The Necessary Angel E-Book

C. K. Stead

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 299

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student. When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse. Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an ode to the power of literature as a nuanced exploration of love, fidelity and the balance of power within relationships.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR C.K. STEAD

‘…a towering talent, cosmopolitan, lucidly intelligent. Few writers on either side of the Tasman have matched Stead’s multi-faceted achievement.’

—Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald

‘Edgy and lyrical, acerbic and witty, intellectually incisive but also visceral and bawdy, disarmingly direct and often intricately plotted, international in focus but always grounded in the country of his birth, the poems and novels are always provocative, always challenging and, above all, always preeminently readable.’

—Professor Andrew Bennett, Bristol University, on the award of an Honorary Doctorate in Letters to C.K. Stead in 2001

PRAISE FOR THE NECESSARY ANGEL

‘Stead is a master at maintaining the reader’s curiosity in “what happens next”. And there is a mystery to be solved. This is elegant fiction with more than a little reflection on the art that has created it.’

—MacDonald P. Jackson, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Auckland

PRAISE FOR THE NAME ON THE DOOR IS NOT MINE (2016)

‘Sharp and cosmopolitan, [this] is a clever, wry and beautifully observed collection. Many of these striking stories, collected from over Stead’s long and storied career, and some of them new versions of earlier stories, offer glimpses of a writing life both in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad, and suggest the work that goes into crafting such a life. These stories are themselves cleverly crafted and honed to seem deceptively simple and effortless.’

—2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges

‘Stead’s evocative power is a triumph.’

—David Herkt, Sunday Star-Times

‘These stories are the best of Stead, with their light touch, precise observation and sheer brio.’

—Stephen Stratford, New Zealand Listener

‘There is something here to suit almost any taste and mood, and the collection as a whole is thought-provoking and immersive without being overly heavy…the essence of one of our finest writers at his inimitable best.’

—Cushla McKinney, Otago Daily Times

PRAISE FOR MY NAME WAS JUDAS (2007)

‘Stead’s deft marshalling of the language, the way he gets words to do his bidding throughout without ever being obvious or showing off, only adds to the pleasure of reading this thought-provoking, witty and highly topical novel.’

—James Wood, The Telegraph

‘It will no doubt be controversial but it shouldn’t be read for that reason; it should be read because it’s brilliant.’

—Michele Hewitson, The New Zealand Herald

‘[Stead], on the basis of My Name Was Judas, must surely be a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize.’

—Roger Lewis, Sunday Express

‘C.K. Stead, New Zealand’s most distinguished man of letters—scholar, critic and poet as well as novelist—has written a fiction that is remarkable, intelligent and moving.’

—Allan Massie, The Scotsman

‘…skilfully measured…a persuasive study of belief, loyalty and betrayal.’

—Sunday Times

‘…a witty, sharp and perfectly formed meditation on belief, loss and the power of language.’

—New Zealand Listener

PRAISE FOR MANSFIELD (2004)

‘…a highly intelligent and scrupulous work.’

—Allan Massie, The Scotsman

‘…a fine achievement, rich in sobriety and purpose, in warmth and dazzling light.’

—Vanessa Curtis, Scotland on Sunday

PRAISE FOR THE SECRET HISTORY OF MODERNISM (2001)

‘Engrossing yet delicately understated, this is fiction of the highest order: gracefully intelligent, emotionally probing, politically sharp.’

—Rosemary Goring, Sunday Tribune (Dublin)

‘…as subtle as Jane Austen and as fatalistic as Thomas Hardy.’

—Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

THE

NECESSARY

ANGEL

First published in Great Britain in 2018

Copyright © Christian Karlson Stead, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House, 26-27 Boswell Street

London, WC1N 3JZ

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 76063 115 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 76063 823 8

Design by Kate Barraclough

Cover design: Kate Barraclough

Cover photograph: Wojciech Zwolinksi / Trevillion Images 

To Claire Davison

and to Margaret Stead

Note: It can be assumed that most of the conversations in this novel are in French, except where the text (or common sense) suggests otherwise.

