Cloudless May (6 page)

“Ask M. Caillemer if he will take seventeen thousand for the cape.”

“It's not very likely, Madame. You understand, it's—”

“Ask him,” she said rudely, pushing the woman aside with her voice.

She waited, confused, feeling herself a stiff insensible knot in the brightly-active web of the shop. M. Caillemer approached, an ungenerous smile clapped on his face; she knew he was going to agree. She felt a pang of dismay: her nerves relaxed and her fear and uncertainty rushed back.

“Madame is getting a bargain.”

“Send it to me to the Manor House.” She was dry and unfriendly. Wretched at the thought of the money she had spent, she went out again. The possessive fury had gone; it might never have been there: nothing consoled her for the mistake she had made, least of all the cape, hanging small and draggled in a corner of her mind. What a fool I've been, she thought, exasperated and baffled.

She was going to see her closest friend, her only close friend. Mme Vayrac lived not far from the Abbey Church of St. Peter. The courtyard had two entrances: the one used by Mme Vayrac's friends was a narrow door leading into a walled-in cloister, carpeted in red, the walls hung with curtains in heavy red and black brocade. It was the most relentlessly carpeted and curtained house in Seuilly; silk draped the sides of mirrors, bedsteads, dressing-tables, thick carpets hid every inch of wood or stone in the rooms and on the stairs. Far more than her car and her jewels, these carpets gave Mme Vayrac the sense of her luxury.

From the disguised cloister a staircase led to the first floor. Marguerite passed, without greeting her, a handsome young woman in a dressing-gown. She went directly to her friend's sitting-room. It was a large room, so over-furnished that a stranger would look all round it before discovering Mme Vayrac sitting, like a snail, among whorled cushions.

She was older than Mme de Freppel, a woman of fifty-two or three, shapeless and uncorseted, with the face of an intelligent and battered clown, dark eyes, a loose handsome mouth with upturned corners. A slight lameness of one leg made her prefer to sit: everything she needed, a decanter of sherry, crystallised fruits, skeins of silk, a box holding rouge and headache powders, in arm's reach. She pressed her cheek against Marguerite's and made room for her on the couch.

“Well, my dear?”

“I passed one of your nieces on the half-landing,” Mme de Freppel said. “I think, a new one.”

“She came last night. From Lille. She's placed already.”

Mme de Freppel was not listening. She was stretching herself at her end of the couch, kicking off her shoes, adjusting a suspender. She began to repair her face, moist from the heat. This was the only place outside her own bedroom where she felt no need to behave politely. She could say what she was thinking, be indiscreet, violent, foolish.

“Léonie, I've bought a fur cape. It's a beautiful thing, but I can't afford it. Do you feel like buying it off me?”

“What did you pay for it?” Léonie asked. Her voice had a precise muted resonance, very like the sounds made by a worn-out piano.

Mme de Freppel hesitated. Her friend was rich. “Twenty thousand francs.”

“Too much for me. If it would help you, I'd give you seventeen.” Her fingers, crossed on her stomach, moved as she counted.

“I'll wait,” Mme de Freppel said evasively. With the idea of parting from it, the fur recovered its gloss. And now that she could. She felt light-hearted. Jumping up, she ran across the room to a long mirror, and stood smoothing her frock.

“Do you remember dancing between two mirrors in that café in Brussels?” Léonie said, smiling.

“But I can still kick over my head.”

Pulling dress and petticoat to her waist, she stood in creased drawers and flung her leg—it was shapely but not slim-straight out and up, holding it steady for a second. She fell back into a chair. Mme Vayrac laughed at her. They sat without speaking for a few minutes, in a warmth which reached them more easily than the heat filtering into the room from outside; it came from a past of stuffy rooms in hotels, third-class railway carriages where they clung together for a little warmth, glances exchanged across café tables, lies one of them had told and the other sworn to, all the thumbed greasy acts of a past far enough away now to seem like a guilty childhood.

“I shan't soon forget you in Brussels,” Mme Vayrac said. “You were so ill, sweat running off you with pain, my hands shook holding the brandy to give you when you came off. Anyone else would have given in. But you had spunk for a dozen.”

