At midnight, they stopped for dinner at an empty inn.
They ate, and Hélène waited for the quarrel to begin with malicious joy: always present, yet invisible, it seemed to simmer near the surface, like flames beneath the ashes.
‘You really must have lost your mind to want to travel like this.’
‘You could have stayed in Paris.’
‘I swear that this is the last time I’ll ever go with you.’
‘You’re such a bore.’
‘And you are unbelievably selfish. You’re on a diet, and you don’t give a damn if everyone else is dying of hunger.’
‘Please do not be crude in front of my daughter.’
‘I’m not crude, but you are certainly mad.’
Hélène watched them, smiling. She deliberately reminded herself of the past, still so near, when she had sat between them this way and watched their every movement in terror, jumping every time they raised their voices, knowing very well that her mother’s anger would inevitably fall back on to her because she was so weak, or on to Mademoiselle Rose. But now, nothing in the world had the power to make her suffer.
She ate, eagerly wolfing down the omelette cooked in lard and the cold meat; she drank the good wine and listened, with joyous scorn, to the quarrel that echoed in her ears, without being affected by it; it had lost its malevolent power, just as the sound of thunder in the theatre eventually ceases to frighten children. They hurled the simplest words at each other as if each one were a hammer; they repeated what they said, looked for the most insignificant words and found some hidden, obscure meaning in them; they recalled things that had happened a year ago, five years ago; pitilessly, they searched for words that could best be misinterpreted.
‘People who love each other,’ thought Hélène contemptuously.
But she was still too young to perceive the dying, bleeding love that remained between Max and his mistress of so long.
‘How did this happen? And so quickly. He loved her so much,’ she wondered. ‘It must have happened in Finland, when I was in love with Fred, so I didn’t notice …’
She studied them with sardonic pity as Bella pushed away her plate and started sobbing; her tears flowed down her face, ruining her make-up; in the past her tears would have pierced Max’s heart, causing him a fierce, insidious pain. But now he simply clenched his teeth, anxiously looking around in anger.
‘That’s enough! You’re embarrassing me,’ he muttered, barely able to speak. He violently pushed back his chair. ‘I’ve really had enough. If you want to come, then come. Let’s go, Hélène.’
Bella powdered her face, still crying, her half-eaten food in front of her, and counted each new wrinkle that appeared beneath her tears with bitter despair; Max and Hélène stood on the doorstep, in the moonlight, and waited for her.
‘Oh, Hélène,’ he said in a weary, hoarse voice, ‘my little Hélène, I’m so unhappy …’
‘Don’t exaggerate.’
‘Well,’ he replied angrily, ‘that’s very nice of you! You’re not the one who’s suffering.’
‘No, that’s true, I’m not suffering, not any more …’
Bella came and joined them and they left, driving through the night in silence.
The next day they arrived at one of the ‘hostelries’ that had started to spring up in the French countryside, where waitresses dressed in Normandy lace headdresses and pink taffeta aprons, as if they were in an operetta. They tottered across the lawns in their pointy high-heeled shoes, carrying fine wines in rustic jugs and, on a chipped earthenware plate decorated with flowers, a lunch bill for three or five or six hundred francs nonchalantly folded in half. This was inflation, fleeting prosperity. Long strands of pearls fell like serpents into the stinging nettles, and gigolos sprawled in the grass, third-rate ‘darlings’ with the hairy chests and damp hands of butcher boys.
It was only when evening fell and the couples disappeared that the scent of perfume and face powder began to fade; then you could smell the cold, damp, bitter Normandy forests. Max and Hélène spoke quietly together, while Bella, hidden by the darkness, tried out some new technique to tighten the muscles in her face. She would slowly lower her jaw twelve or fifteen times in a row, then tightly clench her teeth and pinch her mouth closed until the skin on her cheeks was taut to the point of tearing. She would tilt her head backwards, take a deep breath, then exhale slowly. She couldn’t hear what Max and her daughter were saying. Hélène was still a child …
‘Barely eighteen, a kid, he doesn’t even look at her … But he misses the illusion of a family. At least, that’s what he thinks. The child amuses him …’ she thought.
Max and Hélène were talking about the little town on the Dnieper where they had spent their childhood. Memory had given it a melancholy charm. They happily thought back to the clear, icy air in autumn, the sleepy streets, the cooing of the woodpigeons, the Tsar’s Park, the small green islands and golden church towers on the river.
