The Last of Cheri Read online

  ‘You sit there saying nothing, and I’m not used to it any more. I keep on thinking that there’s something you want to say to me.’

  On her feet, separated from Chéri by an occasional table with a decanter and port glasses, she made no effort to defend herself against the severe inspection to which she was being subjected; but from the almost invisible tremors that passed over her body, Chéri noted the muscular effort required to keep in her spreading stomach. ‘How many times must she have put on her full-length corset again, left it off, then valiantly put it on again, before abandoning it for ever? . . . How often of a morning must she have varied the shades of her face powder, rubbed a new rouge on her cheeks, massaged her neck with cold-cream and a small lump of ice tied up in a handkerchief, before becoming resigned to the varnished hide that now shines on her cheeks!’ Impatience alone, perhaps, had made her tremble, yet this faint tremor led him to expect – so stubbornly blind was he to reality – some miraculous new blossoming, some complete metamorphosis.

  ‘Why don’t you say something?’ Léa persisted.

  Little by little she was losing her poise, though she was careful not to move. She was playing with her rope of large pearls, knotting and unknotting, round her big well-manicured and wrinkled fingers, their luminous, indescribably bedewed and everlasting lustre.

  ‘Perhaps it’s simply because she’s frightened of me,’ Chéri mused. ‘A man who says nothing must always seem a bit cranky. She’s thinking of Valerie Cheniaguine’s terrors. If I put my hand out, would she scream for help? My poor Nounoune!’ He lacked the courage to pronounce this name out loud, and, to protect himself from even a moment’s sincerity, he spoke:

  ‘What are you going to think of me?’

  ‘It all depends,’ Léa answered guardedly. ‘At the moment you remind me of people who bring along a little box of cakes and leave it in the hall, saying to themselves: “There’ll be plenty of time to produce these later,” and then pick them up again when they go.’

  Reassured by the sound of their voices, she had begun to reason like the Léa of old, quick on the uptake, and as wily as a sharp-witted peasant. Chéri rose to his feet, walked round the table which separated him from Léa, and the daylight streaming through the pink curtains struck him full in his face. This made it easy for her to compute the passage of days and years from his features, which were all of them in danger, though still intact. There was something about so secret a falling away to tempt her pity and trouble her memory, and perhaps extract from her the word or gesture that would precipitate Chéri into a frenzy of humiliation. As he stood there, a sacrifice to the light, with eyes lowered as if he were asleep, it seemed to him this was his last chance of extorting from her one last affront, one last prayer, one final act of homage.

  Nothing happened, so he opened his eyes. Once more he had to accept the true picture – in the shape of his stalwart old friend, who, prudently keeping her distance, was bestowing on him a certain degree of benevolence from small and slightly suspicious blue eyes.

  Disillusioned and bewildered, he looked all over the room for her, except in the very spot where she stood. ‘Where is she? Where is she? This old woman is hiding her from me. She’s bored by me, and she’s waiting for me to go, thinking it all an infernal nuisance, these crowding memories and this returning ghost. . . . But if by any chance I did ask for her help, if I beg her to give me back Léa . . .’ Deep inside him, his kneeling double was still palpitating, like a body from which the life-blood is being drained. With an effort of which he would never have deemed himself capable, Chéri tore himself away from this tortured image.

  ‘I must be going,’ he said out loud, and he added on a note of rather cheap wit, ‘and I’m taking my box of cakes with me.’

  Léa’s exuberant bosom heaved with a sigh of relief. ‘As you like, my child. But I’m always here, you know, if you’re in any little trouble.’

  Though she seemed so obliging, Chéri could sense an underlying resentment. Within that vast edifice of flesh crowned with silvery thatch, femininity had for a moment reasserted itself in tones resounding with an intelligent harmony. But Chéri could not respond: like a ghost he had come, and with the shyness of a ghost he must vanish, in his own despite.

  ‘Of course,’ Chéri replied, ‘and I thank you.’

  From that moment on, he knew, unerringly and spontaneously, exactly how to manage his exit. All the right words sprang to his lips, fluently, mechanically.

