They play for an hour, each taking delight in those occasional moments when distance, trajectory and force are judged just right and the crisp sound of ball against ball settles the game. It is the first chance they’ve had to get out of the city, to leave Paris behind – the ins and outs, the outs and ins, of the small literary quarter they live in – as well as the scandal that shows no sign of exhausting itself. The game is not so much mindless as requiring a different kind of thinking. The old men of the town sit on benches and talk, smoke rising from them. Small birds flit from one scrap to another. The sun lazily passes from morning to afternoon. The only sound is the clink of the balls and the purr of the odd car or van past the square. And although there is movement, it is inside this all-encompassing country stillness of a drowsy, summer day that sees no point in rousing itself. Jean looks at her, his face relaxed and glowing: have we arrived in paradise? If so, are we alive or have we passed into some perfect after-world without having noticed?
He has not looked so calm in ages, and she too feels as though some blessedness has fallen on her, that the stillness of the town has slowed them down to the point that they seem to have passed into some everlasting ‘now’, all thoughts of past and future, of scandal and fuss, too impossibly distant to impinge upon the moment. Is this what happiness is – and have we stumbled upon it? It is one of those moments when her love of Jean, and his of her, seems to be concentrated into its very essence. They play in silence, no need of speech.
Then he smiles and takes her hand. They are neither young nor old nor middle-aged. They simply are. She looks about her, infused with the wonder of everything – the town, for all the world, like those villages that exist in storybooks only, not on the map. And is that why neither of them noticed the name of the place as they drove in, because they had already driven off the map?
They carry this blessed state, this grace that descended upon them upon entering the town, into a restaurant that evening. And everything they taste is new: like two lovers discovering or rediscovering the sensation of first-time touch and taste.
And it is as they are twirling their spoons round and round their coffee cups that they hear a voice carrying from the next table – and everything evaporates.
A man is proclaiming, telling the whole table, ‘You know, since Françoise wrote Story of O our lives have never been the same.’
There are murmurs of understanding. Dominique and Jean stare at each other, their spoons suddenly still. A woman’s voice rises above the murmurs.
‘And poor Charles – his position and all. What was I thinking?’
Jean’s eyes, wide with amazement most of the time, have never looked quite so wide. Dominique stifles a giggle. She knows, he knows, that if they start they’ll never stop. The woman at the next table continues.
‘But there you are, the cat’s out of the bag now. Can’t put it back.’
Dominique dares to glance at the table, eyeing the husband – a bland, tweed-coated type in a tie; what the world calls respectable – who is staring at his wife with a mixture of surprise and admiration.
‘Just look at her,’ he says to the table. ‘Who would have thought. Such hidden depths.’
‘Oh Charles,’ his wife protests, ‘please, please. It was just a little thing I tossed off in my leisure.’
Here Dominique’s eyebrows lift as she puffs out her cheeks, for the woman, indeed, has the look of someone used to considerable measures of leisure. Dominique listens with mounting amazement.
‘I can’t,’ says the woman, ‘I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Now everybody thinks I’m a creature of whips and heaven knows what,’ she adds, as Dominique suppresses a giant guffaw. ‘And now my publisher wants a sequel. I’m starting to wish I’d never written the thing. I’m sure Colette felt like this.’
Again, there are murmurs of understanding. Dominique shakes her head, while Jean waves to the waiter for the bill. Somehow, among the discussion of the bill and the payment, fragments of conversation continue to carry to their table.
‘Oh, who knows where these things come from,’ the wife continues, seemingly in answer to a question.
‘And the name?’ someone else asks as Dominique and Jean rise and leave their table.
‘Oh, somebody I met only once. Odd.’
Outside the restaurant Dominique and Jean splutter, then fall into helpless laughter.
‘Just a little thing I tossed off,’ Dominique manages to say, before being rendered speechless by laughter again. It goes on and on, like a bad case of hiccups that seems to know no end. ‘In my lei . . . In my lei . . .’ She tries to finish the sentence but can’t.
Back in Paris, Jean tells the publisher of the conversation they overheard this night, and the publisher confirms that he too has heard of such conversations. Women and men all over France are claiming to be the real Pauline Réage. Hundreds of them. ‘Why?’ Dominique asks, not so much of Jean, but the world. ‘Why do that?’
Jean smiles. ‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘You want anonymity – they want fame.’
She slowly shakes her head. ‘Why ever would they want that?’
‘You’ll have to ask them.’
The game, the parlour game of ‘Who is Pauline Réage?’, has changed. It is no longer enough to ask the question – you must also be the answer. I, I am Pauline Réage.
22.
It is the strangest sound. Loud, insistent, all energy. A kind of invasion. For it insists that you listen to it. And the words, if they are words at all, belong to no language Dominique has ever heard before. They are more like a baby’s cries of delight. And although this is not her music, and it is not the first time she has heard it, she is drawn to it. It is, she senses, the harbinger of something. Although just what that something is she’s not sure.
