Besson heard the music right through to the end. When it stopped there was the sound of a woman’s voice, talking fast and volubly, but the radio was too far away for Besson to make out what she was saying. When the voice ceased, there was silence for four or five seconds, broken only by the crackle of static. Then came more music, but swing this time, and a woman singing to its accompaniment. The song had a slow, muted tempo, occasionally rising to a harsh crescendo, sometimes lingering softly on one word, sustaining the note. Besson tried to catch what the singer was saying, but the most he picked up were single words or mere broken syllables: ‘… me …’, ‘… I … flowers … ow ers … ’, ‘… told me …’, ‘… you knew …’, ‘… me … or people …’ ‘…ated …’, ‘… fi-i-ire …’
The song ended with a most curious sound, a sort of low-pitched throaty buzz that vibrated in the air for a long time, together with the accompaniment, and then stopped, abruptly. There followed another three or four seconds of crackling silence, and then the same voice as before began to speak again, very fast, telling an incomprehensible story in its unknown tongue. What it actually said was more or less as follows: ‘Listen, ladies, don’t worry about wind and rain and seasonal inclemencies of that sort, you can tame them, yes, you can make them your best friends, the most reliable aids to your beauty, if you just know how to get the better of them, these furious elements will freshen up your complexion, put a bright sparkle in your eye, fill you with joie de vivre, but if on the other hand you don’t take them seriously you’ll wish you had afterwards, they’ll dry up your skin and ruin your delicate complexion and give you premature wrinkles, in fact they’ll treat you as enemies, they’ll be absolutely pitiless, so get the better of this severe cold and wind and rain, ladies, learn to preserve your beauty just as you preserve your health and happiness, and to achieve this, make a rule of using Pollen Face Cream every morning, Pollen, exclusively manufactured by Boyer-Vidal, which will keep the proper quota of moisture in your skin all day, Pollen, the face cream for every occasion! Good shopping, ladies!’
Besson stayed where he was for some time, listening to the voice from the little white-and-gold plastic box. If his watch was right, it was half past three; but the clock that stood on the refrigerator, in the kitchen, made the time nearer four o’clock.
A little later the redheaded girl came in, and they talked for a while.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve sort of got used to seeing—to seeing you around.’ She used the familiar tu, and the word came out with embarrassed hesitancy.
‘What do you mean, seeing me around?’ Besson asked.
‘Well, here. I mean to say, you’ve become a feature of the landscape, haven’t you?’
Besson tried to make a joke of it, but felt depressed despite himself.
‘That’s serious,’ he said.
The girl fumbled in her apron pocket and fished a cigarette out of a new packet.
‘Got any matches?’ she asked.
Besson offered her his box. As she took it, she grasped Besson’s hand at the same moment, then let it go again. Her hair was tousled, and its flaming red texture seemed to be reflected in her face. Even her eyes had a red glint about them, under the fine sweep of her gleaming lashes. She smoked her cigarette, watching Besson all the time.
‘You’re not in the least like him,’ she said. ‘He was always chattering, always on the move, couldn’t keep still for a second. Whereas you—well, honestly, I’ve never seen a more inert character.’
‘Oh, I can move, all right,’ Besson said.
‘You? Why, you spend all day stretched out on that bed.’
‘It isn’t true. I go out a lot. I take plenty of walks.’
‘You don’t do a job of work, though. You don’t want to—’
‘Oh, I’ve done that, too. When I was a teacher. Off I’d go to school, day in day out, and rattle off the same stuff to a classroom full of idiots—’
‘Did they rag you?’
‘No, not really. At first I made a real effort and kept them under control. Afterwards I let them do whatever they liked. They used to read the comics. Some of them even smoked—those at the back of the class, anyway—and drank bottles of Coca-Cola. But they didn’t make any noise. I told them one day. Do whatever you like, but I’m not having any noise. I had a book to read, you see. I told them, if I hear so much as a whisper, I’ll paste the stuffing out of you. That was about it. I spent my period reading, and when I heard the bell, I just got up and went.’
‘You weren’t a good teacher.’
‘I was, you know. My lessons were fine. I prepared them very carefully. But the kids just weren’t interested.’
