Paul learned that the girl’s name was Michèle Duchesne, that she was Belgian, that she was only seventeen years old, and that her room was two doors along from his own on the same floor. One afternoon he encountered her in the corridor, they both stopped, and he asked whether he might visit her that evening. Smiling, she assented. And so, after dinner, carrying a box of chocolate cats’ tongues under his arm, he knocked on her door.
Wearing an open-necked shirt and white linen trousers, she was sitting cross-legged on top of a heap of pillows at the head of her bed. Shyly she extended a hand of welcome. Paul presented her with the chocolates. She thanked him gravely and placed them on her table de nuit. Then she invited him to sit down.
Paul looked about him. The four walls were covered with posters and pictures cut from newspapers and magazines. There were generals, dictators, film stars and prize-fighters; one section was devoted to fashions, another to jokes, another to cartoons; down the centre of one wall, like the rungs of a ladder, were the banner titles of a dozen different newspapers: the New York Herald Tribune, Le Monde, the Continental Daily Mail, La Semaine Belge, La Gazette de Lausanne. Across one trousered thigh lay an open, mutilated newspaper, and poised above it a ruthless pair of scissors.
“Monsieur,” she said, speaking in French, “monsieur will kindly cut out the titles of any newspapers not at present on the wall and any pictures which he thinks of interest.”
“Of interest?”
“Gay, evocative or sentimental!”
She laughed at his initial astonishment; she lost all trace of shyness. No, she said, in answer to his questions, no, she did not speak English, but she understood a little and would like to learn. If monsieur would care to, he could teach her—there would be a useful occupation for him. No, monsieur had no need of lessons from her. No, it wasn’t a compliment, monsieur spoke French very well et avec un bon accent—un bon accent anglais! No, time did not hang heavily and there were often visitors, and, besides, up to now there had been all the pictures to cut out of the newspapers.
Corroborating her statement there came a thump on the door and an immense black-bearded Spaniard entered. He was holding an Air France travel poster in front of his face and chest. “Voilà!” he cried, peering round the edge in order to assess Michèle’s reactions. “Excusez-moi!” he added, catching sight of Paul.
“C’est gentil, mais c’est pas tout à fait mon genre,” announced Michèle critically.
“Mais, Cheli, je viens de la voler au chef de la gare!”
“Alors, ne vous en faites pas! Vous irez en prison, c’est tout!”
The Spaniard gave a cry of exasperation, re-rolled the poster and slapped it down on the epaulette of Paul’s battle-dress. “Hommage à tous les capitaines!” he roared. “N’y touchez pas!” ordered Michèle. “Pourquoi? Moi qui suis ancien capitaine dans l’armée du Général Franco!” He turned to Paul and said in English: “Make attention to Cheli! She say you to steal, and then when you steal, it is not her genre! It is the classic type of the young, emancipated, post-war, decadent, new-look pin-up girl without principes!” He put on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and beamed delightedly from Paul to Michèle. His name was Manniez, and Paul had often seen him in the salle à manger. He always wore a grey, roll-necked pullover and corduroy trousers, and his eyebrows were nearly as bushy as his beard. (Paul, inquiring the meaning of ‘Cheli’, learned that Manniez, discussing phonetics with Michèle, had postulated that Chinese grammars contained the rule that the European ‘r’ was pronounced ‘l’. ‘Cheli’, the first fruit of his inductive powers of scholarship, had so pleased him that he had henceforward incorporated it into his own vocabulary.)
A tap on the door announced the arrival of the Baron de la Marelle, a short, stout young man with thick spectacles, large features, a dirty knitted sweater and an open dressing-gown trailing its cords. “Bonjour, chère,” he said. And, removing his cumbersome pipe, he brushed Michèle’s right hand with his lips. She introduced him to Paul, who extended his hand and was offered a crooked and condescending finger. “Très peu de monde ce soir,” de la Marelle commented, raising thick eyebrows at Manniez.
Three more visitors arrived. Then came two Belgians, identical twins with identical conditions. “Bonjour, belle enfant,” they cried in unison.
The newcomers had brought pictures cut from their newspapers; Michèle considered each impartially, selecting, accepting and rejecting. De la Marelle floated easily from group to group, puffing out smoke, gesturing with the stained and scaly mouth-piece of his pipe, dispensing graciously his opinions. More patients arrived. Michèle, unself-conscious and modest, still seated high upon her piled-up cushions, smiled, shook hands and stacked fresh cuttings and little presents on her table de nuit. Under her directions a middle-aged Dutch banker pinned some of her newer acquisitions to the wall.
“Attention! Le Docteur Glou-Glou!” someone shouted.
A false-bearded, false-nosed, twittering creature wearing a white gown and carrying a brief-case tottered into the room. There was a shout of laughter and cries of “Salut, Glou-Glou!” It was a Flemish patient who had been ill for many years, and whose medical impersonations had become so compulsive that even without his disguise he continued to play his rôle, forever trembling, stuttering and uttering his diagnoses in high-pitched, senescent tones.
“Oooooo oooooo,” he shrilled at Michèle. “Quelle sympathique petite consultation nous allons faire tout à l’heure!” And cooing maniacally he started to wrestle with his hose-pipe stethoscope, pulling it foot by foot from an inside pocket. Another candidate for the strait-jacket, his assistant on these occasions, opened the attaché-case and removed a rusty saw, pliers and barometer.
“Va-t-en, Glou-Glou,” cried Michèle, as he advanced on her. He blew out his cheeks and shook them till they wobbled like milk shapes. “Dites ‘glou-glou-glou’!” he commanded, putting one end of the stethoscope against her chest and staring lasciviously down the other.
“Glou-glou-glou!” everyone chorused.
“Silence, les oiseaux!” He jumped in the air in mock rage.
“Glou-glou-glou!”
“Aaaaah!” Waving his instruments, tripping over his stethoscope, he curveted round the room, then stopped, arms raised, legs apart. “Microbe, Bacille, Koch!” he cried. “Microbe, Bacille, Koch,” everyone repeated. “Microbe, Bacille, Koch, Koch, Koch,” he chanted, establishing a rhythm by clapping his hands. Then as the refrain came back to him, he started upon an angular war-dance, symbolically reproducing the ritual medical gestures of the consulting-room.
At the same time, Michèle noticed that Manniez, who was seated beside her table de nuit, had surreptitiously opened the box of cats’ tongues, and had consumed half the contents. “Vous êtes ignoble!” she cried, pulling the box away. She turned to Paul to apologise, and the Spaniard leant over and slapped her face. “Ne dites plus jamais qu’un Espagnole est ignoble!” he shouted. Her reflex was immediate. She seized a rubber hot-water bottle and threw it at him. His arm was raised too late—it hit his face and burst. He staggered, and to regain his balance grasped at the curtains, which, under his weight, detached themselves from the framework of the window, and he fell to the floor with them piled on top of him.
In the laughter which followed, no one noticed Dr. Vernet come into the room. Suddenly there he was, a white gown over his dinner jacket, standing incredulous with anger at the foot of Michèle’s bed. Oblivious of the reason for the succeeding silence, de la Marelle continued to speak: he was lamenting the sanatorium laundry, and inquiring whether one of the poorer patients, a female student, for example, might, for a consideration, be encouraged to care for his personal linen.
“Mademoiselle, I abandon your case,” said Dr. Vernet. De la Marelle looked up. “Docteur,” he cried cheerfully, “you’ve been hiding from me! Do you know that I coughed all night and that this morning I woke up with a headache? I wonder whether——” He broke off, succumbing to the stare which Dr. Vernet was directing at Michèle.
