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  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Surrender

  Occupied France, 1943

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART TWO

  Pauline Réage

  Paris and Normandy, late 1943

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART THREE

  Liberation

  Paris, 1944

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART FOUR

  Story of O

  Paris, early 1950s

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART FIVE

  Publication and Scandal

  Paris, 1955–56

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  PART SIX

  Death and Revolution

  Paris, May 1968

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  PART SEVEN

  Key Words

  Boissise-la-Bertrand, 1970

  Chapter 26

  EPILOGUE

  Boissise-la-Bertrand, 1998

  Notes on a Novel

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Steven Carroll

  Copyright

  Part One

  Surrender

  Occupied France, 1943

  1.

  Swastikas, giant black crawling insects, flutter from town halls, department stores, government buildings and palaces. Dominique shivers at the sight of them, feels them on her skin, scuttling over her face and neck and arms.

  The red, black and white flags hang from the windows of buildings that have never looked so grey. Or pale. They are everywhere. A German staff car passes by, the watchful eyes of two officers staring out from the back seat. Every day they are there, crawling all over the city that was once hers. No one is allowed to escape the symbols of occupation until . . . what? Amnesia sets in and the country forgets itself?

  She approaches the Odéon metro. The wine shop that she loved before the war, and shopped at regularly, is still there, but the boxes of bottles that once spilled out of the shop and onto the footpath have gone, the shop a shadow of itself, the city a shadow of itself. The owner, almost as though he’s been turned to stone, sits in the doorway, gazing vaguely onto the street. Among the late afternoon crowd are two soldiers in steel helmets, grey uniforms and black boots. Polite, ever polite. And considerate, always standing up in trains and buses for old ladies and mothers. And always smiling fondly on children. She switches her gaze from the wine shop to the soldiers in their shell-like helmets and thinks of cockroaches. If they were, you could squash them. If only it were that easy.

  Before the war, everybody was asking if there’d be a war. As if anybody really knew. If there is, she’d instructed herself, if they come, they’ll take everything: the sky, the river, the sea. The future too, and with the future your will. And when they’ve finished with the future, they’ll take the past. Wipe it clean. Would it be possible for a whole country to forget itself? Could these things really happen? People do, she thinks now; why not nations? Think of all those little European countries that aren’t countries any more. One generation of forgetting leads to another and another until one day a generation emerges that has no memory of what it once was. She sighs. Of course it happens. And the Germans haven’t just come for a few years to prove a point as in wars past. They have come to stay.

  The day before, a German soldier stopped her and asked directions, and as he spoke she could smell his breath. And that’s it, their odour is everywhere, brushing up against you in the metro, so close you can catch the scent of the lather they used to shave with that morning. She looks around at her city: the very stones once raucous with history are now mute with shame.

  And just this morning she turned a corner to see a German officer, Gestapo, yelling at a man on the footpath. ‘How dare you look me in the eyes!’ he was yelling. ‘How dare you!’ People passing glanced furtively. The man stood still, staring at his feet, waiting to be dismissed. And when the German said ‘Go! Get out of my sight!’, the man walked slowly away, not daring to look up. The German swung round and strode off, master of the footpath, daring anybody to look him in the eyes, but nobody did. Who knows what the man had done: eyed the German that bit too long? Let his hatred show? But what was so shocking was how unusual it was. For most of the time they are polite. And courteous. They want you to like them, and look hurt when you don’t. And there are times when you almost want to. Almost do.

  She waits at the lights near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the ancient church bowed in perpetual prayer, before crossing. A country is earth, skies and walks, coast and waves, food and stories. Churches. Boulevards. Solid things. And from the moment the Germans marched into her country, exuding victory, almost charming, she felt for her country a love she never knew was there until someone took her country from her. But even while she holds true to this new-found love of her country, she is also disgusted with it. Rolling over so easily like the whore in the illegal posters pasted up all around the city that call on everyone to rise up and fight: France, a tart with her legs open, gazing up at the sky while a foreign army marches all over her. Pétain, the ubiquitous, avuncular pimp who handed her over. It is impossible!

  A desperate need to do something grips her like a choking hand as she turns off the boulevard and into a succession of side streets and alleys that lead down to the publishing house of Gallimard and her appointment with Jean Paulhan.

  As she approaches the rendezvous, a café called Hope (of all things), that feeling of desperation slowly subsides and gives way to anticipation: the possibility of work, and money. Finding work that is not German propaganda gets harder by the day.

  Jean Paulhan. She knows of him, of course. Everybody in the French writing world does. She steps through the doorway of the café and looks about her, scanning the tables. Perhaps he doesn’t look like his photographs. Perhaps she’s early.

  She takes a seat and waits. She may not know him, but her father does. Let me help you, he said one day. I know people. Oh, she replied casually, and whom do you know? It was a rare contrary moment, for she was well aware that her father knew many people, especially writers and publishers.

