Confidant (9781101603628)

by Gremillon, Helene; Anderson, Alison (TRN)

  He nodded his head at last, his eyes staring at a point in front of him, and I knew he was about to say something.

  ‘If I asked you to make love with another man in order to have a child, you would accept, is that what you are trying to say? You think I’m not making enough of an effort? Then so be it . . . If to be a husband worthy of the name you think I have to sleep with that girl, then I shall do it. Because I love you, do you hear me? Only because I love you. But only once, no more, because after that you will have to get this madness out of your head and let us never speak of it again.’

  It is strange how we are made. No sooner had Paul understood that the energy I had deployed in trying to convince him had now turned to despair, than he capitulated. Three minutes in exchange for a child: suddenly the equation no longer seemed so simple.

  I was not jealous by nature, and no one, neither my husband nor Annie, could have foreseen that his bad temper would erupt in love. Nor did I for that matter; I had not yet reached the age where one is no longer fooled by one’s own nature.

  Even today I wonder whether I actually made that proposal to him so that he would reject it. Simply to initiate the conversation between us. So that he would reassure me and tell me he would never leave me, that I would not be repudiated the way other women had been. Catherine of Aragon, Joséphine de Beauharnais, Princess Soraya . . . I would not be the first woman to have been abandoned because of her infertility. Not to mention all the ones we don’t know about.

  But perhaps if he had refused I would have been angry with him, too. In fact, the answer to the question I had asked was bound to be unacceptable.

  If he had said no, I would think he didn’t love me.

  He had said yes, and I still thought he didn’t love me.

  Suddenly all the indecency of the situation became painfully obvious. So I wrote him a letter where I told him everything he had to do. I still see myself working out the constraints to make the act as impersonal as possible. According to all the doctors, the missionary position was the only reasonable form of copulation, and the union must take place in a bed and nowhere else, the bed being ‘the only altar where the work of the flesh can be accomplished with dignity’ (I still remember these words) ‘in utter silence and darkness’. The doctors also proscribed the presence of any mirrors in the conjugal bedchamber, ‘abject objects promoting a loss of concentration’. I could feel my jealousy, how damp my fingers had become around my pen. Those three minutes already seemed to me like an eternity. My torture.

  During the night, with Jacques’ help, I made the room without walls into a suitable venue, and the next day Annie was treated to the same lecture as my husband. But in her case, in person. My persistent bad faith allowed me to reason that I too would have liked someone to explain to me in infinite detail what to expect from my first sexual encounter.

  In fact, my explanations were not meant to reassure her, far from it, I wanted to frighten her, to incite her to refuse so that she would stop this time bomb for me. I was certain that the sight of her studio transformed into a brothel would upset her, I thought that I would be able to reach her innermost feelings through the décor if I could not reach them through my words. ‘My husband will be back within the hour . . .’ I hoped by pressuring her to make her withdraw.

  ‘Let’s wait until tomorrow . . .’

  There, she’d said it. I was sure I had won, that Annie had changed her mind. That she was abandoning the whole idea. I was deeply grateful to her, she was the only one of the three of us who had the pride and the courage to put a halt to this insane scheme.

  When she came the next day I had not been expecting her. I spent the following hours hoping that Paul would not come home early. He did come home early. And this improbable scene unfolded before my eyes.

  He came into the drawing room. I looked at him. He did not return my gaze. Annie had her head down. He said to her, ‘Let’s go.’ She stood up. Followed him. And I did nothing to stop them. I heard the door to the room without walls close behind them.

  I stayed there where they had left me. My pounding heart made my chest rock back and forth imperceptibly; I had trouble catching my breath. Paul would come back, apologetic, and tell me he could not make love to another woman. If someone had slapped me while I waited I would not have felt a thing, I was no longer there. I was in that part of the soul that is unacquainted with the body, perhaps that part of us that survives after death.

  Paul was the first to return to the drawing room, and he stood by the fireplace as if a fire were crackling there. That was his place, summer and winter alike. Sleeping with another woman has not deterred him from his habits, I thought. I believe it was in that very moment that I felt truly betrayed: that he should remain standing there by the fireplace. I looked at him. He did not return my gaze.

  I hated him for standing there, but at the same time it gave me strength, to have him there before my eyes. I felt a surge of pride. I had to behave as if everything that had just happened was in accordance with my wishes. As if I had no problem signing the contract that I myself had drawn up. And while the effect on me was that of a dead man touching his last will and testament, I managed to go deep inside myself and recover my voice, to call out to Annie as she left the house, ‘Goodbye, see you tomorrow.’

  She replied with a faraway, ‘See you tomorrow.’

  Only Paul said nothing. His eyes downcast, staring into the fireplace, he held his hands out as if he wanted to warm them by the fire. It was the ninth of April. The andirons were empty. Outside the sun was warm. I should have suspected something.

  During the month that followed life went on as usual. Annie continued to come to the house, my husband left late morning and came home for dinner, occasionally afterwards, but rarely.

