Overhead in a Balloon (18 page)

“How did Prism turn into a protégé? Easily; he rang a doorbell. Rosalia answered to a young man who was carrying a manila envelope, manuscript-sized, and a letter. She reached for the letter of introduction but did not let Prism in, even though large drops of rain had started to fall.

“Miss Pugh, upstairs in the Balzac sitting room, addressed, from the window, a troubled-looking patch of sky. ‘Hasn’t this been going on long enough?’ Rosalia heard her say. ‘Why don’t you do something?’

“The answer to Miss Pugh’s cosmic despair, or impertinence, was Victor Prism. She had been acknowledged by the universe before now, but perhaps never so quickly. She sat down with her back to the window, read the letter Rosalia gave her, folded it, thought it over, and said, ‘All right. Bring him up.’

“Prism came into her presence with a step that lost its assurance as he drew near. He asked permission to sit down. Having obtained a nod, he placed his manila envelope on a low table, where Miss Pugh could reach it easily, and repeated everything she had just read in the letter: He was promising but poor. He had been staying with Mrs. Hartley-Greene on Avenue Gabriel. Mrs. Hartley-Greene had been indescribably helpful and kind. However, she was interested in painters, not in writers – particularly writers of prose.

“Miss Pugh said, ‘Then you aren’t that poet.’

“ ‘No, no,’ said Prism. ‘I am not that … that.’

“He was puzzled by the house, believing that it had deliberately been built at the heart of a hollow square, perhaps by a demented architect, for nonsensical people. Rain poured down on the ash tree and naked Cupid. In a flat across the way a
kitchen light went on. Miss Pugh pressed the switch of a green-shaded lamp and considered Prism. He turned his head slightly and observed an oil painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. He thought of mile upon mile of museum portraits – young men, young saints pierced with arrows, with nothing to protect them from the staring of women but a coat of varnish.

“The passage of the envelope from his hands to Miss Pugh’s was crucial to his adventure. He wondered if he should speak. At the same time, he hated to let the envelope go. It held his entire capital – two chapters of a novel. He did not know if he would ever write anything better, or even if he could write anything else at all.

“Miss Pugh settled the matter by picking it up. ‘It’s for me to read, isn’t it? I’ll do so at once. Perhaps you could come back after dinner tonight.’

“During
dinner would have suited Prism better: Mrs. Hartley-Greene was under the impression he had already moved out and would not be back except to pick up some luggage.
Goldfinches
gives a vivid account of his retreat: ‘Christopher seemed to leave a trail of sawdust. There were arrow wounds everywhere. He did not know what other people thought and felt about anything, but he could sense to a fine degree how they thought and felt about him. He lived on the feelings he aroused, sought acquaintances among those in whom these feelings were not actively hostile, and did not know of any other way to be.’

“Eighty pages were in the envelope, thirty of them blank. Miss Pugh was not forced to spend every minute between tea and dinner reading, though she would have done so gladly.
She read anything recommended to her, proceeding slowly, pausing often to wonder if the author was sure of his facts. She had a great fear of being hoodwinked, for she knew by now that in art deception is the rule.

“What Prism had described was an elderly duchess, a loyal old manservant named Norbert, a wounded pigeon, and a nation at war. His fifty completed pages were divided into two chapters.

“Chapter 1: In a city under siege, a duchess wonders how to save the priceless eighteenth-century china presented to her family by the Empress. Whatever food Norbert manages to forage she feeds to her cats. She and Norbert adopt and discard schemes for saving the china. They think about this and discuss it all day long.

“Chapter 2: A pigeon flutters in the window. A cat jumps at it, breaking its wing. The duchess and Norbert hear gunfire moving closer. They discuss a plan for saving the pigeon.

“That was as far as it went. Either Prism did not know what came next or did not want to say. It seemed to Miss Pugh that a good deal had been left in the air. The first thing she asked when he came back that night was if the china was really worth saving. If it was priceless, as he claimed, then Norbert ought to pack it into cases lined with heavy silver paper. The cases could then be buried in the garden, if the ground was soft. That would depend on the season, which Prism had not described.

“She had begun a process that Prism had not foreseen and that was the most flattering success he might have imagined. Everything in the story was
hers
, from the duchess to the pigeon.

“Next, she gave her attention to the duchess’s apartments, which seemed to be in the wing of a palace. Prism had not
mentioned the style of architecture of the palace, or its condition. Most palaces nowadays were museums. Miss Pugh advised Prism to give the duchess an address more realistic and to eliminate from her life the threat of war.

“Then, at last, she said the only thing that mattered: she was ready to offer Prism the opportunity for creative endeavour Mrs. Hartley-Greene had been obliged to refuse because of her predilection for painters. Prism could return in the morning, by which time Rosalia would have his room ready. In the meantime, Miss Pugh would comb through the manuscript again.

“In
Goldfinches
, Prism skims over the next few hours. We have only the testimony of Rosalia, which is that he turned up in the morning looking as if he had spent the night curled up in a doorway.

“Miss Pugh was eating her breakfast in the sitting room with the green-shaded lamp and the portrait of St. Sebastian. Through a half-open door Prism caught a glimpse of her large, canopied bed. There was an extra place laid at the table.

“ ‘I was expecting my brother,’ said Miss Pugh. ‘But he has been delayed.’

“Instead of breakfast, Pugh was to have the manila envelope. In his account of the scene, Prism makes a curious mistake: ‘The morning sun, kept from Christopher by the angle of the yellow awning, slid into view and hit him square in the face. His eyes watered, and as if a film of illusion had been removed …’ and so on. There was no awning, no sun; the house was down a well.

“Miss Pugh asked Prism what he thought of Picasso. He understood the question as a test. Her rooms gave no clue to
her own opinion; there were no Picassos in sight, but that was not to say there never could be. He drew a square in his mind, as a way of steadying his thoughts, and put Picasso in it.

“All at once, in a rush of blinding anger, he knew what he believed. His first words were inaudible, but as he regained hold on his feelings the sense of his wild protest became clear: ‘All that money. All that
money
. Does he enjoy it? They say he lives in the kitchen, like a squatter. As if the house did not belong to him. He could travel. He could own things. He could have twenty-two servants. He does not deserve to have a fortune, because he doesn’t know how to use one.’

“His hostess plucked at her table napkin. She was accustomed to hearing poor young men say what they could do with money. She had heard the hunger in the voice, the incoherence and the passion. She had often aroused this longing, putting out the bait and withdrawing it, which was the only form of wickedness she knew. She seemed to be reflecting on what Prism had just said. There was no denying it was original. Who ever had seen Picasso at an auction of rare furniture? At the races, straining after one of his own horses? Photographed at a gala evening in Monte Carlo? Boarding a yacht for a cruise in Greek waters?

“ ‘What do you think?’ said Prism boldly.

“ ‘He is the most attractive man in the world. My brother would look good, too, if he could stop drinking and pull himself together. What’s your opinion of his goats?’ Prism shook his head. ‘The sculpture. You can see Picasso doesn’t care for animals. Those goats are half starved. I suppose you’ll be wanting to get to work.’

“Prism in a very short time came to the conclusion he had climbed on the wrong springboard. He saw that the anxiety and
frustration of patronage, the backer’s terror of being duped, of having been taken in, was second only to the protégé’s fear of being despoiled, stripped, robbed, and left bankrupt by the side of the road. Miss Pugh did not loosen her grip on his two chapters, and even Prism’s decision that he wanted to have nothing more to do with them did not lessen the tension.

“He would not claim those two chapters today. If they followed him in the street, he would probably threaten them with an umbrella. And yet the story is his; it is
his
duchess,
his
rustic bandstand. It was also Miss Pugh’s. ‘Have you moved that poor woman out of that filthy old palace yet?’ she would ask Prism at lunch. ‘Have you found out any more about the china?’ When the leaves of Mrs. Wharton’s ash tree began to droop and turn yellow, patroness and protégé were at a stalemate that could be ended only by sincere admission of defeat. Miss Pugh was in her own house; Prism had to play the loser. One day he sat down at the Louis XVI period table in his room and considered the blank pages still in the manila envelope. He wondered if the time had not come to return to England, try for a good degree, and then teach.

“ ‘I can always branch out from there,’ he said to himself. (How easy it must have sounded.)

“He saw in his mind the museum rooms full of portraits of St. Sebastian, with nothing for protection but a thin coat of varnish. There were two opinions about the conservation of art. One claimed it was a mistake to scour paintings in order to lay bare the original colour. The other believed it was essential to do so, even if the artist had made allowances for the mellowing and darkening effect of the glaze, and even if the colours revealed turned out to be harsher than the artist had intended. Prism drew a blank sheet towards him and began to write, ‘Are
we to take it for granted that the artist thinks he knows what he is doing?’ At that moment, Prism the critic was born.

“Miss Pugh was sorry when she heard he wanted to give up the duchess, but it was not her policy to engage the Muses in battle. Prism presented her with the manuscript; she gave him the crêpe-soled shoes. She was never heard to speak of him slightingly, and she read with generous pleasure all the newspaper cuttings concerning himself that he sent her over the years. Whenever he came to Paris Miss Pugh would ask him to tea and rejoiced in the rich texture of his career, which he unfolded by the hour, without tiring speaker or audience. Prism made Miss Pugh the subject of countless comic anecdotes and the central female character of
Goldfinches
. He was always evenhanded.”

A
nother Easter went by before Grippes received an acknowledgment – a modest cheque in lieu of the promised fee, and an apology: His memoir had been mailed to Victor Prism to be checked for accuracy, and Prism had still not replied. During the year sweeping changes had been made. The
Angliciste
had published a paper on the Common Market as seen through English fiction. It was felt to contain a political bias, and the Ministry had withdrawn support. The publisher had no choice but to replace him as editor by the only responsible person who seemed to be free at the time, a famous
Irlandiste
on leave from a university in Belgium. The
Irlandiste
restored the project to its original three volumes, threw out the English section as irrelevant, and added a division with potted biographies of eight hundred Irish poets favourable to France and the Common Market.

Grippes has heard that it is to be published in 2010, at the very latest. He knows that in the meantime they are bound to call on him again – more and more as time goes on. He is the only person still alive with any sort of memory.

A
t an early hour for the French man of letters Henri Grippes – it was a quarter to nine, on an April morning – he sat in a windowless, brown-painted cubicle, facing a slight, mop-headed young man with horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. The man wore a dark tie with a narrow knot and a buttoned-up blazer. His signature was “O. Poche”; his title, on the grubby, pulpy summons Grippes had read, sweating, was “Controller.” He must be freshly out of his civil-service training school, Grippes guessed. Even his aspect, of a priest hearing a confession a few yards from the guillotine, seemed newly acquired. Before him lay open a dun-coloured folder with not much in it – a letter from Grippes, full of delaying tactics, and copies of
his correspondence with a bank in California. It was not true that American banks protected a depositor’s secrets; anyway, this one hadn’t. Another reason Grippes thought O. Poche must be recent was the way he kept blushing. He was not nearly as pale or as case-hardened as Grippes.

At this time, President de Gaulle had been in power five years, two of which Grippes had spent in blithe writer-in-residenceship in California. Returning to Paris, he had left a bank account behind. It was forbidden, under the Fifth Republic, for a French citizen to have a foreign account. The government might not have cared so much about drachmas or zlotys, but dollars were supposed to be scraped in, converted to francs at bottom rate, and, of course, counted as personal income. Grippes’ unwise and furtive moves with trifling sums, his somewhat paranoid disagreements with California over exchange, had finally caught the eye of the Bank of France, as a glistening minnow might attract a dozing whale. The whale swallowed Grippes, found him too small to matter, and spat him out, straight into the path of a water ox called Public Treasury, Direct Taxation, Personal Income. That was Poche.