The Last of Cheri Page 5

  ‘Fred, you’ve just made the most horrible face; you were the spit and image of that fox Angot brought back from the trenches.’

  It was the least trying hour of the day for the pair of them, awake and in bed with breakfast over. After a refreshing shower-bath, they were gratified to hear the drenching rain – three months ahead of the proper season – falling in sheets that stripped the false Parisian autumn of its leaves and flattened the petunias. They did not bother to find an excuse, that morning, for having wilfully remained behind in town. Had not Charlotte Peloux hit upon the proper excuse the previous evening? She had declared, ‘We’re all good Parigots, born and bred, aren’t we! True blue one and all! We and the concierges can claim that we’ve had a real taste of the first post-war summer in Paris!’

  ‘Fred, are you in love with that suit? You never stop wearing it. It doesn’t look fresh, you know.’

  Chéri raised a finger in the direction of Edmée’s voice, a gesture which enjoined silence and begged that nothing should divert his attention while he was in the throes of exceptional mental labours.

  ‘I should like to know if I have forgotten her. But what is the real meaning of “forgotten”! A whole year’s gone by without my seeing her.’ He felt a sudden little shock of awakening, a tremor, when he found that his memory had failed to account for the war years. Then he totted up the years and, for an instant, everything inside him stopped functioning.

  ‘Fred, shall I never get you to leave your razor in the bathroom, instead of bringing it in here!’

  Almost naked and still damp, he took his time in turning round, and his back was silver-flecked with dabs of talcum powder.

  ‘What?’

  The voice, which seemed to come from afar, broke into a laugh.

  ‘Fred, you look like a cake that’s been badly sugared. An unhealthy looking cake. Next year, we won’t be as stupid as we have been this. We’ll take a place in the country.’

  ‘Do you want a place in the country?’

  ‘Yes. Not this morning, of course.’

  She was pinning up her hair. She pointed with her chin to the curtain of rain, streaming down in a grey torrent, without any sign of thunder or wind.

  ‘But next year, perhaps . . . Don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s an idea. Yes, it’s an idea.’

  He was putting her politely at arm’s length, in order to return to his surprising discovery. ‘I really did think that it was only one year since I’d seen her. I never took the war into reckoning. I haven’t seen her for one, two, three, four, five years. One, two, three, four. . . . But, in that case, have I really forgotten her? No! Because these women have spoken of her in front of me, and I’ve never jumped up and shouted, “Hold on! If that’s true – then what about Léa?” Five years . . . How old was she in 1914?’

  He counted once more, and ran up against an unbelievable total. ‘That would make her just about sixty today, wouldn’t it? . . . How absurd!’

  ‘And the important thing’, Edmée went on, ‘is to choose it carefully. Let’s see, a nice part of the world would be –’

  ‘Normandy,’ Chéri finished for her absent-mindedly.

  ‘Yes, Normandy. Do you know Normandy?’

  ‘No . . . Not at all well. . . . It’s green. There are lime trees, ponds . . .’

  He shut his eyes, as though dazed.

  ‘Where do you mean? In what part of Normandy?’

  ‘Ponds, cream, strawberries, and peacocks. . . .’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about Normandy! What grand country it must be! What else d’you find there?’

  He appeared to be reading out a description as he leaned over the round mirror in which he made sure of the smoothness of chin and cheeks after shaving. He went on, unmoved, but hesitatingly. ‘There are peacocks. . . . Moonlight on parquet floors, and a great big red carpet spread on the gravel in front of . . .’

  He did not finish. He swayed gently, and slithered on to the carpet. His fall was checked half-way by the side of the bed. As his head lay against the rumpled sheets, the overlying tan of his pallid cheeks had the greenish tinge of an old ivory.

  Hardly had he reached the floor when Edmée, without uttering a sound, threw herself down beside him. With one hand she supported his drooping head, and with the other held a bottle of smelling-salts to his nostrils, from which the colour was visibly ebbing. But two enfeebled arms pushed her away.

  ‘Leave me alone. . . . Can’t you see I’m dying?’