“Three times I’ve said that these soirées were to stop,” said Dr. Vernet, his voice quivering, “and this evening I’m interrupted in the middle of my dinner with the information that another is in progress. Well, make still more noise, invite the bed patients, open all the intercommunicating doors and turn the whole floor into a night-club—it’s for the last time! Tomorrow I shall write to your parents to ask them to——” He broke off. There were gasps of astonishment. Dr. Vernet swung round. Glou-Glou had crept up behind him and had been quietly ausculting his back. For a moment the two white-coated figures faced each other, Glou-Glou standing with his stethoscope poised in the air, his head inclined forward and to one side, his face vacant and very tense. Then firmly and with great precision he placed the stethoscope against Dr. Vernet’s chest. “Dites ‘glou-glou-glou’!” he whispered.
Dr. Vernet caught his arm, looked for an instant as if he were going to twist it from his shoulder. “Venez. Vous êtes surexcité,” he said at last. Then to everyone else: “Revenez tous dans vos chambres.” And he led Glou-Glou from the room.
In fact Dr. Vernet’s dinner had been less interrupted than postponed; as was his practice from time to time, he had ordered it to be put back an hour and a half. Besides Mlle. Duchesne (his attack on her had really been directed at her entourage), there were a number of other patients scheduled to receive surprise visits. Hourmikos, the Greek, had announced a fast to the death; he was to be caught with his untouched tray and browbeaten into eating. An amateur photographer was reported to be using his room as a studio for pornographic pictures when the day staff went off duty; a little discretion and one might catch him—and his models. A female patient (who had recently transferred from a neighbouring sanatorium) was said to lock her door at nine o’clock and then to go to bed with her visiting fiancée; give them a quarter of an hour, then make a dramatic entry through the intercommunicating doors between the bedrooms ….
A pity Dr. Hervet refused to employ an additional night nurse; a pity that, employing only one, he did not offer sufficient wages to obtain the services of someone more capable and vigilant than Sœur Rose. But even Sœur Rose (or Sclérose, as Dr. Vernet called her to his associates) had formerly been more effective. It was now rumoured that her muzziness was less attributable to natural incapacities than to a supply of cognac in the medical cabinet of the night-duty room. A little on-the-spot investigation might resolve that question one way or the other.
And during the course of it all there would be one or two parties to break up, and probably half a dozen patients to locate, who—strictly confined to bed—would be missing from their rooms. And then, and only then, would it be possible to start to eat a dinner which, with intense conviction and varying degrees of indignation, he would a dozen times have declared to have been abandoned in the middle.
As far as Michèle was concerned, the upshot of it all was a night tormented by the thought of repacking her cases, of the long train journey back to Liège, of the explanations to her relatives and parents. And although for the next few days she desperately waved away all the heads which protruded round the door, the situation would soon have been the same as before but for the co-operation of Sœur Yvette.
If Paul’s visits were less discouraged than those of the other patients, it was partly because of the sustained inoffensiveness of his conduct over a long period, partly because, owing to his solitary existence, he invariably arrived unaccompanied. A similar privilege was conceded to Manniez, who specifically claimed the right of access to a co-religionist; and henceforth he never entered Michèle’s room without a missal held in his hand like a special visa from the Holy See.
Michèle seemed incapable of remaining in bed. First thing in the morning, at the conclusion of her toilet, she would change her pyjamas for an open-necked shirt and white linen trousers. Whenever Paul called on her, he would find her engaged in sorting out a drawer, rearranging her photographs on the table de nuit, or pinning new images on the wall. When her meal was served, she would sit at the side of her tray on the bed, one leg crossed over the other, occasionally stabbing at morsels of food with her fork. And at the least pretext she would be up again, searching for a letter, drawing the curtains against the sun, dusting the mantelpiece (“Ah, je ne sais pas supporter la poussière”), and the food, tepid on arrival, would become rigid and congealed. When Paul remonstrated with her, she would either pay no attention, or laugh and say: “Alors, vous avez fini?”
She had brought with her a number of board-games—ludo, draughts, snakes-and-ladders—and a purposeful selection of school textbooks. One evening Paul found her with a pencil tucked behind her ear and an algebra primer before her on the bed table. “Ssh! I’m working out a problem,” she said severely, and continued counting aloud on her fingers, muttering her calculations, elaborately inscribing algebraic symbols in a notebook, until Paul said: “Very well. Since you’re busy, I’d better leave.” At which Michèle gave a little cry, announced the problem to be resolved, and bundled her books into a drawer.
