Frances’s calm, beautiful gray-blue eyes looked in the direction of the Ralston house, visible through the window.
She seemed lost in her own thoughts for a few seconds, and her gaze, to Ralph, seemed the gaze of a person who wished to escape (and who could blame her?). He had lost her. Ralph took a quick, deep breath. He could have collapsed with defeat, with unhappiness, and yet at the same time an insane energy boiled within him.
‘I think you’d better leave,” Ralph said in a hoarse but gentle tone.
“Leave?—Well—of course I will, if—” Now her eyes grew wider, with fear.
Because I’m going to destroy this house, Ralph thought. But he didn’t want Frances to be crushed under it, just himself, perhaps.
“If you’re so upset—”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “I’m sorry. I can drive you—home.” He stood rigid, boiling with heat and purpose again, ashamed of his behavior, yet ashamed as if he saw himself from a distance, as if he weren’t himself, standing here, looking at the girl.
“All right. I’ll get my case.”
“Oh, no, I’ll do it!” Ralph dashed past her and up the stairs. Her overnight case was still closed on the floor near the single bed, and a glance into the bathroom showed that she had not put out any toothbrush or cosmetics. Ralph went down with the case.
Now Frances had lit a cigarette, and she seemed calmer, standing where she had been before. “You know, it’s absurd—thinking that you’re inferior somehow—just because you’re not a mason.”
A mason was not what he meant. Ralph meant that he couldn’t do anything properly. “I am not as efficient as other people,” he said tensely, gasping. He could have leapt to the ceiling as easily as he had just run up the stairs. He twitched with repressed brute strength. “Can you—perhaps leave me alone for a minute or two? Could you take a little walk for five minutes?”
She had mentioned the woods across the road, said something about taking a walk there when they had arrived today. Now she said, “But of course.”
When he saw that she had crossed the road, he took her suitcase and set it outside the house by his car. Then he fetched his large saw with the bow-shaped handle from his shed, and attacked the vertical rafter in the center of his living room. This was a blissful outlet for his energy. The wood seemed to cut like butter, though after a moment the saw stuck with friction, so he attacked the post from the other side, which would result in a V-shaped incision a little lower than his waist as he stood.
Done! He could see through the V even, yet the damned house didn’t fall. “Curse you!” Ralph said.
He took a few steps backwards, rubbed his palms together, bent and charged.
His right shoulder struck the top part of the severed rafter, and he pushed harder against it, aware of a crackling, deep yet sharp, over his head. He was aware of pain in his shoulder, then a brief roar as of an avalanche. Then he blacked out.
When Ralph was next aware of consciousness, or of thought, he seemed to be floating, weightless, horizontal perhaps, and on his back. Frances was beside him, the beautiful Frances, and she was sitting by his bed. Of course he was on a bed, or in a bed, in a hospital. He remembered. What he saw through drugged, half-open eyes was a gray-white. He tried to lift his hands, and couldn’t. But there sat Frances, he saw when he groggily looked to his left.
“I’ve come to see you—but I think I shouldn’t see you again, Ralph. You frighten me. I hope you’ll understand.”
Ralph opened his dry lips to reply, and nothing came. Of course he understood. He was a failure, and worse, he had lost his head. He remembered, he had tried to blow up his house. No, not bomb it, but wreck it. He had attacked it with a sledgehammer. No, a saw. He remembered now. No wonder Frances had fled! He wondered if she were all right? And he hadn’t the power to ask her. His eyes when he turned them to the left, whence came her voice, would not even bring Frances into focus. But there was her voice again:
“Ralph, I’m sorry. But I’m afraid of you. You must understand.”
Ralph tried to nod in a pacific, polite and reconciled way. Could she see his nod? Ralph squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to weep, detesting himself, and feeling in agony at the loss, the predictable, inevitable loss of Frances. He wanted to die. And so he gave a groan.
“O-oh-h! A-ah-h!”
And Frances fled out the door. Who could blame her? And a nurse arrived quick as lightning, her figure a vague cloud at the left side of his bed, and she made a motion which Ralph knew was the injection of a needle into his arm, though he didn’t feel anything.
Once more, consciousness stirred, he imagined that he saw things, such as the upper corners of his room, Frances somewhere on his left again, maybe sitting on a chair, leaning forward.
“You’re going to be all right,” said Frances in a soft voice. “Things—it’s not so bad. Just a broken collarbone and a bang on the head.”
“It is hopeless,” Ralph murmured, mumbling like a drunk, and sleepy unto death. Maybe he was already dead? “I’m—hopeless.”
“No!—Ralph, I understand why you did it. It’s just a house. So what?” Frances’s voice said with more conviction.
Now Ralph felt a pressure on his left hand. Frances might have been holding his hand in both hers. “I can’t—” Ralph stopped, wanting to make the statement that he was not efficient, not efficient. “I can’t do anything.”
“Who cares?” Frances’s blonde personage or aura bent and kissed him on the lips.
Ralph blinked. “Are you real?” His vision of her was still fuzzy at the edges, but he felt the pressure on his hand.
“I am real. And I love you, Ralph.”
