Chapter 20
The Sunny Square
Margaret can’t bear solitude in the Living Quarters while the others explore distant rooms for long hours. So she ends by returning to the corridors.
For three outside seasons nothing happens.
Then one day she emerges into a long corridor that ends with the Prefect standing to one side of a door wide open on a sunny square. Trees are in full green leaf. There are children with yellow and red balloons. Jean Hussier is sitting on one of the benches. He’s holding a small gift package. She knows what’s in it. She draws closer, fearfully. The Prefect’s attitude is one of welcome, as usual. His long white hand points to the sunny square invitingly. But to get there she has to pass him.
At the last moment, with the smell of rotting flowers and that death-mask of his, fear gets the better of longing and she turns her back on the Prefect and so on Jean with his ring and on the twinkling green trees and runs back into the years of the dark maze, back to the room and her bed where she wakes up and thinks it was a dream. But not certain.
This time she can’t shun the corridors as she’d once done. She can’t resist the longing to see that sunny square again, no fracture-proof glass between it and her, as much for the children with their bright balloons as for Jean Hussier and the package with the engagement or wedding ring.
One night Helen comes out of the WC. Margaret walks stiffly past her with no greeting or even recognition. Her face is blank, her eyes open but unseeing. Her arms are outstretched in the conventional ambiguous attitude of the sleepwalker, a defensive or yearning outstretch, to repel or to embrace. Helen thinks of all those dangerous staircases and follows her.
After a while Margaret halts before a door, closed of course, and murmurs something over and over. Helen approaches and understands that she’s begging someone to let her dance for him. She’s acting out a dream. There are just the two of them, Helen and Margaret, in the corridor.
Careful not to awaken her, Helen guides her back to their room and her (Margaret’s) bed.
In the morning Helen tells her about it and insists on the danger. Margaret knows about the danger but it’s not the danger Helen means, a fall down a staircase. It’s another danger involving a much greater fall. She doesn’t tell Helen about those meetings, doesn’t tell the others either, doesn’t try to analyze the reasons why she keeps it secret.
Helen devises means to combat her blind wandering in the corridors. Normally they leave their door wide open because of Margaret’s acute claustrophobia. Now Helen locks it. Margaret can’t sleep. She suffocates. So they leave the door wide open again but with Helen’s cot barring the passage. It’s not Margaret’s idea.
It works for a while. Most of the time Margaret bangs her shin against the iron framework of the cot, wakes up and, groaning, returns to her own cot. Sometimes she tumbles down on Helen, wakes up and after a few seconds gets up and returns to her own cot.
Once she tumbles and, maybe not awake, stays with Helen. Helen wakes up, she doesn’t know how much later, passionately kissing Margaret and being kissed, less passionately but they’re so unequal in beauty, Helen knows.
A while later Margaret gets up and whispers: “We mustn’t ever do that again. We’re being tested here.”
“All right,” Helen says. She knows that desire, like hope, is an unfailing source of suffering. She pulls her cot back to its original place, leaving the way out into the corridor free, which is probably what, unconsciously, Margaret wanted all along and not because of the danger of tumbling into that kind of minor temptation. She doesn’t really believe that a little skin-deep pleasure with another woman, particularly if she’s plain like Helen, counts as a sin. Isn’t it almost an act of loving charity?
So the way is free again and the door wide open on a sunny square happens over and over, each time her longing for it stronger. But the fear is stronger too.
The last of those encounters the temptation and the fear are so strong that she cries out: “No, I’ll never dance for you.”
The next day the terrible thing happens to her.
It happens to all of them (poor Louis) but she’s sure it’s collective punishment because she’d said no for all time to Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque.