Overhead in a Balloon Read online

  Speck thought, A few years ago, no one would have dared put it on display. It has been considered rubbish for fifty years. Édouard Drumont died poor, alone, cast off even by his old friends, completely discredited. Perhaps his work was always being sold, quietly, somewhere, and I didn’t know. Had he been Walter and superstitious, he might have crossed his fingers; being Speck and rational, he merely shuddered.

  Walter had a friend – Félicité Blum-Weiler-Bloch, the owner of the Afghan hound. When Walter complained to her about the temperature of the gallery, she gave him a scarf, a sweater, an old flannel bed-sheet, and a Turkey carpet. Walter decided to make a present of the carpet to Speck.

  “Get that thing out of my gallery,” said Speck.

  “It’s really from Félicité.”

  “I don’t want her here, either,” said Speck. “Or the dog.”

  Walter proposed spreading the carpet on the floor in the basement. “I spend a lot of time there,” he said. “My feet get cold.”

  “I want it out,” said Speck.

  Later that day Speck discovered Walter down in the framing room, holding a vacuum cleaner. The Turkey carpet was spread on the floor. A stripe of neutral colour ran through the pattern of mottled reds and blues. Looking closer, Speck saw it was warp and weft. “Watch,” said Walter. He switched on the vacuum; another strip of colour vanished. “The wool lifts right out,” said Walter.

  “I told you to get rid of it,” said Speck, trembling.

  “Why? I can still use it.”

  “I won’t have my gallery stuffed with filth.”

  “You’ll never have to see it. You hardly ever come down here.” He ran the vacuum, drowning Speck’s reply. Over the noise Walter yelled, “It will look better when it’s all one colour.”

  Speck raised his voice to the Right Wing pitch heard during street fights: “Get it out! Get it out of my gallery!”

  Like a telephone breaking into a nightmare, delivering the sleeper, someone was calling, “Dr. Speck.” There on the stairs stood Lydia Cruche, wearing an ankle-length fur coat and a brown velvet turban. “I thought I’d better have a look at the place,” she said. “Just to see how much space you have, how much of Cruche you can hold.”

  Still trembling, Speck took her hand, which smelled as if she had been peeling oranges, and pressed it to his lips.

  That evening, Speck called the Senator: Would he be interested in writing the catalogue introduction? No one was better fitted, said Speck, over senatorial modesty. The Senator had kept faith with Cruche. During his years of disappointment and eclipse Cruche had been heartened, knowing that guests at the Senator’s table could lift their eyes from quail in aspic to feast on “Nude in the Afternoon.”

  Perhaps his lodge brother exaggerated just a trifle, the Senator replied, though it was true that he had hung on to his Cruches even when their value had been wiped out of the market. The only trouble was that his recent prose had been about the capital-gains-tax project, the Common Market sugar-beet subsidy, and the uninformed ecological campaign against plastic containers. He wondered if he could write with the same persuasiveness about art.

  “I have taken the liberty of drawing up an outline,” said Speck. “Just a few notes. Knowing how busy you are.”

  Hanging up, he glanced at his desk calendar. Less than six weeks had gone by since the night when, by moonlight, Speck had heard the Senator saying “… hats.”

  A few days before Christmas Speck drove out to Lydia’s with a briefcase filled with documents that were, at last, working papers: the list of exhibits from the Bellefeuille collection, the introduction, and the chronology in which there were gaps for Lydia to fill. He still had to draw up a financial arrangement. So far, she had said nothing about it, and it was not a matter Speck cared to rush.

  He found another guest in the house – a man somewhat younger than he, slightly bald and as neat as a mouse.

  “Here’s the doctor I was telling you about,” said Lydia, introducing Speck.

  Signor Vigorelli of Milan was a fellow-Japhethite – so Speck gathered from their conversation, which took up, in English, as though he had never come in. Lydia poured Speck’s tea in an offhand manner he found wounding. He felt he was being treated like the hanger-on in a Russian play. He smashed his lemon cupcake, scattering crumbs. The visitor’s plate looked cleaner than his. After a minute of this, Speck took the catalogue material out of his briefcase and started to read. Nobody asked what he was reading. The Italian finally looked at his watch (expensive, of a make Speck recognized) and got to his feet, picking up car keys that had been lying next to his plate.

