Claudine and Annie Page 4

‘Is it usual to forget? . . . I don’t really know. I suppose it depends on the person who goes away. As a husband, Monsieur Samzun – “Alain” as you call him – impresses me as . . . impeccable. As a man? He aims at being distinguished, but all he manages to be is correct. He’s always talking in aphorisms . . . no man ever had such a store of them. And his whole manner, all his typical gestures are highly . . .’

  ‘“Peremptory”,’ I said with a timid smile.

  ‘Yes, but he hasn’t any right to be “peremptory” because he isn’t a cat. No, he most certainly isn’t a cat! He’s got snobbery in his heart and a ramrod in his arse . . . Heavens, what an idiot I am! For goodness’ sake, don’t start crying as if I’d hit you, my poor child! As if it mattered what I say! You know perfectly well that Claudine’s got a hole in her head . . . Oh, very well then, she wants to go! Kiss me first to show me there’s no ill-feeling. Do you know what she looks like with her great knot of hair and her straight little frock and those dewdrops on the end of her lashes? A little girl who’s been married against her will!’

  I smiled to please her, to thank her too for giving me a glimpse of her honest, rebellious mind instead of the conventional lies I was used to.

  ‘Good-bye, Claudine . . . I’m not angry with you.’

  ‘I should hope not. Will you give me a kiss?’

  ‘Oh yes!’

  Her tall flexible body bent over me; she laid both hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Put up your mouth! Goodness, what am I saying . . .? Force of habit . . . Put up your cheek. There! See you soon, in Arriege? This is the way out. Remember me to that trollop of a Marthe. No, your eyes aren’t red. Good-bye, good-bye . . . chrysalis!’

  I went down the stairs slowly, pausing on every step, irresolute and disturbed. She had said: ‘A ramrod in his . . .’ Honestly, I believe it was the metaphor, the picture of that ramrod, that had shocked me, not Claudine’s opinion in itself. She had blasphemed and, abashed for a moment in the presence of this uninhibited child, I had let her blaspheme.

  My dear Alain,

  I promised you to show I could be brave. So I’ll only show you my brave side . . . forgive me for hiding all the other. You can guess it only too well.

  I’ve done everything I possibly can to see that our home that you like to be tidy and properly kept up isn’t suffering too much from your absence. I got through the servants’ books on the appointed day and Léonie is being very kind to me . . . that is to say, I am sure her intentions are good, anyway.

  Your sister is charming, as usual. Seeing her as much as I do, I wish I could acquire a little of her courage and her never-failing will-power. However, I won’t pretend that this isn’t a very lofty ambition. Anyway, you don’t really want me to be like that and you are so intelligent and strong-minded yourself that it’s more than enough for the two of us.

  I don’t know where this letter will reach you and this feeling of uncertainty makes me all the more nervous and awkward when I write to you. A correspondence between us is something so new to me now; I’ve got so much out of the habit of it. I wish I need never have to get into the habit again. Yet I realize that, in my weak moments, it will be my one great stay and comfort. I can only say in a few words, putting it badly, I am sure, and saying much less than I think, that my heart follows you wherever you go with all my devoted love, and that I remain

  Your little slave,

  Annie

  I wrote this letter with extreme constraint, without ever letting my love and grief burst out spontaneously to him. Was it lack of confidence in myself, as usual, or, for the first time, in him?

  Which Annie would he prefer? The Annie softer and more silent than a feather; the one he knew, the one he had accustomed to be mute, to veil her thoughts under her words as she veiled her eyes under lashes or the lost, troubled Annie, defenceless against her crazy imagination, whom he has left behind here – the Annie he does not know?

  Whom he does not know . . .

  Letting my thoughts run on like this, I feel guilty. Hiding something is almost like lying. I have no right to hide two Annies in myself. Suppose the second were only half of the other? How exhausting this all is!

  As for Alain, you know the whole of him when you’ve known him an hour. His mind is as regular as his face. He detests the illogical and dreads the unconventional. Would he have married me if one evening long ago when we were engaged I had flung my arms round his neck and said: ‘Alain, I can’t endure another minute unless you make love to me . . .’?

