Cloudless May (11 page)

He had not recognised her. He blushed, and came forward without breaking anything. Catherine kept an eye on the vase placed on a low bookcase, ready to rush forward. But the young man seemed to have got the better of his hands. Of everything except his habit of turning a brick-red from his collar to the roots of his fair hair.

“I'm waiting here for Madame de Freppel,” he stammered.

“My mother,” Catherine said. “Shall I find her for you?”

“No, thanks, she knows I'm here,” Lucien said brusquely.

He had not been deliberately rude, he was simply vexed with himself for blushing. But Catherine was offended. Instead of going away—though why not? she would certainly have left anyone else if he had spoken to her in such a voice—she seated herself at a desk and pretended to have an urgent and difficult letter to write. She lifted her head and frowned, seeing him still stand there uncomfortable and obstinate. Clumsy fool!

She thought of something to say. She kept her glance down, to hide from him her spiteful happiness.

“You're not at the front then?”

“No,” Lucien said.

“How did you manage to save yourself?”

There was no answer. She looked up. The young man was pale now, and he was looking at her with distaste. She rejoiced.

“I see no reason why I should explain myself to you,” he said at last, quietly. His voice was muted by the hatred she roused in him. It showed itself openly in his eyes; they were still too ingenuous to lie successfully.

“Oh, but do,” Catherine said. “It needs some explaining, and I'm sure you enjoy talking about yourself. Or would you rather break something?”

Lucien turned his back on her and walked out of the room. She heard her mother come downstairs and begin talking to him, but she could not hear what they said. She felt angry. So they leave me out of everything, she thought. She looked at her letter. She had written: “There is a young man in the room with me, he is tall, very fair, he has large hands and blue eyes, not very large but not small; I suspect him of being mulish.” She tore the sheet up, stuffing the scraps in her pocket to be burned. At school there was a nun who pieced letters together when she found them in the waste-paper baskets. Who knows—
perhaps someone here? . . . Suddenly she emptied the torn pieces on to the desk and marched out, leaving them there. The young man had gone.

From his room Georges Labenne watched his two children, a boy and a girl, cross the courtyard. The boy, Henry, was short for his twelve years, the girl tall for her fifteen. Her thin body was already rounded and graceful; this morning her father had noticed the points of her breasts under her thin frock; he called her to him and kissed her, and at the same time he felt angry, and sad. She was a beautiful creature, dark-eyed and lively, with a narrow face, and thick eyebrows it had not yet occurred to her to spoil by having them plucked. She was clever, too, and naturally elegant: her mother's fine-boned wiriness had joined with the peasant strength of Labenne to form this slender, vigorous young girl.

Labenne had decided already to marry her into an aristocratic family. He despised the old families: their neglect of the State—forced on them by opinion—and their pious devotion to the army were both in his eyes ridiculous. They're impotent, he always said, making a gesture of the rudest contempt. He despised the frivolity of their younger sons, wasting on horses, cars, actresses, the money brought into the family by a careful marriage. Yet he was preparing to marry Cécile to one of these playboys. Why? . . . Ask the butcher's little boy why, when he was jumping clumsily out of the way of the Duc de Seuilly's car, which covered him with dirt. He burst into the house, shouting, “They've done for my jacket.” “Who?” “They,” he repeated, in his stammering fury of a strong helpless child. . . . Labenne knew beforehand that his son-in-law would be useless to him in his ambitions. He was going to found a dynasty, yes—but not from the old families. Cécile, his beloved daughter, was his sacrifice to himself. They would be in his debt, these careless apes, when he had given them Cécile, her money, and her rounded waist and young breasts. Henry would carry on the
dynasty. He watched the boy move his broad shoulders in a gesture of self-assurance. Like my father, he thought, with a strong impulse of pride. He saw his father lift the half-carcass of an ox from the ground. Opening the window, he yelled furiously,

“Henry!” The boy turned. “Rut your hat on. Do you want a sun-stroke?”

The boy obeyed, showing his white teeth in a laugh. He knew the worth of his father's rage. He ran to his father, not his pretty gentle mother, when he needed comfort. Once, when he fell and cut open his head, his father sat up for three nights, holding him in his arms so that he could sleep without moving the bandages.

