The Last of Cheri Read online

  ‘Oh! Fred!’

  Edmée crushed a rose from a black vase and threw away its petals. Chéri fanned the flames of anger still smouldering in her eyes, now moist with tears, by saying: ‘That’s the name I give that job-lot of wounded, when I’m not thinking.’

  Without looking at him she murmured through trembling lips: ‘You brute . . . you brute . . . you loathsome monster!’

  He laughed, quite untouched.

  ‘What d’you want me to say? As far as you’re concerned, we all know you’re carrying out a sacred mission. But what about me? You might just as well have to go to the Opera every day and practise in the Rotunda, for all the difference it would make. That would leave me just as much . . . just as much out of it. And those men I called your “job-lot”, well, they’re wounded, aren’t they? wounded who are a little luckier than others, perhaps. I’ve got absolutely nothing to do with them either. With them, too, I’m . . . out of it.’

  She turned round to face him so impulsively that it made her hair fly out from her temples: ‘My darling, don’t be so unhappy! You’re not out of it at all, you’re above all that!’

  He got up, drawn towards a jug of iced water, on the sides of which the moisture was slowly condensing into bluish tears. Edmée hurried forward: ‘With or without lemon, Fred?’

  ‘Without, thanks.’

  He drank, she took the empty glass from his hands, and he went towards the bathroom.

  ‘By the way,’ he said. ‘About that leak in the cement of the bathing-pool. It ought –’

  ‘I’m having it seen to. The man who makes those glass mosaics happens to be a cousin of Chuche, one of my wounded, and he won’t need to be asked twice, believe me.’

  ‘Good.’ Then, as he was moving away, he turned round. ‘Tell me, this business of the Ranch shares we were talking about yesterday morning, ought we to sell or not? Supposing I went to see old Deutsch about them tomorrow morning, and had a chin-wag with him?’

  Edmée gave a shriek of schoolgirl laughter.

  ‘Do you think I waited for you about that? Your mother had a stroke of genius this morning, while we were giving the Baroness a lift home.’

  ‘You mean that old La Berche woman?’

  ‘Yes, the Baroness. Your mother, as you so elegantly put it, had a chin-wag with her. The Baroness is one of the original shareholders, and never leaves the Chairman of the Board alone for a moment –’

  ‘Except to cover her face in flour.’

  ‘Must you interrupt me the whole time? . . . and by two o’clock, my dear, the whole lot had been sold – every bit of it! The little flare-up on the Bourse this afternoon – it lasted only a very short time – raked us in something like two hundred and sixteen thousand francs, Fred! That’ll pay for piles of medicine and bandages. I wanted to keep the news till tomorrow, and then give you one of these topping note-cases. Kiss?’

  He stood, naked and white-skinned, holding back the folds of the door-curtain, and looking closely at the expression on his wife’s face.

  ‘That’s all very well . . .’ he said at last, ‘but where do I come in?’

  Edmée gave a mischievous shake of the head: ‘Your power of attorney still stands, my love. “The right to sell, purchase, draw up, or sign an agreement made out in my name . . . etcetera” – which reminds me, I must send the Baroness something as a souvenir.’

  ‘A briar pipe,’ said Chéri, after pretending to have given the matter his attention.

  ‘No, don’t laugh. The good soul is so valuable to us.’

  ‘And who are “us”?’

  ‘Your mother and me. The Baroness knows how to talk to the men in a way they understand. She speaks their language. She tells them rather risky stories, but in such a way . . . They dote on her.’

  The strangest of laughs trembled on Chéri’s lips. He let go his hold on the dark curtain, and it fell back into place behind him, thus obliterating him completely, as sleep obliterates the figment of a dream. He walked along a passage dimly lit by a blue globe, without making a sound, like a figure floating on air; for he had insisted upon having thick carpets laid on every floor, from top to bottom of the house. He loved silence, and furtiveness, and never knocked at the door of the boudoir, which his wife, since the war, called her study. She showed no annoyance, and sensing Chéri’s presence, never jumped when he came into the room.

  He took a shower-bath without lingering under the cool water, sprayed himself with scent absent-mindedly, and returned to the boudoir.

