I made my way slowly back through the pines, exhausted and numbed. I had asked Cyril not to come with me, it would have been too dangerous. I was afraid that the blatant hallmarks of pleasure might be legible on my face, in the shadows under my eyes and the fullness of my lips, and in my trembling. Anne was on a recliner in front of the house, reading. I had a good story ready to explain my absence but she asked me no questions, she never asked me any questions. So I sat down near her without saying anything, remembering that we had fallen out. I stayed motionless, with my eyes half-closed, attentive to the rhythm of my breathing and the quivering of my fingers. From time to time the memory of Cyril’s body as it had been at certain moments left me feeling drained.
I took a cigarette from the table and struck a match on the matchbox. It went out. I lit a second one carefully, for there was no wind and the only thing quivering was my hand. It went out as soon as it touched my cigarette. I groaned and took a third one. And then, I don’t know why, that match became of vital importance to me. Perhaps it was because Anne, suddenly no longer aloof, was watching me intently and with no hint of a smile. At that moment, time and our surroundings vanished and all that remained was the match with my finger on it, the grey matchbox and Anne’s gaze. My mind went into a spin and my heart began to beat furiously; I tightened my fingers round the match, it flared and while I was eagerly bending my face towards it, my cigarette caught the tip of it and put it out. I let the box fall to the ground and closed my eyes. Anne’s harsh, interrogating gaze was bearing down on me. All that I prayed for, and from whatever quarter, was that the waiting should be over. Anne took my face in her hands while I kept my eyelids tight shut for fear she might see the look in my eyes. I could feel tears oozing out, tears of exhaustion, embarrassment and pleasure. At that point, as if she were forgoing any attempt to question me, in a gesture of appeasement which seemed to convey that she suspected nothing, Anne ran her hands down my face and released me. Then she put a lighted cigarette into my mouth and immersed herself in her book again.
I have imposed a certain meaning on that gesture of hers, or I have tried to. But today, whenever I need a match, I come back to that strange moment and to the gap between myself and what I was trying to do, to Anne’s gaze weighing on me and to that emptiness all around, the intensity of the void …
Five
The incident that I have just described was to have its consequences. Like all those who react to things in a very considered way and are very sure of themselves, Anne could not bear to compromise over her principles. That gesture of hers, the gentle way in which she had released her firm hands from around my face, was for her just such a compromise. She had guessed something that she could have made me confess to, and at the last minute she had given in to pity or retreated into aloofness. For it was just as hard for her to take charge of me and knock me into shape as it was for her to accept my shortcomings. It was her sense of duty that prompted her to assume the role of guardian and teacher. In marrying my father she was at the same time becoming responsible for me. I would have preferred her constant disapproval, if I may call it that, to have been the result of her irritation or of some other feeling that went only skin-deep, because in that case habit would quickly have got the better of it. People get used to the faults of others when they don’t believe it is their duty to correct them. Within six months she would no longer have felt anything but weariness where I was concerned, an affectionate weariness. That is exactly what I would have wanted. But she wasn’t going to feel that way, because she would see herself as being responsible for me, and in a sense she would indeed be responsible for me, since fundamentally I was still pliable – pliable yet headstrong.
So she was annoyed with herself and she let me know it. A few days later at lunch, and still on the topic of the holiday revision that I found so intolerable, an argument erupted. I was rather too outspoken, even my father took offence at it, and in the end Anne locked me in my room, all without having raised her voice. I was unaware of what she had done and, feeling thirsty, I went over to the door and made to open it. When it wouldn’t open I realized it was locked. I had never been locked up before in my life and I was genuinely panic-stricken. I rushed to the window but there was no getting out that way. I turned back, truly horrified, and threw myself against the door, hurting my shoulder very badly in the process. I tried to force the lock, clenching my teeth, as I didn’t want to call for anyone to come and open up for me. I sacrificed my nail clippers in the attempt. So there I was, standing in the middle of the room with nothing to show for my pains. I stood perfectly still, conscious of a sense of peace and tranquillity coming over me as my thoughts became clearer. It was my introduction to cruelty: the idea of it took root in me and became stronger the more I thought. I lay down on my bed and carefully drew up a plan. My ferocity was so much out of proportion to what had given rise to it that I got up two or three times in the course of the afternoon to leave the room and was each time astonished to come up against the locked door.
