Tommy had that quality about him. He could make you see something that had eluded you. He could open your mind and make you see the truth, even about yourself.
There was a chaise lounge by the fireplace, covered in the same painted velvet as the bedspread, then at the far end of the room-reflected, too, in the fireplace mirror-there was a gorgeous Majorelle armoire of burled, inlaid walnut whose tall, floor-to-ceiling mirror was flanked by subordinate closets and topped by a curve of bevelled glass and walnut.
Tommy inspected everything with the enthusiastic eye of a connoisseur while I watched him with feelings of embarrassment. How many times had I stood naked, reaching out to open that thing? How many times had Jules seen my reflection in both of those mirrors, the front, the back, from the two ends of that room?
There was humour in the look Tommy gave me, mischief too, the devil. ‘I like it,’ he said in that horribly accented French of his. We were to nearly always speak en français, and I still can’t believe that he got away with it for so long.
‘Let’s have a cognac in the library,’ I said. We’d lighted a fire there.
He stood grinning at me, and I knew then that if he wanted me, I would betray my husband. But we had the cognac, and the betrayal came later. Much later. Please don’t be disappointed.
Millet’s Goose Girl Bathing hung on the wall above an armchair. Millet had sketched her in the forest, of course, for there everything is elemental-either this or that, life or death, and the shadows, the shadings that were draped about her and in among the trees and blades of grass told you this.
An absolutely gorgeous painting, one of my favourites.
Tommy warmed his cognac by the fire. He hadn’t wanted to sit in one of the stiff-backed Louis XIV armchairs, not him. He had kicked off his shoes and had plunked himself down on the floor, knees up, elbows resting on them. No tie now, the shirt collar open.
I remember thinking then how much he must like to be by a fire. Again, it was something elemental. He didn’t just want to look at those flames, he needed to. They were a part of him and he of them.
I sat some distance from him in one of the chairs. ‘Lily, why did you choose that particular shop? I’m just curious. Nothing else.’
‘Me? I had overheard Jules and Marcel talking about it. Marcel is an artist. Jules has always been interested in rare and beautiful things. I thought … Ah, how should I know? A place to start, I suppose.’
‘Auguste Langlois, Maison des Antiquaires. La plus belle vitrine d’art et d’antiquité.’
This had been written on the window above. ‘Was there something wrong with that shop, other than what I encountered?’
He caught the note of anxiety but shook his head. ‘I just wondered. Langlois would have cheated you and I couldn’t have that. Jules has sold things there, has he?’
‘I … Ah, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think. No, my husband wouldn’t have. Not him. He’s a collector just like his father was.’
Tommy swirled the cognac in his glass. Dipping a fingertip into it, he flicked it at the fire. ‘This is good stuff,’ he said, tossing off the last of his.
‘One shouldn’t waste it,’ I countered.
‘I didn’t. The bluer the flame, the better the cognac.’
I thought I knew what he was thinking and said, ‘Apart from a very small amount, my husband doesn’t give me any money. Everything is done on the account, as it was in the days of his father.’
‘Then you’ll accept the thirty thousand francs I’m still prepared to give you for those earrings?’
‘I don’t think I can leave just yet.’
‘But you know you’re going to have to. Sooner or later, the Germans will be here. France won’t stop them, Lily. For the present, they’re unbeatable.’
‘How is it that you can be so sure?’
Silent for a moment, he withdrew into himself, then said, ‘I can’t. It’s just a feeling I think the two of us share in private. Like myself, you’re afraid they really can’t be stopped and that it’s going to be a very long and unpleasant war. The Nazis …’
Again, he left things unsaid, making me wonder what he did. ‘Has your husband been called up?’ he asked.
‘In the general mobilization of last August? Ah, no. He’s essential where he is.’
‘The Louvre. They’re crating everything they can and shipping it to repositories in châteaux along the Loire. I can’t imagine that place with its doors closed and locked.’
‘He’s at the Sorbonne, a professor.’
‘But is also attached to the Louvre.’
‘Yes. Yes, he’s there also.’
‘What have they got him doing?’
At times, Tommy demanded answers, and this was one of them. It wasn’t simply the determined look in those deep brown eyes with their touches of green, or the set of his chin. It was everything about him. ‘He’s making an inventory of all the holdings in private collections.’
Again, I heard him say, ‘How lovely,’ like a schoolboy-tickled pink but with the salt of larceny. ‘It’ll be done in time then,’ he added. ‘He’ll see to it. You can bet your bottom dollar.’
I had to wonder how much he actually knew about Jules. ‘In time for what?’ I hazarded.
‘For when the Nazis arrive, as they will.’
He asked if Marcel could have sold things to that shop, and I realized then what he’d been after all along, and I knew I couldn’t lie to him, even though the items would have to have been stolen. ‘Marcel, he’s not above such things.’
And the husband must know this, but all Tommy did was to nod curtly. For him, for me the matter was closed, or so I thought. But, of course, it wasn’t. It could never have been, not with someone like Tommy.
You mustn’t think that I paid no attention to the day-to-day events of the war or that I was self-centred and uncaring of the tragedy that was happening to others. At the time of Tommy’s visit, and from then on, that whole business was constantly with me, but just like everyone else, there were things I had to do. The children, school for Jean-Guy in Fontainebleau, sometimes the car, sometimes the walk, mostly our bicycles, but if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have driven to and from everyday. There was also the firewood to get and split, the house to clean, the garden, et cetera. Jules and all that mess with my sister.
Having joined hands with Hitler and eaten the eastern half of Poland, the Russians now threatened war with Finland. A German submarine had penetrated the British naval base at Scapa Flow and had sunk the Royal Oak, a battleship, with the loss of 833 men, most of whom had been asleep. Mines were being sown at sea by aeroplanes. The RAF was dropping leaflets on Berlin. Leaflets! Can you imagine? Sides were being chosen. Nearly one hundred sixty thousand men of the British Expeditionary Force were stationed in northern France along the Belgian border, but the British were not doing their fair share, according to the French who had, by then, mobilized something like two-and-a-half million men. To be British was to be … ah, what can I say? Suspect? Unwanted? This feeling was to grow strongly later, after the defeat, the old animosities surfacing. Jeanne d’Arc, Napoléon, and all that rubbish.
Tommy’s warning kept coming back to me and I thought again and again about taking the children to England while there was still a chance. My father wasn’t well, so I could use that excuse. I wanted so much to see him but Jules wouldn’t have let me take the children, not at a time like that or any other. No, if I went, I’d have to kidnap them. So I waited. I thought a lot about it. I tried to lay in enough things to help us over the worst of times. Petrol, food, clothing, medicines-all those sorts of things, even pears. Everyone else was hoarding, so why shouldn’t I?
Tommy’s thirty thousand francs was my escape money, and I thanked God each night for such generosity in a fellow human being-he had let me keep the earrings and had said we should simply consider it a loan-and sometimes as I lay there in my loneliness, I made love to him in my mind.