‘Please. How long have the taxes not been paid?’
‘Two years, madame. I’m sorry.’
Ah, Sainte-Mère! ‘How much does my husband owe on them?’
Picard cleared his throat and drained his glass. ‘Seventy-five thousand francs.’
Three hundred and seventy-five pounds sterling at the official rate! I stared at my glass. The wine was golden, a little sweet for that time of day, but so nice with the pears I had gone down into the wine cellar and had opened a bottle just for spite.
Now I was to pay for it.
‘Madame, please don’t distress yourself. You mustn’t think the authorities will throw you out of your lovely house.’ He clenched a fist. ‘I, Alphonse Picard, mayor of Fontainebleau, have some say in such matters. Leave it with me. Another month, two, perhaps even three, then a little payment, you understand. Just enough to sweeten the syrup and keep those jackals at bay.’
Never mind the war, the threat of the Germans.
I blinked and forced myself to smile. ‘You’re very kind, Monsieur le maire. It’s not every day one meets with such compassion.’
‘Ah, think nothing of it.’
The English were not so bad—the English, what had he been thinking? Madame de St-Germain’s mother was French!
We talked of the war, of the district, of the forest, and of Fontainebleau. When next in town, I promised to come to see him.
I gave him two jars of pears and pressed on him a third, and even now as I remember it, I wonder if that wasn’t what helped to save my life.
‘Dr. Laurier, could I ask you to send another telegram for me?’
It’s late. She looks up from her desk. She removes her glasses and asks me to sit down. ‘A cognac? It’ll help you to sleep.’
‘No … no, nothing for me, thanks.’
There’s a notepad beside the clinical paper she’s been working on. This she drags in front of her. ‘Well, who’s it to be to this time?’
More information. ‘A firm of insurance agents in London.’
She gives a nod and waits. I hear myself saying, ‘Fairfax, Gordon, and Scharpe, 83-A Lime Street. They were an old, established firm of underwriters before the war. They had a reputation for persistence.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘A senior partner—Gordon, perhaps. Look, it really doesn’t matter. Just do as I …’
‘There’s no need to get upset. I haven’t telephoned De Verville. I’m trusting you to handle this yourself.’
‘Then please send only this: Tommy was killed. That’s all.’
‘The sender?’
Does she think she’s being clever? ‘Lily. Just say it’s from Lily.’
The car was huge, a dark, shiny forest green with sparkling chrome and a bonnet that must have been a kilometre long. It sat behind my tiny Renault on the drive before the house, and the hiss of my whisper was urgent. ‘Jean-Guy, come back! Marie, you, too. Vite, vite.’ I caught them by the hand and held them fiercely.
Together we watched him from the safety of the woods. He took off his jacket, loosened his tie, then used one arm of the jacket to polish the headlamps, even to spit on the chrome. The rims of that thing were wire-spoked, the tyres white-walled and huge. A man of means, then. The man from in front of that shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Suspenders held his trousers up, as before.
He played with us. He let us think he hadn’t seen Jean-Guy run out like that, sat on the front steps and opened a cake box. With a pocketknife, he cut himself a large slice only to decide that wine was needed and an apple, one of ours.
The cake sat there in the afternoon sun. The wine came from a well-stocked hamper in the car. ‘Maman, he will eat it all!’ whispered Marie urgently.
‘Let him choke on it,’ I replied.
‘You’re a vase de nuit, maman! A real stinker.’
‘Jean-Guy, he … he isn’t a friend, not this one. Behave yourselves. Let me deal with him.’
Each step we took brought us closer, and when at last we’d come round the car, he grinned at me and I realized then that he’d chosen to sit on the steps so as to be at eye level with the children. ‘Salut, mes amis. Want some cake?’ he asked. ‘A glass of wine, Lily? A peace offering. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, but things …’
He gave a distinctively personal shrug I was to see so many times, but left the war unsaid. It was too nice a day, and Tommy was always like that. The day came first, and he liked nothing better than to be outside, buggering about in an old pair of boots, cords, and a knitted turtleneck sweater, preferably dark blue or black. Ah, oui, oui, avec un Schmeisser in the crook of one arm and a satchel of ammunition in his other hand.
