Aimez-vous Brahms?

by Françoise Sagan

  "We seem always to be running into each other."

  Simon had been too taken aback to say anything. Roger's stare was threatening him, ordering him to keep mum about this meeting: it was not, thank God, the conniving stare of one gay dog to another. It was a furious stare. He had not answered. He was not afraid of Roger, he was afraid of hurting Paule; for the first time he wanted to interpose between someone and distress. He of all people—normally so quick to tire of his mistresses; so terrified of their confidences, their secrets, their relentless desire for him to play the protective male; so prone to flight —now wanted to turn and wait. But wait for what? For this woman to realise that she was in love with a heel? There was, perhaps, no slower process . . . She must be feeling sad, turning Roger's attitude over in her mind, maybe discovering its faults. A violin soared above the orchestra, throbbed desperately on a shattered note and fell back, to be drowned at once in the encroaching flood of melody. Simon nearly turned, took Paule in his arms and kissed her. Yes, kissed her . . . He imagined that he was leaning over her, that his mouth was against hers, that she was drawing his hands around her neck . . . He shut his eyes. Paule thought, from his expression, that he must be really mad on music. But at once a trembling hand groped for hers and she freed herself impatiently.

  After the concert he took her out for a drink, which meant an orange squash for her and a double gin for him. She wondered if Mrs. Van den Besh's fears were justified. Simon—eyes shining, hands fluttering—was talking music and she listened abstractedly. Roger might have contrived to get back from Lille in time for dinner. Besides, people were looking at them. Simon was a little too good-looking; or was he merely a little too young, and she not quite young enough—for him, at least?

  "Aren't you listening?"

  "Yes," she said. "But we ought to be going. I'm expecting a 'phone call, and people are staring at us."

  "You ought to be used to that," said Simon admiringly. What with the music and the gin, he was feeling distinctly amorous.

  She laughed: at times he was altogether disarming.

  "Ask for the bill, Simon."

  He asked for it with such reluctance that she looked at him closely, probably for the first time that evening. Perhaps he was falling quietly in love with her, perhaps he had been hoist with his own petard? She had thought him merely athirst for conquests; perhaps he was more straightforward, more sensitive, less vain. Odd that it should be his looks which set her against him. She found him too handsome. Too handsome to be true.

  If that were the case, she was wrong to see him, she should put a stop to it. He had called the waiter and was twirling his glass between his hands, without a word. He had suddenly lost his tongue. She laid her hand on his.

  "Don't be angry with me, Simon, I'm in rather a hurry. Roger must be waiting for me."

  He had asked her, that first evening, in the Saint-Germain cellar: "Do you love Roger?" What had she said? She could not remember. At all events, he had to know.

  "Oh yes," he said. "Roger. The man. The brilliant. . ."

  She stopped him.

  "I love him," she said, and she felt herself blush. She had the impression that she had spoken theatrically.

  "And him?"

  "Him too."

  "Naturally. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."

  "Don't act the cynic," she said gently. "It doesn't go with your years. At your age you ought to believe these things, you ..."

  He had seized her by the shoulders and was shaking her.

  "Don't make fun of me. Stop talking like that..."

  I'm too inclined to forget he is a man, thought Paule, trying to free herself. He looks a man now, right enough: a man who's been humiliated. It's true: he's twenty-five, not fifteen.

  "It's not you I'm making fun of, but your attitudes," she said gently. "You're acting a part. . ."

  He had released her. He seemed tired.

  "It's true," he said. "With you I've acted the young and brilliant lawyer, and the bashful lover, and the spoilt child and heaven knows what. But since I've known you, all my rôles have been for you. Don't you think that's love?"

  "It's rather a good definition," she said with a smile.

  They were silent for a few moments, equally embarrassed.

  "I wish we could act the part of passionate lovers," he said.

  "I've told you: I love Roger."

  "And I love my mother, my old nurse, my car. . ."

  "I don't see the connection," she broke in.

