Never Anyone But You Read online

  Claude appeared an hour later, in dark glasses and a headscarf. I closed my sketchbook and put it to one side.

  “Did you sleep?”

  She lowered herself onto the chair opposite me. “I think so.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about what you told me.”

  “I drank too much. You mustn’t let me drink so much.” She glanced towards the lake and shuddered. “I feel dreadful. Look.” She held her hand out over the table, palm facing down. All the fingers trembled.

  “Are you sorry you told me?” I said.

  “No. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  She rarely went into detail about her mother, but the story was always with her. Some shadows don’t fade, not even when the sun goes in.

  The waiter from the night before approached our table. In the daylight he looked less sure of himself. His cheeks and chin were gray-blue. In his long fingers was the local newspaper.

  He spoke to Claude. “How are you feeling this morning, Mademoiselle?”

  She gave him a pale smile. “Was it you who made the coffee?”

  He nodded.

  “That was kind of you,” she said.

  “Have you heard the news?” He showed us the front page of the paper.

  Germany had declared war on France.

  On a colorless October morning I was out in the garden, raking the dead leaves, when my brother Jean appeared. He came and stood beside me, but looked off into the trees. He had volunteered to serve in the ambulance corps, and was wearing his new uniform.

  “You’re up early,” I said.

  He looked at his boots. “I have to leave today.”

  “I’m sorry you’re going. You’ll be careful, won’t you.”

  Still looking down, he smiled. “I’m not sure it will make much difference if I’m careful.”

  I knew what he was thinking. He would have very little control over what happened to him. His survival would depend on chance—the path of a bullet, the trajectory of a shell or a grenade.

  “All the same,” I said stubbornly, “it can’t do any harm.”

  He appeared to consider this.

  “We’re not so unalike, you and I,” he said eventually. “We’re self-sufficient, and don’t give much away, and people find that difficult.” He fiddled with a loose button on his tunic. “Now I’m being posted to the front, our parents are bound to worry. You should be aware of that, and tell them everything’s going to be all right.” He looked me in the eyes for the first and only time that morning. “You should keep telling them that, even if you don’t believe it.”

  “All right,” I said. “I will.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  I had spoken automatically, without thinking. Inside, I was still examining his unexpected declaration. We’re not so unalike, you and I. This was as close to I love you as Jean could get, and I longed to throw my arms around him, but the distance in him prevented me. Instead, I watched him nod again, this time to himself, then move back towards the house, his boots leaving black imprints in the dew.

  In the spring of 1915, Claude’s father found her unconscious on her bedroom floor. Though she assured him it was a fainting fit—it was always happening, she said—he suspected there might be more to it than that and insisted that she remain at home, and under observation. The alienist he brought in to oversee her convalescence had strict rules. There were to be no visits. Claude managed to persuade their housekeeper to deliver a letter to me without anybody knowing. She had lied to her father, she said. Plagued by what she called mal du Loire, her own personal euphemism for suicidal thoughts, she had ingested ether and opium. She was sorry if she had worried me. Claude being Claude, though, she couldn’t help but revel in the drama. Apparently, my lips were blue! Apart from that jaunty, smuggled note, I didn’t hear from her at all.

  While she was recovering, I saw her only once, and the minutes I spent with her did nothing to lessen my anxiety. I sat on a hard chair next to the bed while the alienist stood by the door, his arms folded, the air whistling in and out of his high, pinched nostrils. Intimidated by his presence, I was uncertain as to what I might or might not say. After mouthing a few platitudes, the kind of remarks that Claude would, as a rule, have ridiculed me for, I lapsed into an awkward silence.

  Towards the end of my visit, the alienist was called out of the room. The moment he left, I took Claude’s hand.

  “You have to get better,” I said.

  She seemed listless, almost bored. Had she been given some kind of sleeping draft?

  “You’re not listening to me,” I said in a fierce whisper. “This is what they can do to us, if we don’t watch out. They can stop us being together. Is that what you want?”

  She still hadn’t spoken, but I thought she was listening.

  “You asked me to give you a year,” I went on. “I’ve already done that. If you want more, you have to get well.”

  “Blackmail,” she whispered. But she had a faint smile on her face.

  “Do what I say,” I told her, “and I’ll give you my whole life.”

  Her eyes found mine.

  “If you can’t actually be well, assume the appearance of being well.” I tightened my grip on her hand. “Defer to their superiority. Be submissive. Whatever you do, don’t tell them there’s nothing wrong with you. They won’t believe you. Demonstrate it through your actions.” I paused. “Above all, don’t criticize your father.”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  “Fool them, Claude. You’re cleverer than they are. All you have to do is pretend—”

  I had been so focused on her that I hadn’t heard the alienist returning. “What do you mean ‘pretend’?”

  How much had he heard? I didn’t know.

  “It’s nothing important, Monsieur,” I said. “I was just talking about a project we’ve been working on.”

  He consulted his pocket watch. “I think it’s probably time you left.”

  I leaned over Claude’s bed. “Remember what I told you,” I whispered as I kissed her on the forehead.

