The Last of Cheri Page 10

  ‘Edmée’, Chéri concluded, ‘is a woman who should never grow older than twenty. How like her mother she’s getting!’

  The next moment the resemblance had vanished. Nothing obvious about Edmée recalled Marie-Laure: only in one respect did her daughter exhibit something of the poisonous, pink and white, impudent beauty exploited by the red-haired Marie-Laure to ensnare her victims during her palmy days – and that was in her shamelessness. Careful as she was not to shock anyone, those who still retained their native shrewdness, by instinct or from lack of education, were shocked by her all the same, as if by a second-rate race-horse, or a jewel that looked too new. The servants, as well as Chéri, were frightened of something in Edmée, whom they guessed to be more vulgar than themselves.

  Authorized by Edmée, who was lighting a cigarette, the Baroness de La Berche slowly grilled the tip of her cigar before inhaling the first rapturous puff. Her white Red Cross veil fell over her manly shoulders and she looked like one of those grave-faced men who, at Christmas parties, adorn their heads with tissue-paper Phrygian caps, programme-sellers’ kerchiefs, or shakos. Charlotte undid the plaited leather buttons of her jacket and drew towards her a box of Abdullas; while the butler, mindful of the customs of the house, pushed within easy reach of Chéri a small conjuror’s table on wheels – full of secret drawers, sliding double-bottomed compartments, and liqueurs in silver phials. Then he left the room; and there was no longer against the yellow panels the tall silhouette of an elderly Italian with a face carved out of box-wood, and crowned with white hair.

  ‘Old Giacomo really does look an aristocrat,’ said the Baroness de La Berche, ‘and I know what I’m talking about.’

  Madame Peloux shrugged her shoulders, a movement that had long since ceased to lift her breasts. Her white silk blouse with a jabot sagged under the weight of her bosom, and her short, dyed, but still abundant hair glowed a livid red above large disastrous eyes and high forehead, suggesting a leader of the French Revolution.

  ‘He’s got the distinguished looks of all elderly Italians with white hair. They’re all Papal Chamberlains, by the look of them, and they can write out the menu for you in Latin; but you’ve only to open a door and you’ll find them raping a little girl of seven.’

  Chéri welcomed this outburst of virulence as a timely shower. His mother’s malice had parted the clouds again, bringing back an atmosphere in which he could breathe. Not so long ago he had begun to enjoy discovering traces of the old Charlotte, who, from the safety of her balcony, would refer to a pretty woman passing below as ‘a tuppenny-ha’penny tart’, and who, to Chéri’s ‘Do you know her, then?’ would reply, ‘No! Whatever next! Do you expect me to know that slut?’ Only recently had he begun to take a confused pleasure in Charlotte’s superior vitality, and, confusedly, he now preferred her to the other two creatures present; but he was unaware that this preference, this partiality, could perhaps be termed filial affection. He laughed, and applauded Madame Peloux for still being – and quite startlingly so – the woman he had known, detested, feared, and insulted. For an instant, Madame Peloux took on her authentic character in her son’s eyes; that is to say, he estimated her at her proper value, a woman high-spirited, all-consuming, calculating, and at the same time rash, like a high financier; a woman capable of taking a humorist’s delight in spiteful cruelty. ‘She’s a scourge, certainly,’ he said to himself, ‘and no more. A scourge, but not a stranger.’ Looking at the way the points of her hair impinged upon her Jacobin forehead, he recognized a similarity to the blue-black jutting points on his own forehead, which emphasized the whiteness of his skin and the blackbird sheen of his hair.

  ‘She’s my mother all right,’ he thought. ‘No one’s ever told me I’m like her, but I am.’ The ‘stranger’ was sitting opposite, glimmering with the milky, veiled brilliance of a pearl. Chéri heard the name of the Duchess of Camastra thrown out by the deep voice of the Baroness, and on the stranger’s face he saw a fleeting rapacity flicker and die like the serpent of flame that suddenly flares up along a burnt vine-twig before it is consumed among the embers. But she did not open her mouth, and took no part in the volley of military curses which the Baroness was firing at a hospital rival.