  ‘You do understand, don’t you, I came here today . . . why not sooner, you may ask? I know I ought to have come a long while ago. . . . But you will forgive me. . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ Léa said.

  ‘I’m even more hare-brained than before the war, you know, so that –’

  ‘I understand, I understand.’

  And because of this interruption, he thought that she must be impatient to see the last of him. A few words were exchanged during Chéri’s retreat, in the intervals of bumping into some piece of furniture, crossing a strip of sunshine from the courtyard window – after the pink light in the drawing-room it seemed by comparison almost blue – kissing a puffy hand bulging with rings when it was raised to his lips. Another of Léa’s laughs, which broke off abruptly half-way down its usual scale, just like a fountain when the jet is turned off and the crest of the plume, suddenly bereft of its stem, falls back to earth in a myriad separate pearls. . . . The staircase seemed to glide away under Chéri’s feet like a bridge connecting two dreams, and once more he was in the Rue Raynouard. Even the street was unfamiliar.

  He noticed that the rosy tints of the sky were wonderfully reflected in the rain-filled gutters and on the blue backs of the low-skimming swallows. And now, because the evening was fresh, and because all the impressions he was bringing away with him were slipping back perfidiously into the recesses of his mind – there to assume their final shape and intensity – he came to believe that he had forgotten all about them, and he felt happy.

  ONLY THE SOUND of an old woman’s bronchial cough, as she sat over her glass of crème-de-menthe, disturbed the peace of the bar room where the murmur of the Place de l’Opéra died away, as though muffled in an atmosphere too thick to carry any eddies of sound. Chéri ordered a long drink and mopped his brow: this precaution was a carry-over from the days when he had been a little boy and sat listening to the babble of female voices, as, with Biblical gravity, they bandied such golden rules as: ‘If you want your milk of cucumber with real cucumber in it, you must make it yourself . . .’, or ‘Never rub the perspiration into your face when you’re overheated, or the perspiration will get under your skin and ruin it.’

  The silence, and the emptiness of the bar, created an illusion of coolness, and at first Chéri was not conscious of the couple who, with heads bent close together across a narrow table, were lost in inaudible whisperings. After a few moments his attention was drawn to this unknown man and woman by an occasional hissing sibilant which rose above the main stream of their chatter, and by the exaggerated expressions on their faces. They looked like servants, underpaid, overworked, and patient.

  He took a mouthful or two of the fizzy iced drink, leaned his head back against the yellow plush of the banquette, and was delighted to feel a slackening of the mental strain which, for the last fortnight, had been sapping his strength. The dead weight of the present had not accompanied him across the threshold of the bar, which was old-fashioned, with red walls, gilt festoons, plaster roses, and a large open hearth. The cloakroom attendant could be half seen in her tiled kingdom, counting every stitch as she mended the linen, her white hair bowed beneath a green lamp.

  A passer-by dropped in. He did not trespass upon the yellow room, but took his drink standing at the bar as though to be discreet, and left without a word. The Odol odour of the crème-de-menthe was the only thing distasteful to Chéri, and he frowned in the direction of the dim old woman. Under a black and battered soft hat, he could distinguish an old face, accentuated here and the
re by rouge, wrinkles, kohl, and puffiness – all jumbled together – rather like a pocket into which have been popped, higgledly-piddledy, handkerchief, keys, and loose change. A vulgar old face, in short – and commonplace in its vulgarity, characterized, if at all, only by the indifference natural to a savage or a prisoner. She coughed, opened her bag, blew her nose vaguely, and replaced the seedy black reticule on the marble-topped table. It had an affinity with the hat, for it was made of the same black cracked taffeta, and equally out of fashion.

  Chéri followed her every movement with an exaggerated repugnance; during the last two weeks he had been suffering, more than he could reasonably be expected to bear, from everything that was at once feminine and old. That reticule sprawling over the table almost drove him from the spot. He wanted to avert his eyes, but did nothing of the sort: they were riveted by a small sparkling arabesque, an unexpected brilliance fastened to the folds of the bag. His curiosity surprised him, but half a minute later he was still staring at the point of sparkling light, and his mind became an absolute blank. He was roused from his trance by a subconscious flash of triumphant certainty, and this gave him back the freedom to think and breathe. ‘I know! It’s the two capital Ls interlaced!’

