by Colette
‘Would you rather we took the train?’ suggested Alain suavely.
He had foreseen that Camille would fly out at the detested word. Fly out she did indeed – and blasphemously.
‘I’m afraid,’ he went on, ‘that you’re getting bored. All those trips we’d promised ourselves.’
‘All those summer hotels. All those restaurants full of flies. All those seas full of people bathing,’ she railed plaintively. ‘Look here, you and I are quite used to driving around. But what we’re good at is just going for drives. We’re quite lost when it comes to a real journey.’
He saw that she was slightly depressed and gave her a brotherly kiss. But she turned round and bit him on his mouth and under his ear. Once again, they fell into the diversion which shortens the hours and makes the body attain its pleasure easily. It was beginning to make Alain tired. When he dined at his mother’s with Camille and had to stifle his yawns, Mme Amparat lowered her eyes and Camille invariably gave a little, swaggering laugh. For she was proudly conscious of the habit Alain had acquired of making love to her hurriedly and almost peevishly, flinging her away the moment it was over to return to the cool side of the uncovered bed.
Ingenuously, she would rejoin him there and he did not forgive her for that although, silently, he would yield again. After that he felt at liberty to probe at leisure into the sources of what he called their incompatibility. He was wise enough to put these outside their frequent lovemaking. Clear-headed, helped by the very fact of his sexual exhaustion, he returned to those retreats where the hostility of man to woman keeps its unageing freshness. Sometimes she revealed herself to him in some common-place realm where she slept in broad sunshine, like an innocent creature. Sometimes he was astonished, even scandalized, that she should be so dark. Lying in bed behind her, he surveyed the short hairs on her shaved neck, ranged like the prickles of a sea-urchin and drawn on the skin like the hatching on a map. The shortest of them were blue and visible under the fine skin before each one emerged through a small blackened pore.
‘Have I never really had a dark woman?’ he wondered. ‘Two or three little black-haired things haven’t left me any impression of such darkness.’ And he held his own arm up to the light. It was yellowish-white; a typical fair man’s arm with green-gold down and jade-coloured veins. His own hair seemed to him like a forest with violet shadows, whereas Camille’s showed the strange whiteness of the skin between the exotic abundance of those ranks of black, slightly crinkled stalks.
The sight of a fine, very black hair stuck to the side of a basin made him feel sick. Then the little neurosis changed and, abandoning the detail, he concentrated on her whole body. Holding that young, appeased body in his arms in the night which hid its contours he began to be annoyed that a creative spirit, in moulding Camille, had shown a strict reasonableness like that of his English nurse. ‘Not more prunes than rice, my boy,’ she used to say. ‘Not more rice than chicken.’ That spirit had modelled Camille adequately but with no concessions to lavishness or fantasy. He carried his annoyances and regrets into the antechamber of his dreams during that incalculable moment reserved for the black landscape peopled with bulbous eyes, fish with Greek noses, moons and chins. There he desired a big-hipped charmer of the 1900 type, liberally developed above a tiny waist, to compensate for the acid smallness of Camille’s breasts. At other times, half asleep, he compromised and preferred a top-heavy bosom; two quivering, monstrous hillocks of flesh with sensitive tips. Such feverish desires, which were born of the sexual act and survived it, never affronted the light of day nor even complete wakefulness. They merely peopled a narrow isthmus between nightmare and voluptuous dream.
When her flesh was warm, the ‘foreigner’ smelt of wood licked by tongues of flame; birch, violets . . . a whole bouquet of sweet, dark tenacious scents which clung long to the palms. These fragrances produced in Alain a kind of perverse excitement but did not always arouse his desire.
‘You’re like the smell of roses,’ he said one day to Camille, ‘you take away one’s appetite.’
She looked at him dubiously and assumed the slightly gauche, downcast expression with which she received double-edged compliments.
‘How awfully eighteen-thirty you are,’ she murmured.
‘You’re much more so,’ replied Alain. ‘Oh, ever so much more so. I know who you’re like.’
