After a long moment I heard a whisper:
‘Should I? …’
I said no. It wasn’t her panting body striving for a deliverance she could not find, it wasn’t her haggard eyes, her mouth open as though to utter a cry of despair that I desired today. All that, in fact, I had decided never to desire again. That was what the others had had. That was the old Martine, the Martine of cocktails, cigarettes and bars.
That evening I never considered her pleasure. Nor my own. It was not pleasure I was looking for.
What I wanted was, deliberately and with, I repeat, full consciousness of my act, to impregnate her with my substance, and my emotion was that of a man living through the most solemn hour of his life.
Once and for all I accepted my responsibilities. Not only mine but hers. I was taking her life in charge, both her present and her past, and that is why, your Honour, I held her almost sadly in my arms.
She remained calm and serious. As soon as she felt me melting into her, she turned her head slightly on the pillow, probably to hide her tears. Her hand sought mine, pressed my fingers with the same deliberateness and tenderness as mine when I possessed her.
We lay there for a long time like that in silence, and now we heard Mme Debeurre moving about downstairs, intentionally making a lot of noise, annoyed, probably, by our long tête-à-tête.
These perfectly transparent wiles of hers ended by amusing us, for the good woman, every now and then, would come to the foot of the stairs and stand there listening, as though worried not to hear our voices. Was it because she had heard Martine’s fall?
Quietly I disengaged myself.
‘I almost forgot to tell you … You are invited to spend Christmas Eve at the house …’
And I had imagined myself shouting the words in an outburst of joy! But here I was speaking of it in the simplest way in the world, as though of some fortuitous event.
‘Another thing. After the holidays, probably the day after New Year’s, you will work with me as my assistant.’
We had already gone beyond that.
‘I have to go …’
She rose. She smoothed her hair a little before coming up to me, putting her two arms on my shoulders and, in an artless gesture, holding up her lips to mine.
‘Good night, Charles …’
‘Good night, Martine …’
The throatiness of her voice that evening moved me to the depth of my being. To hear it once more, I repeated:
‘Good night, Martine …’
‘Good night, Charles …’
I took another look around the room and moved away. I stammered:
‘Tomorrow …’
She did not ask me what time, and that meant she would be waiting for me all day, because in the future she would always be waiting for me.
I had to leave quickly, for my emotion was too much for me and I did not want to give in to it again. I needed to be alone, to be once more in the cool darkness of the street, the solitude of the deserted avenues.
She opened the door for me. I don’t know how we managed to break away from one another. I had already gone down a few steps when she repeated, in exactly the same tone of voice as before, like an incantation — and indeed, from that evening on, it became a kind of incantation:
‘Good night, Charles …’
Little did we care for Mme Debeurre spying on us behind her half-open door.
‘Good night, Martine …’
‘I won’t go there any more, you know …’
I rushed out. I had just time to reach my car and to slip in behind the wheel before bursting into tears, and as I drove along, the street-lamps and the headlights of the few cars I passed were so blurred that I had to draw up to the kerb and stop for some time.
A policeman came up, looked in, recognized me.
‘Your car break down, Doctor?’
I didn’t want him to see my face. I took my appointment book out of my pocket. I pretended to be consulting it.
‘No … just looking up an address …’
Chapter Eight
We spent a quiet Christmas among ourselves — Armande, my mother, my daughters, Martine, my friend Frachon and I. Frachon is a bald-headed bachelor who has no family at La Roche — one of those bachelors, in fact, who takes his meals at the Green Oak — and whom for years we always invited for Christmas Eve. Armande received a piece of jewellery, a platinum clip which she had wanted for some time. She seldom wears jewellery but she likes to own it, and I think the first time I ever saw her lose her composure, even to the point of actually weeping, was the day that, wanting to offer her a little present of no importance, I had bought her some imitation pearls. I don’t say that she is avaricious. Even if she were, I should not think myself justified in resenting it or blaming her, for everyone has his own vice. She likes to possess beautiful things, valuable things, even if she never takes them out of her drawer.
I had bought nothing of value for Martine for fear of attracting attention. I even pushed caution so far as to ask my wife to buy two or three pairs of silk stockings to give her.
This very peaceful Christmas was invoked in court. I don’t know if you were present. The prosecutor stigmatized my cynicism, accusing me of having, by ignoble and hypocritical means, insinuated my concubine into the family circle.
I did not protest. I never once protested, and yet many times I had the distinct sensation that these men — including my own lawyers, who for me were birds of the same feather — were not acting in good faith. There are limits to stupidity or to candour. Among doctors we do not talk of disease and of curing disease the way we do to our patients. And when it is a question of a man’s honour, of a man’s liberty — personally I didn’t give a damn since I was pleading guilty, often against them — but, as I say, when it is a question of a man’s honour, one doesn’t mouth moral platitudes for Sunday schools.
