The King of Fools

by Frédéric Dard

  “And his reaction?”

  “Nevil doesn’t react. A snake shows more emotion. A snake will lash out and bite its prey, at least. Nevil is a snake with no bite. It’s terrible, Jean-Marie! What will become of me!”

  I kissed her slowly, with all my heart.

  “We’re going to leave, darling.”

  “But he won’t let me… Now I have to go, I absolutely must. I’ll meet you here, on this same lawn, tomorrow, same time.”

  She kissed me fleetingly on the lips. Then she hurried off in the direction of the theatre. But she had gone barely a dozen paces before she turned back, with a contrite expression.

  “I’m so sorry, Jean-Marie: do you have a penny? To get back into the theatre: there are no tickets, just the turnstiles… And he’s taken all the money I had in my bag.”

  She was red with shame, as if asking for a vast sum.

  I took out a penny coin, kissed the effigy of George VI and slipped it into the palm of her hand.

  “Do you need a few pounds, Marjorie, in case—”

  “No! Oh no! Thank you. If he found that, he would know straight away.”

  When she had gone, I stretched out on the lawn with my arms flung wide, as I had done on the beach at Juan-les-Pins.

  And just as in Juan, my head was bathed in bright sunshine.

  11

  The next morning, I packed my things at the Learmonth and cleared out. My sudden departure was not prompted by terror of Nevil Faulks. I did not fear him and would happily have smashed his face. But it seemed wiser, for Marjorie’s safety, to let her husband believe I had returned home to France.

  He had called the hotel once already to confirm my presence in Edinburgh, and he would very probably call again. If he discovered I had left, he would lower his guard and we would be better able to organize our own escape, Marjorie and I. I was determined to take her away with me, have her divorce Faulks, and marry her. My love for her was so complete that no other possible solution presented itself.

  I explained to the proprietor of the Learmonth that I had met some fellow countrymen and was taking advantage of their car to get back to London, there being no end in sight to the transport strike.

  I was certain this information would be repeated to Faulks. My only nagging doubt concerned Marjorie’s reaction if her husband told her I had left. I feared she would take it for cowardice, rather than mere caution, and my fear sharpened my impatience to see her again on the lawn in Princes Street Gardens.

  I took my things to a less grand, but more central hotel. The establishment was run by a brother and sister: hard-working, respectable folk. He resembled a curate, and she… a curate’s sister. The hotel’s only maid bore an uncanny resemblance to a curate’s housekeeper.

  I spent the day reading the red leather-bound Bible prominently displayed on my bedside table. From time to time, I stroked the mane of Pug, the little toy lion, whispering to him that he would soon be back with his mistress.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon I was on the lawn, my heart beating hard and fast. Would Marjorie be able to get away? Had she formed a plan to calm her husband’s all-seeing jealousy?

  At ten minutes past five she appeared, walking quickly along the broad winding path. She wore a pale-blue two-piece suit in a light fabric – the afternoon was as warm as the day before. The suit flattered her youthful figure, and her face bubbled with freckles.

  “Let’s go farther away,” she said, in greeting.

  In the open-air theatre, the band played the same old-fashioned tunes as the day before. We could hear the fat announcer’s mannish voice calling out instructions to the dancers, as they clapped along to their quadrille in near-perfect unison.

  She took me by the hand and led me farther off, to a quieter part of the gardens, where the lawn swept round in a curve. The park-keepers had cut away the turf to prepare a huge flower bed, but nothing had been planted yet.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t see you, Marjorie.”

  “I did promise.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “He had a meeting with a colleague in Edinburgh, at a building site; he couldn’t take me with him, so he ordered me to stay in our room.”

  “Did he call the Learmonth?”

  “I don’t know. He hardly speaks to me.”

  I told her that I had left the hotel, and why. She listened, nodding her head.

  “You did the right thing, Jean-Marie. He may well have called there, in fact.”

  “We’re leaving, Marjorie.”

  She fixed me with the grave look of a student trying hard to understand; her eyes filled with tears.

  “Are you serious?”

  “More serious than I’ve ever been about anything, my darling. Will you refuse to come?”

