The Age of Reason (31 page)

Mathieu put ten francs in a saucer and they went out. They looked with satisfaction at their stiff, swathed hands.

‘I feel as though my hand was made of wood,’ said Ivich.

The hall was now almost deserted. Lola, standing in the centre of the dancing-floor was just about to sing. Boris was sitting at their table, waiting for them. The lady in black and her husband had disappeared. There remained on their table two half-filled glasses, and a dozen cigarettes in an open box.

‘It’s a rout,’ said Mathieu.

‘Yes,’ said Ivich, ‘and for me too.’

Boris looked at them with a bantering air.

‘You’ve been properly messing yourselves up,’ he said.

‘It’s your beastly knife,’ said Ivich, angrily.

‘The said knife seems very sharp,’ said Boris, with an appraising look at their hands.

‘What about Lola?’ asked Mathieu.

Boris looked depressed. ‘As bad as it could be. I made a bloomer.’

‘How?’

‘I said that Picard had come to my place, and that I had talked to him in my room. It seems that I said something else on the first occasion — God knows what.’

‘You said you had met him in the Boulevard Saint-Michel.’

‘Oh dear!’ said Boris.

‘She’s savage, I suppose.’

‘Indeed she is — as savage as a sow. You’ve only got to look at her.’

Mathieu looked at Lola. Her face was angry and distraught.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mathieu.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about: it’s my fault. Besides, it will turn out all right. I know how to manage these things. They always do turn out all right in the end.’

Silence fell. Ivich looked affectionately at her bandaged hand. Sleep, cool air, and a grey dawn had glided impalpably into the hall, which smelt of early morning.

‘A diamond,’ thought Mathieu, ‘that’s what she said — “a little diamond”.’ He was content, he thought no more about himself, he felt as though he were sitting outside on a bench: outside — outside the dance-hall, outside his life. He smiled: ‘And she also said "I am eternal"...’

Lola began to sing.

‘T
HE
Dôme, at ten o’clock.’ Mathieu awoke. That little hillock of white gauze on the bed was his left hand. It was smarting, but his body was alert. ‘The Dôme, at ten o’clock,’ she had said. ‘I shall be there before you are, I shan’t be able to close my eyes all night.’ It was nine o’clock, he jumped out of bed. ‘She’ll have done her hair differently,’ he thought.

He flung open the shutters: the street was deserted, the sky lowering and grey, it was cooler than the day before — a veritable morning. He spun a tap on the wash-basin, and plunged his head in water: I too am a man of the morning. His life had fallen at his feet and lay there massed, it still enveloped him and enmeshed his ankles, he must step over it, he would leave it lying like a dead skin. The bed, the desk, the lamp, the green armchair: these were no longer his accomplices, they were anonymous objects of iron and wood, mere utensils, he had spent the night in an hotel bedroom. He slipped into his clothes, and went downstairs whistling.

‘There’s an express letter for you,’ said the concierge.

Marcelle! A sour taste came into Mathieu’s mouth: he had forgotten Marcelle. The concierge handed him a yellow envelope: it was Daniel.

‘My dear Mathieu,’ Daniel wrote, ‘I have tried everything, but I just can’t raise the sum in question. Believe me, I am very sorry. Could you look in tomorrow at twelve o’clock? I want to talk to you about your affair. Sincerely yours.’

‘Good,’ thought Mathieu, ‘I’ll go: he won’t part with his own money, but I expect he’s got some suggestion to make.’ Life seemed easy to him, it
must
be made easy: in any case Sarah would induce the doctor to wait a few days: if need be, the money could be sent to him in America.

Ivich was there, in a dark corner. What he first caught sight of was her bandaged hand.

‘Ivich!’ he said, softly.

She raised her eyes: the face was her deceptive, triangular face, with its air of faint, malicious purity, her cheeks half hidden by her curls: she had not lifted her hair.

‘Did you sleep at all?’ asked Mathieu gloomily.

‘Very little.’

He sat down. She noticed that he was looking at their two bandaged hands, she withdrew hers slowly and hid it under the table. The waiter came up, he knew Mathieu.

‘I hope you’re well, sir?’ he said.

‘Very well,’ said Mathieu. ‘Get me some tea and two apples.’

A silence fell, of which Mathieu took advantage to bury his recollections of the night. When he felt that his heart was empty, he looked up: ‘You look rather depressed. Is it the examination?’

Ivich’s reply was a disdainful grimace, and Mathieu said no more, he sat looking at the empty seats. A kneeling woman was swilling water over the tiled floor. The Dôme was barely awake. Fifteen hours to go before there could be any prospect of sleep! Ivich began to talk in an undertone, with a distraught expression on her face.

‘It’s at two o’clock,’ she said. ‘And nine o’clock has just struck. I can feel the hours melting away underneath me.’

She was tugging at her curls again with a wild look in her eyes; how was she to last out? ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘I could get a job as a saleswoman in a big store?’

‘You can’t be serious, Ivich, it’s a killing life.’

‘Or as a mannequin?’

‘You’re rather short, but we might try...’

‘I would do anything to avoid staying at Laon. I’d take a job as scullery-maid.’ And she added with an anxious elderly look: ‘Doesn’t one put advertisements in the papers in such cases?’

‘Look here, Ivich, we’ve got time to turn round. In any case, you’re not ploughed yet.’

Ivich shrugged her shoulders, and Mathieu went on briskly: ‘But even if you were, you wouldn’t be done for. You might, for instance, go home for two months, and I’ll have a look round, I’m sure to find something.’

He spoke with an air of genial conviction, but he had no hope: even if he got her a job, she would get herself sacked at the end of a week.

‘Two months at Laon,’ said Ivich angrily. ‘It’s quite clear you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s... it’s intolerable.’

‘But you would have spent your vacations there, in any case.’

‘Yes, but what sort of welcome will they give me now?’

She fell silent. He looked at her without saying a word: she wore her usual sallow morning face, the face of all her mornings. The night seemed to have glided over her. ‘Nothing leaves a mark on her,’ he thought He could not help saying: ‘You haven’t put up your hair.’

‘As you see,’ said Ivich, curtly.

‘You promised last evening that you would,’ said he, rather irritably.

‘I was tight,’ she said: and she added forcibly, as though to impress herself upon him: ‘I was completely tight.’

‘You didn’t look so very tight when you promised.’

‘Well, well,’ she said, impatiently, ‘and what then? People make very odd promises.’

Mathieu did not answer. He had a sense of being plied with a succession of urgent questions: How to find four thousand francs before the evening? How to get Ivich to Paris next year? What attitude to adopt towards Marcelle now? He hadn’t the time to compose his mind, to return to the queries that had formed the basis of his thoughts since the previous day: Who am I? What have I done with my life? As he turned his head to shake off this fresh anxiety he saw in the distance the tall, hesitant silhouette of Boris, who appeared to be looking for them outside.

‘There’s Boris,’ he said with vexation. And, seized with an unpleasant suspicion, he said, ‘Did you tell him to come?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Ivich, utterly taken aback. ‘I was going to meet him at twelve o’clock, because... because he was spending the night with Lola. And look at his face!’

Boris had caught sight of them. He came towards them. His eyes were wide and staring, and his complexion livid. He smiled.

‘Hullo!’ said Mathieu.

Boris lifted two fingers towards his temple in his usual salutation, but could not make the gesture. He dropped his two hands on the table and began to sway to and fro on his heels without uttering a word. He was still smiling.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Ivich. ‘You look like Frankenstein.’

‘Lola is dead,’ said Boris.

He was staring stupidly into vacancy. Mathieu sat for a moment or two, dumbfounded, then a sense of shocked amazement came upon him.

‘What on earth...’

He looked at Boris: it was plainly no use to question him then and there. He gripped him by the arm, and forced him to sit down beside Ivich. Boris repeated mechanically: ‘Lola is dead.’

Ivich gazed wide-eyed at her brother. She had edged away from him, as though she feared his contact. ‘Did she kill herself?’ she asked.

Boris did not answer, and his hands began to tremble.

‘Tell us,’ repeated Ivich nervously. ‘Did she kill herself? Did she kill herself?’

Boris’s smile widened in unnerving fashion, his lips twitched. Ivich eyed him fixedly, tugging at her curls. ‘She doesn’t realize anything,’ thought Mathieu with vexation.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You will tell us later on. Don’t talk.’

Boris began to laugh. He said: ‘If you... if you...’

Mathieu smacked his face with a sharp, noiseless flip of the fingers. Boris stopped laughing, eyed him, muttered something, then subsided and stood quiet, his mouth agape, and still with a stupid air. All three were silent, there was death among them, anonymous and sacred. It was not an event, it was an enveloping, yeasty substance through which Mathieu saw his cup of tea, the marble-topped table, and Ivich’s delicate, malicious face.

‘And for you, sir?’ asked the waiter. He was standing by their table, looking ironically at Boris.

‘Bring a cognac quick,’ and he added with a casual air, ‘my friend is in a hurry.’

The waiter departed, and soon returned with a bottle and a glass: Mathieu felt limp and exhausted, he was only just beginning to feel the fatigues of the night.

‘Drink that up,’ he said to Boris.

Boris drank obediently: he put down the glass, and said, as though to himself: ‘It’s a bad show.’

‘Dear old boy,’ said Ivich, going up to him. ‘Dear old boy.’

She smiled affectionately, took hold of his hair, and shook his head.

‘I’m glad you’re here — how hot your hands are,’ gasped Boris with relief.

‘Now tell us all about it,’ said Ivich. ‘Are you sure she’s dead?’

‘She took that drug last night,’ said Boris painfully. ‘We’d had a row.’

‘So she poisoned herself?’ said Ivich briskly.

‘I don’t know,’ said Boris.

Mathieu looked at Ivich with amazement: she was affectionately stroking her brother’s hand, but her upper lip was oddly curled over her small teeth. Boris went on speaking in an undertone. He did not seem to be addressing them: ‘We went up to her room, and she took some of the stuff. She had taken the first dose in her dressing-room, while we were having an argument.’

‘In point of fact that must have been the second time,’ said Mathieu. ‘I fancy she took some while you were dancing with Ivich.’

‘Very well,’ said Boris wearily. ‘Then that makes three times. She never used to take as much as that. We went to bed without saying a word. She tossed about in bed, and I couldn’t sleep. And then suddenly she became quiet and I got to sleep.’

He drained his glass, and continued: ‘This morning I woke up feeling stifled. It was her arm, which was lying on the sheet across me. I said to her: “Take your arm away, you’re stifling me.” She did not move. I thought she wanted to make up our quarrel, so I took her arm — and it was cold. I said to her: "What’s the matter?" She did not answer. So then I shoved her arm away, and she nearly fell down between the bed and the wall: I got out of bed, took her wrist, and tried to pull her straight. Her eyes were open. I saw her eyes,’ he said, with a kind of anger, ‘and I’ll never be able to forget them.’

‘My poor old boy,’ said Ivich.

Mathieu tried to feel sorry for Boris, but could not succeed. Boris disconcerted him even more than Ivich did. He looked almost as if he was angry with Lola for having died.

‘I picked up my clothes and dressed,’ Boris went on in a monotonous voice. ‘I didn’t want to be found in her room. They didn’t see me go out, there was no one in the office. I took a taxi and came along here.’

‘Are you sorry?’ asked Ivich gently. She was leaning towards him, but not with much sympathy: she had the air of someone asking for information. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘Are you sorry?’

‘I...’ said Boris: he looked at her, and said abruptly. ‘It’s so repulsive.’

The waiter passed, Boris hailed him: ‘Another brandy, please.’

‘In a hurry again?’ smiled the waiter.

‘Bring it at once,’ said Mathieu curtly.

Boris inspired him with a faint disgust. There was nothing left of the lad’s dry, angular charm. His latest face was too like Ivich’s. Mathieu began to think of Lola’s body, prostrate on the bed in a hotel bedroom. Men in bowler hats would enter that room, they would look at that sumptuous body with combined concupiscence and professional interest, they would pull down the bed-clothes and lift the night-gown in search of injuries, reflecting that the profession of police-inspector is not without its compensations. He shuddered.

‘Is she all alone there?’ he said.

‘Yes, I expect she’ll be discovered about twelve o’clock,’ said Boris, with an anxious look. ‘The maid always wakes her up about that time.’

‘In two hours then,’ said Ivich.

She had resumed her airs of elder sister. She was stroking her brother’s hair with an expression of pity and of exultation. Boris appeared to respond to her caresses and then suddenly exclaimed: ‘God blast my eyes!’

Ivich started. Boris often used slang, but he never swore.

‘What have you done?’ she asked, apprehensively.

‘My letters,’ said Boris.

‘What?’

‘All my letters — what a ghastly fool I am, I’ve left them in her room.’

Mathieu did not understand: ‘Letters you wrote to her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why worry?’

‘Well... the doctor will come, and it will be known that she died of poison.’