CONTENTS

I. SUMMER 2014

1. MIDSUMMER NIGHT

2. WHY ONE BUYS SHOES

3. FAMILY AND FRIENDS

II. SUMMER LIGHTNING

4. SLEEPING AND WAKING

5. SUMMER LIGHTNING

6. FULL OF THE WARM SOUTH

III. TOWARDS AUTUMN

7. A CASE FOR MAIGRET?

8. LE MONDE

9. SYLVIE AND HELEN

IV. THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT

10. THE APE, THE SNAKE AND THE SILVER FOX

11. JE SUIS CHARLIE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY C.K. STEAD

I.

SUMMER

2014

1.

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT

THEY WERE CLOSE TO THE end of their meal and their meeting when Max Jackson commented on the noise coming from the street.

‘It’s the twenty-first of June,’ Sylvie said—and he had to shift his thoughts from the practical matters they’d been talking about to register what this meant: midsummer’s night—the streets would soon be full of revellers, musicians, rock groups, fêtards.

He smiled and put a hand on her arm. It was a way of saying, ‘Of course—I’d forgotten.’ He glanced at her face and she smiled.

The others were gathering up their papers, handbags, silk wraps and scarves. He signalled with his credit card. It was at the expense of the Sorbonne Nouvelle—that was understood, and he would deal with it.

There were farewells, thanks, promises of ‘further suggestions along the same lines’—the kind of winding down and wrapping up when progress has been made. The next stage, the doing, might be more difficult. In the meantime they had a plan. Exactly a year from now, the weekend of 19 to 21 June 2015, there would be a conference, or perhaps something on a slightly smaller scale, what was sometimes called in France a journée d’études, which would focus on just eight poets—four English, four French—who had been killed in battle, or died of wounds in the 1914–18 war, the centenary of which was currently being commemorated. It would be a memorialisation of the fallen, but a literary one; and keeping the number of writers down meant there was some chance of keeping the academic standard up. To Max it felt like a small but significant triumph. And somehow it had been achieved despite very good wine, and Le Procope’s ‘famous coq au vin traditionnel’ preceded by barigoule de légumes, and followed by cheeses and fruit.

Despite—or because of? Either way it had happened, it was done, and he was pleased—with himself and with his colleagues, who had seemed to go out of their way to avoid old arguments. This was Paris, and one of its most venerable cafés, where (as it liked to boast) ‘Balzac, Hugo, Verlaine and so many others’ had planned their books and argued about them, dazzling their friends and admirers, throwing dust in the eyes of their enemies and detractors. Max, who had lived in Paris long enough to feel at ease if not at home, understood all this, and paid these venerable walls and decorated ceilings at least the lip service they expected, and sometimes the more-than-lip service they probably deserved. Now his mind was elsewhere—or nowhere, except in the satisfaction of something accomplished, and the warm and welcome proximity of Sylvie Renard, a recent addition to his Department of Comparative Literature.

The short, plump, pompous young expert on Apollinaire, whose name Max had not caught or couldn’t now remember, was still talking. There was so much yet to be said about Apollinaire, he was insisting, so much only now emerging from the years spent in Nice. It was true he had not died in battle—it was the Spanish flu that had taken him off two days before the Armistice was signed. But he’d been trepanned for shrapnel wounds and that must have weakened his resistance. He could certainly have been honoured as one mort pour la patrie—and indeed was, in the street named after him, and by the tombstone in Père Lachaise.

He had said this already, more than once, and no one now was paying attention. He looked to Max (whose knowledge of Apollinaire was limited) for agreement, for confirmation, and Max nodded and tried to look keen. ‘Sure. Yes—he’s one of our eight. That’s almost certain, I think. And, yes, the Nice years especially.’ Sylvie stood beside him at the desk. There was some rechecking of the bill being done, a small correction to be made. There was a spider’s web, low down almost out of sight where a cleaner would easily miss it. With the tip of his biro, Max touched it. Instantly the insect began to spin in fast circles, violently shaking its web. He said, ‘I always wonder what they’re doing when they do that.’