  She wanted to leave. What could this voracious boy know of her affair, their affair, of these five years of mingled pleasure and doubt, warmth and pain? Nobody could come between her and Roger. She so warmed to Simon for convincing her that, instead of going, she rested her elbows on the table. "You love Roger but you are alone," said Simon. "You spend your Sundays alone, you dine alone and probably you . . . you often sleep alone. I'd sleep beside you, I'd hold you in my arms all night and I'd kiss you while you were asleep. I still know what it is to love. He doesn't. You know he doesn't. . ."

  "You've no right..." she said, rising to her feet.

  "I have the right to speak. I have the right to fall in love with you and take you away from him, if I can."

  Already she was out in the street. He rose, then sat down again, his head in his hands. I must have her, he thought, I must have her ... or I shall suffer.

  7

  THE week-end had been very agreeable. The girl Maisy—she had confessed, with a smirk, to having been christened plain Marcelle, a name for obvious reasons incompatible with her vocation as a starlet— the girl Maisy had kept her word. Once in bed, she had stayed there, unlike certain creatures of Roger's acquaintance who fussed about cocktail-time and lunch-time and dinner-time and tea-time and so forth; just so many excuses for a change of costume. They had gone two days without leaving their room, except once, when naturally he had run into that young milksop, dear Teresa's son. He was unlikely to be seeing Paule, of course, but Roger was left feeling vaguely uneasy. The Lille story had been a little thin, not that he imagined he deluded Paule with his infidelities, or even his lies. But his lapses ought not to be pinned down to a particular place or time. "I saw your friend from the other evening. He was having lunch in Houdan on Sunday." He pictured Paule hearing the news and saying nothing, perhaps turning her head away for a moment. Paule suffering ... It was an old picture by now, and one so often brushed aside that he was ashamed of it, as he was ashamed of the pleasure he would derive from calling on her within the next few minutes, after dropping Maisy-Marcelle. But she wouldn't know. She must have spent the two days resting, without him there to keep her out late; she must have been playing bridge with her friends, working about the flat, reading that new book . . . Suddenly he wondered why he was striving so hard to hit upon something that Paule might do with her Sundays.

  "You drive well," said a voice beside him. He came to with a start and looked at Maisy.

  "Think so?"

  "Come to that, you do everything well," she continued, lolling in her seat.

  And he longed to tell her to forget; to forget her little body and her satisfied appetites for a moment. She gave a languorous, or would-be languorous, laugh and taking his hand laid it on her thigh. The thigh was hard and warm beneath his fingers, and he smiled. She was foolish, prating and affected. She made such a mockery of love that it became curiously down to earth, and her way of shattering any desire he might have for tenderness, comradeship or even faint interest made her more exciting. A dirty little thing; dumb, pretentious, vulgar; someone with whom he made love well. He laughed aloud. She did not ask why, but reached for the radio. Roger followed the movement with his eyes... What was it Paule had said the other night? About the radio and their evenings out... ? He could not remember. A concert was on the air; she dialled away from it, then returned to it for lack of anything better. ". . . by Brahms," said the announcer in a quavering voice, and there was a crackle of applause.

&nb
sp; "When I was eight, I wanted to be a conductor," he said. "And you?"

  "I wanted to be in films," she said, "and one day I shall be."

  He thought it was probable and finally dropped her at her door. She clung to his jacket.

  "Tomorrow I'm having dinner with that awful man Chérel. But I want to see my little Roger again very, very soon. I'll ring you the first chance I get."

  He smiled, rather pleased with the rôle of the young lover in hiding, especially from a man of his own age.

  "What about you?" she pursued. "Can you manage it? I was told you weren't a free agent. .."

  "I'm a free agent," he said with a slight grimace. He certainly didn't intend to discuss Paule with her! She gambolled over the pavement, waved from the porchway, and he drove off. His last remark slightly troubled him. "I'm a free agent." That meant: free not to take on responsibilities. He accelerated: he wanted to see Paule again as soon as possible; she alone could reassure him, and she would.