‘I remember your mother,’ Hélène said. ‘I remember the carriage and the horses. They were so fat! I wondered how they could move at all. Where did you live?’
‘Oh, in a very, very ancient, wonderful house, where the parquet floors would creak beneath your feet because they were so old, I believe I can still remember the sound the floorboards made when you stepped on them. What I would give to have it all back!’
‘How middle class,’ said Bella with scorn. ‘How very middle class. I’m happy here …’
She reached out her hand and took his in hers, squeezing it with desperate affection. ‘With you,’ she whispered.
He moved his chair away and gestured that Hélène was there; he looked upset and confused.
Hélène smiled sadly and thought, ‘Too late, my darling …’
3
By the autumn the Karols no longer lived in a hotel; they had a furnished apartment on the rue de la Pompe that had previously belonged to an American woman who had married an Italian duke. Every armchair was upholstered in velvet embossed with family crests; the back of every chair was topped with a crown sculpted in gilded wood. Boris Karol sometimes absent-mindedly pulled off some pearls from the crowns and rolled them around in his hand. Ever since he had returned from America, a vague attempt at a family life sometimes meant that Hélène, her parents and Max found themselves all together. Karol leaned his head against the cushion embroidered with some indefinable coat of arms, looked at this wife and daughter and smiled. Such moments were a respite in his life, a kind of sweet, ordinary pleasure that he rarely enjoyed, and even then only for a short while, but which brought him contentment, like drinking eggnog when your stomach is sensitive from too much wine and spicy food. Hélène recognised the expression she so rarely saw on his face; she thought of it as ‘Peace on earth good will towards men’. Bella seemed more serious, calmer; these were moments when the fire that burned endlessly in her body died away. Max would smoke; Hélène would read; the lamplight would shine on Hélène’s hair and Bella would say quietly, either to please her husband or because she wasn’t entirely devoid of maternal instinct, despite it being dim and feeble, ‘Hélène’s starting to become a woman.’
She didn’t notice how Max looked intensely at Hélène’s bent head, then quickly turned away. But the more mellow her mother became, the more Hélène felt hatred stir in her heart, hatred that was even fiercer and more passionate than when she was a child.
‘It would have taken so little back then,’ she mused. ‘Now it’s too late. I’ll never forgive her, never. I could forgive her if she hurt me now, the person I am now. Yes, I think I would forgive her. But you can’t forgive someone for ruining your childhood.’
Sometimes she would raise her eyes and look deep into the mirror, searching for the round, tanned face she’d had as a child, for her wide mouth, her black curls. But all she saw was a young girl who was starting to become a woman, as Bella put it; she was losing her air of pride and innocence, and her cheekbones were beginning to st
and out in her face, in the very place where, in years to come, the first wrinkles would appear …
Such were the family evenings spent in Paris, in this bustling and cold foreign city, in this furnished apartment where nothing belonged to them, just as nothing had ever really belonged to them, for that matter, anywhere they’d lived, among the books, the decorative objects, the paintings bought as a job lot that gradually got covered in dust, beneath the electric chandeliers where half the light bulbs needed replacing, and which cast a dim, yellowish glow. Roses no one tended died in their vases; a piano whose cover was never raised by anyone had been pushed into a corner, between torn lace curtains that had cost a thousand francs a metre and were now full of cigarette burns. The carpets were covered in ash; the scornful, silent servants set down the coffee on a corner of the desk and disappeared, their bitter smiles passing harsh judgement on these ‘mad foreigners’. It never crossed Hélène’s mind that she herself might be able to bring a little order and harmony to this home. She was too used to setting up camp wherever they landed to consider the furniture or ornaments as her own; everything, even the curtains and books that decorated her bedroom, aroused a feeling of hostility and mistrust within her.
‘What’s the point? As soon as I get attached to anything, something will surely happen and we’ll have to leave.’
Whenever Karol won at the club he was as joyous and mischievous as a child; he would tell stories about his poor but happy childhood; Hélène listened as if these stories touched a chord in her blood. When she closed her eyes she felt as if she had lived in those dark streets herself, played in the mud and dust, slept at the back of one of those little shops her father described where, in winter, they put a lit candle in front of the window to melt the ice.
