Never Anyone But You Read online

  She stared up at me, her eyes wide open, her lips slightly parted. Light fell across the right side of her face. The left side was in shadow. She managed to look both receptive and wary, but also undaunted, as if she was about to undergo an ordeal that might challenge her, but would never defeat her. I understood that the expression on her face didn’t necessarily have anything to do with me. It was a performance. At the same time, she told me that the photographs wouldn’t work if I were not behind the camera. My gaze had an impact on her, she said, like sun on skin. She seemed to flower under it. Then she smiled and said, “Or do I mean deflower?”

  That year, Claude became so thin that even her father noticed. At his insistence, she saw a doctor, who viewed her weight loss as an illness, or even as an instance of deviant behavior.

  Not long afterwards, I was summoned to Monsieur Schwob’s office on Place du Commerce. When I knocked on the door and entered, he glanced up from the letter he was writing and asked me to take a seat. His manner was somber, but not unkind.

  He held up a copy of his own newspaper. “Have you read any of Lucie’s articles?”

  “I’ve read them all,” I said. “They’re excellent.”

  Claude’s pieces on fashion and the performing arts were just like her—original and charming, every word salted with a mischievous and sometimes caustic wit.

  “In May, the Mercure de France will be running extracts from ‘Vues et visions,’ ” Monsieur Schwob said.

  I nodded. “I’m hoping to provide her with illustrations at some point.”

  “I look forward to that. Your drawings are exquisite.”

  I thanked him.

  “But that isn’t why I asked to see you.” He put the paper down. “You spend a lot of time with Lucie, don’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe she’s in good health?”

  I hesitated, choosing my words carefully. “She’s not like other people,” I said. “She has always been delicate.”

  “I’m extremely concerned about her, Suzanne.” Monsieur Schwob tugged at his mustache. “Sometimes I think the only answer is to put her in a maison de santé…”

  He looked at me steadily, the wood-paneled walls of his office seemed to close around me. The window behind his head was watery, pale with the day.

  “I’m not sure she would benefit,” I said at last.

  He leaned forwards, one hand folded over the other, white cuffs protruding from dark sleeves. The clock on the wall ticked uncertainly but heavily, like an ancient heart.

  “There is one alternative,” he said.

  I stared at him until his amiable, creased face began to blur. I hardly dared to breathe.

  “I could send her away for a month or two,” he said, “to a place where she could regain her strength. But she’s stubborn. I don’t think she would agree to go by herself.

  “She needs someone to travel with her,” he went on, “and make sure she does what she’s supposed to do. Someone she trusts. Would you be prepared to take on such a role?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He frowned. I had answered too quickly.

  “It’s a lot to ask, I know. You’re older than Lucie, but not by much—and after all you have your own life to think of.”

  I mentioned other trips that Lucie and I had taken—to Le Croisic, the Côte d’Azur. I reminded him that we had known each other all our lives. Not entirely true, but still. As families, the Schwobs and the Malherbes had always been close, I said, so close that they might almost be viewed as a single entity.

  He gave me a penetrating look, as if I had stumbled on something I wasn’t supposed to know about.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “I’d like you to give the matter serious consideration. This isn’t something to rush into.”

  I glanced down at my hands, which lay clasped in my lap. “Lucie is my dearest friend. You of all people, Monsieur Schwob, must be aware of that. Nobody cares about her well-being more than I do.”

  “Your father said something similar.” Monsieur Schwob paused. “In fact, this whole thing was his idea.”

  I waited.

  Still looking at me, he nodded slowly, and there was a shift in his eyes, a softening.

  “Very well,” he said. “Good.”

  When summer came, Claude and I traveled to Switzerland. Her father had arranged that she should spend a few weeks at a sanatorium called La Colline, where she was expected to eat regular meals and to take part in activities such as hiking, swimming, and canoeing. Every so often I sent him a telegram, reporting on her progress. By the end of the month, I was able to tell him she had put on several kilos.

