She Who Was No More (4 page)

‘You seem pretty jumpy to me. And your breath smells of drink.’

‘I had to. I had to be seen by plenty of people—you said so yourself.’

He started up the car and they went along the Quai de la Fosse. It was the rush hour. Dozens of little white lights zigzagged about, crossing each other and recrossing. Cyclists. Ravinel had to keep a sharp lookout. If he knew next to nothing about the inside of a car, that didn’t alter the fact that he was an excellent driver. For a while he had to drive very cautiously, but after the transporter bridge the traffic thinned out and it was quite easy going.

‘Give me the keys,’ said Lucienne.

He backed the car into the garage and she shut the door. He would have liked a stiff brandy.

‘The canvas,’ said Lucienne.

She went up two steps and in through the door between the garage and the house. Ravinel pulled the canvas sheet out, then rolled it up. Suddenly he heard the sound he dreaded. A gurgling sound—the bathwater being run away. The waste pipe passed through the garage.

Driving along beside rivers, he had more than once seen a body fished out. An ugly sight, a drowned person. Black and swollen. A prod with a boathook goes right into the flesh.

The gurgling went on. He in turn entered the house. In the doorway of the bedroom, he stopped. The bathroom door was open and through it he could see Lucienne bending
over. A final gurgle in the waste pipe. What was she looking at? She seemed to be examining something. The canvas fell on the floor. It had slipped from under his arm. Or perhaps he had simply dropped it. He really didn’t know. He turned on his heel and went into the dining room. The bottle of wine was still standing there beside the carafe. He drank direct from the bottle. Gulp after gulp, until he was out of breath.

That was better! Now for it! He’d have to face it sooner or later. He retraced his steps and picked up the canvas sheet.

‘Spread it out flat.’

‘What?’

‘The canvas, of course.’

Her face was hard, implacably hard. He had never seen it like that before. Going into the bathroom he spread the green canvas out on the floor, which was not big enough for it.

‘Well?’ he whispered.

Lucienne had taken off her coat and rolled up her sleeves.

‘What can you expect? After forty-eight hours…’

The strange power of words! Ravinel suddenly felt cold. He felt cold for Mireille. But he felt he had to see, and he glanced into the bath.

A wet skirt clinging to the legs. The arms bent, the hands pressed to the neck…

He drew back sharply uttering a cry. He had caught a glimpse of Mireille’s face, her hair, darkened by the water, plastered across her forehead and her eyes, looking like seaweed. He had seen her teeth, her gaping mouth.

‘Help me,’ said Lucienne.

He leaned over the washbasin, feeling sick.

‘Wait—a moment…’

It was ghastly. Though he had to admit that it was less so than he imagined. The bodies he had seen fished out of the water had been much worse. They must have been immersed much longer, a week perhaps.

He straightened himself, removed his overcoat, then his jacket.

‘You take the legs.’

It was Lucienne who gave the orders. It was difficult to lift, bending down over the tub. Mireille’s legs were stiff and icy cold. Water splashed down noisily as the body was dragged over the edge of the bath and lowered onto the canvas sheet. Lucienne promptly covered it, rolled it up. It was rather like doing up a parcel. Soon there was nothing visible but a cylinder of green canvas from which oozed a little water. The two ends were twisted to give them something to hold on to, and like that they carried the body down to the garage.

‘You ought to have left the car door open,’ said Lucienne.

They managed to haul the bundle in and stow it diagonally in the back of the car, from which the rear seat had been removed. For that matter it always was, to make room for all the gear he had to carry round.

‘It would have been better to have tied her up with string.’

Like a parcel!

He regretted the remark at once. The words were those of a traveling salesman, not a husband.

‘It’s all right as it is, and we haven’t any time to waste.’

Ravinel got out of the car and straightened himself. There! Another hurdle had been taken. It hadn’t used up all his nervous energy, which expended itself in tics and jerks. He rubbed
his head, blew his nose, scratched himself and clenched and unclenched his fists.

‘Wait here for me. I’m going back to tidy up.’

‘Not on your life!’

Nothing would have induced him to wait all by himself in that dimly lit garage. So they went back into the house together. Lucienne cleared the dining-room table, emptied the carafe, and rinsed it thoroughly. She mopped up the water on the bathroom floor. Then she put her things on. Meanwhile he had tidied up the bed and put back the counterpane, after which, finding nothing else to do, he had brushed his jacket. At last, when all was in order, they had a final look round, Ravinel in his overcoat, hat in hand, Lucienne carrying Mireille’s bag, coat and hat. Satisfied, she turned toward him.

‘Well?… Pleased?… Give me a kiss then.’

Heavens, no! Not there! Really that was a heartless thing to suggest. There were moments like that when he couldn’t make her out at all, she seemed so utterly inhuman. He pushed her out into the hall, shut and locked the door. Then back to the garage. Before getting into the car he glanced at each of the tires. He drove out, then came back to shut the garage door. A moment’s panic seized him at the thought that any casual passer-by might look into the car.

A minute later they were driving towards the station, choosing the less well-lit streets. In the Rue du Général Buat they jolted over the cobblestones.

‘No need to drive so fast,’ commented Lucienne.

But Ravinel was in a tearing hurry to leave the town and get out into the dark countryside. Gas pumps, red, white, flashed by, workmen’s cottages, the walls of a factory. At the far end of
an avenue the barriers of a grade crossing were lowered, their reflectors scintillating. It was now that fear surged up within him. He stopped behind a truck and switched off his lights.

‘Keep your lights on, silly!’

Was she made of wood, this woman? The train passed. A freight train. Cars full of ballast, drawn by an old locomotive from whose cab a segment of light glared up into the sky. The truck moved forward. The way was clear. Ravinel would have said a prayer if he had been able to remember one.

Ravinel was used to driving at night. He preferred it, for he liked being alone and liked it all the more when tearing through the darkness at top speed. At night there was no need to slow down even at a village. The headlights lit up the road fantastically, making it seem like a canal stirred by a slight swell. Sometimes he could almost imagine he was in a speedboat. Then suddenly it would be like shooting down the slope of a switchback: the white posts bordering the road at the turnings would sweep giddily past, their reflectors glittering like precious stones. It was as if you yourself were conjuring up with a touch of your magic wand this unearthly fairy world, round which was a dim, shadowy void with no horizon. You dream. You leave your earthly flesh behind, to become an astral body gliding through a sleeping universe. Fields, streets, churches, stations. Created on the moment out of nothing and then swept away into nothingness again. A touch of the accelerator is sufficient to destroy them. Perhaps they have never really existed. Mere figments, created by you and lasting no longer than your whim, except, now and again, for an image that stamps itself on your retina like a dead leaf caught on your radiator—yet even that is no more real than the rest.

Yes. Ravinel loved the night. They had already passed Angers, which was now no more than a cluster of lights behind them. The roads were deserted. Lucienne sat silent beside him, her
hands tucked into her sleeves, her chin buried in her turned-up collar.

As a matter of fact, Ravinel had not driven particularly fast since leaving Nantes. He took the bends gently, as though taking pity on the inert body behind, which might be thrown from side to side. Indeed, he probably wasn’t averaging much more than fifty kilometers an hour. At that rate they would still reach Enghien before dawn, as arranged. That is, if all went well. The engine had stalled once as they passed through Angers. Perhaps he ought to have had the carburetor cleaned. Silly not to have thought of it. A breakdown during this drive would be no joke. About as little as an engine failure in a flight across the Atlantic! Ravinel listened to the engine. It sounded all right, but he’d better keep it under observation.

He shut his eyes for a second. There are thoughts which bring bad luck. The airplane flying the Atlantic—he’d no business to think of a thing like that… A red light. He was overtaking a huge truck that spat out a thick cloud of fumes. The driver didn’t leave him much room to pass, but Ravinel took a chance and accelerated. When he drew out in front of the truck, he suddenly realized he was right in the glare of the other’s headlights. From his cab, the driver might be able to see into the car. Ravinel put his foot down hard, but the car didn’t leap forward as it should have done. A bit of dirt in the feed line? It certainly seemed like it.

Lucienne was quite unconscious of it all. She was dozing. In any case she never did react to the things that worried him. Strange how little feminine she was. Even when they made love… How had she ever become his mistress? Which of them had really chosen the other? At first she had taken no notice
of him, behaved almost as if he wasn’t there. She had seemed only interested in Mireille and she had treated her more like a friend than a patient. They were the same age, those two.

Had she sensed that their marriage stood on shaky foundations? Had she suddenly fallen for him? What had she found in him? He knew he wasn’t much to look at. Nor was he amusing. As a lover, he was no more than mediocre.

