The Age of Reason (25 page)

‘Suppose I discussed it with Mathieu myself?’ A slime of pity had engulfed him. He had no sympathy for Marcelle, and he felt profoundly disgusted, but the pity was there, and not to be denied. He would have done anything to extricate himself. Marcelle raised her head, her expression suggested that she thought him crazy.

‘Discuss it with him? You? Really, Daniel, what can you be thinking about?’

‘One could tell him... that I’ve met you...’

‘Where? I never go out. And even so, should I have been likely to tell you all this point-blank?’

‘No. No, clearly not.’

Marcelle laid a hand on his knee: ‘Daniel, I do beseech you not to take a hand in this affair. I’m very angry with Mathieu, he oughtn’t to have told you...’

But Daniel clung to his idea. ‘Listen, Marcelle, this is what we must do. Tell him the truth quite simply. I shall say: You must forgive us our little bit of deception: Marcelle and I do see each other now and again, and we haven’t told you.’

‘Daniel!’ begged Marcelle. ‘It can’t be done. I won’t have you talking about me. I wouldn’t for the world seem to make any claims. It’s for him to understand.’ She added with a conjugal air: ‘And then, you know, he would not forgive me for not having told him myself. We always tell each other everything.’

Daniel thought, ‘She is a good creature.’ But he did not want to laugh.

‘But I should not speak in your name,’ he said. ‘I should tell him that I’ve seen you, that you looked distressed, and that things were possibly not so simple as he thought. All this as though coming from myself.’

‘I won’t have it,’ said Marcelle doggedly. ‘I won’t have it.’

Daniel looked avidly at her shoulders and neck. This crass obstinacy annoyed him: he wanted to break it down. He was possessed by a vast and vile desire — to desecrate that conscience, and with her plumb the depths of this humility. But it was not sadism: it was something more tentative and clinging, more a matter of the flesh. It was goodwill.

‘It must be done, Marcelle. Marcelle, look at me.’

He took her by the shoulders, and his fingers seemed to slide into soft butter.

‘If I don’t tell him, you never will, and... what will be the result? You will live beside him in silence, and come to hate him in the end.’

Marcelle did not answer, but he understood from her peevish and deflated look that she was about to yield. Again she said: ‘I won’t have it.’

He released her. ‘If you won’t let me do as I say,’ he said angrily, ‘I shan’t forgive you for a long while. You will have wrecked your life with your own hands.’

Marcelle rubbed her toes on the bedside mat ‘You would... you would have to speak quite vaguely,’ she said: ‘just to make him take notice.’

‘Of course,’ said Daniel. And he added to himself, ‘You can rely on that.’

Then Marcelle continued, with a gesture of vexation: ‘It isn’t possible.’

‘Oh come! You were just going to be reasonable... Why isn’t it possible?’

‘You will be obliged to tell him that we see each other.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Daniel irritably. ‘I said so just now. But I know him, he won’t mind, he’ll be a bit put out, for the sake of appearances, and then, as he begins to feel guilty, he will be only too glad to have something against you. Besides, I shall say that we have only been seeing each other during the last few months, and at long intervals. Anyway, we should have had to tell him some time.’

‘True.’

She did not look convinced. ‘It was
our
secret,’ she said with profound regret. ‘Look here, Daniel, it was my private life, I have no other.’ And she added venomously: ‘All I have of my own is what I hide from him.’

‘We must try. For the child’s sake.’

She was on the point of giving way; he needed only to wait: she would slip, under her own momentum, into resignation and self-abandonment: in one moment, all she was and had would stand exposed, and she would say: ‘Do as you like, I am in your hands.’ She fascinated him: that soft fire that devoured him — was it Evil or Good? Good and Evil,
their
Good, his Evil — it was the same. Here was this woman, and this repellent and intoxicating communion of two selves.

Marcelle passed a hand over her hair: ‘Well, let us try,’ she said defiantly. ‘After all, it will be a test.’

‘A test?’ asked Daniel. ‘A test for Mathieu do you mean?’

‘Yes —’

‘Can you suppose that he will remain indifferent? That he won’t be eager to have an explanation with you?’

‘I don’t know.’ And she added curtly: ‘I want to respect him.’

Daniel’s heart began to throb violently: ‘Don’t you respect him any more?’

‘Certainly... But I’m no longer in confidence with him since yesterday evening. He has been... You are right: he has been too neglectful. He took no trouble about me. And then, what he said on the telephone today was pitiable. He...’

