Never Anyone But You Read online

  ALSO BY RUPERT THOMSON

  FICTION

  Katherine Carlyle

  Secrecy

  Death of a Murderer

  Divided Kingdom

  The Book of Revelation

  Soft

  The Insult

  Air and Fire

  The Five Gates of Hell

  Dreams of Leaving

  NONFICTION

    This Party’s Got to Stop

  Copyright © 2018 Rupert Thomson

  First epigraph on this page from Collected Poems in English and French, copyright © 1977 by Samuel Beckett.

  Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

  Second epigraph on this page from “X” in Pigeon, copyright © 2009 by Karen Solie, reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press, Inc, Toronto. www.houseofanansi.com

  Photos of Lucy Schwob (top) and Suzanne Malherbe (bottom) on this page courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Thomson, Rupert, author.

  Title: Never anyone but you / Rupert Thomson.

  Description: First American edition. | New York : Other Press, 2018

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017030118 | ISBN 9781590519134 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781590519141 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Malherbe, Suzanne, 1892-1972—Fiction. | Cahun, Claude, 1894-1954—Fiction. | Women artists—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction. | Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PR6070.H685 N49 2018 | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017030118

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519141

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  v5.3.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rupert Thomson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  An Evening Swim: 1940

  A Marriage of Convenience: 1909–1920

  The Kiss of Utter Indifference: 1920–1936

  Self-Portrait in Nazi Uniform: 1937–1944

  Wicked White: 1944–1945

  The Wrong Shoes for A Fire: 1945–1954

  Afterlife: 1954–1970

  Reading Palms: 1972

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ROBERT LUCIEN WOKLER

  1942–2006

  if you do not love me I shall not be loved

  if I do not love you I shall not love

  —SAMUEL BECKETT

  In the fact of your absence,

  you are in some way here

  —KAREN SOLIE

  AN EVENING SWIM

  1940

  I was in the sea when the first bomb fell. Some way out, and floating on my back. Staring up into a cloudless sky. It was a Friday evening towards the end of June. As one of the planes banked to the south, over Mont Fiquet, I could make out stark black shapes on its wings. Swastikas. Fear swerved through me, dark and resonant, like a swarm of bees spilling from a hive. Upright suddenly, I trod water, my breathing rapid, panicky. Like everybody on the island, I had been dreading this moment. Now it had come. There were several planes, and they were flying high up, as if wary of anti-aircraft fire. Didn’t they know that all our troops had been evacuated and only civilians remained? A wave caught me, and I went under. The ocean seemed to shudder. When I came up again a column of smoke was rising, treacle black, above the headland to the east.

  I began to swim back to the shore. My limbs felt weak and uncoordinated, and even though the tide was going in it seemed to take a long time to make any progress. A knot of people huddled on the beach. Others were running towards the road. One of them tripped and fell, but nobody waited or even noticed. Claude had swum earlier. She would be upstairs, smoothing cream into her arms and legs. Edna, our housekeeper, would be preparing supper, a tumbler of neat whiskey on the windowsill above the sink. Our cat would be sprawled on the terrace, the flagstones still warm from the sun—or perhaps, like me, he had been alarmed by the explosions, and had darted back into the house. It seemed wrong that the waves paid no attention to what was happening, but kept rolling shorewards, unrushed, almost lazy.

  I was wading through the shallows when I heard another distant thump. It sounded halfhearted, but a fluttering had started in my stomach. Normally, I would dry myself on the beach, savoring the chill on my skin, the last of the light, the peace. Instead, I gathered up my shoes and my towel and hurried back towards the house, feeling clumsy, nauseous.

  As I reached the slipway, two more planes swooped over the bay, much lower now, their engines throbbing, hoarse. I cowered beside an upturned rowing boat. The chatter of machine guns, splashes lifting into the air like a row of white weeds. I felt embarrassed, though, a forty-seven-year-old woman behaving like a child, and stood up quickly. I entered our garden through the side door. Claude was standing on the grass bank that overlooked the beach. The hose lay on the lawn behind her, water rushing from the nozzle. Dressed in a white bathing suit, she had one hand on her hip. In the other she held a lighted cigarette. She had the air of a general surveying a battlefield. They might have been her planes, her bombs.

  “Were you in the sea?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “I thought you were upstairs.”

  “No.”

  “So you saw them?”

  I nodded again.

  “I saw everything,” she said. “I even saw the faces of the pilots.”

  Her voice was calm, and she was giving off a kind of radiance. I had seen the look before, but couldn’t remember where or when. I stood below her on the lawn, my hair dripping. The short grass prickled between my toes.

