Cloudless May (41 page)

“We must walk about,” Catherine said hurriedly. “If we stand here my mother will notice us.”

A cube of sunlight filled the space between the dry grass and the sky. Impossible to breathe in it. Catherine lifted her head. Seeing that Lucien had lowered his and was walking like a peasant bent under the sun, she did the same. They crossed to the nearest group of poplars and from there to an acacia, and from there, to keep up a pretence of growing smaller, to the shadow thrown by a bush of laurel.

“If we can go on like this we shall be able to hide behind a cabbage,” Lucien said. He stared in front of him, keeping his eyes, which were too small and too blue, on the ground, because he was afraid to look at her. What if she were smiling?

They passed old gentlemen sitting about in couples, the sweat running from their straw hats, and groups of matrons, each keeping one eye on a young girl or two young girls in light frocks. Voices droned under the trees, but in the open stretches of lawn a trance-like silence followed the voices: even the bees could not stand this heat. At the other side of the garden the air was wrinkled by it. . . . There were no young men except Lucien: every eye stung him. He took his glasses off. Now that he saw only faceless statues the stings were blunted. His hand brushed Catherine's: the shock went through his body as though a bolt had been shot home. From her pallor he saw that she had felt it.

Keeping their faces as stiff as possible they talked in ordinary voices, without making a gesture. They said what came into their minds, without trying to live up to the occasion. It was all they could do to breathe at this height.

“We must always be together. . . .”

“I shall be called up next month. . . .”

“Who said?”

“Colonel Rienne has given me a definite promise. I trust him. . . .”

“Look at that bird. . . .”

“You know I can't see it,” he said.

“I love you,” Catherine said carelessly. She pulled a leaf from the laurestinus.

Drawn along by the terrace, they reached the lawn at the other side of the house. Only half of it was green: at its summer lowest the Loire fed half of the fine earthy web stretched from root to root under the grass; exactly where its strength failed it the blades became brittle and yellow.

“Take this leaf. . . .”

“Will you be able to live on a little money until I become a Colonel?”

Mme de Freppel was sitting at the far side of the cypress. She was talking to M. de Thiviers: her parasol fell on the grass and he bent stiffly to pick it up for her.

“I distrust that man,” Lucien said.

“Why? He only reminds me of a very noble goat we had once. . . .”

“You really will wait until I come back?”

They walked about slowly, at one moment afraid they were being overheard; the next, separated by a league of sunlight from everything living, they hurried to throw themselves against the elbows and pointed eyes. Better be listened to than watched. And after all, Catherine thought, we are saying nothing: nothing at all.

“How sandy the river is! Oh! . . .”

“What's the matter?”

“You touched me. . . .”

“What is it like?”

“A burn. . .”

“Child, oh, my child. . . .”

“Don't look round, my mother has noticed us. . . .”

Catherine lifted her arm to point at a poplar. She yawned. Everyone except her mother would see that she was trying to get rid of a very dull young man. They turned back, plunging from sun to shadow, silence to the rasping babble of voices, hope to terror.

“If you were to be killed . . .”

“Bosh,” Lucien said severely, “I can't be.”

“Don't say it!”

She had turned pale. He's mad, she thought. Stubborn, short-sighted. I shall never be able to control him, never. He'll control me. She felt a frightful doubt and an even more frightening joy. They stood a minute under the arch of the courtyard, neither daring to touch the other. Catherine noticed that the shadows striping the light were frayed at the edges, where they had been burned by the sun. They were stammering a word, a single word. I can't hear it, she said to herself: I don't hear anything, we shall be punished. She looked at Lucien without moving her head. He took a step forward; a ray cut the shadow across his face; one half stayed sombre, the other glittered as though a sponge had been passed over it. I shall half-lose him, she thought.

“I'm afraid that when I've gone he'll break down.”

“Who?”

“The Prefect, of course. He works himself to death, and he'll be worse without me. . . .”

You imagine he's nearer death than you are? thought Catherine. Idiot. . . . She wanted to laugh. A tear fell on her arm. She looked round, not sure whether it were raining or not. Lucien was looking away.