‘Panic,’ Sylvie said.

‘Yes, but what’s going on exactly?’

‘Hiding the money,’ she suggested.

He laughed. ‘A raid, d’you think?’

‘Monsieur.’ The card was returned, with a modest flourish and polite thanks, not excessive, because this was, after all, Le Procope, and who owed most thanks—the famous location or its customer?

They walked down the stairs together, Sylvie and Max. As they pushed out through the doors into that huge, raucous crush of people filling the street like a swollen river from one bank to the other, she grabbed his hand—or had he taken hers?—so they would not be swept away from one another on the current.

They fought their way out of the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and across the boulevard. She was leading the way now and he followed, veering right, battered by the racket, the kinds of noise changing from moment to moment. He was uncertain now where they were, where they were going, and didn’t care so long as his hand was in hers.

When she stopped he thought he recognised they were in the rue de Vaugirard. People still swirled around them and they were buffeted this way and that. ‘It’s like the end of Les Enfants du Paradis,’ he said but she didn’t hear.

‘The movie,’ he shouted.

She pointed to her ears and shook her head. ‘Come,’ she said, pulling him with the left hand that was still holding his wrist, and with the other punching a number code in at the door from the street.

Inside, when the door was shut on the wild out-there world, she said, ‘Have you got a moment? Come up—I couldn’t hear a word.’

He would not have suggested this himself but was glad of it. It removed a barrier. While they waited for the lift, ‘Les Enfants du Paradis,’ he repeated. ‘That’s what I was shouting at you. Classic French movie. Ends with Jean-Louis Barrault losing the woman he loves in a crowd…I’m probably telling you something you know.’

‘Garance,’ she wailed, imitating Barrault’s lament. ‘Garance!’

Oh, so she had been listening—and of course she knew the movie. How could she not?

Sylvie smiled at him as the cage cranked down to them. The doors opened. As they entered the small space, he thought of asking whether there was a man in her life, but it was one of those thoughts rejected before spoken. She would probably answer ‘Of course’, or ‘Always’, leaving him no better informed, and mildly punished for being the predictable male in a Paris lift. And she would not need to ask if he had a wife because she would know from talk in the department that there was one, of long standing, French, that they were ‘somewhat estranged’ (Max’s own description of their present arrangement), and that there were two children.

On the other hand, maybe she had heard nothing, had not been interested enough even to enquire. In the past few days the beautiful, clever, intuitive (as she seemed to him) Sylvie Renard had taken hold of his imagination as firmly as she had just taken his hand in the street.

They stepped out at the sixth floor. A light came on. Sylvie approached the apartment door, tucking something under one arm and hunting for keys in her bag. She asked, ‘Would you like coffee?’

‘That would be nice…’

‘A small noisette?’

‘Thank you.’

He hummed a few bars of a tune he’d heard out there on the street, nervous while she fiddled at the lock. She opened the door. There were lights on in there. ‘Darling, it’s me,’ she called ahead of herself.

And there was a response half heard—a male voice, a deep rumble.

AND, AS FOR SYLVIE, HER hand gripping his in that crossing of two major and some minor thoroughfares, through the almost-meltdown of the normal order of things, which was not a real meltdown because the fact of it, and its limits, were what the season and the day of the year dictated: the head-banging racket of it all, the beating her ears were taking—different songs, different voices and languages, klaxons, firecrackers, the seasonal euphoria, the urban cacophony. She was glad to have hold of him, grateful for his physical nearness, yet surprised, and even, dimly, displeased, that he should have signalled interest in her so unambiguously during the whole of their dinner, and now, alone with her, even in this undisciplined moment, seemed unwilling or unable to turn wish into action. Why so passive? Should she reproach herself for the same half-step forward and half-step back? Possibly, probably, yes and no. He was her senior, after all; but it was her impulse now that was pulling him indoors out of the crowd, inviting him to come up to where they could look down on it all, as if on themselves, from above, and where he could learn a little about her in answer to the questions he did not, and probably would not, ask. He had not intended to be heard telling her, as they emerged into the street, that she was beautiful, but chancing it—and of course she had heard, or thought she had. Why even now did he not kiss her in the lift, since it was what he wanted, and what she might welcome—how could they know if he didn’t try? So they were going up, rising above the racket, and he was trying to impress her by talking about Les Enfants du Paradis, that tired old classic of French cinema. Yes, the wine at Le Procope had been good and she’d had enough of it to say what fierce, unbridled things needed to be said, and to do what wild Midsummer Night things needed to be done, if only she and Max could be alone together…