‘Marie Dubas, the actress. I’ve been told that before.’
‘Hopelessly wrong, my girl! Minus the bandeaux, you’re like all those girls who weep on the tops of towers in the works of Loïsa Puget. You can see them weeping on the cover of his romantic songs, with your great, prominent Greek eyes and those thick rims to the lower lid that makes the tears jump down on to the cheeks . . .’
One after another, Alain’s senses took advantage of him to condemn Camille. He had to admit, at least, that she stood up admirably to certain remarks he fired at her pointblank. They were provocative rather than grateful remarks that burst out of him at the times when, lying on the floor, he measured her with narrowed eyes and appraised her new merits without indulgence or regard for her feelings. He judged her particular aptitudes; he noted how that sensual ardour of hers, that slightly monotonous passion, had already developed an enlightened self-interest remarkable in so young a married woman. Those were moments of frankness and certainty and Camille did all she could to prolong their half silent atmosphere of conflict; their tension like that of a tight-rope on which balance was precarious and dangerous.
Having no deep-seated malice in herself, Camille never suspected that Alain was only half taken in by deliberate challenges, pathetic appeals and even by a cool Polynesian cynicism, and that each time he possessed his wife, he meant it to be the last. He mastered her as he might have put a hand on her mouth to stop her from screaming or as he might have murdered her.
When she was dressed again and sitting upright beside him in their roadster, he could look at her closely without rediscovering what it was that had made her his worst enemy. As soon as he regained his breath, listening to his decreasing heartbeats, he ceased to be the dramatic young man who stripped himself naked before wrestling with his companion and overthrowing her. The brief routine of pleasure; the controlled expert movements, the real or simulated gratitude were relegated to the ranks of what is over, of what will probably never happen again. Then his greatest preoccupation would return, the one which he accepted as natural and honourable, the question which reassumed the first place it had so long deserved: ‘How to stop Camille from living in MY house?’
Once this period of hostility towards the ‘alterations’ had passed, he had genuinely put his faith in the return to the home of his childhood, in the tranquillizing influence of a life on ground level; a life in contact with the earth and everything the earth brings forth. ‘Here, I’m suffering from living up in the air. Oh, to see branches and birds from underneath again!’ he sighed. But he concluded severely ‘Pastoral life is no solution’, and once more had recourse to his indispensable ally, the lie.
On a blazing afternoon which melted the asphalt he went to his domain. All about it, Neuilly was a desert of the empty roads and empty tramways of July; the gardens were abandoned except for a few yawning dogs. Before leaving Camille, he had installed Saha on the coolest balcony of the Wedge. He was vaguely worried every time he left his two females alone together.
The garden and the house were asleep and the little iron gate did not creak as he opened it. Overblown roses, red poppies, the first ruby-throated Canna lilies and dark snapdragons burned in isolated clumps on the lawns. At the side of the house gaped the new doorway and two new windows in a freshly-painted little one-storey building. ‘It’s all finished,’ Alain realized. He walked carefully, as he did in his dreams, and trod only on the grass.
Hearing the murmur of a voice rising from the basement, he stopped and absent-mindedly listened. It was only the old well-known voices of servility and ritual grumbling, the old voices which used to say ‘She’ and
‘Monsieur Alain’. Once upon a time they had flattered the fragile, fair-haired little boy and his childish pride . . . ‘I was a king, once,’ Alain said to himself, smiling sadly.
‘Well, so she’ll soon be coming to sleep here, I suppose?’ one of the old voices asked audibly.
‘That’s Adèle,’ thought Alain. Leaning against the wall, he listened without the least scruple.
‘Of course she will,’ bleated Émile. ‘That flat’s shockingly badly built.
The housemaid, a greying Basque woman with a hairy face, broke in: ‘You’re right there. From their bathroom you can hear everything that goes on in the water-closet. Monsieur Alain won’t like that.’
‘She said, the last time she came that she didn’t need curtains in her little drawing-room because there are no neighbours on the garden side.’
