SUNDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 1955
The shutters are already open when she wakes. The scent of lilies is overpowering. She thinks that Kunthea is going to have to burn that disgusting bouquet.
Her night’s sleep was brought to an end by a different smell, one that arose from the drains in the street after torrential rain. It had forced her to breathe through her mouth. At first she had been surprised that a smell could wake her, then she had become more and more desperate. And as always when the underground pipes flooded, cockroaches came up in their dozens through the sinks and drains.
She lay there in the pitch-dark breathing the sickening smell, listening to cockroaches scuttling blindly round the room.
Now she neither wants to get up nor to stay in bed. No longer is it the sickness of the night, now it’s the sickness of the last few mornings closing ever more insistently around her.
And in spite of sleeping so soundly for much of the night, the weight of her weariness is overpowering.
It occurs to her that it’s almost two weeks since that trip to the casino at Kep-sur-Mer. She wonders: how can time seem so long and yet so short?
The restaurant of Le Club Nautique had been closed but she’d still been able to walk out along the shrunken boards of the long wooden pier. Faded pennants twisted in the wind. Where the pier ended the sky and the sea seemed the same size. Pale grey. Milk white.
Through the foliage she had caught a glimpse of lawns and of more houses in the same light modern colours. Private swimming pools, an empty tennis court.
He had gone by the time she woke. That hadn’t bothered her. She spent the morning at the deserted clubhouse, which was built on stout pillars high above the water. When the first rain of the day began to fall, she sat at one of the tables and watched the world around her dissolve in the cloudburst.
She thought she made far too few trips to the coast. She had the same thought whenever she saw the sea.
Then she had sat on the pier, thinking of them lying in silence in the darkness afterwards. The way every sound had seemed magnified and distinct. As if the sounds were only there for them. The surge of the waves, the insects, the frogs.
The moonlight through the window had been so bright that it formed a silver square on the floor. Beside it lay a silver wedge of light falling through the half-open door. They had stayed close to one another in spite of the heat. Forehead to forehead.
The hardness of the underlying bone, the sweat on the thin layer of skin there. His closed eyes. A moment of rapture, outside time. No more than a little blood and a layer of bone separating our thoughts just then. But it didn’t help, of course: it was impossible to know what he was thinking. It always is. He could have been somewhere else entirely, and with someone quite different. He could have been betraying her utterly while lying just a centimetre away from her thoughts. And such thoughts, blissful thoughts.
Kunthea knocks, enters, asks if she can clean the room now.
She says she can.
Her eyes move from the girl and her palm-leaf broom and come to rest again on the small, thin-skinned, almost transparent lizards up on the ceiling. She thinks that it’s a month since she last saw Sar. He feels very far away. Further than just a month. The time since he came home seems unreal, almost as if it is something she has invented. She remembers something Monsieur Hanin told her on some now forgotten occasion. He said that in his homeland stories always began with “Once there was, once there wasn’t”. That seems to her so much more beautiful and so much more comforting than the absolute nature of the French opening, “Once upon a time there was”. She thinks that once there was, once there wasn’t a fiancé who came back from a far country. And then what will be will be.
Only the rich can afford to marry for love. That is another of Sar’s statements that has lodged in her mind, against her will. The words are meaningful in a self-righteous kind of way, their import stays the same however much they are moved around. She finds it irritating, not least because it was Sar (in the days when he often talked about things other than politics) who pointed out that most of what she says or thinks consists of words and phrases she has heard or read. Whatever she thinks, she ends up using other people’s ready-made structures. It is not that she has any ambition to revolutionize human thinking, it’s just that there is something joyless about that particular insight. Like wearing faded second-hand clothes.
Only when drunk does she feel any release from this intellectual straitjacket. It seems that there needs to be an endless row of champagne cocktails lined up in front of her and for her to fill the table with empty glasses before she can tear herself free from the linguistic stranglehold and express her innermost thoughts without restriction.
And, she asks herself, isn’t passionate love, as described by Maman’s friends after the film they watched together, rather similar? A structure that locks you into a pattern.
To be permitted to marry for love has long been a goal, a battle she has fought, but what, she now thinks, what would actually be the point? Wouldn’t it imply capitulation, self-destruction? And what would be left of her and her ambitions then? Even if she can, so to speak, afford it, can she really afford to subordinate herself to love?
Because it’s a structure that even champagne would be hard put to make any impression on.
Mother’s voice through the rooms. A question that isn’t a question. Somaly studies the face she has created in the mirror, shouts that she is coming at once. Immediately. At once. Her starting point had been Vivien Leigh’s Egyptian princess, but it has turned into something else. Exaggerated. That’s what always happens when she doesn’t have a particular purpose in mind.
She washes her face in the basin. Wipes everything off and starts again. She must keep it simple. The lines of her eyes and mouth. And then go and satisfy Maman’s desire for company. It will be a welcome interruption and one that rarely involves more than just being in the same room. And the post should have brought her magazines by now.