Bella, who was too nervous to sit still, but whose hands were never busy doing anything useful, was unstitching dresses; they had been delivered that morning; they came from Chanel or Patou; by the evening they were nothing more than a pile of fabric and crumpled lace.
Bella didn’t notice the way Max stared at Hélène. She didn’t hear how his voice faltered, didn’t worry about the strangely sweet expression that appeared on his face, the slight trembling of his hands if he accidentally brushed against Hélène’s bare arm. To her, Hélène would be a child until the day she died.
‘This is the land of make-believe,’ thought Hélène. ‘Papa plays with paper and pretends it’s money. We entertain all the hoi polloi in Paris and call them society. I’m not allowed to cut my hair, it’s all the way down my back, and she thinks that will do it, that I’ll be twelve years old for ever and that Max will never notice that I’m a woman. Just you wait, you old hag, just you wait …’
One evening after Karol had left for the club, as he did every night, the clock struck eleven and Bella called to Max, ‘Shall we go out? It’s such a nice evening. Let’s go to the Bois de Boulogne.’
It was a beautiful spring night. Max agreed. Bella went to get her hat. Suddenly Hélène took the young man’s hand and said, ‘I don’t want you to go out.’
‘Why not?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t want you to,’ she said again, pleading and capricious.
They looked at each other for a long time and there passed between them the silent consent that ties a man to a woman, when, even though not a word has been said, a kiss given or received, everything is understood, silently spoken, with no turning back.
Nevertheless, the profound effect of his love for Bella remained within him. Her dominating personality, her whims, her madness, everything that had aroused in him deep, sensual, painful feelings of love and desire, had gradually ebbed away; but just as a wave recedes, leaving the beach vulnerable for a stronger wave to crash over it, so a new love had washed over him, a twin of his old love, bringing in its wake the same jealousy, the same tyranny, the same cruel and agonising tenderness.
‘Why?’ he asked again, without looking at her, but with a powerful rush of blood to his face that reached right up to his sunken temples.
‘I’m bored. Oh, Max, I was so bored because of you when I was a child. Don’t you want to give in to my whim a little now?’ she said softly.
He looked at her cruelly, then quickly turned away. ‘Very well, but you’ll also indulge me when I want, then …’
‘What do you mean?’
He saw she had moved away and forced himself to laugh. ‘I was joking, of course,’ he whispered.
When Bella came back, he told her he wouldn’t be going out and he spent the rest of the time smoking nervously, putting out half-finished cigarettes one after the other. He looked exhausted, pale, anxious. Finally he left. Hélène heard the sound of the large door close behind him in the empty street. Bella had sat down and didn’t move, her eyes full of tears, staring blankly in front of her.
Hélène crossed the room and leaned against the ledge by the open window; moonlight shone down on the street; a tree, its first leaves just beginning to grow, swayed its delicate, supple branches. She looked at the Eiffel Tower where a sign flashed: Citroën, Citroën. ‘I’m so happy,’ she thought with surprise, ‘although there’s nothing to be happy about …’
Hélène’s black cat, Tintabel, sat on the balcony railing; Max had given him to her and he was the one thing she loved most in the world after her father, and the only thing she could stroke, take care of and keep close to her. Sometimes she would hold him tightly and say, ‘I love you, yes, I do. You’re warm and alive and I love you.’
He raised his face towards the moon.
‘I’m happy because I’ve got what I wanted, because Max loves me,’ she mused. For she knew very well that he did love her, yet the ease with which she had won him left her feeling disappointed and embarrassed.
‘No, it’s not that. It’s everything, it’s surely because I’m young,’ she thought, savouring the pleasure of being eighteen which, for her, wasn’t about the intoxication and exhilaration of youth, but rather a sensation of well-being, of having a supple, strong body, young blood that flowed peacefully and joyously through her veins. She raised her beautiful arms into the air: they were delicate with soft skin; her hands were agile and slim. She looked at the pale reflection of her body and face in the mirror and was pleased. The cat came and rubbed his smooth black head up against her, purring.
She whistled in the particular way he recognised and which made him meow softly with joy and affection.
‘Tintabel …’
She bent her head and let her long hair fall down into the darkness. She liked watching the sleepy town with its little flickering lights; she liked breathing in the gentle night breeze that carried the scent of the Bois de Boulogne.