It has been a year, more or less, since her book stirred the city. One summer has blended into another. She is walking through the place Saint-Michel on a warm day. Young people, French and Americans, here for the summer vacation, lounge about near the fountain as she steps in front of a café with a juke-box in the window, the mechanism from which this sound rushes, loud and urgent . . . It is the language of the young, a kind of code, which they seem to be fluent in, voices around her occasionally singing along with the record playing on the juke-box. Juke-box, she says to herself, puzzled for a moment, pondering the newness, the clank of both the word and this hyphenated contraption.
As she edges closer to the window she hears it better and sees the small black disc revolving like a flat planet in a glassed-in space. The sound is clearer, but the words are just as much a mystery as when she first heard this, well . . . song. And that’s because they’re not words. They’re expulsions of . . . what? Sheer energy. And, she can’t help but think, a kind of joy. Life, that’s what it is. Life speaking the unfiltered language of life.
It is the new music. American music. The latest scandal. Instead of fathers, mothers and husbands snatching her book from the hands of the young, they are snatching this music from them. Jungle music, they call it. Primitive. Elemental. And just as she scared them by conjuring up anarchic forces in herself and, through her book, conjuring them up in others, so too this music scares them.
It is a sound that overnight, or so it seems, has made everything that has gone before look obsolete. Quaint. History. The old scandal makes way for the new. And she can’t help but wonder if this will be the fate of her book too. Once shocking, soon to be quaint. If not already. And for all its brutality and rawness, this sound also carries with it the poignancy of age. Of aging. For she will turn fifty soon and when she listens to this music, its utterances that need no translation to the young around her, she feels fifty.
She moves through the groups lounging about, the young women with short hair, wearing blue jeans and sandals. And for a moment she contemplates the idea of blue jeans and is aware that she has entered an age that makes her conscious of things that she wil
l never do: like wear jeans and sandals and lounge about beside a fountain on a sunny day. Nothing better to do. And the young men, some wearing goatee beards, others in the kind of brushed back hair that comes with this new music.
She leaves the place Saint-Michel behind and wanders into that tangle of streets that leads down to Gallimard, for contrary to what anybody might think after observing the young groups lounging by the place Saint-Michel fountain, this is not a Sunday but a working day. And as she leaves the square behind and its music fades she is conscious of walking back into the past after a glimpse of the future. One that she will be more an observer of rather than a participant in. For they will do things differently in that future, things that she won’t, such as wear blue jeans.
She blends into the streets, twisting this way and that, passing a bookshop here and there, stopping at their display windows: her book, her love letter that caused such a fuss not so long ago, nowhere in sight. And as much as she tells herself it doesn’t matter, that she never wanted it to be published in the first place, there is a touch of regret at not seeing it there. And with that regret comes the realisation that she enjoyed it all, the scandal, the game. And will miss it.
Nobody in the cafés or restaurants or parks or family gatherings bothers asking Who is Pauline Réage? any more. It is yesterday’s question. Yesterday’s game. Her book, heaven knows, may already be quaint. She imagines a time when young readers may even laugh over it and, instead of asking who the author is, ask: did people really find this shocking?
She nears Gallimard and the offices of the Nouvelle Revue française, conscious of entering that halfway zone in which one world has begun to give way to another. But for the time being both of them occupying the same space and time. If awkwardly. Like those family gatherings attended by the young and old, when they both overlap, before the young leave for their parties, and the old are left to themselves.
When she steps inside, Jean is the first person she sees, his eyes alight, the eyes she has always found entrancing. He quietly takes her aside and leads her into his office. He has news, he says, after shutting the door. Her publisher, a young man whom she has only met in passing (for she is, after all, anonymous), has telephoned Jean that morning not only with news of sales well beyond their expectations, but of translations and publication in countries she never expected her letter to go to.
All those thoughts of one day becoming yesterday’s event, yesterday’s mystery, of the book she became quietly proud of now looking quaint and old-fashioned, even silly, fade with this news. And she’s asking herself who wants to wear jeans anyway?
Jean puts his feet up on his desk and lights a cigarette.
‘We may not be a scandal any more, but our little book is selling more than ever,’ he proudly tells her. And while she is pleased to hear it, she is also amused at the way he now refers to the book as our little book, something he does often now. As though it were a collaboration. She playing Colette to his Willy. And all those rumours that Pauline Réage was, in fact, Jean Paulhan, have become at least half true. And she can’t help but ask herself as well – will he, will he at some point in the future, actually come to believe that it was a collaboration? Anonymity, she tells herself, like a space that must be filled, like nature and a vacuum, has its dangers.
How things change. She never wanted it published, it was written for him, and she was content for him to do what he liked with it: as if, indeed, it were his own. And now she’s aware of being quietly possessive of it. Not that she really believes he would ever come to think of himself as the author, for this talk of our and us and we is the language of a co-conspirator. And isn’t that what they’ve always been? Co-conspirators, their own secret society, initiators of the great game of scandal?