‘Were they all like that?’
‘No, of course not. There were two or three—at first they used to stay and ask me questions, after class. But I soon sent them packing and, they got bored. In the end they got to be just like the others.’
‘And what—’
‘There was one who did interest me, though. A boy called David. He showed me his poems, once. He was an unhealthy kid, with a lot of lines on his face for his age. He really was different from the rest of them. He wrote the weirdest poems, all about the story of the Creation. There was a character in them called Elleüs, if I remember rightly. It was all very much in the mythical tradition, but not bad stuff by any means. I don’t know what became of him afterwards.’
‘What about the others? Did they just play along?’
‘Three-quarters of them, sure. But I didn’t bother. It was their look-out. Luckily, in the end, the Head got wind of what was going on. He dropped in on the class one day, unannounced. Some of the boys were smoking, and others reading their comics. He slaughtered the lot of them—and I got the sack, on the spot. That’s all there is to tell about it.’
The redheaded girl giggled. ‘I’d love to have been there,’ she said.
Outside the wind was blowing more fiercely than ever, howling down the street, wrenching loose everything in sight. In the middle of the room, on the bed, Besson and Marthe felt as though they were in a railway carriage, travelling at full speed, and drawn by an invisible engine.
The redheaded girl said: ‘That’s funny. Do you know, just about the same thing happened to me, too. I used to work in the Post Office, you know. I managed to get a job as a telephone operator. Just part-time, in the afternoon. While I was working I left Lucas in a children’s nursery. I did the job any old how, no kidding, just hit or miss. And no one noticed a bloody thing. I had to make up my own mind that I’d got to get out—if I hadn’t I’d be there still. But after it was finished I felt so damned depressed. Told myself I was a failure, that there wasn’t a single thing in life I was capable of doing, all that jazz.’
She paused, and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her forefinger.
‘Well, maybe in the last resort it’s not all that important anyway,’ she said.
‘Maybe not,’ said Besson.
She hesitated a moment, and then, her eyes on the ash-laden tip of her cigarette, added: ‘The really important thing is to be happy.’
When Besson made no answer to this, she said: ‘What about you? Are you happy?’
He tried to answer the question seriously.
‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I’m happy, yes. Sometimes not. But it isn’t all that important.’
‘Yes, it is important. Just when do you feel happy?’ She looked straight at him as she spoke.
‘I’m not sure,’ Besson said. ‘It all depends. One fellow I used to know said that if you wanted to be happy, all you needed was a system.’
‘A system?’
‘Yes, you know—religious faith, Marxism, anything you like so long as it’s got a system behind it.’
‘But being happy’s a simpler matter than that, surely?’
‘Or more complicated. Maybe it’s having a real grasp of what you’re about—I mean, you’re in a car, and you know you’re in a car.’ He too used the familiar t
u.
She said nothing for a moment, as though digesting this idea—or perhaps as though she had not understood it.
‘But don’t you think it’s easy to know what you’re doing?’ she asked him. ‘Surely it’s easy?’
‘No,’ Besson said. ‘But sometimes it happens.’
Her great deep liquid eyes gazed at him as though they would penetrate to the very depths of his soul. Besson felt a wave of shame surge up within him. In a somewhat lower voice she went on: ‘When I’m happy I know about it all right. But I never manage to work out why. I’m never happy when I’m alone, though. You can see that, can’t you? Well, at this moment, for instance, But I can’t figure out the reason—’ She paused, then added, nervously: ‘Maybe, it’s well, because—because of you—’
‘You’re wrong,’ Besson said.
‘Maybe,’ Marthe conceded.
But it was too late: her white face moved forward towards him, and as it approached—like a tragic mask, pierced by these two dark and heavy-lashed eyes—he felt as though it were an abyss yawning dizzily before him, a void, an emptiness that he could never fill. He tried to forget the eyes, but the head with its mass of tumbled hair settled on his chest, and he had to put his hands behind it, round the nape of the neck. He could feel the warm skin that lay over the vertebrae, and a little lower down a mole or beauty-spot. Her hands were clutching the material of his shirt, on either side of his ribs, fingers crooked and dug in, as though to claw the flesh. And the regular sound of her all-too-human breathing filled his ears, forcing him to breathe too, to be alive, to show awareness.
