The Woman With the Bouquet (7 page)

He called me into his solemn study, on the day I turned seventeen, to demand an explanation.

I told him everything, without hiding a thing.

“Swear to me, Emma, that, well, you understand, you never gave, anybody—”

He couldn’t finish his sentence. I think that in the course of this conversation he was discovering that he was my father and, for the first time, that he had a duty toward me.

“Papa, I swear I didn’t. And you know Madame Georges, she doesn’t fool around! When she says something is a certain way, then that’s the way it is.”

“That’s . . . that’s true” he muttered, blushing, embarrassed that I was acquainted with this Madame Georges, who had had her share in organizing an existence he had hoped to keep secret.

I went on, specifying that I was neither ashamed of spending my time there, nor of having a Madam as my best friend, and you’d really have to be a dolt like my cousin not to grasp that.

“I see . . .” he conceded, to his own surprise.

Not only was he astonished to discover who I was, but he was astonished to find that he liked me, in the end. This discussion, which should have been stormy yet was not, marked the beginning of a new relationship between my father and me, our happy years . . . Until we left the Congo, that is how we lived, spending our time, both he and I, between two houses, our own and the Villa Violette.

“And that is how Guillaume found me, an experienced virgin, a woman who had given herself to no one but was not afraid, either of men, or their bodies, or sex. Health problems required me to go back to Belgium; once my treatment was over, I came to rest in this family house. My father wanted to join me here, and he settled in for six months, bringing home all his library, then he missed the Congo so much—or was it the Villa Violette?—that he went back there. Guillaume met me the year I turned twenty-three. In the beginning, our affair remained a secret. Out of caution, no doubt. And modesty, too. The pleasure of clandestine meetings. And then, it seemed we got into the habit, and our affair remained clandestine. Outside his aide-de-camp, his secretaries, and his servants whom circumstances obliged us to trust, no word got out about our affair. We avoided any gossip, or photographers, we never appeared anywhere together in public. We hid here, apart from a few escapades abroad, in countries where Guillaume was an unknown tourist.”

“Why?” I dared to interrupt her.

Emma Van A. hesitated, her jaw trembled, as it she was forcing herself to keep certain words inside. Her gaze swept the room, and it took her a moment to reply.

“I had chosen a man, not a prince. I had chosen to be a mistress, not a spouse, still less a lady-in-waiting, with the obligations that would imply.”

“Did you refuse the idea of a marriage?”

“He didn’t suggest it.”

“Might you have been waiting for him to propose?”

“No, that would have proved that he hadn’t understood anything, either about me, or about ourselves, or about his duties. And besides, let’s be perfectly clear, dear sir, a royal heir, whatever his rank regarding accession to the throne, does not wed a woman who cannot have children.”

That was the confession that cost her so dear. I looked at her compassionately. She went on, relieved, “We took no precautions where love was concerned. After five years, I gave up: my womb was as dry as the Gobi desert. I will never know, anyway, whether it was physiological, or whether the memory of my mother who died in childbirth had caused my womb to be barren.”

“What happened?”

“In the beginning, nothing changed. Then he confessed that the royal family was giving him a hard time, and the press, too; it wasn’t enough to see him practicing sports, they were beginning to doubt his virility. In these blue blooded lineages, there are a considerable number of homosexuals, so the true ladies’ men are obliged to procreate in order to reassure the people and secure the monarchy. It was his destiny as a man and as a prince. He had tried to ignore it for as long as possible . . . I urged him to react.”

“Which means?”

“To take mistresses, and be seen in public with them.”

“Did you separate?”

“Not at all. We stayed together, and remained lovers, but he kept up appearances. He was allowed to have a few escapades, and each time they were so awkward and indiscreet that invariably there were photos in the newspapers.”

“How could you stand it, knowing he was being unfaithful to you?”

“It was easy: I was the one who chose his mistresses.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me perfectly well. I chose the women with whom he had his affairs.”

“And he went along with this?”

