Poche shook his head. Obviously, it was not the language he was after. He began to write on a clean page of the file, taking no more notice of Grippes.
What a mistake it had been, Grippes reflected, still feeling pain beneath the scar, to have repeated the male teacher — female student pattern. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Flaubert (his academic stalking-horse), he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. The novel had not done well in France, either. (Poche had still to get round to that.) The critics had found Karen-Sue’s sociological context obscure. She seemed at a remove from events of her time, unaware of improved literacy figures in North Korea, never once mentioned, or that since the advent of Gaullism it cost twenty-five centimes to mail a letter. The Pill was still unheard of in much of Europe; readers could not understand what it was Karen-Sue kept forgetting to take, or why Grippes had devoted a contemplative no-action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. The professor had not given Karen-Sue the cultural and political enlightenment one might expect from the graduate of a pre-eminent Paris school. It was a banal story, really, about a pair of complacently bourgeois lovers. The real victim was Grippes, seduced and abandoned by the American middle class.
It was Grippes’ first outstanding debacle and, for that reason, the only one of his works he ever reread. He could still hear Karen-Sue — the true, the original — making of every avowal a poignant question: “I’m Cairn-Sioux? I know you’re busy? It’s just that I don’t understand what you said about Flaubert and his own niece?” He recalled her with tolerance — the same tolerance that had probably weakened the book.
Grippes was wise enough to realize that the California-bank affair had been an act of folly, a con man’s aberration. He had thought he would get away with it, knowing all the while he could not. There existed a deeper treasure for Poche to uncover, well below Public Treasury sights. Computers had not yet come into government use; even typewriters were rare — Poche had summoned Grippes in a cramped, almost secretive hand. It took time to strike an error, still longer to write a letter about it. In his youth, Grippes had received from an American patroness of the arts three rent-bearing apartments in Paris, which he still owned. (The patroness had been the last of a generous species, Grippes one of the last young men to benefit from her kind.) He collected the rents by devious and untraceable means, stowing the cash obtained in safe deposit. His visible way of life was stoic and plain; not even the most vigilant Controller could fault his underfurnished apartment in Montparnasse, shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents. He showed none of the signs of prosperity Public Treasury seemed to like, such as membership in a golf club.
After a few minutes of speculative anguish in the airless cubicle, Grippes saw that Poche had no inkling whatever about the flats. He was chasing something different — the inexistent royalties from the Karen-Sue novel. By a sort of divine evenhandedness, Grippes was going to have to pay for imaginary earnings. He put the safe deposit out of his mind, so that it would not show on his face, and said, “What will be left for me, when you’ve finished adding and subtracting?”
To his surprise, Poche replied in a bold tone, pitched for reciting quotations: “ ‘What is left? What is left? Only what remains at low tide, when small islands are revealed, emerging …” ’ He stopped quoting and flushed. Obviously, he had committed the worst sort of blunder, had been intimate, had let his own personality show. He had crossed over to his opponent’s ground.
“It sounds familiar,” said Grippes, enticing him further. “Although, to tell the truth, I don’t remember writing it.”
“It is a translation,” said Poche. “The Anglo-Saxon British author, Victor Prism.” He pronounced it “Prissom.”
“You’ve read Prism?” said Grippes, pronouncing correctly the name of an old acquaintance.
“I had to. Prissom was on the preparatory program. Anglo-Saxon Commercial English.”
“They stuffed you with foreign writers?” said Grippes. “With so many of us having to go to foreign lands for a living?”
That was perilous: he had just challenged Poche’s training, the very foundation of his right to sit there reading Grippes’ private mail. But he had suddenly recalled his dismay when as a young man he had looked at a shelf in his room and realized he had to compete with the dead — Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, and on into the dark. The rivalry was infinite, a Milky Way of dead stars still daring to shine. He had invented a law, a moratorium on publication that would eliminate the dead, leaving the skies clear for the living. (All the living? Grippes still couldn’t decide.) Foreign writers would be deported to a remote solar system, where they could circle one another.
For Prism, there was no system sufficiently remote. Not so long ago, interviewed in The Listener, Prism had dragged in Grippes, saying that he used to cross the Channel to consult a seer in Half Moon Street, hurrying home to set down the prose revealed from a spirit universe. “Sometimes I actually envied him,” Prism was quoted as saying. He sounded as though Grippes were dead. “I used to wish ghost voices would speak to me, too,” suggesting ribbons of pure Prism running like ticker tape round the equator of a crystal ball. “Unfortunately, I had to depend on my own creative intelligence, modest though I am sure it was.”
Poche did not know about this recent libel in Anglo-Saxon Commercial English. He had been trying to be nice. Grippes made a try of his own, jocular: “I only meant, you could have been reading me.” The trouble was that he meant it, ferociously.
Poche must have heard the repressed shout. He shut the file and said, “This dossier is too complex for my level. I shall have to send it up to the Inspector.” Grippes made a vow that he would never let natural pique get the better of him again.
“What will be left for me?” Grippes asked the Inspector. “When you have finished adding and subtracting?”
Mme. de Pelle did not bother to look up. She said, “Somebody should have taken this file in hand a long time ago. Let us start at the beginning. How long, in all, were you out of the country?”
When Poche said “send up,” he’d meant it literally. Grippes looked out on a church where Delacroix had worked and the slow summer rain. At the far end of the square, a few dark shops displayed joyfully trashy religious goods, like the cross set with tiny seashells Mme. de Pelle wore round her neck. Grippes had been raised in an anticlerical household, in a small town where opposing factions were grouped behind the schoolmaster — Grippes’ father — and the parish priest. Women, lapsed agnostics, sometimes crossed enemy lines and started going to church. One glimpsed them, all in gray, creeping along a gray-walled street.
“You are free to lodge a protest against the fine,” said Mme. de Pelle. “But if you lose the contestation, your fine will be tripled. That is the law”
Grippes decided to transform Mme. de Pelle into the manager of a brothel catering to the Foreign Legion, slovenly in her habits and addicted to chloroform, but he found the idea unpromising. In due course he paid a monstrous penalty, which he did not contest, for fear of drawing attention to the apartments. (It was still believed that he had stashed away millions from the Karen-Sue book, probably in Switzerland.) A summons addressed in O. Poche’s shrunken hand, the following spring, showed Grippes he had been tossed back downstairs. After that he forgot about Mme. de Pelle, except now and then.