Then she raised her head, bent it backwards, let the daylight illuminate it—the tremulous, breathing mouth, the fine-bridged nose, pale cheeks flushed with pink, each tiny line and wrinkle, every spot, the fine down along the jaw-line, the pores in her skin that were like thousands of minuscule windows through which the air came and went. Her great staring eyes blurred, became patches of brown mist, floated towards one another, suddenly merged in the middle of her forehead, forming a moist circle within the unfocused framework of the mask, a circle charged with violence and humiliation and hope. Furiously he plunged into it, no longer hearing the fragmentary words that reached him, calling him by name; plummeted down into the troubled waters of dissension and unhappiness, let them close above his head.
A little while later François Besson found himself out in the street again, all alone in the midst of the hurricane. Fighting against the wind all the way, he went down through the town, street after street, till he reached the sea. The pavements were more or less deserted, and those few people he did meet looked like ghostly silhouettes: they could be seen struggling across the road at an intersection, or hugging the wall as they advanced, harrassed and wind-tossed fugitives, their clothes blown every which way, scarcely able to breathe. A litter of plaster and bits of wood and loose scraps of corrugated iron sheeting testified to the route the hurricane had taken. Besson followed this trail, leaning now forwards, now backwards, hair standing on end, raincoat flattened against his legs, the wind whipping round overhead. But he no longer took any heed of his surroundings: the shop-windows and mirrors, far from becoming dimmer, more opaque, had taken on an extra dimension of brightness, so much so, indeed, that it was as though reality were contained in them. No more stopping to contemplate the images, whether beautiful or hideous, that they presented: anyone who did so would be struck motionless, frozen, maybe turned into a pillar of salt.
One had to keep alert, too. All over town objects came raining down out of the sky: there was danger everywhere. People were liable to get hit on the head by tiles, or chimney-pots, or even by shutters that had been wrenched off their hinges. Besson kept close in against the wall, hands thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, collar turned up around his neck. The cars passing him in the road were travelling at reduced speed: some had their headlights switched on, others were using their windscreen-wipers. Café doors were shut, and many shop blinds had been ripped to ribbons. Whole newspapers went looping along the streets; ‘No Entry’ signs rattled themselves loose from their brackets. Refuse went skittering along beside the gutter, across muddy puddles, took off for some unknown destination.
It had not required much to sow the seeds of panic in the town. There had been a sudden, but quite peaceful, displacement of air. That was all. Just a little air in motion. But this air was hard and solid. It slammed into houses with the speed of an express train. It blew in violent gusts along the tarred surface of the roads, made skylights tremble, shook window-panes loose.
With considerable effort Besson made his way towards the sea-front. It was from this direction that the storm was coming. Already he could hear a low malevolent roar, a confusion of sounds that blended with the sheets of spray now being flung up behind the last row of houses, and spreading across the sky over the roof-tops like a great invisible curtain. Besson walked through one square in which the trees would bend over, cracking and splitting, then suddenly whip upright again with a great rustle of leaves. At one intersection he passed there was a crazy spiral of dust whirling round. A little further on, he reached the street which gave directly on to the front, and the wind took him slap in the face, like the wind of a big gun being fired. Besson stopped in astonishment, and felt a sort of ghostly hand thrusting his head back, trying to push its fingers into his mouth and nostrils. In order to recover his breath, he was forced to turn his back on the wind for a few seconds; this done, he set off down the narrow corridor-like street once more. At the further end of it, like a mirage, hung the pink and black cloud-patterns of the sky, veiled now by flying spindrift. He tacked from one sidewalk to the other, always moving slantwise, his right hand protecting his eyes. He travelled the hundred yards which separated him from the front without once looking up, his eyes fixed on his feet as they stumbled over the ground. At last he reached the end of the street, and the panoramic spectacle of the sea stood revealed before him.