At six o’clock my father came to open up for me. I got up automatically when he entered the room. He looked at me without a word and I smiled at him in the same automatic way.
‘Do you want us to have a talk?’ he asked.
‘What about?’ I said. ‘You hate that kind of thing and so do I, that way of having things out that leads nowhere …’
‘That’s true.’ He seemed relieved. ‘You must be nice to Anne, you must be patient.’
That word surprised me: me, patient with Anne? He was standing the problem on its head. The fact was that he thought of Anne as a woman he was imposing on his daughter, rather than the other way round. There was all still to play for.
‘I’ve been very unpleasant,’ I said. ‘I’m going to apologize to Anne.’
‘You are … um … happy, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said lightly. ‘And then if we don’t get on too well with Anne, I shall just get married a bit sooner, that’s all.’
I knew he was bound to be hurt by that suggestion.
‘That’s not anything we want to consider. You’re not Snow White.12 Could you bear to leave me so soon? We would only have had two years together.’
The idea was as unbearable to me as it was to him. I could easily have seen myself there and then weeping on his shoulder and talking about lost happiness and high-flown emotions. But I could not make him party to my plans.
‘I’m really exaggerating, you know. Anne and I get on well, in fact. And with allowances on both sides …’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said.
He must have been thinking, as I was, that the allowances were unlikely to be reciprocal but would be made by me alone.
‘You understand,’ I said. ‘I am well aware that Anne is always right. Her life is much more of a success than ours, much more meaningful …’
He made as if to protest in spite of himself, but I carried on.
‘In a month or two I’ll have taken Anne’s ideas completely on board, there’ll be no more silly arguments between us. It just needs a little patience.’
He was looking at me, clearly baffled. And he was also fearful. He was losing an accomplice for his future escapades and he was also losing a bit of his past.
‘You mustn’t exaggerate,’ he said feebly. ‘I admit that the kind of life you’ve led with me was perhaps not suitable for your age, nor … um … for mine either, but it wasn’t a foolish or unhappy life, it really wasn’t. Basically we haven’t been too … um … miserable, we really haven’t, or out of kilter, these last two years. We don’t have to disown our way of life just like that, merely because Anne looks at things rather differently.’
‘We don’t have to disown it,’ I said with conviction, ‘but we do have to abandon it.’
‘So it seems,’ said the poor man, and with that we went downstairs.
I made my apologies to Anne without any trouble. She said that they were unnecessary and that the heat must have been
to blame for our argument. I felt indifferent towards her, and perfectly cheerful.
I met up with Cyril in the wood as arranged. I told him what he had to do. He listened to me with a mixture of fear and admiration. Then he took me in his arms, but it was too late, I had to go back. I was surprised at how hard it was for me to part from him. If he had been seeking a means of binding me to him, he had certainly found it. My body responded to him, became fully itself and blossomed when close to his. I kissed him passionately, I wanted to hurt him, to leave my mark on him so that he would not be able to forget me for one instant that evening and would dream of me that night. For the night would be endless without him, without him close to me, without his lover’s skill, his sudden passion and his long caresses.
Six
The next morning I took my father on a walk with me along the road. We talked cheerfully of trivial things. As we headed back towards the villa, I suggested to him that we might go through the pine wood. It was exactly half past ten; I was on time. My father walked ahead of me: the path was narrow and covered in brambles which he pushed aside for me as we went, so that I wouldn’t scratch my legs. When I saw him come to a sudden halt, I knew that he had seen them. I went up to him. Cyril and Elsa were asleep, lying stretched out on the pine needles, giving every appearance of bucolic bliss. It was just what I had told them to do, but when I saw them like that I felt heartbroken. Elsa’s love for my father and Cyril’s love for me could not stop them from being each as beautiful and young as the other, or now so close together. I glanced over at my father: he stood motionless, gazing at them as if mesmerized and looking abnormally pale. I took him by the arm.
