Cont'd

‘I don’t like spring,’ she said.  ‘Something about it revolts me.  Everything is bursting forth … One feels one’s on an over-lavish stage-set.  It always makes me think of larvae, of soft things which haven’t come out of their cocoons … A friend of mine in Odessa died of TB in the middle of spring one year.  She didn’t even have the strength to spit any longer.  I was going round spitting at the bushes and the trees!  How stupid they looked!’

Samuel twirled the stem of his empty glass.

‘It was in the autumn,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The filming of The Woman in Grey:  it was in the autumn.  It’s obvious.  The light of autumn is far more interesting.  The morning mists, too.  Once – not here, a long way away, up on an island in the north – I saw a particular effect of light.  It was exactly what I had been looking for.  Sometimes, after working for hours and hours, I capture it … And then I’m deliriously happy … The next morning I leap out of bed, and what do you know?  The bloody thing’s disappeared from the canvas.  It’s hopeless, absolutely hopeless.  Gauer, now:  Gauer sometimes manages to catch it … Do you remember that scene with the train?  You’re here’ – Samuel stretched out his hands to indicate a carriage-window – ‘and the train’s here, and it starts pulling out of the station.  And what does Gauer do?  What do you actually see?  Nothing!  Not a single soul!  Just the light – my light!  He gets the precise colour of my light, the sod!  How does he get the colour to come alive when he has to film everything in black and white?  Doing the same thing in paint, I’d have to destroy the colour itself, so that you saw nothing but the light …’

‘You once loved someone,’ said Jeanne.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re trying to recapture the light of the day you met that person.’

‘Nothing to do with it,’ said Samuel.  ‘When I was in love, I didn’t even know it.  I didn’t have my eyes open.  And when you do know it’s no longer the same.  It goes to your head a little, you get on with the business of living, you concentrate on a subject.’

‘I told you so,’ said Jeanne, ‘you were in love once.  You’re telling me you were.  You weren’t yet aware of it, but there was a light …’

‘One ought rather to think of every different kind of light … Every light that makes me what I am – all the drawers I’ve rummaged through, all the doors I’ve opened, all the heads of hair, the looks, the feet, the dust, the mist, the rays of light … Shouldn’t one really speak of the lamps of memory?’ he said, in a professorial tone, smiling.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jeanne.  ‘What if we were to stop thinking?  As I do most of the time.’

‘Oh, that’s easy at your age,’ said Samuel.  ‘You’re young.  Waiter, two hard-boiled eggs and a little bread with just a scraping of butter!’

‘What’s young?  My mother’s much younger than me.  My skin may be smoother and my features more distinct, but I’m nothing but a box of ashes inside.’

‘Your hand, I beg you, box of ashes!’

He bent forward over the hand Jeanne automatically held out to him and ceremoniously kissed it.

‘A simple act of homage to the person who produced such a brilliant performance in The Woman in Grey.  You must come and visit me in my den.  I live in Rue de la Glacière.  Do you know it?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t know Paris well at all.  But I was wanting to ask you to come to Incarville this Sunday.  It’s Easter.’

‘I can’t stand services and priests.  Do you really believe in that stuff?’

‘Yes, I do!  As far back as I can remember, Easter has always been a celebration for me.  Won’t you come?’

‘When will you be in Paris again?’

‘I’m here every Monday and Thursday.  I give dancing lessons at a place near the Porte Dauphine, in the Bois de Boulogne.’

‘Give me the address and I’ll come and meet you afterwards.’

‘Here you are,’ said Jeanne, scribbling the address on the back of an envelope, ‘and these are the hours I teach … The Avenue du Bois has a huge pavement:  we could go for a bit of a walk.’

‘We’ll try.’

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