She had found it difficult to understand at that stage. But with a decade’s experience behind her she knows that men who say they want to show her their amazing collection of art, or a unique but unfamiliar beauty spot, or—as in the case of Monsieur Joly—the dubious relationship between man and nature, or—as another Frenchman put it—his immortal soul, actually only want to show her their erections.
She suddenly remembers that when Monsieur Joly came to tutor them at home in the evening, he used to stay to dinner in order to discuss the latest French literature with Maman. She finds it vexing that she will never be able to bring herself to ask her mother whether she and Monsieur Joly stuck to the subject on those occasions.
She brings the tips of her fingers to her nose. A hint of eau-de-cologne and something else. Sweat? She presses them gently to her lips, which still feel warm and swollen.
She carries on smoking the cigarette he gave her and looking out at the streets, the frontages, the few people being picked out by the pale white light of the headlamps as they pass.
The driver drives steadily, carefully. His broad dark shoulders above the seat back.
She suggested to Sary that she should leave the hotel first, him perhaps a quarter of an hour later. Or that he should wait for an extra half hour in order to forestall any suspicions. He dismissed her concerns with amusement, moving restlessly around the room while tying his tie. As if the hour they had spent together had supercharged him.
She thought that he looked happy there. Their eyes had met while he was straightening his jacket in the mirror. With a playful glint.
So they left at the same time, handed in the key to the night porter together, stepped out onto the street arm in arm. And, she thinks, she can’t get enough of this frivolousness. This madness. She does, of course, recognize that they are being foolhardy, but it feels as if it’s impossible for anything bad to happen to him. Or to her when she is with him.
The station building, its lights off, was on the left when they came out. The railway park stretched away for a kilometre on the right.
The half moon layered the darkness in various degrees of dark. The odd shadowy figure showed up on the pavement, sitting outside closed shops, squinting out over the station square.
Then a cyclo crossed in front of them. For a moment she thought she could pick out the driver’s face in the gently swaying light of the paraffin lamp. The man had met her eyes without any expression in his. Then he had crossed the boulevard and continued along the park (which had once been a canal and was the place her parents had met). His unbuttoned light shirt receded like a ghost before being swallowed by the night.
She had stood there, pulse racing, watching the image of his broad nose and thin lips shrink in the distance. It was the same man, wasn’t it, whom she had seen before, on several occasions? Was she being stalked? By whom? She very nearly said something to Sary, but he hadn’t noticed anything. He was still in a state of carefree sensuality. She let him lead her impatiently to the car that was parked discreetly round the corner. He told her the driver would take her home and he would walk. She had tried to refuse. It’s not right for one of the most powerful men in the kingdom to be out on foot in the city at night. Nor is it safe. But she was still feeling uneasy about the cyclo man. Perhaps she was imagining it all and it was just chance? But she was reluctant to take a cyclo, which would take a good while to get her home, and so she accepted the offer of the car without any further objections. Sary said to the driver pick me up afterwards, gave him an address and shut the door behind her.
Half-lying on the back seat she allows herself to sink back into the afterglow of alcohol and the hotel bed. (And of that momentary sensation of a piece of ice running through her body from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head.) In a half trance and from the safety of the car, she can watch the world outside the windows. The flickering of the treetops against the starry sky.
She thinks that he too is on the move, albeit in a different direction, and she wishes she had left the mark of a bite somewhere on his body. Or let her nails scratch his skin until it bled. There would have been consequences, but he would no longer have been able to deny her. Not to Em and, above all, not to himself.
In this unstructured flow of thought, tomorrow begins to emerge. She tries to remember what it contains. Is it a special Tuesday? Is there something she has agreed to do? She doesn’t have an answer. The day opens out on the far side of the night and is pleasantly without shape. She feels, though, that she wants to see Sary again: at a fashionable cocktail reception together, followed by a late visit to a restaurant, and then the hotel again. The hotel yet again. But she remembers she has agreed to have dinner with Voisanne, Nana and the others. He will probably be busy anyway. If not, she can always meet him when she has finished with her friends.
He isn’t her first lover. She had a number of lovers during the years Sar was away. But they were always casual affairs and never with men who live in the city. Why did she break her promise to Sar, whom she loved so devotedly? The answer is the simplest imaginable: just in order to break it.
However much she had wanted to hold to their agreement, the temptation of the forbidden was stronger. The emotional experience of breaking her promise was so much more intense than sticking to what was expected of her, sticking to uncomplicated chastity.
And once she had given in to it, new and unknown experiences were revealed and had to be tested.
Take the odour of skin, for instance. How different her men have smelt behind their soap and aftershave. There was the young French adventurer who was visiting the country with his even younger wife in order to hunt tiger. When she got close to him she was overpowered by the strong spicy odour he gave off. It bordered on the repellent, was as pungent as that of an animal, but it had nothing to do with a lack of hygiene. It was his natural scent. Which was why she absolutely had to have him. The first and second times it was amazingly exciting, but after their third encounter she threw away the clothes she had been wearing because the smell had begun to disgust her. She thinks of Sar’s smell, which is dry and pleasant. It reminds her of dried petals. And Sary’s? For want of a better description, his is distinctive, like cinnamon. And Somaly thinks that someone else might react to it as she did to the Frenchman’s smell. But she thinks it would be impossible to grow tired of it.
