Overhead in a Balloon Read online

  Transfiguration arrived rapidly. Resurrected for Speck’s approval was an ardent lover, a devoted husband who could not work unless his wife was around, preferably in the same room. If she had doubts about a painting, he at once scraped it down. Hers was the only opinion he had ever trusted. His last coherent words before dying had been of praise for his wife’s autumnal beauty.

  Like a swan in muddy waters, Speck’s ancient Bentley cruised the suburbs where his painters had lived their last resentful seasons. He knew by heart the damp villa, the gravel path, the dangling bellpull, the shrubbery containing dead cats and plastic bottles. Indoors the widow sat, her walls plastered with portraits of herself when young. Here she continued the struggle begun in the Master’s lifetime – the evicting of the upstairs tenant – her day made lively by the arrival of mail (dusty beige of anonymous threats, grim blue of legal documents), the coming and going of process servers, the outings to lawyers. Into this spongy territory Speck advanced, bringing his tactful presence, his subtle approximation of courtship, his gift for listening. Thin by choice, pale by nature, he suggested maternal need. Socks and cufflinks suggested breeding. The drift of his talk suggested prosperity. He sent his widows flowers, wooed them with food. Although their taste in cheques and banknotes ran to the dry and crisp, when it came to eating they craved the sweet, the sticky, the moist. From the finest pastry shops in Paris Speck brought soft macaroons, savarins soaked in rum, brioches stuffed with almond cream, mocha cake so tender it had to be eaten with a spoon. Sugar was poison to Speck. Henriette had once reviewed a book that described how refined sugar taken into one’s system turned into a fog of hideous green. Her brief, cool warning, “A Marxist Considers Sweets,” unreeled in Speck’s mind if he was confronted with a cookie. He usually pretended to eat, reducing a mille-feuille to paste, concealing the wreck of an éclair under napkin and fork. He never lost track of his purpose – the prying of paintings out of a dusty studio on terms anesthetizing to the artist’s widow and satisfactory to himself.

  The Senator had mentioned a wife; where there had been wife there was relict. Speck obtained her telephone number by calling a rival gallery and pretending to be looking for someone else. “Cruche’s widow can probably tell you,” he finally heard. She lived in one of the gritty suburbs east of Paris, on the far side of the Bois de Vincennes – in Speck’s view, the wrong direction. The pattern of his life seemed to come unfolded as he dialled. He saw himself stalled in industrial traffic, inhaling pollution, his Bentley pointed towards the seediest mark on the urban compass, with a vanilla cream cake melting beside him on the front seat.

  She answered his first ring; his widows never strayed far from the telephone. He introduced himself. Silence. He gave the name of the gallery, mentioned his street, recited the names of painters he showed.

  Presently he heard “D’you know any English?”

  “Some,” said Speck, who was fluent.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “First of all,” he said, “to meet you.”

  “What for?”

  He cupped his hand round the telephone, as if spies from the embassies down the street were trying to overhear. “I am planning a major Cruche show. A retrospective. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Not unless I know what you want.”

  It seemed to Speck that he had already told her. Her voice was languid and nasal and perfectly flat. An index to English dialects surfaced in his mind, yielding nothing useful.

  “It will be a strong show,” he went on. “The first big Cruche since the nineteen-thirties, I believe.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  He wondered if the Senator had forgotten something essential – that Lydia Cruche had poisoned her husband, for instance. He said, “You probably own quite a lot of his work.”

  “None of it’s for sale.”

  This, at last, was familiar; widows’ negotiations always began with “No.” “Actually, I am not proposing to buy anything,” he said, wanting this to be clear at the start. “I am offering the hospitality of my gallery. It’s a gamble I am willing to take because of my firm belief that the time –”

  “What’s the point of this show?”

  “The point?” said Speck, his voice tightening as it did when Walter was being obtuse. “The point is getting Cruche back on the market. The time has come – the time to … to attack. To attack the museums with Hubert Cruche.”

