between the meals and the excursions, the elegantly empty conversations and the charming women. For Julien had seen into the darkness and felt in himself what could happen.
He dreamed of it still, a face he had seen only for a fraction of a second as a flare lit up the area around, and the German soldier turned. He remembered the look of foolish concern as they stared at each other, neither knowing what to do next. And Julien had reacted first; he had been on patrol, his nerves were frayed, while the other had only just come on duty and was slower. A slight frown, the impression that Julien was behaving badly, rudely, when the bayonet went into his stomach. And then nothing else at all; the rest was in total darkness; Julien heard him fall, remembered pulling the bayonet out and ramming it in again and again. More than anything, he remembered the satisfaction. He remembered that he had continued to stab long after he knew it was necessary, that he did so for pleasure. The moment turned him into a barbarian, exulting in his triumph. That was what he dreamed about, and which so frightened him. He knew how easy it had been to surrender to those feelings. Even worse, his dreams played dreadful games with him, and confused themselves, so that when another flare lit up the landscape and he looked down, he saw the deathly pallor on Julia’s face; the blood flowing from her body in the mud; her lips, moving inaudibly as the rattling of gunfire drowned out her words like a train passing through a station and extinguishing all conversation on the platform. He had killed her, and the nightmare came to him fitfully and without any reason he could discern.
“How is she?” It was the question that he asked as soon as was seemly.
“Splendid,” her father would reply, as he always did, even when the letters she wrote to Julien suggested differently. Julien never discovered whether Bronsen was unaware of her travails, the difficulties she had in painting something she was proud of, or whether he was reluctant to admit that she was not perfect. If the last, the aim was laudably paternal, but even when he first met the Bronsens he considered that it made her life that much more difficult, and in one burst of correspondence he mentioned it. Once a month on average, Julia wrote him a letter, once a month Julien wrote back—long letters on both sides, funny and touching, although neither fully appreciated how much the other waited for them, opened them eagerly, and read them with breathless delight.
“Of course you are right,” came her terse reply. “He wants so much of me and how can I deny him anything? It’s hard to work with someone looking over your shoulder all the time. It would be easier if he thought I was a bad painter, if he discouraged me rather than being entranced by every piece of rubbish I produce. Sooner or later, though, I must find some room . . .”
“She is doing wonderful things, wonderful,” Bronsen said at the dinner in a magnificent restaurant near the Spanish Steps shortly after this letter arrived. “She must keep going with it, I think. I do hope her marriage will not distract her.”
This was said with a slightly arch look, as though he was well aware of the impact the words would have.
“I didn’t know . . .”
“She’s very private, of course. She will marry a diplomat, a man with the greatest potential, from a good family and the sort of connections which will help her immensely with her work. They will be very happy together, I’m sure.”
So that was the escape she had decided upon, Julien thought. He was not quite convinced by the story; her father seemed too satisfied and content, but he wrote some formal congratulations that omitted all the little intimacies of earlier letters. And back, in due course, came an equally formal reply. There their friendship lapsed for some time.
“Perhaps Mussolini will manage something. Who knows?” The conversation continued, as did the dinner, and Julien tried to enjoy himself, or at least to appear to do so. “Everyone else has failed. He has the support of absolutely everyone from cardinals to avant-garde sculptors, so there must be something to him.”
Bronsen had turned to politics now. He had that morning been at a meeting at the finance ministry and two days previously had met the new Italian leader for the first time.
“What did you think?”
Bronsen paused, enjoying himself. Julien had learned that there was no point expecting an even conversation on such topics; Bronsen believed firmly that the person who knew most should dominate. To give him credit, he deferred to Julien on the subject of ruins and paintings, but would brook no interruption on more worldly topics. It made conversations with him sometimes a bit like miniature lectures. “I was impressed,” he said. “Truly I was. He looks like a bit of a fool, but clearly isn’t. He knows what he’s doing and what he expects everyone else to know as well. That clarity is refreshing. It makes a change from the normal squabbling and bickering. Decisions get taken and acted upon. You don’t know how rare that is. God knows this country needs it. France could do with some of the same, I fear. Someone like Mussolini would make mincemeat of the corrupt incompetents we manage to put into power.”
Julien shrugged and looked away. “Politics bores you?” Bronsen said.
Julien smiled. “It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven’t tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations.”
“And how do you do that?”
“Me? In particular?”
“Yes.”
“My contribution is to go into the archives and read old manuscripts. To collect paintings—one of which I would like to show you later on to get your opinion—and try to communicate the importance of such things to other people. To persuade people that politics is the waste product of the ferment of civilization, unavoidable but dangerous if not properly contained. To be a teacher, in fact, which is probably what I will end up doing when I go back to France.”
“That’ll frighten them, no doubt,” Bronsen said with a smile.
“I mean it,” he said, trying to cover his earnestness with a worldly smile. “Civilization needs to be nurtured, cosseted, and protected from those who would damage it, like politicians. It needs constant attention. Once people stop caring, it withers and dies.”
“So? The world burns and you sit in a library?”
“The world did burn,” Julien replied. “I was at the cremation. And it would have been better if I had stayed in a library. One person, at least, would be alive now who is dead, because I wouldn’t have been there to bayonet him.”
Bronsen grunted. “I admire your clarity—though not the experiences which brought it to you. My horizons are bounded by making money, because it is something I know and am good at. I become thereby something of a caricature, which distresses me, but not enough to deter me. I am all too aware that a Jew without money is even more vulnerable than a Jew with money. Not that any of this is so very interesting. I would much rather hear what shape your defense of civilization is taking these days. So tell me. What news from the archives?”
MANY YEARS AFTERWARD, Julia told him that her father had been utterly perplexed by the conversation. “He was so pleased with himself. He had just signed the biggest contract of his life, to build two factories outside Rome and Milan, and was bursting to tell someone. And you never asked what he was doing.”
“I thought I had,” Julien replied. “But he had just dropped into the conversation the little detail about your getting married. I don’t think I was quite so keen to gratify his vanity after that. I did give him a chance to tell me, though. At least, I gave enough hints.”
She laughed. “Oh, dear. Did you never notice that he didn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘hint’? That subtlety was not part of his makeup?”
“I thought it would be rude to ask.”
“And he thought it was rude that you didn’t. Therein lies a lesson for us all.”
“Is this a characteristic you’ve inherited?”
She considered. “I am, perhaps, a little bit more civilized than he is. But only up to a point. You may, perhaps, have realized that now.”
THE MAIN THINGS preventing Claude Bronsen and Julien Barneuve from becoming close friends were Julia,
