How happy he would be to weep with her, to writhe in despair, flesh against flesh, before plunging into pleasure!
But no! What he would really like would be to push open the well-oiled revolving doors of one of those cafés from which you could always hear music coming, an elegant, nonchalant figure with a woman on his arm, to look around disdainfully for a free table, and to summon the waiter with a blasé gesture.
‘What would you like, Monsieur?’
Then to hold out to his companion, who would be busy slipping her fur coat off her shoulders, a cigarette-case, a handsome cigarette-case in gold or silver, to look at people from a great distance, from a great height, as if he could not see them, to smile imperceptibly, to place his hand casually on his mistress’s knee, to behave towards her in such a manner—lovers had a special way of smiling at each other which was at once tender, grateful and affectionate—to behave towards her in such a manner that everybody could tell by looking at them that they had just left the damp sheets where they had exhausted all the joys which the flesh could give.
Why, to put it bluntly, wasn’t it he who was standing in that dark doorway, mouth to mouth with a woman of whom all he could see as he passed was a vague profile, a fixed gaze.
One evening, perhaps, he would pluck up the courage to speak to Sidonie. For weeks now he had been haunting the Carré in the hope of meeting her by herself. He knew her Christian name because everybody knew it; youths murmured it in the darkness when she went by arm-in-arm with a girl friend, recognizable by her toque and her imitation ermine muff; others, street-urchins this time, sang it to the music of popular tunes.
She was only sixteen, a slim girl with a diaphanous face; her eyes were so bright that you could have sworn that the pupils were transparent, and for him she was the incarnation of all that was fragile and feminine in humanity. She had had lovers, he wanted her to have had lovers. He had seen her with her girl friend and some men walking gaily into a restaurant. They had been men and not youths. Everybody knew what men expected. He had met her in the company of German officers with long capes, trailing their swords along the pavements.
Yet he felt that she was pure, he wanted her to be pure, while imagining her frail white body being soiled by friends of a day; he for his part would love her, love her with his very soul, and they would walk along side by side, clasped together, cheek to cheek, without saying a word, listening to an inner music; now and then their lips would meet and a new life would begin.
‘What are you doing here, Mamelin?’
He was not doing anything. He was thinking, while looking at the cigars in a window-display; no doubt he was looking at his own reflection too. Brought suddenly face to face with Gouin, he had a certain difficulty in removing the fierce expression from his face.
‘I’m not doing anything, you can see that. I was waiting until it was time to go to the cinema.’
Gouin was a year or two older than he. They had not met for years, not since they had been at the Institut Saint-André together.
Now he was wearing long trousers, yellow shoes such as only flashy businessmen wore, a pearl-grey hat and a big, comfortable coat, and one hand was toying with a Malacca cane. Roger envied his self-assurance. He was a big fellow, with firm flesh and tight, pink skin.
‘You remember the Rue de la Loi? Incidentally, what are you doing these days?’
‘I’m at the Collège Saint-Servais. And you?’
‘I’m helping my father in the business.’
Gouin senior was a pork-butcher at Bressoux. Since the beginning of the war, this had become the most profitable trade there was.
‘Look here, Mamelin, I’m meeting a couple of tarts at three o’clock. I’m on my own. Why don’t you come along with us? You could look after the girl friend.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the cinema for a start. What do you say? In a box, you can begin having a bit of fun.’
A flush had spread right over Roger’s face.
‘The trouble is …’
‘What?’
‘I’ve come out without bringing enough money.’
At that, Gouin burst out laughing, slapped him hard on the back, and took a handful of banknotes out of his pocket, marks and francs, both large and small denominations.
‘Look! If that’s all that’s worrying you, I’ll pay for everything. Or rather, take this …’
He thrust some banknotes into his hand, without counting them.
‘It’s easy for me, you see; I scrounge a ham from the shop every now and then and sell it. I took one only yesterday, a lovely ham that weighed twenty-four pounds.’
He did not notice that Roger, who had been red in the face a moment earlier, had gone pale, more taken aback by the good-natured simplicity with which the words had been spoken than by the words themselves.
‘You’re sure I wouldn’t be in the way?’
‘Idiot! I tell you, they’re just a couple of tarts! Afterwards, we’ll find somewhere to do them up and that’ll be that. Let’s go. They must be waiting for us already on the corner of the Rue du Pont-d’Ile.’
He had gone with Gouin. For a moment, in the Rue du Pont-d’Ile, he had nearly backed out when he had recognized one of the girls waiting there, for it was Sidonie’s girl friend. The other one, whom he could see from behind, was tall and fat. She was the one Gouin had picked for himself.
‘My pal Roger, Mesdemoiselles Jeanne and Camille … That’s how to do it, isn’t it?’
Gouin had added in front of them, quite naturally:
‘Camille’s yours. And now, let’s go and have some fun!’
He had walked in front with the fat girl while Roger had followed silently beside the short little thing with the round, common face. She was really tiny. What is more, she was too developed for her age, and this helped to make her look like a dwarf.
