Lewis Percy (2 page)

Mme Doche was perhaps fifty, to Roberta’s thirty-nine, and Lewis’s twenty-two: Cynthia was twenty-five and ashamed of the fact. To Lewis Mme Doche was the most obviously maternal presence, although he could see that Roberta had it in her to be a mother, for she had a vivid and short-tempered kindliness mixed with a ruthless practicality that might, he thought, have suited a houseful of sons. Her natural mode of discourse was a series of gossipy pronouncements; she was an expert on everything, or on everything that mattered. With that, confident, disapproving of poor behaviour, frequently let down, yet with lively trusting eyes. Something a little too operatic in Roberta – her dedication to the office and to Mme Van de Waele, her restlessness, her marvellous greedy appetite – alerted Lewis to the fact that she aimed at higher things. She was the only one of them who did not seem to be cast in a mode of acceptance: Lewis did not know how he knew this. Roberta was usually laughing, head flung back, splendid Jewish teeth in evidence. Nevertheless she had an uncertain temper and would fulminate against a colleague who was also a friend and with whom she was nearly always on bad terms, throwing herself into a vigorous performance of an earlier quarrel, her colour rising, her body releasing fresh waves of scent as its heat increased. She could be laughed out of it, or comforted, but she had to have a full hearing: woe betide anyone who tried to take her to task. She was generous and impulsive, wresting Lewis’s plate from him and returning it with a peach or some grapes on it, but she was also outspoken, sometimes brutally so, and was apt to tell Cynthia, who considered herself a martyr to her health and her nerves, that there was nothing wrong with her. This was an obligation upon them all, but Roberta was more caustic. ‘
Faites de la gymnastique ou faites-vous baiser
,’ she would say, and would rock with laughter at the expression on Cynthia’s
face. There was no malice in her. Simply, she had grown up in the school of hard knocks, and, as she put it, had been knocking around ever since. And as far as Lewis could see she was a vagabond, destined never to reach home. Although she seemed old to him he was not surprised that she had never married.

And Roberta’s outspokenness always gave him the chance to comfort Cynthia, who was the only one of the women he cared to think about privately, individually, later in bed at night. Pretty Cynthia, her mouth down-drooping in discouragement at what fate had served up to her: a room in an apartment instead of an apartment of her own, and Lewis, a boy younger than herself, and therefore inferior, instead of the protective and adoring consort her fantasies had led her to expect. To Lewis Cynthia appeared radiant with promise, yet Cynthia herself seemed to think that she was destined for an early grave. Blooming, she gave herself over to headaches, cramps, sore throats, stiff necks, and mild stomach upsets. It was hazardous to ask her how she felt. What she felt, as opposed to how she felt, was disappointment, a forewarning that she might turn into Roberta, without Roberta’s robust temperament to sustain her. Placed in this apartment by an agitated mother, given an allowance and registered at the Sorbonne, Cynthia’s days were an easy but unsatisfactory mixture of lectures and cultural visits, these last regularly interrupted by a moment of malaise which would secure her escape. She would usually lie down in the afternoon and reappear, washed and changed, for the evening’s conversation. This regimen was supposed to prepare her for life ahead, a life without apparent direction, protected by money, already vaguely but hugely let down, taken in, short-changed.

