Aimez-vous Brahms?

  At dawn she half-woke and saw again, as in a dream, the dark mass of Simon's hair tangled with hers by the arctic wind, lingering between their faces like a silken screen; and she thought she could still feel his warm mouth burrowing into her. She went back to sleep smiling.

  11

  IT was ten days now since he had seen her. The morning after that crazy, tender evening when she had kissed him he had received a note from her, enjoining him not to try to see her again. "I should only hurt you and I am too fond of you." He had not realised that she was less afraid for him than for herself; he had believed in her pity and had not even been angry, merely searching for a means, a concept which would enable him to envisage life without her. He did not pause to consider that these precautionary phrases—"I should hurt you too much", "It wouldn't be wise", and so forth—are often the quotation marks surrounding an affair, coming immediately before, or immediately after, but on no account discouraging. Paule did not know this, either. She had been afraid; she was unconsciously waiting for him to come for her and force her to accept his love. She was at the end of her tether. The monotony of the winter days; the endless procession of unchanging streets through which she made her solitary way from flat to shop; that traitorous telephone (Roger sounded so distant and ashamed that she was always sorry she had answered it); and finally a yearning for a long, never rediscovered summer—everything conspired to bring her to a state of defenceless passivity in which something had to happen.

  Simon got down to work. He was punctual, conscientious and withdrawn. From time to time, he looked up, stared vacantly at Madame Alice and drew a hesitant finger across his lips . . . The abrupt, almost commanding way in which Paule, that last evening, had pressed her mouth to his, then thrown back her head and used both her hands to hold his face gently against hers. The wind . . . Madame Alice cleared her throat, embarrassed by his stare, and he gave a faint smile. It had been a fit of spleen on Paule's part, that was all. He had not tried to follow her afterwards—had he perhaps been wrong? Ten or twenty times he went over the slightest incidents in the preceding weeks: their last drive together, that incredibly boring exhibition they had fled from, that infernal dinner at his mother's . . . and every detail, every image, every possibility pained him a little more. Yet the days passed; he was gaining time, or wasting his life; he did not know where he was any more.

  One evening he walked down a dark staircase with a friend and found himself in a small night club which he had never visited. They had drunk a lot; they ordered some more and grew sad again. Then a Negress came on to sing; she had a huge pink mouth; she opened up a thousand longings, she kindled the fires of a hopeless sentimentality to which they succumbed together.

  "I'd give two years of my life to be in love with someone," said Simon's friend.

  "I am in love," said Simon. "And she'll never know I loved her. Never." He refused to enlarge on this, but at the same time it seemed to him that nothing was lost, that it was not possible: this flood of feeling within him to no purpose! They asked the singer over for a drink: she was from Pigalle, but she sang as though she were straight from New Orleans, filling Simon's reeling brain with a blue and tender life, full of proffered hands and faces. He stayed very late, listening to her all alone, and got home at dawn, quite sober.

  * * *

  At six next evening Simon stood waiting for Paule outside her shop. It was raining; he buried his hands in his pockets; he was angry to find them shaking. He felt strangely empty and limp. My God, he thought, perhaps I'm no good at anything with her now, except to feel pain. And he grimaced in disgust.

  At half-past six, Paule came out. She was wearing a dark suit and a blue-grey scarf that matched her eyes. She looked tired. He took a step towards her, she smiled at him and in a flash he felt invaded by such a feeling of peace and plenty that he shut his eyes. He loved her. Whatever happened to him, so long as it was through her, he had nothing to lose. Paule saw his blindman's face, his outstretched hands, and she stopped. She had missed him, it was true, these last ten days. His continual presence, his admiration, his persistency had created, she thought, a kind of tangible habit which she had no reason to break. But the face he thrust towards her had nothing to do with habit, nor with the morale of a woman of thirty-nine. It was something quite different. The grubby pavement, the passers-by, the cars—everything round them suddenly struck her as a timeless, stylized, unchanging backcloth. They looked at each other from a distance of two yards, and before she could succumb again to the noisy, drab reality of the street, while she was still awake, alert, at the limits of her consciousness, Simon stepped forward and took her in his arms.

  He held her loosely against him, unable to breathe yet possessed of a great calm. He laid his cheek on her hair and stared straight ahead of him at the sign over a bookshop: 'The Treasures of Time', dimly wondering how many treasures there could be in the shop, and how many throw-outs. At the same time, he was amazed that he should ask himself such an absurd question at just that moment. He had the impression of having finally solved a problem.

  * * *

  "Simon," said Paule, "how long have you been here? You must be wet through."

  She inhaled the smell of his tweed jacket, his neck, and had no desire to move. His return had brought her unexpected relief, almost a feeling of deliverance.

  "You know," said Simon, "I simply couldn't live without you. I was all at sea. I wasn't even bored: I was cut off from myself. How about you?"

  "Me?" said Paule. "Oh, Paris isn't too bright at the moment." She was trying to introduce a normal note to the conversation. "I looked at a new collection, played the career woman, met a couple of Americans. There's talk of my going to New York . . ."

  At the same time, she was thinking that it was useless taking this tone when they were standing in the rain, with their arms round each other, like two ecstatic lovers; but she could not move. Simon's mouth came lightly to rest on her temples, her hair, her cheek, punctuating her sentences. She broke off and nestled her head a little closer to his shoulder.

  "Are you keen to go to New York?" said Simon's voice above her.

  As he spoke, she felt his jawbone working against her head. It made her want to laugh like a schoolgirl.

  "The States are sure to be fun, don't you think? I've never been."

  "Nor me," said Simon. "My mother couldn't stand it there; but then, she has always hated travel."

  He could have talked to her for hours about his mother, the urge to travel, America and Russia. He wanted to treat her to a hundred commonplaces, to make her a hundred unassuming, effortless speeches. He no longer thought of dazzling her or seducing her. He felt fine, at once frail and self-assured. He would have to take her home to kiss her properly, but he dared not let go of her.

  "I need time to think," said Paule.

  And she herself did not know whether she was referring to him or her trip. She, too, was afraid: afraid of looking up and seeing that youthful face next to hers, afraid of encountering the same old Paule, strong-willed and moderate. Afraid of judging herself.

  "Simon," she murmured.

  He stooped and kissed her lightly on the lips. They kept their eyes open and all each could see of the other was a huge twinkling blur, full of gleams and shadows: an immeasurably enlarged pupil, liquid, terrified almost.

  Two days later they dined together. Paule had only to say a few words for Simon to realise what those ten days had been like for her: Roger's jibes and indifference, her loneliness. No doubt Paule had hoped to turn the interval to account in winning Roger back, or at least in seeing him and restoring their old relationship. But she had been up against an impatient child. Her efforts, so touching in their modesty—dinner served just as he liked it, plus his favourite dress, plus a conversation on his pet topic —all those devices which, in women's magazines, seem so many paltry baits, but which, in the hands of an intelligent woman, are terribly affecting, had been to no avail. And she had not felt humiliated at using them; she ha
d not even been ashamed to substitute skilful lighting or a tender leg of lamb for the phrases burning on her lips: "Roger, you're making me miserable", "Roger, this can't go on". When she came to think about it, she had behaved in this way not from any inherited instinct as a housewife, nor even from bitter acceptance. No, she had acted, rather, from a kind of sadism towards 'them', towards what they had been together. As though one of them, he or she, should have leaped up and said: "That's enough." And she had awaited this reaction from herself almost as anxiously as from Roger. But in vain. Perhaps something had died.

  So, after ten days of wasted schemes and misplaced hopes, she could only be conquered by Simon. Simon saying: "I'm so happy, I love you," without the words sounding insipid; Simon stammering on the telephone; Simon bringing her something whole, or at least the whole half of something. She knew well enough that two were needed for this kind of thing; but she had grown tired, these last years, of always being the first and apparently the only one. "To love is nothing," Simon told her, speaking of himself, "one must also be loved." And this had struck her as strangely personal. Only, on the threshold of this new affair, she was astonished to feel—in place of the excitement, the glow which had ushered in her relationship with Roger, for instance—only a vast, tender weariness which affected even the way she walked. Everyone advised a change of air, and she thought sadly that all she was getting was a change of lovers: less bother, more Parisian, so common . . . And she shied away from her own face in the mirror, or covered it with cold cream. But when Simon rang the door-bell that evening and she saw his dark tie, his anxious eyes, the intense joy of his whole appearance, and his embarrassment too (like someone spoiled by life and striking lucky yet again), she wanted to share his happiness. The happiness she gave him: "Here is my body, my warmth and my tenderness; they are no good to me, but perhaps, in your hands, they will acquire a certain new savour for me." He spent the night in her arms.

  She imagined the tone in which people—her friends—would say: "Have you heard about Paule?" And more than fear of gossip, more than fear at the difference in their ages (which, as she very well knew, would be carefully emphasised), it was shame that gripped her. Shame at the thought of the gaiety with which people would spread the story, of the pep with which they would credit her, the appetite for life and young men, whereas she merely felt old and tired and in need of a little comforting. And it sickened her to think they were now in a position to treat her at once savagely and fawningly, as she had seen them treat others a hundred times over. They had called her "Poor Paule", because Roger was deceiving her, or spoken of her "mad independence"; when she had left a young, good-looking, boring husband they had condemned or pitied her. But they had never shown her the mixture of contempt and envy she was going to arouse this time.

  12

  CONTRARY to Paule's belief, Simon did not sleep during their first night together. He restricted himself to holding her to him, his hand resting on a slight fold at her waist; he lay quite still, listening to her regular breathing and adapting his own to it. You have to be very much in love or very disgusted to feign sleep, he thought hazily; and he, who was accustomed only to the second condition, watched over Paule's sleep as zealously as the vestals guarding their sacred fire. Thus they spent their night side by side, each protecting the other's counterfeit sleep, fondly and thoughtfully, not daring to move.

  Simon was happy. He felt more responsible for Paule, though she was fourteen years his senior, than for a sixteen-year-old virgin. While still marvelling at Paule's acquiescence and, for the first time, feeling that what had happened had been in the nature of a gift, he thought it indispensable that he should watch over her intently, as though to protect her in advance from the harm he might one day do her. He kept watch, he mounted guard against his own dastardliness, his clowning, his terrors, his sudden fits of boredom, his weakness. He would make her happy, he would be happy himself, and he told himself with amazement that he had never sworn such oaths even in the course of his greatest conquests.

  Thus when morning came there were several false awakenings, first one, then the other—but never the two together—going through the motions of a yawn, a contented stretching of limbs. When Simon turned over or propped himself up on one elbow, Paule would instinctively bury herself under the sheets, afraid of what his expression might be—that first expression after the act of love, more commonplace and decisive than any gesture. And when, her patience now exhausted, she in turn started moving about, Simon—equally on his guard, though his eyes were closed, and already afraid of losing the happiness he had found in the night—held his breath. Finally she caught him looking at her from under his lids by the pallid daylight filtering through the curtains, and she froze, facing him. She felt old and ugly; she stared fixedly at him so that he should see her clearly, so that at least there should be no early morning uncertainties between them. Simon, his eyes still not properly open, smiled, murmured her name and slid beside her. "Simon," she said, and she stiffened, still trying to pass the night off as a caprice. He laid his head on her heart and gently kissed her, at the bend of the arm, on the shoulder, on the cheek, hugging her to him. "I dreamed of you," he said. "I shall never dream of anyone but you." She closed her arms about him.

  Simon wanted to drive her to work, stipulating that he would drop her at the corner if she preferred. She replied, rather sadly, that she was not answerable to anyone, and there was a momentary silence between them. It was Simon who broke it.