On his side, he would never have dared touch her. She belonged to another world, refined, distinguished, cultured, the world which his father, the little black-coated provincial schoolmaster, had eyed from afar, with the respect of the poor. At first Ravinel had thought it no more than a woman’s caprice. A strange caprice. Brief, hasty intercourse, sometimes on a consultation room couch, within a yard of an enameled trolley on which stainless-steel instruments were laid out under a sheet of gauze. Sometimes she would take his blood pressure afterwards, as she was anxious about his heart. Anxious? No. Even that wasn’t certain by any means. For if at times she treated him as though she really minded, at others she dismissed his complaints quite casually, just brushing them aside with a smile. That was what was so maddening. She had him completely foxed. The most probable thing was…

The most probable thing was that she’d had her eyes wide open right from the start. She had needed an accomplice, or rather a tool, perhaps, and had cast her net the moment she saw him. Love… That didn’t count. At least not what people ordinarily mean by the word. What had brought them together was not mutual attraction, but something residing in the deeper and darker recesses of the spirit. Was money the one thing that really mattered to her? No, it wasn’t money, not for its own sake,
at all events. It was the power that went with it, the prestige, the right to command. She had to reign: it was an imperious necessity. And of course he had come under her sway at once.

But that wasn’t all. There was also in Lucienne a sort of anxiety. Something so slight, so fugitive, that you could never put your finger on it. All the same, you knew it was there. The sense of insecurity that belongs to people who aren’t quite normal. Perhaps that’s what had drawn them together, for he wasn’t quite normal either, not normal in the sense others were—Larmingeat for instance. He lived like other men, he rubbed shoulders with other men, he even passed for a first-class traveler, but that was only an illusion…

He was going up a steep hill, and the engine wouldn’t pull. No life in it at all. Certainly there was something wrong…

What was he saying? Oh, yes—that he lived a bit to one side of things. Like an exile. He didn’t really belong. And she suffered from the same thing. Sometimes he even got the impression she was clinging to him, as though terrified. Was it possible they could ever live together? Did he really want it?

He jammed on the brake, blinded by someone’s headlights. A car streaked by in a gust of air. Then the road was clear again, a yellow line running down the middle of it, the shoulders flanked by trees painted white head-high. Sometimes a falling leaf would look like a distant stone or hole in the road. Ravinel’s thoughts were going round and round in a circle. He had a cramp in his left foot and was longing for a cigarette.

Lucienne crossed her legs, then carefully drew her coat over her knee. Ravinel had to make an effort to realize he had a dead body in the back of the car.

‘It would have been shorter by Tours.’

Lucienne spoke without turning her head. He too looked straight ahead as he snapped back:

‘The road’s torn up between Angers and Tours. Besides, what difference does it make?’

If she wanted an argument about it, she could have one! He was quite ready. She said nothing, however, merely pulling a map out of the glove compartment and studying it by the light from the dashboard. That irritated him too. Maps were a man’s province. Would he ever have thought of rummaging in her desk? As a matter of fact, he had never been to her flat. Somehow the opportunity seemed never to have presented itself. For that matter, they both led busy lives. In the daytime they might snatch an hour together at lunch, or he might call at the hospital and see her for a few minutes on the pretext of a consultation. Otherwise, it was she who came to the little house on the quay. It was there that they had worked out their plans.

What did he really know about Lucienne? What did he know of her past? She didn’t open up easily. Once she had mentioned that her father had been a judge at Aix-en-Provence and that he had died during the war, unable to stand the hardships. Of her mother she had never spoken and, when he had tried to probe her the response had always been the same—a frown. Presumably she was still alive, but he was pretty certain Lucienne never saw her. Some family row, no doubt. At all events she never went back to Aix. Yet she obviously had some feeling for the South, since it was at Antibes that she wished to set up practice. No brothers or sisters. In her surgery there was a little photograph—at least there had been, but it had disappeared some time ago—the photograph of a very beautiful girl with fair hair and Scandinavian features.
Later on he would inquire about her. After their marriage. How funny that sounded! Unreal. He simply couldn’t picture Lucienne and himself as a married couple. Come to think of it, they were both bachelor types. That was a queer thing to say, and he really couldn’t explain it. It was true all the same. They looked it. They both had the little fads and fancies that belong to a bachelor existence. And while he was extremely attached to his own, he hated hers. To start with, the perfume she used—some flower or other—which mingled badly with the animal smell of her skin. Her signet ring, which she fiddled with incessantly as she talked. It might have looked all right on a banker’s finger or a big industrialist’s. But on hers… Then there was the way she wolfed her food, and her always wanting her meat almost raw. Occasionally there was a touch of vulgarity in her movements or her speech. It didn’t often show through—she was too well brought up for that—but now and again she would come out with a coarse laugh or look at you with the effrontery of a fishwife. Even physically, there were things he found hard to put up with—her thick wrists and ankles, her flat chest. And when she was alone she smoked thin black cigarettes, a habit she’d picked up in Spain. And how they stank! By the way, what had she been doing in Spain, anyway? There was one thing you could say for Mireille: no mystery in her past…

After La Flèche the country became more hilly. Sheets of mist lay in some of the hollows depositing fine droplets on the windshield. He had to take some of the hills in second. What filthy stuff it was, the mixture they sold nowadays as gas. No guts in it whatever, and it played hell with your engine.

Half past ten…

Not a soul stirring. They could have got out of the car and dug a grave by the side of the road—nobody would have stopped them… A dog in a ditch… No. He shouldn’t say a thing like that. It wasn’t fair to Mireille. She deserved better. With a sad tenderness he conjured up a picture of her. What a pity they hadn’t been of the same race. A little housewife so sure of herself, who loved frills and flounces, adored Technicolor films, and put cacti everywhere in tiny little pots. She thought herself superior to him, criticized his choice of ties and made fun of his baldness. She had never been able to make out why, on some days, he wandered gloomily about the house with a scowl on his face, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

‘What on earth’s the matter with you, my precious?… Do you want to go to the movies?… If you’re bored here, you’ve only to say so.’

No he wasn’t bored. It was something much worse than that. He was
sick to death
—that was the only way to put it. Sick of life, sick of everything. What’s more, he always would be. He knew that now. It was something fundamental, irremediable. Now that Mireille was dead, was anything changed?

Perhaps… Perhaps later on, when they had settled down to a new life at Antibes…

A vast plain stretched out on each side of the road. It made it seem as though the car were not advancing at all. With her gloved hand, Lucienne cleaned a patch of the window and gazed out at the monotonous landscape. Right in front, on the horizon, were the lights of Le Mans.

‘Cold?’ he asked.

‘No.’

On the sexual side, things hadn’t gone any better with Mireille than with Lucienne. Possibly it was his own fault. Lack of experience. Or it had been his luck to come upon nothing but frigid women. Mireille had done her best to pretend, but he had never been taken in. She had remained completely unmoved, even when she had clutched at him with an ardor that was meant to be ecstatic. As for Lucienne, she had never bothered to pretend. Love-making left her cold, icy cold, if it didn’t positively irritate her. That was the difference between them. Mireille took her duties seriously, and it was a wife’s duty to respond in the flesh. Strange that she shouldn’t succeed. She was so feminine, so human, that there ought to have been a streak of sensuality in her somewhere.

For his part, he could no longer take anything seriously. Or rather, what he could have taken seriously had no name: it was without form and void. Lucienne knew. He could tell that by the way she looked at him sometimes. And Mireille…

Ravinel pulled himself up. After all he had killed Mireille. Or hadn’t he? That was just the point—he couldn’t bring himself to believe he had committed a crime. Crime had always seemed to him something monstrous. And it still did! To be a real criminal you had to be a savage, bloodthirsty brute. And he wasn’t in the least. He’d have been quite incapable of sticking a knife into anybody or even pressing a trigger. At Enghien there was a loaded revolver in his desk. It was the managing director, Davril, who had advised him to get one. When one’s constantly on the road, particularly at night… But at the end of a month he had slipped it into a drawer, where it had made grease spots on his papers. For he’d have been no
more capable of using it than Mireille. Even less perhaps. As for shooting at her…

No, his crime, if it was one, was negative, consisting of a whole chain of despicablenesses which he’d allowed himself to slide into through indifference. If a judge—a chap like Lucienne’s father—were to ask him what he’d done, he could in all good faith answer: nothing. And since he’d done nothing he regretted nothing. Repentance—that came to much the same thing. What was he to repent? Unless it was being made as he was, and that was meaningless. You can’t help the way you’re made.

A signpost. Le Mans 1½ kilometers. Some big white buildings. Garages. Then the road passed under a steel bridge, after which it was flanked by low houses.

‘You’ll avoid the center, I suppose.’

‘No. That’s the shortest way.’

It was nearly half past eleven, and people were pouring out of the movies. Wet pavements. Here and there a café still lit up. On the left, two policemen, wheeling their bicycles, were crossing a square. Then another suburb, whose streets were lit by gas. More low houses. Garages. Gas pumps. Leaving the cobblestones, they were once more out on the blacktop road. Another railway bridge, with a locomotive, shunting. A moving van passed, going in the opposite direction. Ravinel accelerated to seventy-five. In a few minutes they’d be in the Beauce. An easy road as far as Nogent-le-Rotrou.