Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  The rector nodded. “ ‘And whosoever hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ 1 John 3:17.”

  “Very good,” Claude said, almost as if he were a pupil in a class she was teaching. “But the Jews were in need, and so were the Russian slave workers, and the Church did absolutely nothing.”

  “I wasn’t here during the war.”

  “That’s beside the point. Jews were persecuted, then deported. Slave workers were routinely brutalized, starved, and killed. All of this in plain sight. And the Church made no attempt to stand up for them.” She fingered the ivy that grew around the window. “The Church passed by on the other side, so to speak.”

  The rector lowered his eyes, but not, I thought, out of shame or regret.

  “Actually, that’s not quite accurate,” Claude said. “There was one man—one Christian.” She gave the word a sardonic twist. “Canon Cohu. Have you heard of him?”

  “I know the name.”

  “Clifford Cohu. He was born in Guernsey, but spent most of his adult life in England. He returned to the Channel Islands just before war broke out. By then he was in his fifties. When the occupation began, he spoke out against the Nazis, both from his pulpit and on the streets. In 1943, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for spreading ‘anti-German news.’ He was sent to Saarbrücken, then to a camp near Frankfurt, where he was kept in solitary confinement. In 1944, he was transferred to Zöschen. He was singled out for special treatment by the SS guards because they saw him as English. He was severely beaten. He died in September of that year, aged sixty.”

  “It’s a terrible story,” the rector said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  He watched Claude as she walked back to the fireplace and lit another cigarette. “Can we expect to see you in church?”

  She gave him a long, cool look, the blue smoke rising past her face. “Unlikely.”

  “We’re Marxists,” I said.

  “I see. Well.” He glanced at his watch, then stood up and turned to me. “Thank you for the tea.”

  “You’re leaving?” Claude said.

  He nodded. “I have other people to call on. Other parishioners.”

  “Was I too hard on him?” Claude asked me after I had showed him out.

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “He seemed oddly aggressive. He kept staring at me.” She paused. “Do you think he was attracted to me?”

  “Only if he likes boys.”

  She laughed and threw her cigarette into the grate.

  I woke at dawn to see that Claude’s side of the bed was undisturbed. It didn’t worry me. Since our time in prison, she was troubled more than ever by insomnia. Also, she spent most of the day in bed, either resting or working on her account of our wartime activities. In the small hours she would play the piano. Through a thin layer of sleep I would often hear the sparse, silvery notes of a piece by Erik Satie, or a Chopin nocturne, more melancholy, and more liquid. I walked along the landing to her study. The room was empty. A copy of Fleurs du mal lay open on her desk, flakes of ash scattered across its pages.

  I went downstairs. On the kitchen table was a jug of lilac stems and a blue bowl crowded with dusty green plums. There was no sign of Claude there either, though the coffeepot on the stove was warm. I opened the door and stepped outside. The lawn glistened. It was one of those late summer days that begins with a low-level shifting mist and the smell of dew-soaked vegetation. I moved towards the part of the garden that overlooked the graveyard. Beyond the church, just visible among the trees, was the house where the rector lived. A gull wheeled, screeching, overhead.

  Then I saw her.

  She was wandering among the tombs in a gauzy transparent garment that resembled a nightgown. On her head was a white leather flying helmet. Her feet were bare. Since the clothes she was wearing were pale, there were moments when she blended with the mist and almost disappeared. Following the rector’s visit, we had speculated as to his secret predilections, and Claude liked to refer to the speed with which he had retreated, as if he feared that she might lead him from the path of righteousness. I wondered if her early morning excursion to the churchyard in that revealing outfit wasn’t partly intended as an assault on what she perceived as his resolve—or was she dancing for La Belle Nadja, our dead friend?

  A movement to my right distracted me. A girl stood at the top of the slipway. She had blond hair and wore a simple yellow sundress. I didn’t recognize her. Like me, she had noticed Claude, though she was staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Perhaps she took Claude for a ghost. Deep in a kind of reverie, Claude remained oblivious, her right hand floating in the air above a nearby grave. The girl shook herself and hurried down the slipway, glancing over her shoulder as if she was anxious that she might be followed. Once on the beach, she stopped to undo her sandals, hooked a finger through the straps, and then ran on.

  Sometime in the late forties, Claude received a shipment of fabric from a haberdashery in Paris. Inspired by eighteenth-century English silk merchants, Claude had been planning to line the walls of the room that she retired to when she couldn’t sleep. She had based the design on the paper that had covered our bedroom walls in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs—a dusting of small stars on a ground of midnight blue—and had been eagerly awaiting the delivery. I helped her lift the cylindrical package onto the kitchen table. As we removed the brown paper wrapping and unrolled the bolt of cloth, my elbow caught the handle of the coffeepot and coffee splashed onto the silk.

  “It’s ruined.” Claude’s voice was eerily matter-of-fact. “The whole thing’s ruined.”

  “It’s only the edge,” I told her. “I can easily—”

  “You ruined it.” Her face drained of color, and her hands clenched into fists, the knuckles white. “It’s no use to me now. I might as well throw it out.”

  She began to hurl insults at me. I was careless and stupid. I had no feeling for fine things. My hands were ugly. I was shocked into stillness by this onslaught, and this stillness seemed to infuriate her even more. I was vulgar. Wooden. I was a drone. I couldn’t bear to see her succeed at anything. I wanted to undermine her. Destroy her.

  I backed away and left the room. My head filled with a kind of tangling or static. I felt close to madness then. I knew what it was. No thoughts, just knots and noise. I found myself outside, in the garden. I had no idea where I was going. A place where I couldn’t hear her voice, I suppose.

  “You think you can just walk away?”

  It was evening, the sky above the sea already darkening, but flecked with bright-brown filaments, like threads of saffron. The inside of my head felt swollen, queasy. Numb. Was this the end of everything?

  Claude stood behind me. She was like a piece of paper curling in the heart of a blaze. “You think you can walk away from me and things will be all right?”

  Niké, Kid’s replacement, fled across the lawn.

  “You’re frightening the cat,” I said.

  “You’re talking about the cat? Listen to yourself. You’re ridiculous. Pathetic.”

  She came at me so fast, and with such venom. I had no time to think. If I answered back, it fueled her rage. If I kept quiet, she thought I was being dismissive, or critical, or even—and this was worse—indifferent, and she became more furious still. But if you can’t speak, and you can’t not speak, what are you meant to do? There’s no third place.

  I reached the bottom of the garden. Intent on concealing or disguising the German wall, Claude had planted ivy, honeysuckle, and tall green ferns, and we would often sit facing each other in the carved-out gap, with our backs supported and our legs stretched out. It had become a place where we read books or took the sun. I leaned on the rough concrete and laid my forehead on my arms. Behind me, Claude was still raging.

  “Oh, so you’
re the one who’s suffering. Poor Suzanne—”

  I decided to make one last attempt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  “And I’m supposed to forgive you, am I, just like that?” She hit me in the lower back. The pain was a bright flash, a picture taken in the darkness of my body.

  Though I was doubled over, I managed to grab her by the wrist.

  She struggled to free herself. “Get off.”

  “Stop it!” I shouted. “Shut up. Go back inside.”

  She suddenly went slack. I let go of her. She walked back across the lawn, her head lowered. The sky’s orange filaments had faded. A door slammed deep inside the house. There was poison in her blood, and I didn’t have the antidote. All I could do for her was stay. Not go.

  Later, I found her curled up naked on our bed. Dim light from the window traced the curve of her right hip. She lay quite still, but there was no peace in the room. A force field flickered round her body, a muted crackle or sizzle, as if she was not a woman but an electric fence. I stood near the door, unsure if I should approach her.

  “Are you all right?” she murmured.

  I sat on the edge of the bed.

  Shifting her position, she put her arms round me, her breath feathery against my neck. Her skin was cool.

  “I don’t remember what happened,” she said. “I don’t remember what I did.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I said terrible things…”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She had molded herself against me, as if to remove all the distance and tension that had come between us. Her arms circled my belly, and she had pressed her face into the space between my shoulder blades. I could feel an area of heat where she was breathing into my shirt.

  There were things I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

  You hit me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Sometimes the person you’re closest to is the one you understand the least. Sometimes, when you’re that close, everything just blurs.

  Or were things clearer than they had ever been?

  She lay beside me, fast asleep, her face turned away from me, towards the window. The summer of 1949. Four years since our release, and time enough to have made the house our own again. Time enough, also, to have resigned ourselves to our many losses. It was hard to believe the war was over. It was equally hard to believe that it had ever happened. The truth lay in the gap between the two, perhaps, a gap in which I sometimes felt that Claude had become marooned.

  Though she was brown from our many afternoons on the beach or in the garden, a white band ran up over her shoulder, the ghostly afterimage of the bathing suit she wore if we were in a public place, and the space behind her ear, that subtle curve of bone, was also pale. Traces of lipstick clung to one corner of her mouth, and her hair, which stood out against the whiteness of the pillow, hesitated between blond and gray. A pulse tapped in the thin skin of her neck.

  My little bird.

  I kissed the outer edge of her right eye. “I love you,” I murmured. “I always will.”

  She brushed at her face as if a fly had landed there. I stroked her hair, then lay with my cheek against her naked back. Outside, there was no wind. Behind her breathing I could hear the breathing of the sea.

  I dozed.

  “Fire,” she said.

  She was lying on her back, one forearm draped over her eyes. I waited to see what she would say next.

  “A small house by the water,” she said. “The roar of the flames, the swans taking off—and Dalí with the wrong shoes on.”

