The Last of Cheri Read online

  The Doctor, with his white linen belly and his red-gold hair, had taken no more than three steps across the ward, before the hovering non-commissioned angel glided to earth again, to minister as a humble seraph, rosy with faith and zeal. Chéri thereupon turned to Filipesco, who was distributing American cigarettes, shouted ‘Are you coming?’ in contemptuous tones, and bore him away; but not before he had bidden farewell to his wife, to Doctor Arnaud, to nurses male and female, with the haughty affability of an official visitor. He crossed the rough gravel of the little courtyard, got into his car, and allowed himself no more than a dozen words’ soliloquy: ‘It’s the regular thing. The correct move for the Physician-in-Charge.’

  Never again did he cross the threshold of the Hospital, and thereafter Edmée invited him on State occasions only, out of official courtesy, much as one might, at a dinner-party, politely offer the snipe to a vegetarian guest.

  He was now given over to reflection, and a prey to idleness. Before the war his idleness had been so light and varied, with the resonant ring of a flawless empty glass. During the war, too, he had endured periods of inertia under military discipline, inertia modified by cold, mud, risk, patrols, and even, on occasion, a little fighting. Conditioned to indolence by his upbringing and the life of a sensual young man, he had watched, himself untouched, the fresh young vulnerable companions all round him pine away in silence, solitude, and frustration. He had witnessed the ravages inflicted on intelligent people by the lack of newspapers as if they were being deprived of a daily drug. Whereas he had relapsed into contemplative silence – like a cat in a garden at night – content with a short letter, a postcard, or a cunningly packed parcel, other men, so-called superior men, had appeared to him to be showing every symptom of ruinous mental starvation. Thus he had learned to take pride in bolstering up his patience, and had brooded over two or three ideas, over two or three persistent memories, as highly coloured as a child’s, and over his inability to imagine his own death.

  Time and again, throughout the war, on coming out of a long dreamless sleep or a fitful bout of spasmodically interrupted rest, he would awake to find himself somewhere outside the present time and, his more recent past sloughed off, restored to the days of his boyhood – restored to Léa. Later, Edmée would suddenly rise up from the past, distinct and clear in every detail, and this evocation of her form, no less than its almost immediate disappearance, had always put Chéri in good spirits. ‘That gives me two of them,’ he reckoned. Nothing came to him from Léa; he did not write to her. But he received postcards signed by the crabbed fingers of old mother Aldonza, and cigars chosen by the Baroness de la Berche. Sometimes he dreamed of a long soft-wool scarf, as blue as a pair of blue eyes and with a very faint suggestion of the scent associated with it throughout long hours of warmth and slumber. He had loved this scarf and hugged it to him in the dark, until it had lost its fragrance and the freshness of the blue eyes, and he had thought of it no more.

  For four years he had not bothered his head about Léa. Her trusty old cronies, had occasion arisen, would have forwarded news of any events in her life. He never imagined anything happening to her. What had Léa in common with sickness, or Léa with change?

  In 1918 he could not believe his ears when the Baroness de La Berche casually mentioned ‘Léa’s new flat’.

  ‘Has she moved, then?’

  ‘Where have you sprung from?’ the Baroness answered. ‘The whole world knows it. The sale of her house to the Americans was a brilliant deal, you bet! I’ve seen her new flat. It’s small, but it’s very cosy. Once you sit down in it, you never want to get up again.’

  Chéri clung to the words ‘small, but cosy’. Unable to imagine anything different, he supplied an over-all rose-pink background, threw in that huge galleon of gold and steel – the bed with its lace rigging – and hung Chaplin’s pearly-breasted nymph from some floating cloud.

  When Desmond began looking about for a sleeping partner for his night club, Chéri had spasms of alarm and anxiety. ‘The blackguard’s certain to try and tap Léa, or get her mixed up in some fishy business . . . I’d better tip her off on the telephone.’ He did nothing of the sort, however. Telephoning to a discarded mistress is riskier far than holding out your hand in the street to a nervous enemy who tries to catch your eye.

  He went on biding his time, even after surprising Edmée in front of the looking-glass, after that flagrant exhibition of over-excitement, flushed cheeks, and untidiness. He let the hours slip by, and did not put into words – and so accentuate – his certainty that a still almost chaste understanding existed between his wife and the man who had been singing ‘Oy Marie!’ For he felt much lighter in spirit, and for several days stopped uselessly consulting his wrist-watch as soon as daylight began to fade. He developed the habit of sitting out under the trees in a basket-chair, like a newly arrived guest in a hotel garden. There he marvelled to see how the oncoming night blotted out the blue of the monkshood, producing in its stead a hazier blue into which the shapes of the flowers were fused, while the green of their leaves persisted in distinct clumps. The edging of rose-coloured pinks turned to rank mauve, then the colour ebbed rapidly and the July stars shone yellow between the branches of the weeping ash.

  He tasted at home the pleasures enjoyed by a casual passer-by who sits down to rest in a square, and he never noticed how long he remained there, lying back with his hands dangling. Sometimes he gave a fleeting thought to what he called ‘the looking-glass scene’ and the atmosphere in the blue room when it had been secretly troubled by a man’s sudden appearance, theatrical behaviour, and flight. He whispered over and over, with foolish mechanical regularity, ‘That’s one point established. That’s what’s called a point-t-established,’ running the two words together into one.

  At the beginning of July he bought a new open motor, and called it his Riviera Runabout. He drove Filipesco and Desmond out along drought-whitened roads, but returned to Paris every evening, cleaving alternate waves of warm and cool air, which began to lose their good smells the nearer the motor drew to Paris.

  One day he took out the Baroness de La Berche, a virile companion, who, when they came to the barriers of the Octroi, raised her forefinger to the little felt hat pulled well down on her head. He found her agreeable, sparing of words, interested in wayside inns overgrown with wistaria, and in village wine-shops with their cellar-smell and wine-soaked sand. Rigid and in silence, they covered two hundred miles or more, without ever opening their mouths except to smoke or feed. The following day Chéri again invited Camille de La Berche with a curt ‘Well, how about it, Baroness?’ and whisked her off without further ado.

  The trusty motor sped far afield through the green countryside, and came back at nightfall to Paris like a toy at the end of a string. That evening, Chéri, while never taking his eye off the road, could distinguish on his right side the outline of an elderly woman, with a man’s profile as noble as that of an old family coachman. It astonished him to find her worthy of respect because she was plain and simple, and when he was alone in her company for the first time and far away from town-life, it began to dawn on him that a woman burdened with some monstrous sexual deformity needs must possess a certain bravura and something of the dignified courage of the condemned.

  Since the war this woman had found no further use for her unkindness. The Hospital had put her back in her proper place, that is to say, among males, among men just young enough, just tamed enough by suffering, for her to live serenely in their midst, and forget her frustrated femininity.

  On the sly, Chéri studied his companion’s large nose, the greying hairy upper lip, and the little peasant eyes which glanced incuriously at ripe cornfields and scythed meadows.

  For the first time he felt something very like friendship for old Camille, and was led to make a poignant comparison: ‘She is alone. When she’s no longer with her soldiers or with my mother, she’s alone. She too. Despite her pipe and her glass of wine, she’s alone.’

 
On their way back to Paris they stopped at a ‘hostelry’ where there was no ice, and where, trained against the plinths of columns and clinging to ancient baptismal fonts dotted about the lawn, the rambler-roses were dying, frizzled by the sun. A neighbouring copse screened this dried-up spot from any breeze, and a small cloud, scorched to a cherry hue, hung motionless, high in the heavens.

  The Baroness knocked out her short briar pipe on the ear of a marble fawn.

  ‘It’s going to be grilling over Paris tonight.’

  Chéri nodded in agreement, and looked up at the cloud. The light reflected from it mottled his white cheeks and dimpled chin, like touches of pink powder on an actor’s face.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you know, if the idea tempts you, let’s not go back till tomorrow morning. Just give me time to buy a piece of soap and a tooth-brush. . . . And we’ll telephone your wife. Then, tomorrow morning we can be up and on our way by four o’clock, while it’s fresh.’

  Chéri sprang to his feet in unthinking haste. ‘No, no, I can’t.’

  ‘You can’t? Come, come!’

  Down near his feet he saw two small mannish eyes, and a pair of broad shoulders shaking with laughter.

  ‘I didn’t believe that you were still held on such a tight rein,’ she said. ‘But, of course, if you are . . .’

  ‘Are what?’

  She had risen to her feet again, robust and hearty, and clapped him vigorously on the shoulder.

  ‘Yes, yes. You run around all day long, but you go back to your kennel every night. Oh, you’re kept well in hand.’

  He looked at her coldly: already he liked her less. ‘There’s no hiding anything from you, Baroness. I’ll fetch the car, and in under two hours we’ll be back at your front door.’

  Chéri never forgot their nocturnal journey home, the sadness of the lingering crimson in the west, the smell of the grasses, the feathery moths held prisoner in the beam of the headlamps. The Baroness kept watch beside him, a dark form made denser by the night. He drove cautiously; the air, cool at faster speeds, grew hot again when he slowed down to take a corner. He trusted to his keen sight and his alert senses, but he could not help his thoughts running on the queer massive old woman motionless at his right side, and she caused him a sort of terror, a twitching of the nerves, which suddenly landed him within a few inches of a wagon carrying no rear lamp. At that moment a large hand came lightly to rest on his forearm.

  ‘Take care, child!’

  He certainly had not expected either the gesture or the gentle tone of the voice. But nothing justified the subsequent emotion, the lump like a hard fruit stone in his throat. ‘I’m a fool, I’m a fool,’ he kept repeating. He continued at a slower speed, and amused himself by watching the refraction of the beams, the golden zigzags and peacock’s feathers, that danced for a moment round the headlamps when seen through the tears that brimmed his eyes.

  ‘She told me that it had a hold on me, that I was held well in hand. If she could see us, Edmée and me. . . . How long is it since we took to sleeping like two brothers?’ He tried to count: three weeks, perhaps more? ‘And the joke about the whole business is that Edmée makes no demands, and wakes up smiling.’ To himself, he always used the word ‘joke’ when he wished to avoid the word ‘sad’. ‘Like an old married couple, what! like an old married couple . . . Madame and her Physician-in-Charge, Monsieur . . . and . . . his car. All the same, old Camille said that I was held. Held. Held. Catch me ever taking that old girl out again. . . .’

  He did take her out again, for July began to scorch Paris. But neither Edmée nor Chéri complained about the dog-days. Chéri used to come home, polite and absent-minded, the backs of his hands and the lower part of his face nut-brown. He walked about naked between the bathroom and Edmée’s boudoir.

  ‘You must have been roasted today, you poor townees!’ Chéri jeered.

  Looking rather pale and almost melting away, Edmée straightened her pretty odalisque back and denied that she was tired.

  ‘Oh well, not quite as bad as that, you know. There was rather more air than yesterday. My office down there is cool, you know. And then, we’ve had no time to think about it. My young man in bed twenty-two, who was getting on so well . . .’

  ‘Oh yes!’

  ‘Yes, Doctor Arnaud isn’t too pleased about him.’

  She didn’t hesitate to make play with the name of the Physician-in-Charge, much as a player moves up a decisive piece on the chessboard. But Chéri did not bat an eyelid, and Edmée followed his movements, those of a naked male body dappled a delicate green from the reflected light of the blue curtains. He walked to and fro in front of her, ostentatiously pure, trailing his aura of scent, and living in another world. The very self-confidence of this naked body, superior and contemptuous, reduced Edmée to a mildly vindictive immobility. She could not now have claimed this naked body for her own except in a voice altogether lacking the stone and urgency of desire – that is, in the calm voice of a submissive mate. Now she was held back by an arm covered with fine gold hairs, by an ardent mouth behind a golden moustache, and she gazed at Chéri with the jealous and serene security of a lover who covets a virgin inaccessible to all.

  They went on to talk about holidays and travelling arrangements, in light-hearted and conventional phrases.

  ‘The war hasn’t changed Deauville enough, and what a crowd . . .’ Chéri sighed.

  ‘There’s simply no place where one can eat a good meal, and it’s a huge undertaking to reorganize the hotel business!’ Edmée affirmed.

  One day, not long before the Quatorze Juillet, Charlotte Peloux was lunching with them. She happened to speak of the success of some business deal in American blankets, and complained loudly that Léa had netted a half share of the profits. Chéri raised his head, in astonishment. ‘So you still see her?’