‘No neighbours? What about us when we go to the wash-house? What’s one going to see when she’s with Monsieur Alain?’
Alain could guess the smothered laughter and the ancient Émile continued: ‘Oh, perhaps one won’t see as much as all that. She’ll be put in her place, all right. Monsieur Alain’s not the sort to let himself go on a sofa at any time of day or night.’
There was a silence during which Alain could hear nothing but the sound of a knife on the grindstone. But he stayed listening, with his back against the hot wall and his eyes vaguely searching between a flaming geranium and the acid green of the turf as if he half-expected to see Saha’s moonstone-coloured fur.
‘As for me,’ said Adèle, ‘I think it’s oppressive, that scent she puts on.’
‘And her frocks,’ supplemented Juliette, the Basque woman. ‘The way she dresses isn’t really good style. She looks more like an actress. Behaves like one too, with that brazen way of hers. And now what’s she going to land us with in the way of a lady’s maid? Some creature out of an orphanage, I believe, or worse.’
A fanlight slammed and the voices were cut off. Alain felt weak and trembling. He breathed like a man who has just been spared by a gang of murderers. He was neither surprised nor indignant. There was not much difference between his own opinion of Camille and that of the harsh judges in the basement. But his heart was beating fast because he had meanly eavesdropped without being punished for it and because he had been listening to prejudiced witnesses and unsought accomplices. He wiped his face and took a deep breath as if inhaling this gust of misogyny, this pagan incense offered exclusively to the male principle, had anaesthetized him. His mother, who had just wakened from her siesta and was putting back the shutters of her room, saw him standing there, with his cheek still leant against the wall.
She called softly, like a wise mother.
‘Ah! my boy . . . Is anything the matter?’
He took her hands over the window-sill, like a lover.
‘Nothing at all. I was out for a walk and just thought I’d look in.’
‘A very good idea.’
She did not believe him but they smiled at each other, perfectly aware that neither was telling the truth.
‘Mother, could I ask you to do me a little favour?’
‘A little favour in the way of money, isn’t that it? I know you’re none too well off this year, my poor children.’
‘No, Mother. Please, would you mind not telling Camille that I came here today? As I didn’t come here for any special reason, I mean with no special reason except just to look in and give you a kiss. I’d rather . . . Actually, that’s not all. I want you to give me some advice. Strictly between the two of us, you know.’
Mme Amparat lowered her eyes, ran her hand through her wavy white hair, and tried to avert the confidence.
‘I’m not much of a talker, as you know. You’ve caught me all untidy. I look like an old gipsy. Won’t you come inside into the cool?’
‘No, Mother. Do you think there’s any way . . . it’s an idea I can’t get out of my head . . . a polite way, of course . . . something that wouldn’t offend anyone . . . but some way of stopping Camille from living here?’
He seized his mother’s hands, expecting them to tremble or to draw away But they stayed, cold and soft, between his own.
‘These are just a young husband’s ideas,’ she said, embarrassed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘With young married couples, things go too well or they go too badly. I don’t know which works out best in the end. But they never go straightforwardly, just of their own accord.’
‘But, Mother, that’s not what I’m asking you. I’m asking you whether there isn’t any way . . .’
For the first time, he was unable to look his mother in the face. She gave him no help and he turned away irritably.
‘You’re talking like a child. You run about the streets in this frightful heat and you come to me after a quarrel and ask me impossible questions. I don’t know. Questions whose only answer is divorce. Or moving house. Or heaven knows what.’
She got breathless whenever she talked and Alain only reproached himself for making her flush and pant even at saying so little. ‘That’s enough for today,’ he thought prudently.
‘We haven’t had a quarrel, Mother. It’s only I who can’t get used to the idea . . . who doesn’t want to see . . .’
With a wide, embarrassed gesture, he indicated the garden that surrounded them: the green lake of the lawn; the bed of fallen petals under the rose arches; a swarm of bees over the flowering ivy; the ugly, revered house.
