by Colette
‘That day yesterday!’ sighed Camille. ‘When you think that there are people who get married so often!’
Her vanity returned and she added: ‘All the same, it went off very well. Not a single hitch. It did go off well, didn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Alain feebly.
‘Oh, you . . . You’re just like your mother. I mean, as long as your lawn isn’t ruined and people don’t throw cigarette-ends on your gravel, you think everything’s fine. Isn’t that a fact? All the same, our wedding would have been prettier at Neuilly. Only that would have disturbed the sacred cat! Tell me, you bad boy, what do you keep looking at all round you?’
‘Nothing,’ he said sincerely, ‘because there’s nothing to look at. I’ve seen the dressing-table. I’ve seen the chair – we’ve seen the bed . . .’
‘Couldn’t you live here? I’d love to. Just think . . . three rooms and three balconies! If only one could stay here!’
‘Doesn’t one say: “If only we could stay here”?’
‘Then why do you say: “One says”? Yes, if only one could stay here, as we say.’
‘But Patrick will be back from his cruise in three months.’
‘Who cares? He’ll come back. And we’ll explain that we want to stay on. And we’ll chuck him out.’
‘Oh! You’d actually do that?’
She shook her black mop affirmatively, with a radiant, feminine assurance in dishonesty. Alain wanted to give her a severe look but, under his eyes, Camille changed and became as nervous as he felt himself. Hastily he kissed her on the mouth.
Silent and eager, she returned his kiss, feeling for the hollow of the bed with a movement of her loins. At the same time her free hand, which was holding a peach-stone, groped in the air for an empty cup or ashtray.
Leaning over her, he caressed her lightly, waiting for her to open her eyes again.
She was pressing her eyelashes down over two small, glittering tears which she was trying to stop from flowing. He respected this restraint and this pride. They had done their best, the two of them, aided by the morning warmth and their two odorous, facile bodies.
Alain remembered Camille’s quickened breathing and her warm docility. She had shown an untimely eagerness which was very charming. She reminded him of no other woman; in possessing her for the second time, he had thought only of the careful handling she deserved. She lay against him, her legs and arms relaxed, her hands half-closed, catlike for the first time. ‘Where is Saha?’
Mechanically he gave Camille the ghost of a caress ‘for Saha’, drawing his nails slowly and delicately all the way down her stomach. She cried out with shock and stiffened her arms. One of them hit Alain who nearly hit her back. She sat up, with her hair on end and her eyes hostile and threatening.
‘Are you vicious, by any chance?’
He had expected nothing like this and burst out laughing.
‘There’s nothing to laugh about!’ cried Camille. ‘I’ve always been told that men who tickle women are vicious. They may even be sadists!’
He got off the bed so as to be able to laugh more freely, quite forgetting he was naked. Camille stopped talking so suddenly that he turned round and surprised her lit-up, dazed face staring at the body of the young man whom one night of marriage had made hers.
‘D’you mind if I steal the bathroom for ten minutes?’
He opened the glass door let into one end of the longest wall which they called the hypotenuse.
‘And then I’ll go over to my mother’s for a moment.’
‘Yes . . . Don’t you want me to come with you?’
He looked shocked and she blushed for the first time that day.
‘I’ll see if the alterations . . .’
‘Oh! the alterations! Don’t tell me you’re interested in those alterations! Admit’ – she folded her arms like a tragic actress – ‘admit that you’re going to see my rival!’
‘Saha’s not your rival,’ said Alain simply.
‘How can she be your rival,’ he went on to himself. ‘You can only have rivals in what’s impure.’
‘I don’t need such a serious protestation, darling. Hurry up! You haven’t forgotten that we’re lunching together on our own at Père Léopold’s? On our own at last, just the two of us! You’ll come back soon? You haven’t forgotten we’re going for a drive? Are you taking in what I’m saying?’
What he took in very clearly was that the words ‘come back’ had acquired a new and preposterous significance and he looked at Camille askance. She was flaunting her newly-married bride’s tiredness, drawing his attention to the faint swelling of her lower lids under the corners of her great eyes. ‘Will you always have such enormous eyes the moment you wake up, whatever time of day or night? Don’t you know how to keep your eyes half-closed? It gives me a headache to see eyes as wide open as all that.’