  Outside, the working day is coming to an end, the city’s workers trooping home as they always have. Just another day done. The café begins to fill. Two German officers enter in pressed black uniforms. Regulars, it seems. The owner escorts them, as he might a couple of famous actors or dignitaries who would lend the café a touch of class, to the best table in the house. He is jolly, respectful – accommodating.

  She is contemplating the owner, trying to find something else, something extra – the shrewdness of the game-player, playing a necessary game for the time being – behind the smiling, jolly face. But she can’t see it. He discusses the menu with the officers, apologising for the lack of this or that. They understand. The owner, she concludes, is either very good at concealing what he’s really thinking or is exactly what he seems.

  And it is while she is contemplating all of this that she senses a lofty presence nearby, and looks around to see Paulhan standing directly in front of her.

  ‘You are Dominique Aury?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, rising from her chair.

  ‘Please,’ he urges, sitting down and indicating that she do likewise.

  There is the usual awkward silence that happens when two people meet f
or the first time. He is conservatively dressed: dark suit, English pinstripe, matching tie. He stares at her, an expression on his face somewhere between amusement and curiosity.

  ‘You look nothing like your father,’ he finally pronounces. ‘No,’ tilting his head to one side, ‘I can’t see it. Have you been told that?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, off guard, pausing for thought, any thought, ‘I’m not bald.’ She adds, a slight smile creasing her lips, ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Ah,’ he adds, correcting himself, ‘the smile, the smile is your father’s.’

  ‘And what sort of smile is that?’

  ‘Hard to read.’

  She likes that. She wouldn’t want to be an open book.

  She takes him in as he looks round the café. He is older than she imagined, his hair greying, flying out at the sides as if permanently windblown, and he’s broad-shouldered as one so lofty should be. But under the conservative suit, the chatty exterior, the silver streaks in the hair that mark a man of a certain age, there is something unusual, almost alarming, about his presence. It’s the way he disturbs the air around him. Makes it vibrate. And she is alive to it, senses fully alert, as she takes him in.

  ‘What did my father tell you?’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said you re-read Proust every year. Is that true?’ he asks with a slight air of either incomprehension or astonishment.

  ‘Yes. Is that odd?’

  ‘Not odd. But is it really necessary? I found that once was enough. Life is very short, and Proust is very long. In fact, if the truth be told, I’m not sure I ever finished him.’

  His eyebrows, and what eyebrows they are, rise with the final words, and he sits back in his chair, an air of casual aggression, as if to say over to you. She doesn’t believe him. But as unsettling as his manner and his talk are, she is oddly relaxed in his company all the same. For the first thing he has done is dispense with formality. And it is liberating. She is free, it seems, to say silly things, as long as they’re interesting.

  This is the great Jean Paulhan. Man of letters. Candid, unreliably honest, flippant, playful, serious, but not one of those who takes his seriousness too seriously. Most writers she’s ever mixed with – at least most of those who call themselves writers – would never confess to not finishing Proust. She wasn’t expecting this.

  And the publishers she meets are, on the whole, proper. Often as not like something out of the last century. All decorum. And unnecessary manners. No personality. Or timid. Too frightened to take a risk. Safe. Most of them bureaucrats, could be anybody. But Jean Paulhan is not only an intriguing collision of qualities, there is something – she senses – deeply anarchic about this man as well. Elemental. One of those who carries with him reminders of the forest, which he gives every impression of just having flown in from. Like some fantastic bird his eyes brighten, his eyebrows lift, the beak of his nose inclines towards her and she wouldn’t be surprised if he were to let out a high-pitched squawk about the charade of civilised life around them.

  He’s a flirter too. For this is a man who knows he is still attractive to younger women – like Dominique. And she is sure she is not the first woman to sit where she is now and be pleasingly intrigued by what she sees, and impressed by that devil-may-care dispensing of protocol – which, she concludes, is a kind of posturing in itself. But all the same, she feels he is not so much flirting with her as testing her. Finding out if she is interesting or not, or just one of those dull types who’ve read more Proust than is good for them.

  And straightaway, and with no more than about five or six minutes of conversation between them, she is sure she recognises a twin spirit. She too on the outside is one thing – a thirty-five-year-old woman conservatively dressed in a neutral-coloured jacket and skirt; on the inside, she’s a fellow creature of the forest. She breathes in deeply, then slowly exhales. He folds the wings of his arms and settles into his chair. The silence is no longer awkward, for all that needs to be understood between them has already been registered. Like agents or members of some secret society silently exchanging passwords. At least she imagines as much, and she prays she’s right. He may or may not have been flirting, but he didn’t have to. Sometimes we know someone the moment we meet them. And this, she suspects, is one of those times.

  The owner, fresh from his jolly chat with the German officers, comes to their table, pencil in hand.