  He could hear the sound of someone rumpling the sheets in the bedroom next door, and the tap of a paper-knife against a cup on the bedside table. He sat down and rested his chin on his hand. On the little table beside him, he caught sight of the morrow’s menu, duly made out for the butler, according to daily routine. On it he read: ‘Homard Thermidor, Côtelettes Fulbert-Dumonteil, Chaudfroid de canard, Salade Charlotte, Soufflé au curaçao, Allumettes au Chester.’ . . . ‘No alteration required,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Six places.’ – ‘Ah, yes, that I must alter.’ He corrected the number, and once more cupped his chin in his hand.

  ‘Fred, do you know what time it is?’

  He did not answer the soft voice, but went into their room and sat down facing the bed. With one shoulder bare and the other half hidden by a wisp of white nightgown, Edmée was smiling, despite her tired state, aware that she looked prettier in bed than out. But Chéri remained seated, and once again cupped his chin in his hand.

  ‘Rodin’s Penseur,’ said Edmée, to encourage him to smile or to move.

  ‘There’s many a true word spoken in jest,’ he answered sententiously.

  He pulled the folds of his Chinese dressing-gown closer over his knees and savagely crossed his arms.

  ‘What the hell am I doing here?’

  She did not understand, or had no wish to do so.

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know, Fred. It’s two o’clock, and I get up at eight. Tomorrow’s going to be another of those pleasant little days. . . . It’s unkind of you to dawdle like this. Do come along; there’s a nice breeze rising. We’ll go to bed with it on our faces, and imagine we’re sleeping out of doors.’

  He weakened, and hesitated only an instant before hurling his silk wrap to a far corner of the room, while Edmée switched out the remaining light. She nestled up against him in the dark, but he neatly turned her over with her back to him and held her round the waist with strong arms, murmuring, ‘Like that. That’s like being on a bob-sleigh,’ and fell asleep.

  The following day, from the little window of the linen-room where he was hidden, he watched them leave. The duck’s-egg-green motor and another long American automobile were purring very quietly in the avenue under the thick overhanging chestnut trees. The green shade and the recently watered pavement exuded a pretence of freshness, but Chéri knew very well that in the garden at the back of the house the heat of this June morning – the month that scorches Paris – was already shrivelling the lovely deep blue of a pool of forget-me-nots within their edging of pinks.

  His heart began to beat with a sort of nervousness when he saw, approaching the iron gates to his house, two figures in khaki, with gold stars on their breast and crimson velvet bands round their caps.

  ‘In uniform, of course, the crackpot!’

  This was the nickname Chéri had bestowed on the Physician-in-Charge at Edmée’s Hospital, and without really knowing it, he loathed the man and his red-gold hair and the caressing tones he put into technical terms when talking to Edmée. He muttered vague hearty curses, against the Medical Corps in particular, and against all who insisted on wearing uniform in peace-time. The American officer was growing fat, so Chéri sneered: ‘I thought the Americans went in for sport. What’s he doing with a belly like that?’ but he said not a word when Edmée, in a white dress and white shoes, vivaciously held out her white-gloved hand to the Doctor. She greeted him in loud, quick, cheerful tones. Chéri had not missed a single word that fell from her red mouth, wh
ich parted in a smile over such tiny teeth. She had walked out as far as the motors, come back to tell a footman to fetch a notebook she had forgotten, and stood chatting while she waited for it. She had spoken in English to the American Colonel, and lowered her voice, in automatic deference, when replying to Doctor Arnaud.

  Chéri was keeping a sharp look-out from behind the muslin curtains. His characteristic mistrust and slyness froze his features into immobility directly he concealed a strong emotion, and he kept a strict watch on himself, even when alone. His eyes travelled from Edmée to the Doctor, and then from the American Colonel back to Edmée, who had more than once looked up to the first floor, as though she knew of his hiding-place.

  ‘What are they waiting for?’ he grumbled under his breath. ‘Ah, so this it is. . . . God in heaven!’

  Charlotte Peloux had arrived, in a sports-car driven by an impersonal and impeccable young chauffeur. Bursting out of her gabardine uniform, she held her head stiffly upright under its little tight-fitting hat with a military peak, and the ends of her bobbed red hair could be seen popping out at the back. She did not set foot to ground, but suffered them to come and pay their respects to her. She received Edmée’s kiss and apparently asked after her son, for she too raised her head in the direction of the first floor, thus unveiling her magnificent eyes, over which drifted, as over the huge eyes of an octopus, some dark inhuman dream.

