by Ruth Brandon
Manu considered his beer, then said, after a while and without looking at me, ‘And you thought I might know something about it?’
‘It seemed possible.’
‘But why? There are lots of people in this building. Why did you call me?’
I took another pull at my beer. After all that talking my mouth felt dry, and I needed to sort out my thoughts. ‘Well. You know I told you I was organizing this exhibition.’
He nodded.
‘OK, I’d arranged to borrow the picture that’s in the Louvre, or I thought I had. That’s why I’m here in Paris – to talk to the people there about the details. But when I got here, it turns out they won’t lend it after all. The person in charge just said no. No reason – just no. That happened a week ago, and he hasn’t been in the office since. So I thought I might try and find him at home. But no one would give me his home address. Perhaps it’s policy – that wouldn’t be surprising. Anyhow, he’s called Rigaut – Antoine Rigaut. So I was looking through the Rigauts in the phone book, and I saw that one lived here. And I’d been meaning to come here anyway, because of Robert de Beaupré. So I called.’
He nodded absently, but gave no other sign that he’d heard a word of what I’d just said. He had finished his beer and was lying back in the little armchair, long legs stretched out in front of him, pale brown hair flopping over his pale brown forehead, fixing me somewhat unnervingly with those bright grey eyes. Above his head the lovers on the Picasso plate beatifically fondled each others’ private parts. It felt as though we were engaged in a sort of game: I had to ask the questions, and if they were the right questions, he might give me the answers. I wondered if he was like that all the time – in bed, for instance. Not much fun for his partner, if so.
‘Was this Robert de Beaupré’s house?’
The fruit machine whirred: ker-ching, three in a row. Manu nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And was this – the room?’
‘No.’
‘But it did happen here?’
‘Yes, upstairs.’ He nodded towards an open-tread stair-case at the back of the room. ‘He had his studio there.’ He paused, then (perhaps wanting to move the discussion along a little) volunteered a piece of information. ‘My grandmother found him. She was his sister.’
‘His sister!’
He nodded. I tried to imagine what it must have been like – to walk into your house and find your brother . . . ‘God! How awful.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your grandmother – then Robert de Beaupré’s sister married Emmanuel Rigaut?’
‘Bravo!’
I opened my mouth to make some sharp reply, but caught myself in time. He was doing me a favour, after all. If he wanted to play games, then I’d just have to play along.
‘Did she know – I mean, presumably he was the thief?’
‘Naturellement. Everyone knew who was involved. Everyone’s always known.’
‘Except the police,’ I said, glancing surreptitiously at my watch. It was after five: soon it would be too late to catch Charles Rey. But this was more important. I could phone Rey any time, from London.
‘Oh, the police knew. It’s their job, non?’
‘But no one was arrested.’
‘You can’t exactly arrest a corpse. The picture was returned. No harm was done. What would have been the point of making a fuss? Perhaps they thought the family had suffered enough.’
‘I’m amazed the police were so tactful,’ I said. ‘In England they aren’t.’
‘They probably are, simply you don’t hear. That’s the point, isn’t it?’ He raised his eyebrows and waved towards the staircase. ‘So, you want to look at the fatal spot? I believe it was just in front of the window. You can photo-graph it if you like. Perhaps if I put a hook in we could take parties round. The original hook . . . The tourism of death. What d’you think? If the photo’s good enough you could make it part of your exhibition.’
I let that pass: what could one say? Instead I tried another question. ‘Did the house look like this then?’
‘I don’t expect so. My grandmother had it all done up a few years ago.’
‘It belongs to her?’
Manu nodded.
So she was still alive: perhaps she was the J. Rigaut of the phone book. ‘I’d love to see her. Do you think that might be possible?’
‘Why not? She doesn’t come to Paris much, though.’
I opened my mouth to ask where, in that case, his grandmother did live, but before I could do so he moved the conversation on. ‘Did you want to look upstairs?’
Once again he’d sidestepped me. But I could hardly let the opportunity slip. ‘Of course.’