Ralph sighed, and relaxed in a mingling of pleasure and pain. It was real. Frances was really here, and his earlier vision had been a dream, an hallucination. “Stay with me,” he whispered.
“I will! I can stay all night in the next room. It’s already two in the morning now!” she said with a laugh. “Oh, Ralph, I’m not very efficient either, except a little bit in the kitchen. I mean, I can’t change a washer. Does it matter?” She kissed him again on the lips.
This was real. Ralph smiled, felt like dying again, but in a different way. The nurse came in, shooing Frances away. Did that matter? She would be near him, all night, in the next room.
Ralph saw her wave, as she went out the door. Ralph tried to look firmly at the nurse, steadily, and as usual, he failed. It didn’t matter any more.
The Cruelest Month
Odile Masarati was having a boring, ordinary day. That was the way she thought of it, meaning everything was “the same as always.” She was sitting at her desk (really just a table with a drawer) on its low platform in front of a class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, all with heads bent as they scribbled away at their English exam. Noticing a movement out of the corner of her eye, Odile looked up from her book.
“Philippe?” she said gently, her mind still on what she had been reading.
Philippe’s head ducked back into line, and bent again over the paper.
The little rat had been trying to cheat again, peering at the paper of the girl next to him! Odile returned to Graham Greene. She had read the novel at least twice before, but she never tired of it. How she admired his writing! Such economy, such intellect! She recalled that she had written him two or three highly complimentary letters, care of his publishers, but he had never replied. Well, he wouldn’t reply. He was one of the Pantheon. But no matter. She had a correspondence going now with three of her idols, two men and one woman, so her life was not exactly empty. In fact, what cheered her at that moment was the thought of hurrying home at three and dashing a letter off to Dennis Hollingwood of Essex, England, a writer of adventure novels.
On the dot of three, Odile stood up and said mechanically, “Very good, boys and girls. It’s three o’clock. M
erci—et bon après-midi!”
“Ou-u-u!” moaned one boy.
Others giggled in sudden release, called to friends, stood up, or threw their pens down like angry businessmen.
The students deposited their papers on a corner of Odile’s desk, and these she gathered up, stuck into a folder and stuck the folder into her briefcase. Odile walked briskly to her locker down the hall, barely saying “Bon soir” to a couple of colleagues whom she passed, but then half the time the teachers were feuding with her or among one another, and some were jealous of her, Odile suspected. Why bother keeping track of it all? Provincials, Odile thought, stupid and mediocre. Odile knew she was a born linguist, Italian being her mother tongue, French a close second, because of her family’s moving to France when she was four, Spanish had been a piece of cake, and her German wasn’t bad either, and as for English, she loved English literature so, that that language might as well have been another mother tongue. She tugged on her raincoat. It was raining again. Odile unlocked her Deux Chevaux, and drove off down a street bordered with cropped plane trees that reminded her of freshly trimmed tails of poodles. She might write that to Dennis Hollingwood, though his prose wasn’t inclined to similes, but rather to blunt narration and action. She passed the one butcher’s shop of the town, not open till four, and reminded herself that she must buy some viande hâchée for her father either on her way to or coming from the ecology meeting at 4:30. Odile was almost a vegetarian, but her father liked his meat.
She turned left on to a smaller road at almost the edge of town, and now farm fields spread to right and left, and the few houses were stone farm dwellings and barns. Odile’s house was a bit grander, formerly a small château, though one wing of it had suffered fire and collapsed long ago and had never been rebuilt. Her parents had bought the place for a song thirty years ago, when her father had fled from Italy because of a business scandal due to his brother, who had been a crook, whereas her father was merely naive. The Masarati house was a two-and-a-half story, as Odile described it to her penpals and when she sent photos, which she often did to brighten up her letters, the half at the top being now their two attic rooms, but formerly the rooms of servants. Abominable ivy had been allowed to grow in ages past, and resisted Odile’s vigorous efforts to oust it, though she cut through the thick stems at their base. She and her mother, a really energetic soul, might have conquered the ivy together, but her mother had been killed in a stupid car accident seven years ago, right here in Ezèvry-la-Montagne where the lane joined the main road into town. Her mother had been on foot.
Now Odile lived with her father alone, stuck with him, as she put it in many of her letters, though her feelings about the old man were mixed. Michel wasn’t unintelligent, he had had a respectable career as hydraulic engineer, until Parkinson’s syndrome had struck him about two years ago. Lately he had not been able to walk at all, and lived in a wheelchair, not an electrically propelled one, but one that he could maneuver all over the ground floor where he lived and slept. Bars beside the toilet and over the tub in the downstairs bathroom enabled him to use both these facilities without assistance. Michel read a lot, but the pills he took made him sleepy, and in Odile’s opinion he slept more than their dog, Trixie, which was fifteen hours in twenty-four according to the dog books.
“Hello, Papa!” Odile cried, having let herself in with her key.
Her father sat in the living room in his wheelchair, reading under the yellowish light of the standing lamp, which always struck Odile as insufficient.
“Hello, my child. You had a nice day?” The old man always said this.
