Claudine and Annie Read online

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

  With a bound, Marthe cleared the edge of a kind of sloping open coffin I had not noticed before and lay down, her hands over her breasts to protect them from too rude a shock. The daylight from above lit up the veins in her skin, sculptured the fine creases, harshly illuminated all the red gold fuzz with which her body was fleeced. I blushed in the shadow. I could never have believed Marthe was so hairy . . . I blushed even more at the thought that Alain’s body was covered with the same reddish-gold fuzz, like fine copper wire. Marthe waited with her eyes closed and her elbows trembling, then the sexless creature aimed two great rubber hoses that hung from the ceiling at her.

  There was an outburst of piercing shrieks and imploring supplications. Under the cold jet, thicker than my wrist, Marthe twisted herself like a severed caterpillar, sobbed, ground her teeth and swore. When the hot jet succeeded the cold one, she sighed, appeased and comforted.

  The creature douched with one hand and with the other great solid hand kept remorselessly slapping the delicate body that was now marbled with fiery red.

  After five minutes of this appalling torture, a big warmed towel-robe, a dry friction, and Marthe, delivered of the revolting rubber cap, was looking at me, still breathless and panting, with big tears in the corners of her eyes.

  In a choked voice, I asked her if it was like that every morning.

  ‘Every single one, my child. As Claudine remarked last year: “Apart from an earthquake, they haven’t found a more effective method of stimulating the circulation.”’

  ‘Oh, Marthe, it’s atrocious! that jet’s more brutal than any bludgeon . . . it made you cry and sob . . . The whole thing’s too horrible!’

  Already half-dressed, she gave me a curious, one-sided smile; her nostrils were still quivering.

  ‘I don’t find it so,’ she said.

  Meals here are a torture to me. We have a choice between two restaurants, both of which are attached to the Casino, for the hotels serve no meals and Arriège is a town only in name, since it consists entirely of the Casino, the thermal establishment, and four big hotels. These refectories, where we present ourselves like boarding-school pupils or prisoners, where at midday one is roasted by the harsh mountain sun, are enough to destroy my appetite entirely. I thought of having meals sent up to my room but all they would bring me would be warmed-up left-overs, and besides, it would be unkind to Marthe for whom meals are a pretext for tattling and poking one’s nose into other people’s affairs . . . I’m beginning to talk like Marthe myself!

  Calliope always sits at our table and so does Maugis to whom I find it hard to be civil. Marthe devotes her attention to him, appears to be interested in his critical articles and tries to coax, or rather bully, him into doing one on The Tragic Hearts, my brother-in-law’s latest novel, to whip up the sales and to publicize waterplaces . . .

  Léon devours the tough meat with an anaemic man’s appetite and goes on paying assiduous court to Calliope who persists in sending him back to his sixty lines with the contempt of a royal princess for a paid scribe. Funny little woman! I have to admit it is I who seek her out now. She talks about herself with embarrassed volubility, fishing in some foreign language for the word she lacks in ours, and I listen to the jerky narrative of her life as if it were a fairy story.

  I forget myself in listening to her – most of all while Marthe is having her douche, at the hour when the place is deserted. I sit opposite her in a big wicker armchair, behind the dairy, and, while she talks, I admire her adorned and disarrayed beauty.

  ‘When I was little,’ Calliope said one morning, ‘I was very beautiful.’

  ‘Why “I was”?’

  ‘Parce que I am less. The old woman who did our washing always used to spit in my face.’

  ‘The disgusting creature! Didn’t your parents sack her?’

  Calliope’s lovely blue eyes enveloped me in disdain.

  ‘Sack her? In my country old women must spit on pretty little girls, saying “Phtu! Phtu!” It’s to keep beautiful and guard against evil eye. I was kept kallista too on account my mother, the day I baptized, had meal put on table at night.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. You put many things to eat on table and you go to bed. Then the mires come.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The mires. You don’t see them but they come to eat. And you put each chaise, chiesa, how you say? chair, right against wall because if one of the mires bumped her elbow in passing to s’asseoir at table, she would give . . . bad spell on little child.’

  ‘How charming these old customs are! The mires, as you call them, are they fairies?’

  ‘Fairies? I do not know. They’re mires . . . Oh dear, I’ve got a headache.’

  ‘Would you like some asprin? I’ve got some in my room.’

  Calliope ran a hand with rose-tinted nails over her smooth forehead.

  ‘No, thank you. It’s my own fault. I not made the crosses.’

  ‘What crosses?’

  ‘Like this, on the pillow.’

  With the flat of her hand, she traced a series of hurried little crosses on her knee.

  ‘You make the little crosses and quick, quick you lay your head on the place and the bad visitors doesn’t come in sleep nor mal-de-tête nor anything.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Calliope shrugged her shoulders and stood up.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. But you . . . you is a people without religion.’

  ‘Where are your running off to, Calliope?’

  ‘It’s devtera . . . Monday. I must do my nails. Here’s something again you not know! Do the nails Monday, health. Do the nails Tuesday, wealth.’

  ‘And you prefer health to wealth? How I agree with you!’

  She was already walking away but she turned round, clutching armfuls of her dishevelled laces.

  ‘I not prefer . . . Monday I do one hand, and Tuesday the other.’

  Between noon and five o’clock an inhuman heat prostrates all the bathers. The majority shut themselves up in the huge vestibule of the Casino which looks like a waiting-room in some modern station. Lying back in rocking-chairs, they flirt – poor wretches! – they suck iced coffee and doze to the sound of an orchestra as drowsy as themselves. I often absent myself from these predictable pleasures, embarrassed by people’s stares, by Maugis’ ill manners, by the noise of some thirty children and their already affected unselfconsciousness.

  For I have seen little girls of thirteen there, already developing a woman’s calves and hips, shamelessly exploiting the so-called privileges of childhood. Straddled over the leg of a grown-up male cousin or perched on a bar-stool with her knees up to her chin, one adorable little blonde with knowing eyes shows all she can of herself and studies the shamefaced excitement of the men with an icy, catlike gaze. Her mother, a fat, blotchy-faced cook, says ecstatically: ‘What a baby she is for her age!’ I cannot run into this impudent brat without feeling uncomfortable. She has invented a game of blowing soap-bubbles and chasing them with a wooden racquet. Now males of all ages blow into clay pipes and run after soap-bubbles so as to brush against the little girl, steal her pipe, and snatch her away with one arm when she leans out of the bay window. Oh, what a vile beast must lie dormant in certain men!

  Thank heaven, there still remain some real babies, little boys with bare cigar-brown calves and the clumsy charm of bear-cubs; little girls growing too fast, all angles and long thin feet; tiny tots with arms like pink sausages, dented with soft creases as if they had been tied up with string – like that fat little cherub of four, who had had an accident in his first knickerbockers, and who whispered, very red in the face, to his severe and disgusted English governess: ‘Does ev’yone know I’ve been in my trousers?’

  Today, I slipped away after lunch and went back to the hotel. I crossed the dangerous tract of sunlight that separates it from the Casino. For twenty-five seconds I savoured the scorching pleasure of feeling as if I were being swept of
f my feet by the blast of heat; my back sizzled and my ears buzzed. On the verge of falling, I took refuge in the cool darkness of the lobby where a smell of old casks came up through an open door leading down to the cellars, a smell of red wine turning to vinegar. Then I was back in my silent room that already smells of my scent, back on the less hostile bed where I flung myself in my chemise to lie there half-undressed and daydream till five o’clock.

  Toby lightly licked my bare feet with a hot, red tongue, then fell prone on the carpet. But this caress not only gave me gooseflesh; it left me shuddering as if I had been outraged and switched my thoughts on to a dangerous path . . . My semi-nakedness reminded me of Marthe’s douche, of what she was seeking in those jets that buffeted her, of the whiteness of my husband’s – my dream husband’s – body . . . To free myself from the obsession – was it really to free myself? . . . I jumped out of bed and ran to look for Alain’s latest photograph that I had hidden between two sachets.

  Whatever had happened? . . . Was I actually dreaming? I could not recognize that handsome young man there . . . Those harsh eyebrows, that arrogant stance like a cock! No, surely I was mistaken . . . or perhaps the photographer had absurdly overdone the re-touching?

  But no, that man there was my husband who is far away at sea. I trembled before his picture as I tremble before himself. A slavish creature, unconscious of its chains – that is what he has made of me . . . Shattered, I searched obstinately for one memory in our past as a young married couple that could delude me again, that could give me back the husband I believed I had. Nothing, I could find nothing – only my whipped child’s submissiveness, only his cold condescending smile.

  I wish I knew I were delirious, or dreaming. Ah! The cruel, cruel man! When did he hurt me most deeply . . . when he left me and sailed away – or the very first time he spoke to me?

  FIVE

  WE WERE WAITING, behind closed shutters, in Marthe’s bedroom which is bigger than mine for Claudine and Calliope who were coming to tea. Claudine had arrived last night with her husband and was making an exception and coming alone as Marthe was excluding men today ‘to give herself a rest’. By way of resting, she was pacing round the room; even when she stopped for a moment, she did not stand still but shifted impatiently from one foot to another like a soldier marking time. She was wearing a green muslin dress – a harsh, impossible green that exaggerated the whiteness of her skin and kindled her tempestuous hair to a blaze. Into its low neckline, she had tucked a great pink richly scented common rose. Marthe has an infallible eye for violent, yet successful, colour contrasts in the things she wears.

  She was obviously extremely agitated: her eyes were menacing and her mouth unsmiling. Finally she sat down, did some rapid scribbling on a sheet of paper and muttered some figures.

  ‘It’s two louis a day here . . . fifteen hundred francs due to Hunt when we get back . . . and that fool who wants us to take in Bayreuth on the way . . . Life’s somewhat complicated!’

  ‘Are you talking to me, Marthe?’

  ‘I’m talking to you and not talking to you. I’m saying that life is complicated.’

  ‘Complicated . . . very, in some ways.’

  ‘Exactly “Very, in some ways.” Suppose you had to find five hundred louis?’

  ‘Five hundred louis?’

  ‘Don’t wear yourself out making calculations . . . it comes to ten thousand francs. If you’d got to produce them out of a hat in three weeks from now, what would you do?’

  ‘I . . . I should write to the bank manager . . . and to Alain.’

  ‘How simple!’

  She sounded so acid that I was afraid I had offended her.

  ‘Why did you say it so bitterly, Marthe? . . . Is it . . . is it because you need money?’

  Her hard grey eyes softened:

  ‘My poor innocent child, you distress me. Of course I need money . . . All the time, all the time!’

  ‘But, Marthe, I thought you and Léon were well-off. His novels sell, and there’s your dowry . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes. But one’s got to eat. Porterhouse steak costs the earth this year. All in all, we’ve only thirty thousand francs a year – to cover everything. Do you imagine a woman can live decently on that unless she’s a dim little moth?’

  I looked thoughtful for a moment to give the impression of making calculations.

  ‘Well . . . perhaps it is rather a tight squeeze. But, Marthe, why on earth didn’t you . . .?’

  ‘Didn’t I what?’

  ‘Come to me. I’ve got some money and I’d be only too pleased . . .’

  She kissed me – a kiss that sounded like a slap – and pulled my ear.

  ‘You’re sweet. I’m not saying no. But not now. Leave it for the moment, I’ve still got one or two strings to pull that haven’t been overworked. I’ll keep you as the last resort. Besides it amuses me, fighting against money – waking up and finding a bill that’s come in for the tenth time with “urgent” on it and staring at my empty hands and telling myself: “Tonight there have got to be twenty-five louis in that little fist.”’

  I stared flabbergasted at her – at this diminutive Bellona in a grasshopper-green dress. ‘Fight . . . struggle . . .’ the alarming words conjured up images of murderous gestures, tensed muscles, blood-stained victories . . . I sat there as if paralysed, my hands inert, gazing at her and thinking of my recent tears over Alain’s photograph, of my crushed, ineffective life . . . Then a thought suddenly disturbed my inertia.

  ‘Marthe . . . how do you manage?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘How do you manage, when you need money so badly?’

  She smiled, averted her head, then looked at me again with a sweet, far-away expression.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you . . . I touch Léon’s publisher . . . I get round the tailor, or else I terrorize him . . . And besides, now and then, I get unexpected repayments . . .’

  ‘You mean money you were owed . . . that you’d lent to people?’

