On the corner the deformed little man, who until the day before had been the Emperor, was going up in flames of papier-mâché while revellers in a dozen different uniforms danced around the pyre crazily singing ‘We’ll Hang the Kaiser Under the Linden Tree’. Jere and Manley watched a private and a lieutenant-colonel dancing together wearing each other’s caps. A full colonel snatched up a laughing Red Cross girl and kissed her long and passionately while onlookers cheered. Emboldened, Manley reached for Jere. She slapped him.

‘Je ne comprends pas,’ he said.

‘I don’t want you to kiss me just because everybody is kissing everybody. When you kiss someone I want it to be me.’

They went along with the crowd, they sang ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning’ and endless verses of ‘Mademoiselle’, they were in and out of packed cafés, they danced, drank champagne on the house, were picked up by a general in an open General Staff car on his way to Maxim’s. He insisted on assuming they were married and kept patting Jere’s hand and promising he would see to it that her husband was promoted, decorated and sent back to the States. When the general became too interested, they excused themselves to dance and slipped away through the crowd on the floor.

Outside on the Rue Royale they were caught up in a squad of riotous doughboys executing the goose-step and shouting in unison ‘Ein, zwei, drei, vier – Ach du Himmel!’ When they spied Jere they yelled, ‘Ein Fraülein!’ and broke ranks to embrace her. One was wearing a Kaiser’s moustache of charcoal and several sported Prussian helmets. To Manley’s annoyance, Jere kissed each of the boys smilingly on the lips.

Dawn brought them to Les Halles, where they found themselves gorging on pig’s feet, washed down with champagne, in the company of a happily drunken French butcher and a giant Senegalese sergeant. Then the four of them, arm-in-arm, walked around the market place together, singing the foulest songs the butcher and the sergeant could think of, which, with a great show of conscientiousness and affection, they were teaching Manley and Jere.

It had been one of those nights when their luck was high. It would have been impossible to find a cab and they were miles from Jere’s quarters in the Cité Bergère but suddenly they were embarrassed by too much transportation. The butcher wanted the honour of taking them home in his truck. The Senegalese, for some mysterious reason they preferred not to question, had a motorcycle with a sidecar at his disposal. He would consider himself insulted if they did not avail themselves of its use. The butcher and the Senegalese fell into argument as to who should have the privilege of driving them home. It turned out to be a magnificent match. They were both well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds.

‘The first morning of peace in Europe in four and a half years,’ Manley muttered to Jere as they watched their two friends smash each other’s faces.

At last the butcher was overcome. As he lay panting on the sidewalk, his left eye and his nose a bloody mess, Jere addressed him sweetly. ‘Thank you just the same for your kind offer. Now go straight home and wash your face.’

The burly Frenchman, from his sitting position, touched his hand to his sweaty forehead in a casual salute. ‘Vive la Victoire,’ he said, and then, with an admiring nod toward his conqueror, ‘I leave you in good hands.’

Except for the fact that their Senegalese seemed to lack either a brake or any interest in slowing down, the ride through the city was uneventful. The Senegalese deposited them at the gate, insisted on kissing them on both cheeks, wished them good luck and a full life, and then, like all good characters in fairy tales and drunken escapades, zoomed off down the street, never to be seen by them again but always to be remembered as a fine figure of a man with a superlative memory for earthy lyrics.

Jere tried the gate. ‘I was afraid it would be locked,’ she said.

‘Shall I come up for a few minutes?’

He felt sure of himself. The easy way she had handled those blunt verses and how she had laughed at the stories at Les Halles and the little remarks she dropped.

She looked at him playfully. ‘It’s half past five, my lipstick’s all smeared, my hair’s a mess, I’m two-thirds blotto, I feel older than Elsie Janis’s mother – and you still want to come up?’

‘I’m a very determined young man.’

‘Oh, dear, and I’m a very undetermined young woman. That’s dangerous.’

She turned her lips to him at last, but almost in a taunting way. It made him want to kiss her brutally, to stop this incessant playing. For a moment their kiss was the only reality.

But as suddenly as she had offered her lips she withdrew them again.

‘People who close their eyes when they dance always close their eyes when they kiss.’

Ready for her to go limp in his arms, he was furious.

‘I didn’t realise I was dealing with such an expert.’

‘And your “Shall I come up for a few minutes?” Oh, handsome Lieutenant Hallenstein, how many Red Cross girls and telephone operators and visiting entertainers have you thrilled with that silken phrase?’

He would have liked to throttle her.

Her hand dropped lightly on his arm. ‘Mannie, you’re forgetting half my warning already. Never take me too seriously.’ Her hand slipped down into his, and squeezed it consolingly. ‘Thanks for a swell time.’

