Your Father's Room

by Michel Déon

  Teddy had been the pet of the girl from Gua’loupe from the first term he arrived. She waited for him at the entrance, kissed him on both cheeks, and hugged him to her bosom with a possessive tenderness. When there were witnesses he squirmed, but if they were alone he let her hold his head and snuggle it between her breasts, where a gold cross glinted and he was scratched by something furry which turned out to be a rabbit’s paw mounted on a piece of horn. Évangeline smelt of vanilla, a smell that was easy to identify for a boy who loved ice-cream cornets. Usually she came to school and went home to Rue de la Pompe on her own, stuffing herself all the way with cakes and ice creams at every pâtisserie, but occasionally her father came to collect her when school finished. It would have been hard to imagine a man more different: tall, slender, with slicked-down hair and a pencil moustache, sitting nonchalantly at the wheel of a cream-coloured open tourer. His complexion was perfectly white and he smoked cigars. According to Évangeline, her mother could not stand the cold and preferred to stay behind in Guadeloupe; she was apparently nearly white and waited on by servants who were much blacker than she was, in a big house by the Caribbean. At Mademoiselle de Cordemoy’s Évangeline was in clover, surrounded by admirers who loved her giggles and gaiety and the massive goodness that radiated from her. No one would have dreamt of making fun of her size or the colour of her skin or her laziness. It was probable that she didn’t learn anything quite deliberately, so that she could stay in the same class, whose pupils changed every year.

  Teddy was torn between two loves, one for Évangeline, wild and exotic, and another, unreciprocated, for Huguette, the girl who sat on his right. If you were to open Évangeline up like a Russian doll, you could fit half a dozen Huguettes inside her. One was as mute and diligent as the other was exuberant and warm. Huguette was the best pupil at the school, yet one day Mademoiselle still felt the need to say to her mother, ‘It’s even more commendable, what with her being so beautiful.’ This is a good example of how education has a fixed idea that success in examinations is incompatible with a certain kind of physical appearance or, worse still, with sporting ability. Overhearing these words at the school gate from the lips of an excellent teacher, Blanche repeated them at dinner that evening, sparking a sarcastic response from Papa.

  ‘On that basis, Mademoiselle de Cordemoy must always have come top in class without any merit at all.’

  Teddy himself did not think there was anything incompatible between Huguette’s bone-china looks and her keenness to study. He just wanted her to ignore him a bit less. Whenever she bent over her exercise book, pen poised, for a dictation, Teddy would steal sidelong glances. A blond fringe covered her forehead, her nose was unbelievably delicate, and she had an exquisite mouth. Her hands were so lovely that he was amazed to find out she was already a talented pianist. On top of all this, in contrast to Évangeline, who came to school dressed either in ruby red, canary yellow or electric blue, Huguette’s outfits were a model of elegant discretion: pastel-coloured dresses, white or blue smocks, and in winter neat tweed suits.

  At the end of the day, when the last rays of sunlight stole through the half-obscured windows, Huguette’s profile was so delicate and her skin so translucent that she seemed not to be alive but instead to be a piece of Dresden china, poised to listen to Mademoiselle or write down a precept of grammar in her exercise book. She did not shake hands, and she held herself so stiffly that it was out of the question to kiss her on the cheek when he arrived or left. Teddy nevertheless felt an odd uncertainty about her, the source of which he could not pin down, but the burning memory of which remained intact. Huguette led a double life. She had a mother who was her absolute opposite. Shortly before four o’clock, the whole class began to listen out for the sound of a motor-car engine that made the windows rattle. A nudge of the throttle revved it before the driver switched off the ignition. Huguette put away her pen and pencil (she was the only one who owned a galalith pen) and ran for the door as soon as Mademoiselle dismissed them. Outside an Amilcar roadster with chequer-plate aluminium coachwork was waiting. Unless it was raining, Huguette’s mother always drove with both hood and windscreen down, and she waited at the wheel for her daughter, smoking. She was the opposite of Blanche, who was always so elegant everyone thought she must have just come straight from the hairdresser’s (people didn’t say beautician yet). Madame D. instead sported an open aviator’s jacket over a roll-neck sweater, mica goggles pushed up on her forehead, and a béret basque from which two kiss-curls escaped at her temples. Her lips were an aggressive violet. That this strange creature should be the mother of an elf like Huguette was a logical absurdity, but the little girl would nevertheless throw her school bag into the car, clamber over the door, flop into the bucket seat next to her mother, and the Amilcar would zoom away with a noise like a machine gun to disappear at the top of Avenue Mozart, leaving behind a pleasant smell of engine oil.