  I was the only one who had changed. I no longer hoped for a child the way I had all the previous years; I was expecting it. Serenely. I thought of all the things we would do with our child. Return to Paris, pick up the threads of our former life. I would abandon the pariah status I had been relegated to; nothing more would ever separate Paul and me, we would go to our bed without that heavy burden weighing upon our bodies. We would have a child and expect no others, we would make love the way we had a few years ago, with a lightness of touch. Strengthened by these convictions I was no longer even angry at Paul for having yielded to my entreaties. My jealousy had retreated in the face of such a bright future, and my faith had no bounds.

  But on the ninth of May Paul bluntly informed me that Annie was not pregnant. The news was all the more distressing in that I had not been expecting to hear it from him. This could not be. He must have made a mistake. And why did he know before I did?

  ‘Annie herself told me.’

  When? They had not seen each other since.

  ‘Well, no, she didn’t tell me. Well, not exactly . . . We had agreed that if Annie was not pregnant she would wedge the curtain of the room in the window. That way, in the evening, when I came down the drive, I would see the curtain hanging outside and then I would know and could tell you. We decided together, after we . . . well, you know . . . once we had finished . . . ’

  This was dreadful. That my husband and Annie could have been so complicitous. And yet their fucking had served no purpose. I was mad with despair. I had never been in such a state, even for my own sake. This pregnancy was our last chance for salvation. I had resigned myself to the fact that once their two bodies had connected, it would be once and for all. Now they had to try again. They could not give up, not now, they had to go on, until it worked.

  Paul stood up straight and refused vehemently: we had made our pact, I had defined the rules—‘just once’—and he had respected them, it was my turn now. We spent all that evening and night arguing. He accused me of wanting to destroy us. I replied that we would be destroyed all the more surely if we failed to have a child.

 
The next morning he insisted on staying until Annie arrived.

  ‘I don’t know what you will go putting into the girl’s head this time.’

  He was watching for her from the window in the drawing room. The front door had not even opened yet and he was already in the hall. He rushed to meet her and I could hear them from where I sat.

  ‘I told Elisabeth you aren’t pregnant, I told her about the curtain, that you wedged it in the window to let me know.’

  They came into the drawing room. He was pale, insistent. He was waving in my direction.

  ‘She won’t listen. She wants us to go on. I can’t get her to see reason, you tell her, tell her it’s impossible!’

  Annie was giving him a strange look.

  ‘I agree.’

  Neither Paul nor I understood at first what she meant.

  ‘I agree to go on trying until we manage it.’

  Annie said this in the most poised tone imaginable. My husband stepped away from her, as if she had just burned him. He seemed completely lost. He hunted for his briefcase on the mantelpiece, then remembered he had left it against the wall below the window. He marched over to it, snatched it up and left the room.

  It was as if we were in a play by Feydeau and, in spite of the palpable tension, Annie and I smiled at his ridiculous exit. But for the rest there was nothing to be said, and Annie defused it with her usual natural good grace, handing me a magazine and saying kindly, ‘Come and read next to me, I’d like to get working on a canvas again.’ We could resume our harmonious coexistence.

  Paul and I, on the other hand, no longer spoke. We ate in silence. Even Sophie no longer dared say a thing. Normally she would comment on the dishes she served us—what a good idea it had been to leave the skin of the aubergine on, for more taste; how lucky we were to have this good chicken, which would have ended up in Mrs So-and-So’s shopping bag if Sophie hadn’t hurried to be first in the queue . . . She was a cheerful sort, Sophie, but the pervading bad mood had got the better of her chatter.

  I was literally possessed by my obsession and, as with all obsessions, this one was destroying everything in its wake. Paul had to make this child, by whatever means possible, and I ended up making the worst decision of my life—that of refusing to share my bed with him. I wanted to coerce him somehow into sleeping with Annie and, while his mind might baulk, his body would comply. I had driven him into a corner with all the sadism of an enemy. I had forgotten that I loved him.

  We could have stayed like that for a long time, entrenched in our positions, surly with one another, but as is often the case in hopeless dilemmas, an outside event suddenly got things moving.

  That day Paul came home late morning. It was a Saturday and I was at my dressing table, getting ready. He seemed relieved to find me there. He was extremely agitated, fiddling with all the perfume bottles, and he could not stand still.

  ‘I went to Weidman’s execution this morning and the most dreadful thing happened. First of all, the execution was almost an hour late, we still don’t know why, but it was broad daylight by the time they bound Weidman and shoved him forward. The photographers were going mad with excitement at the prospect of at last being able to get some good shots of an execution, since up to now they had only got mediocre night-time shots. I could hear their cameras clicking away. The crowd was shouting. Impassive as always, Desfourneaux released the blade. Suddenly a group of women, a horde of hyenas, made their way past the guards and flung themselves on the ground to soak their handkerchiefs in the pools of blood. Weidman’s head probably hadn’t even stopped rolling at the bottom of the basket.