Managing to mutter something polite, he staggered off in the general direction of the quays. But he had taken only a few steps when he heard a piercing whistle. It was Jere, with two fingers in her mouth like a tomboy. ‘Don’t slouch when you walk,’ she called. ‘You’ll get round-shouldered.’

As he groped his way down to the Pont de la Tournelle, he whistled his own flat, who-cares arrangement of ‘Butterfly’.

All the next day, through a party at the apartment that was less an Armistice celebration than a counter-attack against ennui and let-down, drinking Big Berthas, a violent concoction he had named with Hank Osborne, his French nurse Mignon and officers and girls who came passing through, Manley’s mind kept wandering off to the Cité Bergère. The problems of the Armistice stirred him less than the riddle of Jere Wildberg. Was she fast? Was she a New World flapper in bright colours? Or was she something strangely un-American, a true eccentric? A self-acknowledged ‘keen judge of character’, this time he had to give himself a failing grade. All he could be sure of was that he was intrigued – no, that word was too mild, and he reached for a more accurate one – incited.

Talk curled around him in argumentative smoke-rings. A PRO major from Tours, hopefully Wilsonian, believed in the Armistice as the first step toward a lasting peace and a new world order. But Mignon – Minnie they called her – wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be better for France and the Allies to crush Germany once and for all while they had the chance. Hank didn’t think it mattered too much one way or the other. The Revolution was bound to spread from Russia to Germany and France. ‘When you keep on using people for cannon fodder, they finally explode in your face.’ He wasn’t a Bolshie, but Christ when you looked at all the raw stuff pulled in the name of Democracy … Manley drank his Big Berthas and thought of Jere.

‘This time the people are gonna be heard from,’ Hank insisted.

‘Aw, in a month you’ll be flying against the Bolshies in Siberia and hating ’em worse ’n the Heinies,’ the PRO prophesied.

‘The hell I will,’ Hank said. ‘This boy’s applying for his discharge as soon as he c’n sober up enough to find his CO and make ’im sign the recommendation.’

Then they were back on topic A. Provided the war was really over (which no one quite believed yet) how soon would they get back into civvies? And B: what would the States be like? And C: whatinhell were they going to do?

‘I know what this boy’s gonna do,’ Hank announced. ‘I’m goin’ out with Minnie to her folk’s farm and grow a long beard and sleep till noon and tank up on Burgundy every afternoon and jump into bed with Minnie every evening after supper and sleep until noon again and then get up and eat half a dozen eggs and comb my beard and …’

‘But Henri,’ Mignon interrupted (they were the only Franco-American arrangement Manley knew that seemed to have a future), ‘you have an active mind. You cannot do that all your life.’

‘Who’s talking about all my life? I was just thinking of the next forty or fifty years.’

Manley was thinking about his plans too. Of course the sensible move was returning to Beatrice. If he could get through law school, Mr Vining would be obliged to take him into the firm. Why, in twenty years, he and Beatrice—the slide blurred and refused to stay in focus. Damn it, if he was a writer, now was the time to prove it. He had a third of a novel written, and a little money saved up. He should stay in France, where a dollar hadn’t lost its prestige, and finish Friends and Foes.

He couldn’t imagine himself explaining the plan of his novel to Beatrice Vining. Jere was the girl to tell. She had that nice kind of madness. Nothing surprised her. She had a horror of ruts and grubbing.

‘Where you goin’, Hally?’

‘Just remembered. Gotta call Pershing. He’s waiting for me to tell him what to do next.’

‘Tell him I said to get the lead out and let’s get the hell home,’ said a bleary-eyed captain in the Field Artillery.

As Manley flung open the great iron gate, he felt a shortness of breath, a pounding in his heart, a quickening of pulse – familiar symptoms of the psychosomatic affliction called, in the poverty of our vocabulary, love.

Behind the desk a powerfully bosomed concierge wearing a prominent black crucifix was primly knitting an absurdly small pair of socks. ‘Mademoiselle Wildberg? Ah, Mademoiselle Wild-airre. Oui, m’sieur.’ It was room 37. She would send a message.

‘Don’t bother. I’ll run up,’ Manley said.

The woman began to protest, then shrugged and returned to her little world of yarn that she could control.

He knocked on the door.

‘Come in, Mannie.’

The odd yellow-green cat-eyes, peering out from under bangs, regarded him impertinently. ‘How did I know it was you? Your knock, m’sieur. No one else bold enough to come up and knock without being invited would knock so shyly.’

