‘She likes you very much … But it’s true … only she doesn’t show her feelings readily …
‘We’ll have the serum tomorrow evening. Go back to your patients and leave the rest to us …’
That, your Honour, is how Armande entered our house, a little travelling bag in her hand. The first thing she did was to put on a white hospital coat and tie a kerchief over her fair hair.
‘And now, Mme Alavoine,’ she said to Mama, ‘under no consideration must you enter the sick-room. You know it is a question of the health of your other little girl. I have brought an electric stove with me and everything I shall need. You don’t have to bother about a thing …’
A few moments later I found Mama in tears in the hall outside the kitchen. She didn’t want to cry in front of the maid — nor in front of me.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied, blowing her nose.
‘Anne-Marie will be well taken care of …’
‘Yes …’
‘Dambois assures me that she is in no danger and he wouldn’t say so if he had the slightest doubt …’
‘I know …’
‘Then why are you crying?’
‘I’m not crying …’
Poor Mama, she knew very well that what had entered our house was a will stronger than her own, to which she would have to yield.
Another thing, your Honour. You are going to say that I accumulate the most ridiculous details. But do you know what, in my opinion, was the most painful thing of all for my mother? The electric stove which the other woman had had the foresight to bring with her.
The other woman had thought of everything, you understand? She needed no one. She refused to need anyone.
Chapter Four
It happened the second night. She probably knocked on my door but did not wait for an answer. Without turning on the electric switch and, as though familiar with the room, she came over and lighted the lamp by my bed. I was vaguely conscious of someone touching my shoulder. I sleep heavily. My hair at nights gets plastered down over my skull and makes my face look even broader than usual. I am always too hot, and my face must have been shiny.
When I opened my eyes she was seated on the edge of my bed in her white hospital coat, her kerchief on her head, and calm and serene, began by saying:
‘Don’t be frightened, Charles. I simply wanted to talk to you.’
There were little mouse-like noises in the house — my mother probably, for she hardly slept at all and must have been on the alert.
That was the first time Armande ever called me Charles. It is true, she had lived where a certain familiarity comes naturally.
‘Anne-Marie is not worse, so don’t worry …’
She had no dress on under her hospital coat, only her lingerie, so that in places the material seemed moulded to her flesh.
‘Henri is certainly an excellent physician,’ she went on, ‘and I should not like to hurt his feelings. I talked to him seriously a little while ago, but he does not seem to understand. You see, in medicine he is inclined to be over-cautious, and in this case, you being a colleague, he feels his responsibility all the more.’
I would have given a good deal to run a comb through my hair and rinse my mouth. I was obliged to keep under the covers on account of my wrinkled pyjamas. She thought of handing me a glass of water, and proposed:
‘A cigarette?’
She lighted one too.
‘In Switzerland I happened to nurse a case similar to Anne-Marie’s, the daughter of one of my neighbours. That will explain why I know something about it. Besides we had many friends who were doctors, and we used to spend night after night discussing medical questions …’
My mother must have been frightened. I saw her standing there framed in the open doorway, grey all over, lighter than the darkness of the hall beyond. She was wearing a wrapper, and her hair was done up in curlers.
‘Don’t be uneasy, Mme Alavoine. I simply wanted to consult your son as to how the treatment should be applied …’
Mama looked at our two cigarettes with their smoke mingling in a luminous halo around the bedside lamp. I am sure this is what struck her most forcibly. We were smoking cigarettes — together, at three o’clock in the morning, on my bed.
‘I didn’t know, excuse me. I heard a noise and I came to see …’
She disappeared, and Armande continued as if we had never been interrupted:
‘Well, Henri gave her twenty thousand units of serum. I did not like to interfere. But you saw what the temperature was this evening?’
‘Let’s go down to my office,’ I said.
She turned her back while I put on my dressing-gown. Once I was on more solid ground, I filled my pipe, which restored a little of my self-assurance.
‘What was it tonight?’
‘A hundred and four. That is why I woke you. Most professors I’ve known have very different ideas about serum from Henri’s. One of them used to tell us over and over again: strike hard, or don’t strike at all; a massive dose, or nothing …’
For three years, at Nantes, I had heard my old master Chevalier, in his ringing voice, say the same thing, only he, with his legendary brutality, would add:
‘If the patient croaks, that’s his fault.’
I noticed that two or three of my books on therapeutics were missing from the shelves and I knew that Armande must have come down and taken them. For ten minutes she talked about diphtheria in a way I should have been incapable of doing myself.
‘You can, of course, telephone Dr Dambois. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler and less galling for him if you simply took it upon yourself to give her another injection.’
This was an extremely grave problem. There was my daughter to be considered. On the other hand it was a question of a colleague, of a heavy professional responsibility, of what must really be termed an indelicacy, to say the least.
‘Come and take a look …’
My daughter’s room was already her domain, organized to suit herself. Why did one feel it the moment one entered? And why, in spite of the scent of illness and medicines, was it her scent that struck me, although the cot was still undisturbed?
‘Read this passage … You will see that almost all the great specialists are of the same opinion.’
That night, your Honour, I wonder if I wasn’t criminal at heart? I yielded. I did what she had decided I should do. Not because I believed it was the right thing to do, not because of my master Chevalier’s opinions on the subject of serums, or because of the texts I was given to read.
I yielded because she willed me to.
I was fully aware of it. My daughter’s life was at stake. If only from the strict point of view of ethics, I was committing a grave dereliction.
I did it and I knew I was doing wrong. I knew it so well that I trembled at the thought of seeing the phantom-like figure of my mother reappear.
Ten thousand units more. She helped me give the hypodermic. Actually she left me nothing but the final gesture to accomplish. During the operation her hair brushed against my cheek.
It did not affect me. I did not desire her and I think I already felt certain that I would never desire her.
‘Now go back to bed. You begin seeing your patients at eight o’clock.’
I slept badly. In my semi-consciousness I had the sensation of something inescapable. Don’t think I am inventing in retrospect. Besides I was pleased, in a way, in spite of my distress and uneasiness. I told myself:
‘It has nothing to do with me. It’s her doing.’
Finally I fell asleep. When I came downstairs next morning I found Armande in the garden, where she had gone for a breath of fresh air, and she was now wearing a dress under her white coat.
‘A hundred and two and one tenth,’ she cried joyously. ‘She perspired so much early this morning that twice I had to change her sheets.’
Neither of us said anything to Dambois. Armande did not find it difficult to
keep silent. But I had to bite my tongue every time I saw him.
I was about to write, your Honour, that what I have just told you is the entire story of our marriage. She entered our house without my asking, without my wanting her to. It was she who on the second day made — or forced me to make — capital decisions.
After she came, Mama was transformed into a grey frightened little mouse who glided past the doors, and she resumed her old habit of apologizing for everything and nothing.
And yet, at the beginning, Armande had Mama on her side. From having seen her on the witness-stand, you only saw the woman of forty. Ten years ago, she possessed the same self-assurance, the same innate faculty for dominating and orchestrating, as I call it, everything around her without seeming to. With, at that time, something a little more resilient about her than today, not only physically, but morally.
It was to her the maid went for orders as a matter of course, reiterating a dozen times a day:
‘Mme Armande said that …’
‘It was Mme Armande who ordered it …’
Later on I began to wonder if she didn’t have an ulterior motive in insinuating herself into our house with the excuse of nursing Anne-Marie. It’s stupid, I admit. Over and over again I have reviewed these questions with myself. True, from the purely material point of view, she had spent her mother’s inheritance nursing her first husband, and she was now entirely dependent on her father. But the latter enjoyed a very handsome fortune which, at his death, even after being divided among five children, would represent an appreciable amount for each of them.
I also told myself that the old man was erratic, and an autocrat, that people called him ‘original’ which, with us, means all sorts of things. She would certainly have wasted her time trying to exercise her power over him and I am convinced that, in the house on the Place Boildieu, she was obliged to play second fiddle.
Is that the key to the problem? I was not wealthy. My profession, as exercised by a man conscious of his limitations like myself, is not one which allows him to pile up a fortune or to live luxuriously.
I am not handsome, your Honour. I went so far as to envisage more audacious hypotheses. My big peasant body, my big face glowing with health, even my ungainliness … of course you know that certain women especially among the more emancipated …
But it wasn’t that either! I know it now. Armande is normally sexed, or rather below normal.
There remains only one explanation. She was living at her father’s as she would have lived at a hotel. It was no longer her home.
She entered our house by chance, by accident. And yet … Let me explain. I want to get to the bottom of this question, even if it makes you shrug your shoulders. I have told you about her first visit, on the occasion of our first bridge party. I have told you that she saw everything, that she looked at everything with a little smile on her lips.
One tiny incident recurs to me. My mother, showing her the empty drawing-room, said:
‘We will probably buy the drawing-room set which was shown last week in Durand-Weil’s window.’
Because I had vaguely mentioned it. A drawing-room set done in imitation Beauvais, chairs and settees with gilded legs.
And although we barely knew her, although she had only just entered our house, I saw her nostrils quiver ever so slightly.
I am sorry if I am idiotic, your Honour. But I tell you this: At that moment Armande knew very well that we would never buy that drawing-room set at Durand-Weil’s. I don’t pretend there was any conspiracy. I don’t affirm that she knew that she would marry me. I say know and I insist upon that word.
Like all peasants I am used to animals. We have had dogs and cats all our life, so intimately mingled with it that when my mother wants to place some recollection, she says for example:
‘It was the year we lost our poor Brutus …’
Or else:
‘It was the time the black cat had kittens under the wardrobe …’
And it often happens in the country that an animal starts following you, follows you and no one else, goes into the house with you, and then deliberately and with almost absolute assurance, decides that this house shall, henceforth, be his. In this way, for three years at Bourgneuf, we kept an old yellow half-blind cur, and my father’s dogs were forced to put up with him.
