The man rose, grasping his umbrella like a riding-whip. ‘Infernal young scoundrels,’ he exclaimed, and the phrase sounded more Edwardian because of the faint American intonation – Henry James might surely have employed it.
‘The poor bird,’ the woman said. The bird struggled upon the gravel, scattering little stones. One wing hung slack and a leg must have been broken too, for the pigeon swivelled round in circles unable to rise. The other pigeons moved away, with disinterest, searching the gravel for crumbs.
‘If you would look away for just a minute,’ the man said. He laid his umbrella down again and walked rapidly to the bird where it thrashed around; then he picked it up, and quickly and expertly he wrung its neck – it was a kind of skill anyone of breeding ought to possess. He looked round for a refuse bin in which he tidily deposited the body.
‘There was nothing else to do,’ he remarked apologetically when he returned.
‘I could not myself have done it,’ the woman said, carefully grammatical in a foreign tongue.
‘Taking life is our privilege,’ he replied with irony rather than pride.
When he sat down the distance between them had narrowed; they were able to speak freely about the weather and the first real day of summer. The last week had been unseasonably cold, and even today. . . . He admired the way in which she spoke English and apologized for his own lack of French, but she reassured him: it was no ingrained talent. She had been ‘finished’ at an English school at Margate.
‘That’s a seaside resort, isn’t it?’
‘The sea always seemed very grey,’ she told him, and for a while they lapsed into separate silences. Then perhaps thinking of the dead pigeon she asked him if he had been in the army. ‘No, I was nearly forty when the war came,’ he said. ‘I served on a government mission, in India. I became very fond of India.’ He began to describe to her Agra, Lucknow, the old city of Delhi, his eyes alight with memories. The new Delhi he did not like, built by a Britisher – Lut-Lut-Lut? No matter. It reminded him of Washington.
‘Then you do not like Washington?’
‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I am not very happy in my own country. You see, I like old things. I found myself more at home – can you believe it? – in India, even with the British. And now in France I find it’s the same. My grandfather was British Consul in Nice.’
‘The Promenade des Anglais was very new then,’ she said.
‘Yes, but it aged. What we Americans build never ages beautifully. The Chrysler Building, Hilton hotels . . .’
‘Are you married? she asked. He hesitated a moment before replying, ‘Yes,’ as though he wished to be quite quite accurate. He put out his hand and felt for his umbrella – it gave him confidence in this surprising situation of talking so openly to a stranger.
‘I ought not to have asked you,’ she said, still careful with her grammar.
‘Why not?’ He excused her awkwardly.
‘I was interested in what you said.’ She gave him a little smile. ‘The question came. It was imprévu.’
‘Are you married?’ he asked, but only to put her at her ease, for he could see her ring.
‘Yes.’
By this time they seemed to know a great deal about each other, and he felt it was churlish not to surrender his identity. He said, ‘My name is Greaves. Henry C. Greaves.’
‘Mine is Marie-Claire. Marie-Claire Duval.’
‘What a lovely afternoon it has been,’ the man called Greaves said.
‘But it gets a little cold when the sun sinks.’ They escaped from each other again with regret.
‘A beautiful umbrella you have,’ she said, and it was quite true – the gold band was distinguished, and even from a few feet away one could see there was a monogram engraved there – an H certainly, entwined perhaps with a B or a P.
‘A present,’ he said without pleasure.
‘I admired so much the way you acted with the pigeon. As for me I am lâche.’
‘That I am quite sure is not true,’ he said kindly.
‘Oh, it is. It is.’
‘Only in the sense that we are all cowards about something.’
‘You are not,’ she said, remembering the pigeon with gratitude.
‘Oh yes, I am,’ he replied, ‘in one whole area of life.’ He seemed on the brink of a personal revelation, and she clung to his coat-tail to pull him back; she literally clung to it, for lifting the edge of his jacket she exclaimed, ‘You have been touching some wet paint.’ The ruse succeeded; he became solicitous about her dress, but examining the bench they both agreed the source was not there. ‘They have been painting on my staircase,’ he said.
‘You have a house here?’
‘No, an apartment on the fourth floor.’
‘With an ascenseur?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s a very old house in the dix-septième.’
The door of his unknown life had opened a crack, and she wanted to give something of her own life in return, but not too much. A bring would give her vertigo. She said, ‘My apartment is only too depressingly new. In the huitième. The door opens electrically without being touched. Like in an airport.’
A strong current of revelation carried them along. He learned how she always bought her cheeses in the Place de la Madeleine – it was quite an expedition from her side of the huitième, near the Avenue George V, and once she had been rewarded by finding Tante Yvonne, the General’s wife, at her elbow choosing a Brie. He on the other hand bought his cheeses in the Rue de Tocqueville, only round the corner from his apartment.
‘You yourself?’
‘Yes, I do the marketing,’ he said in a voice suddenly abrupt.
She said, ‘It’s a little cold now. I think we should go.’
‘Do you come to the Parc often?’
‘It’s the first time.’
‘What a strange coincidence,’ he said. ‘It’s the first time for me too. Even though I live close by.’
‘And I live quite far away.’
They looked at one another with a certain awe, aware of the mysteries of providence. He said, ‘I don’t suppose you would be free to have a little dinner with me.’
Excitement made her lapse into French. ‘Je suis libre, mais vous . . . votre femme . . . ?’
‘She is dining elsewhere,’ he said. ‘And your husband?’
‘He will not be back before eleven.’
He suggested the Brasserie Lorraine, which was only a few minutes’ walk away, and she was glad that he had not chosen something more chic or more flamboyant. The heavy bourgeois atmosphere of the brasserie gave her confidence, and, though she had small appetite herself, she was glad to watch the comfortable military progress down the ranks of the sauerkraut trolley. The menu too was long enough to give them time to readjust to the startling intimacy of dining together. When the order had been given, they both began to speak at once. ‘I never expected . . .’
‘It’s funny the way things happen,’ he added, laying unintentionally a heavy inscribed monument over that conversation.
‘Tell me about your grandfather, the consul.’
‘I never knew him,’ he said. It was much more difficult to talk on a restaurant sofa than on a park bench.
‘Why did your father go to America?’
‘The spirit of adventure perhaps,’ he said. ‘And I suppose it was the spirit of adventure which brought me back to live in Europe. America didn’t mean Coca-Cola and Time-Life when my father was young.’
‘And have you found adventure? How stupid of me to ask. Of course you married here?’
‘I brought my wife with me,’ he said. ‘Poor Patience.’
‘Poor?’
‘She is fond of Coca-Cola.’
‘You can get it here,’ she said, this time with intentional stupidity.
‘Yes.’
The wine-waiter came and he ordered a Sancerre. ‘If that will suit you?’
‘I know so little about wine,’
she said.
‘I thought all French people . . .’
‘We leave it to our husbands,’ she said, and in his turn he felt an obscure hurt. The sofa was shared by a husband now as well as a wife, and for a while the sole meunière gave them an excuse not to talk. And yet silence was not a genuine escape. In the silence the two ghosts would have become more firmly planted, if the woman had not found the courage to speak.
‘Have you any children?’ she asked.
‘No. Have you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sorry?’
She said, ‘I suppose one is always sorry to have missed something.’
‘I’m glad at least I did not miss the Parc Monceau today.’
‘Yes, I am glad too.’
The silence after that was a comfortable silence: the two ghosts went away and left them alone. Once their fingers touched over the sugar-castor (they had chosen strawberries). Neither of them had any desire for further questions; they seemed to know each other more completely than they knew anyone else. It was like a happy marriage; the stage of discovery was over – they had passed the test of jealousy, and now they were tranquil in their middle age. Time and death remained the only enemies, and coffee was like the warning of old age. After that it was necessary to hold sadness at bay with a brandy, though not successfully. It was as though they had experienced a lifetime, which as with butterflies was measured in hours.
He remarked of the passing head waiter, ‘He looks like an undertaker.’
‘Yes,’ she said. So he paid the bill and they went outside. It was a death-agony they were too gentle to resist for long. He asked, ‘Can I see you home?’
‘I would rather not. Really not. You live so close.’
‘We could have another drink on the terrasse?’ he suggested with half a sad heart.
‘It would do nothing more for us,’ she said. ‘The evening was perfect. Tu es vraiment gentil.’ She noticed too late that she had used ‘tu’ and she hoped his French was bad enough for him not to have noticed. They did not exchange addresses or telephone numbers, for neither of them dared to suggest it: the hour had come too late in both their lives. He found her a taxi and she drove away towards the great illuminated Arc, and he walked home by the Rue Jouffroy, slowly. What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.
Marie-Claire walked through the self-opening doors and thought, as she always did, of airports and escapes. On the sixth floor she let herself into the flat. An abstract painting in cruel tones of scarlet and yellow faced the door and treated her like a stranger.
She went straight to her room, as softly as possible, locked the door and sat down on her single bed. Through the wall she could hear her husband’s voice and laugh. She wondered who was with him tonight – Toni or François. François had painted the abstract picture, and Toni, who danced in ballet, always claimed, especially before strangers, to have modelled for the little stone phallus with painted eyes that had a place of honour in the living-room. She began to undress. While the voice next door spun its web, images of the bench in the Parc Monceau returned and of the sauerkraut trolley in the Brasserie Lorraine. If he had heard her come in, her husband would soon proceed to action: it excited him to know that she was a witness. The voice said, ‘Pierre, Pierre,’ reproachfully. Pierre was a new name to her. She spread her fingers on the dressing-table to take off her rings and she thought of the sugar-castor for the strawberries, but at the sound of the little yelps and giggles from next door the sugar-castor turned into the phallus with painted eyes. She lay down and screwed beads of wax into her ears, and she shut her eyes and thought how different things might have been if fifteen years ago she had sat on a bench in the Parc Monceau, watching a man with pity killing a pigeon.
‘I can smell a woman on you,’ Patience Greaves said with pleasure, sitting up against two pillows. The top pillow was punctured with brown cigarette burns.
‘Oh no, you can’t. It’s your imagination, dear.’
‘You said you would be home by ten.’
‘It’s only twenty past now.’
‘You’ve been up in the Rue de Douai, haven’t you, in one of those bars, looking for a fille.’
‘I sat in the Parc Monceau and then I had dinner at the Brasserie Lorraine. Can I give you your drops?’
‘You want me to sleep so that I won’t expect anything. That’s it, isn’t it, you’re too old now to do it twice.’
He mixed the drops from the carafe of water on the table between the twin beds. Anything he might say would be wrong when Patience was in a mood like this. Poor Patience, he thought, holding out the drops towards the face crowned with tight red curls, how she misses America – she will never believe that the Coca-Cola tastes the same here. Luckily this would not be one of their worst nights, for she drank from the glass without further argument, while he sat beside her and remembered the street outside the brasserie and how, by accident he was sure, he had been called ‘tu’.
‘What are you thinking?’ Patience asked. ‘Are you still in the Rue de Douai?’
‘I was only thinking that things might have been different,’ he said.
It was the biggest protest he had ever allowed himself to make against the condition of life.
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Epub ISBN: 9781409040422
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Copyright © Graham Greene 1967
First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head Ltd 1967
First published in paperback by Penguin Books 1970
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Graham Greene, May We Borrow Your Husband & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life
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