The Hand

by Georges Simenon

  And a vague ‘Yoo-hoo!’ would echo a reply.

  The flashlight beam was weakening. All of a sudden, when we must have been only three or four hundred yards from our place, it died completely.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  I had to be quite close to the women, because I heard the snow crunching. I could also hear, to my right, Ray’s footsteps.

  My head began to spin. The energy the alcohol had given me was ebbing away, and it was more and more difficult to advance. In my chest, right where my heart was, I thought, I felt a pain that worried me.

  Hadn’t men my age, even strong, healthy men, died like this of heart attacks in the cold and snow?

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  I felt dizzy. I laboured with each step. I couldn’t see a thing any more. I could hear only that aggressive uproar of the blizzard and I was covered in snow.

  I don’t know how long that lasted. I was paying no more attention to the others. I was still holding on, stupidly, to the dead flashlight, and was stopping every two or three steps to catch my breath.

  Finally, there was a wall, a door opening.

  ‘Come in . . .’

  A gust of warmth, in the darkness of the house.

  ‘And Ray?’

  I did not understand. I wondered why the women hadn’t turned on the lights. I reached for the switch.

  ‘There’s no electricity . . . Where’s Ray?’

  ‘He was close by me . . .’

  I called to him from the threshold.

  ‘Ray! . . . Hey, Ray! . . .’

  I seemed to hear a voice, but it’s easy to hear voices in a blizzard.

  ‘Ray . . .’

  ‘Take the flashlight from the night table.’

  We keep a smaller flashlight on our night table because the electricity sometimes goes off. I fumbled my way slowly through the rooms, bumping into furniture I did not recognize. Then a gleam appeared behind me, one of the red candles from the dining room.

  It was strange to see Isabel emerge dimly from the darkness holding aloft one of the silver candelabras.

  ‘You found it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had the flashlight in my hand, but it was hardly brighter than the one from the car had been.

  ‘Don’t we have any spare batteries?’

  ‘Aren’t there any in the drawer?’

  ‘No . . .’

  I wanted a drink to buck me up but didn’t dare have one. The women said nothing to me. They did not urge me on. Even so, I felt that they were sending me out, armed with a half-dead flashlight, to search for Ray in the blizzard.

  I will say everything, obviously, otherwise it would not have been worthwhile to begin. And, first of all: at no moment of the evening was I completely drunk.

  If I try to define my state as accurately as possible, I’d say that I possessed a warped lucidity. Reality existed around me, and I was in contact with it. I was aware of my actions. Taking pencil and paper, I could record almost exactly the words I spoke at the Ashbridge party, in the car afterwards and, later, at home.

  Suffering from the cold on my bench, however, where I lit one cigarette after another, I was entering, I felt, a new lucidity, which made me uneasy and was beginning to frighten me.

  I could sum it up in a word – in four words, rather, which I seemed to hear out loud: ‘You have killed him . . .’

  Perhaps not in the legal sense. But then again, isn’t the refusal to help someone in danger considered a kind of crime?

  When I had left the house, when the two women had sent me out to look for Ray, I had gone immediately to the right. More precisely, to fool them, in case they’d been watching me from the window and seen the glint from my flashlight, I’d first walked straight ahead for a few yards and then, safe in the darkness, I had veered right, knowing that I would find the barn about thirty yards along.

  I was physically exhausted and think I can say that my morale was spent as well. This enormous storm, this world gone mad that had earlier elated me to the brink of nervous hilarity, now suddenly scared me.

  Why had the women stayed in the house? Why hadn’t they, too, come along to search? I thought back to Isabel, impassive, looking like a statue with her silver candelabra held a little higher than her shoulder. Mona, her features blurred in the shadowy light, had said nothing.

  Neither of them had seemed to understand that a real tragedy was taking place and that by sending me outside they were putting me, too, in danger. My heart was beating too fast, in fits and starts. At every moment I kept losing my breath.