Manniez, no less than Michèle, contrived to keep the décor of the room in a constant state of flux. He stuck her photographs on to improvised cardboard mounts and suspended them in rows by her bed; he shifted whole sections of images from one wall to another in order to permit of the greatest possible concentration. It was also Manniez who had provided the three great posters. One, six feet square, advertised a coffee powder by representing a steaming cup of coffee the size of a zinc bath. The second, on the interior of the door, bore the words ‘Loterie Nationale’ superimposed on an enormous plane tree from the foliage of which were fluttering hundreds of bank-notes. The last hung opposite her bed, a French travel agency poster, with a view of the Alps and the laconic invocation: “Passez vos vacances dans les montagnes!”
Usually Michèle seemed in good spirits, but one day when Paul called on her it was evident that she had been crying. And as they talked she suddenly turned her head away. “Excusez-moi,” she said. “Je suis tellement bête.”
There was a long silence. Paul stared awkwardly at the collection of little objects on Michèle’s table de nuit—the carved ebony negro from the Belgian Congo about whose neck Michèle had hung a medallion of the Virgin; the photographs, as precariously supported, each by the other, as the walls of card houses; the worn missal bursting with the slips announcing the First Communion of her friends; the little circle of lead at the end of a ribbon which, when Michèle held the whole in the air, would answer questions affirmatively or negatively by circling or swinging like a pendulum.
And Michèle, regaining some measure of composure, explained how the isolation, the transition from pensionnat to sanatorium, the longing she felt to see her parents, the continual injunctions she received to remain in bed, the uncertainty as to what was going to happen to her, had all, suddenly, and at the same moment, become too much.
“I’m very ashamed, monsieur,” she said, wiping her eyes. And she added: “But I’m only seventeen.”
“Monsieur!” repeated Paul. He begged her never again to address him by such an appellation.
Then, in order to distract her, he encouraged her to speak of her early life, of her childhood and upbringing in Liège, of her parents, to whom she was devoted and for whom her stay at Les Alpes was ruinous. It appeared that her health had never been robust; there had been pleurisies, two bouts of pneumonia, and several months passed in a preventorium in the Ardennes soon after her tenth birthday. And it was at a pensionnat at Lausanne, where she had been boarding, that, two months previously, it had been discovered that she was tubercular.
Michèle had never before spoken of her condition, and Paul had deliberately avoided any inquiry, choosing to infer from her appearance and energy that very little was wrong. Now he let his gaze wander from her pale, oval face, with its delicate and sensitive features, to her arms, as slender, shapely and subtle in movement as the necks of swans. And grudgingly he conceded to himself that so slight and graceful a frame was unlikely to be concomitant with high physical reserves.
“I suppose there’s not really very much wrong with you,” he said as casually as possible.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I saw Dr. Vernet this morning, and he asked me if I had a lot of courage. Imagine, monsieur——” She broke off, correcting herself. “Imagine, Paul, how much his question frightened me.”
“Did you ask what he meant?”
“Yes. He only smiled and shook his head.”
“There has never been any talk of treatment?”
“Only at first. Dr. Bruneau said I should have a pneumothorax.”
“And then?”
“That was all. He didn’t speak of it again. What do you think will happen to me?”
“Oh, nothing much. I’m sure you’re not very ill.”
“I would be very frightened to die,” said Michèle. She was leaning forward in her bed, her chin cupped in her hands.
“There is no question of that.”
“Paul, I know I’m very ill.” Michèle looked steadily into Paul’s eyes, her own eyes very wide.
“How do you know?”
“I saw a medical report. It was in the drawer of my father’s bureau. It said that my condition was grave and that some form of treatment would have to be attempted.”
Paul avoided her gaze. “I must go,” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s time for the cure.”
“Paul, how much longer are you staying at Les Alpes?”
“About another month. Long enough to see you well on the way to recovery.” And he smiled at her and left the room.