  After the rest cure was completed, we took two rooms in a grand hotel on the shores of Lake Léman. The water was so calm and flat that it mirrored the blue sky with absolute precision. To the north, the Alps were visible; in the heat haze, their snow-capped peaks looked lacy, one-dimensional. Sitting in the hotel bar on our first evening, we felt a heady sense of release. Away from Nantes, and from La Colline, we could finally relax—or, as Claude put it, It’s only among strangers that we can be ourselves. I was twenty-two, Claude still only nineteen.

  One night, when she was in my room, lying face down on the bed, I ran my fingers over a number of small scars on the backs of her legs, so small they almost looked like pockmarks. I had noticed them before, in Le Croisic, and in La Maison sans Nom—they showed more clearly when she was tanned—but I had been too shy to mention them. Here, though, in Switzerland, I felt I could ask.

  “What happened here?”

  She looked up at me, through her hair. “Don’t talk,” she murmured. “Just touch me. Keep touching me.”

  The French windows behind her thrown wide open, the vast black stillness of the lake beyond…

  The next day, on the private beach that belonged to the hotel, she caught me staring at the scars again.

  “You really want to know?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the Dreyfus affair?”

  “Vaguely.”

  She gave me a disapproving look. She expected me to be informed, as she was.

  Dreyfus’s only crime, she said, was that he had been born a Jew. Those were words that Dreyfus himself had used. He was an army officer who was accused of having passed state secrets to the Germans in a note. When the handwriting was shown not to match his own, high-ranking military and government personnel claimed that he had disguised it in order to deceive them. It would have been funny, she said, if it hadn’t had such horrific consequences. Dreyfus was tried, found guilty, and transported across the Atlantic in a steel cage, exposed at first to gale-force winds and rain, and then, once the ship entered the tropics, to blistering sun. On his arrival in Guiana, he was placed in solitary confinement. For four years, he didn’t see or talk to anyone, not even his jailers.

  Claude spoke about the concept of the scapegoat, and about hypocrisy and prejudice, and about how those in authority will do anything to safeguard their position, even if it involves a violation of the very principles they were appointed to uphold. She listed the main offenders. She knew their names. Fabre, Henry, Sandherr, Mercier, Du Paty de Clam—and Drumont too, editor of the openly anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole. Drumont had written a “disgusting book,” in which he recorded the wealth and influence of all the Jews in France. His aim was to incite envy and hatred. It was so easy, wasn’t it, she said, to cast the first stone.

  She was five when Dreyfus returned to France. During the trials, convictions, and appeals that followed, the anti-Semitic feeling that had been so virulent in the early 1890s began to surface once again. Pale and fragile, with a nose that sloped down at the end, just like her father’s, Claude became a target. It didn’t help that her name was Schwob. At school, she was subjected to all manner of abuse. She would often hide
in the broom cupboard during break to avoid being bullied. Once, she fell asleep and missed most of a lesson.

  “Do you know the story about Franz Kafka?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  One sunlit morning, Kafka had been walking in the botanical gardens in Prague when a beautiful young woman waved and called out to him. Though he didn’t recognize her, he smiled and waved back. How good the world could be sometimes, he thought to himself. How kind. It was only later that he realized what she had been saying. Dirty Jew.

  “That’s what they called me too,” Claude said. “A dirty Jew. They called me a traitor too. They even called me Judas.”

