15
NORMALLY Roger and Paule went away together in February for a week in the mountains. It had been agreed between them that, whatever their emotional involvements (only Roger's had then been in question), they should set aside a few peaceful days each winter. One morning Roger rang Paule at her office to say he was leaving in ten days' time and should he get a ticket for her? There was a silence. For a moment she wondered in terror what lay behind this invitation: instinctive need of her, remorse, or the desire to separate her from Simon? She might possibly have yielded to the first of these reasons. But she was well aware that, whatever he said to her, she would never be sure enough of him not to suffer a great deal during the holiday. At the same time, the memory of Roger in the mountains, brimming over with vitality, tearing down the slopes like a bullet and dragging her after him in terror, wrenched at her heart.
"Well?"
"I don't think it's possible, Roger. We should be making a pretence of . . . well, of not thinking of other things."
"But that's the very reason why I'm going: to think of nothing. And I assure you I'm quite capable of it."
"I'd come with you if you ..." (she was going to say: "if you were capable of thinking of me, of us", but she checked herself) ". . . if you really needed me. But you'll get along fine by yourself or with . . . someone else."
"Check. If I understand rightly, you don't want to leave Paris at the moment?"
He's thinking of Simon, she said to herself: why can people never distinguish between appearance and reality? At the same time she told herself that, for the past month, Simon's appearance had become her daily life. And perhaps she owed him the refusal which something had prompted her to make to Roger's proposal.
"If you like to put it that way," she said.
There was a silence.
"You don't seem too fit at the moment, Paule. You looked tired when I saw you. If you don't like my arrangements, make others. You need to get away."
His voice was warm and sad, and Paule felt the tears come into her eyes. Yes, she needed him; she needed him to protect her completely instead of suggesting these ten days on the cheap. He should have known that; there were limits to everything, even male egoism.
"Oh, I shall," she said. "We'll send each other postcards, peak to peak."
He hung up. After all, he may merely have been asking for support, and she had refused it. A fine love hers was! But at the same time she felt confusedly that it was her prerogative, almost her duty, to be exacting and suffer for it. After all, there was someone who loved her passionately.
Up to now, she and Simon had always eaten alone in small local restaurants. But when she got home that evening she found him on the doorstep, looking very sedate in a dark suit, every hair in place. Once again she noticed his beauty, the feline length of his eyes, the perfect shape of his mouth, and she reflected with amusement that this little boy, who spent his days waiting for her buried under her dresses, had the looks of a Reiter and lady- killer.
"Such elegance!" she said. "What goes on?"
"We're having an evening out," he said. "We're going to eat somewhere lavish and dance. I should be just as happy with a couple of fried eggs here, but I feel like taking you out."
He helped her off with her coat. She noticed that he had smothered himself with toilet water. On the bed in her room lay a very low-cut cocktail dress which she had worn twice in her life.
"That's my favourite," said Simon. "Would you like a drink?"
He had mixed the kind she liked. Paule sat down on the bed, completely in a whirl: she had come down from the mountains to find herself faced with an evening out. She smiled at him.
"Are you pleased? You aren't tired, are you? If you like, I'll climb straight out of this suit and we'll stay here."
He set one knee on the bed and went through the motions of taking off his jacket. She leaned against him, slid her hand under his shirt, felt the warmth of his skin against her palm. He was alive, so alive.
"It's a wonderful idea," she said. "Do you insist on this dress? I look a bit silly in it."
"I love you naked," he said, "and this is the most naked you have. I had a good look."
She reached for her cocktail and drank it. She might have come home to a lonely flat and gone rather gloomily to bed with a book, as she often had before he came along. But he was there, he was laughing, he was happy, she laughed with him and he was insistent she should teach him the Charleston, thus blithely putting twenty years on her, and she tripped on the carpet as she was dancing and fell breathless into his arms, and he hugged her to him, and she laughed more than ever, completely forgetting Roger and the snow and her sorrows. She was young, she was beautiful; she turned him out, made herself up to look rather like a vamp and put on that indecent dress, and he pounded on the door in his impatience. When she emerged he looked at her in dazzlement and covered her shoulders with kisses. He made her have a second cocktail—with her head for drink! She was happy. Marvellously happy.
