The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (3 page)

They crossed the dining-room, describing a circle round the table to reach the
children’s bedroom on the right.

Here the furniture consisted of two diminutive beds, a chest of drawers, three chairs and
a mantelpiece. A door between the beds gave access to the kitchen-dressing-room, which
boasted a second entrance, from the hall.

It was a bedroom to startle an unaccustomed eye. But for the beds, it would have seemed a
lumber room. The floor was strewn with empty boxes, with towels and various articles of
underwear; apart from these, one threadbare rug adorned it. A plaster bust, its features
emphasized by inked-in eyes and a mustache, occupied a central position on the
mantelpiece. Every available inch of wall space was stuck with thumbtacks impaling
sheets of newspapers, pages torn out of magazines, programs, photographs of film stars,
murderers, boxers.

Elisabeth led the way, swearing, forcing a path between the boxes by means of violent
kicks delivered left and right. At length they stretched him on his bed, among a tumbled
heap of books. Then Gérard told his tale.

“It’s the limit!” burst out Elisabeth. “Here am I, tied hand
and foot to my poor sick mother, while you go snowballing. A precious pair, I must say.
My poor sick mother!” she said again, agreeably struck by the phrase and by the
sense of dignity it gave her. “I tend my poor mother on her bed of sickness while
you disport yourself with snowballs. I bet it was you as usual who made Paul do it, you
idiot!”

Gérard held his tongue. He was familiar with the impassioned rhetoric coupled with
schoolboy slang the pair affected, as well as with their perpetual state of nervous
tension. But he remained abashed and could not help being a little upset by it.

“Who’ll have to nurse Paul,” she went on, “you or me? What
are you standing there for, gaping at me?”

“Libbie darling….”

“I’m not Libbie, and I’m not your darling. Kindly keep a civil
tongue in your head. Besides….”

A far-away voice broke in on them.

“Gérard, old fellow,” Paul muttered. “Don’t take any
notice of the bitch. It’s too boring.”

Elisabeth was stung.

“Oh, I’m at bitch, am I? All right, you dirty dogs, I’m through. You
can damn well fend for yourself. It’s the end. Fancy me bothering about a feeble
ass who can’t stand up to a harmless little snowball! Look,
Gérard,” she went on without a break, “watch.” She executed
a sudden violent high kick that flung her tight leg higher than her head.
“I’ve been practicing that for weeks.” She repeated the
performance. “And now, be off! Get a move on.”

She pointed to the door.

On the threshold Gérard hesitated.

“Perhaps…” he stammered. “Oughtn’t we to get a
doctor….”

She swung a leg up.

“A doctor? I was so hoping to have the benefit of your advice. What it is to be
brainy! Perhaps I might humbly beg to mention the doctor’s coming to see Mummy at
seven o’clock and I thought of getting him to look at Paul. Go on now,
skedaddle!” Then, as Gérard still hovered uncertainly, she added:
“Or are you a medical man, by any chance? Oh, you’re not? Then leave this
house.
Will
you be off?”

She stamped her foot, her eye flashed, steely. Beating a hasty retreat backwards through
the dark dining-room, he knocked a chair over.

“Idiot! Idiot!” she repeated. “Don’t pick it up; you’d
only knock another over. Make haste, for heaven’s sake! And mind you don’t
bang the door.”

On the landing, Gérard remembered that the cab was still waiting and that he had
not a penny in his pockets. He dared not ring again. She would take no notice; or if she
did, she would be expecting to see the doctor and flay him, Gérard, with her
tongue.

He lived with his guardian, whose nephew he was, in the rue Lafitte. He decided to take
the cab on home, then explain the situation to his uncle, and persuade him to settle the
whole bill.

He sank into Paul’s corner of the cab; deliberately he let his head loll back,
surrendered, as Paul’s had been, to the jolting springs. He made no attempt to
play the Game; he was feeling wretched. His fabulous journey was over; he was back now
in the discomfiting climate of Elisabeth and Paul. She had shattered his dream of Paul
in his pure weakness, stabbed him awake with reminders of his selfish whims. Paul in his
relationship to Dargelos, Paul victim, overthrown, was not that Paul to whom he,
Gérard, was in thrall.

