Claudine and Annie Read online

  Clever, certainly, at using her wits and her hands. I watch her in amazement when, all the time she is chattering, her fingers are busy creating an adorable hat or a lace jabot with the professional skill of a ‘first hand’ in a good fashion-house. All the same, there is nothing of the ‘little milliner’ about Marthe. She is dimpled and rather short, with a tight-laced, very slim waist, and a shapely, provocative behind. She carries her head of flaming red-gold hair (Alain’s hair) very high, and she has glittering, ruthless grey eyes. Her face is the face of a young incendiary – a fierce little female ‘comrade’ – and she composes it into a charming pastiche of an eighteenth-century court lady. She uses powder and lipstick and wears rustling silk dresses patterned with garlands of flowers, pointed bodices, and very high heels. Claudine (the amusing Claudine whom one mustn’t see too much of) calls her ‘The Marquise of the Barricades’.

  This revolutionary Ninon de Lenclos has completely subjugated the husband she conquered after a brief struggle – there again I recognize her kinship with Alain: Léon is rather like Marthe’s Annie. When I think of him, I mentally call him ‘poor old Léon’. Nevertheless, he does not look unhappy. He is dark, good-looking, with regular features, a pointed beard, almond-shaped eyes and soft hair plastered close to his skull. A typical Frenchman of the mild, unassertive kind. He would be more impressive if his profile were a little more forceful, his chin squarer, and his brows more emphatically drawn, also if his brown eyes were not so eagerly anxious to please. He is a trifle – it’s malicious of me to write it – a trifle ‘head salesman in the silk department’ as that wicked Claudine suggested when she nicknamed him one day: ‘And-what-next-Madame?’ The label has stuck to poor old Léon whom Marthe treats merely as a productive piece of property.

  She shuts him up regularly for three or four hours a day, with the result that he furnishes, she told me confidentially, a good average yield of one and two-thirds novels per year – ‘enough for our bare necessities,’ she added.

  It is beyond me that there should be women with enough initiative and enough constant, persevering will – enough cruelty too – to build up an income large enough to sustain an extravagant way of life on the bent back of a man who is forced to write and write till he nearly kills himself. Sometimes I condemn Marthe; at others, she inspires me with admiration tinged with fear.

  Thinking of her masculine authority that exploited Léon’s meekness, I said to her one day, when I was feeling extraordinarily bold:

  ‘Marthe, you and your husband are an unnatural couple.’

  She stared at me in stupefaction, then she laughed till she nearly made herself ill.

  ‘No, really . . . the things our little Annie says! You ought never to go without a dictionary. An unnatural couple! Luckily, there’s no one to hear you but me, considering what those words imply nowadays . . .’

  The fact remains that Alain has gone! I can’t forget him for long while I run on like this, talking to myself on paper. What am I to do? This burden of living alone overwhelms me . . . Suppose I go off to the country – to Casamène – to the house my grandmother Lajarrisse left us, so as to see no one, no one at all till he comes back?

  Marthe came in at that point, sweeping away all my splendid, ridiculous plans with her stiff skirts and her rustling sleeves. Hurriedly, I hid my notebook.

  ‘All by yourself? Are you coming to the tailor’s? All alone in this dreary room? The inconsolable widow, in fact!’

  Her ill-timed jest . . . and also her likeness to her brother in spite of the powder, the Marie-Antoinette shepherdess hat and the tall parasol . . . made me start crying again.

  ‘There, now I’ve done it! Annie, you are the most abject of . . . wives. He’ll come back, I tell you! In my simple-minded, unworthy way, I imagined his absence . . . anyway for the first few weeks . . . would give you a holiday feeling – that it would actually be rather a lark . . .’

  ‘A lark? Oh! Marthe . . .’

  ‘Why “Oh! Marthe”? . . . I admit it feels empty here,’ she said, wandering round the room, my room, where nothing, in fact, has changed.

  I dried my eyes, which always takes a little time because I have such thick lashes. Marthe says, with a laugh, that I have ‘hair on my eyelids’.

  She turned her back to me and leant with both elbows on the mantelpiece. She was wearing – a little early for the time of the year, I thought – a high-waisted beige voile dress sprinkled with little old-fashioned roses, with a gathered skirt and a cross-over fichu in the style of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. Her red hair, swept up from the nape, was typical of a very different painter – Helleu. The two styles clashed a little, but not crudely. But I shall keep these remarks to myself. After all, what remarks do I not keep to myself?

  ‘What are you studying for such a long time, Marthe?’

  ‘I’m contemplating the portrait of his lordship, my brother.’

  ‘Alain?’

  ‘Right first time.’

  ‘What do you find so striking about him?’

  She did not answer at once. Then she burst out laughing and said, turning round:

  ‘It’s extraordinary how like a cock he is!’

  ‘A cock?’

  ‘Yes, a cock. Just look.’

  Horrified to hear such a blasphemy, I mechanically picked up the portrait, a photograph printed in reddish sepia. It’s one I’m very fond of. My husband is standing, bare-headed, in a summer garden, with his red hair bristling, his eyes glaring haughtily, and his calves braced taut. That is his habitual stance. He looks like a robust, handsome young man with a fiery disposition and an alert eye; he also looks like a cock. Marthe was right. Yes a red, shiny-plumaged, crested and spurred cock . . . As miserable as if he had just gone away all over again, I relapsed once more into tears. My sister-in-law threw up her arms in consternation.

  ‘No, really, if one can’t even mention him! You’re a case, my dear. It’s going to be a gay expedition to the tailor’s with your eyes in that state! Have I hurt your feelings?’

  ‘No, no, it’s just me . . . Take no notice, I’ll be all right in a minute.’

  The fact is that I couldn’t admit to her that I was appalled that Alain should look like a cock and even more appalled that I should have realized it . . . A cock! Why did she have to make me notice that?

  TWO

  ‘MADAME DIDN’T SLEEP very well?’

  ‘No, Léonie.’

  ‘Madame has black rings round her eyes . . . Madame should take a glass of brandy.’

  Léonie knows only one remedy for all ills – a glass of brandy. I imagine she tests its good effects daily. She intimidates me a little because she is tall and very decisive in her movements. She has an authoritative way of shutting doors and when she is sewing in the linen-room she whistles military bugle-calls, like a coachman who has just returned from his regiment. Nevertheless she is capable of devotion and she has worked for me, ever since my marriage four years ago, with affectionate contempt.

  That solitary awakening! There I was, all alone, telling myself that a day and a night had gone by since Alain left, summoning up all my courage to order meals, telephone to the ‘Urbaine’, go through the account books! . . . A schoolboy who had not done his holiday task could not have woken up more depressed on the first morning of term . . .

  Yesterday, I did not accompany my sister-in-law to her fitting. I felt angry with her about that business of the cock. I pleaded tiredness and the redness of my eyelids.

  Today I want to shake myself out of my nervous depression and – since Alain has ordered me to – go to Marthe’s at-home day, though crossing that immense drawing-room, full of the babel of women’s voices, alone and unsupported has always been a torture to me. Suppose, as Claudine says, I ‘reported sick’! Oh, no, I can’t disobey my husband.

  ‘Which dress does Madame want?’

  Yes, which dress? Alain would not have hesitated for a moment. With one glance, he would have considered the state of the weather and of my co
mplexion, then the names on Marthe’s visiting-list and his impeccable choice would have satisfied every contingency . . .

  ‘My grey crêpe dress, Léonie, and the hat with the butterflies.’

  They amuse me, those grey butterflies with their soft feather wings speckled with pink and orange crescents. At least I must admit that my great sorrow hasn’t had too disastrous an effect on my looks. With the butterfly hat set very straight on my smooth, thick hair, parted on the right and knotted in a low chignon, and my pale, disturbing blue eyes, more liquid than ever from recent tears, I could count on infuriating Valentine Chessenet. She is one of my sister-in-law’s most faithful ‘regulars’ and she loathes me because (I can sense this) she finds my husband very much to her taste. That creature looks as if she had been dipped in a bleaching bath. Her hair, her skin, her eyelashes, are all of the same uniform pinkish fairness. She makes her face up pink and plasters her lashes with mascara (Marthe told me this herself) without managing to liven up her insipid, anaemic colouring.

  She would already have taken up her post at Marthe’s with her back to the light to hide the bags under her eyes, as far away as possible from the lovely, stupid Cabbage-Rose whose healthy radiance she dreads. She would screech nasty things at me over the heads of the other women and I should be incapable of making any retort; my intimidated silence would make the other parakeets laugh and call me ‘the little black goose’ again. Alain, it is only for you that I am off to expose myself to all those painful pinpricks.

  The moment I reached the hall, my hands went cold at the sound of that hen-house cackle, punctuated by the clatter of little spoons like the sound of pecking beaks.

  Of course that Chessenet woman was there! They were all there and all chattering away, except Candeur, the child-poetess, whose silent soul only blossoms in beautiful verses. She kept quiet, slowly rolling her mottled eyes and biting her lower lips with a voluptuous, guilty air, as if it were someone else’s.

  There was Miss Flossie who, when she refuses a cup of tea, utters such a prolonged, guttural ‘No’ that she seems to be offering her whole self in that throaty purr. Alain (why?) does not want me to know her, that American woman, supple as a piece of silk, with her sparkling face glittering with tiny gold hairs, her sea-blue eyes, and her ruthless teeth. She smiled at me without a trace of embarrassment, her eyes riveted on mine, till a curious quiver of her left eyebrow, as disturbing as an appeal, made me look away . . . At that, Miss Flossie gave me a more nervous smile while a slim, red-haired young girl huddled in her shadow glared at me with inexplicable hatred in her deep eyes.

  Maugis – a fat music critic – his protruding eyes flashing for a second, stared straight at the two Americans so insolently that he deserved to be hit, and mumbled almost inaudibly as he filled a claret-glass with whisky:

  ‘Some Sappho . . . if that sort of thing amuses you!’

  I didn’t understand. I hardly dared look at all those faces suddenly fixed in a malicious rigidity because I was wearing a pretty frock. How I longed to escape! I took refuge by Marthe who revived me with her firm little hand and her audacious eyes, courageous as herself. How I envy her for being so brave. She has a sharp, impatient tongue, and she is very extravagant; she could easily be a target for unkind gossip. She is well aware of it and has a method of forestalling any spiteful innuendo: she gets her teeth into any treacherous female friend and shakes her with the tenacity of a good ratting terrier.

  Today, I could have hugged her for her retort to Madame Chessenet who shrieked as I entered the room:

  ‘Ah! Here comes the Hindu widow!’

  ‘Don’t tease her too much,’ Marthe flashed. ‘After all, when a husband goes off, it leaves a void.’

  A penetrating voice behind me, a voice that rolled its r’s, acquiesced:

  ‘Certainly . . . a verry considerrable and painful void!’

  And all those women burst out laughing. I turned round in confusion and was more confused than ever when I saw that it was Renaud’s wife, Claudine. ‘Only one call on Renaud and Claudine, too fantastically unconventional a couple . . .’ Alain treats them so distantly that I feel stupid and almost guilty in their presence. Nevertheless, I find them charming and to be envied, that husband and wife who never leave each other and are as united as lovers.

  One day, when I was admitting to Alain that I didn’t blame Claudine and Renaud in the least for posing as married lovers, he asked me rather sharply:

  ‘My dear, where did you get the notion that lovers see each other and enjoy each other’s company more than married people?’

  I replied sincerely:

  ‘I’ve no idea . . .’

  Ever since then, we have only exchanged occasional formal visits with this ‘fantastic’ couple.

  This doesn’t embarrass Claudine in the slightest, for nothing embarrasses her. Renuad doesn’t mind either, for the only thing in the world he minds about is his wife. Yet Alain has a perfect horror of breaking with people unnecessarily.

  Claudine seemed perfectly unaware that she had raised a laugh. She lowered her eyes and went on eating a lobster sandwich, announcing calmly when she had finished it: ‘That’s the sixth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marthe gaily, ‘you’re an expensive acquaintance. The soul of Madame Beulé has passed into you.’

  ‘Only her stomach, the one thing she had worth taking,’ Claudine corrected her.

