by Michel Déon
‘She’s better today,’ the supervisor told him, taking out her pass key to unlock Claude’s room.
‘In that case why is she locked up?’
‘It’s Sunday. I look after the whole floor. We have to take precautions.’
‘There are patients walking unaccompanied in the garden.’
‘During the week she goes out, but, as you know, her little boy comes to see her on Sunday. She’s unpredictable after he leaves …’
The door opened. Claude was sitting on a chair next to the barred window, looking at the kitchen garden and the road. She turned to Jean, her face serene.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said, offering her cheek.
‘Shall we go for a walk in the garden?’
The supervisor protested. Jean took no notice and led Claude downstairs. They walked along the path that bordered the lawn. Residents were strolling on the grass or reading under the trees. A number, in perfect mental health, were paying dearly to remove themselves discreetly to a place of safety from the new racial censuses. An arbour in the shade of a copse of young copper beeches had benches where two men were reading newspapers. A young woman, her face ravaged by nervous tics, was rummaging in an overnight bag, pulling out rags, folding them and replacing them in a jumble to start again.
‘She’s crazy,’ Claude said. ‘Pay no attention.’
They sat on two chairs, facing the sprinkler watering the lawn. The flowerbeds were full of lettuces.
‘Did you see Cyrille?’ he asked.
‘Yes, this morning with Maman. Poor darling, he gets bored here, goes round and round in circles. Maman scolds him all the time. I asked if I couldn’t have him with me. They could put a small bed in my bedroom …’
‘And the doctor said no?’
‘He says no to everything.’
A man in his sixties, in white trousers and a shantung jacket and wearing a panama, raised his hat politely as he passed them. Claude gripped Jean’s arm and murmured, ‘All that man thinks about is raping me. He’s tried to several times.’
‘I’m sure he doesn’t. He’s harmless, I promise you. I’ve talked to him. He lived in the Far East for a long time … He’s not a pervert.’
‘But you don’t know him. When you’re not here, he shows me his—’
He interrupted her.
‘No, Claude, no. Think about something else.’
‘If I can’t tell you, who can I tell?’
‘Nobody. When you say those things you start to believe them. So don’t say them.’
Her eyes filled up with tears.
‘You don’t love me the way you used to.’
‘I love you more than ever.’
She turned her mouth to him and he kissed her lightly.
‘Everything’s better when you’re here,’ she said. ‘They don’t dare come.’
‘There’s nothing for you to be afraid of any more.’
‘Maman says they can find me here.’
Anna Petrovna’s stupidity exasperated Jean and he began to despair. What he had hoped was an ordinary depression, in his relative ignorance of mental illness, was turning out to be a deep, painful wound that was probably incurable. Claude’s illness, or possibly an overuse of sedatives by her doctors so that she left them and the nurses in peace, was altering her looks. Her face had become expressionless and her blank stare reflected her constant indecision. She seemed at the mercy of the last person to speak to her. How could he fight it?
‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing,’ she said.
‘I’m running a gallery.’
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘Not really, but it’s a living and it means I can help you.’
‘Do you mean you’re paying for me here?’
‘Yes, you know I am.’
She looked thoughtful for a long time.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said. ‘If I leave the clinic, you won’t need to work any more. We’ll take Cyrille to Saint-Tropez, to your grandfather’s. I’m sure Marie-Dévote will have us. You can go fishing with Théo and help him with his delivery business. Cyrille’s very pale. He needs sunshine.’
He was amazed how at certain moments she could reason with such logic and imagine practical solutions to the situation they found themselves in. There was no doubt that Marie-Dévote and Antoine du Courseau would welcome them with open arms. He had thought of it himself. But Claude’s mental fragility made it too great a risk.
