Aimez-vous Brahms?

  13

  "I MUST make a 'phone call," said Paule. "After lunch will be too late."

  Roger stood up as she left the table, and Paule gave him that brief, apologetic smile which she could not deny herself whenever she obliged him, through the conventions of society or of the heart, to put himself out for her. She thought of this with irritation as she walked down the dank stairway which led to the telephone. With Simon, it was different. He was so keen, so glad, so prompt to look after her, to open doors for her, to light her cigarettes, to anticipate her slightest wishes, that he had come to think of these things before she did, making them seem a series of attentions rather than obligations. That morning she had left him half-asleep, his arms round his pillow, his dark locks tousled, and she had written him a note: "Will ring at twelve." But at twelve she had met Roger and now she was amazed to find herself leaving him alone at table so as to telephone a lazy young lover. Would he notice? His brow was furrowed and anxious, as it always was on his off-days; he seemed older.

  Simon picked up the receiver at once. He laughed the moment she said hullo, and she laughed too.

  "You're awake, then?"

  "I've been awake since eleven. It's one now. I've already rung the operator to find out whether the telephone was out of order."

  "Why?"

  "You were supposed to call me at twelve. Where are you?"

  "At Luigi's. I'm about to have lunch."

  "I see," said Simon.

  There was a silence. In the end she added baldly: "I'm lunching with Roger."

  "I see."

  "Is that all you can say?" she said. " 'I see . . .' I shall be back at the shop by two-thirty at latest. What are you doing?"

  "I'm going round to my mother's for some clothes," said Simon very quickly. "I'm coming back here to hang them up and then I'm going to get that water-colour that caught your eye in Desnos's."

  For a moment she wanted to laugh. It was typical of Simon to run two sentences together like that.

  "Why? Are you thinking of using my place as a changing-room?' '

  At the same time she cast around for serious arguments to dissuade him. But what were they? He hardly ever left her, and she had not reproached him up to now . . .

  "Yes," said Simon. "There are too many people hanging round you. I mean to be your watchdog, and for that I need clean clothes."

  "We'll talk about it later," she said.

  She had the impression she had been on the 'phone for an hour. Roger was upstairs alone. He was sure to ask questions, and she could not rid herself of a feeling of guilt.

  "I love you," said Simon, before he hung up.

  On her way out, she automatically gave her hair a quick comb in the cloakroom mirror. She was staring at a face to which someone said: "I love you."

  Roger was drinking a cocktail and Paule was surprised, knowing that he never touched alcohol during the day.

  "Is something wrong?"

  "Why? Oh, the gin! No, I'm just tired."

  "It's a long time since I've seen you," she said, and, as he rather absent-mindedly agreed, she felt the tears prick at her eyes. The day would come when they would say: "Is it two months since we met, or three?" And they would quietly tot it up. Roger, with his quaint gestures and his tired face, that childish look in spite of his strength, his near- cruelty . . . She averted her head. He was wearing his old grey jacket which she had seen, almost new, draped on a chair in her bedroom, at the start of their affair. He was very proud of it. He seldom gave much thought to being elegant, and anyway he was rather on the heavy side ever really to be so.

  "A fortnight," she said calmly. "Are you well?"

  "Yes. Not bad, anyway."

  He broke off. No doubt he was waiting for her to say: "And how's work?", but she didn't. First she was going to have to tell him about Simon; then he would be able to confide in her without later having the feeling that he had made a fool of himself.

  "Have you been enjoying yourself?" he said.

  She froze. A pulse raced in her temples; she felt her heart wither. She heard herself say: "Yes, I've been seeing Simon. A lot."

  "Ah!" said Roger. "That charming boy? Still stuck on you?"

  She nodded her head slowly and once too often, without looking up.

  "You still find him fun?" said Roger.

  She raised her eyes, but it was his turn not to look at her: he was concentrating hard on his grapefruit. She thought: he has realised.

  "Yes," she said.

  "You find him fun? Or more than that?"