  ‘It was revolting, those squatting, screaming women, sponging up the blood with their hands. I could not understand what they were doing. It was Eugène who explained it to me. He’d been in a foul temper ever since the trial began. For one thing, he has the same first name as Weidman, and he could no longer go anywhere in the office without some clever idiot slamming his hand against his neck as if to sever his throat, “clack”. ‘“Look at those women, they’re mad, they think that a lunatic’s blood will make them fertile.” When he said that, you cannot imagine how afraid I was. I closed my eyes and did not dare open them again. I was afraid you might emerge from the crowd too and kneel down among those women. I stayed on after all the others had left, checking every street corner; it would have been just like you to go there once no one could see you, to kneel down just long enough to take something out of your bag, just long enough to let the hem of your skirt inconspicuously touch the ground, in the hope of absorbing a few drops of blood for you, too. You could have done that, couldn’t you? I asked Eugène to write up the story in my place and I hurried home, I wanted to be with you as soon as possible. I am so distraught about everything that is happening to us, my love, I don’t want you ever to go somewhere just to let your skirt hem touch the ground, do you hear me? Ever. Do you still want me to go ahead with it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was the seventeenth of June. Eugène Weidman, ‘the killer from La Voulzie’, six-time assassin, had just been beheaded. And so had I.

  After that Saturday they got into the habit of meeting every Saturday. It was a secret we shared, but we never spoke about it together—those are the most terrifying kinds of secrets. I had decided I would stay away from the house on those days, and I had Sophie and Jacques leave as well. He would drive us up to Paris, and she would do the shopping, that way they would not suspect what was going on in the room without walls.

  Jacques waited for me outside the Normandie. I hoped that going to the cinema would get my mind off things. To be far away and distracted would make things easier than if I stayed in the next room. But one cannot suppress one’s thoughts that easily. You Can’t Take It With You: I remember, it won the Oscar for the best film, people spoke of it very highly, ‘a sentimental film by Capra’, what harm could there be . . . Except that sentiment is exasperating when you are caught up in your own drama, and I learned that at my own expense. That day the knot around my soul was pulled too tight for me to digest the film, and while all was well that ended well, to the tune of Polly Wolly Doodle, I burst into tears. Unlike the spectators around me I could find neither happiness nor relief; on the contrary, nothing but misery, rage, dismay. The man I loved was making love to another woman. Instead of removing me to a safe distance from my own drama, the film made it more blatant than ever.

  I absolutely had to find a way to get closer to Paul, that much I knew. To give him something in exchange for those Saturdays, to show him how grateful I was to him.

  Although I was the one who had turned down all the invitations we’d received since we moved to L’Escalier, now I offered to go with him to the reception at the Polish Embassy and to Sacha Guitry’s wedding, both of which I knew he planned to attend, the first for political reasons, and the second for the sake of their friendship. And could we stay and sleep at the house between the two events?

  Fine.

  At our house in Paris, I mean.

  Yes, yes, he knew what I meant.

  It was the twenty-eighth of June 1939.

  The party at the embassy was lively, but troubling. Everyone who was anyone in Paris was there, utterly carefree, as if the tension between Poland and Germany simply did not exist. Lukasiewicz, the ambassador, danced all evening, barefoot and gesticulating, inviting all and sundry to join him. Even the valets in their livery were dancing, even I was dancing. I had not had so much fun in a long time. A mazurka, a polonaise, a polka . . .

  Paul was aghast. When you thought of the danger they were in, back in Poland . . . Had they not learned their lesson with Czechoslovakia? Someone next to us retorted in an offhand manner that Lukasiewicz was convinced Hitler was bluffing, that he had it on authority that the Führer had promised the Duce peace until 1943. Paul called
him an idiot, but his words were lost in the music.

  When the firework display began I reached for his hand. He let me take it, hardly seeming to realise that it had been months since I had shown any gestures of affection. I could tell at that moment how worried he was by the political situation. As for me, light years from any geopolitical considerations, with Paul’s hand in mine I was thinking that our baby might be on its way. Look at those magnificent blue fireworks! It would be a boy.

  It was the fourteenth of July.

  I did not sleep well that night, Paul did not come to sleep in my bed, whereas I had imagined I would fall asleep in his arms. He spent the night in his study cleaning his ‘collection of collectable pistols’ as he called it.

  At breakfast he remarked, wasn’t life strange: in his collection there were some items he had not seen in such a long time and which he found quite charming, while others had lost any charm at all.

  I remember his words well, and I know why. It was one of those statements that conceal what they actually mean, and leave an aftertaste with those who say them as well as with those who hear them. A ‘key statement’ one will remember at a later time as one thinks, So that’s what was meant. How could I have failed to realise at the time?

  The collection had belonged to his father, and Paul had inherited it upon his death.

  He always carried the ‘little Deringer’ on him. Like a ring that passes from finger to finger among the women in a family, that pistol had been passing for generations from pocket to pocket of the men in my husband’s family. They said it was the same model that had been used to assassinate Lincoln, and that keeping it on one’s person would prevent it from doing any more harm. Sophie, to whom Lincoln’s death was meaningless compared to the frequent mending she had to do on Paul’s trouser pockets, often grumbled that it was a right nasty habit to walk around all day with a pistol in one’s pocket. That it was bad luck. It only made us laugh.