"You re wearing a truly astonishing tie." I beamed. "Yes, what do you think?" There's no denying one's tie, no standing back from it. Mrs Vivier nodded at me to show she had taken in the phenomenon but was too polite, too little all courant with the whole tie scene, perhaps, to venture an opinion. I went towards the over-mantel mirror with the backward-leaning prance of an actor made up fat, and was more startled than I had expected by the gaudy flash of the main motif.
"I'm not sure I'd want one myself," said Paul Echevin, considering it too in the mirror's safe distance. "Isn't it the wrong way round? I mean it's right in the mirror."
"Oh." I squinted down at it uncertainly.
"But do tell me where you got it."
"A most extraordinary clothes shop in I think it's Tanners Street, aptly enough. Masses of leather, and jewellery made out of knives and forks." It was the campest thing I'd said to Echevin, but he laughed intelligently. "There's someone there who paints these artties."
The dry buzz of the doorbell was heard—Mrs Vivier called out from the kitchen, and Echevin went down to let in the other guests. I was alone with my tie for a few moments, and with the pumapounce of love that made me gasp and go white and then go red. I felt so raw and mad that afternoon that I had bought absurdly in the little shop, spent to soothe myself, a kind of proxy giving to Luc. And I had considered getting him just something, a neckerchief, a death's-head ring, a silver lurex cache-sexe . . . When the doe-eyed assistant in jodhpurs and smoking-cap had peeked through the curtains to ask if I needed a hand getting into some oddly unelasticated swimming-trunks that he had recommended, I thought perhaps I should bring the boy along for a fitting—remembering how he had told me, the first day we met, of borrowing from his friend Patrick a costume that was too large, that, like my shorts, had promised to peel off. In the end I took the trunks, and a shirt so lobelia-blue you could scarcely look at it, and the notorious tie. I imagined wearing it to Paul Echevin's house as a badge of my inner turmoil as well as a distraction from it.
My fellow guests were a man called Maurice, his coolly humorous wife Inge and their daughter Helene, a serious young woman I took a moment to recognise—the one who sold the tickets at the Museum next door. Maurice was a firm dogged little man, quite good-looking, who flung himself into a chair with a sigh as if he lived there: he was a schoolmaster, it turned out, and he had certain schoolmaster's characteristics: in some subtle way dislocated from ordinary adult society, squeezed between vocation and routine, dull yet with a habit of enthusiasm. I remembered the mystery of masters' marriages, the way the poor wives had been figures of lust or ridicule to the filthy-minded boys. I wasn't sure which the plump, unageing Inge would be. She was half-German, half Swedish, she lived in Flemish-speaking Belgium and had been for years an interpreter in Brussels, at home in the lexicon-limbo of Community administration. She told me her story at dinner, without much sense that I would be interested in it, and the drunken excitement I showed as each turn of her career unfolded may well have sounded forced or even mocking. But by then I had discovered that Maurice was no ordinary teacher, he was the head of English at St Narcissus, and so the source, if I handled him right, of exquisitely precious information. He and his wife were to be courted and heeded as they had never been before.
The start was a bit rough. Maurice made himself so completely at home that I was left out while he gossiped with Echevin. Inge was busying into the kitchen to swap notes with Mrs Vivier, and Helene and I found ourselves back in the role of children, who, if discreetly ignored, might well get on together. We were still dry, to my dismay, and I stood with my hands in my pockets while Helene fiddled with a ring on her left hand.
"You're engaged!" I said; and she blushed when she said yes. That happy confusion, coupled with some remote tribal relief that in that case I wouldn't have to marry her myself, and indeed was honour-bound not to flirt with her, made me suddenly warm to her. "Are you an art historian, I suppose?"
Again the solemn discomposure. "No, no. Oh, you mean the Museum. No, I just help out there from time to time when Paul asks me to." How often I misread a face, an attitude, and credited strangers with intimidating powers they didn't have or want. "I do bits and pieces. Baby-sitting I don't mind at all, and helping with censuses. I've done secretarial work for my father, and even invigilated exams. But no, I'm nothing really."
"You like jobs where you can read a book."
"They are the best," she said, with a shy chuckle. There was something so sensible and tender about her that I began to feel quite jealous of her husband after all, her husband to be. I thought of asking her about him, although I tended to mistrust the accounts young women gave of their intendeds, their wonderful jobs and looks. But in rushed Mrs Vivier with the claret-cup and glasses on a tray. At which Maurice looked up and said, "I've just noticed your Orst tie."
"Oh yes," I said, smoothing it over the largely imaginary stomach that it caparisoned.