He looked around at incredible disorder. Old clothes on a pile on the floor. Ends of things hanging out of bureau drawers. Books and magazines scattered on tables, in the window seat and on the floor. Crumpled papers that had missed the wastebasket. Cigarette butts crushed into damp coffee saucers.

She followed his eyes and grinned. ‘I suppose you’re terribly neat.’

‘I guess so. I’ve always had to keep after my room-mates.’

‘Good. Be neat for both of us.’

He noticed the steamer trunk in the corner, used as an auxiliary bureau. Stencilled on top was the name W-i-l-d-e-r.

‘So your name is Wilder?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘What made you say Wildberg?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Everybody there has a name like that. And sometimes I get tired of being me.’

Manley felt as if a sack of stones had just been removed from his shoulder.

‘But why in the world do you work for the Jewish Welfare Board?’

‘Well, first, Anne Morgan bounced me for being AWOL. Then I found out the JWB let their hostesses wear evening clothes at dances. And I hate uniforms. On women I mean. I wouldn’t mind so much if I were plump and homely. But I’m not.’

She was wearing an ankle-length green chiffon tea gown that followed her tall, wiry figure.

‘That’s the main reason I work for the JWB. And then it makes me laugh to think how much it annoys Pate.’

‘Pate?’

‘Papa. Calling him Pate annoys him too. In fact everything annoys him that isn’t done exactly the way he orders. Sometimes I think I might marry a Jew – it would serve him right for being so narrow-minded.’

‘You know, my name really isn’t Hallenstein either. It’s Halliday. Manley Halliday.’

She curtsied prettily again. ‘Welcome back to the Anglo-Saxon fold, Halliday.’

Just the same, and all fooling aside, he was damned relieved.

‘For twenty-four hours you were the most beautiful Jewess I’ve ever seen.’

‘Are you rich?’ she asked. The uniform was expensively tailored and he had the airs that go with money.

He was beginning to get used to her sudden questions.

‘You mean permanently? Or tonight?’

‘Oh, tonight will do.’

‘Tonight I’ve got a month’s pay in my pocket – my allowance from Uncle Sam in return for putting in an occasional appearance at the S & S office, where my official job is not to interfere with the journalistic activities of the most ornery assortment of enlisted men to be found this side of a Russian Soviet. But to come to the point, Miss Wilder, my entire wealth is at your disposal.’

‘In that case you can take me to Prunier’s. Did I warn you, I have frightfully expensive tastes? I’m a fiend for caviar and oysters and buckets of champagne.’

Even in the crush of diners waiting for tables at Prunier’s, they found it easy to talk to each other. And all through dinner and on to the Café de Paris and further on to a little place in the Montmartre that specialised in second-rate champagne and second-hand American jazz they talked the way only young people can when their words glow with the special intensity of romance. Manley liked the way she listened, her head down, her eyes very wide, attentive – somehow she was able to make listening a positive act (Or was this, he wondered, simply phase one of falling in love?) He told her things he hadn’t even revealed to Hank Osborne – his sense of loss, of having missed something vital to his career in not seeing action at the front. His fear, ‘to be absolutely honest about it’, that Hank might crack through with the first great war book (‘Hank certainly has it in him’) and that his own account of rear-echelon stagnation would seem narrow and tame.

It was probably a silly damnfool notion that he could write a novel. The stuff he had written so far was so much flatter than the way he saw it in his mind. But sometimes he had come right back to the room from evening chow and pounded till daylight and he could feel it coming, pouring out of him in a stream that seemed strangely independent of him. Then he could see it in print, with his name in big letters, hear everybody saying Have you read Friends and Foes, why, Halliday has it all over Hergesheimer. Oh, he was a fool, a callow simpleton to have such dreams. There were things he wanted to say but they stayed locked in his head. He would never be a second Wells or Conrad or Compton Mackenzie, he was morosely convinced, just one more unpublished would-be author.

More than just listening, Jere was going through it with him. He found himself telling her of his visit to a German prison camp some months before, of his revulsion for the profane and ignorant American major who treated all Germans as if they were pigs and of the chance meeting with a prisoner who happened to be a mild but inquisitive philologist.

‘It made me wonder,’ Manley was summing it up for Jere over cognac and coffee, ‘which was friend and which was foe? Which was the man we’ve been fighting to defend and which was the tyrant we’ve been trying to crush? I left the States with a lot of juvenile black-and-white notions about noble and atrocious causes. I would’ve made a peach of an editorial writer for the Literary Digest. Now I just want to write about people, good and bad, some on one side, some on another, caught up in something that carries them all along together, combat men going about their bloody business reluctantly and with no grand heroics, and SOS officers having the time of their lives working the old Army game. I want to get down to the rock-bottom truth of all this, Jere.’