‘We’ll go swimming,’ she said. ‘The sea’s always blue and warm. Cyrille can play on that lovely sandy beach. Your grandfather can start up his Bugatti, and at night we’ll make love, lots. I’m dying to make love to you, Jean. Here I dream you’re inside me, everywhere inside me, and then I wake up crying because I’m empty …’
She squeezed his hand with the force of desperation. The man in the shantung jacket stopped in front of them and raised his panama.
‘What a glorious June we’re having, don’t you think?’
‘Glorious,’ Jean said.
‘Not too hot, not too cool. The Île-de-France is paradise. Our kings should have left it at that. Why make it bigger? Ambition is the mother of all misfortune. Napoleon should have stopped at Austerlitz. He’d beaten the two emperors of Russia and Germany, taken forty thousand prisoners, including twenty Russian generals, captured forty flags and a hundred cannon. Why go on? He was master of all Europe … I bid you a very good day.’
He went on his way, panama raised.
‘You see …’ Claude said. ‘Now you understand.’
‘I didn’t hear him say anything rude.’
‘Because you’re here …’
A maid appeared at the doors of the home pushing a trolley laden with a tea urn and cups. There was no need to summon the residents. They had seen her. Leaving their benches and interrupting their strolls, they converged on the trolley, producing momentary confusion around it.
‘Don’t push, don’t push,’ the woman huffed, as if she were talking to spoilt children. ‘There’s enough for everyone.’
Claude stayed sitting with Jean. The man in the panama walked past them again, raising his hat and leering.
‘There’s tart today,’ he said. ‘It’s Sunday.’
The supervisor’s head and shoulders appeared at a first-floor window, looking down at the group massed around the trolley. A patient caught sight of her. Word went round and the impatience subsided. Her voice nevertheless rang out.
‘Monsieur Trouleau! Don’t push. I can see you pushing! You’ll be served along with everyone else. And you, Madame Chaminadze, you must have your tea.’
Claude got up meekly, joined the group and waited patiently to be served with the liquid they called tea. Jean watched her from a distance and tried to rekindle the extraordinary emotion that had swept over him at Clermont-Ferrand when, as the regiment marched past, he had seen her standing between himself and the light. Her body was as firm and willowy as it had been then, but the rough dress she was wearing made her look heavier. The residents dispersed into the garden with their tasteless slices of tart on the rim of their saucers.
The supervisor shouted again, ‘And remember when you’ve finished to bring back your cups.’
Claude returned to Jean, smiling, her face suddenly enlivened by pleasure.
‘We’ll share,’ she said. ‘I asked for some tart for you, but there’s just enough for the residents. The cooking’s awfully good here.’
He doubted it, and was startled, too, to see Claude obeying the commands of the virago on the first floor so readily, and docilely parroting the glowing reports the nursing home gave itself. She was in their power and, despite a few timid outbreaks of revolt, had surrendered to the regulations laid down by the management with the distressing resignation of a being who places her life permanently in the hands of a nameless power. She began to talk about going away again, but now with a fearful indirectness.
‘They’re talking about shutting down the clin
ic,’ she said. ‘The doctor wants to go on holiday. He’s entitled to a holiday like everyone else, isn’t he?’
‘Of course.’
‘The supervisor and the nurses too. I could come and live with you in Paris. Or at Quai Saint-Michel if you like …’
He had enquired: there was no question of the clinic shutting for the summer. Claude had made it up. The resident psychiatrist lived on the top floor, avoiding patients’ families and friends as much as he could. Jean had seen him twice in six months. With each monthly bill he included a medical report couched in sufficiently cautious terms for it to be impossible to draw any precise conclusion. Claude was ‘making progress’, an ambiguous phrase that was not to be construed as meaning recovery. For as long as they could pay, the patients remained helplessly in the hands of this occult power lurking under the eaves in a book-crammed apartment. His name was Dr Bertrand, and he had been working on a thesis on the madness of Gérard de Nerval for the last ten years.
Claude took her cup back and returned to sit next to Jean.
‘You don’t tell me anything about Nelly,’ she said. ‘Do you still see her?’