“Ye-es, thank you.” Odile hung her raincoat on a peg in the dim hall, slipped out of her boots and went in stockinged feet up the stairs to her room, greeted Trixie who was asleep in her basket by the radiator, and opened her briefcase. “Ready for your walk, Trixie?” Odile asked, as she laid the folder of exam papers on a clear spot on her desk. She put on loafers. She wasn’t going to walk any distance in this rain, just let the dog out on the back terrace to pee.
Trixie followed her, having yawned and groaned a little. The dog was eleven years old, a little plump, though Odile was strict about food and exercise when the weather permitted, taking walks of two miles with Trixie in the lanes and fields around. It was just that dogs who were part dachshund and part cocker (both these breeds being famous for overeating, Odile thought) needed discipline or they gained too much weight. Odile was back in her room with Trixie in five minutes, and sat down at her desk to spend a happy twenty minutes or so.
She addressed an envelope to Dennis Hollingwood at Five Oaks. She knew the rest of the long address and its postal zone by heart.
Dear Dennis,
What a day! Two English exams today, morning and afternoon for my little beasties, one of whom I caught cheating! If I find any amusing bloopers in the exams, which I have to start on later this afternoon after an ecology meeting of the locals, I shall regale you with same. Meanwhile it rains incessantly, reminding me of the old English soldiers’ song, First World War: “Raining, raining, raining, always bloody well raining . . .” I hope weather is nicer at Five Oaks.
Did you receive my last letter with photos of my ivy which I’ve told you so much about? It fairly obscures all sunlight, when we have any, in downstairs living room. Must cut again around the windows.
She paused, ballpoint pen’s end against her upper lip. She had sent Dennis cuff links at Christmas, for which he had written a note of thanks (they were a bit pricey), and he had added, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I haven’t the time to answer every letter you write or in fact any of them just now.” That had been Dennis’s second and last letter, his first having been in response to a carefully wrought letter of praise from Odile in regard to Devil’s Bounty, which Dennis Hollingwood had deigned to acknowledge with the remark, “I don’t usually receive such intelligent fan mail, so yours was a pleasure—though I hardly fancy myself the equal of Conrad.” This first letter had made Odile spin with joy (after all, Dennis Hollingwood was rather famous, and two of his eight novels had been made into films), and Odile had responded with a spate of letters to him, all of which she wrote in a light vein, but she had told him a lot about her own life, and about Stefan, a married man she had fallen in love with when she had been twenty-seven, and with whom she had had an affair for five years, until Stefan broke it off. Stefan Mockers was a doctor, a nose and throat specialist, dashing and handsome when she had met him, an Adonis to many women and girls, Odile had known, but she had also known that she had been his only mistress while their affair had lasted. The sad sequel to her five years of bliss with Stefan was that three months after Stefan had broken it off, he had been in a car accident (Stefan had been driving but it hadn’t been his fault) on the Corniche near Marseille, had suffered broken legs and a head injury that had done him permanent brain damage. Stefan had had to abandon his practice, and was now not even a shadow of his old self, lived at home with his wife and their two teenaged children, and occasionally Odile saw Stefan and his wife shopping in Ezèvry, Stefan creeping around with a cane as if he were ninety instead of fifty-five, and Odile always looked the other way and was sure Stefan never saw her. On her cluttered, ever-changing desktop, Odile still found room for a small photograph of Stefan, virile and smiling, with dark hair and mustache (now his hair was all gray), in a frame which stood up. Odile believed that Stefan had been the love of her life, that she might, just might, meet another man with whom she might fall in love, but no one would ever be able to hold a candle to the brilliant Stefan in his prime.
However, back to Dennis Hollingwood. She had told Dennis (whom she had started addressing as Dennis after his thank-you letter for the cuff links) about her first meeting with Stefan, their discretion in making rendezvous in the area, Stefan’s fantastic wit and charm, the tragedy of his breaking it off, followed so soon by his accident—and all this flashed through her head again li
ke a recorded tape, and she experienced it all again in a matter of seconds, as if indeed it were a tape that she couldn’t switch off until it played itself out.
Odile had realized that Dennis’s letter saying he hadn’t time to answer her letters had been a brush-off, but she had felt that silence on her part after that would have looked as if she were hurt or sulking, so she had gone on writing to Dennis every two weeks or so, as if he had said nothing of this kind. Odile didn’t see that an occasional cheerful letter could be annoying. She wasn’t telephoning him, which she had once tried to do and discovered that he had an unlisted number which the English operator had refused to give out.
I wonder what you’re working on now? I hope another masterpiece like Devil’s Bounty. I shall never forget the scene in which Ally learns the truth about his sister . . .
Odile went on for a few lines, glanced at her watch and saw that she still had time to inform Dennis that she was about to go off to the ecology meeting concerning tree care today, on which she would be expected, as town workhorse, to write a report of four or five hundred words, the report to be dropped into the post box of La Voix d’Ezèvry before she went to bed tonight.
She attended the ecology meeting—ten people, nearly all women—in the rundown bourgeois house of Mme. Gauthier of the village. Odile was bored, though she took notes on what was said. Ecology interested Odile, but the town was doing all right in the tree department, and Odile was more concerned about animal protection, the local rabbits and deer during the hunting season.