The Hand

by Georges Simenon

  Whenever I arrive, I find her in a peignoir and lead her in the most natural way to the couch on which I entered her for the first time.

  Afterwards, she pours our drinks, carries the two glasses into the bedroom and begins her morning ritual.

  ‘How is Isabel?’

  She talks to me about her every time I visit.

  ‘She still hasn’t said anything yet?’

  ‘She looks at me . . .’

  ‘It’s a tactic.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘By watching you silently, without upbraiding you, she’ll wind up giving you a guilty conscience.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s counting on it.’

  ‘Perhaps, but if so, she’s wrong.’

  Mona is intrigued by Isabel and she is the one who is impressed by her personality.

  As for me, this is one of the best moments of my day, of my week. She busies herself with her toilette, and I sink with delight into this intimate scene as if into a hot bath.

  I know every one of her movements, each expression, the way she purses her mouth to apply lipstick.

  When she takes her bath, I follow the water droplets that zigzag along her flushed skin. Because her skin is not pale and tinged with pink like Isabel’s, but more golden.

  She is quite petite, actually. She weighs nothing.

  ‘Has Lowenstein made up his mind?’

  Because we do discuss her business. We even pay a great deal of attention to it. Lowenstein is the decorator who made an offer to buy all the furnishings at Sutton Place, except for the few pieces Mona kept back.

  Only the price was still a matter for debate. Now that’s settled, and the lease has gone to an actor recently arrived from Hollywood to appear on Broadway.

  The negotiations with the Miller brothers are almost completely wound up, and the name of Sanders has long since been scraped off the glass panels where it appeared after Miller and Miller. Only a few details remain to be dealt with.

  I never asked Mona what she did with Ray’s clothing, his golf clubs, a certain number of personal belongings I no longer see anywhere.

  We often go down to the little ground-floor restaurant, where we always choose the same corner. The owner comes over to shake hands. We are treated like a couple, and it amuses us. In the afternoon, I almost always have to rush around everywhere, either for Mona’s business or for mine. We arrange to meet later in a bar. We drink martinis because, for the evening cocktail, we have adopted the extra-dry martini.

  We do enough drinking, perhaps too much, but without ever being drunk.

  ‘Where shall we have dinner?’

  We wander at random, on foot, and sometimes Mona, perched on her high heels, takes my arm. Once, we encountered Justin Greene, from Canaan, one of old Ashbridge’s guests, in fact, who was present at that memorable evening. He hesitated to acknowledge us. I turned around at the same moment he did, and he seemed embarrassed.

  By now, all Brentwood – indeed, the whole area – must know that I’m conducting an affair in New York. Did he recognize Mona? It’s possible, although improbable, because it was the first time she had ever been to that house, and she had hardly made herself conspicuous.

  ‘Was that one of your clients?’

  ‘An acquaintance . . . He lives in Canaan . . .’

  ‘Doesn’t it bother you that he saw us?’

  ‘No . . .’

  On the contrary! I’d finished with all those people. One day they would certainly realize that although I was still pretending to play the game, I no longer believed in it.

  One Saturday, I went to Torrington. It’s a placid little town, with only two commercial streets, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods.

  To the west, there’s a bit of industry, but it’s almost artisanal, a watch factory, for example, and another plant, brand new, where they manufacture minuscule components for electronic instruments.

  The house where I was born is on the main street, at the corner of a dead end, with a sign saying the Citizen in gothic letters. Most of the workers in the printing shop have been with my father for more than thirty years. Everything is antiquated, including the machines that entranced me when I was a child.

  Because it was Saturday, the print shop was closed. Nevertheless, my father was in his glass cage and could be seen, in his usual shirt-sleeves, from the street.

  He had always worked in that spot, as if to proclaim that the newspaper had nothing to hide.

  The door was not locked. I went in. I sat down on the other side of the desk and waited for my father to look up.

  ‘It’s you?’

  ‘I’m sorry for not having come by lately . . .’

  ‘It means that you had something else to do. So there’s no need to apologize . . .’

  That’s my father’s style. I don’t believe he has ever kissed me, not even when I was little. In the evening he would simply offer his forehead, like Isabel. I never saw him kiss my mother, either.

  ‘You’re in good health?’

  I replied yes, just as it dawned on me that my father had aged a lot in the last few weeks. His neck was so thin that the tendons showed, and his eyes looked a little faded.

  ‘Your wife came by a few days back.’

  She had not mentioned that to me.

  ‘She’d come to do some errands, to buy some dishes, I think, from that old thief Tibbits . . .’

  A shop that existed already in my day, selling china and silverware. I had known old Tibbits and then his son, now old himself.

  When we got married, we bought our set of dishes from Tibbits, and when too many pieces had been broken, Isabel would come to Torrington to replace them.

  ‘Are you still content?’

  The relationship between my father and me was so reserved that I never knew how to interpret his questions. He would often ask me if I was content, the way he asked me for news about the health of Isabel and the girls.

  But, this time, didn’t the question go deeper? Hadn’t my wife spoken to him? Hadn’t any rumours reached him?