In the restaurant, at a table close to theirs, she recognised two women rather older than herself who occasionally worked with her and who now gave her a surprised smile. When Simon rose to escort her on to the floor she caught the phrase: "How old is she now?"
She leaned against Simon. Everything was spoiled. Her dress was ridiculous for her age, Simon rather too striking and her life rather too absurd. She asked Simon to take her home. He did not protest and she knew that he had heard, too.
She undressed very quickly. Simon was talking about the band. She would have liked to send him away. She stretched out in the dark while he undressed. She had been wrong to drink those two cocktails and the champagne; she would look haggard next day. She was almost dazed with gloom. Simon came back into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on her forehead.
"Not tonight, Simon," she said. "I'm tired."
He made no reply, but sat quite still. She could see his figure outlined against the light from the bathroom; his head was lowered and he seemed to be reflecting.
"Paule," he said at last, "I must talk to you."
"It's late. I'm tired. Tomorrow."
"No," he said. "I want to talk to you right away. And you're going to listen to me."
She opened her eyes in amazement. This was the first time he had spoken to her in a tone of authority.
"I heard what those old hags behind us said. I won't have you upsetting yourself over it. It's unworthy of you, it's cowardly and it's hurtful to me."
"But Simon, you're making a tragedy out of nothing . . ."
"I'm not making a tragedy of it: on the contrary, I want to stop you from making tragedies out of such trifles. Naturally you would hide them from me. But you've no need to. I'm not a little boy, Paule. I'm quite capable of understanding you, and maybe of helping you. I'm very happy with you, you know that, but my ambitions don't rest there: I want you to be happy with me. At present you're too bound up with Roger for that to happen. But you have got to start thinking of our affair as something positive, something on which you must help me to build, and not as a momentary windfall. There's what I had to say."
He spoke calmly but with effort. Paule listened to him with astonishment and a kind of hope. She had thought him unaware; he wasn't, and he thought she could start all over again. Perhaps, after all, she could ... ?
"I'm not a fool, you know. I'm twenty-five, I hadn't lived before you came and I certainly shan't live after you've gone. You are the woman—more than that: the human being—I must have. I know it. If you liked, I'd marry you tomorrow."
"I'm thirty-nine," she said.
"Life isn't a woman's magazine, nor a cluster of reminiscences. You are fourteen years older than me, and I love you, and I shall love you for a very long time. That's all there is to it. So I won't have you sinking to the level of those old witches or of public opinion. The problem for you, for us, is Roger. There are no others."
"Simon," she said, "I want you to forgive me for . . . w
ell, for supposing ..."
"You didn't think I was capable of thinking, that's all. Now move over a bit."
He slipped into bed beside her, kissed her and took her. She did not complain of her tiredness, and he roused her to a pitch of pleasure such as she had not previously known with him. Afterwards he stroked her sweating brow, installed it in the hollow of his shoulder, reversing his usual practice, and carefully drew the bedclothes over her.
"Go to sleep," he said. "I'll take care of everything."
In the darkness she gave a tender little smile and pressed her lips to his shoulder, a caress which he received with the olympian calm of a master. He lay awake for a long time, alarmed and impressed by his own firmness.