With an exaggerated, courtly gesture, he indicated the staircase.
The upstairs room – it was the middle floor of the house: the staircase, zigzagging back on itself, continued upwards – was as charming and impersonal as the salon. It was a bedroom, also white-carpeted, with wainscoting and built-in panelled cupboards in shades of pale blue-grey. There was a large bed with a bright green cover, over which hung a picture that might have been a small Chirico, of the early period. To the right a door opened into a bathroom; to the left, a window, curtained in the same green fabric as the bedcover, looked on to the little front garden. The ceiling was blandly white and smoothly plastered. Like everything about Robert de Beaupré’s fatal exploit, it had been efficiently covered over.
Manu’s voice floated up from below. ‘Are you going to take a photo?’
I always carry a little camera in my bag, but what would be the point? This might be the same space, but it certainly wasn’t the same room. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Fine, whatever you want.’
I tried to picture the room as it had been, with the swing-ing body. I wondered how tall Robert de Beaupré had been. Manu would have a job hanging himself in here.
Downstairs, the phone began to ring. I heard him answer it – ‘Oui, allo?’ Then, in the first display I’d heard of any-thing approaching emotion, he said, ‘Quoi?’ This was followed by a series of questions – ‘Where?’ ‘You’re quite sure?’ and a series of Yeses and Of courses. After a while he said, ‘A bientôt, alors,’ and I heard him replace the phone. Only then did I venture downstairs.
Manu was striding about the room, as though trying to gather his thoughts from its various corners and crevices. He looked stunned, thunderstruck. I said, ‘Perhaps I’d better go.’
He started – whatever the phone call had been about, it had completely overlaid all memory of my presence. ‘Yes. I’m sorry. Yes, there are some things I must do now.’
‘Bad news?’
He shook his head like a dog in the rain, as if to slough off what he had just heard. ‘My uncle’s died.’
‘I’m so sorry. Was he ill?’
‘No, not at all. It was an accident.’
‘God! Who found him – not your aunt, I hope?’
‘No, no, he wasn’t married . . . You knew him,’ Manu said, finally answering one of the questions I had failed to put. ‘He was head of the Italian department at the Louvre.’
‘Antoine Rigaut?’ I felt the hairs on my neck stand up. ‘Your uncle? When was this?’
‘When?’ Manu looked surprised. ‘I’ve no idea. Yesterday, today? They just found him. Why?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m so sorry. You’ve been very kind. If there’s anything I can do for you . . .’
‘What could you do?’ He held out his hand. ‘Au revoir.’
My head buzzed with questions I’d have liked to ask. Who was that on the phone? What sort of accident? When did you last see him? What was he like? But I had to choke them back. Manu had joined the ranks of the bereaved, who operate in a space and time that prohibits these worldly intrusions. We shook hands, and the door shut behind me.
Before I’d reached the garden gate, however, it opened again and I heard him call out. ‘I didn’t give you my grandmother’s address, did I?’ And he came running after m
e, a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘Here.’
I opened my mouth to thank him, but he was already back inside the house, and had shut the door.
So that impenetrable façade had been just that – a façade. It wasn’t my imagination – he had been hiding something. Before that call, he had not only shown no interest in giving me his grandmother’s address – he had actively avoided doing so. Nor had he told me Antoine Rigaut was his uncle. Then he had heard of his uncle’s death, and all that had changed.
To do with his father? That was something else I hadn’t asked. But unless there was another brother, he must be the Minister’s son. Of course there might be any number of reasons – privacy, shame – why he might not want to advertise that just now. I tried to remember what Jean-Jacques Rigaut had looked like on that television interview. I had an impression of elongation – but that might easily be post hoc, a consequence of meeting Manu. He had mostly been a huge talking head.
As the Eurostar sped northwards across the flat fields of the Pas de Calais, I took out Manu’s slip of paper and laid it on the table in front of me. It was torn from a telephone pad, and contained a scribbled name, a phone number, and an address with a 24 postcode. Madame Juliette Rigaut, Château de la Jaubertie, St Front d’Argentat, 24700 Meyrignac. Where could that be? Somewhere in the south-west, most likely, where all the towns end in –ac.