  He continued to run his eyes over the proofs, striking out a word and replacing it, in the margin, with another.

  Had we ever had anything to say to each other? I stayed there, looking at him, sometimes turning to the street, where the traffic had changed since my childhood. Once, passing cars had been rare, and you could park anywhere.

  ‘How old are you, by the way?’

  ‘Forty-five.’

  He nodded, murmuring as if to himself, ‘That’s young, of course . . .’

  He was about to turn eighty. He had married late, after the death of his father, who was already running the Citizen. He had begun his career in Hartford and had worked, for only a few months, on a daily paper in New York.

  I had a brother, Stuart, who would most likely have taken over the business if he had not been killed in the war. He was more like my father than I was, and I have the impression that the two of them got along well together.

  My father and I got along well, too, but without intimacy.

  ‘It’s your life, after all . . .’

  He was muttering. I hadn’t necessarily heard him. Was it better to let the matter drop, to talk about something else?

  ‘Are you referring to Mona?’

  My father pushed his glasses back up on his nose and looked at me.

  ‘I didn’t know her name was Mona.’

  ‘Isabel didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Isabel did not tell me anything . . . She’s not a woman who talks about her business, even to her father-in-law.’

  There was obvious admiration in his voice. You might have thought that he and Isabel were cut from the same cloth.

  ‘So, who told you that I had a mistress?’

  ‘Everybody, more or less . . . There’s talk . . . It seems she’s the widow of your friend Ray . . .’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘The one who had the accident, at your house, the night of the b
lizzard, right?’

  I flushed, because I sensed a vague accusation behind those words.

  ‘I’m not the one putting the two things together, Son . . . It’s other people.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘Your friends in Brentwood, Canaan, Lakeville . . . Some of them wonder if you’ll get divorced and go to live in New York.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘I’m not asking you the question, but others have asked me, and I’ve told them that it’s none of my business.’

  He wasn’t reproaching me, either. He seemed not to have any hidden agenda, again like Isabel. He filled his old curved pipe with the burned bowl and lit it slowly.

  ‘Did you come to tell me something?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Did you have anything to do in Torrington?’

  ‘Again, no . . . I just wanted to see you.’

  ‘Would you like to go upstairs?’

  He had understood that it was not only him I had come to see, but the house as well, that I was there, in short, to come face to face with my youth.

  It’s true that I would have liked to go upstairs, to see once more the apartment of former days, where I’d crawled around before I could stand up, and where my mother had seemed like an immense being.

  I can just see her eternal apron with tiny checks, the kind they still wore in those days.

  No. I could no longer go up there. Not after what my father had just told me.

  I could no longer make contact with him as I had obscurely hoped to do, either.

  In fact, what had I come to do?

  ‘You know, it must be rather a mess up there, because the cleaning lady doesn’t come on Saturday and Sunday . . .’

  I imagined the old man alone in the apartment where the four of us had lived. He drew slowly on his pipe, which made a familiar gurgle.

  ‘Time passes, Sonny . . . For everyone, you see. You’ve gone more than halfway along the path . . . Me, I’m beginning to catch sight of the end . . .’

  He was not waxing sentimental about himself, which would not have been in his character. I sensed that he was speaking for me, that he was trying to show me his thoughts.

  ‘Isabel was sitting where you are now . . . When you introduced her to us, your mother and I did not much like her.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. She was from Litchfield, and in our part of the world those people were considered snobs who thought themselves a cut above the rest of us.

  Wide boulevards, lots of greenery, lovely houses and, especially in the morning, men and women out riding horses.

  Isabel had had her horse.

  ‘You can be mistaken about people, you see, even when you think you know them. She’s a fine woman.’

  When my father called someone fine, that was his highest compliment.

  ‘Again, it’s your business . . .’

  ‘I am not in love with Mona, and we have no plans for the future.’

  He coughed. He had had chronic bronchitis for a few years now and occasionally had painful fits of coughing.

  ‘Please excuse me.’

  His physical decline humiliated him. He hated making a spectacle of it before others. I think that’s why he would have preferred that we no longer visit him.

  ‘What were you saying? . . . Ah, yes . . .’

  He relit his pipe and, while puffing on it, announced, slowly and distinctly:

  ‘In that case, it’s even worse.’

  I was wrong to have visited my father. I’m certain that I disappointed him. And I was disappointed as well. There was no connection between us, whereas, from the little he told me, I realize that he and Isabel have been keeping up some kind of relationship. When I got into my car, I saw, through the window, that he was watching me leave and probably thinking, as I did, that we had perhaps seen each other for the last time.

  During the entire drive home, I kept seeing his worn-out face, his melancholy dignity, and I asked myself questions. Has he really kept his faith to the end and, at the moment of leaving, does he still harbour illusions?

  Does he believe in the usefulness of this little newspaper, which fought against injustice a hundred or even sixty years ago but which no longer does anything but flatter people’s vanity by reporting on engagements, weddings, parties and other unimportant local events?

