‘Would you like to hear? Or would you like to read it?’
He leans back in the car seat. ‘I’d like you to read to me,’ he says, a playful hint of the indulgent.
‘Now?’
‘Please,’ he says, a tone that suggests we are here, after all. Let’s hear your surprise.
Without saying any more she opens the notebook. She has not slept but she is wide awake, as though she has just come from an all-night party, jittery with excitement and exhaustion. But also with apprehension, even a touch of terror. What if he doesn’t like it? What if he hates it? What if it simply leaves him cold and indifferent? Now that the moment is upon her, it is, she realises, a crucial one: not just for the story – which she doesn’t think of as a book, more as a tale to seduce her lover all over again – but for them. She looks at Jean. He nods. She takes a breath, pauses, and begins reading.
She reads to him of this young woman known only as O: with her lover in the park, the drive to the mansion, her lover’s demands of her in the car, the blindfold, the tied hands, the château and the events there, O’s surrender and submission, her defeat and humiliation, all of which she endures to please her lover, strangely proud and resolute all the while – what she does, she does willingly and for love. And as she reads it, part of Dominique is once again aware that this odd tale is a mystery even to her. But at the same time she has no doubt that this is the tale she was born to write. Whatever he may think of it – whether he finds it grotesque, bizarre, ugly or beautiful – this fantasy that she has conjured up, written as if in a strange and disturbing dream, is, all the same, as true as a dream. For as she reads she feels as though her mind has become a kind of magic lantern show, revealing all the things – the wretched and the exalted, the debased and the resolute, the shameful and the honourable – that are in it.
She feels Jean’s eyes on her as she reads about O’s lover offering her, like a pimp, to men who take her casually, indifferently, and nearly always abruptly, often brutally. Who speak of and to her in the most degrading ways: calling her a prostitute, treating her as a slave with no identity other than the name ‘O’. She is stripped and whipped and left bleeding and weeping, her cries and shrieks echoing through the mansion. Then, with tender consideration for her state, she is gently led to her cell-like room, like a defiled nun to her rest and her fate. For this place and the strange costumes she and all the other women wear, that are designed to make them open and available at any time, night or day, recall some distorted medieval nunnery or monastery, cut off from the world. A wild universe unto itself. For page after page O endures everything (as nobody, Dominique notes, could in life), yet grows stronger, begins to turn her degradation into a strength, the kind of strength that those who have never known such depths can ever acquire, her torturers increasingly at her service, her instruments, giving her the very thing she wants: the liberation found in surrender, that feeling of never having been so free as when conquered, the calm transcendence that follows, and finally the release of peace, all the sweeter for the pain endured. And yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this pain that I could never wish to be rid of it . . .
Dominique breaks from the reading for a moment to rest her voice and gauge Jean’s reaction. He is no longer looking at her but seems transfixed by the view through the windscreen. Early morning traffic is gathering along the quai in front of them. A crowded bus passes. Workers tramp towards the bus stop. Everybody going about their business, getting on with things. Just another day.
The wonder is that Dominique is not tired. For in those hours between midnight and dawn when she was writing her story, she was in a kind of heaven. Suspended in some blessed state that was as restful and restoring as the deepest of deep sleeps.
Jean turns to her as if only just noticing the silence, his bright eyes telling her to go on.
‘Why have you stopped?’
‘To rest.’
‘Are you now rested?’ he asks, unable to hide his eagerness.
She adjusts her glasses, he returns to the view outside the car windscreen, and she resumes.
She has reached that point in her story where O is introduced by her lover to the Englishman, Sir Stephen: a man who exudes power and control. She is taken to a restaurant where the three dine, and then taken back to Sir Stephen’s apartment, where her lover, a minion, a subject in the service of the Englishman, hands her over to Sir Stephen. Her lover leaves the two of them, and the Englishman, after degrading and humiliating her, possesses and defiles O brutally, at one point casually allowing the ash from his cigarette, which he smokes through a holder clamped between his teeth, to fall onto her naked shoulders.
O, it seems to Dominique as she reads, has entered some phantasmagoria that is real and yet somehow not. Like descending into an underground society and assuming a secret life. Sir Stephen the one for whom she has been groomed all this time and to whom she has willingly surrendered herself. But always with this proud, defiant air of being somehow beyond him and beyond them all.
Here Dominique’s reading finishes and she places the notebook back in the satchel, rests it on her lap, then looks to Jean for his reaction. Much of the morning has passed: she absorbed in the reading; he transfixed by the tale. He sits in silence, his face giving nothing away. Perhaps he hates it. Perhaps she’s deluded herself. Then he turns to her, eyebrows lifted.
‘Continue.’
‘That’s all I have.’
‘All?’
‘No more.’
‘You must finish it. You must. It is magnificent!’ he says, pausing and summoning up the words. ‘Like the rumbling before a storm. Or a war. And as much as we tremble before it, we can’t wait for the storm to break.’
She gulps, those emotions held in check since yesterday morning when she stumbled upon him in the café with a young woman, and which she can barely hold in, now straining for release. But this time, instead of a blow to the heart, it is a rapture. You see, she silently whispers, I have done it.
