The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  The photographs of Sir Austin with the inner Cabinet in Downing Street, Sir Austin with open attaché case on his lap in his official Humber, Sir Austin in Whitehall—these only depressed her. She had seen enough photographs of that filthy hypocrite in his different seats of power, and they did no more than remind her of her own helplessness against so formidable an opponent. She lingered longer over the caption. In a week, she read, the Foreign Secretary would be in Paris, to bring his diplomatic skills to bear against the unpredictable Chinese Communist delegation. In a week Sir Austin would be in Paris, and then it occurred to her that her supplement was one week old, and so a week had passed, and tomorrow was another Sunday and Sir Austin would be in Paris tomorrow.

  She stared at her salad and thought: tomorrow in Paris. He would be in a country where she was accepted, not banished; within reach, an hour and a half by jet plane from Nice, or overnight by Train Bleu from the Juan-les-Pins depot. The possibility of confronting him was tempting. She fantasied it, remembering some lurid, sentimental feature story in a French magazine about others who had done it—who?—yes, the young girl from Caen, Charlotte Corday, and the mighty Marat in his bath, and she had been admitted to see him, and had plunged a dagger into his heart. Medora tried to visualize herself in Paris cornering Sir Austin, the two of them alone, and her threatening to murder him unless he wrote and signed a document allowing her to return home, and his immediate fear and compliance. But the biting salt of an anchovy on her tongue brought her back to the Provençal beach and made her realize the futility of her daydream. Sir Austin was too prominent to be reached by a nobody. And even were she to reach him, she possessed no weapon (as Corday had had her lie and her dagger) with which to intimidate him into abject surrender. It was a hopeless dream. If you bargained, you had to have-strength. Her arsenal was empty.

  In despair, discarding her fork for the glass of Tavel, Medora turned another page, revealing her tormentor at play, and finally, her tormentor’s recent bride, new wife, Her Ladyship, the twenty-nine-year-old Fleur Ormsby, with the hounds on the rolling green meadows of the country place, with the ancient groom at their stables, with the bishop’s wife at tea, with her personal maid studying her latest wardrobe designed for the Summit, with her most recent still life on the easel in her skylighted studio—and with her fabulous collection of Picassos, Braques, Giacomettis, Nardeaus in the background.

  Medora hated her, too. The waxen, supercilious, haughty, moneyed, upper-class features, the chignon with not a single strand of hair out of place, the linen Legrande sheath hanging faultlessly. Not really good breasts, Medora thought, and rather thick ankles. She read the caption. While Sir Austin fenced with world ministers at the Quai d’Orsay and the Palais Rose, Her Ladyship would grace and enhance the social whirl surrounding the Summit, and she would make an indelible mark because of her beauty, wit, manners, and cosmopolitan background. (“For the evolution of a Social Queen, see next pages.”)

  Reluctantly, Medora flipped to the next pages: Fleur’s wealthy antecedents, the Grearson family. Fleur at five on a pony. Fleur at ten with her governess. Fleur at fifteen in a private school near Lucerne. Fleur at eighteen at the Sorbonne, and Fleur at nineteen traveling about France. Caption: “In her formative years, Fleur Grearson turned her back on the Beaufort Hunt and the debutante routine and kited off to the Continent. Accompanied by girls of her own class, and driving a red Ferrari roadster, she traveled the Continent, rounding out her formal education with firsthand forays into the world of art. ‘As a student abroad, I was shy and inhibited,’ recalls Her Ladyship today, ‘yet so eager was I to taste of the wells of creativity that I brought myself to meet and interview authors like Sartre, and painters like Nardeau, who was especially generous of his time.’”

  Resentful over the fact that her enemy had once shared Nardeau, Medora moved her eyes from the caption to a portrait of Fleur Grearson, taken in a studio in Cannes by a renowned Swiss photographer, when she was nineteen. Medora stared at the full-length reproduction of a girl with all the advantages, and had to concede—no flat breasts or thick ankles here—that she had possessed a lovely face, that is, if you liked such features: high cheekbones, rosebud mouth, swan’s neck.