  “That little man had an Alfa Romeo tag,” said Speck when Lydia returned after seeing him out.

  “I don’t know why you people drive here when there is perfectly good bus service,” she said.

  “What does he do?”

  “He is a devout, religious man.”

  For the first time, she sat down on the sofa, close to Speck. He showed her the introduction and the chronology. She made a number of sharp and useful suggestions. Then they went upstairs and looked at the pictures. The studio had been cleaned, the light repaired. Speck suddenly thought, I’ve done it – I’ve brought it off.

  “We must discuss terms,” he said.

  “When you’re ready,” she replied. “Your cold seems a lot better.”

  Inching along in stagnant traffic, Speck tried one after the other the FM state-controlled stations on his car radio. He obtained a lecture about the cultural oppression of Cajuns in Louisiana, a warning that the road he was now driving on was saturated, and the disheartening squeaks and wails of a circumcision ceremony in Ethiopia. On the station called France-Culture someone said, “Henri Cruche.”

  “Not Henri, excuse me,” said a polite foreigner. “His name was Hubert. Hubert Cruche.”

  “Strange that it should be an Italian to discover an artist so essentially French,” said the interviewer.

  Signor Vigorelli explained that his admiration for France was second only to his intense feelings about Europe. His career had been consecrated to enhancing Italian elegance with French refinement and then scattering the result abroad. He believed that the unjustly neglected Cruche would be a revelation and might even bring the whole of Western art to its senses.

  Speck nodded, agreeing. The interview came to an end. Wild jungle drums broke forth, heralding the announcement that there was to be a reading of medieval Bulgarian poetry in an abandoned factory at Nanterre. It was then and then only that Speck took in the sense of what he had heard. He swung the car in a wild U-turn and, without killing himself or anyone else, ran into a tree. He sat quietly, for about a minute, until his breathing became steady again, then unlocked his safety belt and got out. For a long time he stood by the side of the road, holding his briefcase, feeling neither shock nor pain. Other drivers, noticing a man alone with a wrecked car, picked up speed. He began to walk in Lydia’s direction. A cruising prostitute, on her way home to cook her husband’s dinner, finally agreed to drop him off at a taxi stand. Speck gave her two hundred francs.

  Lydia did not seem at all surprised to see him. “I’d invite you to supper,” she said. “But all I’ve got is a tiny pizza and some of the leftover cake.”

  “The Italian,” said Speck.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve heard him. On the radio. He says he’s got Cruche. That he discovered him. My car is piled up in the Bois. I tried to turn around and come back here. I’ve been walking for hours.”

  “Sit down,” said Lydia. “There, on the sofa. Signor Vigorelli is having a big Cruche show in Milan next March.”

  “He can’t,” said Speck.

  “Why can’t he?”

  “Because Cruche is mine. He was my idea. No one can have my idea. Not until after June.”

  “Then it goes to Trieste in April,” said Lydia. “You could still have it by about the tenth of May. If you still want it.”

  If I want it, said Speck to himself.
If I want it. With the best work sold and the insurance rates tripled and the commissions shared out like candy. And with everyone saying Speck jumped on the bandwagon, Speck made the last train.

  “Lydia, listen to me,” he said. “I invented Hubert Cruche. There would be no Hubert Cruche without Sandor Speck. This is an unspeakable betrayal. It is dishonourable. It is wrong.” She listened, nodding her head. “What happens to me now?” he said. “Have you thought about that?” He knew better than to ask, “Why didn’t you tell me about him?” Like all dissembling women, she would simply answer, “Tell you what?”

  “It might be all the better,” she said. “There’ll be that much more interest in Hube.”

  “Interest?” said Speck. “The worst kind of interest. Third-rate, tawdry interest. Do you suppose I can get the Pompidou Centre to look at a painter who has been trailing around in Trieste? It had to be a new idea. It had to be strong.”

  “You’ll save on the catalogue,” she said. “He will probably want to share.”

  “It’s my catalogue,” said Speck. “I’m not sharing. Senator Bellefeuille … my biography … never. The catalogue is mine. Besides, it would look as if he’d had the idea.”

  “He did.”

  “But after me,” said Speck, falling back on the most useless of all lover’s arguments. “After me. I was there first.”