The impact was total and instantaneous. As the wind slammed against his body, forcing him backwards, he saw the whole of that vast heaving expanse, mile upon mile of it, heard the continuous howling of the storm. From the mist-enshrouded horizon waves came rolling in one behind the other, surging, dipping, flecked with white crests that the wind scythed away as they moved, roaring on till they reached the high bastion of the promenade, then soaring up for the last time, up, up, hanging there briefly as though frozen, so that you could see the great hollow underside of the comber, gunmetal grey, glinting with wisps of straw, then falling in one swift movement, with a bang like a lid being slammed home. Each breaker began to rise far out in the bay, and came closer, closer, its muted thunder shaking the earth’s foundations as it moved, till it reached that point of the shore where Besson now stood: then the spray would rise vertically into the sky like a geyser, there would be that noise like a giant casserole being shut, and the spray would form a grey, powdery column that the air blew apart into shreds driving it towards the houses, fanning it out into quicksilver branches, dwindling now, stems, slivers, blades of grass, glittering yet lustreless strands of hair, threads of silver and silk that melted in the gusty air and, as they whipped along, let fall a few big, dirty drops of moisture, which evaporated as soon as they hit the ground.
After each wave broke, Besson’s hair and skin and clothes were drenched with spindrift. Tiny globules of spray were blown into his mouth as he breathed, so that he tasted salt and smelt the pungent odour of iodine. For a moment he remained like this, buffeted by the wind, taking an occasional step forward or back, struggling to maintain his balance. The town seemed quite dead. Black clouds scudded over it, heavy, charged with electricity, now and then emitting a great flash of pale sheet-lightning, which sent shadows and colours dancing across the storm-tossed front, as though a great conflagration had broken out on the further horizon.
The promenade was completely deserted. No cars ventured along the road because of the waves bursting over it. The shutters in the ho
uses were closed and barred.
Sometimes a wave would rise up higher than the rest, and it looked as though the swollen waters were trying to regain possession of their ancient domain. Pebbles were scooped up from the beach and sent flying across the pavements or against the foot of the wall. One of them, about the size of an egg, came rolling in front of Besson. He stooped and picked it up, and tried to throw it back into that heaving mountainous mass of water, but the wind caught it in mid-flight and flung it back again. A sudden panic swept over Besson. He wondered whether he ought not get away from there, beat a retreat inland, seek refuge on some mountaintop. But he was determined to see more of what was going on. He struggled down to the shore, and painfully made his way along it, stumbling through puddles of dirty sea-water, drenched with bursts of spray, twisting his ankles on stones. At the far end of the beach there was a causeway, protected by breakwaters. Besson made his way towards it.
In order to get on to the causeway, he had to climb over a barricade with a notice that read: OUT OF BOUNDS: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The causeway ran a long way out into the sea. At its far end there stood a lighthouse, and a flagpole with a red flag flying from it. Panting from the wind, which took his breath away, sodden by bursts of spray, Besson began to walk along the causeway, clinging to the iron handrail. Here the sea was divided into two parts. On the right the great waves came piling in on top of one another, burst against the foot of the wall; on the left lay the harbour entrance. The water here was black, its surface churned up by long eddies that spread out like oil-slicks.
Danger threatened on all sides; the sea writhed into countless voracious mouths, here, there, horrible fascinating mouths that came mooing up at you. There would be a sudden upsurge of water, and the mouth would rise rapidly towards the level of the causeway. For a moment it would hang there, only a few inches away, opening and closing its toothless gums, so that behind that slobbering curtain of spray you could see the black tunnel of its throat. It reached up towards the living flesh, imploringly, with its long tonsils and palpitating gullet and eager belly: it resembled the huge liquid eye of some big carnivore, struggling to reach up further, but struggling in vain. The waves could no longer sustain it, and it would fall back in a burst of fury, break up on the groyne with a thunderous report that left the causeway’s stone foundations quivering for some time afterwards. The iron guide-rail shuddered under Besson’s hand, and this shuddering sensation passed up his arm into every part of his body, troubling the waters, dredging up silt off the bottom, rapidly opening and closing the feed-valves of depression. Then the healing cloud rose right overhead in the sky, the angry breathing of the frustrated elements was all around him. Besson leaned back and for several long seconds let the chill rain drive down on his face and clothes, which absorbed it hungrily. Then, refreshed by this break he broke into a run.
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