Sunday (11 page)

She sneered:

'Would you get yourself a job again as a hotel cook?'

'Why not?'

Something was slipping somewhere. There was no longer any point of contact.

'Think carefully, Emile.'

'No.'

'And if I killed myself?'

'I should be a widower.'

'Would you marry her?'

He preferred not to reply. Already he regretted his unintended cruelty. It was Berthe who had started it. He had felt no tremor in her which could be attributed to love.

Nothing but disappointment, the fury of outraged ownership.

They were walking in silence now, and when they crossed a patch of sunlight, some grasshoppers chirped at their feet.

'You're sure you don't want to wait until tomorrow?'

'I'm sure.'

He was obdurate. Even as a small boy his mother used to claim that sometimes he made people want to give him a good slap on account of his pigheadedness.

They covered another hundred yards without a word.

'There is one thing, at least, which I have the right to insist on.'

'What is that?'

'For the others, even for Madame Lavaud and the Maubis, there must be no change.'

He was not sure he had understood.

'We shall go on living to all appearances as we have done in the past, and we shall continue to share the same bedroom.'

He just stopped himself from putting in:

'And the same bed?'

But he didn't want to take too much advantage of her.

'As for this girl, she has ceased to exist as far as I am concerned, and I shall not address another word to her except to give her essential orders.'

He had to restrain a smile of contentment. After all, it was a victory he had won, thanks to Berthe's pride.

'Your dirty little tricks have nothing to do with me, but I don't want everybody to know about them, and if you're lucky enough to give her a child, I forbid you to recognize it.'

He had never considered the problem from this angle and he knew nothing of the law.

'Is that settled?'

They had come to a halt, face to face, and this time they were now definitely nothing more to each other than strangers.

Was Berthe tempted, as he feared for a few seconds, to throw herself into his arms?

'It's settled!' he said quietly.

Without waiting for her, he headed with long strides towards La Bastide, and in the kitchen doorway found Ada helping Madame La-vaud to peel potatoes as if nothing had happened.

He simply gave her a wink, to let her know that everything was all right.

He was satisfied and bewildered. In a ridiculously short time everything had changed, and yet life was going to go on as it had in the past. He didn't know yet how he would face it. He had never asked himself whether he loved Ada, nor with what sort of love, and he was still incapable of answering the question.

For the moment, she was only playing a subsidiary role in the drama. What counted was the rupture between Berthe and himself, a rupture accepted on both sides.

If, a few hours before, they were still husband and wife, they were from now onwards no more than strangers, colleagues to be more accurate, for there remained La Bastide, and it was doubtless on account of this that Berthe had proposed her strange
status quo.

La Bastide held them both, love or no love, hate or no hate.

Berthe had bought him, just as Big Louis had bought the old farmhouse, he was more acutely aware of it than ever, and she had just dictated her terms.

He went to play bowls at Mouans-Sartoux. The hardest thing, that night, was undressing in front of her, for it seemed suddenly indecent to show her his naked body. Nor did he know whether he ought to say good-night to her or not. He avoided her gaze, slipped in between the sheets, keeping to the extreme edge of the bed.

It was she who switched out the light and said:

'Good-night, Emile.'

He made an effort.

'Good-night.'

Was he going to have to go to bed, each night for the rest of his life, under the same conditions?

Next morning, he went downstairs a few minutes earlier than usual, so as to be there before the arrival of Madame Lavaud.

'What did she say?'

'You're staying.'

'Isn't she giving me the sack?'

Ada did not realize that this was acknowledging that Berthe was the real mistress of the house and that Emile had no say in the matter.

'No.'

A silence. She did not understand. Perhaps she did not try to understand? Yet she wanted to know where they stood.

'And us?'

'Nothing is changed.'

They caught the sound, still fairly far off, in the roadway, of Madame Lavaud's footsteps.

'I wonder whether I'll still be able to, now that she knows.'

Instantly he stiffened, and, without any precise reason, almost slapped her in the face, rapped in a dry voice:

'You will do what I tell you to do.'

'Yes.'

'Get the coffee.'

'All right.'

He did not ask her to come to him that day, for decency's sake, perhaps out of tact. He pretended to take no notice of Berthe, who affected the gestures of an automaton and only addressed him, in a neutral voice, about serving the customers.

After his siesta, he took the van and went into Cannes to see a girl, the first one he could find, in order to calm his nerves, and, by an ironical twist, he knocked at three doors before he found one at home.

'Whatever's the matter with you?'

'Nothing.'

'Been fighting with the wife?'

'Get undressed and shut up.'

On these occasions, he gave the impression of a petty cad, a thug of the kind one sees playing the tough guy in bars. A sentence was taking shape in his head, to which he did not yet attach any meaning, and he did not foresee that it was to become an obsession.

'I shall kill her!'

For now he hated her, not just for this or that reason, but for everything.

He no longer told himself that she had bought him, that there was nothing in her but pride and peasant rapaciousness.

He did not even dwell any longer on her attitude the day before, nor on the bargain she had proposed to him, or rather the conditions she had dictated.

The matter had gone beyond the stages of reason and sentiment. The sentence surged up from his subconscious, like something self-evident, an indisputable necessity.

'I shall kill her.'

He did not believe it, was not sketching any plans, did not feel himself to be a potential murderer.

'You're kind of queer today,' his partner remarked. 'Anyone would think you were looking for someone to pick a fight with. I'll be all covered in bruises later on the beach.'

He had to go home, because of the guests' dinner. He was a little anxious, as he went into the kitchen, for he was wondering whether Berthe had kept her word. Had she just said what she had, the evening before, to quieten him, and had she taken advantage of his absence to chase Ada out of the house?

Ada was there. Berthe was busy with her accounts. She was in her element. She would have been more lost if she had been deprived of her cash-desk than of her husband.

Had her mother been unhappy, since the death of Big Louis? She had gone back to her sister and her niece, into their spinster world, as a fish drawn for a moment from the water would return wriggling to its own element.

It made little difference if he were being unjust.

'I shall kill her/'

This time, he said it to himself in front of her, looking at her, with her head bent over her papers, and it was already more serious.

No fibre in him trembled, nor pity, nor feeling of any kind.

Once again, it was not a project, nor even a resolve. It remained vague, outside the realm of consciousness.

He was not living, at the moment, in a solid world, but in a kind of luminous mist where objects and people were perhaps nothing but illusions.

He went and helped himself to a drink at the bar, a few paces away from his wife. For she was still his wife. Usually, as soon as he picked up a bottle, she would raise her head to see what he was drinking, and to murmur, when she deemed it necessary:

'That's enough, Emile.'

He was waiting for it. Did she still dare to say it? Was it still her business?

Deliberately he emptied his glass at a gulp, poured out another, as if he were hoping that she would stop him.

If she had any urge of the sort, she suppressed it and continued to concentrate on her sums as if she were unaware of his presence.

So it was established once and for all: he was free!

On condition that he went on sleeping in the same room, in the same bed as she did, and hid himself away to make love with Ada.

He threw his glass to the floor before going off into the kitchen with a sneer.

Free, eh?

VI

H
E
still had a disturbed, incoherent phase to pass through, with his head in a turmoil. The season was at its height, all the bedrooms, all the tables on the terrace were occupied, and often the last to arrive had to wait at the bar for others to finish eating before they could get a place.

Apart from the waiter Berthe had sent for from Lyons, called Jean-Claude, who was too blond and rolled his hips like a woman, they had had to hire a local youth, with thick hair and black finger-nails, and Maubi came in to lend a hand as well.

In the kitchen Emile would from time to time pick up a cloth to wipe his brow, so covered with sweat that after a while he couldn't see properly, and the pauses between getting each meal became shorter and shorter. There was no question of going out in his boat, or of playing bowls, and it was through all this activity that he used to think, when he found time, about his personal affairs.

As one of his colleagues in the basement kitchen of the grand Vichy hotel used to say, the machine must be fed. There, one might have thought one was in a factory. Instead of stoking the furnace of a locomotive with coal, they were ceaselessly filling the service-lift for the
maîtres d'hôtel
and the head waiters upstairs standing ready to hurry over to the tables.

He felt that Madame Lavaud was watching him, quickly noting each new sign of nervousness he showed.

Everybody, inevitably, had noticed that Berthe and he no longer addressed one another except for essential remarks, in a flat voice, which, to himself, he used to call a cardboard voice. Were they not wearing cardboard masks over their faces as well!

What was stopping him from being satisfied? Almost every afternoon, even when he did not desire her, he would give the signal to Ada. She joined him in the Cabin and, automatically, because it was for this that he had asked her in the first place, she began by removing her dress.

'Lie down.'

He had read that the larger apes huddle against one another to sleep, sometimes in entire families, without distinction of sex, and it could not be for warmth, since they lived in the heart of Africa. Was it to reassure themselves? Or through need of contact?

In captivity, when people tried to separate them for the night, they would become frantic, and in this book which had fallen into his hands, it was claimed that some of them pined away and died.

Sullenly, fiercely, he clung to Ada, his hand upon her shoulder, her back, her stomach, no matter where, and he tried to make himself sleep while she lay still with her breathing almost suspended.

Something was disturbing him, and he would ask himself questions to which he could not or did not want to find satisfactory answers.

Supposing things had taken a different turn and, against all likelihood, Berthe had left, for example, thus giving him back his liberty; would he have married Ada?

The answer ought to have come to him clearly, and yet this was not the case. He even asked himself sometimes whether he loved her, and the very fact of posing the question made him angry with himself.

Ada did not judge him, did not spy on him to correct him, to make him into what she would have wished him to be. If she was attentive to his actions and behaviour, to his expression, the curl of his lip, it was to divine his wishes and to do everything that lay in her power to make him happy.

Was he sure, on his side, that he looked upon her altogether as a human being? He had nothing to say to her, remained content with caressing her, and for her, as for an animal, it was enough.

He would never leave her, for he needed her, especially at present. Berthe had, knowingly, put the two of them in a position at once painful and ridiculous.

They were not allowed to leave. They could touch one another in private, even though everybody was certainly aware of what was going on. In front of other people, he was not even allowed to look at her.

He was a prisoner, like a May-bug on the end of a line, and it was Berthe, with her appearance of melancholy dignity, who held the other end of the line.

It was again a religious term which came back to him, despite the fact that since he had left Vendée he had not been to Mass, and religion had never much concerned him. Had these words, perhaps, an incantatory value for him?

He was in
limbo.
He was part of the household without having his place in it, was the master but without a master's rights, and he loved without being sure of loving.

Admittedly, he no longer needed to deceive as he had had to before, but it came to the same thing in the long run.

Perhaps another word was more accurate? Hadn't Berthe, at the time that she had settled his future,
excommunicated
him?

He caught himself suspecting people of thoughts which almost certainly they did not have. When Pascali came to drink his glass of wine, he now used to wonder what went on inside his head, that head like an apostle's in a stained-glass window, or a bandit's, for the mason might well have been one as much as the other.

Why, one fine morning, had Pascali brought his daughter, still only a child, to La Bastide? It was to Emile, not to Berthe, that he had entrusted her. And Pascali must know men.

Since then, every time he came and sat in the kitchen, wasn't it to see how Emile and Ada were getting on?