A Question of Loyalties

by Allan Massie

  Lucien felt a hand laid on his sleeve. He turned to see a small man with a black beard whom he did not immediately recognise. Then he realised it was Léon-Paul Cebran, an essayist who had been an occasional contributor to L’Echo de l’Avenir.

  ‘Lucien,’ he said, ‘so the future echoes more loudly.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I understand what you mean.’

  Léon-Paul smiled. Surely the beard was new, that was why he had failed to recognise him.

  ‘What do I mean? Why, that we see before us our two possible futures. Either France is confirmed as a Jewish State or it is not. Look at that collection of Hebrews. Are they not evidence of the moral muck through which we are wading? Do you see the fat man there? He has made millions selling rotten beef to the Army. Yes, I assure you. And the man with him, the lean one who looks like a satyr, well, he is a Communist schoolteacher who has debauched the youth of France. They are brothers, my dear.’

  The smell of aniseed rose from the glass Léon-Paul was waving under his nose.

  ‘Are you looking for someone?’ Léon-Paul asked him.

  Lucien did not know how to reply. He wasn’t sure why he was there or what he was in search of. He shook his head, letting his eyes rove. Death, he said to himself, would undo many of these; but not the worst, not the worst.

  ‘I’m told you are in regular touch with the Marshal,’ Léon-Paul said. ‘Now there’s a real man. A pity he is so old. He’s not one of these politicians ruled by their mistresses and by an ignoble desire to curry favour with the mob. No fear: they say he even tells his mistress where to get off.’

  Lucien wished the little man would go away and leave him in peace. He had not realised how tired he was. He wanted to go home to sleep, but the thought of the journey – on foot, for he was doubtful whether he would find a taxi – dismayed him. Léon-Paul pulled him towards his table and he sat down. A waiter appeared. He asked for a glass of lemon tea.

  ‘There will have to be a real clear-out, a purge,’ Léon-Paul said. ‘France is disfigured and made disgusting by intellectual ordure. It’s got to be cleaned up.’

  That week in Paris was like a kaleidoscope. Everything familiar seemed to be shaken out of place. His ears were assailed by a babble of rhetoric, which seemed to him less and less real. Every day he found himself walking for hours without intention and ignorant of any destination. He arrived in districts which were unknown to him and where even the accents were unrecognisable. Then he would sit, his feet sore from walking, at café tables, watching the other customers by the half-hour. It came to him that he was seeking signs of hope, but then he thought that anyone watching him would think he was looking for a pick-up. But if he had been, his gaze would have been sharper, not the dull brooding thing he knew it to be. Then he said to himself: ‘I am preparing my soul for suffering.’ He even scribbled that sentence in a note-book where it rested alongside scraps of conversation he had heard, and stray reflections.

  On his last night he met Marcel Pougier for dinner. They had fixed the date at their first accidental meeting, and when the evening came, Lucien was tempted to break the engagement. After all, if he talked of the private soldiers whose bewilderment bewildered and disturbed him, Marcel would wonder whether any of them were pretty.

  But Marcel was in a sombre mood himself. For the first time Lucien realised that his friend was middle-aged. There were bags under the dark lemur eyes, and the skin of his face was shrivelled. There had always been something simian in his appearance, but now the prettiness and gaiety had been eclipsed; he looked like one of those little old monkeys one sometimes sees huddling in the corner of their cage in the zoo. When he removed the beret which he had been wearing on their encounter in the street Lucien saw that the front part of his head was entirely bald. Curiously this emphasised his resemblance to the monkey.

  He talked first and for a long time of Charles de Fasquelle.

  ‘Do you know – would you believe, my dear? – that there’s hardly a day I don’t miss the old thing. Oh, he was so difficult and demanding with his jealousy. You know, once, I woke up very early, about dawn, and went to the window in the way one does, and looked out on the street. It was summer and a lovely morning, and there, standing under a chestnut tree, just next to a pissoir, was Charles, gazing up at my window, keeping an eye on me, watching, I daresay, to see if anyone slipped out in the morning. It was absurd – he couldn’t have known, could he, whether that someone came from my apartment or somebody else’s. I wondered if he had been there all night, and I hoped not because the old dear was already sixty. He used to pay the concierge to report on my visitors. Oh, his jealousy never stopped. Even on his deathbed all he could talk of was a young actor he had once seen me with. ‘Your concierge tells me he called on you three times in a week last month,’ he complained, for by that time he had accepted that I knew he was spying on me. I don’t know. It gave him some satisfaction. Isn’t life sad, my dear … I owe him so much, and yet sometimes I wonder if my life mightn’t have been better if I had never met him … nobody would know of me, and I would just be a nice old queen … or perhaps not, I might have married and had children if I had never met him … people do change – our natures are not immutable but each step that we take in our progress through life leads us in a certain direction, and meeting Charles was such a big step for me.’

  It was a Provençal restaurant. They ate red mullet, which, Lucien reflected as he always did when he ate that favourite fish in Paris, never tastes as good as when you eat it fresh from the sea, on the coast, on the terrace of a restaurant where you can breath salt air.

  ‘How is your mother?’ he asked.

  Marcel smiled, as he always did when his mother was mentioned.

  ‘She’s very fat,’ he said, ‘and complains of her liver. I’m not surprised. I tell her, “If you will spend the day sitting in your kitchen sipping white wine, what can you expect.” But I’m worried about the silly old dear. She absolutely refuses to leave Paris. I have a nice house, you know, a few miles from Cannes, but will she go there? “I’m a Parisian,” she says, “and I stay put …”’

  ‘Like Colette,’ Lucien said. ‘She tells me, “I pass all my wars in Paris.”’

  ‘So much for her provincial wisdom,’ Marcel said, ‘but I tell Maman they are going to bomb Paris, and all she says is, “that will be interesting”. “Besides,” she says, “if we are going to be occupied, I don’t know that I don’t prefer Germans to Italians.” “But we are not at war with Italy,” I say, and she nods her head and says, “We will be.” Then I remind her that Italians have always been perfectly sweet to me, and she just says, “Anyway, I’ve worked all my life for this apartment” – which you must know, Lucien, is a lie because Charles gave it to her – “and I’m not going to abandon it now,” and I’m just terrified as to what will happen to her when the Boches do arrive.’

  ‘You think they will?’

  ‘My dear, we both know they will.’

  The mullet was succeeded by the lamb and then by an anchovy tart. Seeing Marcel dig his fork into this, Lucien recalled how, as a young man, Marcel had detested anchovies.

  ‘You used to like everything sweet.’

  ‘And now I have come to appreciate bitterness.’

  They drank Tavel rosé, because it reminded Lucien of summers such as he did not hope for again.

  ‘Do you know,’ Marcel said, ‘I have never been more in demand. Your tastes are of course more austere, but my particular brand of bitter-sweet comedy is exactly what the public want just now. I suppose it’s a form of escapism. I’m a minor artist, but, within my limits, a good one. It’s a light truth that I tell, but at least my form of sentimentality is not a lie, like so much art that is both more pretentious and more noisy. Yet I don’t deceive myself, it’s an art for the end of a particular civilisation.’

  He scrunched out his cigarette.

  ‘Like that,’ he said, ‘a fag-end.’

  Then, with the arrival of the coffee, he
began looking at his watch.

  ‘Have you an appointment?’ Lucien asked, offended that Marcel might have one. It seemed an indication that he had expected to be bored, that he had viewed the prospect of the dinner – which he had proposed himself – with an enthusiasm that had diminished as it approached; rather as Lucien himself had done. But now that they were there together, at a restaurant table as they had so often been, Lucien didn’t wish their conversation to come to an end, didn’t wish to be forced out into the streets, and back into responsible life again. It was so pleasant and undemanding sitting there with Marcel indulging in mild melancholy. There was nothing important in their conversation, and that pleased him.