There had been something of perversion, almost of necrophily, in the delicious pleasures
of that journey with the unconscious youth; not that he envisaged it in such crude
psychopathic terms. All the same he realized that Paul’s swoon, the falling snow,
had contributed to an illusion. Paul had been absent, dead. Only the ruddy glow cast by
the flying fire engines had given him a counterfeit life. He understood
Elisabeth—knew, of course, that her affection for him was simply an extension of
her worship of her brother. Oh yes, he was their friend, had witnessed their transports
of immoderate love, the stormy glances they exchanged, the clash of their conflicting
fantasies and their malicious tongues. He lay back soberly in the cab and let his head
roll to and fro and felt the draft cold on the back of his neck and set about reducing
his world to commonsense proportions. But a rational approach had its disadvantages as
well as its rewards. If on the one hand it enabled him to discern a tender heart beneath
her outward harshness, on the other it forced him to recognize Paul’s seizure for
what it was—a real, grownup fainting-fit, suggesting dire possibilities.

The cab stopped at his front door. Placating the grumbling driver as best he could, he
rushed upstairs to find his uncle, who gave his case kindly and prompt attention.

Downstairs again. The road stretched blank as far as the eye could see, empty of everything
but snow. Presumably the driver had thrown his hand in, picked up another fare willing
to settle the amount already on the meter, and driven off. Gérard pocketed his
uncle’s money. He thought: “I’ll keep it and say nothing.
I’ll use it to buy Elisabeth a present. Then I shall have an excuse to go round
and see her and get more news.”

Meanwhile, in the rue Montmartre, after the rout of Gérard, Elisabeth was with her
mother. The sick woman lay with her eyes shut in a bedroom opening into a shabby
drawing-room on the left side of the apartment. Four months ago this woman had been
young and vigorous. Then, without warning, paralysis had struck her down; and now she
looked like an old woman. She was thirty-five years old and longed for death.

She had been bewitched, despoiled, and finally deserted by her husband. For three years
he had gone on treating his family to occasional brief visits, during the course of
which—having meanwhile developed cirrhosis of the liver—he would brandish
revolvers, threaten suicide and order them to nurse the master of the house; for the
mistress with whom he lived refused this office and kicked him out whenever his attacks
occurred. His custom was to go back to her as soon as he felt better. He turned up one
day at home, raged, stamped, took to his bed, found himself unable to get up again, and
died; thereby bestowing his end upon the wife he had repudiated.

An impulse of revolt now turned this woman into a mother who neglected her children, took
to night clubs, got herself up like a tart, sacked her maid once a week, begged,
borrowed indiscriminately.

Elisabeth and Paul had inherited her pallor and her cast of countenance. Their heritage
of instability, extravagant caprice and natural elegance was their paternal portion.

Now, as she lay there, she was thinking to herself: “Why go on living?” The
doctor was an old friend; he would keep an eye on the children, see that they did not
come to grief. She had become a hopeless liability, a millstone round her
daughter’s neck, a burden to them all.

“Are you asleep, Mummy?”

“No. Just dozing.”

“Paul’s strained himself. I’ve put him to bed. I’ll ask the
doctor to look at him.”

“Is he in pain?”

“He says it hurts when he walks. He sends his love. He’s got his
newspapers; he’s doing some cutting out.”

The sick woman sighed, reluctant to pursue the matter. She had developed the egotism born
of suffering, as well as a settled habit of dependence on her daughter.

“What about a maid?”

“I can manage.”

Elisabeth went back to her own quarters. She found Paul lying with his face to the wall.
Stooping over him she said:

“Are you asleep?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Very polite, I’m sure. Charming manners. I suppose you’ve
gone
away
.” (To “go away” was a private term in the Game, i.e.,
they said: I’m going to go away; I’m going away; I’ve gone away. To
disturb a player once this third stage had been accomplished was considered
unforgivable.)

“Here am I toiling and slaving while you
go away.
You’re a heel;
you’re a disgusting heel. Here, hold your foot up; let me take off your shoes.
Your feet are frozen. Wait, I’ll get you a hot water bottle.”