  ‘Something of the kind . . . I can hear Claudine. Who’s she talking to?’ She opened the door and leant out into the corridor. I followed her with my eyes, painfully aware of having dissembled. For the first time, I had just feigned ignorance and pretended to be as idiotically naïve as the Cabbage-Rose. ‘Unexpected repayments! . . .’ Marthe troubles me.

  Claudine was certainly talking in the corridor. I could hear her saying gutturally, ‘My girrrl . . .’ What girl? And why with such a tender voice?

  She appeared, holding her Fanchette on a lead. The cat minced in with a calm, undulating gait, but its green eyes blackened at the sight of us. Marthe, in raptures, clapped her hands as if she were at the theatre.

  ‘What a marvellous idea, Claudine! Where did you get that delicious animal? At Barnum’s?’

  ‘Certainly not. At home. In Montigny. Sit, Fanchette.’

  Claudine removed her boy’s hat and shook out her curls. I find that ivory skin and that fierce yet sweet expression of hers extraordinarily attractive. Her cat sat down primly with her tail wrapped round her front paws. It was a good thing I had sent Toby out for a walk with Léonie; she would have scratched him.

  ‘Hullo, you, princess in the tower.’

  ‘Hullo, Claudine. Did you have a good journey?’

  ‘Very good. Renaud was charming. He flirted with me all the time, so ardently that I didn’t feel for one minute as if we were married . . . Would you believe it . . . a man wanted to buy Fanchette from me? I gave him a look as if he’d raped my mother . . . It’s hot in here. Are there a lot of ladies coming?’

  ‘No, no, only Calliope Van Langendonck.’

  Claudine nimbly swung her foot over a chair – a very high chair.

  ‘What luck! I adore Calliope. Trireme ahoy! She’ll keep us in fits. Besides which, she’s pretty and she’s the last reincarnation of the “soul of antiquity”.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ exclaimed Marthe. ‘Why, she’s as cosmopolitan as a croupier in a casino!’


  ‘That’s what I meant. In my over-simple imagination she’s the living embodiment of all those people down below us.’

  ‘The moles?’ I chaffed her, shyly.

  ‘No, you sly little bitch. Down below . . . on the map. Here she is! Appear, Calliope, Hebe, Aphrodite, Mnasidika . . . I’m trotting out all my Greek for you!’

  Calliope gave the impression of being naked in a too-sumptuous dress of black Chantilly lace over flesh-coloured crêpe-de-Chine. She almost collapsed on the threshold.

  ‘I’m dead . . . three flights . . .’

  ‘Is bad for the skin,’ Claudine finished for her.

  ‘But is good for pregnant woman. It makes child drop.’

  MARTHE (horrified) Are you pregnant, Calliope?

  CALLIOPE (serene) No . . . jamais, never.

  MARTHE (bitter) You’re lucky. Neither am I, as it happens. But what a ghastly bore it is, having to take all these precautions. How do you prevent it?

  CALLIOPE (modest) I am a widow.

  CLAUDINE Obviously, that’s one method. But not inevitably sufficient in itself. What did you do when you weren’t a widow?

  CALLIOPE I made crosses on, before. And I cough, after.

  MARTHE (bursting with laughter) Crosses! . . . On which of you? You or your partner?

  CALLIOPE On both, chérie.

  CLAUDINE Ah! Ah! And you coughed afterwards? Is that the Greek rite?

  CALLIOPE No. You cough like this (coughing) and it’s gone.

  MARTHE (dubious) It gets in quicker than it gets out . . . Claudine, just pass me the peach salad . . .

  CLAUDINE (absorbed) No one could call me curious, but I would like to have seen his face . . .

  CALLIOPE Whose face?

  CLAUDINE The face of the late Van Langendonck when you were ‘making crosses over’.

  CALLIOPE (candid) But I didn’t make them on face!

  CLAUDINE (unable to control herself) Oh, this is bliss! (suffocating with laughter) Calliope . . . you incredible woman . . . you’ll make me choke to death in a moment . . .

  She shrieked and doubled herself up with delight; Marthe too was convulsed with laughter. In spite of being shocked and disgusted by them, I could not help smiling in the dimness that protected me. But it did not protect me enough; Claudine had noticed the silent amusement for which I rebuked myself sternly.