Finally Aymeric yielded and said Monique could infer character from handwriting. Walter’s picture of a gypsy in a trailer remained imprinted even after Aymeric assured him that she worked with a team of psychotherapists, in the clean, glassy rooms of a modern office building in Montparnasse. Instead of dropping the matter, Walter wanted to know if she had undergone the proper kind of training; without that, he said, it was the same thing as analyzing handwriting by mail order.
Aymeric thought it over and said that her daughters were well educated and that one of them had travelled to Peru and got on quite well in Peruvian. This time, Walter had sense enough to keep quiet.
By June, Robert’s mother had become too difficult for him to manage alone, and so his sister, Monique, who did not live with her husband, turned her apartment over to one of her daughters and moved in to help. Her name was added to the list of tenants hanging from the concierge’s doorknob. Walter asked Aymeric if “Montrepos” was a Spanish name. Walter was thinking of the Empress Eugénie, born Montijo, he said.
One would need to consult her husband, Aymeric replied. Aymeric thought that Gaston de Montrepos had been born Dupuy or Dupont or Durand or Dumas. His childhood was spent in one of the weedier Paris suburbs, in a bungalow called Mon Repos. The name was painted, pale green on a rose background, on an enamel plaque just over the doorbell. Most family names had a simple, sentimental origin, if one cared to look them up. (Walter doubted that this applied to Obermauer.) Monique was a perfect specimen of the para-troop aristocracy, Aymeric went on. He was referring not to a regiment of grandees about to jump in formation but to a recognizable upper-class physical type, stumping along on unbreakable legs. Aymeric represented a more perishable race; the mother with the spun-out surname had left him bones that crumbled, teeth that dissolved in the gum, fine, unbiddable hair. (There was no doubt that Aymeric was haunted by the subject of hair. He combed his own with his fingers all the while he was speaking. The pale tint Walter had observed last March had since been deepened to the yellow of high summer.) Monique’s husband had also carried a look of impermanence, in spite of his unassuming background. Monique’s father had at first minded about the name. Some simple names he would not have objected to — Rothschild, for instance. He would have let his only daughter be buried as “Monique de Rothschild” any day. Even though. Yes, even though. Gaston had some sort of patronage appointment in the Senate, checking stationery supplies. He had spent most of his working life reading in the Luxembourg when it was fine, and eating coffee éclairs in Pons on rainy afternoons.
After Gaston Dumas or Dupuy had asked for Monique’s hand and been turned down, and after Monique had tried to kill herself by taking port wine and four aspirin tablets, Gaston had come back with the news that he was called Montrepos. He showed them something scribbled in his own hand on a leaf torn off a Senate memo pad.
Well, said her father, if Monique wanted that.
Walter soon saw that it was not true about Monique’s stumpy legs. For the rest, she was something like Aymeric — blooming, sound. Unlike him, she made free with friendly slaps and punches. Her pat on the back was enough to send one across the room; a knuckle ground into one’s arm was a sign of great good spirits. She kissed easily — noisy peasant smacks on both cheeks. She kissed the concierge for bringing good tidings with the morning mail (a cheque from Gaston, now retired and living in Antibes); kissed Aymeric’s cleaning woman for unpaid favours, such as washing her underclothes. The concierge and the cleaning woman were no more familiar with Monique than with Robert or Aymeric. If anything, they showed a faint, cautious reserve. Women who joke and embrace too easily are often quick to mount a high horse. Of Walter they took the barest notice, in spite of the size of his tips.
Monique soon overflowed two rooms and a third belonging to Robert. She shared her mother’s bathroom and Robert’s kitchen, striding through Walter’s apartment without asking if her perpetual trespassing suited him. In Robert’s kitchen she left supper dishes to soak until morning. Robert could not stand that, and he washed and dried them before going to bed. Soon after he had fallen asleep, his mother would come in and ask him what time it was.
“He was her favourite,” Monique told Walter. “Poor Robert. He’s paying for it now. It’s a bad idea to be a mother’s favourite. It costs too much later on.”
Entering without knocking, Monique let herself fall into one of Walter’s cretonne-covered armchairs. She crossed her legs and asked if anyone ever bought the stuff one saw in windows of art galleries. Walter hardly knew how to begin his reply. It would have encouraged him if Monique had worn clothes that rustled. Rustle in women’s dress, the settling of a skirt as a woman sat down, smoothing it with both hands, suggested feminine expectancy. Do explain, the taffeta hiss said. Tell about spies, interest rates, the Americans, Elizabeth Taylor. Is Hitler somewhere, still alive? But all that was the far past — his boyhood. He had grown adult in a world where clothes told one nothing. As soon as he thought of an answer, Monique shouted at him, “What? What did you say?” When she made a move, it was to knock something over. In Walter’s sitting room she upset a cut-glass decanter, breaking the stopper; another time it was a mahogany plant stand and a Chinese pot holding a rare kind of fern. He offered sponge cakes and watched in distress as she swept the crumbs onto the floor.
“You’ve got the best space in the house,” she said, looking around.
Soon after that remark, after giving himself time to think about it, Walter started locking all his doors.
Monique and Robert began by discussing Walter’s apartment, and moved along to the edge of a quarrel.
“In any case,” said Robert, “you should be under your husband’s roof. That is the law. You should never have left him.”
“Nobody left. It’s been like this for years.” Monique did not mention that she had come here to help; he knew that. He did not say that he was grateful.
“The law is the law,” Robert said.
“Not anymore.”
“It was a law when you got married,” he said. “The husband is head of the family, he chooses the domicile, the wife is obliged to live under his roof, and he is obliged to receive her there. Under his roof.”
“That’s finished. If you still bothered to go to weddings, you’d know.”
“It was still binding when you married him. He should be offering you a roof.”
“He can’t,” said Monique, flinging out her arm and hitting Robert’s record-player, which resisted the shock. “It’s about to cave in from the weight of the mortgage.”
“Well,” said Robert, forgetting Gaston for a moment, “he has a lease and he pays his rent regularly. And I am still paying for mending my roof.” After a pause he said, “Aymeric says Gaston has a rich woman in Antibes.”
“I was said to have been a rich young one.”
“There is space for you here, always,” said Robert instantly. There would be even more, later on. When the time came, they would knock all the flats into one and divide up the new space obtained.
“Look up ‘harp’ in your dream book,” she said. “I dreamed I was giving a concert.”