Overhead in a Balloon Read online

  Luc came home in time for dinner, dressed in a shirt and corduroys belonging to Cousin Henri. His silence, Roger thought, challenged them for questions; none came. He accepted a portion of Roger’s birthday cake, which, of course, Roger could not touch, and left half on his plate. “Even as a small child, Luc never cared for chocolate,” Simone explained to Cassandra.

  The next day, only food favoured by Luc was served. Simone turned over a letter from Katia. It was brief and cool in tone: Katia had been exercising horses in a riding school, helping a friend.

  The Clairevoies, preceded by Luc on the Honda, packed up and drove back to Paris. This time Cassandra was allowed to sit in front, next to Simone. Roger and the dog shared the back seat with Luc’s books and a number of parcels.

  They saw Cassandra off at the Gare du Nord. Roger was careful not to take her arm, brush against her, or otherwise inspire a mention in her diary. She wore a T-shirt decorated with a grinning mouth. “It’s been really lovely,” she said. Roger bowed.

  Her letter of thanks arrived promptly. She was planning to help her father with his book on Stalin, Cromwell, and Torquemada. He wanted to include a woman on the list, to bring the work in line with trends of the day. Cassandra had suggested Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni. Boadicea stood for feminine rectitude, firmness, and true love of one’s native culture. So Cassandra felt.

  “Cassandra has written a most learned and affectionate letter,” said Simone, who would never have to see Cassandra again. “I only hope Luc was as polite to the Brunts.” Her voice held a new tone of maternal grievance and maternal threat.

  Luc, who no longer found threats alarming, packed his books and took the train for Rennes. Katia’s letters seemed to have stopped. Searching Luc’s room, Simone found nothing to read except a paperback on private ownership. “I believe he is taking an interest in things,” she told Roger.

  It was late in May when the Clairevoies made their final trip to Rennes. Suspecting what awaited them, Simone wore mourning – a dark linen suit, black sandals, sunglasses. Father Rousseau had on a dark suit and black tie. After some hesitation he said what Roger was waiting to hear: it was useless to make Luc sit for an examination he had not even a remote chance of passing. Luc was unprepared, now and forever. He had, in fact, disappeared, though he had promised to come back once the talk with his parents was over. Luc had confided that he would be content to live like Cousin Henri, without a degree to his name, and with a reliable tenant farmer to keep things running.

  My son is a fool, said Roger to himself. Katia, who was certainly beautiful, perhaps even clever, loved him. She stood crying in the street, trying to see a light in his room.

  “Luc’s cousin is rich,” said Simone. “Luc is too pure to understand the difference. He will have to learn something. What about computer training?”

  “Luc has a mind too fluid to be restrained,” said Father Rousseau.

  “Literature?” said Simone, bringing up the last resort.

  Roger came to life. “Sorting letters in the post office?”

  “Machines do that,” said Father Rousseau. “Luc would have to pass a test to show he understands the machine. I have been wondering if there might be in Luc’s close environment a family affair.” The Clairevoies fell silent. “A family business,” Father Rousseau repeated. “Families are open, airy structures. They take in the dreamy as well as the alert. There is always an extra corner somewhere.”

  Like most of her women friends, Simone had given up wearing jewellery: the streets were full of anarchists and muggers. One of her friends knew of someone who had had a string of pearls ripped off her neck by a bearded intellectual of the Mediterranean type – that is, quite dark. Simone still kept, for luck, a pair of gold earrings, so large and heavy they looked fake. She touched her talisman earrings and said, “We have in our family a bank too small to be nationalized.”

  “Congratulations,” said Father Rousseau, sincerely. When he got up to see them to the door, Roger saw he wore running shoes.

  It fell to Roger to tell Luc what was to become of him. After military service of the most humdrum and unprotected kind, he would move to a provincial town and learn about banks. The conversation took place late one night in Luc’s room. Simone had persuaded Roger that Luc needed to be among his own things – the galleon lamp, the Foreign Legion recruiting poster that had replaced Che Guevara, the photograph of Simone that replaced Roger’s graduating class. Roger said, somewhat shyly, “You will be that much closer to Biarritz.”

