An Officer and a Spy

upstairs . . .’
    ‘Don’t be silly! It’s barely seven!’ She lowers her voice. ‘Is this a German thing, do you suppose?’
    She marches me towards the glass doors that open on to the tiny strip of garden, separated from its neighbours by a high wall strung with unlit Chinese lanterns. Waiters are collecting discarded glasses of orangeade and liqueurs. The drinkers have all left to go upstairs. Only one woman stands alone, with her back to me, and when she turns I see it is Pauline. She smiles.
    ‘There,’ says Blanche, with a strange edge to her voice, ‘you see? A surprise.’
    It is always Blanche who arranges the concerts. Tonight she presents her latest discovery, a young Catalan prodigy, Monsieur Casals, only eighteen, whom she found playing second cello in the theatre orchestra of the Folies-Marigny. He begins with the Saint-Saëns cello sonata, and from the opening chords it is clear he is a marvel. Normally I would sit rapt, but tonight my attention wanders. I glance around the audience, arranged against the walls of the grand salon, facing the players in the centre. Out of sixty or so spectators, I count a dozen uniforms, mostly cavalrymen like Aimery, half of whom I know for a fact are attached to the General Staff. And after a while it seems to me that I am attracting some sidelong looks myself: the youngest colonel in the army, unmarried, sitting beside the attractive wife of a senior official of the Foreign Ministry, and no sign anywhere of her husband. For a colonel in a position such as mine, to be caught in an adulterous affair would be a scandal that could ruin a career. I try to put it out of my mind and concentrate on the music, but I am uneasy.
    In the interval Pauline and I return to the garden, Blanche walking between us, clasping each of us by the arm. A couple of officers, old friends of mine, come over to congratulate me on my promotion, and I introduce them to Pauline. ‘This is Major Albert Curé – we were in Tonkin together with Aimery. This is Madame Monnier. And this is Captain William Lallemand de Marais—’
    ‘Also known as the Demigod,’ interrupts Blanche.
    Pauline smiles. ‘Why?’
    ‘In honour of Loge in Das Rheingold , of course – the demigod of fire. You must see the resemblance, my dear? Look at that passion! Captain Lallemand is the Demigod, and Georges is the Good God.’
    ‘I don’t know very much Wagner, I’m afraid.’
    Lallemand, the keenest student of music in our circle, affects shocked disbelief. ‘Don’t know very much Wagner! Colonel Picquart, you must take Madame Monnier to Bayreuth!’
    Curé asks, a little too pointedly for my liking, ‘And does Monsieur Monnier enjoy the opera?’
    ‘Unfortunately my husband dislikes all forms of music.’
    After they have moved off, Pauline says quietly, ‘Do you want me to leave?’
    ‘No, why would I want that?’ We are drinking orangeade. The great stink has lifted in the last day or so; the breezes of the faubourg Saint-Germain are warm and blossomy with the scent of a summer evening.
    ‘Only you seem very uncomfortable, my darling.’
    ‘No, it’s just I wasn’t aware that you and Blanche were acquainted, that’s all.’
    ‘Isabelle took me to tea with Alix Tocnaye a month ago, and she was there.’
    ‘And where is Philippe?’
    ‘He’s out of Paris tonight. He doesn’t get back until tomorrow.’
    The implication, the offer, hangs unspoken in the air.
    ‘What about the girls?’ Pauline’s daughters are ten and seven. ‘Do you have to get back to them?’
    ‘They’re staying with Philippe’s sister.’
    ‘Ah, so now I know what Blanche meant by my “surprise”!’ I am not sure whether to be amused or annoyed. ‘Why did you decide to confide in her?’
    ‘I didn’t. I thought you had.’
    ‘Not I!’
    ‘But the way she spoke – she led me to believe you had. That’s why I let her arrange this evening.’ We stare at one another. And then, by a process of intuition or deduction too rapid for me to follow, she says, ‘Blanche is in love with you.’
    I laugh in alarm. ‘She is not!’
    ‘At least you must have had an affair with her?’
    I lie. What else should a gentleman do on these occasions? ‘My darling Pauline, she’s fifteen years younger than I am. I’m like an older brother to her.’
    ‘But she watches you all the time. She’s obsessed with you and now she’s guessed about us.’
    ‘If Blanche was in love with me,’ I say quietly, ‘she’d