  “Oh! Jean-Marie…”

  Moving as one, we sat down in the lush grass.

  “We barely know one another,” she objected.

  “Precisely. We have our whole lives to make each others’ acquaintance, my darling.”

  Then she kissed me. And I returned her embrace. We were oblivious to everything around us. The lawn felt like a cloud floating two thousand metres up in a clear summer sky.

  “You’ve suffered a great deal with that man, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “But I prefer not to talk about that right now. Later, I’ll tell you everything.”

  Her reticence gave the measure of her pain. Genuine distress lacks the strength and courage to express itself. It takes reserves of energy to confide. Marjorie had no reserves on which to draw. I had come into her life just as she was about to give up all hope and succumb to a living death: the appalling indifference endured by wives who are resigned to their fate.

  “Where shall we go?” she asked, shyly.

  “Paris, of course.”

  “But when? Travel is impossible right now. There are no trains, no planes. Not even passenger ferries. It’s a general strike, and people say it will hold.”

  “I’ll hire a car.”

  She shook her head.

  “Yesterday, Nevil tried to hire one from Hertz: they hadn’t a single vehicle left!”

  This was vexing, indeed. I thought hard, stroking Marjorie’s hand.

  “Vous savez—”

  “Jean-Marie,” Marjorie interrupted me, in English. “Please, call me tu, not vous. I should love it. We make no distinction in English, anyhow.”

  “That won’t be difficult. You’ve been tu in my thoughts from the very beginning.”

  Another, still more passionate kiss sealed our pact.

  “Listen, the local services are all operating. We’ll take a bus to the very edge of town, and once we’re out of Edinburgh we’ll find a discreet inn where we can sit out this damned strike.”

  I pictured the inn in my mind’s eye: a fine old house with a slate roof, covered in ivy. I imagined the dining room, with its polished woodwork and monumental chimneypiece.

  “What do you say?”

  I was seized with sudden terror that she might refuse to see the whole adventure through. But she agreed with a firm nod of the head, signalling her determination.

  “I’ll go to my hotel,” I said, “and fetch my things. Meanwhile you’ll need to buy yourself some clothes. Going back to East London Street is out of the question. Then you’ll send a message to your husband telling him that you’re leaving with me and that you plan to seek a divorce… Yes?”

  She made no reply. She was staring at something behind me. Something in her fixed gaze prompted me to look around. I found myself staring at a pair of trousered legs planted firmly on the lawn, fifty centimetres behind my back. Far above loomed the white, ice-cold face of Nevil Faulks.

  12

  I was reminded of a motor accident that I was involved in eight years before, while driving along a corniche road. I was at the wheel of a Renault 4CV. I’d had the engine specially tuned and could take her to 130 kmph, to the astonishment of other motorists. We were four
friends, all mad for speed, and I was going full tilt when we suffered a burst tyre. I lost control of the little car, which went into a tremendous swerve before heading straight for the cliff edge.

  Nobody cried out on board. We were speechless with horror, ecstasy and acceptance of our fate. And then the car hit a boundary stone just so, and stopped right where it was, with no one injured. A miracle!

  At the time, I felt a kind of vague disappointment. I felt cheated, in some obscure way – I had understood and accepted my imminent death, but death had not come.

  Faulks’s face was the car spinning out of control. The revolver in his hand was the ravine. Marjorie and I were the helpless passengers hurtling towards the abyss. We made no sound. Death had stepped aboard our cloud, and we could do nothing but submit to His coming.

  Far below, the band was playing an old-fashioned mazurka of sorts, while the lady with the microphone urged her charges on, hollering quasi-military commands.

  Couples frolicked on the lawns nearby. Their obliviousness seemed utterly inhuman. This man was about to kill us, to the general indifference of all. I remembered a cartoon I once saw, of a hanged man in the middle of a crowded public park. No one had noticed him.

  No one in Princes Street Gardens had noticed a jealous husband pointing a gun at his wife and her accomplice.