  He has devoted his life to the Citizen as seriously as if he had been fighting for a great cause and he is clinging to the paper until his last breath.

  It’s what would have happened to my brother if he hadn’t died at the front. With small differences, isn’t that what happened to me as well, until, on the bench in the barn, I lit a first cigarette?

  After a while, I drove more slowly. Lately I’ve been subject at times to sudden sensations of vertigo. I am not ill. It isn’t fatigue, either, because I’m not working any harder than usual.

  Age? It’s true that I am now conscious of my age, which I’d never thought about, and the sight of my father has reinforced this.

  I would have liked to explain something to him, about Mona. I tried. Did he understand that to me she is above all a symbol?

  We are not in love. I am not sure that I believe in love, or in any case, in a love that lasts a lifetime.

  We join together because it reassures us to feel skin against skin, to live in the same rhythm. That’s still the closest, in the union of two beings, that one can be.

  We need someone. I needed Isabel, not in the same way. I needed her as a witness, as a guard rail, I’m not sure what, exactly. It’s all so far in the past that I myself no longer understand what I was seeking in her and am beginning to hate her.

  Her gaze exasperates me. It has become an obsession. When I arrived home, without having mentioned either Torrington or my father, she asked:

  ‘How is he?’

  It’s easy to figure out, I admit. There are clues. But I constantly feel myself at the end of a string. Wherever I go, whatever I do, it’s a little as if she were keeping her eyes fixed on me.

  I only go once a week to New York now, because the estate has been taken care of and, even with regard to Mona, I did need an excuse. I must not lapse back into what I was. I could not bear that any more. When you’ve made certain wrenching discoveries, it’s impossible to go backwards.

  I need Mona, which is to say her presence, an animal intimacy. I love it when, naked or half naked, she goes about her morning routine without paying attention to me. I love, in bed, feeling her skin against mine.

  As for the rest, though, hasn’t our experiment been a failure? I’ve talked about the restaurants where we’d have lunch and dinner, the little bars where we’d have our two late-afternoon martinis.

  We were still good friends, of course. We were perfectly at ease with each other. But to tell the truth, I did not feel in communication with her and at times I had to look for something to say. It was the same for her.

  Nevertheless, she is everything that I did not possess during those forty-five years, everything I shied away from, out of fear.

  The girls have been back. I’ve been observing Mildred a lot. I love her complexion, the colour of warm bread, and the way she crinkles her nostrils when she smiles. She has begun to wear make-up, not at school, of course, where that must be forbidden, but at home.

  Does she imagine that we don’t notice? She spent last Sunday afternoon with her friend, the girl who has the twenty-year-old brother. Who will probably be what she’ll later call her first love. She has no idea that the memory of those furtive glances, those blushes, those hands brushing against each other as if by chance will pursue her all her life.

  She will not be pretty in the usual sense of the word. She isn’t beautiful, either.

  What kind of man will she meet and what life will she live with him?

  I see her as a housewife, one of the women whom I class among those who smell like pastry.

  As for Cecilia, I don’t know. She remains an enigma, and I would not be surprised
if she possesses quite a strong personality. She watches us live, and I’m almost convinced that she does not approve of us, that the only thing she feels for us is a certain disdain.

  It’s really odd! For years you’re so preoccupied with the children that they become the reason for everything you do. The house is arranged for them, along with Sundays, vacations, and one fine day you find yourself face to face, strangers to each other, like my father and me.

  I repeat that I was wrong to go and see him. That visit has reinforced a pessimism I’m only too inclined to indulge in when I’m not in New York. And even when I am there, actually, aside from certain moments that could be counted in minutes.

  It wouldn’t take much to get me talking about a conspiracy. Isabel and my father, for a start! Why did she go to Torrington? Was it so important to replace a few plates, when most of the time there are only two of us at the table? It has been six months since we’ve invited anyone to the house.

  My father claims that Isabel did not talk to him about Mona or me. Fine! I have to believe him. But he, didn’t he speak to her about us? Even if he didn’t, all they had to do was look at each other.

  ‘So, what’s Donald up to?’

  She must have smiled, with a smile as pale as the sun after a rain.

  ‘Don’t worry about him . . .’

  Wasn’t she watching over me? Doesn’t she keep an eye on me every day, at every hour?

  Now here were the locals getting involved, whispering as I pass. They’ve finally got some disreputable gossip to spread around . . . Donald Dodd, you know, the lawyer whose office is almost directly across from the post office . . . The partner of old Higgins, yes . . . The one who has such a nice, sweet, devoted wife . . . Well, he’s carrying on an affair in New York!

  Higgins joins in. When I tell him that I’ll be going to New York the following day he asks:

  ‘Will you be there for two days?’

  ‘Not this time, no . . .’

  Higgins ought to be satisfied, though, because the Miller brothers paid us handsomely indeed for the work I did. I would have done it for nothing, to help Mona. They are the ones who insisted on it.

  Warren, our doctor, came to see me at my office to ask me a question about his taxes, because I handle his affairs. He studied me closely while we were chatting, and I suspected that his story about the taxes was simply a pretext.