  When school was over, a curtain fell on people’s private lives. Almost as soon as Huguette dropped into the seat beside her mother she was no longer there for anyone, but gone without even a goodbye wave to Teddy and the others, vanishing into thin air, no more than a memory for those who had spent the day with her, exchanged a look or very occasionally a smile. And she was so perfect, it was hard even to summon up an image of her. You can’t reconstitute, in the abstract, a creature conceived, composed and designed by God, then rashly entrusted to a whizz-bang Jason at the helm of her silver Argo, an Amilcar with chequer-plate aluminium coachwork and red-spoked wheels that threw out a disdainful plume of blue smoke whose smell lingered long after it had disappeared.

  Teddy was finding out that there are some women so unreachable they are only present for the twinkling of an eye. Of course the same could not be said of Évangeline, who, as soon as Huguette had vanished, took possession of Teddy, pressing him against her, hugging him tightly, planting a wet kiss on his cheek and – the horror! – inserting a sharp tongue in his ear. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked. No, he did not like it, but when Huguette had gone he didn’t care about anything any more. From the pavement they could hear Mademoiselle de Cordemoy opening the windows to blow away the smell of the little farts her pupils had accumulated during the day. Then a distant, hollow roaring would make her bang the casements shut again as she called out, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’

  Blanche, invariably a few minutes late, always had a kind word for Évangeline before scooping up her property and leading him away in the direction of Rue Henri-Heine.

  At the back of their apartment his bedroom looked out over a garden. Already day was breaking, hesitant, still grey, oddly silent. Afraid to disturb his parents’ rest, because they must have come back late from their Christmas Eve party and because, before they went, they had urged him not to get up till they came and fetched him, Teddy pulls the sheet and blankets over his head and, despite his impatience, persuades himself that the night is still dragging on. Of course he was mildly disappointed when he found out for certain that Father Christmas didn’t exist, but he had simultaneously experienced a feeling of secret superiority over the children of his own age who naively went on believing in him. The apartment at Rue Henri-Heine had only one chimney, in the sitting room, and it was highly improbable that an old man with a white beard who was also rather stout and had his arms laden with presents and a sack stuffed with toys could get down it. The day this illusion was shattered, Teddy had crossed an invisible frontier. Fairies, wizards, witches and elves were left behind on the other side. From time to time a picture book he had forgotten at the bottom of a drawer reminded him, but they no longer interested him. He had cast off on his own voyages, plunged into thick forests, got lost in deep valleys filled with Indians and wild animals, nearly died of thirst in the desert and of cold in the polar wastes. He had made new friends: Robinson Crusoe, Mayne Reid’s Plant Hunters, Long John Silver and his parrot. With them his adventures were without end, and the universe exploded, racing away in different directions, and the men he en
countered there and whose heroic progress he followed were proud and brave. He left them behind at night when Blanche came to kiss him goodnight and turn his light off, and he rejoined them in the morning as he half slept, half dreamt before Papa came to get him out of bed.

  But this morning there was no school at Mademoiselle de Cordemoy’s. Évangeline had left for the Midi with her father (did she really have a mother?), Huguette was in the mountains with her mother (did she really have a father?), Paris was empty. And now suddenly the emptiness was filling with life and people: voices, laughter, footsteps in the hall. He half pushed his bedclothes off and pretended to be asleep as his mother opened his bedroom door.

  ‘Come on, lazy boy! Merry Christmas!’