  As he said this, Speck saw the great armour-plated walls of the Pompidou Art Centre and the chink in the armour through which an 80 × 95 Cruche 1919 abstract might slip. He saw the provincial museums, cheeseparing, saving on light bulbs, but, like the French bourgeoisie they stood for, so much richer than they seemed. At the name “Cruche” their curators would wake up from neurotic dreams of forced auction sales, remembering they had millions to get rid of before the end of the fiscal year. And France was the least of it; London, Zurich, Stockholm, and Amsterdam materialized as frescoes representing the neoclassical façades of four handsome banks. Overhead, on a Baroque ceiling, nymphs pointed their rosy feet to gods whose chariots were called “Tokyo” and “New York.” Speck lowered his voice as if he had portentous news. Museums all over the world, although they did not yet know this, were starving for Cruche. In the pause that followed he seemed to feel Henriette’s hand on his shoulder, warning him to brake before enthusiasm took him over the cliff.

  “Although for the moment Cruche is just an idea of mine,” he said, stopping cold at the edge. “Just an idea. We can develop the idea when we meet.”

  A week later, Speck parked his car between a ramshackle shopping centre – survivor of the building boom of the sixties – and a municipal low-cost housing project that resembled a jail. In the space bounded by these structures crouched the late artist’s villa, abiding proof in stucco that the taste of earlier generations had been as disastrous as today’s. He recognized the shards of legal battle: centre and block had left the drawing board of some state-employed hack as a unit, only to be wedged apart by a widow’s refusal to sell. Speck wondered how she had escaped expropriation. Either she knows someone powerful, he thought, or she can make such a pest of herself that they were thankful to give up.

  A minute after having pushed the gate and tugged the rusted wire bellpull, he found himself alone in a bleak sitting room, from which his hostess had been called by a whistling kettle. He sat down on a faded sofa. The furniture was of popular local design, garnished with marble and ormolu. A television set encrusted with gilt acanthus leaves sat on a sideboard, like an objet d’art. A few rectangular shadings on the wallpaper showed where pictures had hung.

  The melancholy tinged with foreboding Speck felt between seven and eight overtook him at this much earlier hour. The room was no more hideous than others he had visited in his professional quest for a bargain, but this time it seemed to daunt him, recalling sieges and pseudo courtships and expenditures of time, charm, and money that had come to nothing. He got up and examined a glass-fronted bookcase with nothing inside. His features, afloat on a dusty pane, were not quite as pinched as they had been the other night, but the image was still below par for a man considered handsome. The approach of a squeaking tea cart sent him scurrying back to the sofa, like a docile child invited somewhere for the first time.

  “I was just admiring …” he began.

  “I’ve run out of milk,” she said. “I’m sure you won’t mind your tea plain.” With this governessy statement she handed him a cup of black Ceylon, a large slice of poisonous raisin cake, and a Mickey Mouse paper napkin.

  Nothing about Cruche’s widow tallied with the Senator’s description. She was short and quite round, and reminded Speck of the fat little dogs one saw being reluctantly exercised in Paris streets. The abundant red-gold hair of the Senator’s memory, or imagination, had gone ash-grey and was, in any case, pinned up. The striking fact of her person was simply the utter blankness of her expression. Usually widows’ faces spo
ke to him. They said, “I am lonely,” or “Can I trust you?” Lydia Cruche’s did not suggest that she had so much as taken Speck in. She chose a chair at some distance from Speck, and proceeded to eat her cake without speaking. He thought of things to say, but none of them seemed appealing.

  At last, she said, “Did you notice the supermarket next door?”

  “I saw a shopping centre.”

  “The market is part of it. You can get anything there now – bran, frozen pizzas, maple syrup. That’s where I got the cake mix. I haven’t been to Paris for three years.”

  Speck had been born in France. French education had left him the certainty that he was a logical, fair-minded person imbued with a culture from which every other Western nation was obliged to take its bearings. French was his first language; he did not really approve of any other. He said, rather coldly, “Have you been in this country long?”