  ‘She’s wearing her little military cap,’ Chéri murmured.

  He gave a curious shudder, which made him angry with himself, and smiled when the three motors drove away. He waited patiently until his ‘bachelor’s runabout’ drew up against the kerb punctually at eleven o’clock, and he kept it waiting for some considerable time. Twice he stretched out his hand to lift the receiver of the telephone, and twice he let it fall again to his side. His sudden impulse to invite Filipesco soon vanished and he thought he would like to collect young Maudru and his girl. ‘Or, better still, Jean de Touzac. . . . But at this hour he’ll still be furiously snoring. Gosh! all that lot . . . not one of them, I must be fair, a patch on Desmond. . . . Poor old boy.’

  He regarded Desmond as a war casualty; but with greater compassion than he ever vouchsafed the dead. Desmond, who was alive yet lost to him, had the power of inspiring him with an almost tender melancholy, as well as with the jealous respect due to a man with a ‘job’. Desmond ran a night club, and sold antiques to Americans. A gutless wash-out during the whole of the war, when he had carried anything and everything but a rifle – official papers, billy-cans, any dirty hospital receptacle – Desmond had bitten deep into peace-time with a warlike fervour, and rich had been his immediate reward, very much to Chéri’s astonishment. Desmond’s had been started in quite a small way in a private house in the Avenue d’Alma, and now it sheltered frenzied and silent couples behind its heavy ashlar masonry, beneath ceilings decorated with swallows and hawthorn, and hemmed in by the bulrushes and flamingoes of its stained-glass windows. They danced at Desmond’s, night and day, as people dance after war: the men, young and old, free from the burden of thinking and being frightened – empty-minded, innocent; the women, given over to a pleasure far greater than any more definite sensual delight, to the company of men: that is to say, to physical contact with them, their smell, their tonic sweat, the certain proof of which tingled in every inch of their bodies – the certainty of being the prey of a man wholly alive and vital, and of succumbing in his arms to rhythms as personal, as intimate, as those of sleep.

  ‘Desmond will have got to bed at three, or three-thirty,’ Chéri reckoned. ‘He’ll have had enough sleep.’

  But once again he let drop the hand he had stretched out to the telephone. He went down the stairs in double-quick time, aided by the springy thick pile that covered every floorboard in his house. As he passed by the dining-room he looked without anger at the five white plates set in a diadem round a black crystal bowl, in which floated pink water-lilies, matching the pink of the tablecloth; and he did not pause till face to face with the looking-glass, fixed to the back of the heavy door of the reception-room on the ground floor. He feared, yet was attracted by, this looking-glass, which drew what little light it had from the french windows immediately facing it across the corridor, their opaque blue panes further obscured by the dark foliage of the garden. Every time he bumped into his own image, Chéri was brought up sharp by a slight shock when he recognized it as his own. He never could understand why this glass did not reflect the faithful image of a young man of twenty-four. He could not detect the precise points where time, with invisible finger, marks first the hour of perfection on a handsome face, and then the hour of that more blatant beauty, the herald of a majestic decline.

  To Chéri’s mind, there could be no question of a decline, and he could never have noticed it on his own features. He had just happened to bump into a thirty-year-old Chéri and failed to recognize him; and he sometimes asked himself ‘What’s wrong with me?’ as though he were feeling a little off-colour or had thrown his clothes on anyhow. Now he hurried past the reception-room door, and thought no more about it.

  Desmond’s, being a properly organized establishment, was up and doing by midday, despite the late hours it kept. The concierge was hosing the paved courtyard, a waiter was sweeping the steps clean, brushing away a heap of high-class rubbish – fine light dust, silver paper, corks with metal caps, stub-ends of gold-tipped cigarettes, and crumpled drinking-straws – rubbish which bore daily witness to the prosperity of Desmond’s.

