Cloudless May (7 page)

“But you understand,” M. Sadinsky said softly, “I shall try to please your great Madame Huet. Perhaps I can do it by giving money to something of hers. If you persuade her to invite me to her house I shall hand you five thousand francs for some charity, any charity you like. I shan't ask what you give it to. Perhaps ten thousand.”

He stood up. This time, with an air of tenderness, he kissed Mme de Freppel's hand, and moved backwards skilfully until he was at the door. He opened it widely enough to pass his body through, squeezing his buttocks against the sides. After he had gone, there was a moment's silence, then Léonie said,

“I think you needn't get rid of your fur cape yet. Wait.” Without raising her voice or looking up, she went on, “Now I must talk to you a little about Edgar. His affair has dragged on long enough, I want him home. Why not? I can pay back the money he lost—poor boy, he ought not to have agreed to be the treasurer, he doesn't understand figures. But why put him in prison for it? It's absurd. Marguerite, I think of him every night. I begin with his feet, and think of him upwards to his face; sometimes I can't see it clearly. I must, yes, get him out.”

She was speaking calmly, but a thread of sorrow had been caught up by her voice and twisted round it. It was more moving than if she had cried. Had anyone seen Léonie cry? What sort of dregs—or mother, don't they call it?—would be emptied out of eyes so used as hers? She looks older than she is, Marguerite thought. She took Léonie's hand; it was unresponsive; she had to draw hers back, foolishly.

“What more can we do?” she asked.

She knew what had been done. Edgar Vayrac's lawyer had named an examining magistrate, Maître Naquet, as a pliant sensible fellow. Bergeot was on good terms with the Minister: pressed by Léonie, she had coaxed him to write a letter, and in due time the case was given into the sensible old fellow's hands. After this, Maitre Naquet was reminded delicately of the vices he had enjoyed during his life of careful magistrate and faithful dependent husband. There were too many of these; at his age, if the stories became known, he would look very foolish as the gay seducer. In the examinations nothing surprising emerged
except that Edgar Vayrac had spent his own money on the organisation. The magistrate—indiscreet, but why not?—let it be known.

Léonie raised her eyebrows. “My dear, it would be perfectly easy to get the boy released and the case postponed indefinitely. He has plenty of useful friends. The Public Prosecutor himself—I had to see him the other day privately to pay arrears of taxes——”

“Arrears of taxes?” Marguerite said blankly.

“Don't be absurd,” Mme Vayrac said, smiling.

“Well?”

“Well. He had nothing against my boy, he has always believed that he is innocent. Of course he's innocent. He's very naughty sometimes and then he does something so delicious you can't help forgiving him.”

Does she believe this? Marguerite wondered. When Edgar was ten, living in the country with foster-parents, the woman wrote asking his mother to take him away. Léonie was ill, and Marguerite went down to find out what was wrong: she saw the boy first; he looked at her from clear grey eyes—he was a tall fair child, as handsome as an angel—and said, “I've always been good.” She spoke to the foster-mother. “He's cruel,” the woman said uneasily: she showed the arms of her own child, blackened from wrist to shoulder by Edgar's pinches. “I won't keep him, I tell you he's bad. . . .”

“If only that devil Mathieu could be silenced,” Mme Vayrac said quietly. “They're all afraid of the nonsense he might write about it. I believe that if the Prefect sent for him, and told him not to make trouble because Edgar had been released—and explain ...” Her frank smile made her look as though she were lying. “I've bribed as many people as I can, it would be no use trying to bribe Mathieu.”

“You want me to talk to Émile?”

“Yes,” Léonie said in a humble voice.

Marguerite looked away. She was reluctant to mix Émile in Edgar Vayrac's affair; it could turn out badly. Easy to promise and then do nothing, but—with Léonie—that would be no use.

Mme Vayrac moved quickly and softly off the couch. She put her arms round her friend, and began in her softest voice, scarcely moving her lips. “You will help me, won't you? Yes,
I know you will. We understand each other. My sweet girl, I love you so much: do you remember the time when we were starving, and I stole for us? Yes, of course you do. You will help, won't you? It's absolutely simple. Isn't it? Yes, yes.”

Mme de Freppel felt ashamed of her caution.

“I'll talk to Émile,” she said, putting into her voice all the sincerity she did not feel.