  I leaned up on one elbow. “The wrong shoes?”

  “The wrong shoes for a fire.” Though her eyes were covered, I could see her mouth. She was smiling. “Gold high heels.”

  On waking, Claude would often speak directly from her dreams. Like the Surrealists, she believed dreams had a way of throwing light on the fundamental questions of our daily lives. Sometimes it was an image, sometimes a line of dialogue. Sometimes it was just an atmosphere. She said the photographs we took together came from dreams. The photographs were dreams. Attempts to capture or decode her volatile and fluctuating self. Attempts at the impossible, in other words, for even as the shutter clicked she was beginning to change into someone else. Something else. Michaux had told her once that the self wasn’t one thing, but many. Nothing was fixed or stable. To be was to become. He liked to claim that he had multiple selves trapped inside his body. It was one of the causes of his great fatigue.

  Claude asked if I remembered what René Crevel had said about Dalí’s bedroom.

  “Yes,” I said. “He had a mirror on the wall that was angled towards the window. It was so he could lie in bed and watch the sun come up.”

  “That wasn’t the reason.”

  She told me that Dalí wanted to wake up every morning with his face bathed in sunlight, illuminated and golden, like a mythical creature. Like a hero. Like a god.

  “The mirror wasn’t there to help him see the sun,” she said. “It was there to help the sun see him.”

  I smiled. Dalí’s imagination was unguarded, free of all restraints and inhibitions. He was like a child, demanding and perverse—the absolute center of his world.

  “You think he still lives in the madwoman’s cottage?” Claude asked.

  “When he’s not traveling the world,” I said, “being lionized.”

  “He deserves it. His work’s astonishing.”

  “I used to think about that place when I was in my cell. I thought about it all the time. I’m not sure why.”

  “The things we could have done,” Claude said, “but didn’t…” Her arm was still draped over her eyes. “What’s the weather like?”

  I got out of bed and walked to the window. “Sunny. Cool, though.”

  “Maybe we should take some photographs today.”

  “Maybe.”

  As I crossed the room, still thinking of the fire, the frantic beating of swans’ wings, the gold high heels, I suddenly remembered what had happened to Marie-Louise. During the war she had finally left Gaston, her husband, and had married Henri Michaux. One evening, though, her nightgown had caught fire. The burns had been so severe that she had died. On reaching the door, I stopped and looked at Claude.

  “Do you think you were dreaming about Marie-Louise?”

  “No,” Claude said, her face in profile. “I was dreaming about my mother.”

  Those bright, brittle years after the war. They seemed ethereal, even at the time. We should rightfully have been dead, both of us, and yet there we were, back in our house, and still together. We were like cats, Claude told me, with our nine lives…

  Who was it who said that at every moment we stand on the edge of eternity? I don’t remember. But that was how it felt to live with her.

  That was how it felt from the beginning.

  Something woke me. A subtle shift in the air. I could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke, and something cold was being held against my throat. Claude was bending over me, her head close to mine.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  Her face was stiff, her eyes glittering through peepholes in her skin. What had she written once? Under this mask, another mask. And then another. I will never finish removing all the masks. The ceiling above her tilted at an angle, like a ship’s deck in heavy seas.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Be careful.” Her voice was tender, dreamy. “This knife is sharp. I sharpened it.”

  Perhaps that was the noise that had woken me—Claude crouching at the kitchen table with a knife in one hand and a whetstone in the other.

  “I had
a revelation,” she said. “If I kill you, I will be free to die.”

  She had been prevented from taking her own life by the fact of my existence. She couldn’t bring herself to leave me. If she killed me first, though, she would be removing all the obstacles. It was entirely logical, a brilliant resolution of her dilemma. So what could I say that would dissuade her? I swallowed, the tendons in my neck pushing cautiously against the blade.

  “Claude?”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” Her voice was drowsy, drugged.

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “Very much.”

  The gulf between her words and the knife was a wide one, and I didn’t know if I could close it.

  “Will you come for a walk?” I said.

  “Now?” She looked towards the window. Moonlight on the ivy, a lick of silver on the black.

  “Walking at night,” I said. “There’s nothing better.”

  Though she didn’t seem sure how to respond, I felt the blade leave my throat. I remained where I was, on my back, the ghost of the knife still with me, a cold line on my skin.

  Keep talking. Don’t give her time to think.

  “Hand in hand through the darkness,” I said, “the night wind on our faces, and in our hair—”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  Claude was clever. Even this new, twisted version of Claude was clever. I had found a way of speaking to her, though. It was a matter of stalling her. Deflecting her. I had to insert doubts and possibilities into her thinking, like slack into a rope.

  “A little walk,” I said. “After that, you can do what you want.”

  “All right.” She put the knife down on the bedside table, where it caught the light, like a thin spill of water. “Will I need shoes?”