She put his muddy shoes on the mantelpiece beside the bust and vanished into the kitchen.
Presently she could be heard lighting the gas. Then she came back and set about
undressing Paul. He let out a grunt but made no further protest, silently complying at
intervals with such requests as: “Lift your head”; “Lift your
leg”; “Will you kindly stop shamming dead? I’ll never get this
sleeve off.”

As she took off his clothes, she emptied his pockets of their miscellaneous contents:
item, an ink-stained handkerchief; item, some bait; item, a few lozenges stuck together
with fluff. All these she threw on the floor; the rest of the hoard, consisting of a
miniature hand in ivory, a marble, the cap of a fountain-pen, she deposited in one of
the drawers of the wardrobe.

Here was the treasure, a treasure impossible to describe because the miscellaneous
objects in the drawer had been so far stripped of their original function, so charged
with symbolism, that what remained looked merely like old junk—empty aspirin
bottles, metal rings, keys, curling-pins; all worthless rubbish, save to the eye of the
initiate.

She filled the bottle, slipped it between the sheets, pulled off his day shirt, skinned
him like a rabbit, swore, put on his night shirt; disarmed, as usual, melted almost to
tears, by the grace and beauty of his body. She settled him down, tucked him in, then
said with a little gesture of dismissal: “Go to sleep, silly.” After
which, summoning a look of maniac concentration, she started to practice a few
exercises.

She was startled by the faint ringing of the front door bell; it had been stuffed with a
cloth to muffle it, and was barely audible. The doctor had come. She flew to meet him,
clutching his overcoat to drag him towards Paul’s bedside while she poured out
explanations.

“Go and get the thermometer and then run along, there’s a good girl. You
can wait in the drawing-room. I’m going to sound his chest and I always dislike
an audience.”

Elisabeth crossed the dining-room and went into the drawing-room. Here too the snow had
been about its magic work. The room hung in mid-air, miraculously suspended, changed,
unfamiliar to the child who stood there, stock still, staring, behind one of the
armchairs. The lamplit brightness of the opposite pavement had printed on the ceiling
several windows made of squares of shadow and half-shadow curtained with arabesques of
light; upon this groundwork the silhouetted forms of passers-by circled diminished as in
a moving fresco.

The mirror, which had begun to come alive, revealing within its depths a spectral figure,
motionless, poised midway between floor and cornice, added a further touch of travesty
to this aerial dwelling, swept darkly ever and again by the broad headlight of a passing
car.

She tried to play the Game but found she could not. Her heart, aware, like
Gérard’s, that their private legend would not assimilate the snowball and
its consequences, was beating an alarm. Such events belonged to the stark world of fear
and doctors, a world of people who run temperatures and catch their deaths. In a flash
she saw it all: her mother paralyzed, her brother dying, no help in the house, no love,
the cupboard bare, cold scraps, dry biscuits nibbled at odd hours, then nothing—a
bowl of broth perhaps, left by a neighbor.

Within the framework of their legend, the consumption, in bed, of quantities of barley
sugar had become
de rigueur
—a fortifying accompaniment to their
ceremonial sessions of quarreling over books. They read the same books over and over
again, snatching them acrimoniously from one another, devouring them with gluttonous
indiscretion, aiming to reach satiety, revulsion, and so begin the Game; for this
initial stage was integrally designed like every other—beginning with the ritual
preparation of the beds, the smoothing, the brushing out of crumbs—to serve the
Game’s one end and give it wings for flight.

She had
gone
well away at last when she heard her name called.
“Lise!”

It was the doctor, shocking her back into the world of grief. She opened the door.

“Come now,” he said, “no need to make such heavy weather of it.
He’s not dangerously ill. It’s serious, mind—but not dangerous. The
slightest blow on a weak chest like his…. No more school—that’s out
of the question. Rest, rest, and again
rest
. You were quite right to tell your
mother it was just a strain—we don’t want her worried. You’re a
sensible girl; I can rely on you. I’d like a word with your maid.”

“There isn’t a maid any more.”

“Capital. I shall be sending a couple of nurses in tomorrow. They’ll take
turns running the house and doing the shopping. You’ll be in charge, of
course.”

She did not thank him. She was accustomed to miracles and accepted them as part of daily
life. She expected them to happen, and they always did.