Caravaggio's Angel

by Ruth Brandon

  ‘You don’t mind being all alone?’

  ‘I can manage. Babette leaves me plenty of food, and the bar will send something if I phone. Jean-Jacques wanted to send someone, but I prefer to manage by myself.’

  For whose benefit, exactly, the ‘someone’? I wondered if her thoughts were the same as mine.

  ‘Did you know your son had written to me about the picture?’ I asked her.

  ‘He mentioned something . . . What did he say?’

  I held out the letter. She took it and read it, again using the magnifying glass, then handed it back, shaking her head. ‘He’s always so obstinate,’ she said irritably, as though we were discussing a problem child. ‘He gets an idea into his head . . . I told him I’d do what I wanted with my own property, but he’s too used to getting his own way, that’s the trouble. So when I wouldn’t agree with him he tried something else. It’s rubbish, take no notice.’ I must have looked sceptical, for she added: ‘He’s a bully, always has been. He relies on intimidating people into doing what he wants. Just ignore him. It’s the only way. Do you have a pen?’

  I nodded, mystified, and held it out. Below Rigaut’s signature she wrote: This is a lie. I alone own the picture and the loan will go ahead. She signed and dated it, and handed it back. ‘There.’

  I took it gingerly, as one might a stick of dynamite. ‘Are you really sure this will be all right?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t want to make trouble.’

  ‘With Jean-Jacques,’ she said, ‘you can’t avoid trouble. He searches it out. Always has. All one can do is ignore it or stand up to him.’

  There didn’t seem much point arguing. Presumably she knew her own son.

  I thanked her and stashed the letter safely away in my bag. I’d brought my little tape machine along, and now I pulled it out. ‘I was wondering, since I’m here, if perhaps you could tell me a bit more of your story.’

  ‘It’s rather long,’ she said drily. ‘Which bits did you have in mind?’

  ‘What happened after your brother died. And during the war.’ Perhaps we’d get to the bottom of that rumour. Or perhaps she wouldn’t mention it at all.

  She sat back in her chair. For some minutes she said nothing, and I wondered whether she’d drifted off to sleep. But then she spoke. ‘So long ago,’ she said. ‘But to me it seems like yesterday.’

  After Robert’s death, Juliette said, she collapsed. She knew it was her fault, and she wanted to die too. She refused to go home to La Jaubertie but took refuge with an aunt, her mother’s sister, in Passy. Eventually, however, she began to recover, and the question arose: where would she go? Her aunt and her parents naturally assumed it would be La Jaubertie, but that was out of the question. So was rue d’Assas (which now belonged to her: her parents, on her father’s insistence, had made over their share in it). Emmanuel wanted her to live with him – he was making a good living as a photographer, and had a chic new studio in Montparnasse. But she’d put her parents through so much – to add to their misery after what had happened was more than she could do. And then Emmanuel came up with a solution: they would get married.

  That was in the spring of 1938. Then in 1939 war was declared, and Emmanuel was conscripted. When France fell he was near St Quentin, and there was no word to say what had become of him. She refused to leave Paris, but continued with her job as a legal secretary. If he had been taken prisoner, or had escaped, she would have heard, so she assumed he was dead.

  One day someone cautiously opened the door and slid into the studio. She cried out in alarm: the intruder swung round: she found herself staring at a pistol. Terrified, she raised her eyes.

  Emmanuel.

  He wasn’t in uniform, and his clothes were different from the civilian clothes he usually wore. He explained that they were English. He’d come from England – from London. Officially, he didn’t exist.

  ‘Then how will you eat?’ she asked. Everything was rationed, and without papers there were no rations.

  ‘I’ve got some papers,’ he said, but did not tell her whose.