Labenne moved from the window. He had seen a car swerve to turn in at the main gates of the courtyard. It would be the guest he expected to lunch. He sat down and began to bore into his ear with his little finger, wiping it afterwards on a piece of blotting-paper.

He jumped up and ran with his heavy feral steps across the room and along the corridor to the landing. Looking cautiously over the stone gallery into the hall, he could see Huet standing there in his usual attitude. The deputy disliked to wait, even for a minute: he would put on an air of abstraction, as though he were sunk in profound thoughts, as though he were indifferent to time, place, and the dwarfs round him. When the usher approached him he started. Seeming to recall where he was, he drawled,

“Yes . . . er, yes. I want to see the Mayor at once. He expects me.”

Labenne hurried back to his room.

He sat idly, his thick hands folded on the desk. Ernest Huet came into the room, and advanced, as he always did, close to the wall instead of trusting himself to the open floor. He stretched out his lean arm, smiling, friendly, taking in Labenne and the empty desk in a single clouded glance.

“Well, well, my dear Georges, and how are you? You're an extraordinary fellow. You never seem to work.”

Labenne smiled slyly. It amused him with Huet to pretend that he was lazy. The deputy himself was tireless: nose down to a purpose, he worked all day and into the night, he telephoned,
he wrote letters, drafting and re-drafting them with his own hand; he lunched and dined with useful persons. The pity was, his long flexible nose led him astray. It pointed to all quarters, even backwards. His friends themselves, watching him weave and unravel like Penelope, became suspicious. So many stratagems cancelled one another out, and left him, blown and disappointed, to repair the cracks in his vanity. He was intelligent, industrious, prudent. Yet he suffered from disappointments as other men from colds in the head. Like them, he did not know why.

“I don't work,” Labenne said, still smiling. “I lie in the sun and wait for hares to run into my mouth. You'd be fatter, my dear Ernest, if you did the same. But you're a fox, you like running.”

Huet smiled absently. If he had his nose to a scent, he could swallow insults without tasting them. Either his skin thickened for the moment, or he became sublime. You can, with human beings, always take your choice of motives.

“You're peaceful here,” he murmured. He turned sideways in his armchair, draping one of his long legs over the arm, to seem at his ease.

“Is Paris having a war, then?” Labenne said.

“The proper answer to your sarcasm,” Huet said genially, “is yes and no. We are making terrible sacrifices, of course, but so far—thank God—bloodless ones.” His nose twitched to one side. “I had a telephone call last night, the moment I arrived, from the Prefecture, asking me to call as soon as I could. Perhaps you know why?. . . But before I say another word, how is Madame Prefect? Still the power in front of the throne?”

Labenne passed his tongue over his upper lip before making a schoolboy's crude joke about Marguerite. He added,

“Other men take a mistress for the fun of it. Or for their health. Our friend Bergeot takes his as—as mother's milk. He's an idiot. One of these days her habits will get him into trouble.”

“Her habits?” the deputy said lightly. “This is extraordinarily interesting.”

But Labenne never gave away even the most harmless information for pleasure. He waved his hand.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said.

Huet pretended to lose interest. His eyes became dull, as
though he had turned them lining-outwards to hide the real surface. But he did this, as Labenne knew, whether he had anything to hide or not. It signified nothing—unless that he had received another peremptory message from his nose.

“And what,” he drawled, “do you suppose our friend wants to say to me?”

“I can tell you,” Labenne said energetically. “I saw him an hour ago. He's full of plans for bringing the war home to us all. Completely fatuous.” He jumped up. “Come and have lunch.”

He led the way to the dining-room. Their places had been laid at the end of an ancient table of greyish oak. A man-servant brought in the first dish and set it in front of Labenne. It was pike, cooked lavishly in butter. Labenne served his guest, then heaped his own plate and began to cram the fish into his mouth: butter ran over his chin and fell on to his shirt; he had taken his jacket off, dropping it on the floor, where the servant moved it out of his way with his foot.

“Fill your glass,” Labenne said. “It's a Coulée de Serrant. You won't get it in Paris, no matter what you pay. It's magnificent, eh? Puts a man on his horse and a woman on her back—and as soft as young grass. Yes, it makes a poet of me.”