  Chéri cleared at a bound the residue of last night’s brisk business; but the smell inside the house barred further progress like a rope stretched across his path. Forty couples, packed like sardines, had left behind the smell – the memory of their sweat-soaked clothes – stale, and tainted with tobacco fumes. Chéri plucked up courage and leapt up the staircase, narrowed by heavy oak banisters supported on caryatids. Desmond had wasted no money on changing the stuffy sumptuosities of 1880. After removing two dividing walls, installing a refrigerator in the basement, engaging a jazz-band regardless of cost, no further outlay would be necessary for at least another year. ‘I’ll bring it up to date to attract customers’, so Desmond said, ‘when dancing isn’t such a rage.’

  He slept on the second floor, in a room where convolvulus ran riot on the walls and storks on the stained-glass windows; his bath was of enamelled zinc, bordered by a tiled frieze of river-plants, and the ancient heating apparatus wheezed like a bulldog past its prime. But the telephone shone as brightly as a weapon kept polished by daily use, and Chéri, after bounding up four steps at a time, discovered his friend, lips to the chalice, apparently imbibing the murky breath of its mouthpiece. His wandering glance came down to earth, and hardly settled on Chéri before it was off and up again to the convolvulus-wreathed cornice. His yellow-gold pyjamas cast a blight over a morning-after-the-night-before face, but Desmond was inflated by prosperity and no longer worried about being ugly.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Chéri. ‘I came through all right. What a stench there is on your stairs. Worse than a dug-out.’

  ‘. . . You’ll never get Desmond’s custom at twelve,’ Desmond was saying to an invisible listener. ‘I have no difficulty in buying Pommery at that price. And for my private cellar, Pommery ought to be eleven when minus labels . . . hullo . . . yes, the labels that came off in the general rumpus. That’s what I want . . . hullo?’

  ‘You’re coming out to lunch. I’ve got the runabout at the door,’ Chéri said.

  ‘No, and twice times no,’ said Desmond.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, and a thousand times no. Hullo? . . . Sherry! What d’you take me for? This isn’t a bar. Champagne, or nothing. Don’t go on wasting your time and mine. Hullo. . . . That’s quite possible. Only I’m all the rage at the moment. Hullo. . . . At two o’clock precisely. A very good day to you, Monsieur.’

  He stretched himself before offering a limp hand. He still looked like Alfonso XIII, but thirty summers and the war
had rooted this uncertain creature in the soil he needed. To have come through the war without firing a shot, to have eaten regularly, taken every advantage of it, and malingered in general, were so many personal victories from which he had emerged strengthened and self-confident. Assurance and a full pocket had made him less ugly, and you could be sure that, at sixty, he would give the illusion of having once passed for a handsome man with a large nose and long legs. He looked at Chéri condescendingly, but with a friendlier eye. Chéri turned away his head and said: ‘What! Are you reduced to this? Come on, old boy. It’s midday and you’re not up yet.’

  ‘In the first place, I am ready,’ Desmond replied, unbuttoning his pyjamas to show a white silk shirt and a bronze-coloured bow tie. ‘And in the second, I’m not going to lunch out.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Chéri. ‘Well, of all . . . I’m speechless. . . .’

  ‘But if you like I can give you two fried eggs, and half my ham, my salad, my stout, and my strawberries. No extra charge for coffee.’

  Chéri looked at him in impotent fury. ‘Why?’

  ‘Business,’ said Desmond, with a deliberately nasal twang. ‘Champagne! You heard what I was saying a moment ago. Oh! these wine-merchants! If one didn’t put on the screw . . . But I’m a match for them.’

  He knotted his fingers and the knuckle-joints cracked with commercial pride.

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes, you swine.’

  Chéri chucked his soft felt hat at his head; but Desmond picked it up and brushed it with his forearm, to show that this was not the moment for childish jokes. They had eggs in aspic, ham and tongue, and good black stout with coffee-coloured foam on it. They spoke little, and Chéri, gazing out on to the paved courtyard, was politely bored.

  ‘What am I doing here? Nothing, except that I’m not at home, sitting down to cutlets Fulbert-Dumonteil.’ He visualized Edmée in white, the baby-faced American Colonel, and Arnaud, the Physician-in-Charge, in whose presence she acted the docile little girl. He thought of Charlotte Peloux’s epaulettes, and a sort of fruitless affection for his host was coming over him, when the latter asked him an abrupt question: