Her Lover (Belle de Seigneur)

by Albert Cohen

  Enter three budding adolescent girls. After a lot of silly giggling, because they had decided that he was awfully handsome, they began chattering away, using words which they considered very smart to make themselves seem interesting and original, to attract his attention. One mentioned a crooner and said that he was dishy, another mentioned this fantastic cold she'd had last week, and the third said she'd had one too and it made her cough like, well, like anything. He stood up, left the compartment, and negotiated the concertina-sided passage which linked coaches and smelled of sheep's wool. He found himself in the third-class, opened the door of the last compartment along, and sat down.

  Intoxicated by its own speed, constantly threatening to leave the rails, the panicking, clumsy, streaking train thundered into a tunnel with a screech of fear, and smoke whitened the windows, and clanking pandemonium bounced back off the oozing walls, and then the countryside was suddenly there again, serene and green. From time to time the other passengers watched the well-dressed intruder in silence, and then eventually resumed their conversations. A heavily made-up factory-girl with darned silk stockings gave the cold shoulder to a farmworker who, as he sweet-talked her, stroked his stubbly chin to cover his shyness. A fat motherly body wearing a tam and a coat with a rabbit-fur collar answered a question put by the woman sitting next to her, then yawned to disguise the lie still fresh on her lips, after which she wiped the long candle dangling from the nose of her three-year-old cherub and began chatting to him in a false, showy way for the edification of the other passengers, asking him things in a peculiar, formal voice so as to extract unexpected grown-up answers which would amaze the onlookers, on whom she kept a keen weather eye, while the brat, sensing that he had been granted unusual licence, made the most of the opportunity to scream his head off, stamp his feet, dribble, and regurgitate bits of garlic sausage. An engaged couple, in a world of their own at the far end of one of the bench-seats, sat with their red, dirty-nailed fingers intertwined. She sported a crop of pustules on her forehead. He had a tiny nose and wore a light-brown dog-tooth jacket, a stiff collar, a jumper zipped up the front, patent-leather shoes and purple socks. A propelling-pencil and a pen were clipped to his top pocket, which also boasted a lace-edged handkerchief and a chain holding a 13 in a circle. He kept plying her with whispered questions, purring amorous entreaties to which she, highly delighted, merely replied with stifled giggles or little wheedling oohs. A fully paid-up member of society's great club, within his rights, confident of his bona fides, he pawed his girl's backside while she simpered smugly, hummed 'The Chapel in the Moonlight' to bind him in her spell, and, as she did so, laid her pustule-studded forehead smoochily on his manly, heavily padded shoulder.

  Saint-Raphaël. Recoiling, lurching, wheels protesting like a pack of yelping, tormented puppies, the train ground to a halt with a long, weary sigh and a series of spasms, metallic growls and hisses which culminated in one expiring gasp. A bold influx of new passengers. Room reluctantly, suspiciously made for them by the old. A whole family trooped in, led by an elderly red-faced matron in a black veil, and the train set off, endlessly asthmatically wheezing, in a clangour of panicking metal. In the distance a river gleamed briefly and was immediately extinguished, and the elderly matron handed all her brood's tickets to the inspector with that little self-satisfied smirk which is the trade mark of persons whose papers are in order and who are members of a group. Then she struck up a conversation with the motherly party in the tam, to whom she said outright that she could not bear to see animals suffer, then another with the girl with the fiance with the still wandering hands, who, before replying to the forceful virago, licked her downy top lip. After which the engaged couple fed their inner selves with brawn and saveloys, the girl sucking at filaments of meat stuck between her teeth with sophistication and the last word in bird noises. When they had finished their repast, she peeled an orange with her thumbnail and passed it to her man, who absorbed it leaning forward, legs apart, to avoid making a mess on his clothes, then belched, wiped his hands on the handkerchief she gave him, and wrestled with the zip of his new jumper, while the train bolted, lurched, and careered along at an alarming speed. Flushed with wine, perspiring freely, the girl decided it would be a lark to say goo'bye goo'bye goo'bye to all the people they passed, and she waved her hand at them excitedly. This made all the other passengers laugh. Proud of his fiancee's success and his thoughts turning again to love, he began nibbling an ear graced with an earring in the shape of a ship's anchor, a proceeding which drew a fit of giggles from the delectable creature, who exclaimed: 'Stop it, you're driving me crazy!' and followed this up with: 'Give over, pack it in!' When her young suitor, now red in the face, persisted in notifying her of his passion, the pimply damsel gave him a saucy slap, poked out a well-coated tongue, and then cast a coal-black eye over her audience to see what effect this had produced. Solal stood up. He'd rubbed shoulders with proles for quite long enough. Safe now to go back to where the money was, for the three stupid girls had got off at Saint-Raphaël, chattering and giggling.

  In her best little-girl voice, she said that she'd been wrong about there being an early-morning train for Marseilles that stopped at Agay. According to the timetable the three girls had let her see, this was the first train of the day for Marseilles. 'Good,' he said, without looking at her, and he lit a cigarette as a barrier between them. There was a pause, and then she said that this train was very fast and they'd be in Marseilles early, they were due in at one thirty-nine. 'Good,' he said. After another pause, she said it was a pity they'd caught the train at Cannes, because there was a scheduled stop at Saint-Raphaël. It was the fault of the first taxi-driver, who had misled him, done it on purpose probably, to have the longer fare. He did not reply. Then she got up and came and sat down beside him. 'May I?' she asked. He did not answer. She put her arm through the arm of her great big shamefaced Mr Wolf and asked if he was all right. 'Yes, fine,' he said. 'Me too,' she said, and she kissed his cut hand and laid her head on the shoulder of the man she loved.

  When the train pulled into the station at Toulon, she woke with a start and whispered yes she'd turned the gas off. A white-jacketed waiter from the dining-car walked by ringing his bell and announced the second service of lunch. She said she was hungry. He said that he was hungry too.

  CHAPTER 101

  They had just got back to the hotel from an afternoon spent roaming round the city hand in hand. She had loved everything about Marseilles: the barrows in the Rue Longue-des-Capucins bright with food-mountains and raucous with the cries of the street traders, the fish market and the loud-mouthed fishwives, the Rue de Rome, the Rue Saint-Ferreol, the Canebière, the Vieux-Port, the narrow, ominous, spontaneous streets where sinister men sidled with feline grace and pock-marked faces.

  Happy because she could hear him singing in the bath, she smiled at herself in the mirror. Such a good idea remembering to bring the pretty slippers and the pearl necklace which went so well with her dressing-gown. Holding her smile, she proceeded to inspect the cold dinner which had just been laid out on the table and gave herself a mental pat on the back for ordering the kind of meal he liked best: hors-d'oeuvres, salmon steaks, assorted cold meats', chocolate mousse, petits fours and champagne. Another good idea had been to ask for a five-branched candelabra. They would dine by candlelight, so much cosier. Eveiything was fine. He had been ever so gentle with her from the moment they had arrived.

  She was about to open the box of candles and dress the candelabra when he came in, looking quite superb in his raw-silk dressing-gown. She pushed back a strand of hair from her forehead and motioned to the table with a gracious, effeminate wave of her hand.

  'Just look at these hors-d'oeuvres. Such wonderful colours. There are Swedish starters and Russian salad: they were my idea. Those little straw-coloured things are called supions, it's a Provencal speciality so the waiter told me, and delicious by all accounts, but you have to dunk them in this green dip. Listen, darling, you know what? You are goi
ng to go and lie down and I shall bring you dinner in bed. And, while you're tucking in to all these delicious goodies, I'll read to you. What do you say?'

  'No, we'll sit down to dinner here. You can read to me after we've eaten, when I'm in bed. And, while you read, I'll be ruthless with the petits fours. But I'll let you have some if you like.'

  'All right, darling, that's fine by me,' she said, and on her face appeared such a look of maternal love. (How could I ever be angry with him, she thought.) And now I'm going to light the candelabra, you'll see, it'll make a lovely glow. (She opened the box and took out a candle.) It's very fat, I don't know if it'll fit.'

  He stiffened like a startled leopard. Oh, her hand, her pure hand, around the candle! Oh, that horrible, angelic smile!

  'Please put that candle down,' he said, looking at the floor. 'No candles, I don't want candles, I hate candles. Put them out of sight somewhere. Thank you. Now listen, I'm going to ask you a question, just one, it won't hurt. If you answer, I won't get angry, I promise. Did you used to take a bag with you on those evenings when you were going to spend the night. (He broke off. He could not bring himself to say with Dietsch.) An overnight bag?'

  'Yes,' she said, trembling, and he raised his head ruefully and all of a sudden looked like a sick dog.

  'A small bag, was it?'

  'Yes.'

  'Of course it was.'

  In his mind's eye he pictured with horror the contents of the bag. A very fetching pair of silk pyjamas or maybe a flimsy nightie, though it would have been no sooner on than off again. Comb, toothbrush, creams, powder, toothpaste, all the paraphernalia she'd need when she woke up, and she would wake up happy. Oh, those waking kisses. Damn that disgusting Boygne woman. And almost certainly a book that she particularly liked and would want to read out to her man when the earth had stopped moving. She liked sharing, it was in her nature. Besides, reading to him was refined, a shared experience which would ease her conscience by casting a veil of nobility over the sordidness of adultery. And did she call him 'Serge'? She would certainly have said 'dear' as she did to him, and 'darling' as she did to him, and would have spoken the self-same secret words in the shadow of the night. Perhaps she had even been taught to say them by her man. And maybe in the bag was a little box of cachous designed to give the impression that her breath was perennially sweet. Surreptitiously, in the pause between two protracted kisses, quick reach for a cachou, but keep it casual, and then quick as a flash tuck it into her cheek, left-hand side, behind the wisdom tooth, so that it was undetectable to the probing tongue of her bandleader.

  'Did you put just one or several in your mouth?'

  'One or several what?'

  'Cachous.'

  'I've never eaten a cachou in my life,' she sighed. 'Oh come on, let's eat. Or, if you don't want to eat, we'll go out instead.'

  'One last thing, and then I shan't ask you anything else. When you got to his place, did you take all your clothes off at once? (His blood pressure rose alarmingly. She, undressing unblushingly or, worse, blushingly, and Dietsch standing there with his tongue already hanging out lecherously!) Answer me, darling. You see, I'm perfectly calm, I'm holding your hand. All I want to know is did you undress the instant you got there?'

  'Of course not. Don't be silly!'

  Oh the shame of that 'Don't be silly'! A 'Don't be silly' which meant 'I am far too pure to take my clothes off all at once, it simply isn't done, it has to be taken in stages, in a kind of seraphic striptease punctuated by high-carat oglings and large inputs of soul.' Naturally: all the idealistic abominations of her class. She needed romantic gradations, whipped cream, needed whipped- cream to hide the pig's trotters! She was a hypocrite, because the only reason she'd gone there in the first place was to undress!

  Stop, stop, don't think any more, and more to the point don't imagine any more. Take pity on her, so unhappy, pale as death, jelly-kneed, awaiting sentence, head bowed, not daring to look him in the eye. Think that one day she will die. Think about that day at Belle de Mai when he had asked her casually if there was any more of some sort of sweet, he couldn't remember what sort, and she'd gone to Saint-Raphaël to buy some in the pouring rain, on foot, because there weren't any trains or taxis. Eleven kilometres there and eleven kilometres back, a six-hour walk in all. And he had not known what she'd done, because he'd gone up to his room to rest. And the note she'd left: for him when he woke up: 'I can't bear it when you don't have everything you want.' Oh yes, it was halva. And the state she was in when she'd got home that evening, and it was only then that he'd found out that she'd walked all the way there and back. Yes, but that was exactly what made everything so terrible — a woman who loved him so absolutely had allowed Dietsch's hairy paw to unbutton her blouse. Oh, how she must have loved his white hair and black moustache!

  She looked up at him with her pleading, lustrous, loving eyes. So why had she countenanced the hairy paw? And by what right had she told him on that first night at Cologny, just as he was leaving, that she wasn't going to sleep, instead she was going to think about what was happening to her, about the miracle that had happened? She'd been good and dietsched, and would have been far better off sticking with dishy Dietsch.