  In her long silver dress her shoulders, which were very beautiful, were bare and dimpled; her hair bounced, waved and short; she had added a beauty spot to her cheek; and her necklace of (imitation) pearls went once round her neck before falling to her waist. She was a modern fairy … but there were no fairies, ancient or modern. She brushed his hair, made him put on his slippers, and let him run through to the sitting room. A bottle of champagne in his hand, Papa was filling the glasses his guests were holding out. There were five or six of them, apparently full of life despite having stayed up all night, the men in dinner jackets, the women barely warmed by their fringed shawls. The one Teddy was particularly looking for, Pat Paterson, was there. Teddy adored Pat because he was a kind, jolly giant, smoked through a long amber cigarette holder, and most of all because he had a wooden leg like Long John Silver – not a peg leg exactly, but an invisible mechanical limb that made him roll his hips when he walked, leaning on a cane like the ones British Army officers carried when they led their infantry in an attack. Pat was a veteran of the Great War. He had been a friend of Arthur Cravan, the poet and boxer. He lived at Montparnasse with a woman who looked faintly terrifying at first meeting and who moved in all the artistic and bohemian circles: she had modelled for Van Dongen, Kisling and Pascin, who had all painted her portrait. She was known as La Monicci, she had a lovely sing-song Italian accent, and Papa said she was painted like a fairground and festooned with jewels so big they had to be false.

  On this Christmas morning it was to Pat and La Monicci that Teddy owed the bicycle that was leaning carelessly against the mantelpiece. It had aluminium mudguards, a lamp, a chromed chainset, a bell and, along the frame, the glorious name of its manufacturer: Peugeot. Never in his wildest dreams having imagined this moment, Teddy was so excited that he threw himself at Pat, hugging his long legs and feeling through his trousers the famous articulated limb that he was known to take off and stand on the dinner table when a party got particularly wild. La Monicci had come up with something else as well: a complete set of lead soldiers, Napoleon’s general staff flanked by the Mamelukes of the Imperial Guard.

  ‘My hereditary enemy!’ Pat said in his picturesque English accent.

  Teddy knew more or less who Napoleon was – the man who slept beneath the dome of Les Invalides – but he did not know that his friend Pat was a distant relation of Wellington. Anyway … it hardly mattered this morning, when his new Peugeot bicycle filled all his thoughts. He felt almost suffocated with happiness as he unwrapped his other presents, which, apart from some books, hardly interested him. His bicycle, with its pale-green frame with black stripes and all its shiny new accessories, put everything else in the shade.

  It was a moment when Teddy badly wanted Maman to be there, to share an excitement so intense that he felt it was the best day of his life.

  But she was in the kitchen, making coffee, and she was not alone. Behind her, pressed to her back, is a man with curly blond hair whom he has never seen before, and this stranger has his arms wrapped around her waist and is nibbling the nape of her neck. She is laughing, not resisting, murmuring words that could just as easily be ‘yes, yes’ or ‘no, no’, before she finally turns and sees Teddy standing tensely in the doorway, his eyes wide. She pushes the curly-haired man away. He takes a moment to understand, then, seeing the boy, detaches himself with a shrug of the shoulders. From the sitting room comes the loud laughter of La Monicci and Paterson. Mother and son’s eyes meet. Blanche puts a finger to her lips. Their pact is sealed for life. No one will ever mention this, not now or in the future. Not a word.

  And by doing so she cuts him off from his other parent, his father who pretends to know nothing or perhaps really doesn’t know anything, thanks to a divine gift that is reserved for the most simple hearts. Let us not criticise a mother who feels an overwhelming need for an accomplice she can trust with her secret when she feels that she’s bored or in love. But from now on, Teddy can only see in his father a man he hides from in order to avoid the Truth. As a result, their relationship will remain difficult to the end, an end that comes much sooner than anyone imagined, the day those dark-suited, bareheaded men slide the coffin into the recess reserved for it in the columbarium, facing a sea bristling with the white sails of a regatta. That was May 1933. As the smell of the incense faded, a breeze filled the air with the scent of orange blossom.

  ‘Not a word’ was one of Blanche’s cardinal rules, as it was for others. Any violation was severely punished. You only spoke freely to yourself or to a blank sheet of paper. Silence meant that tragedies were avoided. As were comedies. It was the price you paid.

  For there to have been that image of the coffin sliding into the recess of the columbarium, the white sails of the regatta, and the breeze laden with orange blossom that gave death a taste of something celestial and blunted the sudden stinging sorrows and remorse for a remoteness that had clouded their last years, for that image – beneath a serene blue sky and in the presence of a bishop, a bored prince, and a clutch of officials contemplating how much time they were wasting – to have been engraved for ever on Teddy’s memory, there had to have been another Papa, the exuberant Papa of five years before, a Papa completely unlike his usual closed self.