“I don't,” he said, “hate the Germans.”

Now why? Why say that? If you don't hate them, she said to herself, how can you kill one of them? She saw him advancing pitilessly, his eyes blurred with kindness behind their glasses, towards the enemy. Towards a poor human being, a poor German Lucien. There were German Luciens, then? She closed her eyes. Opened them. Lucien had stepped over his enemy's body into the full light. He went without looking at her to his motor-cycle, pulled it out of the shade of the laurels, and when she had given up hope, turned his head to look at her for a minute. She could see the two short lines at either end of his mouth. They made a single word in brackets. Straining her ears, she heard her heart beating, nothing else, not a sound. Even the old gentlemen had stopped chattering. Lucien started the engine. Now if I shout, he won't hear me. She shouted with all her force and without making a sound. Lucien. My love. My life.

“Catherine, don't stand there burning your face. Had you forgotten—it's this evening we're going to the Huets'?”

Her mother had crossed the courtyard without her guessing it. Lucien has gone and you won't dare to ask me any questions, she said to herself. She turned round, smiling.

“No,” she said, “I remembered.”

Andrée Huet chose, to wear at her reception, a dress made for her in Paris, to be worn in Paris. Ever since she married (in 1920) she had had two lives, one in her apartment in the Avenue Émile-Acollas, in which every year a room was redecorated for her by the most fashionable painter—the year
of the Russian Ballet by Alexander Benoist, the year of surrealism by Dali, the year of the Spanish war by Picasso—each painter joyfully or piously obliterating his predecessor: and a second life in Seuilly. Here she settled back on to her roots, cook on the defensive colouring of the province, wore clothes copied from portraits of her seventeenth-century ancestors, pored herself, and drew on a source of life rapidly drying up—she had no children and no sister or brother—but still joined in some way to who knows what Angevin root of France.

Without knowing it yet, she had decided to break with the province. She was going to throw in her lot with Paris, with the Future governors of Paris, whether they were French or German, or Frenchmen speaking German and modelling their thoughts
on
German lasts. In a few months' time her childhood in a province would cease speaking to her. All she was turning her back on would reject her. All that had bored and fed her would die. All that had caressed as a nurse caresses a child, with roughness, with animal love, would wither in her. So, without feeling it yet, she intended. So she thought. She had forgotten that she must sleep. She had forgotten that she must dream—and what dreams: of the child whose mother, displeased, turns her back. She had forgotten that she would be away from home when she died.

The dress from the Place Vendôme made her look like any hostess in any cosmopolitan society, brittle and without savour. It cost a small fortune. Andrée was mean about money—except the money, including that paid to “agents,” spent on her husband's career, and except the money she spent on clothing herself, this included Dufy's panels of Monte Carlo in the dining-room in Paris. She could put on one of her provincial dresses in a few minutes and with it the good sense, the wit, the flat bony elegance she was given at birth. It took her maid an hour and a half to turn out a Place Vendôme nobody. Her dress could have stood alone at the head of the staircase where her ancestors received Charles V, and all her guests would have known what to admire.

A few minutes before eight o'clock—in Seuilly a reception had to begin at an hour when in the Avenue Émile-Acollas she would still be dressing for dinner, or half the guests would fall asleep—she heard the first car rasping the gravel of the
drive. It sounded of nothing but the provinces. In Paris her guests appeared in the doorway of the room as though the footmen had shaken them out of a sleeve. Vexed, she left her room and looked between the double columns supporting the ceiling of the great staircase. The thought came to her—before she could laugh at it, it had nipped her—that Saint-Jouin might be coming before time. It was Mme de Freppel and her daughter. Smiling with fury, she said,

“Charming of you to come before I expected you.”

Catherine, not her mother, showed anger at this rudeness. She blushed and her eyebrows drew together in a line sending out two glances of hate at the older woman. What a little shrew, Mme Huet thought. She felt old. Catherine's face, without line or roughness, wearied her. She turned to Mme de Freppel with relief: nothing here to depress her, except a vitality she could write off as vulgar.

Catherine listened when her mother explained that a certain M. Sadinsky, a new-comer to Seuilly, wanted to give a large sum of money—possibly as much as ten thousand francs—to Mme Huet's War Comforts Fund.

“Why not?” Mme Huet said coolly. “Let him offer it. We shan't refuse.”

Mme de Freppel was not satisfied. Catherine saw her stifling her resentment of the other woman's tone. Snub her, she cried, be rude to her: who is this Monsieur Sadinsky? why are you humbling yourself for his sake? She stared, trying to lose her humiliation in it, at an enormous Puvis de Chavannes, doves, mosaics, figures in togas gesticulating under the arches of a courtyard. . . . Where has Lucien got to? If I walk round those doves—as large as geese—they'll snap the palms. . . . Monsieur Sadinsky, her mother was saying—and what a generous charming man!—had thought of founding a Joan of Arc League for young women. And what, Mme Huet demanded rudely, had it to do with her, this no doubt very patriotic—as his name implied—scheme?

“Your patronage——” Mme de Freppel began.

“Absurd.”

Catherine almost cried with rage. Her mother was smiling. Lifting her hands in that gesture which meant indifference, which meant “I know too much,” she said carelessly,

“As you like. But Monsieur Sadinsky has a great many political friends, he's going to Paris, he's rich or at least knows where to put his hand on money, no doubt you could have used him. But to do that you would have to see him.”

Other guests were arriving. “I'll see,” Mme Huet said abruptly.

She turned her back on Mme de Freppel: who moved off, with her light step, smiling as if she had not just been insulted. Catherine followed her closely. She was suffering as a child who sees his mother laughed at can suffer. She pulled Mme de Freppel's dress.

“Let's go home.”

Her mother looked at her in astonishment. “Go home now? Silly girl. You must meet people.”

“I hate them,” Catherine muttered. “I'm bored.”

“How difficult you are!”

Smiling, Mme de Freppel allowed herself to be drawn aside by Abbé Garnier, who had just come. He had looked round the room, and seeing no one of greater importance, had hurried to her. He believed she was influential. If it was the divine will to lift him into the about-to-be-empty throne at Euxerre, he must also be meant to overlook her immoral life and make all the use of her possible. Besides, it gave him pleasure to be seen talking confidentially to Mme Prefect. He noticed neither her impatience nor the brevity of her replies. When in a minute or two she walked abruptly away from him, he carried over his unfinished sentence to the nearest listener, a half-deaf Senator, who accepted with a blank face the moral of a story he had not heard, and answered with a remark about truffles.

“I'm told that all our truffles are to be sent to America to pay for aeroplanes. Tell me it's not true!”

“But I don't know,” Abbé Garnier said. He was annoyed by this irrelevance to his future.

“To—pay—for—aeroplanes! In what war have aeroplanes been decisive? You can't tell me. But our pâtés! It's unbelievable.”

“You needn't believe anything which revolts your conscience,” Abbé Garnier said absently. His glance passed over the room, missing low-placed objects with the regularity of a searchlight trained to pick up only the tops of hills. It rested
on Mme Huet, just coming back into the room. Calling an absorbed look into his eyes, to avoid being spoken to, he slipped his lean body between the dumb eyeless bodies separating him from his victim.

Mme Huet spoke to him with kindness. She did not like him, but by birth and principles she approved of the Church. Of any but its parish priests. Towards a priest working in a parish she felt a coldness she did not recognise as mistrust and guilt: he might hold dangerous views, or he might, looking at her, see the schoolgirl who used to give her arm a deep prick when she had a sinful thought. Odious little saint! She could speak to Garnier comfortably: he would never distress her, never, she thought, betray our class. Knowing him to be the son of a small Morvan farmer, she did not speak of his class.

“Ah, my dear Madame Huet, you must let me a-ah congratulate you on keeping our courage up by your charming hospitality. It's admirable of you!”

“We need courage,” Mme Huet said.

“I agree, I agree profoundly. . . .”