So then to hurry the years past – and to contemplate something that should not be thought of in the category of ‘an affair’ – Camille arrived in her life when he was twenty-two years old. Stanislas Fréron – her family knew his family – had brought him to the house. Camille looked perhaps seventeen. It was four years before he would be old enough to practise at the Bar. It was not a thing one could readily imagine. His conversation was a series of little sighs and hesitations, defections and demurs. Sometimes his hands shook. He had trouble looking anyone in the face.
He’s brilliant, Stanislas Fréron said. He’s going to be famous. Her presence, her household, seemed to terrify him. But he didn’t stay away.
RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING, Claude had invited him to supper. It was a well-chosen guest list, and for her husband a fine opportunity to expound his economic forecast for the next five years – grim – and to tell stories about the Abbé Terray. Camille sat in tense near-silence, occasionally asking in his soft voice for M. Duplessis to be more precise, to explain to him and to show him how he arrived at that figure. Claude called for pen, paper and ink. He pushed some plates aside and put his head down; at his end of the table, the meal came to a halt. The other guests looked down at them, nonplussed, and turned to each other with polite conversation. While Claude muttered and scribbled, Camille looked over his shoulder, disputing his simplifications, and asking questions that were longer and more cogent. Claude shut his eyes momentarily. Figures swooped and scattered from the end of his pen like starlings in the snow.
She had leaned across the table: ‘Darling, couldn’t you …’
‘One minute –’
‘If it’s so complicated –’
‘Here, you see, and here –’
‘ – talk about it afterwards?’
Claude flapped a balance sheet in the air. ‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘No more than vaguely. But then the comptrollers are vague, and it gives you an idea.’
Camille took it from him and ran a glance over it; then he looked up, meeting her eyes. She was startled, shocked by the – emotion, she could only call it. She took her eyes away and rested them on other guests, solicitous for their comfort. What he basically didn’t understand, Camille said – and probably he was being very stupid – was the relationship of one ministry to another and how they all got their funds. No, Claude said, not stupid at all: might he demonstrate?
Claude now thrust back his chair and rose from his place at the head of the table. Her guests looked up. ‘We might all learn much, I am sure,’ said an under-secretary. But he looked dubious, very dubious, as Claude crossed the room. As he passed her, Annette put out a hand, as if to restrain a child. ‘I only want the fruit bowl,’ Claude said: as if it were reasonable.
When he had secured it he returned to his place and set it in the middle of the table. An orange jumped down and circumambulated slowly, as if sentient and tropically bound. All the guests watched it. His eyes on Claude’s face, Camille put out a hand and detained it. He gave it a gentle push, and slowly it rolled towards her across the table: entranced, she reached for it. All the guests watched her; she blushed faintly, as if she were fifteen. Her husband retrieved from a side-table the soup tureen. He snatched a dish of vegetables from a servant who was taking it away. ‘Let the fruit bowl represent revenue,’ he said.
Claude was the cynosure now; chit-chat ceased. If … Camille said; and but. ‘And let the soup tureen represent the Minister of Justice, who is also, of course, Keeper of the Seals.’
‘Claude –’ she said.
He shushed her. Fascinated, paralysed, the guests followed the movement of the food about the table; deftly, from the under-secretary’s finger ends, Claude removed his wine glass. This functionary now appeared, hand extended, as one who mimes a harpist at charades; his expression darkened, but Claude failed to see it.
‘Let us say, this salt cellar is the minister’s secretary.’
‘So much smaller,’ Camille marvelled. ‘I never knew they were so low.’
‘And these spoons, Treasury warrants. Now …’
Yes, Camille said, but would he clarify, would he explain, and could he just go back to where he said – yes indeed, Claude allowed, you need to get it straight in your mind. He reached for a water jug, to rectify the proportions; his face shone.
‘It’s better than the puppet show with Mr Punch,’ someone whispered.
‘Perhaps the tureen will talk in a squeaky voice soon.’
Let him have mercy, Annette prayed, please let him stop asking questions; with a little flourish here and one there she saw him orchestrating Claude, while her guests sat open-mouthed at the disarrayed board, their glasses empty or snatched away, deprived of their cutlery, gone without dessert, exchanging glances, bottling their mirth; all over town it will be told, ministry to ministry and at the Law Courts too, and people will dine out on the story of my dinner party. Please let him stop, she said, please something make it stop; but what could stop it? Perhaps, she thought, a small fire.
All the while, as she grew flurried, cast about her, as she swallowed a glass of wine and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief, Camille’s incendiary eyes scorched her over the flower arrangement. Finally with a nod of apology, and a placating smile that took in the voyeurs, she swept from the table and left the room. She sat for ten minutes at her dressing-table, shaken by the trend of her own thoughts. She meant to retouch her face, but not to see the hollow and lost expression in her eyes. It was some years since she and Claude had slept together; what relevance has it, why is she stopping to calculate it, should she also call for paper and ink and tot up the Deficit of her own life? Claude says that if this goes on till ’89 the country will have gone to the dogs and so will we all. In the mirror she sees herself, large blue eyes now swimming with unaccountable tears, which she instantly dabs away as earlier she dabbed red wine from her lips; perhaps I have drunk too much, perhaps we have all drunk too much, except that viperous boy, and whatever else the years give me cause to forgive him for I shall never forgive him for wrecking my party and making a fool of Claude. Why am I clutching this orange, she wondered. She stared down at her hand, like Lady Macbeth. What, in our house?
When she returned to her guests – the perfumed blood under her nails – the performance was over. The guests toyed with petits fours. Claude glanced up at her as if to ask where she had been. He looked cheerful. Camille had ceased to contribute to the conversation. He sat with his eyes cast down to the table. His expression, in one of her daughters, she would have called demure. All other faces wore an expression of dislocation and strain. Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.
NEXT DAY CLAUDE referred to these events. He said what a stimulating occasion it had been, so much better than the usual supper-party trivia. If all their social life were like that, he wouldn’t mind it so much, and so would she ask again that young man whose name for the present escaped him? He was so charming, so interested, and a shame about his stutter, but was he perhaps a little slow on the uptake? He hoped he had not carried away any wrong impressions about the workings of the Treasury.
How torturing, she thought, is the situation of fools who know they are fools; and how pleasant is Claude’s state, by comparison.
THE NEXT TIME Camille called, he was more discreet in the way he looked at her. It was as if they had reached an agreement that nothing should be precipitated. Interesting, she thought. Interesting.
He told her he did not want a legal career: but what else? He was trapped by the terms of his scholarship. Like Voltaire, he said, he wanted no profession but that of man of letters. ‘Oh, Voltaire,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of the name. Men of letters will be a luxury, let me tell you, in the years to come. We shall all have to work hard, with no diversions. We shall all have to emulate Claude.’ Camille pushed his hair back a fraction.