A French band straining bravely to render American songs in ragtime had made it impossible for any but the enthralled to concentrate. But now it slipped into something more comfortable. ‘Poor Butterfly’ fluttering from weeping violins.

They looked at each other; they already had quite a repertoire of looks with different meanings.

‘Our song,’ Manley said. This was suddenly much more important than any discussion of literary dreams.

‘Dance with me.’

Tall and thin – supple he would have said – she reminded him a little of Irene Castle as they whirled slowly together in a kind of floating somnambulism. He became aware of admiring glances from seated onlookers and other dancers. It gave him a racy sense of appreciation of what a startlingly handsome couple they were. Somehow the tragic death of Vernon Castle lent poignancy to the moment. Just a year or so before, Vernon Castle had lived with the world literally at his feet, with his sweetheart for a partner, his partner for a bride, personifying the triumph of romance over reality. No wonder their place had been called Castle in the Sky. But suddenly the castle had become a plane and the plane a junk-pile of twisted metal and torn flesh on a Texas field. Fame, romance, success – these things were so precious that no one could be entrusted with their possession for more than a moment. Here, hold this, it’s yours, for an instant! Then it was snatched back and something fell away from under you and you were plummeting to earth – Crash.

Somehow it was good to feel so sad, to be so young, to have such hope and such vanity, to move with such delicious ease. As they circled slowly in perfect time together she asked, ‘Why are you so sad, m’sieur?’ It was a little coy, but he didn’t mind.

‘Because while we’re enjoying this it’s slipping out of our hands. Jere, if we could only stop the big clock and be us tonight the rest of our lives.’

‘But we can’t. We’ll grow old and ugly and say humph to young people.’

He held her very close. She liked the pressure of his hand urging her closer. She was the goddess of fleeting time and if he merged her body with his, prone together like the midnight hands, the works might be stopped, the hour of youth forever suspended.

All this leapt up from a dark fold in Manley’s brain as he studied the panel in the entrance of the Sutton Place apartment house and pushed the button beside the little black letters forming Wilder-Halliday.

What is more painful than the memory of lost pleasures?

As the self-operating elevator moved up the shaft on its creeping journey toward the roof, Manley’s mind, in another building and another time, moved slowly down into the past, level after level, until he was back at the Cité Bergère.

They were closing the gates for midnight curfew. If he went up with Jere now he would have to stay until dawn, thanks to this medieval architectural appendix Paris was too sentimental to remove. The Rimbaud translation, which Manley now seemed so anxious to hear, provided a semi-respectable motive for going back to 37 with her.

Jere poured them each a cognac. Lighting two tall candles, she turned out the overhead light. It seemed to Manley that the yellow glow of the candles was exactly the colour tone of her skin.

‘Rimbaud and bright lights just never seem right together. He lived in his own world of half-light. When you read Rimbaud – or go into Rimbaud, I should say – you feel sure he must have written by the light of hellfire.’

Manley realised for the first time what an extremist she was. She drank her brandy avidly, searched haphazardly among the helter-skelter of her desk for the work in progress. It was an atmosphere of dark intensity she created as she began to read, first from the Rimbaud original and then her own:

She paused. ‘The next words are “Quelle vie!” That’s what drives you crazy. You’d have to say “What a life!” or even “What an existence!” But the thing about Rimbaud is, he’s so direct, blunt. If I could only find two short words that produce the impact of Quelle vie! It’s a better language, that’s the trouble. Much better for poetry. So the best I can ever do is a dullish paraphrase.’

‘How about “Some Life!”’

‘Mmm. That’s closer to the feeling. But isn’t it awfully American?’ She tossed the scribbled page away impatiently. ‘Oh, the hell with it. If people want to read Rimbaud, let ’em learn French.’

She had drunk her first cognac quickly and now she poured herself another. Manley was still inhaling his luxuriously. He was wondering, should he grab her suddenly, should he lead her gently toward the bed … She rose and went to the window. ‘I think I’ll miss the air raids. When they came over it gave you such a – such a whole feeling. All your little worries and fears seemed so futile …’

‘Purification by TNT,’ Manley said. His voice was low. He had come up behind her at the window.

Lips, open a little in hunger, fed upon each other. His hands were two thieves, one holding her fast while the other made a desperate search, a hurried, clumsy thief pulling at buttons, tearing at openings.

‘Mannie, I – I hate that feeling.’

Fighting him off was passion too.

‘Jere, I – I can’t help it – you make me …’

‘Fingers under my clothes …’

‘Jere, please, please, you must …’

The words struck him like sharp little stones; ‘There isn’t anything in this world I must do, except die, and I’ll never forgive God for making me do that.’

She drew away. He felt limp, gross, boorish; he loathed himself. All lathered up in a sweat of passion, he thought in disgust.

But she was the one to apologise. ‘Mannie, I know – it’s a compliment. My nose would grow long as Pinocchio’s if I told you I didn’t want you to want me this way. But – when it happens, there won’t be any tugging at buttons. If it happens, we’ll both know it’s going to happen, and we’ll come to each other and the clothes will fall away.’

Idiotically – or did it only seem so in retrospect – he had taken her hand and kissed her fingertips. ‘Bien entendu, Mademoiselle Wildberg.’

The balance was restored.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m one of those RCVs who’s listened to one too many lectures on a Christian mind in a Christian body.’

‘Now don’t forget, we’re a couple of JWB kids. When a Hallenstein can’t mess around with a Wildberg, what are we Jews coming to?’

At one o’clock in the morning, with nerves still taut, that made them howl with laughter.

‘After all,’ Manley ventured, ‘it’s not your fault if your father slipped an old-fashioned chastity belt on you before you came overseas and locked the key in his safe.’

‘That’s my father – holding all the keys, always – thousands of them – he wears them all on his belly like a fat sommelier.’

Conversation and brandy flowed through the night together in a swift, warm stream. Everything one had to tell the other seemed of enormous importance to both. Manley learnt that Jere’s father was the George Nibely Wilder of Wilder, Spence & Worthington, the Wall Street law firm. Knowing she was a Wilder didn’t make her any more attractive. But it did make her attractive in a different way. There were no obstacles to his falling in love, maybe even marrying a Wilder.

He learnt that Jere had been packed off to Switzerland when she was fifteen, as a sort of banishment from the Wilder realm. ‘I was the only one who talked back to Pate. My sisters were broken early like good little colts. Everything he ever asked me to do, I’d do the opposite. He thought he could run our lives by deciding how much money to allow us. He thought money and what he called “all the advantages” could take the place of – place of …’ She laughed defiantly. ‘I showed him. I ran away from that school in Geneva with a French boy called Jean-Jacques. Named after Rousseau. I loved the name. I guess that was the only thing about him I was in love with. As soon as I got on the train with him I couldn’t stand him. It had just been one of those school things. When you’re with a lot of girls, and you’re competing, and you see a boy somebody else likes very much, you can make yourself believe all kinds of things. He had horribly oily hair and was only sixteen years old and had read the complete works of Casanova and he was all mishy inside.’

Mr Wilder, using a convenient Government inspection tour, had arrived promptly. He had meant to be patiently firm and severe because, after all, he was a reasonable man and he realised what a handicap it had been for a high-spirited girl to be raised without a mother. But Jere’s emotionalism and hateful temper had finally unnerved him. When he placed her in a highly recommended school in Nice, it was with the understanding that they would no longer bother with the conventions of a proper father-daughter relationship. ‘I will continue to support you and pray that you do no more than you have already done to besmirch the Wilder reputation,’ he had said stiffly.

‘Well,’ Jere went on, ‘at Madame Legendre’s in Nice, the headmistress was sleeping with the Latin teacher. I found out – oh, in a very sly way – and she hated me like rat poison after that. A bunch of us slipped out through a second-floor window one night and went riding with some French junior officers. We all got caught, because a teacher’s pet snitched, but I was the only one Madame expelled. Then I said right out loud in front of teachers and everybody what I knew about her and Monsieur Guillon. It was a terrible thing to do. Because Madame Legendre ran a very respectable school and Monsieur Guillon was married. Sometimes I think I like to hate people. Hurt people, I mean. Always dominating or being dominated. That’s why I like Rimbaud. He was such a good hater. I mean, he hated the whole thing – religion, domesticity, business and laws, respectability – “these Occidental swamps”.’

He was beginning to see how her mind worked. It travelled no rational straight line. It was an active but reckless and whimsical mind that rushed to sudden violent conclusions, a mind often struck by brilliance but a brilliance that zigzagged as haphazardly and uselessly as lightning.

While the little cubicle of an elevator crawls up the wall to the penthouse apartment of Jere Wilder-Halliday as tediously as a potato bug, the memories slide by with the speed and invisibility of light.

That first post-war winter in Paris, for those who knew their Army game, foreshadowed the waves of American tourists and expatriates soon to come. More than ever, Manley felt that his uniform was a masquerade, especially since, through a fait of discreet cultivation, he wore the Croix de Guerre.

