Cloudless May (18 page)

Mme de Freppel was able to control her voice.

“Well, Léonie?”

The letter under her hand now had to do with certain pawnshop bonds. It was not a thing she wanted to remember. She felt an impulse to put it in her pocket, but was saved from this folly. Léonie snatched it from her. The violence, and Léonie's shaking hand, had an extraordinary effect on Marguerite. She felt pity, even tenderness. Poor Léonie. How she must have suffered! Jumping up, she took hold
of both the other woman's hands, pressing them against her face.

“Oh, Léonie, Léonie,” she cried, “why do you distrust me? I've never let you down, have I? If I've had no effect on Émile it's not my fault. I have to do things my own way. I can't drive him. . . . Leave him to me and trust me.”

She kissed Léonie's plump hands. The two of them embraced like children, crying and laughing. Mme de Vayrac stooped to pick up the papers, and took them across the room to the cabinet. She had her back to her friend, but when she was pushing the papers to the back of a drawer, she could see her in a mirror. Marguerite's face had lost its animation; she looked stupid and sullen.

She came back holding something in her hand—a small fifteenth-century figure, in wood, of a woman. It was not eight inches high. The polished curves of the belly, thighs, cheeks, were so many smiles. It was an embodied smile, all the more entrancing for having outlived dear knows what of terror and death. Really, to look at it you would think that peace and kindness were the rule, and cruelty the exception.

“I want to give you this,” she said.

“Oh, no, Léonie, it's worth hundreds!”

“And I want you to have it,” Mme Vayrac smiled. “You know you like it, and I like giving it to you.”

She spoke in a caressing voice, warm and amused, and cut Marguerite's thanks off quickly by stroking her cheek.

“And now I'm going to show you something else,” she said. “Look. Sadinsky brought it yesterday. He wants to sell it.”

She watched Marguerite turning the diamond between her fingers. The greed in the younger woman's eyes did not shock her; nothing human shocked her; she enjoyed life so warmly—beginning with the first sip of chocolate in the morning, ending, when she got between the sheets of her bed, on a groan of comfort—that she had no impulse to judge her fellows. She believed that even ascetics are amusing themselves. Marguerite's passion for diamonds tickled her.

“Do you remember your first diamond?” she said. “Wasn't it a ring that Englishman gave you? You wore it over your glove, you'd seen a rich woman wear hers there, and you thought it was a sign of belonging to the right set, the people
who don't know that anything exists in the world outside a dozen hotels, three beaches, and a golf-course.”

“This is a fine stone,” Mme de Freppel murmured.

“Add it to your collection, my dear.”

“How can I possibly afford it!”

But Mme Vayrac had considered that, too. That agile avid spider, her mind, which only existed to join fact to fact, had seen at once the relation between Sadinsky's diamond, her friend, and a certain Schnerb, an accountant, who had been useful to her in the matter of her income tax and was now trying to place himself in the financial department of the Prefecture: if Marguerite were to use her influence—he was not the sort of accountant who questions a necessary item. And Sadinsky would let his diamond go cheap, reasonably cheap, to the friend who introduced him to Mme Huet.

“But that's not easy,” Mme de Freppel frowned, with impatience. “I don't know why he's so anxious to know this cow of a woman. I'm told she reads her poems to her friends. Is he a poetry lover?” She stood up. “I must go.” She looked at her hat in the glass, then kissed her friend, warmly; their hands lingered on each other's arms. “Don't let him sell his diamond until I've tried to find the money. I'll think about your Schnerb.”

She had reached the door. A fatal impulse made her turn back. “Why did you say that about grandchildren? Edgar isn't the sort of man to have a family.”

Mme Vayrac did not answer, except by a glance which gave away no emotion of any kind. Possibly she did not know herself that, in this short sentence, her love for Marguerite had come face to face with its opposite. When the younger woman had gone, she sat still for a few minutes, then walked to the cupboard where she had thrown the letters. She fingered them thoughtfully. There was a lock on the drawer, but no key. She tried several of a collection of keys in her handbag until she found one that fitted. Her hand meditated, its thick flesh, used by life, closing round the key to hide its movements.

