Return to the Chateau (3 page)

“But you promised, you promised,” the child kept saying over and over.

“It’s just not possible, little one,” Sir Stephen said. “You could make it possible if you really wanted to” Natalie insisted.

Sir Stephen made no response. O was gently stroking the silken hair that bathed her bare knees. The fact of the matter was, if Sir Stephen had really wanted to, O could probably have found some way to persuade Natalie’s mother to let her keep the child with her for another two weeks or so, under the pretense of taking her to the country outside Paris. It would not have taken much: one letter, or at most a visit from O. And in two weeks, Natalie=85

What it meant was that Sir Stephen had changed his mind. He was standing by the window, gazing out at the garden. O bent down over the child, lifted her head, and kissed both her tear-filled eyes. She glanced quickly: Sir Stephen had not moved an inch. She took Natalie’s mouth. It was Natalie’s moan that caught Sir Stephen’s attention and made him turn back to them. But O remained seemingly oblivious and slipped down beside her, so that they were both lying side by side on the rug. Two steps, and Sir Stephen was standing over them. O heard him striking a match and smelled the acrid odor of his cigarette. He smoked dark-tobaccoed Gaulloise blue, like a Frenchman. Natalie’s eyes were closed.

“Undress her, O, and caress her,” he said suddenly. “Then you can turn her over to me. But first open her up a little. I don’t want to hurt her too much.”

Was that it? Oh, if all he wanted was Natalie, if that was all she had to give him! Was he in love with her? It seemed rather that he wanted, just as she was about to disappear, to bring something to an end, to destroy a fantasy. Well-rounded and soft, Natalie was nonetheless slender, and slightly shorter than O. Sir Stephen seemed twice her size. Without moving a muscle, she allowed herself to be undressed by O, allowed herself to be brought to the bed, which O had opened and turned down without moving a muscle she allowed herself to be Ca ressed, moaning faintly when O touched her or stroked her gently, gritting her teeth when O was more brutal. It was not long before O’s hand was covered with blood. But Natalie refrained from crying out until the full weight of Sir Stephen was upon her. It was the first time that O saw Sir Stephen deriving pleasure from someone other than herself, and more simply because she could see the expression on his face in the throes of pleasure. How he fled! Yes, he held Natalie’s head against his loins, his hands grasping fistfuls of hair as he did with O’s hair; O persuaded herself that it was only to feel more fully and intimately the mouth that encompassed him, until he found release within it, but any mouth, provided it was docile and ardent enough, would have provided him with similar satisfaction, with like release. Natalie did not count. Was O all that sure that she counted?

“I love you,” she whispered over and over again, too softly for him to hear it. “I love you,” using the formal “vous” rather than the familiar “tu.” Even in her thoughts and whispers she didn’t dare use the familiar form with him. Sir Stephen’s head was thrown back, and his gray eyes were nearly closed, like two slits of light. Between his slightly parted lips, his teeth also gleamed. For a moment he seemed disarmed, defenseless, but as soon as he felt O looking at him he caught himself, left the current into which he was slipping, a current into which O thought she had so often in the past slipped with him, stretched out beside him on that bark where lovers drift. But it was probably not true. They had probably been alone, each in his own way, and perhaps there was nothing fortuitous about the fact that each time he sank within her his face was averted from her; perhaps he wanted to be alone, and today was the accident, the rule rather than the exception. O saw this as a fatal sign: the sign that his feelings for her had withered to such a state of indifference that he no longer even took the trouble to turn his head. It was impossible, in any case, no matter how one interpreted it, not to see in his act an assurance, a freedom which ought to have, were it not for the very doubts she felt as to whether she was loved at all, made her giddy, proud, content, happy. She told herself as much.

When Sir Stephen left her, with Natalie curled up in her arms, still burning and murmuring with pride, O watched her fall asleep, then gently drew the sheets and a light blanket up over her. No, he wasn’t in love with Natalie. But he was absent, as absent from himself, perhaps, as he was from her. Somewhere else.