“It's excellent,” Huet said. He was completely indifferent to food or wine. He never ate if he was alone. Meals offered him the excuse he sometimes needed for a conversation. Seeing him come out of Larue's, no one supposed that his air of repletion had anything to do with food.

The servant took away the remnants of the pike and brought in as large a dish of fried chicken. Labenne ate it as his father would have eaten, taking the joints in his hands to tear them apart, and gnawing the edges of the bones with his black strong teeth. He sent his children to the dentist if their teeth showed the least sign of losing their lustre, but since he was born he had never cleaned his own, except, like an animal, on his food.

The deputy watched him, fascinated: he envied this peasant his absence of false shame. If only I could tear at my food, he thought pensively, I might now be Prime Minister. He had tried every other means: aided millionaires to avoid income tax; made friends in every walk of life, from provincial journalists to councillors of the Bank of France; tied knots between himself
and every sort of political and financial group. With the unexpected result that at any moment one of them mistrusted him, and undid the efforts on his behalf of all the others. Discouragement overcame him as he watched Labenne swallow two at a time the big glossy strawberries, fill his gullet with wine, and use his nails to work out seeds wedged between his teeth. I lack showmanship, he thought. He felt his ambitions trembling in him, under cover of his sparse flesh. He made an effort to sit upright. I can make use of this coarse fellow, he thought; he can't get anywhere in Paris without me: and I suppose he wants to go to Paris; they all do.

“You're not going to go short of food here,” he said in a plaintive voice.

Labenne snapped his fingers. Nothing was wasted in his household. He knew to a mouthful what was left on the pike's backbone and the legs of the chicken. If it was not accounted for at supper he would raise Cain. Mistrusting his wife, he did the ordering and paid the bills himself. Everything he had learned in his childhood, seeing his mother count the spoonfuls of coffee and the blades of chives, he remembered and applied: an instinct led him straight to the one drawer among a hundred in the vast kitchen where a servant had hidden a handkerchief of his wife's; his thick fingers picked it out from the heap of rags without fumbling and held it under the nose of the thief. He never made a mistake. No more than in his investments. Since he placed his first five pounds he had never lost a penny: he saw a failure coming and withdrew his funds months before the firm itself became uneasy. When he was a child he had kept his toys, never more than one or two, under his pillow at night where he could guard them. He never slept now without calling up the list of his investments, sure that any mistake, any danger threatening one of them, would show itself in the darkness. His broker was resigned to telephone calls in the small hours, so that Labenne could sleep placidly. He slept like a child, with his hand under the pillow.

“Food?” he said. “We have enough to eat, plenty to drink.” He pushed his lips forward. “Do you know, Ernest, the only thing I want is to be safe. I'm not, like you, ambitious, nor I don't want any Madame de Freppels in my bed. Security. That's all I ask.”

The deputy nodded. He did not believe the other man for an instant. It was not only that he could not imagine a life not tortured by ambition. But to be near Labenne was like putting your hand on the soil of Anjou in summer and scorching it on that hidden energy.

“You're a wise man,” he said, sighing. “I admit I'm ambitious. But why not? I know I'm more fit to be in office than anyone in the present Government. . . yes, I include Reynaud! But I've never done better than Under-Secretary for Mines. And it lasted three months—just long enough for a frightful pit disaster, followed by a strike when the troops had to be called out and fired on the strikers. My successor, like the man before me, stayed in office for two years without an incident of any sort.”

The sprightliness of his voice pointed to the anguish he felt in his failures. Labenne watched him with an air of sympathy . . . it was almost genuine. But he did not feel moved to tell Huet the truth—that he was too much of an egotist even for politics. All his stratagems—obvious, even when he was most secretive, from the dinner-parties and telephone calls he threw up on all sides—would have been forgiven if he at least pretended they were for a cause. But since they, every one, had to do with getting him into office, they roused malice even in his friends. This was so inevitable that the day he rescued a little girl from the Seine, almost drowning himself, the newspapers reported that he had saved the daughter of the President: no one believed the truth, that she was a little errand-girl, without a vote in her family. . . . What was the use of warning Huet? He never listened to advice. He gave it.