The Fires of Autumn (16 page)

‘I’m sure it will be excellent,’ Thérèse said happily.

‘I could give this Chinese servant some recipes, I’m sure,’
Madame Jacquelain continued. ‘I wonder if he knows how to make a good mutton stew with apples, or waffles. Those were Bernard’s favourite dishes. Let’s go back into the sitting room, if that’s all right with you, my dear. My son will be back any minute now.’

Thérèse agreed; they waited in silence; after a few moments, they heard footsteps on the carpet outside the door.

‘Here he is,’ whispered Madame Jacquelain. ‘We didn’t hear the bell ring, or the key turn in the door, but this apartment is so enormous!’

But it was only the Chinese man who opened the door of a small bar:

‘Cocktails?’

‘My God, Thérèse, look at how funny that bar is!’ cried Madame Jacquelain. She was on the verge of admitting to herself that she and her husband had pointlessly wasted their youth. The world offered more than she had thought, full of mysterious pleasures.

‘But tell me now, aren’t all those drinks very strong?’

‘Some are strong and some are mild,’ the Chinese servant replied.

Madame Jacquelain accepted a glass full of an iced liquid the colour of murky, stagnant water; then she was eager to try a concoction made with cinnamon and an egg yolk. ‘It must be like eggnog.’ It was sweet, with the flavour of fire and ice.

The Chinese man silently left the room. Madame Jacquelain took a few unsteady steps in the middle of the sitting room:

‘My little boy … Can you picture my little boy serving cocktails to his old mother? I should have had another one, don’t you think, Thérèse? We’ll drink some more when he gets here …’

When he gets here … Thérèse looked over at the clock. It was so late … She was unconsciously folding and unfolding her little handkerchief.

‘I wonder,’ said Madame Jacquelain pensively, ‘I wonder where my naughty little boy can be. He must have some meeting in very “high society”. Some aristocratic lady, perhaps, or a wealthy foreign woman …’

‘Don’t fool yourself,’ said Thérèse curtly. ‘He’s Renée Humbert’s lover, the one who used to go for walks with us down the Champs-Élysées on Sundays. The hat maker’s daughter … Only now that she is very rich and very well dressed, he finds her dazzling, that’s all there is to it, he finds her dazzling. Just like all this ostentatious luxury, and that Chinese servant with the long face.’

‘I think he’s very nice,’ said Madame Jacquelain, her face beaming with delight, ‘yes, I do.’ She was seeing everything through the heady mists of the drinks she’d had. ‘And this apartment is very nice too. Isn’t that the telephone ringing?’

It was indeed the telephone. They could hear the Chinese man’s muffled voice from behind the door replying: ‘Yes, Monsieur. Very good, Monsieur. Of course, Monsieur.’ He put down the phone, opened the door and appeared for a moment.

‘Monsieur has just telephoned. Monsieur sends many apologies. He has been detained. He asks for the ladies to begin dinner without him. He will come back a little later.’

‘Well, then,’ cried Madame Jacquelain after a moment’s silence. ‘Let us eat. We mustn’t let the soup get cold.’

They sat down opposite each other at the table, secretly glancing now and again at the empty chair that belonged to the man of the house. Thérèse had lost her appetite. ‘Eat something,’ said Madame Jacquelain, who was gradually falling asleep, ‘you haven’t touched a thing!’

When the fish was served, a Siamese cat with fur the colour of sable and translucent eyes, jumped on to the table; Madame Jacquelain chased it away with her napkin.

‘My dear old Moumoute would never have done such a thing,’ she remarked, shocked.

The cat let out a shrill, unpleasant miaow, scratched Thérèse who tried to stroke it and ran off. Thérèse burst into tears. Madame Jacquelain, now sober, watched her cry in dismay:

‘Come now, my darling, pull yourself together, think of the servant …’

‘I don’t give a damn about that horrid creature,’ Thérèse insisted through her tears. ‘Please, Madame Jacquelain, please just let me go home.’

‘But Bernard will be home any minute. He’ll apologise. It’s very rude of him but you are such old friends,’ cried Madame Jacquelain.

‘I’m not angry, I won’t hold it against him, but I just want to go.’

‘You’re not going to leave me here alone? Wait another quarter of an hour, just another fifteen minutes. Until ten o’clock, all right? At ten o’clock we’ll leave.’

