Suddenly he was dazzled by the headlights of another car, which almost grazed him as he passed. A sudden wave of fear swept over him, but only for a second. All the same he drove more slowly. An accident at that particular moment would be really too stupid. He must arrive home in one piece and with all his faculties about him.
The last turning he took very cautiously indeed. And there were the first lights of Enghien, shining wanly through the mist. He changed gear. Here was his street. He was conscious of being cold. He slipped out the clutch and let the car glide forward on its own momentum. At the gate he gently put on the brakes. He looked up at the house.
Behind the shutters lights were burning.
ELEVEN
There was no doubt about it: lights were on in the house. Ravinel hesitated. He was tired, very tired. Otherwise he might perhaps have decided at the last moment not to go in. He might even have turned tail and run away screaming. He felt the comb in his pocket and, turning towards the end of the street, peered into the fog. Certainly nobody could see him. If they did it wouldn’t matter. They’d merely say: ‘Ah, Monsieur Ravinel’s back,’ and go on to talk of something else.
Getting out of the car, he walked towards the gate. Everything was exactly as it always was. He’d find Mireille in the dining room, sewing. She would look up from her work when she heard his step.
‘Well, darling,’ she would say, ‘you must be worn out after driving through this fog.’
He would take off his shoes before going upstairs to change, so as not to dirty the stair carpet. His slippers would be on the bottom stair ready for him. After that…
Ravinel thrust his key into the lock and opened the front door. He had come home. All the rest was obliterated. He had never killed Mireille. He loved her. He had always loved her. In a moment of aberration he had thought he was sick of the daily round of his jog-trot existence. But that had never been serious. No. Mireille was the one he loved. He would never see Lucienne again.
He went into the hall. The light was on. So was the one over the sink in the kitchen. As he shut the front door behind him, he automatically called out:
‘It’s me—Fernand.’
He sniffed. A smell of ragout. On the kitchen stove two saucepans were simmering, and the gas under them had been carefully turned down to little blue beads. The tiled floor had been washed, the clock wound up. It was ten past seven. Everything was bright, clean and tidy, and the ragout filled the room with a pleasant, welcoming smell. In spite of himself, Ravinel peeped into one of the saucepans. Mutton with haricot beans, a favorite dish of his. How thoughtful! Too much so. This intimate homeliness, this atmosphere of peace and… and kindness… It was almost too much of a good thing. He would have really preferred to come home to a more dramatic scene.
He leaned against the table. His head swam. He must talk to Lucienne about that, and she’d give him some medicine for it… To Lucienne? In that case… He gasped like a diver coming up to the surface from the depths.
The dining-room door was half open, and the light was on there too. Through the doorway he could see a chair and one corner of the table covered with a fancy blue tablecloth the pattern of which consisted of a series of alternate coaches and turrets. Mireille had chosen it because it reminded her of some old fairy tale. Was Mireille sitting by the fire? For she generally lit a fire there in damp weather.
He stood outside the door, his head lowered, as though under a weight of guilt. It wasn’t that he was looking for his words, still less trumping up excuses. It was simply that his body refused to advance another step. And he suddenly realized that there were two Ravinels, just as there were two Mireilles. There were the two spirits seeking each other, and the two bodies repelling each other. The fire had been lit; he could hear it crackling now. Of course. Poor Mireille! She’d need some warming up after lying two days in cold water! No. That was wrong. It had never happened.
It was with a trembling hand that he pushed the door open a little farther. He could now see that the table was laid. His napkin was there in its boxwood ring. The light shone down on the carafe. Everything was in its place and welcoming him.
‘Mireille!’
It was as though he were asking permission to enter the room. With a renewed effort he finally flung the door wide open. But there was no one on the sofa in the corner by the fireplace. Behind the brass fireguard, the fire flickered gaily. The table was laid for two. Ravinel was still in his raincoat. He took it off and threw it onto a chair. Ah! On Mireille’s plate was a note. This time it was written on their own note-paper.
My poor darling
Everything seems to be going wrong. Have your supper. Don’t wait for me. I’ll be back later.
It was hardly necessary to study the handwriting, yet he did so. The puzzling thing was why she hadn’t signed the last two notes. Perhaps, where she was now, names didn’t count for so much. Nor perhaps did individuality. Such individuality as there was was vague and undefined. It must be marvelous. To get away from that burdensome thing ‘self,’ with its own particular trajectory which we call fate, and its own particular label of a name! Ravinel to boot! The absurd name given to him by that pedantic little schoolmaster who had made his youth a misery. Yes, it must be wonderful. It offered hope.
He sat down heavily in the easy chair and began to unlace his shoes. When Mireille came back, he’d explain everything to her. Everything. Beginning at the very beginning, that is to say at Brest. For that’s where everything had started. They had neither of them ever talked about their childhood. Too shy no doubt. What did he know of Mireille’s? She had suddenly sailed into his life at the age of twenty-four. Up to then her life was a closed book, and it had remained so. Ten years earlier she had been a girl of fourteen. Of course. But what did that tell him? Nothing. It didn’t tell him whether she was afraid of the dark, for instance, or what sort of games she played. Perhaps she too had played the secret fog game. What had she talked about with her young friends? And why had she had those sudden irresistible urges to run away?
They had lived so close together, yet they had never realized that they suffered from the same nameless ill. They had felt cramped there in that too quiet little house. They had wanted to be elsewhere. Anywhere. Even in Paradise. For he had always believed in Paradise. He had heard about it from Sister Madeleine in the catechism class. She was very old and on the subject of sin was apt to speak violently, even venomously. But when she spoke of Paradise it was impossible not to believe her. She used to describe it as though she’d actually seen it, as a huge park scintillating with light. Full of wild animals too, but gentle ones with large pathetic eyes. And flowers, strange ones, blue and white. Finally she would add, looking down at her work-stained hands:
‘And there’ll be no more work to do, no more work at all.’
It used to make him feel sad and happy at the same time. But he knew already that Paradise was a place it would be very difficult to get into.
He got up and carried his shoes into the kitchen, putting them down in their proper place, on the shelf by the cupboard. His slippers were waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. He had bought them at Nantes in a shop near the Place Royale. It was silly to think of a thing like that, but in the over-excited state of his mind his memory was sharpened, filling his head with trivial details.
He turned out the gas. He wasn’t hungry. Mireille wouldn’t be hungry either. She couldn’t be. He walked upstairs slowly one hand pressed to his side. All the lights were on, in the bedroom, in the study, and even on the landing. They gave the house a festive air. It had been like that when they first came to take possession of it, and Mireille had clapped her hands for joy.
Upstairs, he mooched about, not knowing what to do with himself. He had a slight headache. The bed had been tidied, and the empty bottle was no longer under the wardrobe. The study too was spick and span. He sat down at his desk, in front of a pile of folders of various colors.
What were they doing there? Oh, yes. His
firm had asked him for a report. On what? He couldn’t remember. It was all so far away, and so utterly unimportant. A faint sound came from the direction of the street. He went quickly back into the bedroom and stood listening at the window. A man’s step. A door shutting. One of the neighbors, the railway man, coming home.
Ravinel was in the study again. He left all the doors open so as not to be caught unaware. The faintest tread or rustle of a skirt would warn him of Mireille’s presence. Why did he start going through all his drawers? Was he endeavoring to sum up his life and find a meaning in it? Or was he merely trying to occupy his mind, to fix his attention on something? Downstairs the clock was ticking faintly. It was a little after half past seven.
The drawers were full of papers of all sorts—drafts of reports he had written to the firm, circulars and other publicity material for the lines he traveled in, photographs and newspaper cuttings, mostly about fishing—futile all of them and bearing witness to a futile life.
In the left-hand drawer were the materials from which he made his flies. Here was something different: no one could call this futile. He felt a twinge of regret. In his way he had been an artist. He had invented new flies, as horticulturists invent new flowers. In the firm’s catalogue there was a whole page devoted to ‘Ravinel flies.’ The drawer was divided into compartments containing the partridge feathers, cock’s hackles, fur, and tying silk, with which he had made these delicate little creatures. One compartment was full of them, and they lay there huddled like insects struck down in a heap at the foot of a wall by the chill air of evening. It wasn’t exactly a pretty sight. They might be artificial, but that didn’t make them any the less a picture of massacre.
He shut the drawer again quickly. He had toyed with the idea of writing a monograph on flies. He wouldn’t be able to now. That was a loss. It might have been something really worth while.
Come on! None of that! He mustn’t soften. He listened. The silence was so complete, so absolute, that it seemed to him that he could hear the trickle of the stream in the lavoir. It was an illusion, of course. What’s more: it was a disagreeable one which had to be banished promptly. He dived into another drawer, in which, beneath a heap of carbon copies of letters, he found some old prescriptions. They dated from the time before his marriage when he had persuaded himself he was suffering from cancer. He had lost all appetite and had been unable to sleep, till one day he realized that he had simply raised a bogey to frighten himself. A sort of self-flagellation. He had become fascinated by the word cancer and took a sort of perverted pleasure in picturing it as a kind of spider devouring his guts. They had had any amount of spiders in the house at Brest, and he had always been at the same time afraid of them and fascinated. They might even have had something to do with his taking up flies later on, but that of course was mere speculation.
A stair creaked and Ravinel pricked up his ears. It was one single creak and nothing more—probably merely the oak in the staircase working. And all at once this brightly lit house seemed to become mournful. If Mireille were suddenly to appear there in the doorway he felt that he would hear the same sort of sound inside him. Something would crack and he would fall to the ground in splinters. That’s what he felt, but of course it didn’t mean anything. He’d felt the cancer, hadn’t he? Yet he was still alive. It took a lot to kill a human being. It had taken two heavy andirons to…
Shut up! No more of that! He got up, pushing back his chair to make a noise and break the spell. For a minute or two he paced up and down the study, then went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. The dresses were all there, hanging from the rod at the top, in a pungent atmosphere of mothball. Why had he opened the door? What had he expected to find there? He slammed it to again and went downstairs.
Silence! It was the silence of the place that…
Generally he could hear the trains going by. Did the fog blanket sounds after all? More likely it stopped them running. It stopped everything. Everything except that exasperating clock. Nine fifteen. She was never as late as this. At least…
He shrugged his shoulders. He was getting in a muddle; he was losing his grip. Something must have happened to Mireille: she had met with an accident. The trouble was that the ideas of before got mixed up with those of afterwards, and they turned slowly round and round in his cranium, pressing against its bones.
The dining-room fire was dying down. He ought to fetch some more wood from the cellar. But he hadn’t the courage. It might well be in the cellar that they had set the trap. Who? What trap? There wasn’t one.
He poured himself out a little wine, which he sipped gingerly. How late she was! He went upstairs again, heavily. His whole body was heavy. What if she didn’t come? Was he to wait all night for her? And if she didn’t come in the morning? How long could he hold out?
Not much longer. Not much. If she didn’t come to him, he’d have to take matters in his own hands. He took out his revolver, warm from his pocket with a nice living warmth. Lying in his hand, it was nothing but a bright shining toy. With his thumb he pressed up the safety catch. He had never really understood the mechanism of a revolver. For that matter, he had never understood how a man could press the barrel to his own temple or to his chest. But what was the point of going into that? Obviously that was not what was going to happen to him.
He put it back into his pocket and sat down once more at his desk. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to write to Lucienne. On second thoughts, no. She wouldn’t believe what he said. She’d think he was deliberately lying. What did she really think of him? There was no longer any point in pretending things were otherwise: she thought of him as a second-rater. That was the sort of thing you knew all the time, however much you might pretend the contrary, that you had known right from the start. So she despised him, did she? No, it wasn’t exactly that. She just took him for a man who had no inward drive. Which of course was perfectly true. He hadn’t. He had gone on too long allowing other people to think for him, decide for him, and make him lead a life that wasn’t of his own choosing. Even Mireille: she was one of them too.
But hadn’t Lucienne been attracted by him? If not, why had she taken such an intense interest in him, studying his reactions, analyzing his character? And there were moments when her manner was positively tender. She seemed to be encouraging him, holding out a helping hand. At such moments she could speak quite sweetly, too, of their future. She was never very precise about it, but that didn’t alter the fact that her words contained more than a hint of promise. Admittedly she had often been sweet and gentle with Mireille too. But that—it was like chatting genially with her patients when they were going to die.
Mechanically, he rummaged among some more papers, bringing some photographs to light. Mireille taken with the Kodak he had given her. That must have been only a few days before she fell ill with typhoid. There was also a snapshot of Lucienne taken about the same time. He compared the two. How graceful she was, Mireille! Slim as a boy and appealing, with those large candid eyes, which were focused on the camera but which saw farther, infinitely farther, right through the camera and right through him, as though he was standing between her and her future, between her and something she had long been waiting for.
In the other, Lucienne was just as she always was, impersonal, almost stern, her shoulders square, her chin a bit heavy. Not that she wasn’t good-looking. She was. But hers was a cold and dangerous beauty.
There wasn’t a single snapshot of him. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Mireille to take one of him. Nor to Lucienne either. The only photograph he could find of himself was an old one that had been taken for an identity card or driving license. What age was he then? Twenty-one, perhaps, or twenty-two. He hadn’t begun to get bald. The print was already fading with age, but it was still possible to make out a thin face that was at the same time eager and disappointed.
More photographs. And one after the other he gazed at them dreamily, recalling incidents that no one would ever know. It was getting late.
Ten perhaps or half past. The damp from outside seeped slowly into the flimsily built house. He was cold and numb and could no longer control the train of his thoughts. Was he going to fall asleep there in his chair? Was Mireille going after all to creep upon him unawares?
With an effort he opened his eyes and got up, groaning. Yes, he had dozed off for a second. He mustn’t let that happen again. Not on any account. Dragging his feet, he went downstairs once more and into the kitchen. It wasn’t so late as he’d thought—only ten to ten—but he was desperately tired. It seemed ages since he’d had a good night’s rest. His hands were shaking all the time, like an alcoholic’s. He was parched and thirsty and felt all shriveled up inside. A cup of coffee was what he needed, but he hadn’t the energy to make any.
He put on an overcoat and turned the collar up. With that and his slippers and his unshaven face, he looked a pretty sight. He felt like a person in a dream wandering through a house that had somehow ceased to be his home. They had changed places now, he and Mireille. He was the ghost while she was still in the land of the living. It only needed her to come in and he would be pushed back into the shades.
He lumbered round the table, his movements becoming slower and slower. He had no hat on, but it felt as though his head was encircled by an iron ring. Finally, utterly exhausted, he turned off all the lights on the ground floor and climbed laboriously up to the first floor again. There he turned the lights out too, except the one in the study where he took refuge, shutting the door behind him. He had made up his mind: he couldn’t go down again. He couldn’t face it. After all, he would still be able to hear.
The minutes passed, how many he had no idea, for he gradually sank into a semistupor, incoherent memories racing through his brain. His eyes were shut, but he wasn’t really asleep. With what consciousness was left him he listened, listened to the vast silence around him that sometimes turned into a roar like that of the sea heard in a shell. Like the sea, yes. The silence was like a sea all round him and he was drowning in it. Soon he would go under…
She Who Was No More Page 14