He preferred to lie, though Claude never showed any jealousy.
‘Less than I used to. She’s working hard and she was a terrific Pauline in Polyeucte. It’s a pity you can’t see her. We’ll go as soon as you’re better. She’s always asking for news of you.’
‘I’d like to see her again. It was so strange living at her place and knowing she was your girlfriend too. Do you still sleep with her?’
‘No, of course not.’
The man in the panama paused in front of them.
‘How did you like the tart?’
‘Excellent,’ Claude said.
‘Wasn’t it? There are so many residents who’ve come here to treat their nerves, but I’m here to treat my stomach … I’m on a gastronomic cure. The world’s going to pieces and we’re eating our fill. It’s the survival of the fittest. See you soon, I hope.’
He raised his hat and immediately went to sit on a garden chair next to the young woman who was unpacking and repacking her bag of rags. She paid no attention to his conversation, her face tense with anxiety, counting the rags in her long skinny fingers. The man stood up, shrugging his shoulders, and walked back past Jean and Claude.
‘She’s not normal,’ he said.
Claude smiled and whispered to Jean, ‘Am I normal?’
‘Perfectly. You’re just tired.’
‘You haven’t given me any news of Madame Michette.’
‘Oh, she’s all right, I think. Always very busy.’
‘Cyrille infuriated her.’
‘She got over it.’
A cloud covered the sun. Faces looked up and walkers paused as if the mechanism that regulated the peaceful scene and its movement had been thrown out of gear. The supervisor appeared in the doorway, looking up to squint at the sky. The cloud went on drifting, a single formless mass in the infinite pallor. The sun was already coming out again and the cloud was passing. The supervisor walked towards Jean and Claude.
‘The doctor would like to see you.’
‘Now?’
‘If possible.’
He squeezed Claude’s hand.
‘Wait for me.’
She looked up at the supervisor, who stood watching her and saying nothing.
‘Jean, I think I’m going to go back to my room.’
‘She’s very sensible,’ the supervisor said. ‘Very. If only all the patients were like her.’
Jean’s heart ached. Claude drifted at the mercy of any will stronger than her own. The supervisor’s face displayed a kindness and indulgence that froze his soul. Claude followed her, turning at the door of her room to kiss Jean before walking over to her chair by the window. He would have wept, had it not been for her radiant smile as the door closed on his past.
‘Is it really necessary?’
‘The doctor will tell you, Monsieur. We’re responsible for Madame …’
The psychiatrist’s apartment was reached by a spiral staircase that ended in a door with double locks. The doctor himself opened it, in shirtsleeves, a man in his fifties whose Freud-like goatee beard failed to conceal the innate cheerfulness of a face whose eyes sparkled with amused curiosity. He wore dark lenses whenever there was a pessimistic diagnosis to be delivered to a patient’s relations. Yet, as we have noted, this man was not fond of external contacts, of anything in fact that disturbed his closed universe in the nursing home, and considered the explanations he was obliged to supply in order to keep his patients there as a distasteful chore.
‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting you twice, and to be honest, though I know many things about Madame Chaminadze I know nothing about you. Forgive me for asking you up here. I should have come down to my consulting room to meet you there, but it’s Sunday – I deserve a little rest too, and I thought an informal meeting in my apartment would be more pleasant and relaxed, that you’d find my curiosity less oppressive and that we might even have a drink together, though my drinks cabinet is very modest: a brandy and water as Mr Pickwick preferred it, or a bootleg pastis the way Marius liked it. What’s your choice?’
‘Nothing,’ Jean said. ‘I’m listening.’
He did not like to be talked to, by an intelligent man, in language that indicated he was thought to be an idiot, unable to work out the most elementary aspects of life. Dr Bertrand annoyed him, and Palfy had taught him how to cut short such false chumminess.
‘Oh, well … you’ll allow me not to follow your example.’
