A Place of Greater Safety
When his early struggles were over, and Claude was ready for marriage, he found himself awash in a dismaying sea of light-mindedness. She was the moneyed, sought-after girl on whom, for no reason one could see, he fixed his good opinion: on whom, at last, he settled his affection. The very disjunction between them seemed to say, here is some deep process at work; friends forecast a marriage that was out of the common run.
Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.
Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, “Claude, you are dull.” She remembered the damp grass underfoot, and how she had shivered as she looked back at the lights of the house. She had sought marriage to be free from her parents’ constraints, but now she had given Claude her parole. You must never break gaol again, she told herself; it ends badly, dead bodies in muddy fields. She crept back inside, washed her feet; she drank a warm tisane, to cure any lingering hopes.
Afterwards Claude had treated her with reserve and suspicion for some months. Even now, if she was unwell or whimsical, he would allude to the incident—explaining that he had learned to live with her unstable nature but that, when he was a young man, it had taken him quite by surprise.
After the girls were born there had been a small affair. He was a friend of her husband, a barrister, a square blond man: last heard of in Toulouse, supporting a red-faced dropsical wife and five daughters at a convent school. She had not repeated the experiment. Claude had not found out about it. If he had, perhaps something would have had to change, but as he hadn’t—as he staunchly, willfully, manfully hadn’t—there was no point in doing it again.
So then to hurry the years past—and to contemplate something that should not be thought of in the category of “an affair”—Camille arrived in her life when he was twenty-two years old. Stanislas Fréron—her family knew his family—had brought him to the house. Camille looked perhaps seventeen. It was four years before he would be old enough to practice at the Bar. It was not a thing one could readily imagine. His conversation was a series of little sighs and hesitations, defections and demurs. Sometimes his hands shook. He had trouble looking anyone in the face.
He’s brilliant, Stanislas Fréron said. He’s going to be famous. Her presence, her household, seemed to terrify him. But he didn’t stay away.
Right at the beginning, Claude had invited him to supper. It was a well-chosen guest list, and for her husband a fine opportunity to expound his economic forecast for the next five years—grim—and to tell stories about the Abbé Terray. Camille sat in tense near-silence, occasionally asking in his soft voice for M. Duplessis to be more precise, to explain to him and to show him how he arrived at that figure. Claude called for pen, paper and ink. He pushed some plates aside and put his head down; at his end of the table, the meal came to a halt. The other guests looked down at them, nonplussed, and turned to each other with polite conversation. While Claude muttered and scribbled, Camille looked over his shoulder, disputing his simplifications, and asking questions that were longer and more cogent. Claude shut his eyes momentarily. Figures swooped and scattered from the end of his pen like starlings in the snow.
She had leaned across the table: “Darling, couldn’t you …”
“One minute—”
“If it’s so complicated—”
“Here, you see, and here—”
“—talk about it afterwards?”
Claude flapped a balance sheet in the air. “Vaguely,” he said. “No more than vaguely. But then the comptrollers are vague, and it gives you an idea.”
Camille took it from him and ran a glance over it; then he looked up, meeting her eyes. She was startled, shocked by the—emotion, she could only call it. She took her eyes away and rested them on other guests, solicitous for their comfort. What he basically didn’t understand, Camille said—and probably he was being very stupid—was the relationship of one ministry to another and how they all got their funds. No, Claude said, not stupid at all: might he demonstrate?
Claude now thrust back his chair and rose from his place at the head of the table. Her guests looked up. “We might all learn much, I am sure,” said an under-secretary. But he looked dubious, very dubious, as Claude crossed the room. As he passed her, Annette put out a hand, as if to restrain a child. “I only want the fruit bowl,” Claude said, as if it were reasonable.
When he had secured it he returned to his place and set it in the middle of the table. An orange jumped down and circumambulated slowly, as if sentient and tropically bound. All the guests watched it. His eyes on Claude’s face, Camille put out a hand and detained it. He gave it a gentle push, and slowly it rolled towards her across the table: entranced, she reached for it. All the guests watched her; she blushed faintly, as if she were fifteen. Her husband retrieved from a side table the soup tureen. He snatched a dish of vegetables from a servant who was taking it away. “Let the fruit bowl represent revenue,” he said.
Claude was the cynosure now; chit-chat ceased. If … Camille said; and but. “And let the soup tureen represent the Minister of Justice, who is also, of course, Keeper of the Seals.”
“Claude—” she said.
He shushed her. Fascinated, paralyzed, the guests followed the movement of the food about the table; deftly, from the under-secretary’s finger ends, Claude removed his wineglass. This functionary now appeared, hand extended, as one who mimes a harpist at charades; his expression darkened, but Claude failed to see it.
“Let us say, this salt cellar is the minister’s secretary.”
“So much smaller,” Camille marveled. “I never knew they were so low.”
“And these spoons, Treasury warrants. Now …”
Yes, Camille said but would he clarify, would he explain, and could he just go back to where he said—yes indeed, Claude allowed, you need to get it straight in your mind. He reached for a water jug, to rectify the proportions; his face shone.
