A Life (26 page)

Recalled to God? Or scattered, randomly assumed into the process of new creation, mingling with the seeds that were about to spring into life?

Or close by, perhaps? In this room, hovering around the lifeless flesh from which it had just departed! And suddenly Jeanne thought she felt a current of air brush over her, like the touch of a spirit. She was afraid, desperately afraid, so violently afraid that she did not dare move, or breathe, or turn round and look behind her. Her heart was pounding as though she were in the throes of some nightmare horror.

And all at once the invisible insect took off again and began to bump into the walls as it whirled its way round the room. She shivered from head to toe; then, having been reassured when she  recognized the droning of the winged insect, she rose to her feet and looked round. Her eyes fell on the desk with the sphinxes' heads, the place where Mama kept her 'relics'.

And a most singular and tender thought occurred to her: which was, during this final vigil, to readas though from some pious workthese old letters that had been dear to her mother's heart. It seemed to her that she would be performing a delicate and sacred task, the act of a true daughter, which would bring pleasure to Mama in the other world.

They were old letters from her grandfather and grandmother, whom she had never known. She wanted to reach out to them over their daughter's body, to go towards them on this funereal night as if they too were suffering, to form a kind of mysterious chain of affection between those long dead, their daughter just departed, and herself left behind on earth.

She stood up, lowered the lid of the desk, and took from the bottom drawer ten or so little packets of yellowed paper, neatly tied together with string and stored side by side.

She placed them all on the bed, between the arms of the Baroness, out of a sort of sentimental courtesy, and began to read.

They were the sort of old letters one finds in ancient family desks, letters redolent of another age.

The first began: 'My darling.' Another with 'My beautiful grand-daughter,' then it was 'My dear little one,' 'My sweet,' 'My dearest daughter,' then 'My dear child,' 'My dear Adélaïde,' 'My dear daughter,' depending on whether they were addressed to the little girl, the older child, or later the young woman.

And they all contained warm, inconsequential expressions of affection, a thousand little intimate details, or the important but unexceptional events of family life that seem so paltry to those not directly concerned: 'Papa has flu; Hortense the maid has burnt her finger; Ratscov, the cat, is dead; they've cut down the fir-tree on the right of the front gate; Mother lost her missal on the way back from church, she thinks it's been stolen.'

There was mention, too, of people Jeanne did not know, but whose names she vaguely remembered cropping up in conversations, long ago, when she was a child.

These details moved her as though they had been revelations, as though she had suddenly entered Mama's secret past, her heart's history. She looked at the body lying there; and all at once she began to read aloud, to read to her dead mother, as though to amuse her, to bring her comfort.

And the motionless corpse seemed happy.

One by one she tossed the letters onto the foot of the bed; and it occurred to her that they ought to be placed in the coffin, as is the custom with flowers.

She untied another packet. The writing was different. It began:

'I can't live a moment longer without your caresses. I am mad with love for you.'

That was all; there was no name.

Puzzled, she turned the piece of paper over. Sure enough it was addressed to 'Madame la Baronne Le Perthuis des Vauds.'

Then she opened the next one:

'Come this evening, as soon as he's gone out. We shall be able to have an hour together. I adore you.'

In another one: 'I spent last night in a fever, wanting you desperately. I felt your body in my arms, your lips against mine, your eyes gazing into mine. And I could have thrown myself out of the window in frustration at the thought that you were lying by his side at that very moment, that he could have you as he pleased. . .'

Thoroughly perplexed, Jeanne still did not understand.

What did this all mean? To whom, for whom, from whom were these words of love addressed?

She went on reading, coming on yet further wild declarations of love, notes about assignations accompanied by the advice to be careful, and then always these five words at the end: 'Be sure to burn this.'

Finally she opened a harmless-looking note, a simple message accepting an invitation to dinner, but written in the same hand and signed: 'Paul d'Ennemare', the man the Baron still called 'my poor old Paul' whenever he referred to him, and whose wife had been the Baroness's best friend.

Suspicion dawned on Jeanne in an instant and became all at once a certainty. Her mother had taken him as her lover.

Distraught, she immediately flung these vile documents from her, as though she were casting off some poisonous creature that had attacked her, and she rushed to the window, weeping horribly as involuntary cries tore at her throat. Her whole inner being collapsed, and she slumped down at the foot of the wall; and as she hid her face in the curtain so that people would not hear her groans, she sobbed her heart out, plunged into fathomless despair.

She might have remained like this all night; but the sound of footsteps in the next room brought her to her feet in an instant. Perhaps it was her father? And all these letters lying on the bed and on the floor! He had only to open one of them! And then he would know! Him of all people!

She rushed forward, grabbed pieces of old, yellowing paper by the handful, the grandparents' letters and the lover's, and those she had not yet opened, and those that still lay in bundles in the drawers of the desk, and threw them into the fireplace in a great heap. Then she took one of the candles burning on the bedside table and set fire to the mound of letters. A tall flame sprang up and shone out across the room, over the bed and the corpse, a bright, dancing shaft of light that lit up the white curtain at the foot of the bed and there etched in black the quivering profile of the stiffened face and the contours of the enormous body lying beneath the sheet.

When all that was left in the grate was a pile of ash, she went and sat by the open window as if she no longer dared remain near the dead woman, and she began to cry once more, with her face in her hands, groaning in anguish, in a tone of desolate lament:

'Oh! my poor mother, oh! my poor mother!'

And an awful thought struck her:

What if by any chance Mama were not dead, if she were merely in some deep sleep, and if she were suddenly to get up, to start talking?Wouldn't the knowledge of Mama's terrible secret diminish her daughterly love? Would she kiss her with the same respectful lips? Would she cherish her with the same, devout  affection? No. That was now impossible! And it broke her heart to think so.

