The Rules of Engagement (12 page)

“
I had to find out more about him. It sounds
silly, but I only knew what he had told
me, and that was so little as to be meaningless. He wouldn't
even talk about his childhood, and most people are
willing to do that, aren't they? But I didn't know
where to go, whom to ask. The friends I used to meet
—
I told you about them
—
had begun to disperse. Either that
or they were doing other things. Or avoiding him.
”
She sighed.
“
He had become very
argumentative.
”

“
I thought you were all plotting the next
revolution.
”

“
Oh, that was nonsense. We may have been
interested in politics when we first met; well,
it was hard to avoid such discussions after 1968. But
in fact we were already drifting apart. It was
Daniel who took these things seriously. Too
seriously. And Roland, of course.
”

“
Who was he?
”

“
I may have mentioned him. Roland
Besnard.
”

I shook my head.

“
He was an older man who sometimes joined us.
He took an interest in us, and inevitably
wondered how we saw the future. I think he just
liked young people. He had been a schoolteacher in
Angers. He'd come to Paris in his holidays and
had stayed on. He was the only one of us who
viewed the situation as something more than spectacle.
He said it was a good time to be young. I think he was
a little envious, in the nicest possible way. He
and Daniel sometimes went off together. I don't
know what they talked about.
”

“
I saw things quite differently. He seemed so
... radical.
”

“
Yes, that was worrying. But I thought I could
make things better for him, get him to settle
down. But he wouldn't. Or couldn't. He was always
serious: as if this were 1789, or rather 1848. I
think what he really needed was a future
for himself, one in which he could claim his rightful
place. I wasn't enough for him. I could see that.
But to tell the truth I didn't know what to do.
”

“
Were you very unhappy?
”

“
Oh, yes. But it was his unhappiness that
upset me. And I suppose I gave him
something. He did seem to rely on me.
”

“
Betsy, you are painting a picture of
someone who was not quite normal.
”

“
That's what I had to find out about. Because if
he was as ... eccentric as he was beginning to become
...
”

“
Or always had been ...
”

She ignored me.
“
I had to see whether I
had been mistaken all along. And yet I think
he loved me.
”

“
What did you do?
”

“
I went round the various
cafés
where we
used to meet. It took me a whole day. Then,
when I had almost given up, I had a stroke of
luck, if you can call it luck. I met Roland
coming up the steps of the
Métro
station at
Odéon
. I must have been looking a bit odd.
He knew what had happened. Word had got
round, and I think there was something in the papers, though
I deliberately didn't read them. I
didn't want to know what they said about him. I
wanted, if possible, to talk to someone who had
known him. So it was really providential my
meeting up with Roland in that unexpected fashion.
And he was very kind. He took me to a
café
and
made me drink some coffee. Then he told me
things I never knew, that Daniel had never told
me. That was part of the trouble. You do see that, don't
you?
”

I saw it all too clearly. What he had
told her was dismaying even to a hostile witness like
myself. Daniel de Saint-Jorre was a
fabrication from start to finish. His name was Petit-
jean. Saint-Jorre was one of his mother's lovers,
distinguishable from the others because he had taken pity on
the child Daniel and bought him a toy boat to sail
on the pond in t
he Tuileries. The child had fan
tasized that this man was his father and had appropriated
his name. As the real Saint-Jorre had disappeared
he had no knowledge of this. In any case he would have
been anxious to leave no trace, and there had been
no further contact. It had been easy to assume
that Daniel was an orphan. In fact his mother still
lived in the room in
Asnières
where
she had brought him up, had earned her living as
best she could, no doubt in the most banal way
possible. Betsy, without knowing the reasons for
Daniel's unbalanced outlook, had
instinctively taken him under her wing. They were not and
never had been equals. For all of Betsy's
own sense of early deprivation her character rested on
rock-solid foundations. He had understood this as
strength, and, like all the dispossessed, had looked
for and found a protector. To a certain extent, and
from a certain point of view, he was as innocent as
she was. And social justice, of the fairytale
variety in which he believed, would restore him to a
place in life in which Betsy might or might not
be invited to join him, depending on whether or not
he still needed her.

I was profoundly shocked by this, Betsy even more
so.
“
Did you love him?
”
I asked, curious
to know. My own life had managed to accommodate
a number of unwelcome facts, and perhaps I
took pride in my realism. I did not see
how one could ignore such facts and preserve the
simplicity of one's feelings. Perhaps it was that very
simplicity that had saved her from the sort of
corrosion to which even the least selfish are
susceptible. She looked like someone who had
survived a terrible ordeal, her eyes wide and
her expression fixed, as if the telling of the story
were some kind of physical re-enactment of that
ordeal.
“
Did you?
”
I prompted.