And my crime? After an hour of arguments I had already understood that it was and would remain relegated to second place, that as little would be said about it as possible. My crime was embarrassing — shocking — and did not belong to the category of things that could happen to you, that threaten you. This feeling was so evident that I should not have been surprised to hear one of the gentlemen declare:
‘She got what she deserved!’
But my ‘concubine under the conjugal roof’, and that Christmas Eve, so calm and so austere, so happy … Yes, your Honour, so happy. Armande, who still suspected nothing, spent the evening teasing Frachon, who is her regularly appointed butt and who revels in his role. I played and chattered with my daughters for a long time while Mama told Martine all about our life at Ormois — and on this subject she is inexhaustible.
We all kissed one another at midnight and, before that, I had gone to the dining-room to light the candles on the tree and to put the chilled champagne on the table. I kissed Martine last. Isn’t it a night when one has a right to kiss everybody? And I did it chastely, I assure you, without any improper insistence.
Now, why, when it was time to go to bed, shouldn’t my wife have gone upstairs by herself and let me go home with Martine, instead of asking Frachon to take her?
Don’t protest, you Honour. I haven’t finished, and this is a question I’ve wanted for a long time to examine fully. I asked why, and I’m going to explain the reason for my question. At that period it had been months, I might say years, since Armande and I had had sexual relations. For during the last few years if it happened once in a long time it was only by some unexpected accident, so unexpected that afterwards Armande was embarrassed.
This sexual question was never discussed between us. It had been none the less plain to both of us from the beginning of our marriage that we were not attracted to each other physically.
She put up with this semi-chastity, that’s true. As for me, although I occasionally indulged in banal distractions outside, I haven’t mentioned them, because they were too trifling to mention. I wanted them to be trifling because I
was brought up to respect what exists, what is — to respect a thing, not because it is respectable, but because it is.
After all, it is in the name of this principle that they too, all the gentlemen of the law, discoursed.
And my house was, my family was, and to safeguard them both I restricted myself for years to living the life of an automaton instead of that of a man, until sometimes I felt like sinking down on the nearest bench and never getting up again.
On the witness-stand Armande said, and this time you were present, for I noticed you in the crowd:
‘I have given him ten years of my life, and, should he be free tomorrow, I am ready to give him the rest.’
No, your Honour, no! Why can’t people be honest? Or think before they pronounce phrases like that which start a little shiver of admiration running through an audience?
Note that today I am convinced Armande did not speak in that way to make an impression on the judges, or on the public, or on the press. It has taken me a long time to come to this conclusion, but now I am willing to admit her sincerity.
And that is what is so terrifying: that there can exist for years between two people living together such irremediable misunderstandings.
In what way, will you tell, in what way did she give me ten years of her life? Where are they, those ten years? What have I done with them? Where have I put them? Forgive this bitter jesting. Those ten years, all joking apart, she lived them herself and you can’t deny it. She came into my house to live them and, what’s more, to live them in her own way. I didn’t force her to. I didn’t deceive her as to the fate that awaited her.
It isn’t my fault if our customs or laws provide that when a man and a woman enter a house to live together, even if they’re only eighteen years old, they solemnly engage to live in exactly the same way until they die.
During those ten years, not only did she live her own life, but she imposed it on all the rest of us. Moreover, had it been otherwise, had we been on an equal footing, I could still have answered her:
‘Granted that you gave me ten years of your life, I also gave you ten years of mine. We’re quits.’
Perhaps she did not always do what she wanted to during those ten years. Didn’t she devote herself to the care of my daughters? Didn’t she nurse me during a short illness? Didn’t she give up trips she would like to have taken?
So did I.
And because I had no taste for her flesh, I renounced, so to speak, the flesh. I would sometimes wait weeks before going to rid myself of my sexual preoccupation with God knows whom, on the sly, under conditions that make me blush today.
I reached the point where I envied people who had some hobby as a safety valve — billiards, for example, cards, prize fights, or football. Such people know at least that they belong to a sort of fraternity and, thanks to that, ridiculous though it may appear, they never feel altogether isolated or abandoned in the world.
She said: ‘When he introduced the young woman into my house, I did not know that …’
Her house. You too heard her. She did not say our house. She said my house.
Her house, her maid, her husband …
There you have the key to the enigma, your Honour, for enigma there must be since nobody understood or seemed to understand. She never went so far as to talk about her patients, but she used to say our patients and would question me about them, on the treatment I had prescribed, give me her advice — often very much to the point, I must say — as to the surgeon to whom they should be sent for an operation.
Incidentally — I just spoke of belonging to a fraternity. Well, there is one and only one to which I belong by the force of circumstances and that is the medical profession. But because all the doctors in our circle were our friends, though more Armande’s friends than mine, I never had that feeling of solidarity which would at times have fortified me.
I am sure she always thought that she was acting for the best. Knowing her as I do now, I think it would be a terrible disillusionment if she ever perceived that her conduct had not always been practically faultless.
She was convinced, like the judges, like everybody at the trial, that I am a coward, that it was through cowardice that I organized that Christmas Eve, the memory of which was so painful to her, and through cowardice that I schemed — let’s say the word — to get Martine into my home.
My home, you understand? I insist on that. Because, after all, it seems to me that it was my home too, wasn’t it?
And I did scheme, it is true. Only I should hardly be reproached for that since I was the one who suffered the most from it, I was the most humiliated by it.
Not only I, but Martine. Martine even more than I.
By inference, during the trial, they treated her as an adventuress, which was most convenient. They did not dare come out with the word itself because then, in spite of my two guards, I would have leaped out of the prisoner’s dock. But, it seemed no less clear to everyone that she had wormed her way into our family for her own advantage.
A girl, it was true, who came from a good family — the gentlemen of the law never fail to salute the family, as at the cemetery, because among people of the same world certain civilities are due — a girl from a good family, but a black sheep who for four years had worked here, there and everywhere, and had slept with men.
I don’t say who had had lovers. She had none before me. I say slept with men, just as I had slept with women.
But that’s not the question now, and in addition it is nobody’s business but mine.
She came from God knows where, she arrived in our honest town, with her poor little tailored suit that wasn’t warm enough, her two suitcases, and her anaemic complexion, and, behold, she insinuates herself shamelessly into a well-heated, well-lighted house with substantial bourgeois meals, and from one day to the next becomes a doctor’s assistant and almost the friend of his wife, who even goes out of her way to buy her a Christmas present.
It is terrifying to think that we are all human beings, all of us forced to bend our backs, more or less, under an unknown sky, and that we refuse to make the least little effort to understand one another.
But for her to enter our home like that, your Honour, by the back door, as it were — to enter our home thanks to a whole tangled web of lies imposed upon her by me, was not only the worst humiliation but the sacrifice of everything that she could still consider her personality.
If she had gone to work for Raoul Boquet, for instance. Suppose she had become his mistress, which is what would probably have happened. The whole town would have known about it, for the director of the Galleries does not suffer from an excess of delicacy. She would at once have become one of the little group at the Poker-Bar. She would have made friends there, men and women living like her, smoking and drinking like her, helping her to look upon her existence as normal.
The Poker-Bar? Even I, your Honour, before knowing Martine, would sometimes find myself looking wistfully at those creamy lights and longing to become one of the pillars of the place.
To have a round of lights where one could take refuge, you understand? Take refuge while still remaining oneself, among people who let you think you are someone.
In my house she was nothing. For three weeks she lived in constant terror of a suspicious glance from Armande, and this obsession became so strong that I was obliged to treat her nerves.
Even in the matter of work she was denied the simple self-satisfaction which is the right of the meanest labourer. She was an excellent secretary before knowing me. On the other hand, she was totally ignorant of the medical profession, and I had no time to teach her. That wasn’t why I wanted her near me.
I have seen her for days on end in a corner of my office, poring over old files which she had to pretend to be classifying.
Now that Martine was in our employ, whenever Armande spoke to her it was usually to ask her to telephone the dressmaker or one of the tradesmen.
We had to hide, it’s true. And we often lie
d.
Through mercy, your Honour!
Because at that time I was still naïve, because at forty I knew nothing of love and because I imagined that at last I could be happy without taking away anything from others.
It seemed to me that with a little goodwill it would be so easy to arrange matters! We, Martine and I, were doing our part for the very reason that we consented to hide and to lie. Wouldn’t it have been logical to expect others to make an effort too?
Was it my fault if I needed, as much as I needed air to breathe, this woman whom, two weeks ago, I’d not even heard of and whom I had not tried to know?
If a sudden illness had put my life in danger, the greatest specialists would have been called in, all the established order and ways of the household would have been disrupted, every one would have sacrificed himself, I would have been sent to Switzerland or somewhere else, they might have pushed duty — or pity — to the point of taking me out in a wheel chair.
Something different, but just as grave, had happened to me. My life was equally at stake. I am not being romantic. I speak of what I know for a fact, your Honour. For weeks I spent my nights without her. For weeks she would return to her apartment at meal-times. And besides, every day I had my round of visits to make.
For weeks, a dozen times, by day and by night, I would feel that lacerating sensation of emptiness I have already mentioned, so that I would have to remain stock still, my hand on my heart, panic in my eyes, like a cardiac. And do you think I could stand it without interruption, without hope, day after day, from morning to night and from night to morning?
What right had they to demand it of me, will you tell me? Don’t begin talking of my daughters. That argument is too easy. Children don’t enter into such questions at all, and among my patients I have seen enough ill-assorted or discordant couples to know that, except in popular fiction, children do not suffer in the least.
Act of Passion Page 14