Life: A User's Manual (4 page)

That day Valène asked Winckler how he’d come to Paris and how he’d met Bartlebooth. But Winckler replied only that it was because he was young.

CHAPTER NINE

Servants’ Quarters, 3

THIS IS THE room where the painter Hutting houses his two servants, Joseph and Ethel.

Joseph Nieto is the chauffeur and odd-job man. He’s a Paraguayan of about forty who used to be a quartermaster in the merchant navy.

Ethel Rogers, a Dutch woman of twenty-six, serves as cook and laundress.

The room is almost entirely filled by a big Empire bed with posts topped by carefully polished brass spheres. Ethel Rogers is getting dressed, half-hidden by a rice-paper screen decorated with floral motifs, over which a cashmere-style shawl has been thrown. Nieto, dressed in an embroidered white shirt and broad-belted black trousers, is stretched out on the bed; in his left hand, held up to his eyes, he has a letter with a diamond-shaped stamp bearing the image of Simon Bolivar, and in his right hand, the middle finger adorned with a heavy signet ring, he holds an ignited cigarette lighter, as if he is preparing to burn the letter he has just received.

Between the bed and the door, there is a small sideboard made of fruit-tree wood, on which a bottle of Black and White whisky stands, identifiable by the two dogs on the label, as well as a plate containing an assortment of salted biscuits.

The room is painted light green. The floor is covered with a carpet of yellow and pink squares. A dressing table, and a single straw chair, with a well-thumbed book on it:
French Through Reading. Intermediate Level. Second Year
, complete the furnishing.

Above the bed they have pinned a reproduction entitled
Arminius and Sigimer
: it depicts two grey-cloaked, bull-necked giants with Herculean biceps and red faces sprouting thick moustaches and bushy sideburns.

On the main door a postcard has been fixed with drawing pins: it shows a monumental sculpture by Hutting –
Beasts of the Night
– adorning the main courtyard of the Prefecture at Pontarlier: entwined lumps of slag dimly suggestive, overall, of some prehistoric animal.

The bottle of whisky and the salted biscuits are a present, or more precisely a tip which Madame Altamont has sent up to them in advance. Hutting has close ties with the Altamonts, and the painter has lent them his servants, who will serve this evening as extras at the annual reception they are holding, in their big flat on the second floor left, beneath Bartlebooth’s. It happens the same way each year, and the Altamonts return the favour for the often lavish parties which the painter gives, every quarter, in his studio.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

CHAPTER TEN

Servants’ Quarters, 4

ON THE TOP floor, a tiny little room, occupied by a sixteen-year-old girl, Jane Sutton, who works as an au pair for the Rorschachs.

The girl is standing by the window. Her face is lit up with joy as she reads a letter – or maybe, even, rereads it for the twentieth time – whilst chewing the crust end of a French loaf. There is a cage hanging in the window; it holds a bird with grey plumage, with a metal ring on its foot.

The bed is very narrow: actually it’s a foam mattress laid on three wooden cubes which serve as drawers, and covered with a patchwork quilt. Fixed to the wall above the bed is a cork board, about two feet by three, on which are pinned several bits of paper – instructions for the use of an electric toaster, a laundry ticket, a calendar, an
Alliance Française
timetable, and three photographs showing the girl – two or three years younger – in school plays put on at Greenhill, near Harrow, where, some sixty-five years previously, Bartlebooth, following in the footsteps of Byron, Sir Robert Peel, Sheridan, Spencer, John Percival, Lord Palmerston, and dozens of other equally eminent men, had been educated.

On the first photo Jane Sutton appears as a page, dressed in red brocade breeches with gold piping, light-red hose, a white shirt, and a short, collarless doublet, red in colour, with slightly puffed sleeves and edged with a yellow silk fringe.

On the second, she is Princess Beryl, kneeling at the bedside of her grandfather, King Utherpandragon (“
When King Utherpandragon felt the sickness of death coming upon him, he had the princess brought to his side …
”).