Not looking up, he cut the cake. ‘Lily, I wish you’d stop hating me. I want to help.’
‘Why? What the hell am I to you? If I’d had the chance to sell those earrings, you wouldn’t have found us here.’
‘And we wouldn’t be talking. I’d miss that, I think.’
He held out a slab of cake to Jean-Guy. A travelling salesman, an estate agent—what was he, some sort of magician? A gâteau Saint-Honoré—he’d known I’d see the significance of that with its pâte sucrée circle, golden brown at the edges. Droplets of pâte à choux had been baked and split in half to be filled with crème chantilly, the whole given a caramel glaze and a garnish of fresh fruit.
He had had the pâtisserie in Fontainebleau bake it specially, and that, of course, meant that he had waited at least a couple of hours and had paid dearly for the privilege—Henri-Jacques Rouleau would have seen to it.
‘Then it’s peace, at last, and we’ll drink to that,’ he said.
So we sat in the sun on the steps, the four of us, and we had our little feast. Very soon, Tommy was showing off the car, a Packard he’d had shipped all the way from America, from some little place in Montana where his ‘old man’ was a ‘car dealer.’
Jean-Guy was the first to sit in his lap and steer that thing, then Marie. We went for a drive. I threw caution away. How can I explain it? He made me feel good, made me laugh, but it wasn’t only that.
The children quickly came to love him, and when children do, it’s very hard to say no.
‘Maman, can he stay with us tonight? Please … ah, please,’ said my son, no thoughts of Tante Marie and Georges, or what they would say to Jules. No thoughts of anything but that he should stay.
Defeated, I smiled and gave a futile shrug. ‘But, of course, chéri, if he’d like to. There’s plenty of room.’ How could I have known what he really wanted?
The Aubusson carpet was soft, of a swirled beige with shades of yellow, blue, and red to complement the linen of the walls whose flowered pattern, on a pale yellow background, offered muted tones of green, rust, soft pink, and faded Prussian blue. At one end of the room, there was a fireplace with wrought-iron firedogs and square blue tiles. The furniture—the big double bed—was Majorelle, bought at the turn of the century and cherished ever since. The carpenters had matched the burled walnut with panelling about the fireplace and wide mouldings against the ceiling. Under the mantelpiece, the wood was gently arched to match the curved top of the mirror above.
Meissonier-patterned candlesticks of tall, spun gold with white candles were reflected in that mirror. The blue porcelain vases were full of late asters, beech leaves on their branches, goldenrod, stalks of straw, some barley heads, too. Tommy stood there looking at that room, and I remember thinking how like the window of that shop it was. That same quickness came to him, that same sense of intense interest. He let me see this in the mirror as he said in English, ‘My God, this place is a treasure.’
A ‘treasure’—did you get that, eh? I did. It frightened me. It made me think Jean-Guy had spilled the beans.
There were two sketches by Toulouse-Lautrec, one on either side of that fireplace, gorgeous things purchased by Jules’s father years ago. Tommy stood back to look at them—all interest now in the female form, a boldness, too. The sketch on the
right, nearest the first of the windows, showed a young woman pulling on her stockings. She was naked except for these and a towel that had been carelessly draped about her neck, and her breasts were full and squeezed between her upper arms, she leaning over, bending an upraised knee …
Tommy gave a gentle chuckle—one I was to mistake for appreciation, but one I was to hear him give so many times. As if bemused, as if discovering something for the first time, as if a student of man’s weaknesses: the flesh.
The other sketch was of a dancer at the Jardin de Paris and I wondered, as he looked at it, if the two women hadn’t been one and the same and my father-in-law’s mistress. The earrings … that citrine, of course.
Tommy had that quality about him. He could make you see something that had eluded you. He could open your mind and make you see the truth, even about yourself.
