O

by Steven Carroll

  The couple watch the woman’s exit as Dominique leans down and quickly picks the book up from the floor, smoothing the flap – which proclaims that the book has won a prestigious prize – back into place.

  ‘Madame,’ she calls. The woman turns. ‘I believe this is yours.’

  ‘Oh, I quite forgot. Thank you.’

  As Dominique hands the book to her, each glancing down at the cover, its title and author, a kind of sorority is instantly established between them. A smile, a recognition that says we two, we understand each other. Then the woman is gone and Dominique calls for the bill, while the couple nearby lean towards each other in hushed conversation. And as Dominique leaves she hears the ripple of a young woman’s laughter following her out onto the street. So it begins, she tells herself, so it begins: the age-old dance of love and death. He with experience, she with the vibrancy of youth. It’s all about death.

  Twice in two days. First the classroom, now this. And yesterday she noticed in a bookshop that the novel had been taken out from under the counter – where it has been in most shops for the last year – and put on display, legitimised by a prize. A prestigious literary prize. Even so, people pick it up furtively, glancing about to see that nobody is watching. And she can’t help but notice that they’re nearly always women.

  * * *

  Over the following weeks it is impossible to ignore what is happening. Some shops brazenly place the book in their windows, displaying the sash of the prize like a licence to read. All the same, customers complain, it seems, for she hears stories – from her father, from Jean – about regular customers of this bookshop or that who vow they will never shop there again. Women reading the book in parks are scolded, reprimanded by passing elders; fathers and mothers (who may or may not have read the book) snatch the filth from their daughters’ hands, in the same way that nineteenth-century parents snatched novels from their daughters’ hands – the mothers appalled by as little as a line here and there; the fathers protesting just that bit too much. Half the city eager to read the thing; the other half eager to burn it. And as the weeks pass it is clear to Dominique – from all the stories she continually hears, from what she reads in the papers (for the book is now written about everywhere) and from what she sees with her own eyes – that this little love letter of hers (for it is, she readily grants, a slight book) has taken on a life of its own. Gone from her, gone from Jean. Out into the world, an object of disgust and delight in equal measure, condemned and acclaimed by the most unlikely people. At once smut and art. A national disgrace. A masterpiece. In short, a scandal.

  All of which amuses Dominique, even if poignantly, for there will always be part of her that wishes it had never gone out into the world, that it retained a readership of one.

  And, not for the first time, she is relieved that the book does not bear her name – and that her parents will not bear the shame of having a scandalous daughter. For even though her father is the most enlightened of fathers – something she will be grateful for all her life – she suspects he would be appalled. Even hurt, and the very thought of that disturbs her.

  And, of course, Gallimard would ask her to leave if the author were ever made public. They would have to, she tells herself. In fact, she wouldn’t even wait for them to ask. For to have the author of such smut sitting on the reading committee would be impossible. Unthinkable.

  So if it is a scandal, she asks herself, walking along the boulevard Saint-Germain in the amber evening light to meet Jean, what is a scandal? What is touched in people to make them feel scandalised? It is a question that preoccupies her until she arrives at the river, the pont de Sully in front of her, a small park to her right. She crosses the quai, entering the park, and there on a bench that has become theirs over the years sees Jean waiting: that face, staring back at her in welcome surprise, as though their meeting were somehow a wonderful coincidence.

  May he never lose that look, she tells herself as he rises from the bench and they kiss, or the energy behind it. They take the steps down to the river as they have so often, so often that the fishermen along the river greet them.

  ‘You should have your own bench named after you,’ one of them calls.

  They laugh. A barge slowly passes, its wake lapping the river’s edge. She tells him the latest stories of outrage; names the bookshops brazenly displaying her book. He tells her of similar incidents: heated words in cafés, a man accusing a couple of women in a park of being shameless for reading such a book in public – and Camus that morning at Gallimard, passing Jean in the foyer, saying, ‘It’s you, isn’t it? You are Pauline Réage.’

