‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You won’t remember me, but I saw your name, I was passing and I saw your name.’
He stared at her, and she could see that he remembered her.
‘I remember you,’ he said, ‘I met you in the middle of the Channel, and I danced with you at that dance; I do remember you.’
‘You don’t remember my name,’ said Clara, ‘but it’s Clara. You’d forgotten my name, hadn’t you?’
‘I’d have remembered it if I’d seen it written on a door,’ he said.
‘Ah yes,’ said Clara, ‘but I bet you wouldn’t have knocked.’
‘I might not have knocked,’ said Peter Harronson, ‘but I would probably have wanted to. Come in, do come in and sit down and tell me what you’re doing here.’
‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ said Clara.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my work for today. I work too fast for them, I never get given enough to do. Look, I was reading Iris Murdoch.’
And he showed her the book on his desk, which was, no less, Iris Murdoch. So, persuaded, she went in, and she told him, precisely and in detail, exactly what she was doing in Paris, and extracted a similar story from him, and it seemed to her that never had she been so lucid, so perfectly in control of the significance of the events of her own life, so perfectly receptive to those of another’s. He was working for French television, he had taken up French, had read French at Oxford, and had been in Paris for a year; his job, he said, was dull, and even to her it sounded duller than Gabriel’s, but then, she gently reassured him, he had but to wait, and they would find him something better to do than to read Iris Murdoch under the desk.
Then he asked her why she was carrying three pairs of stockings, and she explained about the machine, and then she asked him if he could help her to find Gabriel again, and looking at her watch discovered that it was five o’clock, so she invited him to come and have a drink with them on the terrasse on the Place, and he said that he would, and they set off to look for Gabriel. They did not find him in the studio, and as Clara had forgotten Patrice’s surname, if she had ever known it, they did not know where else to look, so they went up to the canteen, and on the way Peter put some more francs in the machine and got her another pair of stockings to add to her collection, and the gesture touched her to the heart, she felt she was very near to some elusive, lovely happiness. Patrice and Gabriel were in the canteen, drinking coffee, and when Clara introduced Peter she thought she surprised upon Gabriel’s face a marvellous gleam of alarm.
So they had coffee, and talked for an hour or so about Patrice’s divorce, which had been caused, or so he asserted, by his wife’s passion for one of his uncles; the conversation was in French, so Clara felt that she was gaining in all ways, in her knowledge of the world, and in her knowledge of the French language. There were a few words that she did not know, but she felt that they were exactly the ones for which she had always been searching, and she recognized them as by instinct. And when it approached six o’clock, Clara, who had never in her life dared to risk asserting her authority on any gathering, suddenly said, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s go and have a drink.’
And nobody demurred, nobody resisted, nobody fell away; they all said yes, what an idea, let’s go and have a drink. And then they all went and got into Patrice’s car, and said where should they go, it wasn’t time yet to meet Magnus, so they went to the Avenue Gabriel, at Clara’s suggestion, who said that she wanted to sit with Gabriel on the Avenue Gabriel, and he sat and held her hand there, before them all, and this made her happy, but at ten to seven, afraid of missing Magnus, she insisted that they should all move once more, so they all got back into Patrice’s car and went back to the Place du Trocadéro, and there was Magnus, waiting for them, as he had said he would be, and Patrice’s friend waiting at a different table. They stayed there for about an hour, and then Clara began to grow nervous lest they should all go away, and she was not yet satisfied, she had not had enough, she had not had what she wanted, whatever it might be that she wanted, and when Peter said to them, why don’t we all go to my apartment, it’s just down the road, she heaved a sigh of relief for she knew that they would all go.
Patrice tried to make them all get back into his car, but Peter said that it wasn’t worth it, and at first nobody listened to him, but finally they took his word, and followed him, and it was, they found, more or less next door, at the top of the Rue Raynouard. Clara was very impressed by the whole installation; the block of flats was large and grand, the lift was made of wood and brass and carpet, and Peter’s flat, on the sixth floor, seemed limitless, lavishly furnished, and had an amazing view over the river. She was not alone in her amazement, for everyone else started to make clucking noises of appreciation and wonder, and Peter explained that the apartment was not, naturally, his, but belonged to one of his aunts who was never there. At this Clara started a long lecture upon people who had aunts with flats and uncles who ran off with their wives, and broke it off only when Peter appeared with a whole crate of Beaujolais and asked her if she wouldn’t like to help him make some supper. No, I wouldn’t, she said sharply, I can’t cook and I don’t intend to try, but having thus stated her position she consented to go into the kitchen with him and opened some tins and cut up some bread. Nobody seemed to mind much what they ate; they sat around eating bread and cheese and tinned asparagus and crême de marrons and horrible tinned tomatoes and every piece of fruit in the house, and all Peter’s aunt’s store of cocktail sausages and cocktail biscuits and olives and packets of Ryvita, and while they ate Gabriel tried without success to make Magnus explain why he was in Paris, and Clara inspected the décor, which, although highly gilt and decorated, was not a patch on the Denhams’, and she felt curiously satisfied to notice its defects. When they all felt less hungry, Peter said, would it be all right if he rang up a few friends and asked them to come round, and they all said why not, so he made several telephone calls, and Clara managed to make herself feel generous about the arrival of other girls, because she was after all herself entrenched beyond all removal, indeed one might say that the whole enterprise belonged to her alone. When Peter had finished on the telephone, he came and asked Gabriel and Magnus and Patrice and Patrice’s friend if they would all like to ring up their friends too, and Patrice said he might ring his ex-wife and his uncle, and did, but they were out, and Patrice’s friend rang up his girl friend, and Gabriel said that perhaps he might after all ring up Samuel Wisden, who was living in Paris, and he did, and Samuel Wisden said that he would come.