Through the open windows of the dining room she can see Kunthea out on the covered veranda slowly folding the washing that has been hanging there since morning. Out beyond Kunthea the afternoon light is turning to the gold that precedes darkness. She enquires about the papers and is told brusquely that they are where they always are.
The rest of the day’s deliveries are on the table by the front door, between two armchairs of dark polished wood. As expected, there are red roses accompanied by a card in Sar’s handwriting. She doesn’t read it, picking up a square package instead. Wrapped in violet paper with a beautiful golden pattern on it. In the small attached envelope is a greeting signed by the Chinese man from last Friday’s soirée. The paper encloses a simple metal box containing China tea. Judging by the seal it is exclusive tea. What a bizarre present, she thinks. She looks through the other flowers in an absent-minded way. She doesn’t know the people who sent them. Nothing original, just everyday congratulatory phrases and the usual unimaginative praise of her unique beauty. Everything seems to have been written in the secret and unnerving hope that she will reply. One young man—young to all appearances, anyway—has even enclosed a small photographic portrait. A touch of the film star. Dark suit and a wave of glossy hair. He has been taken in half-profile, smiling, his mouth closed (probably to conceal bad teeth, she thinks). She drops the photograph and picks up a twig of temple flowers with yellowish white petals that shade over to reddish violet at the centre. No wrapping, nothing but the solitary twig. An Indian custom, perhaps, she thinks, seeing the name Klein, the cultural attaché, on the card. He writes that he insists on a rendezvous as a matter of urgency since there are important issues involved.
Klein’s insistence certainly raises the spirits anyway, she thinks.
Through the doorway she can see the new housekeeper preparing dinner. Watches her bony hands gripping the slippery pale body of a squid, sees the knife slicing through the flesh. The sight makes her feel sick. She picks up one of the presents, a box of
candied fruit that also fills her with nausea, and asks whether the housekeeper would like it. For her children? She does have children? The woman smiles, nods, thanks her most humbly.
The papers are on the counter. She takes the package addressed to her and moves on into the drawing room.
She sits at the table, gently smoothing out the cover of the magazine with the woman in the bright yellow sundress and thinking if only I could be as pale as the foreigners. She hasn’t gone beyond the first page yet. It has become a monthly ritual, which she usually manages to stick to, to wait until evening before abandoning herself to all the beautiful pictures of beautiful people in beautiful clothes.
Brigitte Bardot is on the cover (SI ELLE LIT ELLE LIT ELLE) again. On closer inspection the yellow dress has white spots. The photograph was taken looking diagonally down, with Bardot sitting on a red floor and leaning on a grey wall. The dress is spread out and her petticoat is visible, as are her shoes and naked calves. The context seems to Somaly to be an essentially private one, unlike the photograph of the actress in an evening dress on last November’s cover. Bardot is cuddling a grey tabby cat and her eyes meet Somaly’s.
They are almost the same age and she wonders whether they could be friends. They might perhaps meet in Paris and get to know one another. That is, if Bardot would have anything to do with natives.
The theme of the number is relaxation, which she finds disappointing since she knows everything there is to know about tedium.
To spin things out a little longer she lights a cigarette. Takes a sip of the sweet red wine her mother has poured for her. An advertisement for cherry pralines takes up the back page of the magazine. Mon chéri. She smiles at the wordplay and thinks I ought to send some of them to someone at some point.
Her mother is sitting curled up on the velvet sofa with a small limp-covered book in her hand.
A car can be heard approaching outside. To judge by the sound of the engine, it slows down as it passes and then speeds up again as it departs.
It’s a starless night. The rain is holding off.
She has tried to follow her mother’s example and read novels, but she finds it hard to keep her interest going for the whole of a long book. And she can’t remember the plot afterwards anyway. Film is obviously much more her medium, though certain passages or episodes in novels do stick in her mind. Like the one where a man and a woman have an extramarital affair. The unfaithfulness, if it can be called that, is limited to the two of them deciding what underwear the other should wear when they meet to share innocent meals at restaurants. No kisses, no embraces, just the knowledge that each has decided what the other will be wearing next to their body. She finds something peculiarly sensual in this curious behaviour. But the rest of the novel has been completely wiped from her memory.
She has a sudden urge to share this little story, hoping perhaps to understand better why she remembers it and has forgotten the rest. She hesitates several times before interrupting her mother’s reading.
Her mother’s expression changes from distant to amused. Which novel is she referring to? She confesses that she doesn’t know and regrets having broached the topic. Her mother says she would like to read it and Somaly can’t decide whether she is being ironic or not. Her mother goes on: I really think you would like what I’m reading at the moment. It was written by a French girl who is only nineteen but has an impressive ear for psychological subtleties. Its sales run into the hundreds of thousands.
She asks (with a touch of envy) what a woman that young could write that Mother of all people would find enlightening?
They top up their glasses and Mother nods in the direction of the cover of the magazine. Even Brigitte Bardot reads novels. Somaly looks at the photograph again and notices now that Bardot’s left hand is resting on a book she has perched on her knee. And on the floor there is a small stack of volumes of various sizes. A half-empty glass is sitting on top of the pile. She feels annoyed to have been caught out, even though her mother can’t know that she hadn’t noticed all the books on the cover.