  They were looking at each other now, all right. Roger laid down his spoon. With demented fondness she registered the two long lines beside his mouth, the impassive face, the faintly ringed blue eyes.

  "More than that," she said.

  Roger's hand strayed back to the spoon and closed on it. He has never known the proper way to eat a grapefruit, she thought. Time seemed at once to be standing still and whistling in her ears.

  "I suppose there's nothing I can say," said Roger.

  And at this she knew he was unhappy. Had he been happy, he would have remonstrated with her. But he sat there as though her admission were the final straw.

  She murmured: "There was everything you could have said."

  "You yourself put it in the past."

  "To spare you, Roger. If I told you that everything still depends on you, what could you say?"

  He said nothing. He stared at the table-cloth.

  She continued: "You would tell me you are too taken up with your freedom, too frightened of losing it to . . . well, to make the necessary effort to get me back."

  "I tell you I just don't know," snapped Roger. "Obviously I loathe the idea of your ... Is he gifted, at least?"

  "It isn't a question of gifts of that sort," she said. "He loves me."

  She saw him relax slightly and for a moment she detested him. He was reassured: this was just an emotional fit on her part; he was still her real lover, the he-man.

  "Though obviously," she added, "I can't say he leaves me cold in certain matters."

  That's the first time, she thought bewilderedly, that I have ever deliberately hurt him.

  "I must confess," said Roger, "that when I asked you out to lunch, I didn't expect to be treated to an account of your antics with a schoolboy."

  "You expected me to imagine yours with a schoolgirl," returned Paule.

  "That's more normal, anyway," he said through his teeth.

  Paule was shaking. She picked up her handbag and got to her feet.

  "I suppose you're going to throw my age in my face?"

  "Paule . . ."

  Rising in turn, he followed her through the swing-doors. She stumbled, blind with tears. He caught up with her at her car. She was tugging fruitlessly at the starter. He reached through the window and turned on the ignition, which she had forgotten. Roger's hand . . . She turned a distraught face towards him.

  "Paule . . . you know very well . . . That was vile of me. Forgive me. You know I wasn't thinking that."

  "I know," she said. "I was spiteful too. It would be better if we didn't see each other for a time."

  He stood there, looking lost. She gave him a brief smile.

  "Au revoir, mon chéri."

  He stooped towards the window.

  "I think the world of you, Paule."

  She drove off very fast so that he should not see the tears that blurred her vision. Mechanically she turned on the windscreen-wipers, and her action wrenched a small, broken laugh from her. It was half-past one. She had plenty of time to go home, recover and fix her make-up. She at once hoped and dreaded that Simon had gone. She ran into him in the entrance hall.

  "Paule . . . what's the matter?" She did not answer. In the lift, he wrapped his arms round her, drank her tears, begged her not to cry any more and swore indistinctly to "kill the swine" (at which she had to smile). "I must be a terrible woman," she said, and she had the impression that she had read the line a thousand times, or heard it
in a hundred films.

  Later, she sank on to the divan beside Simon and took his hand.

  "Don't ask me anything," she said.

  "Not today. But one day I shall ask you everything. Very soon. I can't bear people making you cry. And most of all, I can't bear him succeeding," he shouted angrily. "What about me? Shall I never be able to make you cry ... ?"

  She looked at him: men really were savages.

  "Are you so keen to?"

  "I would rather be in pain myself," said Simon, and he buried his face in Paule's neck.

  When she got back in the evening, he had drunk three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch and had not even been out. He declared with great dignity that he'd had personal worries, launched into a speech on the difficulty of existence and fell asleep on the bed while she was taking off his shoes. She was half moved, half alarmed.

  Roger was standing at the window, watching the dawn. It was one of those residential farms in the Ile-de-France where the countryside came strangely close to the mental picture formed by the town-sick. With quiet hills, rich fields and hoardings all along the roads. But then, at that strange hour of daybreak, it was the real, remote countryside of childhood which came to haunt Roger with the oppressive, chilly smell of rain. He turned and said: "Damned fine weather for a week-end," but he was thinking: "It's wonderful. I love this mist. If only I could be alone." In the warmth of her bed, Maisy turned over.