They waited until ten o’clock, ten thirty, eleven o’clock. They had finished eating. Every now and again, they heard the sound of the great carriage doors below and the long, muffled rumbling of the lift. ‘It’s him. He’s coming,’ the two women thought, their hearts beating faster. But the lift stopped at the floor below or continued rising. The cut flowers sagged on to the tablecloth. Thérèse gathered them up, made them into a bouquet and put them into a glass of water. Poor flowers … Where was Bernard? At eleven o’clock, Madame Jacquelain sighed:

‘Well, I think that, in fact … We’ll do it another time, Thérèse …’

They took the Étoile–Gare de Lyon metro line and went home.

‘I will give him a good telling off,’ said Madame Jacquelain, speaking through the noise of the tunnels and trains. ‘He is too spoiled. He thinks he can do whatever he likes. He will come and apologise to you, Thérèse. That apartment … I’m still under its spell … I had never tasted grapefruit before. Did you notice the
hand-embroidered tablecloth, Thérèse? He has crepe de Chine sheets. His wife will look after all those beautiful things. He’ll settle down one day. He could marry a wealthy woman, but … if he found a woman who loved him … What do you think, Thérèse my darling?’

But Thérèse refused to say a word.

Thérèse got home and went to bed. It was a cloudy February night; a foggy mist slipped in through the half-open window. She did not cry, but her whole body was trembling. Through the partition, Thérèse listened to the sighs and agitated little groans from Madame Pain. The elderly woman slept lightly, restlessly. But at least she slept! How fortunate the elderly were, their dreams and desires gone, they no longer felt regret, no longer felt bitter despair, no longer thought only of love!

‘He was so rude! Why would he do that?’ Thérèse kept asking herself over and over again. She refused to believe in some accident, that something had prevented him from coming, not even that he had simply forgotten. Especially not that he had forgotten!… She would never have forgiven that. She preferred to imagine some well-laid plan made in advance to humiliate her, some evil plan to take his revenge because she had refused to fall into his arms like a whore. ‘So what do I have left now? I’ll never see him again. I’ll never speak to him again. And what about him? Will he pursue me? No, of course not.’ He had made himself quite clear. Men don’t chase after women who turn them down. There are too many other women, and they are far too easy: ‘You don’t want to have some fun? Goodnight then.’

‘I was too proud,’ thought Thérèse. ‘When it comes to love, nothing counts, not pride, not virtue. Since he wanted me, all I had to do was give in. After all, men are stronger, more intelligent than we are. If he thinks that this is what love is, nothing more than sleeping around, he must be right. I can’t stand up to him, I can’t. I’m just an ordinary woman. I couldn’t prove to him that he’s wrong. I love him, I’m weak. Let him take me, if he wants to. Women like Renée don’t pretend to be prudes and they’re the ones who are loved, while I … If only he had deigned to say some loving words to me, make promises … anything … even lies … But to act so brutally, with such vulgarity … And then, because I had refused, to insult me this way! Oh, you’re just a little bourgeois woman who needs people to respect her!’ she cried out in anger. ‘If he wants to humiliate you, why should that matter? Accept it all, since you love him, or else, forget him! And you’ll grow old without knowing sensuality, love, pleasure.’

She suddenly thought that she had never spoken those words ‘sensuality … pleasure’, never dreamt, in any case, that they might apply to her. Two words you read in books. But she now realised that other people enjoyed them, savoured them, that other people’s lives were, in fact, controlled by those feelings, by sensuality and pleasure. While she …!

‘But what does the future hold in store for me?’ she murmured in despair. ‘I’ll grow old. I’ll help grandmother in the house. I’ll make new hats out of a few bits of old ribbon. I’ll go to the cinema with grandmother on Saturdays. Then grandmother will die, and I’ll be alone. Even if I become Bernard’s mistress, I’d still be all alone … But at least I will have had a few nights with him, some memories. My God, forgive me! Martial, forgive me! I wanted to remain faithful to you, not simply to your memory but to everything that you loved: a respectable, peaceful, honourable way of life,’ she whispered, ‘a life where no one does any harm or has anything to hide …’ and she looked away from the photograph
of Martial lit by her bedside lamp. A photograph, a dead man, a ghost. The dead have no power over the heart of a woman of twenty-five.

