by Jean Stubbs
He realised that she must have borrowed clothes from Natalie, to avoid his usual ironies, and they suited her no better. She looked in fact how she saw herself in fancy: a mistress meeting her gallant. She unpinned her hat, unrolled her gloves, removed her mantle, and sat down near the washstand. Her dignity was ridiculous, was heart-breaking. Her resolution was that of a child about to take bad medicine. So must the great aristocrats have ridden to the guillotine. And this was her idea, he thought, infuriated.
Suddenly she caught sight of the bottle of champagne on the mantelpiece and eyed it with asperity.
‘I do not have to be drunk!’ she remarked bitterly, coming down to earth.
‘I think perhaps I do,’ said Carradine, resigned.
‘You make me feel a dirt!’
He said reasonably, ‘I am returning to England, Claire, in the next few days. I shall go alone, and you are free to leave now.’
Her eyes narrowed, widened, were hurt, were angry. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘I give you my word. I keep my word. Please to unbutton my back dress.’
‘I have never understood monks before,’ he remarked, ‘but their wisdom now confounds me.’
‘You wish to seduce? Then seduce! Be over with it. I do not like this room.’
She was endeavouring, by a series of arm contortions, to unfasten her dress. Three satin buttons totally eluded her. She yanked them from their moorings. One flew across the room and hit a cavernous wardrobe. Undeterred, she stepped out of her gown, removed her petticoat, and began on her suspenders. Her stockings and stays were black. Her concentration and lack of enjoyment, her haste, were dampening: an erotic cartoon gone wrong.
‘I cannot, by the wildest feat of imagination, find any allurement in your offer,’ said Carradine objectively, though he would have liked to laugh.
‘Oh, you will, m’sieu, you will. I know men. They are animals. They allure very quick. My stays I cannot. You must.’
‘I don’t wish to appear insulting, mam’selle, but I have seldom felt less amorous.’
‘Where is there a knife?’
‘You wish to kill me, or yourself?’
She undipped her pochette, found a small pair of nail scissors, twisted with the agility of an acrobat, and snipped the stay lace free.
‘You stupid girl!’ said Carradine, thoroughly annoyed. ‘How in the world are you going to get dressed again?’
‘I do not care. I warn you and you will not listen. Now I insist you take your pleasure.’
A little breathless, defiant, triumphant at her magnanimity and decisiveness, she stood naked in a cauldron of lawn and lace. She folded her arms.
‘Commencez!’
Carradine could no longer control his hilarity. He laughed until his ribs pained him, until his eyes ran tears, until he could not draw breath. She, railing and weeping, flailed him with her velvet pochette. At last he picked up the faded quilt and wrapped it carefully about her, stroked her dishevelled hair. Occasionally, he caught up a little spurt of laughter before it mounted. Huddled in the quilt, in humiliation, she did not speak. He sat by her on the floor and poured out a cup of hot coffee.
‘For God’s sake, Claire, forgive yourself and me. I most humbly apologise. Drink this, and let us — as you so often beg me — be good friends again.’
‘But look what I have done!’ she whispered, indicating the torn placket, the missing buttons, the severed stay lace.
‘Have I not warned you a thousand times, to count ten before you lose your temper?’
‘I do not learn. I never learn.’ She wept and sneezed, dried her eyes on her petticoat. ‘I shall suffer la grippe, this room is full of draughts. I hope you suffer too, very much, even more than me.’
‘I shall share your cold with pleasure, and account it an honour. Here, Claire, I’ve found the prettiest and most delectable cake on the plate for you. Eat it up, like a good girl.’
He had his father to thank for that quiet good humour which now enveloped them, though he never stopped to think about it. His father was present, too, in the acceptance without reproach of feminine caprices. But he possessed, as his father had not, some insight into their origins.
‘Have you been tormenting yourself about this all afternoon, Claire?’
She nodded, restored to their old comradeship, and bit at the cream cake. Apart from pink splotches on either side of her eyes she was almost herself again.
