Claudine Married Read online

  ‘But I am a boarder! Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘No, of course not . . . but it’s such a pity you aren’t.’

  Things were going well. I moved closer.

  ‘Do you like me?’

  ‘Yes . . . awfully,’ she whispered. It sounded like a sigh.

  ‘Will you kiss me?’

  ‘No,’ she protested fiercely, in a very low, almost frightened voice.

  I leant forward very close and said:

  ‘No? I know those noes that mean yes. I’ve said them myself in the old days . . .’

  Her imploring eyes indicated the other girls. But I felt so mischievous and so curious! And I was just going to tease her again, at even closer quarters . . . when the door opened and Renaud entered, followed by Mademoiselle in a dressing-gown. Whatever am I saying? In a house-coat, with her hair already done to face the public gaze.

  ‘Well, Madame Claudine, do you find the boarders tempting?’

  ‘I must say there’d be some excuse for being tempted this year.’

  ‘Only this year? How marriage has altered my Claudine! . . . Come along, young ladies, do you know it’s nearly eight o’clock. At a quarter to nine, I shall look under the beds, and, if I find the least thing, I shall make you sweep it up with your tongues!’

  We left the dormitory with her.

  ‘Mademoiselle, will you forgive us for this double invasion at this hour of the morning?’

  Amiable and ambiguous, she answered in a low voice:

  ‘Oh, well, in the holidays! And, as for your husband, I like to see it as a charming piece of indulgence, entirely paternal.’

  I shall not forgive her for that word.

  I remember the walk before lunch, the pilgrimage I wanted to make to the threshold of ‘my’ house of the old days which that hateful sojourn in Paris had made dearer to me than ever. I remember the clutch at my heart that kept me standing motionless before the double flight of steps with their blackened iron railings that led to the front door. I stared fixedly at the worn copper ring I used to tug at to peal the bell when I came home from School; I stared at it so hard that I could feel it in my hand. And, as Renaud was gazing at the window of my bedroom, I looked up at him with eyes misty with tears.

  ‘Let’s go away. I can’t bear it . . .’

  Overcome by my misery, he led me away in silence, my arm clutched tight against his. In my mind, I turned the knob of the ground-floor window shutter with my finger – I could not stop myself . . . and it was over.

  It was over, and now I regretted having wanted to come back to Montigny, impelled by regrets, love, and pride. Yes, by pride as well. I had wanted to show off my husband . . . Was he really a husband, this paternal lover, this sensual protector? . . . I had wanted to cock a snook at Mademoiselle and at her absent Aimée . . . And then – that would teach me – look at me now, nothing but an anguished little girl, no longer sure where I really belonged, my heart prostrate between two homes!

  Entirely owing to me, lunch was a thoroughly uncomfortable meal. Mademoiselle could not make out why I looked so distressed (neither could I); the little girls, sickened with sugary stuff, could not eat. Renaud was the only one who laughed, as he teased Pomme with questions.

  ‘Do you say yes to everything you’re asked, Pomme?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur.’

  ‘Pomme, I certainly don’t pity the lucky man who will seek your favours, you round, pink apple. I foresee the happiest possible future for you, a future made up of fair shares for all and no quarrelling.’

  Then he glanced at Mademoiselle in case she might be annoyed, but she shrugged her shoulders and said, in reply to his look:

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter what you say to her, she never understands.’

  ‘Perhaps a practical demonstration would help?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have time before your train. Pomme never grasps anything till it’s been explained four times, at the very least.’

  I made a sign to stop the outrageous thing my wicked wretch of a husband was going to retort; my little Hélène, who was listening with all her ears, was already on the alert for it. (‘My little Hélène’ was the name I had privately given her from the first.)

  Good-bye to all that! For, while I was strapping up the suitcase, there was a clatter in the courtyard, punctuated by old Racalin’s oaths. Good-bye!

  I had loved – and still loved – those echoing white corridors, that barracks with the pink-brick corners; I had loved the aversion inspired in me by Mademoiselle; I had loved her little Aimée, and Luce, who had never known that I did.

  I stopped for a moment on that landing, with my hand on the cool wall.

  Renaud, down below, beneath my feet, was having a private conversation (yet another!) with Pomme.

  ‘Good-bye, Pomme.’

  ‘Good-bye, Monsieur.’

  ‘Will you write to me, Pomme?’

  ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘The excuse won’t hold water. I’m called “Claudine’s Husband”. At least, you’ll be sorry to see me go?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur.’

  ‘Especially on account of the sweets?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Monsieur!’

  ‘Pomme, your shameless candour inspires me with enthusiasm. Kiss me!’

  Behind me, something rustled very softly . . . My little Hélène was there. I turned round; she stood there, pretty and silent, a study in black and white; I smiled at her. She wanted very much to say something to me. But I knew it was too difficult and she could only gaze at me with lovely black-and-white eyes. Then as, down below, Pomme clasped herself round Renaud’s neck with placid docility, I put one arm round this silent little girl who smelt of cedar-wood pencils and sandalwood fans. It was on her resilient mouth that I said good-bye to my youthful past . . .

  To my youthful past?. . . Here, at least, I might as well not lie . . . Hélène, trembling and already passionate as she ran to the window to watch me go, you will never know something that would surprise and hurt you: what I kissed on your clinging, inexpert mouth was only the ghost of Luce . . .

  Before talking to Renaud, in the train that carried us away, I gave one last look at the tower, hooded over by a woolly mass of thickening storm clouds; I watched it till it vanished behind the round back of a hill. Then, relieved, as if I had said good-bye to someone, I returned to my dear, frivolous man, who, so as not to break the habit, was saying admiring things and holding me close and . . . but I interrupted him.

  ‘Tell me, Renaud, is it awfully nice, kissing that Pomme?’

  I looked earnestly into his eyes, without being able to see into the blue-black depths of them; it was like looking into a bottomless lake.

  ‘That Pomme? Darling, you wouldn’t be doing me the great honour of being jealous? Nothing would give me more intense pleasure!’

  ‘Oh, don’t think it’s an honour! Pomme isn’t my idea of an honourable victory.’

  ‘My slenderest, loveliest of girls, if you’d said: “Don’t kiss Pomme!” it wouldn’t even have been any merit for me to have kept off her!’

  Yes. He would do whatever I wanted. But he had not given a straight answer to my question: ‘Is it awfully nice, kissing that Pomme?’ He is adept at never giving himself away, at sliding out of things, at smoothing me with evasive tenderness.

  He loves me, there is no doubt whatever of that, more than anything in the world. Thank God, I love him – that is certain too. But how much more feminine he is than I am! How much simpler I feel I am, how much more ruthless . . . more sombre . . . more passionate.

  I expressly avoid saying: more upright. I could have said it a year and some months ago. At that time, I would not have given in so quickly to temptation, up there on the dormitory landing. I would not have kissed that young mouth, cold and moist as a split fruit, under the pretence of saying good-bye to my schoolgirl past, to my black-overalled childhood self. I would only have kissed the desk over which Luce had bent her stubborn brow.

 
For a year and a half, I have been aware of the progress of the slow and pleasant corruption within myself that I owe to Renaud. When one looks at them through his eyes, big things grow small and all that is serious in life is reduced to triviality. On the other hand, futile trivialities, especially if they are harmful, assume an enormous importance. But how can I defend myself against the incurable and engaging frivolity that prevails over everything else in him and sweeps me along in his wake?

  There is something worse: through Renaud I have discovered the secret of giving and receiving sensual delight, and the possession and use of it gives me the thrill of a child wielding a deadly weapon. He has revealed to me the sure and urgent power of my tall, lithe, muscular body – hard buttocks, scarcely any breasts, an even-textured skin as smooth as porcelain – of my Egyptian tobacco eyes that have grown deeper and more restless, of a short, bushy mane the colour of ripening chestnuts . . . All this new strength I exert, only half-consciously, on Renaud – just as, had I stayed two days more at the school, I should have exerted it on that charming Hélène.

  Yes, yes, I admit it, but do not press me further. Otherwise I shall say that Renaud was responsible for my kissing my little Hélène on the lips.

  Three

  ‘Small and silent Claudine, what are you thinking about?’ He asked me that, I remember, on the hotel terrace at Heidelberg, while my eyes were wandering from the ample curve of the Neckar to the sham ruins of the Schloss down below us.

  Sitting on the ground, I raised my chin from the props of my two fists.

  ‘I’m thinking of the garden.’

  ‘What garden?’

  ‘Oh, “What garden”! The garden at Montigny, of course!’

  Renaud threw away his cigarette. He lives, like a god, in clouds of fragrant Egyptian tobacco smoke.

  ‘Funny little girl . . . With that landscape in front of you! Are you going to tell me it’s more beautiful than this, the garden at Montigny?’

  ‘Of course not. But it’s mine.’

  That was just it! Over and over again we had discussed it, but neither could understand the other. Renaud would kiss me affectionately, a little contemptuously, and call me a lazy little stay-at-home and a gipsy who wouldn’t leave her tent. I would laugh and retort that his home was in a suitcase. We were both right, but I blamed him because he did not think as I did.

  He has travelled too much and I not enough. There is nothing nomadic about me, except my mind. I cheerfully follow Renaud in his wanderings because I adore him. But I like journeys that have an end. He is in love with travel for travel’s sake; he gets up happily under a foreign sky, thinking that today he will be off somewhere else. He longs for the mountains of one nearby country, for the harsh wine of another, for the artificial charm of this dolled-up watering-place ablaze with flowers, for the solitude of that high-perched hamlet. And he goes off, with no regrets for the hamlet or the flowers or the potent wine.

  I follow him. And I enjoy – yes, truly I enjoy them too – the friendly town, the sun behind the pine-trees, the echoing mountain air. But round my ankle I feel a thread whose other end is wound and knotted round the old walnut-tree in the garden at Montigny.

  I don’t think I am an unnatural daughter! And yet there is something I have to admit: I have missed Fanchette during our travels almost as much as Papa. The only time I really missed my noble father badly was in Germany, where those Wagnerian chromolithographs and picture-postcards reminded me of him. All the representations of Odin and Wotan, apart from the missing eye, resembled him. Like him, they were handsome, they brandished harmless thunderbolts and they displayed tempestuous beards and commanding gestures. And I could imagine that, like his, their vocabulary included all the coarse expressions of a mythical bygone age.

  I wrote to him seldom and he rarely replied. His letters were affectionate and higgledy-piggledy, written in a juicily hybrid style, in which periods whose cadence would have delighted Chateaubriand (I am flattering Papa a little) harboured in their bosom – their august bosom – the most scarifying oaths. I learnt from these anything but commonplace letters that, apart from the silent, faithful Monsieur Maria, who was still the perfect secretary, nothing was going right . . . ‘I don’t know whether to blame your absence for it, little donkey,’ my dear father confided to me, ‘but I’m beginning to find Paris pestilential, especially since that specimen of the dregs of humanity by name of X . . . has just published a treatise on Universal Malacology stupid enough to make even the squatting lions outside the Institute vomit. How can the Eternal Justice still pour forth the light of the day on such filthy skunks?

  Mélie wrote to me also, well describing Fanchette’s state of mind since my departure; how she had wailed in desolation for days and days. But Mélie’s handwriting is so hieroglyphic that it is impossible to keep up a sustained correspondence with her.

  Fanchette was mourning me! The thought of this haunted me wherever I went. All the time I was on my travels, I started at the sight of every lean tomcat fleeing round the corner of a wall. Over and over again, to Renaud’s surprise, I have let go his arm to run up to a she-cat, sitting sedately on a doorstep, and say to her: ‘My Sweeeet!’ Often the little animal would be shocked and tuck in her chin, with a dignified movement, against her ruffled shirt-front. But I would insist, adding a series of shrill onomatopoeic noises in a minor key until I saw the green eyes melt into gentleness and narrow in smile. Then the flat, caressing head would rub hard against the door-post in polite greeting and the cat would turn round three times, which clearly meant: ‘I like you.’

  Never once did Renaud show any impatience during these bouts of cat-mania. But I suspect him of being more indulgent than understanding. He is quite capable, monster that he is, of never having stroked my Fanchette except out of diplomacy.

  How willingly I look back over this recent past and dwell on it! But Renaud lives in the future. This paradoxical man who is devoured by the terror of growing old, who studies himself minutely in looking-glasses and desperately notes every tiny wrinkle in the network at the corner of his eyes, is uneasy in the present and feverishly hurries Today on Tomorrow. I myself linger in the past, even if that past be only Yesterday, and I look back almost always with regret. It is as if marriage (be honest and say sex!) had developed certain modes of ‘feeling’ in me that were older than myself. This amazes Renaud. But he loves me, and if, as my lover, he no longer understands me, I can still take refuge in the other Renaud, my dear, great fatherly friend! For him, I am a trusting daughter who leans on her self-chosen father and confides in him, almost without the lover’s knowledge. Better still, if Renaud-the-lover tries to insinuate himself as a third between Papa-Renaud and Daughter-Claudine, the latter gives him a ruthless reception. She pushes him away like a cat who’s jumped up on one’s desk. So then the poor thing has to wait, impatient and disappointed, until the other Claudine returns, light-hearted and rested, to bring him her swiftly overcome resistance, her silence and her fire.

  Alas, all I have put down here, more or less at random, does not make me see where the rift between us lies. Nevertheless, how conscious, how terribly conscious, of it I am!

  Here we are, in our own place at last! All the tiring shopping expeditions of our return are over; Renaud’s fevered anxiety that I should like my new home has calmed down.

  He begged me to choose between two flats, both of which are his. (Two flats; that’s none too many for one Renaud . . .) ‘If you don’t fancy them, darling child, we’ll find another one that’s prettier than these two.’ I resisted the desire to reply: ‘Show me the third one,’ and, overcome once more by my insurmountable horror of moving, I examined the two quite conscientiously; above all, I had a good sniff at them. And, finding the smell of this one more sympathetic to my hypersensitive nose, I chose it. It needed very little more in the way of furniture, but Renaud, scrupulous over details and much more feminine and houseproud than myself, used all his ingenuity ferreting round for objects to complete a flawless
whole. Anxious to please me, anxious too not to include anything that might offend his over-critical eye, he consulted me twenty times over. My first answer was sincere: ‘It’s all the same to me!’ My second too. But on the subject of the bed, ‘that keystone of conjugal bliss’, to use Papa’s expression, I gave my opinion very definitely.

  ‘I’d like my little four-poster with the chintz curtains.’

  At which my poor Renaud flung up his arms in despair.

  ‘Misery me! A four-poster in a Louis XV bedroom! Besides, my darling, monstrous little girl, do use your imagination! We should have to add an extension to lengthen it . . . I mean, widen it . . .’

  Yes, I realized that only too well. But what could you expect? I couldn’t feel much interest in furniture that I didn’t know – not yet. The big low bed has become my friend, and so have the dressing-room and a few vast padded armchairs. But the rest continues to regard me, if I dare use the expression, with a mistrustful eye; the wardrobe with the long mirror squints at me when I pass, the drawing-room table with its curved legs tries to trip me up and I kick it back good and hard.

  Two months, Lord, two months – isn’t that long enough to break in a flat? And I stifle the voice of reason that growls: ‘In two months, you can tame plenty of pieces of furniture, but not one Claudine.’

  Would Fanchette consent to live here? I saw her again at Papa’s flat in the rue Jacob, my darling white beautiful. She had not been warned of my return and it made my heart heavy to see her prostrate with emotion at my feet, unable to utter a sound, while, with my hand on her warm pink stomach, I tried vainly to count the wild pulsations of her heart. I laid her on her side to comb her dulled coat; at that familiar gesture, she raised her head with a look full of so many things – reproach, unfailing love, torment accepted with joy . . . Oh, little white animal, how close I feel to you because I understand you so well!

  I have seen my noble father again, tall and broad with his tricoloured beard, brimming over with sonorous words and ineffective pugnacity. Without being consciously aware of it, we love each other and I understand all the genuine pleasure implied by his first words of welcome: ‘Would you deign to give me a kiss, you vile slut?’ I think he has grown larger in the last two years. I’m not joking! And the proof is that he confessed to me that he felt cramped in the rue Jacob. I admit that he did add afterwards: ‘You know, this last year or two, I’ve been picking up books, for nothing, in the sale-rooms. Nineteen hundred at least . . . A thousand herds of sacred swine! I’ve been forced to stuff them away in the box-room! It’s so small, this pig-sty . . . Whereas, in that room at the back at Montigny, I could . . .’ He turned away his head and pulled his beard, but our eyes had had time to meet and exchange an odd look. He’s b . . . well, I mean he’s quite capable of going back there just as he came here, for no reason at all . . .