I didn't even pretend. I showed her my false passport, and in the bathroom of her suite she helped me to rub out the traces of make-up which on a winter's afternoon, in the light of the lamps, had passed for genuine lines. I saw Frиre Laurent disappear wrinkle by wrinkle in the mirror above the shelf where lay her lotions, her eyebrow-pencils, her pots of pomade. We might have been two actors sharing a dressing-room.
Tea at the college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboyclutch and the tea strong. At the Hфtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the йclairs stuffed with cream. I lost my shyness, I spoke of my mother, of my Latin compositions, of Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps without evil intention, I quoted Catullus to show off my learning. I cannot remember now the gradation of events which led to the first long adult kiss upon the sofa. She was married, I remember she told me, to a director of the Banque de l'Indochine, and I had visions of a man ladling coins into a drawer with a brass scoop. He was at the moment on a visit to Saigon where she suspected him of supporting a Cochinese mistress. It was not a long conversation; I was soon back at the beginning of my studies, learning a first lesson in love on a big white bed with carved pineapple bedposts, in a small white room. What a lot of details I can still remember of those hours after more than forty years. For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation - but I think it is equally true of us all. An odd thing happened as we lay on the bed. She was finding me shy, frightened, difficult. Her fingers had no success, even her lips had failed their office, when into the room suddenly, from the port below the hill, flew a seagull. For a moment the room seemed spanned by the length of the white wings. She gave an exclamation of dismay and retreated: it was she who was scared now. I put out a hand to reassure her. The bird came to rest on a chest below a gold-framed looking-glass and stood there regarding us on its long stilt-like legs. It seemed as completely at home in the room as a cat and at any moment I expected it to begin to clean its plumage. My new friend trembled a little with her fear, and suddenly I found myself as firm as a man and I took her with such ease and confidence it was as though we had been lovers for a long time. Neither of us during those minutes saw the seagull go, although I shall always think that I felt the current of its wings on my back as the bird sailed out again towards the port and the bay. That was all there was, the victory in the Casino, and in the white-andgold room a few further triumphant minutes - the only love-affair I have ever had which ended without pain or regret. For she was not even the cause of my departure from the college; that was the result of my own indiscretion in dropping into the collection-bag at mass a roulette token for five francs which I had failed to cash. I thought I was showing generosity, for my usual contribution was twenty sous, but someone spotted me and reported me to the Dean of Studies. In the interview which followed the last vestige of my vocation was blown away. I parted from the fathers with politeness on both sides; if they felt disappointment I think they also felt a grudging respect - my exploit was not unworthy of the college. I had successfully concealed my small fortune under my mattress, and when they were assured that an uncle, on my father's side, had sent me my fare to England with promises of future support and a position in his firm, they relinquished me without regret. I told them that I would repay my mother's debt as soon as I had earned enough (a promise they accepted with a little embarrassment because they obviously doubted whether it would ever be fulfilled), and I assured them too that I would certainly get in touch with a certain Father Thomas Capriole S.J. at Farm Street, an old friend of the Rector's (a promise which they believed I might keep). As for the notional uncle's letter, it had been a very easy one to compose. If I could deceive the Casino authorities I had no fear of failing with the Fathers of the Visitation, and not one of them thought of demanding to see the envelope. I set out to England by the international express which halted then at the little station below the Casino. It was my last sight of the baroque towers that had dominated my childhood - a vision of grown-up life, the palace of chance, where anything at all might happen as I had well enough proved.
2
I would lose the proper proportions of my subject if I were to recount every stage of my progress from the casino in Monte Carlo to another casino in Port-au-Prince, where I found myself again in possession of money and in love with a woman, a coincidence no more unlikely than the encounter on the Atlantic between three people called Smith, Brown and Jones. In the long interval I had led a hand-to-mouth existence, except for a period of peace and respectability which came with the war, and not all my occupations were of the kind to find a place in my curriculum vitae. The first job I obtained, thanks to my good knowledge of French (my Latin was singularly unhelpful), was at a small restaurant in Soho where I served for six months as a waiter. I never mentioned that, nor my graduation to the Trocadero, thanks to a forged reference from Fouquet's in Paris. After some years at the Trocadero I rose to being adviser to a small firm of educational publishers who were launching a series of French classics with notes of a scrupulously cleansing nature. That did find a place in my curriculum. Others that followed did not. Indeed I was a little spoilt by the security of my employment during the war, when I served in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, supervising the style of our propaganda to Vichy teffitory, and even had a lady novelist as my secretary. When the war was over I wanted something better than my old life of hand-to-mouth, though nevertheless for some years I returned to that way of life, until at last an idea came to me south of Piccadilly, outside one of those galleries where you are likely to see a less than pedigree work by an obscure seventeenthcentury Dutch painter, or perhaps it was outside a gallery a degree lower in the trade where a taste for jovial cardinals enjoying their Friday salmon was mysteriously catered for. A middleaged man wearing a double-breasted waistcoat and a watchchain, a man remote, I would have said, from artistic interests, stood gazing at the pictures, and suddenly I thought I knew exactly what was passing in his mind. 'At Sotheby's last month a picture fetched a hundred thousand pounds. A picture can represent a fortune - if one knew enough or even took a chance,' and he stared very hard at some cows in a meadow, as though he were watching a little ivory ball running round a groove. It was surely the cows in the meadow at which he gazed and not the cardinals. No one could possibly envisage the cardinals in a Sotheby sale. A week after that vision south of Piccadilly I gambled most of what I had accumulated during more than thirty years and invested in a trailer-caravan and about twenty inexpensive prints - there was an Henri Rousseau at one end of the scale and a Jackson Pollock at the other. I hung these on one side of my van with a record of the sums which they had fetched at auction and the date of the sales. Then I procured a young art student able to turn me out rapidly a number of rough pastiches which he signed each time with a different name - I would often sit with him while he worked and try out signatures on a piece of paper. In spite of the example of Pollock and Moore, which proved that even an Anglo-Saxon name could have value, most of the names were foreign. I remember Msloz only, because his work obstinately refused to sell, and in the end we had to paint out his signature and substitute Weill. I had come to realize that the purchaser wanted, as his minimum satistion, to be able to pronounce a name - 'I got a new Weill the other day,'