The Wine of Solitude (21 page)

She had cried out in surprise and with a kind of hatred and bitterness that shocked him. ‘Never,’ she whispered, ‘never, never, never …’

‘Why not?’ he said, anger flashing in his eyes, which brought back the Max she had so detested, the enemy of her childhood; she shrugged her shoulders, wanting to say ‘Because I don’t love you’. But she immediately thought, ‘Ah, no. If I tell him that he’ll never forgive me, it will be finished, the game will be over. Marry him? I’d never do anything as stupid as that. My desire for revenge isn’t strong enough to risk my own happiness. I don’t love him …’

She just shook her head in silence.

He thought he understood and went deathly pale. He grabbed her and held her in his arms. ‘Hélène, forgive me, forgive me, how could I know? I love you, you’re still so young, you’ll love me some day. It isn’t possible that you won’t love me,’ he said, as she allowed him to kiss her cheek and lips in passionate despair.

Outside, the loud noise of the rain was subsiding; they could hear the faint musical sound of the dripping wet leaves more clearly. Max held her tightly against him, and she could feel his mouth trembling as he gently kissed and bit her shoulder through the flimsy fabric of her dress.

Gently she pushed him away. ‘No, no …’

He wanted to kiss her on the lips but she stretched out her hands and thrust away his eager, affectionate face.

‘Let go of me! I can hear footsteps; it’s my mother,’ she cried, terrified.

He let her go; she fell back on to the settee, pale and drained. But it was only the driver who had come up to find out what he should do. While Max was talking to him, she slipped out of the room and ran away.

They didn’t leave for Biarritz that night; Hélène went home. She got into her narrow bed; her room was the only one on the ground floor of the house they lived in and her bed was pushed up against the window. Noise from the city beat against her shutters while, above her head, she heard her mother walking endlessly from one room to another in an attempt to overcome her insomnia and stop herself from crying; outside, she could hear cars coming back from the countryside; couples who had stayed out late strolled down the street or kissed on benches. Hélène lit the lamp; she looked at the décor of her life with hostility: the bright red and sea-green Directoire mouldings, the pink curtains, the tall, narrow mirrors set into the walls. She loved nothing in this world.

‘Nothing and no one,’ she thought sadly. ‘I should have been so happy tonight. I got everything I desired. If only I wanted to …’

She shook her head and laughed.

‘Oh Hélène,’ she said, talking to herself as she had done
since she was a child, ‘you know very well that you’re the strongest one and they’re nothing but pitifully easy prey. Was it really so difficult to make Max fall in love with you? I’m eighteen and she’s forty-five. Any young girl could have done it. And here you are, bursting with pride. What you should have done was conquer yourself. What right do you have to look at them with scorn if you’re no stronger, no better than they are?’ She raised her slim, tanned arm and looked at the veins visible beneath the skin. ‘I’ve spent my whole life fighting against my hideous bloodline,’ she thought, ‘but it’s here within me. It’s flowing through me, and if I don’t learn how to conquer myself, this bitter, cursed blood will win out.’

She recalled the mirror in the dark room at Max’s apartment and how her face looked when she let him kiss her. It was a terrifying, sensual, triumphant face, and for an instant it reminded her of the way her mother had looked when she was young.

‘I won’t let this demon get the better of me,’ she said out loud, laughing. ‘Surely it’s easy to give up the game, now that I virtually have what I set out to get. I’m not a hypocrite, I don’t make myself out to be better than I am; I’m not good, I don’t want to be good. Being good has something soft, weak, suffocating about it. But I do want to be stronger than I am, to conquer myself. Yes, to leave them in their mire, with their shame, while I … My God,’ she murmured with sudden, heart-rending remorse, ‘I’m so flawed, so bitter, so egotistical, so proud of myself. I have no humility, no charity in my heart, but I want so very much to be better. I swear that from this day forward he’ll never see me alone. I’ll avoid him. I’ll avoid him with as much determination as
I did before when trying to arrange to be alone with him. It will be boring.’ She smiled. ‘Well, too bad! It’s what I want. Demon of pride or demon of vengeance, we’ll see which is the stronger! But will I have the courage to see her happy? Yes, why not? From this moment on I’ll no longer hate her. I’ve forgiven her …’

She threw off her blanket and stretched out straight, with her arms under her head.