After another hour or so these various guests started to arrive, but Clara found it hard to take them in, and began to think that perhaps she should stop drinking. But she found that she could not stop. A passion stronger than curiosity, or perhaps curiosity itself reduced to a passion drove her. After midnight, the scenes began to take on a truly festive, picturesque aspect; bottles lay all over the floor, Samuel Wisden kept reciting poetry to which nobody listened, and Patrice’s friend’s girl took off her dress. Peter went out and came back with some bottles of whisky, and tried to persuade Clara to have some, but she declined, and told him instead the story of the Italian man who had taken her to the cinema.
‘I bet you fancied him more than you fancied me,’ said Peter, when he heard the story.
‘It wasn’t that, it wasn’t that, but what did you offer me?’ said Clara.
‘We were very young,’ said Peter.
‘I’m not so old now,’ said Clara, and got up, dislodging Gabriel’s hand from the back of her skirt, where it had neatly wedged itself; he did not see her go, he was talking to Patrice on the other side. She went to the bathroom, and then into the kitchen, and started to look for some Nescafé, and she had just found it, and was standing holding it to her trying to work out what to do next when Magnus appeared. He shut the door behind him, so she was not, somehow, at all surprised when he came over to her and kissed her. He did not kiss her very seriously, but he held her, rather hard, and the co
ffee jar rammed itself uncomfortably into her bosom and his, caught there between them like Tristram’s sword.
‘Shall I tell you something?’ said Magnus, when he let go of her. ‘Shall I tell you something? Perhaps you won’t want to know.’
‘I like to know everything,’ she said.
‘It’s about Phillipa,’ he said.
‘Even about Phillipa,’ she said.
‘I was in love with Phillipa,’ he said.
‘Is that all?’ she asked him, wanting more.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, standing there, and looking for what she was thinking, ‘I don’t know, but you might almost say that that seems to me to be normal. What I mean is, that it seems to me that I might almost have known it. Though how I should have known it is another matter.’
‘One knows these things from birth,’ said Magnus.
‘Some people may,’ said Clara, ‘you and all your family may, but I don’t know, I didn’t know, I’ve had to find it all out. I think, perhaps, that I am not talking very clearly. Can you hear what I am saying?’
‘Yes.’
‘You aren’t in love with her now, though.’
‘Oh no, not now. I don’t suppose anyone will ever be in love with her again.’
‘You resent me, you resent me,’ said Clara, suddenly, seeming to see, through a swaying mist, some new illumination, ‘you resent me for wanting Gabriel.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘on the contrary, I wish you well, I wish you and Gabriel well, though I haven’t very much hope that it will do him much good.’
‘I can’t stand this conversation much longer,’ said Clara. ‘I came in here to make myself a coffee, let me make myself a coffee.’
‘First of all,’ said Magnus, ‘give me a kiss.’
And she, acquiescent, confused, willing, stood there and shut her eyes and waited, and he said, patiently, ‘No, no, I said give me a kiss. Open your eyes. It is better to give than to receive.’
‘You must be very drunk,’ she said, ‘as drunk as I am.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Open your eyes.’
So she opened her eyes, and saw him, and also the truth of what he had said, which was that she had never kissed a man in her life, she had merely allowed herself to be kissed; and she forced herself, she forced herself, she reached up towards him, feeling his height, after Gabriel’s, unnatural, and she kissed him, on the lips, and she felt that in doing so she was forcing her nature beyond the limits of its spring, that it could not bend back, that it would break rather than bend so far, or bend so far that it would bear the shape of the curve for life. And then she let go of him, and he, in silence, went over to the gas stove, and put on a pan of water, and got down a cup for her coffee, and another cup for his, and made them two cups of coffee, without speaking another word. Then he said,
‘Drink it here, or everyone else will want one,’ so she stayed there and drank it, and then she went back to look for Gabriel.