“
Oh, yes,
”
she said tiredly, her
shoulders relaxing slightly.
“
Of course I
loved him. I was very slow to fall in love; I
had too many arrangements to make, and no one
to help me make them. When I was in Paris I
realized for the first time that I was young, that I had a
little money of my own, and could be as independent as
I wanted to be. And being the sort of student I
was then
—
the sort of student who doesn't have
to take exams
—
was enormous fun. That was how
I met those friends I used to go about with. That was how
I met Daniel. Someone brought him along at
some point. And you saw how beautiful he was.
”

I nodded. That at least was authentic.

“
We started living together straight away, in his
little room in the rue Cler. And at the beginning I
was so happy. It was like
La Bohème
.
”

“
Which ends badly,
”
I reminded her.

“
Yes, and we ended badly too. He died.
There can be no worse ending than that.
”

We were both silent.
“
And yet,
”
she said,
“
I felt a certain relief. I felt it was
my fault that he was unhappy. I blamed myself
entirely. So that when I was alone once more, with
little money left, and the landlord being very polite but very
insistent, it was as if, in a terrible way, I
accepted everything that had happened, that I knew that
for me a certain kind of happiness was at an end.
That's when I decided to come home.
”

“
No wonder you were ill. Are you sure you're
all right?
”

“
I've got to be, haven't I? I've
got to move. I've got to get used to living
alone. And I'll need some sort of a job.
”

“
Tell me about this flat you've bought.
”

She sighed, rubbed her forehead.
“
It's a
perfectly ordinary one-bedroom flat designed
for a person with no roots. It's impossible
to think of normal life going on there. I mean the
sort of life lived by normal people.
”

“
I know exactly what you mean,
”
I said.

“
But it needn't be like that. I'll help all I
can.
”

At this faint show of sympathy she let down
her guard and wept. Yet even as she did so she
attempted to reassure me. It was a sign that
her essential decency had not been compromised.

“
Digby will be home soon,
”
I warned
her.
“
There's a bathroom down there if you want
it. I'll make some fresh tea.
”

I felt anger on Betsy's behalf, and also
on my own. That I knew little about Edmund beyond
what he chose to reveal was beginning to seem
unnervingly close to Betsy's situation; we were
both in love with virtual strangers, whose
intimacy was a closely guarded secret. Like
simpletons, or perhaps just like women, even here we
had been seduced by outward form, and had made the
mistake of believing that this outward form
represented the truth. But truth is not so
easily discerned, certainly not disclosed. I, in
my hard-hearted way, was aware of this, but Betsy
was so clearly above board that she was a victim of
her own good faith. I regretted the fact that she
was now enlightened, however reluctantly: her sad
face, her wide eyes reflected her new
condition. She had spoken as if she would never find
her way back to the sort of innocent confidence that
had been her most noticeable characteristic. And yet
there was no shadow in her wistful smile,
no suggestion of widowhood. It was as if she was
still bewitched by some youthful amalgam of love and
beauty, as if, in fact, she had been true
to some ideal which she was not willing to abandon. And it was
true that in appearance Daniel had fitted the
stereotype of a young hero of legend, and whatever
inner darkness he managed so successfully to conceal
merely added an intriguing complexity to what was in
reality a series of aberrations, to which no one
meeting him for the first time could have access.
There was a dreadful pathos in all this. I thought
of the boy and his toy boat, giving him parity with the
other children watched over by mothers in the peaceful afternoons.
Simply put, it had taken him a lifetime
to recover from childhood and he had not managed the
process, had in fact abandoned it, had perhaps had
a moment of lucidity and known himself to be
inadequate to the task. Whereas Betsy had not
accepted that her circumstances had been
unfavourable, and had only revealed her longing for
love and friendship in a sometimes misplaced
enthusiasm. That eagerness had now gone, replaced
by something that was not yet maturity, was perhaps merely the
dawning realization that all her efforts, her
acceptance, and even the happiness she had known in the
early days of her love affair, were all
aspects of a reality, a complexity with which she had
not reckoned, simply because it was not in her nature
to look beyond the truth she sought, and had so far
managed to find. That truth had revealed itself as
unpalatable, and this constituted a moral problem.
There was evidence of this in the way she had rubbed her
forehead, as philosophers do in the statues of
old. Enlightenment would not be altogether welcome. But
then it so rarely is.