  Medora wondered what Nardeau had thought of her. He had never mentioned meeting her. Of course, that had been a decade ago and she had not yet become the darling of the Sunday supplements, although her appearance at nineteen differed little from her appearance today at twenty-nine. Besides, Nardeau had met so many women, or girls, of so many nationalities. Still, you’d think—and that moment Medora’s eyes widened, and she bent down over the photograph of the nineteen-year-old Fleur Ormsby, inspecting it anew with a growing chill of discovery and excitement.

  Medora gave her memory freedom to range from this face, back to another, then to this face again, and Medora realized that she was shivering at the enormity of what she had just detected in the Sunday supplement before her, because of what she had disinterred from her recent past. It couldn’t be—it was impossible, she told herself, trying to check her mind; yet there could be no doubt. As her eyes darted from picture to picture of the willowy young Fleur, she knew that her memory was not deceiving her.

  Suddenly, she was positive.

  She set down her glass of Tavel with a thump, clutching the open supplement and trying to sift out the full meaning of her incredible find. If it were true—but it was true, but if it was really, really true, why, she had her Corday weapon. Not merely for petty vengeance. That, too, but there was more. She had the weapon with which she could slash free from the imprisonment of exile, liberate herself, go home again. Absolutely no question about it.

  One person possessed the key to unshackle her, emancipate her: Nardeau.

  And Nardeau was her friend.

  She felt the blood in her temples, the beating of her heart, the intoxication of recovered hope.

  Hastily folding the Sunday supplement, she shoved it into her handbag and called out to Jean, “Pay you tomorrow! I’ve got to dash!”

  The male heads had lecherously swiveled toward her, as she leaped off the counter stool, her white bikini bottom precariously loosened. She didn’t care. She was armed against them now, all the Sir Austins—well, almost, almost. She heard Jean cry out after her, “But the salade—”

  “I’m late for an appointment,” she called back over her shoulder, and found herself smiling and thinking to herself, yes, late, three years late, as she rushed down to the beach.

  In the locker, she drew on her mesh pullover, did her lips, combed her long flaxen hair. Then, grabbing her handbag, she half ran and half skipped along the cement walk, up the stone steps, and through the pine-wooded park. Bursting out of the park, she scurried across the Boulevard du Littoral, veered to the left of the hotel’s beach entrance, and hastily climbed up the front driveway to the lobby doors. Approaching the uniformed doorman, she shouted, “Emile, get me my motorcar, please!”

  In seconds, she was off, spinning her Mercedes coupe out of the Provençal hotel driveway. In short minutes, she had raced past Cap d’Antibes and taken the Route Nationale 7 toward Nice, oblivious of the unattractive camping sites along the way. At the dividing of the highway she bore left, watching for the sign that gave the kilometers to Cagnes-sur-Mer. When she saw it, she kept an eye out for the first turnoff, and reaching this, she swung left up into the hilly hinterland, leaving the coastline and the Mediterranean behind.

  She gunned the Mercedes along sweeping curves, going too fast, she knew, yet eager to reach her destination. Even though unremittingly conscious of the magazine supplement stuffed in her handbag on the leather seat beside her, conscious of the two faces of Fleur Grearson Ormsby, conscious of what Nardeau alone could do for her, she tried to keep them all out of her mind. She would not permit herself to think of the implications of her discovery. It meant simply too much, the last hope of normal life left, and she feared that examining it, pro and con, would dim the shining brilliance of hope.

/>   Until now, nearing La Colle-sur-Loup, she had been steering the coupe by instinct, as blind to her surroundings as if she were roaring through an endless, colorless tunnel. It was remarkable what anxiety and obsession could block out, for this was her favorite drive, so much better than the noisy glittering crowded resort elegance of the streets along the Mediterranean coast. On every occasion when she had taken this drive to Nardeau’s pink villa during the last three years, she had never failed to escape exhaustion and tension briefly. She had always loved to wave to the vineyard laborers and farmers, with their ready sunburned smiles, to look across the smooth green valleys and espy tiny distant villages fortified by ancient ramparts, still waiting for Moslem pirates and barbaric Huns with their spears and cutlasses, and tolerating, instead, tourists in shorts with their offensive cameras.

