31

DUTILLEUL AND THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER

The photograph of a blond man hangs on the wall by my father’s desk. He has a knitted scarf around his neck and a mysterious smile. Who is he? One of my mysterious uncles living in New York? Why don’t we ever see him? One day, I ask. My father hesitates before answering me.

‘Because he’s dead, Catherine. He was my friend. We were in the same Resistance cell.’

‘Your friend …’

He slows his breaths as if he were breathing some other air. When he finally makes up his mind, his eyes narrow and their pale light becomes as blue as a knife.

‘Dutilleul didn’t say anything much. In the cell, people didn’t talk to him as they did to others. There are not a lot of people around of his sort, Catherine. You’ll meet two or three in your lifetime, maybe fewer. He had an angel’s face, but it wasn’t only that. Some men come to earth but they are not from here.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘The Germans caught him …’

His words get stranded in the middle of nowhere.

‘… But if I’m here today, it’s thanks to Dutilleul. If you’re here today, it’s thanks to Dutilleul. They tortured him, Catherine, and he didn’t speak. If he had, I would have been killed and all the others in the cell too. And you would not exist, little one.’

We both stand very quiet, my father and I, we who are both here thanks to Dutilleul. I now know that my father had a friend. For, unlike other men, he never goes out for a beer or gets calls from a cheery male voice. Every day before leaving for school, I come and say hello to Dutilleul. I wonder who knitted his scarf. I don’t even know his first name.

Soon things start happening again on the outskirts of my perception. The bank is not going well, there are articles in the paper about it. Instead of reading and trying to understand, I stay in the cumulonimbus in which I have lived up to now. But I can feel Alexandre’s anxiety as keenly as Napoleon’s soldiers felt his loss at Waterloo. Even when the end was close, everything must have gone on just the same for Napoleon’s intimates. People try to prick my bubble and tell me things, but the information stays on the fringe of my consciousness and I can’t make sense of it.

At night, my father comes and sits on the end of my bed and tells me I must get married soon. I am fourteen. I must go to balls, he explains. He will take me to one next week. I have never been to a ball before and somehow it doesn’t feel like a party, but more like a necessity.

A dress is bought for me in a terrible hurry while I am at school. It is red and blue, a bit like some bright Napoleonic flag. Something in me lies low, says nothing. I am told to put it on and wear it around the sitting room in front of anyone who may be there. The agony of it reminds me of the English general walking in front of his own cannons so that his men won’t shoot at the French galloping towards them – until the very last moment. Poum makes the sign of the Cross at odd moments.

One night, my father appears in my bedroom.

‘Do you know, your sister Clothilde is beautiful, clever and very brave. She found an English parachutist wounded behind a tree. She could speak English, of course, because she had been brought up in New York. She dragged him up behind her on her bike and managed to cross the German lines and bring him home to me in Cudot. We patched him up, hid him and got him away safely, thanks to her.’

‘How did the Germans not see him?’

‘They saw him, of course. She told him: “Hug me tight as if we were lovers,” and waving happily to the Germans, pedalled as fast as she could.’

I am overawed by the dash of it. During that period, tales of female bravery come thick and fast. My other sister Marie-Alpais is younger and even prettier. According to my father, all Saint Phalle women are as beautiful as day, brave as men and don’t move an ear – which means they are also faithful to their husbands. This sister makes my father very proud too. All the young men of Paris were running after her. She would get them to take her to fun fairs and ask to go on the highest, scariest roller-coaster; being absolutely fearless, she thought it was fun. They, on the other hand, went completely green.

‘All your sisters got married at eighteen. You could get married younger. You are quite ready to have children. Saint Phalles are extremely fertile! We could get a dispensation.’

Then he becomes thoughtful.

‘You know, if anyone says anything about me, just raise your head and smile. Anyway, I’ll be there. But at the other balls, where I won’t be, just remember that the dogs bark and the caravan passes. They are just crows, my little one.’

The night of the ball inches forward. It’s organised by one of my father’s clubs. He never goes there because the people in it bore him, but these people organise balls at the drop of a hat, he explains. The night before, he takes me for a walk to the Avenue Gabriel, which has a thriving stamp market, where shrivelled men and women are selling their wares in little plastic tents, exchanging tiny bits of paper with tweezers. My father paces past them towards the trees.

‘Your sister Thérèse, Catherine, she went to work, which none of your other sisters did. She started out as secretary for a writer, then she wrote novels herself, then she became a publisher, too.’

He rubs his hands gleefully as if it were bitterly cold, but he’s not trying to get warm – he’s always warm because he’s a marcou.

‘You see, she was cleverer than all those men put together!’