  Later, she heard his story – or some of it. The armistice had caught his company near St Quentin. In the confusion of the retreat he and a friend had made off, lain low for a while at a farm near the fortress of Ham, then made their way to the coast at Hardelot-Plage near Boulogne. There, one night, they stole a dinghy and rowed across the Channel. They got across against all the odds, only to have their adventure nearly ended when in theory they had finally reached safety. It was four in the morning, first light, and they were beaching their boat, when a patrol of the Home Guard came across them, took them for German spies, and almost shot them. Fortunately they managed to persuade their captors that they were French, not German, and were taken to the local schoolmaster, who was also the commanding officer, and who eventually put them on the train for London, where they joined General de Gaulle. Now Emmanuel had been sent back to France, charged with various missions. He wanted to know who Juliette saw, how she spent her days, whether she knew any Germans, whether she ever came across the Resistance.

  He didn’t live at the studio, though he often appeared there, and sometimes stayed the night. She didn’t ask what he was doing, nor where he got the money to live; nor did she mention his presence to any of her friends. She didn’t even know what name he operated under, though she did know that it was not his own, and that he had several sets of false papers. She simply did what she was told, without ever asking why, or knowing whether her action had had the desired effect. If there were others – and there must have been others – she never met them. She took instructions only from him, and only directly, by word of mouth, never in writing. Her life became a series of apparently random encounters. In the galleried café of the Samaritaine department store, with its many exits and entrances, she sat at the table he had specified, beside the wrought-iron balcony railing that overlooked the scurrying ground-floor shoppers, and passed an envelope, concealed in the menu, to a waitress who announced herself by tapping the table twice with her pencil. Another day, in the hat department, when she tried on a small red confection with a pheasant-feather after it had been rejected by a chic blonde woman in her thirties, she found a note behind the feather, which she passed on without reading it to a tailor in the rue Christine. In a little bookshop near the Odéon, she left a parcel in the back room, addressed to a Monsieur Denoyau. Taking her friend Arlette’s little girl Aurélie to a nursery near the parc Monceau, she exchanged the child for a slip of paper with an address, passed on to her by a girl with black curls in a red and white print dress. On these occasions she felt much as she had that April morning in the Louvre – scared, excited, jubilant, defiant, triumphant.

  Then he vanished again; what might have happened to him this time, she had no way of knowing. She thought of going over to the rue d’Assas to check on the house, but decided not to, partly because the place still filled her with revulsion, partly because it was possible she was being followed and she didn’t want to risk endangering any of his plans. Grimly, automatically, she went on with her life, but as the months passed, she feared the worst. The hard-est thing, she found, was that there was no one she could talk to. Emmanuel’s appearances and disappearances were things she had never mentioned: as far as the world was concerned, her husband was dead or in England.

  And then, one day, there he was again, waiting for her when she returned from work, sitting in the old armchair by the window. He told her he’d had to vanish, fast. For the moment, however, the danger seemed to have abated. Their old life resumed, though not quite as before. Emmanuel was warier, his appearances even more spasmodic, and he no longer asked her to run errands for him. It seemed that the network had been betrayed by one of the people at the bookshop, and it wasn’t safe to use any-one who had been even tenuously connected with it.

  Two months after his return, she knew she was pregnant.

  Emmanuel was horrified. He would have liked her to have an aborti
on. When she refused, he suggested she go home to have the baby at La Jaubertie. At first she just laughed. But the more she thought about it, the more appealing the idea seemed. It might thaw her mother, who since Robert’s death had retreated into fanatical Catholicism. And (since there could be no question of Emmanuel living with her) it would be better than trying to manage alone in Paris.

  She left in May: she was two and a half months gone. The journey took three days in trains that were infrequent, slow, and full to bursting. Her father met her at the station: on their way back to the house, she told him she was pregnant. When she asked if he was pleased he gave her a look she remembered from when she was ten years old, and had said something unexpectedly stupid. ‘Of course I’d like to be pleased,’ he said. ‘But whose child is this, exactly? I sup-pose you do know?’ And she remembered that as far as the world was concerned, Emmanuel was dead.

  So she told him the whole story – how Emmanuel had escaped, and was working for the Resistance. And he sighed, and said they’d better not mention that to her mother. She wasn’t to be trusted – Robert’s death had unhinged her slightly, she blamed it on his Communist friends, she was a hardline Pétainist. And there was a German staying in the house – an officer, one of the occupying force, billeted on them. He was living in Robert’s old room, and her mother was very friendly with him. So – discretion. They’d think of some story. Meanwhile Juliette should keep quiet.

  Unfortunately, pregnancy isn’t a secret anyone can keep for long. Their old bonne à tout faire Suzanne guessed immediately. She, too, assumed Juliette had been sleeping around – and this time, there could be no explanation. That was when Juliette took in how hard life might become. So she began to do the kind of heavy work that might bring on a miscarriage – like digging the vegetable garden. Which was how she met the German. He offered to help, and she told him to go back to Germany – that would be the best help he could give her. Then, realizing how foolish she had been, she waited for some reprisal. But it never came.

  By then she’d told her mother about the baby – and told her, too, it was Emmanuel’s.

  ‘Back from the dead?’ her mother mocked. ‘What d’you think I am, blind?’ she’d asked bitterly when Juliette finally confessed. Juliette explained that he was moving around, and thought she’d be safer at La Jaubertie. Which of course could mean only one thing – the Resistance.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ her mother asked. She was very angry. ‘You thought I’d denounce him, is that it?’

  What could Juliette say? It was exactly what she’d thought.

  The showdown cleared the air, and things became easier. The atmosphere lightened, and the coming baby was acknowledged, if not joyfully welcomed.

  By this time Juliette knew the German better. He was called Kopp – Helmut Kopp. In civilian life he was an architect, and came from Hamburg. He was good-looking – tall, blond, with high cheekbones and grey eyes: a true Aryan. They’d got talking one day when he found her in her father’s study. He said he wanted to look at the picture. He’d guessed it was a Caravaggio – one of his favourite painters. And by the end of the conversation, Juliette had to admit that she rather liked him. As her mother had said, he was just another human being. One day he asked her when the baby was due. She told him, December.

  He said, ‘I like the idea of a baby. Such a normal thing in all this craziness.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ll still be here then.’

  ‘Do you hope I won’t?’

  ‘Of course,’ she replied, but they both knew that things had got too complicated for ‘of course’. After that she tried to avoid these encounters: her feelings about him were too confused.

  At the beginning of December, most of the German troops moved on, and Helmut with them: military exigencies demanded their presence elsewhere. Juliette’s mother mourned his departure – he had been such an addition to the household, so cultured, so delightful – and to her shame, Juliette, too, found herself missing him.

  The baby arrived on 31st December, at three in the morning: a boy, called Antoine after Juliette’s grandfather. He was a big baby, and wakeful. During the next months, she spent many night hours walking about the house with Antoine suspended in a sling on her hip, trying to lull him to sleep. It was during one of these perambulations that she became aware of her father’s hidden life.

  It was April, 1943: Antoine was just over three months old. As usual he had begun to cry after his evening feed, and continued inconsolably until midnight. Tired of walking the dim rooms she decided to vary her route, and descended the staircase to the garden room. She paced along the front, then turned towards one of the small towers at the back. She had just reached it when its door began to open.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but was so paralysed with horror that as in a nightmare no sound came. The door opened wider – and her father emerged, holding a hurricane lantern in one hand and a shopping basket in the other.

  It was hard to say which of them was the more astonished. Juliette, anxious not to wake the baby, whispered in the low croak that for the moment seemed to have replaced her voice, ‘Papa! I thought it was burglars! What on earth are you doing?’ Her father started as though he had been stung. The hurricane lantern went out, leaving everyone in the dark. And Antoine, roused by the sudden switch from light to dark, or by his mother’s transmitted terror, began to bawl. She hugged him close, jiggled and kissed him, but he yelled inconsolably on.

