She slid into a brief, light sleep and found herself in a strange place where she could see Thérèse walking towards her. She took her in her arms, stroked her face and said … Oh, she spoke such wise words to her! She explained the present to her; she revealed the future. She took her hand and they walked together through wide fields where fires were burning. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘these are the fires of autumn; they purify the land; they prepare it for new growth. You are still young. These great fires have not yet burned in your life. But they will. They will destroy many things. You’ll see, you’ll see …’
She woke up: she could not remember her dream very well, but it left her feeling as if she needed to hurry. ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘I must tell Thérèse! There’s no time to lose. People never talk to their children. I have to hurry …’
‘Thérèse, Thérèse,’ she called out, several times.
Then she fell into a half-sleep and when she woke up, Thérèse was at her bedside putting cold compresses on her head.
‘She’s had an attack,’ she said to someone.
‘An attack! How ridiculous,’ thought the elderly Madame Pain. ‘But of course I’ve forgotten what I wanted to tell her … Yes, the fires … Yes, she thinks she has lived, but she’s just a child, and he is as well …’
She gestured that she wanted to say something; they told her not to speak. But there were so many good pieces of advice she needed to give; she had such a wealth of experience and she wanted to pass it on to her children: that Colette ought to be weaned soon because she was wearing out her mother, that their little Yves was too intelligent, he thought too much, they mustn’t say anything in front of him, and that they should really get rid of the cleaning lady – yes, so many things that she could not manage to express, that became transformed into a gentle, childish moan as they passed her lips, or sometimes a mumbled cry:
‘Thérèse! Thérèse!’
‘Oh, my poor Grandmama, you’re in pain, try not to speak,’ said Thérèse.
But she was not in pain; she was just very hot. She pitied these poor children standing at her bedside. She stretched out her hand towards them in a gesture that was at once a blessing, a pleading, a caress, an acceptance of her helplessness. She could do nothing for them; all she could do was feel sorry for them.
10
When married couples quarrel, whoever is the first to say the words: ‘It would be better if we separated’ immediately feels as if he or she has committed murder: love still exists between the couple – love is still alive, but those words kill it. Nothing can ever bring it back to life again; once the lovers have admitted that love could die, the deed is done: nothing remains but its dead body. Once Bernard had said to his wife:
‘Listen, all these conversations are getting us nowhere. Since we can’t agree, it would be better for you, for me and for the children if we separate …’
Once he had said those words, he stopped, turned completely white, paced up and down the room, from one end to the other, then walked over to Thérèse, who had remained totally still, and stroked her hair. There was something fatal in that kind gesture; she could sense it; she stopped fighting; she agreed to the separation.
This scene was the culmination of four years of constant disagreements. ‘You are no longer my husband,’ Thérèse said over and over again. ‘You don’t belong to me any more; you aren’t mine any more.’ She meant that not only did he belong to another woman, but also that he was betraying an entire world of traditions, emotions, joys and pain that they had shared, just the two of them, in the past, everything that had been inalienable, and now, she would have to embody those values alone. For the first three years of his affair with Renée, he had attempted the impossible; he had tried to reconcile two irreconcilable worlds, the world of the Détangs and the world of the Bruns. An ordinary banker, father of a family on the one hand, and on the other, the lover of one of the most elegant women in Paris, a man who was part of Bernheimer’s and Raymond Détang’s social circle, someone who shared their way of life. And their way of life required money; Renée pressured him to accept Bernheimer’s offer of doing business with him, with Bernheimer putting up the capital. Détang would also have an interest in the deal: Détang had an interest in every deal. He was not a Minister; he was not even a Member of Parliament. He was one of the ten or twelve puppet-masters of the time who worked behind the scenes. He knew everything; he was well thought of by all the political parties; everyone treated him with consideration; he got everything he wanted.
‘I take my hat off to him,’ said Bernard. ‘He’s made a success of himself. Now, being successful when you are a genius, or are knowledgeable or are exceptionally intelligent, is, in fact, nothing special. What is very tricky is to succeed having none of those gifts; it’s like being an academic with no talent, a diplomat who can’t find the island of Java on a map; it’s knowing how to make a fortune without having done any work, or how to manipulate everyone when you are actually quite mediocre in every way, like Raymond Détang. Now that, that is worthy of admiration. There are two or three hundred men like that in France, a hundred and fifty of them in Paris. They are our masters.’
‘Those men are evil and dangerous,’ Thérèse had said sharply, ‘and they will cause our downfall.’