‘Because you found Natalie and her soldiers disgusting?’
She shook her head and sniffed.
‘Because you had committed yourself — and truly, Claire, you made a bogeyman out of the whole business — to something you knew but had not experienced?’
She shook her head again and answered him. ‘Because you will not like me when you love me!’
‘There seemed to be nothing amiss in what I saw of you,’ observed Carradine, entertained. ‘I had begun to think you were in some way deformed!’ He recollected that amusement was out of place. ‘Why should I not like you?’
She shrugged. ‘I know, Nicholas. That is all.’
‘But I know that we shall find each other everything we could hope for,’ he said quietly, persuasively.
‘It is a terrible risk.’
‘Who shrieked at me in public and hit me with her parasol, because I never took risks?’
She held up the remains of the cake in awful warning.
‘Claire! If you throw that at me I shall leave,’ said Carradine firmly. ‘You have a most astonishing view of men as being quite invincible. They are not. With my hand on my heart, I assure you that you were in no danger of seduction when you treated me to that little theatre of strip-tease. I never wanted you less. I can feel as humiliated and as defiled as you can, and just as easily. If you are going to fight me I don’t want to come within a mile of you. And I don’t want to fight you if you want to make love. You must be as honest as you always say I should be, and tell me. Do you, or do you not, wish to spend the evening in this appallingly vulgar bed?’
She finished the cake, wiped the cream from her face and fingers on the coverlet, and began to take down her hair.
‘I wish the vulgar bed,’ she said. Then extending one arm through the curtain of hair. ‘On one condition!'
‘I thought there might possibly be a condition or two.’
‘You must never laugh at me!’
‘What an extraordinary condition!’ said Carradine, removing his tie.
Nothing was as he had anticipated. He began with restraint, registered her first responses with some relief, responded in turn as she joined him, and remained inside her for several minutes afterwards because she clasped him so closely. They were new to each other and yet completely familiar, as though they had known and made love for a year. Her sudden reversal from prudery to frank enjoyment astounded him. His vanity was not so great as to obscure his judgement. He moved away and looked at her, lying lazy and replete as a cat. She opened her eyes, stroked his face, kissed his lips, a goddess who had received just tribute.
‘It is sad,’ she said, ‘that there is only one first time together, Nicholas. Nicholas?’
He said deliberately, ‘That was not the first time for either of us.’
Enclosed in their kingdom all sound had ceased, now it became clamorous. Children in the courtyard, a married couple screaming at each other, the jarred song of birds, the clash of dishes.
She stopped in mid-stretch, staring at him, tumbling down again.
‘Oh, be your age, sir,’ Lintott chided, in chilling retrospect. ‘That girl’s been on the French merry-go-round, as God’s my judge. You ain’t the first. I’m surprised at you. I really am.’
‘And you speak of honesty!’ he cried, cheated.
She was sitting up, placing both hands on his mouth, beseeching.
‘You must not say so. You must not spoil us.’
‘Oh, spare me the pathos!’
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his clothes.
‘Before God, this is the first time I make love with loving, Nicholas. Other times never,’ she cried, terrified by their separation.
‘How many men have you had?’
‘Just one man. I live with him two years.’
‘I suppose Natalie fished him out of the slime for you. Was he very rich? Married and unfaithful? Widowed, with money to leave? Single and peculiar, with money to leave?’
She pulled the quilt round her again as though it gave protection, as though it stood between her and violation. She sought to defend herself, but had no defences.
‘He was old and he was rich, yes. I do not like him. He was — I am — like King David with the girl. I warm his bed so that he does not die alone.’
‘You warmed it to some purpose!’ he shouted. ‘Were you a virgin when he adopted you?’
Her eyes lit. She had only herself to fight for now, but she had fought for that one a long time.
‘I say, yes! And yes! And yes a thousand times!’
‘When did you leave him? When he died? Did he have a little gift for you in his will?’
They were both freed from each other. Free to scorn, to cease loving, to explain, to be lonely. She answered him rapidly, in a fusillade of French, finding her English inadequate for the occasion.
‘I left him because he made me sick. Do you know what it is to rouse an old man who is losing his potency? It becomes one long weary game that ends in nothing. I know every whore’s trick in the book, and I am sick to the stomach with him. Now get out! To hell with you and your stupid purity, the purity that men like you expect of women, without having a purity of their own! You make me sick, too. Oh, I know you, M. Carradine. Love is not blind, it sees too clearly. You make love to phantoms. You make love to your maman in every woman — but not with me. This afternoon you made love to Claire Picard, and it was like no other woman. Don’t lie to yourself! Did you think of your Gabrielle even once? I know you did not. I know that because I am a clever whore, and because I love you. Well, that will be my problem, and I shall survive it. I shall survive as you will not, because you have no faith, no love, not even hope. But sometime I shall find a man who is not a spoiled little boy, and then we shall make love together so that I snap my fingers, and say, “Pouf! to you M. Carradine!”’
She, too, began dressing herself, back turned. The stays she rolled up. The dress placket would not meet, let alone fasten. She hid her discrepancies beneath the silk mantle.
‘You are as old as Eve,’ said Carradine, in fascinated abhorrence.
‘I am older than you will ever be. I face the truth — all but that little truth you could not accept. I hoped — oh, I was a fool! — that you would be too bouleverse to notice. I should have known that your mind never sleeps. That mind! Tick-tock-tick-tock. If you had let your mind follow your body we could have been happy.’
‘On a rotten foundation? On a lie?’
‘How easily you become the good man! Shall I tell you something. We are not perfect, we French, and we accept imperfections. Often, a man and a woman are held together by a little secret. He makes love well because another woman has taught him. He does not speak of that. In time his wife understands, she accepts, she does not speak either. You make a parade of your love for the French. You admire us, you mock at us, you prize us and laugh at us. But you are not one of us! You cannot feel, you cannot share, you cannot forgive. You cling to your rags of goodness and reason. You are amused by Natalie, you are amused by M. Roche, because he is faithless to his rich wife and his son cuckolds him. But he grows old, and Natalie is the last of his youth and needs more love-making than he can give. He accepts that his son keeps the balance.’
She looked round the room as Carradine had looked, to imprint it on her remembrance. With an irony that matched his own, she said, ‘I have never made love in a hotel before — what a terrible admission for a woman of my vast experience!’
‘Inspector Lintott knew you were like this,’ said Carradine, incredulous, ‘but you portrayed yourself differently — admit that.’
‘I portrayed what I was, what I felt. You talk of virginity as though you were an expert. Let me tell you something that will be of no use to you, because you will not accept it. If I had been raped by twenty men in the market-place I should still have been a virgin, here and here!’ She touched her heart and her forehead. ‘Only with you, this afternoon, I am no longer a virgin.’
Her anger mounted. ‘And you had better loving than you would have had with a virgin!’ She became cynical, hand on hip, screwing up her mouth in derision. ‘But if your taste is for innocent little girls, M. Carradine, and you do not want their Papas confronting you, then I advise you to frequent the brothels. Paris — and I am sure, London — supply such commodities at a price. Only, don’t be misled in your eagerness to despoil them. We have prostitutes who are set aside, because of their modest air and appearance, to play the virgin. We have peepholes, too, so that other men may observe the fun. It is very good business, I believe, and the English are noted for enjoying the roles of both rapist and peeper!’
He could have hit her, and was speechless as she fired first one salvo and then the next with abominable precision.
‘You may find a cab for me,’ she said, pale and composed, ‘to show me you have not forgotten your English good manners. Your manners, M. Carradine, are all that are left to you.’
She had penetrated, from observation, from dedicated listening, to his inmost weakness and utmost ambition.
‘But forget, M. Carradine, the desire to be a Dégas, a Renoir, a Toulouse-Lautrec! Please do not interrupt me. I know that each of them is quite different, and you resemble none of them. But they have one — great — virtue!’ Prodding his chest with her parasol to emphasise each word. ‘They live. They are participants, not spectators. They do not lay down rules for everybody but themselves. When you learn what they knew from the beginning — then you may call yourself an artist!’
She motioned him to open the door for her. She ruined her exit.
‘And merde to you!’ she cried.
She was gone, in a flurry of plum and black, taking care to have the last word. She had, after all, lost everything else.
Carradine surfaced very slowly, sitting on the edge of the bed. Then he took the bottle of champagne from the mantelpiece, resolving to give it to the patronne who was listening on the staircase. It had not been needed, either as an aphrodisiac or a celebration.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Each might have expected to spend a sleepless night, but the explosion had exhausted them both. In the apartment near Étoile, Claire rose refreshed and drank chocolate with Natalie in unusual comradeship. Carradine in Montmartre confided in the communal cat, over black coffee. Rationally, the affair was impossible. Emotionally, it was fraught. In terms of trust it was shattered. Yet neither of them could wait to pick up the fragments of the previous afternoon and begin justifications all over again. Their notes, delivered by hand for greater speed, arrived at their different doors around the same time, and were written in the same vein. They did not address each other by name, but plunged immediately into the good fight.
Carradine wrote deliberately. I did not object to your past but to the deception you practised on me. I am not in the habit of seducing virgins, nor have I ever seduced a virgin, incidentally. So you seemed rather a special person, and I acted accordingly. No man enjoys being a fool, and I feel my reactions were fully justified at the time — though I now regret the manner in which my reproaches were delivered. Your inflated sense of your own importance will probably prevent your admitting some responsibility for our present situation. In order to show you that I, at least, was sincerely offering friendship — which admits of faults — I shall be lunching at Café Procope at one o’clock today. I shall be delighted to welcome you as my guest, and somewhat disappointed by your lack of integrity if you choose not to accept this invitation. He signed himself simply Carradine.
Claire scrawled. Do not imag
ine I regret anything I said yesterday. I did not speak to the man who had been my friend but to that stupid, pious Englishman who is my worst enemy — and yours. Still, you have done me a great service in opening my eyes to your hypocrisy, and for that I thank you. You have also shown me myself, and I like her very much. True, she has some small faults, but then we French admit to our faults freely and generously. It will not surprise me to hear that you have run away home to England, but I wish you happiness fust the same. A Frenchman would be polite and say goodbye, but perhaps you prefer to hide, and to pretend you never make mistakes? She signed herself in full. Mlle Claire Picard.
‘Pompous swine!’ cried Claire, and flung his letter across the room.
‘Impudent bitch!’ shouted Carradine, and startled the cat.
They were at Café Procope fifteen minutes early: immaculately dressed, hungry, furious, and utterly relieved to see each other. How Claire had found time, money and taste to select and buy her costume he could not imagine. Perhaps it was the first occasion on which she had felt sufficiently herself to discover herself. Natalie’s seductive drapes and loops were absent, so were the jeune fille effects which she had previously chosen for her younger sister. Claire saw herself as a woman unhampered, unattached, with a penchant for brilliant colour and simple elegance.
The jacket was extremely dashing, with wide revers, slanting pockets and a nipped waist. The high white collar of a Byronic shirt perked round her throat. Black and white glacé kid boots peered beneath her narrow skirt. The ensemble was of viridian green finely checked with white. A broad-brimmed black velvet hat reared, cavalier-fashion, from her right jaw — and ended several inches in the air above her left ear. It was flamboyantly crowned by an emerald ostrich-feather. Carradine felt quite soothed by her old pearl ear-drops. They were the only familiar thing about her.
Damaged by her references to his artistic and personal inadequacy, he had decided on fashionable tailoring. A suit of brown so rich that it appeared almost black: the cuffs, lapels and waistcoat pockets piped with coffee-coloured velvet. He had bought a new cravat to keep up his courage. It gleamed dully, its bronze folds starting from a diamond pin.