Despite her small tight beautiful face, there was something plaintive and valetudinarian about Cynthia, her dove-like ramblings usually serving as an introduction to tales of illness, her own and other people’s, mingled with self-questionings about what she was supposed to be doing.
She had persuaded her anxious parents to let her come to Paris to study French civilisation, since she had shown no signs of wanting to do anything else, and her French accent was already pretty. Her mildly punishing appearance, her fussy self-protective walk, implied a whole world of dignified matronhood. Yet it seemed, incredibly enough, that this was not to be – or not yet, not while she was a girl. Her age and status seemed uncertain. Lewis eyed her with respect, as if she were already a woman, although she was only three years older than himself. She seemed to have access to a mature disappointment. Once her mother had come over to see how she was getting on. Lewis had caught sight of them from the bus, shopping in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. They looked resigned and helpless, stranded by receding waves of menfolk on whom they trained their batteries of silent accusation. The resentment Cynthia felt had no conscious focus yet could be sensed about her like an aura. It was this aura that prompted Roberta’s brutal recommendations. She would eventually marry, Lewis thought. Some confident and elderly business man would come along, view her as a prize, and be hooked; she would sit at the foot of his dining table in St John’s Wood, playing with the pearls he had given her and vaguely wondering what had gone wrong with her life. Although none of this had happened – or showed signs of happening – it was clear that Cynthia possessed a kind of invalid sex-appeal, which would beguile the sort of man who was half-appalled by women, half-afraid of them. She used her fabled delicacy as an instrument of persuasion. She would become a woman whom men were reluctant to cross. Lewis saw this as a most valuable lesson in what he hoped would become his lifetime’s quest: the study of, and love for, women. All information was valuable. In this way he would arrive at a higher understanding.

At this stage in his life, and even later, especially later, in the light of memory, Lewis saw women in general, and these women in particular, as a beneficent institution. Their attitude towards himself he divined as merciful, which was
precisely what he desired it to be. As to his attitude towards them, it was, given his extreme youth, still unformed, but he looked to his little group, the first representatives of the species he had been given to study at close quarters, with a mixture of love, respect, and innocent enquiry. He seemed to think that all knowledge would come to him in this context. The only son of a widowed mother, tasting independence from her anxious care for the first time, he was grateful, in the midst of the bewilderingly adult city, to be taken in hand and to be thus returned to that silent passive dreaming adolescence which he had so recently left. His days were a mixture of great thoughts and trivial routine. He would rise early, strip-wash himself at the basin in his room, make himself a cup of coffee (use of kitchen allowed at specified hours) and emerge quietly into the grey morning. He loved this time, which made him feel at one with all the workers in the world, although he was only going to the Bibliothèque Nationale to begin his long day’s reading. Grasping his new briefcase, his mother’s present, and trying to ignore his eternally unassuaged hunger, he would stride out, down the long straight route to the Palais-Royal, where he would allow himself another cup of coffee and a croissant, and a morning paper –
Le Figaro
: he knew he was not old enough for
Le Monde –
which he would, in moments of boredom, read surreptitiously at his desk, giving his fullest attention to the announcements of births, marriages, and deaths. He particularly liked the deaths, the long string of relatives’ names, all joining in the
immense douleur
attendant on the decease of their wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, great-aunt, and sister-in-law. Such richness! Such a matrix, he thought, longing to sink into the arms of just such a welter of women, feeling lonely for a while with his lack of worldliness, his ignorance of his own entitlements, and always the thought of his mother at home, even lonelier without him.

It was with a sigh, with a slight lowering of vitality, that he made his way towards the library. Scholarship seemed
hedged about with such restraints, such restrictions on the living body. Already his long days of reading were beginning to give him headaches, although he enjoyed his work and could not envisage a future without it. It was just that, at present, he was unsatisfied by his days under the green-shaded lamps. While loving the thick silence that hung like a miasma over the noble room, he was too aware of the incipient mania around him to feel entirely comfortable. Inside every scholar lurked a potential fanatic. From any mild instinctive protest he might have formulated his writers delivered him. They were too epic not to be taken seriously, and too magnanimous. He felt that they had a particular message for him, and that he would learn a particular wisdom from them. This would be his final education, stored up for use in the years ahead. Sometimes he was bewildered by the amount of learning that was coming at him from every quarter, and sometimes it was with a further sigh that he contemplated the burden of his days. Sometimes he wanted to leave the library and run for his life.