But Gabriel had gone. At first she could not believe it; she sat down and waited for him to reappear, thinking he might have gone to the bathroom, or gone for a breath of air, not beginning to fear that he might not return, but he did not come and he did not come, and as time went on it appeared increasingly obvious that he was not coming, and she could too easily imagine the reasons for his absence. Her conduct, which had hitherto seemed to her to taste of liberation, worsened in her own eyes, worsened with a sickening, dreadful rapidity, and she sat there suffering the loss of faith that she had always dreaded, and all the more bitterly for the fact that the reproach should come from her ally, her lover. She looked back over the day, giddy at the lengthening prospect behind her, and she thought, I thought it was beautiful but it was nothing, I cannot do it, I was not made that way, and all that I have done is to make a fool of myself, and Gabriel knows it, he has found me out, he has recognized that I cannot do it, I am no use to him. And the thought of Magnus filled her with alarm and guilt and misery, and she started to cry, and the thought of being discovered in tears by Magnus pulled her to her feet, and she walked unsteadily through the dining room and through the hall, and started to open the front door, to let herself out, and there Peter Harronson overtook her and asked her where she was going. She said that she was going back to the hotel, and he asked her how, and she said that she would pick up a taxi, which was not true, for she had not enough money on her, and he said that he would come with her, so she let him, lacking the strength to prevent him, and they walked up to the Place du Trocadéro, where she had been so gaily earlier in the day, and there they found a taxi. And she got into it, and then remembered she had no money, and when he said that he would come with her she had to say that he could, and he got in beside her and held her hand, and she cried and cried, all the way across the river, all the way to the hotel. There she thanked him, and he said it was nothing, and that was that, and he went off again, and she had not had to pay.
The hotel door was open; it was always open, and there was never anyone there. She looked at her watch, for the first time for hours, and saw that it was twenty past four. The key to their room was not on its hook, and her spirits rose, slightly, at the thought that he must be there, that his disaffection had not been great enough to remove him to some place where she could not find him; she needed to set eyes on him again. She went quietly up the stairs, and pushed open the unlatched door of their room, and there he lay, flat on the bed, still fully dressed, face downwards, his head buried in the pillow, asleep. He had not even taken off his shoes. She sat down beside him on the bed, but he did not stir. He was sleeping as he had not slept all week, the sleep of total exhaustion. And it occurred to her, mercifully, that there was a chance that he had left her because he was so tired. There might have been nothing more to it than that. She sat by him, and she thought of how tired he had been, and of how little they had slept, and of how they had laughed together over their inability to leave each other alone, and of how he had groaned, night after night, into her arms, Oh darling, you’re killing me, I’ll die of you, I’ll die. And these intimate recollections reassured her, and she stared down at his disorder, at the checked cotton shirt escaping from the indecently low waist of his trousers, and at his dangling shoes: she had thought that she would wake him, to hear him speak to her, to see him turn to her, but instead she lay down quietly by his side, and tried to sleep. She thought that it would be an intimate, familiar kindness, to let him sleep, to abandon love and reproaches until the morning: a mark of progress, a sign of unselfish care.
But she could not sleep. The world swam whenever she shut her eyes, so she kept them open and stared at the ceiling, and as she stared she thought of the morning. They were intending to leave together on the nine o’clock plane, as Gabriel had to be back at work. And as she thought of her return, the immense folly of her absence hit her for the first time, and misgivings possessed her; a hundred things might have happened while she had been away, there were a hundred reasons why she might have been found out. She wondered what would happen to her, and whether it would matter, and whether she would mind, and whether it had been worth it. She felt committed: she felt that she had aligned herself. And this gave her nothing but pleasure, for at the heart of all her misgivings there was a small disgraceful gaiety. She had started on a course, and she had gone far enough at last to know that she could never go back.
But, for Gabriel, she was worried. She looked at him, so sleeping, so much himself, so heavily excluding her, and shame renewed in her, for it did not seem that they had used each other well. And she felt that it had ended. She was sure that it had ended; when she had chosen not to wake him, she had chosen not to continue it, but to make an end.
At six o’clock, she got up and put her things in her case. Still he did not move. And it was then that she realized that she was going to leave him there. The thought of walking out on him, as he had walked out on her, occurred to her as though it were the greate
st inspiration of her life; indeed, she greeted it with such satisfaction that she was obliged to recognize that she must still be drunk, for it was not the kind of inspiration that came to her often in sobriety. Once it had occurred to her it seemed irresistible. The thought of his missing his plane did not dismay her: she wanted him to miss it. She wanted to shake his faith as he had shaken hers, or this was what she thought that she wanted, as she searched, quietly and anxiously, through his briefcase to find the plane tickets. They were not there, so she tried his coat pocket, and his suitcase, and could not find them there either: determination gripped her the more strongly for such opposition to her efforts, and she started to look in his trouser pockets. She could feel them there, and got them out without waking him, though he stirred and murmured and turned over on to his side: she took her own, and left his by the bedside. Then, remembering her total lack of money, she took a ten-franc note as well. And then, on the point of leaving him, she stood and looked down at him and she thought: I am not leaving him because I don’t want him, but because I do, and because it will prove that I do, because he will know that I want him so much that for his sake I have made myself able to leave this room, for him I have left him, and what I want, I prepare myself most endlessly to leave. For to renounce is to value. And then, leaving no word, she left. It did not much look as though he would wake in time.
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