  Charlotte Peloux enveloped her son in the loving glances induced by old port, and appealed to her daughter-in-law as witness: ‘He’s got an odd way of putting things – as if he’d been gassed – hasn’t he? . . . It’s disturbing at times. I’ve never stopped seeing Léa, darling. Why should I have stopped seeing her?’

  ‘Why?’ Edmée repeated.

  He looked at the two women, finding a strange flavour in their kindly attention.

  ‘Because you never talk to me about her . . .’ he began ingenuously.

  ‘Me!’ barked Charlotte. ‘For goodness’ sake . . . Edmée, you hear what he says? Well at least it does credit to his feelings for you. He has so completely forgotten about everything that isn’t you.’

  Edmée smiled without answering, bent her head, and adjusted the lace that edged the low-cut neck of her dress by tweaking it between her fingers. The movement drew Chéri’s attention to her bodice, and through the yellow lawn he noticed that the points of her breasts and their mauve aureoles looked like twin bruises. He shuddered, and his shudder made him realize that the conventional beauty and all the most secret details of her charming body, that the whole of this young woman, in fact, so close and so disloyal, no longer aroused in him anything but positive repugnance. Nonsense, nonsense; but he was whipping a dead horse. And he listened to Charlotte’s ever flowing stream of nasal burblings.

  ‘. . . and then again, the day before yesterday, I was saying in your presence, that motor for motor, well – I’d far rather have a taxi, a taxi, any day, than that prehistoric old Renault of Léa’s – and if it wasn’t the day before yesterday, it was yesterday, that I said – speaking of Léa – that if you’re a woman living on your own and you’ve got to have a manservant, you might just as well have a good-looking one. And then Camille was saying, only the other day when you were there, how angry she was with herself for having sent a second barrel of Quarts-de-Chaumes round to Léa instead of keeping it for herself. I’ve complimented you often enough on your fidelity, my darling; I must now scold you for your ingratitude. Léa deserved better of you. Edmée will be the first to admit that!’

  ‘The
second,’ Edmée corrected.

  ‘Never heard a word of it,’ Chéri said.

  He was gorging himself with hard pink July cherries, and flipping them from beneath the lowered blind at the sparrows in the garden, where, after too heavy a watering, the flower-beds were steaming like a hot spring. Edmée, motionless, was cogitating on Chéri’s comment, ‘Never heard a word of it.’ He certainly was not lying, and yet his off-hand assumed schoolboyishness, as he squeezed the cherry stones and took aim at a sparrow by closing his left eye, spoke clearly enough to Edmée. ‘What can he have been thinking about, if he never heard a word?’

  Before the war, she would have looked for the woman in the case. A month earlier, on the day following the looking-glass scene, she would have feared reprisals, some Red Indian act of cruelty, or a bite on the nose. But no . . . nothing . . . he lived and roamed about innocently, as quiet in his freedom as a prisoner in the depths of a gaol, and as chaste as an animal brought from the Antipodes, which does not bother to look for a kindred female in our hemisphere.

  Was he ill? He slept well, ate according to his fancy – that is, delicately, sniffing all the meat suspiciously, and preferring fruit and new-laid eggs. No nervous twitch disfigured the lovely balance of his features, and he drank more water than champagne. ‘No, he’s not ill. And yet he’s . . . something. Something that I should guess, perhaps, if I were still in love with him. But . . .’ Once again she fingered the lace round the neck of her bodice, inhaled the warmth and fragrance that rose up from between her breasts, and as she bent down her head she saw the precious twin pink and mauve disks through the material of her dress. She blushed with carnal pleasure, and dedicated the scent and the mauve shadows to the skilful, condescending, red-haired man whom she would be meeting again in an hour’s time.

  ‘They’ve spoken of Léa in front of me every day, and I didn’t hear. Have I forgotten her, then? Yes, I have forgotten her. But then what does it mean, “to forget”? If I think of Léa, I see her clearly, I remember the sound of her voice, the scent which she sprayed herself with and rubbed so lavishly into her long hands.’ He took such a deep breath that his nostrils were indented, and his lips curled up to his nose in an expression of exquisite pleasure.