She slipped out of bed. She looked at the time; her watch had stopped at seven o’clock the night before: she had not wound it up. Yesterday, at seven o’clock, she was getting dressed; she had powdered her bare arms and neck, perfumed her fine hair, that spot at the back of the neck that a man breathes in when he helps a woman on with her coat. She knew all the subtle ways of flirting, the cunning little wiles that are in every woman’s blood, yes, even she … If she wanted to, she would be able to make herself just as beautiful, just as seductive, just as easy, so she could compete with Renée or any other woman. The watch had stopped; she raised the curtain and looked through the slats of the shutter; it was dead of night. He would be home by now. Asleep. She would go to him, and then … anything he wanted. She had taken off her long nightdress; she stood motionless for a moment, naked, looking at her body by the pale light of the lamp; it was a beautiful body, she knew that, a body made for love. She had been wrong, she thought bitterly, wrong to set such a high price on the gift of her body. ‘I want him to take me! Even if he casts me away when he no longer wants me!’ She opened the drawer of her dresser, her heart pounding, and took out a pair of silk stockings and some pretty underwear. Yes, anything he wants … and afterwards, never a word of reproach. After all, she was a woman; she was free. Feeling her way around in the dark room, she got dressed; she put on perfume; she brushed her hair. No one wore a corset then, just a slip and a one-piece dress … She understood why now. Everyone around her lived only for those moments of pleasure that they did not even dare call ‘love’. She would do as they did. She did not want to put on the ceiling light: a bright light shining through the little squares of glass on her grandmother’s door would wake her up. Standing in front of the mirror
of her wardrobe, Thérèse held the bedside lamp in one hand and with the other, powdered her wide, terrified eyes, her pale cheeks, her cold, trembling mouth. He would warm that mouth with his kisses. He would say nothing to her, but at least he would kiss her, and, with every kiss, she would imagine what he really meant. One kiss would say ‘I won’t make you suffer too much’ and the next, ‘I won’t leave you right away …’ ‘If only he could love me the way I love him … But no, no, that’s impossible! And besides, what’s the difference? Does the love you get really matter? The only love worth anything is the love you give.’ He would mock her faithful heart. She knew that. She was walking towards love the way you walk towards a fire, in full knowledge that you will only end up seriously injured or even dead, that you will have died for nothing, in obscurity, without honour. She had the sure, blind, rapid movements of a sleepwalker; she picked up the small handbag that had fallen to the floor when she had thrown it on her bed after she got home; she counted her money; she would take a taxi. Some powder, a little handkerchief. The key to come home in the morning. Madame Pain would not be surprised if she wasn’t there: she sometimes went out very early to the flower market where they sold such beautiful roses.

She walked quietly through the apartment; her grandmother was still asleep. She opened the door, went down the stairs and on to the street that was shrouded in fog and full of shadows. Was it later than she had thought? Well, that was just too bad. She was determined. She rushed into the first taxi she saw and gave the driver Bernard’s address. In his house, everything was still quiet; she didn’t take the lift but rushed up the steps, four at a time. When she reached the landing, she had to stop, on the verge of fainting. She rang the doorbell, and it was only when she heard the ring echo through the silent house that a horrible thought crossed her mind: what if he was not alone, what if a woman … Oh, how humiliating! She covered her eyes, then
her ears, not wanting to see, not wanting to hear a voice, the laughter of a rival … She longed to flee but her body refused to obey her; she was in love and her terrified body had drawn her to this very spot. Now her body was in control; she leaned against the door that would not open. Bernard was sleeping; he hadn’t heard her. But she had pressed the buzzer very hard. Then she remembered that Madame Jacquelain had put the key back under the mat when they left the night before: her son had asked her to do that if she ever called round when he wasn’t there. She bent down and found the key; she silently opened the door and went inside. ‘The servant isn’t here, if he was, he would have heard the bell ring and come to open the door, and if he does come, that’s just too bad! I’ll tell him that I must see his master, that it’s a matter of life and death. He’ll think that Madame Jacquelain is ill and he’ll let me in.’

The hallway was empty, as was the large sitting room. The bedroom she walked into was empty. The bed was empty. He had not come home at all. He had spent the night somewhere else. In whose arms? No, he had not intended to take revenge for her coldness; he had quite simply forgotten about her. She fell on to the bed. She would leave. There was nothing more she could do here since he did not even desire her. She stroked the pillow, the bedspread. ‘He’ll never know that I came looking for him,’ she thought, ‘but he’ll be able to sense a strange warmth, the scent of perfume he doesn’t recognise …’ She closed her eyes for a moment then pressed her lips hard against the delicate linen. ‘Enough! Enough! I’ve had my moment of madness. That’s enough. I swear that I will never come near him again.’