She asks the driver for another cigarette. He passes her a packet of Red Club without taking his eyes off the road. She then asks him, without really thinking about it, what kind of place is the address Sary gave him. The driver laughs and says it’s not his place to say anything about it. If she wants information of that sort, Miss will have to ask His Excellency herself.
If she had been in a different frame of mind his answer would have annoyed her, but now she doesn’t let it worry her. She thinks that if she is ever in a position to employ a driver of her own, she wouldn’t be pleased either if he answered a question of that sort.
That thought leads her to start fleshing out the future she envisages for herself. In a few months’ time she may be sitting in a French taxi on her way through a city pulsing with nightlife and flashing neon signs. Alone, or perhaps sitting beside new friends? When that time comes, how will she remember tonight’s journey through sleeping streets with no street lights and just the stars above? She will feel nothing but joy at leaving most of this behind. A joy bordering on contempt. But she also thinks that now, as things are just now, she is in fact utterly content. However hopelessly tangled everything is at present, she may well find herself hankering after this moment.
The car slows down, turns right and drives along the long straight street that leads to her house. All that is left is one more left turn and then a couple of blocks. She opens her handbag to check in her mirror that she is presentable. Her cigarette case is there, too, along with the money from Sary, the notes new and smooth. When she opens the cigarette case she sees it is half empty. But the driver’s cheap cigarettes add to the special
feeling of the moment, and she asks for one more and leans over the seat back to get a light.
A sudden impulse causes her—against her will—to turn her head and look out of the rear window. There is no cyclo in sight, just darkness. And the road unrolling behind them in the weak red glow of the rear lights.
TUESDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 1955
With the tip of the nail of her index finger she traces the narrow black line around the photographs on the cover of the magazine. She looks down into them, seeing smoky crowded bars in which young women and men are leaning forward and gesticulating as they talk. She sees the bare brick of a low vaulted cellar in which a sweating band is playing, the sharp outline of their own shadows on the wall behind. She sees dancing couples frozen in strange poses with ecstatic expressions on their faces.
Brigitte Bardot is standing outside a restaurant, smiling together with someone called Albert Camus (as she discovers from the text).
Her own outside consists of dazzling white light and deserted afternoon streets. The humid heat is pressing down on the city, squeezing all life out of it. The soft rumble of distant thunder. In the photographs in front of her, however, it always seems to be night or a sort of greyish dusk. The next picture: a wide boulevard dissolves into darkness and mist, the weak globe lights of the street lamps resembling a lonely line of abandoned lighthouses.
She hates the powerful longing that these pictures awaken in her, the way their emotional magnetism sucks out infinite quantities of energy while giving her nothing but emptiness in return. She wants to be part of that world that both Sar and Sary learnt to know thanks to their royal scholarships. Neither of them, however, was clever enough to take advantage of the possibilities: Sar says he prioritized political meetings, Sary his studies. As if it isn’t just as easy to devote yourself to politics and books here, she thinks.
Her wardrobe with all her beautiful clothes, all the small jars on her dressing table, all the eyes on her at soirées. Spending your time on things like that makes existence bearable. But the photographs in the magazines reveal something very different from polite conversations about familiar and harmless things, from the constantly repeated appearance of the same faces, from the oh-so-familiar social structures. And now even political change seems to be off the agenda, so everything will continue as before.
Nana was talking recently about a dinner with her parents and her father’s business acquaintances. For no reason at all the wife of one of the guests told them about a miscarriage she had suffered and what a distressing time it had been afterwards. Nana pulled a disapproving face as she recounted the story. So utterly unsuitable, Nana insisted, it completely spoilt the atmosphere.
That’s just it, she thinks, nothing of any significance can be discussed. Only what is safe and inoffensive is permissible.
And while that is happening here, the café tables in the cellar over there witness heated discussions on the very nature of existence, while one band follows another onto the stage! Long night after long night the fashion studios teem with models, with genius and with champagne. A world that she cannot be sure of gaining entry to, but one which is irresistibly desirable and where she will find—she searches for the right term—the real thing.
That, she thinks, that is the place where what happens happens.
At the same time, however, she recognizes that her image of Parisian life has more to do with the photographs in the illustrated monthly magazines than with reality. Just as the clientele in the dance restaurants of her home city do not have access to the beautiful venues she is at home in, she knows that the majority of Parisians live their lives without ever coming into contact with the nocturnal universe she perceives as being the real thing. But the distinction is this: the division here is on the basis of birth and wealth, there it is a matter of talent. And she thinks, in spite of her uncertainty as to whether she is up to it, that if she were ever to find herself sitting alone in the Café de Flore, some young man with a pale brow and a riot of brown curls would immediately invite her to a vernissage or to a wild masked ball or to a nightclub réservé aux membres. Once there she would be introduced to new and fascinating acquaintances and would quickly become part of a small and intimate group of girlfriends, who accompany each other through the unpredictable adventures of night. The difference between them and her current companions being that all the new ones would be enviably talented.
