The Last of Cheri Read online

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘Funk. Blue funk, that’s all. She’s not the sort of woman who knows how to carry such wealth. Cheniaguine left her everything. But one might say that it would have done her less harm if he’d taken her money instead of leaving her his. You heard what she said?’

  She subsided into the depths of a well upholstered armchair, and Chéri hated to hear the gentle sigh of its cushions as they took the weight of her vast bulk. She ran the tip of her finger along the grooved moulding of the chair, blew away the few specks of dust, and her face fell.

  ‘Ah! things are not at all what they were, not even servants. Eh?’

  He felt that he had lost colour, and that the skin round his mouth was growing tighter, as during a severe frost. He fought back an overwhelming impulse to burst out in rancour mingled with entreaties. He longed to cry out loud: ‘Stop! Show me your real self! Throw off your disguise! You must be somewhere behind it, since it’s your voice I hear. Appear in your true colours! Arise as a creature reborn, with your hair newly hennaed this morning, your face freshly powdered: put on your long stays again, the blue dress with its delicate jabot, the scent like a meadow that was so much a part of you. In these new surroundings I search for it in vain! Leave all this behind, and come away to Passy – never mind the showers – Passy with its dogs and its birds, and in the Avenue Bugeaud we’ll be sure to find Ernest polishing the brass bars on your front door.’ He shut his eyes, utterly worn out.

  ‘And now, my child, I’m going to tell you something for your own good. What you need is to have your urine tested. Your colour’s shocking, and you’ve got that pinched look round your lips – sure signs, both of them: you’re not taking proper care of your kidneys.’

  Chéri opened his eyes again, and they took their fill of this placid epitome of disaster seated in front of him. Heroically he said: ‘D’you really think so? It’s quite possible.’

  ‘You mean, it’s certain. And then, you’ve not got enough flesh on you. . . . It’s no use telling me that the best fighting cocks are scraggy. You could do with a good ten pounds more on you.’

  ‘Give them to me,’ he said with a smile. But he found his cheeks singularly recalcitrant and opposed to smiling, almost as though his skin had stiffened with age.

  Léa burst into a peal of happy laughter, and Chéri tasted a pleasure which he could not have borne for long; he listened again to its full and rounded tones, the very laugh which in the old days used to greet some outrageous impertinence on the part of the ‘naughty little boy’.

  ‘That I could well afford! I’ve certainly been putting on weight, haven’t I? Eh? Look . . . here . . . would you believe it? . . . and again here!’

  She lit a cigarette, exhaled a double jet of smoke through her nostrils, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s age!’

  The word flew out of her mouth so lightly that it gave Chéri a sort of extravagant hope. ‘Yes: she’s only joking. In a flash she’ll reappear as her real self.’ For an instant she seemed to take in the meaning of the look he gave her.

  ‘I’ve changed a lot, haven’t I, child? Fortunately, it doesn’t much matter. As for you, I don’t like the look of you at all. . . . You’ve been fluttering your wings too much, as we used to say in the old days. Eh?’

  He detested this new ‘Eh?’ with which she peppered her sentences so freely. But he stiffened at each interrogation, and each time mastered his rising excitement, preferring to remain in ignorance of both its reason and its aim.

  ‘I don’t ask whether you have any troubles at home. In the first place, it’s none of my business; and besides, I know your wife as if I were her mother.’

  He listened to the sound of her voice without paying much attention. He noticed, above all, that when she stopped smiling or laughing, she ceased to belong to any assignable sex. Despite her enormous breasts and crushing backside, she seemed by virtue of age altogether virile and happy in that state.

  ‘And I know your wife to be thoroughly capable of making a man happy.’

  He was powerless to hide his inward laughter, and Léa quickly went on to say:

  ‘What I said was “a man”, and not “any man”. Here you are in my house, without a word of warning. You’ve not come, I take it, just to gaze into my beautiful eyes, eh?’

