He was put out by his desire for Elsa, but not in the way you might think. He didn’t say to himself: ‘I’m going to deceive Anne and that must mean that I love her less.’ What he thought was: ‘It’s a nuisance, my wanting Elsa. I’d better get it over with quickly, otherwise I’m going to have complications with Anne.’ What’s more, he loved Anne, he admired her; she made a change from that succession of shallow, rather silly women with whom he had kept company over the previous few years. She satisfied at one and the same time his vanity, his sensuality and his sensibility, for she understood him and she offered him her intelligence and experience against which to match his own. I am less sure now that he realized how deeply she cared for him. He saw her as the ideal mistress for him and the ideal mother for me. But did he think of her as ‘the ideal wife’, with all the obligations which that entails? I do not believe so. I am sure that, from Cyril and Anne’s standpoint, he was, like me, abnormal where emotions were concerned. That did not prevent him from leading a highly charged life, because he did not consider such a life to be out of the ordinary and he brought all his vitality to bear on it.
I was not thinking of him when I formulated my plan to banish Anne from our lives. I knew that he would get over it, as he got over everything. A break-up would be less painful to him than having to live a well-ordered life. He was only truly disturbed and undermined, as I was myself, by things being repetitive and foreseeable. We were of the same tribe, he and I; sometimes I told myself we belonged to a pure, noble tribe of nomads, and at other times I told myself it was to a poor, washed-up tribe of pleasure-seekers.
Just then he was really suffering, or at least he was becoming intensely irritated. Elsa had come to symbolize for him a life that was past, she had come to symbolize youth and in particular his own youth. I sensed that he was longing to say to Anne: ‘Sweetheart, excuse my absence for one day. I have got to go and prove to myself with that girl that I’m not an old buffer. To be at peace with myself I have got to be reminded how tired I am of her physically.’ But he couldn’t say that to her, not because Anne was jealous or fundamentally prudish or uncompromising in that regard, but because she must have agreed to live with him on the understanding that the days of casual dissipation were over, that he was no longer a schoolboy but a man to whom she was entrusting her life and that consequently he had to behave himself properly and not like some pathetic individual who was a slave to his impulses. You couldn’t blame Anne for reckoning like that, it was perfectly normal and sound as an approach, but it did not prevent my father from desiring Elsa. And he was gradually coming to desire her more than anything else, and to do so with that doubly strong desire that you have for forbidden fruit.
At that point I could probably have made it all come right. I only had to tell Elsa to consent to his wishes and on some pretext or other I would have got Anne to go to Nice with me for the afternoon, or anywhere else for that matter. On our return we would have found my father relaxed and imbued with a fresh devotion to legitimized love, or love that was due at least to become so in the autumn. That was another thing about Anne: she would never put up with the idea of having been merely a mistress like the others, a temporary fixture. How difficult she made life for us, with her sense of dignity and her self-esteem!
But I did not tell Elsa to consent, nor did I tell Anne to come with me to Nice. I wanted that desire in my father’s heart to get the better of him and cause him to commit a blunder. I could not endure the contempt which Anne heaped on our past life, that casual disdain she displayed towards everything that, for my father and me, had represented happiness. I was not setting out to humiliate her, but to make her accept our view of life. She had to know that my father had been unfaithful to her and she had to see that infidelity for what it actually was, a purely physical whim, not an attack on her personal worth or dignity. If she wanted at all costs to be in the right, she had to allow us to be in the wrong.
I even pretended to know nothing of the torment my father was going through. It was essential that he should not confide in me, nor should I be forced by him to become his partner in crime by speaking to Elsa on his behalf or getting Anne out of the way.
I had to pretend to believe that his love for Anne, and Anne herself, were sacrosanct. And I must say that I had no difficulty in doing so. The idea that he might deceive Anne and then face up to her filled me with terror and a sense of awe.
In the meantime the days passed happily for us. I found repeated opportunities to get my father worked up over Elsa. I had stopped feeling remorseful at the sight of Anne’s face. I sometimes thought that she would accept the deed and that we would subsequently have a life with her that suited our tastes as much as hers. Furthermore I was seeing a lot of Cyril and we were carrying on our love affair in secret. There was the scent of the pines, the sound of the sea, the feel of his body … He was beginning to torture himself with remorse: the role that I was making him play was as disagreeable to him as it could possibly be and he continued with it only because I persuaded him that it was necessary for our love. This all added up to a lot of duplicity and keeping quiet, but it involved very little effort and surprisingly few lies (and, as I have said, the only things that forced me into passing judgement on myself were actual deeds).
I am passing rapidly over this period, for I’m afraid that, if I examine it too closely, I could lapse back into memories that might overwhelm me. As it is, I only have to reflect on Anne’s happy laughter and on her kindness to me for something to land me a nasty, low, painful punch. I’m winded. I get so close to having what people call a bad conscience that I have to resort to certain activities such as lighting a cigarette or putting on a record or phoning a friend. Then eventually I think of something else. But I don’t like having to take refuge in my faulty memory and my superficiality instead of combatting these traits. I don’t like to recognize them for what they are, not even to the extent of being very glad that I possess them.