  Nevil Faulks folded his long legs and dropped to his knees. He was pointing the barrel of his gun right between the two of us, and this was fiendishly clever because the slightest turn of the wrist allowed to him to fire at first one, then the other. One is seldom kindly disposed towards a man on the point of discharging a pistol into one’s body, but this man inspired feelings of a different order altogether. Observed at close range, with the attention I accorded him now, he was a bastard down to the last detail – the set of his angular features, the hard lines of his naturally twisted leer.

  His nose resembled the sharp beak of a bird of prey, and his dark eyes, sunk deep beneath prominent brows, had the look of some malevolent ape. A thoroughly poisonous and dangerous creature.

  “I followed you, Marjorie,” he said quietly. “I suspected you were about to join this man.”

  His voice was deep and muffled, and so rasping that he sounded completely hoarse.

  “You see, Marjorie, one had better be realistic in this life, and know when to admit defeat. You no longer love me. In fact, you have never loved me. So be it. I must accept the truth. The trouble is, I cannot accept your loving another man. And that is why I shall kill you.”

  Marjorie issued a quiet plea: “Nevil—”

  “No, no. Don’t complicate an already difficult situation. Take a moment to collect your thoughts! I am not personally persuaded of the existence of God, but it’s a theory worth considering when you’re about to die.”

  He spoke only to her, feigning total disregard for my presence. But he kept me firmly in the corner of his eye.

  “Look here, Mr Faulks,” I heard myself croak. “How about we talk things over before you do something you’ll regret?”

  “We have nothing to say to one another.”

  The scene had an unreal, unbelievable quality. We were crouched in a circle on the lawn like people enjoying a picnic. Less than thirty metres away, a band was playing, and people were dancing and lovers were embracing. The comforting murmur of Princes Street rose from across the valley. And we were caught in a terrifying, chilling drama. This implacable man, crazed with jealousy, was savouring our last moments, playing the scene in slow motion, almost as if he hoped we might die of fright before he was forced to shoot. I had no strength left to speak, and knew that to do so was pointless, and dishonourable. Marjorie felt the same. She stared at me with huge, terrified eyes. She might almost have been begging me not to shoot.

  It was seconds before I realized the wild hope in her heart. She was expecting me to try something, reproaching me for my passivity. Darling Marjorie! How right she was! No man should go to the slaughter with his head bowed, like some prize bull. People resigned to their fate are the greatest losers in life. I was not sitting on the grass, but crouched on my heels. In a single move, I could lunge forward and bring Nevil Faulks to the ground.

  He would shoot, but would be unable to take aim.

  I acted almost as the thought struck, as if in a trance. I needed no conscious decision; my limbs obeyed my imagination, not my will. I pounced like a leopard and my skull hit something hard, doubtless Faulks’s own head. He gave a faint, rapidly stifled cry. I heard a rustle of skirts. My brow throbbed. It hurt so badly I wondered whether I had been shot. But the gold stars blurring my vision cleared, and I saw precisely what had happened. Faulks had fallen over backwards. His right arm stuck straight out, and Marjorie was kneeling on it, immobilizing the weapon as best she could. Her skirt was pulled up, and I had an electrifying vision of her white undergarments and thighs.

  “The gun!” she gasped. “Quick, Jean-Marie, take it!”

  Nevil made desperate efforts to free his hand, clamped tight around the revolver. Frantically, he twisted his wrist left and right.

  I placed my hand on the revolver. Faulks’s clenched fingers had to be prised off one by one. They snapped tight again, each time. Then I released his obstinate grip with a hard blow of my fist. He let go of the weapon. Rather than try to get it back, he rolled over onto his side and, in a single movement, clasped his left hand around Marjorie’s neck.

  “Jean-Marie…” she pleaded, hoarsely.

  I pointed the barrel of the gun at Faulks’s face, over Marjorie’s shoulder. It was easy. My actions were methodical. I curled my index finger around the trigger, and the shot was fired. At point-blank range there was not much noise, which surprised me, I remember. Nevil lurched. His left hand fell away. He seemed to gather sudden strength, as if to get to his feet, but fell face forward onto the grass. A faint, hesitant trail of smoke rose from the barrel of the revolver, as if from a discarded but unextinguished cigarette. Marjorie bent over her husband and placed her hand under his cheek. When she pulled it away, her fingers were clotted with blood. She gave a shudder of disgust, and wiped her hand on the grass, over and over again.

