The Conspiracy (14 page)

— Why did you bring me to this Punch-and-Judy show? asked Catherine as they left.

— To amuse you, said Bernard with that little derisive laugh of his – which resembled the loud derisive laugh of his brother more than he would have wished. But the finest piece in the collection was missing: that's the son of the house. Young Victor is thirteen, he's got a thyroid deficiency, he's apt to dribble, he has frog's eyes and a Mongoloid complexion. It's due to Calvados in his ancestry, and collateral marriages to round out the estates. But he will inherit the councillor's two million and the paternal seat: the elector won't look all that closely. The priest at Martin-Eglise, who gave me a few Latin lessons ten years ago, says he's a good boy: he'll vote in the senatorial elections for M. Thureau-Dangin, who'll still be alive, praise the Lord. Senators live to a ripe old age in these parts. Doesn't it make you laugh, that future Norman bourgeois grandee with a calf's head?

— No, said Catherine, it doesn't make me laugh. It's quite sad, and I find you disgusting.

On that day, Bernard and Catherine came home quite late from Neufchâtel-en-Bray. Bernard brought the car to a halt in front of La Vicomté's white front gate. Catherine, who to go out for lunch at Martin-Eglise had put on town clothes again, gathered up her handbag and gloves: a movement she made revealed her leg, right up to the cruel swell of the thigh over her stocking-top. Bernard blushed, and felt his heart thump, at this discovery of so much nakedness in the confused clouds of silk and wool.

After perhaps a second, Catherine finally realized from Bernard's total immobility that she was in danger – that a catastrophic event was taking place. She saw her knee, pulled down her dress with a reaction of modesty as violent as a gesture of anger. She looked to her left, she met Bernard's eyes. It was over, the family magic was dead. Getting out of the car, Bernard took Catherine's arm above the elbow and squeezed it with such violence that she gave a sigh and said plaintively:

— You hurt me!

— I beg your pardon, he said, but he did not release his sister-in-law's arm throughout the unending time they took to walk from the front gate to the perron. M. Rosenthal was reading in the drawing-room – it was still broad daylight. He asked them:

— Did you have a good outing?

— Excellent, replied Catherine, but your son took me to visit some impossible people.

— The Burels, I'll warrant, said M. Rosenthal. Bernard has always had an inexplicable soft spot for those people.

That evening, when dinner was over, Catherine came up to Bernard and lifted the sleeve of her dress: her skin still bore the marks of his fingers. Without a word, he took her arm again with the same force. She did not free herself, merely said to him in a low voice:

— I'll have bruises tomorrow . . . What shall I look like for the next two or three days, with long sleeves in the middle of August?

XIV

How few authentic actions exist – couplings, murders, building monuments, opening roads, capturing a large body of troops, risking one's life! Almost everything one does is but a dream. For Bernard, love was perhaps merely the entrance of reality upon the scene, Catherine his first chance – because the occasion of his first clash and the pretext for his first action.

‘Well now,' Bernard told himself one evening, ‘no more games! A victory to be won, defences to be overcome.'

But everything was too easy. What Bernard doubtless needed was a woman hard to conquer, a mistress whose capitulation would have been the outcome of a battle and a surrender. Catherine did not resist, she was a woman who knew she wished to yield . . .

For five days, Bernard lived as in a dream. He spent his days extracting from his nights all that they contained. He no longer even needed Catherine's company: he fled it to walk alone or stretch out in a meadow, listening to Mme Lyons, Mme Plessis and Comtesse Kamenskaia twitter like birds in an aviary.

When everyone was asleep and he could no longer hear anything on the first-floor landing but his father's little nocturnal rale, which since childhood had made him think of final agony and death, he would go to join Catherine in her room.

An overwhelming silence would reign there, scarcely broken by the plaintive hoots of night-birds or by the rustle of a bird or cat on the tiles of the roof. Through the window, which looked out over the lawns, there would sometimes enter an insect to buzz and blunder into the walls, or a hesitant wisp of mist.

For five nights, within that cold and velvety darkness, that gloomy solitude of a countryside which speaks to men only of heavenly bodies and death, Bernard and Catherine shared the terrible secrets of pleasure: its alternations of self-oblivion, sacrifice, patience, indolence and slumber; its sighs, from fighters conspiring in a rigged fight; its miraculous oblivion of the disgust a body inspires in a body; its indulgence, its exaltation and its degradation. How could Bernard fail to confuse with love: flashes of happiness; the death of time; the company of that tall girl, moist and naked; and the connivance which, at times, made them long remain motionless because they had heard something creak, with the sound of blood in their ears covering everything like a sea? On the sixth day, Claude came.

He arrived in his car as he did every Saturday, at about five in the afternoon. Bernard was flabbergasted: he had entirely forgotten his brother.

Claude took a bath, came down from his room again in a tweed suit, with stockings and white spats reaching halfway up the calf. Catherine smiled, Bernard felt like laughing.

The dinner hour came. The chambermaid came into the drawing-room and said everything was ready for Madame. The whole machinery of La Vicomté continued to function perfectly. At table, Mme Lyons asked Claude:

— What was the weather like in Paris?

Mme Lyons was a very fat lady who wore gold-framed spectacles and a pearl necklace: she had no concerns in the world except the dishes she ate and the temperature – since great heat used to give her palpitations. However, she would sometimes come out with a cruel witticism, which everyone would find admirably accurate but surprising on those soft lips.

— Abominable, Claude replied. It's getting warmer by the day. Yesterday we had thirty-two in the shade, and when I got into the car this morning on Place de la Bourse it was already thirty-three . . .

— You'll see, said Mme Lyons, today or tomorrow we'll have a dreadful storm. I'm sure of it, I only have to listen to the palpitations of my poor heart . . .

— Thank the Lord, said Mme Plessis, at least you can breathe in the country, where a nice big storm is not all that disagreeable.

— Speaking of the Bourse, asked M. Rosenthal, how's it doing?

— Haven't you heard? said Claude.

— No, replied M. Rosenthal, come now, you know very well that holidays are sacrosanct and I never open a paper when I'm at La Vicomté.

— I always forget that you're a broker with principles, said Claude. Well, the market's pretty fair. Suez ended up around 23,000 and a bit over, and Royal Dutch at 43-44,000. Norvégienne went up 95 points . . .

— That's not bad, said M. Rosenthal. What was it? The celebrated confidence of those fools in the Palais-Bourbon?

— I think, said Claude in what Bernard used to call his Rue Saint-Guillaume tone of voice, it's the international situation. The
Hague agreements
were signed only yesterday, but since the signature had been anticipated since Wednesday speculation got under way at once, with provincial customers following suit . . . The trend's just beginning: the Young Plan and the Bank for International Settlements – that could be quite good for the European markets. As always, people are asking only to be reassured. If it wasn't for the
trouble in Palestine
, which is causing London such a lot of nuisance . . .

There had, in fact, just been six hundred deaths in Palestine. Such carnage was still a surprise to men who, seven or eight years later, were to accustom themselves with terrifying adaptability to the incredible massacres in Abyssinia, China and Spain.

— I'd have given something, said Bernard, to be present at the final farce in The Hague, when Henderson was so overcome he put the gold fountain pen he'd just presented to Jaspar back into his pocket. All those characters must have had a proper laugh, apart from
Chéron
, who still can't stand Snowden. Well, at any rate the French Army's going to evacuate the Rhineland. That's at least one rotten business coming to an end. A bit late.

— Let's discuss that, exclaimed M. Lyons, who was almost as fat as his wife and had not yet said anything because he had been eating. Let's discuss that! It's the last guarantee we held against Germany. Oh! they've wasted no time in taking advantage of Poincaré's exhaustion to demolish his work! There's going to be some fine goings-on, with that gangster Briand . . .

— It's not the first time, said M. Rosenthal, that a bad prostate will have had historic consequences.

— Edouard! said Mme Rosenthal.

— You're quite right, said M. Plessis, looking fixedly at M. Lyons. The Boches only understand firm methods. This Bank for International Settlements and this Young Plan are going to be just one more swindle. They'll have managed to nibble away at our Victory all right . . .

— It's perhaps not all that bad financially, said Claude. The occupation of the Rhineland wasn't always good for business.

— Enough figures, Gentlemen.
Never talk shop
as they say across the Channel, exclaimed Mme Rosenthal, diverting the conversation with authority. They spoke about the countryside: Mme Lyons said that even with excellent friends it wasn't fun every day, and that so far as she was concerned she missed her little Paris habits ‘cruelly'. But Mme Plessis, who was younger and more aware of what is due to one's hosts, found that it was splendidly restful and ‘so much less enervating than the seaside' for people with sensitive nerves.

There is no better subject than health, and Mme Rosenthal explained their constitutions to her guests, whereupon they sang the praises of doctors, of whom people always speak ironically when they are healthy, but whom they are very glad to summon as soon as their temperature reaches thirty-seven point nine. Then it was time to go and take coffee and herbal infusions in the small drawing-room and elevate one's mind before going to sleep.

Comtesse Kamenskaia, who like many Muscovite women was rather short but whose flaming auburn hair had its admirers, went to look through the French windows leading to the terrace and exclaimed that she liked nothing in the world except great plains, so she ‘adored' this region, because the patches of steppe interspersed with copses where Picardy began reminded her of the surroundings of Zagorsk, where she had been brought up, and the time when she used to go and visit the abbot of the Convent of the Trinity, in his little Louis XV office with its Chinese screens. All the guests were familiar with the Comtesse's adventures – apart from the life she had really led after the evacuation of Baron Wrangel's army from the Crimea – but they always used to feel a certain pleasure in hearing a few accounts of atrocities from the mouth of
la petite comtesse
, who had such a ravishing accent. So she spoke once more:

— Well, on the evening of my wedding, my husband took me to one of his villages, which was in the
guberniya
of Kiev. It was terrible, the peasants insulted us and someone threw an axe at the head of one of the horses. At daybreak we escaped through the back gate of the park, and the four-horse carriage that had brought us to Kiev remained behind in the stables. At Kiev I lost my husband and it was two years before I saw him again. The Bolsheviks arrested me, but a little Jewish student of seventeen or eighteen, who was sitting as a judge in their court and who was perhaps in love with me, saved my life, and then somebody remembered that I used to sing before the Revolution and they made me act parts in their ridiculous propaganda films. Then they arrested me again. I was in a horrible green building where there were fourteen of us women. I used to hear gunshots being fired outside my window and it was certainly people being killed, but I couldn't see anything because they'd nailed planks across the panes, I could see only a snow-covered roof high up, and in the morning, when the red sun of Kiev was shining, the crows used to let themselves roll down the snow as far as the gutter. How cold we were! And hungry! But we always managed somehow to get hold of cocaine, through a woman who was called Marusha. What a life that was! My God, what a life that was! Then one day the Whites released us. For thirteen months we'd been so accustomed to dread, the streets scared us. Friends fed me and handed me some pearls my mother had given them to keep safe for me, and, of course, in all that misfortune my poor mother had died . . .

Mme Rosenthal patted Mme Kamenskaia's hand, and Mme Lyons said the Comtesse ought to sing something Russian to take her mind off it. She made them entreat her, then promised she would sing the Tsarina's Song. M. Rosenthal suddenly recalled the Easter-egg collection which had been at La Vicomté in his mother's lifetime, and which reminded him of Nicholas II – he really wondered why.

Mme Plessis asked Claude if he didn't get too bored in Paris:

— It's pretty deadly, he answered. Everybody has left and one can't even play bridge. There's absolutely nothing to see at the theatre. When I tell you that on Wednesday I went to the
Concert Mayol
!

— Aren't you worried, Kate dear, asked Mme Lyons. All those naked women . . . You know how holidays are the ruin of husbands . . .

— I'm not worried, said Catherine. With Claude . . .

‘This life can't go on,' thought Bernard. ‘What are we doing, she and I, among all these hateful phantoms?'

Later, after other phrases by lamplight in the small drawing-room and after the Tsarina's Song on the terrace (someone, as always, finding that Boris Godunov was definitely superior to Prince Igor), when Mme Plessis had declared that women would be plump next winter and at last one would be able to have one's waist in the proper place, and when Mme Rosenthal had stowed away in her work-table the beige garments – beige like all garments for the poor – that she was knitting for the poor, Bernard suddenly heard his brother say to Catherine:

— Shall we go up, if you're ready, Kate?

That ‘we' struck Bernard as horrible: it coupled Catherine. He felt indignant that, after those five nights, she should still be his brother's wife.

‘I'd be a coward to put up with this sharing any longer,' he thought. ‘It's nothing to have slept with Catherine. He has too. It's me alone she must accept into her bed . . .'

Next morning Bernard – who had not slept; who had been walking for two hours along the road, right on past the barking of the dogs into a slumbering Grandcourt – scrutinized Catherine's lips and cheeks for Heaven knows what marks of happiness he was terrified he might discern there. At one moment during the morning she smiled at him, but he saw in this smile only the evidence of a hateful complicity: the mark of a whore's familiarity. It was enough to destroy the childlike plenitude of the first moments of love – to make Bernard forget their recent walks, their recent nights. He told himself that Catherine must be torn away from her husband completely, that this was even his sole duty.

At table, over lunch, Claude spoke of going that afternoon to the races at Dieppe.

— The meeting seems decent enough, he said. It's the day of the Grand Steeplechase, obviously it won't be quite Auteuil or Deauville, but the horses aren't bad in these provincial races.

— How about pushing on to Deauville? said M. Plessis.

— Do you think that's really a good idea in this heat? asked Claude. And it must be a hundred and fifty or two hundred kilometres via Rouen, you know, we'd just get there for the last race.

— Anyway the roads are impossible on Sundays, said Mme Plessis. Now that everybody drives a car!

Claude said to Bernard:

— Will you come along? Unless such capitalist amusements are in contradiction with the demands of the Revolution?

How could he abandon Catherine, in God knows what dark though sunlit void?

— Idiot, replied Bernard. I'll come.

M. Rosenthal said:

— Would this be the beginning of infidelities to your principles?

— You're extraordinary, said Bernard. Anyone would think revolutionaries were all priests. You're as surprised at a communist taking a bath as at a priest smoking a cigar! Traps like that are childish.

Mme Rosenthal smiled: Bernard was going to the races, he wasn't angry. What a happy family they made!

A little before their departure, Bernard spied Catherine putting on lipstick, alone in the big drawing-room. He entered and went over to her: