The Thibaults (52 page)

A deep blush mantled Jenny’s cheeks, and Nicole came to her rescue. She had lived with the Fontanins long enough to learn the kinks in Jenny’s character, one of which was her shyness always at issue with her pride, and sometimes lapsing into a morbid readiness to take offence.

“The poor boy had a boil on his neck,” she put in good-naturedly, “and that doesn’t help a man to be his social best.”

Jenny made no comment, and Hequét did not insist. He turned to Nicole.

“We must be getting ready now, dear.” His tone was that of a man who always runs his life by clockwork.

Mme. de Fontanin’s return was the signal for a general move. Jenny went with her cousin to the bedroom where she had left her coat. Some minutes passed before she spoke.

“So there’s my summer spoilt, absolutely ruined!”

Seated before the mirror, Nicole was tidying her hair for the sole benefit of her fiance. She felt that she was looking her best, wondered what he was saying to her aunt downstairs, and pictured the long drive home in her lover’s car across the silent night. So she paid little heed to Jenny’s ill-humour. Noticing the sullen look on her friend’s face, she merely smiled.

“What an infant you are!”

She did not see the look that Jenny flung her.

A motor-horn sounded and Nicole swung round gaily and darted towards her cousin to embrace her, with the mixture of affection, innocence, and coquetry that made her so attractive. But Jenny, uttering an involuntary cry, swerved out of her reach. She shrank from being touched by anybody and had always refused to learn to dance, so physically repugnant to her was the contact of another’s arm. Once, in early childhood, she had sprained her ankle in the Luxembourg and had to be taken home in a carriage; she had preferred to climb the stairs, trailing an injured limb, to letting the concierge carry her in his arms up to their landing.

“What a touch-me-not you are!” laughed Nicole. Then, with a cheerful glance at her cousin, she changed the subject, returning to their conversation before dinner in the rose-alley. “I’m ever so glad to have had my talk with you, darling. Some days I’m positively oppressed by my happiness. With you of course I’m always perfectly sincere—just myself, my real self, exactly as I am. Oh, how I hope, darling, it won’t be long before you, too …”

Under the headlights the garden had the glamour of a stage, set for a gala night. Hequét had raised the hood of his car and was tightening a plug with the measured gestures of a skilled surgeon. Nicole suggested keeping her coat folded on her knees, but he insisted on her wearing it. He treated her like a little girl for whom he was responsible. Did he treat all women thus—like children? But Nicole gave in with a good grace that startled Jenny and roused in her a vague resentment towards the engaged couple. “No,” she said to herself, with a shake of her head; “that sort of happiness … not for me, thanks!”

For a long while her eyes followed the flail of light that swept the trees before the receding car. Leaning against the garden wall, with Puce clasped in her arms, she felt such hopeless hope, such bitterness against she knew not what, that, lifting her eyes towards the star-strewn spaces, she wished for an instant or two that she might die thus, before attempting life’s adventure.

GISÈLE was wondering why for some days past the daylight hours had seemed so short, summer so glorious, and why each morning as she dressed before her open window she could not help singing, smiling at everything—her mirror, the cloudless sky, the garden, the sweet peas she watered on her windowsill, the orange trees on the terrace, which seemed to be curling themselves into balls, like hedgehogs, the better to screen themselves from the far-darting sun.

M. Thibault rarely spent more than two or three days at Maisons-Laffitte without making a business trip to Paris, where he stayed overnight. When he was away, a brisker air seemed to pervade the house. Meals came and went like games, and Jacques and Gisèle once more gave free vent to their bursts of childish glee. Mademoiselle, in gayer mood, pattered from pantry to linen-closet, from kitchen to drying-room, lilting antiquated hyms that sounded like bygone music-hall refrains. On such occasions Jacques felt unconstrained, his brain alert and full of warring projects, and gave himself wholeheartedly to his vocation. He spent the afternoons in a corner of the garden, getting up, sitting down again, scribbling in his note-book. Gisèle, too, infected by a desire to turn her leisure hours to good account, posted herself on a landing whence she could watch Jacques coming and going beneath the trees and, immersed in Dickens’s
Great Expectation
s—Mademoiselle, on Jacques’s suggestion, had sanctioned its perusal as being “good for Gisèle’s English”—wept ecstatically for having guessed from the outset that Pip would give poor Biddy up for the exotic charms of cruel Miss Estella.

