My Uncle Oswald(55)

If I have given the impression that Yasmin and I were paying our visits more or less on consecutive days, that is wrong. We were, in fact, moving slowly and carefully. Usually about a week went between visits. This gave me time to investigate thoroughly the next victim before we moved in on him. We never drove up to a house and rang the bell and hoped for the best. Before we made a call, I knew all about the man’s habits and his working hours, about his family and his servants if he had any, and we would choose our time with care. But even then Yasmin would occasionally have to wait outside in the motor car until a wife or a servant came out to go shopping.

Monsieur Proust was our next choice. He was forty-eight years old, and six years back, in 1913, he had published Du Cóté de chez Swann. Now he had just brought out A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. This book had been received with much enthusiasm by the reviewers and had won him the Goncourt Prize. But I was a bit nervous about Monsieur Proust. My enquiries showed him to be a very queer duck indeed. He was independently wealthy. He was a snob. He was anti-Semitic. He was vain. He was a hypochondriac who suffered from asthma. He slept until four in the afternoon and stayed awake all night. He lived with a faithful watchdog servant called Céleste and his present address was an apartment at No. 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichet. The house belonged to the celebrated actress Réjane, and Réjane’s son lived in the flat immediately below Proust, while Réjane herself occupied the rest of the place.

I learned that Monsieur Proust was, from a literary point of view, totally unscrupulous and would use both persuasion and money to inspire rave articles about his books in newspapers and magazines. And on top of all this, he was completely homosexual. No woman, other than the faithful Céleste, was ever permitted into his bedroom. In order to study the man more closely, I got myself invited to a dinner at the house of his close friend Princess Soutzo. And there I discovered that Monsieur Proust was nothing to look at. With his black moustache, his round bulging eyes, and his baggy little figure, he bore an astonishing resemblance to an actor on the cinematograph screen called Charlie Chaplin. At Princess Soutzo’s, he complained a lot about draughts in the dining-room and he held court among the guests and expected everyone to be silent when he spoke. I can remember two incredible pronouncements he made that evening. Of a man who preferred women, he said, “I can answer for him. He is completely abnormal.” And another time I heard him say, “Fondness for men leads to virility.” In short, he was a tricky fellow.

“Now wait just a minute,” Yasmin had said to me when I told her all this. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to take on a bugger.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t be so stupid, Oswald. If he’s a raging hundred per cent fairy--”

“He calls it an invert.”

“I don’t care what he calls it.”

“It’s a very Proustian word,” I said. “Look up ‘to invert’ in the dictionary and you’ll find the definition is ‘to turn upside down.’”

“He’s not turning me upside down, thank you very much,” Yasmin said.

“Now don’t get excited.”

“Anyway, it’s a waste of time,” she said. “He wouldn’t even look at me.”

“I think he would.”

“What d’you want me to do, dress up as a choirboy?”

“We’ll give him a double dose of Blister Beetle.”

“That’s not going to change his habits.”

“No,” I said, “but it’ll make him so bloody horny he won’t care what sex you are.”

“He’ll invert me.”

“No, he won’t.”

“He’ll invert me like a comma.”

“Take a hatpin with you.”

“It’s still not going to work,” she said. “If he’s a genuine twenty-four carat homo, then all women are physically repulsive to him.”

“It’s essential we get him,” I said. “Our collection won’t be complete without fifty Proust straws.”

“Is he really so important?”

“He’s going to be,” I said. “I’m sure of it. There’ll be a strong demand for Proust children in the years to come.”

Yasmin gazed out of the Ritz windows at the cloudygrey summer sky over Paris. “If that’s the case, then there’s only one thing for it,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You do it yourself.”

I was so shocked I jumped.

“Steady on,” I said.

“He wants a man,” she said. “Well, you’re a man. You’re perfect. You’re young, you’re beautiful, and you’re lecherous.”