CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Third Floor Right, 2

THE MAIN DRAWING ROOM in the flat on the third floor right could well display all the classic signs of the morning after a party.

It is a huge room with light-coloured woodwork, revealing its finely laid parquet floor as the carpets have been either rolled up or pushed back. The whole rear wall is taken up by a Regency-style bookcase, the middle part of which is in fact a door painted in trompe l’œil. Through this half-opened door can be seen a long corridor down which a girl of maybe sixteen is walking, holding a glass of milk in her right hand.

In the drawing room another girl – maybe it’s for her that the restoring glassful is meant – lies asleep on a grey suede sofa: buried beneath the cushions, half covered by a black, flower-and-leaf-embroidered shawl, she seems to be wearing only a nylon jerkin which is clearly several sizes too big for her.

On the floor, everywhere, the remains of the party: several odd shoes, a long white sock, a pair of tights, a top hat, a false nose, cardboard plates in piles, or crumpled, or lying singly, laden with left-overs – tops of radishes, heads of sardines, slightly gnawed lumps of bread, chicken bones, cheese rinds, crimped paper boats that have been used for petits fours and chocolates, cigarette butts, paper napkins, cardboard cups; on a low table, various empty bottles and an almost entire pat of butter in which several cigarettes have been neatly crushed; in other places, a whole assortment of small triangular trays with various morsels still in them: green olives, roast nuts, salty biscuits, prawn crackers; further on, where there is just a little more open space, a barrel of Côtes-du-Rhône on its own stand, beneath which floorcloths, a few yards of kitchen towel that has capriciously loosed itself from its dispenser, and a whole collection of glasses and cups, some of them still half-full, are spread; coffee cups lie about, here and there, as do lumps of sugar, liqueur glasses, forks, knives, a cake-slice, coffee spoons, beer cans, Coca-Cola bottles, almost untouched bottles of gin, port, Armagnac, Marie-Brizard, Cointreau, crème de banane, hairpins, innumerable receptacles used as ashtrays and overflowing with carbonised matchsticks, cigarette ash, pipe ash, butts with and without lipstick stain, date stones, walnut, almond, and peanut shells, apple cores, orange and tangerine peel; in various places lie large plates piled with the remains of diverse dishes: rolled ham in now running jelly, slices of roast beef garnished with gherkins, half a cold hake decorated with sprigs of parsley, tomato quarters, whorls of mayonnaise and crinkle-cut slices of lemon; other shapes have found sanctuary in sometimes implausible locations: balancing on a radiator there is a big Japanese lacquered-wood salad bowl with a bit of rice salad left in it (olives, anchovy fillets, hard-boiled eggs, capers, strips of green pepper, shrimps); under the sofa, a silver dish on which untouched drumsticks lie alongside bare and half-bare chicken bones; a bowl of gooey mayonnaise sits in an armchair; under a bronze paperweight depicting Scopas’s Ares Resting, a saucerful of radishes; dried-out cucumbers, aubergines, and mangoes and a remnant of a lettuce gone sour perch near the top of the bookcase, above a six-volume edition of Mirabeau’s salacious stories, and the remains of an elaborate party cake – a huge meringue in the shape of a squirrel – are precariously wedged between two folds in one of the carpets.

Innumerable records, with and without their sleeves, are spread around the room, mostly dance records, but with a few surprising variations included, such as: The Marches and Fanfares of the 2nd Armoured Division; The Ploughman and His Children, told in Cockney by Pierre Devaux; An Evening in Paris with Tom Lehrer; May ’68 at the Sorbonne; La Tempesta di Mare, Concerto in E major, Op. 8, No. 5, by Antonio Vivaldi, performed on the synthesiser by Léonie Prouillot; and absolutely everywhere dismembered cartons, hurriedly opened packaging, pieces of string, and gold-painted ribbon with curly spiral ends, showing that the party was given to celebrate the birthday of one or the other of the two girls, and that her friends have done her proud: amongst other things, and not counting the comestible solids and liquids brought as gifts by some of the guests, she received as presents: a small musical-box device which we can safely presume plays “Happy Birthday To You”; an ink drawing by Thorwaldsson depicting a Norwegian groom in his wedding outfit: short jacket with close-set silver buttons, starched shirt with straight corolla, waistcoat with silk-braided border, tight trousers brought in at the knee in bunches of woolly tassels, a soft hat, yellowish boots, and at his waist, in its leather sheath, his Dolknif or Scandinavian knife, which the true Norseman always carries; a tiny box of English watercolours – from which we may deduce that the girl enjoys painting; an old-fashioned poster showing a barman with mischievous eyes holding a long clay pipe and pouring himself a glass of Hulstkamp geneva (which he’s already raised to his lips on a smaller poster behind him, incorrectly mirroring the larger one in which it’s set), whilst crowds prepare to invade the tavern with three men – one in a straw boater, one in a felt hat, one in a top hat – jostling at the door; another drawing, by a certain William Falsten, an American cartoonist of the early years of this century, entitled The Punishment, showing a boy lying in bed thinking of the wonderful cake his family is sharing – this mental image being realised in a cloud-bubble above his head – and which he has not been allowed to taste, owing to some silly behaviour; and lastly, presents from jokers with a mildly morbid sense of humour, various trick items including a flick-knife that springs open at the slightest touch, and a frightful imitation of a big black spider.

We can deduce from the general appearance of the room that the party was lavish, perhaps even grandiose, but that it did not turn riotous: there are a few spilt glasses, a few scorch-marks made by cigarettes on cushions and carpets, quite a few grease and wine stains, but no really irreparable damage has been done, except for one torn parchment lampshade, one pot of strong mustard spilt on Yvette Horner’s golden disc, and a bottle of vodka broken in a plantpot containing a fragile papyrus, which will surely not recover.