O had never really given any thought to deducing what Sir Stephen’s profession was, or even whether he had one, and Ren=E9 had never talked about it. It was obvious that he was wealthy, in that mysterious way English aristocrats are wealthy, when they still are. Where did his money come from? Ren=E9 worked for an export-import company; Ren=E9 used to say, ““I have to make a business trip to Algiers to see about some jute”; “I have to fly over to London about some woolen goods, or china”; “I have to run down to Spain to buy some copper.” Ren=E9 had an office, business associates, employees. She may not have been very clear as to the exact nature of his job, or the title he held, but the job did exist and the obligations it entailed were strikingly apparent. Perhaps Sir Stephen had some position too, one that might explain his trips, his prolonged stays in Paris and, thought O, not without a feeling of dread, his connection with Roissy (a connection which in Ren=E9’s case struck her as being no more or less than the result of a chance encounter-“I happened to run into a friend one day and he took me there,” he used to tell her-and O believed him). What did she know about Sir Stephen? That he belonged to the Campbell clan and was thus a descendant of the earls of Argyll. That their somber plaid, with its black, blue-black, and green colors, was the most beautiful of all Scodand, and the most infamous (the Campbells betrayed the Stuarts, and the ninth earl of Argyll was captured and beheaded, in 1685). That he owned a castle somewhere in the northwest corner of Scotland overlooking the Irish Sea, a small, compact granite castle built in the French manner by some eighteenth-century ancestor and looking for all the world like some St. Malo ch=E2teau. But what native of St. Mao had ever had, as a setting for his ch=E2teau, vast greenswards steeped in the morning dew, or as a sheath for its walls lush layers of Scottish ivy?

“I’ll take you there next year, with Anne-Marie,” Sir Stephen had said one day as he was showing her photos of the place.

Who lived in the castle? What kind of family did he have, if indeed he had one? O suspected that he had been, and perhaps still was, a professional career officer. A number of his compatriots who were younger than he invariably addressed him as “Sir,” nothing more, the way a subordinate speaks to a superior. O was well aware that there still exists in the British Isles a prejudice, or a peculiar custom, whereby a man is bound not to talk about either his wife or his business, about his profession or about money. Out of respect? Out of contempt? It was impossible to say. But it was also impossible to complain about it. And so O did not. She would simply have liked to feel certain that Sir Stephen’s silence concerning her was part and parcel of this same British quality or custom. And at the same time she secretly wanted him to break his silence, so that she could reassure him that if he had the slightest problem, the slightest worry, she was ready and willing to help him, if it was within her power to do so, in any way.

The DAY FOLLOWING the departure of Natalie-for whom they had booked a sleeper on the Train Bleu-and two days before the departure of O and Sir Stephen, who were taking the train together back to Paris-but Sir Stephen had specified that it be such and such a date, and not the same day as Natalie’s departure, as he had specified in no uncertain terms that they return by train, and by that particular train, rather than by car-O finally managed to say to him, while they were finishing breakfast, which they had taken alone together, and as old Norah was bringing in the coffee, O, emboldened because when she had got up and passed close to where he was sitting he had, mechanically perhaps, the way one does to a dog or cat, caressed her buttocks, O finally managed to say to him, in a voice so low it was scarcely audible, that she was afraid she was a source of irritation, of displeasure, to him, but that she wanted to assure him that she would serve him in any way he wanted. He looked at her tenderly at first, then had her kneel down while he kissed her breasts; then, after she had got back up and was standing beside him, his expression changed.

“I know,” he said. “The two men the other day…”

“The Germans?” O broke in.

“They aren’t German,” said Sir Stephen, “but that’s not the point. I just wanted to warn you that one of them will be travelling in the same train with us. We’ll have dinner together in the dining car. Please make a special effort to be pretty so that he’ll desire you, and follow you back to your compartment.”

“But he knows very well,” O said, “that you’re the one who determines what I do & don’t do.”

“Of course he does,” Sir Stephen went on. “We have adjoining compartments. He’ll come in through mine to yours.”

“Whatever you say’ O said, and did not ask what the reason was-certain as she was that this time there was a reason-despondent at being unable to rid herself of the notion that, if Sir Stephen had prostituted her the other times for no reason, and as it were gratuitously, it was less in order to accustom her to the idea than to sow confusion and make her the instrument, the blind instrument, of something 1other than his own pleasure.