Now that I had the information I’d wanted, I felt suddenly unsure what to do with it. This was hardly the moment to suggest a visit – the poor woman must be distraught. On the other hand, Manu clearly thought I should call her. And urgently. Why else had he come rushing out like that?
But perhaps I was reading too much into all this. Perhaps he’d been meaning to give me the address all along, and just thought there was no time to lose. Juliette Rigaut must be getting on. In her late eighties, perhaps even older. She might die at any moment, especially after a nasty shock like this.
Well, at any rate I’d have plenty to tell Joe. I thought how pleased he’d be, and wondered what he was doing. And realized with astonishment that I hadn’t thought of him – not really thought of him – all afternoon.
5
Meyrignac, July
I phoned Joe as soon as I got back to London. He wasn’t in the office, but I left a message saying I had news for him from Paris.
He called me that evening. ‘Reg? So, what’s this detective work you’ve been doing?’
I told him, losing confidence with every word I spoke. When it came down to it, it didn’t amount to much. Antoine Rigaut had indeed been the Minister’s brother, but he had died. I’d spoken to a boy who might be the Minister’s son.
‘Might be?’
‘Well, Antoine Rigaut was his uncle. So unless there’s another brother . . .’
‘Didn’t you ask him?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘But you feel the death’s significant.’
‘I think it might be. Though I’ve no idea why, other than what I’ve told you.’
‘Will you go and see the old lady?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You suppose so! Where’s the spirit of the chase?’
‘She’s just lost her son. It hardly seems the moment to say I want to talk to her about the Surrealists.’
‘The Surrealists?’ Joe sounded mystified.
‘The Surrealists,’ I assured him. ‘She was married to one. Her brother was one. It’s to do with my exhibition. Remember?’
‘Yeah, of course, your exhibition. Well, if you do go, don’t forget to keep your eyes open. I kind of feel we may be on to something rather interesting.’
He didn’t suggest we met. But at least we were on terms again.
Next morning, when I opened the paper, there was Rigaut’s obituary.
Antoine Rigaut, who has died aged 58, was a fixture of Parisian cultural life. His father, the Surrealist photographer Emmanuel Rigaut, made his living after the war as a picture dealer, so that Antoine grew up surrounded by art and artists. He himself would have liked to be a painter, but although he had some facility, it quickly became clear that he was not talented enough to make his living in this way. Although it would have been easy for him to enter the fam-ily firm, Antoine preferred instead to devote himself to scholarship. He soon established himself as an expert on the baroque, and by his mid-forties had become head of Italian paintings at the Louvre, a post he held until his death.
Rigaut showed a particular facility for spotting master-pieces in improbable settings, and although some aspects of his career were controversial, leading to occasional fallingsout amongst his colleagues, all would agree that he left the collection distinctly stronger than when he arrived.
Rigaut never married. His mother and a younger brother survive him.
I tore the page out. Naturally, it didn’t say how he’d died. For some reason, obituaries never do. You have to translate: ‘suddenly’ probably means an accident, ‘after a long illness’ equals cancer or alcoholism. But this one was giving even less away than usual. An accident, Manu had said. But what kind of accident? Perhaps the French press would be more forthcoming.
When I got to my computer at the office, I googled Rigaut’s name. There were a number of other obituaries, longer, but almost as uninformative. The French style is less direct than the English, oblique, allusive, given to tailing off in suggestive ellipsis . . . Both Le Monde and Le Figaro hinted at an edgy attraction to rough trade. But they didn’t imply that this was related to Rigaut’s death. In any case, why would a quarrel with a boyfriend have prompted Manu to give me his grandmother’s address? There was also a short paragraph from the news pages of Le Figaro, stating that the body had been found at Rigaut’s home, and that foul play was not suspected – a phrase which probably meant suicide.