  ‘Shush, petit,’ Etienne said. ‘You’ll have the whole house-hold down.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Juliette, angry with relief. ‘There’s only Maman, and she’s not going to get up because Antoine’s crying. What on earth were you doing?’ she asked again.

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing that need worry you. Go back to bed.’

  Two days after the midnight incident, they had a visit. Lunch was over, it was a sunny afternoon, and Madame de Beaupré, who however mixed her feelings regarding her daughter was unequivocally besotted by her new grandson, was walking him round the park in Juliette’s old pram. Juliette, as often in these periods of respite, was in her father’s study. She was dozing over a novel when a sharp knock on the door brought her to abrupt wakefulness.

  Her father, who in his capacity of mayor was used to these interruptions, said, ‘Oui,’ and went on writing. The door opened, and in marched three Germans in the uni-form of the Gestapo. They must have arrived while Juliette was asleep. Craning out of the window, she could see their car parked by the tower.

  Etienne put down his pen. ‘Alors, messieurs?’ he said politely.

  One of them said something in German. Etienne shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, messieurs, I don’t speak German.’

  The youngest of the three visitors came forward and repeated the request, this time in French. ‘Monsieur, we would like to search your house.’

  ‘Search my house? What for?’

  ‘We have information that some people we are looking for were seen in this area. We are searching all the houses in the village. I must remind you, you should tell us if you know anything about this.’

  ‘But of course I’d tell you, I’m the mayor, that’s my job,’ Etienne said politely. ‘By all means search. I’m afraid it’s rather a large house. Do you want me to show you round?’

  ‘Thank you, we can do it,’ said the officer.

  ‘Will you begin here?’ Etienne gestured round the room.

  The Germans, clearly somewhat embarrassed, looked around. There was in fact, as Juliette knew, a secret door behind one of the bookshelves, leading to a space in the wall, which at this point was two metres thick. It had been a favourite hiding-place in the games she and Robert used to play with their friends when they were children. No one knew who had made it, or why, though it probably dated from the wars of religion. She watched as the Germans blundered past it and wondered whether anyone was hidden there. It seemed unlikely.

  They left the room and moved on. For
the next three quarters of an hour they could be heard moving round the house, carefully shifting and replacing furniture, opening cupboard doors. Etienne continued with his interrupted business. Juliette, looking out of the window, saw her mother approaching with the pram, got up and went out to meet her. ‘The Germans are searching the house,’ she warned, as her mother wheeled the old-fashioned perambulator with its sleeping baby into the garden room.

  Leaving Antoine asleep, they mounted the stairs. Overhead, footsteps sounded on bare boards. Then the young French-speaking officer appeared on the stairs, fol-lowed by his colleagues. ‘Can you show me please how to get to the space under the roof, and the cellar?’

  Silently, Juliette indicated the doors in the small towers. ‘Please be as quiet as you can,’ she said sternly. ‘I don’t want the baby wakened.’

  The Germans disappeared, and they joined Etienne in the study.

  ‘Are they still here?’

  ‘They’re in the cellar,’ Juliette said, watching him.

  Etienne nodded: he seemed unmoved. He continued calmly with his work, while Juliette and Véronique sat in tense silence. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door. The Germans had finished, evidently without finding anything. The one who was in charge, a fleshy, burly man with a florid face, clicked his heels. ‘Danke, Herr Bürgermeister.’

  Etienne nodded and went on writing.

  One sunny day in early July, Emmanuel arrived at La Jaubertie. The Beauprés were away for a couple of days at a cousin’s first communion, and Juliette and Antoine were sitting out on the grass, Antoine practising crawling, while Juliette picked wild strawberries to share with him. Intent on her task she didn’t hear the footstep – and then, when she looked up, there he was, standing before her. ‘Bonjour,’ he said, and dropped down on to the grass beside them. ‘Bonjour, mon bébé!’ He picked up Antoine, held him up in the air, pretended to drop him, and caught him in the nick of time. Antoine laughed madly, and Emmanuel did it again.