  After school one day, some children from her class used a skipping rope to tie her to a tree. When they taunted her for being Jewish, she didn’t attempt to deny it. Quite the opposite. I’m the granddaughter of a rabbi from Frankfurt, she told them proudly. They pelted her with gravel. She got home later than usual, her uniform mud-stained, crumpled. Her father lost his temper. Do you have no self-respect? Thinking to show him what had happened, she began to take off her skirt. He tried to stop her. What are you doing? But when he saw the cuts and scratches on her legs, his eyes misted over, and the creases curving past his mouth grew deeper. It’s all right, father, she said. I’m not hurt. He demanded to know who was responsible. If I tell you that, she said, they’ll have even more reason to despise me. When he informed her, a week or two later, that she would be leaving the school—the country too—she didn’t want to go. She thought it would be seen as a sign of weakness. As a defeat. But it was a relief to arrive at Parsons Mead in Surrey, and to have the opportunity to re-create herself. The English didn’t see her as a Jew. To them, she was just a foreigner.

  “You weren’t homesick?” I asked.

  “Not really.” She yawned and stretched. “I loved it there.” Removing her dark glasses, she jumped to her feet. “Come on. Let’s swim.”

  On our last night in Montreux we ate at a bistro on the waterfront. In among the mountains, on the south side of the lake, low-voltage lightning flared and flickered. At the next table was a Swiss family—a father, a mother, and two little girls. The younger of the two had something of Claude’s alertness. Something of her impatience too, as if the world wasn’t quick enough, and she was always waiting for it to catch up. Prompted by the similarity, perhaps, I asked Claude about her early life.

  She lit an English cigarette and began to describe what it had been like to grow up in the apartment on rue du Calvaire, which was where her family had lived before the move to Place du Commerce. Her mother’s outbursts would often be preceded by an intense, insistent tenderness. She would stroke Claude’s hair over and over. Mon petit crochon, she would say—a mingling of the words crouton and cochon. But it wouldn’t be long before she started finding fault. You’re too short to be elegant, and your nose isn’t Greek enough. Later, there would be screaming and breakages. Claude recalled a night when her mother bent down and seized her by the wrist. Sentences came sizzling towards her. I don’t know who you are. Who are you? The inside of her mother’s head was scorched and blackened, like a pan of water that had boiled dry. Another time, her mother chased her along the corridor and kicked her in the back. She fell over, crying. She could only have been three or four. Her mother knelt in front of her. Begged to be forgiven. She found the pleading even more disturbing than the violence.

  I looked out over Lake Léman, its surface scuffed and dark. I hadn’t expected anything so detailed, or so distressing.

  Following an outburst, Claude went on, her mother would always disappear, but the silence in the apartment would feel tense, provisional. It would be days before the air relaxed. She was a disappointment to her mother. She had made her angry. Driven her away. Worse still, her mother hid from her—or was hidden. The places had abstract, complicated names that seemed designed to baffle and exclude. Sanatorium, clinic. Spa. She missed her mother—she loved her—but when she asked if she could see her she was told that visits weren’t allowed. Why? she would cry, her small hands knotted into fists. Why can’t I see her? People appeared unable to explain. All they would say was they were sorry, and it was for the best.

  “Who looked after you?” I asked.

  At first, she was sent to her aunt Maggy, she told me, but Maggy was in love with a married man—a musician—and her father thought she set a poor example. After a few weeks, he moved her to her grandmother Mathilde’s apartment in the Cours Cambronne, with its bandstand, its lime trees, and its statue of the general. Mathilde had been beautiful when she was young, eyes a blend of green and brown and gold, hair falling to her waist, and she had lived an exotic life, eight years of it in Egypt, where her husband had worked as an adviser to Cherif Pacha, the minister of foreign affairs. By the time Claude arrived she was almost blind and rarely left the apartment, but she fed Claude on a diet of books and talked to her about the Bible and Greek mythology and the death of Socrates. She saw something in Claude, and insisted that she give expression to it. She did her best to make up for the failings of Claude’s mother.

  “So you never had much contact with your mother?” I said.

  “Almost none.”

  “And now?”

  “There was that time with you, in Le Pradet—”

  “But apart from that?”

  “The doctors are always talking about the ‘therapeutic value of isolation.’ They think that if she’s to find any equilibrium or peace she should avoid things that remind her of the past. That includes me, unfortunately…” She finished her whiskey and ordered another. “She came to visit once, when I was six or seven. The room was dark, and people were talking in hushed voices. I couldn’t see her properly.