“It’s better than the puppet show with Mr. Punch,” someone whispered.
“Perhaps the tureen will talk in a squeaky voice soon.”
Let him have mercy, Annette prayed, please let him stop asking questions; with a little flourish here and one there she saw him orchestrating Claude, while her guests sat open-mouthed at the disarrayed board, their glasses empty or snatched away, deprived of their cutlery, gone without dessert, exchanging glances, bottling their mirth; all over town it will be told, ministry to ministry and at the Law Courts, too, and people will dine out on the story of my dinner party. Please let him stop, she said, please something make it stop; but what could stop it? Perhaps, she thought, a small fire.
All the while, as she grew flurried, cast about her, as she swallowed a glass of wine and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief, Camille’s incendiary eyes scorched her over the flower arrangement. Finally with a nod of apology, and a placating smile that took in the voyeurs, she swept from the table and left the room. She sat for ten minutes at her dressing table, shaken by the trend of her own thoughts. She meant to retouch her face, but not to see the hollow and lost expression in her eyes. It was some years since she and Claude had slept together; what relevance has it, why is she stopping to calculate it, should she also call for paper and ink and tot up the Deficit of her own life? Claude says that if this goes on til ’89 the country will have gone to the dogs and so will we all. In the mirror she sees herself, large blue eyes now swimming with unaccountable tears, which she instantly dabs away as earlier she dabbed red wine from her lips; perhaps I have drunk too much, perhaps we have all drunk too much, except that viperous boy, and whatever else the years give me cause to forgive him for I shall never forgive him for wrecking my party and making
a fool of Claude. Why am I clutching this orange, she wondered. She stared down at her hand, like Lady Macbeth. What, in our house?
When she returned to her guests—the perfumed blood under her nails—the performance was over. The guests toyed with petits fours. Claude glanced up at her as if to ask where she had been. He looked cheerful. Camille had ceased to contribute to the conversation. He sat with his eyes cast down to the table. His expression, in one of her daughters, she would have called demure. All other faces wore an expression of dislocation and strain. Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.
Next day Claude referred to these events. He said what a stimulting occasion it had been, so much better than the usual supper-party trivia. If all their social life were like that, he wouldn’t mind it so much, and so would she ask again that young man whose name for the present escaped him? He was so charming, so interested, and a shame about his stutter, but was he perhaps a little slow on the uptake? He hoped he had not carried away any wrong impressions about the workings of the Treasury.
How torturing, she thought, is this situation of fools who know they are fools; and how pleasant is Claude’s state, by comparison.
The next time Camille called, he was more discreet in the way he looked at her. It was as if they had reached an agreement that nothing should be precipitated. Interesting, she thought. Interesting.
He told her he did not want a legal career: but what else? He was trapped by the terms of his scholarship. Like Voltaire, he said, he wanted no profession but that of man of letters. “Oh, Voltaire,” she said. “I’m sick of the name. Men of letters will be a luxury, let me tell you, in the years to come. We shall all have to emulate Claude.” Camille pushed his hair back a fraction. That was a gesture she liked: rather representative, useless but winning. “You’re only saying that. You don’t believe it, in your heart. In your heart you think that things will go on as they are.”
“Allow me,” she said, “to be the expert on my heart.”
As the afternoons passed, the general unsuitability of their friendship was borne in on her. It was not simply a matter of his age, but of his general direction. His friends were out-of-work actors, or they slid inkily from the offices of back-street printers. They had illegitimate children and subversive opinions; they went abroad when the police got on their trail. There was the drawing-room life; then there was this other life. She thought it was best not to ask questions about it.
He continued to come to supper. There were no further incidents. Sometimes Claude asked him to spend the weekend with a party at Bourg-la-Reine, where they had some land and a comfortable farmhouse. The girls, she thought, had really taken to him.
From quite two years ago, they had begun to see a great deal of each other. One of her friends, who was supposed to know about these things, had told her that he was a homosexual. She did not believe this, but kept it to hand as a defense, in case her husband complained. But why should he complain? He was just a young man who called at the house. There was nothing between them.
One day she asked him, “Do you know much about wild flowers?”
“Not especially.”
“It’s just that Lucile picked up a flower at Bourg-la-Reine and asked me what it was, I hadn’t the least idea, and I told her confidently that you knew everything, and I pressed it”—she reached out—“inside my book, and I said I’d ask you.”
She moved to sit beside him, holding the large dictionary into which she would cram letters and shopping lists and anything she needed to keep safe. She opened the book—carefully, or its contents would have cascaded out. He examined the flower. Delicately with a fingernail he turned up the underside of its papery leaf. He frowned at it. “Probably some extremely common noxious weed,” he said.