  Circling upward and upward, Medora was fleetingly aware, more by smell than sight, of a passage through rows of formal pleached limes, and of terraced banks covered with jasmine, wild white freesias, spicy geraniums, roses, and of the dusty soft evergreen foliage of countless olive trees. She was nearly there, she knew, and slowing, she rolled into the village of St.-Paul. Braking to a bouncing halt before the arch leading into the Auberge Colombe d’Or, she honked her horn three times and peered through her open car window. She could see a portion of the leafy outdoor terrace of the restaurant, the guests having wine at tables, a cluster of doves, a small boy in leather shorts throwing darts. She honked again, and a puzzled waiter appeared.

  “Monsieur, excusez-moi,” she called out in her execrable French, “but I am seeking Nardeau. Is he at lunch?”

  “Nardeau? Non, mademoiselle!”

  “Merci!”

  She wondered if, by chance, he might be shopping in one of the cubicles off the ancient stone street of St.-Paul proper, or having a bowl of bouillabaisse at a table in the café across from the twelfth-century church. She squinted into her rear-view mirror, saw intermingled natives and tourists passing in and out of the fortified hill town, but no one resembling Nardeau. She had no patience to park and search for him. Consulting her wristwatch, she decided that he most likely would be in the villa, possibly working, even though it was Saturday.

  She shifted to forward gear and fell in behind the traffic until it opened up, and then she rapidly began to pass the cars of sightseers, as she ascended the climbing highway north toward La Fondation Maeght. After two kilometers, the cracked ruin of the obscene cement blockhouse the German Nazis had built during their occupation came into view, and after that the dirt road, and Medora turned the Mercedes left for the short, steep, bumpy climb to the villa.

  As ever, the suddenness and the size of the two-story pink villa surprised her. She skidded to a halt in the parking area before the garage, took up her handbag, and hastened across the flagstone courtyard to the sheltering awning over the entrance. She wondered if Nardeau was asleep in the vine-covered, second-story turret, or dozing on the roof of the sunny rotunda which stood between the house and his studio and overlooked his two-acre fruit orchard and his thirty-foot swimming pool, or if, indeed, he was deep at work in the vast unkempt studio which, together with his storerooms, took up an entire wing of the villa.

  Momentarily, at the heavy wooden door set on wrought-iron hinges, she hesitated. Perhaps she should have telephoned first. But no, he was a friend, he knew her past, her entire travail, and in this crucial time, when he could save her if anyone could, he would receive her at any hour and unannounced.

  Ignoring the decorative bronze knocker, Medora pressed firmly on the doorbell.

  Waiting, Medora wondered which of the artist’s two women would respond: Mme. Nardeau, his second wife, wed to him fifteen years, with her increasing corpulence and fading prettiness, always abject, tolerant, unobtrusive, concerned only with their gangling son and the kitchen? Or Signe Andersson, the painter’s statuesque, intellectual, multilingual, candid young Swedish model and mistress of the past two years?

  There was the clack of footsteps on the hardwood floor inside, and the door opened, and there, tall and sinuous in a low-cut silk blouse and short pleated skirt, ashen hair sleek and bunned, barelegged, was Signe Andersson.

  “Medora!” Signe cried with sincere delight. “What a nice surprise.” And then, in Swedish, which she used only to confuse close friends, she demanded, “Hur star det till?”

  Her arms were open, and Medora went into them, and they hugged one another. “If you asked how I am, I’m fine—never better.”

  They were in the entrance hall, and Signe, closing the door with one hand, held Medora off with the other, searching her face. “You are beautiful as always. Maybe you can use more sleep. I think you have much on your mind.”

  “I always have, Signe,” Medora said with a wan smile. “Especially, today.” As the Swedish model led her into the living room, Medora again marveled that one whose flawless complexion was never touched by the sun could look so healthy, so much a creature of the outdoors. “I’ve never seen you more radiant, Signe.”

  “Ah, but I have Nardeau.”

  “How is he? Is he here?”

  “At work. Always at work now. I go to sleep, and he is not yet there. I wake up, and he is already gone.” She stopped at the opening to the rotunda, lifted her hand to the slight breeze, then smiled at Medora. “But I understand. After all, his sixtieth-year Retrospective Exhibit is to begin in Paris next week, and—”

  “I’d completely forgotten. Of course. I read about it.”

