G. (27 page)

She waited impatiently for the time when she could decently send Yvonne with a message to Mathilde, asking the latter to join her as quickly as possible because she needed her help.

Whilst waiting she ordered coffee.

From the window she saw a cat cross the courtyard with that undeviating fleetness which characterizes cats when they have direct access to what they want. The cat had heard the noise of the coffee grinder being turned by the peasant girl in the kitchen, who sat on a stool and held the grinder between her knees. For the cat the noise signified cream. When the maid finished grinding the coffee, she would go to the wooden larder in the wall and take down a large jug of cream. She would pour the cream from this jug into small silver jugs, and if the cat rubbed itself against her leg, she would also pour some into a chipped blue and white plate and place it by the door to the yard for the cat to drink.

She looked several times through her wardrobe to decide what to wear today. They would be catching the train to Paris. She was being taken home to her children, herself like a child who had misbehaved. She had a dark travelling suit in linen lined with patterned satin, which would be highly suitable. She decided, however, to wear her
trotteur
of pale lilac grey. She was being taken home under protest.

It was not for her advice that she needed Mathilde but for her assistance. Mathilde was a person, Camille considered, with different standards from her own and with far more luxurious tastes. Mathilde understood contracts and because she understood them, she was able to keep them. When she married Monsieur Le Diraison, aged sixty-four, she undertook to make the rest of his life agreeable in exchange for the inheritance she would receive at his death. And for five years she had spoilt the old sick man like a child. She, Camille, would be incapable of carrying out such a bargain; she believed that life should be finer than that. She believed in a justice whose essence was spiritual, not material. She liked the parable of
the labourers in the vineyard of whom the last to be hired, who worked for only one hour, were nevertheless paid the same amount as those who had borne the burden and heat of the whole day.

She needed Mathilde’s assistance precisely because she wanted to redress an injustice. If her husband had spoken to him as he had threatened to do (and his absence seemed to confirm that this might be the case) she wanted to go out into the town this morning, accompanied by Mathilde, in the hope that they might meet him. She never wished to see him again, but she wanted to give him her assurance that however unsuitable, imprudent and mistaken his pursuit of her had been, she had never for one moment considered it base.

She foresaw that Mathilde would dismiss this plan as quixotic and childish. But she knew that Mathilde would do what she asked: partly out of friendship, even more out of her fear of boredom.

What are we waiting for in this horrid little provincial town? Mathilde had said yesterday morning, I believe we are waiting, my dear, for the hero to die.

As the local train drew into Domodossola station, Monsieur Hennequin opened the carriage door, ready to jump down on the platform. He was not impatient and he knew he had time to kill, but the more briskly he acted, the more certain he was of the correctness of his decision. A number of workers got out of the same train, but instead of making for the exit they crossed the lines towards the shunting yards. There were no cabs waiting outside the station and he could only see one other person at the far end of the Corso.

He passed his hand over his side pocket to satisfy himself once again that the automatic pistol, to obtain which he had made the tedious night journey, was solidly there. Its solidity, like the briskness of his actions, acted as a confirmation; it was like hearing an acquaintance say of him: Maurice acted calmly and firmly.

Passing the hotel, he looked up at his own bedroom window and
remembered Camille’s taunt about fighting a duel. It was the traditional time of day for duels and for executions. He told himself that after a night without sleep, in the early morning, before the day for most people had begun, you might have an unusual sense of your own destiny.

He walked into the old centre of the town where there is an irregularly shaped piazza and the pavement in front of the shops is arcaded. The blackboard on which was written last night’s medical bulletin concerning Chavez had been placed under the arcades in case it rained during the night. The writing was smudged at one corner.
The instability and irregularity of the patient’s cardiac functions give rise to continuing anxiety …

The shop windows under the arcades had large wooden shutters folded across them. They were painted green, but because they had been painted on different occasions, each had its own distinctive shade. Above the shutters were the shop signs. Several family names occurred more than once over different shops. When the shops were open, it was obvious from what was displayed in their windows that they were little more than poorly stocked stalls in a remote provincial town. But with their shutters up they looked different. It was possible to imagine that they were shops full of rare articles. Monsieur Hennequin walked several times round the arcade.

He would have liked Camille to witness the forthcoming encounter. She would see the young man shown up for what he was—a cynical philanderer with the mentality of a petty criminal. And she would also learn how far he, her husband, was prepared to go in order to protect her.

He no longer blamed Camille. Last night be had glimpsed in her the tart who, according to Monsieur Hennequin, is found in every woman but who only makes herself evident if the woman is denied the controls which her nature requires. He had ignored the warning contained in her infatuation with Mallarmé’s poetry: this poetry had stimulated and irritated her taste for the limitless, the boundless. But finally, he convinced himself she was not to blame: she was innocent. Her weakness was the weakness of her sex.

In protecting her from this weakness, in putting a stop to the
leering young man’s felonies, he was acting on behalf of all husbands for the sake of all wives. Women who were far more cunning than Camille, far more capable of pursuing their own interests, suffered from the same weakness: the weakness of succumbing to their own false first impressions. Women, able to twist men round their little fingers as soon as they knew them, could be rendered as impressionable as an eleven-year-old before a stranger whom they did not yet know. Women could calculate, they could make elaborate strategic and tactical plans, they could be patient and persistent, they could be merciless and generous—but their first impressions were invariably faulty. They could not see what was in front of them. This was why philanderers, so long as they were dealing with women, had need of so little diguise or distinction.

Monsieur Hennequin came to believe that what he intended to do was a duty placed upon him as a consequence of the weakness and inferiority of others. He was in no way aware of having to defend his own interests, or of having to try to escape from the solitude being imposed upon him. He left the arcade and the shuttered shops.

Monsieur Hennequin stood in the doorway of the bedroom. I don’t imagine you are surprised to see me, he said and shut the door behind him. We men are not the fools you take us for, he continued, and we know exactly how to deal with your type.

The bedroom was a modest one with a wooden plank floor. On the bed, instead of blankets, there was a large eiderdown in a white coverlet. The pillows were stuffed, not with feathers, but with grain. It was the hotel where the drivers of the Simplon mail coach used to stay. G. was still in bed but had raised himself up on one elbow.

As soon as he had shut the door behind him, Monsieur Hennequin pointed the pistol at the man in bed. Either you stop or I will kill you.

The man in bed stared at the pistol. (Is it the mere sight of gun metal which reminds him so strongly of the smell in the gun room of his childhood?) He heard Monsieur Hennequin’s voice continue as though in the room next door.

If I see you in my wife’s company again, here or anywhere else, I swear that I will shoot you on the spot.

Monsieur Hennequin was perfectly well aware of which way the gun in his hand was pointing—it was not his life that was in jeopardy. Further, he had reckoned since his first discovery of the note that it supplied him with evidence which would assure his receiving a purely nominal sentence even if he killed the man lying in the bed. Very little in his own life was menaced and he was now putting a stop to what might later have become a serious danger. Yet the invocation, the use of the threat of death may sometimes have a wider effect than the intended one. When once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary. In any case Monsieur Hennequin began to tremble.

He was not frightened, but he sensed that at this moment he was justifying his whole life. It was as if he was now prepared to choose death for himself rather than compromise or deny the meaning of his life. The important thing was the choice of death; whether for himself or another—always with the gun in his hand pointing at the man in the bed in front of him—seemed unimportant. It no longer mattered whether or not Camille witnessed the scene. To threaten or take the life of an avowed enemy was to enhance his own. He was discovering with excitement a new power.

If I have the slightest reason to suspect that you have seen her, I will shoot you like a dog whilst you sleep.

G. began to laugh. The pretences had been dropped and the truth which was revealed was absurdly familiar. The truth was Monsieur Hennequin, visibly trembling, the words coming out of his mouth with strange cries of pleasure, a pistol in his hand.

If I see you approaching the wife of any colleague or acquaintance of mine I shall shoot you as you leave the gathering.

Often he had been asked: why do you laugh, love?

After days of intrigue and hope and calculations, after doubts and heart-searchings, after boldness and timidity and further boldness, what truth is disclosed? His trousers flung across a chair, her wrap put aside or the coverlet of the bed pulled back, two rough triangles of darkish hair are disclosed and within them the parts whose exact
forms first-year medical students are taught to recognize as typical of the entire human species. There is no mistaking any of it, and in this total lack of ambiguity there is a truly comic banality. The longer the mask has been worn, the longer the familiar has been hidden, the more comic the revelation becomes, for the more the pair of them are meant to be astounded at what they have always known.

You tried to take advantage of the innocence of my wife—as I’m sure you have taken advantage of God knows how many other unfortunate women. But this time, thank God, it is not too late.

When Beatrice fell back on the bed laughing, she was no longer laughing at the absurd man in black in the trap, but at what she knew would now become obvious on her bed, beneath the portrait of her father, according to a freedom apparently granted by a wasp sting.

Keep quiet. Stop laughing. Or you will get a bullet in your chest now.

He continued to laugh because at last he was face to face with the unexceptional. It was partly a laugh of relief, as though, against all reason, he had feared that the other might, in this, be exceptional. And partly he laughed at the great first joke of the commonplace becoming inexorable, like a penis becoming erect.

Monsieur Hennequin considered that his laughter was like that of a madman alone in his cell. And this idea that the leering man in the bed might be mad disturbed and discouraged him, for he believed that, although the mad must be forcibly restrained and in certain cases exterminated, madness itself was nevertheless self-defeating, and so his avowed enemy appeared to represent a less substantial menace than the one he had resolved, without hesitation or compromise, to put a stop to.

You are mad, he said. But mad or not you will have no second warning.

Monsieur Hennequin walked backwards out of the door, prolonging to the last possible moment the excitement (which the mad laughter
had done so much to diminish) of pointing the gun at the man who had tried to seduce his wife.