  “My father stood behind me, one hand on my shoulder. He pushed me towards her. Told me to kiss her. Her skin smelled bad, like the water in a vase when all the flowers have died—”

  Claude’s mouth crumpled, and she blinked back the tears. She took a drink, then wiped at her face carelessly, almost savagely. She didn’t want to cry in front of me. She didn’t even want to seem to be moved.

  “She peered at me as if I wasn’t fully realized,” she went on. “As if I was only a sketch of a child. Or as if I was someone she had heard about, but never actually met. Someone she was only vaguely interested in, and wouldn’t remember afterwards.

  “There was no feeling coming from her. She wasn’t even curious…”

  My love for Claude burst out of me, like a rope thrown across an abyss, but she was deep in her own thoughts, eyes lowered. The love I felt for her fell short.

  I looked around. The Swiss family had gone. We were the last people in the place.

  I signaled for the bill.

  The path that led to the hotel ran along the edge of the lake. The lightning had come closer. No forks, just weak, sickly flashes. Thunder muttered in the back of the sky, and the air was warm and damp. There was no storm, no rain. Only a kind of tension. Claude was unsteady on her feet, and had to lean against me.

  When we reached her room, I helped her onto the bed, then I went back downstairs. It was nearly midnight, and the dining room was closed. As I stood there, a flash of silver through the window showed me crisp tablecloths, clean cutlery—everything laid out for breakfast. Passing between the tables, I pushed on the swing door that led into the kitchen. Though the lights were on, I thought at first that the large, high-ceilinged room was empty, but then I noticed a door at the far end that was open to the night. A man in a white jacket leaned against the frame, one hand in his trouser pocket, smoking.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He looked over his shoulder. He was in his forties, with slick black hair and gaunt cheeks. He had long, prehensile fingers, which made the smoking of a cigarette appear exotic, and slightly sinister.

  I asked if he could make some coffee.

  “The kitchen’s closed,” he said.r />
  “It’s my friend. She drank too much.”

  He shook his head. “You Parisians.”

  “We’re from Nantes.”

  We stared at each other for a few moments, then he flicked his cigarette stub into the darkness and walked over to the stove, rubbing his hands lightly, one against the other, as though removing dust or dirt. “It should be strong, yes?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “And black?”

  “Yes.”

  While he brewed the coffee, his back to me, I stood where he had been standing, looking out. The night was irritable with lightning.

  “Will there be a storm tonight?” I asked.

  There was a brief silence before he answered. “In the mountains, maybe. Not here.”

  He handed me a tray with a small pot of coffee and two cups. I asked him what I owed him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I thanked him again.

  As I moved away, towards the door, he spoke into the space behind me. “Your friendship is very close.”

  I stopped and looked at him. “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s very intimate, your friendship. I have watched you together. On the beach.”

  What had he seen? It was impossible to know. But it seemed Claude and I had not been as free from scrutiny as we had thought.

  He scratched his cheek. It was so quiet in the kitchen that I could hear the rasp of fingernails on stubble, like someone striking a match.

  “You’re lucky to have found her,” he said.

  I sensed that he had guessed the truth about us, and that he didn’t disapprove. It occurred to me that he might also be a homosexual.

  “I’d better go,” I said, “or the coffee will get cold.”

  I moved on into the darkened restaurant, the door to the kitchen swinging shut behind me.

  The next day, I woke just after dawn. After looking in on Claude—she was still asleep—I went downstairs and sat on the terrace, under a blue-and-white-striped parasol. It was already hot. I opened my sketchbook and began to draw the old English couple at the next table. As I worked, I was aware of the glitter of the lake to my right, like a field of silver foil, and the chink and clatter of cutlery on fine bone china. From somewhere behind me came the plump sound of a tennis ball being stroked this way and that.