He was filthy besides, and I have often heard my father say:
‘It would be better to put a bullet through his head …’
He never did. The animal, whom he had named Jaundice, died peacefully of old age — or, rather, horribly, since it took him three days to die, during which time my mother never stopped applying hot compresses to his belly.
I, too, later on, sometimes thought:
‘It would be better to put a bullet through her head.’
And I never did. It was someone else I …
What I am trying to make you understand, your Honour, is that she came into our house in the most natural way in the world and that, also in the most natural way in the world, she remained.
When it comes to fatalities like this, to inescapable things, it seems as if every one were in a hurry to be fate’s accomplice and went out of the way to humour her.
From the very first days my friends fell into the habit of asking me:
‘How is Armande?’
And it seemed to them perfectly normal for her to be living in my house, and for them to be coming to me to inquire about her.
After two weeks, during which the disease ran its natural course, people would say with the same artlessness which nevertheless implied so much:
‘She is an amazing woman.’
As though, you understand, they considered that she belonged to me already. Even my mother … I’ve talked to you enough about Mama for you to know her by this time. To get her son married, that was all very well, since I had not chosen to be a priest … But on the express condition that the house should remain hers and that she should continue to run it as she saw fit …
Well, your Honour, believe it or not, my mother was the first to say, while after all Armande was in our house only in the capacity of a volunteer nurse, one evening when I expressed surprise at the peas being cooked in a way they had never been before:
‘I asked Armande how she liked them. This is the recipe she gave me. Don’t you like them?’
Armande called me Charles right away and it was she who asked me to call her by her first name. She was not coquettish. I never saw her, even after we were married, dressed in any but a rather strict way, and I remember a remark I heard about her:
‘Mme Alavoine is a statue, if a statue could walk.’
Even after Anne-Marie was well again, she continued to come to the house almost every day. As Mama had very little time to go out with the children, she would call for them and take them for a walk in the gardens of the Prefecture.
My mother used to say to me:
‘She is very fond of your daughters.’
One of my patients made a faux pas:
‘I just ran into your wife and your little girls at the corner of the Rue de la République.’
And Anne-Marie, when we were all together at table one day, said very gravely:
‘But, Mama, Armande said so …’
By the time we were married six months later, she had already been reigning over the house and the family for a very long time, and it would not have been surprising if the townspeople in speaking of me had said, not:
‘That is Dr Alavoine …’
But:
‘That is Mme Armande’s future husband …’
Have I the right to claim that I did not want to marry her? I acquiesced. First of all there were my two daughters.
‘They will be so happy to have a mother …’
Mama was beginning to get old and, refusing to admit it, bustled about from morning to night, wearing herself out at her task.
But no — let’s be absolutely sincere. If not, your Honour, what’s the use of writing to
you at all? I can sum up in two words my state of mind at the time:
First: cowardice.
Second: vanity.
Cowardice because I did not have the courage to say no. Everybody was against me. Everybody by a kind of tacit agreement encouraged the marriage.
But, for this woman who was so amazing, I felt not the least sexual desire. I had felt no particular desire for Jeanne, my first wife, either, but at that time I was young, I married for the sake of being married. In marrying her I did not know that she would leave a large part of me unsatisfied and that all my life I should be tormented by the desire to be unfaithful to her.
With Armande, I knew it. I am going to confess something absurd. Suppose that conventions and worldly wisdom did not exist. I would much rather have married Laurette than the daughter of M. Hilaire de Lanusse.
What’s more, I should have preferred our little servant girl Lucile, with whom I sometimes had intercourse without even giving her time to put down the shoe she happened to be polishing and which she had to keep in her hand, very comically, the whole time.
Only, I was just beginning to practise in the city. I was living in a handsome house. Just the sound of footsteps on the fine gravel of the paths was for me a sign of luxury, and I had finally made myself a present of something I had been coveting, a revolving sprinkler for watering the lawn.
I was not speaking lightly, your Honour, when I told you that one generation, more or less, could be of capital importance.
Armande was I don’t know how many generations ahead of me. Her ancestors — we have any number of families like hers in the Vendée — most probably made their fortune buying confiscated property at the time of the Revolution and afterwards ennobled themselves with a de.
I am making every effort, you can see that, to get as close to the truth as possible. God knows, at the point I have reached, a little more or a little less doesn’t matter. I believe that I am as frank as a man can be. And I am as lucid as one becomes only after one has crossed to the other side.
But that doesn’t prevent my being conscious of my impotence. Everything that I have just told you is true and is false. And yet, night after night, stretched out beside Armande in the same bed, I have asked myself the question, I have asked myself why she was there.
Act of Passion Page 7
