‘It’s all over.’
Dubreuilh dumped the load of red fruit on the couch. ‘Here’s something to decorate your little brothel.’
‘Thanks,’ Paula said coolly. It annoyed her when Dubreuilh called her studio a brothel – because of all the mirrors and those red draperies, he said.
He surveyed the room. ‘The centre beam is the only place for them; they’ll look a lot better up there than that mistletoe.’
‘I like the mistletoe,’ Paula said firmly.
‘Mistletoe is stupid; it’s round, it’s traditional. And moreover it’s a parasite.’
‘Why not string the pimentos along the railing at the head of the stairs,’ Anne suggested.
‘It would look much better up here,’ Dubreuilh replied.
‘I’m sticking to my holly and my mistletoe,’ Paula insisted.
‘All right, all right, it’s your home,’ Dubreuilh conceded. He beckoned to Nadine. ‘Come and help me,’ he said.
Anne unpacked a pork pâté, butter, cheese, cakes. ‘And this is for the punch,’ she said, setting two bottles of rum on the table. She placed a package in Paula’s hands. ‘Here, that’s your present. And here’s something for you,’ she said, handing Henri a clay pipe, the bowl shaped like a bird’s claw clutching a small egg. It was the same kind of pipe that Louis used to smoke fifteen years before.
‘Remarkable,’ said Henri. ‘How did you ever guess that I’ve been wanting a pipe like this for the past fifteen years?’
‘Simple,’ said Anne. ‘You told me.’
‘Two pounds of tea!’ Paula exclaimed. ‘You’ve saved my life! And does it smell good! Real tea!’
Henri began cutting slices of bread which Anne smeared with butter and Paula with the pork pâté. At the same time, Paula kept an anxious eye on Dubreuilh, who was hammering nails into the railing with heavy blows.
‘Do you know what’s missing here?’ he cried out to Paula. ‘A big crystal chandelier. I’ll dig one up for you.’
‘Don’t bother. I don’t want one.’
Dubreuilh finished hanging the clusters of pimentos and came down the stairs.
‘Not bad!’ he said, examining his work with a critical eye. He went over to the table and opened a small bag of spices; for years, on the slightest excuse, he had been concocting that same punch, the recipe for which he had learned in Haiti. Leaning against the railing, Nadine was chewing one of the pimentos; at eighteen, in spite of her experiences in the various French and American beds, she still seemed in the middle of the awkward age.
‘Don’t eat the scenery,’ Dubreuilh shouted at her. He emptied a bottle of rum into a salad bowl and turned towards Henri. ‘I met Samazelle the day before yesterday and I’m glad to say that he seems inclined to go along with us. Are you free tomorrow night?’
‘I can’t get away from the paper before eleven,’ Henri replied.
‘Then stop by at eleven,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘We have to go over the whole deal, and I’d very much like you to be there.’
Henri smiled. ‘I don’t quite see why.’
‘I told him that you work with me, but your actually being there will carry more weight.’
‘I doubt if it would mean very much to someone like Samazelle,’ Henry said, still smiling. ‘He must know I’m not a politician.’
‘But, like myself, he thinks that politics should never again be left to politicians,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Come over, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Samazelle has an interesting group behind him. Young fellows; we need them.’
‘Now listen,’ Paula said angrily, ‘you’re not going to start talking politics again! Tonight’s a holiday.’
‘So?’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Is there a law against talking about things that interest you on holidays?’
‘Why do you insist on dragging Henri into this thing?’ Paula asked. ‘He knocks himself out enough already. And he’s told you again and again that politics bore him.’
‘I know,’ Dubreuilh said with a smile, ‘you think I’m an old reprobate trying to debauch his little friends. But politics isn’t a vice, my beauty, nor a parlour game. If a new war were to break out three years from now, you’d be the first to howl.’
‘That’s blackmail,’ Paula said. ‘When this war finally ends its coming to an end, no one is going to feel like starting a new one.’
‘Do you think that what people feel like doing means anything at all?’ Dubreuilh asked.
Paula started to answer, but Henri cut her off. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I haven’t got the time.’
‘There’s always time,’ Dubreuilh countered.
‘For you, yes,’ Henri said, laughing. ‘But me, I’m just a normal human being; I can’t work twenty hours at a stretch or go without sleep for a month.’
‘And neither can I!’ Dubreuilh said. ‘I’m not eighteen any more. No one is asking that much of you,’ he added, tasting the punch with a worried look.
Henri looked at him cheerfully. Eighteen or eighty, Dubreuilh, with his huge, laughing eyes that consumed everything in sight, would always look just as young. What a zealot! By comparison, Henri was often tempted to think of himself as dissipated, lazy, weak. But it was useless to drive himself. At twenty, he had had so great an admiration for Dubreuilh that he felt himself compelled to ape him. The result was that he was constantly sleepy, loaded himself with medicines, sank almost into a stupor. Now he had to make up his mind once and for all. With no time for himself he had lost his taste for life and the desire to write. He had become a machine. For four years he had been a machine, and now he was determined above all else to become a man again.
‘I wonder just how my inexperience could help you,’ he said.
‘Oh, inexperience has its advantages,’ Dubreuilh replied with a wry smile. ‘Besides, just now you have a name that means a lot to a lot of people.’ His smile broadened. ‘Before the war, Samazelle was in and out of every political faction and all the factions of factions. But that’s not why I want him; I want him because he’s a hero of the Maquis. His name carries a lot of weight.’
Henri began to laugh. Dubreuilh never seemed more ingenuous to him than when he tried being cynical. Paula was right, of course, to accuse him of blackmail; if he really believed in the imminence of a third world war, he would not have been in so good a mood. The truth of the matter was that he saw possibilities for action opening before him and he was burning to exploit them. Henri, however, felt less enthusiastic. Clearly, he had changed since ’39. Before then, he had been on the left because the bourgeoisie disgusted him, because injustice roused his indignation, because he considered all men his brothers – fine, generous sentiments which involved him in absolutely nothing. Now he knew that if he really wanted to break away from his class, he would have to risk some personal loss. Malefilatre, Bourgoin, Picard had taken the risk and lost at the edge of the little woods, but he would always think of them as living men. He had sat with them at a table in front of a rabbit stew, and they drank white wine and spoke of the future without much believing in what they were saying. Four of a kind, they were then. But with the war over they would once again have become a bourgeois, a farmer, and two mill hands. At that moment, sitting with them, Henri understood that in the eyes of the three others, and in his own eyes as well, he was one of the privileged classes, more or less disreputable, even if well-intentioned. And he knew there was only one way of remaining their friend: by continuing to do things with them. He understood