CHAPTER FORTY

Beaumont, 4

A BATHROOM FLOORED WITH large, square, cream-coloured tiles. On the walls, flower-printed washable wallpaper. No item of decoration complements the purely sanitary furniture and fittings, apart from a small round table with a moulded cast-iron centre pillar on whose veined marble top, lipped with a vaguely Empire-style rim, stands an ultraviolet lamp of brutally modernistic ugliness.

On a turned-wood clothes-stand hangs a green satin dressing gown with a cat silhouette and the symbol designating spades at cards embroidered on its back. Béatrice Breidel alleges that this indoor gown which her grandmother still occasionally uses was the match robe of an American boxer called Cat Spade, whom her grandmother must have met on one of her US tours and who had been her lover. Anne Breidel does not agree at all with this version. It is the case that in the nineteen thirties there was a black boxer called Cat Spade. His career was very short. In nineteen twenty-nine he won the Combined Forces Tournament, left the army to go professional, and was beaten successively by Gene Tunney, Jack Delaney, and Jack Dempsey, even though this last was on the way out. So he went back into the army. It’s not likely he moved in the same circles as Véra Orlova, and even if they had met, a white Russian with rigid prejudices would never have given herself to a black, even if he was a gorgeous heavyweight. Anne Breidel’s explanation is different but also based on the many anecdotes of her forebear’s love life: the dressing gown, she claims, was indeed a present from one of her lovers, a history professor at Carson College, New York, called Arnold Flexner, the author of a significant thesis on The Voyages of Tavernier and Chardin and the Image of Persia in Europe from Scudéry to Montesquieu, and, under various pseudonyms – Marty Rowlands, Kex Camelot, Trim Jinemewicz, James W. London, Harvey Elliott – of detective stories laced with quite explicitly sexy, not to say pornographic, interludes: Murders at Pigalle, Hot Nights in Ankara, etc. They met, so the story went, at Cincinnati (OH), where Véra Orlova had been engaged to sing Blondine in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Quite apart from their sexual suggestiveness, which Anne Breidel mentions only in passing, the cat and the spade allude directly, in her view, to Flexner’s most famous novel, The Seventh Crack Shot of Saratoga, the story of a pickpocket working the racecourse, nicknamed “The Cat” because of his quick, light touch, who gets mixed up against his will in a police investigation which he solves with flair and cunning.

Madame de Beaumont is unaware of these two explanations; for her part, she has never made the slightest comment on the origin of her dressing gown.

On the rim of the bath, designed to be wide enough to serve as a shelf, there are some bottles, a sky-blue dimpled rubber bath-cap, a purse-shaped toilet bag made of a spongy pink substance with a plaited string closing, and a shiny parallelepipedic metal box, with a long slit opening on the top side, out of which emerges, in part, a Kleenex.

Anne Breidel lies prone on the floor by the bath, on a green bath towel. She is wearing a white buckram nightdress pulled halfway up her back; on her stretchmarked buttocks there lies an electrical thermal massage vibrator, about fifteen inches in diameter, covered in a red plastic material.

Whilst Béatrice, her sister, younger by one year, is tall and slim, Anne is chubby and puffed with fat. As she is constantly preoccupied by her weight, she imposes Draconian diets on herself but never has the strength to keep them up to the end; inflicts on herself treatments of every variety, from mud baths to sweating suits, from saunas followed by twig-beating to anorexic pills, from acupuncture to homeopathy, and from medicine balls, home trainers, forced marches, foot treading, chest expanders, parallel bars, and other exhausting exercises to every kind of massage possible: hair-glove massage, dried-squash massage, boxwood rolling-pin massage, massage with special soap, pumice stone, alum powder, gentian, ginseng, cucumber milk, and coarse salt. The one she is going through now has a particular advantage over all the others: it allows her to get on with other things at the same time; specifically, she uses these daily seventy-minute sessions during which the vibrator cushion will bring its alleged benefit successively to her shoulders, her back, her hips, her buttocks, her thighs, and her stomach to tot up her dietary performance: she has in front of her a little brochure entitled Complete Table of Energy Values of Customary Foods, in which the foods whose names are printed in special characters are obviously those to avoid, and she compares the figure it gives – chicory 20, quince 70, haddock 70, sirloin 220, raisins 290, coconut 620 – with those of the foods she took the previous day and of which she has noted the precise quantities in a diary obviously kept for this purpose alone:

TEA, NO SUGAR, NO MILK	0
ONE PINEAPPLE JUICE	66
ONE YOGHURT	60
3 RYE BISCUITS	60
GRATED CARROTS	45
LAMB CUTLETS (TWO)	192
COURGETTES	35
GOAT CHEESE, FRESH	190
QUINCES	70
FISH SOUP (WITHOUT BREAD OR GARLIC MAYONNAISE)	180
FRESH SARDINES	240
CRESS AND LIME SALAD	66
SAINT-NECTAIRE	400
BLUEBERRY SORBET	110
TOTAL	1,714

Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission; to be sure, Anne has scrupulously entered all she ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but she has taken no account at all of the forty or fifty furtive raids she made between meals on the fridge and the larder to try to calm her insatiable appetite. Her grandmother, her sister, and Madame Lafuente, the cleaning lady who’s looked after them for more than twenty years, have tried everything to stop her, even going so far as to empty the fridge every evening and shut all edibles in a padlocked cupboard; but it was pointless: deprived of snacks, Anne Breidel flew into indescribable tantrums and went out to a café or to friends to appease her irrepressible bulimia. As it happens, the worst thing is not that Anne eats between meals, which many dieticians even believe to be quite beneficial, but that whilst she is irreproachably strict about her diet at table, forcing it moreover on her grandmother and sister as well, once she has left the dining room she turns amazingly slack: though she will not tolerate on the dinner table bread or butter or even supposedly neutral foods like olives, shrimps, mustard, or salsify, she wakes up at night to go and wolf down quite shamelessly oat flakes (350), slices of bread and butter (900), bars of chocolate (600), stuffed brioches (360), Auvergne blue cheese (320), walnuts (600), rillette pâté (600), Gruyère cheese (380) or tuna in oil (300). In fact she is practically continuously nibbling something or other, and whilst she is now doing her self-consoling sum with her right hand, with her left hand she is gnawing a chicken leg.

Anne Breidel is only eighteen. She is as clever at school as her younger sister. But where Béatrice shines at languages – she won first place in the nationwide Concours général for Greek – and aims to do ancient history and maybe even archaeology, Anne is a scientist: she graduated at sixteen, and has just come seventh at her first attempt at the entrance examination for the Ecole Centrale.

In 1967, at the age of nine, Anne discovered her vocation to be an engineer. That year, a Panamanian tanker, the Silver Glen of Alva, capsized off Tierra del Fuego with one hundred and four crew on board. Her distress signals were poorly received due to storms raging over the South Atlantic and the Weddell Sea, and her position could not be pinpointed. For two weeks, Argentinian coastguards and Chilean civil-defence teams, with help from ships sailing in the waters, searched tirelessly around all the myriad islets off Cape Horn and Nassau Bay.

Every evening, with increasing excitement, Anne read the news of the search; bad weather hampered it considerably, and, with every week that passed, the chances of finding survivors diminished. When all hope had been abandoned, the national dailies paid their respects to the unselfish men of the rescue teams, who had done the impossible in dreadful conditions to help any survivors there might have been; but several journalists claimed with some justification that the real cause of the disaster was not the bad weather but the absence in Tierra del Fuego, and more generally on all the seven seas, of receiving aerials of sufficient power to pick up Maydays in all atmospheric conditions from vessels in distress.

It was after she had read these articles, and cut them out, and stuck them into a special scrapbook, which she later used as the basis for a talk she gave in class (she was then in the first form), that Anne Breidel decided she would build the biggest radio beacon in the world, an aerial eight hundred yards high which would be called Breidel’s Tower and which would be capable of picking up any message broadcast within a radius of five thousand miles.

Up until she was about fourteen years of age, Anne spent most of her spare time drawing plans of her tower, calculating its weight and wind resistance, checking its coverage, working out its optimal siting – Tristan da Cunha, the Crozet Islands, the Bounty Islands, São Paolo Island, Isla Margarita, and, finally, Prince Edward Islands, south of Madagascar – and inventing detailed accounts of all the miraculous rescues it would make possible. Her taste for the physical and mathematical sciences grew out of this mythical image of a fusiform mast piercing the freezing fog of the Indian Ocean.

Her last two years of school, studying hard for competitive college entrance examinations, and the growth of satellite telecommunications finally got the better of her project. All that is left of it now is a newspaper photograph of her at the age of twelve, posing in front of a model she had spent six months making, an airy metal construction made out of 2,715 steel pickup needles held together by microscopic dots of glue, two yards high, as delicate as lace, as graceful as a ballerina, and bearing at its apex 366 minute parabolic receiving dishes.