* * *
In the late afternoon they walk to their café and choose a booth, for there are few customers. The jolly host, she notes, becoming rounder and rounder every day. Without even having to order, he brings them glasses of wine and a small basket of bread.
Jean lights a cigarette, lost in thought. He says nothing, nor does she. Instead, she looks around, suddenly struck by how much of their lives have been lived here, how many of their plans hatched here, and with this she’s remembering her first meeting with Jean and that instant sense of them being one and the same. As though some elemental bond were formed here which has never really gone.
‘The fact is,’ he says, leaning forward, ‘things are never what they seem. When the English banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover and everybody was outraged, was it really,’ and here he breaks into English, ‘because the word cock was mentioned forty-seven times, balls thirty-eight and cunt twenty-three?’
She grins. ‘You’ve counted them?’
He returns the grin with a slight shrug. ‘Somebody has.’
‘Somebody with nothing much better to do.’
‘No, it wasn’t that that shocked them. They’re a plain-speaking people. And English ladies have affairs all the time.’
‘I know,’ she says, anticipating him. ‘It wasn’t the fact that she had an affair, it was the fact that she had an affair with the gamekeeper.’
‘That was the shocking bit.’
‘And that poor Bovary woman,’ she adds, enjoying the speculative game. ‘It wasn’t the fact that she made love to a man other than her husband . . .’
‘It was the fact that she was so unrestrained as to do it in a carriage! In the centre of the city!’
They laugh. More wine appears, the wine and the words complementing each other like the right wine with the right dish.
‘You see,’ he says, ‘there’s always something else. Even if you can’t see it at the time.’
‘I once slapped a man,’ she says, distracted by a memory.
‘Hard?’
‘Really slapped him.’ She pauses. ‘It felt good. I should have slapped more men.’
‘Why?’ Jean asks, intrigued by the turn in the conversation.
‘Why did I slap him, or why should I have slapped more men?’
‘Why did you slap him?’
‘Well,’ she says, relishing the moment, ‘this is it. His hand was on my knee. But that wasn’t the reason. He had, at least, asked permission after he put it there. It was because he said tu when he asked me. The nerve, I thought. Put your hand on my knee, yes. Kiss me. Make love to me, but don’t assume we are intimate!’
He smiles. ‘Of course.’
‘But he went away nursing his cheek, convinced, no doubt, that it was because he merely put his hand on my knee. Oh, he had transgressed, but not in the way he thought.’
‘Exactly. There is always something else . . .’
They sit in silent communion. The calm after the storm. Everybody settling back into their routines – until the next explosion, the next eruption, the next scandal, comes along.
Part Six
Death and Revolution
Paris, May 1968
23.
Perhaps I too could write those books you like to read . . . She can’t remember her exact words any more, they were spoken so long ago now. What does it matter? Who cares? This is where it all ends. This is where it was always going to end. An old man in the thrall of a young woman’s laughter, the words we write that will last or not, the pyramids – it’s all about death in the end.
Dominique sits by Jean’s bed, a notebook on her lap, pencil in hand. There is a small cot near his bed where she often sleeps, just so he will know that she is there in the night. There for him, if needed. At the moment he is sleeping, an uneasy troubled sleep. Long silences, followed by loud snorts and sudden exhalations. Breath in and out. Old breath, breathing its last. The faint blue light casting a dreamy glow over the room, almost as though the bed that Jean sleeps in, the chair she sits in, the very room itself, have been cut loose from their earthly moorings and they are floating through space.
Almost. For outside, in the glare of the corridor, the night nurse has her radio on, tuned to Radio Lux
embourg, as does the whole city, it seems, and even from where she sits reality impinges. A news reporter is telling listeners what is happening on the streets outside their closed doors. Dominique, quite clearly, can hear the fizz and crack of gas canisters exploding in the night: crack, crack, like rifle shots. And the crash, the shattered sound of broken glass, a police siren, the boom of something blowing up. Probably a car. And then the sudden roar of the crowd, or is it a mob? For the people are both crowd and mob, and their cheers and shouts and screams pour from the radio out into the corridor and into the room in which she sits by Jean’s side.
And this music that she first heard years before, this elemental sound, can be heard among the shouts and cheers; the words indistinct, but always more utterances than words anyway. It is a picture painted with sound that distracts her for the moment. Takes her away from what she is writing in her notepad.
Jean sleeps through it all. The nurse switches the radio off and picks up a magazine. The room once again slips from its earthly mooring, and Dominique resumes writing her second love letter to Jean while they float through the space of their own private universe. It is the story of a girl in love, but a girl – and she calls herself that – who is afraid of losing her lover, for the girl is not young any more and every time she watches her lover’s eyes stray – to this woman and that one – she asks herself how long will it be before his body follows his eyes. And as much as she would never stop him or presume to deny anybody the pleasure of experience, she dreads that moment. Dreads it like death. For it would inevitably be a kind of death: a death to the spirit. Death in life. And so to stave off that moment and draw him back to her, the girl in the story decides to write for him, and for him alone, one of those books he likes to read.
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