  “Katia is getting married,” said Luc. “His father has a riding school.” He said this looking away, rolling a pencil between thumb and finger, something like the way his mother had rolled a kitchen match. Reflected in the dark window, Luc’s cheeks were hollowed, his eyes blazing and black. He looked almost a hero and, like most heroes, lonely.

  “What happened to your friends?” said Roger. “The friends you used to see every Sunday.”

  “Oh, that … that fell apart. All the people they ever talked about were already dead. And some of the parents were worried. You were the only parents who never interfered.”

  “We wanted you to live your own life,” said Roger. “It must have been that. Could you get her back?”

  “You can do anything with a woman if you give her enough money.”

  “Who told you a thing like that?” In the window Roger examined the reflected lamp, the very sight of which was supposed to have made a man of Luc.

  “Everyone. Cousin Henri. I told her we owned a bank, because Cousin Henri said it would be a good thing to tell her. She asked me how to go about getting a bank loan. That was all.”

  Does he really believe he owns a bank, Roger wondered. “About money,” he said. “Nothing of Cousin Henri’s is likely to be ours. Illegitimate children are allowed to inherit now, and my cousin,” said Roger with some wonder, “has acknowledged everyone. I pity the schoolteacher. All she ever sees is the same face.” This was not what Luc was waiting to hear. “You will inherit everything your mother owns. I have to share with my cousin, because that is how our grandparents arranged it.” He did not go on about the Freemasons and Protestants, because Luc already knew.

  “It isn’t fair,” said Luc.

  “Then you and your mother share my share.”

  “How much of yours is mine?” said Luc politely.

  “Oh, something at least the size of the tennis court,” said Roger.

  On Luc’s desk stood, silver-framed, another picture of Simone, a charming one taken at the time of her engagement. She wore, already, the gold earrings. Her hair was in the upswept balloon style of the time. Her expression was smiling, confident but untried. Both Luc and Roger suddenly looked at it in silence.

  It was Simone’s belief that, after Katia, Luc had started sleeping with one of her own friends. She thought she knew the one: the Hungarian wife of an architect, fond of saying she wished she had a daughter the right age for Luc. This was a direct sexual compliment, based on experience, Simone thought. Roger thought it meant nothing at all. It was the kind of empty declaration mothers mistook for appreciation. Simone had asked Roger to find out what he could, for this was the last chance either of them would ever have to talk to Luc. From now on, he would undoubtedly get along better with his parents, but where there had been a fence there would be a wall. Luc was on his own.

  Roger said, “It was often thought, in my day, mainly by foreigners who had never been to France, that young men began their lives with their mother’s best friend. Absurd, when you consider it. Why pick an old woman when you can have a young one?” Buy a young one, he had been about to say, by mistake. “Your mother’s friends often seem young to me. I suppose it has to do with their clothes – so loose, unbuttoned. The disorder is already there. My mother’s best friends wore armour. It was called the New Look, invented by Christian Dior, a great defender of matronly virtue.” A direct glance from Luc – the first. “There really was a Mr. Dior, just as I suppose there was a Mr. Mer
cedes and a Mr. Benz. My mother and her friends were put into boned corsets, stiff petticoats, wide-brimmed, murderous hats. Their nails were pointed, and as red as your lampshade. They carried furled parasols with silver handles and metal-edged handbags. Even the heels of their shoes were contrived for braining people. No young man would have gone anywhere near.” Luc’s eyes met Roger’s in the window. “I have often wondered,” said Roger, “though I’m not trying to make it my business, what you and Katia could have done. Where could you have taken her? Well, unless she had some private place of her own. There’s more and more of that. Daughters of nice couples, people we know. Their own apartment, car, money. Holidays no one knows where. Credit cards, bank accounts, abortions. In my day, we had a miserable amount of spending money, but we had the girls in the Rue Spontini. Long after the bordellos were closed, there was the Rue Spontini. Do you know who first took me there? Cousin Henri. Not surprising, considering the life he has led since. Henri called it ‘the annex,’ because he ran into so many friends from his school. On Thursday afternoons, that was.” A slight question in Luc’s eyes. “Thursday was our weekly holiday, like Wednesdays for you. I don’t suppose every Wednesday – no, I’m sure you don’t. Besides, even the last of those places vanished years ago. There were Belgian girls, Spanish girls from Algeria. Some were so young – oh, very young. One told me I was like a brother. I asked Cousin Henri what she meant. He said he didn’t know.”