But there were lights on in there.

‘Darling, it’s me,’ she called.

AT THE DOOR MAX WAS making the necessary inner adjustment. His feelings were mixed—disappointment, but also relief. He would not be called upon to be decisive—only sociable. Or did this only add an extra dimension to what might still be an adventure and a challenge? Signals, you could say, had gone back and forth between him and Sylvie—or he thought they had. They might come to mean little or a lot.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘He’ll be pleased to meet you.’

And there he was, scrambling up out of his armchair. He had a lot of frizzy-blond, somewhat grizzled hair standing out from his head as though electrified. Solidly built—a sort of Beethoven figure, robust but not beautiful. Middle-aged—possibly older than Max, but not much. Max smiled, amused as he told himself, ‘Someone got here before you.’ He felt relaxed, relieved of an anxiety.

‘Max, this is Bertholdt Volker. And his English is better than his French, so you can speak to him in English if you prefer.’

But they continued in French. ‘Bertholdt’s a TV producer,’ Sylvie explained. ‘France 5. Canal.’

‘Max,’ Bertholdt said, shaking his hand. ‘Professor Jackson. I’ve heard good things about you.’

‘I too—likewise,’ Max said, though in fact he’d heard nothing.

She gathered up papers that were scattered about the coffee table and the sofa, tidying them into a single sheaf. ‘Will you do coffee for us, Bertholdt? You make it so much better.’ And then to Max, ‘He doesn’t like my coffee. He’s very particular. Come and look at the apartment.’

Already Max was taking in the view from the windows—down there the Luxembourg Gardens, in darkness now the gates had closed for the night, but the palace illuminated for Midsummer Night.

‘Lovely in the daytime,’ she said; and told him about this interior space, under the slope of the mansards, that had been created by converting the servants’ quarters—les chambres de bonnes—taking out partitions. The floors were polished wood with good-quality woollen rugs. On a low square table were ceramic bowls, a spiky flower arrangement and a piece of carved greenstone. A Matisse lithograph on the wall was of a woman in red wearing a grey-blue hat; another was a poster for a Fernand Léger exhibition, in dark blue. On the bookshelves the books looked very handsome, possibly more looked at than read. The walls were dark grey and pale yellow. The piano at the far end of the room was an ordinary upright, pale grey rather than the usual dark brown. The screen at the far end was a big one. The sofa was Danske Møbler, with no back support: you either perched there, or you lay down. The glossy magazines—arts, architecture, gardens, cooking—were in an angled holder on the floor at the end of the sofa. ‘It’s Bertholdt’s apartment,’ Sylvie said, noticing his eye on the magazines.

‘It’s very nice,’ Max said. ‘And you’re a pianist. I saw it on your CV.’

‘I was, yes. Past tense. But it used to be serious, so it goes into the record.’

‘Please—play something.’

‘Not on this piano,’ she said. ‘It’s here as part of the décor but he doesn’t have it tuned.’ She struck one note, and then a pair, by way of illustration. It sounded fine to Max.

‘Another time,’ she said. ‘Not here, not now.’

He said, ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

The small strong coffees were served with a little jug of hot milk on the side. ‘Add according to taste,’ Bertholdt said.

