The student of Greek lived across the river from the lycée and the Rohan palace. On the quay itself is a row of picturesque ‘Alsacien’ houses that feature on picture postcards, have been elaborately restored, and are becoming snobbish, like the Marais of Paris. But behind is the Sainte-Madeleine quarter, stretching over to the Krutenau and the horrible ‘Suisse’ streets, dank, lightless and cheerless. The church is nothing to boast of and neither is the primary school, and neither is the commercial college where girls troop to become office staff.
Lying in the middle of all this is a little rectangle with trees; the Place des Orphelins. The houses are shabby, the trees few and dispirited, the parked cars almost welded together. The inhabitants have won, though, a notable victory. They have forced the municipality to declare it a no-parking area, and have already won a bit of terrain, roped it off, and have a good plan for more trees, a bit of grass, a bit of peace, a few benches where the old can sit quietly. Everyone is hoping, and Arthur Davidson one of the most hopeful, that the idea will spread. So many little squares like this. The idea of recovering tiny markets, artisanal workshops with outdoor show-spaces, the old pavement life under plane trees (and with orange trees?) could easily be twee and selfconscious. But one hopes. If the islands could spread and link – ah, this could still be a lovely town. Violence, fed and nourished by that hideous invention the automobile – ah …
Arlette found a shop, tiny, dark and smelly, where you can buy little cards of press-studs or hook-and-eyes, buttons, zips, bias binding or bra elastic. There was a tiny, dark, smelly little woman who looked on her with suspicion, spoke Alsacien, admitted without enthusiasm to speaking French. It is in these quarters that one realizes that Strasbourg is not French, any more than it is German. What did either country ever do for us, beyond a vague idea of making money somewhere from the deal, and acquiring a nonsensical prestige from pushing the frontier farther? Yet the cross-fertilization from both countries is exactly what makes the place interesting. There are those who would like to turn Alsace into yet another horrible little nation-state.
Michel lived upstairs: in fact the old biddy was his auntie.
These minute crooked houses, looking as though a poke would set them tumbling, built for dwarfs, are not very habitable. Nobody knew better than Arlette who had spent, by preference, years in the hideous Rue de Zurich. No heating, no sanitation, and you knock your head all the time. The younger generation – so incredibly tall – solves this problem with ingenuity. It takes up Japanese attitudes on the floor, throws out that clutter of tables and chairs that people born before the war need in order to be comfortable. Bed? – nonsense, a mattress will do. There is no space left on the floor? Hang it up like a birdcage. Michel had screwed things in the ceiling beams, secured planks with cords, slept up there airy among the geraniums.
Often there is no furniture at all, and they lie on the deck quite happy, a dictionary on one side and the record-player on the other. Michel, a thoughtful hammerer and tinkerer at bits of wood, made his own furniture. Who wants to buy any? Hideous, wretchedly thrown together, and fearfully expensive. Arlette was offered the only chair there was, a canvas one on an aluminium frame which served as spare bed, if anybody needed one.
He was the usual basket-ball-player’s size, with Joan of Arc hair, a silky black moustache he had never bothered shaving, fierce eyebrows like Monsieur Pompidou’s, aluminium glasses and candid gentle eyes. A very soft voice, an engaging casual hospitality.
The walls were full of pictures. A few of the expected ones, Toulouse-Lautrec posters, Cretan dolls, lovely broken columns not-quite-Doric and not-quite-Ionic, enough of both to be interesting, fifteenth century Persian miniatures, and so on. Much too that was less expected, Gothic, primitive – Flemish, very suitable to this architecture. He looked like a Clouet portrait himself, when the glasses were off, in a high-necked, long-sleeved black blouse with silver embroidery. Face very male, and yet feminine too as often at this age, and altogether a bit like Mary Queen of Scots with a moustache. He was sorry he hadn’t any cigarettes: would she like a bottle of beer?
Here at least Arlette did not feel handicapped by her lack of experience. She had had two sons, on the whole successfully. Even the closed one, the difficult one, who never uttered, of whom his father complained that no contact was possible at all (since whatever you said he was never listening) and who treated you with negligent affection as though you were a lovable but mentally deficient dog, had never been the anxiety to her he’d been to everyone else. A man was always so defensive and selfconscious. They loathed that, and put on the bored look. That particular one used, when spoken to about anything serious, to let his jaw hang and his eyes go glassy, so that Pa, a monument of patience in all his professional dealings, became intensely irritable.
One had to avoid heavy-handed tact. Nothing but the truth will do, and that as plain and short as possible. Anything that smells of cant, humbug, hypocrisy or an ulterior motive, and you lose them. Michel took some convincing. Was she the cops or the social worker or the Ministry of Education? No? Then something governmental, departmental, municipal? Neither? Then, if he might ask without seeming rude, what the hell was she? The family! Because really, sorry you know, but he didn’t want to get involved. Oh, she was just in it for the money? That was all right; didn’t see anything wrong with that. But if they were paying her then she was kind of ambassador from the family, right?
