The Janeites

by Nicolas Freeling

  Cut her off? There, though, he’s ‘unwilling to admit’. He doesn’t like thinking about it, because his thinking is far from clear. He just doesn’t like it.

  For sure it hadn’t been clever to take this minor irritation to a harridan like Mrs Ben. A distinct relief to find the woman so professional about it: so unsurprised. Like something on his skin, a growth of sorts he’d once had; unsightly, it worried him. ‘What’s that a sign of?’. The dermatologist had a thin, icy smile. ‘Nothing at all.’ A quick puff of anaesthetic spray, the smallest nick of the razor. ‘There; you never even felt it.’

  “We’ll have her detached. It’ll be quite simple. You need know nothing about it. It costs a little; there are people who will need payment. Leave it to me. It’s preferable that you stay out of whatever is decided. I’ll bill you; that’s all. You have there a perfect security.”

  “You propose a sort of intimidation?”

  “My dear man – whatever I propose you’re unaware of it.”

  One evening Crystal had been crying a good deal; red-eyed. Sign of upset, a sullenness. It’s nothing. Girl’s got her period. The next morning he was busy; ‘reading the papers’. He combs through these, it’s one of the jobs. Looking for little signs – upturn, downturn. Not so much ‘economic’; Bonn have people for that. There are other ways of perceiving confidence, prosperity – or a certain slackening. His private line buzzed; something he had absolutely forbidden to Crystal.

  “That was absolutely vile,” a hysterical tone. “You have to promise me you had nothing to do with that.” He could be freezing while remaining perfectly sincere.

  “I know nothing whatsoever about it. This is a private line.”

  “Have I your word of honour?” Idiotic remark, very French, that.

  “I don’t intend to repeat myself.” Killing it, glancing across at his secretary, who was assiduously marking a FAZ article. A Company boy but pretty junior. There was no need of any remark. Once had been enough, when the lad was posted to him.

  ‘It’s a comfortable little job. Undemanding except of an absolute discretion. You understand that word? Bear in mind: a breath in Bonn and you’re counting those subversive penguins on Kerguelen Island.’

  The old woman had demanded an immoderate amount of money but knew better than to ever mention the matter.

  Raymond Valdez never had any notion at all that Janine moved in diplomatic circles: it’s not the sort of thing he was curious about. She knew lots of people, had lots of friends. She is an artist. When one works in that sort of business, and more still when one hunts work, any acquaintance may turn out useful. She is warmhearted, talkative, flirtatious – she has to be. She could be over-blatant. He had known anger, even sudden rage. One couldn’t expect a round-the-clock humble devotion.

  There is when one comes to think of it a well-known and pertinent parallel. The Marquis would have been reminded of this and would have chuckled over it. Raymond has never bothered reading Proust; takes too long and is too much trouble; no doubt one would, if the circumstances were right; if sent, for example, to study the penguin population on Kerguelen. William hasn’t either; had no real need to … since during the years with the Marquis extrapolations had been fairly frequent. Robert de Saint Loup has a tiresome girlfriend somewhat like Janine; known always to Marcel as ‘Rachel-quand-du-Seigneur’ from her imagined resemblance to the girl in an opera popular in those years. Marcel, jealous soul and can be catty, can’t stand her and is forever dropping nasty hints to Robert: gold-digging little bitch and the world’s worst actress into the bargain. Robert, upright and generous nobleman, won’t hear a word against her. She is shy, timid, over-sensitive, and Marcel frightens her.

  It isn’t really a parallel but an approximation, of a sort frequent enough; men when comfortable with young mistress are indulgent (a row every so often livens things up), don’t ask too many questions; comfort is secured by vanity. Rachel can be horribly spiteful – and so can Marcel – and are we any better?

  There’s no great harm in Janine; there’s plenty in Madame Bénédicte.

  Old Mother Riley had a daughter Kitty, but La Mère Béné as the police call her is mother to nothing but her own evil thoughts. She’ll slip up one day and they’ll get her. They aren’t in fact in a great hurry: there will always be people like this, another might be still worse, and politically speaking, in these diplomatic circles nobody wants a noisy scandal, so don’t rock the boat. She sells sea shells, says William’s friend Xavier who is busy learning English.

  The old woman doesn’t blackmail people much, likes it to be believed that she could if she would; knows a great deal about turpitudes, including those of police officers and important municipal functionaries; keeps a firm grip on the girls, and also on a few people who do dirty jobs; she has plenty of leverage on ‘Monsieur Philippe’. Since she never does anything herself she needs them, but they couldn’t denounce her without exposing themselves to pursuits they prefer to avoid.

  Rebellious girls, obstreperous girls, might often get a bit beaten up but no harm is to come to Mireille, harmless and at present the treasure of an important personage. Frightening her a bit won’t come amiss; just knock off the boyfriend. Knock him off how? Bit of violence, mean to say? I don’t want to know, that’s no concern of mine, I only want her scared off. How you do it’s your affair.

  Monsieur Philippe doesn’t go in himself for violence; not his thing. He’s adept at weaving webs, but that will be complicated, will take time, will be expensive. It seems simpler to arrange that the boyfriend gets given a smack, and let the girl know obliquely that here’s a thing happens when she’s over-affectionate in the wrong direction. He knows a fellow to whom strong-arm comes pretty naturally at the best of times: Terry the Trucker is a strong-arm pin-head. He has plenty on that idiot, whose long hauler is mostly laced with contraband out of Istanbul.

  He invested a bit of time and trouble; old-mother Benny is very hot on the expense account and he will have to justify every penny in looking up the boyfriend. An easy target; scientist chap, biologist in one of the Research Institutes, absentminded type, Professor Sunflower on a bicycle, lives bohemian-style in the city centre, scruffy place full of Arabs, down a handy narrow alley, this is pure jam. So easy in fact he doesn’t bother learning any more. Terry gets told to lurk-in-the-shadows, give the bugger a black eye, and ticketyboo. Terry’s heavy hand is pricy but he never asks questions. Mother-Benny never pays one; remembers you in her will, tells you what stock to buy, stuff like that. The Council-of-Europe people have plenty of ways of doing her big favours. She doesn’t send in a bill. Some people want a taxfree Mercedes, others dabble in Corsican cows; others again import something, have it relabelled as of Community origin, sell it in Taiwan. Juice enough for all and a bit over for Monsieur Philippe.

  Janine, an innocent girl, childishly so where her emotions were involved, learned – obliquely – that if you make a bit of money on the side, rather too easily, sooner or later the bill does get sent in.

  Quite abruptly Dr Barbour asked, “What happened to your face?”

  “Road accident,” said Ray, hoping to make it sound more peaceable than it had been.

  “Nasty things,” conveying some disapproval; the French have far too many of them.

  “Yes indeed. Superficial – looked worse than they are when half healed.” Should have seen me when I got mugged in the alley, but he didn’t say so. PermRep thought about it, and not wishing to sound aggressive added, “Could happen to anybody.” A doctor might perfectly well refuse to see anyone before bruises healed.

  “And did,” sitting to write the jargon abbreviations for the lab tests he wanted.

  “Worse things can happen,” taking the piece of paper. “I’ll be in touch.” Raymond produced the Research Institute’s card.

  “Better early than late.”

  “Let me show you the way out,” remembering his manners.

  William is thinking. Why is there never time to think things
out properly? Of Bernadette Martin’s ‘sound advice’ – to do nothing. Of solitude. It was another of her remarks ‘let fall’.

  ‘On est tout seul, tu sais.’ It covered the physical aloneness which he’d had time to get used to, here in this house. Joséphine was back? Really? She might suddenly disappear again? One would echo the great joyous shout of excitement and delight in the Jacques Brel song – ‘Mathilde est revenu’ – the wonderful ending ‘Since you are there, since you are there, since you are there…’ The singer does not wish to enquire further, could not bear to think beyond this moment of now, and here.

  It covered responsibility. What you do, you do alone, decide alone. Nobody else is to blame.

  William thought, briefly, of his youth. Early days in the police. His brother whom he admired was already a soldier, doing well. They shared an idea, that service was honourable; you do something for your country, you volunteer, it’s professional, you give of your best. Even then, he’d followed his own path. It had to be ‘the best’. Me and Paris: the country boy frightened, feeling the challenge, welcoming it. That was all right; tall boy well set up, smart appearance, alert; it hadn’t taken long for him to be picked for a team. He’d not been good, really, at team work – oh, he got on all right, the others accepted him but only just. They’d always felt some instinctive reservation. Kind of an apartheid. Something mocking in the camaraderie: ol’William thinks himself too good for us. His Commissaire thought him bright but didn’t like him. That boy – I don’t know, gets on my nerves somehow.

  Better, in a Kripo service. They like them bright there, allow for a bit of eccentricity; you’re more of an individual. Good marks for being dogged, conscientious, thorough. Tell that boy to do something you don’t find him goofing off in a corner. Solitude – was it his enemy?

  A bright, ambitious, vicious chief – himself young, pushing for higher rank; first in and last out; took a fancy to him – I like this boy, he’s not sloppy.

  Physically he’d been good; lots of fast, nice coordination, basketball. He’d thought of getting tapped for the Protection Service, liked the idea. When it came he didn’t hesitate. Plenty of the colleagues said Fuck That. Our time off is bad enough; those poor bastards never have any time off at all. Sure it’s more moneys and it’s a promotion, but shit, where’s your private life? Can’t call your soul your own, over there.

  It seemed to him, he’d never had any proper private life, anyhow. He’d been brought up hard. He liked discipline. Five-thirty in the morning – out there with you. Here you were in perpetual training, the physical fitness is the first thing of all. He loved it; this was satisfaction. That smart appearance, properly polished shoes. He liked the lessons, was good at them. This is the boy for us.

  On these teams, instant success. Back-up boy, point boy, bag boy (there are several purely technical angles to close protection). Put him on with a few difficult ones; the Chief Rabbi, the Spanish Ambassador, the Environment Minister (tricky; would the hunting crowd like to see him with egg on his face!). Hostile crowd meeting and election rallies; dockers and schoolteachers – and school children too, with highly imaginative ideas about covering the Minister in scarlet paint.

  He’d become a star. Chef d’Equipe, and the man they all asked for. He’d reached the top of his profession; the man who walks behind the President. He’d understood the most important thing of all: the total discretion. Whatever you see, hear, sense, you know without knowing. Around the President, the turnover is pretty rapid as a rule; he’d stayed much longer than most. And when your Chief comes to think, from the confidential notes, the medical reports, that you are slowing or slackening even that microsecond, there are cosier berths. The Marquis had asked for him, got him. The old man had colossal pull (been in every senior ministry untold years, since de Gaulle’s day). Kept him. He’d been happy; here he was happiest. You learned so much, here most of all. The high personalities of the Republic gave astonishing amounts of confidence – he got to know the Marquis as nobody did, ever had. The old boy prized his reputation as the Great Enigma; didn’t care what he said to William.

  Oh well, he’d known everyone; the Pope and Citizen Kane: ‘to bed with Marlene and to breakfast with the Kennedys’. At one of his parties William had first laid eyes on Joséphine; tall and elegant, not giving a damn; grey frock and very little jewellery. Gone head over ears; only the cliché will do, here. His job by then was to stand in the shadow, immobile unless something were to happen, watching. He had neglected his job, for the first time he could remember, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She had known. Complex things happen in astonishingly simple fashion. William had been to bed with girls he had told himself he was ‘in love with’. What’s this word love? The most famous word in the language and what does it mean?

  A cook asked a famous cook for a job. He’d prepared his answers to every possible question, brought along his CV carefully written out in every step. The great man asked only one question: ‘Tu bandes pour ce métier?’ The translation is not as simple as it seems. ‘You’ve a hard on for your trade?’ But it means, ‘Does your passion overmaster you?’ To the exclusion of everything else? The boy said ‘Yes’ and got the job. An art; you don’t think – you’ve no time – about anything outside.

  Getting married? That’s another complex affair and he couldn’t remember anything about it but the Marquis insisting on being his witness, very beautifully dressed. He’d given them a pair of silver candlesticks, extremely fine, eighteenth century; William is looking at them. Joséphine didn’t seem to have said much when asked.

  ‘You’re the vertical man. One doesn’t meet with them often.’ as though he were some kind of rare butterfly.

  Resigning everything – he remembered that better, the Marquis saying, ‘Can’t have this, can we? – Joséphine married to the security man!’ ‘Benedick the married man’ – who the hell was Benedick?

  Well, one didn’t lose just-like-that more than twelve years of the trade; seniority, experience, value; the job he knows and is good at. They never left you very long anyhow, you weren’t allowed to get mouldy in the Protection Service, you’d get Napoleon quoted at you – ‘After thirty man loses the aptitude for war’. You remain a crimbrig officer with a good rank, diploma’d up to here and high-class confidential notes; most of us can look forward to staff jobs. You can go to commissaires-school, Saint Cyr au Mont d’Or just outside Lyon, you’ll sail through that.

  He went to see his chef, Place Beauvau, Ministry of the Interior – a man only a year or two older than himself.

  “Married! Oh well – it happens. You’re living in Paris? I’ve an instructor’s job for you, out in Vincennes. You’d be good at that; I’d like you to take it. So you can, too… howsoever… The Marquis has been in.” Damn him, what’s he meddling with now? “The old man – as you know – still a great deal of pull in various quarters and I’ll be frank with you, I don’t want the old bastard being occult in my back. You’ve been with him a long time. He tells me that your wife…” He’s not going to tell me that Joséphine has been manoeuvring…? “No no no. But Strasbourg, it’s not at the present open but it will be when the Schengen agreement… now that would be pretty good and you’ve the profile if we adjust a bit here or there; I’d subscribe to that one. Political, you’ve pretty good English. These Germans in Frankfurt, you go in high up and you’re answerable to the Premier Ministre. So you think about it and if you want to talk about it with your wife…” That was a nasty daggerthrust to take home with him.

  They were living in the ‘family’ flat in the septième, Ministries all around one; he didn’t like it at all. Joséphine didn’t either.

  Out by the Bois de Vincennes one could find a nice apartment – the twentieth arrondissement is a bit East End when you’ve been accustomed to the seventh, but it’s not so much that as – Instructing is a very good job in police books; well paid, secure, easy hours. The ‘cadets’, boy and girl trainees for the Protection Service. He’d be
good at it too, could grow to like it. He knew most of the colleagues, got on well with them; they had a pretty good life. But this police world, where conversation revolves around the television programme of the night before: can you seriously see Joséphine in this milieu?

  He knew about her plans, for Strasbourg. Her brother-the-Baron was giving them some land and she had her house sketched out. The job? – like all these political deals it was a lollipop, with some luscious perks. You aren’t taking the tram to go to work there, my boy. But whose pocket are you living in? His Ministerial years had taught him a good deal about the politician’s arts.

  But he’d taken it, hadn’t he! He’d asked the advice of friends; none had hesitated. He didn’t have a lot of women friends. Most of his girl-adventures had run aground within a day or so, on the rocks of those impossible hours: he just hadn’t enough time for what they wanted. He hadn’t known anyone like Bernadette Martin then. He’d started to compromise, and he wasn’t good at that. It had been many months later that he began to feel those odd twinges of pain. The two facts might be linked but where was the evidence to support theories?

  He had ‘no family’. This was surely sentimentalism. A PJ. group is quite fond of referring to itself as ‘the family’. Or – absurd the Marquis’ household; that strangely tight-knit cluster, the world seen from the kitchen of the marvellous house in the Rue de l’Université – the cook and the secretary; driver, housemaid, and yes, even ‘Madame de Maintenon’. We knew each other’s birthdays and bought flowers for them and Charlotte would have baked a cake. Ridiculous? Bernadette Martin didn’t think so. ‘Oh yes, that’s a family’ Adding a remark William remembered. ‘Without a family a man trembles with the cold.’ But the nucleus is a man and a woman, isn’t it? ‘And why then, do you think, they should want so to have a child?’ This very morning he’d said as much to Joséphine.