“That was my condition. I would only share him if I could decide whom I was sharing him with. Because he was crazy about me, he consented.”

“How did you choose his mistresses?”

“Always very beautiful.”

“Indeed?”

“Very beautiful and very stupid. While there are not ten ways to go about being beautiful, there are a thousand ways to go about being stupid—stupid because you have no conversation, stupid because your conversation is boring, stupid because you’re only interested in what excites women and not men, stupid because you think you’re more intelligent than you are, stupid because you have a one track mind. My poor Guillaume, I signed him up for the grand tour of the country of stupid women!”

“I get the feeling you rather enjoyed it.”

“Absolutely. Well, I was kind, I only pointed him in the direction of decorative ninnies; if I had wanted to be nasty, I could have set him up with women who were both stupid and ugly!”

“How did he take it?”

“Very well. He knew how to appreciate what was best about them, and to flee from what was worst. He left me quickly, but he always came back just as quickly.”

“Would you swear that he wasn’t angry with you?”

“We would talk about the ditzy doll of the season; as the ones I chose were always picturesque, he had something to tell me. Otherwise . . . I will have to admit we had a good laugh. It was cynical on my part but we were under a double pressure: on the one hand, society obliged us to hide; on the other hand, it forced him to prove that he was a ladies’ man; we had found a solution. When we were alone together, nothing had changed, we adored each other just as much, if not more, because we went through these difficulties together.”

“Weren’t you ever jealous?”

“I wouldn’t let myself show it.”

“So, you did feel some jealousy!”

“Obviously. How many times was my brain filled with images of him with his women until I felt like saying I’d had enough?”

“To commit suicide?”

“No, to kill those women. I had dreams of murder. But in fact they destroyed themselves, through their stupidity. That much was lucky, they were such nincompoops. One time, only once, did I nearly make a mistake!”

She waved her hands, as if she were still struggling against the danger.

“That wretched Myriam, she nearly got me. I’ve never seen a woman who put so much energy into trying to seem brainless . . . Guillaume sneaked me into the palace, where I took part in his meals, hidden behind some drapery, in order to confirm my choice of ninny. In the beginning I chose that Myriam because she spouted one stupidity after another, like a veritable machine gun of nonsense, until the moment I noticed she never said anything but amusing stupidities, always funny, never off the mark, never boring: it gave me a chill, and I concluded that she had a sense of humor, which is no less than a sign of refinement. After that, I paid closer attention, and I noticed that she behaved in a certain way with each of the men she met: if a man was starchy, she would let slip something like, ‘He’s a funny sort of fellow,’ with a relaxing familiarity; if he was vain, she would come out with flattering things about his so-called success; if he was crazy about hunting, she would listen tirelessly, as if the conqueror of the rabbits were a hero of several world wars; in short, she was an ace charmer who hid her game very well. At dessert, she went over to Guillaume and talked to him about sports, persuading him that she wanted to do a parachute jump. It wasn’t true, but she was perfectly capable of trying her luck in order to fall into his arms, she was an adventurer after all! I forbade her from coming to the palace. A clever little bitch who played the airhead, all the better to manipulate her men . . . She’s had a brilliant career since then, she’s married one important gentleman after the other, and each time, what do you suppose, worse luck: they were all rich!”

“Did Guillaume get attached to any of those women?”

“No. You know, men are not demanding regarding the conversation they have before getting into bed, because they are ready to deserve their reward; after bed, however, a man of taste and culture becomes strict again, don’t you think?”

I looked down, silenced by this unanswerable truth.

She wiped her hands on her knees, and smoothed the folds of her skirt.

“That period with the mistresses, it may have been tiring, but it was rather thrilling, because it also allowed me to become an expert in the art of ending relationships. Obviously! It was I who suggested the words to say when he left them. I invented them, loads of them, all the phrases destined to ditch them, their mouths gaping, speechless. The break had to be clean, no mess, no trace, irrevocable, no suicides.”

“And?”

“We’re getting there.”

Now I suspected we were about to deal with the darkest period of this story, the one that would relate its culmination. Emma Van A. could sense it, too.