‘No, she came to me herself. The family wasn’t pleased at all: in fact they were hostile. Once convinced that I wasn’t trying to twist their arm, then they showed themselves anxious to help. Without her knowing about it. I’m not in a easy position: I don’t want to do anything behind her back and I mustn’t abuse her confidence. I come to you because you probably know her best.’
Michel, crosslegged on the floor, looked at her, and thought her over, shared a bottle of beer into two mustard glasses, and embarked on a sketch of Marie-Line.
‘Une Paumée’; a duck with a malformation of the wing. An emotional one, safety valve jammed, brimming all the time and threatening to blow its boiler. A nice girl, a pretty girl, a warmhearted girl, and with a conspicuous talent for doing the wrong thing. He had liked her a lot: he still did. She’d some very good qualities. Didn’t want to sound a prig, but she was a very entangling person and she slopped over. Vulnerable. Cramped and who’d blame her, with that goddam family. She’ll be all right, if people let her alone a bit. They won’t, and she goes on tumbling into disastrous situations, and getting a black eye, and one’s got to build up her confidence. Not knock it down. People pick her up, and then drop her because she’s a bloody bore, and that’s all wrong. You might think me selfish, or coldblooded, and I don’t care if you do, but I didn’t want an emotional relationship with her because she’s a mess, on my account, and on hers because she’s not able to handle it and she only gets wounded.
She’s pretty, and she’s highly attractive, and I did once go to bed with her, and that was wrong and highly foolish, and I tried to make it up to her, and I hope she feels she can rely on me. She drinks and becomes reckless. Dope of some sort, wouldn’t be surprised. They’re always experimenting with some rubbish. Not from me she never got any, I don’t see any use in it and it’s certainly bad for her. Reckless enough as it is.
This other Michel? An art student? I’ve heard of him. She’s talked about him. Doesn’t interest me, don’t much like what I hear. Didn’t welcome interference from me so I wasn’t about to attempt any. That wouldn’t do any good. Don’t know where he lives; try the Beaux Arts.
Good that she has sense enough to ask for help; she needs it. And she’s a valuable person. I’d hate to see her in trouble. I’ll do what I can for her. But I’ve a lot of work. Not like that pissy baccalaureat. An entry class for a higher school; the competition’s tough, you know: you’re up against the Family Favourites from Louis le Grand and Henri Quatre; the Parisian Orchids.
Arlette thought him a valuable person too. Better able to defend himself than poor old Marie-Line. He knew where he was going.
She made a couple of false casts. The School of Decorative Arts was in the Krutenau, no distance: pleasant building with a nice garden. She got no help from a tiresome secretarial female who thought that students were a pest and shouldn’t be allowed. And there were too many Michels, and all sounding or proving wrong. But there was a Michel – if you follow – whose surname was Michel. Jean-Luc Michel. No longer a student. Finished school. An artist now. Lives over in the Petite-France, one of those old houses.
It is the most picturesque part of Strasbourg. The engineer Vauban dammed the river here and sent it different ways, to make a moat around the fortified town: downstream of his beautiful bridge is a weir and a millstream and backwaters, and crooked streets through the seventeenth-century huddle, and the city fathers are busy restoring a nostalgic atmosphere with cobblestones and antique gas lamps, and rather pathetic corners of greenery. The most tumbledown of the old blocks have been razed in favour of exceedingly expensive flats in suitably steep-roofed dove-cote style, but where they are pressed thickest and darkest, and dingiest, there you find the poor who live in highly insanitary and crowded fashion. The streets are blind, greasy old masonry alternating with heavily barred windows choked with a century of dust. The very word ‘alsatia’ seems to have been invented to describe these houses.
A door yielded to her push. Stone flags, remnants of ragged plaster, loud smells of Portuguese cooking and loud voices in what didn’t sound like Portuguese. Might be Yugoslav, and so might the cooking. A stone stair mounted. But she’d got it right: a big plywood notice painted in bright blue said J-L. Michel, with an arrow and various mermaids, pointing upwards. Repeated on a smaller scale on the next landing. At the second was a door in the same violent ultramarine, and ‘Michel’ in script. A card said ‘Come on in; faites comme chez vous’, so she did.
Immense surprise. Instead of the darkness, the dirt, and the plaster chewed down to humid old stonework it was bright, white, beautiful. The walls had been fresh-plastered and whitewashed, the old wooden beams carefully stripped and restored. This was all attractive. Art, mostly looking bad but anyhow vigorous, stood and hung about in quantities; that was to be expected, but the floors had fresh planking and several largish green trees stood about in pots. As Arlette knew from only that morning, such things cost lots of money. A doorway was open to a kitchen. Also all modern. Tiles, two gleaming new fridges, a cooker grander than her own. Lots of bottles, bundles of herbs. Not that much money in art; fellow must have come into an inheritance. No owner of all this to be seen: she repressed the temptation to pinch a bottle of champagne and a few shallots in a plait and do a bunk with them.
