The Thinking Reed (39 page)
“You must say whatever is true,” he assured her. “We must know how things stand.”
The lines on his face reminded her that he had known long and atrocious sufferings from wounds in the war. She murmured, her tears flowing faster, “I would never have come back if I had known, but I thought it was going to be all right.”
“Of course you could not tell, you did everything for the best; in the circumstances everything that has happened is most natural,” he told her. Suddenly an expression of concern crossed his face, he looked as she had seen him when he had forgotten to leave some necessary instruction to his secretary. He rose, letting his packet of cigarettes fall on the floor, and, without picking them up, went to the door, saying, “I will be back in a minute.”
But he did not return for some time. She went to the mirror and looked at her ravaged face. It was no use powdering it, for she could not stop weeping. She went to the window and flung it open, leaning out into the night, and stopped weeping to wonder, because she saw that on the high wall at the end of their garden was reflected not only the small oblong of the window where she stood, but the three broad windows of the dressing room on the story above. He must be standing there with all the lights burning in those chandeliers which she had thought of as a symbol of domesticity, with the four eaglets springing away to the four corners of the globe but held back by gold bands in beauty greater than free flight. As she looked, the lights went on in their bedroom, on the story above. He was walking about the house, filling it with brightness, remembering it as it had been when they were lovers, pretending that it was not soon to be deserted. Incredulously she asked herself how she could make another human creature so unhappy. But she knew that it was not in her power to cancel her repudiation of him. Her body and soul were closed against him. If she lay in his arms now, she would not think of curtains and lances, of helmets and serpents; she would simply say to herself, “By the same violence my child was killed,” and if she saw him commit one of his great swinging acts of generosity, it would simply seem to her, “He threw away my child’s life just as easily.” For the rest of her life she would stay among the kind and mild, like Alan Fielding.
When Marc came back, he was quite composed. He picked up the cigarettes from the floor and said, “It is strange, the things that come into one’s mind at such a time. I keep on thinking of an Englishwoman I met on the boat coming over from New York. She was very attractive, but she was very unhappy on account of some love affair that had gone wrong, and for some reason connected with that, though she gave me the ultimate privileges quite freely, she would not let me kiss her on the mouth.”
“I can understand a woman doing that,” said Isabelle. “One’s body, that might be a matter of money, or pleasure. But one’s mouth, that is love.”
“Yes, I can understand it now,” said Marc, “but what horrifies me is that I made no attempt to understand it then. I was alternately amused and irritated by it. Well, well. You are looking very pale, you know, my dear. I see they have put out a bottle of Chablis for us along with the whisky and soda, you always like that. Won’t you have a glass now?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “You are very kind to me, Marc.”
He said, “I am not being kind. I realize I did something frightful to you that cannot be atoned for. Anything I can do for you …” He stopped talking and poured out the wine with an agonized exactitude, as if much depended on his not spilling a drop. She rose to take her glass from him, and they sat side by side on the edge of the table, looking down as they sipped.
“It is funny,” said Marc. “I keep on thinking of that Englishwoman. You do not mind me speaking of such things at this time, do you?”
“No, no,” said Isabelle. “It is right that we should remember that many other people have been unhappy as well as ourselves.”
“Yes,” he said. “The poor woman was very unhappy.” After a long silence, he asked, “Do you want a divorce?”
She whispered, “Yes.”
For a long time he continued to take his wine in little painful sips. “But will you not now go to stay with Blanche Yates?” he asked abruptly. “After all, she is your oldest friend!”
“No, no!” she exclaimed. “I could not bear it. I will go South.”
“Listen,” he said, “a storm has begun.”
They sat for some moments, thoughtfully drinking the wine they did not taste, while the rain lashed the panes. He asked her again, “You are sure you want a divorce?”
“What else is there to do?” she answered. She was astonished to find how profusely she wept, considering she was not thinking of the child, but only of him and her. As soon as she could speak again, she repeated firmly, “What else is there to do?”