The Train Bleu was due to arrive in Paris about nine o’clock in the morning. At about eight, O, prey to a kind of indifference which she completely failed to understand but which created an armored seal around her heart, bad walked steadily on her high heels down the corridors that separated her compartment from the dining car, where she bad drunk the too-bitter coffee and eaten the eggs and bacon which constituted the breakfast fare. Sir Stephen had sat down across from her. The eggs were stale and tasteless: the smell of cigarettes~ the swaying movement of the train, all contributed to make O slightly nauseous. But when the pseudoGerman arrived to join them and sat down next to Sir Stephen, neither his open stare that fixed itself on O’s lips, nor the memory of the meekness with which she had caressed him during the previous night, disturbed her. Something, she didn’t quite know what, protected her, left her free to watch the woods and fields slip by beside her, to look for the names of the wayside stations. The trees and the fog concealed the houses set back any distance from the tracks; tall iron pylons, set in concrete bases, flashed by periodically, incongruous in the pastoral setting; one could scarcely make out the electric wires that passed from one to the other, every three hundred yards as far as the eye could see. At Ville-neuve-Saint-Georges Sir Stephen suggested to O that they return to their compartments. His neighbor, scrambling to his feet, clicked his heels and almost split himself in two bidding O good-bye. A sudden jolt of the train made him lose his balance and sent him sprawling back into his seat. O could not keep from laughing. Was she surprised when Sir Stephen-who had completely ignored her since the start of the journey-had her bend down over the suitcases piled pell-mell on the compartment seat, virtually the minute they were back inside, and raised her pleated skirt? She was delighted, and grateful. To anyone who might have seen her in this position, kneeling on the compartment seat, her breasts crushed against the baggage, completely dressed, but offering, between the hem of her suitcoat and her stockings, and the black garter belt to which they were fastened, her bare buttocks crisscrossed with leatherlike stripes, to anyone who might have seen her thus she could only have seemed ridiculous, and she was well aware of it. She could never help remembering, whenever she was thus made to lie prone, the disturbing, but also the humiliating and ridiculous aspect of the expression “lift your skirt,” even more humiliating than that other expression which Sir Stephen, as Ren=E9 before him, employed at least each time he offered her to someone. This feeling of humiliation that Sir Stephen, or rather Sir Stephen’s words, caused her each time he uttered them, was soothing to her. But this sweetness was as nothing compared to the happiness, mixed with pride, one might almost say with glory that overwhelmed her whenever he deigned to seize and possess her, whenever he found her body to his liking sufficiently to enter it and, for a fleeting moment, dwell therein; it seemed to O that no submission, no humiliation, would ever compensate him fairly for these precious moments.

All the time he held her transfixed, poised against him and jostled gently by the movement of the train, she moaned. It was only when the cars collided noisily against each other, as the train ground to a halt at the Gare de Lyon, that he slipped from her and told her to straighten up.

As they emerged from the station onto the cobblestone courtyard, from which the stairways descend to street level and which serves as a parking lot, a young man dressed in the uniform of a noncommissioned Air Force officer stepped forward from where he was standing near a black Citro=EBn, which was locked, as soon as he saw Sir Stephen. He saluted, opened the door, and stood aside. When O was settled in the back seat, with the baggage in the front seat, Sir Stephen bent down just long enough to kiss her hand and smile, before closing the door. He had said nothing to her, neither “Goodbye’ nor “I’ll see you in a few days,” nor even “Goodbye forever.” O had thought that he was going to join her in the back seat. The car started off so suddenly and at such speed that she did not have the presence of mind to call out to him, and although she threw herself against the back window in an effort to make some kind of sign to him, it was too late: his back was already turned to her and he was giving some instructions to his porter. Suddenly, like someone removing a bandage from a wound, the indifference which had protected her throughout the trip was stripped away and a single phrase began to dance through her head, over and over and over again: “He didn’t say good-bye to me. He didn’t even look at me.”