“A glass of port?”

“With pleasure.”

While she busied herself, it allowed us to take a breather before attacking the rest of the story. She savored the fortified wine, in no hurry to narrate the end, dismayed that we had reached it so soon.

Suddenly, she turned to me, her expression grave.

“And yet, I realized that we could no longer go back. Up to then, we had postponed the issue, gone around the obstacle, and yet now the time was coming where he would have to get married and have children. I would rather it was I who rejected him than see him leave me. Pride . . . I dreaded the moment where I would no longer be the object of his affections, but his mother. Yes, his mother . . . Who else pushes a man to take a wife and have children, when she would really rather keep him for herself?”

Her eyes grew moist. Several decades later, the same reluctance overwhelmed her.

“Oh, I was not ready to become Guillaume’s mother! Not for a second—I loved him so much, so passionately. I became resolved therefore to act ‘as if.’”

She swallowed. Telling me must be as painful as it had been to do it.

“One morning, I informed him that I had to take him back to where I had found him several years earlier, in the dunes. He understood right away. He refused, he begged me to wait. He cried, dragging himself along the ground. I stood fast. We went to the place where he had first appeared to me, we spread some blankets in the sand, and there, despite the damp, dreary weather, we had our last embrace. And, for the first time, without resorting to our book of pleasures. It would be impossible to say whether it was enjoyable; it was savage, furious, disenchanted. Then I handed him a drink where I had placed a sleeping tablet.

“By his naked body, fast asleep, as similar to a sculpture as on the first day, I picked up his clothes, put them into my basket with the blankets, then I took out the Dictaphone that I had stolen from him.

“Above his long legs shivering with cold, my gaze wandering over his muscular rump, his tanned back, his hair curling over his long neck, I recorded my farewell message: ‘Guillaume, it was I who chose your mistresses; it is you who will choose your wife. I want to leave you the right to decide on your own how much you will miss me. Either you will suffer so much from our separation that you will choose someone completely the opposite from me, to erase any trace of me, or you will want to make me a part of your future and you will choose a woman who resembles me. I don’t know what will happen, my love, I just know I won’t like it but that it’s necessary. I beg you, we must not see each other under any circumstances. You must act as if Ostend were at the other end of the planet, inaccessible. Don’t torture me with hope. I will never open my door to you again, I will hang up if you call me, I will tear up the letters you send me. We are going to have to suffer the way we burned, terribly, inordinately. I will keep nothing to remind me of you. This evening, I shall destroy everything. What does it matter, no one can take my memories. I love you, our separation changes none of that. Thanks to you my life has meaning. Farewell.’ I dashed away. When I got to the house, I informed his aide-de-camp so that he would go to fetch him along the coast before nightfall, and then I threw our letters and photographs into the fire.”

She grew thoughtful, then continued, “No, that’s not entirely true. At the decisive moment, I refrained from throwing away his gloves. You see, he had such hands . . .”

Her gnarled old fingers caressed an absent hand.

“The next day, I sent one of the gloves to him, and put the other away in my drawer. A glove is like a memory. A glove keeps the shape of the body, the way memory keeps the shape of reality; a glove lives as far from flesh as memory does from vanished time. A glove is woven with nostalgia . . .”

She fell silent.

Her story had taken me so far away that I did not want to interrupt it with banal words.

We stayed like that for a moment, in the thickness of time, so small among all the books, in a darkness briefly yellowed by lamplight. Outside, a furious ocean was raging.

And then, I went over to her, took her hand, placed a kiss on it and murmured, “Thank you.”

She smiled to me, terribly moving, like a dying woman asking, “I’ve had a beautiful life, haven’t I?”

I went back up to my bedroom, luxuriating as I stretched out on the bed, where her story fed dreams so strong that in the morning, I almost wondered if I had slept.

At nine thirty, Gerda called to me from the corridor, insisting on serving me breakfast in bed. With a brisk gesture, she drew open the curtains, then set the tray among the quilts.