AT HALF PAST TWO in the morning Isabelle had not slept, so she took three of the tablets the German doctor had given her, and in consequence she did not wake until after ten. She sat up in bed and cried out to her maid, “But, Adrienne, you let me sleep so late! Monsieur must have gone to the works long ago!” Yet she had no idea why she wished she had seen him before he went, and when the maid brought a note which Marc had left to be given to her with her coffee, she did not want to read it. She held open the envelope and peered inside trying to see a phrase which would indicate the quality of the whole, before she dared to take out the letter. It was, however, only to say that he would return earlier than usual in the evening, so that they might settle the ways and means of their parting, and that she could rely on him to consider her convenience in everything. At the thought of how many tedious discussions of this sort there would have to be before they were free, she burst into tears. She believed that under the Code Napoleon she had rights over Marc’s property which she would have to take a great deal of trouble to renounce, but it was not that which had broken her nerves, it was the amount of time and energy she would have to expend in detaching her personal possessions from Marc’s, both here in Paris and out at the house in the valley of the Chevreuse. She would have liked simply to abandon them, and refit herself in America, or England, or wherever it was she would make her new home; but that would not have been fair to Marc, who would then have to clear them out himself. And there would be so much to clear up. The marriage with Roy had left hardly any debris: only their furniture, which she had sold without regret since it had all been chosen for them by an interior decorator as they were too busy travelling from airport to airport to do it themselves, and his flying equipment and library, which she had distributed among his friends. But while she was with Marc, she had bought an infinity of things, books, pictures, silly little bibelots that might amuse children, contemporary records that would be amusing to look over forty years hence. She would never have the strength or the fortitude to winnow what she had designed to be the setting for her whole lifetime.
Adrienne came back into the room, leaving the door half open and saying doubtfully, “Madame Elise is here to fit those new chemises. Shall I tell her to go away?”
“Why should you tell her to go away?” asked Isabelle, blowing her nose.
“I thought you were not very well, Madame,” said Adrienne.
“I have a slight cold,” said Isabelle, “but, as the room is warm, that need not prevent me trying on chemises. Are you there, Madame Elise? Come in, come in.”
“Good morning, Madame,” said Madame Elise, whipping in through the doorway with the sinister little black box, resembling a child’s coffin, in which the makers of women’s underclothing always carry their wares, as if they were trying to cheat some supernal eye into believing that they were hurrying about the streets of Paris on one of the gloomier kinds of good work. “How beautiful you are looking this morning, Madame! And what an exquisite bedroom this is! None of my other clients has such a chic bedroom.”
“You are a humbug,” said Isabelle, stepping out of bed. “I am sure you say that to every single client you visit. But you are very nice, and you are so pretty that it is extraordinary you should be going about selling underclothes to other women not so pretty as yourself, and I hope the children are well. Now we will try on the chemises, and find out that, as usual, you have made the shoulder-straps too long.”
“They will be perfect,” said Madame Elise. “These will be perfect. It’s a good thing I saw you in this nightdress, Madame, I see the tucks at the neck need redoing. She wasn’t good, the girl I had that did these nightdresses. What, are my fingers cold?”
“Not at all,” said Isabelle.
“But you are shuddering, Madame,” said Elise.
“Madame is not quite herself yet,” said Adrienne.
“She is certainly thinner,” said Elise. “Madame should go to Bad Garbrück in the Tirol, the season’s not over yet. All my clients who go there come back feeling marvellous.”
“What do you have to do there?” asked Adrienne.
“Oh, it’s the mildest cure you can think of,” said Elise. “You don’t drink any waters, or eat any filthy rusks, or walk up any hills. You just take a bath in the radium springs for ten minutes every morning and that rejuvenates you.”
“Ah, in France we are more matter of fact,” said Adrienne. “Our spas set out to do good in any ordinary way for particular organs. You go to Vichy to clean out your kidneys, and to Aix to clean out your liver. But an Austrian spa, that would be bound to be a little bit like a fairy-tale.”
“But there’s some sense in it,” said Elise. “You should see Madame Justin de Bonetat when she’s come back from there. You’d think she was thirty, and she’ll never see forty-five again.”
