Climates (12 page)

Toward morning I tried to persuade myself that this coincidence proved nothing and that Odile might not even know François was so near her. But I knew this was not the case. I fell asleep at dawn and dreamt I was walking along a street in Paris near the Palais
Bourbon. The street was lit by an old-style streetlamp, and I could see a man hurrying away ahead of me. I recognized François from behind. I took a revolver from my pocket and fired at him. He fell. I felt relieved and ashamed, and woke up.

Two days later I received a letter from Odile:
The weather’s lovely. The rocks are lovely. I’ve met an elderly lady at the hotel who knows you. Her name is Madame Jouhan; she has a house near Gandumas. I bathe in the sea every day. The water is lukewarm. I have been on excursions locally. I really like Brittany. I went for a trip in a boat. I do hope you’re not unhappy. Are you having fun? Did you dine with Aunt Cora last Tuesday? Have you seen Misa
? It finished with:
With fond love to you, my darling
. The writing was slightly larger than her natural hand. It was obvious she had wanted to fill four pages so as not to hurt me but had also had a lot of trouble filling them. She was in a hurry, I thought, he was waiting for her. “But I really must write to my husband,” she told him. And, when I imagined my wife’s face as she spoke these words, I could not help thinking it beautiful and longing for nothing more than her return.

The week after Odile left
,
Misa telephoned me.

“I know you’re on your own,” she said. “Odile’s abandoned you. I’m on my own too. I’ve come to stay with my parents because I needed to do some shopping and have a little dose of Paris, but they’re away and I have the apartment to myself. Come and see me.”

I thought that talking with Misa might help me forget some of the terrible, pointless thoughts in whose midst I was floundering, and I arranged to meet her that same evening. She opened the door to me herself; the staff were out. She looked very pretty; she was wearing a pink silk negligee copied
from a pattern lent to her by Odile. I noticed she had changed her hairstyle, and it now looked like Odile’s. The weather had changed since the storm and, toward evening, it was very cold. Misa had lit a wood fire in the hearth, and she sat on a pile of cushions by the fire. I sat close to her and we started talking about our families, the terrible summer, Gandumas, her husband, and Odile.

“Have you heard from her?” Misa asked. “She hasn’t written to me, which isn’t very kind.”

I told her I had had two letters.

“Has she met any people? Has she been to Brest?”

“No,” I said. “Brest is quite far from where she is.”

But it seemed a strange question. Misa was wearing a bracelet of blue and green glass beads. I said I liked it and took her wrist to look at it more closely. She leaned toward me. I put my arm around her waist; she did not resist. I could tell she was naked beneath that pink dress. She looked at me anxiously, questioningly. I leaned toward her, found her lips and, as I had on that day when we wrestled, felt the firm twin pressure of her breasts against my chest. She let herself drop backward and there, before that
fire, on those cushions, she was my mistress. I felt no inkling of love, but I desired her and thought, “If I don’t take her, I’ll look like a coward.”

We ended up sitting watching the dying embers of the last log. I held her hand and she looked at me with a happy, triumphant expression. I felt sad; I wished I could die.

“What are you thinking?” asked Misa.

“I’m thinking of poor Odile.”

She became hostile; two hard lines formed across her forehead.

“Listen,” she said, “I love you, and I want you to stop talking nonsense now.”

“Why nonsense?”

She hesitated, looking at me for a long time.

“Do you
really
not understand,” she asked, “or do you just pretend not to understand?”

I could anticipate everything she was about to say and knew I should stop her, but I wanted to know.

“It’s true,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you knew but loved Odile too much to leave her or talk to her about it … I’ve often thought I ought to tell you everything … only I was Odile’s friend. It was hard for
me … Well, never mind! I now love you a thousand times more than I love her.”

So she told me that Odile was François’s mistress, that it had been going on for six months, and that Odile had even asked her, Misa, to pass on their letters so that the Toulon postmark did not attract my attention.

