‘Allow me,’ she said, ‘to be the expert on my heart.’
As the afternoons passed, the general unsuitability of their friendship was borne in on her. It was not simply a matter of his age, but of his general direction. His friends were out-of-work actors, or they slid inkily from the offices of back-street printers. They had illegitimate children and subversive opinions; they went abroad when the police got on their trail. There was the drawing-room life; then there was this other life. She thought it was best not to ask questions about it.
HE CONTINUED to come to supper. There were no further incidents. Sometimes Claude asked him to spend the weekend with a party at Bourg-la-Reine, where they had some land and a comfortable farmhouse. The girls, she thought, had really taken to him.
FROM QUITE TWO YEARS ago, they had begun to see a great deal of each other. One of her friends, who was supposed to know about these things, had told her that he was a homosexual. She did not believe this, but kept it to hand as a defence, in case her husband complained. But why should he complain? He was just a young man who called at the house. There was nothing between them.
ONE DAY SHE ASKED HIM, ‘Do you know much about wild flowers?’
‘Not especially.’
‘It’s just that Lucile picked up a flower at Bourg-la-Reine and asked me what it was, I hadn’t the least idea, and I told her confidently that you knew everything, and I pressed it –’ she reached out – ‘inside my book, and I said I’d ask you.’
She moved to sit beside him, holding the large dictionary into which she would cram letters and shopping lists and anything she needed to keep safe. She opened the book – carefully, or its contents would have cascaded out. He examined the flower. Delicately with a fingernail he turned up the underside of its papery leaf. He frowned at it. ‘Probably some extremely common noxious weed,’ he said.
He put an arm around her and tried to kiss her. More out of astonishment than intention, she jumped away. She dropped the dictionary and everything fell out. It would have been quite in order to slap his face, but what a cliché, she thought, and besides she was off balance. She had always wanted to do it to someone, but would have preferred someone more robust; so, between one thing and another, the moment passed. She clutched the sofa and stood up, unsteadily.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That lacked finesse.’
He was trembling a little.
‘How could you?’
He raised a hand, palm upwards. ‘Oh, because, Annette, I want you.’
‘It’s out of the question,’ she said. She picked her feet out of the scattered papers. Some verses he had written lay on the carpet folded with a milliner’s bill she had found it necessary to conceal from Claude. Camille, she thought, would never in a thousand years ask questions about the price of a woman’s hats. It would be beyond him; beyond, and beneath. She found it necessary to stare out of the window (even though it was a bleak winter’s day as unpromising as this one) and to bite her lips to stop them from quivering.
This had been going on for a year now.
THEY TALKED about the theatre, about books and about people they knew; really though, they were only ever talking about one thing, and that was whether she would go to bed with him. She said the usual things. He said that her arguments were stale and that these were the things people always said, because they were afraid of themselves and afraid of trying to be happy in case God smote them and because they were choked up with puritanism and guilt.
She thought (privately) that he was more afraid of himself than anyone she had ever known: and that he had reason to be.
She said that she was not going to change her mind, but that the argument could be prolonged indefinitely. Not indefinitely, Camille said, not strictly speaking: but until they were both so old that they were no longer interested. The English do it, he said, in the House of Commons. She raised a shocked face. No, not what she had so clearly on her mind: but if someone proposes a measure you don’t like, you can just stand up and start spinning out the pros and cons until everybody goes home, or the session ends and there’s no more time. It’s called talking a measure out. It can go on for years. ‘Considered in one way,’ he said, ‘since I like talking to you, it might be a pleasant way to spend my life. But in fact I want you now.’
AFTER THAT FIRST OCCASION she had always been cool, fended him off rather expertly. Not that he had ever touched her again. He had seldom allowed her to touch him. If he had brushed against her, even accidentally, he had apologized. It was better like this, he said. Human nature being what it is, and the afternoons so long; the girls visiting friends, the streets deserted, no sound in the room except the ticking of clocks, the beating of hearts.
It had been her intention to end this non-affair smoothly, in her own good time; considered as a non-affair, it had had its moments. But then, obviously, Camille had started talking to somebody, or one of her husband’s friends had been observant: and everybody knew. Claude had a host of interested acquaintances. The question was contended for in robing rooms (scouted at the Châtelet but proposed in the civil courts as the scandal of the year, in the middle-class scandals division); it was circulated around the more select cafés, and mulled over at the ministry. In the gossips’ minds there were no debates, no delicately balanced temptations and counter-temptations, no moral anguish, no scruples. She was attractive, bored, not a girl any more. He was young and persistent. Of course they were – well, what would you think? Since when, is the question? And when will Duplessis decide to know?
Now Claude may be deaf, he may be blind, he may be dumb, but he is not a saint, he is not a martyr. Adultery is an ugly word. Time to end it, Annette thought; time to end what has never begun.
She remembered, for some reason, a couple of occasions when she’d thought she might be pregnant again, in the years before she and Claude had separate rooms. You thought you might be, you had those strange feelings, but then you bled and you knew you weren’t. A week, a fortnight out of your life had gone by, a certain life had been considered, a certain steady flow of love had begun, from the mind to the body and into the world and the years to come. Then it was over, or had never been: a miscarriage of love. The child went on in your mind. Would it have had blue eyes? What would its character have been?
AND NOW THE DAY HAD COME. Annette sat at her dressing-table. Her maid fussed about, tweaking and pulling at her hair. ‘Not like that,’ Annette said. ‘I don’t like it like that. Makes me look older.’
‘No!’ said the maid, with a pretence at horror. ‘Not a day over thirty-eight.’
‘I don’t like thirty-eight,’ Annette said. ‘I like a nice round number. Say, thirty-five.’
‘Forty’s a nice round number.’
Annette took a sip of her cider vinegar. She grimaced. ‘Your visitor’s here,’ the maid said.
The rain blew in gusts against the window.
IN ANOTHER ROOM, Annette’s daughter Lucile opened her new journal. Now for a fresh start. Red binding. White paper with a satin sheen. A ribbon to mark her place.
‘Anne Lucile Philippa Duplessis,’ she wrote. She was in the process of changing her handwriting again. ‘The Journal of Lucile Duplessis, born 1770, died? Volume III. The year 1786.’
‘At this time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I think a lot about what it would be like to be a Queen. Not our Queen; some more tragic one. I think about Mary Tudor: “When I am dead and opened they will find ‘Calais’ written on my heart.” If I, Lucile, were dead and opened, what they would find written is “Ennui.”
‘Actually, I prefer Maria Stuart. She is my favourite Queen by a long way. I think of her dazzling beauty among the barbarian Scots. I think of the walls of Fotheringay, closing in like the sides of a grave. It’s a pity really that she didn’t die young. It’s always better when people die young, they stay radiant, you don’t have to think of them