  Luc said, “Katia could cry whenever she wanted to.” Her face never altered, but two great tears would suddenly brim over and course along her cheeks.

  The curtains and shutters were open. Anyone could look in. There was no one in the street – not even a ghost. How real Katia and Luc had seemed; how they had touched what was left of Roger’s heart; how he had loved them. Giving them up forever, he said, “I always admired that picture of your mother.”

  Simone and Roger had become engaged while Roger was still a lieutenant in Algeria. On the night before their wedding, which was to take place at ten o’clock in the morning in the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, Roger paid a wholly unwelcome call. Simone received him alone, in her dressing gown, wearing a fine net over her carefully ballooned hair. Her parents, listening at the door, took it for granted Roger had caught a venereal disease in a North African brothel and wanted the wedding postponed; Simone supposed he had met a richer and prettier girl. All Roger had to say was that he had seen an Algerian prisoner being tortured to death. Simone had often asked Roger, since then, why he had tried to frighten her with something that had so little bearing on their future. Roger could not remember what his reason had been.

  He tried, now, to think of something important to say to Luc, as if the essence of his own life could be bottled in words and handed over. Sylvestre, wakened by a familiar voice, came snuffling at the door, expecting at this unsuitable hour to be taken out. Roger remarked, “Whatever happens, don’t get your life all mixed up with a dog’s.”

  A Painful Affair

  Grippes’ opinion remains unchanged: He was the last author to have received a stipend from the Mary Margaret Pugh Arts Foundation, and so it should have fallen to him – Henri Grippes, Parisian novelist, diarist, essayist, polemical journalist, and critic – to preside at the commemoration of the late Miss Pugh’s centenary. (This celebration, widely reported in Paris, particularly in publications that seemed to have it in for Grippes, took place in a room lent by the firm of Fronce & Baril, formerly drapers and upholsterers, now purveyors of bluejeans from Madras. The firm’s books reveal that Miss Pugh was the first person ever to have opened a charge account – a habit she brought from her native America and is thought to have introduced into France.) But the honour did not fall to M. Grippes. The Pugh Memorial Committee, made up of old-age pensioners from the American Embassy, the Chase Manhattan Bank (Paris), the French Ministry for Culture, and other intellectual oatcakes, chose instead to invite Victor Prism, winkling him with no trouble out of his obscure post at a university in the North of England. Prism’s eagerness to get away from England whatever the season, his willingness to travel under foul conditions, for a trifling sum of money, make him a popular feature of subsidized gatherings throughout the Free World. This is still the way Grippes sees things.

  Prism, author of Suomi Serenade: A Key to the Kalevala, much praised in its day as an outstandingly skillful performance, also thinks Grippes should have been chairman. The fact that the Pugh centenary celebration coincided with the breakup of the M. M. Pugh Investment Trust, from which the Foundation – and, incidentally, M. Grippes – had drawn considerable funds over the years, might have made Grippes’ presence in the chair especially poignant. It could also have tested his capacity for showing humility – an accommodation already strained more than once. Think of Grippes, Miss Pugh’s youthful protégé, fresh from his father’s hog farm in Auvergne, dozing on a bed in her house (a bed that had belonged to Prism a scant six months before), with Rosalia, the maid, sent along every half hour to see how he was getting on with Chapter 2. Think of Grippes at the end, when Miss Pugh’s long-lost baby brother, now seventy-something – snappy Hong Kong forty-eight-hour tailoring, silk shirt from Bangkok, arrogant suntan – turned up at her bedside, saying, “Well, Maggie, long time no see.”

  “She died in his arms,” wrote Grippes, in an unusually confidential letter to Prism, “though not without a struggle.”