“Ah, but that’s a special case,” said Adrienne. “Nothing’s ever happened to her, as we all know. That leaves a woman always like a young girl.”
“I don’t believe that has anything to do with the case,” said Elise. “Look at Madame de Saint-Bernasche, she’s another one of the same sort, you’d think her twenty years younger than her age, and she’s got several children, though, as the whole world can tell, not so many as she might have had. Madame, it’s too mortifying, but about these last two chemises, you are perfectly right. The first two were perfect, they couldn’t have been better, but these two, it’s no use trying to hide the truth, they need just the breath of a centimetre over the shoulder-straps.”
“Madame Elise, you are the most tiresome of creatures,” said Isabelle.
“That I am not,” said Elise, “for I can sit down and alter them in a couple of minutes, and it’s your fault because you have too beautiful a figure. I haven’t another client whose bosom is so high.”
“You lie, Madame Elise,” said Isabelle. “You make for Madame Emil Sarrach, and she has a figure exactly like mine, we could go to each other’s fittings. Anyway I am going to get back into bed till you are ready. But don’t bother about me, I am feeling perfectly well.”
“How’s your husband?” Adrienne asked Elise.
“Not so good, not so bad,” said Elise.
“Is he still so insane about politics?”
“Ah, no, he’s beginning to see through the leaders,” said Elise. “He sees that the workers are being betrayed all right. You should have heard him going on after Achille Clairon’s speech in the Chamber last Thursday.”
“I didn’t read it,” said Adrienne. “They were quarrelling about it downstairs on Friday, but some said one thing and some said another, I couldn’t make out what it was all about.”
“Well, it shouldn’t have been made at all,” said Elise. “He’s a fine one to speak for the people.”
“Why, he’s of the people, isn’t he?” said Adrienne. “I was at a place once where one of the footmen said he was related to him. They came from the Dordogne, I think it was.”
“It isn’t where you come from, it’s what you do afterwards,” said Elise. “You know that rez-de-chaussée flat, the Duchesse de Campierre’s house in the Avenue Montaigne? It’s supposed to be let, you know, and that’s what the Duke thinks, but I’ve had two of my clients go after it, and each time they’ve been told that somebody’s just about to take it, and that they can’t even see over it. Well, that’s where Monsieur Achille Clairon has his hideaway. He doesn’t waste much time in that humble little apartment at Menilmontant we’ve all heard so much about. He’s been the Duchess’s lover for a year. So, you see, that’s a fine one to speak for the people.”
“Madame Elise! Madame Elise!” exclaimed Isabelle, who had suddenly caught a name which was familiar to her and had begun to listen to what they were saying. She pulled down the sheet with which she had been covering her face, and leaned up on her elbows. “You must not tell such stories! I know the Duchesse de Campierre very well, and she is the most serious of women. There cannot be a word of truth in what you say. They may be friends, that is all.”
“Ah, but I know it as if I had seen it with my own eyes,” said Elise. “Lovers have to have their washing done like anybody else, and I know the laundress who works for the house, and she takes a full set of household linen from the rez-de-chaussée, which shows that somebody’s living there, and she is always finding among the sheets and tablecloths, shirts marked with Monsieur Clairon’s name. That may be friendship, but it’s of an extreme form.”
“But it is not possible,” said Isabelle, “you cannot think how good a woman the Duchess is. You really must not spread such a story.”
“But I have said nothing to suggest that she is not good,” said Elise. “After all the Duke is twenty-five years older than she is, and Monsieur Clairon is a very distinguished man, and quite passable to look at. There would be nothing perverse about such an affair. But really, Madame, I’m certain of what I say. For just consider, Madame! All her life the Duchess has had her hair done at home, by a very old maid that she inherited from her mother, that’s why she always looked like a friend of King Edward the Seventh. Why does she now have her hair set three times a week by one of the best assistants of Monsieur Padoue?”
“But how can you possibly know all this?” protested Isabelle.
“Because the assistant told me himself,” said Elise. “He is a charming young man, called Claude Issot, not at all the same as most of Monsieur Padoue’s assistants, I can assure you; his tastes are not at all of that sort.”