What kept him in his seat was a peculiar ideal, all the more remarkable for having been glimpsed so early and at such a young age. What he wanted was not his accumulation of notes but an absence of notes, a holocaust of notes: what he wanted was transparency. He was aware that scholarship – the acquisition of knowledge – brought with it a terrible anxiety. How much was enough? How much more was there? Was there any end to it? If one did not possess enough knowledge how could one be sure of possessing more? And if one called a halt to the process how could one not die of shame? Thus with his love for his books went a certain obscure desire to have done with them, or rather not to have to be an officious midwife to small thoughts about great masterpieces. Let Stendhal, Balzac, Zola speak for themselves! That, after all, was what they were there for. He had even thought, in the days before he had timidly assumed the apparatus of the professional scholar, that one’s whole purpose with regard to the arts
should be confined to seeing the world as the painter saw it, and reading the world through the books of the masters. Humility, a reasonable respect, were all that was required. He saw himself as having left this stage, even as having forsaken it in the interests of growing up, not knowing exactly what was required of him in the long run. In the short run he had to write and present his thesis, to gain the degree that would put him on the lowest rung of the academic ladder. He had to justify his choice to his mother, to his censorious cousin Andrew, his only other relative, and in euphoric moments – not difficult to come by in this city – he thought it might be a fine thing to expound on great works for the benefit of the eager minds of the young. For he did not doubt that they would be eager. He saw himself quite clearly, in a classroom, holding forth, and was pleased enough with the prospect. Yet at the same time he burned with grateful understanding as Julien Sorel, in his prison cell, pleaded for his ideal life and articulated the great dilemma. ‘
Laissez-moi ma vie idéale …
’ Over and above the life of contingencies was the life of the spirit, the life that many would never know. Real life, dull life, would imprison them, foreclose on their possibilities. Lewis was willing to bet that many people, of every age, woke up in the morning, surveyed the circumstances of the day, and formulated the same instinctive protest. Thus, while initiating his future profession, Lewis already looked ahead to the agreeable prison cell for which he was destined.

At twelve noon, in the interests of his lungs and his stomach, he went out, walked around the stony garden of the Palais-Royal, and bought himself a sandwich in the rue des Petits-Champs. No coffee: that would come later, at the end of the working day. Once the morning was passed, he had little difficulty with the afternoon. In the afternoon, as the light faded, and the atmosphere grew thicker, as the lamps snapped on one by one, a sort of exaltation took hold of him; by four-thirty he thought no other life possible. It was as if his thoughts came more easily in the barely illuminated gloom of the dying day: the mornings were too harsh with
rational life to enable him to endure his subdued existence. Also, his thoughts quickened not only with the insights of his trade but with the prospect of his imminent release. He thus rode two horses on which he might gallop in different directions, but was not yet at the point of having to commit himself to either one of them. The high vaulted room seemed to be scholarship itself, putting a finger to its lips, urging silence, but his youthful body demanded movement. After such austerity he desired gratification, simple sustenance, the prospect of adventure. He wanted noise, spectacle, a more than impersonal beauty. Yet in the street it was hard for him to shake off the peculiar thrall of his day, the palpable silence that kept him wrapped in his thoughts, unprepared for, perhaps unequal to, the challenge of real life.

After five or ten minutes he was an ordinary young man again, looking forward to his walk home, his purchase of the cheese that was his passport, his entrance fee to that other world where there was still so much to learn, looking forward even to the privacy of his own thoughts, after listening to the conversation of the women. He was easily, naïvely, simply pleased. The silence pursued him down the ravine of the rue de Richelieu, as if the environs of the library partook of the various silences imposed inside the building, but in the Place du Palais-Royal all was animation. Noise, air, light! He stepped onto this territory as if he were crossing a frontier, and from then on the pleasure was of a different order. He travelled up from the depths to the life of the senses, was happy to know that so many lives were open to him. He took what he thought of as the rich man’s route home, passing through great thoroughfares alive with crowds, until he reached the Place de l’Alma, where he sat and allowed himself a cup of coffee. He was always tempted to drink another, to linger and watch passers-by, to increase his anticipation of the evening’s further pleasures, mild though they were by the world’s standards, but the thought of his widowed mother, drawing the curtains at home in the house in unfashionable Parsons Green, and chafing her permanently
cold hands, kept his lips firmly shut, as if one more cup of coffee, drunk in a sybaritic frame of mind, would lower her temperature still further. He missed her: they were too close, and both knew it. Nevertheless the thought of his mother was not unlike the thought of the library waiting for him the following morning, and all the mornings after that, something on which, in this moment of reprieve, he did not wish to dwell.