The third snapshot shows fourteen girls in a row. Jane is the fourth from the left (an X over her head shows which she is, otherwise it would be hard to recognise her). It is the last scene from Yorick’s
Count of Gleichen
:

The Count of Gleichen was taken prisoner in a battle against the Saracens, and condemned to slavery. As he was employed in the gardens of the harem, the Sultan’s daughter espied him. She judged him to be a man of quality, was inspired with love for him, and offered to assist in his escape if he would marry her. He gave the reply that he was married already; which caused not the slightest scruple to the princess, accustomed as she was to the plurality of wives. They soon agreed on’t, set sail, and landed at Venice. The Count went to Rome, and told Pope Gregory IX his tale in every particular. On the Count’s promise to convert the Saracen, the Pope gave him a dispensation to keep both his wives.

His first wife was so overcome with joy at her husband’s return, no matter what conditions were attach’d to it, that she acquiesced to everything, and demonstrated the full extent of her gratitude to her benefactress. History recounts that the Saracen had no children, and loved those of her rival as their mother did. What pity ’tis, that she did not bring into the world a being that resembled her!

At Gleichen can be seen the bed in which these three rare individuals slept together. They were buried in the same grave, at the Benedictine monastery at Saint Petersburg; and the Count, who survived both his wives, ordered that their tomb, which was later to be his own also, should bear this epitaph, which he composed:

“Here lie two rival wives who loved each other as sisters, and loved me in equal measure. One of them abandoned Mahomet to follow her husband, and the other threw herself into the arms of the rival who brought him back to her. United by ties of love and marriage, we had but one nuptial bed throughout our lives; and the same stone covereth us all after death.” An oak and two limes, as is proper, were planted beside the grave.

* * *

The only other piece of furniture in the room is a narrow low table filling the available space between the bed and the window, on which stands a gramophone – a tiny model, known as a disc-muncher – plus a quarter-full bottle of Pepsi-Cola, a set of playing cards, a potted cactus complemented by some multicoloured gravel, a little plastic bridge, and a minute parasol.

There are some records piled up on the low table. One of them, out of its sleeve, stands almost vertical against the edge of the bed: it’s a jazz record –
Gerry Mulligan: Far East Tour
– and the sleeve depicts the temples of Angkor Wat in morning haze.

A macintosh and a long cashmere scarf hang on a coathook fixed to the door.

A fourth photograph, of large square format, is stuck with drawing pins on the right-hand wall, not far from where the girl is standing; it depicts a large drawing room at Versailles with a woodblock floor, without any furniture except a huge, carved armchair in Second Empire style, to the right of which, with one hand on the top of the chair-back and the other on his hip, with his chin jutting forward, there stands a very short man dressed as a musketeer.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hutting’s Studio, 1

IN THE LEFT-hand corner of the two top floors of the building, Hutting the painter has knocked eight maids’ rooms, a stretch of corridor, and the corresponding roof-space into a huge studio, with a raised gallery running round three sides of it giving access to several bedrooms. Around the open spiral stairs leading to the gallery he has made a sort of lounge, where he likes to rest between working sessions, and where during the day he receives friends and clients, separated from the main part of the studio by an L-shaped piece of furniture, a two-sided bookcase, vaguely Chinese in style, that is to say lacquered black with imitation mother-of-pearl and beaten brass inlays; it is tall, broad, and long – more than seven feet along the larger arm, about five feet along the shorter. Lined up on top of this bookcase are various casts, an old Marianne from some town hall, large vases, three fine alabaster pyramids, whilst the five layers of shelving bow under the weight of a heap of knickknacks, curios, and gadgets: kitsch objects from a 1930s Inventors’ Exhibition: a potato-peeler, a device for stirring mayonnaise with a little cylinder that releases the oil drop by drop, a tool for fine-slicing hard-boiled eggs and another for making butter whorls, a terrifyingly complicated monkey wrench no doubt intended to be merely the ultimate in corkscrews; ready-mades of surrealist inspiration – a silver-coated stick loaf – and of the pop-art age: a bottle of 7-Up; dried flowers under glass in little romantic or rococo settings made of painted cardboard and cloth, charming
trompe-l’oeil
works in which every detail is minutely reproduced, from a lace doily on a table no more than an inch high to a zigzag parquet floor of which each woodblock is no more than one tenth of an inch long; a whole collection of old postcards showing Pompeii at the turn of the century: Der Triumphbogen des Nero (Arco di Nerone, Arc de Néron, Nero’s Arch), la Casa dei Vetti (
“one of the best examples of a noble Roman villa, the fine paintings and marble decorations have been preserved in the peristyle, which was decorated with greenery …”
), Casa di Cavio Rufio, Vico di Lupanare, etc. The finest pieces of the collections are dainty musical boxes; one of them, allegedly antique, is a small church with bells which play the famous
Smanie implacabili che m’agitate
from
Così fan tutte
when you gently lift the bell-tower; another is a tiny, valuable pendulum clock whose movement powers a little ballerina in a tutu.