‘Don’t let’s waken them, let’s go.’
He cast a last glance at Elsa lying back in all her youthful beauty, all gold-skinned and red-haired, and with a slight smile playing on her lips, the smile of the young nymph who has at last been overtaken. Turning on his heel, he began to stride away.
‘The trollop,’ he was muttering, ‘the trollop!’
‘Why do you say that? Isn’t she free to do as she pleases?’
‘That’s not the point. Do you like it, seeing Cyril in her arms?’
‘I don’t love him any more,’ I said.
‘And I don’t love Elsa either,’ he cried out furiously. ‘But it does something to me, even so. After all, I’ve – er – lived with her! That makes it much worse …’
I knew that made it worse! He must have felt the same urge as I had, to rush forward, to part them, to reclaim what was, or had once been, his.
‘If Anne could hear you now …’
‘What? If Anne could hear me? Obviously she wouldn’t understand or she’d be shocked, that’s only natural. But what about you? You’re my daughter, aren’t you? Don’t you understand me any more? Are you shocked too?’
How easy it was for me to steer his thoughts! I was rather alarmed at knowing him so well.
‘I’m not shocked,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got to face up to things. Elsa has a short memory, she likes Cyril, she’s lost to you. Especially after what you did to her. People don’t forgive things like that.’
‘If I wanted to …’ my father began, and then stopped as if afraid to go on.
‘You wouldn’t succeed,’ I said emphatically, as if it were quite natural to be discussing his chances of getting Elsa back.
‘But I’m not thinking of it,’ he said, coming to his senses.
‘Of course not,’ I said with a shrug of the shoulders.
The shrug meant: ‘Impossible, dear chap, you’re out of the running.’ He said nothing further to me on the way back to the house. When he got there he took Anne in his arms and held her close for a few moments with his eyes closed. Smiling and surprised, she made no objection. I left the room and went to lean against the wall in the hallway, trembling with shame.
At two o’clock I heard Cyril’s faint whistle and I went down to the beach. He made me get into the boat straight away and headed out to sea. There were no other boats, no one was thinking of going out in that sun. Once we were on the open sea he lowered the sail and turned to face me. We had hardly said a word.
‘About this morning …’ he began.
‘Be quiet,’ I said, ‘oh, do be quiet …’
He gently pushed me down on to the tarpaulin. We were soaked, running with sweat; we were clumsy and in a hurry. The boat swayed rhythmically beneath us. I lay looking at the sun just above me. And suddenly I heard Cyril’s whispering, masterful yet tender. The sun was becoming detached from the sky. It was bursting open and falling on me. Where was I? It was as if I were at the bottom of the ocean, I was lost in time, I was in extremes of pleasure … I cried out to Cyril but he made no reply – there was no need.
Then came the coolness of the salt water. We were laughing together, dazzled, languid, grateful. We had sun and sea, laughter and love. Would we ever experience them again as we did that summer, with all the vividness and intensity lent to them by fear and remorse?
As well as the very real physical pleasure that I got from love, I also experienced a kind of intellectual pleasure from thinking about it. The expression ‘to make love’ has an attraction all of its own which, if you analyse it, springs from the meaning of the individual words. I was charmed by the fact that the verb ‘to make’, with its clear-cut, material connotations, was associated with the poetic abstraction of the word ‘love’. I had used the phrase before quite unblushingly, without the least embarrassment and without noticing how it could be savoured. Now I felt that I was becoming easily embarrassed. I would lower my gaze whenever my father looked at all intently at Anne, whenever she laughed that new, little, husky and unseemly laugh of hers, which made both my father and me turn pale and stare out of the window. If we had told Anne that her laugh was like that, she would not have believed us. She did not behave as if she were my father’s mistress but, rather, as if she were a dear friend. Yet at night, no doubt … I refused to entertain such thoughts, I hated notions that unsettled me.