  ‘They’re properly in the soup, it appears, over some new-fangled injection or other. Two men died within two days of being given the needle. That needs some explaining!’ said Madame de La Berche with a hearty laugh.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ corrected Edmée dryly. ‘That’s an old story of Janson-de-Sailly resuscitated.’

  ‘No smoke without fire,’ sighed Charlotte charitably. ‘Chéri, are you sleepy?’

  He was dropping with fatigue, but he admired the powers of resistance of these three women: neither hard work, the Parisian summer, nor perpetual movement and jabber could put them out of action.

  ‘The heat,’ he murmured laconically. He caught Edmée’s eye, but she made no comment and refrained from contradicting him.

  ‘Pooh, pooh, pooh,’ chanted Charlotte. ‘The heat! But, of course. . . . Pooh, pooh, pooh.’

  Her eyes, which remained fixed on Chéri’s, overflowed with blackmailing tenderness and complicity. As usual, she knew everything there was to be known: backstairs gossip, concierges’ chatter. Perhaps Léa herself, for the pleasure of a feminine fib, of winning one last trick, had told Charlotte. The Baroness de La Berche emitted a little neigh, and the shadow of her large clerical nose covered the lower part of her face.

  ‘God in Heaven!’ swore Chéri.

  His chair fell to the floor behind him, and Edmée, alert and on the watch, promptly jumped to her feet. She showed not the slightest astonishment. Charlotte Peloux and the Baroness de La Berche at once put themselves on the defensive, but in the old-fashioned way – hands clutching skirts, ready to gather them up and fly. Chéri, leaning forward with his fists on the table, was panting and turning his head to right and left, like a wild animal caught in a net.

  ‘You, to start with, you . . .’ he stammered. He pointed at Charlotte; used as she was to such scenes, she was galvanized by this filial threat in the presence of witnesses.

  ‘What? What? What?’ she barked in sharp little yelps. ‘You dare to insult me? a little whippersnapper like you, a wretched little whippersnapper who, were I to open my mouth . . .’

  The wine-glasses quivered at the sound of her piercing voice, but her words were cut short by a shriller voice: ‘Leave him alone!’

  After three such abrupt explosions the silence seemed deafening, and Chéri, his physical dignity restored, shook himself, and a smile spread over his green face.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Madame Peloux,’ he said mischievously.

  She was already conferring blessings on him with eye and hand, like a champion in the ring, pacified at the end of a round.

  ‘You’re hot-blooded and no mistake!’

  ‘He’s a soldier all right,’ said the Baroness, as she shook hands with Edmée. ‘I must say goodbye, Chéri; they’ll be missing me in my dug-out.’

  She refused a lift in Charlotte’s motor, and insisted on going home on foot. The tall figure, the white nurse’s veil, and the glow of her cigar would strike terror at night into the heart of the fiercest footpad. Edmée accompanied the two old women as far as the front door, an exceptional act of courtesy, which allowed Chéri time to draw what conclusions he could from his wife’s wary action and her diplomatic peacemaking.

  He drank a glass of cold water very slowly, as he stood beneath the cataract of light, thinking the matter over and savouring his terrible loneliness.

  ‘She defended me,’ he kept repeating to himself. ‘She defended me with no love in her heart. She protected me as she protects the garden against blackbirds, her store of sugar against thieving nurses, or her cellar against the footmen. Little doubt she knows that I went to the Rue Raynouard, and came back here, never to go there again. She’s not said a word about it to me, in any case – perhaps because she doesn’t care. She protected me, becaus
e it wouldn’t have done for my mother to talk. She defended me with no love in her heart.’

  He heard Edmée’s voice in the garden. She was testing his mood from afar. ‘You don’t feel ill, Fred, do you? Would you like to go straight to bed?’

  She put her head through the half-open door, and he laughed bitterly to himself: ‘How cautious she’s being.’

  She saw his smile and grew bolder. ‘Come along, Fred. I believe I’m just as tired as you, or I wouldn’t have let myself go just now. I’ve been apologizing to your mother.’

  She switched off some of the cruel light, and gathered the roses from the table-cloth to put them into water. Her body, her hands, her head bending over the roses and set off by a haze of fair hair from which the heat had taken most of the crimp – everything about her might have charmed a man.