In the rectangle defined by the L-shaped structure each arm of which ends on an opening that can be closed by a leather drape, Hutting has placed a low sofa, a few poufs, and a drinks trolley equipped with bottles, glasses, and an ice bucket from the famous Beirut nightclub
The Star
: it portrays a short, fat, seated monk holding a goblet in his right hand; he is dressed in a long grey robe tied with a cord; his head and shoulders are enclosed in a black hood which forms the bucket’s lid.

The wall on the left, facing the longer arm of the L, is hung with cork paper. On the track fixed about nine feet up, several metal hangers run, and on them the painter has hung a score of his canvases, mostly small ones: they almost all belong to one of the painter’s earlier styles, the one he refers to himself as his “
haze period
” and which gained him his notoriety: they are, generally, minutely executed copies of well-known paintings –
Mona Lisa, The Angelus, The Retreat from Russia, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Anatomy Lesson
, etc. – over which he has then painted a more or less heavy haze, producing a greyish blur beneath which you can only just make out the silhouette of his celebrated originals. The private viewing of his Paris exhibition at Gallery 22 in 1960 was complemented by artificial fog, made even denser by the crowds of cigar- and cigarette-smokers amongst the guests, to the great joy of the gossip-columnists. It was an instant success. One or two critics carped, for example Beyssandre from Switzerland, who wrote: “Hutting’s greys hark back less to Malevich’s
White on White
than to bad jokes by vulgar comedians about black men in unlit tunnels.” But most of them enthused over what one called his
romantic meteorology
, which, he said, placed Hutting on a par with his famous quasi-namesake, Huffing, the New York pioneer of
Arte brutta
. Astutely advised, Hutting kept nearly half his canvases himself and will consent to parting with them only on exorbitant terms.

There are three people in this little lounge. One is a woman, fortyish; she is coming down the gallery stairs; she is wearing black leather dungarees and holds in her hand an intricately carved oriental dagger, which she is cleaning with a piece of chamois leather. Tradition has it that this is the dagger used by the fanatic Suleiman el-Halebi in the assassination of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, at Cairo on 14 June 1800, when this strategist of genius, who had been left on station by Bonaparte after the semi-success of the Egyptian Campaign, had just replied to Admiral Keith’s ultimatum by winning victory at the Battle of Heliopolis.

The two other occupants are seated on poufs. They are a couple in their sixties. The woman is wearing a patchwork skirt reaching down to her knees, and wide fishnet stockings; she stubs out her lipstick-stained cigarette in a cut-glass ashtray shaped something like a starfish; the man is dressed in a dark suit with red pinstripes, a pale-blue shirt with matching tie, and breast-pocket handkerchief in blue with red stripes; pepper-and-salt hair cut short and brushed up; tortoiseshell spectacles. On his knees he has a booklet bound in red, entitled
Internal Revenue Legislation
.