  “Around fifty years.”

  “Then you should know some French.”

  “I don’t speak it if I don’t have to. I never liked it.”

  He put down his cup, engulfed by a wave of second-generation distress. She was his first foreign widow. Most painters, whatever their origins, had sense enough to marry French-women – unrivalled with creditors, thrifty hoarders of bits of real estate, endowed with relations in country places where one could decamp in times of need and war.

  “Perhaps, where you come from –” he began.

  “Saskatchewan.”

  His tea had gone cold. Tannic scum had collected on its surface. She said, “This idea of yours, this show – what was it you called it? The hospitality of your gallery? I just want to say don’t count on me. Don’t count on me for anything. I don’t mind showing you what I’ve got. But not today. The studio hasn’t been dusted or heated for years, and even the light isn’t working.”

  In Speck’s experience, this was about average for a first attempt. Before making for civilization he stopped at a florist’s in the shopping centre and ordered two dozen roses to be delivered to Mme. Cruche. While these were lifted, dripping, from a plastic pail, he jotted down a warm message on his card, crossing out the engraved “Dr. Sandor Speck.” His title, earned by a thesis on French neo-Humanism and its ups and downs, created some confusion in Paris, where it was taken to mean that Speck could cure slipped discs and gastric ulcers. Still, he felt that it gave a grip to his name, and it was his only link with all the freethinking, agnostic Specks, who, though they had not been able to claim affinity by right of birth with Voltaire and Descartes, had probably been wise and intelligent and quite often known as “Dr.”

  As soon as he got back to the gallery, he had Walter look up Saskatchewan in an atlas. Its austere oblong shape turned his heart to ice. Walter said that it was one of the right-angled territories that so frequently contain oil. Oil seemed to Speck to improve the oblong. He saw a Chirico chessboard sliding off towards a horizon where the lights of derricks twinkled and blinked.

  He let a week go by before calling Lydia Cruche.

  “I won’t be able to show you those roses of yours,” she said. “They died right off.”

  He took the hint and arrived with a spray of pale-green orchids imported from Brazil. Settled upon the faded sofa, which was apparently destined to be his place, he congratulated his hostess on the discovery of oil in her native plain.

  “I haven’t seen or heard of the place since Trotsky left the Soviet Union,” she said. “If there is oil, I’d sooner not know about it. Oil is God’s curse.” The iron silence that followed this seemed to press on Speck’s lungs. “That’s a bad cough you’ve got there, Doctor,” she said. “Men never look after those things. Who looks after you?”

  “I look after myself,” said Speck.

  “Where’s your wife? Where’d she run off to?”

  Not even “Are you married?” He saw his hostess as a tough little pagan figure, with a goddess’s gift for reading men’s lives. He had a quick vision of himself clasping her knees and sobbing out the betrayal of his marriage, though he continued to sit upright, crumbling walnut cake so that he would not have to eat it.

  “My wife,” he said, “insofar as I can still be said to have one, has gone to live in a warm climate.”

  “She run off alone? Women don’t often do that. They haven’t got that kind of nerve.”

  Stepping carefully, for he did not wish to sound like a stage cuckold or a male fool, Speck described in the lightest possible manner how Henriette had followed her lover, a teacher of literature, to a depressed part of French-speaking Africa where the inhabitants were suffering from a shortage of Racine. Unable to halt once he had started, he tore on towards the edge: Henriette was a hopeless nymphomaniac (she had fallen in love) who lacked any sense of values (the man was broke); she was at the same time a grasping neurotic (having sunk her savings in the gallery, she wanted a return with fourteen per cent interest).

  “You must be thankful you finally got rid of her,” said Lydia Cruche. “You must be wondering why you married her in the first place.”

  “I felt sorry for Henriette,” he said, momentarily forgetting any other reason. “She seemed so helpless.” He told about Henriette living in her sixth-floor walkup, working as slave labour on a shoddy magazine. A peasant from Alsace, she had never eaten anything but pickled cabbage until Speck drove his Bentley into her life. Under his tactful guidance she had tasted her first fresh truffle salad at Le Récamier; had worn her first mink-lined Dior raincoat; had published her first book-length critical essay, “A Woman Looks at Edgar Allan Poe.” And then she had left him – just like that.

  “You trained her,” said Lydia Cruche. “Brought her up to your level. And now she’s considered good enough to marry a teacher. You should feel proud. You shouldn’t mind what happened. You should feel satisfied.”

  “I’m not satisfied,” said Speck. “I do mind.” He realized that something had been left out of his account. “I loved her.” Lydia Cruche looked straight at him, for once, as though puzzled. “As you loved Hubert Cruche,” he said.

  There was no response except for the removal of crumbs from her lap. The goddess, displeased by his mortal impertinence, symbolically knocked his head off her knee.

  “Hube liked my company,” she finally said. “That’s true enough. After he died I saw him sitting next to the television, by the radiator, where his mother usually crouched all winter looking like a sheep with an earache. I was just resting here, thinking of nothing in particular, when I looked up and noticed him. He said, ‘You carry the seed of your death.’ I said, ‘If that’s the case, I might as well put my head in the oven and be done with it.’ ‘Non,’ he said, ‘ce n’est pas la peine.’ Now, his mother was up in her room, making lists of all the things she had to feel sorry about. I went up and said, ‘Madame,’ because you can bet your boots she never got a ‘Maman’ out of me, ‘Hube was in the parlour just now.’ She answered, ‘It was his mother he wanted. Any message was for me.’ I said that if that was so, then all he needed to do was to materialize upstairs and save me the bother of climbing. She gave me some half-baked reason why he preferred not to, and then she did die. Aged a hundred and three. It was in France-Soir.”

  The French she had spoken rang to Speck like silver bells. Everything about her had changed – voice, posture, expression. If he still could not see the Lydia Cruche of the Senator’s vision, at least he could believe in her.

  “Do you talk to your husband often?” he said, trying to make it sound like a usual experience.

  “How could I talk to Hube? He’s dead and buried. I hope you don’t go in for ghosts, Dr. Speck. I would find that very silly. That was just some kind of accident – a visitation. I never saw him again or ever expect to. As for his mother, there wasn’t a peep out of her after she died. And here I am, alone in the Cruche house.” It was hard to say if she sounded glad or sorry. “I gather you’re on your own, too. God never meant men and women to live by themselves, convenient though it may seem to s
ome of us. That’s why he throws men and women together. Coincidence is God’s plan.”

  So soon, thought Speck. It was only their second meeting. It seemed discourteous to draw attention to the full generation that lay between them; experience had taught him that acknowledging any fragment of this dangerous subject did more harm than good. When widows showed their cards, he tried to look like a man with no time for games. He thought of the young André Malraux, dark and tormented, the windblown lock on the worried brow, the stub of a Gauloise sending up a vagabond spiral of smoke. Unfortunately, Speck had been born forty years too late for the model; he belonged to a much reedier generation of European manhood. He thought of the Pope. White-clad, serene, he gazed out on St. Peter’s Square, over the subdued heads of one hundred thousand artists’ widows, not one of whom would dare.

  “So this was the Cruche family home,” he said, striking out, he hoped, in a safe direction.

  “The furniture was his mother’s,” said Lydia Cruche. “I got rid of most of it, but there was stuff you couldn’t pay them to cart away. Sa petite Maman adorable,” she said softly. Again Speck heard the string of silver bells. “I thought she was going to hang around forever. They were a tough family – peasants from the west of France. She took good care of him. Cooked him sheep’s heart, tripe and onions, big beefsteaks they used to eat half raw. He was good-looking, a big fellow, big for a Frenchman. At seventy you’d have taken him for forty. Never had a cold. Never had a headache. Never said he was tired. Drank a litre of Calvados every other day. One morning he just keeled over, and that was that. I’ll show you a picture of him sometime.”