The Honeyed Peace (10 page)

'But, darling, we've only been here six weeks.'

'I'm not going to have my work interfered with.'

'Of course not. Probably the rain will stop later on. It's a fall shower. Madge Jarvis telephoned. She's here for the dressmakers. I asked her to dinner. And the Boyds. And Johnny Fitch. Shall we have a party next week?'

'Why?'

'Your birthday.'

So soon, he thought, has it come so soon again? And then it seemed years since the last one, several years lived between forty-six and forty-seven, several years hurried together. He was bewildered.

'I don't want a party.' Nor do I want to see Madge Jarvis, he thought; did June know about that? Clothes and men, but mainly clothes; Madge's interest in men wore out, eventually the man was just someone to admire her clothes. He was ashamed of Madge Jarvis, and ashamed that for months in some other year, some other place, he had obediently thought about her infuriating dresses.

He found himself waiting for the rain to stop, which it didn't, and waiting to see Madge. The afternoon was as treacherous and unsettled as the morning. He had forgotten Madge's golden handsomeness and the false way she had of looking interesting. Still, as before, those mindless eyes held promise; her body too could confuse a man into thinking it was meant for use. She used it long enough to get what she wanted: an attached admirer who would tell her how beautiful she was. He saw that Johnny Fitch was responding nicely; Johnny Fitch wanted to bed that lightly bronzed clothes-horse. Hendricks was saddened and alarmed because he felt nothing except boredom.

'Telephone me. The Crillon,' Madge said softly as he helped her into her sable tippet. 'Darling,' she said in a warm voice. Hendricks nodded. He would not telephone. Johnny could attend to her. Johnny did no work of any kind.

The voice woke him as usual, asking, 'What are you doing here?' He turned to the window and saw the permanent rain. He had to force himself to sit at his long oak table, so neatly arranged with the tools of his trade; and the story stuck dead after two paragraphs. He looked at the paper as if he had found something alive and hideous on it, a spotted spider, an oozing worm. It was only ten o'clock; what became of a day that would be so long? Three hours until lunchtime with nothing to do, no one to be, no place to go. What did a man do with the morning, if he couldn't work; and how could he face the afternoon when he had already used up his energy living through the morning?

'I won't be able to stand this, you know,' he said at lunch. 'I couldn't work again.'

'Matty! How too terrible! Perhaps you're not feeling well?'

'I feel awful.'

'But then let's telephone Dr Dupré. The Boyds say he's wonderful.'

'It's the rain.'

'We can't do much about the rain,' June said.

'We'll have to leave.'

'Now, Matty, really it's
too
silly. Where would you want to go?'

Where? Yes, where? Suddenly he knew that there was nowhere on earth he wanted to go; no new name pleased him; it would be raining, one way or another, everywhere. And another house, another Ermilla, another cook? What for? Change, he thought, does one good. It does not. It is only change. It is only wearing shorts instead of flannel trousers; only smelling sea instead of gasoline; only mountains instead of house-fronts, sun instead of rain.

'Do you like Paris?' he asked June.

'I adore it.'

He thought that, at forty-three, she still looked like one of the dowdier, smaller, neutral types of flower: marguerite, bachelor's button, pansy. Paris, also, shrank to her size and became a pretty place for her to be pretty in.

'All right. But I don't want anyone here for a week or two and I don't want to go out. Make your plans on your own.'

'Whatever you say, darling.' I'll get Johnny Fitch to squire me round, June thought, unless Madge has him already. If not Johnny, there's Alain Clermont, better for my French anyhow; he dances well. Matthew was easy and reliable, but not exciting; how could he be, after twenty years? It was all right to be unexciting, but all wrong to be troublesome; one could not tolerate a man who made scenes because the weather affected him.