Despite this frustrating lack of direct information, I did manage to glean a few references to old scandals – pre-sumably, the ‘controversial’ career aspects mentioned in the English obit. There was a dubious provenance regard-ing a Titian – Rigaut had insisted the painting was genuine, a view which had eventually prevailed, to the extent of its being bought by the Louvre, but which was still, it seemed, strongly contested in some quarters. Also, there had been a string of lucky finds in Switzerland, apparently an improbable venue for such serendipities. Why, I could not quite make out. If you were rich and wanted to conceal the extent of your wealth, wasn’t Switzerland the place to go, or at any rate to send the excess, knowing that no awkward questions would be asked? And why, in that case, should the odd escaped picture not find itself floating around Zurich, waiting to be identified by a knowledgeable eye? But these were hardly more than hints – a sense that all was not what it might have seemed. Whatever the story (and maybe there was no story) I would not find it here. The obliterating hand of nil nisi bonum saw to that.
The necessary phone call to Madame Rigaut loomed ineluctably. But if I didn’t make it, my new line to Joe – that tender shoot – would wither irretrievably. Manu’s bit of paper seemed for one horrendous moment to have vanished, but proved, after a short panic, merely to have slipped inside a lurking file. However, when I rang the number, the woman who answered told me, in an accent so broad I could only just make out what she said, that Madame Rigaut was not home.
I said I’d been very much hoping to speak to her, and wondered when she’d be back.
In a week, said the woman. She was staying with her son.
I thought: her son’s dead. But of course she had another son – Manu’s father. ‘The Minister?’
‘The Minister.’
That, at least, was one question answered. I said, ‘I’m going to be in Meyrignac in a couple of weeks. Do you think she’d be able to see me then?’
The woman, who must have been a housekeeper – no secretary would speak so broadly, she pronounced ‘madame’ as three distinct syllables – said, ‘You can try, madame.’ And we left it at that.
Meyrignac’s nearest airport was Bergerac. Joe
offered to stand me the ticket, but I was interested in art, not politics. If any interesting facts turned up – interesting, that is, to him – then fine. But this was my trip, not his. In any case, the fare was so cheap that even my exhibition’s tiny budget would probably stand the strain.
The day before my departure I called Madame Rigaut again. This time she answered the phone herself. In a dry little voice thin with age she agreed that yes, she would be home the day after tomorrow, and that yes, I could, if I wanted, come and talk to her then about the Surrealists.
‘It’s kind of you to see me, madame. I know it’s not a good time for you.’
‘Frankly, at my age it all feels much the same,’ she said. ‘Bad, mostly. I don’t have a great deal to tell you. I hope you realize that.’
I assured her I was happy to take my chances, and we agreed that I would call on her at 10 a.m. the day follow-ing my arrival.
The south-west was a part of France I’d never been to, but airports are airports – the same wherever you go. Bergerac’s was smaller than most, a tin shed and a tent set amid flat fields of maize and sunflowers. But it possessed a car hire shack, at which in theory I’d made a reservation. Although Meyrignac had a train station, and was only fifty kilometres distant, there was no direct line from Bergerac. I’d have to change at Libourne, then wait three hours for a stopping train. We arrived just after ten; taking the train I’d arrive in Meyrignac at three, an average of ten kilometres an hour. It would almost be quicker to walk – far quicker to cycle. But there was no bike hire counter, so a car it had to be. I signed for the smallest vehicle on offer – a Fiat Panda – checked the route on the map, and set off into the shining countryside.
Unlike England’s permanent traffic jam, the roads seemed almost empty, and on the back lanes into which I soon turned there was no traffic at all, give or take the odd tractor. A perfumed waft blew in the open window from a field where new-mown hay lay in neat green rows. I stopped the car, got out and luxuriously inhaled the fra-grant, fume-free breath of summer. High in the sky two big hawks rode the updraughts, calling to each other like lost souls. An oak wood at the field’s edge photosynthesized in the sunshine. I was filled with an unfamiliar feeling that I couldn’t at once name, but which I eventually identified as calm.