Jacques’s brief absence in the second week of August to attend Battaincourt’s wedding in Touraine—he had not dared to stand out against his friend’s request—sufficed to break the spell.

The day after his return to Maisons he awoke too early after a restless night; shaving warily, he noticed that his cheeks were innocent of rash and the boil had given place to an invisible scar, and now the prospect of resuming this too uniform existence seemed so exasperating that he suddenly stopped dressing and threw himself upon his bed. The weeks are passing, passing, he thought. Could this be the vacation to which he had looked forward so? He sprang up from the bed. “Exercise is what I need,” he murmured in a cool voice that assorted ill with his fevered gestures. He took a tennis-shirt from the wardrobe, saw that his white shoes and racket were in order, and a few minutes later jumped on his bicycle and was off post-haste to the tennis-club.

Two courts were in play; Jenny was one of the players. She did not seem to notice Jacques’s arrival and he made no haste to greet her. A new toss-up brought them into the same four; first against each other, then as partners. As players, there was little to choose between them.

No sooner were they together than they dropped back into their old-time unmannerliness. True, Jacques paid ample attention to Jenny, but always in an irritating, not to say offensive way; he jeered at her bad shots and obviously enjoyed contradicting her. Jenny gave him tit for tat, in a shrill voice that was quite unlike her. She could easily have replaced him by a less churlish partner, but apparently did not want to do so; on the contrary she seemed set on having the last word. When it was lunch-time and the players began to disperse she challenged Jacques in a voice that had lost nothing of its hostility:

“Play four up with me!”

The energy she put into her play was so intense, so combative, that she beat Jacques four-love.

The victory made her generous.

“There’s nothing in it, you know; you’re out of training. One of these days you’ll have your revenge.”

Her voice had once again the soft, brooding tone that was natural to her. We’re just two kids, Jacques thought. It pleased him that they shared a failing and he seemed to see a gleam of hope. A wave of shame traversed his mind when he recalled his attitude to Jenny, but when he asked himself what other to adopt he found no answer. There was no one with whom he longed so keenly to be natural; yet in her company he found it utterly impossible.

Noon was striking when they left the club together, wheeling their bicycles.

“
Au revoir
,” she said. “Don’t wait for me. I’m so hot that I might catch a chill if I started riding now.”

Without replying, he continued walking at her side.

Jenny disliked the clinging type of person; to be unable to dislodge a companion at the moment of her choice always annoyed her. Jacques had no idea of this; he meant to return for another game next day and cast about for a pretext to justify this sudden assiduity.

“Now that I’m back from Touraine …” he began awkwardly. The tone of mockery had left his voice. Last year she had noticed the same thing; when they were alone, he dropped his teasing ways.

“So you were in Touraine,” she repeated, for want of anything better to say.

“Yes. A friend’s wedding. But of course you know him; I met him at your place—Battaincourt.”

“Simon de Battaincourt?” Her tone implied that she was piecing together her memories of him. She summed them up bluntly. “Ah, yes—I didn’t like him.”

“Why not?”

She resented being cross-examined in this fashion.

“You’re too hard on him,” Jacques continued, seeing she would not answer. “He’s a good sort.” Then he thought better of it. “No, you’re right, really; there’s nothing much in him.” She vouchsafed an approving nod which delighted him.

“I didn’t know you were so attached to him,” she observed.

“Hardly that,” Jacques smiled. “He attached himself to me. It happened on our way back from some show or other. It was very late and Daniel had deserted us. Without a word of warning, Battaincourt launched out into a plenary confession. The way he unloaded his life-story on me made me think of a fellow handing his money over to a banker: ‘Look after my capital; I put myself-in your hands!’ ”

Jacques’s description interested her up to a point and, for the moment, she ceased wishing to shake him off.

“Do many people confide in you?”

“No. Why should they? … Well, perhaps they do.” He smiled. “Yes, as a matter of fact, quite often. Does that surprise you?” There was a note of defiance in his voice.

He was touched to hear her answer quickly:

“No, not at all.”

Gusts of warm wind wafted towards them the fragrance of the gardens beside the road, a fume of freshly watered mould, and the thick pungency of marigolds and heliotropes. Jacques found nothing more to say and it was she who broke the silence first.

“And by dint of all those confessions, you brought off the marriage?”

“Certainly not, quite the opposite. I tried my best to prevent him from doing anything so silly. Think of it! A widow, fourteen years older than he, with a child, what’s more! And now his people have dropped him completely. But there was no holding him.” He remembered that he had often used the word “possessed”—in its theological sense—when speaking of his friend and it had struck him as felicitous. “Battaincourt is positively possessed by that woman.”

“Is she pretty?” Jenny asked, disregarding the strong term he had used.

He pondered so deeply that she pursed her lips.

“I’d no notion I was setting you such a poser!”

But he remained, unsmiling, in a brown study.

“Pretty? Well, hardly that. She’s sinister. I can’t find any other word for it.” He paused again. “Oh, it’s a queer world!” he exclaimed. He caught the look of surprise on Jenny’s face. “Yes, I mean it. Every one’s so queer. Even quite uninteresting people. Have you ever noticed, whenever you speak of a person you know to others who know him too, how many small points that are really suggestive and revealing seem to have escaped them? That’s why people misunderstand each other so often.”

He looked at her again and felt that she had been listening attentively and was repeating to herself what he had just said. And suddenly the cloud of mistrust which hung over his relations with Jenny seemed to lift, giving place to radiant understanding. To make the most of her attention, so rarely given him, and rouse her interest further, he fell to describing certain incidents at the wedding which were still fresh in his mind.

“Where was I?” he murmured hazily. “Oh, I’d love to write that woman’s life one day—from the little I learned of her! She was once a shop-girl in one of the big stores, they say. That woman’s a ruthless climber” (he quoted a tag he had jotted down in his note-book), “a Julien Sorel in petticoats! Do you like
Le Rouge et le Noir
?”

“No, not a bit.”

“Really? Yes, I see what you mean.” After a pensive moment he smiled and spoke again. “But, if I switch off onto side-issues, I’ll never get to the end of it. Sure I’m not taking up too much of your time?”

She answered without thinking, reluctant to betray her desire-to hear more.

“Oh, no; we won’t lunch till half-past twelve today, on Daniel’s account.”

“So Daniel’s at home?”

She had to fall back on a downright lie.

“He said he might come,” she replied with a blush. “But how about you?”

“I needn’t hurry, as Father’s in Paris. Shall we take the shady side? What I really want to tell you about is the wedding breakfast. Nothing much happened, yet, I assure you, it was a very poignant experience. Let’s see! The setting, to begin with: an Old World château of sorts, with a dungeon restored by Goupillot. Goupillot was her first husband, a remarkable fellow too; he started as a haberdasher in a small way, but he had big business in the blood, and died a multimillionaire after providing every French provincial town with its ‘Goupillot’s Store.’ You must have come across them. The widow, by the way, is enormously wealthy. I’d never met her before. How shall I describe her? A thin, lithe, ultra-smart woman, with rather shrewish features and a haughty profile; pale eyes that showed up against a rather muddy complexion—eyes of a moleskin grey, with a sort of gloss upon them, like stagnant ooze. Does that give you an idea of her? She has the manners of a spoilt child—far too youthful for her looks. She has a shrill voice and laughs a lot. Now and again— how shall I describe it?—you catch a flicker of grey fire between her eyelids, along the lashes, and, all of a sudden, the childish smalltalk she reels off seems to have something macabre behind it and you can’t help recalling what people said soon after Goupillot’s death, that she had poisoned him by inches.”

“She gives me the shivers!” Jenny exclaimed, no longer trying to repress the interest Jacques’s narrative roused in her. He felt the change and was pleasantly elated by it.

“Yes, you’re right; she’s rather terrifying. That was just what I felt when we took our seats and I saw her standing with that mask of steel upon her face behind the white flowers on the table.”

“Was she in white?”

“Almost. It wasn’t absolutely a wedding-dress; more of a garden-party costume, rather theatrical, a rich, creamy white. Breakfast was served at separate tables. She went on asking people right and left to sit at her table, quite regardless of the number of places at it. Battaincourt, who was near her, looked worried. ‘You’re muddling everything up, my dear,’ he protested. You should have seen the look that passed between them—a curious look! It struck me that all that was young and vital had died out of their relations; they were living on the past.”