16
EASTER was approaching and Simon spent his days poring over maps hidden among his chief's files or strewn over Paule's carpet. To date he had planned two crowded itineraries for Italy and three for Spain, and was at present wavering towards Greece. Paule listened to him without saying anything: she would have ten days at most and she was feeling too tired even to catch a train. She would have liked a house in the country, a succession of identical days: childhood, in short! But she hadn't the heart to discourage Simon. Already he saw himself as the perfect traveller, leaping from the carriage to help her down on to the platform, guiding her to a car hired a fortnight beforehand, which would drive them to the best hotel in town, where their room would be full of the flowers he had telegraphed; he was forgetting that he had never yet managed to time a connection or hold on to a ticket. He was dreaming, still dreaming, but all his dreams were directed at Paule, rushed headlong towards her like churning rivers towards a calm sea. He had never felt so free as in these last few months, when each day had found him at the same office, each evening with the same companion, in the same flat, clinging to the same desire, the same anxiety, the same pain. For Paule still broke away at times, avoided his eyes, smiled fondly at his impassioned speeches. Paule still said nothing when there was talk of Roger. Often he had the impression of waging an absurd, exhausting and hopeless struggle, for, as he fully sensed, the passage of time was getting him nowhere. He had not simply to efface Paule's memory of Roger; he had to kill something inside her which was Roger, a kind of painful, ineradicable root which she endured with forbearance, and there were times when he reached the point of wondering whether it were not this forbearance, this accepted suffering that had first made him fall for her and now, perhaps, even kept his love alive. But generally he said to himself: "Paule is waiting for me; in an hour I shall have her in my arms," and it seemed to him that Roger had never existed, that Paule loved him, Simon, and that everything was simple and ablaze with happiness. And these were the times Paule preferred him—when he treated their relationship as an inescapable fact to which she could only subscribe. She was tired of her own diffidence. But when she was alone, the thought of Roger living without her would seem a fundamental mistake; she would ask herself how they had landed where they were. And 'they', 'we' still meant her and Roger. Simon was 'he'. Only, Roger knew nothing of this. When he was weary of his present life, he would come and grumble to her and no doubt try to win her back. And perhaps he would succeed. Simon would be well and truly hurt and she would be alone again, waiting for unreliable telephone calls and unfailing slights. And she rebelled against her own fatalism, against the impression that all this was inescapable. There was someone inescapable in her life: Roger.
But this did not prevent her from living with Simon, from sighing in his arms at night and sometimes from holding him to her in response to one of those impulses which only children and slick lovers can inspire, an impulse so possessive, so terrified at the idea of the precariousness of all possession, that he himself did not notice its intensity. At these moments Paule was close to old age, to that incomparable love that comes with age, and afterwards she was angry with herself and angry with Roger (who did not compel her to withdraw into herself) for not being there. When Roger took her, he was her master, she was his property, he was only a year or two older than she, and everything complied with certain moral or aesthetic rules which she had never till then suspected herself of harbouring. But Simon did not feel himself to be her master. He had adopted, through an unconscious 'hamming' which he could not have supposed would lead to his downfall, a complete attitude of dependence which made him fall asleep on her shoulder, as though for protection, get up at dawn to make breakfast, and consult her over the smallest thing—an attitude which moved Paule, yet somehow embarrassed her, discomforted her, as though she were faced with something abnormal. She respected him: he was working now; on one occasion he had taken her to a trial, in Versailles, where he had given a remarkable performance as the young lawyer, shaking hands, smiling condescendingly at the journalists and always returning to her as to the pivot of all his activity, at times interrupting his effusions to strangers so as to confirm that she was looking at him. No, he made no show of detachment. So she kept her eyes on him, putting every ounce of admiration and interest into her expression, which changed, the moment he turned his back, into one of affection and a certain pride. The women looked at him a good deal. She felt good: someone was living wholly for her. For her, at last, the question of the difference in their ages did not arise; she did not ask herself: "And in ten years' time will he still love me?" In ten years' time, she would be alone or with Roger. Something inside her persisted in telling her this. And at the thought of this duplicity, which she could do nothing about, her fondness for Simon redoubled: "My victim, my dear victim, my little Simon!" For the first time she was tasting the awful pleasure of loving somebody whom one is unavoidably going to hurt.
This 'unavoidably' and its consequences—the questions which Simon would one day ask her, which he would be entitled to ask her as a man she had hurt—appalled her. "Why do you prefer Roger to me? What has that heel to offer that's so much better than the love I pour out on you day after day?" And already she panicked at the veiy thought of having to explain Roger. She would not say 'him', she would say 'us', for she was quite unable to dissociate their two lives. She did not know why. Possibly because the efforts—the painful, unceasing efforts—which she had made for their love these six years had finally come to mean more to her than happiness. Possibly because her pride would not stand for their proving useless; it had grown so used to taking knocks that slowly but surely it had fed on them until finally it had chosen and anointed Roger as its chief scourge. In the end he had always escaped her. And this unpropitious fight had become the reason for her existence.
