Gigi and the Cat

by Colette

  ‘What’s the matter with me? I wanted . . . Ah, yes! I wanted to cry.’ He smiled and fell asleep again.

  His sleep was feverish and crowded with dreams. Two or three times he thought he had woken up and was becoming conscious of where he was, but each time he was undeceived by the expression of the walls of his room. They were angrily watching the fluttering of a winged eye.

  ‘But I’m asleep . . . of course, I’m asleep.’

  ‘I’m asleep . . .’ he answered again to the crunching gravel. ‘I’m asleep, I tell you,’ he called to two dragging feet that brushed against the door. The feet went away and the sleeper congratulated himself in his dream. But the dream had come to a head under the repeated solicitings and Alain opened his eyes.

  The sun he had left on the window-sill in May had become an August sun and reached no farther than the satiny trunk of the tulip-tree opposite the house. ‘How the summer has aged,’ Alain said to himself. He got up, naked, looked for something to wear and found some pyjamas, too short and too tight in the sleeves and a faded dressing-gown which he joyfully pulled on. The window summoned him but he was stopped by Camille’s photograph which he had left, forgotten, by his bed. Curiously, he examined the inaccurate, retouched little portrait; whitened here, blackened there. ‘It’s more like her than I supposed,’ he thought. ‘How was it I didn’t notice it? Four months ago I used to say “Oh, she’s entirely different from that. Much more subtle, not nearly so hard.” But I was wrong.’

  The long, steady breeze ran through the trees with a murmur like a river’s. Dazed and quite painfully hungry, Alain lay back on his pillows. ‘How delightful it is, a convalescence.’ To complete the illusion a knuckle tapped on the door and the bearded Basque woman entered, carrying a tray.

  ‘But I’d have had breakfast in the garden, Juliette!’

  A kind of smile appeared among the grey hairs on her face.

  ‘I thought as much. Would Monsieur Alain like me to take the tray down?’

  ‘No, no, I’m too hungry. Leave that there. Saha’ll come in by the window.’

  He called the cat who rose from some invisible retreat as if she had come into existence at his call. She bounded up the vertical path of climbing plants and fell back again – she had forgotten her broken claws.

  ‘Wait, I’m coming!’

  He brought her back in his arms and they gorged themselves, she on milk and rusks, he on slices of bread and butter and scalding hot coffee. On one corner of the tray, a little rose adorned the lid of the honey-pot.

  ‘It’s not one of my mother’s roses,’ Alain decided. It was an ill-made, stunted little rose, picked from a low branch, that gave out the queer smell of a yellow rose. ‘It’s a little homage from the Basque.’

  Saha, radiant, seemed to have grown plumper over-night. Her shirt-frill erect, her four darker stripes well marked between her ears, she stared at the garden with the eyes of a happy despot.

  ‘How simple it all is, isn’t it, Saha? For you, at any rate.’

  Old Émile entered in his turn and insisted on removing Alain’s shoes.

  ‘There’s one of the laces got very worn. Monsieur Alain hasn’t another? It doesn’t matter, I’ll put one of my own laces in,’ he bleated with emotion.

  ‘Decidedly, it’s my gala-day,’ said Alain to himself. The word drove him back by contrast to all the things that only yesterday had been daily bothers; time to get up and dress, time to go to the Amparat office, time to come back to lunch with Camille.

  ‘But I’ve nothing on earth to put on!’ he cried.

  In the bathroom he recognized the slightly rusty razor, the worn cake of pink soap, and the old toothbrush and used them with a delight of a man who has got shipwrecked for fun. But he had to come down in the outgrown pyjamas as the Basque woman had carried off his clothes.

  ‘Come Saha, Saha.’

  She went ahead and he ran after her uncertainly in a pair of frayed raffia sandals that kept threatening to slip off. He stretched out his shoulders to feel the cape of the mild sun fall on them and half closed his eyes that had grown unaccustomed to the green reverberations of the lawns and the hot colours which blazed above a serried block of crimson love-lies-bleeding and a tuft of red salvias bordered with heliotrope.

  ‘Oh, the same, the very same salvias!’