He put an arm around her and tried to kiss her. More out of astonishment than intention, she jumped away. She dropped the dictionary and everything fell out. It would have been quite in order to slap his face, but what a cliché, she thought, and besides she was off balance. She had always wanted to do it to someone, but would have preferred someone more robust; so, between one thing and another, the moment passed. She clutched the sofa and stood up, unsteadily.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That lacked finesse.”
He was trembling a little.
“How could you?”
He raised a hand, palm upwards. “Oh, because, Annette, I want you.”
“It’s out of the question,” she said. She picked her feet out of the scattered papers. Some verses he had written lay on the carpet folded with a milliner’s bill she had found it necessary to conceal from Claude. Camille, she thought, would never in a thousand years ask questions about the price of a woman’s hat. It would be beyond him; beyond, and beneath. She found it necessary to stare out of the window (even though it was a bleak winter’s day as unpromising as this one) and to bite her lips to stop them from quivering.
This had been going on for a year now.
They talked about the theater, about books and about people they knew; really though, they were only ever talking about one thing, and that was whether she would go to bed with him. She said the usual things. He said that her arguments were stale and that these were the things people always said, because they were afraid of themselves and afraid of trying to be happy in case God smote them and because they were choked up with puritanism and guilt.
She thought (privately) that he was more afraid of himself than anyone she had ever known: and that he had reason to be.
She said that she was not going to change her mind, and that the argument could be prolonged indefinitely. Not indefinitely, Camille said, not strictly speaking: but until they were both so old that they were no longer interested. The English do it, he said, in the House of Commons. She raised a shocked face. No, not what she had so clearly on her mind: but if someone proposes a measure you don’t like, you can just stand up and start spinning out the pros and cons until everybody goes home, or the session ends and there’s no more time. It’s called talking a measure out. It can go on for years. “Considered in one way,” he said, “since I like talking to you, it might be a pleasant way to spend my life. But in fact I want you now.”
After that first occasion she had always been cool, fended him off rather expertly. Not that he had ever touched her again. He had seldom allowed her to touch him. If he had brushed against her, even accidentally, he had apologized. It was better like this, he said. Human nature being what it is, and the afternoons so long; the girls visiting friends, the streets deserted, no sound in the room except the ticking of clocks, the beating of hearts.
It had been her intention to end this non-affair smoothly, in her own good time; considered as a non-affair, it had had its moments. But then, obviously, Camille had started talking to somebody, or one of her husband’s friends had been observant: and everybody knew. Claude had a host of interested acquaintances. The question was contended for in robing rooms (scouted at the Châtelet but proposed in the civil courts as the scandal of the year, in the middle-class scandals division); it was circulated around the more select cafés, and mulled over at the ministry. In the gossips’ minds there were no debates, no delicately balanced temptations and counter-temptations, no moral anguish, no scruples. She was attractive, bored, not a girl anymore. He was young and persistent. Of course they were—well, what would you think? Since when, is the question. And when will Duplessis decide to know?
Now Claude may be deaf, he may be blind, he may be dumb, but he is not a saint, he is not a martyr. Adultery is an ugly word. Time to end it, Annette thought; time to end what has never begun.
She remembered, for some reason, a couple of occasions when she’d thought she might be pregnant again, in the years before she and Claude had separate rooms. You thought you might be, you had those strange feelings, but then you bled and you knew you weren’t. A week, a fortnight out of your life had gone by, a certain life had been considered, a certain steady flow of love had begun, from th
e mind to the body and into the world and the years to come. Then it was over, or had never been: a miscarriage of love. The child went on in your mind. Would it have had blue eyes? What would its character have been?
And now the day had come. Annette sat at her dressing table. Her maid fussed about, tweaking and pulling at her hair. “Not like that,” Annette said. “I don’t like it like that. Makes me look older.”
“No!” said the maid, with a pretense at horror. “Not a day over thirty-eight.”
“I don’t like thirty-eight,” Annette said. “I like a nice round number. Say, thirty-five.”
“Forty’s a nice round number.”
Annette took a sip of her cider vinegar. She grimaced. “Your visitor’s here,” the maid said.
The rain blew in gusts against the window.
In another room, Annette’s daughter Lucile opened her new journal. Now for a fresh start. Red binding. White paper with a satin sheen. A ribbon to mark her place.
“Anne Lucile Philippa Duplessis,” she wrote. She was in the process of changing her handwriting again. “The Journal of Lucile Duplessis, born 1770, died ? Volume III. The year 1786.”
“At this time in my life,” she wrote, “I think a lot about what it would be like to be a Queen. Not our Queen; some more tragic one. I think about Mary Tudor: ‘When I am dead and opened they will find”Calais” written on my heart.’ If I, Lucile, were dead and opened, what they would find written is ‘Ennui.’
“Actually, I prefer Maria Stuart. She is my favorite Queen by a long way. I think of her dazzling beauty among the barbarian Scots. I think of the walls of Fotheringay, closing in like the sides of a grave. It’s a pity really that she didn’t die young. It’s always better when people die young, they stay radiant, you don’t have to think of them getting rheumatics or growing stout.”