Mme De Freppel's bedroom looked across the unshaven lawn to the Loire. She enjoyed lying in bed, propped up so that she could see the river: at night she had the shutters folded back so that her first glance in the morning rested on it, clear, or doubled by mist, or the surface raised by the reflection on it of the clouds. When in other rooms she woke facing a wall, or trees not able to touch a river with their farthest root, she felt cheated.

Tonight she went to bed early, after a disappointment. When she came home from seeing Mme Vayrac, Bergeot telephoned to say he would come to dinner. He did not come. Lucien Sugny rang up and said that the Prefect had been summoned by General Piriac and would come when he could. Vexed, she lay in bed waiting for him. At one moment she fell asleep, and saw him looking down at her with a contorted face, swollen and wavering. She sat up in terror, pushing the sheet from her so that it was heaped up like the Loire running against a sand-bank. If he left me, I should have no one, she thought. She felt stupid with dismay. She thought of her husband: his habit of rubbing his nails together had been born in him with his sense of his duty as a landowner: he was stiff and conscientious, and she disliked him more than if he had injured her. I couldn't go back to him, she thought; I should be alone.

Insensibly, the thought of Émile dying became the fear that he would tire of her: she would see him trying, out of pity, to hide his boredom; it would break out in criticisms of her, she
would resent them, there would be tears, anger, reconciliation, pity, hate, boredom. . . . She looked at her arms, as firm as a girl's, and pressed her hands on her body. Even while she was thinking, I'm not young, she felt certain that he was bound to her by ties as strong, as mysteriously carnal and immaterial, as those binding some children—not all—to their mother. He depended on her. From the pressure of her fingers on her arm sprang the familiar and hated thought that she herself would die. It faded quickly, drowned by the louder fear of losing her money.

“This war,” she said, with despair.

Poverty had its clear image in her mind: the bed with tumbled sheets pushed against a wall, the noises of the street splitting her skull as though her skull were the walls of the room, the print on the soles of her feet of the stringy carpet. To be tumbled back to it, she thought: at my age. She knew she had lost the resilience and greedy strength of her body.

She tried to lose herself in an image of the Loire, flowing in darkness at the other side of the shutters, in the night of France, offering—to the Atlantic on one side, on the other to the enemy—its valleys and high pastures, its cathedrals, old and new houses, vines, olives, walnuts, its Maginot line of thrift and freedom, and the bodies of its men and children. But her nerves were on edge. She began to be angry with Émile. . . . It was after midnight when she heard him coming along the corridor, and at once forgot her annoyance in the urgency of what she had to say to him.

He was tired. He seated himself on the side of the bed and said vehemently,

“That old fool Piriac. What d'you think he wanted?”

“Flattery.”

“Of course. He read me his speech to the League of Frenchwomen next Tuesday. About Joan of Arc, of course, and terribly muddled. I think he believes sometimes that he's fighting the English. I tried to talk to him about the war, but it was useless. After two minutes he was hearing voices. . . . Rest me.”

He leaned back, with his head on her shoulder. Putting her hand on his forehead, she felt the blood beating in his temples. “You do far too much. When is this war going to end?”

“I don't know. Not for years.”

“We ought to think about our future,” she said calmly. “Thiviers thinks we ought to put some of our money in America, so that we're not ruined at the end of the war. Or if we're defeated. He can arrange it for us. I told him to send as much of mine away as he can, at once.”

Bergeot frowned and sat up. “Do you know what you're doing? It will be a frightful scandal if you're found out. I couldn't protect you. And apart from that, it's abominably unpatriotic. You'd better see Thiviers tomorrow and tell him you've changed your mind. You must.”

She did not answer. What did he see when he thought of poverty? Not a shabby dress, stained under the arms, not his wife bending over a pan at the sink, her nails scraping into the cracks. Patriotism—a cloud floating at a great height, and men gaping at it.

She slipped easily into her part, the more easily that she was absolutely sincere.

“Why have you moved? Please listen, my darling. We've had four years. We've been happy. Why? Not simply because we have each other, but because you have your work. Would you be satisfied with an ordinary life? Never. And you need money, enough to be independent: it's the same in politics as in everything else, if you have money, and don't need help, people will offer to help you. You want to get on in politics, don't you? You won't do it as a poor man. You must be safe—and for us, too, so that we can be happy, and grow to look like each other. Old husbands and wives do, you know. . . . Let Robert send part of your money to the States. You can trust him, he's fond of you.”

