II

The jubilee was imminent. The Armand-Dubois were expecting the Baragliouls any day. On the morning the telegram came announcing their arrival that evening, Anthime went out to buy a necktie.

He did not go out often. In fact he went out as little as possible, because he was unable to move around easily. Véronique was happy to do his shopping for him or bring tradespeople to him to take orders from his selections. He no longer worried about fashion but, as simple as he wanted his new tie to be (a restrained bow of black silk), he still wished to choose it. The light-brown satin cravat he had bought for the journey and worn during their stay at the hotel kept escaping from his waistcoat (which he liked to wear cut low), and Marguerite de Baraglioul would think that the cream-coloured scarf he had replaced it with, held in place by a big old worthless cameo set on a pin, was far too casual. It had been a serious error to give up the small black ready-made bows he wore in Paris, and especially not to have kept one as an example. What styles would Rome have to offer? He decided not to choose until he had been to several shirtmakers on the Corso and the Via dei Condotti. Rounded ends were too informal for a man of fifty. No, what he needed was a nice straight bow in dull black silk …

Lunch was not until one. He came back around midday with his shopping, in time to weigh his animals.

He was not vain, but he felt the need to try on his necktie before settling down to work. There was a piece of a looking-glass lying there, which he had used for some of his tropism experiments. He propped it on the floor, against a cage, and bent over to see his reflection.

His hair was still thick and he kept it cut short. It had been ginger once, but now it was that variable greyish yellow of old silver-gilt. He had bushy eyebrows and a look in his eyes that was greyer and colder than the sky in winter. His whiskers, shaved high and cut short, had the same reddish tinge as his stiff moustache. He ran the back of his hand over his cheeks and under his big square chin and muttered, ‘All right, all right, I’ll shave this afternoon.’

He took the necktie out of its paper and placed it in front of him, unpinned his cameo and unwound his scarf. His powerful neck was confined by a medium-height collar cut low at the front, whose corners he turned down. And here, in spite of my earnest desire to describe only what is essential, I cannot pass over Anthime Armand-Dubois’s cyst in silence. Until I have learnt to distinguish more skilfully between what is incidental and what is necessary, what else can I demand from my pen except accuracy and scrupulousness? In any case, who can say for certain that Anthime’s cyst had never played any part in, or influenced in any way, the decisions that he collected together under the heading of free thinking? He was willing to disregard his sciatica, but he could not forgive the Good Lord for the petty meanness of inflicting a cyst on him.

It had appeared out of nowhere shortly after he got married, and to begin with had been nothing more than an insignificant wart south-east of his left ear, on his hairline. For a long time he had been able to conceal the growth beneath his abundant hair, which he brushed over it in a curl. Even Véronique had not noticed it until one night, as she stroked his head, her hand had suddenly come up against it.

‘Heavens! What have you got there?’ she had exclaimed.

And almost as if, once identified, it had no reason to restrain its expansion, within a few months the cyst had become as big as a partridge’s egg, then a guinea fowl’s egg, then a hen’s egg, where it paused as Anthime’s receding hairline, struggling to perform its task, left it increasingly exposed. At the age of forty-six Anthime Armand-Dubois no longer needed to worry about looking appealing. He cut his hair short, and started to wear a style of detachable medium-height collar in which a kind of pocket hid and exposed the cyst at the same time. But enough about Anthime’s cyst.

He put the necktie around his neck. In its middle there was a fastening ribbon that was supposed to be threaded through a small metal tube and clipped in place with a tiny lever. It was an ingenious device, but it took only the first poke of the ribbon for it to become detached from the tie, which slithered off his neck onto the table. He was forced to call Véronique, who came running.

‘Be kind and sew this thing back on for me, will you?’

‘Machine-made,’ she muttered, ‘awfully trashy.’

‘It’s true it wasn’t sewn on at all well.’

Véronique always carried two needles, threaded with white and black respectively, pinned to the left breast of her tailored blouse. Standing by the French window, not bothering to sit down, she started the repair. Anthime watched her. She was a biggish woman with strong features and as stubborn as he was, but cheerful and smiling most of the time, so that even a faint moustache had not hardened her looks.