Still inwardly purring, she says, ‘It is yours. I wrote it for you.’
He eyes her steadily, her wise owl, the both of them forest creatures acknowledging each other all over again in silent communion.
‘And has a man,’ he solemnly asks her, ‘ever received such an ardent love letter?’ Then adds, ‘But it is too extraordinary to be the possession of just one man. Or one woman. Think of all those misers who buy art only to shut it away in their rooms and deny the world a chance to see it.’
‘But I didn’t write this for the world. Only for you. Isn’t that enough?’
He shakes his head emphatically but affectionately. ‘Yes and no. We are sharing this moment now. Nobody else. Ours. But I can’t keep this to myself. Nor can you.’
It’s not a matter of importance to her, what the world thinks or wants. Only what he thinks. She checks her watch. It is mid-morning, she has been reading her tale for almost two hours and has held him spellbound. That is enough. The story did its job. She starts the engine and turns the car towards Gallimard. Throughout the drive they are mostly silent, but as they near Gallimard, she says, ‘I forgot to have breakfast. I’m starved.’
‘So am I.’
She parks and they stroll, Dominique floating towards their regular café, her tale evolving as she walks. Jean takes her hand, something he rarely does so near their work. It is warm inside. The jolly owner, whose hair has thinned over the years and who has become more portly, is as jolly and accommodating as ever. They order. The coffee, when it arrives, has never tasted so intoxicating, the brioche never so light. Everything – cups, café, the street outside – is as alive and vibrant as if she has just taken a fantastic drug, and with her profane love letter entered some sacred realm. Her old owl is back. And they are back in their old haunt called Hope.
16.
Over the following weeks Dominique writes whenever she can, staying up until dawn, this strange tale pouring from her, this story of O. She has no idea why she called her pr
otagonist O – O for what? Sometimes she watches her hand moving over the pages as if she herself is waiting to see what comes next.
Occasionally she hears her parents in the next room, a conversation in the dark, a cough, or her father snoring, and she can’t help but wonder what they would think if they knew. Jean is adamant that the book, and she never really thought of it as a book until he started treating it like one, must be published. She cares and she doesn’t, but it is his, after all; she wrote it for him, a gift, and part of her concludes that he can do what he wants with it.
At the same time the prospect of publication is deeply troubling. She always imagines she is writing for an audience of one, and this releases her, frees her to write whatever she chooses, even if she can’t be sure where it comes from or what it all means. But however hideous this progeny of hers may be, she knows it’s true: true of her, true to her. In its heart, in its essence, the truest thing she has ever done. As true as a dream. Not that she could lie. As a writer you can’t lie, even when you try. Whenever you put words on a page, she tells herself, you are always laying yourself bare. And this strange tale, this proud, defiled figure of O, which comes from some deep-seated part of Dominique that even she doesn’t really know, some mystery that’s lain inside her through one birthday and another, waiting for its moment of release, has been liberated from her by the thought of an audience of one.
But once a book, any book, is published it goes out into the world, where strangers will read it irrespective of whom it was written for. They will make it their own, snigger and snort. She rests from her writing at a point where this young woman called O, who is her and not her, who could be anybody, has just been branded, like an animal, with Sir Stephen’s mark. Or, she wonders, is it more like the man with Molly tattooed on his chest? But O’s brand is on her buttock and all who bear witness to it will know that she is Sir Stephen’s possession and that she has consented to be. How could she let this go public? She has stopped thinking about her story and is contemplating the word itself: public. And suddenly there is something vulgar in being published, undignified and unsettling, like those dreams of finding yourself naked in a public place. She thought she was writing for one person only and has revealed herself in such a way that only lovers do for each other. In this sense her whole love letter is a conversation with Jean, full of the things she might tell him or say to him in bed, fantasies intended only for him. And for them. Never meant to be lived. For is that not the essence of fantasy? Is that not the source of its power? How can she let these things go out into the world?
The self she willingly laid bare for him to read would become the possession of strangers. To be grasped and pawed by strangers. It occurs to her that is what O is doing: consenting to be the possession of strangers. And in this sense, in the event of publication, would she not become her character?
Is she any different from O? Other than that she has pimped herself? To write the kind of book he likes to read, she had to. And is Jean, is anybody, worth that? And for the first time she’s beginning to wish she’d never started the book at all.
And then there is her mother, who was born to be a nun and who abhors the flesh. She would be mortified, scandalised, if she was ever to learn that her daughter had written such a book. And what is more that the book was written under her own roof, while she lay sleeping in the next room. It would soil her name, the family name, and soil the house. If the book must go out into the world it cannot bear Dominique’s name. But whose? And then, in a way that is as mysterious as the book itself, the name comes to her.
* * *
The weeks pass and she writes whenever the opportunity arises, until she comes to the end. O, dressed only in a long, flowing cape, naked underneath it, is being led, a glittering metal collar around her neck, and wearing a carnival mask, to a public showing. A fabulous rite at which she will be on display, the centre of attention. And as Dominique lies on the bed, on her side, pencil in hand, she is contemplating the carnival mask. What is it? She ponders this question, then realises. Of course. It is the mask of an owl, a creature of the forest. O, at this final moment, is part of some pagan or ancient religious ritual, being led to what may be either sacrifice or transfiguration.
When they arrive at the isolated gathering place, O, Sir Stephen and a stranger known only as the Commander make a grand entrance, Sir Stephen walking beside her, enthralled by the spectacle that O presents. She stands in the middle of the assembled congregation, all wearing costumes and masks, and allows herself to be viewed, the way human exhibits brought back from the colonies were once publicly shown. And when the viewing is finished, when they have all feasted upon her with their eyes, gawked and gone, and there are only a few stragglers left as the dawn rises, she turns to her lover, to Sir Stephen, sensing that he will soon leave her alone in the ice-cold world, and because she cannot live in this world or any other without him, she asks for his permission to die. Which he casually grants.
He then leads her to the centre of the courtyard in which the gathering was assembled. Sir Stephen detaches her chain, removes her mask and lays her down upon a table that might just as easily be a sacrificial stone. There, Sir Stephen and the stranger possess her: one then the other. They depart the scene and leave her to her fate.
Dominique lays her pencil down for the last time and closes the notebook. She watches the dawn come to her window then rises, washes as she always does, changes into fresh clothes, makes up her face and places the notebook in her satchel, then leaves, calling out a brief farewell to her parents as she closes the door.
But this morning, instead of going to her car, she walks towards Jean’s place. This morning, instead of reading it to Jean, they have arranged for her to leave the pages in his letter box. Much in the same way, she reflects – light-headed from no sleep but also giddy from having finished her tale – that she deposited those dangerously illegal pamphlets in designated letter boxes during the war. In the days when they each chose freedom and danger, when they had never felt so free as they were when they were defeated and occupied. The whole exercise, the book itself, a momentary retrieval of the intensity of those days.
She walks on through the early morning streets down to Jean’s apartment where he will, at this moment, be caring for his wife. It is not so far from where she lives. And some ten or fifteen minutes later she comes to a stop in front of his building, the ancient Roman arena just a few steps away. Stately, solid, respectable: the face these apartments present to the world one thing, the lives inside another. But isn’t that always the case, she muses: nothing and no one what they seem. Are we not all doubles, triples, quadruples, Russian dolls, selves within selves within selves?
As she approaches the front door she reaches into her satchel for the story (there is no copy, she has never kept one), looks about her and quickly and decisively – no lingering, for lingering is death – puts the folded pages inside an envelope with his name on it and places the envelope in his letter box. She then swings about and walks away, the old familiar drug of secrecy and danger and freedom surging through her veins.
17.
‘Who is Pauline Réage?’
The eyes of Albert Camus are about to leap from their sockets, and the woman to whom the question is addressed, Dominique, is so drawn to his eyes that she forgets the question. Not only is the question delivered with an inquisitorial stare, it is delivered with the thunderous crack of a manuscript hitting the large oval table at which they are sitting, along with five others in the committee reading room of Gallimard publishing. The question and the sound of the manuscript hitting the table hang in the air.
This is where they decide what will be published and what will not. And all afternoon committee members have been banging manuscripts on the table, accompanied by a yes or a no as emphatic as the banging. To anyone listening outside, the meeting would sound like a series of explosions and heated arguments. Almost a brawl. Which, in many ways, it is. For this, after all, is the clearing hous
e of Gallimard: to those at this table not just a publishing house but a world unto itself, almost a wing of government, the clearing house of the committee room a kind of cabinet. What they publish here matters. Only the best. Only that which defines the nation: what it is thinking and feeling, from the vacant eyes of small-town squares in the middle of a drowsy summer’s day to the acrid, tobacco-drenched cafés of Paris, where habitués sit arguing into the night like some unofficial parliament. What they publish here must not only be the best but must define the nation at this particular time – in all its meanness and majesty.
For the war and the occupation are still close enough to be yesterday, feelings are still raw, everybody still growing back a layer of skin. Peace, Dominique notes to herself, can be ugly. There are scores to be settled, memories both true and invented to be aired, fingers to be pointed. There, all the time, underneath the apparent normality of everybody going about their business, getting on with things after a bad dream that is best forgotten. For as much as the cafés may be full of furious debate, most of the country just wants to get on with things, let the past be and drink the medicine of blissful amnesia: not so much forget things as pretend they never happened.
What they decide to publish, to those here in this room, has possibly never mattered so much as it does now. Specks of dust rise from the table as Camus, temples pulsing, bangs the manuscript with his fist, his unanswered question still hanging in the air. And then, with a raising of the eyebrows and a puff of smoke, he moves on to judgement.
‘I say yes. We must publish this.’ He pauses briefly, looking at Dominique and the others at the table, then continues. ‘But no woman could have written such a book!’ he says, staring down at the table. ‘It is a fine book. An elegant book. Shocking. Brutal. Honest. But only a man could have written it!’
It is at this point that the head of Gallimard himself, the imposing seventy-four-year-old Gaston Gallimard, leans forward, patrician forehead and nose thrust out, and speaks, as emphatically negative as Camus is positive.
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