Believing Speck’s deliverance at hand, Walter assailed him with texts and encouragement. He left Biblical messages on Speck’s desk so that he had to see them first thing after lunch. Apparently the British Israelite movement had truly existed, enjoying a large and respectable following. Its premise that it was the British who were really God’s elect had never been challenged, though membership had dwindled at mid-century; Walter could find no trace of Lydia’s group, however. He urged Speck to drive to the north of Scotland, but Speck had already decided to abandon the religious approach to Cruche.
“No modern translation conveys the word of Japheth or of God,” Lydia had said when Speck showed her Walter’s finds. There had been something unusual about the orange dust jacket, after all. He did not consider this a defeat. Bible reading had raised his spirits. He understood now why Walter found it consoling, for much in it consisted of the assurance of downing one’s enemies, dashing them against stones, seeing their children reduced to beggary and their wives to despair. Still, he was not drawn to deep belief: he remained rational, skeptical, anxious, and subject to colds, and he had not succeeded in moving Lydia Cruche an inch.
Lunch at Senator Bellefeuille’s was balm. Nothing was served that Speck could not swallow. From the dining room he looked across at the dark November trees of the Bois de Boulogne. The Senator lived on the west side of Paris — the clients’ side. A social allegory in the shape of a city separated Speck from Lydia Cruche. The Senator’s collection was fully insured, free from dust, attractively framed or stored in racks built to order.
Speck began a new catalogue introduction as he ate lunch. “The Bellefeuille Cruches represent a unique aspect of Cruche’s vision,” he composed, heartily enjoying fresh crab soufflé. “Not nearly enough has been said about Cruche and the nude.”
The Senator broke in, asking how much Cruche was likely to fetch after the retrospective. Speck gave figures to which his choice of socks and cufflinks lent authority.
“Cruche-and-the-nude implies a definition of Woman,” Speck continued, silently, sipping coffee from a gold-rimmed cup. “Lilith, Eve, temptress, saint, child, mother, nurse — Cruche delineated the feminine factor once and for all.”
The Senator saw his guest to the door, took his briefcase from the hands of a manservant, and bestowed it on Speck like a diploma. He told Speck he would send him a personal invitation list for the Cruche opening next May. The list would include the estranged wife of a respected royal pretender, the publisher of an influential morning paper, the president of a nationalized bank, and the highest-ranking administrative official of a thickly populated area. Before driving away, Speck took a deep breath of west-end air. It was cool and dry, like Speck’s new expression.
That evening, around closing time, he called Lydia Cruche. He had to let her know that the show could go on without her. “I shall be showing the Bellefeuille Cruches,” he said.
“The what?”
Speck changed the subject. “There is enormous American interest,” he said, meaning that he had written half a dozen letters and received prudent answers or none at all. He was accustomed to the tense excitement “American interest” could arouse. He had known artists to enroll in crash courses at Berlitz, the better to understand prices quoted in English.
Lydia was silent; then she said, slowly, “Don’t ever mention such a thing again. Hube was anti-American — especially during the war.” As for Lydia, she had set foot in the United States once, when a marshmallow roast had taken her a few yards inside North Dakota, some sixty years before.
The time was between half past seven and eight. Walter had gone to early dinner and a lecture on lost Atlantis. The Belgian painter was back in Bruges, unsold and unsung. The cultural-affairs committee had turned Speck’s bill for expenses over to a law firm in Brussels. Two Paris galleries had folded in the past month and a third was packing up for America, where Speck gave it less than a year. Painters set adrift by these frightening changes drifted to other galleries, shipwrecked victims trying to crawl on board waterlogged rafts. On all sides Speck heard that the economic decline was irreversible. He knew one thing — art had sunk low on the scale of consumer necessities. To mop up a few back bills, he was showing part of his own collection — his last-ditch old-age security reserve. He clasped his hands behind his neck, staring at a Vlaminck India ink on his desk. It had been certified genuine by an expert now serving a jail sentence in Zurich. Speck was planning to flog it to one of the ambassadors down the street.
He got up and began turning out lights, leaving just a spot in the window. To have been anti-American during the Second World War in France had a strict political meaning. Any hope of letters from Louis Aragon and Elsa withered and died: Hubert Cruche had been far Right. Of course, there was Right and Right, thought Speck as he triple-locked the front door. Nowadays the Paris intelligentsia drew new lines across the past, separating coarse collaborators from fine-drawn intellectual Fascists. One could no longer lump together young hotheads whose passionate belief in Europe had led them straight to the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-S.S. and the soft middle class that had stayed behind to make money on the black market. Speck could not quite remember why pure Fascism had been better for civilization than the other kind, but somewhere on the safe side of the barrier there was bound to be a slot for Cruche. From the street, he considered a page of Charles Despiau sketches — a woman’s hand, her breast, her thigh. He thought of the Senator’s description of that other, early Lydia and of the fragments of perfection Speck could now believe in, for he had seen the Bellefeuille nudes. The familiar evening sadness caught up with him and lodged in his heart. Posterity forgives, he repeated, turning away, crossing the road on his way to his dinner.
Speck’s ritual pause brought him up to St. Amand and his demon just as M. Chassepoule leaned into his window to replace a two-volume work he had probably taken out to show a customer. The bookseller drew himself straight, stared confidently into the night, and caught sight of Speck. The two greeted each other through glass. M. Chassepoule seemed safe, at ease, tucked away in a warm setting of lights and friends and royal blue, and yet he made an odd little gesture of helplessness, as if to tell Speck, “Here I am, like you, overtaxed, hounded, running an honest business against dreadful odds.” Speck made a wry face of sympathy, as if to answer that he knew, he knew. His neighbour seemed to belong to an old and desperate breed, its back to the wall, its birthright gnawed away by foreigners, by the heathen, by the blithe continuity of art, by Speck himself. He dropped his gaze, genuinely troubled, examining the wares M. Chassepoule had collected, dusted, sorted, and priced for a new and ardent generation. The work he had just put back in the window was La France Juive, by Édouard Drumont. A handwritten notice described it as a classic study, out of print, hard to find, and in good condition.
Speck thought, A few years ago, no one would have dared put it on display. It has been considered rubbish for fifty years. Édouard Drumont died poor, alone, cast off even by his old friends, completely discredited. Perhaps his work was always being sold, quietly, somewhere, and I didn’t know. Had he been Walter and superstitious, he might have crossed his fingers; being Speck and rational, he merely shuddered.