  He enjoyed a moment of calm satisfaction, not unlike the sense of security on reaching a journey’s end. He actually forgot the cropped hair on the nape of that neck, the vigorous grey locks, the big nondescript coat buttoned over a bulging stomach; he forgot the contralto notes of the peal of youthful laughter – everything that had dogged him so persistently for the past fortnight, that had deprived him of any appetite for food, any ability to feel that he was alone.

  ‘It’s too good to last!’ he thought. So, with a brave effort, he returned to reality. He looked more carefully at the offending object, and was able to reel off: ‘The two initials, set in little brilliants, which Léa had designed first for her suède bag, then for her dressing-table set of light tortoise-shell, and later for her writing-paper!’ Not for a moment would he admit that the monogram on the bag might represent some other name.

  He smiled ironically. ‘Coincidence be blowed! I wasn’t born yesterday! I came upon this bag by chance this evening, and tomorrow my wife will go and engage one of Léa’s old footmen – again by chance. After that I shan’t be able to go into a single restaurant, cinema, or tobacconist’s without running up against Léa at every turn. It’s my own fault. I can’t complain. I ought to have left her alone.’

  He put some small change beside his glass, and got up before summoning the barman. He faced away from the old woman as he slipped between the two tables, holding himself in under his waistcoat, like a tomcat squeezing under a gate. This he managed so adroitly that the edge of his coat only just brushed against the glass of green crème-de-menthe. Murmuring an apology, he made a dash for the glass door, to escape into the fresh air beyond. Horrified, but not really in the least surprised, he heard a voice call out after him, ‘Chéri!’

  He had feared – known indeed – that this was coming. He turned to find that there was nothing about the raddled old ruin to help him recall her name; but he made no second attempt to escape, realizing that everything would be explained.

  ‘Don’t you recognize me? You don’t? But how could you? More women were aged by the war than men were killed by it, and that’s a fact. All the same, it’s not for me to complain; I didn’t risk losing anyone in the war. . . . Eh! Chéri! . . .’

  She laughed; and recognition was complete, for he saw that what he had taken for decrepitude was only poverty and natural indifference. Now that she was holding herself upright and laughing, she did not look more than her age – sixty or thereabouts – and the hand with which she sought Chéri’s was certainly not that of a doddering old grandmother.

  ‘The Pal!’ Chéri murmured, almost in tones of admiration.

  ‘Are you really pleased to see me?’

  ‘Oh, yes. . . .’

  He was not telling a lie. He was gaining assurance step by step and thinking, ‘It’s only her . . . Poor Old Pal . . . I’d begun to fear . . .’

  ‘Will you have a glass of something, Pal?’

  ‘Just a whisky and soda, my pretty. My! haven’t you kept your looks!’

  He swallowed the bitter compliment which she tossed to him from the peaceful fringes of old age.

  ‘And decorated, too,’ she added out of pure politeness. ‘Oh! I knew all about it, you may be sure! We all knew about it.’

  The ambiguous plural failed to wrest a smile from Chéri, and the Pal thought she had shocked him.

  ‘When I say “we”, I’m speaking of those of us who were your real friends – Camille de La Berche, Léa, Rita, and me. You may be sure Charlotte would never have told me a word about it. As far as she’s concerned, I don’t exist. But – and I may as well say so – she doesn’t exist for me, either.’ She stretched out across the table a pale hand that had long forgotten the light of day. ‘You must understand that Charlotte will never again be anything to me but the woman who contrived to get poor little Rita arrested and detained for twenty-four hours. . . . Poor Rita, who had never known a word of German. Was it Rita’s fault, I ask you, if she happened to be Swiss?’

  ‘I know, I know. I know the whole story,’ Chéri broke in precipitately.

  The Pal raised her huge dark watery eyes towards him, full of inveterate complicity and a compassion that was always misplaced. ‘Poor kid,’ she sighed. ‘I understand you. Forgive me. Ah! you’ve certainly had your cross to bear!’

  He questioned her with a look, no longer accustomed to the overstatements that added a rich funereal tone to the Pal’s vocabulary, and he feared she might be going to talk to him about the war. But she was not thinking of the war. Perhaps she never had, for it is the concern of two generations only.

