense to him, a look he was usually unable—or unwilling—to disguise. After Claude’s initial meeting with Breton, she had fallen under his spell, and despite his views—he found homosexuality repulsive, but was titillated by the idea of a lesbian—she would refer to him all the time, so much so that I used to tease her. Now, though, as spring came to the island, she fell for Breton’s wife, with her swept-back golden hair, her one-liners, and her two-piece eau-de-nil bathing costume, the latest in Paris fashion.
Of all the pictures that Claude took during the six weeks Jacqueline stayed with us there is one that stands out from the rest. A bronzed Jacqueline is shown from the waist up, with pale stripes undulating across her skin, as though she is under the sea and the midday sun is striking down through the clear water. A wide ribbon or sash circles her neck and hangs down, partially obscuring her right breast. Her eyes are closed, and her expression is calm and faintly dismissive, with just the hint of a smile or a sneer on her perfect lips. She looks less like a human being than a goddess. She appears to inhabit a world that is inaccessible to mere mortals.
The first time I saw the photograph, an unexpected surge of jealousy went through me. That Claude should take such a picture of another woman, even if she was a friend of ours. That she should capture her beauty with such sensuality and precision. The image was unquestionably erotic—it spoke of the laziness of summer, and the dark urgency of lust—and there was a part of me that resented that, though I would never have admitted it. The more I turned it over in my mind, however, the more I began to see that there might be other, less obvious interpretations, meanings Claude might not have intended, and might still in fact be unaware of. I remembered standing at a downstairs window. Claude sat on the lawn, her legs folded sideways, her weight propped on one arm. Jacqueline and Aube were nearby, playing with a ball. When I noticed the expression on Claude’s face, the hair prickled at the back of my neck. At first I thought she was envious, but then I realized it was more like a kind of craving. Craving for what, though? It wasn’t that she wished she could sleep with Jacqueline—not, at least, in that moment—nor did I think she was wishing she had a child of her own. No, she was watching the scene through a child’s eyes. She didn’t want Aube. She wanted to be Aube. The next time I looked at the photograph I saw it as a portrait taken by somebody who longed for the impossible. Claude, the adoring child, and Jacqueline, the mother. Imperious, alluring. Out of reach.
The dark time came, as Michaux had predicted. During the months following Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, we kept a close eye on developments in countries like Poland, Denmark, and Norway, and were left in no doubt as to both the scale of Hitler’s ambition and the might of his armed forces. We knew the Germans were coming. It was just a matter of when. In the last decade of his life, Monsieur Schwob had constantly written editorials that warned readers of “the German threat.” He was right, Claude would murmur as she pored over the newspaper. He was so right.
That winter was bitterly cold. In January a dusting of snow lay on the ground, the crust glittering in the sun like granulated sugar. The island had never looked more beautiful. After lunch Claude would retire to an upstairs bedroom, draw the curtains, and sit in the gloom for hours, tuning in to broadcasts from the BBC. Sometimes she spent whole nights there too, and when she reappeared she would give me the latest bulletins—Polish Jews had been ordered to wear Star of David armbands, Chamberlain had resigned. She came to me once at dawn and told me that Mussolini had met Hitler at the Brenner Pass, and that Italy would be entering the war. Her eyes were dull and listless. Her hands were trembling.
“This isn’t good for you,” I said.
She laughed a short, sardonic laugh. “It’s war,” she said. “It isn’t good for anyone.”
Though Claude had resisted Michaux’s arguments at the end of 1938, she began to talk once again about the possibility of leaving. She ruled out a return to Paris: we would be too exposed—and besides, most of our friends had already s
cattered, some to the south of France, others overseas. We could move to New York, though, as Breton had—or there was always Quebec or Montreal…We circled the subject night after night, but I refused to change my mind, and in the end she decided to stay put. She didn’t want to be parted from me, of course, but there was something else. The idea that she would be allowing the Nazis to determine her future. The idea of being driven out—of fleeing. That went against the grain.
On a warm, drowsy afternoon at the beginning of June 1940, Claude and I had an unforeseen encounter. We had been for a swim at Beauport, and were returning by way of La Route des Champs, a road that curved back down the hill, past the house where the rector lived. Claude picked wildflowers as we went. She had an idea for a new series of photographs that didn’t feature her at all. They would be interiors, she said. Still lifes. As we came out onto La Marquanderie, we noticed a group of men standing outside the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel. They were drinking beer and talking in loud voices. Their laughter was loud too, and abrupt, almost like shouting. Probably they were locals, from the farms up on La Moye. Farm people often drank at the hotel bar. There was nowhere else for miles around. As we approached, one of the men detached himself from the rest and stood in front of us. He looked at Claude, then at the flowers.
“Those for me?” He grinned. Though his feet were planted wide apart, he was swaying a little from the waist up.
“Bob?” Claude said. “Is that you?”
“It’s me all right.” He drank from his pint. “I heard you were living here.”
The other men had stopped talking. Bob was aware that they were listening, and it seemed to make him bolder, more confrontational.
“You bought the big house,” he said. “That must have set you back a bit.”
“We’re very happy here,” Claude said.
“You never married, then?”
Claude looked past him, along the road, as if she was waiting for a bus. Bob kept his eyes on her for a while longer, then turned to me.
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