  I was afraid, I’ve already said so. I called out one or two times more.

  ‘Ray! . . .’

  It would have been a miracle if he had heard me, just as it would have been if he had glimpsed the glow, way too weak, of the flashlight through the snow falling almost parallel to the ground. It wasn’t falling, it was whipping, thrown forward in actual clumps that hit you in the face and smothered you.

  I heard the barn door creak and rushed inside, where I collapsed on the bench.

  A red bench. A garden bench. I did see the grotesque aspect of the situation: in the middle of the night, in the middle of a blizzard, a forty-five-year-old man, a lawyer and respectable citizen, sitting on a red bench lighting a first cigarette with a trembling hand as if this were going to warm him up.

  ‘I killed him . . .’

  Perhaps not yet. Doubtless he was still alive, but dying, in danger of death. He was not familiar, as I was, with the area around the house and if he veered to the right, if he was off by just a few yards, he would tumble down a small cliff into a freezing stream.

  That was nothing to me. I did not have the courage to look for him, to run the slightest risk. On the contrary.

  And here is where I’ve arrived, where I am indeed forced to end up. Here is where I was heading little by little, on that particular night, the night of 15–16 January, on my bench, in the barn: what was happening to Ray did not displease me.

  Would I have been in the same frame of mind if I had not been drinking at the Ashbridges’ party? This problem is difficult to resolve and, in the end, does not change much. Would I have felt the same perverse relief if I had not pushed open the bathroom door and surprised Ray making love with Patricia?

  Now, that’s different. I’m getting to the heart of my ruminations. For what I was indulging in on my bench were ruminations rather than coherent reflections.

  I had the time. I was supposed to look for Ray. The longer I stayed outdoors, the more thanks I would receive.

  What Ray was doing that evening in the bathroom, with a woman he had known for barely two hours, one as beautiful and desirable as Patricia, was something I’d dreamed of doing a hundred, a thousand times.

  He had married Mona, who, like Patricia, makes men think of a bed.

  Me, I married Isabel.

  I might almost say, ‘That’s all there is.’

  But it isn’t. I had begun, God knows why, tearing off a corner from everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces.

  This went back to Yale. This went back to before Yale, before I knew Ray. This went back, in the end, to my childhood. I would have liked . . . Where are words when you need them! . . . I would have liked to do everything, be everything, be daring in every way, to look people in the eye, to tell them . . .

  To look at people the way old Ashbridge does, for example, before whom, earlier that evening, I had felt like a little boy.

  He didn’t bother to speak, to strike an attitude. He didn’t try to communicate. I was in front of him. Was he perhaps looking straight through my head? I was of no importance.

  He was seventy years old and had never been handsome. He drank his little drinks that gave his eyes that glazed look, and dozens of guests had invaded his house.

  Did he worry about what they thought of him? He provided them with food, drink,
armchairs, open bedrooms, as well as the bathroom where Patricia . . . Did he know that his wife was cheating on him? Did he suffer because of it? Did he, on the contrary, despise poor Ray, who had merely followed so many others and who, within five minutes, would no longer matter, who already no longer mattered, whom Patricia would perhaps, that very evening, replace with a successor in the same or some other room?

  I didn’t admire Ashbridge simply because he was rich and had interests in fifty different business ventures, from commercial shipping to television stations.

  When he had moved into the area ten years earlier, I would have liked to have had him as a client, to have acquired just a tiny part of his affairs to look after.

  ‘One of these days, I’ll have to have a talk with you,’ he’d told me.

  The years had passed, and he had never had that talk. I did not resent him for that.

  With Ray, it was different, because Ray and I were the same age, had almost the same background; we’d studied the same things, and at Yale I’d been more brilliant than he was and he’d become an important figure on Madison Avenue, whereas I was just a plucky little lawyer in Brentwood, Connecticut.

  Ray was taller than I was, stronger than I was. At twenty, he could already look at people the way old Ashbridge did.