Sylvie perched beside Max. Bertholdt sprawled in his chair and explained how it was that he was working on a production of The Ghost Sonata for Canal. ‘There was a famous production of it done not long after Strindberg died—by Max Reinhardt in Berlin. I suspect that’s why they asked me to do it. Thought, Germans can make sense of this mad Swede. Let’s give it to Bertholdt. He’ll make it work.’

‘And have you?’

‘It’s fiendishly difficult—just to make sense of it. It keeps me awake at night.’

‘Keeps us both awake,’ she said.

Bertholdt asked how the dinner had gone and between them Max and Sylvie explained how far the meeting had taken them. ‘It’s a start,’ Max said.

‘A rather expensive one,’ Sylvie said.

‘Another Great War centennial,’ Bertholdt said. ‘By the time we get to November 2018 we’re going to be tired of them.’

‘Today, however,’ Sylvie said, ‘is June 2014. Let’s not be tired in advance.’

Bertholdt asked about Max’s career, how it had brought him to France.

‘My wife, Louise, is French. I came here to do postgraduate work—we were students together, and we…’

‘Married,’ Sylvie said, exploiting his hesitation.

Max said, ‘That’s the shortened version, yes.’

‘And children?’

‘Girl and boy, eight and twelve. Two small Frogs.’

‘Bilingual?’ Bertholdt asked.

‘Of course. No detectable accent, but French is definitely the mother tongue.’

Feeling the old, familiar need to explain further he said, ‘I’m not English. I came here from London, but I was born in New Zealand. Grew up there.’

‘Unimaginable,’ Bertholdt said; and when Max looked as if he did not understand, Bertholdt said, ‘Such a long way.’

‘You have to start somewhere,’ Max said; and then, ‘You have a piece of pounamu.’

Bertholdt looked where he was pointing. ‘It’s jade, isn’t it?’

‘Jade, greenstone—the Māori word is pounamu.’

Bertholdt’s sideways nod of the head was an unspoken ‘Whatever’.

‘So, in the family,’ Sylvie said, ‘you’re the outsider.’

‘I’m the foreigner—downstairs with the dog.’

‘Downstairs—really?’

‘We have two apartments. They both belong to Louise—to her family. Her father was a distinguished civil servant—Légion d’Honneur and so on. An earlier forebear was a doctor in Rouen and a friend of Flaubert’s. Louise lives upstairs with the kids. I’m downstairs with the dog—for the moment anyway.’

‘Do you call that an estrangement?’ Sylvie asked.

‘I think we call it an arrangement.’

‘You cook?’ Bertholdt asked.

‘Picard frozen dinners and Monoprix pizzas…’

‘That’s either tragic,’ Sylvie said, ‘or it’s deplorable.’

‘If it were true,’ Max said, ‘it might be both. I’m joking. I can do better than that for myself. And I have a lot of my meals upstairs with the troops.’

‘So you’re not banished.’

‘Not banished, no. It’s just…I’m not sure what. Something that happened.’

‘A commendable disposition of space,’ Bertholdt said. ‘You’ll probably stay married forever.’

‘Like you and Gertrude,’ Sylvie said.

‘I think of it as time out,’ Max said. ‘A bit of space. Distance.’

‘Only the distance between two floors,’ Bertholdt said. ‘That’s a residence. It’s a domicile.’

Max didn’t say that Louise was on floor three while he was down at the level of the courtyard.

‘Bertholdt has a wife in Berlin,’ Sylvie said.

Bertholdt sighed and spread his hands in a gesture that said, ‘Enough already.’

‘And two sons,’ Sylvie said.

There was unease now, and a brief silence. Max told them that, in the hierarchy of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Louise ranked above him. ‘She has leave from teaching at the moment to edit a new edition of L’Éducation Sentimentale.’

‘Flaubert,’ Bertholdt said.

‘A very important work,’ Sylvie said. There was a faint note of weariness—the well-brought-up schoolgirl acknowledging the classics.

‘A long, dreary story of a man making mistakes,’ Max said.

‘One mistake,’ Sylvie said, ‘but it lasts—’

‘A lifetime,’ Max agreed.