  “I have a strange feeling, something like elation.” She faced east, towards Noirmont. Smoke dirtied the pure blue sky. “I think it’s because we’re going to be tested.”

  “You don’t think we’ve been tested enough?”

  “Not like this.”

  Earlier that month, we had heard rumors that Churchill was prepared to abandon the Channel Islands—they were too close to mainland France, too hard to defend—but there had been no mention of any such decision on the BBC. The news bulletins were full of bluster. The Nazis had reached the Seine, we were told, but “our boys” would be waiting on the other side, and they would “give as good as they got.” The next thing we knew, Nazi motorcyclists were spotted on the Normandy coast, near Granville, and “our boys” had retreated to Dunkirk. In mid-June, once the troops stationed on Jersey and Guernsey had been shipped back to England, the civilian population was offered the chance to evacuate. Long queues formed outside the
Town Hall, and the telephone lines jammed as islanders asked each other for advice. It was a time for drastic measures. Two dogs and a macaw were found shot dead in a back garden in St. Helier. A man arrived at the airport with a painting by Picasso under his arm. His wife was wearing a sable coat, even though the temperature was in the upper seventies. They had no other luggage. Half the population put their names down for evacuation—more than twenty thousand people—but the Bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, declared that he was staying, come what may, and in the end only six or seven thousand left. There followed a week when things seemed to return to normal. The sense of calm was abrupt and eerie—you could almost hear the grass growing on the lawns of all the empty houses—but we knew it wouldn’t last, and now the Nazis had bombed the island it was clear the occupation was only days away, or even hours.

  “Perhaps you were right,” I said. “Perhaps it would have been more sensible to leave…”

  Claude shook her head. “We already had that discussion—and anyway, it’s too late now. There aren’t any boats.”

  “I know. It’s just—”

  She stepped down off the grass bank. “Come here.” She took the towel and began to rub me dry. “You’re trembling.”

  “It’s probably just shock,” I said. “I was in the sea when they came over.”

  She wrapped the towel round my shoulders and led me back across the lawn. Once inside, she poured me a cognac. I swallowed it in one. Afterwards, we went out to the road and looked towards St. Helier, but there was nothing to see except the black smoke drifting southwards on the summer breeze. The planes had gone. The skies were quiet.

  Later, while we were having supper, the push and pull of the waves could be heard through the open window, and it was possible to believe that nothing had happened. Still, we sent Edna home early, telling her not to bother with the dishes.

  A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

  1909–1920

  Our first meeting of any consequence was in the spring of 1909, in Nantes. She was still called Lucie then. She was fourteen and a half. Her father, Maurice Schwob, was Jewish, and he owned and edited Le Phare de la Loire, the biggest newspaper in western France. Her mother was a Catholic. Madame Schwob was often ill, and spent most of her life in clinics. On the morning my mother took me to their apartment, on Place du Commerce, a reason was given for Madame Schwob’s absence, but it sounded unconvincing, even to me, only drawing attention to the shame it was intended to conceal.

  A maid showed us into a parlor cluttered with the ornate, ungainly furniture so favored by bourgeois society at the time. It was still raining—it had rained all night—and the corners of the room lay in deep shadow; the space in which we stood felt rounded and bleary, like a crystal ball that was no longer being used. Lucie had been attending a school in England, my mother told me, but she was back now, and perhaps I could be a friend to her. Outside, trees gleamed black beneath a somber sky.

  The door opened, and Lucie stepped into the room, followed by her father, a solid man with an affable, lined face. Shorter than me, and slighter, Lucie seemed removed and ethereal, as if she existed in a different dimension from the rest of us, and yet I felt a jolt as our eyes met, the strong but subtle click of recognition. Words came with it, words that whispered inside my head. Ah yes. Of course. Lucie and I had played together as young children, but I had only the sketchiest memory of that. Some moments are so dazzling that they obliterate everything that came before. This new Lucie had a pale, almost luminous complexion and wavy, dark-brown hair, and on her cheek, halfway between her provocative, determined mouth and the delicate curl of her left ear, was a smear of red that looked like jam. I imagined I could taste that jam, and her cheek beneath it, the raspberries picked during the summer and simmered in sugar, her skin creamy and cool. I couldn’t remember having such thoughts before, even about boys, and I found myself blushing, but the light in the room was so dim that I don’t think anybody noticed.

  Lucie came forwards and spoke to me in English. “How do you do, Suzanne?”

  We shook hands.

  Her father sighed, then turned to my mother. “I’m afraid Lucie has become something of an Anglophile.”