  * * *

  She must have got back just before him, for she still had her coat on; she was pale, and when he arrived she flung herself at him and hung against his shoulder, without stirring. He folded his arms about her, rested his cheek on her hair and waited for her to speak. He had been right to hurry back; she needed him; something must have happened to her; and, as he reflected on how he had known it in his bones, he felt his fondness for her become intense. He protected her. Of course, she was strong, and independent, and intelligent, but she was probably more female than any woman he had ever known, as he was well aware. And to that extent he was indispensable to her. She gently freed herself from his arms.

  "Did you have a good journey? How was Lille?"

  He shot a glance at her. No, of course she suspected nothing. She was not the kind of woman to set traps like that. He raised his eyebrows.

  "So-so. But you? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," she said, and she turned away.

  He did not press the matter; she would tell him later.

  "What have you been up to?"

  "Yesterday I worked. And today I went to a concert at the Pleyel."

  "Aimez-vous Brahms?" he said with a smile.

  She had her back to him, and she swung round so abruptly that he recoiled.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "I heard part of the concert on the radio, on the way back."

  "Yes, of course," she said, "I'd forgotten it was broadcast. . . But you surprised me: it isn't like you to be so musical."

  "Nor you. What came over you? I imagined you playing bridge at the Darets or . . ."

  She had turned on the sitting-room lights. She wearily took off her coat.

  "Young Van den Besh invited me to the concert; I had nothing to do, and I couldn't remember whether I cared for Brahms . . . Can you imagine? ... I couldn't remember whether I cared for Brahms . . ."

  She began to laugh, softly at first, then more and more loudly. Roger's brain was in a whirl. Simon Van den Besh? And he had not spoken of their meeting ... in Houdan? Why was she laughing, anyway?

  "Paule," he said, "calm down. What were you doing with that popinjay, anyway?"

  "I was listening to Brahms," she said between laughs.

  "Do stop talking about Brahms . . ."

  "I can hardly leave him out. . ."

  He seized her by the shoulders. She had tears in her eyes from laughing so much.

  "Paule," he said, "my Paule . . . what has that character been telling you? And what does he want out of you, anyway?"

  He was furious; he felt outdistanced and derided.

  "He's twenty-five, of course," he said.

  "To me that's a failing," she said tenderly, and he took her in his arms again.

  "Paule, I trust you so much. So very much! I can't stand the thought of your falling for a young cub like that."

  He hugged her to him; suddenly he imagined Paule reaching out for someone else, Paule kissing someone else, giving her fondness and attention to someone else; he was in pain. Paule thought without bitterness: men really are amazing. "I trust you so much"—so much that I can deceive you and abandon you, yet there can be no question of the same thing happening in reverse.

  It took one's breath away.

  "He's nice and he's unimportant," she said. "That's all there is to it. Where do you want us to eat?"

  8

  "FORGIVE ME," wrote Simon. "It's true: I had no right to say that. I was jealous, and I suppose one has the right to be jealous only of what one possesses. Anyway, it seems clear I was rather boring you. Well, now you are rid of me. I'm leaving town, to work on a case with my chief, bless him. We shall be living in an old country house belonging to friends of his. I imagine the beds will smell of verbena, there will be a fire in every room and the birds will sing outside my window in the mornings. But I know that for once in my life I shall be unable to act the young rustic. You will sleep beside me; I shall picture you in reach, by the light of the flames; I shall be within an ace of returning a dozen times. Do not think—even if you never want to see me again—do not think I don't love you. Your Simon."

  The letter faltered in Paule's grasp. It slipped on to the sheet, then on to the carpet. Paule laid her head back on the pillow and shut her eyes. No doubt he loved her . . . She was tired this morning, she had slept badly. Was it because of the brief sentence Roger had let slip the night before, when she had asked him about his return journey? She had not at once caught on to it, but he had stumbled over it and his voice had dropped almost to a murmur.

  "Of course, it's always dreadful driving back on Sundays . . . But at least the motorway is quick, even when it's crowded ..."

  Had he not changed his tone, she would doubtless not have noticed it. She would have immediately imagined—thanks to an unconscious mental reflex, that terrible, self-protective reflex which had grown so over the past two years—she would have imagined a wonderful, brand new motorway to Lille. But he had broken off, she had not looked at him, and it had been left to her, fifteen seconds later, to steer their talk back on to its unruffled path. Their dinner had ended on the same note, but it seemed to Paule that the tiredness and dejection she felt, far more than any jealousy or curiosity, would never leave her. Across the table his face was taut: that loved, familiar face, scanning hers to discover whether she had realised, scanning it for signs of suffering, as though they would cause him intolerable pain. At this she thought: isn't it enough for him to make me suffer; does he have to care about it? And it seemed to her that she would never be able to rise from her chair and cross the restaurant with the ease and grace which he expected of her, or even to bid him au revoir at her doorstep. She would have loved to behave differently: she would have loved to insult him, to fling her glass at him, to forget herself, forget everything that made her seem fine and upstanding, everything that distinguished her from the pack of sluts he went around with. She would have loved to be one of them. He had told her often enough how little they meant to him, that he was like that and had no wish to hide it from her. Yes, he had been honest. But she wondered whether honesty, the only honesty possible in this inextricable life, did not consist in loving someone enough to make her happy. Even if it meant being less self- indulgent.

  Simon's letter still lay on the carpet and she trod on it getting out of bed. She picked it up and read it again. Then she opened the drawer of her desk, took out pen and paper, and replied.

  * * *

  Simon had hung back in the drawing-room, not wishing to mingle with the crowd congratulating the Grand Maître on the outcome of the case. The house was cold and dismal. There had been a frost in the night and the window revealed a captive landscape, two bare trees and a moribund lawn where a pair of rattan seats were quietly rotting, sacrificed to autumn by a neglectful gardener. Simon was reading an English book, a strange story about a woman who turned into a fox, and from time to time he laughed aloud. But his legs would not keep still; he crossed them, then uncrossed them, and gradually his feeling of malaise
came between him and the book until finally he rose, set the book down and went out.

  He walked as far as a small pond at the foot of the garden, inhaling the smell of coldness and the smell of evening, to which was added the more distant smell of burning leaves: he could barely distinguish the smoke behind a hedge. He liked this final smell more than anything and momentarily halted and closed his eyes, so that he could really take it in. Occasionally a bird would give a small, graceless cry, and the perfect unity and cohesion of its yearnings dimly consoled him in his own. He bent over the murky water, plunged his hand in and stared at his lean fingers to which the water gave the appearance of sloping almost perpendicularly from the palm. He did not move, but closed his hand in the water, slowly, as though to capture some mysterious fish. He had not seen Paule in seven days now, seven and a half days. She must have received his letter, given a slight shrug and hidden it so that Roger should not find it and make fun of him. For she was kind, as he well knew. She was kind and affectionate and unhappy, and he needed her. But how was he to let her know? He had already tried, one evening in this sinister house, tried to think of her so long and so intensely that he would get through to her in her far-off Paris, and had even come down in his pyjamas to scour the library for a work on telepathy. In vain, of course! He knew it was puerile: he always tried to get out of things by childish solutions or strokes of luck. But Paule was someone you had to deserve, there was no escaping the fact. He could not win her merely by charm. On the contrary, he felt that his looks set her against him. "I've a face like a hairdresser's assistant," he groaned aloud, and the bird momentarily broke off its piercing cry.

  He walked slowly back to the house, stretched out on the carpet, put another log on the fire. Maître Fleury would be back soon, modest in his triumph but even more sure of himself than usual. He would revive famous trials before a few dazzled countrywomen who, their brains tiring slightly towards the end of the meal and their eyes somewhat blurred with wine, would begin to transfer their attentions to the young, silent, well-mannered pupil—to himself, in fact. "You stand a chance with that one, young Simon," Maître Fleury would whisper, probably singling out the oldest. They had been away together before, but the obsessive allusions of the great advocate had never led either of them into much mischief.