The Conspiracy (15 page)

— How was your husband last night? he said.

— Dreadful, said Catherine, closing her eyes.

It was a reply which clearly hinted at everything Bernard had to fear. Yet he breathed again, as though accepting his brother's exercise of his husbandly function at the weekend – for he felt himself preferred. He had a reaction of pride: a desire to strut, to run outside with Catherine and cleanse her of her husband's body in the wind.

‘That brute doubtless thought only of himself,' he told himself, thinking of his nights of patience when he would sacrifice his own pleasure to Catherine's.

Catherine reopened her eyes and looked at Bernard, then continued spreading lipstick on her lower lip with her little finger.

They left. On the Dieppe road he mused in the back of the car beside Comtesse Kamenskaia, who was perhaps not a comtesse he said to himself; it's hard to tell, with her white breasts set high – they haven't made them like that for three hundred years – and her cooing. He imagined himself alone in the company of Catherine, of an escaped Catherine, finally stripped of everything, carried away on an impulse so passionate she would no longer recognize herself, in Italy or on Naxos. For every man there exists a place where he imagines love: for Bernard, since '25, it had been the Greek islands.

‘Naxos,' he thought, ‘I was happy there with a sister. What happiness to live there with a woman I loved, who'd sleep in my bed and not leave me alone at night!'

At the races he remembered Anna Karenina: he saw himself running, jumping and finally falling from his horse like Vronsky. Would Catherine utter a cry similar to Anna's cry, which would reveal all? Would she have the icy courage not even to blush?

On the way back Claude was not happy. In the Prix d'Elbeuf he had backed Theocritus to win, but Theocritus had paid out only 8.50 francs for a place, behind Dragonfly. In the Prix de Clôture, Lady of the Parish had paid out 97.50 francs and, of course, he had not backed her. One winner out of five races, which had paid nine francs – he had nothing to be pleased about.

— It's not the money, he said, but I detest losing.

He complained about provincial meetings and about the idiotic names of the horses. The Comtesse, who was sitting next to him, without hearing what he said answered him with accounts of races at Tsarskoe Selo. The weather was perfect, the heat was diminishing, the storms forecast by Mme Lyons had not broken out. Bernard caressed Catherine's wrist and the wind on the road eventually lulled her to sleep. Bernard did not like to see a woman he thought he loved sleeping: he was afraid a hateful woman – and one who would hate him – might take her place while she slept, at the very moment when nothing but death could take her body from him. He woke Catherine.

— Why did you wake me? she said.

— So that I wouldn't lose you, Bernard replied.

How romantic!

That evening, while they were all talking in the small drawing-room, Bernard and Catherine left and went to stretch out side by side on the lawn, out of range of the rectangles of light from the windows and the hum of voices in the house. Bernard looked at the sky and said:

— When we were sixteen, Laforgue and I, we had a soft spot for a star called Aldebaran; we thought it was that star over there, just below the Great Bear to the left. Perhaps that's not really Aldebaran but Cassiopeia, or Betelgeuse, or some other Greek or Arab lady, but it was Aldebaran for whom we had a liking.

— Yes, Catherine said.

— Catherine, said Bernard. Leave everything, let's go away, all this can't go on. These compromises will become vile. People like me can't be content with complicity.

— Let me breathe, said Catherine. You really do have to bring things to a head right away! Don't you understand the pleasure of hesitating? Aren't we happy?

— No, Bernard said, people aren't happy when they're split in two. I don't want you to hesitate, I don't even want you to breathe, I want to take you away.

Bernard undid Catherine's blouse, kissed her breasts. She pushed him away, covered her bosom.

— You're utterly crazy, Bernard, she said.

— Thank God! said Bernard. And I don't even have the excuse of the moon, as somebody else said, you know,
It is the very error of the moon; She comes more near the earth than she was wont, And makes men mad .
. . The first quarter will appear only in two days' time, close to the earth, just above the elms in the Besnards' place . . .

— You're a fifteen-year-old, she said, you're a schoolboy.

— Catherine, said Bernard, there are too many people round us, we can't hear each other any more. What we need is great expanses of stone or water, a desert, the sea, or mountains with lakes, slopes covered with barren snow the colour of hyacinths or forget-me-nots . . .

Catherine rose to her knees and bent over Bernard to kiss him, then they returned to the drawing-room.

— Why don't you all go outside? asked Catherine. It's one of those nights . . .

They all went out onto the terrace and, of course, everybody exclaimed at all those stars. Mme Plessis, who loved nature, said it was a sin to stay cooped up indoors when the weather was like this, Catherine was quite right.

— In days gone by, said M. Rosenthal, I was very strong on cosmography. But now, if my life depended on it, you couldn't get me to say where the Pole Star was . . .

XV

Claude went off again on Monday morning at first light. It was 2 September: like every other day, it was going to be fine. Bernard, still in bed, heard the car's engine turn in the dawn silence and – far away across the fields, on the farms – the last cockcrows greeting the break of day.

— Everything's going to start all over again, he said to himself. We'll be doing this for ever.

Down below, the engine roared: automatically Bernard counted the successive gear changes. Claude drove away, Bernard went back to sleep.

Everything should have started all over again, if Bernard had been capable of rediscovering the careless ardour of those first days; living only for his sleepless nights at the summit of La Vicomté; being, from one day to the next, only remembrance and anticipation of the dark. But he lapsed into endless reflections upon existence and fate. He no longer thought about anything but saving Catherine, forcing her to be happy in accordance with the idea he had of bliss. All men are like this – but they rarely find women to put up with imposed bliss of this kind. If Bernard was already thinking about organizing the future, he was going to lose everything: you can preserve love only by welcoming it with your eyes shut.

That evening, he once more joined Catherine in her room. She was waiting for him, stretched out on her bed: she was telling herself how pleasure was about to be reborn for a further night. When Bernard entered she jumped from the bed and ran to kiss him, but he told her they must talk. Catherine sighed, knelt on her bed or went to lean out of the window, above the dark, moist countryside lit up nightly by summer lightning.

Pacing up and down the room bare-footed, Bernard explained to Catherine in a low voice how he wanted to rescue her from complacency and death, and how one could accept life only by laying down conditions for it – by dominating it with the most exigent demands. Catherine finally asked him what he expected of her:

— Absolutely everything, he said. At once. Why do you resist?

Catherine resisted like life, passively.

Was she then just a woman equipped for pleasure, but dying of love for the world, money, consideration and respect? Bernard was frightened by the thought that perhaps Catherine was stupid, for one can triumph over everything but not over foolishness. Or that she had no desire to leave her husband; that she found him bearable now that another man loved her and was avenging her for Claude's existence; and that she was in fact capable, like most women, of enjoying a revenge in falsehood and secrecy.

— I want you to have nothing left but me, Bernard said. I want you to start everything all over again. We'll go away, I have a bit of money, we won't even be very poor . . . Nothing keeps us apart – not even a child, not even responsibilities. You're free: free as a barren woman, free as an orphan. You don't owe them anything . . . After a few months of idleness and love, we shall have become companions, accomplices, we'll be able to communicate by half-spoken hints and allusions, we shall return. I'll begin the struggle and the anger once again . . . You'll see, eventually you'll follow me – it's a life that offers joy. You'll be released entirely from your first and second lives . . .

— Don't tempt me, Catherine answered. I don't know where you're dragging me, let me wait a while longer . . .

— No, Bernard said, the holidays have lasted long enough. It's time for you to abandon everything.

Ten years later, Bernard would not have made plans – he would doubtless have felt confident of carrying the day through patience. But a young man believes himself so insecurely established in his life that he wants forcibly to chain the future, to obtain pledges and promises. He is the only creature who has the heart to demand everything, and think he has been cheated if he does not have everything. Later, nothing will be left but contracts and exchanges.

Everything, it seemed, was owed to Bernard – though he would one day restore all that he now asked should be bestowed upon him. It was necessary for Catherine to commit herself for her whole life. Might he add that he wished his victory over his brother and parents not to be a clandestine victory, of which the vanquished would be unaware, but a scandal – a rupture – that would make Catherine the public, radiant, shocking witness of his triumph? He still barely suspected this secret. He said merely:

— You cannot remain on the side of this angerless world, where everything's settled peaceably. Where money alone must remain undivided, while hearts are parcelled out . . .

He sensed that Catherine was fleeing; that each renewal of love into which she drew him dispensed her from answering everything; and that she kissed him so fiercely only in order to have a reason not to speak.

— No, Bernard would answer.

These new sleepless nights were full of bitterness and time lost.

Then Bernard received a letter from Laforgue, who was now far from his thoughts. Philippe wrote:

Dear old Rosen,

you will find enclosed with this letter my modest contribution to the Conspiracy: the plans, which will surely appear just as obscure to you as sketches of flying machines by Leonardo da Vinci, are elucidated by a number of typewritten sheets and some blueprints. Our friends will understand these technical arabesques. The plans are of a model boilerworks they have just completed at the railway workshops which, as you know, my father runs.

I have just returned from England, where I spent six weeks and where I explored the Lake District on foot. There is a great deal to be said about Great Britain and the Englanders – if you like, it could be for the journal.

Family life lacks fire, and lamplit dinners with the maid in felt slippers in a corner lack passion. My father is becoming more and more reduced to his condition as an engineer and product of the Polytechnique – and I know nothing about him: he would doubtless have to be ill, or suddenly struck down by some social cataclysm, for the shells to crack and the man living inside them to make his appearance. In the meantime, he displays an unbearable self-satisfaction and professional pride which overwhelm me. The evenings are full of speeches about the manufacture of machines, the management of firms and the sly vices of the working class. These meals would dismay the members of your family, where the mistress of the house never fails to exclaim in English, when a guest begins talking about contangos and settlements:
Don't talk shop!
My mother is a decorative, frivolous person, who spends her time seeing ladies of her own station and who lives in pretty well exactly the same manner as the wife of a high official in Hanoi or Casablanca, who does not mix at all with the natives. She has moments of affection when I will suddenly see her come into my room, where she likes to tuck me up in bed just as she used to when I was ten years old: this action, which for years never failed to touch me, impresses me much less today. All this lacks reality, and it is difficult to be passionately fond of phantoms; but they inspire in me a kind of pity, which my father repays with affection and with scorn.

So I gave some thought to our projects and, since my father was talking with pride about the boilerworks constructed from his plans which he says is the most modern in Europe, I said to myself that perhaps there was here a subject for research that might be of interest to us. No one is more open to flattery than men like my father, and when I told him I should like to visit the new installations, he was astonished to see an abstract and light-minded intellectual like me being interested in the virile exactitudes of technology. I sensed the rebirth in his breast of a hope he entertained, for a time, of seeing me, after my agrégation, become an expert in rationalization and Taylorism – somebody like
M. de Fréminville
or
M. le Châtelier
– although I explained to him a dozen times that I had no taste for that kind of sophisticated spying and grassing, with chronometer and slide-rule. I do not have to tell you that my father is one of those stewards of capitalism who, after the War, were dazzled by the
neo-Saint-Simonians
, and that he views Ford as the greatest man of the twentieth century.

I visited the factory and the new boilerworks, which struck me as clean and sensible. My father showed me blueprints indicating the location of the machines, the order of operations and standard diagrams for the total overhaul of locomotives – he talked to me at great length about tubes, lagging sheets and struts. All this was at the back of a filing-cabinet and already gathering dust. Since the cabinet had no key, I wonder if these papers are really very sensational. But I reckoned I owed our project at least a symbolic collaboration, so I took advantage of a fresh visit to the factory to remain there alone in my father's office and take the plans and diagrams. This act – contrary to all filial values – struck me as entirely natural. Here are the results. I entrust them to you. Give me some news of yourself. I suppose La Vicomté, where you are browsing, is not much more fun than the villa at Grafenstaden and the streets of Strasburg. Yours.

Bernard was surprised to discover that this letter did not have the least effect on him. He was a bit alarmed, however, to think that an idea he had launched with enthusiasm, but which he had ceased to care about, could still produce consequences and lead a kind of autonomous existence. He told himself that he would have to reflect, but there were other things to be done and Catherine's love was more important than all the plots of youth. He reread Laforgue's letter and found that it had a childish ring – for a woman had just abruptly given him man's estate. He put Laforgue's papers away in a drawer and endeavoured to forget them. However, since he felt a vague unease each time he thought that he ought to have answered his friend but the answer was still not forthcoming, he eventually went to send off a telegram from the post office at Grandcourt:

‘Letter received safely. Thanks. So long.'

This missive set him at peace with himself. Laforgue wondered what the telegram hid. He could not yet guess that Rosenthal wished to make a new start, accepted that his friends might think he had betrayed them, and was already exclaiming – with an inner impulse of defiance:

‘So what? They can't imagine what strength a person derives from the carefree state born of love. I'm ready to renounce everything, even the pleasure of influence. They'll have to grow up without me!'

A week went by in this manner. Claude was about to return to La Vicomté for a month, M. Rosenthal was already packing his bags to go back to Paris. Bernard divined that he would never endure for thirty days what he had barely stood without exploding for a weekend. So he resolved to leave and give Catherine a further month's respite to make up her mind to choose his bed. He was counting on the fact that she would find her husband's company hard to put up with, and that the pleasure he was at least sure of having given her granted him a power over her which absence would cause to grow: she had made him a party to many humiliated confidences concerning Claude.

But Catherine lacked imagination – and her body memory. Bernard never suspected that she had welcomed the contractions and releases of pleasure only as pieces of good fortune, as delicious accidents: she did not say she would no longer be able to live without them. She was a woman who, in love, was like those people whom music overwhelms at the time they hear it, but who cannot remember a tune.