  ‘No,’ Marcel said, ‘not exactly.’ He lit another cigarette.

  ‘I asked David to join us here,’ he said.

  ‘David?’

  ‘I told you about David.’

  Of course, David was the new lover whom he was trying to keep out of the Army.

  ‘He’s late. It worries me when he’s late.’

  Lucien smiled. ‘Is he unfaithful?’ He tried to make it sound like a joke.

  Marcel waved his cigarette.

  ‘Of course he isn’t,’ he drew on it, puffed out the smoke. ‘Of course he is. I’m terrified that he is. I’m getting like Charles, you know. It’s humiliating. I smoke such a lot and he doesn’t like it. Or I’m afraid he doesn’t, which is absurd because he smokes himself, you know. It’s humiliating to be helplessly in love with someone who can’t love you. But then, I’d rather be like that than not in love at all.’

  ‘Of course I don’t understand you, but I don’t see why he shouldn’t love you. After all, since you have made the comparison, you loved Charles didn’t you?’

  ‘Not as he wished to be loved.’

  ‘But is anyone – are we ever – loved in that way? Isn’t the whole business of loving cursed by discordancy of emotion. You never love anyone so much as at the moment when you fear your love is lost forever.’

  ‘When I was confident,’ Marcel said, ‘I always sat facing the door of a restaurant. Now I sit with my back to it, hoping to be taken by surprise.’

  ‘Tell me about him,’ Lucien said, to comfort his friend.

  ‘I saw him first on the stage, in an absurd comedy. He had a way of touching his lips with his fingers – to show surprise. There was something so vulnerable about it, and then he had to throw himself on a couch, weeping, and it was the way he lay there with his feet trailing on the ground … he’s very young, an American mother and a French father. The mother’s Jewish, which is why he is called David, but …’

  Marcel ran on and Lucien thought how absurd it was indeed that he should be sitting at a table covered with white linen, empty bottles, glasses, coffee-cups and a brimming ash-tray, listening to this, while, a few hours’ train journey to the north, his men lounged bored and apprehensive in their lines, longing for their girlfriends, or for their mothers to wake them in the morning with a bowl of coffee. Then he thought of his own mother, asleep in Provence, having prayed for him before he went to bed, and of Polly, perhaps in a nightclub in London, and it seemed to him that life was made up of a network of affections, like a spider’s web, spread over experience and over the physical world; and as fragile as that web.

  Marcel stopped. Lucien looked up and saw that a young man had laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late. There was a bit of trouble at the theatre. It was rather horrible. One of the understudies tried to hang herself. Fortunately she didn’t succeed. You must be Monsieur de Balafré. I’m so pleased to meet you. I loved your magazine. I do hope the war isn’t going to interrupt publication indefinitely.’

  He sat down. Marcel fussed over him, persuaded him to drink a glass of armagnac ‘for the shock’, enquired about the girl, announced that he knew her mother, ‘the poor thing’, smoked cigarette after cigarette, while the conversation bubbled.

  The telephone rang just as Lucien had finished writing an account of the evening in his diary and was preparing for bed. His last words had been: ‘Despite my preconception, David is indeed charming. But I tremble for Marcel. He has given his heart to him, and the price of such gifts is always high. Yet I envy him too. The ability to lose myself in another would at least be a distraction from the torments and uncertainties that beset me. I suppose I should do so in devotion to the interests of the men who are my responsibility. But I cannot, I feel only pity for them, and yet they exasperate me. It is their dull readiness to take life as it comes which is the cause of my exasperation. Someone like Marcel is at least always attempting to make life the right shape.’