He felt a dishonest pleasure, an evasive comfort in calling her to account in his mind. ‘After all, it’s less ungracious than being frank.’ He hurried to reach the square bathroom, the hot water, and a solitude propitious to thought. But, as the glass door inserted in the hypotenuse reflected him from head to foot, Alain opened it with complacent slowness and was in no haste to shut it again.
When he was leaving the flat an hour later, he opened the wrong door on one of the balconies which ran along every side of the Wedge. Like the sharp down-stroke of a fan, the east wind which was turning Paris blue, blowing away the smoke and scouring the distant Sacré Cœur, caught him full in the face. On the cement parapet, five or six pots, put there by well-meaning hands, contained white roses and hydrangeas and lilies sullied by their pollen. ‘Last night’s dessert is never attractive.’ Nevertheless, before he went down, he sheltered the ill-treated flowers from the wind.
FOUR
HE STOLE INTO the garden like a boy in his teens who has stayed out all night. The air was full of the heady scent of beds being watered, of the secret exhalation of the filth which nourishes fleshy, expensive flowers and of spray blown on the breeze. In the very act of drawing a deep breath to inhale it all, he suddenly discovered he needed comforting.
‘Saha! Saha!’
She did not come for a moment or two, and at first he did not recognize that bewildered, incredulous face which seemed clouded by a bad dream.
‘Saha darling!’
He took her on his chest, smoothing the soft flanks which seemed to him a trifle hollow, and removed cobwebs, pine needles, and elm twigs from the neglected fur. She pulled herself together quickly and resumed her familiar expression and her cat’s dignity. Her face, her pure golden eyes looked again as he had known them. Under his thumb, Alain could feel the palpitations of a hard, irregular little heart and also the beginnings of a faint, uncertain purr. He put her down on an iron table and stroked her head. But at the moment of thrusting her head into Alain’s hand, wildly and as if for life in the way she had, she sniffed that hand and stepped back a pace.
His eyes sought the white pigeon, the gloved hand behind the pink flowering shrubs, behind the flaming rhododendrons. He rejoiced that yesterday’s ‘ceremony’ had respected the beautiful garden and only ravaged Camille’s home.
‘Imagine those people here! And those four bridesmaids in pink paper! And the flowers they’d have picked, and the deutzias sacrificed to adorn fat women’s bosoms! And Saha!’
He called in the direction of the house: ‘Has Saha had anything to eat or drink? She looks awfully queer. I’m here, Mother.’
A heavy white shape appeared in the doorway of the hall and answered from the distance: ‘No. Just fancy, she had no supper and wouldn’t drink her milk this morning. I think she was waiting for you. Are you all right, dear?’
He stood at the foot of the steps, deferential in his mother’s presence. He noticed that she did not offer him her cheek as usual and that she kept her hands clasped together at her waist. He understood and shared this motherly sense of decency with a mixture of embarrassment and gratitude. ‘Saha hasn’t
kissed me either.’
‘After all, the cat’s often seen you go away. She made allowances for your going off sometimes.’
‘But I didn’t go so far,’ he thought.
Near him, on the iron table, Saha drank her milk avidly like an animal that has walked far and slept little.
‘Alain, wouldn’t you like a cup of warm milk too? Some bread and butter?’
‘I’ve had breakfast, Mother. We’ve had breakfast.’
‘Not much of a breakfast, I imagine. In such a glory-hole!’
With the eye of an exile, Alain contemplated the cup with the gilt arabesque beside Saha’s saucer; then his mother’s heavy face, amiable under the mass of wavy, prematurely white hair.
‘I haven’t asked you whether my new daughter is satisfied.’ She was frightened he would misunderstand her and added hurriedly: ‘I mean, whether she’s in good health.’
‘Excellent, Mother. We’re going out to Rambouillet for lunch in the forest. I’ve got to run the car in.’ He corrected himself: ‘We’ve got to run the car in, I mean.’
They remained alone together in the garden, he and Saha, both torpid with silence and weariness and overcome with longing to sleep.