  Alain had always known that little heart-shaped bed as red and invariably bordered with heliotropes. It was shaded by a lean, ancient cherry-tree which occasionally produced a few cherries in September.

  ‘I can see six . . . seven. Seven green cherries!’

  He was talking to the cat who, with empty, golden eyes, had her mouth half open, almost overcome by the excessive scent of the heliotropes. Her face had the look of almost sickened ecstasy animals assume when confronted with an overpowering smell.

  She ate a blade of grass to recover herself, listened to various voices, and rubbed her nose against the hard twigs of the privet hedge. But she did not display any exuberance, any irresponsible gaiety and she walked nobly, surrounded by the tiny silver halo which outlined all her body.

  ‘Thrown, from a height of nine storeys,’ Alain thought as he watched her. ‘Grabbed . . . or pushed. Perhaps she defended herself . . . perhaps she escaped to be caught again and thrown over. Assassinated.’

  He tried by such conjectures to arouse his just anger, but he did not succeed. ‘If I truly, deeply loved Camille, how furious I should be.’ Around him shone his kingdom, threatened like all kingdoms. ‘My mother assures me that in less than twenty years no one will be able to keep on houses and gardens like this. She’s probably right. I’m quite willing to lose them. I don’t want to let them come into them.’

  He was shaken by the sound of a telephone ringing in the house. ‘Come, come now! I’m not frightened, am I? Camille’s not so stupid as to telephone me. To do her justice, I’ve never known a young woman so restrained in using that instrument.’

  But he could not stop himself from running awkwardly towards the house, losing his sandals and tripping over pebbles, and calling out: ‘Mother! Who’s that on the phone?’

  The thick white dressing-gown appeared on the steps and Alain felt ashamed of having called out.

  ‘How I love your big white dressing-gown, Mother! Always the same, always the same.’

  ‘Thank you very much on behalf of my dressing-gown,’ said Mme Amparat.

  She kept Alain waiting a moment before she said: ‘It was Monsieur Veuillet. It’s half-past nine. Have you forgotten the ways of the house?’

  She combed her son’s hair with her fingers and buttoned up the too-tight pyjamas jacket.

  ‘You’re a pretty sight. I suppose you don’t intend to spend the rest of your life as a ragamuffin?’

  Alain was grateful to her for questioning him so adroitly.

  ‘No question of that, Mother. In a moment, I’ll get busy about all that.’

  Mme Amparat tenderly interrupted his vague, wide gesture.

  ‘Tonight . . . where will you be?’

  ‘Here!’ he cried, and the tears welled up in his eyes.

  ‘Good gracious, what a child!’ said Mme Amparat and he took up the word with the earnestness of a boy scout.

  ‘Perhaps I am a child, Mother. That’s why I want to think over what I ought to do to get out of this childishness.’

  ‘Get out of it how? By a divorce? That’s a door that makes a lot of noise.’

  ‘But which lets in some air,’ he dared to retort sharply.

  ‘Wouldn’t a separation . . . a temporary one, give just as good results? What about a thorough rest or a little travel, perhaps?’

  He threw up his arms indignantly.

  ‘My poor dear Mother, you’ve no idea. You’re a thousand miles from imagining.’

  He was going to bring it all out and tell her about the attempted murder.

  ‘Very well then, leave me a thousand miles! Such things don’t concern me. Have a little . . . a little reserve,’ said Mme Amparat hastil
y and Alain took advantage of a misunderstanding which was due to her innate modesty.

  ‘Now, Mother, there’s still all the tiresome side to be thought of. I mean the family point of view which is all mixed up with the business side. From the Malmerts’ point of view, my divorce will be quite indefensible, no matter how much Camille may be partly responsible. A bride of three and a half months! I can hear it all.’

  ‘Where do you get the idea that there’s a business side involved? You and the little Malmert girl aren’t running a firm together. A married couple is not a pair of business partners.’

  ‘I know, Mother. But if things turn out as I expect, there’s bound to be a horrible period of formalities and interviews and so on. It’s never as simple as everyone says, a divorce.’

  She listened to her son with gentle forbearance. She knew that certain causes produce unexpected results and that, all through his life, a man has to be born many times with no other assistance than that of chance, of bruises, of mistakes.