  He was not dying, however, and under Edmée’s fingers his pulse retained its rhythm. He had spoken in a subdued whisper, with the glib, emphatic sincerity of very young would-be suicides who, at one and the same moment, both court death and fight shy of it.

  His lips were parted over gleaming teeth and his breathing was regular; but he was in no haste to come right back to life. Safely ensconced behind his tightly shut eyes, he sought refuge in the heart of that green domain, so vivid in his imagination at the instant of his fainting fit – a flat domain, rich in strawberry-beds and bees, in pools of moonbeams fringed with warm stones. . . . After he regained his strength, he still kept his eyes shut, thinking ‘If I open my eyes, Edmée will then see the picture in my mind.’

  She remained bowed over him on bended knee. She was looking after him efficiently, professionally. She reached out with her free hand, picked up a newspaper and used it to fan his forehead. She whispered insignificant but appropriate words, ‘It’s the storm. . . . Relax. . . . No, don’t try to move. . . . Wait till I slip this pillow under you. . . .’

  He sat up again, smiling, and pressed her hand in thanks. His parched mouth longed for lemons or vinegar. The ringing of the telephone snatched Edmée away from him.

  ‘Yes, yes. . . . What? Yes, of course I know it’s ten. Yes. What?’

  From the imperious brevity of her replies, Chéri knew that it was someone telephoning from the Hospital.

  ‘Yes, of course I’m coming. What? In . . .’ With a rapid glance she estimated Chéri’s term of recovery. ‘In twenty-five minutes. Thanks. See you presently.’

  She opened the two glass doors of the french windows to their fullest extent, and a few peaceful drops of rain dripped into the room, bringing with them an insipid river smell.

  ‘Are you better, Fred? What exactly did you feel? Nothing wrong with your heart, is there? You must be short of phosphates. It’s the result of this ridiculous summer we’re having. But what can you expect?’

  She glanced at the telephone furtively, as she might at an onlooker.

  Chéri stood up on his feet again without apparent effort. ‘Run along, child. You’ll be late at your shop. I’m quite all right.’

  ‘A mild grog? A little hot tea?’

  ‘Don’t bother about me. . . . You’ve been very sweet. Yes, a little cup of tea – ask for it on your way out. And some lemon.’

  Five minutes later she was gone, after giving him a look, which she believed expressed solicitude only. She had searched in vain for a true sign, for some explanation of so inexplicable a state of affairs. As though the sound of the door shutting had severed his bonds, Chéri stretched himself and found that he felt light, cold, and empty. He hurried to the window and saw his wife crossing the small strip of garden, her bead bowed under the rain. ‘She’s got a guilty back,’ he pronounced, ‘she’s always had a guilty back. From the front, she looks a charming little lady. But her back gives the show away. She’s lost a good half-hour by my having fainted. But “back to our muttons”, as my mother would say. When I got married, Léa was fifty-one – at the very least – so Madame Peloux assures me. That would make her fifty-eight now, sixty perhaps. . . . The same age as General Courbat? No! That’s too rich a joke!’

  He tried his hardest to associate the picture of Léa at sixty with the white bristling moustache and crannied cheeks of General Courbat and his ancient cab-horse stance. ‘It’s the best joke out!’

  The arrival of Madame Peloux found Chéri still given over t
o his latest pastime, pale, staring out at the drenched garden, and chewing a cigarette that had gone out. He showed no surprise at his mother’s entrance. ‘You’re certainly up with the lark, my dear mother.’

  ‘And you’ve got out of bed the wrong side, it would seem,’ was her rejoinder.

  ‘Pure imagination. There are, at least, extenuating circumstances to account for your activity, I presume?’

  She raised both eyes and shoulders in the direction of the ceiling. A cheeky little leather sports hat was pulled down like a vizor over her forehead.

  ‘My poor child,’ she sighed, ‘if you only knew what I’m engaged on at this moment! If you knew what a gigantic task . . .’

  He took careful stock of the wrinkles on his mother’s face, the inverted commas round her mouth. He contemplated the small flabby wavelet of a double chin, the ebb and flow of which now covered, now uncovered, the collar of her mackintosh. He started to weigh up the fluctuating pouches under her eyes, repeating to himself: ‘Fifty-eight . . . Sixty . . .’

  ‘Do you know the task I’ve set myself? Do you know?’ She waited a moment, opening wider her large eyes outlined by black pencil ‘I’m going to revive the hot springs at Passy! Les Thermes de Passy! Yes, that means nothing to you, of course. The springs are there under the Rue Raynouard, only a few yards away. They’re dormant; all they need is to be revived. Very active waters. If we go the right way about it, it will mean the ruination of Uriage, the collapse of Mont Dore, perhaps – but that would be too wonderful! Already I’ve made certain of the cooperation of twenty-seven Swiss doctors. Edmée and I have been getting to work on the Paris Municipal Council. . . . And that’s exactly why I’ve come – I missed your wife by five minutes. . . . What’s wrong with you? You’re not listening to me. . . .’

  He persisted in trying to relight his damp cigarette. He gave it up, threw the stub out upon the balcony, where large drops of rain were rebounding like grasshoppers; then he gravely looked his mother up and down.

  ‘I am listening to you,’ he said. ‘Even before you speak I know what you’re going to say. I know all about this business of yours. It goes by the varying names of company promotion, wheezes, commissions, founders’ shares, American blankets, bully-beef, etcetera. . . . You don’t suppose I’ve been deaf or blind for the last year, do you? You are nasty, wicked women, that’s all there is to it. I bear you no ill will.’

  He stopped talking and sat down, by force of habit rubbing his fingers almost viciously over the little twin scars beneath his right breast He looked out at the green, rain-battered garden, and on his relaxed features weariness battled with youth – weariness, hollowing his cheeks and darkening his eye-sockets, youth perfectly preserved in the ravishing curve and full ripeness of his lips, the downiness of his nostrils, and the raven-black abundance of his hair.

  ‘Very well, then,’ said Charlotte Peloux at length. ‘That’s a nice thing to hear, I must say. The devil turned preacher! I seem to have given birth to a Censor of Public Morals.’

  He showed no intention of breaking the silence, or of making any movement whatever.

  ‘And by what high standards do you presume to judge this poor corrupt world? By your own honesty, I don’t doubt!’

  Buckled into a leather jerkin, like a yeoman of old, she was at the top of her form and ready for the fray. But Chéri appeared to be through with all fighting, now and for ever.

  ‘By my honesty? . . . Perhaps. Had I been hunting for the right word, I should never have hit upon that. You yourself said it. Honesty will pass.’

  She did not deign to reply, postponing her offensive until a later moment. She held her tongue that she might give her full attention to her son’s peculiar new aspect. He was sitting with his legs very wide apart, elbows on knees, his hands firmly locked together. He continued to stare out at the garden laid flat by the lashing rain, and after a moment he sighed without turning his head: ‘Do you really call this a life?’

  As might be expected, she asked: ‘What life?’

  He raised one arm, only to let it fall again. ‘Mine. Yours. Everything. All that’s going on under our eyes.’

  Madame Peloux hesitated a moment. Then she threw off her leather coat, lit a cigarette, and she too sat down.

  ‘Are you bored?’

  Coaxed by the unusual sweetness of a voice that sounded ethereally solicitous, he became natural and almost confidential.

  ‘Bored? No, I’m not bored. What makes you think I’m bored? I’m a trifle . . . what shall I say? . . . a trifle worried, that’s all.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About everything. Myself. . . . Even about you.’

  ‘I’m surprised at that.’

  ‘So am I. These fellows . . . this year . . . this peace.’ He stretched his fingers apart as though they were sticky or tangled in overlong hair.

  ‘You say that as we used to say “This war” . . .’ She put a hand on his shoulders and tactfully lowered her voice. ‘What is the matter with you?’

  He could not bear the questioning weight of this hand; he stood up, and began moving about in a haphazard way. ‘The matter is that everyone’s rotten. No!’ he begged, seeing an artificial look of indignation on the maternal countenance, ‘No, don’t start all over again. No, present company not excluded. No, I do not accept the fact that we are living in splendid times, with a dawn of this, a resurrection of that. No, I am not angry, don’t love you any less than before, and there is nothing wrong with my liver. But I do seriously think that I’m nearly at the end of my tether.’

  He cracked his fingers as he walked about the room, sniffing the sweet-smelling spray of the heavy rain as it splashed off the balcony. Charlotte Peloux threw down her hat and her red gloves, a gesture intended as a peace-offering.

  ‘Do tell me exactly what you mean, child. We’re alone.’ She smoothed back her sparse hennaed hair, cut boyishly short. Her mushroom-coloured garb held in her body as an iron hoop clamps a cask. ‘A woman. . . . She has been a woman. . . . Fifty-eight. . . . Sixty . . .’ Chéri was thinking. She turned on him her lovely velvety eyes, brimming with maternal coquetry, the feminine power of which he had long forgotten. This sudden charm of his mother’s warned him of the danger lying ahead, and the difficulty of the confession towards which she was leading him. But he felt empty and listless, tormented by what he lacked. The hope of shocking her drove him on still further.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in answer to his own question. ‘You have your blankets, your macaroni and spaghetti, your légions d’honneur. You joke about the meetings of the Chambre des Députés and the accident to young Lenoir. You are thrilled by Madame Caillaux, and by the hot springs at Passy. Edmée’s got her shopful of wounded and her Physician-in-Charge. Desmond dabbles in dance-halls, wines and spirits, and white slavery. Filipesco bags cigars from Americans and hospitals, to hawk them round night clubs. Jean de Touzac . . . is in the surplus store racket. What a set! What –’

  ‘You’re forgetting Landru,’ Charlotte put in edgeways.

  His eyes twinkled as he gave the slyest of winks, in silent tribute to the malicious humour that rejuvenated his old pugilist of a mother.

  ‘Landru? That doesn’t count, there’s a pre-war flavour about that. There’s nothing odd about Landru. But as for the rest – well . . . well, to cut it short, there’s not one who’s not a rotter and . . . and I don’t like it. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s certainly short, but not very clear,’ Charlotte said, after a moment. ‘You’ve a nice opinion of us. Mind you, I don’t say you’re wrong. Myself, I’ve got the qualities of my defects, and nothing frightens me. Only it doesn’t give me an inkling of what you’re really after.’

  Chéri swayed awkwardly on his chair. He frowned so furiously that the skin on his forehead contracted in deep wrinkles between his eyes, as though trying to keep a hat on his head in a gusty wind.

  ‘What I’m really after . . . I simply don’t know. I only wish people weren’t such rotters. I mean t
o say, weren’t only rotten. . . . Or, quite simply, I should like to be able not to notice it.’

  He showed such hesitancy, such a need of coming to terms with himself, that Charlotte made fun of it. ‘Why notice it, then?’

  ‘Ah, well. . . . That’s just the point, you see.’

  He gave her a helpless smile, and she noticed how much her son’s face aged as he smiled. ‘Someone ought constantly to be telling him hard-luck stories,’ she said to herself, ‘or else making him really angry. Gaiety doesn’t improve his looks . . .’ She blew out a cloud of smoke and in her turn allowed an ambiguous commonplace to escape her. ‘You didn’t notice anything of that before.’

  He raised his head sharply. ‘Before? Before what?’

  ‘Before the war, of course.’

  ‘Ah, yes . . .’ he murmured, disappointed. ‘No, before the war, obviously. . . . But before the war I didn’t look at things in the same way.’

  ‘Why?’

  The simple word struck him dumb.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Charlotte chid him, ‘you’ve turned honest.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think of admitting, by any chance, that I’ve simply remained so?’

  ‘No, no, don’t let’s get that wrong.’ She was arguing, a flush on her cheeks, with the fervour of a prophetess. ‘Your way of life before the war, after all – I’m putting myself in the position of people who are not exactly broad-minded and who take a superficial view of things, understand! – such a way of life, after all, has a name!’

  ‘If you like,’ Chéri agreed. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Well then, that implies a . . . a way of looking at things. Your point of view was a gigolo’s.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ said Chéri, unmoved. ‘Do you see any harm in that?’