Her mother sits down again and, with her eyes on her book, says that the main character is supposed to be spending the summer studying for her matriculation exam. Maybe it would be a good idea for Somaly to pick up her studies again?
She doesn’t know what to answer. Once her mother has decided something, that something happens. For lack of any other way of delaying her mother’s mind from moving towards such an unwanted decision, she says in an acid tone that she would have been only too happy to do that five years ago when she was still going to school: she wasn’t the one who had wanted to stop. Her mother carries on reading for a moment before answering in a preoccupied way that it had been a matter of money, as she well knows. Their finances at that point were not what they had been. Their circumstances are different now.
So her attacking move is unsuccessful. She decides on honesty instead and says in a conciliatory tone that it’s too late now. She has other plans. Her mother raises her head at that point and says, I see?
She takes a breath, looks out of the window instead of at her mother and reminds her what Miss World, Miss Riviera and Miss Elegance said to her. Then she talks about her thoughts of France and about the invitations she has had and those that will undoubtedly come. About Paris and the possibility that one day there could be a fashion house bearing the family name.
She looks back at her mother who, in her turn, is studying her. There is a long, almost unbearable pause and then her mother makes a quick movement with her mouth before returning to her novel.
She has just heard the car slow down as it passed. Again. It’s pointless: all the lights are out, she is already in bed, hidden from view. Whoever it is at the wheel will have to drive on disappointed.
She is tired, too tired to read but still unable to get to sleep. Her thoughts will simply not be at rest; they tug at their chains, stamp restlessly, anxiously. The night outside is silent again, apart from the insects and the old gecko up in the roof lining.
It’s very annoying, because she has already become accustomed to this new sort of sleep that washes over her the moment she puts her head on the pillow. That fills her head with convincing colourful dreams. It would also give her some relief from this vague nagging ache which has settled in just below her navel.
The darkness in the room is complete and it seems it might last for ever.
The thought of Sar comes into her mind. The difference in him when he returned from France. He wasn’t a new person, for the most part he was just as before, but still. There was a new self-assurance about him, a kind of distance that came at the expense of the vulnerable, almost childlike quality she used to find so attractive. And the part of him that had earlier been tentative and seeking had ossified into certainty. His objection to injustice—a seemingly natural part of his character—had turned into an obsession with justice that…
Indeed, how best to put it?
… that seemed more important than every other consideration? It has become a rule that allows no exception?
She doesn’t know why she finds it so maddening. To some degree frightening even, in fact. It only deals in absolutes, and there is an iron-bound answer to every objection.
His earlier attitude (permissive, questioning) has disappeared almost completely.
Instead of filling her with enthusiasm, as it almost certainly would have done a few years ago, it merely increases her desire to tear it down. To destroy it utterly. To erase that self-sufficient smile from his complacent face.
But why?
Is it because he left her and when he came back he was someone else? Or is it because of her inability to share his vision wholeheartedly, to become part of a community that she finds intolerable because of its rigidity and because of its insistence that she should be the one to adapt on point after point after point? Or are all these things merely excuses to cover the fact that she herself has changed?
If you cannot even be sure about your own
inner world (which, after all, is in a state of perpetual movement, so that what seemed to be a guiding star can easily turn out to be no more than a will-o’-the-wisp leading you astray), how is it possible to be so confident about how the external world with its countless unpredictable inhabitants and circumstances should be organized?
But without all that, what is there left apart from loneliness?
MONDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 1955
More roses from Sar and she wonders where his imagination, his finesse, has gone? Does he believe that if he just keeps sending more bouquets the whole business will be resolved (as if the problem is one of too few roses)?
Red roses. Always the same dark shade and probably, she thinks, from the same florist in the Old Market. She strokes the silky half-open buds and wonders whether deep, deep down in the capillaries of the petals the flower knows it has been cut. Red, firm, they spring back when she squeezes them. Almost animal. A slightly musty, earthy smell.
She recalls that it was Monsieur Joly, her French tutor, who first pointed out to her that all the flowers in beautiful arrangements are dead. At that time, almost ten years ago, she had been horrified, finding it both sad and macabre. Now, however, she feels it enhances their beauty. She rarely thinks of him these days, the jovial professor with the paunch whose job it was to educate her and her brother in all things French. He was different from the teachers at school who demanded that their pupils could repeat the sentences on the blackboard word-perfect. Monsieur Joly encouraged them instead to reason their way to a solution of the problems he laid before them. But he also considered it appropriate to extend his mandate to include the more philosophical aspects of biology. Particularly when she was alone with him, when her brother was occupied studying other things. Initially, Monsieur Joly restricted himself to ad hoc comments, such as the one about the dead roses which everyone thought of as being alive. But without departing from his elegant academic didacticism the professor then moved on to human anatomy, more specifically to that of the male, and even more specifically to that of the male organ (his own). One afternoon, when instruction included ocular inspection, it all got too much even for a thirteen-year-old who was well disposed to Monsieur Joly. And that was the end of his employment.
Song for an Approaching Storm Page 28