  “So you were,” she said tenderly, like any woman on her way out.

  Speck said, “I thought you were happy with our arrangement.”

  “I was. But I hadn’t met him yet. You see, he was so interested in the Japhethite movement. One day he opened the Bible and put his finger on something that seemed to make it all right about the graven image. In Ecclesiastes, I think.”

  Speck gave up. “I suppose it would be no use calling for a taxi?”

  “Not around here, I’m afraid, though you might pick one up at the shopping centre. Shouldn’t you report the accident?”

  “Which accident?”

  “To the police,” she said. “Get it on record fast. Make it a case. That squeezes the insurance people. The phone’s in the hall.”

  “I don’t care about the insurance,” said Speck.

  “You will care, once you’re over the shock. Tell me exactly where it happened. Can you remember? Have you got your license? Registration? Insurance?”

  Speck sank back and closed his eyes. He could hear Lydia dialling; then she began to speak. He listened, exactly as Cruche must have listened, while Lydia, her voice full of silver bells, dealt with creditors and dealers and Cruche’s castoff girlfriends and a Senator Bellefeuille more than forty years younger.

  “I wish to report an accident,” Lydia sang. “The victim is Dr. S. Speck. He is still alive – luckily. He was forced off the road in the Bois de Vincennes by a tank truck carrying high-octane fuel. It had an Italian plate. Dr. Speck was too shaken to get the number. Yes, I saw the accident, but I couldn’t see the number. There was a van in the way. All I noticed was ‘MI.’ That must stand for Milan. I recognized the victim. Dr. Speck is well known in some circles … an intimate friend of Senator Antoine Bellefeuille, the former Minister of … that’s right.” She talked a few minutes longer, then came back to Speck. “Get in touch with the insurance people first thing tomorrow,” she said, flat Lydia again. “Get a medical certificate – you’ve had a serious emotional trauma. It can lead to jaundice. Tell your doctor to write that down. If he doesn’t want to, I’ll give you the name of a doctor who will. You’re on the edge of nervous depression. By the way, the police will be towing your car to a garage. They know they’ve been very remiss, letting a foreign vehicle with a dangerous cargo race through the Bois. It might have hit a bus full of children. They must be looking for that tanker all over Paris. I’ve made a list of the numbers you’re to call.”

  Speck produced his last card: “Senator Bellefeuille will never allow his Cruches to go to Milan. He’ll never let them out of the country.”

  “Who – Antoine?” said Lydia. “Of course he will.”

  She cut a cupcake in half and gave him a piece. Broken, Speck crammed the whole thing in his mouth. She stood over him, humming. “Do you know that old hymn, Dr. Speck – ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’?”

  He searched her face, as he had often, looking for irony, or playfulness – a gleam of light. There floated between them the cold oblong on the map and the Chirico chessboard moving along to its Arctic destination. Trees dwindled to shrubs and shrubs to moss and moss to nothing. Speck had been defeated by a landscape.

  Although Speck by no means considered himself a natural victim of hard luck, he had known disappointment. Shows had fallen flat. Galleries had been blown up and torn down. Artists he had nursed along had been lured away by siren dealers. Women had wandered off, bequeathing to Speck the warp and weft of a clear situation, so much less interesting than the ambiguous patterns of love. Disappointment had taught him rules: the first was that it takes next to no time to get used to bad news. Rain began to fall as he walked to the taxi stand. In his mind, Cruche was already being shown in Milan and he was making the best of it.

  He gazed up and down the bleak road; of course there were no taxis. Inside a bus shelter huddled a few commuters. The thrust of their lives, their genetic destiny obliged them to wait for public transport – unlike Speck, thrown among them by random adventures. A plastic-covered timetable announced a bus to Paris every twenty-three minutes until five, every sixteen minutes from four to eight, and every thirty-one minutes thereafter. His watch had stopped late in the afternoon, probably at the time of the accident. He left the shelter and stood out in the wet, looking at windows of shops, one of which might contain a clock. He stood for a minute or two staring at a china tea set flanked by two notices: “Hand Painted” and “Christmas Is Coming,” both of which he found deeply sad. The tea set had been decorated with reproductions of the Pompidou Art Centre, which was gradually replacing the Eiffel Tower as a constituent feature of French design. The day’s shocks caught up with him: he stared at the milk jug, feeling surprise because it did not tell him the time. The arrival of a bus replaced this perplexity with one more pressing. He did not know what was needed on suburban buses – tickets or tokens or a monthly pass. He wondered whether the drivers accepted banknotes, and gave change, with civility.

