Léon and Louise (17 page)

By day he dutifully went off to work, and at night he joked with his wife and was an affectionate father to his children; fundamentally, however, he always felt most alive when devoting himself to his memories like an old man. His outward appearance had changed little in the twelve years since his excursion with Louise. He had neither gained nor lost weight, and although his hair was receding, his body at forty was much the same as it had been ten or even twenty years earlier.

But he wasn't, he had felt of late, a young man any more. He still had no aches and pains and still wasn't given to melancholy, his memory wasn't failing and he still found the sight of a woman's shapely pair of legs disturbing. For all that, he felt that the sun had passed its zenith. He had no wish to look young any more and no longer felt the need to make himself look interesting in gleaming spats and a jaunty bowler hat. Having recently bought a classic tweed suit, he was surprised and rather amused, when trying it on, to find that he looked the spitting image of the father of his childhood years.

His wife didn't complain. When he had kissed Louise for the last time that Sunday morning in the Place Saint-Michel and got out of the Torpedo prior to dragging himself back to the Rue des Écoles like a condemned man on his way to the scaffold, Yvonne had behaved as if he hadn't been out all night but had just got back from the baker's or popped downstairs with some shirts for Madame Rossetos to iron. The door of the flat was open, the scent of coffee was drifting out of the kitchen, and when he took her hand and started to try to explain, she released herself and said, ‘Skip it, Léon, we both know the score. Let's not waste any words on the subject.'

To his boundless amazement, they then spent an agreeably unemotional Sunday like the happiest of families, went walking in the Jardin des Plantes in the milky light of the November afternoon, showed Michel the stuffed mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers in the Natural History Museum, ate lemon ices at the
Brasserie au Vieux Soldat,
and treated their little son to a motorbike ride on the carousel at the entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens. And all the while Yvonne had clung to his arm, her soft, pregnant hips following his every movement like a cuddlesome cat, as if they had always had the same goals, desires and intentions in life.

Léon was puzzled at first by the absence of the seemingly inevitable scene. He felt surprised by Yvonne's magnanimity on the one hand, and, on the other, by how quickly he could become unfaithful to his own infidelity. But then he grasped that Yvonne had vanquished him by taking possession of his escapade and turning it into an episode in her marriage. So far from coming between them, his reunion with Louise would in future be a mutual bond, a shared memory. At the same time, he also realized that her magnanimity stemmed ultimately from cruel implacability: from the certainty that she was dependent on him for better or worse, and that a moral person like him would find it impossible, in times of crisis and inflation and in a Roman Catholic country like France, to desert his first-born son and his God-entrusted, five-months-pregnant wife purely in order to seek happiness at another woman's side.

It did, in fact, seem so natural to Léon to stay with Yvonne that it wasn't even a duty; he had no need to give it a second thought. They would stay together and never get divorced – not, in the first place, because they were insufficiently passionate by nature to lend themselves to such a final catastrophe, but because they lacked the requisite measure of unscrupulousness and egocentricity peculiar to all marital dramas despite their emotional exaltation. Secondly, because for all its alienation and detachment their marriage was sustained by a siblinglike feeling of affection, goodwill and respect which neither of them had ever betrayed. And this, thirdly, was how it came about that they had never really discerned the strongest and most important bond that keeps most couples together: the fear of hunger and hardship in an unheated attic.

It was dark by the time they came home from their Sunday outing. After a supper of bread, ham and eggs in the kitchen, they put little Michel to bed and went to bed too. Under the bedclothes they were closer, in their mingled grief and happiness, than they had been for a long time, and Léon, heavyhearted though he was, felt bound to his wife by fate. But, when he moved still closer to her and pulled up the hem of her nightdress, she said, ‘No, Léon, not that. Not any more.'

Next morning he went to work just as he had on a thousand other mornings. The grass in the park across the way was fluffy with snow, the streets were wet and the plane trees black, and the Métro rumbled beneath their roots as usual. At Christmas 1928 he went to the Rue de Rennes and spent all their savings on a pearl bracelet at which Yvonne had more than once cast hopelessly covetous glances in passing, not that she had meant him to notice. A springlike New Year's Eve was followed by the harsh winter of 1929. In April, when Yvonne gave birth to a healthy boy, the Rue des Écoles was still covered in hard-frozen snow stained with coal dust.

One Friday morning three months later, Léon's mother died while buying some perch for supper in Cherbourg's fish market. She had just been handed the fish wrapped in newspaper when an extremely important artery in her competent brain, which had functioned perfectly for fifty-eight years, was occluded by a blood clot. She said ‘Ow, what's that!', clasped her forehead with her left hand, and sat down abruptly on the icy wet pavement, which smelt of fish, knocking over a basketful of oysters as she did so. When the fishmonger's wife, shocked by her customer's deathly pallor, called loudly for a doctor, she made a dismissive gesture and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Don't bother, that won't be necessary. Better call the police, they'll notify the medical officer and...' Then she shut her eyes and mouth as if she had now seen and said all she wanted, lay down on her side, and died.

The funeral took place on a stormy spring morning when cherry blossom was whirling through the air like snowflakes. As he stood beside the open grave, Léon marvelled at how smoothly the ritual ran its course – at the positively insulting simplicity with which persons who had, after all, been loved, hated or at least needed during their lifetime, could be simply buried, consigned to the past and removed from everyday life without more ado.

He left the next day, although it was only Saturday and he could have stayed longer. He was surprised at himself for being in such a hurry to return to Paris and annoyed that he blurted out an excuse to his father like a sixteen-year-old boy caught playing truant. It didn't dawn on him until later that his mother's death had finally set the seal on his youth, and that no link remained between Cherbourg and the man he now was.

Yvonne stayed on in Cherbourg with the boys for a few weeks to help her widower father-in-law to pack up the house and move to a small flat near the harbour.

She returned to Paris having developed a new habit which Léon initially found disturbing. Its outward manifestation was a notebook with a black oilcloth cover and red-lined pages in which she recorded her dreams every morning before getting up. Léon suspected that the oilcloth-covered notebook presaged renewed marital turbulence. When this failed to materialize he construed it as a belated effect of childbirth or an aftershock of his extramarital escapade.

For her part, Yvonne neither concealed nor made a fuss about the notebook, which she always left open on her bedside table. For a while Léon suspected that this was because it contained messages addressed to himself, so one day, when Yvonne was out, he picked it up and leafed through it. ‘Train journey by night through snowy winter countryside,' he read, or: ‘Something to do with a horse, then Papa on the sofa.' And, under another date: ‘Léon practised shooting in the garden, but what garden, where did he get the pistol and what was he firing at?' Or: ‘I and the little boys in the Métro. Hole in stocking. Yves screamed like a stuck pig. Indignant glances. Terribly embarrassing. The train went on and on along the dark tunnel – it just wouldn't stop. Back into the womb of Mother Earth?'

Such or similar were the fragments Yvonne's memory had salvaged in her waking state. All she had written one morning was: ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing. Was it really just dark all night long?' Léon did his level best to develop an interest in his wife's nocturnal peregrinations. At first he also strove to interpret their inherent symbols and imagery, whose meaning tended to be dismayingly obvious, and make inferences about Yvonne's mental well-being, the state of her marriage, and her idea of himself. Because he never learned anything really new, however, he eventually came to the conclusion that dreams were merely waste products of the mental metabolic process. A young girl might find it entertaining to examine them for a while, but he found it profoundly surprising that a grown woman like Yvonne could take such an obsessive interest in her nocturnal phantasmagoria.

In July 1931, by which time he was well past his second birthday and had aroused the family doctor's incipient concern by failing to utter a single word – really not a word, not even ‘Mama' or ‘Papa' – little Yves at last enunciated, loud and clear, the resonant word ‘Roquefort', complete with long-drawn-out vowel sounds and a guttural, unmistakably Parisian R.

That was also the summer when the Great Depression began, somewhat belatedly, to ravage France as well. In accordance with ministerial orders to economize, the Police Judiciaire had to shed twenty per cent of its staff. Léon escaped redundancy because he had two children to feed, and his wife, who, motivated by natural good nature, pleasure in forgiveness and self-interest, had not maintained her sexual embargo for long, was three months pregnant.

In April 1932 Yvonne gave birth to a third son, who was christened Robert. In the second week of July, when the summer holidays began, Léon's father retired from the teaching profession after spending exactly forty years sitting on the same chair behind the same desk in the same Cherbourg classroom. Ten days later he put a thoroughly proactive end to his lonely widower's life by discreetly purchasing a coffin of the appropriate size and setting it up in his living room. Having donned a white nightshirt and imbibed a hefty dose of castor oil, he emptied his bowels in the lavatory before taking a sufficient dose of barbiturates and lying down in the coffin, where he pulled the lid over himself, shut his eyes and folded his hands. The housekeeper found him next morning. On top of the coffin lay a note addressed to her, a five franc coin intended to compensate her for the shock, and a notarized will that settled all matters relating to his estate and gave full details of his funeral, which had already been arranged and paid for.

Yvonne and the children again spent the summer in Cherbourg, where she took possession of her father-in-law's flat for use as a holiday home, and also of Léon's inheritance, which proved to be quite substantial. After all expenses had been deducted, they acquired a nice financial cushion in the Société Générale amounting to several months' salary. Because they managed this nest egg cleverly, it maintained its value for decades with only minor fluctuations and guaranteed them a modest but financially carefree way of life.

While walking on the beach shortly before she returned to Paris, Yvonne made the acquaintance of a handsome, dark-eyed youth named Raoul, who had no regular job, cadged some money off her after only a few minutes, and had the audacity, when the children were asleep that evening, to visit her at her late father-in-law's almost empty flat. She slept with him the same night and the two nights thereafter, doings things she had never done in the connubial bed she shared with Léon.

She bitterly reproached herself on the train journey home to Paris, uncertain whether she had committed adultery in retaliation for Léon's affair with Louise or from feminine vanity and fear of growing old. It wouldn't have been worth it for sexual pleasure alone – that had been borne in on her after the first time at latest. She was still convinced, even when the train pulled into the Gare Saint-Lazaire, that she would have to make a clean breast of it to Léon, but when she saw her blue-eyed, unsuspecting husband standing on the platform in a suit creased and crumpled by two months of enforced bachelorhood, she couldn't bring herself to do so. Instead, she rushed at him and took refuge in an embrace whose duration and intensity should have aroused his suspicions. It would be almost thirty years, and with death staring her in the face, before she owned up to her one and only fall from grace.

In May 1936 the Popular Front won the election and Léon got paid holidays for the first time. He went to Cherbourg for two weeks with the boys and Yvonne, who had given birth to a girl named Muriel a short time before. Although he failed to meet up with his boyhood friends, he did hire a sailing dinghy and take the family on trips to the Channel Islands. Yvonne, who spent the whole fortnight secretly dreading the possibility that her handsome beau might surface at some stage, did not relax until they were sitting in the train on their way back to Paris.