"So Paul's selling these now, is he?"—at which Echevin merely hummed. "It's the Athena, isn't it? Not here, though, not next door. It's in the Town Museum, surely?" He stood up and peered at the tie—on which Orst's Athena was indeed reproduced with a certain additional gold and glitter and with the illusory depth of a hologram. "What is it William Butler Yeats says? 'Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting for a train, Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head' . . . " He looked up, stirred by his own brief delivery.
"Waiting a train," I said.
"Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting for a train."
"Yes, it's waiting a train—no for." He looked uncertain, not altogether pleased. "It's an aphetic form of awaiting; or perhaps more strictly an aphaeretic one," I went on like a complete arsehole. "You know, deliberate docking of the first syllable."
"I can see you're going to have to watch yourself with your quotations, dear," said Inge, with a mild air of vindication.
I glanced self-deprecatingly around the room, actually quite shocked myself to have brought this blare of kitsch into a place where real Orsts, of incomparable delicacy, were hung.
We sat down to dinner without Marcel. "Gone to the pictures with a friend," Echevin said. "Bloodbath 4, I think it's called. Will it be all right? It's so many years since I saw a film . . . I have an idea perhaps I should be protecting him from something."
"I'm sure it will be fine," I said. It wasn't my kind of thing, but I had a proper reverence for the ripped pecs of Kurt Burns, the subhuman star of the whole successful series, who had reared up all over town in the past few days with oiled bust and machine-gun aflame.
"How's the little fellow getting on?" Maurice asked robustly, across the table.
"He's fine. He's a lot happier," his father said, which gave me a keener sense of just how unhappy he must have been before. "He's still a bit wheezy. But if you think what he was like a year ago . . . "
"Is he showing any inclination to read books?" said Maurice, not quite gently enough.
"The poor child has been so slowed down with drugs, Maurice," said Mrs Vivier, "it is hardly surprising if his work has suffered." It was an unexpected flash, which Echevin appreciated even as he smothered it.
"You'd have to ask our friend Edward about that," he said.
Maurice turned to me after a second's bafflement, and I hastily confessed that I was indeed Marcel's English tutor, and was doing what I could to . . . "He's getting on fine," I said loyally. "What he needs most is confidence." (And there was the simple substance of a million end-of-term reports.)
Maurice ducked to his soup, and took several spoonfuls rapidly and without appreciation, as if it were the school food he must be used to. "So when are you going to let us have him back?" That was when the coin dropped for me; within a few moments the two of us had been revealed to each other as colleagues of a kind, though he stood at the centre of the great self-exalting machine, whilst I was picking up the damaged and difficult fragments that its noisy shuttling shook loose. Perhaps at dusk, with closer attention, I would be able to see him from my window, pacing the illuminated classroom and holding forth on Yeats.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "I hadn't realised that you were at St Narcissus." I hadn't realised, in fact, that the staff of a Jesuit school need not all be cold-eyed clergymen.
"We'll see how he's doing at the end of the spring," said Echevin.
I was so keen to ask about Luc that I fell completely silent. I felt that if I even mentioned his name I would turn crimson, or my fly would burst open, ricocheting buttons off the wine-glasses, or the Athena on my tie would turn and give a wink. I wouldn't use that lolling monosyllable itself, of course; it would be "the Altidore boy" or some such crisply pastoral phrase. I drank with a need, and was touched to find that Echevin, who was a cautious drinker himself, remembered my habit and reached out to me frequently with the sharp, appley wine I had guzzled and praised on my first visit.
"Helene tells me you've had some great excitement at the Museum, Paul," said Inge. "I didn't quite follow it . . ." His expression lightened beautifully: here was a man familiar to the point of weariness with his own job, his own rather airless and enervating cabin, suddenly wresting open the corroded port-hole and taking deep breaths of his forgotten purpose.
"I've been on the phone for days, trying to bring it off, and it looks as if—as if I've been successful." I nodded at him approvingly. "I'm reassembling a triptych that was broken up before the war. We've had one wing of it for years, the woman looking into the mirror. You remember you only see the woman's face in the reflection, cut in half by the edge of the mirror."
"That must be the most popular postcard we sell," said Helene.
Her mother said, "It's the very dark one; isn't it almost all in the dark?"
"It's very ténébreux," Echevin agreed; "there are extraordinary effects of candle-light on the woman's robe—well, it's like a sort of cope—and the hair, of course, is given a lavish treatment."
"It's a Jane, I imagine," said Inge, with a tolerant chuckle like her daughter's.