  “He’s dead,” she said evenly.

  I had just killed a man! The ghastly silhouette of the scaffold rose before me on the lawn.

  The drama had taken place on the ground, in the grass. Marjorie got to her feet and stared around her, attentively. All was perfectly calm. No one had heard anything thanks to the racket from the theatre. And we were in a small hollow, so that no one had seen anything, either. This seemed unbelievable, and yet it was the absolute truth: I had just killed a man in a public park, in bright sunshine, in the presence of a good thousand or so people. Again, I thought of the cartoon showing the hanged man in the garden square.

  “Let’s go, quickly,” ordered Marjorie.

  The revolver was still in my hand. She shook me by the wrist to release it, stowed it in her bag, then took charge of me. She glanced at the lawn as if to make sure we had left nothing behind. The grass around the corpse was clean and neat.

  “We must tell the police!” I stammered, as we moved away.

  She made no reply. We walked side by side along the broad path leading to the theatre. I was exhausted, as after a tremendous physical effort. I walked blindly beside her, repeating with crazed obstinacy: “I killed a man! I killed a man! I killed a man!”

  13

  I stared at the man posted by the turnstile. He was small, square and ape-like. Tufts of hair burst from his ears. A thick nickel watch chain was fastened to his threadbare lapel.

  “Give him two pennies!” whispered Marjorie. I searched my pockets. I placed two pennies on the man’s copper plate and he activated a pedal, opening the turnstile. Marjorie pushed me through. Ordinarily, I would have stepped aside to allow her through first, but I obeyed her pressure on my back and moved forward. People were scattered unevenly in the seats. We took the first row we came to and I found myself sitting next to an elderly
Scotsman in a kilt. His patrician bearing and manners seemed at odds with his outlandish outfit: he wore a short, close-fitting jacket, a white frilled shirt, and a ribboned beret. A leather sporran with an engraved silver clasp hung below his waist.

  I stared fixedly at the ground in front of the stage, just below the seats, where the closely packed crowd of dancers jigged. On the podium, the elderly musicians played like a collection of automata, and the music they produced was music for automata too. At the microphone, the lady in the coarse woollen skirt, with her fat calves and burgeoning chest, continued to guide the dancers’ dainty entrechats with her guttural cries.

  “We must go to the police, Marjorie.”

  I spoke very quietly, but she heard me. Without looking at me, staring straight ahead, she replied:

  “No! Madness!”

  “It was legitimate self-defence,” I continued in the same plaintive tone, speaking out of the corner of my mouth.

  “The police won’t believe that.”

  “What are we to do?”

  “Nothing. After the show, go back to your hotel. I’ll telephone you this evening. What’s it called?”

  “The Fort William.”

  “Now, stop speaking to me!”

  “But…”

  She stood up and left, as if finding the seats uncomfortable. I saw her making her way up through the rows. She disappeared into the crowd of delighted spectators, warmly applauding the conclusion of the dance.

  Never in my life had I felt so forsaken.

  I could scarcely believe the appalling situation I was in. It was like a drunken man’s hallucination. I felt desperately hungover, but the effects would wear off: they couldn’t possibly not wear off. There are some realities we cannot accept and must destroy by sheer force of denial.

  I was sitting in an open-air theatre next to an elderly Scottish gentleman wearing a skirt, listening to dreadful music and watching couples jump up and down like idiots. And behind the theatre lay the corpse of a man I had just killed. The man’s wife was watching the same show, a few metres from where I sat. My fingers smelt of cordite. Thoughts began to whirl in my head. A carousel of images – some clear, some confused. I saw Nevil’s body curled on the grass. I saw Marjorie’s horrified face as he attempted to strangle her. My hand could still feel the revolver’s monstrous lurch as the shot was fired. When, after getting to our feet, we realized that no one had seen the dramatic incident, we had felt intense relief. And yet the absence of witnesses would be our undoing.