Aimez-vous Brahms (10 page)

"Check. If I understand rightly, you don't want to leave Paris at the moment?"

He's thinking of Simon, she said to herself: why can people never distinguish between appearance and reality? At the same time she told herself that, for the past month, Simon's appearance had become her daily life. And perhaps she owed him the refusal which something had prompted her to make to Roger's proposal.

"If you like to put it that way," she said.

There was a silence.

"You don't seem too fit at the moment, Paule. You looked tired when I saw you. If you don't like my arrangements, make others. You need to get away."

His voice was warm and sad, and Paule felt the tears come into her eyes. Yes, she needed him; she needed him to protect her completely instead of suggesting these ten days on the cheap. He should have known that; there were limits to everything, even male egoism.

"Oh, I shall," she said. "We'll send each other postcards, peak to peak."

He hung up. After all, he may merely have been asking for support, and she had refused it. A fine love hers was! But at the same time she felt confusedly that it was her prerogative, almost her duty, to be exacting and suffer for it. After all, there was someone who loved her passionately.

Up to now, she and Simon had always eaten alone in small local restaurants. But when she got home that evening she found him on the doorstep, looking very sedate in a dark suit, every hair in place. Once again she noticed his beauty, the feline length of his eyes, the perfect shape of his mouth, and she reflected with amusement that this little boy, who spent his days waiting for her buried under her dresses, had the looks of a Reiter and lady- killer.

"Such elegance!" she said. "What goes on?"

"We're having an evening out," he said. "We're going to eat somewhere lavish and dance. I should be just as happy with a couple of fried eggs here, but I feel like taking you out."

He helped her off with her coat. She noticed that he had smothered himself with toilet water. On the bed in her room lay a very low-cut cocktail dress which she had worn twice in her life.

"That's my favourite," said Simon. "Would you like a drink?"

He had mixed the kind she liked. Paule sat down on the bed, completely in a whirl: she had come down from the mountains to find herself faced with an evening out. She smiled at him.

"Are you pleased? You aren't tired, are you? If you like, I'll climb straight out of this suit and we'll stay here."

He set one knee on the bed and went through the motions of taking off his jacket. She leaned against him, slid her hand under his shirt, felt the warmth of his skin against her palm. He was alive, so alive.

"It's a wonderful idea," she said. "Do you insist on this dress? I look a bit silly in it."

"I love you naked," he said, "and this is the most naked you have. I had a good look."

She reached for her cocktail and drank it. She might have come home to a lonely flat and gone rather gloomily to bed with a book, as she often had before he came along. But he was there, he was laughing, he was happy, she laughed with him and he was insistent she should teach him the Charleston, thus blithely putting twenty years on her, and she tripped on the carpet as she was dancing and fell breathless into his arms, and he hugged her to him, and she laughed more than ever, completely forgetting Roger and the snow and her sorrows. She was young, she was beautiful; she turned him out, made herself up to look rather like a vamp and put on that indecent dress, and he pounded on the door in his impatience. When she emerged he looked at her in dazzlement and covered her shoulders with kisses. He made her have a second cocktail—with
her
head for drink! She was happy. Marvellously happy.

In the restaurant, at a table close to theirs, she recognised two women rather older than herself who occasionally worked with her and who now gave her a surprised smile. When Simon rose to escort her on to the floor she caught the phrase:
"
How
old is she now?"

She leaned against Simon. Everything was spoiled. Her dress was ridiculous for her age, Simon rather too striking and her life rather too absurd. She asked Simon to take her home. He did not protest and she knew that he had heard, too.

She undressed very quickly. Simon was talking about the band. She would have liked to send him away. She stretched out in the dark while he undressed. She had been wrong to drink those two cocktails and the champagne; she would look haggard next day. She was almost dazed with gloom. Simon came back into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on her forehead.

"Not tonight, Simon," she said. "I'm tired."

He made no reply, but sat quite still. She could see his figure outlined against the light from the bathroom; his head was lowered and he seemed to be reflecting.