  She turned on Chéri those once ‘beautiful blue eyes’, now so diminished, marbled with tiny red veins, quizzical, neither kind nor unkind, alert and bright certainly, but . . . but where was now the limpid freshness that had laved their whites with palest blue? Where the contour of their orbs, with the roundness of fruit, breast, or hemisphere, and blue as a land watered by many a river?

  Jestingly, he said, ‘Pooh! aren’t you sharp! A real detective!’ And it amazed him to find that he had fallen into such a carefree posture, with his legs crossed, like a handsome young man with bad manners. For inwardly he was watching his other self, hopelessly distracted and on his knees, waving his arms, baring his breast, and shrieking incoherently.

  ‘I’m not a particularly stupid woman. But you must admit that you don’t present me today with a very difficult problem!’

  She drew in her chin and its lower folds spread over her neck: the kneeling ghost of his other self bowed its head like a man who has received a death-blow.

  ‘You show every known sign of suffering from the disease of your generation. No, no, let me go on. Like all your soldier friends, you’re looking everywhere for your paradise, eh! the paradise they owe you as a war hero: your own special Victory Parade, your youth, your lovely women. . . . They owe you all that and more, for they promised you everything, and, dear God, you deserved it. And what do you find? A decent ordinary life. So you go in for nostalgia, listlessness, disillusion, and neurasthenia. Am I wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Chéri, for he was thinking that he would give his little finger to stop her talking.

  Léa clapped him on the shoulder, letting her hand with its large rings rest there. As he bent his head down towards it, he could feel on his cheek the heat of this heavy hand.

  ‘Oh!’ Léa continued, raising her voice. ‘You’re not the only one! I’ve come across dozens of boys, since the war ended, exactly in your state of –’

  ‘Where?’ Chéri interrupted.

  The suddenness of the interruption and its aggressive character put an end to Léa’s parsonic eloquence. She withdrew her hand.

  ‘They’re to be met with everywhere, my child. Is it possible to be so vain? You seem to think you’re unique because you find the post-war world insipid. Don’t flatter yourself to that extent!’

  She gave a low chuckle, and a toss to her sportive grey hair, and then a self-important smile like a judge who has a nice taste in wine. ‘And you do flatter yourself, you know, always imagining that you’re the only one of your kind.’

  She took a step back and narrowed her gaze, adding, perhaps a little vindictively: ‘You were unique only for . . . for a time.’

  Behind this veiled but carefully chosen insult, Chéri discovered something of her femininity at last. He sat bolt upright, delighted to find himself suffering less acutely. But by this time Léa had reverted to her milk and honey.

  ‘But you didn’t come here to have that said about you. Did you make up your mind on the spur of the moment?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chéri.

  He could have wished that this monosyllable might have been the last word between the two of them. Shyly, he let his gaze wander to all the things that surrounded Léa. From the nearest plate he took a dry cake shaped like a curved tile, and then put it back, convinced that it would turn to brick-red grit in his mouth were he to take a bite out of it. Léa noticed this action, and the painful way he swallowed his saliva.

  ‘Tut, tut, so we’re suffering from nerves, are we? Peeky chin, and dark lines under the eyes. That’s a pretty state of affairs!’

  He closed his eyes, and like a coward decided to listen and not look.

  ‘Listen to me, c
hild, I know a little restaurant in the Avenue des Gobelins. . . .’

  He looked up at her, in the full hope that she was going mad, that in this way he would be able to forgive her for both looking and behaving like an old woman.

  ‘Yes, I know a little restaurant . . . Let me speak! Only, you must be quick, before the smart set and the newspapers take it into their heads to make it fashionable, and the good woman herself is replaced by a chef. She does all the cooking at present, and, my dear . . .’ She brought thumb and forefinger together on the tip of her lips, and blew an imitation kiss. Chéri turned away to look out of the window, where the shadow thrown by a branch flicked at the steady shaft of sunlight, impatiently but at regular intervals, much as a bent reed or river-plant appears to strike at the ripples of a regularly flowing current.

  ‘What an odd sort of conversation . . .’ he ventured in strained tones.

  ‘No more odd than your presence in my house,’ Léa snapped back at him.