  "Won't you be free before six? Can you have lunch with me?"

  "I haven't time," she said. "I shall have a sandwich in the shop."

  "What am I going to do until six?" he groaned.

  She looked at him. She was perturbed: could she tell him that there was no law which said they had to meet at six? On the other hand, the thought of his being there, outside the shop, impatient in his little car every evening brought her real happiness . . . Someone who waited for you every evening, someone who did not ring you up vaguely, at eight or after, when he felt like it. . . She smiled.

  "How do you know I haven't a dinner engagement this evening?"

  Simon, who was having difficulty with his cufflinks, stopped wrestling with them. After a moment he said: "True, I don't," in a neutral voice. He was thinking of Roger, of course! He thought only of Roger; he visualized him ready to reclaim his property; he was afraid. But she knew Roger was not thinking of her. The whole thing struck her as hateful. Let her at least be generous!

  "I've no engagement this evening," she said. "Come here and let me help you with those."

  She was sitting on the bed and he knelt in front of her, holding out his arms as if his sleeves had been fetters. He had a boy's wrists, smooth and slender. As she fastened the links, Paule suddenly had the feeling of having played this scene before. That's very theatrical, she thought, but she laid her cheek on Simon's hair with a small, happy laugh.

  "And what am I going to do until six?" he persisted.

  "I don't know . . . you're going to work."

  "I shan't be able to," he said. "I'm too happy."

  "That doesn't stop people from working!"

  "Me it does. Besides, I know what I'll do. I'll drive around and think of you, then I'll lunch alone, thinking of you, and then I'll wait for six o'clock. I'm not one of your energetic types."

  "What will your lawyer friend say?"

  "I don't know. Why should I waste my time preparing for my future when only my present interests me. And overwhelms me," he added with a sweeping bow.

  Paule shrugged. But Simon did exactly as he had said, that day and the days that followed. He motored about Paris, smiling at everyone; ten times he drove past Paule's shop, at ten miles an hour; he read a book, parking anywhere, laying it down at times to throw back his head and shut his eyes. He had the look of a happy sleepwalker, and this did not fail to move Paule and endear him to her more. She had the impression of giving and was amazed that this should suddenly strike her as almost indisp
ensable.

  * * *

  Roger had been travelling for ten days, in appalling weather, rushing from one business dinner to another, and the northern province was symbolised for him by an interminable slippery road and the characterless interiors of restaurants. From time to time he put through a call to Paris, asking for two numbers at the same time, and listened to the complaints of Maisy-Marcelle before complaining to Paule—or after. He felt despondent, helpless, his life resembled this province. Paule's voice was changing, becoming at once more anguished and more distant; he wanted to see her again. He had never been able to spend a fortnight away from her without missing her. In Paris, of course, where he knew she was always ready to see him, always at his disposal, he could space out their meetings; but Lille restored her to him as she had been right at the beginning, when his life had depended entirely on hers and he had been as afraid of conquering her as he was now afraid of losing her. On the last day of his travels, he announced his return. There was a silence, then at once she resumed: "I've got to see you." The words had a final ring. He asked no questions, but arranged to meet her next day.

  He returned to Paris that night and at two in the morning was outside Paule's. For the first time, he hesitated to go up. He was not sure of finding that same happy face, forcing itself to be calm, which his surprises usually prompted; he was afraid. He waited ten minutes, self-impeded, providing himself with poor excuses—"She'll be asleep, she works too hard," and so forth—then drove off. Outside his own flat, he hesitated again, then suddenly swung the car round and drove to Maisy's. She was asleep; waking, she thrust a puffy face towards him. She had been out very late, she said, with her inevitable producers . . . she was so happy ... as a matter of fact, she had just been dreaming about him, etc. He undressed rapidly and went straight off to sleep, despite her provocations. For the first time, he did not want her. At dawn he complied mechanically, laughed a little at her gossip and decided that everything was all right. He spent the morning in her flat and left her ten minutes before his rendezvous with Paule.