He poured himself a cognac and water. Jean relaxed: there was nothing sinister about this Freud lookalike, he was simply cultivating an attitude, as shown by his evident awkwardness when he was not addressing a mental patient, or perhaps he had got into the habit of considering all his interlocutors as grown-up retarded children, to whom it was necessary to explain the most ordinary facts.
‘I know how concerned you are by Madame Chaminadze’s condition …’
He had sat down at his desk, piled with documents and files, a sheet of paper half covered in handwriting in front of him. The shelves on the walls were sagging under the weight of books. A voice rose from the garden.
‘Monsieur Draguignan, can I remind you that there are lavatories on the ground floor. If you don’t mind …’
The doctor smiled.
‘She’s a dragon, I know, but without her the patients would do exactly as they pleased. She’s especially interested in your relation’s case, you know …’
‘She’s not my relation; she’s the woman I love.’
‘Oh, I know, I know, but we are sometimes obliged to maintain a certain fiction. Where the mentally ill are concerned the family are all-powerful and can forbid the visit of someone who isn’t a family member.’
‘I don’t really see how Claude’s mother could forbid me to see her daughter. Putting it rather vulgarly, Doctor, I buy the right to see her by paying your monthly bills.’
‘I know, I know …’
His embarrassment was growing. He swallowed a mouthful of brandy and put the glass down in front of him. A mad thought crossed Jean’s mind: a plan had been hatched against him, and they were going to prevent him from seeing Claude. He was gripped by a terrible anxiety and the thought that he still loved her as much as before, even in her present condition. If he had doubted it in recent months, the threat he faced reminded him of his attachment.
‘I’d be happy to have a brandy and water like you, Doctor.’
‘Ah, now we’re being sensible … Good sense always wins out.’
As delighted as if he had just won a personal victory and made a wayward patient see reason, Dr Bertrand put on his glasses and fetched the bottle of cognac.
‘It’s not easy to lay your hands on good cognac at the moment,’ he said. ‘I had some put by, but it quickly ran out. Fortunately I have relations in Charente. Do you know Charente, Monsieur Arnaud?�
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‘No, I don’t know Charente. War and defeat haven’t really favoured my appetite for travel.’
‘Fancy that! But I hear you often go abroad.’
‘I’ve been to Portugal three times since the beginning of the year, but not for tourism, for business.’
‘You’re a very young businessman.’
‘I have a feeling it’s a profession I’ll do well not to grow old in.’
Anna Petrovna was the only person who could have told the doctor, and even she could only have known of his journeys via Cyrille, who Jean had answered carelessly about one of his absences. He began thoroughly to detest Claude’s mother, who had clearly mounted an undeclared war against him. Dr Bertrand sat down at his desk.
‘Yes,’ he said, as though resuming after a digression a train of thought interrupted by small talk, ‘yes, I get the impression that your visits, despite the desire she expresses for them, are upsetting Madame Chaminadze. You know that she is suffering from an obsession triggered by physical mistreatment, the nature of which I don’t need to elaborate on. She used to be, I believe, according to what you and her family have told me, a balanced person, very much in control of herself. Is that correct?’
Jean, resolved not to come to his aid, nodded in confirmation. Dr Bertrand compressed his lips purposefully. Once more he had let himself get carried away by long phrases that reassured him of his own subtle understanding of psychology, but this laconic interlocutor whose irritated gaze he felt settling on him, this boy whom Anna Petrovna had claimed was involved in shady business dealings, disconcerted him.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he went on, ‘that you should space out your visits … Just an experiment, you understand, a simple experiment, but we need to try everything in the case of a sensitive patient such as this, in which science only has formulas to offer, when what we really need are intuition and psychology.’
‘If you’d talk to me openly, Doctor, we’d understand each other, and I’d answer you.’
The doctor again compressed his lips, which were full and sensual in his round, happy face. It was a tic that had been commented on sarcastically at his oral examination and he thought he had succeeded in suppressing it, but the slightest difficulty made it reappear. It embarrassed him horribly.