The Woman Who Had Imagination (3 page)

To his relief Rosset was not back. A waiter was just drawing back the bolts of the street-door to open the place for the evening. Pierre stood still, watching. The waiter switched on the lights, fingered the dark leaves of the aspidistra in the window, peered into the dark street. The lights of other restaurants shone out across the street. The waiter stood still, his napkin on his arm, his thin sallow face negative, blank, thoughtless, his weak round-shouldered body broken and servile.

Turning, he saw the boy. He came from the window, hobbling badly. ‘Bon soir, Pierre'. His voice was hollow, and spiritless. The boy nodded, formed some words on his lips, heard them in his mind and felt that they had been spoken. In reality he knew he was afraid to speak. He expected Rosset at any
moment: the waiter also had fear in his eyes, an unconscious fear, an emotion bred of years of just such waiting.

But Rosset did not arrive; and they held a brief whispered conversation, the man giving the boy hoarse scraps of advice, little tips to remember. He was not to be afraid, he was not to be afraid, he kept whispering. It was all right.

The only other waiter appeared and stared also with that fixed blankness into the dark street. How long had they been there, these waiters? The boy kept wondering. Had they also come, as boys, to learn? Would he too go on serving for years and years and become like them? Would he also, in time, stare out into the dark street with that fixed emptiness of expression, his body crushed and servile, waiting for something? Was that what Rosset meant when he said that it took years to become a waiter? He caught himself staring, too, with a curious static gaze, as he wondered.

A moment later he was standing alone; the waiter beside him was hurriedly flicking at the tables with his napkin, the waiter at the window was nervously busy over a cruet. He turned in sudden alarm at their sudden fearful activity. Rosset had entered.

He had come in silently, and in the same silent way he moved to the window. He did not look at the boy, who stood stiff and contracted with fear. After a moment, rubbing his hands together, he turned from
the window and came back. Fear seized the boy like a paralysis; he held himself rigid as though against a blow, contracted, sick. And again Rosset did nothing, neither looked nor spoke.

Diners began to drift in by twos and threes, Rosset greeting them with obese affability, rubbing his hands or hiding them behind his back. The place became animated: there was a clatter of conversation and crockery together, the shouting of waiters and the answering echo from the kitchen below. Rosset walked up and down. And the boy, all the time, might not have existed.

From taking the wine-list to each table the boy returned always to the same place: an opening between two empty tables, at the edge of the gangway. There he stood, his fingers gripping the wine-list, enduring over and over again the same piercing fear of Rosset each time he passed him. He felt always weak, cold, dazed; he hardly saw anything except Rosset. It would have been a relief to do something, to pour out some wine: but no one had yet asked for wine. He was to discover later that it was an event when anyone did.

Finally he almost conquered his fear of Rosset. He could do it by staring at the opposite wall, by staring so intensely as to see beyond it and there lose himself. He would stare in this desperate way for minutes on end, while Rosset passed and repassed, saying and doing nothing to him.

He was aroused from one of these stares by a sudden blow on his chest, a blow which made him stagger back against the wall, and by Rosset's voice in a fierce whisper:

‘Always against the wall — always against the wall.' The words came first in English and then in French. ‘Always against the wall. You see? Always against the wall.'

The boy pressed himself back against the wall. His head, cracked against the wall, ached and throbbed. He shut his eyes, groped in a cold swooning darkness and came to life again. Rosset had gone.

He stared at the opposite wall. A long time seemed to pass. Finding that someone wished for coffee he roused himself, took it, poured it into the cups, came back to the wall again. ‘Always against the wall,' he kept thinking. A little later, realising that someone was staring at him in return, he let his eyes flicker back to a conscious gaze. This brought back a consciousness of mind also. He looked down the restaurant towards the door.

There, on a table, stood the cash-desk, at which Madame Rosset had sat all evening. Now Madame Rosset had gone and her place had been taken by a girl of perhaps twenty-eight or nine, a dark, sallow-skinned girl with a mass of luxuriant black hair, and warm liquid eyes. He did not understand her sudden presence. Perhaps the Rossets had gone for their evening meal. His mind seemed stupid, drugged.
He tried to force into his eyes some expression of understanding, of response. It was futile. Something in him had been crushed, annihilated, by that blow of Rosset's sending him back against the wall.

Nevertheless the girl continued to look at him. With her big, fluid dark eyes she coaxed him back gradually to a belief in his own existence. He felt inexpressibly soothed. Finally she shrugged her shoulders, smiled and made a droll face in the direction where Rosset must have gone. In spite of himself he smiled. She repeated it all, with a momentary flash of mimicry, mocking Rosset's twitching brows, his fierce eyes and loose drooping lips. As, in spite of himself, he smiled again, she looked round, saw an imaginary Rosset approaching, bent her head hastily over the accounts and then looked up again, grinning with eyes that were bright and mischievous.

As the evening went on she would repeat all this. It saved him from complete despair, took him away from himself. Her dumb-show was delicious. Normally he would have abandoned himself to absurd laughter. But he still felt sick; he was still apprehensive about Rosset's sudden return; and he gave her back quick little smiles which simply flickered across his face and fled.

The clatter of the restaurant died down. On Sundays it shut down at eleven, and long before then he was utterly weary by that prolonged standing against the wall. His head ached, the sickness in his heart
persisted, and only the smiling mimicry of the girl saved him, again and again, from desolation.

Once, just before eleven, Rosset returned, on drunken legs, took a lugubrious look round the empty restaurant and then disappeared.

Soon afterwards a waiter bolted the door. The girl came from behind the cash-desk, straight to the boy. She spoke to him quickly in the flexible, sweet tones of his own language.

‘Go up to bed, quickly,' she told him. ‘Quickly. We'll clear up. Go along and sleep. We'll talk to-morrow.'

She put her arm softly about his shoulders, gave him a brief squeeze, and took him to the door. ‘There you go — sleep well.' He caught the comfortable odour of her dress and the thick warm fragrance of her body.

As he dragged himself upstairs he burst into tears, silently, and he lay on his bed choking with deep sobs of agony, holding his hands desperately to his mouth, afraid that Rosset would hear and come up and knock the life out of him.

It was Sunday again, Easter Sunday. He stood there, against the wall, pressed back, as he had done every day of the winter. It was midday: in April the sun, at noon, could just clear the high roof of the buildings
opposite Rosset's; it was fitful windy April weather, with stumbling white clouds which hid the sun, and snow-cold air. There was no sign of spring: not even a daffodil on the tables of the empty restaurant. The two waiters stood at the window, gazing into the street, waiting for something to turn up, and the girl, Yvette, sat at the cash-desk, scratching her head with a pencil, licking her lips, and exchanging occasional glances with the boy, her eyes sparkling and mischievous. Sometimes she hugged herself against the cold and at last she got up and walked about the restaurant, stamping her feet. She walked to the far end of the empty room and turned, and it occurred to her then to retrace her steps like Rosset and she came back with his heavy rolling gait, twitching her brows up and down, her hands clasped behind her back, her full red lips loosely drooping. ‘Ah! bon jour, m'sieu', bon jour! You like to sit 'ere? No? Over there? Nize table, ver' nize. The Preence of Wales sit sometimes there — sometimes. Oh yes. Sometimes. You sit 'ere? As you wish, m'sieu.'

She had come down to the door and was bowing and rubbing her hands to that imaginary customer, while the waiters rolled against themselves and laughed and the boy smiled with delight by the wall, and now suddenly she flung up her hands and turned back by a series of quick rhythmical turns up the room, like a dancer, her black skirts flowing out wider and wider like an opening sunshade, showing her plump legs and
the mauve garters on her black stockings just above her knees. Laughing with delight, she kept snapping her fingers, and performing little seductive wriggles of her body for sheer joy.

‘Ach! Rosset! Who cares anything about Rosset now? Who cares anything? Pouf!'

It was a great day, for Rosset and his wife had gone away for Easter Sunday, on a visit to some relations, so that Pierre, the girl and the waiters would be free after three o'clock until the place opened again at six in the evening.

Almost intoxicated by the mere thought of freedom, the girl bantered with the waiters, satirically. Where were they going for their long holiday? Ah! but she knew. They didn't need to tell her. She knew! She walked up and down the restaurant, hobbling a little, talking to the imaginary image of a girl on her arm, smiling. ‘Where do I work? Tut, tut! Don't you know, I'm the
maître d'hôtel
at the Restaurant Rosset? Fifty waiters! You didn't know it? Ah, ah! Let us sit down, shall we? My feet ache.'

Without Rosset the place was transformed; and since no one had yet come in to eat it was strangely quiet in the intervals of the girl's foolery. Yet the boy, by the wall, was weary, almost afraid. Without consciously knowing it, he kept looking at the door, expecting to see at any moment the fat shadow of Rosset on the white curtain. It was something which no mere gaiety could dispel, this fear of Rosset. It was
something cancerous, unseen but deep, gnawing at the tissues of mind, never letting him rest, blackening his brain. His heart still bounded to his throat, flooding him with its sickening nausea, at the mere approach of Rosset, and alone again, even though Rosset had said nothing to him, he would feel weak and swooning, drained white by his own fear. It might have been different, he sometimes reasoned, if Rosset's own antagonism had lessened; but that too increased. He seemed to hate the faintest sight of the boy's mute face, with its dark bulging eyes, and its shrinking mouth. It was a hatred that had no limits; it rose from the mere cold despising sneer when the boy dropped a spoon to the fanatical heat of fury that poured out savagely as when he spilled the wine, as he had once done, at the table of a party of suburban fools, half-drunk, who had come in late one night to play a kind of Bohemian pantomine which they found amusing. But it could go beyond this, to be more petty or more diabolical, so that the boy feared not only its outward manifestations, but its inward strength, its terrible potentiality. One day Rosset would kill him; not by a blow or by deliberation, but by the mere persistency of his hatred, of a long cruel sucking at his life. When there was no more pleasure in cruelty he would throw the boy out perhaps, but as long as there was a response from him, that sudden awful light of fear in his eyes, he would torture him, like an animal, for the mere pleasure of seeing him suffer. The boy hoped for
dismissal, praying to be sent back: but there was no hope of it. He was as necessary to Rosset's life, though he did not know it, as Rosset was to his.

He could speak a little English now, but his words were mere repetitions of words, made into quaint phrases, that he had picked up surreptitiously from the girl and the waiters. Except that he was whiter, more strained, it was the only outward sign of change in him. Underneath he had the big yellow-black bruises where Rosset had kicked him, on the legs and thighs, but he said nothing of them. He limped sometimes, but to questions he said that he had slipped on the brass-shod stairs. But the girl knew, and from the look of strained pity in her eyes he was made aware of it.

They had become intimate. With her gaiety she made friends easily: her moods were elastic and the current of her joy would sometimes transmit itself to him. There were things that they must do together, the washing-up, the cleaning of the silver, down in the basement. They sat at the table or stood over the sink for hours together, the girl keeping up her tireless pantomime, mocking Rosset, Madame Rosset, the two waiters, the regular diners. They talked in whispers, learned the art of laughing silently, and could read each other's eyes.

She was twenty-nine, a Breton, one of a big family; there were always letters for her, from sisters and brothers and her mother, long letters which she read to the boy, mimicking the writer, as they cleaned the
cutlery together. He was from the South, the Mediterranean; he had wanted to go to sea, but his mother, blindly worshipping, had only one dream for him. She saw him as a kind of heavenly
maître d'hôtel
, the archangel of all waiters, and with joy and pride she had made this bargain with her cousin Rosset. She kept a little wine-shop overlooking the sea, and sailors came in to bring her fish in exchange for a bit of bread and some wine. There was a fisherman named Anton, a very old man with a little red woollen tasselled cap, who had taken him fishing in the bay in summer afternoons. His heart began to ache whenever he thought of it. Quick to catch at his moods, the girl would see this and make him tell what troubled him and when he told her she would laugh it off, with gentle carelessness.

‘Fishing? For what? Shrimps? What else could you and an old man hope to catch, eh?'

‘We'd row out, a long way out.'

‘Who? — who rowed? Not that old man! No? Then you?—ach! with arms like that—with those drumsticks?'