  ‘Coffee,’ says Dominique.

  ‘Coffee,’ Jean echoes.

  ‘We have oysters today,’ the owner says, proudly. ‘Camembert and Langres too. Fresh from the cows.’

  They glance at each other. There is a mutual shake of the head.

  ‘Coffee will do,’ Jean says, and the owner, with a shrug suggesting who knows when we will have such things again, passes the order on.

  Jean and Dominique share a smile.

  ‘We have oysters today,’ he whispers across the table to her, a glint in his eyes, while Dominique wonders where the owner got them from. Is even puzzled by it until her gaze falls on the two German officers gulping down the grey slippery delicacies, and the puzzle is solved. Of course. Accommodation has its rewards. She looks back to Jean.

  ‘But only today,’ she says.

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘We’re at war.’ She breaks into English. ‘One day at a time.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘your father does that too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Suddenly drops into English.’ He leans down, reaches for his briefcase and pulls out a newspaper, opened at the books pages. ‘I read an old review of yours this morning. On a book of John Donne. The Divine Poems.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ she says, mildly curious, ‘that feels like such a long time ago. Was a long time ago.’

  ‘Not so long,’ he says, suggesting she’s still too young for that. ‘I liked it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Suddenly, they are formal. And he is, for a moment, just like any publisher she’s ever met, all manners and formality.

  ‘But you didn’t like the translation?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He is a very established translator. Highly regarded.’

  ‘I know. Forgive me, it is quite some time since I wrote it. But I do remember he made the poems boring. And John Donne is many things, but he is not . . .’ and she lingers on the next word, which she says in English, ‘. . . boring.’

  She says this with such authority and confidence that he sits back, staring at her. Impressed, but also distracted, as if her very confidence has forced him to reappraise whatever assumptions about her he may have brought with him.

  ‘Your father taught you well. English, I mean,’ he says quietly. It is the language of the enemy, after all, and perhaps they shouldn’t be using it so freely. But their jolly host is at the counter and the Germans are laughing over a large slice of creamy cheese and bread. Nobody is listening.

  ‘We spoke it all the time at home. One moment my father was speaking French, the next English. And soon I was. It was like breathing; you didn’t notice.’

  ‘A useful skill,’ he sighs as their coffee arrives. They sip and, in unison, place their cups back on the saucers.

  ‘Your father tells me you’d like some work.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He pauses. She’s candid, he seems to be thinking. No playing hard to get. No pretence. And he appears to like that. In this, Dominique notes to herself, we are one.

  ‘Well, I have a job for you.’

  The café, without either of them having noticed, has become crowded and noisy. It is hard to speak easily.

  ‘I’ll be quick. I’d like you to compile a book of religious French poetry. It is worth doing and, quite frankly, in times like these, uncontroversial. It will keep our hosts happy – and the German censor who sits in the office beside me.’ He draws breath, letting that sink in. ‘I also want you to write an introduction. You write well,’ he adds, holding up the Donne
essay. ‘You get straight to the point. No nonsense.’

  She raises her eyebrows, slowly nodding.

  He continues, ‘You are religious?’

  She weighs her answer. ‘I like the rituals of religion. And the costumes. And incense.’

  He smiles. ‘And God, heaven and all that?’

  She inclines her head to one side thoughtfully. ‘I’m with Pascal: it’s worth a wager.’

  ‘Just in case?’

  She nods. ‘A gambler’s faith.’

  The German officers have gone. The jolly host is entertaining a group of businessmen. Jean looks towards the door, suggesting that this is a good time to leave.

  Outside in the warm autumn air the afternoon is passing into twilight. Shadows are lengthening and people pass: charcoal, black and grey, unfinished sketches, only half there. Only half here. But fascinating all the same. And when she looks from them to this Jean Paulhan she has only just met, but whom she feels she already knows, as though only they are real in this street shadow-play, she sees his eyes are shining, and that he too is drawn to this ghostly home-time procession, for he’s one of those for whom all of life, the miserable and the magnificent, the ghostly and the real, is fascinating. The two of them forest creatures together, but giving nothing away.

  He kisses her hand briefly in farewell.

  ‘Take your time. I will speak to you soon.’

  He steps back and raises his winged arms as if to say the night calls, I must go. And she would not be surprised to see him suddenly take flight and return to the wood from which he surely came.

  Instead he wheels around, briefcase in hand, and merges with the crowd, heading towards the Gallimard building up the street from the café: just anybody. Dominique watches his retreating figure, intrigued, unable to shake this strange sense of intimation. Can these things really happen so quickly?

  * * *

  At some point she leaves the main street and stops, momentarily unsure where she is. She’s not lost, this is her city. More lost in thought. But she is puzzled because she has just entered a network of small lanes, each leading one into the other, like the lines of an intricate argument towards a conclusion that is yet to become clear. She presses on, her progress as rambling as her thoughts.