‘What is the mistake?’ Bertholdt asked.

‘Falling in love,’ they said in unison.

‘Of course,’ Bertholdt said. ‘What else in a nineteenth-century novel? And there are still new things to be said about the great Flaubert?’

‘Always,’ Max said.

Bertholdt shrugged. ‘Scholars find new things to say about Goethe.’

Max explained, ‘The old Rouen forebear’s archives are being properly explored for the first time. There are letters that haven’t been seen before. Some things in the biographies will have to be revised.’

‘Scandals?’

‘Nothing shocking. Flaubert was always very frank about his sex life.’

‘Didn’t he die of syphilis?’ Sylvie said.

Max thought so but wasn’t sure.

‘A new edit of a major Flaubert,’ she said. ‘Your wife must be very distinguished.’

Max laughed. ‘Too distinguished to walk the dog, yes.’

MAX HAD GONE AND SYLVIE and Bertholdt were getting ready for bed. They were cleaning their teeth, bumping into one another in the small tiled bathroom. ‘I’ve heard of his wife,’ Sylvie said. ‘Professor Louise Simon-Jackson.’

‘He seems pleased enough to be her husband even if he’s banished downstairs.’

‘Reflected glory, I guess.’

‘Doesn’t he have any of his own?’

‘Academically? Some, yes. But he’s nice, don’t you think?’

Down in the streets the tumult continued, getting louder as midnight approached. It was as if they had turned Max loose into a storm.

She stood naked in front of the mirror, half-heartedly brushing her hair and looking at herself. ‘Do you think I’m putting on weight?’

In a sighing tone he said, ‘No, Sylvie.’

‘I think I am.’

‘Weigh yourself.’

‘What do you mean, weigh myself?’

‘Weigh yourself. Stand on the scales and read the dial. If it’s higher than last time—’

‘Oh get fucked, Bertholdt.’ In her voice there was a hint of tears.

He sighed again, but went to her, still staring at herself in the mirror. He stood behind her and put his arms around her. ‘Of course you’re not putting on weight. Look at you.’

In the mirror he could see himself looking over her head, and his hands moving down towards her lower stomach, his fingers touching lightly all that was left of the pubic hair, shaved on either side, making a little Mohawk on the mound of Venus.

She put a hand behind her back. ‘I could feel that happening,’ she said.

She looked back over her shoulder and, still holding her from behind, he kissed her.

2.

WHY ONE

BUYS SHOES

JULIEN LEMONT, MAX’S CLOSEST COLLEAGUE, with whom he shared an office, was well known for exhibitions of eccentric behaviour. One in particular was a tantrum early in the academic year, at the first lecture to agrégation students. Julien, it was said, asked a question, something difficult, even abstruse, received an unsatisfactory answer, or no answer at all, and flew into a rage, berating the class as provincials unworthy of a great university, and then flung his notes across the room and stormed out. At his next scheduled meeting with the class he behaved as if the tantrum had not happened, and delivered a carefully prepared script (probably a fresh copy of the one previously thrown away) to a subdued and still shell-shocked class.

Perhaps the accounts Max heard of this were exaggerated, but something of the kind happened. The commonest explanation was that Julien believed he was despised by his colleagues, or at the very least was not valued by them, because he was himself a graduate from the provinces. To Max it was one of those matters that he put away under the general heading of ‘peculiarly French’ and therefore inexplicable.

In any case, Max liked Julien, found him amusing and clever company, and often had lunch with him. But he would have preferred not to share an office—something that never, or only very rarely, happened in anglophone universities, but was the rule here. Often, when he was interviewing a student and Julien was there working at his desk, Max would be sure the conversation was being listened to. There was something about Julien’s breathing that signalled interest. The breath might be held, or let out in a sigh, sad or impatient; or now and then there might be something like a snort, quickly suppressed, disguised as a sneeze or a blowing of the nose, but indicating anything from amusement to outrage.