“I don't remember leaving,” Marguerite said. “I remember you lying on me in that ghastly room afterwards, to warm me.”

“Help me up,” Léonie said, “we'll have lunch.”

She stooped to lift out of its basket a poodle, still young, but too fat to enjoy walking, and took him with them into the dining-room. He had his chair at table and his plate of chicken. Mme Vayrac sent the servant away. She began to talk with a gentle amusement about two old gentlemen, a Senator, and a collector of church tapestries, who had been staying in the house: except that they could walk, they had the habits of the poodle. She laughed, shaking her breasts.

“Which of them will get your newest niece?”

“Neither.” Frowning, Mme Vayrac sucked the edge of a sleeve she had trailed in a sauce-boat. “Help yourself, my love. Do you remember what you said after Freppel asked you to marry him? . . . 'Léonie, if I like I can eat lobster every day of my life now. . .' He wasn't a bad sort, Freppel.”

“I wrote to him again last week,” Marguerite said abruptly, “asking him if he would change his mind and divorce me. After all, the war ...”

“He never will,” Léonie said quietly. “Men of his good sort are not generous.”

Marguerite did not answer. She would never admit, not even to this woman who knew every blemish of her body and soul, the humiliation she felt at not being able to move her husband, that weak limited man. On the day she left him, he who had always been so anxious to please her, became severe and immovable. Neither tears nor sarcasm took on him, he was too eager to punish her—for the insult to his name, he said. As if a name shakes with jealousy and grief! For the first time her will had beaten on an object that deflected it, and she felt her failure as a flaw in herself, an aching joint. Even now, when she remembered it, she felt weak and old. Her fear of losing Bergeot sprang through her other fears—for her money, her health, looks.

“D'you ever think of going back to him?” Léonie asked.

“Never.”

“Well, my dear girl, I wish I could help you.”

She sank into Léonie's love and faithfulness. Dear Léonie, who lied to everyone else, whose way of life, to put it civilly, was equivocal, but to one person, to her friend, was honesty itself, purity itself. A gentle happiness passed into her, coming from Léonie's heavy body and easy maternal lips.

Mme Vayrac was expecting a visitor: he arrived when they went back into the sitting-room. He came in holding his hat, shockingly new, in both hands, bowing over it. His eyes, lively and lifeless pieces of flesh, looked at both women with the same impersonal calculation. He kissed Léonie's hand. Below the waist, his body filled out like a vase; he was nearly bald; long hair, starting from the crown of his head, was cut in a fringe above a white neck. He smiled with great sweetness, turning up his eyes slightly: this smile, intended to charm, was defensive.
Léonie presented him: he bowed again, with exaggerated dignity.

“Sit down, Sadinsky. Now, tell me—you can speak quite frankly before the Countess—have you been able to settle the things we discussed?”

“Thank you, yes.” M. Sadinsky had a delightful voice, sympathetic and rounded. “I have all the documents I need, and they are in order. All.”

“Sadinsky came here from Roumania, from Bucharest, three months ago,” Léonie said, glancing at her friend, “and of course, after he got here, he had to regularise his position.”

“Of course,” Mme de Freppel said, smiling. Her smile was. meant to reassure M. Sadinsky: she was not one of those obtuse people who refuse to understand that a Jew must use any means he can to get himself into a country where at least he will not be persecuted, and at best may settle down and become respectable, even respected; she did not object to his slipping into the country and afterwards buying himself some sort of citizenship. He would either join the pullulating mass of refugees, living pitifully by obscure shifts. Or he would climb out, his smile, his wits, his charming voice, so many papillae to cling where they touched. Glancing at him, at his broadcloth trousers and morning coat, she saw that he was outside the anonymous crowd already; in a week or two he would remember to brush the scurf from his collar; a little later, someone would brush it off for him.

“I don't know Bucharest,” she said kindly.

“A handsome city,” M. Sadinsky murmured. His eyes, looking backward, reminded you of oil-wells; they were deep, obviously, but any light falling on them was turned back at the surface; only the surface moved. He turned his palms out, offering the heat, the rich smells, the feminine luxury and brutality of eastern Europe.

“Why did you come to Seuilly? Why not Paris?”

Rolling his lips, M. Sadinsky said softly, “I was invited to come here. You know, one needs an invitation now to enter another country. The age of freedom is over. . . . I had a relative here. And then I had a link with Mme Vayrac. I knew her son when he was in Roumania.”

Marguerite did not look at Léonie to see whether this
reference to her son affected her. Edgar Vayrac was in prison; he had been there more than eight months; luckily for him, he was arrested six weeks before the outbreak of war: when he was arrested it was because the funds were missing of a half-political organisation he directed, a league formed to provide gymnasia for boys and youths, and blessed by the deputy for Seuilly, M. Huet: after he had been in prison a month, the rumours began. Had he in fact sold information about the garrison in Seuilly? The whole affair was heavy with judicial mystery. It was from his mother's agitation that Marguerite suspected as much as she knew.

“Give me a cigarette,” Léonie said.

She was half lying on the couch, her legs doubled under her; her large body seemed to flow as far as her knees and there stop. Her face when she was not talking became dull, a piece of finger-marked flesh.

“Sadinsky is going to ask you to do something, my love. He has a scheme. We've discussed it together. I told him I knew you could help him. He thinks—I think, too—that we ought to be doing much more to rouse national feeling in the Department. He's anxious to help——”

“I see the dangers that threaten France,” M. Sadinsky said in a low voice. He looked in front of him.

“His idea is to form a Joan of Arc League for women. The members would pledge themselves to France; they would wear a badge, hold meetings sometimes—with banners. The League would grow, it would spread to other Departments, to Paris. It could become a big movement.”

“It will need money,” Marguerite said, frowning.

“There will be no subscription,” M. Sadinsky said quickly and firmly. “Except, of course, voluntary gifts. The members must buy their badges. That's all. I know an artist who will design the badge. It will cost a little to manufacture. Perhaps we shall make a small, naturally a very small, profit on it—who knows?”

He looked at her with his charming smile.

“What Sadinsky wants you to do,” Léonie said gently, “is—You know Madame Huet, don't you?”

“The wife of the deputy for Seuilly,” M. Sadinsky said, pressing on the word deputy. You saw, as though a sea plant
was closing round the pebble dropped in it, all the antennae moving one way.

“Yes, yes,” Marguerite said.

She frowned again, without knowing it. Her jealousy of Andrée Huet—she had known her for six years—had so many roots that it might have been planted in her when she was born. In effect, it was. It had pushed up first when she saw a child of her own age point at her from a motor-car: it grew in her with her senses, with every blow, every injury. She nourished it in squalid rooms and among the spittle of cheap cafés. It was already flowering, ready to attach itself to some one person, the day of her first meeting with Mme Huet. No one would have guessed that she felt diminished by the other woman's insolent politeness, the tricks of speech and gesture taken down obediently from an ancestor who governed for Charles V, or that her clothes, down to her chemise, had become vulgar by contrast with clothes made only for the niece of a Councillor of the Bank of France. She held a sarcastic smile between herself and Mme Huet's wit, she was even flippant; and all the time the edge of the gutter was cutting her naked little bottom and a shred of newspaper flickered out of her claw in the freezing wind.

“Yes, I know her, but not well,” she repeated drily.

“I'm sure you know her well enough,” Léonie said, with the insidious warmth she could roll into her voice. “All we want you to do, my dear Marguerite, is to ask her to see Sadinsky, so that he can explain his scheme and invite her to be a patroness. It's very simple.”

M. Sadinsky looked at Marguerite as though they were already close friends. “May I hope that the Countess will patronise it too?”

“Why do you want Madame Huet?”

Léonie pressed out her cigarette, crushing it with her strong fingers. “Because,” she said, smiling, “if we have her, we shall get the duchesses. One must have duchesses for these things. It's a pity.”

Marguerite could not help laughing: she was delighted by the contempt in her friend's voice, contempt of the adroit female for the lady; she felt an avid sympathy with it. She laughed, looking into Mme Vayrac's eyes.

“I can't promise anything,” she said to Sadinsky. “Madame Huet is not easy—”