5
Davey’s plan could not be put into operation for a day or two. When M’sieur Clément understood what he was being hired to do he demanded an enormous bribe. He pointed out that Lady Leone’s acquaintances all employed him in one capacity or another; if they suspected him of betraying them to les Anglais he might lose the many lucrative engagements and transactions on which his living depended. Philip, after a long session with him, came back to report and explained this to Davey and me but said that in fact no Parisian, especially not those who lived in M’sieur Clément’s district, would dare get on the wrong side of him. He had been king of the black market during the war and was now indispensable for things like difficult railway and theatre tickets and for his ability to produce any requirement, from unlimited whisky to a trained nurse, not to speak of other, more sinister commodities, at a moment’s notice. Undoubtedly very thick with the police, he knew all about the private lives of a vast section of the community. Philip had suggested to him that he would not really be risking very much by undertaking our assignment and had said that we, for our part, were obliged to take into account the remuneration he would receive from people wanting him to keep dark the fact that they had been about to visit Lady Leone. After long, hard bargaining and double bluffing on both sides, Philip got him down to £500. They shook hands on this. M’sieur Clément, wreathed now in smiles, said it might seem rather expensive but he guaranteed that the work would be impeccable. Philip then flew to London and, with some difficulty, persuaded the powers that be to disburse this amount from the secret funds. All these negotiations had to take place without the knowledge of Alfred who would certainly never have allowed them for a single minute.
At last the stage was set. Davey, Philip, and I were the audience, established behind muslin curtains at Philip’s bedroom window. His flat, which was over one of our lodges, had good views both of the courtyard and the street and was therefore in a commanding position. One could see and not be seen.
‘I haven’t been so excited since chubb-fuddling days with Uncle Matthew,’ I said to Davey.
M’sieur Clément, a lugubrious individual with a bottle nose, had posted himself by the staircase of the entresol. For some reason he was not only dressed in inky black from head to foot but the sheets of paper which he held ready for the guilty names were black-edged like those put out, for the congregation to sign, at a French funeral. No doubt, in fact, pinched from one, according to Philip, since M’sieur Clément was, of course, a beadle. (Another of his part-time jobs was that of executioner’s assistant.)
Presently a group of Lady Leone’s gossips sauntered elegantly into the courtyard. There were five or six of them, all seemed to have arrived together and they were deep in talk. A tall, commanding man began to recount something, the others clustered round him, savouring his words. Two more people came in from the street; they joined the group, shook hands and were evidently put into the picture, after which the teller continued his tale. Suddenly, looking round as if to illustrate some point, his eye fell on M’sieur Clément. He stopped short, clutched the arm of a young woman and pointed; they all turned and looked. Consternation. Hesitation. Confabulation. Flight. Never had chub been more thoroughly fuddled; they flapped off, mouths open, and disappeared into the main stream of the Faubourg.
After this, incidents succeeded each other. A well-known pederast fainted dead away on seeing M’sieur Clément and was heaved, like Antony to the Monument, into the entresol. Women screamed; very few kept their heads and demanded to sign our book. Nobody else went near Lady Leone. Gradually, the intervals between visitors became longer; at eight o’clock, when the entresol was usually at its liveliest, a whole hour had gone by without a single soul coming through our gate.
‘It’s done the trick,’ Philip said, ‘all the telephones in Paris must be engaged. I’d better go and give the old fiend his ill-gotten gains and then we can dine. Good work!’ he said to Davey.
‘I must say I never saw £500 so easily earned.’
‘M’sieur Clément would reply, like Whistler, that we are paying for the knowledge of a lifetime.’
Lady Leone was now deserted by her friends, except for faithful Mrs Jungfleisch, but greatly to my disappointment she showed no signs of leaving us. She lay on in her bed, perfectly contented, according to Davey, with her embroidery, the crossword puzzle and a very loud gramophone. When I suggested that we might take the gramophone away, since it did not belong to her at all but had been presented to the Embassy by a visiting rajah long ago, Davey and Philip made me feel like some cruel gaoler trying to remove the last solace of a lovely, unfortunate, incarcerated princess. It was less irritating, certainly, for me to hear strains of Mozart or the war speeches of Sir Winston Churchill, which she was inordinately fond of and which she played at full blast, than shrieks of laughter; at least Lady Leone could not be discussing me and my mother with a gramophone. The sting of her presence had been drawn by Davey’s clever manoeuvre – now that nobody went near her any more the fiction of illness could be maintained. Alfred’s face was saved. All the same it annoyed me that she should still be under my roof and so did the fact that Davey was in the habit of slipping downstairs for a