  The mere fact of his being away is upsetting my reason. Already there are so many tormenting thoughts that I must not admit to him when he returns. This is not going to be anything like the ‘Diary of his journey’ I was expected to keep: it will be the diary of a wretched, distraught creature . . .

  ‘Madame, a telegram!’

  That brusque military manner of Léonie’s frightened me. My fingers are still trembling with apprehension.

  Excellent journey. Sailing today. Letter follows. Affectionate thoughts.

  Samzun

  Was that all? A telegram is not a letter and this one should have reassured me on every vital point. But it arrived at a moment when I was completely demoralized. Somehow, I would have liked something very different. Besides, I don’t like his signing himself ‘Samzun’. Do I sign myself ‘Lajarrisse’? My poor Annie, what hornet has stung you today? And what madness to go and compare yourself to a man . . . to a man like Alain!

  I shall go and see Marthe to escape from myself.

  When I arrived, it was Léon I found at home. As every day, at this time, he was busy in his study which Marthe calls ‘the torture-chamber’. Bookcases with gilded latticework, a beautiful Louis XVI table on which this model writer never lets a drop of ink spill, for he writes carefully, with a blotter under his hand . . . altogether a very commodious prison.

  As I entered, he rose and dabbed his temples.

  ‘This heat, Annie! I can’t produce anything the least good in it. Besides, somehow, it’s a languid, depressing day in spite of the sunshine. A bad, immoral day.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ I broke in eagerly, almost gratefully. He stared at me with his beautiful spaniel-like eyes, without the faintest idea what I meant . . .

  ‘Yes, I’m going to find it hard to grind out my sixty lines today.’

  ‘You’ll be scolded, Léon.’

  He languidly shrugged his shoulders, as if inured to it.

  ‘How’s your novel going? Well?’

  Pulling his pointed beard, he answered with a vanity as discreet as his modest talent:

  ‘Not too badly . . . much as the others.’

  ‘Tell me how it’s going to end.’

  Léon appreciates me as a willing, easily interested audience. I have at least managed to acquire a taste, however mild, for his tales of adulteresses in high society and noble suicides and princely bankrupts . . .

  ‘The end’s giving me a good deal of trouble,’ sighed my unhappy brother-in-law. ‘The husband has taken his wife back, but she’s tasted freedom and found it intoxicating. It would be better, from the literary point of view, if she stayed with him. But, as Marthe points out, it would sell better if she went off again and hopped into bed with someone else.’

  Léon has retained some expressions from his journalist days that I find quite revolting.

  I said: ‘The point is, does she want to go off?’

  ‘Of course she does!’

  ‘Well, then, she must.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’s “tasted freedom”.’

  Léon sniggered as he continued to count his pages.

  ‘That sounds funny . . . coming from you, of all people! . . . Marthe’s waiting for you at the Fritz,’ he went on, picking up his pen again. ‘Forgive me for hustling you off, Annie dear, won’t you? I’ve got to deliver this thing in October, so . . .’

  He indicated the still meagre pile of manuscript.

  ‘Yes, of course . . . Get
on with your work, poor old Léon.’

  ‘Place Vendôme, Charles!’

  Marthe has become passionately addicted to these five o’clock teas in the Fritz. I infinitely prefer my little ‘Afternoon Tea’ in the Rue d’Indy with its low-ceilinged room that smells of cake and ginger, and its mixed clientele of elderly English ladies in sham pearl necklaces, and demi-mondaines who use it for discreet assignations.

  Marthe, however, loves that long white gallery at the Fritz. She walks through it, peering about as if she were short-sighted and were searching for someone when, all the time, from the moment she entered, her menacing grey eyes have been taking in every detail. She has been counting the people there and summing them up; noting familiar faces and scanning them sharply; noting, most of all, the hats she will copy with that infallible hand when she gets home.

  What a horrible nature I have! Here I am, thinking almost spitefully of my sister-in-law whose company has cheered me up and distracted me ever since Alain went away . . . The fact is, I tremble every time I have to walk by myself down that redoubtable gallery at the Fritz, under the eyes of those people devouring little cakes and even more eagerly devouring their neighbours.

