The Age of Reason (36 page)

‘Archangel. She calls you archangel. I should never have thought of that. A fallen archangel, I imagine; something of the type of Lucifer. And you see the old lady too: that puts the lid on it.’

Daniel seemed disconcerted: ‘Good,’ he said dryly. ‘I was rather afraid you might be angry...’

Mathieu turned towards him and eyed him dubiously: it was quite clear that Daniel had been convinced he would be angry.

‘True,’ he said, ‘I ought to be angry, it would be the normal reaction. And take note: it may so happen. But, for the moment, I’m just bewildered.’

He drained his glass, in his turn astonished that he was not more annoyed.

‘Do you see her often?’

‘At irregular intervals: say about twice a month.’

‘But what on earth can you find to say to each other?’

Daniel started, and his eyes flashed: he said in a rather silky voice: ‘Have you any subjects of conversation to suggest?’

‘Now don’t lose your temper,’ said Mathieu in a conciliatory tone. ‘It’s all so sudden, so unexpected — it seems, somehow, funny. But I’m not feeling unfriendly. So it’s true? You enjoy talking to each other? But — now do keep calm: I’m trying to understand — but what do you talk about?’

‘All sorts of things,’ said Daniel coldly: ‘of course, Marcelle doesn’t expect a very elevated style of conversation. But she finds me soothing.’

‘It’s incredible, you are so different.’

He could not rid himself of the ridiculous vision: Daniel, the man of ceremony, of high, insinuating charm, with his Cagliostro airs and his long, African smile, and Marcelle, face to face with him; Marcelle — stiff, awkward, and loyal... Loyal? Stiff? She can’t be so stiff after all: ‘Come, Archangel, we await your visitation.’ It was Marcelle who had written that, it was she who was attempting these heavy-handed courtesies. For the first time Mathieu felt a flicker of something like anger: ‘She has deceived me,’ he thought with amazement. ‘She has been deceiving me for six months.’ And he went on: ‘I’m so astonished that Marcelle should have kept anything from me.’

Daniel did not answer.

‘Was it you who asked her to say nothing?’ asked Mathieu.

‘Yes. I didn’t want you to take charge of our relations. At present I’ve known her for some while, so it doesn’t matter so much.’

‘It was you who asked her,’ repeated Mathieu, in a milder tone. And he added: ‘But didn’t she object?’

‘She was greatly surprised.’

‘Yes, but she didn’t refuse.’

‘No, she couldn’t have thought it very wrong. She laughed, I remember, and she said: “It’s a case of conscience.” She thinks I like to surround myself with mystery.’ And he added, with a veiled irony that annoyed Mathieu extremely: ‘She began by calling me Lohengrin. Then, as you see, she chose Archangel.’

‘Yes,’ said Mathieu, and he thought: ‘He’s making fun of her,’ and he felt ashamed for Marcelle’s sake. His pipe had gone out, mechanically he reached out a hand and picked up an olive. This was serious: he did not feel
sufficiently
upset. Mentally bewildered — yes, just as when one discovers one has been completely mistaken... But, a while ago there had been something alive within him that would have bled. He merely said in a melancholy voice: ‘We used to tell each other everything.’

‘You imagined you did,’ said Daniel. ‘Can people tell each other everything?’

Mathieu shrugged his shoulders irritably. But he was mainly angry with himself.

‘And that letter!’ he said. ‘“We await your visitation.” I seem to be discovering another Marcelle.’

Daniel looked alarmed: ‘Another Marcelle, indeed! Look here, you’re not going to let a bit of nonsense...’

‘You were reproaching me, just now for not taking things seriously enough.’

‘The fact is — you pass from one extreme to the other,’ said Daniel. And he continued with an air of affectionate understanding: ‘And what is more, you are inclined to rely too much on your judgements of people. This little affair merely goes to show that Marcelle is more complicated than you thought.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Mathieu. ‘But there is more to it than that.’

Marcelle had put herself in the wrong, and he was afraid of being angry with her: he must not lose his confidence in her, today — today, when he would be perhaps obliged to sacrifice his freedom for her sake. He needed to respect her, otherwise the task would be too hard.

‘Besides,’ said Daniel, ‘we always intended to tell you, but we found our little conspiracy so amusing, that we put off doing so from day to day.’

‘We!’ he said. ‘We.’ Here was someone who could say we, when speaking to Mathieu about Marcelle. Mathieu looked at Daniel with no friendly eye: this would have been the moment to hate him. But Daniel was as disarming as ever. Mathieu said to him abruptly: ‘Daniel, why did she do it?’

‘Well, I told you,’ replied Daniel. ‘Because I asked her to. And then it must have entertained her to have a secret.’

Mathieu shook his head. ‘No. There’s something else. She knew quite well what she was doing. Why did she do it?’

‘But...’ said Daniel. ‘I imagine it can’t always be very comfortable to live within your orbit. She wanted to find a shady corner.’

‘She finds me too dominating?’

‘She didn’t exactly say so, but that is what I gathered. After all, you are rather compelling,’ he added with a smile. ‘But don’t forget that she admires you, she admires your habit of living in a glass-house, and announcing to the world what one usually keeps to oneself: but it gets her down. She didn’t tell you about my visits, because she was afraid you might put pressure on her feelings for me, that you might force her to give them a name, that you might dissect them and return them to her in small pieces. They need to be kept in a half-light, you know... they are rather nebulous and ill-defined...’

‘She told you so?’

‘Yes: she did. She said to me: “What amuses me in your company is that I don’t in the least know where I am going. With Mathieu, I always know.”’

‘With Mathieu, I always know.’ And Ivich: ‘With you one never has to fear anything unexpected.’ He felt a little sick.

‘Why didn’t she speak to me about all this?’

‘She says it’s because you never asked her.’

It was true, Mathieu bowed his head: each time when it was a question of getting at Marcelle’s feelings, an invincible lethargy weighed him down. When sometimes he thought he noticed a shadow in her eyes, he had shrugged his shoulders: ‘Nonsense! If there was anything, she would tell me, she tells me everything.’ And that is what I called my confidence in her. I’ve ruined everything.

He shook himself, and said abruptly: ‘Why are you telling me this today?’

‘I had to tell you one day or another.’

This evasive air was intended to stimulate curiosity: Mathieu was not duped by it.

‘Why today, and why you?’ he went on. ‘It would have been more... normal that she should mention it first.’

‘Well,’ said Daniel, with an assumption of embarrassment, ‘I may have been mistaken, but I... I thought it was in the best interests of you both.’

Good. Mathieu stiffened: ‘Look out for the real attack, it will be coming now.’ And Daniel added: ‘I’m going to tell you the truth: Marcelle doesn’t know I’ve spoken to you, and only yesterday she didn’t look as though she had made up her mind to make it known to you so soon. You will do me the favour of saying nothing to her about our conversation.’

Mathieu laughed despite himself: ‘How truly Satanic! You sow secrets everywhere. Only yesterday you were conspiring with Marcelle against me, and today you ask for my collusion against her. A peculiar brand of treachery.’

Daniel smiled: ‘There’s nothing Satanic about me,’ he said. ‘What impelled me to speak was a genuine feeling of anxiety that came over me yesterday evening. It seemed to me that you were both involved in a serious misunderstanding. Naturally Marcelle is too proud to mention it to you herself.’

Mathieu took a firm grip of his glass: he began to understand.

‘It’s about your...’ Daniel struggled with his modesty, and continued: ‘Your accident.’

‘Ah,’ said Mathieu. ‘Did you tell her you knew?’

‘Certainly not. It was she who mentioned it first.’

‘Ah.’

‘Only yesterday, on the telephone,’ he thought, ‘she seemed to be afraid I should refer to it. And in the evening she told him everything. Another little comedy.’ And he added: ‘Well, what then?’

‘Look here, all is not well: something has gone wrong.’

‘What makes you say so?’ asked Mathieu hoarsely.

‘Nothing definite, it’s rather... the way in which she put things to me.’

‘What’s the matter? Is she angry with me for having got her with child?’

‘I don’t think so. No, it’s not that. It’s your attitude yesterday, rather. She spoke of it with bitterness.’

‘What did I do?’

‘I couldn’t tell you exactly. But there’s something she said to me, among other things: “It’s always he that decides, and if I am not in agreement with him, it is understood that I am to object. But that is entirely to his advantage, because he always has his mind made up, and he never leaves me the time to make up mine” — I won’t guarantee the exact words.’

‘But I have never had a decision to make,’ said Mathieu with a puzzled look. ‘We have always been in agreement on what had to be done in such cases.’

‘Yes, but did you worry about what she might think, the day before yesterday?’

‘Certainly not. I was sure she thought as I did.’

‘Yes, the point being that you didn’t ask. When did you last consider this... eventuality?’

‘I don’t know — two or three years ago.’

‘Two or three years. And you don’t think she may have changed her mind in the interval?’

At the far end of the room, the men had got up, they were laughing with genial familiarity, a chasseur brought their hats, three black felts and a bowler. They went out with a friendly salute to the barman, and the waiter switched off the radio. The bar sank into arid silence; there was a savour of disaster in the air.

‘This is going to end badly,’ thought Mathieu. He did not exactly know what was going to end badly: this stormy day, this abortion business, his relations with Marcelle? No, it was something vaguer and more comprehensive: his life, Europe, this ineffectual, ominous peace. He had a vision of Brunet’s red hair: ‘There will be war in September.’ At that moment, in the dim, deserted bar, one could almost believe it. There had been something tainted in his life that summer.

‘Is she afraid of the operation?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Daniel, with a distant air.

‘She wants me to marry her?’

Daniel burst out laughing: ‘I don’t know at all, that’s asking me too much. Anyway, it can’t be as simple as all that. Look here, you ought to have a talk with her this evening. Without mentioning me, of course: as though you had been attacked by scruples. From her manner yesterday, I should be surprised if she doesn’t tell you everything: she looked as though she wanted to unburden herself.’

‘Very well. I’ll try to make her talk.’

A silence followed, then Daniel added with an embarrassed air: ‘Well, I’ve warned you.’

‘Yes, thanks all the same,’ said Mathieu.

‘Are you annoyed with me?’

‘Not at all. It is so very much the sort of service that you favour: it drops on a fellow’s head as plumb as a tile.’

Daniel laughed heartily, opening his mouth wide, exposing his brilliant teeth and the back of his throat.

‘I oughtn’t to have done it,’ she thought, with her hand on the receiver; ‘I oughtn’t to have done it, we always told each other everything. He is thinking — Marcelle used to tell me everything — Oh, he thinks it, he knows, by now he knows; shocked amazement in his head and this little voice in his head — Marcelle always told me everything, it is there, at this moment — it is there in his head. Oh, it’s beyond bearing; I would a hundred times rather he hated me, but there he was, sitting on the café sofa, his arms dangling as though he had just dropped something, and his eyes fixed on the floor as though something lay there broken. It’s done, the conversation
has taken place
. Neither seen nor heard, I was not there, I knew nothing; but it has happened, the words have been spoken and I know nothing; the grave voice rises like smoke to the café ceiling, the voice will come from there; the fine, grave voice that always makes the disc of the receiver quiver; it will come from there and say that it is done; O God — O God, what will it say? I am naked, I am pregnant, and that voice will come out fully clad from the white disc; we oughtn’t to have done it, we oughtn’t to have done it. She could almost have been angry with Daniel if it had been possible to be angry with him; he has been so generous, so good; he is the only person who ever bothered about me. He took up my cause, did the Archangel, and he devoted his grand voice to it. A woman, a weak woman, utterly weak, and protected in the world of men and of the living by a dark, warm voice. The voice will come from there, and it will say — Marcelle used to tell me everything — poor Mathieu, dear Archangel! At the thought of the Archangel, her eyes melted into soft tears, tears of abundance and fertility; the tears of a true woman after a scorching week; tears of a soft, soft woman, who has found someone to protect her. He took me in his arms, a woman caressed and now protected; teardrops glimmering in her eyes, a caress trickling sinuously down her cheeks on to pouting, quivering lips. For a week she had been looking at a fixed point in the distance, with dry and desolate eyes: they’ll kill me. For a week she had been a Marcelle who knew her mind, a hard and sensible Marcelle, a manly Marcelle. He says I am a man and behold the tears; the weak woman, the streaming eyes. Why resist, tomorrow I’ll be hard and sensible; once and for once only, tears, remorse, sweet self-pity, and humility sweeter still; velvet hands on my sides and on my thighs. She longed to take Mathieu in her arms and ask his pardon; pardon on her knees: poor Mathieu, my poor dear fellow. Once, once only, to be protected and forgiven, it’s so comforting. An idea suddenly took her breath away, and filled her veins with vinegar. This evening when he comes into the room, when I put my arms round his neck and kiss him, he’ll know everything, and I’ll have to pretend not to know that he knows. Ah, we’re deceiving him, she thought in desperation, we’re still deceiving him; we tell him everything, but our sincerity is tainted. He knows he will come in this evening, I shall see his kind eyes, I shall think to myself — he knows and how shall I bear it; my poor old fellow, for the first time in my life I have hurt you — ah, I’ll agree to everything, I’ll go to the old woman, I’ll destroy the child; I’m ashamed, café I’ll do what he wishes, everything you wish.’