‘Where are we going?’ she had asked, just to say something, seeing how shy he looked.
‘I think we’re going to the Mondain.’
‘Is he a friend of yours?’
Embarrassed by the question, he had answered:
‘I went to school with him.’
‘I live behind their house. It’s my mother who does their washing.’
The sun had already disappeared, the streets were a cold grey, and the cinema bell was ringing. They went in, and had to wait some time before an empty box could be found for them.
Not for a moment did Roger feel at ease. In front of him, Gouin and his companion whispered, talked and laughed so loud that people turned round and hushed them.
‘All right, back there?’
He replied:
‘All right.’
But he was thinking about the stolen ham, and about Camille’s mother who did people’s washing like the woman who came to the Rue de la Loi every week. It was Camille who ended up by timidly putting her hand, which was already moist, on his.
‘Don’t you like me?’
He reassured her, at the same time thinking of what Gouin had said.
‘Afterwards, we’ll find somewhere to do them up …’
And the little thing, doing all she could to break the ice, murmured:
‘I know you already. I know where you live: that lovely house on the corner of the Rue des Maraîchers. I go past it nearly every day. In summer I used to see you reading in your room, smoking your pipe, with your feet on the window-sill, and I used to call you the young man who was always reading. Then when I was out with Sidonie, we used to see you at the Carré. But you’re such a proud one. You never talk to anybody. You’re always so smart and well dressed! The other day you nearly knocked us over and Sidonie was ever so annoyed that you didn’t even look at us.’
‘Was she really?’
In spite of the piano accompaniment, you could still hear the shrill ringing of the bell outside, you thought of the blue light over the padded door, and you could also hear the insect noise being made by the film as it unwound. People came in
and others went out. Roger could feel sweat under his armpits and Camille’s hand lying soft and moist in his. The dwarf cuddled up to him, and for the sake of appearances, so as not to hurt her, for he could feel that she would like it, he put his arm round her waist.
It embarrassed him that she should smell of poverty. For a long time he wondered whether to kiss her or not. He did not want to, indeed he felt a certain repugnance at the thought, but she placed one hand on his thigh and then contact was established. His hands moved too, searching for the bare skin above the stockings, then moving imperceptibly upwards into the warmth.
The other two were doing the same in front of them; you could see that from their positions, from a certain sort of tense immobility which suddenly came over them. Roger was awkwardly placed. His shoulder became stiff, his arm got tired, and when he turned towards his companion he saw, in the pale halo of the screen, a little round, attentive head, with a pair of eyes following the incidents in the film as if nothing were happening nearer to her.
Finally he asked a question.
‘Why isn’t Sidonie with you today?’
‘What! You mean to say you don’t know? I bet you’re the only one at the Carré who hasn’t heard. The police have been looking into it. It was the night before last, and Sidonie couldn’t come out today because her dress was torn and her sister’s mending it. She’s a dressmaker, you know.’
She broke off for a moment to whisper:
‘Careful. You’re hurting me a bit.’
Then she went on, quite naturally:
‘A couple of chaps had asked us to supper in a fried-fish shop, in the Rue Lulay, profiteers they were, country types all dressed up, like you see on Mondays at the Stock Exchange with their pockets full of money. We’d decided to make fun of them. We began by having a good blow-out, ordering the best there was, Russian salad, lobster, steak. We were on the first floor, in the little private room, you know …’
No, he didn’t know, he had never suspected that there were private rooms in fried-fish shops.
‘We drank a lot, English beer, champagne, wine, then some more English beer. The fellows with us were drunk. Sidonie was sick. Then, instead of looking after her, they decided to have some fun and they took it into their heads to undress Sidonie who didn’t want them to and swore at them and struggled. The bigger of the two, a man as red faced as a butcher, with big fishy eyes, had already undone his buttons and started trying to …’
Her girl friend, without turning round, remarked:
‘Don’t talk so loud, Camille. The people in the next box are listening.’
And to Gouin, who asked her what she was talking about, she said:
‘I’ll tell you. I wasn’t there, but Sidonie told me all about it.’
In defending herself, Sidonie had cut her elbow on a broken bottle. Camille, seeing the blood, had lost her head and rushed downstairs, calling for help. The proprietor had intervened, trying in vain to calm down the two frantic girls.
‘No scandal now, girls! I’ll see to it all. In any case, if you came here, you must have known that it wasn’t for a knitting-party.’
They were drunk and went on shouting for the police at the top of their voices. Some customers on the ground floor became alarmed and sent for a policeman.
Gouin promptly hit upon the idea of going to have supper after the film in the same private room.
‘That would be fun, eh, Mamelin?’
But Camille objected.
‘The proprietor won’t let me in. He was livid. He even went so far as to offer us some money to keep quiet.’
‘You were a couple of idiots!’ said her girl friend.
‘I told you we were schlass. And then, after all, not with brutes like that!’
It made Roger feel ill. Try as he might, he could not banish from his eyes the picture of the private room as he imagined it, Sidonie half-naked and bleeding, the man with the face like a butcher’s, and finally the policeman who did not know what to do and took them away.
He wanted to go home. If he had not been there on Gouin’s money—the ham money!—and if he had not had some of that money in his pocket, he would have found some sort of excuse and gone off.
‘I say, you kids, I think this is the film we saw when we came in. Let’s go!’
They went. Some worthy people, who must have heard more than enough, raised a murmur of protest as they passed. They were swallowed up, still warm, by the icy darkness, and it took them a little while to find their bearings, to remember that they were in the Rue de la Régence, that the Place Verte was on the right and the Passerelle on the left.
‘What are we going to do now?’
Just as at the Mamelins’ when they argued for hours on end how they were going to spend Sunday afternoon! They walked along, without knowing where they were going, Gouin in front with his girl, Roger with Camille hanging on to his arm.
‘Let’s decide what we’re going to do. You’re sure they won’t let you into the Rue Lulay shop?’
‘In any case, I’m not going to try. You go ahead if you want to.’
‘And you, Mamelin, what do you suggest?’
The fact of the matter, Roger suspected, was that his companion no longer wanted anything, that the pleasures taken in the darkness of the cinema had satisfied him. He had lost the noisy gaiety he had displayed a little earlier. It was without any great conviction that he suggested having fun, because he had promised this to himself and to the others. It was only six o’clock.
‘What if we started by having a drink?’
But Roger was reluctant to show himself in a café in the company of his little badly dressed dwarf who was wearing round her neck a flabbergasting boa with dirty feathers.
It was Jeanne, the fat girl, who saved him by whispering to Gouin. He could not hear what she said, but he guessed what it was.
‘Let ’em go off on their own. He’s no fun, your pal isn’t. We can’t do nothing with him.’
Of the two couples, probably only Gouin and Camille envisaged the projected foursome without any embarrassment. For Roger, the story of the evening in the Rue Lulay had been enough. With the best will in the world, he couldn’t have managed.
‘She says you might perhaps like to …’
‘She’s right. Besides, I’ve got to get home early. My parents are expecting me.’
‘See you next Sunday?’
‘Right.’
They did not specify where they were going to meet. It was better that way. They shook hands. Gouin asked in a whisper:
‘Fixed it?’
Roger nodded, even though both of them knew that it was not true. Then he came back and thrust into his friend’s pocket the banknotes Gouin had given him.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing … Have a good time …’
Camille went with him, hanging on to his arm, and trying in vain to keep in step with him. In the darkness they walked through the streets like the couples he had envied so much, and because of that, just as they were starting to cross the Passerelle, the idea occurred to him of taking his companion to the deserted embankment and there, in a dark corner, possessing her completely.
‘What are you stopping for?’
Yes? No? Should he? If he took her, he would have to kiss her on the mouth and the idea disgusted him. He was frightened too of the cold, and of the complicated movements he would have to make. And what if, the next day, in broad daylight, she spoke familiarly to him in the street and perhaps kissed him in front of everybody? What is more, she would be sure to tell Sidonie all about it.
No.
‘I have to go home. They really are expecting me.’
‘You don’t mind if I go with you as far as your house, do you? It’s on my way.’
In the Rue Puits-en-Sock, they went past his grandfather’s shop, but the shutters were up and everything was dark.
‘Anyone can see straight away that you aren’t the same sort as your friend. I bet you haven’t b
een out very often with him.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. They must have gone to an hotel. Jeanne felt embarrassed, I could see that, even though it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d done that in front of me. It was you that was embarrassing her.’
He pretended to laugh. He felt flattered.
‘Am I as terrifying as all that?’
‘No. But if anybody had told me yesterday that the two of us would be getting together, I wouldn’t have believed them. Neither would Sidonie.’
‘Are you going to tell her?’
‘Not if you ask me not to.’
‘Then don’t tell her.’
‘You’re in love with her, aren’t you?’
He did not answer.
‘Go on, admit that you’re in love with her. All the men are in love with Sidonie. I’m not jealous. I can tell the difference, you know, and if you wanted …’
‘You think so?’
‘I’m sure you’d get on well together. Do you want me to speak to her?’
This time, he clasped her to him without needing to make any effort, bent down and kissed her on her cheek.
‘You think I’ve got a chance?’
‘You realize that that’s the first time you’ve kissed me?’
‘Ah!’
‘Just because I spoke to you about Sidonie. Come to the Carré on Thursday.’
‘What time?’
‘Between five and six, as usual. I’ll signal to you. If I flash my torch at you several times when you come near us, then it’s yes …’
‘And what if it’s no?’
‘I tell you it’s sure to be yes.’
Had he even said good night to her? He could not remember how he had left her, but now he was back home again. Here, in the few cubic feet of warmth and light of the kitchen, he had found each person in his place, frozen and set in the immobility of the atmosphere like the inhabitants of Pompeii in the lava, his father sitting reading with his chair tilted back, Mademoiselle Rinquet knitting and counting the stitches with soundlessly moving lips, and his mother doing her mending, her head bent forward.
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