Happily, he starts walking again, jabbing the high grasses with his umbrella like d’Artagnan. I don’t dare interrupt his joy, as I didn’t dare interrupt his sadness. I feel rather dull, like a drum with no sound. Something is grinding to a halt – perhaps it’s my childhood. Maybe my father feels it too, because he leans against a plane tree and crosses his arms.

‘I knew another man in the Resistance who haunts me.’

‘Was he your friend like Dutilleul?’

He shakes his head.

‘I never had a friend like Dutilleul. After his death, I never had a friend again.’

‘Like Touts?’

He smiles sadly.

‘Yes, like Touts. This other man I knew was caught by the Germans. He was not in my cell but we sometimes had to meet. He told me how he escaped. He was walking around the prison courtyard, thinking this was probably his last day. He knew he was going to be tortured. Suddenly he saw, between two cobblestones, a four-leaf clover and he picked it up. I’m going to be all right, he told himself. But he was tortured all the same. He said the pain was so wild, he knew nothing for a while; he was in a kind of limbo. It came in excruciating waves. His eyes felt full of blood. But, strangely, worst of all was their questioning, the unrelenting voice repeating the same thing, over and over again. They were asking him where the cell’s meeting place was. But the Resistance had recently started changing meeting places each time, so no one could give the location under torture. “I knew this,” said the man, “so I gave them a random location: the sixth tree after the corner of two roads in the Bois de Boulogne. It was pure invention. During the time they went to check it, I would have a breather.” After an hour, a German officer came back into the room and set him free. By an awful stroke of luck, he had unknowingly given them the right place.’

‘So sometimes it’s better not to have the baraka?’

My father shakes his head sadly.

‘Sometimes I wish Dutilleul had found that four-leaf clover.’

We, who usually have so much to say to each other, walk back to the apartment in silence. He pats me on the back encouragingly, like he did when I was on the merry-go-round.

‘You have to go to bed! Balls are very tiring.’

The next day is a Saturday. No school. To my surprise, my mother’s friend Pilar arrives. She is to go to the ball with us. Not my mother. This has to do with the situation. I don’t like it. It feels wrong. Though, since the age of three, I have loved Pilar over and above any of my mother’s other strange pals, over and above any of my own. I try to say something but my mother herself overrides me.

‘No, Catherine. We have to do it this way. Pilar is very kind to take my place. I cannot, do not wish to, go myself. I’m perfectly happy here with a book.’

She squeezes my arm and stares through me with her shipwrecked eyes and her strange unholy strength. It is a barrier, an impossibility. I feel uncomfortable, and though I don’t get along with my mother at this time, she having belatedly discovered the delights of motherhood, crowding me with rules and regulations from a vanished world, I want her there. I feel I am leaving a lung behind.

We climb into the car, which feels like a funeral carriage. My mother has given every outward sign of relaxation and cosiness, sitting in her chair, her mohair blanket on her knees, reading an outsized Russian novel and waving us off nonchalantly. Pilar is herself, as she is in every situation, sitting in the front with my father as if it were the most natural thing. The respectable screen for my first ball is the daughter of a Grandee of Spain and a widow to boot, but a wacky one – for she is the freest spirit in Christendom and only lends herself to this rigmarole to soothe her old friend’s fears. The whole situation is unreal. We arrive at a castle close to Paris, Breteuil, about an hour later. It’s festooned with fairy lights, but fairytales couldn’t be further from my mind. For a moment we all stare through the windscreen. We sit there quietly. We may have arrived, but it doesn’t feel like it.

We walk in, our names are called out at the door. There are so many people I feel dizzy. I look at Pilar, who tells me not to worry, it’s only a ball. My father pilots us both around, one hand under each of our elbows. Suddenly a waltz is struck. He leads Pilar to a seat and kisses her hand.

‘Do you mind if I dance with my little one?’

Pilar laughs. ‘But is that the point?’

She has a quirky sense of humour that sometimes disassembles my parents’ schemes, leaving them like broken toys at their feet.

He grabs me then and whirls me out. He’s the one who taught me how to waltz, so I know how to swim in with him. Suddenly there’s no more noise, no more voices, no more music even.

‘One, two, three,’ he whispers in my ear.

‘One, two, three,’ I whisper back, but it’s as if we were saying something quite different. Once we tread on each other’s feet, yet there is no interruption in our swimming. Because that is what we are doing, swimming away from all this, from all he wants me to strive for, because we both know, deep down, that he doesn’t really mean it. I think of Napoleon and Julian the Apostate. I think of Dutilleul, who died in unbearable pain to save my father’s life, but most of all I think of Alexander the Great.