"Paule," he said at last, "I must talk to you."

"It's late. I'm tired. Tomorrow."

"No," he said. "I want to talk to you right away. And you're going to listen to me."

She opened her eyes in amazement. This was the first time he had spoken to her in a tone of authority.

"I heard what those old hags behind us said. I won't have you upsetting yourself over it. It's unworthy of you, it's cowardly and it's hurtful to me."

"But Simon, you're making a tragedy out of nothing . . ."

"I'm not making a tragedy of it: on the contrary, I want to stop
you
from making tragedies out of such trifles. Naturally you would hide them from me. But you've no need to. I'm not a little boy, Paule. I'm quite capable of understanding you, and maybe of helping you. I'm very happy with you, you know that, but my ambitions don't rest there: I want you to be happy with me. At present you're too bound up with Roger for that to happen. But you have got to start thinking of our affair as something positive, something on which you must help me to build, and not as a momentary windfall. There's what I had to say."

He spoke calmly but with effort. Paule listened to him with astonishment and a kind of hope. She had thought him unaware; he wasn't, and he thought she could start all over again. Perhaps, after all, she could ... ?

"I'm not a fool, you know. I'm twenty-five, I hadn't lived before you came and I certainly shan't live after you've gone. You are the woman—more than that: the human being—I must have. I know it. If you liked, I'd marry you tomorrow."

"I'm thirty-nine," she said.

"Life isn't a woman's magazine, nor a cluster of reminiscences. You are fourteen years older than me, and I love you, and I shall love you for a very long time. That's all there is to it. So I won't have you sinking to the level of those old witches or of public opinion. The problem for you, for us, is Roger. There are no others."

"Simon," she said, "I want you to forgive me for . . . well, for supposing ..."

"You didn't think I was capable of thinking, that's all. Now move over a bit."

He slipped into bed beside her, kissed her and took her. She did not complain of her tiredness, and he roused her to a pitch of pleasure such as she had not previously known with him. Afterwards he stroked her sweating brow, installed it in the hollow of his shoulder, reversing his usual practice, and carefully drew the bedclothes over her.

"Go to sleep," he said. "I'll take care of everything."

In the darkness she gave a tender little smile and pressed her lips to his shoulder, a caress which he received with the olympian calm of a master. He lay awake for a long time, alarmed and impressed by his own firmness.

16

E
ASTER
was approaching and Simon spent his days poring over maps hidden among his chief's files or strewn over Paule's carpet. To date he had planned two crowded itineraries for Italy and three for Spain, and was at present wavering towards Greece. Paule listened to him without saying anything: she would have ten days at most and she was feeling too tired even to catch a train. She would have liked a house in the country, a succession of identical days: childhood, in short! But she hadn't the heart to discourage Simon. Already he saw himself as the perfect traveller, leaping from the carriage to help her down on to the platform, guiding her to a car hired a fortnight beforehand, which would drive them to the best hotel in town, where their room would be full of the flowers he had telegraphed; he was forgetting that he had never yet managed to time a connection or hold on to a ticket. He was dreaming, still dreaming, but all his dreams were directed at Paule, rushed headlong towards her like churning rivers towards a calm sea. He had never felt so free as in these last few months, when each day had found him at the same office, each evening with the same companion, in the same flat, clinging to the same desire, the same anxiety, the same pain. For Paule still broke away at times, avoided his eyes, smiled fondly at his impassioned speeches. Paule still said nothing when there was talk of Roger. Often he had the impression of waging an absurd, exhausting and hopeless struggle, for, as he fully sensed, the passage of time was getting him nowhere. He had not simply to efface Paule's memory of Roger; he had to kill something inside her which
was
Roger, a kind of painful, ineradicable root which she endured with forbearance, and there were times when he reached the point of wondering whether it were not this forbearance, this accepted suffering that had first made him fall for her and now, perhaps, even kept his love alive. But generally he said to himself: "Paule is waiting for me; in an hour I shall have her in my arms," and it seemed to him that Roger had never existed, that Paule loved him, Simon, and that everything was simple and ablaze with happiness. And these were the times Paule preferred him—when he treated their relationship as an inescapable fact to which she could only subscribe. She was tired of her own diffidence. But when she was alone, the thought of Roger living without her would seem a fundamental mistake; she would ask herself how they had landed where they were. And 'they', 'we' still meant her and Roger. Simon was 'he'. Only, Roger knew nothing of this. When he was weary of his present life, he would come and grumble to her and no doubt try to win her back. And perhaps he would succeed. Simon would be well and truly hurt and she would be alone again, waiting for unreliable telephone calls and unfailing slights. And she rebelled against her own fatalism, against the impression that all this was inescapable. There was someone inescapable in her life: Roger.