  ‘So,’ he says, taking her hand as another barge passes and they exchange greetings with a man walking his dog. ‘It’s official. It’s a scandal.’

  ‘But why?’ she asks, genuinely surprised and amused by everything. ‘It’s not just the usual reaction to an outrageous book. Even a grubby one.’

  ‘But it’s not a grubby book,’ Jean says, jumping in. ‘That’s just the point. It’s not. And people don’t waste their energy on grubby little books. But they fear this one, precisely because it is not grubby but beautifully written. And that is what makes it dangerous and why they fear it.’

  ‘And this,’ she adds, a persistent puzzled look in her eyes, ‘is not just the usual case of offended morals.’

  ‘No,’ he says, with a nod of agreement, ‘there’s something more. There’s always something more.’

  They are staring at the waters of the river stirred up by the barges, stirred like the city itself. ‘What have we touched on?’

  The pont de Sully behind them, they continue along the river, the sound of traffic on the quai above them building with the end of the working day.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ she continues, ‘it sets off this, this . . .’

  ‘Madness.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says emphatically. ‘But what?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Do they know themselves?’

  ‘There are so many things to be scandalised by in the papers every day,’ she says, an air of perplexed amusement in her voice. ‘Atom bombs, wars, refugees fleeing dictators and death, corrupt cardinals railing against the very thing they desire . . . And yet they choose to be scandalised by the different ways people make love.’

  ‘Do they choose?’

  She is gazing at the waving arms of a passing tourist boat. She frowns. ‘That man I told you about in the café. He exploded. Like a bomb.’ She turns to Jean. ‘Boom!’

  He stares at her, assembling his thoughts, while lifting the collar of his coat up as the early spring chill begins to descend on them. Odd, she thinks, it makes him look suddenly younger.

  ‘There is always a part of people,’ he begins, the next bit of the sentence forming in his head as he is speaking, ‘that they want kept even from themselves. Perhaps you’ve touched that part. Whatever it may be.’

  She smiles. ‘With my little bit of porn?’

  ‘It’s more than that and you know it is.’

  ‘You heard Gaston: smut, porn!’

  He dismisses this with a wave of the hand. ‘And a country, for that matter, also has those parts it wants kept even from itself because it’s too painful to know. Touchy times.’ He then quickly adds, ‘You’ve become a parlour game, you know.’

  ‘A game?’

  ‘Who is Pauline Réage?’

  ‘Ah!’ she sighs thoughtfully, as if asking herself the same question. Who, indeed? That woman leaning over the railing of the pont Marie? For they have strolled from one bridge to another, taking in the wake of a barge and listening to its horn rolling out over the river and the city like some prehistoric mating call. Or that woman walking her dog, or some bright young sage with tristesse in her eyes? Who, indeed? Any of them, all of them? Could Pauline Réage not be everybody? And aren’t we all our authors? Do not the times themselves write their story through the agency of the author? The two – the times and the one who just happens to pick up the pen – inseparable from
each other? Yes and no, she muses, head tilting from one side to the other in silent debate with herself.

  They pass under the bridge. Jean continues, ‘I watched a group of students in a café today. For once they weren’t talking politics. They were playing the game: Who is Pauline Réage? Someone said Camus. Another Sartre. And Robbe-Grillet.’

  She smiles. ‘All men.’

  ‘Then someone said Charles de Gaulle.’

  ‘Pah!’ she suddenly explodes into laughter, both of their faces lighting up.

  ‘Look what you’ve done!’

  She takes his hand. ‘What we’ve done.’

  Hand in hand, they stroll on. Silent for a moment.

  ‘Do you regret it?’ he asks.

  ‘Writing it?’

  ‘No, publishing it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She wonders. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he says, looking over his shoulder as they mount the spiral of metal steps to the street above. ‘Aren’t we both hearing the first night slap-slap-slap of theatre seats banging back into place as half the audience walks out, mid-performance, in protest?’ He stops and turns round to her, beneath him on the steps. ‘And isn’t it a beautiful sound?’ He grins. ‘Not heard very often. And can’t you just hear that sound now, all over the city?’

