Claudine Married Read online

  ‘Coo! Everyone knows why you say that and why Mademoiselle won’t let you sit next to each other at the evening class any more, even though you’re mugging up the same book!’

  The elder one’s lovely eyes filled with bright tears.

  ‘Will you let your sister alone, you little pest! And you needn’t put on that saintly air either! After all, this child’s only imitating the example set by Mademoiselle and Aimée . . .’

  Inwardly, I was delirious with joy; things were going well, the School had made considerable progress! In my time, Luce was the only one who wrote me love-letters; Anaïs herself had got no further than boys. How charming they were, this new lot! If Doctor Dutertre still carried on his job as Regional Inspector, he had nothing to complain of.

  Our group was worth looking at. A brunette to the right, a brunette to the left, Claudine’s curly, excited head in the middle, and that fresh Pomme innocently contemplating us . . . bring on the old gentlemen! When I say ‘the old gentlemen’ . . . I know some, who, though still young . . . It would not be long before Renaud returned.

  ‘Pomme, do go and look out of the window and see if the gentleman with the sweets is coming! . . . Is her name really Pomme?’ I asked my pretty Hélène, who was leaning trustfully against my shoulder.

  ‘Yes; her name’s Marie Pomme; she’s always called “Pomme”.’

  ‘Not exactly a brilliant genius, eh?’

  ‘Goodness gracious, no! But she doesn’t make a nuisance of herself and she agrees with everybody.’

  I went off into a daydream, and they stared at me. Like reassured little animals they investigated everything about me with curious eyes and light paws. ‘It curls naturally, doesn’t it?’ they asked, touching my short hair. Fingering my white buckskin belt, a hand’s-breadth wide, with its dull gold buckle, a present – like everything I have – from Renaud, one cried: ‘There, you see! You insisted broad belts weren’t being worn any more.’ They studied my stiffly starched butterfly collar, my pale blue linen blouse with its broad tucks . . . Time was slipping by . . . I realized that I was leaving tomorrow; that all this was a brief dream; that I was jealous of a present that was already past and wanted to leave a mark on it. I wanted to imprint a sweet and searing memory on something or on somebody . . . I tightened my arm about Hélène’s shoulder and whispered almost inaudibly:

  ‘If I were your school friend, little Hélène, would you love me as much as your sister loves Liline?’

  Her Spanish eyes, with their drooping corners, opened wide, as if almost frightened: then the thick lashes were lowered and I felt her shoulders stiffen.

  ‘I don’t know yet . . .’

  That was enough; I knew.

  Pomme, over at the window, burst into shrieks of joy: ‘Bags and bags! He’s got simply sacks of them!’

  After this explosion, Renaud’s entrance was greeted with a reverent silence. He had bought everything Montigny’s modest sweet-shop could provide: from chocolate creams to striped bull’s-eyes and English sweets whose smell reminds you of sour cider.

  All the same, such a quantity of sweets! . . . I wanted some too! Renaud, who had stopped in the doorway, gazed at our group for a minute with a smile – a smile I had sometimes seen on his face before – and at last took pity on the palpitating Pomme.

  ‘Pomme, which do you like best?’

  ‘All of them!’ cried Pomme, intoxicated.

  ‘Oh!’ the other two exclaimed indignantly. ‘How can you!’

  ‘Pomme,’ went on Renaud, bubbling over with pleasure, ‘I’ll give you this bag here, if you’ll kiss me . . . You don’t mind, Claudine?’

  ‘Heavens, I don’t care!’

  Pomme hesitated for three seconds, torn between her furious greed and regard for the proprieties. Her frank, red-brown gaze wandered beseechingly to her hostile schoolmates, to me, to heaven, to the bags Renaud was holding out to her at arm’s length . . . Then, with the slightly foolish grace of her whole small person, she flung her arms round Renaud’s neck, received the bag and went off, scarlet, to open it in a corner . . .

  I meanwhile was pillaging a box of chocolates, helped silently, but swiftly, by the pair of sisters. Hélène’s small hand went to and fro from the box to her mouth, sure and indefatigable . . . Who would have thought that little mouth could take in so much!

  A shrill bell interrupted us and broke off Renaud’s contemplative trance. The little girls fled in terror, without saying ‘Thank you’, without even glancing at us, like thieving cats . . .

  Dinner in the refectory amused Renaud prodigiously, but I was slightly bored by it. The uncertain hour, the purple twilight I could feel thickening and falling on the woods . . . I escaped, in spite of myself . . . But my dear man was so happy! Ah, how craftily Mademoiselle had found the right way to arouse his curiosity! Sitting beside Renaud, in this white room, at the table covered with white oilcloth, opposite those pretty little girls, still in their black aprons, who were fiddling disgustedly with their boiled beef after their orgy of sweets, Mademoiselle talked about me. She talked about me, lowering her voice now and then, because of the pricked-up ears of the two little Jousserands were straining in our direction. Wearily, I listened and smiled.

  ‘She was a terrible tomboy, Monsieur, and, for a long time, I didn’t know what to do with her. From fourteen to fifteen, she spent most of her time twenty feet above ground and her sole preoccupation appeared to be to display her legs right up to her eyes. I’ve sometimes seen her show the cruelty children show to grown-up people . . .’ (That was a good one! . . .) ‘She’s remained just what she was, a delicious little girl. Although she didn’t like me at all, I used to enjoy watching her move . . . such suppleness, such precision of movement. The staircase that leads to this room – I’ve never seen her come down it except astride the banisters. Monsieur, what an example to the others!’

  The perfidiousness of that motherly tone ended up by amusing me and by kindling a well-known dark and dangerous light in Renaud’s eyes. He looked at Pomme, but what he was seeing was Claudine, Claudine at fourteen and her legs displayed ‘up to the eyes’ (up to the eyes, Mademoiselle! The tone of the establishment has risen considerably since I left it). He looked at Hélène and saw Claudine astride a banister rail, Claudine cheeky and defiant, blotched with purple ink-stains. It would be a warm night. And he burst into a nervous laugh when Mademoiselle turned away from him to exclaim: ‘Pomme, if you take salt with your fingers again, I shall make you copy out five pages of Blanchet!’

  Little Hélène was very silent; she kept trying to catch my eye and avoiding it when she succeeded. Her sister Isabelle was decidedly less pretty; that shadow of a moustache, now that it was no longer silvered by daylight, made her look like a child that has not wiped its mouth properly.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ said Renaud, coming to with a start, ‘will you authorize a distribution of sweets tomorrow morning?’

  The voracious little red-head, who had licked all the plates clean and eaten up all the crusts during dinner, let out a little yelp of greed. No! said the contemptuous eyes of the three big ones, who were already gorged with sticky filth.

  ‘I authorize it,’ replied Mademoiselle. ‘They don’t deserve anything; they’re a lot of ticks. But the circumstances are so exceptional! Well, come along, aren’t you going to say thank you, little sillies? Have you lost your tongues? . . . Off to bed with you now! It’s nearly nine o’clock.’

  ‘Oh, Mmmzelle, may Renaud see the dormitory before the kids go to bed?’

  ‘Kid yourself! Yes, he may,’ she conceded, rising from her chair. ‘And you, Miss Untidies, if I find one brush lying about!’

  Grey-white, blue-white, yellow-white; the walls, the curtains, the narrow beds that looked like babies swaddled too tight. Renaud sniffed the peculiar smell in the air; the smell of healthy little girls and of sleep, the dry, peppery fragrance of marsh peppermint, a bunch of which hung from the ceiling; his subtle nose analysed, savoured, and took it all in. Mademoiselle
, from force of habit, thrust a redoubtable hand under the bolsters in search of booty to confiscate – a half-nibbled tablet of chocolate or an instalment of a forbidden book, serialized in ten-centime paperbacks.

  ‘Did you ever sleep here?’ Renaud asked me, very low, drumming his burning fingers on my shoulders.

  Mademoiselle’s sharp ear caught the question and she forestalled my reply.

  ‘Claudine? Never in her life! And I’m extremely glad she didn’t. Whatever state should we have found the dormitory in next day – not to mention the boarders!’

  ‘Not to mention the boarders’ – she had actually said that! It was the giddy limit! My modesty was up in arms. I just could not tolerate these broad hints any longer. High time we got off to bed.

  ‘Seen everything you want to see, Renaud?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Then let’s go to bed.’

  There was much whispering as we turned to go. I could guess pretty well what the little brunettes were muttering: ‘I say, is she going to sleep with the gentleman in Mademoiselle Aimée’s bed? . . . First time it’s ever had even one man in it, Mademoiselle Aimée’s bed!’

  The sooner we got away, the better. I flashed a smile at little Hélène, who was plaiting her hair for the night, her chin on her shoulder. More than ever, I wanted to be gone.

  The cramped, light bedroom, the lamp that gave out too much heat, the pure blue of the night through the window; a cat creeping like a little velvet ghost along the dangerous window-ledge.

  The reviving ardour of my lord and master, who had been titillated all the evening by too-youthful Claudines, the nervous excitement that drew the corners of his mouth into a horizontal smile . . .

  My own brief slumber, lying on my stomach with my hands clasped behind my back ‘like a bound captive’, as Renaud says . . .

  The dawn that drew me from bed to stand at the window in my nightdress, so as to see the mist sailing over the woods up by Moutiers, so as to hear the little anvil at Choucas from closer to. It rang that morning, as it had rung all those other mornings, a clear G sharp . . .

  Every detail of that night is still clear in my mind.

  In the school, nothing was stirring yet; it was only six o’clock. But Renaud woke up because he could no longer feel me there in the bed; he listened to the blacksmith’s silvery hammering and unconsciously whistled a motif from Siegfried . . .

  He is not ugly in the morning, and that after all is a great asset in a man! Invariably, he begins by combing his hair over to the left with his fingers, then he flings himself on the water-jug and drinks a huge glass of water. This is quite beyond me! How can anyone drink something cold first thing in the morning? And, since I don’t like it, how can he possibly like it?

  ‘Claudine, what time are we leaving?’

  ‘I don’t know. So soon?’

  ‘So soon. You aren’t truly mine in this place. You’re unfaithful to me with all the sounds and the smells, all the old, remembered faces; there isn’t a tree that doesn’t possess you . . .’

  I laughed. But I did not make any reply, because I thought there was some truth in his accusation. And, besides, I no longer have my home here . . .

  ‘We’ll leave at two.’

  Reassured, Renaud looked thoughtfully at the candies piled up on the table.

  ‘Claudine, suppose we go and wake the little girls up with the sweets? What do you think?’

  ‘Let’s! Only, suppose Mademoiselle sees us . . .’

  ‘Afraid she’ll punish you with two hundred lines?’

  ‘’Course not . . . And, anyway, it’d be lots more fun if she caught us!’

  ‘Oh, Claudine! How I love your schoolgirl soul! Come and let me bury my nose in you, you dear little reopened exercise-book.’

  ‘Ouch! You’re crumpling my covers, Renaud! . . . And Mademoiselle will be up, if we don’t hurry . . .’

  Laden with sweets, we walked silently along the passage, he in his blue pyjamas, I in my long, white billowing nightdress with my hair over my eyes. I listened outside the dormitory door before going in . . . Not a sound. They were as silent as little corpses. I opened the door very softly . . .

  How could those wretched little girls sleep in broad daylight, with the sun blazing through the white curtains!

  Promptly, I searched round for Hélène’s bed: her charming little face was buried in the pillow and all one could see was her black plait, like an uncoiled serpent. Next to her, her little sister Isabelle lay flat on her back, her long lashes on her cheeks, wearing a virtuous, absorbed expression. Further on, the red-headed kid, sprawled like a dropped puppet, an arm here, an arm there, her mouth open and her red mop standing out like a halo, was snoring gently . . . But Renaud was staring chiefly at Pomme, Pomme who had been too hot, and was curled up like a dog on the outside of her bed, muffled in her long-sleeved nightdress, her head level with her knees and her charming little round behind thrust out . . . She had plaited her hair in a tight rope and plastered it smooth like a Chinese girl’s; she had one pink cheek and one red one and her mouth and her fists were closed.

  They were a charming sight, all of them! The standard of looks in the School had definitely gone up! In my time, the boarders would have inspired chastity even in that notorious ‘fumbler’, Dutertre . . .

  Finding them as attractive as I did, and in another way too, Renaud went up close to Pomme’s bed – she was quite definitely his favourite – and dropped a large green pistachio fondant on her smooth cheek. The cheek quivered, the hands opened and the charming little muffled behind shifted.

  ‘Good morning, Pomme.’

  The red-brown eyes opened roundly in startled welcome. Pomme sat up, still dazed. But her hand clapped down on the harsh green sweet. Pomme said ‘Oh!’ swallowed it down like a cherry and exclaimed:

  ‘Good morning, Monsieur.’

  At the sound of her clear voice and my laugh, the sheets on Hélène’s bed rippled, the tail of the uncoiled serpent swished, and, darker than a blackcap, Hélène suddenly sat up. Sleep was difficult to shake off; she stared at us, trying to connect up today’s thoughts with yesterday’s; then her amber cheeks turned pink. Dishevelled and charming, she pushed back a big, obstinate lock that fell across her little nose. Then she had a good view of Pomme, sitting up, with her mouth full.

  ‘Ah!’ she squeaked in turn. ‘She’ll go and eat the lot.’ Her squeal, her outstretched arm, and her childish anguish enchanted me. I went and squatted cross-legged on the foot of her bed, which made her draw her feet up under her and blush still more.

  Her sister yawned, mumbled and put up modest hands to where the ample nightdress had come a little unbuttoned. And the carrot-headed kid, Nana, moaned covetously at the far end of the room, twisting her arms with longing . . . for Pomme, conscientious and indefatigable, was eating more and still more sweets.

  ‘Renaud, it’s cruel! Pomme is a bundle of charms, I don’t deny it, but do give Hélène and the others some sweets too!’

  Solemnly, he nodded his head and moved away.

  ‘Right! Now, listen to me, all of you! I’m not giving anybody one single more sweet’ . . . (palpitating silence) . . . ‘unless she comes and gets it.’

  They looked at each other in consternation. But little Nana had already thrust her stocky little legs out of bed and was examining her feet to see if they were clean enough to be presentable. Swiftly, holding up her long nightdress so as not to stumble, she ran up to Renaud on her bare feet that went flic, flac, on the wooden floor. With her tousled head, she looked like a child on a Christmas card. Then, catching tight hold of the full bag Renaud threw her, she went back to her bed like a contented dog.

  Pomme could stand it no longer and sprang out of bed in turn. Heedless of a plump calf, gilded for a second by the sun, she ran to Renaud, who held the coveted fondants high above her head:

  ‘Oh,’ she wept, too little to reach them. ‘Please, Monsieur!’

  And then, since this had been successfu
l last night, she flung her arms round Renaud’s neck and kissed him. It was highly successful today as well. This game was beginning to irritate me . . .

  ‘Go on, Hélène,’ muttered Isabelle, furious.

  ‘Go on, yourself! You’re the bigger. And the greedier too.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t true, isn’t it? All right, then. I’m not going. Pomme will eat the lot . . . I jolly well wish she’d be sick, just to teach her . . .’

  At the thought of Pomme eating the lot, Isabelle jumped to the floor while I held Hélène back by her slim ankle, through the sheet.

  ‘Don’t go, Hélène. I’ll give you some.’

  Isabelle returned triumphantly. But, as she was hurriedly climbing back into her bed, the shrill voice of Nana was heard yapping:

  ‘Isabelle’s got hair on her legs! Her legs are all over hair!’

  ‘Indecent little beast!’ cried the accused. By now she was huddled up under the sheets, leaving only her shining, angry eyes visible. She reviled and threatened Nana, then her voice turned hoarse and she collapsed on her bolster in tears.

  ‘There, Renaud! Now look what you’ve done!’

  He laughed so loud, the mischievous fiend, that he dropped the last paperbag on the floor and it burst.

  ‘I’ll pick them up for you. What can I put them into?’ I asked my little Hélène.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t anything here – ah, I know, my basin, the third one on the wash-stand . . .’

  I put all those multicoloured horrors into the enamel basin and took it over to her.

  ‘Renaud, do just look out into the passage. Didn’t I hear footsteps?’

  And I remained seated on my little Hélène’s bed while she sucked and nibbled and glanced at me stealthily. When I smiled at her, she promptly blushed, then plucked up courage and smiled back. She had a moist, white smile that looked fresh and appetizing.

  ‘What are you laughing at, Hélène?’

  ‘I’m looking at your nightdress. You look a bit like a boarder, only it’s linen – no, batiste, isn’t it? – and you can see through it.’