Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  But now as she looked at the handsome youth with the dark sparkling eyes and slow smile, and gauged the effect she was having on him, her spirits rose emphatically. Too much time had passed since she had allowed herself an escapade for sheer pleasure. Casually, she suggested that Jacob see her home and they have another glass of champagne there. Her carriage was waiting in the square. It would be nice to chat in intimacy.

  Wide-eyed, Jacob followed her. At once nervous and exhilarated, he sat by Germaine’s fur-clad side and listened to her rippling voice punctuated by the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on cobble stones. When she opened the door on her apartment, Jacob felt he had entered a magic lantern world. Germaine had a taste for the theatrical which verged on the vulgar, but managed to stay within the purview of mere extravagance as long as she was at the centre of her surroundings. Her sitting room was heady with the fragrance of roses, an opulence of velvet and satin. She moved within it with the ease of a woman who has read her beauty in men’s eyes over a surfeit of seasons.

  What she read in Jacob’s features was not quite that. Yes, he was appreciative, excited. She could see that. But the look he slowly cast around the room and over her, also had curiosity in it, as if he were storing up impressions which he would later mull over. He was anything but overwhelmed. It intrigued her, this reflectiveness, challenged her. She sat down next to him on the sofa and with a little smile, pulled at his bow tie.

  ‘You’ll be more comfortable without that,’ she said. ‘It’s warm in here.’ She ran a glossy nail down his starched shirt and then with a provocative tilt to her features, lingeringly opened first one button, then the next. As her fingers brushed his bare skin, Jacob caught at her wrist.

  ‘Ah, you don’t like to be touched, perhaps? Pity.’ Her small pointed tongue moved slowly over her lower lip. ‘Pity,’ she said again. Under the shadow of lowered lashes, her eyes trailed over him, stopping for a moment at his crotch.

  That look jolted Jacob into action. He had been nervous, unsure of what was appropriate to him. Could this friend of his father’s really be touching him like that? He had kept himself as still as he could. But now came that taunting look. He pulled her towards him and kissed her with fervency and the little skill that Mariette had given him.

  ‘Tiens, tiens, tiens,’ Germaine whispered as she drew back from him. ‘You’re not quite the novice I imagined. Your father would be surprised.’

  Confused, Jacob flushed and turned away from her. He paced to the end of the room and restlessly fingered one of the many mementoes which decorated a corner table. Germaine came up to him from behind and wove slender arms round him. She found herself moved by this youth with his mixture of pride and uncertainty. ‘Come,’ she said gently, ‘let us see what you know about women.’

  Jacob followed her into her bedroom. She gestured he unbutton her dress. Clumsily Jacob did so, marvelling at the smooth skin. Her fragrance enveloped him. As she rustled out of the short silk dress, the movement of her hips sent the blood rushing through him. With a practiced eye, Germaine caught the bulging of his trousers. Dark pupils grew darker. She came close to him and with infinite care undressed him, easing him out of his shirt, slowly unbuckling his trousers. Her fingers trailed over him, deftly followed by pursed lips. When she reached his shorts, she stopped for a moment and looked up at him with mocking eyes. Then she clasped his penis. It was agonizingly hard. Jacob moaned. In a second it would all be over. He threw her down on the bed and lunged into her with all the strength of his youth. He came almost at once.

  Embarrassed then, he turned away from her, reached for his trousers. He had learned enough with Mariette to know that he had just made a fool of himself. But it had been so long ago. And this Germaine had tantalized him, touched him where Mariette’s hands had never strayed. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

  Her voice reached his ringing ears. ‘Jacob,’ she said, a new low note in her tone, ‘Jacob, I would be honoured if you were to stay and we played that scene again with just a little variation.’ He turned to face her. Her green eyes bore no trace of mockery. She smiled a small moue. The boy’s face with its fine earnest eyes moved her. How difficult it must be to be constantly betrayed by that jutting flesh. And he was remarkably beautiful, with his long muscled limbs. She took his hand and brought it to her taut small breast. Jacob’s penis filled almost at once. ‘Doucement, mon ami, slowly,’ she said. Germaine guided his hand into places he had never explored. His tongue followed, until she was moaning at his touch.

  By the end of that night, Jacob knew a great deal more about women than he had ever imagined there was to know. And that, he felt with a rare certainty, was still only the beginning. Throughout that year, he visited Germaine as often as she would permit him. Each time he left, he counted the days until his return, revelling in the memory of her silken flesh, her limbs entwined around him in a ballet of positions.

  As her hunger for him began to match his for her, Germaine started to worry. It was foolish of her to develop an involvement with a mere stripling who could do nothing for her. She should be spending her time wisely, finding a husband who would allow her comfort in her old age. But his youthful passion was such a relief after the saggy flounderings of her old count and her bullish financier that she allowed the time with Jacob to stretch. And stretch. Until she discovered that she could not do without him. His lovemaking had grown so subtle. He listened to her so attentively, ate up the stories she told him of her life with such appetite, that she found herself feeding his ardour with increasing invention, flowering in his presence.

  Jacob listened and learned. He learned hungrily about the ways of a world which was not yet his. At first his mouth would fall open in disbelief when Germaine told him of the doings of a man who was a friend of the family or a great lady whom he had thought a perfect wife. Gradually he laughed, as she did, about these little vagaries. He did not feel disillusioned or aghast at what were evident hypocrisies and double standards. The world appeared to him as a place vast in foibles, full of curiosities. He was like a spectator in an incessant comedy - untouched, happy to smile wryly. Neither, after the first few months, did he have any false sense that Germaine could ever be his and only his. It was enough that each of their meetings should stretch into this time-caught infinity.

  But one night, when he was sitting in her apartment waiting for her to come home from a date at the opera - something she would never give up even for him - Jacob happened to leaf through a pile of books he had not chanced on before. One of them he noticed was a tome of his father’s. He opened it unthinkingly, wondering only how curious it was that Germaine should be interested in a medical treatise. On the title page, there was a handwritten inscription. ‘A Germaine, qui m’a tant appris sur la vie’. The signature was his father’s. Jacob stared at it. Stared at it hard. Germaine had taught his father about life, the inscription said. Jacob dropped the book as if it were a hot coal and rushed out of the apartment.

  He had had a sudden vision of his father wrapped in Germaine’s embrace. Shame pounded through him. He walked blindly through a labyrinth of streets. His father, his respected, indeed idealised father and Germaine, between whose legs he burrowed with such consummate delight; Germaine who sat astride him and moaned, her bright hair tumbling over his chest. All at once all the men Germaine had talked about as she regaled him with her stories crystallised into his father. For the first time, he was stung by real jealousy which turned as quickly into rage. He suddenly remembered it was his father who had introduced him to Germaine. He hated them both. They had probably laughed over him as he had over others.

  Oblivious to the rain which drenched through him, Jacob blundered on, his emotions askew. He wanted to hit Germaine, punish her as he would never be able to punish his father. He wanted to straddle her, pin her down with his penis until she begged him to stop. The violence of his imaginings made him pause. He realised he was perspiring profusely, despite the chill rain. He walked into a cafe and quickly downed a cup of bi
tter coffee. A woman strolled up to him. Her proposition was unmistakable. Jacob looked at her with distaste: she was old, almost as old as his mother. The angelic purity of Germaine’s face flitted through his mind.

  With fleet steps, Jacob raced back to Germaine’s apartment. She was already there, perched on the sofa where they had originally kissed. She looked vulnerably small. There were tears running down her face. In her hands, she held Robert Jardine’s book. Jacob met her eyes and held them for a long moment. It was in that moment which mingled anger, dismay, yearning, understanding, that Jacob suddenly felt he had crossed the border into manhood. He walked over to Germaine and kissed her gently where the tears had stained her cheeks. He lifted her in his arms and carried her lightly over to the bed which had seen so many of their ardours. Tenderly, lingeringly, they made love. They both knew it was for the last time.

  Two years later, Germaine was dead, drowned in the Mediterranean, some said by her own doing. A mysterious package was delivered to Jacob. In it, together with a solicitor’s letter, he found Germaine’s journals. She had bequeathed them to him. He read them avidly over and over again, astounded at Germaine’s mixture of cynicism and innocence, at her shrewd observations and ear for gossip, at her humour and eroticism. He always blushed when the entries were about him. He was also shadowed by a residue of guilt: had he contributed in any way to Germaine’s death? For a long time he was haunted by the fact that at each reading the mystery of this woman who had overseen his journey into manhood seemed always and only to increase.

  Afterwards, when he was in the midst of his training as an analyst, he would wonder whether it was his inability to understand Germaine and even Mariette which had spurred him to enter a profession intent on deciphering human actions.

  Chapter

  Four

  __________

  ∞

  In the autumn of 1929 the presence of a young dark-haired woman at the lectures of Gaétan Gaitan de Clérambault, chief of the Paris special Infirmary, caused a stir amongst the medical students almost equal to that of the Wall Street Crash. It was not simply that women were rarely to be seen amongst the ranks of psychiatric interns; nor that M. de Clérambault’s utterances were often deeply misogynist; nor even that his manner of classifying madness led him to disquisitions on erotomania hardly thought suitable for a better class of female ear. What troubled the gathered students was that this woman in their midst, who scribbled incessant notes during the course of the lectures, disappeared as mysteriously as she came. None of them knew who she was, even though several had taken steps to find out.

  By Christmas, rumours were rife. One faction had it that she was M. de Clérambault’s secret mistress, this despite the previously held belief that he was a consummate woman-hater. He had been seen in close private conversation with her. Moreover, one enterprising student had slipped out of the lecture hall early and followed her round the block. The elusive woman had vanished into the entrails of a vast silver-grey limousine and been sped away. They all knew of their maître’s aristocratic lineage, a family tree which linked him to Descartes. What more appropriate than that he should keep his mistress in style?

  Another faction, unable to imagine M. de Clérambault straying from his famed and rigid celibacy, had constructed a far more elaborate history for this evasive female in their midst. They determined that she was a former patient whom their teacher, in his haste to institutionalise all and sundry, had mistakenly had confined years ago when he was in charge of the nightly police round-up of unclassifiable offenders. Her crime had been to smack a policeman. The story she had told to explain her act had borne enough relation to M. de Clérambault’s understanding of a hallucinatory paranoia for him to have her locked up. It had however been true (and here the students gave endless examples of how close ‘normal’ behaviour and delusion could come to one another). Some weeks later, the young woman’s family had unearthed her from a psychiatric ward. And now, she was attending Clérambault’s lectures in order to build up a case against him and expose the fallacy of his beliefs and methods.

  Needless to say, the students who put round this latter version of affairs, were a rebellious lot who had fantasies about displacing their teacher. Jacob Jardine was amongst them. He was intrigued by this woman, who, in her tailored suits of unostentatious grey, with her look of serious concentration as she took notes, bore so little resemblance to the women he knew. But then, at this stage of his life, he was intrigued by everything. His medical studies complete, he had opted to pursue a specialisation in psychiatry, a field in which it seemed to him everything still needed to be done and which fed his ravenous curiosity about people and ideas.

  Jacob’s friend, Jacques Brenner, who, after his philosophy studies, had moved in a dilettantish way into his father’s firm, would laugh at Jacob. ‘Your ceaseless activity exhausts me,’ he would say. When Jacob would smile in turn and tell him to stop pretending to a laziness he didn’t really have, Jacques, a veritable magpie, would regale him with a concise and witty resumé of the latest novel by Gide, a current philosophical treatise or archaeological foray, or the state of the stock market. As a result of their interchange, Jacob, when he was off-duty would spend nights catching up with Jacques’s reading. His interests were those of a polymath and he dreamt of somehow being able to unite the disparity of fields that interested him.

  That New Year’s Eve he had been invited by Jacques’s mother to celebrate the Reveillon with them. They were having a little party. Jacques warned him that ‘little’ in his mother’s vocabulary had nothing, in this case, to do with small or intimate. Indeed, when Jacob made his way through the trail of luxurious automobiles and uniformed chauffeurs lining the street which led to the Brenner house, he chuckled at his friend’s warning. A liveried servant announced his arrival. The house shone with the brilliance of a hundred chandeliers. Mirrors glowed with refracted crystal, the bare shoulders and diamond-strewn throats of women. Voices trilled and galloped. Waiters poured wine and champagne of unforgettable years. A vast table bowed beneath the weight of delicacies decked with an eye to shape and colour. In retrospect, Jacob was to remember this eve of 1930 as the last, glittering celebration of Europe’s brief post-war holiday of plenty. The air had an electric edge, as if the gathered guests knew that for the next thirty years, nothing would equal this for sheer dazzle and ostentation.

  Jacob paid his respects to Lady Leonore, who curled her long lower lip into her customary wry smile.

  ‘Thank-you for coming to our little party,’ she said to him in English. Resplendent in a long gown cut out of two sheaths of golden fabric, she waved him in a particular direction. ‘Jacques was last seen somewhere over there.’

  Jacob was happy to wander and observe, equally happy to stop and exchange a few desultory words with the people he knew. He made his way into a second, slightly quieter room and cast his eyes over the assembled groups. In a far corner a woman caught his attention. With a particularly animated gesture of braceleted arms, she was addressing a small circle of friends. Jacob strolled in her general direction and watched.

  She was wearing a gown made out of two splendid lengths of glitter, knotted at shoulder and waist. Her dark hair waved around a face memorable as much for its expression of intelligence, as for its subtlety of brow and bone. The eyes were lacquered, intensely dark, fine. Jacob stared and when, discomfited, she returned his look, he turned away, only to renew his study of her after a moment. He was almost certain he recognised in this striking figure the woman who had caused him and his friends hours of intrigued speculation.

  The woman in question noticed the young man staring at her with particular intentness and identified him instantly. She had already singled him out amidst Clérambault’s students for the distinctive way he posed questions, the polite but trenchant criticism he occasionally levelled at the older man. After a moment, she walked toward Jacob.

  ‘So you have found me out,’ she said quietly. There was a rich vein of humour visible j
ust beneath her haughty manner.

  Jacob nodded briefly. He was unsure of his ground.

  ‘But you won’t break my cover,’ she continued tentatively, watching for his response.

  ‘I wouldn’t even if I could,’ Jacob smiled a slow smile. ‘I still have no idea who you are.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be easier if we kept it that way,’ she hesitated.

  ‘It might be easier, but I would hardly find it desirable,’ Jacob said. Now that she was standing so close to him, he found her even more compelling. They examined each other closely.

  Suddenly Jacques was upon them. ‘So there you are. I should have known that I would find you with our most exquisite guest.’

  ‘Ah, but we haven’t formally met,’ Jacob murmured.

  Jacques chuckled. ‘Let me do the honours then. Princesse Mathilde of Denmark, may I present Jacob Jardine, my erstwhile friend and sometime doctor.’

  Jacob could do nothing to hide his startled expression. The last thing in the world he had expected was to find in this woman who haunted the Infirmerie a princess whose name was linked to that of Europe’s principal royal houses. His tongue refused to formulate a sentence.

  Princesse Mathilde gave him a ravishing smile. ‘Your friend seems none too pleased to learn my identity,’ she said to Jacques.