She blushed: ‘He felt impelled to tell me that he loved me. Just as he was hanging up the receiver. It stank of a bad conscience. I can’t tell you the effect it had on me! If ever I ceased to respect him... But I won’t think of that. When I happen to be angry with him, I’m always so upset. If only he tries to make me talk a bit tomorrow, if he would
ask
me once, and only once: “What is in your mind?”’

She was silent, and sat shaking her head despondently.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Daniel. ‘When I leave you, I’ll drop a note in his letter-box and make an appointment for tomorrow.’

They were silent. Daniel began to think of tomorrow’s interview: it looked like being hard and heated, another plunge into the clinging slime of pity.

‘Daniel!’ said Marcelle. ‘Dear Daniel.’

He raised his head, and met her eyes. The look in them was heavy and hypnotic, brimming with sexual gratitude, the look that follows love. He closed his eyes: there was between them something more than love. She stood open, he had entered into her, they were now one entity.

‘Daniel!’ Marcelle repeated.

Daniel opened his eyes and coughed: he had a touch of asthma. He took her hand, and kissed her, letting his lips linger upon hers.

‘My archangel,’ said Marcelle over his head. He will spend his whole life bent over that odorous hand, and she will stroke his hair.

A
GREAT
mauve flower was rising towards the sky; it was the night. And in that night Mathieu was walking through the city, thinking to himself: ‘I am a wash-out.’ It was quite a new idea, he must turn it over in his mind, and sniff at it with circumspection. From time to time Mathieu lost it, nothing remained but the words. The words were not devoid of a certain sombre charm. ‘A wash-out.’ Imagination could conceive all manner of grand disasters — suicide, revolt, and other violent issues. But the idea quickly returned: no, nothing of that kind: what was here in question was a little, quiet, modest misery, no matter for despair; on the contrary, a rather soothing state of mind. Mathieu had the impression that he had just been allowed any indulgence he fancied, like a sick man who cannot recover. ‘All I need do is to go on living,’ he thought. He read the word ‘Sumatra’ in letters of fire, and the Negro hurried towards him, touching his cap. On the threshold, Mathieu hesitated: he could hear confused sounds, a tango: his heart was still filled with lethargy and darkness. And then — it happened in an instant, just as a sleeper suddenly finds himself on his feet in the morning without knowing how he got there: he had pulled the green curtain aside, walked down seventeen steps, and emerged into a scarlet, echoing cellar, picked out with patches of unwholesome white — the table-cloths. At the far end of the cellar, silk-shirted gauchos were playing dance-music on a platform. Before him stood a throng of people, motionless, decorous, and apparently expectant: they were dancers: they looked like gloomy victims of an interminable destiny. Mathieu surveyed the room listlessly, in search of Boris and Ivich.

‘A table, sir?’ A sleek young man bowed to him with an insinuating air.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ said Mathieu.

The young man recognized him: ‘Oh, it’s you, sir,’ he said cordially. ‘Mademoiselle Lola is dressing. Your friends are at the far end, on the left — I’ll take you along.’

‘No, thanks, I shall find them all right You’re very full this evening.’

‘Yes, not so bad. Mostly Dutch. Rather noisy, but they drink a good deal.’

The young man vanished. There was no prospect of threading a way between the dancing couples. Mathieu waited: he listened to the tango and the shuffling feet, watching the slow evolutions of that taciturn assemblage. Bare shoulders, a Negro’s head, some handsome women of uncertain age, and a number of elderly gentlemen dancing with an apologetic air. The rasping notes of the tango passed over their heads: the bandsmen did not appear to be playing for their benefit. ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ said Mathieu to himself. His jacket was shiny at the elbows, his trousers had lost their creases, he was a poor dancer, and he was incapable of amusing himself with the appropriate air of grave vacuity. He felt ill at ease: in Montmartre, despite the benevolence of the head-waiters, one could never feel at one’s ease: there was a sense of anxious, restless cruelty in the air.