  Outside, in the square, a raw wind blew, and the air smelled of drains. There was a part of Claude that didn’t believe she deserved to live. It frightened me to think it might be the strongest part of her. If that was the case, they would never let her leave. Our love was over. I sank down onto a bench and cried so hard a woman stopped and asked me what was wrong.

  “Everything,” I said.

  That autumn, only a few weeks after I began my studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, my father died suddenly. A colleague found him slumped over his desk. He had just returned from a nearby brasserie, where he had enjoyed half a bottle of Fleurie and a menu du jour. The cause of death was a heart attack. He was seventy years old.

  You might expect somebody who studied disease to be morbid, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Despite working long hours and shouldering heavy responsibilities, my father was always playful. At Christmas once, we invited a few friends to our house for a game of charades. When it was my father’s turn, he appeared in a hat with a lamp attached to it and a white ankle-length garment that resembled a djellaba.

  What am I? he said. Nobody could guess. It turned out he was pretending to be Monsieur Schwob’s newspaper, The Lighthouse of the Loire. Monsieur Schwob laughed so hard that a button flew off his waistcoat and struck the side of my mother’s wineglass. She was shaking her head. She thought my father’s sense of humor inappropriate in a man of his age and social standing. I wouldn’t have changed anything about him, though I did sometimes have the curious feeling that he was younger than I was. Years later, long after we had left Nantes, Claude observed that my father was surreal before the word had even been invented.

  My mother grieved stoically, her complexion paler than ever, dark smudges beneath her eyes. As a widow, she
appeared to grow more beautiful. She had a stark, moonlit coloring I had seen in paintings by El Greco. It was his remarkable Madonna of Charity she most resembled. I was less graceful, less discreet. I shut myself away. Drew tombstones, coffins. Men laid out on marble slabs, their eyes weighed down with coins. When I emerged I spoke in monosyllables. There was a lavish funeral—my father had been a public figure, popular with everyone he met—but I found it difficult to believe that he was dead. At night, at home, I kept expecting him to walk in through the door, joking about a patient’s bizarre behavior or going into raptures about his favorite Nantaise speciality, glass eels. How was I supposed to adapt to his absence? What happened to that unique and fluctuating space, the space he used to occupy? I remembered Claude describing her mother as hiding, or being hidden. That was how it felt. If I looked hard enough I would find him. In a cupboard, behind a curtain. Under the stairs.

  The following summer Claude and I couldn’t holiday in Le Croisic, since the area had been commandeered by the army. Instead, we traveled to Saint-Malo and caught a boat to the Channel Islands. Jersey lay only a few miles from mainland France, and most of its towns and streets had French names, but Claude was charmed by what she called its “English atmosphere”—the policemen in their dark-blue helmets, the gingerbread for sale in the shops. The island was famous for its beaches, though the difference between high and low tide was as much as a mile and a half in some places, which could make swimming hazardous; we thought we could feel the pull of the distant Atlantic, even in the most sheltered of the bays. On the rare days when the sun didn’t shine, we rented bicycles and rode inland, quickly finding ourselves in country lanes, between high hedgerows, or plunging down steep hills into narrow, concealed valleys, where we saw red squirrels. Trees closed over our heads, and the gardens surprised us with their exotic plants—date palms, evergreen oaks, and even sugarcane. We came across mansions built in the Victorian style, with pillared porches and snaking gravel drives, proof that great fortunes could be made in farming, but also, possibly, hinting at darker activities, like piracy and smuggling.

  We stayed at the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel, in the southwest of the island, since it overlooked a wide, unspoiled beach. Though it was our first visit, the proprietors, Mr. Harden and his eldest daughter Helen, sent a horse and cart to collect us from the docks in St. Helier, and when we arrived they welcomed us like the old friends that we would, in time, become. Beyond the hotel, next to a slipway, was a Norman church and a fishermen’s chapel. Most days, we climbed up through the trees behind the graveyard. There was a path that led over the headland to a small hidden treasure of a cove called Beauport. Sometimes we sunbathed naked in the field of bracken that grew on the low cliff above the beach, or sometimes we climbed down the wooden steps and spread our towels on the stones, the deep blue and green of the English Channel punctuated by oddly shaped rocks, one of which resembled an old man’s head.

  One afternoon, we caught the bus to Bonne Nuit in the north of the island and set out along the coastal path. When we reached Sorel, we rested in the long grass, close to the cliff edge. The island of Sark lay to the northwest, a long low slab of darkest blue, its outline blurred in the heat haze, and seeming to hover just above the sea. It looked like a lost kingdom, half there, half not. During the walk, Claude had been talking about how she saw our relationship, and as we lay side by side beneath a cloudless sky she took up where she had left off.

  “I don’t think of us as lesbian,” she said. “We’re just people—people who happen to love each other.”

  “We’re women who happen to love each other,” I said.

  “Gender’s irrelevant. I would love you whatever you were. Man, woman—hermaphrodite…” She smiled.

