The Frenchman seized a young woman’s hand and began to tell her fortune. I see a long, contented life, he said, with many children and grandchildren. The woman thanked him and bent her head and drank the rain from the palm of her own hand. What about me? cried a man who was shivering nearby. What will happen to me? He was in his late forties, and dressed in rags. The Frenchman studied the lines on the man’s hand. I see a fire burning in a hearth, he said, and the love of a good woman. I see a peaceful old age. And me? What about me? Prisoners crowded round, eager to discover what lay in store for them. In every case, the reading was positive. A windfall here, a new job there, but always happiness and love and children, many children. Longevity too. That above all else. The guards stood about, uncertain what to do. Though they all had guns, they seemed disarmed. The sky still overcast, the rain still coming down…
Youki asked what happened next.
The guards marched all the prisoners back to their huts, the doctor told her. The Frenchman was Robert, of course, and he saved a great number of lives that day.
Including yours, Youki said.
The doctor swallowed. Including mine, he said. And then again, more quietly, Including mine.
I drank some water.
Youki lit a cigarette and looked away from me, into the room. “I no longer want to think about that time. I’m sick of it.”
I was struck by the change in her. The numb heaviness, the disgust. The apathy. It was hard to believe that people like Picasso and Hemingway had passed through these dim rooms, that we had talked and laughed and danced, often until dawn—Robert, Lucie, me, and her…
I left shortly afterwards.
The heat was still oppressive, though the sky had faded from fierce blue to a gentle, gritty violet, and the street was no longer divided into areas of stark light and shade. Glancing at the closed shutters high in the building, I felt a tightening in my throat. I knew I would never see Youki again.
You may cut the rope of this anchored ship…
The last bright fragments of my dream.
It was hard to leave Majorca. When the taxi pulled up outside the villa, its silver bumper bleary with pale-brown dust, Lucie and I were sitting on the terrace with our luggage. Our ginger cat didn’t appear, but the thin stray dog was sniffing round the gate. The driver carried our cases down to the car, and we followed him, but when we reached the bottom of the steps Lucie told me she had forgotten something, and she turned back. The sun was high and hot, and everything was still. The shadows were so black that it looked as if pieces had gone missing from the world. I remember watching Lucie climb the tiled steps and pass through the doorway into the darkness of the house, but I don’t remember her coming out again, though I suppose she must have, and I don’t remember what it was that she forgot. I only remember the steps up to the open door. The stillness of noon, and the keen smell of the lemon trees. The driver whistling a tune I didn’t know.
Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the course of writing this novel, I tried to read everything that might be relevant, but no book was more useful than François Leperlier’s masterly biography, Claude Cahun: L’Exotisme intérieur. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to François, not only for his written work but also for allowing me access to his archive and for answering my endless questions, both in person and via e-mail. I would also like to thank François’s partner, Christine Texier, for her hospitality during my stay in Conches-en-Ouche. Heartfelt thanks go to one of Jersey’s treasures, Bob Le Sueur, for showing me round the island, for drawing my attention to various aspects of its history, and for introducing me to some of the people mentioned below. There were many, in the end, who helped: David Austen, Norma di Bernardo, Louise Downie and everyone at the Jersey Heritage Trust, Bob le Neveu, Alan le Rossignol, Diana Martland, Rod McLoughlin, P. F. Misson (the Deputy Viscount of Jersey), Maureen and David Ratel, Lucille Renouf, and Derek Villette. Thanks to all of you. On the editing front, I was fortunate to have three such incisive early readers: Judith Gurewich, Katharine Norbury, and Peter Straus. Their insights were invaluable. I’m also indebted to James Gurbutt for continuing to have faith in me, to Sarah Castleton for her rare sensibility and her perceptiveness, and to Alexandra Poreda, for her sharp and focused late reading of the manuscript. My copyeditors, Yvonne E. Cárdenas and Tamsin Shelton, were, as always, wonderfully meticulous. I count myself lucky to be published by Other Press, its independent and single-minded vision epitomized by everyone who works there, above all by its creator and guiding light, Judith Gurewich. I know of no other editor who devotes so much time and energy to making a book as good as it can be. I should also mention the Society of Authors in London. The generous Travelling Scholarship I received in 2015 enabled me to make a much-needed second visit to the Channel Islands. Finally, I’m grateful to those closest to me—Katharine Norbury and Eva Rae Thomson—for their inspiration, their humor, and their love. Never anyone but you.
RUPERT THOMSON is the author of nine highly acclaimed novels, including Katherine Carlyle; Secrecy; The Insult, which was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and selected by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time; The Book of Revelation, which was made into a feature film by Ana Kokkinos; and Death of a Murderer, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel of the Year Award. His memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, was named Writers’ Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He lives in London.
Also by Rupert Thomson KATHERINE CARLYLE
“Katherine Carlyle is a masterpiece.”
—PHILIP PULLMAN, best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy
“This road trip through a snow dome of mesmeric hallucinations is Thomson at his best.”
—RICHARD FLANAGAN, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize
NAMED A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BIG INDIE BOOK OF FALL 2015
Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Rupert Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, Katherine Carlyle uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about identity, the search for personal meaning, and how we are loved.
Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.
www.otherpress.com
Also by Rupert Thomson SECRECY
“Thomson paints a suspenseful picture of the moody, factional world of Florentine politics and draws parallels with the inner life of an artist whose work imitates darkness and decay.”
—THE NEW YORKER
“A page-turning historical thriller by one of Britain’s finest writers.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
In this highly charged novel, Thomson brings Florence to life in all its vibrant sensuality, while remaining entirely contemporary in his exploration of the tensions between love and solitude, beauty and decay. When reality becomes threatening, not to say unfathomable, survival strategies are tested to the limit. Redemption is a possibility, but only if the agonies of death and separation can be transcended.
Zummo, a Sicilian sculptor, is summoned by Cosimo III to join the Medici court. Late seventeenth-century Florence is a hotbed of repression and hypocrisy. All forms of pleasure are brutally punished, and the Grand Duke himself, a man for whom marriage has been an exquisite torture, hides his pain beneath a show of excessive piety.
The Grand Duke
asks Zummo to produce a life-size woman out of wax, an antidote to the French wife who made him suffer so. As Zummo wrestles with this unique commission, he falls under the spell of a woman whose elusiveness mirrors his own, but whose secrets are far more explosive.
www.otherpress.com
Never Anyone But You Page 31