The days passed. I rather forgot about Anne and about my father and Elsa. Love made me live with my eyes wide open, yet with my head in the clouds; I was pleasant and peaceable. Cyril asked me whether I was not afraid of conceiving a child. I told him that I was relying on him and he seemed to find that quite natural. Perhaps that was why I had given myself to him so readily, because he would not leave it to me to take responsibility and hence, if I had a child, he would be to blame. He took upon himself what I could not bear to take on: responsibilities. In any case, I found it difficult to imagine myself pregnant, given my slim, firm body. For once I congratulated myself on having an adolescent’s frame.
But Elsa was growing impatient. She constantly plied me with questions. I was always afraid of being discovered in her company or in Cyril’s. She arranged things so that wherever my father was, she was; she ran into him everywhere. Then she would congratulate herself on imagined triumphs and on glimpsing what she said were repressed impulses of his that he couldn’t conceal. This was a girl who, frankly, because of what she was, was well used to the idea of love as a commercial exchange. So I was astonished to see her become so romantic and get so excited by details such as a look or a gesture, she being someone who had been moulded to suit the precise requirements of men in a hurry. The fact is that she was not used to having a role that involved any form of subtlety, and the role that she was now playing must have seemed to her the height of psychological refinement.
Even if my father was gradually becoming obsessed with Elsa, Anne did not seem to notice. He was more tender and attentive towards her than ever and that frightened me, because I put his attitude down to unconscious remorse. The important thing was that nothing should happen over the remaining three weeks. We would return to Paris, Elsa would go on her way and, assuming they were still decided on it, my father and Anne would get married. In Paris there would be Cyril and, just as she had been unable to stop me from loving him here, Anne would not be able to stop me from
seeing him. He had a room there well away from where his mother lived. I could already imagine the window opening on to the amazing pink and blue Parisian skies, pigeons cooing on the rail outside and Cyril and me on the narrow bed …
Seven
A few days later, my father was contacted by a friend of ours suggesting that we meet up in Saint-Raphaël for an aperitif. He couldn’t wait to tell us, as he was delighted at the thought of being able to escape briefly from the self-imposed and rather artificial isolation in which we were living. So I informed Elsa and Cyril that we would be at the Bar du Soleil at seven o’clock and that, if they wanted to come along, they would see us there. As ill luck would have it, Elsa knew the friend in question, which made her doubly eager to go. Foreseeing complications, I tried to put her off but I was wasting my time.
‘Charles Webb adores me,’ she said with childlike simplicity. ‘If he sees me, he’s bound to urge Raymond to come back to me.’
Cyril didn’t care whether he went to Saint-Raphaël or not. The main thing for him was to be where I was. I saw it in his expression and I couldn’t help feeling proud.
So that afternoon around six o’clock we set off in Anne’s car. I loved her car: it was an impressive American convertible more in line with her professional image than her personal taste. It was certainly to my taste, being full of shiny fittings and very quiet and cut off from the outside world, and it tilted when it went round bends. What’s more, all three of us sat in the front, and nowhere did I feel fonder of anyone than in a car. There we were, the three of us squashed up together, laying ourselves open to the same pleasures of speed and wind, and perhaps even to the same death. Anne drove, as if to symbolize her place in the family that we were going to become. I had not been in her car since the evening in Cannes, and that made me think.
We met Charles Webb and his wife at the Bar du Soleil. He specialized in theatre advertising and his wife specialized in spending the money he made, which she did at an incredible rate by lavishing it on young men. He was absolutely obsessed with the idea of making ends meet and he pursued money relentlessly, hence he had an anxious, impatient side to him that was somewhat unseemly. He had been Elsa’s lover over a long period because, for all her good looks, she was not a particularly grasping woman and he liked the fact that she was quite relaxed where money was concerned.
Bonjour Tristesse & a Certain Smile Page 8