“Can you see how difficult that was for me … especially because I loved you … Haven’t you noticed that I’ve been in love with you for three years? … Men don’t understand anything. Well, at least everything’s all right now. I’ll make you so happy, you’ll see. You deserve it and I so admire you … You’re an admirable person.”

And she showered me with compliments for several minutes. It afforded me no pleasure whatsoever. I kept thinking, “This is all so wrong. I’m not a good person at all! I can’t cope without Odile … Why am I here? Why do I have my arm round this woman’s waist?” We were still sitting side by side like happy lovers, and I hated it.

“Misa, how can you betray Odile’s trust? What you’re doing is appalling.”

She looked at me in astonishment.

“Oh, this is too much,” she said, “I can’t believe
you’re
defending her.”

“Yes, I am. I don’t like what you’re doing, even if you are doing it for my sake. Odile’s your friend …”

“She was. I don’t like her anymore.”

“Since when?”

“Since I’ve loved you.”

“I sincerely hope you
don’t
love me … 
I
love Odile just as she is,” I said, looking at Misa defiantly, but she was shaking. “And when I try to work out why I love Odile, I wouldn’t know how to describe it … I think it’s because I’m never bored with her, because for me she is life itself and happiness.”

“You are odd,” she said bitterly.

“Perhaps.”

She seemed to go into a dream for a moment, then let her head drop down onto my shoulder and, in a voice filled with deep-seated passion that should have touched me if I had not been so impassioned and blinded myself, she said, “Well, I do love you and I could make you happy in spite of yourself … I would be faithful to you, devoted … Julien’s at Gandumas; he leaves me well alone.
If you like, you could even come to see me there because he spends two days a week at la Guichardie … You’ll see, you’ve lost the habit of being happy, I’ll get you back into it.”

“I can only thank you,” I said coldly, “but I’m very happy.”

This scene carried on far into the night. We adopted positions and made gestures associated with love, but I could feel a savage, incomprehensible resentment rising within me. And yet we parted tenderly with a kiss.

I swore to myself that I would never go to see her again, and yet I often went to her house while Odile was away. Misa was unbelievably daring and gave herself to me in her parents’ salon when a chambermaid might come in at any minute. I would stay with her until two or three in the morning, almost always without a word.

“What are you thinking?” she kept asking, trying to smile kindly.

I would be thinking, “She’s so deceitful to Odile,” and would reply, “About you.”

Now, when I look back on it all calmly, I can see that Misa was not a bad woman, but I treated her harshly at the time.

Odile eventually came home
one evening, and I went to pick her up at the station. I had promised myself I would tell her nothing. I was well aware what such a conversation would be like. I would be reproachful; she would deny everything. I would relay what Misa had said; she would say Misa was lying. I meanwhile would know that Misa had told the truth. It was all pointless. As I walked along the station platform, surrounded by strangers and a smell of coal and oil, I kept telling myself, “Given that I’m only happy when I’m with her and given that I will never break up with her, I might as well enjoy the pleasure of seeing her again and
avoid annoying her.” Then the next minute I would be thinking, “What a coward! It would take only a week’s effort to force her to change her ways or to get used to coping without her.”

A member of the staff came and hung up a sign:
FAST TRAIN FROM BREST
. I came to a stop.

“Come on,” I thought, “this is too ridiculous. What if you had gone to stay in a different hotel in Florence in May 1909? You would have spent your whole life not even knowing Odile Malet existed. But you’d be alive, you’d be happy. Why not start, right now at this exact moment, assuming she doesn’t exist?”

It was then that I spotted in the distance the headlamps of a locomotive and the curve of a train undulating toward us. It all felt unreal. I could not even picture Odile’s face anymore. I took a few steps forward. Heads leaned out of windows. Men were jumping from the train before it stopped. Then a walking crowd formed. Porters pushed trolleys. All at once I spotted Odile’s outline some way away, and a moment later she was beside me flanked by a porter carrying her gray bag. She looked well and I could tell she was in good spirits.

As we climbed into the car she said, “Dickie, we’re going to stop to buy some champagne and some caviar, and we’ll have a little supper like the day we came home from our honeymoon.”