  “What’s gender, anyway?” she went on after a moment. “It’s just a matter of organs and cycles and—what do you call them?—hormones. I refuse to allow myself to be defined by a few biological characteristics. When I stand in a room by myself, I’m not standing there as a woman. I’m a consciousness. An intelligence. Everything else is secondary.”

  When Claude was in full flow, it was hard to disagree with her. “Masculine, feminine,” she said. “I can do all that. But neuter—that’s where I feel comfortable. I’m not going to be typecast or put in a box. Not ever. I’m always going to have a choice.”

  The smell of warm grass, the distant airy murmur of the waves…

  I think I might have dozed.

  When I opened my eyes again, Claude was lying on her back, gazing up into the sky.

  “If life was always like this,” she said, “it wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

  On a dark wet day during the third year of the war I was standing near the front door, shaking the rain from my umbrella, when my mother approached, saying she wanted to have a word with me. Her eyebrows were raised, and her mouth, usually so generous, had tightened or shrunk, which I took for signs of disapproval. Since Claude’s recovery, we had been careful, making love while on holiday, or in out-of-the-way places, or in the apartment on Place du Commerce, when nobody was home. Even so, the idea that we might be caught often preyed on us, especially on Claude, who was more thin-skinned than I was, and more prone to feelings of persecution. As I followed my mother down the corridor, my mind flooded with fear and dread. Had she found out about us? If so, how?

  She led me into the drawing room. Once seated, she spent a few moments arranging the folds in her dress. With its velvet wall hangings and its somber furniture, the room seemed designed to complement her Spanish looks. Outside, the rain grew heavier.

  She looked me full in the face. “I don’t know quite how to say this.”

  I held my breath. I was prepared to deny everything, even if she had evidence.

  “Monsieur Schwob has asked me to marry him.”

  A laugh burst out of me. Though it only lasted an instant, it was abrupt and loud, and it hung on in the room, like a shape punched in the air. The blood drained from my mother’s face. Her black hair looked blacker still.

  “Have I said something amusing?” Her voice was cold and curt, but also injured.

  “No, no. Sorry—”

  I remembered my mother taking me to the Schwobs’ apartment in 1909. It had been raining, as it was now, and she and Monsieur Schwob had stood by the window, their heads close together, their voices hushed. I remembered overhearing the word “therapeutic,” and realized they must have been talking about his wife. I remembered the time my father dressed up as a lighthouse, and how one of Monsieur Schwob’s buttons flew across the table and bounced off my mother’s glass. I remembered how they looked at each other. There was nothing in their faces. It was just the fact that the look had happened. And I remembered how solicitous Monsieur Schwob had been since my father’s death. He had called on us most days, and never arrived without a gift—tickets for the theater, oysters from Cancale…

  I tried to focus on the proposition my mother had laid before me. “What about Madame Schwob?” I said.

  “He has divorced her.” Glancing down, my mother brushed something invisible from her skirts. “Monsieur Schwob couldn’t live with her. No one could. He spoke with her doctors, and they agreed—

  “If the idea upsets you,” she went on, looking away from me, into the room, “if you feel it’s too soon, or somehow inappropriate, I won’t go through with it…”

  I was only half listening. Now my fears of being found out had been dispelled, I was beginning to wonder what effect the marriage might have on my relationship with Claude. Thoughts my mother couldn’t possibly have imagined were whirling through my head, and I realized I was blushing. In an attempt to stop her noticing, I said the first thing that came into my mind. “I just want you to be happy.”

  In the meantime, my mother had regained some of her equanimity. She was also, it seemed, relieved—though for different reasons. “That’s very thoughtful of you, dear, but your happiness comes
first—yours, and that of your brother.”

  My brother.

  In 1915, when our father died, Jean had come home on leave. He had been stationed in marshy woodland in Alsace, and his skin was soggy, gray. He would stand in front of windows, staring out. His face would empty in the middle of a conversation. The only time he was able to rouse himself was when I mentioned I might volunteer for the medical corps. No, don’t, he said. They get no sleep. Their hearts give out. Only the week before, he had buried a nurse who was the same age as I was. Stay here. Our mother needs you. Six months later, when he returned from the front, he was lying on a stretcher in an ambulance. I spent hours by his bedside, holding his hand, something that would have been impossible before. He was weak and feverish, and shouted in his sleep. Though his doctors suspected he might have contracted some sort of blood disease, they had been unable to suggest an effective course of treatment, or even a convincing diagnosis. He was in and out of hospital all the time, but his condition didn’t seem to be improving.

  I asked my mother what Jean had said.

  “He didn’t say anything. He just grunted and turned away from me.” She sighed. “I feel a gap has opened up between us. I never know what he’s thinking.”

  “He probably has more important things on his mind.” I turned to my mother quickly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude—”

  She patted my hand. “It’s all right. I know.”

  “I think it’s a good idea, the marriage.”

  “Really?” She looked hopeful suddenly, and much younger.

  “I’ve always found Monsieur Schwob to be a kind and decent man,” I said, “and I would very much like to have Claude as a sister.”