She let two tears roll over her cheeks. “Have you a handkerchief?” she said, smiling. She turned her head away, so that her tears ran into the pillow. She was crying without a sound. “My life hasn't been easy,” she said, with her poor little smile.

Émile bent over her. “My dear love. What is it?”

“You could make us safe,” she said, pressing his cheek against hers. “It's much easier than listening to an old idiot pretending to be Joan of Arc. You haven't a great deal of money, it will make no difference to the country—and to me, all the difference between happiness and a dreadful anxiety.”

“Very well,” he said quietly. “I agree.”

She was afraid of rousing mistrust and resentment in him if she showed her thankfulness. But her relief was so great, now that she had relaxed, that it showed in her face; it became paler and older. He saw it; and the conviction that he had made a grave mistake vanished, in his pity for her. To reassure her—she might think he had made a sacrifice—he turned brusquely to something else.

“What did you do today?” he asked.

“I had lunch with Léonie,” she said gratefully. “She wants you to speak to your friend Mathieu about Edgar. If the police were sure they could do it quietly, they would release him—provisionally—” She was deliberately being clumsy, so that he could get rid on Léonie of his resentment and doubts. And she would be able to tell Léonie that she had done her best.

“My God, I like her impudence,” he said, with sudden fury. “The fellow is a common swindler. He hasn't been charged with spying or he wouldn't be sitting comfortably in prison. But I shouldn't be surprised if he were a German agent—at least an Italian one. And I'm told he had a brothel in Nantes. And she wants to loose him on society again. I won't do a thing to help her.”

“He's her son,” she murmured.

“Then she's responsible for him,” Bergeot said. “Don't let's talk about him.”

He undressed and came back to her. Almost as soon as he lay down he fell asleep, but she was awake for a long time, reluctant to move the arm she had stretched under his head. With her free hand she felt his side and shoulder and the back of his head. The bones were very close under his skin: she felt afraid; it is so easy to kill men; their thin covering of skin is no cover. An accident, a trifle of violence, and Émile's courage and nervous life would slip out. Take care of him, take care of him, she said soundlessly—speaking to the featureless severity she believed in. She felt heavy with her faults, lies, cowardice, greed. Nothing in her was sound except her love for Émile, her ambitions for Émile, her pleasure in Émile. . . . She moved, drawing away her arm.

Lucien Sugny took his morning coffee on to the north terrace. The sun—it was not seven o'clock yet—was already the same no-colour, the colour of molten heat, as the sky. Light sprang back from the roofs of houses at the foot of the cliff, from the Loire itself, and ripples of light were beginning to mask the town and the fields beyond the town. Lucien thought, as he did every morning at this time, that his life was perfect: he would have run the length of the terrace if he had not been afraid that even out here, at this hour, he could be seen. He sat still, the figure of a sober secretary. . . . Seuilly had been taken by the Germans—except the Prefecture, which was holding out on its cliff: his job was to fire off the machine-gun at the head of the slope while the Prefect and Mme de Freppel, in the dress she had worn at dinner, slipped away. He was wounded. She came running back—Lucien, you're hurt!—No, Marguerite, I'm dying. Or should it be, No, I'm dying, Madame . . .? Her lips brushed his, she leaned her warm body along his, rapidly growing cold . . . You could invent something more original, he thought angrily. Need you, because you're not a soldier, become an idiot?

He rushed indoors and switched on the wireless in time to hear the communiqué. A patrol encounter east of the Moselle ended to our advantage. There have been more artillery actions east of the Vosges. The German High Command states that two British planes were brought down in the North Sea. . . . That was all. Except for the French and the Germans, the two invariable actors, Europe had nothing it wanted to say: there were no signals from Norway: in Spain, no Republican peasants had been released from prison to work in the olive fields; the Italians, except an orator who demanded Marseilles, because it was Roman—why not the whole of France, to the Loire?—were quiet; Poland and Czechoslovakia were as quiet as death. All Europe—apart from a patch of ground near the Moselle, another in the Vosges, and an undefined patch of the North Sea—was perfectly peaceful; men stretching themselves in the early sun, women moving about their houses. . . . Lucien
switched off. He went out again. The sunlight tickled the back of his neck; he turned round to feel its fingers on his face . . . What am I missing by staying here? Obviously nothing.