There was a chaise lounge by the fireplace, covered in the same painted velvet as the bedspread, then at the far end of the room—reflected, too, in the fireplace mirror—there was a gorgeous Majorelle armoire of burled, inlaid walnut whose tall, floor-to-ceiling mirror was flanked by subordinate closets and topped by a curve of bevelled glass and walnut.
Tommy inspected everything with the enthusiastic eye of a connoisseur while I watched him with feelings of embarrassment. How many times had I stood naked, reaching out to open that thing? How many times had Jules seen my reflection in both of those mirrors, the front, the back, from the two ends of that room?
There was humour in the look Tommy gave me, mischief too, the devil. ‘I like it,’ he said in that horribly accented French of his. We were to nearly always speak en français, and I still can’t believe that he got away with it for so long.
‘Let’s have a cognac in the library,’ I said. We’d lighted a fire there.
He stood grinning at me, and I knew then that if he wanted me, I would betray my husband. But we had the cognac, and the betrayal came later. Much later. Please don’t be disappointed.
Millet’s Goose Girl Bathing hung on the wall above an armchair. Millet had sketched her in the forest, of course, for there everything is elemental—either this or that, life or death, and the shadows, the shadings that were draped about her and in among the trees and blades of grass told you this.
An absolutely gorgeous painting, one of my favourites.
Tommy warmed his cognac by the fire. He hadn’t wanted to sit in one of the stiff-backed Louis XIV armchairs, not him. He had kicked off his shoes and had plunked himself down on the floor, knees up, elbows resting on them. No tie now, the shirt collar open.
I remember thinking then how much he must like to be by a fire. Again, it was something elemental. He didn’t just want to look at those flames, he needed to. They were a part of him and he of them.
I sat some distance from him in one of the chairs. ‘Lily, why did you choose that particular shop? I’m just curious. Nothing else.’
‘Me? I had overheard Jules and Marcel talking about it. Marcel is an artist. Jules has always been interested in rare and beautiful things. I thought … Ah, how should I know? A place to start, I suppose.’
‘Auguste Langlois, Maison des Antiquaires. La plus belle vitrine d’art et d’antiquité.’
This had been written on the window above. ‘Was there something wrong with that shop, other than what I encountered?’
He caught the note of anxiety but shook his head. ‘I just wondered. Langlois would have cheated you and I couldn’t have that. Jules has sold things there, has he?’
‘I … Ah, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think. No, my husband wouldn’t have. Not him. He’s a collector just like his father was.’
Tommy swirled the cognac in his glass. Dipping a fingertip into it, he flicked it at the fire. ‘This is good stuff,’ he said, tossing off the last of his.
‘One shouldn’t waste it,’ I countered.
‘I didn’t. The bluer the flame, the better the cognac.’
I thought I knew what he was thinking and said, ‘Apart from a very small amount, my husband doesn’t give me any money. Everything is done on the account, as it was in the days of his father.’
‘Then you’ll accept the thirty thousand francs I’m still prepared to give you for those earrings?’
‘I don’t think I can leave just yet.’
‘But you know you’re going to have to. Sooner or later, the Germans will be here. France won’t stop them, Lily. For the present, they’re unbeatable.’
‘How is it that you can be so sure?’
Silent for a moment, he withdrew into himself, then said, ‘I can’t. It’s just a feeling I think the two of us share in private. Like myself, you’re afraid they really can’t be stopped and that it’s going to be a very long and unpleasant war. The Nazis …’
Again, he left things unsaid, making me wonder what he did. ‘Has your husband been called up?’ he asked.
‘In the general mobilization of last August? Ah, no. He’s essential where he is.’
‘The Louvre. They’re crating everything they can and shipping it to repositories in châteaux along the Loire. I can’t imagine that place with its doors closed and locked.’
‘He’s at the Sorbonne, a professor.’
‘But is also attached to the Louvre.’
‘Yes. Yes, he’s there also.’
‘What have they got him doing?’