"It's a Jane," said Echevin. "The whole thing is called 'Autrefois', which in itself has been a problem, since Orst produced about thirty pictures with that title. Fortunately, however, I had a photograph of it, when it was still in his studio at the Villa Hermes. Not a very clear photograph: it's at the back among various other works, but it gives enough to go on. I could be pretty sure when I saw something whether or not it was it."
"Why would anyone break it up in the first place?" I asked.
"It was sold quite late on; the old man was rather pressed for cash in the thirties—he was out of fashion, of course, and going blind and not producing any more. One or two collectors rather preyed on him, I think; his whole inclination was to hoard things but he did let quite a lot go. This particular work was bought by a Bavarian Jewish manufacturer who hung on as long as possible before fleeing into Switzerland with almost nothing, except a wing of the triptych— the other one, which is completely different and I believe a lot later. I've known about it for two or three years now: it's an astonishingly beautiful seascape, nearly abstract, just three zones, sea, sky and shore, very brooding and intense." We hummed appreciatively.
"I wonder what the connection is between that and the woman at the mirror," I said.
"Ah well . . ." rumbled Maurice.
"It is rather one of his things," said Echevin, smiling to cover the implication that I might have been expected to know. "You probably noticed several pieces next door where he frames apparently unconnected subjects together. Sometimes there is a clear symbolic relation between them, sometimes the poetry I suppose lies in their mysterious difference, like images in a dream. He speaks of them as being shrines of a mood or a memory—he hoped for an attitude of mystic contemplation in the viewer."
I nodded. I sort of did know that; and was sorry to have forced the recital of the point. "I want to hear about the middle bit, then," I said.
"Now, the middle bit," said Echevin again with the sweet glow of discovery, a warm crinkling about his large pale eyes, "is what I found almost by accident when I went to Munich in the summer for the big Symbolist show. I met a man at a party one night and when he heard of my Orst connections he said would I go to his flat and look at a painting he had bought in a sale in Czechoslovakia which had the EO monogram on it. I must admit I hesitated. The owner himself clearly wasn't an expert, he was a perfectly nice dentist, but the odd provenance made me wonder, and the idea of treasures in Eastern Europe suddenly rising to the surface and becoming available was attractive too."
It was clear how the story was going to end and we sat with expressions of placid encouragement and poked politely at the thick, off-white fish on our plates, a fish that must figure somewhere in Luc's catalogue, though I couldn't put a name to it myself. And that had me sunk for a heart-gripping ten seconds in the sensation of Luc: abruptly in his presence, I was starting to unbutton his shirt. . . "It wasn't quite so easy," our host was saying. "He took me off from the party in a taxi, he wanted to know straight away, it seemed. We drove and drove, and then we were on a sort of motorway and it turned out he lived in what was virtually another town; I was getting a bit restive, and I could see how anxious he was that I shouldn't get anxious, so there was a rather difficult kind of constraint. Eventually we reached a magnificent apartment block—absolutely brand new, he was evidently a very rich dentist—and went up about ten floors. He lived there with his fierce old mother; she emerged in her dressing-gown and shawl, looking very disorientated and very possessive.
"The apartment was stuffed with art, most of it rubbish but with occasional little things which it might have been worth getting down and looking at carefully. There were some Puvis drawings for instance. But the picture he wanted me to see was very much in the rubbish category, a crude portrait by someone who couldn't paint, which Orst, whatever his faults, decidedly could. I looked at it and pronounced upon it perhaps a little . . . firmly. It didn't even have the promised monogram. The mother stood around suspiciously, despite the son's urgings that she should go back to bed; it was only when I said I must return to my hotel that she shuffled off." Echevin's eyes rested on me for a moment. "I'm so slow to understand," he went on. "I popped into the bathroom before I left, and when I came out, wondering if I had enough money for the taxi back and imagining an embarrassing moment as I asked the dentist to help me out, there the dentist was, but now sans jacket and tie, waiting in the doorway of a dimly lit bedroom. I suppose I must have given some signal earlier on, or misunderstood something when we were talking at the party: my German's by no means perfect."
"Oh, my god," said Maurice; and Helene and I laughed appreciatively. I could imagine how Echevin's nice looks and his neat, shy, independent manner might encourage this kind of confusion.
"The awful thing was," he said, "that over his shoulder, and indeed over the bed, I could see a painting that made my pulse . quicken just the way the poor dentist must have hoped it would when I saw him. It was of course the Orst he wanted me to see, it had all been a front with that other awful daub; and despite the shadow, I could see that it was very like the middle panel in the old photograph—one of his deserted gothic town-scapes: actually the dimness made it very like the photograph. And I had to get into that bedroom! That was a testing ten minutes . . . " Echevin noticed his food, and set to catching up.