  “—and while he refuses to attend—he says it is not a publicity Cirque d’Hiver for him to perform in the center ring—he has pride that it must be the best. So every day, one more picture to touch up, alter, always something. I am taking the last of them to Paris in a few days.” She gestured toward the rotunda. “Tea, Medora?”

  “No, thank you. I rather want to see him. A personal matter, but urgent. I can wait until he’s finished.”

  “Finished? He is never finished. He would not want you to wait. If we kept you, he would be furious.” She had taken Medora by the arm, and started her into the rotunda.

  Medora protested. “I’m afraid to interrupt—”

  “I am afraid not to. I am one who cannot interrupt. Madame is another who cannot. His son cannot. But you—ah, always he is speaking of you, with affection, with worry—Medora, his pet… Let us put our heads in the studio and see.”

  They had crossed the cool tiled rotunda and entered a narrow passageway of the villa. As she followed the Swedish girl, Medora nostalgically recalled the familiar walk. How often she had made it during her first summer on the Riviera, when for several months she had been Nardeau’s favorite model. Now, remembering that time, relating something that had happened then to the Sunday supplement that had captured Fleur Ormsby in her handbag, she began to have doubts about her discovery. Maybe memory had deceived her, or maybe wish had altered memory in an effort to serve her desperation and despair.

  At the door to the studio, the door with Nardeau’s carving of a grotesque basilisk—“Self-portrait,” Nardeau liked to call it—Signe stopped, listened, tentatively knocked. There was no reply. She shrugged, softly opened the door, peeked inside, then silently signaled to Medora. She entered, and Medora followed.

  In the very center of the enormous atelier, Nardeau, his bare back to them, the vertebrae of his spine showing, as he bent his glistening bald head toward the easel, dabbed his brush at the vivid Montmartre scene, with its bold contrasts of light and dark, that he was painting.

  Signe tiptoed forward, waited for the brush to leave the canvas. When it did, she whispered, “Psst, cher ami. Monsieur Nardeau est-il visible?” Then, in English, she said more loudly, “Lover, there is a friend here to see you.”

  Nardeau’s head bobbed acknowledgment, without turning, and a movement of his palette indicated the only piece of usable furniture in the studio, an oversized sofa to the left of his easel. Pleased, Signe propelled Medora toward the sofa, after which she quickly slipped
out of the room.

  Nervously Medora settled on the sofa, knowing that Nardeau had not yet seen her. Already his brush had returned to the oil painting. Once again, she enjoyed her favorite studio—the pieces of sculpture standing on the floor and on the stained tables, one an immense and wise fish, another a rugged peasant’s head; the piles of stretched, unframed brilliant canvases, some abstract, most expressionistic, sensuous nudes of Signe, portraits of his son, Riviera landscapes, views of Montmartre in the spring, harlequins, or the streets of Lyon where he had been born. Across the studio was the doorway to Nardeau’s kitchenette, tiny office, and storage rooms. Near the door stood a heating unit with a stovepipe rising along the whitewashed wall. Everywhere, the broad barred windows. Above, the skylight, with the afternoon’s sun filtering through.

  She gave her attention once more to Nardeau, squatting on a low crude stool, transported to the Paris of his past on the easel. She loved her friend with his shining hairless skull, his sunken eyes, sometimes brooding, sometimes piercing, his broad pugilist’s nose, his wide mouth and square jaw. While only five feet seven, he seemed even shorter because of his stubbiness, his hairy barrel-chest, his abnormally muscular legs. At sixty he was incredibly spry—vigorous really, virile—and none of the naked and uninhibited Riviera girls would refer to him, as they contemptuously referred to the flabby winking aging male tourists, as one of les croulants—the crumbling ones.

  Art dealers and critics considered Nardeau, now that his fame matched the fame of Picasso and Giacometti, as the personification of ego—insulting, cantankerous, erratic, irascible, a terror, a one-man plague. But those who knew him well, Medora, for example, knew that much of this behavior was a defense against the locusts of business, who were the dealers, and the bloodsuckers of creativity, who were the critics. Where no defensive stance was required, Nardeau was possessed of a nature hospitable enough to embrace those he respected or adored, and for these permanent boarders he had only humor, warmth, helping hands. If one could love a friend, Medora loved this genius.