On a bench outside a man and a woman were kissing. She watched them with curiosity and scorn.
‘Love is ugly and stupid. But what about Fred? Oh, Fred. That was just a bit of fun.’
‘Tintabel,’ she said to the cat, ‘how wise we become when we grow up.’
She leaned out over the edge of the balcony, swaying absent-mindedly, enjoying the dangerous pleasure of being half suspended in mid-air, and she thought she could hear a beloved voice, silent now.
‘Lili, you mustn’t do that. You shouldn’t play dangerous games, that’s not what real courage is.’
But those words had a meaning she didn’t want to understand. ‘Real courage? Yes, I know: being humble, forgiving. But no, no … you can’t ask me to do that, really, you can’t ask me to do such a thing. First of all, when I decide the game has lasted long enough I’ll stop. But not before I’ve made her suffer. At least a little, and it will always be less than I suffered because of her. Just let her suffer a little …’
She turned round, looked at her mother for a long time, cruelly, screwing up her eyes. ‘What a beautiful night,’ she said. ‘How wonderful it is to be eighteen! Oh, I wouldn’t like to be old, Mama … my poor Mama.’
Bella shuddered; Hélène saw her hands tremble, the hands she hated so much: her nails were s
till shaped like claws but had lost their strength and brightness over the years. ‘You’ll get old just like everyone else, my girl,’ she said, her voice low and faint, ‘then you’ll see how amusing it is.’
‘Oh, but I still have time on my side,’ Hélène said happily, ‘lots of time …’
Bella stood up and left the room, slamming the door angrily behind her.
When she was alone, Hélène could feel tears welling up in her eyes in spite of herself. ‘So,’ she thought, shrugging her shoulders, ‘do I feel sorry for her? No, and besides, it’s not my fault that she’s getting old. All she had to do was not take up with a gigolo fifteen years younger than she was. But I, I … I’m just as bad as they are.’
4
Slowly, gradually, the guilty love grew stronger. It had already set its deep, sinuous roots into the man’s heart before the first fragile flower had started to bloom. It seemed so delicate, so small, that the man thought about it less to admire it than to become intoxicated by its very power. Its perfume was so strong. Yet it would take the slightest gesture, the tiniest effort to pluck it out, to kill it for ever in his soul, and it would all be over. So what did he have to fear? He smiled with defiance and tenderness. ‘Well, then, all right, so it’s the beginning of love. What do I have to fear, at my age? I know that if I let it grow, it will only bring me unhappiness.’ But from the day he called it love, when he consented to acknowledge it existed, he became aware of his own weakness for the first time. Agile, tenacious roots plunged deeper and deeper within him with every passing day. The moment when he finally shuddered and thought ‘That’s enough now, enough, the game is over’ was the very moment when he succumbed, when he got used to being in love, when he cherished his suffering. Then all he could do was wait, wait for time and disillusionment to destroy the deep-rooted, fragile, deadly flower.
Max had begun to think about Hélène, picturing her face when he was in bed at night, when he felt particularly tired of his ageing mistress and life itself. Just before falling asleep, he liked to close his eyes and imagine Hélène’s face. He wasn’t in love. How absurd! ‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘never again. Love, how ridiculous. Love is a terrible cross to bear. In love with Hélène, with that child?’ He remembered one day in autumn, on the islands in St Petersburg, when he’d been out walking with Bella; he’d noticed how little Hélène was dragging her boots through the mud and looking gloomy. How he’d hated her! Her very presence irritated him. Every time she looked at him, he felt she was spying on him. How many times had he said to Bella, ‘But really, why don’t you dump her in some boarding school so she leaves us in peace?’ That little girl … And now? No, no, he didn’t love her. His imagination was playing tricks on him, it was a whim. Except he enjoyed seeing her so much. And she was the only person in the world he could talk to honestly, as a friend. He thought back to her thin, sun-tanned neck, her face, so young … Young, that was what he found so seductive. He was thirty and Bella … ‘Wooden dolls, lifeless and cold,’ Bella said of younger women. ‘Two a penny …’ True, but older women in love were intense, passionate creatures, and were they so very difficult to find? Sometimes, when he was asleep, some quirk merged the faces of the two women. Sometimes he was holding Hélène tightly in his arms but calling her: ‘Bella, darling Bella …’