I'll go out and walk, Hendricks thought, or sit in a bar; but there was the rain and, having done nothing all morning, he had no strength to do nothing all afternoon. I ought to have a coin collection, he thought. It was odd how writers never seemed to have anything to do except write or live; you never found writers (or did you?) deep in remarkable disinterested pursuits like Etruscan pots or astronomy or the respiratory system of frogs. What do I usually do in the afternoons? he wondered, having this unmovable afternoon on his hands. I mooch around, he answered himself, I suspend judgement, I wait for night. And at night? At night I do what June has arranged. But I have friends; I might go and see a friend now, taking a taxi through this goddamned rain. Who were his friends? They were a lot of people he knew. Women were more diverting than friends; at present there were no women. He had not recovered from the fatigue and disappointment of the last affair, at Charlotte Amalie. Besides, now that he thought of it, it was appalling to use women only as a means to get through the afternoon. This is terrible, he told himself, just because I haven't worked for two days.

June telephoned Dr Dupré and made charm over the wire and got a prescription for luminal and sent Ermilla to collect it. She was displeased with her husband. Matthew could keep himself in sleeping pills and not ask these absurd little services like a helpless baby; besides, why should he need drugs to sleep?

'You ought to get more exercise. Have a nice evening. I'm going to the theatre with Alain Clermont.'

The luminal produced a thick bloated kind of sleep until three in the morning, when Hendricks woke, thinking: I can't work because I don't know what that story is about. The story was planned as if it were a conducted tour with all points of historical interest, museums, hotels, hours of arrival and departure listed in advance. He went to his workroom and studied, for a cold hour, the folder where he kept the main outline, the biographies of the characters, and the chapter outlines. There was nothing lacking and nothing different; this was as well packaged as the fourteen novels which had preceded it. I'm drugged, he thought, I don't know what I'm thinking; tomorrow morning I will get up and work, that's all there is to it.

At seven, the voice woke him with its guttural question. 'You bastard,' Hendricks said aloud, 'I wouldn't tell you if I knew.' It was still raining.

'Ermilla,' he said, when the maid brought his tray, '
il pleut toujours comme ça, en Octobre, à Paris?'

'Mais je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Vous savez, moi, je suis de Rouen.'

'Et à Rouen, il pleut comme ça?'

'Je ne sais pas, Monsieur.'

Why not? Hendricks thought; she can bloody well know if it rains at Rouen since she lives there, for God's sake; she doesn't have to be a complete imbecile. 'June,' he said, stamping into his wife's room, 'get another maid, get someone pretty, put her in a blue uniform for a change.'

'Matthew, what is the matter with you?' Puffy-eyed, June stared at him over her breakfast tray, her letters, the Paris
Herald Tribune
, the telephone book. She had been out late, dancing; she could not remember when she had seen Matthew in the morning; the maids were none of his business; this was going too far.

'I think I'll go to a hotel for a few days. The house is getting on my nerves.'

'Honestly, Matthew. Pull yourself together. See a doctor. Play golf. Do something sensible. What will everyone think if you move to a hotel?'

'Whatever they like. Whatever you tell them.'

'What hotel?'

'I'll let you know.'

For a day, the suite at the Georges V with its colourless modern furniture, its woven curtains patterned in a tasteful design of knotted intestines, seemed a useful change; it amused him; he ordered drinks in his room, delighted to see no green uniforms, delighted not to feel June anywhere around. The view was different too, but on second thoughts not different enough. He had never liked the Right Bank; it was June who considered it bohemian if not common to live on the Left Bank unless you had a huge inherited house, it was June who selected their stylish maisonette in the Square du Bois de Boulogne. He moved the next day to the Lutetia, and the golden-oak furniture and the orange and blue flowers of the wallpaper brightened him; he felt that he was back in a remembered world that had been free and fun some time ago. If he changed hotels every two days that would keep him so busy he would not need to work. If he took sleeping pills at night, say twice in the night, he would not have a very long day. Then he could walk around and buy books along the quais. He did not want any of the books one bought along the quais; he would, instead, just walk; as soon as the rain stopped. He moved to the Hotel Jacob, where the walls were the colour of old dried blood, a knob was missing from the brass bed, and the mirror in the wardrobe rippled like water. He tried the Hotel Littré and did not find it funny, just sad, worn to colourlessness by a thousand passing strangers who did not have enough money. He was sick of moving and hotels. He sat at the small wobbly writing-table provided by the Hotel Littré, with the weak lamp-bulb burning against the grey morning light, and thought: I cannot write anywhere or ever. I don't know how I started to write and I don't know how I managed to write so much, and nothing I write makes sense, and who are those people anyhow and where is that island and what do they think they are doing there and why?

He had been awake for four hours, he needed a bath and a shave, he could smell himself, grey and dank like the towels, the room was cold. Clearly, in front of him, he heard the known voice asking, 'What are you doing here?'

He raised his eyes and saw, without surprise, a man; head and shoulders and fat, square, white hands.

'Pleased to meet you, at last,' Hendricks said; 'you look just like your voice.'

The man said nothing; apparently he had finished talking. He studied Matthew Hendricks through clean gold-rimmed glasses. He saw Matthew Hendricks entirely and had no opinion.

'What's your name?' Hendricks asked and said, into the silence, 'Don't bother, I know it anyhow. Well, Doctor, what can I do for you?'

He knew it was the other way around but he did not intend to be an affable or easy patient. He would haggle about the price and he would lie as much as he felt like. He would lead Dr Wolfgang Raumwitz a pretty chase.

'I did not ask you to come,' Hendricks said, 'and I do not specially want or need your services. First of all, I am going to pack and go home. You may think me a person suffering from some neurosis with a fancy name, who has to flit from hotel to hotel. You are mistaken. I am upset, at the moment, by an inability to work and I am accustomed to work.'

Dr Raumwitz said nothing, stared without blinking and with impersonal contempt, and when Hendricks had lifted his suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, Dr Raumwitz was gone.

Quite right, Hendricks thought with satisfaction, he could be reported to the medical profession, very unethical to break in on people and solicit trade. Then Hendricks had one of those terrifying suspended moments, knowing this had all happened before, but where, to whom, in what life, and he thought: there was no one here, I've started talking to myself; this is very bad, I better get on home and cut this out; I'll begin to think I really did see that fellow if I'm not careful.

June Hendricks was relieved to find her husband home at lunch-time. For six days she had been telling her friends that Matty had at last turned into a writer, he found hotels were more inspirational, too comic of Matty, such an affectation, it must be something you caught from Paris. She had done this cheerfully and well and her friends believed Matthew had gone off on a toot with a lady which was nobody's business. The Hendricks were married for keeps, that was clear; they both had flirts from time to time; their marriage was considered very good; June's manners, in this instance, were faultless. June would have accepted a short trip with a woman but was annoyed by a break in custom. She wished always to know where she stood; a need of hotel rooms for working was new and disagreeable.

'I hope you worked well,' she said at lunch in an unfriendly voice.

'I didn't work at all.'

She refused to discuss it; she would not indulge Matthew in this folly. She told him her news: the theatre, Balenciaga's collection, the Boyds were going to Tangier since a fortune-teller had predicted a wet winter in Paris, Madge Jarvis and Johnny Fitch were a thing, they spent their evenings at Monseigneur's, which was so childish you could only do it if beginning a romance, Ermilla had a boil poor creature, she thought they might join the Boyds for Christmas or go to Tunis on their own. He did not listen; he wondered if he changed his schedule and worked in the afternoons it would go better.

His workroom looked abandoned and strange, he seemed to have been away from it for months. The last chapter had been written by someone else; he went back and read through the whole book, it was more than half finished. He could not imagine who had dreamed it up, nothing was familiar. It was a bore, which did not surprise him. The books were not written to please him, they were for other people whose tastes he had always understood. Suddenly I he felt he had come to the wrong house, this was not his address; the room seemed queer because he did not belong in it. He went into the bathroom and studied his face; to reassure himself. More than ever it appeared to be someone else's, and to have no connexion with him. I'll read, he decided, and made himself comfortable on the couch in his workroom. He tried a detective story and
Madame Bovary
and
Paradise Lost
and then started reading
Black's Medical Dictionary
, very slowly, saying the words in his mind. He got up, put on his raincoat and hat, and left the house.

He was sitting on a bench in the sodden Tuileries Gardens when Dr Raumwitz returned. Dr Raumwitz, oddly, looked just the same outdoors as indoors; he had on a starched white medical gown with a collar like a Russian blouse, he was inordinately clean. His skin was colourless but not sick, he had thin brownish hair combed over a large bald spot, his eyes were fish-round and pale blue. Dr Raumwitz appeared to be waiting, but not for anyone or anything.