  I’ve met other men of their kind. I have some for clients. My attitude towards them varies depending on the day and my mood. At times I’m convinced that it’s admiration. At other moments I admit to a certain envy.

  Well, I knew this now, I’d just discovered it on my bench: it was hatred.

  They frightened me. They were too strong for me, or I was the one too weak for them.

  I remember the evening when Ray introduced me to Mona, who was wearing a little black silk dress, underneath which you could sense her body, alive in its smallest recesses.

  ‘Why not me?’

  For me, Isabel. For him, Mona.

  And, if I chose Isabel, isn’t that precisely because I never dared to speak to a Mona, to a Patricia, to all the women whom I’ve desired to the point of clenching my fists in rage?

  The wind was blowing so violently that I expected to see the roof fly off the barn. Its upper hinge broken, the door now sagged crookedly, which did not prevent it from striking muffled blows against the wall.

  The snow whirling inside the barn almost reached my feet, and I kept thinking in a kind of delirium, a cold delirium, a lucid delirium.

  ‘I killed you, Ray . . .’

  And what if I went to tell them this, those two women nice and warm in the house, in the candlelight?

  ‘I killed Ray . . .’

  They would not believe me. I was not even the man to kill Ray, or to kill anyone.

  I had just done so, however, and this flooded me with a sense of physical joy, as if I had just cheered myself up with a potent drink.

  I stood up. After all, I was not supposed to spend hours outside. Besides, I was frozen stiff and was scared about my heart. I have always been afraid that my heart would suddenly stop beating.

  I plunged out into the snow that was hitting my face, my chest, enveloping my legs. I had to make an effort to hoist out one foot, then the other.

  ‘Ray!’

  I had to make sure I did not make a mistake and stray from the path. The house was invisible. I had taken my bearings when I’d left the barn. All I had to do now was walk straight ahead.

  And what if I found Ray in front of the living-room fireplace with the two women? I imagined them, watching me enter like a ghost, smiling and saying, ‘Why did you stay out so long?’

  That frightened me so much that I managed to walk faster, so that I bumped into the wall of the house. I felt my way along to the door. No one had heard me arrive. I turned the knob and saw first the logs burning in the fireplace, then someone, in an armchair, wearing Isabel’s light blue peignoir. It wasn’t Isabel. It was Mona.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Isabel? . . . She went to fix something to eat. But . . . Donald!’

  It was almost a shout: ‘Donald!’

  She did not rise from her armchair. She did not look at me. She stared at the flames in the hearth. Her face reflected no feeling; she looked stunned.

  In a low voice she added, ‘You didn’t find him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Watching the time go by . . .’

  Yes, seeing the time pass, she had begun to understand.

  ‘Still, he’s a strong man,’ I said, ‘more vigorous than I am . . . Perhaps . . .’

  ‘Perhaps what?’

  How to lie? And how could Ray have oriented himself in that ocean of snow and ice?

  Isabel arrived, candelabra in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in the other. She looked at me; her face became paler, her features more rigid.

  ‘Eat, Mona.’

  How long does it take to die, buried in snow? Another three or four hours, and day would begin to break.

  ‘Did you try telephoning?’ I asked.

  ‘The lines are dead.’

  She looked pointedly at a small transistor.

  ‘We’ve been getting the news every fifteen minutes . . . It seems the storm stretches from the Canadian border to New York. Almost everywhere, out in the countryside, the phone and electricity are cut.’

  In a dull voice she added:

  ‘Ray should have held on to your arm, the way Mona and I were walking . . .’

  ‘He was at my right, not far from me . . .’

  Mona wasn’t crying. She was holding a sandwich and finally took a bite.

  ‘Have you anything to drink, Isabel?’

  ‘Some beer? Spirits? I can’t fix you anything hot, because the stove is electric.’

  ‘Some whisky . . .’