At times, Tommy demanded answers, and this was one of them. It wasn’t simply the determined look in those deep brown eyes with their touches of green, or the set of his chin. It was everything about him. ‘He’s making an inventory of all the holdings in private collections.’
Again, I heard him say, ‘How lovely,’ like a schoolboy—tickled pink but with the salt of larceny. ‘It’ll be done in time then,’ he added. ‘He’ll see to it. You can bet your bottom dollar.’
I had to wonder how much he actually knew about Jules. ‘In time for what?’ I hazarded.
‘For when the Nazis arrive, as they will.’
He asked if Marcel could have sold things to that shop, and I realized then what he’d been after all along, and I knew I couldn’t lie to him, even though the items would have to have been stolen. ‘Marcel, he’s not above such things.’
And the husband must know this, but all Tommy did was to nod curtly. For him, for me the matter was closed, or so I thought. But, of course, it wasn’t. It could never have been, not with someone like Tommy.
You mustn’t think that I paid no attention to the day-to-day events of the war or that I was self-centred and uncaring of the tragedy that was happening to others. At the time of Tommy’s visit, and from then on, that whole business was constantly with me, but just like everyone else, there were things I had to do. The children, school for Jean-Guy in Fontainebleau, sometimes the car, sometimes the walk, mostly our bicycles, but if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have driven to and from everyday. There was also the firewood to get and split, the house to clean, the garden, et cetera. Jules and all that mess with my sister.
Having joined hands with Hitler and eaten the eastern half of Poland, the Russians now threatened war with Finland. A German submarine had penetrated the British naval base at Scapa Flow and had sunk the Royal Oak, a battleship, with the loss of 833 men, most of whom had been asleep. Mines were being sown at sea by aeroplanes. The RAF was dropping leaflets on Berlin. Leaflets! Can you imagine? Sides were being chosen. Nearly one hundred sixty thousand men of the British Expeditionary Force were stationed in northern France along the Belgian border, but the British were not doing their fair share, according to the French who had, by then, mobilized something like two-and-a-half million men. To be British was to be … ah, what can I say? Suspect? Unwanted? This feeling was to grow strongly later, after the defeat, the old animosities surfacing. Jeanne d’Arc, Napoléon, and all that rubbish.
Tommy’s warning kept coming back to me and I thought again and again about taking the children to England while there was still a chance. My father wasn’t w
ell, so I could use that excuse. I wanted so much to see him but Jules wouldn’t have let me take the children, not at a time like that or any other. No, if I went, I’d have to kidnap them. So I waited. I thought a lot about it. I tried to lay in enough things to help us over the worst of times. Petrol, food, clothing, medicines—all those sorts of things, even pears. Everyone else was hoarding, so why shouldn’t I?
Tommy’s thirty thousand francs was my escape money, and I thanked God each night for such generosity in a fellow human being—he had let me keep the earrings and had said we should simply consider it a loan—and sometimes as I lay there in my loneliness, I made love to him in my mind.
But more of Jules, more of my husband. In that last weekend of October 1939, the train had brought them from Paris in the early morning. We’d been to the palais, the Château de Fontainebleau so deserted our steps had echoed. Jules knew the owners of Vaux—the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte—so we had gone there, too. Such beautiful things, so many of them.
Now our guests sat about two picnic tables that had been placed end to end among the pear trees so as to catch the sun. Jules was at the far end, with Janine on his left, everyone eating, drinking, endlessly discussing politics and the war. Oh, for sure, it was good to see Simone and André de Verville again, nice of Jules to have included them, Simone, in particular, for she was special to me, but the others … Apart from Marcel Clairmont, whom you know I didn’t trust and would rather not have had as a more-or-less permanent house guest, I simply didn’t know them.
In secret, from behind the parted curtains of Jean-Guy’s room, I looked down at those tables. Louis and Dominique Vuitton were thin, stiff, greying, black-haired, and from the Ministry of Culture and the Louvre, respectively, and wasn’t it nice how some couples could have their fingers in so many pies?
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