The telephone rang.

It was Georges Labenne ringing up to invite himself to dinner.

“Do come. You know Sadinsky's coming?” she said. “Do you want to meet him?”

Labenne's voice broadened. “Certainly I know. Apart from seeing you, and getting a good dinner, that's why I'm coming.”

“You shall tell me which you want most,” Mme Vayrac said, laughing. “And I want to talk to you.”

The atmosphere at the dinner-table was of complete ease. The Germans that morning had crossed the Meuse, but there was not a tremor of discomfort in the room. The nerves joining this house to other houses in France, this province to other French provinces, must have been cut. Labenne sprawled in his chair, and ate voraciously of tomatoes, whole hard-boiled eggs blanketed in cream, followed by salmon, followed by veal with young beans, followed by truffled chicken. He picked his blackened teeth thoroughly before dipping into the bowl of fruit.

Mme Vayrac drank glass for glass with him of her excellent Vouvray; both of them mocked the less unbuttoned Roumanian. Sadinsky was behaving with a formality which would have been ridiculous if it had not been natural to him to sit eating with elbows pressed into his sides. He ate with extreme delicacy. His thighs when he sat down spread out like a woman's and seemed about to burst through the broadcloth of his trousers: a looser garment would have suited him. He held his head up to eat, and looked round him with a smile of friendly condescension, a little mocking. He must have practised it.

Labenne looked at his hostess affectionately. One of her virtues in his eyes was that she enjoyed eating and drinking. He was really fond of her. In the same moment he let his glance move without respect over her shapeless body. What a sow, he thought. Under everything in him, the peasant despised her because she was a loose woman. And yet he admired her cleverness, her knowledge of men, even the tolerance which proved that she had no morals.

The room smelled richly of food, mingled with odours drawn out of curtains and woodwork by the sun coming through the slatted blinds. Labenne cleared a space in front of him on the disordered table so that he could rest both elbows on it.

“You've heard the news?” he said in his deep voice—he had a beautiful voice, low and flexible. “Do you realise what it means? The Maginot has been turned. The Germans are
in.
An army ten times more powerful, better equipped, better trained than our army, is inside our defences. Don't let's delude ourselves. The war is as good as lost.”

He paused to grab a handful of blackish-red cherries, biting one after another with his discoloured teeth, and spitting the stone on to his hand.

“For a foreigner—who is also a Jew—the prospect is very uncomfortable,” Sadinsky said. He spoke quietly. It was obvious that he was controlling himself.

“You'll be all right,” Labenne said brutally. “Roumania has sold out to Germany in good time.”

Mme Vayrac looked grave. “Then the war may reach us here?” she said in a soft voice. “Have you seen our Prefect? No. Do you know we've been advised to make a list of the food we have in our houses, and ...”

“I know all about it,” Labenne interrupted. “It's all perfectly fatuous.”

“Why?”

“My dear Léonie, a town can only stand the horror of a siege if its citizens are burning with hatred of the enemy, and would in fact rather die than let him put a foot in their houses. You go round Seuilly tomorrow and find out how many respectable men and women—shopkeepers, clerks, lawyers, vine-growers, coopers—would rather lie dead in the ruins of their houses than billet a German officer. You know the answer before you ask.”

“Yes, that's true,” she said, reflecting.

Labenne was picking his teeth again. “All the same, we don't want our Prefect prancing about the town disturbing people. You never know with our people. Roused to make war, they might shoot the wrong man. I shall take steps.”

“What will you do?” Sadinsky asked. A delicate smile, full of his suave Jewish malice, touched his lips.

“Leave it to me,” Labenne repeated, with an air of irony. “I wasn't born yesterday.”

Mme Vayrac was genuinely distressed. “I can't help thinking of our soldiers—dying up there. In this sunshine.”

“Soldiers expect to be killed,” Labenne said. He had begun to strip its skin from a banana, cramming the fruit into his throat. “And y'know, it's not important. There's a war, and thousands of men are slaughtered. Millions. You'd expect the factories to be half empty afterwards, shops closed, and so on and so forth. Not a bit of it. The shops are open, other men work the machines, society goes on just the same; in a few months, a few days, you can't see the gaps. People have to eat. . . .”