The cat fell asleep suddenly on her side, her chin up and her teeth bared like a dead animal. Feathery panicles from the Venetian sumach and clematis petals rained down on her without her so much as twitching in the depths of the dream in which, no doubt, she was enjoying the security of her friend’s inalienable presence. Her defeated attitude, the pale, drawn corners of her periwinkle-grey lips gave evidence of a night of miserable watching.
Above the withered stump draped with climbing plants, a flight of bees over the ivy-flowers gave out a solemn cymbal note, the identical note of so many summers. ‘To go to sleep out here, on the grass, between the yellow rose-bush and the cat. Camille won’t come till dinner-time, that will be very pleasant. And the cat, good heavens, the cat . . .’ Over by the ‘alterations’ could be heard the rasp of a plane shaving a beam, the clang of an iron hammer on a metal girder, and Alain promptly embarked on a dream about a village peopled with mysterious blacksmiths. As eleven sounded from the belfry of the school near by, he got up and fled without daring to wake the cat.
FIVE
JUNE CAME WITH its longer days, its night skies devoid of mystery which the late glow of the sunset and the early glimmer of dawn over the east of Paris kept from being wholly dark. But June is cruel only to city-dwellers who have no car and are caged up in hot stone and forced to live elbow to elbow. A never-still breeze played round the Wedge, rippling the yellow awnings. It blew through the triangular room and the studio, broke against the prow of the building, and dried up the little hedges of privet that stood in boxes on the balconies. With the help of their daily drives, Alain and Camille lived pleasantly enough. The warm weather and their sensual life combined to make them drowsy and less exacting with each other.
‘Why did I call her an untamed girl?’ Alain asked himself in surprise. Camille swore less when she was driving the car and had lost certain crudities of speech. She had also lost her passion for night-clubs with female gipsy singers who had nostrils like horses.
She spent much time eating and sleeping, opened her now much gentler eyes very wide, gave up a dozen summer projects, and became interested in the ‘alterations’ which she visited daily. Often she lingered long in the garden at Neuilly, where Alain, when he came back from the dark offices of Amparat Fils in the Rue des Petits-Champs, would find her idle, ready to prolong the afternoon and drive along the hot roads.
Then his mood would darken. He would listen to her giving orders to the singing painters and the distant electricians. She would question him in a general, peremptory way as if, as soon as he was there, it was her duty to renounce her new gentleness.
‘Business going all right? Crisis still expected? Have you managed to put over the spotted foulard on the big dress-houses?’
She did not even respect old Émile, whom she shook until he let fall certain formulas pregnant with oracular imbecility.
‘What do you think of our shanty, Émile? Have you ever seen the house looking so nice?’
Between his whiskers, the old butler muttered answers as shallow and colourless as himself.
‘You wouldn’t know the place any more. Had anyone told me, in the old days, that this house would be divided up into little compartments . . . There’s certainly a difference. It will be very nice being so near each other, very gay.’
Or else, drop by drop, he poured a stream of blessings over Alain, blessings in which there was an under-current of hostility.
‘Monsieur Alain’s young lady is beginning to look ever so well. What a fine voice she has. When she’s speaking loud, the neighbours can hear every word. You can’t deny she has a splendid voice but . . . The young lady speaks her mind all right. She told the gardener that the bed of pink silene and forget-me-not looked cuckoo. I still have to laugh when I think of it.’
And he raised his pale, oyster-coloured eyes, which had never laughed in their life, to the pure sky. Alain did not laugh either. He was worried about Saha. She was getting thinner and seemed to have given up a hope; undoubtedly the hope of seeing Alain every day again – and alone. She no longer ran away when Camille arrived. But she did not escort Alain to the gate and, when he sat by her, she looked at him with a profound and bitter wisdom. ‘Her look when she was a little cat behind the bars. The same, same look.’ He called her very softly: ‘Saha . . . Saha . . .’ strongly aspirating the ‘h’s. But she did not jump or flatten her ears and it was days since she had given her insistent: ‘Merrang’ I or the ‘Mouek-mouek-mouek’ of good humour and greed.