  “Father,” Lucie said, “I always was.”

  She let go of my hand, but her eyes, which sloped downwards at the outer edges, remained fixed on mine. What did she see in me? I’m not sure. I was quiet. A little shy. My hair fell past my shoulders and was parted in the middle. There were ink stains on my fingers. Later that morning, she told me I looked like a statue. No, not a statue. A caryatid. I was monumental, she said, unable to resist the play on words. Thinking I might be offended, perhaps, she hastened to add that she was paying me a compliment. There were more than two years between us—I was nearly seventeen—but I was aware of no difference in age. If anything, I felt younger. She had a kind of authority, even then—the extended hand, the steady gaze. I had never met anyone like her. Henri Michaux, who later became a friend of ours, put it best. In his novel Un certain Plume, the headwaiter places a lamb cutlet in front of the protagonist and, bending close to him, speaks in a voice that is mysterious and deep. That which you have on your plate, he says, does not appear on the menu.

  The room darkened.

  Over by the window, my mother was talking to Monsieur Schwob, a murmured conversation in which I thought I overheard the word “therapeutic.” Beyond them, in the square, the fierce, gravelly crashing of the rain. I was still staring at Lucie. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. My mouth was dry and my heart was jumping. Later, Lucie would claim that she had felt the same. She said it was the first great moment of our lives.

  Lucie attended the lycée, as I did, though she didn’t take many courses. She spent most of her time studying at home, under the supervision of a teacher hired by her father. Even so, she would often be waiting outside the entrance when school finished for the day. Back then, Nantes was known as the Venice of the West, and we wandered the streets for hours, losing ourselves in the maze of canals and waterways the city was famous for. We would stop at a small buvette or taproom on Quai Duguay-Trouin, which overlooked the point where the Erdre emptied into the Loire. The walls were dark brown to shoulder height and yellow higher up, and the iron-bound barrels behind the bar gave off the musky smell of oak and crushed grapes. The proprietor had a large placid face that seemed out of keeping with her sharp tongue and her sullen disposition. Here come the troublemakers, she would say when we walked in, though all we ever did was sit in the corner, drinking café noir. Maybe she had sensed what lay ahead.

  On one of our first afternoons alone together, Lucie asked me how I saw my future. I told her my passion was drawing, and that I was planning to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. Lucie’s ambition was to write.

  “My uncle Marcel was a writer,” she told me. “I was very close to him. He died five years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes drifted away from me, towards the window.

  The curve of her throat, the slope of her nose. Something leapt inside me, like a flame.

  “He was a pervert.” She looked at me sidelong. “Sometimes he dressed in women’s clothes.”

  I already knew that Lucie liked to shock. The way to impress her, I thought, was to appear not to be impressed.

  “I’m descended from a poet,” I told her.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. His name was François de Malherbe.”

  She sat back. “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, I’d never heard of your uncle either,” I said, “not until just now.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  “He was friends with Oscar Wilde and Colette,” she said. “He even wrote a play for Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  Lucie looked at me, eyes glittering. “You’re very funny.”

  No
one had ever told me I was funny before. It’s difficult to convey quite how intoxicating that was.

  It was autumn before I summoned up the courage to show Lucie my work. She stood beside me in my bedroom as I opened my portfolio and began to turn the pages. There were pencil sketches of half-naked female dancers and ink drawings of the skeletons of leaves and fish, and also of mythical figures such as mermen, sirens, and Egyptian gods.

  She touched my arm. “Slow down. You’re going too fast.”

  I stepped back and let her look.

  “They have confidence and grace,” she said at last, “and there’s a natural feeling for design—a kind of stark simplicity.” She turned to face me. “You know who they remind me of? Aubrey Beardsley.”

  My heart seemed to expand. “I’ve always loved his work.”

  “You’re good, Suzanne. You’re really good.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “It’s relief,” she said. “You’re much better than I thought you’d be.”

  She had a suggestion, she went on. As I probably knew, Beardsley had worked with Oscar Wilde, providing the illustrations for several of his books. What if we were to form a kind of partnership? Her words, my images. She would soon be starting work on something she was calling “Vues et visions,” which would be incomplete, she now realized, without my drawings. I would be delighted to collaborate with her, I told her, but then I would have agreed to anything that might bring us closer.

  Just then, we were distracted by loud voices in the corridor. My brother Jean appeared with Patrice, a friend from medical school. Two years older than me, Jean had dark eyes and a face that was pale and serene. He took after my mother, his looks more Spanish than French. Patrice was tall and spindly, all knuckles and elbows, with sticking-up red-blond hair.