The Misunderstanding

by Irene Nemirovsky

  The day passed strangely quickly; wind, rain and sudden flashes of lightning made the sea flare up like an immense expanse of silver. Without giving a thought to the mud that covered the paths, Denise and Yves walked through the countryside for one last time. Whipped by the storm, leaves were falling from the trees; in this region, where the weather can change incredibly swiftly, one rainy night had managed to transform the sunny landscape of the previous day into a desolate, autumnal scene. Teams of livestock passed by. Great birds followed each other inland from the sea, almost skimming the ground with the sound of swishing wings. Yves and Denise walked down to the old port; its rosy stone steps, polished for so many years by the sea, were as smooth and shiny as marble; reflected in the shimmering water were the ancient ramparts of the city, the small boats, Pierre Loti’s little villa with its overgrown garden and faded green shutters. Yves held Denise close; his face – normally weary and somewhat sad – seemed young again with an expression of passionate tenderness.

  It was then that Denise asked him to stay in Hendaye with her for two more days; her voice held a tone of certainty: she was totally confident of his reply. But to her great astonishment he immediately looked worried.

  ‘But Denise,’ he said, surprised, ‘the day after tomorrow is the 1st of October … My holiday finishes then … In two days I have to be in Paris …’

  ‘Is someone expecting you back?’

  ‘My office is expecting me, unfortunately!’

  ‘Oh, two days more, two days less, what difference would that make?’

  ‘The difference would be that I’d lose my job,’ he explained quietly.

  She said nothing, at a loss for words. She had never thought of asking him what he did. Her husband had told her that Yves was rich; she vaguely thought he had something to do with business, like her husband and all the other men in her social circle, business that women know nothing about unless it is translated into actual sums, most often in the millions. She’d been spoiled as a girl, the only child of a wealthy industrialist, then a young wife doted upon by a husband who earned a lot of money, so certain aspects of the material world, not surprisingly, were unknown to her. She realised that Yves was nothing more than an employee, and the idea of him being a lowly office worker who needed to earn a living shocked and upset her. Did that mean he was poor? But then, how could he afford to stay in Hendaye where he had to be spending at least a hundred francs a day? She didn’t really understand … It is true that sacrificing necessities in order to have certain luxuries was a way of life that would have surprised many people. But when she saw the hardened look that suddenly appeared on the face of her lover, she realised she mustn’t press him further. He was sitting on the steps by the port. She put her hand up to his face. Gently she lowered his unwilling head until it leaned submissively against her body, then she pressed it against her.

  ‘Yves!’ she said, then whispered, ‘You’ll go when you must … We still have a whole day together, my love …’

  ‘Not really, Denise … I’m leaving at seven o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Ah, now you’re really acting like a madman,’ she cried out, laughing. ‘Good Lord, why wear yourself out for no reason when there’s an excellent train at seven in the evening that will get you to Paris the day after tomorrow in time to go to your office?’

  ‘Because it only has sleeping cars and I’m travelling second class. I’ve lived the high life here on holiday and now I have to be careful how much I spend … It’s not my fault, Denise, if I’m part of the new poor generation …’ he added, with a kind of awkward pride. ‘You mustn’t hold it against me …’

  ‘Oh, Yves,’ she said.

  Then she shyly added: ‘I think you’re even more precious to me, now that I know you’re not happy …’

  He smiled. ‘I’m very happy, Denise; but never take my happiness away, my darling, because now, if you left me, I don’t think I’d be able to live all alone, the way I did before.’

  Then he smiled the sweet smile that softened his harsh features and said once more: ‘I’m very happy.’

  He pressed his lips against her delicate hand and held it in his for a long time. ‘When will you be back home, Denise?’

  ‘On the 5th or 6th …’

  ‘So late?’

  ‘We’re driving back,’ she explained and suddenly felt somewhat embarrassed that she had such wealth, such luxuries, like the beautiful Hispano-Suiza that would get them back to Paris while Yves was buffeted about in a second-class train compartment.

  But all he said was: ‘It’s a beautiful drive … I often did it when I was young … But the roads are bad, especially until you get to Bordeaux … be careful … Don’t go too fast … I’ll be terribly worried …’

  11

  PARIS: THE TREES shed their yellow leaves that lay rotting in the thick mud on the pavements. The pace of life and the noise were incredible: the Automobile Show attracted the entire country to the capital, as it did each autumn.