  ‘You ought to take a bath, too, Donald. Later, there won’t be any more hot water.’

  It’s true, the oil burner shuts down. Everything is electric, even the clocks, except for the little one in our bedroom.

  Now I understood why Mona was wearing Isabel’s bathrobe. My wife had made her take a bath, to relax as well as warm her.

  ‘Did you go as far as the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again, I felt a rush of fear. What if, while zigzagging in the snow, Ray had wound up back at the car? The smartest thing would then have been to shelter inside it, muffling up there as best he could to wait for daylight.

  Our house, Yellow Rock Farm, is not on the road. We have a private access road of more than half a mile. As for the neighbours, they’re about a mile away.

  ‘From what I know of Ray . . .’ my wife began.

  I waited for the rest with curiosity.

  ‘. . . he’ll have pulled through . . .’

  Not me, but him. Because it’s Ray. Because it’s someone other than Donald Dodd.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have a bath? . . . Take the candle . . . We’d best not waste them, and light only one at a time. Here, we have the fireplace flames.’

  The radiators were going to grow cold. They were cooling already. In a few hours, there would be no more heat except in the living room. We’d be forced to huddle there, all three of us, as close as possible to the hearth.

  It was my turn to carry the candelabra to find my way to our bedroom. I began wanting a drink again. Retracing my steps, I found Isabel pouring Mona a whisky.

  I took a glass from the cupboard, picked up the bottle in turn and understood my wife’s look. Still no reproach. Not even a mute warning. It was different. It had been going on for years, doubtless for as long as we’d known each other. A sort of official record.

  She noticed things, without commentary, as if without passing judgement – and even forbidding herself to do so. The facts were nevertheless all there, in columns, perfectly organized, one after the other.

  There must have been thousands, tens of thousands of them. Seventeen years of life together, not counting a one-year engagement!

  I served myself generously on purpose, pouring the double –
if not the triple – of my usual amount.

  ‘Cheers, Mona . . .’

  A silly thing to say, but she didn’t seem to hear. I drank greedily. The warmth spread through me, and only then did I realize how cold my body was.

  The bathroom reminded me of the one at the Ashbridges’ house, and a thought of humiliating vulgarity occurred to me.

  ‘At least he will have had one last pleasure . . .’

  Why was I so sure that Ray was dead? The hypothesis about the car was plausible. Perhaps Isabel was right. She had no idea that I hadn’t gone that far. He might also have reached, although that was more difficult, one of the surrounding houses. Since the telephone was out of order, it was impossible for him to let us know.

  ‘I killed him . . .’

  Mona had the same impression as I did; I’d seen that in her attitude. Does she really love Ray? Are there people who go on loving one another after a certain number of years?

  Ray and Mona have no children. Us, we’ve got two, two girls, who are at Adams, one of the best boarding schools in Connecticut, in Litchfield, run by Miss Jenkins.

  Did they have light, in Litchfield?

  Mildred is fifteen, Cecilia twelve, and every two weeks they come and spend the weekend at the house. Luckily this had not been one of their weekends.

  The water was running in the bathtub. I put my hand under the faucet in time to notice that the water was now cold, and I had to settle for a third of the bathtub.

  It was an odd feeling, that night, to be an honourable man, one of the two partners of the firm of Higgins and Dodd, married, the father of two girls, the owner of Yellow Rock Farm, one of the oldest and most pleasant houses in Brentwood, and to think about having just killed a man.

  By omission, true! By having failed to look for him.

  Who knows? If I had spent hours with my dying flashlight, wandering in the snow, it is possible, even probable, that I would not have found him.

  In my mind, then? That was closer to it. I had not searched. As soon as I could not be seen from the house, I had veered off towards the barn to take shelter.

  Would Mona be in despair? Did she know that Ray was having sex with other women whenever he got the chance?

  Who knows if she wasn’t like Patricia? Perhaps Ray and Mona weren’t jealous and told each other about their adventures?