Yet she was not made for struggling; at times she told herself as much, rubbing Simon's soft, silken, flowing hair up the wrong way. She could, she murmured to him, have glided through life like her hand through his hair. They would lie like this for long hours in the dark night, until at last they fell asleep. They would hold hands and whisper, so that at times she had the ridiculous feeling that she was fourteen again and lying next to a classmate in one of those ghostly dormitories where girls spoke under their breath of God and men. She would whisper and Simon, enchanted by this suggestion of mystery, would lower his voice too.
"How would you have lived?"
"I'd have stayed with Marc, my husband. He was nice at heart. Very much in the social swim. And he had too much money ... I wanted to try ..."
She attempted to explain it to him. How her life had abruptly assumed the shape of a life, purely as a result of choice, the day she had plunged into the complex, exacting, humiliating world of the professional woman. The intrigues, the material worries, the smiles, the silences. Simon listened, trying to disentangle from these reminiscences something which had a bearing on his love.
"And . . .?"
"And I think that's how I'd have lived. I might have taken to deceiving Marc in a mild sort of way, I don't know. But I'd have had a child. And for that alone ..."
She broke off. Simon was hugging her. He wanted a child by her: he wanted everything. She laughed, kissed his eyes an
d continued: "But at twenty, things weren't like that. I remember clearly: I had made up my mind to be happy."
Yes, she remembered clearly. She walked through the streets and over the beaches with the impetuosity of her desire; she never stopped walking, searching for a face, an idea—a prey. The determination to be happy weighed on her, as it had weighed on three generations: there were no obstacles, there would never be enough. Nowadays she aimed, not at acquiring, but merely at keeping. Keeping a job and a man: both had been unchanged for years, yet at thirty-nine she was certain of neither. Simon was dozing beside her. She murmured: "Darling, are you asleep ... ?" and these four words partly wakened him, he said no, he pressed against her in the dark, in her scent, in their mingled warmth, wonderfully happy.
17
IT was his thirtieth cigarette. He sensed as much as he stubbed it out in the cluttered ash-tray. He gave a shudder of distaste and switched on the bedside lamp yet again. It was three in the morning and he could not get to sleep. He flung the window open, and the icy air struck at his face and neck so fiercely that he shut it again and leaned against it, as though to 'look at' the cold. Finally he renounced the deserted street, shot a glance at his mirror and at once looked away again. He did not like what he saw. He took the packet of Gauloises from the night table, thrust one mechanically to his lips and immediately took it out again. He no longer cared for these mechanical gestures which had always, till now, given life a good deal of its flavour; he no longer cared for these bachelor habits; he no longer cared for the taste of tobacco. He must take himself in hand; he must be ill. Of course, he missed Paule —but that wasn't enough. At this moment she must be asleep in the arms of that spoilt young brat, she had forgotten everything. He, Roger, had only to go out, pick up a woman and drink. As she supposed. For he sensed that she had never valued him at his true worth. She had always thought him boorish and brutal, although he had offered her the best, the solidest part of himself. Women were like that: they appeared to demand everything and offer everything, they let you bask in complete confidence, and then one fine day they vanished, for the most futile reason. For nothing could be more futile for Paule than an affair with Simon. But at this moment the boy was holding her in his arms, he was bending over her upturned face, over her body, so sweet, so abandoned, so . . . He spun round, lit his cigarette at last, inhaling the smoke with furious avidity, then emptied the ash-tray into the fireplace. He should have made a fire; Paule used to light one every time she came; she would kneel in front of it, watching the flames spread, helping them along from time to time with one of her wonderfully calm, adroit movements, then she rose, withdrew a little, and the room became pink and shadowy and full of movement, he wanted to make love and he told her so. But that was some time ago. How long was it since Paule had stopped coming? Two years, three perhaps. He had fallen into the habit of calling at her place: it was easier; she was waiting for him.