One day, when he and Camille had been summoned to Neuilly to be informed that the enormous, heavy, new sunk bath would cave in the tiled platform supporting it, he heard his wife sigh: ‘It’ll never be finished!’
‘But,’ he said, surprised, ‘I thought you really much preferred the Wedge with its petrels and cormorants.’
‘Yes. But all the same . . . And after all it’s your house here, your real house. Our house.’
She leaned on his arm, rather limp and unusually hesitant. The bluish whites of her eyes, almost as blue as her light summer dress; the unnecessary but admirable make-up of her cheeks and mouth and eyelids did not move him in the least.
Nevertheless, it seemed to him that, for the first time, she was asking his advice without speaking. ‘Camille here with me. So soon! Camille in pyjamas under the rose trellis.’ One of the oldest climbing roses carried its load of flowers, which faded as soon as they opened, as high as his head and their oriental scent dominated the garden in the evening; he could smell it where they stood by the steps. ‘Camille in a bathrobe under the screen of elms. Wouldn’t it be better, all things considered, to keep her shut away in the little gazebo of the Wedge? Not here, not here . . . not yet.’
The June evening, drenched with light, was reluctant to give way to darkness. Some empty glasses on a wicker table were still attracting the big orange bumble-bees but, under all the trees except the pines, an area of impalpable damp was growing, bringing a promise of coolness. Neither the rose geraniums, so prodigal of their southern scent upon the air, nor the fiery poppies suffered from the fierce onslaught of summer. ‘Not here, not here.’ Alain repeated to the rhythm of his own footsteps. He was looking for Saha and did not want to call her out loud. He found her lying on the little low wall which buttressed a blue knoll covered with lobelias. She was asleep, or appeared to be asleep, curled up in a ball. ‘Curled up in a ball? At this time and in this weather? Sleeping curled up like that is a winter position!’
‘Saha darling!’
She did not quiver as he picked her up and held her in the air. She only opened two hollow eyes, very beautiful and almost indifferent.
‘Heavens, how light you are! But you’re ill, my little puma!’
He carried her off and ran back to his mother and Camille.
>
‘But, Mother, Saha’s ill! Her coat’s shocking – she weighs next to nothing – and you never told me!’
‘It’s because she eats nothing,’ said Mme Amparat. ‘She refuses to eat.’
‘She doesn’t eat? And what else?’
He cradled the cat against his chest and Saha abandoned herself to him. Her breathing was shallow and her nostrils dry. Mme Amparat’s eyes, under the thick white waves, glanced intelligently at Camille.
‘Nothing else,’ she said.
‘She’s bored with you,’ said Camille. ‘After all she’s your cat, isn’t she?’
He thought she was laughing at him and raised his head defiantly. But Camille’s face had not changed and she was seriously examining Saha, who shut her eyes again as soon as touched by her.
‘Feel her ears,’ said Alain sharply. ‘They’re burning.’
In an instant, his mind was made up.
‘Right. I’m taking her with me. Mother, get them to fetch me her basket, will you? And a sack of sand for the tray. We’ve got everything else she needs. You understand I simply couldn’t bear . . . This cat believes . . .’
He broke off and turned belatedly to his wife.
‘It won’t worry you, Camille, if I take Saha while we’re waiting to come back here?’
‘What a question! But where do you propose to put her at night?’ she added so naïvely that Alain blushed because of his mother’s presence and answered acridly: ‘That’s for her to decide.’
They left in a little procession; Alain carrying Saha, mute in her travelling-basket. Old Émile was bowed under the sack full of sand and Camille brought up the rear, bearing an old frayed kasha travelling rug which Alain called the Kashasaha.
SIX
‘NO, I NEVER thought a cat would get acclimatized so quickly.’
‘A cat’s merely a cat. But Saha’s Saha.’
Alain was proudly doing the honours of Saha. He himself had never kept her so close at hand, imprisoned in twenty-five square metres and visible at all hours. For her feline meditation, for her craving for solitude and shadow, she was reduced to withdrawing under the giant armchairs scattered about the studio or into the miniature hall or into one of the built-in wardrobes camouflaged with mirrors.