  One evening he had taken his little boy on his knees and told him: ‘We’re leaving Paris, we’re going to live abroad … well, not really abroad … we’ll live, in a principality, with, as the name suggests, a prince! It’s a country by the seaside. The sun shines every day. It never snows.’

  ‘Even at Christmas time?’

  ‘Well, maybe, once every fifty years.’

  According to Papa, the prince was easy-going, big and tall, with short spiky hair, and dressed the way everyone else did. He had been a general in the French army. Teddy had been put down for the lycée in the old town, and they would live in an apartment in a block called ‘Le Palais Rose’. Everything had been decided in secret. His Peugeot bicycle would be sent on later, even though cycling was not really the national sport in a principality that nestled at the foot of a mountain.

  ‘We’ll be starting a new life,’ Papa said.

  ‘Will Pat Paterson and La Monicci be coming too?’

  ‘No, but they’ll visit.’

  No one mentioned Blanche’s curly-haired friend.

  The change was astonishing. Papa had an official car with a uniformed chauffeur to drive him, and Maman was given a convertible coupé as a present. At home Papa’s new aide Émile called Teddy ‘Monsieur Édouard’. The cook, a huge Italian woman with a moustache, had the resounding name of Giuseppina Staffaroni. In the harbour were moored many yachts and huge cruisers that never went anywhere. From here Alain Gerbault had set out in Firecrest on his solo crossing of the Atlantic. The apartment’s balcony looked out over the harbour entrance and its pair of lights, over the roof of a mysterious villa whose shutters were always closed. During the day Teddy would see men emerging in frock coats and top hats and women (always in twos) wearing long black dresses and pillbox hats with little veils that they peeled back to walk cautiously down the front steps.

  They were, Papa said (one of his functions apparently being to know everything about everybody), Antoinists. They recognised St Anthony as the son of God and awaited his resurrection with ac
ts of penitence and prayer. On the left of this building was another, which would have been completely unremarkable if, on the second floor, there had not lived a silver-haired man and two very young ladies whose main source of pleasure, it seemed, was to wander about their apartment in their underwear – or nothing at all – in between changing their dresses several times a day. Teddy had spotted them immediately and amused himself by watching them walk back and forth, stark naked, in front of the window while on the pavement below the Antoinist ladies went solemnly by, clutching with both hands – as if unbelievers were about to snatch them away – their voluminous black cloth bags. A bit further up the street, towards the Jardin Exotique, stood a singular house at the edge of the boulevard, a palace out of the Thousand and One Nights with a façade of blue and green tiles encrusted with coloured glass. Lowered blinds blanked out its windows. This was the residence of the Persian ambassador, Prince Reza Mirza Khan. Blanche took Teddy there one day. The ambassador’s wife received them alone in a drawing room lit by low lamps. As at Madame N.’s, scented oils burnt on a table. The lady seemed enormous to Teddy, but he was possibly confusing her with the jumble of cushions that lay squashed by her weight all around her. It was easy to see that, despite the puffiness of her face, she had once been a beauty. She spoke warbling French. A majestic mane of hennaed hair framed her face and fat cheeks, which were undeniably olive despite her concealing herself determinedly from the sun whose rays, filtered by the slats of the blinds, sliced her into light and dark stripes. Bonbons and cubes of Turkish delight filled a large opal cup that stood within reach of her blue- and sepia-tattooed fingers, which she plunged negligently into it to scoop sweetmeats into her greedy, heavily lipsticked mouth. Her sticky index finger and thumb had glued together the pages of the magazines and books lying around her, which she read avidly. Their unofficial visit was coming to an end when the ambassador arrived, a small man with a sallow face whose hair and moustache were so black they must have been carefully dyed each morning. As ambassador to a principality that otherwise possessed only the odd consul from those countries in its immediate vicinity, with the lightest of duties – Persians being thin on the ground, and the Shah himself having probably forgotten he had appointed an emissary to this toy state – Mirza Khan’s chief value was as an asset to the roulette and trente et quarante tables and as a generous admirer of the corps de ballet. A dignified descendant of a great civilisation that had lost its way in the modern era, he bent over Teddy.