  Prism says he had been promised Miss Pugh’s library, her collection of autograph letters (Apollinaire to Zola), her matching ormolu-mounted opaline urns, her Meissen coffee service, her father’s cufflinks, her Louis XVI period writing table, and the key to a safe-deposit vault containing two Caillebottes and a Morisot. The promise was not kept, but no trick of fortune could possibly erode his gratitude for earlier favours. He still visits Miss Pugh’s grave, in a mossy corner of Passy Cemetery, whenever he happens to be in Paris. He leaves a bunch of anemones, or a pot of chrysanthemums, or, when the cost of flowers is really sky-high, merely stands silently with his head bowed. Sunshine flows upon the back of his neck, in a kind of benison. Seeing how the rich are buried imbues him with strengthened faith. He receives the formal promise of a future offered and accepted – a pledge he once believed existed in art. He thinks of Grippes, in his flat across the Seine, scribbling away amid Miss Pugh’s furniture and his tribe of stray cats.

  Grippes says he visits Miss Pugh’s grave as often as he is able. (He has to find someone to stay with the cats.) Each time he goes to the cemetery he gets caught up in a phalanx of mourners shuffling behind a creeping hearse. The hearse parks close to some family mausoleum that is an architectural echo of the mansions that lined Avenue du Bois before it became Avenue Foch. Waiting for the coffin to be unloaded, the mourners stare at one another’s collars. Grippes reads inscriptions on tombstones, some of which indicate with astonishing precision what the occupant expected to find on the other side. In this place, where it is never spring, he is conscious of bare branches, dark birds cawing. The day takes on a grainy texture, like a German Expressionist film. The only colour glows from the ribbons and rosettes some of the mourners wear on their lapels. (Among the crumbs flicked in Grippes’ direction was Miss Pugh’s Legion of Honour, after her brother had been assured it would not fetch one franc, his floor price, at auction.) There is nothing extravagant or dangerous about these excursions. They cost Grippes a Métro ticket each way – direct line, Montparnasse-Trocadéro, no awkward change, no transfer, no flight along underground corridors pursued by a gang of those savage children of whom even the police are afraid.

  Prism thinks that Grippes started showing signs of infantile avarice and timidity soon after Miss Pugh’s death, which left him homeless. For a time Grippes even thought of moving to London. He sent Prism a letter suggesting they take a flat together and live on their memories. Prism responded with a strange and terrifying account of gang wars, with pimps and blackmailers shot dead on the steps of the National Gallery. In Paris, Prism wrote, Grippes could be r
ecognized on sight as a literary odd-jobs man with style. No one would call him a climber – at least, not to his face. Rather, Grippes seemed to have been dropped in early youth onto one of those middling-high peaks of Paris bohemia from which the artist can see both machine-knit and cashmere blazers hanging in Boulevard Haussmann department stores and five-thousand-franc custom tailoring. In England, where caste signs were radically different, he might give the false impression that he was a procurer or a drug pusher and be gunned down at a bus stop.

  After reading this letter, Grippes got out a map of London and studied it. It looked crowded and untidy. He cashed in about half the bonds Miss Pugh had made over to him in her lifetime and bought four rooms above a cinema in Montparnasse. While he was showing the removal men where to place Miss Pugh’s writing table, a cat came mewing at the door and he let it in.

  Grippes denies the imputation of avarice. When Prism gave his famous lecture in Brussels, in 1970, “Is Language a Deterrent?” Grippes travelled by train to hear him, at his own expense. He recalls that Prism was wearing a green corduroy suit, a canary-yellow V-neck sweater, and a tie that must have been a souvenir of Belfast. On his return to Paris, Grippes wrote a light-hearted essay about le style Anglais.

  Just before the centennial, Prism was interviewed on French television: eighteen minutes of Victor Prism, at a green baize table, with an adulating journalist who seemed to have been dipped in shellac. Prism’s French had not deteriorated, though it still sounded to Grippes like dried peas rattling in a tin can. “The fact is,” he said, rattling, “that I am the only person who knew Miss Pugh well – apart from her devoted servant Rosalia, that is. All raise hands, please, who remember Rosalia. (Camera on studio smiles) I am the person who called on Miss Pugh after she was evicted from her beautiful house and transported by ambulance to a nursing home in Meudon. She never quite understood that she had bought a house but not the land it stood on. (Sympathetic laughter) The last time I saw her, she was sitting up in bed, wearing her sapphire earrings, drinking a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. I have forgotten to say that she was by now completely bald, which did not make her in the least self-conscious. (Immense good will) I was obliged to return to England, believing I was leaving Miss Pugh in radiant health and in trusted hands.” (Audience delight)