‘Yes, it’s odd, but for the first time in my life I can think of her without my heart quivering or feeling as heavy as stone. I even feel a little sorry for her …’

She pictured her mother’s pale face, the marks her tears left on her make-up, her ravaged features.

‘Me, her little Hélène … What did she call me? “An awkward, wild little girl. You’re so clumsy, my poor Hélène.” ’

Her eyes flashed in the darkness.

‘Not as clumsy as all that,’ she whispered, clenching her teeth, but she forced herself to slow the intense, rapid beating of her heart. ‘Being a hungry wolf isn’t all that hard but it’s not worthy of me. I’ll tell Max that I don’t love him, that it was all just a game. He’ll go back to her, even if it’s only to try to make me suffer. Tomorrow, everything will go back to normal, so to speak. Since Father either doesn’t see anything or doesn’t want to see anything, all I have to do is let things carry on as they were. And besides, my intense, evil pleasure was poisoned by bitterness. What a strange night.’ She switched off the lamp and watched silvery rays of light peek through the shutters. ‘What beautiful moonlight …’

She got out of bed and walked barefoot over to the window; she opened the shutters and looked out at the wide,
empty avenue. The wind was blowing in from the Bois. The night was crystal clear now, a transparent blue. She sat down by the window, humming softly. Never had her heart felt so light; a kind of joyous passion flowed through her blood. ‘To know that I’m the one who holds her happiness in my hands and can manipulate it as I wish … Isn’t that the best revenge? What more could I want? I don’t love him. If I did love him …’

She stared straight ahead, picturing in her mind his eager, submissive face. ‘I don’t love anyone, thank God, I’m alone and free. If I could,’ she suddenly thought, ‘I’d go away right now, tonight. To tell the truth, that’s all I really want. To go away to some corner of the earth where I’ll never see my mother or this house ever again, where I’ll never hear the word “money”, or the word “love”. But there’s my father … Although, he doesn’t need me,’ she thought bitterly. ‘No one needs me. Max is in love, but that’s not what I need, I want a peaceful, secure kind of tenderness. But do I really? I’m not a child any more. I’m at the age where most people reject that kind of tenderness … Yes, but I’ve never had it, I’ve missed it so much … And not having had a childhood when I should have means that it’s probably impossible to mature like other people; I’m shrivelled on one side and green on the other, like fruit that’s been exposed to the cold and the wind.’

It was almost as if the recent years of sadness had melted away and she was, once again, the strong, powerful child who silently choked back her tears, clenched her fists and used all her strength to suffer without a word of complaint.

‘Life is beautiful but harsh,’ she said out loud.

She’d gone back to bed, but left the shutters open; she watched the night grow lighter and the spring morning glisten on the leaves. Finally, she fell asleep.

A week went by during which Hélène succeeded in avoiding Max, but their lives were too closely intertwined by Bella’s will and their chaotic lifestyle. She missed him already, especially towards the end of the day. On those interminable evenings when, at nine or ten o’clock, they were still waiting for Karol to arrive home so they could sit down to dinner, Hélène felt so sad that she thought about Max, wanting him to be there in spite of herself. Kneeling on a chair, she absent-mindedly sketched the contours of the rickety old Louis XV desk whose decorative gilt claws were hanging loose; above her head she heard the butler’s impatient footsteps. The situation awakened too many memories in her heart …

One evening Madame Karol, holding the telephone in one hand, flew through the room where Hélène was, followed by a chambermaid who was trying to shorten her dress; her mouth full of pins, the servant stumbled as her feet got caught up in the telephone wire; behind her was another servant, carrying a jewellery box with the lid open.

Hélène heard her mother calling Max’s number. While she
was speaking, Bella was putting on her diamond earrings; she dropped them and they rolled on to the floor. She was speaking in Russian and stopped every now and again, presumably because she remembered that Hélène was in the next room, but then she forgot again and began pleading once more: ‘Do come, please come … You promised you’d go out with me tonight … He’s not here, I’m so lonely, Max … Take pity on me …’

After she hung up, she stood still for a moment, absent-mindedly wringing her hands. It was over. He didn’t love her any more. Anxiously she searched her memory to see which woman could have stolen him from her. He was tired of her.

‘In the past we quarrelled, but he always came back to me more submissive and loving. In the past … it’s barely been a year … but now … Oh, another woman has stolen him, I can feel it,’ she thought with despair. ‘What will I do without him?’

She remembered with profound bitterness how she had been scrupulous about being faithful to him.

‘My best years are gone … I don’t want to admit it, so I show off, but I know very well that youth and love are finished for me now. It’s either that or paying for lovers, gigolos, young boys you keep, who are young enough to be your son, and who make fun of you behind your back.’ She pictured some of her women friends with the handsome young men they kept on a leash like a Pekinese. ‘Or perhaps I should just give in, become an old woman. Oh no, no, never that, never! I can’t do without love, it isn’t possible,’ she murmured and, instinctively, she wiped away the tears that ran down her neck through her pearls.

‘He’s decked me out with jewels as if I were a shrine,’ she thought, hearing the door open and the sound of her husband’s footsteps in the next room, ‘but that’s not what I need, and besides, I’m bored, I’m so terribly bored. If you don’t have a man in your life, if you don’t have a young, handsome lover, what’s the point of living? Women who claim to be satisfied without love are either ignorant, fools or hypocrites. I need love,’ she said urgently, looking at her distorted face in the mirror with hatred. ‘If they only knew how clearly I see myself, without pity, without being indulgent.’

They sat down to dinner. The windowless hall had been transformed into a dining room; it was cold and gloomy with a bluish cast; dust gathered on the imitation marble mouldings.

Fancy stucco work reigned supreme; the carpet had blue and white squares in imitation of stone tiles; the artificial flowers in marble urns were covered with mildew and gave off the slightly acrid odour of dust; alabaster fruits sat in a conch shell, an electric light illuminating them from within. The marble table was so cold that it froze your hands through the lace doilies. Karol ate eagerly, hurriedly; he swallowed his food without seeing it or tasting it and, along with it, the many tablets he was given, which he hoped would allow him to do without rest and fresh air. Hélène studied him with silent pity: he was more handsome and more elegant than ever.

He was blessed with a fire, a kind of touching passion that burned with the greatest beauty just as it was about to die down. In his pale, tormented face, his beautiful, piercing sad eyes were covered by a yellowish film, yet shone with a
brightness that was almost unbearable. He continually snapped his thin fingers: ‘Faster, come on, serve up faster …’

‘Are you going out again tonight?’ Bella sighed.

‘I have a business meeting. But you’re going out as well, aren’t you?’ he asked, looking at her.

She shook her head. ‘No.’

Then, immediately, she continued in a bitter, pleading voice, ‘I’m always alone. The life we lead is mad. I’m the unhappiest woman in the world. I’ve always suffered.’

He didn’t reply. He was barely listening to her; after twenty years of married life he was used to her complaining.

But that evening Hélène was prepared to feel sorry for her; she was an ageing, argumentative woman who sat opposite her but never looked at her, as if the sight of her young face was too painful; her beautiful hands and bare arms covered in bracelets rested sadly on the tablecloth. Her face was painted, bloated, heavy with make-up and sticky from all the powder and cream, but it seemed as if her flesh was giving way from the inside, and that its smooth, pink-and-white surface was slowly sagging, revealing the ravages of age; yet she still had a wonderful figure, with pert, firm breasts.

Hélène turned towards her father. ‘Papa, darling Papa, do stay home tonight. Look at you. You look so tired …’

He shrugged his shoulders; when she insisted and Bella began complaining again he cried out impatiently, ‘To hell with all you women!’

Hélène fell silent, her eyes welling up with tears: it hurt that he rejected her like that and especially that he treated her the same as her mother. ‘Can’t he see that I love him?’ she wondered sadly.

But all he could see was the green gaming table where that very night he would lose a fortune.

‘No,’ thought Hélène, ‘it’s not so easy to give up Max, or to stop gambling.’

The next day, quite suddenly, they left for Biarritz; Hélène had no excuses to allow her to remain in Paris; besides, they still treated her like a little girl who had no business questioning what she was told to do, and Max was going with them.

In the morning, in Blois, he called her down while Bella was still asleep and bought her some of the first cherries of the season from an outdoor stall on a little street rosy with sunshine; the fruit was covered by a silvery dew and as icy cold and delicious as a drop of chilled liqueur. He looked at her with desire and tenderness. ‘Hélène, you are so elusive, evasive, enigmatic, I find you so attractive, so very attractive. I’ve never loved another woman the way I love you. You’re beautiful, I’m mad about you …’