  Once again, I launched myself into that rectangular hall with the foolhardiness of the very shy and traversed it with long strides, thinking with terror: ‘I’m going to catch my foot in my dress and twist my ankle . . . perhaps my placket-hole is gaping, I’m sure my hair is coming down at the back . . .’ I was so preoccupied that I walked right past Marthe without seeing her.

  She caught me by the crook of her parasol and laughed so uproariously that I thought I would die of shame.

  ‘Who are you running after, Annie? You look like a woman hurrying guiltily to her first assignation. There, there, sit down, give me your parasol, take off your gloves . . . Ouf! Saved once again in the nick of time! I must say that little face could be a lot worse, even if you are in torture. It suits you to look scared to death. Who were you running away from?’

  ‘Everybody.’

  She contemplated me with pitying disdain and sighed:

  ‘I’ve almost given up hope of ever making anything of you. Do you like my hat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I said it with genuine conviction.

  Till then, I had been too busy pulling myself together to look at Marthe. I suppose you could, by stretching a point, call it a hat, that muslin mob-cap, falling in pleats round the face? Hat or not, it ‘came off’. The linen dress, the inevitable fichu that revealed the milky neck, completed a charming fancy-dress of the French Revolution period. She was still Marie-Antionette, but already in the Temple prison. Never would I have dared to go out arrayed like that!

  Radiating with self-confidence, she flashed her formidable eyes all about her; there were not many men who could sustain those glances. As she crunched her toast with relish, she stared at people, chattered and simultaneously reassured me and dazed me.

  ‘Did you look in at our place?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Did you see Léon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he working?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He mustn’t let up, the thing’s simply got to be in in October. I’ve got some heavy bills . . . Any news of Alain?’

  ‘A telegram . . . he says there’s a letter coming.’

  ‘You know we’re leaving in five days time?’

  ‘Whenever you like, Marthe.’

  ‘“Whenever you like”! Honestly, you wear me out, my good girl! Look, quick, there’s the Cabbage-Rose. Her hat’s a disaster!’

  Hats play a considerable part in my sister-in-law’s life. Moreover, it was undeniable that the hat the Cabbage-Rose (a lovely, fresh, slightly overblown creature) was wearing was an utter failure. Marthe wriggled with delight.

  ‘And she wants us to believe that she ruins herself buying her hats at Reboux! The Chessenet, who’s her best friend, told me the Cabbage-Rose cuts all the labels out of her mother-in-law’s smart hats and sews them inside her own.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘One should always believe the worst first go, there’s always time to find out the facts later . . . What luck! Here come the Renaud-Claudines . . . we’ll call them over to our table. Maugis is with them.’

  ‘But, Marthe . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Alain doesn’t like us to see too much of the Renaud-Claudines.’

  ‘I’m quite aware of that.’

  ‘So I oughtn’t to . . .’

  ‘Since your husband isn’t here, stop worrying . . . I’m the one who invited you, so you’re relieved of all responsibility . . .’

  After all, since Marthe was my hostess . . . my Timetable might forgive me!

  Claudine had seen us. From a yard away, she greeted Marthe with a resounding: ‘All hail, Goldilocks!’ that made heads turn in our direction. Renaud followed her, indulgent as usual to all her crazy ways, and Maugis brought up the rear. I don’t much like that Maugis, but I put up with his cheerful drunken effrontery and now and then find it amusing. I shan’t say a word to Alain about this meeting; being so sober and correct himself, he positively abhors this great fat untidy Bohemian who always wears a stovepipe top-hat.

  Marthe fluttered like a white hen.

  ‘Claudine, will you have tea?’

  ‘Ugh, not tea! It turns my stomach.’

  ‘Chocolate?’

  ‘No. I’d like some cheap wine. The twelve sous a litre kind.’

  ‘Some what?’ I asked, staggered.

  ‘Ssh, Claudine!’ Renaud gently remonstrated, smiling under his whitening moustache. ‘You’ll scandalize Madame Samzun.’

  ‘Why?’ exclaimed Claudine. ‘What’s wrong with wine at twelve sous a . . .’

  ‘Not here, my pet. You and I will go off and have some on our own. We’ll drink it, with our elbows propped on the zinc counter of that little pub in the Avenue Trudaine – the one with the shady but extremely affable proprietor. Would you like that—’ (he dropped his voice) ‘—my darling bird?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes! Oh, I’d adore it!’ cried the incorrigible Claudine.

  She gazed at her husband with so much childish enthusiasm and loving admiration that I was suddenly choked with an overwhelming desire to cry. If I had asked Alain for wine that cost twelve sous a litre he would have given me . . . permission to go to bed and take some bromide!

  Maugis dropped his moustache towards me, a moustache bleached by a cosmopolitan taste in liquor.

  ‘Madame, you appear to be suffering certain pangs of remorse occasioned by this tepid tea and these vomitively chocolatious éclairs . . . You most certainly will not be able to imbibe the necessary cordial here at the Fritz. The liquid refreshments they serve here would wreck the livers of hardened drinkers in the lowest type of military canteen . . . I cannot say the six-centime claret recommended by Madame Claudine excites me either, except to cynical merriment . . . What you need is a nice green.’

  ‘A nice what?’

  ‘Call it blue, if that appeals to you more. A Pernod for babies. I am the president of a Feminist Society: “The Right to Absinthe”. I can tell you the members don’t half put it away.’

  ‘I’ve never drunk absinthe in my life,’ I said with some disgust.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Claudine, ‘there are so many things you’ve never tasted, good little Annie!’

  She put so much meaning into the words that she made me feel foolish and embarrassed. With a laugh, she gave a mocking glance at Marthe who replied:

  ‘She needs educating. We’re counting a lot on “the easy relaxed life of fashionable watering-places”, as someone puts it in Léon’s latest novel.’

  ‘In The Tragic Hearts!’ exclaimed Maugis effusively. ‘A powerful work, Madame, and one that will live. The torments of an ill-starred but aristocratic love affair are depicted in letters of fire by a pen dipped in gall!’

  To my amazement, Marthe burst out laughing. There the
y were, all four of them, making fun of that poor, wretched man back at home, grinding out his daily sixty lines. I was embarrassed and shocked, yet forced to seem amused in self-defence. I studied the bottom of my cup, then I furtively glanced up at Claudine who happened to be looking at me and who murmured very low to her husband, as if she were talking to herself:

  ‘What marvellous eyes Annie’s got, hasn’t she, Renaud dear? Wild chicory flowers, growing out of brown sand . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Renaud, and added: ‘When she raises her eyelids it’s as if she were taking off her clothes.’

  All four stared at me with a far-away expression. I suffered agonies of shame, coupled with agonies of appalling pleasure, as if my dress had suddenly dropped off.

  Marthe was the first to pull herself together and change the conversation.

  ‘When will you two be coming down there?’ she asked Renaud and Claudine.

  ‘Down where, my dear Marthe?’

  ‘To Arriège, naturally. It’s a sad fact, but nowadays all good Parisians harbour a sleeping arthritic under their skin.’

  ‘Mine suffers from insomnia,’ said Maugis pompously. ‘I douse it with whisky. But you and your cures, that’s all a lot of chichi, lady Marthe. You just want to be in the fashion.’

  ‘Not at all, you insolent man! I take Arriège very seriously. Those four weeks of treatment set me up for the winter so that I can eat truffles, drink Burgundy, and go to bed at three in the morning . . . Talking of that, it is next Tuesday, isn’t it, that we all make our pilgrimage to the shrine of the Lalcade? It should be a good party, much gayer than Arriège.’

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ replied Claudine. ‘It’ll be crammed with dukes, with some princes thrown in for good measure. You’d go if you had to stand on your head, wouldn’t you, Marthe?’

  ‘I could stand on my head here and now,’ said Marthe rather superciliously. ‘My underclothes are nice enough to survive it . . .’

  ‘And besides,’ Maugis grumbled into his moustache, ‘she wears closed knickers.’

  I had heard. We had all heard!

  There was a brief, chilly silence.

  ‘What about you, pensive one?’ Claudine was asking. ‘Are you Arrièging?’