They mingled with the American crowd busy straightening out the world in the plush corners of the Crillon. The spectacle provided Manley with a new ending for his book. His last chapter viewed the goings-on at the Crillon as ‘the crowning absurdity of a generation with a singular talent for embracing absurdities – for rising with earth-shaking enthusiasm to the most absurd of occasions.’

Jere, characteristically, expressed her feelings somewhat more directly. At the Crillon bar one evening she and Manley were boasting about their athletic prowess. Manley insisted that he had once sparred with Freddy Welsh and that the champion had told Manley he had the makings of a first-rate lightweight if he ever thought of turning pro. (This fistic myth was to cause Manley considerable difficulty, much climbing through imaginary ropes with six-drink courage.) Jere had boasted of her ability to do cartwheels and backward flips. (‘I dive fantastically well,’ she had added.) ‘Look, I’ll show you!’ she had said suddenly. She executed a perfect cartwheel in front of the bar.

It rated a box in next morning’s Paris Trib and a few scandalised lines in the Dyle Myle. Jere was quoted as saying, ‘Was it any sillier than some of the things going on in the ballroom?’

Everyone knew Jere Wilder after that. She became a sort of femme du moment like Regina Flory.

In March of 1919, to a young man in love, inefficiency, absent-mindedness, lack of regard for money and the ease with which she slipped off the corset of responsibility all seemed to be delightful traits.

People would turn to smile in appreciation when they entered rooms. Manley and Jere saw in their eyes the flattering reflection. They were a kind of double Narcissus.

Spring came to Paris like a big travelling circus. There was music in the streets and the girls were pretty again. Pinched faces filled out, children played round the fountains, Paris wore bright skirts bordered with chestnut blossoms and blue violets. Merry-go-rounds whirled and lovers took to sidewalk tables, parks, little boats, carriages, benches on the Seine, the Eiffel, lacy iron balconies, bridlepaths …

The first Memorial Day Manley wangled one of the S & S Fords and they drove out to the ceremonies at Suresnes. Jere looked charmingly – deceptively – provincial in her white organdie dress and oval-brimmed straw hat with its little black band running under her chin. They couldn’t help laughing as they drove out along the cobblestone streets of the suburbs. Not until they saw the incredible number of little white crosses on the hillside of Suresnes did they remember the mood of the day.

They were able to get quite close to the President. With his top hat and frock coat accentuating his height and his angularity, he looked less a popular leader than an undertaker presiding at the burial of a world. They had never seen anyone so severely in earnest. A personification of irony, this dry Scotch Presbyterian scholar who permitted himself to dream, this stern Princetonian aristocrat who, alone of the peacemakers, had captured the imagination of the common people of Europe.

They heard him say:

‘These men came … to defeat forever … arrogant, selfish, dominance … and to see to it that there should never be a war like this again.

‘It is our duty to see to it … that the mothers of America … of France and England and Italy and Belgium … shall never be called upon for this sacrifice again.

‘These men … have given their lives that the world might be united … in order to secure the freedom of mankind … The people … are in the saddle … this age rejects the standards of national selfishness …

‘We must have a League of Nations … not merely a peace settlement … There shall never be a war like this again …’

Righteousness, heavy as dew, settled on the brows of the listeners.

Prayers. Taps. Artillery salute. The minute of silence.

In their graves, should dead soldiers lie in a heap as they fell? Or at parade rest?

Stiff with virtue, fat with hope, the assembly moved off. Mr Wilson, the good man gone wrong and/or the wrong man gone good, retired with appropriate solemnity.

‘I’m glad you made me come,’ Jere said. ‘He makes you feel so positive – and hopeful.’

She was easily carried away. Two days later she would be agreeing with all the pronouncements of Wilson’s mistakes.

‘It sounds good,’ Manley admitted, ‘but when you think about the Italian demands, and all this talk about secret deals—Oh, hell, it’s too beautiful a day to think. Let’s just drive somewhere.’

The Ford seemed to lead them back along the Seine through Paris to the Bois de Vincennes. They stopped for vins blancs at a funny little place on the corner across from the fortress and then, beyond the suburbs at last, they went rolling on through the soft green countryside, following the Marne in the general direction of Reims.

Manley had never seen her so relaxed. She kept saying how much she loved the sunshine. She stretched and purred in it. All winter she had seemed high-strung and brittle.

They turned up toward Château Thierry. Farmers were ploughing around shell holes. A country church lay in ruins. A native caretaker was a scarecrow figure of desolation in an orderly garden of white crosses.

For the first time since their meeting half a year before, she talked about the war. He had grown used to the idea of her being so self-centred that the problems of translating Rimbaud would seem more important to her than human suffering and the puzzle of converting Armistice to peace.

‘Maybe the little white crosses are better off,’ she said suddenly when they had been left a kilometre behind. ‘I did a little aid work at a base hospital at Neuilly – I don’t think I ever told you. There were quite a few French gueules cassées there. There was one with no arms and no legs and just a mess of burnt flesh where his face used to be. He had no mouth at all, just a little charred hole. And yet – this was the scary part – he could talk. He kept pleading with the doctors to kill him. His name was Robert Denise. Before the war he had been a bicycle racer. One day I had to read him a letter from his fiancée. From the sounds he started making in his throat I could tell he was crying, but there wasn’t enough face left to be able to see …’

A shadow of silence slipped past them. She took a deep breath, opening her mouth as if the air were something good to eat. ‘Too nice a day,’ she said, ‘too nice a day.’ She looked over and smiled at him. Her straw hat had fallen back on her shoulders. He had never liked her so much before.

They had passed through a number of partially destroyed villages which were slowly coming back to life. Now they were approaching Vaux. Rising on the left was a gentle slope covered with apple trees in blossom. Just beyond was another small American cemetery where perhaps a company had been wiped out in one of the bitter battles of the last-gasp German counter-attack the year before.

‘Mmmm, smell the apple blossoms,’ Jere said. They had seen enough white crosses for one day.

Vaux was the first village of their journey to be totally destroyed. The broken neck of the church steeple drew a harsh line against the sky. Every one of the modest stone houses had collapsed into a pile of rubble. A great city in ruins is a tragic sight. A little village reduced to a junk-lot of broken stones makes one want to cry, the way the crushed body of a little girl side-swiped on a roadside is a more sorrowful sight than thousands of men lying dead on a battlefield. Human emotion has never excelled at higher mathematics.

They had to pick their way carefully along the battered road of the ghost-village. Nothing seemed to live here, not even dogs or rats. Then, in front of the house next to the last, they saw two old people sitting motionlessly on their broken stone steps, staring without watching anything. The roof that shells had ripped away had been replaced by stray boards and tattered tar paper. The torn windows had been boarded up. The only inhabitants of Vaux did not seem to see the Ford as it approached.

‘Mannie,’ Jere said. ‘Those two old people.’

They parked and got out, but the old couple gave no sign of having seen them. Jere said ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Are you the only ones who have come back?’ and ‘When did you return?’ The old man answered in toneless monosyllables. Manley offered them a pack of cigarettes. The old man accepted with a grunt, merci. Jere and Manley looked at each other, frowning. They had a common impulse to break through this wall of suspicion, to say, ‘Look, we’re sorry for you. It isn’t our fault. We’d like to help you.’

‘Are you able to manage here all alone?’ Manley asked. His heavy American accent hung awkwardly in the silence. For an answer, the old man merely shrugged.

‘But why do you stay here? How is it possible to live?’

The hostile silence, infecting them, made Jere sound almost petulant.

The old man shrugged again. The old woman’s voice was cracked and she had too much hair on her lip. She was not at all the beautiful silver-haired vision of an old woman young people like to imagine.

‘Perhaps if one of our sons is living he will come here.’

She glared at Jere.

Jere’s lips straightened as if she might cry. Then she quickly slipped off her necklace of amethysts set in tiny heart-shaped frames of gold.

‘Here, I want you to have this.’

When she closed it into the woman’s hand, her own hand receded at the boniness. The old woman neither protested nor thanked her.

It was all very unsatisfactory.

There was another awkward silence, and then Jere and Manley got back into their car. They thought they could feel the eyes of the old couple boring into them. These stupid American sightseers touring the battlefields.

They had little to say to each other as they drove on to Épernay. The Marne flowed peacefully, as if it had never seen a war. A red-purple sun was sliding off into the hills behind them when they turned back toward Paris. The world was powder blue when they reached the edge of Belleau Wood. The bare, amputated trees made grotesque silhouettes against the early twilight.

‘Look, pussy-willows,’ Jere said. ‘I’d love some for my room.’

Manley held her hand as they walked to the edge of the ravaged wood. Young pussy-willows had pushed up through the torn trees. One had forced its way up through the loosened root of a fallen beech.

Suddenly, Jere didn’t have the heart to pick it. ‘All these nice trees with their arms and their trunks cut off, this lovely country ripped apart, and then—’ She stared at the pussy-willow. Tears came, then she was weeping, and finally she was sobbing in his arms. But in a minute it was over and her voice, still shaky, tried to be smart again. ‘Don’t I deserve the sterling silver spittoon though, bawling over a goddam pussy-willow?’

Manley kissed a shiny spot on her cheek where a tear had passed. She was not wise and self-sufficient and untamably wild after all. The sobbing of her body in his arms had told him all the things she had to cry for that she had been forcing back into herself.

She gave him a funny little grin. ‘When you take me back to Paris will you make me see a doctor – I’m beginning to babble like a shell-shock case.’

‘When I take you back to Paris,’ he heard himself say, ‘I’m going to marry you.’

‘Why, Hallenstein,’ she said, ‘do you know what you just said? Maybe you’re the shell-shock case.’

Jere cuddled under his arm as they drove back to Paris through the cool spring night. At Meaux they stopped at an unassuming little restaurant where they had a surprisingly good Potage Crécy and two bottles of St Émilion. Whenever their eyes met they would smile and everything that was said about the food, the room, the horse-faced waiter seemed uproariously funny.

Then for six hectic weeks the Army of the United States and the Republic of France seemed to be conspiring against the sanctification of their love. They went to sleep and awakened scheming about certificates: birth certificates, death certificates, certificates of residence, marriage certificates, certificates on lost certificates, climaxed by their wheedling a reluctant certificate of permission from Jere’s father by a bit of indelicate blackmail fictionising the urgency of her ‘condition’.

Jere, always subject to romantic hallucinations, had wanted to be married in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. ‘Josephine and Marie Antoinette and Mary Stuart and Joan will be our handmaids.’ But an Episcopalian and a Scotch-Irish Protestant, little better than heathens from Our Mother’s point of view, were not entitled to marriage in the eyes of the true Church. Then Manley had a bright idea. Where should Mannie Hallenstein and Jere Wildberg be hitched? In a Jewish synagogue. They found one near the Étoile. They were just crazy enough to try it. ‘To make this legal, you’ll have to stitch a hem on your dick,’ Hank Osborne had razzed with a best man’s prerogative.

But the rabbi had rebuffed them with ancient pride. ‘Children, even if you were serious – which I fear you are not – this is not your father’s house. Only if you were to take instruction …’ Then, to satisfy the whim, Jere remembered the chaplain she had known at the JWB. Capt. Lorwin consented to marry them at the recreation centre that had brought them together. Everybody had a good time at the wedding and the party at Hank’s place afterward. ‘To a couple of wonderful kids who deserve each other,’ Hank had said over the champagne. ‘May they be as young and as beautiful and as nuts about each other on their golden anniversary as they are tonight.’

They drove out toward Barbizon with a case of Pommery 1911 and another case full of dreams, both sparkling, both born in years of bright promise. Forgotten was the bristling cable from Jere’s father, still resenting her marriage to ‘your rash young man from Kansas City’, and carrying out his threat to cut her off. Why worry? They had enough money for two months, for Manley was still in the Army, on a sixty-day leave before reporting to Gièvres for his discharge. They had borrowed a Dodge staff car from a friend of Hank’s who was an officer in the Paris motor pool. And they had been able to get one of the Hotel Cornebiche bungalows in the woods of Arbonne.

Their first dinner had been exquisitely prolonged, though urgent messages kept passing back and forth between their eyes and their fingertips. When they were back in the bungalow, Jere turned out all the lights and lit her candles. He could never forget his first sight of the honey-yellow thighs, the narrow waist, the small, perfect breasts, the slow, serious way she approached him, the surprising shyness of her eyes. But best of all he would remember the sharp pleasure and surprise of finding he had been the first. After all her limericks and bawdy verses and obscene jokes and sly references – the first. He had told himself that it would not matter. After all, he was a man of reason and this was 1919, not 1909. But those had been merely words, merely thoughts. When the moment came, he was buoyed up in an atavistic triumph.

‘You silly darling. Why didn’t you tell me? I never would have tried.’

‘I felt like such an old-fashioned ninny. I – I wanted you to think I was wickeder than Theda Bara.’

But she was not virginal in mind or heart and she joined him willingly. Those nights at the Cornebiche. In the light of Jere’s candles they looked on in wonder at the things young lovers do. It was all new to Jere, but she was eighteen and she had thought about it. In the candlelight, until dawn tapped lightly at the windows, at the Cornebiche, Jere clung to him with a woman’s knowledge. She gave herself – as she had given herself to Rimbaud and hatred of her father and adolescent rebellion and a good time – with nothing held in reserve. Jere’s moods were changeable, but they never overlapped. Each mood was pushed to its limits, sometimes almost a little beyond. In those weeks at the Cornebiche there was nothing she would not do for love.

Nine years later, retracing their steps in a last desperate search for what they had lost along the way, they had returned to the Cornebiche. But the flicker of candlelight had only irritated them; the champagne had been a fraud and the plumbing in the cottage had been abominable.