Ten
It’s funny how fate likes to choose faces to represent it which are unworthy or second-rate. That summer it had selected Elsa’s face. Call it, if you will, a very lovely face, but it was really merely alluring. She also had an extraordinary laugh, one that was hearty and infectious, the kind of laugh that only rather stupid people have.
It hadn’t taken long for me to notice the effect that laugh of hers had on my father. I told Elsa to make maximum use of it whenever we were due to ‘come across’ her with Cyril. I would say: ‘Whenever you hear me approach with my father, don’t say anything, just laugh.’ And then, whenever my father heard that exaggerated laughter, I would see his face cloud over with fury. My role in directing these events never ceased to enthral me. I never missed the mark, for whenever we saw Cyril and Elsa together, openly engaged in a relationship that, although imaginary, was perfectly imaginable, my father and I would both go pale, the blood draining from my face as it did from his, sucked away by a desire for possession which was worse than pain. Cyril, Cyril bending over Elsa … that was the image that ravaged my heart and yet it was an image that I helped them to bring to perfection without realizing its potency. Words are easy, companionable things, but whenever I saw the outline of Cyril’s face and his smooth, suntanned neck bent over Elsa’s upturned face, I would have given anything for that not to be. I kept forgetting that it was I myself who had willed it.
Aside from these incidents, and suffusing our everyday life, there was Anne’s confidence, her gentleness and – it pains me to use the word – her happiness. She was in fact closer to happiness than I had ever seen her, and although she had given herself over to the egoists that we were, she was far removed from our tempestuous desires and my low little schemes. This was precisely what I had counted on, that her aloofness and pride would instinctively prevent her from employing any kind of tactic to bind herself more closely to my father, would prevent her, indeed, from using any type of seductiveness other than that of being beautiful, intelligent and tender. I began to feel
more and more sorry for her. Pity is a most agreeable emotion. It carries you along like the music of a military band. No one could reproach me for feeling it.
It happened one morning that the maid, in great excitement, handed me a note from Elsa which read as follows: ‘Come quickly! It’s all working out!’ I had the impression that a catastrophe was in the offing: I hate it when things come to a head. Anyway, I met a triumphant-looking Elsa on the beach.
‘I’ve just seen your father. I mean, an hour ago.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He told me he was extremely sorry about what had happened and that he’d behaved very boorishly. Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’
I thought it best to agree.
‘Then he paid me various compliments, the way only he can … you know, in that rather detached tone of his, and very quietly, as if it were causing him pain … that tone of voice …’
I dragged her back to reality from her idyllic visions:
‘What was the upshot?’
‘Well, nothing really … No, there was something, he invited me to take tea with him in the village, to show that I had no hard feelings and that I was broadminded, you know what I mean, progressive.’
I was greatly amused at the thought of the views my father might have on the progressiveness of red-headed young women.
‘Why are you laughing? Am I to go?’
I almost replied that it was nothing to do with me. Then I realized that she credited me with the success of her stratagems. Rightly or wrongly, that irritated me. I felt cornered.
‘I don’t know, Elsa. It’s up to you. Don’t keep asking me what to do. Anyone would think I’m the one pushing you …’
‘But you are,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s thanks to you that …’
The admiring way in which she spoke suddenly frightened me.
‘Go if you want to. Just, for heaven’s sake, don’t talk to me about it any more!’
‘But we have to get rid of that woman for him … don’t we, Cécile?’
I fled. My father could do as he wished and Anne could sort herself out as best she could. In any case, I had a date with Cyril. It seemed to me that love was the only antidote to the fear that was sapping me.
Cyril took me in his arms without a word and led me off. When I was with him, everything became simple and charged with intensity and pleasure. Later, lying stretched out against that golden, sweat-bathed torso of his, and feeling exhausted and adrift, as if I had been shipwrecked, I told him that I hated myself. I smiled when I told him, for, although I meant it, the thought caused me no pain, just a kind of pleasant resignation. He did not take me seriously.
‘It doesn’t matter. I love you enough to make you share my opinion of you. I love you, I love you so much.’
The lilt of that sentence stayed with me right through lunch: ‘I love you, I love you so much.’ That’s why, although I’ve tried, I no longer remember much of that meal. Anne was wearing a mauve dress whose colour matched the circles under her eyes, and her eyes themselves. My father laughed and appeared to be relaxed: the situation was working out for him. Over dessert he announced that he had shopping to do in the village that afternoon. I smiled to myself. I was tired and I was feeling fatalistic. All I wanted to do was to have a swim.
At four o’clock I set off down to the beach. I ran into my father on the terrace as he was leaving to go to the village. I said nothing. I did not even warn him to be careful.