  Every year – true little Parisian that she was – Denise rediscovered the city with profound, sweet, somewhat silly emotion: the light fog, the smell of petrol and electricity, the misty sky coloured an ‘elegant’ grey above the tall houses, the hustle and bustle of the streets, and towards evening, the flood of lights rushing along the Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Normally, as soon as she arrived, she would have a bath, give instructions to the servants, then go out for a long walk. She would return with rosy cheeks from being outdoors, and carrying armfuls of flowers – chrysanthemums and brightly coloured dahlias tinged with the scent of mushrooms and earth. Then she would organise the apartment, put the flowers in the vases, move all the knick-knacks, paintings and cushions around until she had returned the former warmth and familiar charm to the house that, abandoned for three months, felt impersonal and cold.

  This year her pleasure at seeing Paris again had something intensely painful about it, something akin to sensuality. She had nearly cried out with joy on seeing Neuilly, and when the Arc de Triomphe appeared on the horizon her eyes had filled with tears. But when she got home, she didn’t even glance at the apartment. She had her bath, slipped on a dressing gown, refused to put on the day outfit her chambermaid laid out for her and went into the little sitting room, her eyes staring at the clock, waiting for her husband to leave, which he did quite soon after. Then she had the telephone brought in to her, carefully closed the door and asked for the number of Yves’s office, her voice trembling slightly.

  ‘Hello,’ replied a weary voice.

  ‘Hello, Yves; it’s me, Denise …’

  A brief silence.

  ‘Darling …’ he said, but his tone of voice had barely changed. ‘Did you have a good trip?’

  She could sense there was someone standing near him. She quickly said a few banal things, then anxiously asked: ‘I’ll see you today, won’t I?’

  ‘Of course. I’d be delighted … I’m free after six-thirty.’

  ‘Not before then?’

  ‘Absolutely impossible.’

  She knew very well that he had no choice but to speak the way he did: he was not alone; she could hear the murmur of conversations in the background. Nevertheless, such coldness coming from Yves chilled her, hurt her.

  ‘Well, then, six-thirty,’ she agreed. ‘Do you want to meet near your office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then he quickly added in a low voice: ‘Square de l’Opéra. There’s a quiet little bar where no one ever goes. They have excellent port. It’s just opposite my office. Shall we meet there?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. See you there.’

  Then she heard the brief click that ended their conversation. She slowly replaced the receiver, her heart suddenly heavy with an inexplicable feeling of disappointment and unease. Did he love her? Her hope was so intense that she wanted to see it as a certainty. And besides, she loved him so much, so very much …

  It was four o’clock. She took her ti
me getting dressed, carefully, with fresh attention to detail and a new way of intently studying her face and body in the mirror that alone was enough to give away that she was in love. But she was still ready early. She picked up a book, leafed through it without reading it and tossed it aside. Then she started to smooth out her unruly curls and changed her hat. Finally, at six o’clock, she went out.

  She arrived at their meeting place just after six-thirty because there was a lot of traffic in Paris; but Yves wasn’t there yet. She sat down at a small table hidden away in a corner. It was an English bar, tiny, sparkling clean, with a serious, ‘respectable’ look about it. It was almost empty; one couple sat at a nearby table smoking and staring into each other’s eyes in silence.

  Denise ordered a glass of port and waited. She felt embarrassed, nervous; she blushed intensely when the barman brought her some magazines. When he glanced discreetly at her, he looked blasé but a little sorry for her, as if he were thinking: ‘Not another one.’

  Finally Yves appeared. She felt as if her heart might leap out of her chest.

  ‘Are you well?’ she whispered in a quiet, toneless voice.

  ‘Denise,’ was all he said. But he looked overcome with emotion; he kissed her hand passionately. ‘At last you’re here with me.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Are you happy to see me? You sounded so cold earlier on the telephone.’

  ‘What?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Didn’t you realise there were people all around me?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  He had sat down; he began asking her questions about her trip, how she was, with an intense look of tenderness and happiness in his eyes. But she glanced at him furtively, sadly; he seemed weary, older, with dark circles under his eyes and a bitter expression round his mouth. Something indefinable was missing: that air of youthfulness, of elegance that men lose as soon as they can no longer take trouble over their appearance. She recalled how impeccable he had looked when he came down to dinner in Hendaye after bathing and shaving: like a young Englishman in his evening suit, his dinner jacket showing off his attractive body.

  ‘Do you want to come back to my apartment?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d like to very much but I have to be home at seven o’clock … My husband is always home by then …’

  ‘Ah! Never mind then,’ he said, annoyed.

  ‘Does your office close so late every day, Yves?’ she asked.

  He made a weary gesture. ‘Oh, I’ll work something out … but it will be difficult …’

  Then, with a kind of forced cheerfulness, he added: ‘I’m free tomorrow, Denise, completely free … It’s Saturday and I only work a five-day week … You’ll come and see me, won’t you, my darling?’

  ‘Oh, how could you doubt it? Of course I will …’

  It was five to seven. Yves hailed a taxi. Inside the cab he grabbed Denise and crushed her in his arms. ‘My darling, my love …’

  She melted into his arms, very pale, her eyes closed. He bruised her cheeks, her neck, the delicate skin on her wrists with passionate kisses. Then he had the driver stop outside a florist’s shop and got out; she waited a moment for him. He came back carrying a single orchid, wrapped in tissue paper, as if it were a jewel, an expensive thing of beauty with twisted petals and a velvety trumpet of deep red, glowing with fire.

  ‘Oh! It’s so beautiful!’ cried Denise, enthralled.

  ‘Do you really like it?’ asked Yves. ‘I like orchids though I prefer roses. But they didn’t have any left, so I got this. There are women who look like these flowers, aren’t there?’ he added, smiling. ‘At least, that’s what they think. Not you, fortunately. You’re so pure and simple. You’re like a rose, Denise, really you are. You are like one of those fragrant roses that grow in English gardens, with delicate, flesh-pink petals and a deeper colour at the heart; and their scent reminds me of your perfume, my darling, it truly does.’

  Denise had buried her head in the hollow of Yves’s shoulder and was listening to him speak, overwhelmed, her eyes closed, drinking in his words, like a child hearing a fairy tale. He fell silent and began rocking her very gently. Then she whispered ‘I love you’, offering her passionate heart to him. All her feminine instinct made her expect to hear him say the same words back to her, the eternal ‘I love you’, like an echo, sensed even more than heard. But he said nothing. He just pressed her more tightly to him.

  12

  SHE WAS RATHER apprehensive about going to his apartment: she was afraid he might live in some nondescript furnished place where she would feel ill at ease. She was pleasantly surprised when she went into the apartment; he had managed to hold on to it since 1912. You could tell that every object had been chosen with love; it had comfortable furniture, bought in England before the war, and a large fireplace where logs were burning brightly. A little table was set up in the bedroom; there was some fruit in a splendid Bohemian crystal bowl and wine in a small old silver decanter; everything was lit by a pair of lamps with rose-coloured shades mounted on two old silver-gilt candelabra of meticulous workmanship.

  Yves seemed truly at home among all these beautiful, expensive objects; how surprising it was to see the sudden change in his face, she thought to herself. Yesterday he was old, lifeless, almost ugly; today he was young and handsome.

  She met Pierrot, the white Spitz who looked like a curly sheep out of some pastoral scene, with a pale pink ribbon round his neck. Then he showed her his favourite but modest collection of perfume flasks. He insisted she accept one as a gift; it dated back to Elizabeth I of England and bore the princess’s coat of arms carved in darkened silver on deep blue glass that shone beneath the light like a precious stone.

  ‘Please, please take it,’ he urged, when she first tried to refuse. ‘If you only knew what a rare pleasure it is for me to give presents, too rare, sadly … Please …’

  Then he showed her portraits of his family; he told her about his father and some of his romantic adventures, especially the time when he fell in love with a Russian artist and left his wife and son to be with her; he’d lived with her near Nice for almost a year, in a villa called ‘Sniegurochka’, ‘snow maiden’. Since she was very blonde and adored white, all the rooms in the house were white, decorated with marble, alabaster, crystal, and white peacocks roamed the grounds were planted exclusively with white flowers – tuberoses, camellias, snow-white roses – while wonderful swans glided across its three lakes. She had died there, so he went back to his wife.

  ‘She forgave him, as she had so many other times,’ Yves said. ‘She always forgave him … his betrayals were like works of art … You couldn’t hold it against him … he was irresistible … He had the hypnotic charm of people who are loved too much. It’s true that when he was in love he gave himself entirely, and each time, for ever … We don’t know how to love like that any more …’

  He was sitting at Denise’s feet, leaning against her legs, in front of the fireplace; he stared into the fire.

  ‘Why?’ asked Denise.

  He made a vague gesture.

  ‘Ah, why? I don’t know … First of all, life these days is too harsh … The effort we used to spend on passion, on love, is now used up on the thousand stupid, poisonous little problems we face every day … To love the way they did, you have to be wealthy and have all the time in the world … and of course, they were so happy … their lives were peaceful, secure, easy, pleasurable … they needed emotions, but all we need is rest. And besides, in the end, perhaps love demands marble palaces, white peacocks and swans – more than we like to admit.’

  She leaned down towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Yves, do you love me?’ she asked and her voice did not sound like a woman in love murmuring ‘Do you love me?’ as if it were an affirmation, divinely certain in advance of the response. Quite the opposite: her voice was full of anxiety and suffering. All the same, she hoped. He remained silent.

  ‘What good are words, Denise?’ he finally said. ‘Words mean nothing.
’

  ‘Say it to me anyway, please … I need to know.’

  ‘It’s just … I wonder if I’m capable of loving, loving the way I want to.’ He sighed. ‘And yet, Denise, I feel you’re so very, very precious to me. The desire I feel for you is filled with immense tenderness …’

  ‘That’s what love is,’ she stammered, staring at him, imploring him, her heart nearly breaking.

  But all he said was, ‘If you think that’s what love is, Denise, then I love you.’

  For the first time she felt a kind of barrier rise up between their two hearts, like a border crossing that was not well marked out but was impossible to breach. She said nothing; she preferred to close her eyes, to forget about herself, not to see, not to be reassured, not to lose him, especially not to lose him. And as he kissed her she furtively wiped away two large tears that welled up and overflowed from her heavy heart.

  13

  ONE SUNDAY IN December, Denise’s mother, Madame Franchevielle, came to lunch at the Jessaints’ along with her cousin, Jean-Paul. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-three, with bold eyes and the pouting red lips of a pageboy. It was a beautiful winter’s day: freezing cold, clear, with bright sunshine. A pinkish light lit up the dining room so the reflections from the crystal danced over the walls. Denise’s face was suddenly clearly seen in the brightness: it was pale, drawn, with the hint of the creeping shadows you sometimes see on young faces, outlining the eyelids, the corners of their mouths, places where future wrinkles will appear, almost like a subtle warning.

  ‘Are you ill, Denise?’ asked Madame Franchevielle.

  At the age of forty-nine, Denise’s mother was still an exquisite woman who had no qualms about going to a ball with her daughter in the evening wearing a sleeveless gown, her arms bare despite the cruel light of the chandeliers. Even today, in the pitiless bright sunshine, she looked younger than Denise. She was expertly made-up, with beautiful gleaming teeth and luxurious, shiny hair; she looked healthy and was always in good spirits. Denise loved her a great deal; she was grateful to her for having been a good mother: attentive, intelligent and, hiding her intense affection beneath a somewhat distant, mocking exterior. She had not been very outgoing or demonstrative, but Denise had a clear memory from long ago of the nine nights when she had scarlet fever: through her high fever and delirium, she could see her mother’s eyes looking into hers, fixed to hers, with a stubborn expression that willed her to recover, a determination that had, in fact, kept her from dying. Because she was so attractive and had been widowed so young, Madame Franchevielle had had, and undoubtedly still had, discreet, tasteful affairs. Denise was vaguely aware of them but did not wish to know any details, and these affairs – rather than diminishing her mother in her eyes – almost increased Denise’s respect for her, for they made her mother the symbol of the perfect woman, someone who misses nothing, sees everything and understands even more. Madame Franchevielle’s insight was renowned; her daughter had never managed to hide anything from her. And even today, when her mother questioned her, she felt uncomfortable and blushed without replying.