CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
Louvet, 3
THE LOUVETS’ KITCHEN. On the floor is a greenish mottled linoleum; on the walls, a washable flowery wallpaper. Along the whole right-hand wall stand “space-saving” devices on either side of a worktop: a waste-grinder sink, hotplates, a rotisserie, a fridge-freezer, a washing machine, and a dishwasher. A range of pots and pans, shelves and cupboards complete this model fitted kitchen. In the centre of the room stands a small oval table in Spanish rustic style with metal trim, surrounded by four rush-seated chairs. On the table there is a porcelain plate-warmer decorated with a picture of the three-master Henriette, under the command of Captain Louis Guion, entering Marseilles harbour (after an original watercolour by Antoine Roux senior, 1818), and two photographs in a twin leather mount: one depicts an old bishop giving his ring to be kissed by a very beautiful woman, dressed as a Greuze peasant, kneeling at his feet; the other, a small sepia print, portrays a young captain in the uniform of the Spanish-American war, with earnest candid eyes beneath a high, fine brow, and a full-lipped, sensitive mouth beneath the dark silky moustache.
Some years ago the Louvets had a big party in their flat and made such a racket that around three in the morning Madame Trévins, Madame Altamont, Madame de Beaumont, and even Madame Marcia, who after all does not usually bother about such things, having knocked at the revellers’ door to no avail, ended up phoning the police. Two officers were dispatched to the scene, soon to be joined by an official locksmith, who let them in.
The kitchen was where they found the bulk of the guests, a dozen or so of them, improvising a concert of contemporary music conducted by the master of the house. He was dressed in a green-and-grey-striped dressing gown, with leather babouches on his feet and a conical lampshade for a hat, and sat astride a straw-seated chair, beating time with his left arm raised and his erect right index finger close to his lips, as he repeated, roughly every second and a half, trying to stop himself laughing: “softly softly catchee monkey, softee softee catchly monkly, softly softly catchee monkly”, etc.
The musicians, slumped on a sofa which had no reason to be where it was or wallowing on cushions, performed to the conductor’s gesticulations either by banging forks, ladles, and knives on diverse kitchen utensils, or by mimicking more or less successfully the sound of some instrument with their mouths. The most infuriating noises were those emitted by Madame Louvet, who sat in a veritable puddle banging two bottles of bubbly cider together until one or the other of the corks popped. Two guests seemed to be ignoring Louvet’s instructions and were making their own contribution to the concert: one was playing continually with one of those toys known as “Jack-in-the-box”, a golliwog head mounted on a powerful spring, which jumps out of the wooden cube in which it is loaded whenever opened; the other was slurping as noisily as he could a soup plate full of the kind of cottage cheese known in France as “silk-worker’s brains”.
The rest of the flat was virtually empty. There was no one in the living room, where a Françoise Hardy record (C’est à l’amour auquel je pense) carried on turning on the gramophone turntable. In the entrance hall, snuggled into a heap of coats and macintoshes, a ten-year-old child was fast asleep, still holding in his hands Contat and Rybalka’s bulky essay on Les Ecrits de Sartre, open at page 88, concerning the original performance of The Flies at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, then called Théâtre de la Cité, on 3 June 1943. In the bathroom, two men indulged in the game known to American schoolkids as tick-tack-toe and to the Japanese as gomoku: they were playing without paper or pencil, directly on the floor tiles, respectively using as playing tokens the remains of some Hungarian-brand cigarettes from an overflowing ashtray and wilted petals torn from a bouquet of red tulips.
Apart from causing this nocturnal disturbance, the Louvets have not been very noticeable. He works in some bauxite (or maybe wolfram) business, and they are often away.