  “Dr. Speck, Dr. Speck!” Lydia Cruche, her raincoat open and flying, waving a battered black umbrella, bore down on him out of the dark. “You were right,” she said, gasping. “You were there first.” Speck took his place at the end of the bus queue. “I mean it,” she said, clutching his arm. “He can wait.”

  Speck’s second rule of disappointment came into play: the deceitful one will always come back to you ten seconds too late. “What does it mean?” he said, wiping rain from the end of his nose. “Having it before him means what? Paying for the primary expenses and the catalogue and sweetening the Paris critics and letting him rake in the chips?”

  “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Your chap from Milan thought he was first,” said Speck. “He may not want to step aside for me – a humble Parisian expert on the entire Cruche context and period. You wouldn’t want Cruche to miss a chance at Milan, either.”

  “Milan is ten times better for money than Paris,” she said. “If that’s what we’re talking about. But of course we aren’t.”

  Speck looked down at her from the step of the bus. “Very well,” he said. “As we were.”

  “I’ll come to the gallery,” she called. “I’ll be there tomorrow. We can work out new terms.”

  Speck paid his fare without trouble and moved to the far end of the bus. The dark shopping centre with its windows shining for no one was a Magritte vision of fear. Lydia had already forgotten him. Having tampered with his pride, made a professional ass of him, gone off with his idea and returned it dented and chipped, she now stood gazing at the Pompidou Centre tea set, perhaps wondering if the ban on graven images could possibly extend t
o this. Speck had often meant to ask her about the Mickey Mouse napkins. He thought of the hoops she had put him through – God, and politics, and finally the most dangerous one, which was jealousy. There seemed to be no way of rolling down the window, but a sliding panel at the top admitted half his face. Rising from his seat, he drew in a gulp of wet suburban air and threw it out as a shout: “Fascist! Fascist! Fascist!”

  Not a soul in the bus turned to see. From the look of them, they had spent the best Sundays of their lives shuffling in demonstrations from Place de la République to Place de la Nation, tossing “Fascist”s around like confetti. Lydia turned slowly and looked at Speck. She raised her umbrella at arm’s length, like a trophy. For the first time, Speck saw her smile. What was it the Senator had said? “She had a smile like a fox’s.” He could see, gleaming white, her straight little animal teeth.

  The bus lurched away from the curb and lumbered towards Paris. Speck leaned back and shut his eyes. Now he understood about that parting shot. It was amazing how it cleared the mind, tearing out weeds and tree stumps, flattening the live stuff along with the dead. “Fascist” advanced like a regiment of tanks. Only the future remained – clean, raked, ready for new growth. New growth of what? Of Cruche, of course – Cruche, whose hour was at hand, whose time was here. Speck began to explore his altered prospects. “New terms,” she had said. So far, there had been none at all. The sorcerer from Milan must have promised something dazzling, swinging it before her eyes as he had swung his Alfa Romeo key. It would be foolish to match the offer. By the time they had all done with bungling, there might not be enough left over to buy a new Turkey carpet for Walter.

  I was no match for her, he thought. No match at all. But then, look at the help she had – that visitation from Cruche. “Only once,” she said, but women always said that: “He asked if he could see me just once more. I couldn’t very well refuse.” Dead or alive, when it came to confusion and double-dealing, there was no such thing as “only once.” And there had been not only the departed Cruche but the very living Senator Bellefeuille – “Antoine”; who had bought every picture of Lydia for sixteen years, the span of her early beauty. Nothing would ever be the same again between Speck and Lydia, of course. No man could give the same trust and confidence the second time around. All that remained to them was the patch of landscape they held in common – a domain reserved for the winning, collecting, and sharing out of profits, a territory where believer and skeptic, dupe and embezzler, the loving and the faithless could walk hand in hand. Lydia had a talent for money. He could sense it. She had never been given much chance to use it, and she had waited so much longer than Speck.