  With a wave of the hand he made it clear that he wanted peace, only peace, with as few words spoken as possible, and preferably none at all. He felt defeated in face of this elderly woman’s boundless reserves of energy and appetite. Léa’s quick blood was now rising and turning her bulging neck and her ears to purple. ‘She’s got a crop like an old hen,’ he thought, with something of his old enjoyment of cruelty.

  ‘And that’s the truth!’ she hurled at him excitedly. ‘You drag yourself round here, for all the world like an apparition, and when I do my best to find some way of putting things to rights, I who, when all’s said and done, do happen to know you rather well . . .’

  He smiled at her despondently, ‘And how in the world should she know me? When far shrewder people than she, and even than I myself . . .’

  ‘A certain kind of sickness of the soul, my child, of disillusion, is just a question of stomach. Yes, yes, you may laugh!’ He was not laughing, but she might well think he was. ‘Romanticism, nerves, distaste for life: stomach. The whole lot, simply stomach. Love itself! If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love – well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction. If only I knew how to write, or to make speeches, my child, what things I could say about that! Oh, of course, it wouldn’t be anything new, but I should know what I was talking about, and that would be a change from our present-day writers.’

  Something worse than this obsession with the kitchen was upsetting Chéri: the affectation, the false tone of voice, the almost studied joviality. He suspected Léa of putting on an act of hearty and sybaritic geniality, just as a fat actor, on the stage, plays ‘jovial’ characters because he has developed a paunch.

  As though defiantly, she rubbed her shiny, almost blotchy red nose with the back of her first finger, and fanned the upper part of her body with the aid of the two revers of her long jacket. In so doing, she was altogether too cheerfully inviting Chéri to sit in judgement on her appearance, and she even ran her hand through her thick grey locks as she shook them free of her head.

  ‘Do you like my hair short?’

  He deigned to reply only by a silent shake of the head, just like someone brushing aside an idle argument.

  ‘Weren’t you saying something just now about a little restaurant in the Avenue des Gobelins . . .?’

  It was now her turn to brush aside an irrelevance. She was beginning to understand, and he could see from the quivering of her nostrils that at last she was piqued. His animal instincts, which had been shocked into dullness, were now on the alert and it was as though a weight had been lifted from his mind. He intended somehow to find a way past this shameless flesh, the greying curls, and ‘merry friar’ joviality, and reach the being concealed behind them, to whom he was coming back, as to the scene of a crime. He remained close to this buried treasure, burrowing towards it spontaneously. ‘How in the world did old age come upon her? All of a sudden, on waking up one morning? or little by little? And this surplus fat, this extra avoirdupois, under the weight of which armchairs groan? Was it some sudden shock that brought about this change and unsexed her? Could it, perhaps, have been grief on my account?’ But he asked these questions of no one but himself, and without voicing them. ‘She is piqued. She’s on the way to understanding me. She’s just going to tell me. . . .’

  He watched her rise to her feet, walk over to the bureau, and start to tidy the papers lying on the open hinged flap. He noticed that she was holding herself more upright than when he had first entered the room, and that, under his following eye, she straightened her back still more. He accepted the fact that she was really colossal, her body seeming to run absolutely straight from armpit to hip. Before turning round again to face Chéri, she arranged a white silk scarf tightly round her neck, despite the heat of the room. He heard her take a deep breath, before she came towards him with the slow rolling gait of a ponderous animal.

  She smiled at him. ‘I am not doing my duty as a hostess, it would seem. It’s not very polite to welcome someone by giving them advice, especially useless advice.’

  From under a fold of her white scarf peeped insinuatingly a twisting, coiling, resplendent string of pearls, which Chéri at once recognized.

  Held captive beneath the translucent skin, the seven colours of the rainbow flickered with some secret fire of their own all over the surface of each precious sphere. Chéri recognized the pearl with a dimple, the slightly egg-shaped pearl, and the biggest pearl of the string, distinguishable by its unique pink. ‘These pearls, these at least, are unchanged! They and I remain unchanged.’

  ‘So you’ve still got your pearls,’ he said.