“But the soldiers who are dying now are being killed in a war you say is hopeless,” Sadinsky murmured, with the same delicate and malicious smile. “It seems sad.”

Labenne turned on him a look of calm ferocity. “There are forms which have to be observed. Let's say you've decided to make peace. You don't take the cannon-meat into your confidence. If you did, it would stop fighting—and then what sort of terms would you make?”

This speech was followed by silence. Labenne helped himself to more cherries, swallowed them, and wiped his hands. Leaning across the table, he patted Mme Vayrac's arm.

“You look well this evening,” he said, smiling.

“You've alarmed me,” she said pensively. “If we are defeated—what happens?”

“We shall negotiate in good time. My God, why don't they send
me
to Berlin? I could turn the German General Staff into our best friends.”

“What have you to offer them?” Sadinsky enquired.

“A navy—intact. Millions of workmen,” Labenne said.

The Jew raised his fine eyebrows. “You would give away our ally?”

“In these crises,” Labenne said, “a country has no allies.”

Mme Vayrac laughed gently. She had drunk enough to believe that nothing was irreparable, not even her life.

“We three are allies,” she said, rolling the words on her lips. “You must let Sadinsky talk to you, Georges. He has a wonderful idea. We want to start a syndicate of people who have a
little money to invest. There are millions of them. Added together, they could put millions of francs in our hands. We shall operate on the Bourse. You, my dear good Labenne, will give financial advice in the press—in our favour.”

Labenne looked meditatively at the Roumanian. Sadinsky's plump face, mild and fresh-coloured, was that of an adult baby. When he smiled, his tongue touched the corners of his lips slyly. No first glance would detect the wheels and cogs of a subtle mind turning in this mild flesh. But Labenne had been able to watch them, and had discovered that all he knew about making money on the exchanges of Europe was childish and feeble beside Sadinsky's knowledge. Sadinsky was a physician who had only to rest his finger on the patient's wrist to know that in less than a week a fever of spending would break out in Paris, that panic was brewing among the peasants of Macedonia, that the Hungarian wheat harvest was going to fail; every one of these breakdowns would show itself in changes in the money market which he could predict to five decimal points. He had been useful to Labenne already. And Labenne conceived further uses for a man with no recognisable scruples and friends in several capital cities.

“It's not a bad scheme,” he said briefly. “I'll give my mind to it presently.”

Sadinsky and Mme Vayrac exchanged a glance, which said: He needs time to think what he can get out of it. Labenne noticed this glance and read it correctly.

“And now,” Léonie said softly, “I must talk to you about Edgar. When is my poor boy going to be released? After all—it's unjust to keep him in prison without a trial.”

“My dear Léonie,” Labenne said, “you know perfectly well that justice is one of the pleasant fictions of a democracy. I don't know the truth about Edgar's—mistakes, shall we say?—but it doesn't matter. Who knows the truth about any action? The prosecution, when Edgar comes to trial, will have made up its mind about him, it will have a plausible version of his act. He himself, and his lawyer, will have another. It will be one version against the other—the same thing happens in any trial. The truth
can't
come out . . . it would mean putting society itself in the witness-box, and take a lifetime. No, no, what we've got to do—whether Edgar is guilty or innocent—is
to prepare an iron-bound fable . . . capable of standing up to knocks. . . . Don't think I'm neglecting him. But don't ask me to strike without a fair chance of getting my man.”

It is in his choice of metaphors that a man, otherwise impenetrable, gives himself away. For one second, as Labenne ended his speech, he was terrifying. Mme Vayrac felt herself ready to faint, her hands trembled.

“I have only one son,” she said in a low voice. “I don't want my family to come to an end.”

“Good God,” Labenne said, “do you think you're the only woman whose future has been cut short this year?”

Léonie could not speak. Ah, she thought, he feels sure of his own survival. He intends to found a dynasty.