"He must have been pleased to find he owned a valuable picture, though," said Inge.
"Oh yes, he was—in the end. One could see the tussle of greed and hurt feelings. It was unsigned—had belonged to an uncle—our Bavarian industrialist, of course. The man liked it very much, which was why he had it in his bedroom. And why it has not been at all easy to get him to part with it. I've had to be quite flirtatious on the phone. However, I believe he will now lend it to us, and as the wing from Switzerland will arrive on permanent loan next month, we might well be able to reassemble a major lost work by the end of the year."
"What a ghastly experience," said Maurice.
"He was quite a handsome dentist," said Echevin with a teasing shake of the head. There was a moment of mutual adjustment, of taking the ethical temperature. I was feeling terrifically queer tonight, but none the less anxious not to alienate the strait-laced Maurice or lead him to suspect that under the benign curiosity I would show about Luc I was aching for the boy's arse and touch and lips and tongue and tits and legs and salty toes and involuntarily spurting cock. The talk ambled and clumped through dessert, prompted and set askew by drink. There was that common dinnerparty sense that no one truly knew what they were talking about, Helene, who played the piano, keen but clueless about music, Maurice with his fudged quotations and half-forgotten stories from the evening news, and me pretending to have half-forgotten books I had never read. Echevin, of course, truly knew about Edgard Orst, but when the talk turned to football and boxing, on which Inge had vigorous views, he was soon feinting and conceding.
For a minute or two I played a game of introducing the name covertly into the chatter, as I remembered doing with long-ago infatuations, asking or rather telling Helene about Gluck, or swapping Cavalier quotes with Maurice, jealously watching him shape and just exactly mispronounce the word Lucasta, the darting buss with which it began, the upward and downward flicker of the tongue against the teeth. Then he said, firmly and uncorrectably, "If I have freedom in my love And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty."
It was only when we returned to the other room and stood around with our coffee-cups, filling the contented pauses with long looks at the paintings, that I at last brought out my question: "I wonder if you taught my other pupil, the Altidore lad." Even to my ears it sounded deranged, bumblingly casual for the first few words and then, as the sacred name approached, slipping the gears with a reckless snarl. I tried to pass it off as a smothered belch, cough and sneeze.
"What's that? Um . . . No." He took a sip of coffee, and looked around.
"Don't be ridiculous," I felt like saying; but waited and then prompted: "He seems a very clever fellow."
"Yes, I believe he always did pretty well. I only take them for the last year, as a rule." What a miracle, I thought, that Luc was not even now writing an essay on Lovelace or Suckling for this busy, musty-smelling man, who was turning and raising a hand to signal to his wife and so perhaps about to leave.
"It must have thrown him a good deal to be chucked out," I hazarded.
"I'm sure you'll keep him up to the mark," he said, with the sudden warmth of someone who is going and wishes to leave a friendly impression on a person whose company he has not enjoyed.
Blessedly, Inge had heard. "Who's he going to keep up?" she asked.
"Oh, it's just another boy I'm teaching, Luc Altidore, and I wondered if Maurice remembered him from St Narcissus."
"Well, there's a story," she said, plus chuckle.
"You mean his being expelled?" I said rapturously.
"Quite so." Again there was a scary pause, in which I foresaw the conversation being hijacked by some intolerable boring other thing.
"I wasn't quite sure," I said dawdlingly, "from what his mother told me, what actually happened."
"Well, I don't suppose anyone knows exactly what happened, do you," she said with a jolly-stern tucking in of the chin "—except the boy and the sailors themselves."
I don't have a clue how I took this. I think I smiled, smirked probably, under the creasing pressure of horrified excitement. "The sailors," I said at last, rather crossly, and as if I'd always expected the worst from them.
"I mean, that's all I know, maybe Maurice knows more"—but Maurice had already turned away and was calling something to his host—"the boy, what's he called?"
"Luc," I said weakly.
"Young Luc was found on a ship out at the port, playing cards or whatever with a bunch of Norwegian sailors, at, like, 3 a.m. . . ." She shrugged. "Isn't that it?"
"Mm, that's all I know," I agreed.
"And it's probably enough." Now there I couldn't agree. And happily she said, "But if you should find out more, it might be rather fascinating to know."
"I don't think I could very well ask him," I said, already wondering how it could be done.
"When you're better friends," she said, so that I thought she had seen right through me. "I rather love these dentist-sailor stories."