The hand he had kept in one of his clenched and hardened into a little fist and he suddenly kissed that sensitive hand: ‘Enough, that’s enough for today.’
‘I’m off now, Mother. Monsieur Veuillet’s telephoning you at eight tomorrow about this business of the shares going down. Do I look better now, Mother?’
He raised his eyes that looked greener in the shade of the tulip-tree and threw back his face which from habit, affection, and diplomacy he had forced into his old childish expression. A flutter of the lids to brighten the eye, the seductive smile, a little pout of the lips. His mother’s hand unclenched again and reached over the sill to feel Alain’s well-known weak spots; his shoulder-blades, his Adam’s apple, the top of his arm. She did all this before replying.
‘A little better. Yes, really, quite a lot better.’
‘I’ve pleased her by asking her to keep something secret from Camille.’ At the remembrance of his mother’s last caress, he tightened his belt under his jacket. ‘I’ve got thinner, I’m getting thinner. No more physical culture – no physical culture other than making love.’
He went off with a light step, in his summer clothes, and the cooling breeze dried his sweat and blew the acrid smell of it ahead of him. He left his native castle inviolate, his subterranean cohort intact, and the rest of the day would pass easily enough. Until midnight, no doubt, sitting in the car beside an inoffensive Camille, he would drink in the evening air, now sylvan as they drove between oak plantations edged with muddy ditches, now dry and smelling of wheatstraw. ‘And I’ll bring back some fresh couch-grass for Saha.’
Vehemently, he reproached himself for the lot of his cat who lived so soundlessly at the top of their glass tower. ‘She’s like her own chrysalis, and it’s my fault.’ At the hour of their conjugal games she banished herself so rigorously that Alain had never seen her in the triangular room. She ate just sufficient to keep alive; she had lost her varied language and given up all her demands, seeming to prefer her long waiting to everything else. ‘Once again, she’s waiting behind bars. She’s waiting for me.’
Camille’s shattering voice came through the closed door as he reached the landing.
‘It’s that filthy bloody swine of an animal! I wish it were dead! What? No, Madame Buque, I don’t care what you say. To hell with it! To hell with it!’
He made out a few more violent expressions. Very softly he turned the key in the lock but, once over his own threshold, he could not consent to listen without being seen. ‘A filthy bloody swine of an animal? But what a
nimal? An animal in the house?’
In the studio Camille, wearing a little sleeveless pullover and a knitted béret miraculously balanced on her skull, was furiously pulling a pair of gauntlet gloves over her bare hands. She seemed stupefied at the sight of her husband.
‘It’s you! Where have you sprung from?’
‘I haven’t sprung from anywhere. I’ve simply arrived home. Who are you so furious with?’
She avoided the trap and neatly turned the attack on Alain.
‘You’re very cutting, the first time you get home punctually. I’m ready. I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘You haven’t been waiting for me since I’m punctual to the minute. Who were you so angry with? I heard “filthy bloody swine of an animal?” What animal?’
She squinted very slightly but sustained Alain’s look.
‘The dog!’ she cried. ‘That damned dog downstairs, the dog that barks morning, noon, and night. It’s started again! Can’t you hear it barking? Listen!’
She raised her finger to make him keep quiet and Alain had time to notice that the gloved finger was shaking. He yielded to a naïve need to make sure.
‘Just fancy, I thought you were talking about Saha.’
‘Me?’ cried Camille. ‘Me speak about Saha in that tone? Why I wouldn’t dare! The heavens would fall if I did! For goodness’ sake, are you coming?’
‘Go and get the car out, I’ll join you down below. I’ve just got to get a handkerchief and a pullover.’
His first thought was to find the cat. On the coolest balcony, near the deck-chair in which Camille occasionally slept in the afternoon, he could see nothing but some fragments of broken glass. He stared at them blankly.
‘The cat’s with me, Monsieur,’ came the fluting voice of Mme Buque. ‘She’s very fond of my wicker stool. She sharpens her claws on it.’