He had listened to her without getting angry; he replied almost with humility:
‘It’s extremely tempting, Thérèse. You can’t understand … Everything that is happening now in France is in the hands of these people, for better or for worse. That is why I have to go back to the United States now to place an order for some aeroplane parts for the Air Ministry. It’s all been arranged, by Détang, of course … He’ll take the biggest cut. I hate him but I need to do it: I can’t pass this up. Just think what the advantages would be for me: I’ll travel, make contacts, and if my transaction is successful, I can hope to start my own business with the backing of a financial magnate like Bernheimer. And then there’s the joy of earning a lot of money in one go, the joy of being able to spend it … If I listen to you, if I break off relations with them again, we’d be left with an average, dull existence, and this time it would be forever.’
‘But that’s happiness, that’s peace!’
‘It’s extremely tempting,’ he said once more. ‘And you, Thérèse, if only you wanted to … We could have such a wonderful life!’
‘You mean ignore the fact that you’re having an affair with Renée? Smile at people I despise? Entertain them here at home? And later on, find one of them who would be a patron for Yves? No, never! Never! Don’t ever hope I would do that. I’m just like everyone else, of course: I’d rather be rich than poor, have a car instead of walking, but I won’t have anything to do with that world. You already told me about this business about the parts for planes. I asked you then if they didn’t manufacture them here in France and you replied: “How naïve you are! If everything were that simple, what would people like Détang and I do?” Well, all that is just …’
She tried to express what she felt, a complicated mixture of anger, disgust and fear.
But all she said was:
‘All that is bad.’
She might have been able to accept the adultery. So many women are forced to. You suffer but say nothing, either for the children or because of all the memories from the past. But in this case, it was not simply her husband’s heart that was being taken away: he was being entirely changed, and right before her eyes. She barely recognised him. His desires, opinions, dreams, everything seemed foreign to her. My God, she had been so alone ever since Madame Pain had died! A woman cannot love or hate in the abstract: this world that Thérèse detested so very much had taken on the features of a certain face, her rival’s face. Every time she hurled abuse at it, she seemed to be cursing Renée. She burst into tears.
‘Tell me, really, what has that woman done to have such a hold on you?’
During the first year, he had defended himself; he had sworn that he was not Renée’s l
over. The second year, he had sighed wearily: ‘You’re mad, I’m telling you, you’re mad,’ without admitting anything, but without denying anything. The third year, he could stand it no longer … He had become brutal. Yes, all right, he did have a mistress! Yes, it was Renée! He didn’t know whether it was love or a sort of sexual passion that would die out one day … All he knew was that he wanted her, that he would not give her up, that they were happy together after a fashion.
Finally, he had offered his wife a divorce, or, better still, an amicable separation. That way, the family would save face; the children would know nothing. They would tell them that he was living abroad for business reasons. He would come back to Thérèse’s house from time to time, spend a few days at the apartment with her, but they would be living as strangers under the same roof.
‘Don’t you think that would be best? Simpler?’
‘Everything seems simple to you now. You have enough money to support two households. With money, you can do anything, fix anything, isn’t that right? Well, what can I do? Leave then, I can’t stand it any more. I’ve done everything I can to keep you these past four years. Go! Yes, it’s better if we separate.’
One evening, a few days later, he got up from the table and left to see the Détangs. He looked very handsome and seemed quite young in his evening suit. His wife and child watched him in silence. He was out of place in this little bourgeois dining room, thought Thérèse, and she sadly imagined the dazzling world that was taking him away from her.
‘Where are you going tonight, Papa?’ asked Yves.
Yves was fifteen. He was a strong boy, stocky, with a neck that was a little too short, a head that was a little too big and wide shoulders; there was something solid about him, something tense and wilful that struck you when you looked at him. He had broad features, but they would become handsome with age. He did not have a child’s face; he had the face of a man. The disproportion between his strong, virile face and his clothing, his bearing and his voice, all of which were still childish, made people smile. He had pale skin, three wrinkles across his forehead, a large, nicely shaped straight nose and dark eyes.
‘Where are you going, Papa?’ he asked.
‘To the Opera, to hear the Magic Flute by Mozart.’
‘You should take Mama with you. Doesn’t she like music?’
‘No, I don’t like music very much,’ Thérèse said quietly.
‘Your mother doesn’t want to go with me,’ Bernard replied.
They got up from the table. Yves went over to his father and instinctively stroked the satin lining of his suit. Bernard pulled away.
‘Don’t touch, my boy. You have ink on your hands.’
‘Papa … I think that Mama gets bored every night, all alone.’
‘Be quiet, Yves,’ whispered Thérèse. ‘Be quiet. Please.’
‘She isn’t alone,’ said Bernard after a moment of silence, ‘because you’re here to keep her company.’
Everyone fell silent. The maid brought in the coffee. Bernard drank his quickly. ‘It’s a strange thing. It’s impossible to get that girl to serve the coffee hot.’ Then he quickly kissed Thérèse’s hair.
‘I’ll be home late; please don’t wait up for me. Yves, you’ll be kind enough not to touch my books, won’t you?’
He left. The mother and son were left alone. Thérèse walked wearily over to the armchair next to the fireplace. She was nearly forty; her complexion and face still looked very young; it was only the way she walked that at certain moments gave away her age. She sighed and reached for a basket full of clothes that needed mending. Yves made a movement; he was about to say something but thought better of it and turned away without a word.
Thérèse looked at him:
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ she asked quietly.
‘Nothing. It’s just that you seem so … dejected …’
‘I have been a little tired recently.’
‘I said dejected.’
She did not reply; she looked through the basket for her crochet hook and a ball of wool and started working, her fingers moving so quickly that her son was fascinated. When he was a very small boy, he had loved sitting at her feet while she did this kind of work; he never tired of watching the delicate, swift movement of her pale fingers as she unwound the wool. For a long time, he knew his mother’s hands better than her features, her face: grown-ups are always half hidden in the shadows to a child; the look in their eyes, their smiles are all too far away, too high above him. But the hands that tuck him into bed, bathe him, stroke him are close by. He had drawn those hands from memory the moment he was old enough to hold a pencil and he had forgotten nothing: not the tiny marks left on her index finger by the sewing needle, not the scar on her fourth finger that she got from burning herself when she pulled his ball out of the fire after it had fallen in, not the little maze of veins on her wrist just below the spot where her long sleeves ended.
‘Did you finish your homework?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘Well then, go and get something to read. But don’t touch your father’s books.’
He picked up a book and pretended to read. His eyes constantly wandered from the page as he studied one object after the other in the room, as if he were comparing them to some internal image.
‘Mama,’ he finally said, ‘we have a nice house, don’t we?’
‘I think so … Yes … Why are you asking me that?’
And immediately, she regretted her words. She knew very well that he would not reply. A child – and he was still only a child – never explains himself. Especially not this child … And besides, she knew what he meant: ‘Since it’s so comfortable here, since our apartment is so pretty, so clean, so nicely furnished, why does Papa always rush away?’
On the mantelpiece, between a lamp and a small silver vase full of holly branches, sat some photographs that Yves had seen there for as long as he could remember: Madame Pain as a young girl, slim and smiling with her fine hair, one of Yves when he was three years old, one of his two little sisters and one of Martial Brun. Yves had always looked at this one with strange curiosity. ‘He was one of your mother’s cousins,’ he’d been told, ‘and he was killed in the war. He was a doctor.’
This evening, as he often did, Yves walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up the photograph. This thin, bearded man with deep-set eyes, his uniform and military decorations seemed to belong to a different age. He studied it attentively and with fascination. He had died six years before his own birth, in a great war. That fact linked him in a way to a mythical, even legendary, historical past, and at the same time, brought him closer to Yves himself: for Yves, like all the young boys of his generation, believed he was destined to go to war. In five, ten, twenty years, war would break out. Everyone seemed to hate war, and yet everyone expected it, just as one fears and expects death, or rather, the way a bird fascinated by a snake trembles and lowers its head without thinking of fleeing. War … He held the framed photograph in his hands and sat down next to Thérèse.
‘Was he killed at the beginning or the end of the war?’
‘Who?’
‘Your cousin.’
‘After a few months.’
‘How was he killed?’
‘Didn’t I ever tell you? He died under fire,’ said Thérèse, ‘when he went to save a wounded man who had been abandoned.’
Yves closed his eyes to better imagine the scene that he pictured so clearly; it seemed so vivid that it was almost painful. Those great fields of mud during the war, so often destroyed, a dying soldier caught in barbed wire, another who crawls towards him in the glare of the rockets, finally takes hold of him, lifts him up, carries him away. Then both of them are hit by a hail of machinegun fire. They both fall to the ground. And before their bones are crushed and scattered, death unites them so that these soldiers are no longer alone but together, brothers in arms, along with the other bodies already fallen. Thérèse told him the story of how Ma
rtial died:
The Fires of Autumn Page 15