  ‘I said a man – I didn’t say any man,’ Léa’s insidious voice kept ringing in Chéri’s ears.

  ‘I can behave as I like to her,’ he thought, as he followed Edmée with his eyes. ‘She’ll never complain, she’ll never divorce me; I’ve nothing to fear from her, not even love. I should be happy enough, if I chose.’

  But, at the same time, he recoiled with unspeakable repugnance from the idea of the two of them living together in a home where love no longer held sway. His childhood as a bastard, his long adolescence as a ward, had taught him that his world, though people thought of it as reckless, was governed by a code almost as narrow-minded as middle-class prejudice. In it, Chéri had learned that love is a question of money, infidelity, betrayals, and cowardly resignation. But now he was well on the way to forgetting the rules he had been taught, and to be repelled by acts of silent condescension.

  He therefore ignored the gentle hand on his sleeve. And, as he walked with Edmée towards the room whence would issue no sound of endearment or reproach, he was overcome with shame, and blushed at the horror of their unspoken agreement.

  HE FOUND HIMSELF out of doors, dressed for the street and hardly conscious of having put on his soft hat and light raincoat. Behind him lay the drawing-room, misty with tobacco smoke; the overpowering scent of women and flowers; the cyanide smell of cherry brandy. There he had left Edmée, Doctor Arnaud, Filipesco, Atkins, and the two Kelekian girls, well-connected young women who, having done a little mild lorry-driving during the war, had no use now for anything but cigars, motors, and their garage-hand friends. He had left Desmond sitting between a real estate merchant and an Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, together with an invalided poet and Charlotte Peloux. Also a fashionable young married couple, who had obviously been put wise. Throughout dinner they had looked greedy but prudish, with a knowing expression and a simple-minded eagerness to be shocked – as though expecting Chéri to dance stark naked, or Charlotte and the Under-Secretary to make violent love to one another in the middle of the carpet.

  Chéri had made off, aware that his behaviour had been stoical, with no other lapse than a sudden loss of interest in the present: an awkward thing to lose in the middle of a meal. Even so, his trance could have lasted little more than a moment, had been instantaneous, like a dream. But now he was putting a distance between himself and the strangers who thronged his house, and the sound of his footfall on the sand was as light as the soft padding of an animal. His light silver-grey coat shaded into the mist that had fallen over the Bois; and a few nocturnal loiterers must have envied a young man who was in such a hurry to go nowhere in particular.

  He was haunted by the vision of his crowded house. He could still hear the sound of voices, and carried with him the memory of faces, of smiles, and especially of the shape of mouths. An elderly man had talked about the war; a woman about politics. He remembered, too, the new understanding between Desmond and Edmée, and the interest his wife had taken in some building scheme. ‘Desmond! . . . Just the husband for my wife!’ And then, dancing . . . the strange effect of the tango on Charlotte Peloux. Chéri quickened his step.

  The night was filled with the damp mist of a too early autumn and the full moon was shrouded. A great milky halo, ringed with a pallid iridescence, had replaced the planet, and was sometimes itself hidden by fitful puffs of scudding cloud. The smell of September was already in the leaves that had fallen during the dog days.

  ‘How mild it is,’ Chéri thought.

  He rested his weary limbs on a bench, but not for long. He was rejoined by an invisible companion, to whom he refused his seat on the bench – a woman with grey hair, wearing a long coat, who poured forth a relentless gaiety. Chéri turned his head towards the gardens of La Muette, as though he could hear, even at that distance, the cymbals of the jazz-band.

  The time had not yet come for him to go back to the blue room, where perhaps the two society girls were still smoking good cigars, as they sat side-saddle on the blue velvet of the bed, keeping the real estate merchant amused with mess-room tales.

  ‘Oh! for a nice hotel bedroom, a jolly pink room, very ordinary and very pink . . .’ But would it not lose its very ordinariness the moment the light was turned out and total darkness gave the right of entry – a ponderous, mocking entry – to a figure with vigorous grey hair, dressed in a long, nondescript coat? He smiled at the intruder, for he was past the stage of fear. ‘There, or in any other place, she will be just as faithful. But I simply can’t go on living with those people.’