  'There's just one thing that surprises me, though,' he started mellifluously, and he began putting the little silver boat containing the green dip for the fried supions through a series of threatening manoeuvres, 'the only thing that surprises me is that you never call me "Adrien" or "Serge". It's odd you never get muddled: I mean to say there's quite a crowd of us, yet you always call me "Sol". Don't you ever get fed up with the same name all the time? It would be nicer if you called me "Adrisergeolal", don't you think? That way you could enjoy having us all at the same time.'

  'Please don't go on. I know you don't really mean to be cruel. Get a grip on yourself, Sol.'

  That's not my name. If you don't call me by my real name I won't ever kiss you again, I'll never Adrisergeolalize you again. Or, better still, call me "Monsieur Three-in-One".'

  'No.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because I won't let you sink so low. Because you're my only love.'

  'I'm not your only love. I don't want to be called by names that have already been used for somebody else. I want a name all to myself, an honest name. Come, my little stockpiles let's have a little honesty! Call me "Monsieur Three-in-One"!'

  'No,' she said, and looked him straight in the eye, stared back at him, beautiful and aggressive.

  She was wonderful. Which was why he toyed with the notion of throwing the sauce-boat and its contents at the wall. But that would only cause unpleasantness with the hotel management. He abandoned the idea and turned on the radio. That swine Mussolini was speaking, and a whole nation listened adoringly. And meanwhile what was he doing? Tormenting a defenceless woman, that's what. If only she would suddenly shout out that Dietsch disgusted her, that she'd never felt anything when she was with him. But she did not say the only words, even if they were untrue words, that would have calmed him, nor would she ever, for she was too decent a girl to repudiate or blacken or ridicule an old flame. He respected her for that. But he also hated her for it.

  'Get a grip on yourself, darling,' she said, holding out both hands. (He frowned. What right did she have to call him "darling"?) You must get a grip on yourself, Sol,' she repeated.

  'That's not my name. I'll get a grip on myself if you ask properly. Come on, make an effort!'

  'Get a grip on yourself, Monsieur Three-in-One,' she said softly, after a moment's silence.

  He rubbed his hands. At last a glimmer of honesty! He gave her a little thank-you smile. But suddenly her conductor in tails and white tie was unbuttoning her silk blouse. Oh, that black moustache nuzzling her golden breasts! And she cooing and crooning while the mouth belonging to her white-maned moustachioed baby suckled at her and his head drove greedily and aggressively against her. Oh, the nipple held between those front teeth, and that tongue maypoling around the nipple! And she had the gall
to sit there looking innocent and so modest! Now the orchestra-conducting baby unclenched its teeth and ran its hairy tongue, its rasping ox-tongue, over a breast that was spikier than a Prussian helmet! And as the bull licked, the mistress of the keyboard chorale smiled! Oh, now one hairy paw was lifting her skirt! He shuddered with horror and dropped his amber beads. She bent down to pick them up, and as she did so the top of her dressing-gown yawned and revealed her breasts. The same breasts, not replacements, which had been offered to her other man! The full set! All that was missing now was the man and his hairiness!

  'Did he use any fancy German techniques when he fornicated?' She did not answer. So he picked up the dish of chocolate mousse and threw the contents at the fornicatee, deliberately pulling his aim to avoid hitting her. But, having little or no talent for slapstick, he misjudged it. The missile hit the target, and her luminous face was spattered with chocolate mousse. She did not move, deriving a not unenjoyable sense of self-righteousness from letting the brown goo dribble unchecked, then touched her cheek and stared at her messy hand. So it was to end up like this that she had led love's march of triumph on the day she had waited for him to return to Geneva! He made a dash for the bathroom, came back with a towel, applied one damp end to her sticky face, and wiped it gently. He knelt before her, kissed the hem of her dressing-gown, kissed her feet, and then looked up at her. 'Go to bed,' she said, 'I'll come to you, I'll stroke your hair and you'll sleep.'

  Suddenly waking in the dark, they held hands. 'I'm a brute,' he murmured. 'Hush, it's not true, you are my sick boy,' she said, and he kissed her hand, wet her hand with his tears, put it to her that he should slash his face, cut himself with one of the table-knives, to prove it to her. He'd do it now if she wanted! 'No, darling, no, my sick boy,' she said, 'save your face for me, save all your love for me,' she said.