But this did not prevent her from living with Simon, from sighing in his arms at night and sometimes from holding him to her in response to one of those impulses which only children and slick lovers can inspire, an impulse so possessive, so terrified at the idea of the precariousness of all possession, that he himself did not notice its intensity. At these moments Paule was close to old age, to that incomparable love that comes with age, and afterwards she was angry with herself and angry with Roger (who did not compel her to withdraw into herself) for not being there. When Roger took her, he was her master, she was his property, he was only a year or two older than she, and everything complied with certain moral or aesthetic rules which she had never till then suspected herself of harbouring. But Simon did not feel himself to be her master. He had adopted, through an unconscious 'hamming' which he could not have supposed would lead to his downfall, a complete attitude of dependence which made him fall asleep on her shoulder, as though for protection, get up at dawn to make breakfast, and consult her over the smallest thing—an attitude which moved Paule, yet somehow embarrassed her, discomforted her, as though she were faced with something abnormal. She respected him: he was working now; on one occasion he had taken her to a trial, in Versailles, where he had given a remarkable performance as the young lawyer, shaking hands, smiling condescendingly at the journalists and always returning to her as to the pivot of all his activity, at times interrupting his effusions to strangers so as to confirm that she was looking at him. No, he made no show of detachment. So she kept her eyes on him, putting every ounce of admiration and interest into her expression, which changed, the moment he turned his back, into one of affection and a certain pride. The women looked at him a good deal. She felt good: someone was living wholly for her. For her, at last, the question of the difference in their ages did not arise; she did not ask herself: "And in ten years' time will he still love me?" In ten years' time, she would be alone or with Roger. Something inside her persisted in telling her this. And at the thought of this duplicity, which she could do nothing about, her fondness for Simon redoubled: "My victim, my dear victim, my little Simon!" For the first time she was tasting the awful pleasure of loving somebody whom one is unavoidably going to hurt.

This 'unavoidably' and its consequences—the questions which Simon would one day ask her, which he would be entitled to ask her as a man she had hurt—appalled her. "Why do you prefer Roger to me? What has that heel to offer that's so much better than the love I pour out on you day after day?" And already she panicked at the veiy thought of having to explain Roger. She would not say 'him', she would say 'us', for she was quite unable to dissociate their two lives. She did not know why. Possibly because the efforts—the painful, unceasing efforts—which she had made for their love these six years had finally come to mean more to her than happiness. Possibly because her pride would not stand for their proving useless; it had grown so used to taking knocks that slowly but surely it had fed on them until finally it had chosen and anointed Roger as its chief scourge. In the end he had always escaped her. And this unpropitious fight had become the reason for her existence.

Yet she was not made for struggling; at times she told herself as much, rubbing Simon's soft, silken, flowing hair up the wrong way. She could, she murmured to him, have glided through life like her hand through his hair. They would lie like this for long hours in the dark night, until at last they fell asleep. They would hold hands and whisper, so that at times she had the ridiculous feeling that she was fourteen again and lying next to a classmate in one of those ghostly dormitories where girls spoke under their breath of God and men. She would whisper and Simon, enchanted by this suggestion of mystery, would lower his voice too.