  When they emerge on the footpath the light has dimmed, the blue hour falls across the scene like a veil. But they are not walking to their room. Instead, they stroll to a small gallery in the tangle of familiar Latin Quarter streets before them.

  ‘Have you noticed a pattern?’ she asks.

  ‘A pattern?’

  ‘I might be wrong. I see women reading it, but not men.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it.’

  ‘You’re a man.’

  ‘But I’ve read it.’

  ‘You had to.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Only that I see a pattern. But what does it mean? That,’ she says, suddenly breaking into English, ‘is the question.’

  They come to the door of the crowded gallery: paintings, trays of drinks, the hum of people.

  ‘Men hate it,’ she adds, a troubled look on her face. ‘I’m sure they do.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ His eyebrows rise, the owl of wonder is thinking. ‘Perhaps.’

  She weighs the matter as he discreetly puts his arm around her waist and guides her into the humming throng of the gallery opening, a well-known painter walking straight up to Jean the moment they enter, almost accosting him with the question, as if he must surely know: ‘Who is Pauline Réage?’

  * * *

  A middle-aged woman in a simple skirt and matching jacket, over which is draped a long winter coat, a small woman, somebody’s aunt, just anybody really, is staring back at Dominique, and Dominique gazes upon her as if asking herself – do I know you? Have we met before?

  Dominique moves her foot, making circling motions on the footpath; the familiar other of her reflection in a shop window does likewise. Dominique lifts her arm, then drops it. Her reflection too. They stop moving, they look at each other, like an old vaudeville duo trying to catch each other out. But of course you can’t catch yourself out. They are each other, one and the same, and yet not: like those mirrored rooms and halls that reveal multiple reflections and multiple selves all contained inside the shell of the person we present to the world.

  You scare them, whoever you are. You frighten them. You unnerve them. And once again Dominique, having farewelled Jean for the evening and begun her walk home, is dwelling on the idea of scandal. Look at you, she silently intones, nothing exceptional to look at, just another face on the street, and yet you frighten them. But why, why? Everyone has forces within them, drives ancient and new, that the world insists they contain. Or restrain. But she has conjured them up, set them loose and unleashed the chaos of desire and disruption: disruption that shakes the order of things and leaves wives not listening to their husbands. And husbands throwing away the book that so disrupts. But why should it bother them so? It is a story, after all, in which the men are in control. Or seem to be. Do they sense something else: that the submission of the ever-consenting O is not what it seems? She nods to herself, they burnt witches for that.

  And is that the fear, that her words will echo through neat, suburban streets and homes, into the heart of a million marriages, releasing the anarchy of desire in the hearts of a million wives, calling out to one or more of those thousand unlived lives that they carry inside them? Calling them into life?

  Or, she wonders, do they see in O’s progress the brutal, everyday order of things revealed, laid bare, the mirror of the man-made order of things held up; see it all for what it is – house, home, duty, obedience, self-denial, submission, all mirrored in the captivity of O’s château – and know somewhere in their hearts that no man could ever have written such a book?

  The question stays with her as she meanders back to her parents’ apartment, to the stately part of town into which she can disappear, neither witch nor disruptive revolutionary. She pictures the scene: her cat sleeping on the sofa (before slipping out into the night through the half-open window), the mystery of her mother scanning the newspaper while listening to the radio, her father at rest in his armchair in the library, the escape of a book on his lap. Her world and not her world, but the one that takes her in, and the one to which she brings that secret society of selves – the Dominique Aury she invented years ago, the Pauline Réage she adopted and the Anne Desclos she left behind in the garden of childhood games at Avranches, but who still haunts her every thought and move the way old selves do.

  * * *

  Jean rings early the next morning, asking her to pick him up at his place. It happens, not often, but often enough. It’s a short drive, not difficult. But it’s not the difficulty or ease of the drive that matters; it’s simply being there, knowing that Jean’s wife, bedridden, will be in her room and quite possibly hear the car when Dominique pulls up in the street outside the apartment.