She looks over at her mother who has fallen asleep in her armchair. In relaxation her face looks older. Ink stains on her fingers like an accountant. There was a time when she used to wonder how her mother put up with these petty circumstances. One way of dealing with them is no doubt provided by all the novels and the various forms of escapism they have to offer. But she has come to recognize that her mother, in spite of her intelligence and her offhand attitude, is firmly ensconced in her milieu. That any break with the narrow boundaries drawn around life here would probably be neither welcome nor possible for her. This is where Maman belongs. To seem to be destined for something different is actually what Mother is destined for. Or at least chooses to be.
The neon sign flashes out the restaurant’s name in red French, green Chinese and pale-blue Khmer. Large clay pots with plants poking out of them form a small avenue running up to the entrance. A couple of cyclo drivers are squatting on their haunches by the door, engrossed in a low-voiced conversation with the uniformed doorman.
It is a clear dry evening and the gravel crunches under her heels as she walks to the door. One of the men nods to draw the doorman’s attention to her arrival, and the doorman smiles obligingly, says welcome and opens the door.
For some reason that is the picture that will stay in her mind most clearly afterwards, much more so than what happens later.
They are sitting at the one big round table in the restaurant. She is late, she is always late. And they all turn towards her as she arrives. They are Nana and Mei, Voisanne and Mari. Voisanne’s brother Phirun and Cédric, his French friend. Pale pastel dresses, high collars and black or gold trimmings. A dark brown suit and an even darker blue one. Welcoming smiles. A light-hearted expectancy in the voices.
There is an element of making an entrance about her arrival, she thinks. The way she is suddenly there in front of them, all eyes on her. The way they allow themselves to be interrupted.
There are seven tall glasses of Kir Royale already standing on the table, dishes with thick-sliced sausage, pistachio nuts, fried grasshoppers, potato crisps, green olives.
She sits down and remembers that on the way there she had continued her afternoon train of thought: that her friends lack sophistication. That they willingly put up with circumstances (such as the present ones) that are so far removed from those of the truly metropolitan cities of the world. That they are incapable of stepping beyond the bounds of convention and, indeed, they have no wish to do so. And that now, by allowing herself to be drawn unresisting into their carefree pleasures, she no longer considers that particular thought to be burdensome. They are here now, she is here now and there is no need for anything to be much more significant than that.
Cédric, Phirun’s French friend, tells them that he recently experienced something quite improbable. He holds some position at the bottom of the hierarchy in the French Embassy, but they have known him for a long time, from the Lycée Sisowath. She finds him very ordinary, but these days he has that paradoxical mixture of the gravitas that pertains to a diplomatic post and the insubstantiality that arises from inexperience and a juvenile appearance. At first, with his new suits and his topics of conversation, he seemed to her to be playing a stage role, but he becomes more and more of a stranger as he grows into the role. A different person is taking shape, a person who might make a reliable and solid impression on people meeting him for the first time, whereas she, from certain angles anyway, continues to see the schoolboy in him.
Cédric says that he spent last weekend by the sea, at Kep-sur-Mer. He says he was there with acquaintances from various
embassies and that he and the daughter of the new Yugoslav ambassador went swimming together. How old she is? Eighteen, perhaps nineteen. Is she pretty? Cut all that. She was wearing a little ivory figure around her neck on a leather thong and she told him she had found it washed up on a beach in Africa. It didn’t look much to the world at large but she valued it very highly, saying it brought good luck. Where in Africa? Not clear. Just listen now. As they were swimming she suddenly shouted that she had dropped the amulet. She was absolutely desperate. Absolutely. He says that he fetched his diving mask even though it was completely hopeless. He had no idea where she had been when the leather came undone and the open sea starts there, after all. But, just to be nice, he dived pretty much at random. You couldn’t see more than half a metre or so—in other words, the situation was doubly hopeless—and once he thought he had done everything that could be expected of a gentleman, he turned towards the shore. But he made one last dive, for its own sake, so to speak, and there it was, half buried in the sand at a depth of a couple of metres! Yes, honestly! Well, he says, as you can imagine, I was nervous and I had to surface first to get some air before I could swim down and dig it up. All it would have taken was the slightest current and I would have been in the wrong place and never found it again. Diplomatic relations between Paris and Belgrade have never been as good as they are now! Phirun says that sounds like a story his uncle the sea captain could have told and, as an example, he tells of his uncle’s encounter with a whirlwind. In the Pacific. Or it might have been the Indian Ocean. Well, the crew sighted the whirlwind on the horizon and tried to steer away from it. Too late! The storm struck one side of the vessel and when they went and looked afterwards, all the paint had been stripped from that half of the ship. Polished steel! Whether it’s true? Mais alors.
Song for an Approaching Storm Page 29