Her Lover (Belle de Seigneur)

by Albert Cohen

  CHAPTER 91

  The days of exquisite love uncoiled slowly, each one like the one before. The two supreme lovers never met in the morning, which was set aside by Ariane for domestic duties. Ever determined to provide the man she loved with a setting characterized by order and beauty, she gave Mariette her instructions, oversaw all cleaning operations, drew up menus, wrote lists for tradesmen, and saw to the flower arrangements. She came and went freely, for they had agreed that from the moment she gave two rings from her room he wasn't to show his face. He in turn was to respond with two rings to confirm that he had heard and thus ensure that she ran no risk of being taken unawares in a too-too-shaming state of aesthetic disarray. Most days he simply stayed out of the way until lunch-time while Ariane, not yet bathed and hair not done, moved hither and thither in a white housecoat conscientiously discharging her scene-setting function.

  At the end of the morning, after issuing her final instructions, she would repair to her room and read a literary magazine or a novel praised by the critics or a few pages of a history of philosophy. All this she did for his sake, so that she might have intellectual conversations with him. When she'd finished reading, she would stretch out on the sofa, empty her thoughts of all material considerations, close her eyes, and force herself to concentrate on their love, so that her mind would be protean and cleansed, two of her favourite words, so that she would exist only for him when she saw him again. When she'd had her bath, she would seek him out, hair set and with perfumes anointed. And then would unfurl what she called their 'Prime Time'. Gravely he would kiss her hand, in full knowledge of how false and absurd was the life they led. After lunch, if he sensed that a move in the direction of sexual congress was called for on psychological grounds, he would say that he would like to lie next to her for a while, for there were proprieties to respect. She would take his meaning and kiss his hand. With a little song of victory in her heart she would say: 'I'll call you', and go to her room. There she closed the shutters, drew the curtains, covered her bedside lamp with a red scarf to create a suitably voluptuous atmosphere but also perhaps to neutralize any post-prandial flushing of her cheek, undressed, covered her nakedness with a robe of love, a kind of silky peplum designed by herself and intended to be put on so that it could be taken off, ensured that she was unimpeachable in her beauty, then slipped on her finger the platinum wedding ring she had asked him to buy her, wound up the ghastly gramophone, and the Mozart aria would go forth just as it used to at the Royal. Then he would make his entrance, a rather reluctant priest of love, sometimes biting his lip to hold back a fit of giggles, and the priestess in her consecrated robes would tense the muscles of her jaw as a way of convincing herself that desire moved within her. 'My pet lamb,' she had murmured one day as she undressed him slowly. 'Pet lamb, bed-lamb. To the bed-slaughter,' he had replied to himself. A feeble retaliation.

  For the wretched girl was so damned precious. She used such choice language, even when she had no clothes on. In the tender and all too familiar remarks which followed what she called a 'consecration', the word 'ecstasy' had always to figure, because it was more elevated. Oh how Solal squirmed whenever she said in tones verging on the stern: 'Hold back, let's know ecstasy together!' It made him blush in the red-tinged semi-dark, though he was genuinely touched by her concern to preserve intact something which gave life a real point, the simultaneousness which she interpreted as an indication that love was still alive.

  Yes, she got through enormous quantities of choice words at Belle de Mai. For instance, she said 'centre' rather than use another word which she considered too medical. And so on, and he felt ashamed. He also felt ashamed of the kiss on the forehead she gave him after each aforementioned ecstasy, which inwardly, imitating the accent of a famous clown, he took pathetic pleasure in pronouncing eggstasy. It's to demonstrate what colossal amounts of soul have gone into it, he would muse after the peck on his forehead, and then would feel instantly contrite and silently ask his poor girl to forgive him, for she genuinely yearned after style, fine feeling and beauty, especially beauty, which they sprayed over areas where life was extinct.

  At the end of the afternoon they would take a stroll or drive over to Cannes. Then they returned home. After a candlelit dinner, he wearing dinner-jacket and she in an evening gown, they would proceed to the drawing-room, where they admired the pointless whorl and surge of the sea framed in the bay window. Just as they had done at the Royal, they smoked expensive cigarettes and talked of lofty subjects, music or painting or the beauties of nature. Sometimes there were silences. Whenever this happened she would talk animatedly about the tiny velvet animals they'd bought at Cannes, arrange them to better effect on the table specially set aside for them, and gaze at them fondly. 'Our little world,' she would say as she stroked the little donkey which was her favourite. Heigh-ho, he thought, you have to make the most of whatever social openings come your way. Or else she would ask what he would like to go on tomorrow's menus. They would discuss this at some length, because, though she was not aware of it, she had in fact become rather greedy. Or else she would sit herself down at the piano and sing while he listened, with a faint smile on his face for the absurdity of the life they led. Or else they talked about literature. They were alarmingly interested in literature. Sombrely he chewed on the emptiness of their talk. Art was a means of communing with others, a social act, an act of fraternization. On a desert island there was neither art nor literature.

  If by chance the conversation descended to some banal topic, she who stood for Values persisted in using her noble language. Which is why she always said 'photograph' never 'photo', 'cinema' not 'the pictures' and certainly not 'the flicks'. Which is also why she always referred to her lawn undergarments as her 'heavenlies', even 'pantalettes' being unspeakable. Which, lastly, is why as she was telling him one day about what one of the tradesmen had said — nothing was beneath reporting in the solitary life they led — and the man having said something about laughing fit to bust, she spelt this last word out so as not to sully her lips with it. She's becoming halfwitted, he thought. A further symptom of her mania for the noble mode: the system of rings pinned up in the kitchen for the edification of Mariette had been written out in capitals, so as not to devalue her handwriting in her lover's eyes should he, exceptionally, stray into the kitchen one day.