Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(89)

“There are worse things,” Rudi opined resuming thumb-typing on his phone. “It takes a rare kind of patience to be a patissier. Or at least to be any good at it.”

The Frenchman looked at him. Then he shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “My father was adequate. It was my mother who introduced me to mathematics, who taught me things I wasn’t being taught at school, who prepared me for university.”

“Your mother,” Rudi said, “wasn’t English, by any chance, was she?”

Jean-Yves chuckled. “No. But I see where your mind’s going. His mother was English. Sarkisian.”

“Le Parapluie.”

“Roland,” said Jean-Yves. “At university everyone called him Le Parapluie because he always carried an umbrella. We all started doing it; it was our trademark.”

“The Sarkisian Collective.”

Jean-Yves waved the name away.

“How did you meet?”

“In Paris, at university. Although we weren’t there long, because of the War. We met again afterward.”

Rudi glanced at the old Frenchman and wondered what lay in the gap between ‘... because of the War’ and ‘We met again afterward.’

“I was in Caen by then,” Jean-Yves went on. “He wrote to me. I have no idea how he found me; my parents were dead by then, no one from university knew where I was. Roland said he wanted me to join a group of friends – mathematicians and cartographers – who were studying a particularly interesting question of topology. There was a patron who would fund our work. He told me to meet him at Versailles.”

“His mother’s maiden name was Whitton-Whyte, wasn’t it.”

“White. He said her name was White. He had some papers she’d left him, things she’d inherited from some distant relative. Maps and things.”

Rudi paused, just momentarily, in his texting.

“There was a... treatise,” Jean-Yves went on. “Among the papers. It was really very strange work; I hadn’t seen anything like it before.” He paused. “You already know what it was, don’t you.”

“The holy grail. The creation myth.”

Jean-Yves nodded. “Just so. It wasn’t the work of one person. It was a bundle of papers, oh, so thick.” He indicated by holding his thumb and forefinger about three centimetres apart. “It was written in perhaps a dozen different hands, in different inks. Some of it was very old. There were many annotations and crossings-out. It was actually quite a mess. Roland wanted us to work on it, refine it, try to understand it.”

“Which you did, in the end.”

“Ah,” Jean-Yves looked sad. “I’m not sure we ever understood it. But we learned how to use it, eventually, which was sufficient for the purposes of our patrons.”

“Your patrons being...?”

Jean-Yves ignored the question. “We worked for years. This was no simple problem, it was...” he searched for the words. “It was all-consuming. Even with the treatise, we were working in completely unknown territory. Our patrons looked after us, took care of our every need.” He paused and looked out of the window again. “We were prisoners, of course. But we became so absorbed in our work that it didn’t matter. Only the work mattered. We were like monks.” He glanced at Rudi. “I suppose you find that absurd.”

Still typing, Rudi shook his head.

“We moved, from time to time,” Jean-Yves went on. “Were moved, I should say. We’d stay in country houses, old hotels, abandoned farms. After a few years, representatives of our patrons would come and we would be told to pack up our work and our belongings and we would be taken somewhere else. We wound up near Auxerre, in a big old house with a vineyard. This was, oh, late 1937, early 1938. Roland saw the way the wind was blowing – we all did, we’d lived through one German invasion – and he said we had to leave in order to protect our work. So we left Auxerre and he led us into the Promised Land.”

“The Community.”

“No. That was later.”

Rudi didn’t say anything. He turned his head and looked out of the window.

“It was very isolated,” Jean-Yves said. “A house by the sea. We were free to walk anywhere we wanted, but there was nowhere to go. No other habitation, no other people. It was as if we were the only people in the world. And we stayed there while Europe burned and millions died.” He sighed.

“Did you see no one else at all?”

“There was a small staff at the house. Half a dozen men and women. They looked after us.” He shrugged. “There was a man who used to visit us when we were in France. To visit Roland, really. A quiet man, unassuming, almost apologetic. We called him ‘Gaston’, but he wasn’t French. I got the impression he was Russian. He came and went from the house by the sea. I think he represented our patrons, and he took our work away with him for others to look at.”

“How long were you there for?” asked Rudi.

Jean-Yves looked at him. “How familiar are you with the Community?”

“I know there’s a time dilation effect, if that’s what you mean,” Rudi said. “Time passes more slowly in the Community. Nobody knows why.”

The Frenchman looked smug. “I know why.”

There was a silence in the car for almost a minute. Then Rudi said, “I presume you’re not going to tell us.”