  ‘It’s never simple to leave anything we’ve wanted to attach to ourselves,’ said Mme Amparat. ‘She’s not so bad, that little Malmert. A little . . . coarse, a little lacking in manners. No, not so bad. At least, that’s my way of seeing it. I don’t want to impose it on you. We’ve plenty of time to think it over.’

  ‘I’ve taken care of that,’ said Alain with harsh politeness. ‘And, at the moment, I prefer to keep a certain story to myself.’

  His face suddenly lit up in a laugh that restored it to childhood. Standing up on her hind legs, Saha, using her paw as a spoon, was fishing drowned ants out of a brimming watering-can.

  ‘Look at her, Mother! Isn’t she a miraculous cat?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Mme Amparat. ‘She’s your chimera.’

  He was always surprised when his mother employed an unusual word. He greeted this one with a kiss on her prematurely aged hand with its swollen veins and the little brown flecks which Juliette lugubriously called ‘earth-stains’.

  At the sound of the bell ringing at the gate, he jerked himself upright.

  ‘Run and hide,’ said Mme Amparat. ‘We’re right in the way of the tradesmen. Go and dress yourself. Do you want the butcher’s little boy to catch you in that extraordinary get-up?’

  But they both knew perfectly well that it was not the butcher’s little boy ringing at the visitor’s gate. Mme Amparat had already turned her back and was hurrying up the steps, holding up her dressing-gown in both hands. Behind the clipped hedge Alain could see the Basque woman retreating in disorder, her black silk apron flying in the wind, while a slither of slippers on the gravel announced the flight of old Émile. Alain cut off his escape.

  ‘You have at least opened the gate?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur Alain. The young lady’s behind her car.’

  He lifted terrified eyes to the sky, hunched up his shoulders, as if he were in a hailstorm, and vanished.

  ‘Well, that’s certainly something like a picnic! I wish I’d had time to get dressed. Gracious, she’s got a new suit!’

  Camille had seen him and came straight up to him without overmuch haste. In one of those moments of almost hilarious anxiety that crop up on dramatic occasions, he thought confusedly: ‘Perhaps she’s come to lunch.’

  Carefully and lightly made-up as she was, armed with black lashes and beautiful parted lips and shining teeth, she seemed all the same to lose her self-assurance when Alain came forward to meet her. For he was approaching without breaking away from the shelter of his protective atmosphere. He was treading his native lawn under the rich patronage of the trees, and Camille looked at him with the eyes of a poor person.

  ‘Forgive me, I look like a schoolboy who’s suddenly shot up out of all knowledge. We didn’t arrange to meet this morning, did we?’

  ‘No. I’ve brought you your big suitcase. It’s packed full.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t have done that!’ he expostulated. ‘I’d have sent Émile round today to fetch it.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Émile. I wanted to give him your case but the old idiot rushed off as if I’d got the plague. The case is down there by the gate.’

  She flushed with humiliation, biting the inside of her cheek. ‘It’s beginning well,’ said Alain to himself.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. You know what Émile’s like. Listen,’ he decided, ‘let’s go on the lawn inside the yew hedges. We’ll be quieter there than in the house.’

  He promptly repented his choice for that clearing, enclosed in clipped yews and furnished with wicker chairs, had been the scene of their secret kisses in the old days.

  ‘Wait while I dust the twigs off. You mustn’t spoil the pretty suit. Incidentally, I don’t know it, do I?’

  ‘It’s new,’ said Camille in a tone of profound sadness, as if she had said: ‘It’s dead.’

  She sat sideways, looking about her. Two arched arcades, one opposite the other, broke the circle of greenery. Alain remembered something Camille had once confided to him: ‘You’ve no idea how your beautiful garden used to frighten me. I used to come here like the little girl from the village who comes to play with the son of the grand people at the château, in their park. And yet, when you come to think of it . . .’ She had spoiled everything by that last remark. That ‘when you come to think of it’ implied the prosperity of Malmert Mangles compared with the declining house of Amparat.