  She went on to explain. ‘Yes, I was saying that to have such a mother must have been a heavy cross to bear for a son like you – for a boy, that’s to say, with a blameless life, both before marriage and after! A nice, quiet boy and all that; not one to sow his wild oats all over the place, or to squander his inheritance.’

  She wagged her head, and bit by bit he began to piece together the past. He rediscovered her, though she had the mask of a ravaged tragedy queen. Her old age was without nobility, yet bore no signs of illness, no tell-tale trace that betrayed her addiction to opium. The drug is merciful to those unworthy of it.

  ‘Have you quite given up the pipe?’ asked Chéri sharply.

  She raised a white untended hand. ‘What do you suppose? That kind of foolishness is all very well when you’re not all on your own. In the days when I used to shock you young men, yes. . . . You remember when you used to come back at nights? Ah! you were very fond of that. . . . “Dear old Pal,” you used to say to me, “just let me have another little pipeful, and pack it well!”’

  Without turning a hair, he accepted this humble flattery, as he might from an old retainer, who fibs in order to fawn. He smiled knowingly, and scrutinized the folds of black tulle round her neck, looking in the shadows under the faded hat for a necklace of large fake pearls.

  Almost mechanically and sip by sip, he drank the whisky which had been put in front of him by mistake. He did not care for spirits as a rule, but this evening he enjoyed the whisky, for it helped him to smile easily and softened to his touch unpolished surfaces and rough materials; it enabled him to listen kindly to an old woman for whom the present did not exist. They met again on the further side of the superfluous war-years and the young, importunate dead: the Pal spanned the gap by throwing across to Chéri a bridge of names – names of old men who bore charmed lives, of old women revitalized for the struggle or turned to stone in their ultimate shape, never to alter again. She recounted in detail a hard-luck story of 1913, some unhappiness that had taken place before August 1914, and something trembled in her voice when she spoke of La Loupiote – a woman now dead – ‘The very week of your wedding, dear boy! you see what a coincidence it was? the h
and of Fate was upon us, indeed’ – dead after four years of a pure and peaceful friendship.

  ‘We slanged each other day in, day out, dear boy, but only in front of other people. Because, don’t you see, it gave them the impression that we were “a couple”. Who would have believed it, had we not gone for each other hammer and tongs? So we called each other the most diabolical names, and the onlookers chuckled: “Have you ever seen such a devoted pair?” Dear boy, I’ll tell you something else that will knock you flat – surely you must have heard about the will Massau was supposed to have made. . . .’

  ‘What Massau?’ Chéri asked languidly.

  ‘Oh, come. You knew him as well as you know yourself! The story of the will – so called – that he handed to Louise MacMillar. It was in 1909, and at the time I am speaking of, I was one of the Gérault pack, his pack of “faithful hounds” – and there were five of us he fed every evening at La Belle Meunière down at Nice; but on the Promenade des Anglais, you must remember, we only had eyes for you – dolled up in white like an English baby, and Léa all in white as well. . . . Ah! what a pair you made! You were the sensation – a miracle, straight from the hands of the Creator! Gérault used to tease Léa: “You’re far too young, girlie, and what’s worse you’re too proud. I shan’t take you on for fifteen or twenty years at least. . . .” And to think that such a man had to be taken from us! Not a tear at his funeral that wasn’t genuine, the whole nation was in mourning. And now let me get on with the story of the will. . . .’

  Chéri was deluged with a perfect flood of incidents, a tide of bygone regrets and harmless resurrections, all declaimed with the ease and rapidity of a professional mourner. The two of them formed a symmetrical pattern as they leaned towards each other. The Pal lowered her voice when she came to the dramatic passages, giving out a sudden laugh or exclamation; and he saw in one of the looking-glasses how closely they seemed to resemble the whispering couple whose place they had taken. He got up, finding it imperative to put an end to this resemblance. The barman imitated his movement, but from afar, like a discreet dog when its master comes to the end of a visit. ‘Ah! well . . . yes . . .’ said the Pal, ‘well, I’ll finish the rest another time.’