‘Monsieur Michel,’ she bawled.
‘In here,’ a robust baritone bawled back. She pushed a very nice original oak door, and surprise heightened. Two rooms or maybe even three had been knocked into a narrow but splendid studio facing on the inner courtyard. The old windows replaced, in good taste, by much bigger ones. On a big table with two anglepoise working lamps the artist was doing things with acid to a copper sheet. The press for pulling prints stood against the far wall. The artist was tall and burly, with a bushy beard, a blue-jean suit, sandals, and a superduper-emperorlength cigarette.
‘This is the grander for being so unexpected,’ looking jealously at a lemon tree four times the size of the one Mr Taglang had given her.
He beamed with approval. Splendid-looking, and the looks suited the Bohemian get-up: the thick dark brown hair waved and curled naturally above well over six foot of muscular body, bright intelligent eyes and a good forehead. At first glance most impressive; almost the young Augustus John. At second glance a bit too pleased with himself.
‘Yes, if I could do something about that damn entrance one could have a gallery here. But we have a permanent exhibition, me and a few chaps. And that’s better than gallery space, and the bastard taking twenty or more of every per cent you earn. What can I do for you?’ with an air of being ready for anything.
Arlette grinned.
‘Not really in the market today, but could be another time.’
‘Just window-shopping huh? Make yourself at home. The loose prints in the sheaf are really cheap, only three to seven hundred apiece. The walls three to five thousand, bar one or two of the biggies. A drink if you want it? White wine or a kir?’
‘No thanks; I’ll wander though.’
‘Sure. I can’t leave this, I’m afraid; got to time it carefully.’
The prints were commercial stuff; competent streetscapes on nice broad lines. Nothing to write home to Mother about, but look nice on the living-room wall of German tourist bourgeoisie, and that was what they were designed for. The Alsace wine towns, and the hill landscapes of the country round them. With the smells of the acid came an incensey smell of expensive male stuff to dab under the ear. The hands were too white. He was only twenty-two or three, but had already the practised patter. Another one who knew where he was going, and seemed well on the way with no time lost.
‘See one of my posters?’ he enquired.
‘A girl I know mentioned you. Marie-Line Siegel.’
‘Ah, yes. Doctor Siegel’s friends don’t buy many pictures, I’m sorry to say. I know the girl, of course. In fact she’s a tiny bit amorous,’ with a little laugh.
‘Yes I know.’
‘Really – how? She told you, I suppose. Well, don’t take it too seriously. Not exactly a grand passion. She’s not a minor, but I wouldn’t want her father stamping about making a scene. She’s a bit of a scene-maker herself.’
‘Oh, I’m not an emissary; I just know her and like her, that’s all. She worries me a bit. Drinks too much.’
‘Ach,’ casually, ‘nothing very dreadful.’
‘No, but a bit irresponsible. She has no mother and she’s rather vulnerable.’
Variety of facial expressions; virtuous, affronted, irritable: the no-earthly-business-of-mine and the even-if-it-were-I-wouldn’t-want-to-know.
‘I detest people who preach.’
‘The invariable excuse of the selfish and superficial.’
‘Why don’t you ask whether I sleep with her.’
‘A satisfaction to your vanity, no doubt.’
‘She’s of age to make up her own mind. You people who moralize make me sick.’
‘It must be true since it says so in Playboy Have you been giving her drugs too?’ He was silent for a moment, dabbing at the work in front of him with a rag, bending down and squinting at it, making a to-do of the concentration involved.
‘Got to make sure it’s all neutralized,’ chatty and relaxed. ‘Has she been telling you these tales?’ wiping his hands and throwing the rag in a corner. ‘Totally untrue you know. I wouldn’t mind, and it wouldn’t have any importance, but that sort of malicious invention can make trouble. One wouldn’t want to spread stories like that, and if I were you I’d advise her not to repeat them. Her word’s not that trustworthy. What people do is no concern of mine, but if you start imagining orgies here, smoking grass and group sex and rubbish like that, it’s total folklore. People always tell these tales about a studio. I’ve my living to make and it’s important to me and believe me, I don’t mix business with pleasure. I know plenty of these girls who hang around the art school but I tell you quite frankly they don’t interest me. I don’t want to say anything about Marie-Line. She’s a nice girl. But it excites them to haunt studios, and it excites them to make up lurid tales. Better believe me – nothing in them. I’ve smoked marijuana occasionally, who hasn’t, but I don’t use drugs and don’t have any here. Okay?’
‘Perfectly okay. You’re building it up rather, aren’t you? I came to say that if you care about her, don’t encourage her in anything silly. A bit of thought and you’ll see this is right; nothing to do with morality. Having said that, nice to have met you, and good luck with the business.’
‘Sure. No hard feelings. Sorry, just that people here imagine God knows what, all this haunt-of-vice stuff, don’t stop to think a painter has something better to do – I suppose I’m sensitive. Come again – bring your friends!’
Arlette, whose car was parked miles away, walked into the town and stopped to phone Arthur.