  Dominique will look up, familiar with the window, and know that Germaine’s just there behind the glass. Not some ghost in the background, but actual. She is the silence that follows them, even haunts them if they let her. But just being there, in front of the apartment building, forces Dominique to acknowledge that silence they rarely speak of. Germaine becomes real at such moments, and for Dominique, now pulling up at the front of the building, uncomfortably real. For it is here that she is forced to confront the fact of Germaine, and her deep desire not to be here at all is, of course, a kind of cowardice. Or hypocrisy. Like a meat-eater who can’t stand the thought of an animal being slaughtered.

  And suddenly it’s Germaine – bedridden, weak, dying – who is the strong one, and Dominque the weak one. She looks up, gazing at the window, as Jean steps out the door, briefcase in hand.

  He slides into the passenger seat, a morning smile on his face, and kisses Dominique on the lips. But there is something stolen in the kiss. And unusually awkward, lips not quite connecting. Odd. It’s as though somebody is watching, and then they both realise that somebody is.

  The woman who looks after Germaine is suddenly striding from the front door and walking straight towards the car. And it is the way she strides up to them, a woman on a mission, a woman with something to say, and who will say it whether you want to hear it or not, that makes her approach compelling. Dominique knows instantly that she doesn’t want to hear, and that all she wants is to be gone from this place, that she should never have come here at all. And Jean, in turn, is clearly alarmed as he watches her progress.

  The woman stops by his window; he winds it down. He is about to say something, but he doesn’t get the chance. This woman is here to speak her mind. She leans down slightly, looks through the window and points at Dominique, while speaking directly to Jean.

  ‘Tell this girl,’ she says, in a voice not to be contradicted, ‘that she is not to come here.
’ Both Dominique and Jean are silent. Or rather have been silenced, for this woman brings with her the strength of moral authority. ‘Because when she does,’ the woman continues, ‘madame hears the car – and weeps!’

  Here she slams the flat of her hand down hard on the roof of the car. ‘She must never come here again.’

  And with this, having said what she came to say, the woman swivels on her feet, and strides back into the building, closing the door firmly behind her.

  Dominique and Jean watch her go, both feeling weak in her presence. They watch the door close, then Dominique turns to Jean. He is still, statue-like. Gazing out of the windscreen onto the backstreet. Dominique is shaking. Hands unsteady. Tell this girl . . . They never fight. Have never fought. Not really. But this morning they fight.

  ‘I knew,’ Dominique begins, ‘I should never have come here. It was wrong,’ she says, letting the ‘wrong’ sink in. ‘I knew it was and I should have listened to my instinct.’

  Jean listens, but shows no emotion, and Dominique glares at him in a mixture of anger and disappointment – he’s just another man, after all. No owl, no fabulous forest creature. Just like all the rest. I took you for better, but look at you. You sit there like stone. ‘And you,’ Dominique continues, her voice rising, her hand shaking as she points at him, ‘should never have asked me. You should have known. I should have known. We have been cruel. And callous.’ She gulps in breath, while Jean sits there. ‘Look at us, sitting here, kissing, right under her nose. No wonder she weeps. I would weep if I were her.’ She then adds, ‘But I’m not. I’m the one who makes her weep.’

  Here she stops, gazing through the windscreen onto the ruined morning. ‘Say something. Speak!’

  He sighs, takes her hand, and as if the sigh were speech enough he says, ‘Drive off.’

  She holds his hand for some time. Yes, oh yes, the hand of her owl, her forest creature, his eyes no longer wide with wonder at the beauty and brutality of life, but glazed over with a sense of its sordidness. And at the same time Dominique is thinking of hotel rooms all over the country and . . . what do they call them in America? Motels. Sordid rooms, sordid love. Furtive liaisons. And are they any different, really? Just two more sordid lovers enacting the same old scenes in the same old rooms.