The white lights were switched on again. Mathieu advanced on to the dancing-floor among a throng of retreating backs. In an alcove stood two tables. At one of them, a man and a woman were talking intermittently, with eyes averted. At the other, he saw Boris and Ivich leaning towards each other, looking very intent, and quite charmingly austere. ‘Like two little monks.’ It was Ivich who was talking, and gesticulating vivaciously. Never, even in her confidential moments, had she presented such a face to Mathieu. ‘How young they are!’ thought Mathieu. He felt inclined to turn round and go away. But he went on towards them, because he could no longer endure his solitude: he felt as though he were looking at them through a keyhole. Soon they would catch sight of him, they would turn towards him those impassive faces which they kept for their parents and important persons, and even in their very hearts there would be something changed. He was now quite near Ivich, but she had not seen him. She was leaning close to Boris’s ear and whispering. She looked a little — just a very little — like an elder sister, and she was talking to Boris with an air of baffled tolerance. Mathieu felt a little cheered: even with her brother, Ivich did not quite let herself go, she played the part of elder sister, she never forgot herself. Boris laughed shortly: ‘Punk,’ was all he said.

Mathieu laid a hand on their table. ‘Punk.’ On that word their dialogue closed for ever: it was like the last rejoinder in a novel or a play. Mathieu gazed at Boris and Ivich: they looked quite romantic, he thought.

‘Hullo,’ he said.

‘Hullo,’ said Boris, getting up.

Mathieu threw a brief glance at Ivich: she was leaning back in her chair. Her eyes were pale and mournful. The
real
Ivich had disappeared. ‘And why the
real
one?’ he thought with irritation.

‘How are you, Mathieu?’ said Ivich.

She did not smile, nor did she look astonished or annoyed: she seemed to find Mathieu’s presence quite natural. Boris jerked a hand towards the packed hall.

‘Quite a crowd,’ he said, with satisfaction.

‘Yes,’ said Mathieu.

‘Would you like my place?’

‘No, don’t trouble: you’ll want it for Lola later on.’

He sat down. The dance-floor was deserted, and there was no one on the band platform: the gauchos had finished their succession of tangos, the Negro jazz, ‘Hijito’s band’, would soon take their place.

‘What are you drinking?’ asked Mathieu.

People were buzzing around him, Ivich had not received him unamiably: a moist warmth ran through him, and he savoured the agreeable intensification of existence that comes from the sense of being a man among other men.

‘A vodka,’ said Ivich.

‘Dear me! So you now like the stuff?’

‘It’s strong,’ she said, without committing herself.

‘But what’s that?’ asked Mathieu, anxious to deal fairly, pointing to a white froth in Boris’s glass.

Boris eyed him with jovial and open-mouthed admiration; Mathieu felt embarrassed.

‘It’s filthy,’ said Boris, ‘it’s the barman’s cocktail.’

‘I suppose you ordered it for politeness’ sake?’

‘He’s been pestering me for the last three weeks to try it. The fact is, he doesn’t know how to make cocktails. He became a barman because he had been a conjurer. He says it’s the same sort of job, but he’s wrong.’

‘I suppose he’s thinking of the shaker,’ said Mathieu. ‘And besides, breaking eggs calls for a light hand.’

‘In that case he’d better have become a juggler. Anyway, I wouldn’t have touched his foul compound, but I borrowed a hundred from him this evening.’

‘A hundred francs,’ said Ivich, ‘but I had that amount.’

‘So had I,’ said Boris, ‘but it’s just because he’s the barman. It’s a done thing to borrow money from a barman,’ he explained, in a faintly austere tone.

Mathieu looked at the barman. He was standing behind his bar, all in white, arms folded, and smoking a cigarette. He looked a placid sort of man.

‘I should like to have been a barman,’ said Mathieu: ‘It must be great fun.’

‘It would have cost you a lot,’ said Boris, ‘you would have broken so many glasses.’

Silence fell. Boris looked at Mathieu, and Ivich looked at Boris.

‘I’m not wanted,’ said Mathieu sadly to himself.

The head-waiter handed him the champagne list: he must be careful: he had under five hundred francs left.

‘I’ll have a whisky,’ said Mathieu.

He was seized with a sudden disgust for economy, and the meagre wad of notes languishing in his pocket-book. He called the head-waiter back.

‘One moment. I’ll have some champagne.’

He looked at the list again. Mumm cost 300 francs.

‘You’ll drink some,’ he said to Ivich.

‘No — yes,’ she said, after brief reflection, ‘I do like it better.’

‘Bring a bottle of Mumm, Cordon Rouge.’

‘I’m always glad to drink champagne,’ said Boris, ‘because I don’t like it. One must get used to it.’