  He observed that Camille kept her gloves on. ‘That’s a precaution that defeats its own ends. Without those gloves it’s possible I mightn’t have thought about her hands, about what they’ve done. Ah, at last a little . . . just a little anger,’ he said to himself, listening to his heartbeats. ‘I’ve taken enough time about it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Camille sadly, ‘well, what are you going to do? Perhaps you haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve decided,’ said Alain.

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Yes. I can’t come back.’

  ‘I quite understand that there’s no question of your coming back today.’

  ‘I don’t want to come back.’

  ‘Not at all? Ever?’

  He shrugged his shoulders:

  ‘What does that mean, ever? I don’t want to come back. Not now. I don’t want to.’

  She watched him closely, trying to distinguish the false from the true, the deliberate irritation from the authentic shudder. He returned her suspicion for suspicion. ‘She’s small, this morning. She looks rather like a pretty shop-girl. She’s lost in all this green. We’ve already exchanged a fair number of useless remarks.’

  In the distance, through one of the arched arcades, Camille caught sight of traces of the ‘alterations’ on one side of the face of the house; a new window, some freshly-painted shutters. Bravely she threw herself into the path of danger: ‘Suppose I’d said nothing yesterday?’ she suggested abruptly. ‘Suppose you’d known nothing?’

  ‘What a superb woman’s idea,’ he sneered. ‘It does you honour.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Camille, shaking her head. ‘Honour, honour. It wouldn’t be the first time that the happiness of two married people depended on something that couldn’t be owned up to . . . or wasn’t owned up to. But I’ve got the idea that by not telling you, I’d only have made things worse than ever for myself. I didn’t feel you were . . . I don’t know how to put it.’

  Hunting for the word, she mimed it by clenching her hands together. ‘She’s wrong to draw attention to her hands,’ thought Alain vindictively. ‘Those hands that have sent someone to their death.’

  ‘After all, you’re so awfully little on my side,’ said Camille. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’

  That struck him. He had to admit, mentally, that she was right. He said nothing and Camille insisted plaintively in a voice he knew all too well.

  ‘Isn’t it true, you hateful man?’

  ‘But, good God!’ he burst out. ‘That’s not the question. The only thing that can possibly interest me – interest me in you – is to know whethe
r you regret what you’ve done, whether you can’t stop thinking about it, whether it makes you sick to think of it. Remorse, good heavens, remorse! There does exist such a thing as remorse!’

  Carried away he got up and strode round the circular lawn, wiping his brow on his sleeve.

  ‘Ah!’ said Camille with a contrite, affected expression. ‘Naturally, of course. I’d a million times rather not have done it. I must have lost my head.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ he cried, trying not to shout. ‘All you regret is that you didn’t bring it off! One’s only got to listen to you, to look at you with you little hat on one side and your gloves and your new suit – everything you’ve so carefully arranged to charm me. If you really had any regret, I’d see it in your face. I’d feel it!’

  He was shouting now, in a low grating voice, and was no longer quite master of the rage he had fostered. The worn stuff of his pyjamas burst at the elbow and he tore off nearly the whole of his sleeve and flung it on a bush.

  At first Camille had eyes only for the gesticulating arm, extraordinarily white against the dark block of the yew hedge.

  He put his hands over his eyes and forced himself to speak lower.

  ‘A little blameless creature, blue as the loveliest dreams. A little soul. Faithful, capable of quietly, delicately dying if what she has chosen fails her. You held that in your hands, over empty space . . . and you opened your hands. You’re a monster. I don’t wish to live with a monster.’

  He uncovered his damp face and came nearer to Camille, trying to find words which would overwhelm her. Her breath came short and her eyes went from the white naked arm to the bloodless face which was no less white.

  ‘An animal!’ she cried indignantly. ‘You’re sacrificing me to an animal. I’m your wife, all the same! You’re leaving me for an animal!’

  ‘An animal? Yes, an animal.’

  Apparently calm now, he hid behind a mysteriously informed smile. ‘I’m perfectly willing to admit that Saha’s an animal. If she’s really one, what is there higher than this animal and how can I make Camille understand that? She makes me laugh, this barefaced little criminal, all virtue and indignation, who pretends to know what an animal is.’ He was prevented from going further by the sound of Camille’s voice.