The water was warm and caressing. There was no sign of Anne; she must have been busy with her collection, drawing in her room while my father was playing the ladies’ man with Elsa. Two hours elapsed and, as it was no longer warm enough to sunbathe, I went back up to the terrace, sat down in a chair and opened a magazine.
It was just then that Anne appeared, coming from the direction of the wood. She was running, and with some difficulty, awkwardly, with her elbows held against her sides. I had the sudden, shocking impression that it was an old lady running and that she was going to fall. I was aghast. She disappeared behind the house, heading for the garage. Then all at once I realized what had happened and I too began to run, to catch up with her.
She was already in her car and turning the ignition. I rushed up and threw myself against the door.
‘Anne,’ I cried, ‘Anne, don’t go. It’s all a mistake, it’s my fault, I can explain …’
She was neither listening to nor looking at me, but leaning forward to release the handbrake.
‘We need you, Anne!’
At that, she straightened up. Her composure had gone and she was crying. Then all at once I saw that I had been attacking a living creature, a creature with feelings and not an abstraction. She must once have been a little girl, on the secretive side, then a teenager, then a woman. She was forty years old, she was on her own, she loved a man and she had hoped to be happy with him for ten, maybe twenty years. And as for me … that face, that face of hers, was my handiwork. I was rooted to the spot, my whole body trembling as I leant against the car door.
‘You don’t need anyone,’ she murmured. ‘Neither of you does.’
The engine was running. I was in despair; she couldn’t leave like that!
‘Forgive me, I beg you …’
‘Forgive you for what?’
The tears continued to stream down her cheeks. She did not seem to notice them and her face was rigid.
‘My poor little girl!’
She laid her hand on my cheek for an instant and then she was gone. I watched her car disappear round the side of the house. I was lost, adrift … It had all happened so quickly. And that face of hers, that face …
I heard footsteps behind me: it was my father. He had taken the time to remove traces of Elsa’s lipstick and to brush the pine needles from his suit. I turned round and threw myself at him:
‘You bastard!’
I began to sob.
‘What’s going on? Has Anne …? Cécile, tell me, Cécile …’
Eleven
We did not meet again until dinner, both of us nervous about this togetherness that was so suddenly ours again. I was not in the least hungry and neither was he. We both knew that it was essential for Anne to come back to us. For my part, I could not bear for long the memory of the distraught face that she had turned towards me before she left, nor the thought of her grief and my responsibility. I had forgotten all about my patient stratagems and the plans that I had so carefully laid. I felt that I had completely lost my compass, there was nothing to guide me, and I could see from my father’s face that he felt the same way.
‘Do you think she has abandoned us for long?’ he asked.
‘She’s no doubt heading for Paris,’ I replied.
‘Paris …’ my father murmured pensively.
‘Perhaps we shall never see her again.’
He looked at me, quite at a loss, and took my hand across the table.
‘You must hold this against me terribly. I don’t know what got into me … On the way back through the wood with Elsa, she … The fact is, I kissed her and Anne must have arrived at that very moment and …’
I wasn’t listening. The idea of those two characters, my father and Elsa, embracing in the shadow of the pines seemed to me farcical and devoid of reality, I couldn’t visualize it. The only vivid thing from that day, and cruelly vivid at that, was Anne’s face as I had last seen it, with grief written on it, the face of a person who has been betrayed. I took a cigarette from my father’s packet and lit it. That was another thing that Anne would not tolerate, smoking during meals. I smiled at my father:
‘I understand fully: it’s not your fault. It was a moment of madness, as they say. But Anne will just have to forgive us, what I mean is, she’ll have to forgive you.’
‘What’s to be done?’ he asked.
He looked dreadful. I was sorry for him and for myself as well. Why was Anne abandoning us like this, why was she making us suffer for what amounted to nothing more than an indiscretion
? Was she under no obligation to us?
‘We’ll write to her,’ I said, ‘and ask her forgiveness.’
‘What a brilliant idea!’ my father cried, at last finding a way out of the state of remorseful inactivity in which we had been wallowing for the past three hours.
Without waiting to finish our meal we pushed back the tablecloth and what was on it, my father went to fetch a big lamp, pen and ink and his writing paper and we settled down opposite each other. The gracious scene thus created seemed so likely to bring about Anne’s return that we were almost cheerful. A bat came and traced silken curves outside the window. My father bent his head and began to write.
I cannot recall without an unendurable awareness of mockery and cruelty the letters overflowing with kind sentiments that we penned to Anne that evening, the two of us sitting in the lamplight like two diligent, clumsy schoolchildren working away in silence at that impossible task of ‘getting Anne back’. But we produced two masterpieces of their kind, full of good excuses, affection and repentance. By the time I had finished, I was more or less persuaded that Anne would be unable to resist them and that a reconciliation was imminent. I could already envisage the scene of forgiveness, full of delicacy and humour … It would take place in our drawing room in Paris, Anne would come in and …