  "Shut the window," she said. "It's cold."

  She pulled the sheet over her shoulder. Despite the languid contentment of her body, she was already appalled by the thought of the day ahead, in this isolated spot, with Roger sullen and distant and those fields stretching away for as far as the eye could see . . . She wanted to groan.

  "I asked you to shut the window," she said tartly.

  He had lit a Gauloise, the first of the day, and was savouring its almost unpleasant, yet somehow delightful bitterness, already plucked from his morning daydreams and feeling, with a kind of impatience, Maisy's hostility mounting at his back. Let her get mad, he thought! Let her jump out of bed and take the coach back to Paris! I shall spend the whole day walking through the fields; I'm sure to find a stray dog to keep me company (he had a horror of being alone).

  Yet after her second injunction Maisy hesitated. She could forget about the window and go back to sleep, or she could make a scene. In her befogged brain there fluttered such lines as: "I am a woman who is cold. He is a man who ought to shut the window." At the same time her intuition, awake bright and early that morning, warned her against provoking Roger.

  She took a moderate line.

  "You should shut the window and order breakfast, chéri."

  Roger swung round in disappointment and said at random: " 'Chéri? What does 'chéri' mean?"

  She laughed. He went on: "I didn't ask you to laugh, I merely asked you what 'chéri' means. Do you cherish me? Do you know the verb 'to cherish' other than by hearsay?"

  I really must have had enough of her, he thought, amazed at his own words; when I start worrying about a woman's vocabulary, the end is in sight.

  "What's got into you?" said Maisy.

  From the bedclothes emerged her face (horror- stricken, almost), which he found comic, and her breasts, which he no longer desired. Indecent! She was indecent!

  "Feelings are very important," he said. "For you, I'm just a passing fancy. A convenient one. So don't call me 'chéri', especially in the morning; at night, okay!"

  "But Roger," protested Maisy, understandably alarmed, "I love you."

  "Oh no! Don't say anything!—anything at all!" he shouted, with a mixture of embarrassment, for at heart he wasn't a bad fellow, and relief, for his remark reduced their situation to the classic and, to him, familiar one of a man sick to death of an inopportune affair.

  He pulled his sweater down over his trousers and went out. He wished he were wearing his jacket, but fetching it would have meant walking right round the bed, and the manœuvre would have impaired the speed essential for his exit. Outside, he inhaled the icy air and a kind of dizziness took hold of him. He had to return to Paris, and there was no Paule waiting for him. The car would skid on the wet roads, he would have coffee at the Porte d'Auteuil in dead, Sunday-morning Paris. He went back inside to pay his bill, then drove off like a burglar. Maisy would bring his jacket with her; he would send his secretary round to her flat for it, with some flowers. For I don't know how to do things, he thought without gaiety.

  For a time he drove in silence, frowning to himself; then he reached for the radio and remembered. Cherish, he thought, cherish—that was Paule and me. Life had no flavour for him. He had lost her.

  14

  A WEEK later, in the flat, the smell of tobacco caught at Paule's throat. She opened the sitting-room window, called "Simon!" and received no answer. For a moment she was afraid, and this amazed her. She walked over to the bedroom door and opened it. Simon lay there asleep, his shirt open at the neck. She called him a second time and he did not stir. She returned to the living-room, opened a cupboard, looked at the whisky bottle and replaced it with a brief grimace of distaste. She looked about her for a glass, failed to find one and went out to the kitchen. There was a wet glass on the draining-board. She stood stock-still for a second or two, then slowly took off her coat. In the bathroom, she carefully made herself up and tidied her hair. She laid the brush down hurriedly, chiding herself for her coquetry as though it were a weakness. Much point there was in trying to please Simon!

  Back in the bedroom, she shook him and switched on the bedside lamp. He stretched, murmured her name and turned back to face the wall.

  "Simon," she said curtly.

  His movement had uncovered Paule's scarf—he must have buried his face in it before falling asleep. She had chaffed him about his fetishism often enough. But she was in no mood to laugh. She felt in the grips of a cold anger. She turned him towards the light. He opened his eyes, smiled and at once stopped smiling.

