Altamont, 4
CYRILLE ALTAMONT’S STUDY: a highly polished herringbone parquet floor, a wallpaper with a pattern of large red and gold vine leaves, and furniture constituting a very fine, heavy, cosy Regency suite: a nine-drawer kneehole desk, in mahogany, with the working surface covered in dark imitation leather, a rocking swivel chair in leather-padded ebony, horseshoe shaped, and a little reclining seat, something like a Recamier, in rosewood, with cast-iron claw feet. Against the right-hand wall, a large glass-fronted bookcase with a swan-neck pediment. Opposite, a large harbour chart on clothbacked paper, framed in wooden beads, a slightly yellowing reproduction of
On the rear wall to the left of the door giving onto the entrance hall are three pictures of almost identical dimensions: the first is a portrait, by Morrell d’Hoaxville, an English painter of the nineteenth century, of the brothers Dunn, two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects – palæopedology and æolian harps, respectively. Herbert Dunn, the æolian harp specialist, is on the left: he is a man of tall stature, thin, wearing a black worsted suit, a red beard trimmed to frame his face, and rimless oval spectacles. Jeremy Dunn, the palæopedologist, is a rotund little man, portrayed in his working clothes, that is to say equipped for an expedition in the field, with a good military haversack, a surveyor’s chain, a file, crowbars, a compass, and three hammers stuck in his belt, plus a staff taller than he is, with a long iron spike and a handle gripped with upstretched hand.
The second is a work by the American artist Organ Trapp, whom Hutting introduced to the Altamonts ten years or so ago on Corfu. It shows a gas station at Sheridan, Wyoming, in full detail: a green garbage can, very black, very whitewalled tyres for sale, bright cans of motor oil, a red icebox with assorted drinks.
The third work of art is a drawing signed Priou and entitled The Joiner in Rue du Champ-de-Mars: a young lad of twenty or so, wearing a secondhand sweater and trousers held up by string, warms himself at a brazier burning wood shavings.
Beneath Organ Trapp’s picture is a little table with two levels: on the lower shelf lies a chessboard with the pieces set in the position following the eighteenth black move in the match played in Berlin in 1852 between Anderssen and Dufresne, just before Anderssen began his brilliant play for mate which gave the game the nickname “Evergreen”:
On the upper shelf there is a white telephone and a vase with a trapezial profile overflowing with gladioli and chrysanthemums.
Cyrille Altamont now almost never uses the desk, for he has transferred all the books and all the things he needs or is fond of to the official flat that he is provided with in Geneva. There remain in this now almost always empty room only dead and frozen things, furniture with neat drawers and, in the locked bookcase, never-opened books: the Grand Larousse Universel, a nineteenth-century encyclopædia bound in green morocco, the complete works of La Fontaine, Musset, minor poets, and Maupassant in the standard Pléiade editions; bound sets of reviews: Preuves, Encounter, Merkur, La Nef, Icarus, Diogène, Le Mercure de France, and some artbooks and collectors’ editions, including a romantic Midsummer Night’s Dream with etchings by Helena Richmond, Venus in Furs by Sacher Masoch in a mink presentation case on which the title characters seem to have been branded with a red-hot iron, and the manuscript score of Incertum, opus 74 by Pierre Block, for voice and percussion, bound in buffalo hide with bone and ivory encrustations.
They are just putting the last touches to the room for the reception. Two butlers all clad in black spread a big white tablecloth over the desk. Framed in the doorway, a waiter in shirtsleeves is waiting to come in, as soon as they have finished, to lay the contents of his two baskets on the table: bottles of fruit juice and two octahedral bowls in blue porcelain filled with rice salad garnished with olives, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs, shrimps, and tomatoes.