This might strike you as the height of hypocrisy, but you had to know Odile to judge her. She had most likely truly savored the few days she had spent with François; she was now prepared to enjoy the present moment and make it as wonderful for me as she could. She noticed I was glum and not smiling.

“What
is
the matter, Dickie?” she asked desperately.

My resolutions to be silent were never very solid, and I let the thoughts I was trying to hide burst out in front of her.

“The matter is that people say François is in Brest.”

“Who told you that?”

“Admiral Garnier.”

“That François is in Brest? And then what? What difference does that make to you?”

“The difference it makes to me is that he was very close to Morgat and it would have been easy for him to come to see you.”

“Very easy, so easy that, if you must know, he did come to see me. Does that upset you?”

“You didn’t tell me that in your letters.”

“Are you sure? But I honestly thought … Anyway, if I didn’t tell you in a letter it’s because I couldn’t see that it was in the least bit important, and it wasn’t.”

“That’s not what I think. I’ve also heard that he was engaged in a secret correspondence with you.”

This time it looked as if I had hit home: Odile was almost beside herself. It was the first time I had seen her look like that.

“And who told you that?”

“Misa.”

“Misa! She’s a wretch! She lied to you. Did she show you any letters?”

“No, but why should she invent something like that?”

“Well, I don’t know … Out of jealousy.”

“That’s a cock-and-bull story if ever I heard one, Odile.”

We reached the house. Odile mustered a pure and charming smile for the staff. She went to her bedroom, took off her hat, looked at herself in the glass to tidy her hair and, spotting me behind
her, looked directly at my reflection and smiled at me too.

“What am I to do with you, Dickie!” she said. “I can’t leave you alone for a week without the black moths descending … You’re thankless, sir. I thought about you the whole time and I’m going to prove it to you. Pass me my bag.”

She opened it and took out a small parcel that she handed to me. It contained two books,
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
and
The Charterhouse
, both in vintage editions.

“But, Odile … Thank you … these are incredible … How did you find them?”

“I sifted through the bookshops in Brest, sir. I wanted to bring something back for you.”

“So you went to Brest, then?”

“Of course. It was very close to where I was, there was a ferry service, and I’ve been wanting to see Brest for ten years now … Well, aren’t you going to kiss me for my little present? And there I was thinking it would be such a success … I went to a lot of trouble, you know … They’re very rare, Dickie. All my little savings went on those.”

So I kissed her. I had such complex feelings for her that I had trouble understanding them myself.
I loathed her and adored her. I thought her innocent and guilty. The violent scene I had prepared for turned into a friendly, trusting conversation. We talked all evening about Misa’s betrayal as if the revelations made to me (which were no doubt true) had not been about Odile and myself but a couple of friends whose happiness we wanted to protect.

“I do hope,” Odile said, “that you won’t see her again.”

I promised I would not.

I have never known what happened between Odile and Misa the following day. Did they talk it out over the telephone? Did Odile go to see Misa? I knew she was candid and brutal. That was all part of the almost insolent courage that both shocked and charmed my silent inherited reserve. I myself stopped seeing Misa. I did not hear her mentioned again, and my memories of that brief affair were like those left by a dream.

Suspicious planted
in the mind are triggered like a series of mines and destroy love gradually with their successive explosions. On the evening that Odile came home, her kindness and adroitness, along with the pleasure I felt seeing her again, managed to delay the catastrophe. But from that moment, we both knew we were living in a minefield and it would all go up one day. Even when I loved her best, I could now talk to Odile only in terms laced, however delicately, with bitterness. Like the shadow of clouds in the distance, my most banal sentences bore the shadow of unspoken resentments. The cheerful optimistic philosophy I
had espoused in the first months of our marriage was replaced by a melancholy pessimism. The natural world, which I had so loved since Odile had revealed it to me, now sang only sad tunes in a minor key. Even Odile’s own beauty was no longer perfect, and I could sometimes see traces of deceitfulness in her face. It was fleeting; five minutes later I would see only her smooth forehead and candid eyes, and would love her again.