It was possible that Julien was not listening at all, was simply finding it difficult to concentrate on his own work. This sharing of spaces was part of the university’s general lack of money. The state provided—but what it provided was never enough. The buildings, once you got beyond the grandeur that was for public show, were often shabby and run-down; and the determination of elderly conservationists to preserve, where possible, their original character and features made the problem worse. The amphitheatre where Max and Julien both did a large part of their teaching had been a theatre in which demonstration autopsies had been carried out in the Medical Faculty during the eighteenth century. The bust of some bewigged grand master of long ago stared down from behind the lecturer’s back. The benches on which the students sat were so hard and badly designed it was impossible to be in them for more than an hour without pain. Echoes off hard surfaces made hearing difficult. Sometimes Max allowed himself to regret that Paris had been spared the Second World War pasting that London and Berlin had received.

Today Julien was not there, and Max was talking to a student who said she had come, not as a member of his class, but because she had found, in a long-ago issue of a literary magazine, Poésies Vagabondages, a long poem of his describing his experience as an outsider—in Paris for the first time, decidedly unhappy and yet also excited—‘lit up’, she said. She had found it ‘thrilling’, ‘so vivid’, and especially moving because she was herself an outsider—English (her name was Helen White) and ‘mad’.

Max looked at her and decided the word ‘mad’ must be self-dramatisation, and best ignored. She appeared to be entirely sane; and, after all, she liked his poem so much.

‘Yes I remember it well,’ he said. ‘I wrote it when I was first here as a postgraduate student. Before I’d met Louise…met my wife. It was one of my very few ventures into print as a poet.’

He felt himself smiling with a warmth he couldn’t suppress. He’d been surprised and pleased with that poem—‘From the dark place’ it was called—and he remembered how writing it had more or less made up for miseries of loneliness, homesickness and physical discomfort. It was about France in winter, about Paris as an outsider sees it, romantic, rich in history and culture, but full of rain and darkness and uncertainty, inability to choose a place to eat, or decide which offered floor to sleep on. Those had been his disconsolate days, his days of depression and exaggeration, of acting the Existentialist, the Outsider, the Other.

‘There was so much went into that poem,’ he said, remembering encounters with sinister concierges and black-clad cops, gloomy rambles in the cemetery of Père Lachaise and the Luxembourg Gardens. And then there had been all the excitements and discoveries of Art at the Beaubourg and the Jeu de Paume. He had somehow brought all this together with the obvious things, the clichés—croissants and millefeuilles, Jacques Brel and Édith Piaf, accordion music and black-and-white movies—finishing with the line, ‘the Paris of Paris that’s nobody’s dream but your own’.

‘It seems so long ago,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you found it, and that you liked it.’

‘So now,’ she said, ‘I want to read more of your work.’

When he didn’t respond she said, ‘Your poetry—what you’ve written since.’

‘Oh there’s none,’ he said. ‘Nothing. The poetry bank’s empty, I’m afraid. The cupboard’s bare.’

She was shocked. ‘But why?’

‘Why? There’s no why.’ He was pleased, even flattered, that she liked what she’d found in that faraway place, but also irritated by the question. ‘All I can tell you is, once I wrote poems and now I don’t. I teach. My written work is for the academic journals.’

‘Because you don’t want to, is it, or because you can’t?’

He took a deep breath, thinking the question was somewhat brutal. ‘It’s something that belongs to my past. Right now I’m afraid—’ he patted the pile of examination scripts—‘These won’t be ignored.’

She said, ‘Exam marking? I thought all that was finished by now.’

‘These are second shots.’

It was something which French law required and which the Sorbonne did not always act on: that a student who failed an examination should be allowed to try a second time.

She half stood, while saying urgently, even darkly, ‘No one writes a poem as good as that one and doesn’t want to write another.’ She was speaking up for poetry now, its defender, as if he were standing in the way.

‘One’s life changes,’ he said, feeling the weariness he heard in his own voice. ‘One moves on—isn’t that the cliché?’

Perhaps there was something in this that suggested he might after all want their conversation to continue. She heard it too and, very gently, sat down again. They stared at one another. The outer of several masks had been removed, his and hers. ‘The person doesn’t change,’ she said. ‘A poet is a poet…’

‘…is a poet?’ He looked up at her. ‘You think? Well, maybe so.

I’m still waiting.’

‘For the Muse?’

He saw her more clearly now. She was not beautiful, and not ill-favoured, but distinct, noticeable, a well-defined face you might look at a second time because it gave you pleasure. Character, that was called; but there was something in the face that might be desperation. Rosa Dartle, he thought, remembering the wild woman, the only one with real character in David Copperfield. And then he remembered, or thought he did, that Rosa Dartle had described herself as ‘mad’.

‘A week or so ago,’ Max said, ‘I dreamed I’d written a poem. It was long enough to be published as a small book. Mostly my dreams are gone the next day, forgotten, but this one was so real it stayed with me. Even fully awake I was still not sure it wasn’t true. I went hunting on my shelves for that little book just to be sure, even though I knew it didn’t exist. I didn’t remember it as a dream. I remembered it as a bit of my reality.’

This was something he had not told anyone. It had surprised him so much that the dream reality could hang on like that and assert itself so forcefully.

She was very still, listening, excited. ‘That’s either the next poem you will write,’ she said, ‘or it’s the ghost of one you should have written and didn’t.’

‘Quite a powerful ghost,’ he said. He was thinking he should not be having this conversation even as he began to ask what she’d meant—

He stopped himself, but she guessed what he was asking.

‘When I said I was mad?’

‘Yes.’

‘I meant mad. Insane. Nuts.’

‘I don’t think I believe you,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’m probably never entirely sane, but this is how I am as long as I take my medication. I’ve just had to accept it. Lithium. I don’t like it. It dulls me, soothes me down, but it keeps me on the rails.’ Lithium. He remembered it was the medication that had kept the American poet Robert Lowell more or less normal. When he didn’t take it, he tended to make scenes and smash things.

‘I like to be brilliant,’ she said, ‘but it’s better to be sane.’

He nodded, admiring. If that remark wasn’t brilliant, there was at least something very clever about it.

‘I’ve been diagnosed as bipolar,’ she said.

‘Here, or in England?’

‘Ah.’ She laughed, thought it was funny, and he saw that it was, as if sane in England might be mad in France, and vice versa.

‘In England first,’ she said. ‘But the French health service is very good. They keep a watch on me and prescribe what I need. If I don’t take the medication I have brilliant highs and then I can go right down—turn into one of those people you see out on the streets, shuffling around, sleeping rough, not coping. I was locked up in England—twice.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘I have to be careful. Lithium’s my necessary angel.’

He saw why she’d liked his poem. There had been something extreme about it, extravagant—something he was not capable of now. ‘That poem of mine,’ he said. ‘It was full of exaggeration, you know. I never had to sleep rough…’

‘It was full of feeling,’ she said.

‘I guess it was—yes. It was long ago.’

‘You can’t renounce it, Monsieur.’

‘No, you’re right. I can’t. However…’ Once again he put his hand on the pile of examination scripts.

‘You want to get on with your work.’

‘I don’t want to, but I must.’

She stood, reached her right hand across the desk. Max shook it and said—not sure what he meant, but feeling grateful, and even hopeful—‘You might be my necessary angel.’

She said, ‘I hope so,’ and darted away towards the door and through it, leaving him with the impression of a small animal scuttling away into the undergrowth.

IN THE SORBONNE NOUVELLE’S Club des Enseignants Sylvie Renard was listening to her colleagues talking about what was to be in the syllabus in the new academic year and beyond. There had been a meeting, and now the talk continued over coffee. She had not had a chance to speak to Max Jackson and he had left for something else before the meeting finished.

Sylvie knew her own preferences for what might be kept in, or scrapped from, the syllabus. But these were not only local decisions: they were also national, involving the Minister, and how the two, local and national, came together and reached an agreement was mysterious. She was not only junior (her rank was