  Day by day, hour by hour, he was becoming more scornful, more exacting. Already he was severely critical of the Agony Column heroes, and young war widows who clamoured for new husbands, like the parched for cold water. His uncompromising intolerance extended to the world of finance, without his realizing how grave was the change. ‘That Company for transporting raw hides they talked about at dinner. . . . How disgusting it was! And they don’t mind discussing it at the top of their voices. . . .’ But nothing in the world would have induced him to protest, to reveal that he was fast becoming a man utterly out of sympathy with his surroundings. Prudently, he kept quiet about that, as about everything else. When he had taken Charlotte Peloux to task for having disposed of several tons of sugar in rather a dubious fashion, had she not reminded him – and in no uncertain terms – of the time when he had shouted, without a trace of embarrassment, ‘Hand over five louis, Léa, so that I can go and buy some cigarettes’?

  ‘Ah!’ he sighed, ‘they’ll never understand anything, these women. It wasn’t at all the same thing.’

  Thus he let his thoughts run on, as he stood, bareheaded, his hair glistening, barely distinguishable in the mist. The shadowy form of a female passed close beside him, running. The rhythm of her steps and the crunch as each foot bit into the gravel betrayed anxiety and haste. Then the shadowy woman fell into the arms of a shadowy man who came to meet her, and down they fell together, breast to breast, as though struck by the same bullet.

  ‘Those two are trying to hide,’ Chéri thought. ‘They’re deceiving someone somewhere. The whole world’s busy deceiving and being deceived. But I . . .’ He did not finish the sentence, but a repugnance made him jump to his feet, an action that meant, ‘But I am chaste.’ A faint ray of light, flickering uncertainly over stagnant, hitherto unfeeling regions of his inmost being, was enough to suggest that chastity and loneliness are one and the same misfortune.

  As night advanced, he began to feel the cold. From his prolonged, aimless vigils, he had learned that, at night, tastes, smells, and temperatures vary according to the hour, and that midnight is warm in comparison with the hour which immediately precedes the dawn.

  ‘The winter will soon be on us,’ he thought, as he lengthened his stride, ‘and none too soon, putting an end to this interminable summer. Next winter, I should like . . . let me see . . . next winter . . .’ His attempts at anticipation collapsed almost at once; and he came to a halt, head lowered, like a horse at the prospect of a long steep climb ahead.

  ‘Next winter, there’ll still be my wife, my mother, old gammer La Berche, Thingummy, What’s-his-name, and the rest of them. There’ll be t
he same old gang. . . . And for me there’ll never again be . . .’

  He paused once more, to watch a procession of low clouds advancing over the Bois, clouds of an indescribable pink, set upon by a gusty wind which buried its fingers in their misty tresses, twisting and dragging them across the lawns of heaven, to carry them off to the moon. Chéri gazed with eyes well used to the translucent magic of the night, which those who sleep regard as pitch-dark.

  The apparition of the large, flat, half-veiled moon among the scurrying vaporous clouds, which she seemed to be pursuing and tearing asunder, did not divert him from working out an arithmetical fantasy: he was computing – in years, months, hours, and days – the amount of precious time that had been lost to him for ever.

  ‘Had I never let her go when I went to see her again that day before the war – then it would have meant three or four years to the good; hundreds and hundreds of days and nights gained and garnered for love.’ He did not fight shy of so big a word.

  ‘Hundreds of days – a lifetime – life itself. Life as it was in the old days, life with my “worst enemy”, as she used to call herself. My worst enemy! who forgave me all, and never let me off a single thing.’ He seized hold of his past, to squeeze out every remaining drop upon his empty, arid present; bringing back to life, and inventing where necessary, the princely days of his youth, his adolescence shaped and guided by a woman’s strong capable hands – loving hands, ever ready to chastise. A prolonged, sheltered, oriental adolescence, in which the pleasures of the flesh had their passing place, like silent pauses in a song. A life of luxury, passing whims, childish cruelty, with fidelity a yet unspoken word.