  "What's up?"

  "I've got to talk to you."

  "I knew it," he said, and he sat up on the bed.

  She rose, for she'd had to restrain an impulse to brush away the strand of black hair which hung over his eyes. She leaned against the window.

  "Simon, this can't go on. This is the last time I shall tell you. You must work. It's come to the point where you drink on the sly."

  "I've just rinsed the glass. You hate untidiness."

  "I hate untidiness, lies and weakness," she burst out. "I'm beginning to hate you."

  He was off the bed. She could feel him standing behind her, looking crestfallen. She deliberately refrained from turning.

  "I knew you couldn't stand me anymore," he said. "It's a short step from quite liking someone to not liking him at all . . ."

  "It isn't a question of feelings, Simon. It's a question of your drinking, of your doing nothing, of your besotting yourself. I've told you to work. I've told you a hundred times. This is the last."

  "And then what?"

  "I shan't be able to see you anymore," she said.

  "You could leave me just like that," he said thoughtfully.

  "Yes."

  She turned to him and opened her mouth to speak.

  "Listen, Simon . . ."

  He was sitting on the bed again, staring at his hands with an odd expression. He slowly raised them and put them to his face. She was thunderstruck. He did not cry, he did not move, and it seemed to Paule that she had never seen anyone in such utter despair. She murmured his name, as though to pluck him from some danger the nature of which she could not conceive, then went up to him. He was gently rocking himself on the edge of the bed, still keeping his face hidden. She thought for a moment he was drunk, and reached out to stop him swaying. Then she tried to remove his hands; he resisted, and in the end she knelt facing him and took hold of his wrists.

  "Simon, look at me . . . Simon, stop play-acting."

  She drew his hands away and he looked at her. He had the smoo
th, perfectly impassive face of certain statues, and the same blind stare. Instinctively she put her own hand over his eyes.

  "What's wrong? Simon . . . Tell me. what's wrong . . ."

  He bent a little further forward, laid his head on her shoulder with a sigh, like someone very tired.

  "You don't love me, that's what," said Simon evenly, "and there's nothing I can do about it. And I knew right from the start you would throw me out. And I waited, bowing to the inevitable, yet hoping at times . . . That's the worst part, hoping at times, especially at night," he said more softly, and she felt herself blush. "And now today it's happened, and for a week I've felt it coming, and all the whisky in the world couldn't reassure me. And I could feel you quietly hating me. That's what is wrong." Then: "Paule", he said, "Paule . . .»

  She folded her arms about him and hugged him to her, her eyes full of tears. She heard herself soothing him: "Simon, you're crazy . . . you're only a child . . . My darling, my poor love ..." She kissed him on the forehead and on the cheeks, and for a second she thought, with cruelty to herself, that she had finally reached the maternal stage. At the same time, something inside her persisted, delighted in cradling in Simon some old shared grief.

  "You're tired," she said. "You've been so busy acting the abandoned lover that you've fooled even yourself. You mean a lot to me, Simon, more than I can say. My mind has been on my work lately, that's all."

  "Really all? You don't want me to leave?"

  "Not today," she said with a smile. "But I do want you to work."

  "I'll do whatever you want," he said. "Lie down beside me, Paule. I've been so afraid! I need you. Kiss me. Keep still. I loathe these complicated dresses . . . Paule . . ."

  Afterwards, she lay quite still. He was breathing gently beside her, exhausted, and laying her hand on the back of his neck she was invaded by a feeling of possession so painful and heart-rending that she thought she loved him.

  Next day he went to work, smoothed things over with his chief, turned up a few files, rang Paule half a dozen times, borrowed some money from his mother (she was relieved to hear from him) and returned to Paule's at half-past eight, looking weighed down with work. At the end of the day, he had killed two hours playing '421' in a bar, merely to engineer this triumphal return. Privately he reflected that his really was a very boring profession and that he was going to have a hard time filling in the idle spells.