  She was astonished by the foolish phrase, and looked as though she wanted to interpret it.

  ‘Yes, in spite of the war. Are you thinking that I could, or should, have sold them? Why should I have sold them?’

  ‘Or “for whom”?’ he answered jokingly, in a tired voice.

  She could not restrain a rapid glance towards the bureau and its scattered papers; and Chéri, in his turn, felt he knew the thought behind it, guessing that it was aimed at some yellowish postcard-photograph, probably the frightened features of a beardless boy in uniform. Disdainfully, he considered this imaginary face and said to himself, ‘That’s none of my concern,’ adding a moment later, ‘But what is there here that does concern me?’

  The agitation which he had brought in his heart was now excited by everything around him; everything added to it – the setting sun, the cries of insect-chasing swallows, and the ember-glowing shafts of light stabbing through the curtains. He remembered that Léa carried with her wherever she went this incandescent rose-pink, as the sea, on its ebb-tide, carries with it far out from shore the earthy smells of pastures and new-mown hay.

  No word passed between them for a while, and they were kept in countenance by pretending to listen to the clear fresh notes of a child singing. Léa had not sat down again. Standing massively in front of him, she carried her irretrievable chin higher than before, and betrayed some vague distress by the frequent fluttering of her eyelids.

  ‘Am I making you late? Have you to go out this evening? Do you want to dress?’ The questions were abrupt, and forced Léa to look at Chéri.

  ‘Dress? Good Lord, and in what do you wish me to dress? I am dressed – irrevocably – once and for all.’

  She laughed her incomparable laugh, starting on a high note and descending the scale by leaps of equal interval till she got to the deep musical reaches reserved for sobs and amorous moans. Chéri unconsciously raised a hand in supplication.

  ‘Dressed for life, I tell you! And how convenient that is! Blouses, fine linen, and this uniform on top, and here I am in full fig. Equally ready for dinner either at Montagné’s or somewhere modest, ready for the cinema, for bridge, or for a stroll in the Bois.’

  ‘And what about love – which you’re forgetting to mention?’

  ‘Oh, child!’

  She blushed: and, though her face was dark with the chron
ic red of sufferers from arthritis, the blush could not be concealed. Chéri, after the first caddish satisfaction of having said something outrageous, was seized with shame and remorse at the sight of this maidenly reaction.

  ‘I was only joking,’ he said, in some confusion. ‘Have I gone too far?’

  ‘Of course not. But you know very well I have never cared for certain kinds of impropriety or for jokes that are not really funny.’

  She strove to control her voice, but her face revealed that she was hurt, and every coarsened feature gave signs of a distress that could perhaps be outraged modesty.

  ‘Dear God, if she takes it into her head to cry!’ and he imagined the catastrophic effect of tears coursing down each cheek into the single deep ravine near the mouth, and of her eyelids reddened by the salt of tears.

  He hastened to intercept: ‘No, no, you mustn’t think that! How could you! I never meant . . . Please, Léa . . .’

  From her quick reaction he realized suddenly that this was the first time he had spoken her name. Proud, as in the old days, of her self-control, she gently stopped him.

  ‘Don’t worry, child. I’m not offended. But I’ve only got you here for a few minutes, so don’t spoil them by saying anything I shouldn’t care to remember.’

  Her gentle tone left him cold, and her actual words seemed offensively tactful to him. ‘Either she’s lying, or she really has become the sort of person she pretends. Peace, purity, and the Lord knows what! She might as well wear a ring in her nose! Peace of heart, guzzling, and the cinema. . . . Lies, lies, all lies! She wants to make me think that women find growing old comfortable, positively enjoyable. How can she expect me to swallow that? Let her bore anyone else she likes with her fine talk about how cosy life is, and the little restaurants with the most delicious country dishes. I’m not having any! Before I could toddle, I knew all there is to know about reducing. I was born among ageing beauties! All my life I’ve watched them, my painted pixies, squabbling about their wrinkles, and, well into their fifties, scratching each other’s eyes out over some wretched gigolo!’