  The caller was Philippe Torrance. He sounded nervous and aggrieved. He told Lucien that he had been trying to find him all day. He implied that his failure to do so was to Lucien’s discredit. Lucien smiled at that: Torrance was the sort of egotist who expects the world to arrange itself to his convenience. Now he insisted that he must see Lucien. That was difficult. Lucien was due to return to the front the following morning. To the front? Well, nevertheless Torrance must see him. Besides – with a harsh laugh – just at present there was no front, not in reality, was there? Didn’t Lucien understand that it was urgent? He would not have been trying to reach him all day if it wasn’t. Very well, he would come round now, even though it would be almost impossible to find a taxi. No, Lucien said, that wouldn’t do. Torrance protested. They argued for some time. Eventually they agreed to meet in the buffet of the Gare de l’Est at half-past nine the following morning. Lucien replaced the receiver; the room seemed to be filled with dislike and resentment. He reminded himself that Torrance was a writer of real talent – ‘limited but intense, and very fine’, as he had said – who required to be cherished. He was difficult, because of his disposition. Nevertheless, Lucien continued to feel protective towards him as his own discovery.

  The morning was cold, grey and windless. His knee, which he had banged against a stone during one of the first exercises of the war, ached. Unless it improved he could not be considered fit for active service. On the other hand he had not mentioned it to the Medical Officer.

  The station was thronged. So many girls, wives and mothers were seeing off young soldiers returning to the lines after a brief leave that he had the sensation that the air was full of sobbing. The cavernous station was like an antechamber of the infernal regions, as men surrendered themselves, their individuality and their free will, to a malevolent force over which they were powerless, against which they had no protection. As each man placed a heavy shiny boot on the high step of the train, he lifted himself into a realm where he was at the disposal of the Fates. Behind him, the women held out their arms as if he had been torn from them. And then there were handkerchiefs dabbing at the eyes; arms were placed round shoulders; girls clung to mothers, mothers to daughters and sweethearts, all thrown into limbo, their eyes still fixed on the carriages which the railway company had consecrated to the service of death. Even three tarts standing near Lucien were sobbing. He heard one of them say, ‘He kept telling me he wished I hadn’t left off wearing my mascara, and I said I couldn’t because of my gasmask. But I wish now I had put it on for his sake.’ One girl was leaning against a pillar. Her pale face, which was thin and bony, was lifted up so that she was gazing over the top of the train at the girders which supported the roof. There were piles of newspapers tied up with string around her feet, as if they were faggots and she a sacrifice to the gods of war. But the train needed no favourable wind to carry the men to their Trojan War which this time – Lucien felt his temple throb – was definitely going to take place.

  He turned away and made for the buffet, crowded and steamy and noisy without hilarity. There was no sign of Torrance, though Lucien’s delay by the troop train had already made him a few minutes late. He was not surprised. Torrance’s insecurity would never allow him to be first at an appointment. It was impossible to reach the counter which, however quickly the barmaids worked, was alway
s jammed with people who thought service overdue. He took up his place instead at the door of the buffet watching for Torrance.

  He had consulted his watch twice before he saw him approach. Torrance carried a cane and wore a light-coloured tweed overcoat and a soft hat.

  ‘I’ve had a terrible journey,’ he said, his tone establishing that this was not an excuse for his lateness, but rather an expression of a just grievance at the way things were arranged.

  ‘This place is awful,’ he said, ‘it’s impossible to talk here.’

  They crossed the square into a café which was less crowded. As usual Lucien ordered the drinks – a café filtre for each of them and also a fine à l’eau for Torrance – knowing that he would have to pay. The elderly waiter shuffled off.

  Lucien said, ‘I’ve just half an hour before I must board my train.’

  Philippe Torrance looked round the café. It seemed to Lucien that he was anxious lest they should be overheard. He dropped his voice, speaking in a husky manner, unlike his usual tone, which was that of a schoolmaster dominating a class of boys for whom he had no respect.

  ‘I’ve been to your office twice,’ he said. ‘It’s all locked up.’

  ‘Well, yes, I’m afraid it is. I can’t produce my magazine while I’m in the Army, you know. There are more important matters.’