  ‘Take care, dear,’ insinuated Madame Chessenet. ‘You’ll get fat on that diet. It struck me the other night that your arms were filling out into a charming but dangerous roundness.’

  ‘Pooh!’ retorted Claudine, with her mouth full. ‘I only wish you had thighs as round as my arms. So many people would be pleased if you had.’

  Madame Chessenet, who is skinny and bitterly laments it, swallowed this rebuff with difficulty. Her neck was so tense that I feared there was going to be a little scene. However, she merely glared in mute fury at the insolent young woman with the short hair and rose to her feet. I was on the point of getting up to go myself, but I sat down again so as not to have to leave the room with that bleached viper.

  Claudine valiantly attacked the plate of little cream cakes topped with praline and offered me one (if Alain had seen us! . . .). I accepted, and whispered to her:

  ‘That Chessenet woman’s going to invent the most appalling scandals about you!’

  ‘I defy her to. She’s already brought out everything she’s capable of imagining. There’s nothing she hasn’t attributed to me except infanticide and I wouldn’t even be too sure of that.’

  ‘She doesn’t like you?’ I asked her shyly.

  ‘Oh yes, she does. But she conceals the fact.’

  ‘Don’t you mind?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  Claudine’s beautiful tobacco-brown eyes stared at me.

  ‘Why? I don’t know. Because . . .’

  Her husband’s approach broke off her reply. Smiling, he unobtrusively pointed towards the door. She rose from her chair, supple and silent as a cat. I had no idea why.

  All the same, it seemed to me that the all-embracing look she gave him was definitely an answer.

  I wanted to leave too. Standing in the middle of that circle of men and women, I felt ready to faint with embarrassment. Claudine noticed my misery and came back to my side; her sinewy hand gripped hold of mine and held it tight while my sister-in-law started asking me questions.

  ‘Any news of Alain yet?’

  ‘No, not yet. Perhaps I’ll find a telegram when I get home.’

  ‘Well, good luck, and my blessing. Good-bye, Annie.’

  ‘Where are you spending your holidays?’ Claudine asked me very gently.

  ‘At Arriège, with Marthe and Léon.’

  ‘As long as it’s with Marthe! . . . Alain can sail the seas without a qualm.’

  ‘You don’t imagine, that, even without Marthe . . .’

  I realized I was blushing. Claudine shrugged her shoulders a
nd replied, as she joined her husband who was waiting for her by the door with no sign of impatience:

  ‘Good Lord, no! He’s trained you too well!’

  THREE

  THAT TELEPHONE MESSAGE of Marthe’s embarrassed me considerably: ‘Impossible to come and pick you up at home to go for a fitting at Taylor’s. Come and fetch me at four o’clock at Claudine’s.’

  An indecent picture could not have upset me more than that piece of blue paper. At Claudine’s! Marthe suggests it quite casually; the Timetable says . . . What does it not say?

  This appointment arranged by Marthe . . . ought I to consider it as an official call on Renaud and Claudine? No . . . Yes, of course . . . I got in a state, and wondered whether to shuffle out of it, torn between the fear of offending my sister-in-law and the dread of Alain and my own conscience. However, my enfeebled conscience was too unsure of the right course to follow not to yield to the more immediate influence of Marthe. It yielded most of all to the delightful prospect of seeing this Claudine who is forbidden me like an outspoken, over-truthful book.

  ‘Rue de Bassano, Charles.’

  I had put on a dark, unassuming dress and I wore a plain net veil and neutral-tinted suede gloves, with the sole idea of removing any trace of ‘official character’ from my ‘deportment’. I know how to use those words, for Alain’s social experience has made me acutely conscious that, according to the occasion, one’s ‘deportment’ should or should not assume an official character. When I mentally pronounce those words, they accompany a quaint, childish, puzzle-picture in the form of a caption . . . Deportment, a little person with threadlike limbs, stretches out his arms towards the proffered sleeves of an Academician’s uniform, round whose collar ‘officialcharacterofficialcharact . . .’ is embroidered in a delicate garland . . . How silly I am to write all this down! It’s only a little bit of maundering. I shall never put down my other maunderings; if I were to read them through again, this notebook would drop from my hands . . .