The night was fading, and the stars were turning pale; it was that chill hour which precedes the dawn. The moon, already low in the sky and about to sink into the sea, cast a pearly glow across its entire surface.

And Jeanne suddenly recalled that night she had spent standing at the window when they had first arrived at Les Peuples. How distant that was, how everything had changed, how different the future looked now!

With that the sky turned pink, a joyous, blushful, spellbinding pink. She watched this radiant birth of a new day, and with surprise on this occasion as though she were witnessing some strange natural phenomenon, wondering how it were possible for neither joy nor happiness to exist in this world when such dawns as these could break upon the Earth.

The sound of a door opening made her jump. It was Julien.

'Well, not too tired?' he enquired.

'No,' she mumbled, glad not to be alone any more.

'You go and get some rest now,' he said.

She kissed her mother slowly, with a long, sorrowful, heartbroken kiss; and then she returned to her bedroom.

The day was filled with all the sad business consequent upon a person's death. The Baron arrived towards evening. He cried a great deal.

The funeral took place the following day.

When she had pressed her lips to the ice-cold forehead for the last time and put the final touches to her mother's toilette and seen the coffin lid closed, Jeanne retired to her room. The guests would be soon be here.

Gilberte arrived first, and threw herself sobbing into the arms of her friend.

From the window the carriages could be seen turning in at the iron gate and arriving at a trot. And voices echoed down in the hall. Women dressed in black gradually began to appear in the room, women whom Jeanne did not know. The Marquise de Coutelier and the Vicomtesse de Briseville embraced her.

Suddenly she noticed Aunt Lison sidling up behind her. And she hugged her with warm affection, which almost caused the old maid to pass out.

Julien walked in, dressed in full mourning, elegant, looking busy and important, satisfied at the presence of all these people. He spoke in hushed tones to his wife, asking her advice on some matter, and then added in a confidential tone:

'The whole of the nobility has come. It will be very fine.'

And off he went, bowing gravely to the ladies.

Aunt Lison and the Comtesse Gilberte remained alone with Jeanne during the funeral service. The Comtesse kept kissing her all the time and saying:

'My poor darling, my poor darling!'

When the Comte de Fourville returned to fetch his wife, he was in tears as if he had lost his own mother.

X

The days that followed were particularly sad, those days of gloom when a house seems empty because of the absence of the familiar person who has gone for ever, days punctuated by grief at each chance encounter with all the objects the departed was wont to touch. At every turn some memory tugs at your heart and leaves its bruise. Here is her chair, her umbrella still in the hall, her glass that the maid forgot to put away! And in every room there are things still lying about: her scissors, a glove, the book with its pages worn by her swollen fingers, and a thousand other little things that assume poignant significance because they recall a thousand other little incidents.

And the person's voice pursues you; you think you can hear it; you want to escape somewhere, anywhere, to flee the haunting presence in the house. But you have to stay because there are other people there, and they, too, are staying and suffering.

On top of which, Jeanne continued to feel crushed by the memory of what she had just discovered. The thought of it weighed on her mind, and her wounded feelings refused to heal. The loneliness she now felt was increased by this horrible secret; her last vestige of trust in others had vanished with her last vestige of belief in another human being.

Some time later Papa departed: he needed to be doing something, to have a change of air and escape the black depression into which he was sinking further and further.

And the great house, which was used to its masters disappearing periodically in this way, resumed its calm, regular ways.

And then Paul fell ill. Jeanne was distraught, and went twelve days without sleep, without food almost.

He recovered; but she remained horrified at the idea that he might die. What would she do then? What would become of her? And very gradually her heart began to entertain the vague longing for another child. Soon she began to daydream about such a prospect, filled once more with her former desire to have two  little creatures round her, a boy and a girl. And the dream became an obsession.

But ever since the business with Rosalie, she had lived apart from Julien. Any thought of a rapprochement indeed seemed impossible, given their respective situations. Julien loved elsewhere; she knew he did; and the mere idea of submitting once more to his caresses made her shudder with revulsion.

She would nevertheless have resigned herself to it, so driven was she by the desire to become a mother again; but she wondered just how their intimacy was to resume. She would have died of humiliation rather than let her intentions be known; and he did not appear to give her a thought.

She would have given up the idea perhaps; but now, each night, she began to dream of having a daughter; and she saw her playing with Paul beneath the plane-tree; and sometimes she felt almost an itching to get out of bed and, without uttering a word, to go to her husband in his room. Twice even she tiptoed to his door; but then she hurried back to her room, her heart pounding with shame.

The Baron had left; Mama was dead; Jeanne now had no one whom she could consult or in whom she could confide her innermost secrets.

So she resolved to go and see the Abbé Picot, and to tell him, within the secrecy of the confessional, of the difficult project which she had in mind.

When she arrived, he was reading his breviary in his little orchard garden.

Having chatted for a few minutes about this and that, she mumbled with a blush:

'I would like to say confession, Monsieur l'Abbé.'

He was astonished, and raised his glasses to observe her more closely. Then he began to laugh:

'But you can't have many terrible sins on your conscience.'

She lost her composure completely and replied:

'No, but I want to ask your advice, about something so . . . so delicate that I don't dare ask you just like that.'

Instantly he forsook his jovial manner and assumed his priestly air:

'Well then, my child, I shall listen to you in the confessional. Let us go.'

But she stopped him, hesitantly, given sudden pause by a sort of scruple at talking about these rather shameful matters in the peace and quiet of an empty church.

'Or rise perhaps . . . Father . . . I could . . . I could . . . if you wished . . . tell you what I've come about out here. Look, we could go and sit over there under your little arbour.'

They walked slowly towards it. She cast around for how to express herself, how to begin. They sat down.

Then, as if she were saying confession, she began: