The Woman Destroyed

‘Yours are astray. It’s always the same with you. Out of optimism or systematic obstinacy you hide the truth from yourself and when it is forced upon you you either collapse or else you explode. What you can’t bear—and of coarse I bear the brunt of it—is that you had too high an opinion of Philippe.’

‘You always had too low a one.’

‘No. It was merely that I never had much in the way of illusions about his abilities or his character. Yet even so I thought too highly of him.’

‘A child is not something you can evaluate like an experiment in the laboratory. He turns into what his parents make him. You backed him to lose, and that was no help to him at all.’

‘And you always back to win. You’re free to do so. But only if you can take it when you lose. And you can’t take it. You always try to get out of paying; you fly into a rage, you accuse other people right and left—anything at all not to own yourself in the wrong.’

‘Believing in someone is not being in the wrong.’

‘Pigs will fly the day you admit you were mistaken.’

I know. When I was young I was perpetually in the wrong and it was so difficult for me ever to be in the right that now I am very reluctant ever to blame myself. But I was in no mood to acknowledge it. I grasped the whisky bottle. ‘Unbelievable! You as prosecuting counsel against me!’

I filled a glass and emptied it in one gulp. André’s face, André’s voice: the same man, another; beloved, hated; this anomaly went down inside my body. My sinews, my muscles contracted in a tetanic convulsion.

‘From the very beginning you refused to discuss it calmly. Instead of that you have been swooning about all over the place … And now you’re going to get drunk? It’s grotesque,’ he said, as I began my second glass.

‘I shall get drunk if I want. It’s nothing to do with you: leave me alone.’

I carried the bottle into my room. I settled in bed with a spy-story but I could not read. Philippe. I had been so wholly taken up with my fury against André that his image had faded a little. Suddenly he was there smiling at me with unbearable sweetnesss through the swimming of the whisky. Too high an opinion of him: no. I had loved him for his weaknesses: if he had been less temperamental and less casual he would have needed me less. He would never have been so adorably tender if he had nothing to beg forgiveness for. Our reconciliations, tears, kisses. But in those days it was only a question of peccadilloes. Now it was something quite different. I swallowed a brimming glass of whisky, the walls began to turn, and I sank right down.

The light made its way through my eyelids. I kept them closed. My head was heavy: I was deathly sad. I could not remember my dreams. I had sunk down into black depths—liquid and stifling, like diesel-oil—and now, this morning, I was only just coming to the surface. I opened my eyes. André was sitting in an armchair at the foot of the bed, watching me with a smile. ‘My dear, we can’t go on like this.’

It was he, the past, the present André, the same man; I acknowledged it. But there was still that iron bar in my chest. My lips trembled. Stiffen even more, sink to the bottom, drown myself in the depths of loneliness and the night. Or try to catch this outstretched hand. He was talking in that even, calming voice I love. He admitted that he had been wrong. But it was for my sake that he had spoken to Philippe. He knew we were both so miserable that he had determined to step in right away, before our break could become definitive.

‘You are always so gay and alive, and you have no idea how wretched it made me to see you eating your heart out! I quite understand that at the time you were furious with me. But don’t forget what we are for one another: you mustn’t hold it against me for ever.’

I gave a weak smile; he came close and put an arm round my shoulders. I clung to him and wept quietly. The warm physical pleasure of tears running down my cheek. What a relief! It is so tiring to hate someone you love.

‘I know why I lied to you,’ he said to me a little later. ‘Because I’m growing old. I knew that telling you the truth would mean a scene: that would never have held me back once, but now the idea of a quarrel makes me feel weary. I took a short cut.’

‘Does that mean you are going to lie to me more and more?’

‘No, I promise you. And in any case I shan’t see Philippe often: we haven’t much to say to one another.’

‘Quarrels make you feel tired: but you bawled me out very thoroughly yesterday evening, for all that.’

‘I can’t bear it when you sulk. It’s much better to shout and scream.’

I smiled at him. ‘Maybe you’re right. We had to get out of it.’

He took me by the shoulders. ‘We are out of it, really out of it? You aren’t cross with me any more?’

‘Not any more at all. It’s over and done with.’

It was over: we were friends again. But had we said everything we had to say to one another? I had not, at all events. There was still something that rankled—the way André just gave in to old age. I did not want to talk about it to him now: the sky had to be quite clear again first. And what about him? Had he any mental reservations? Was he serious in blaming me for what he called my systematically stubborn optimism? The storm had been too short to change anything between us: but Was it not a sign that for some time past—since when?—something had in fact been imperceptibly changing?

Something has changed, I said to myself as we drove down the motorway at ninety miles an hour. I was sitting next to André; our eyes saw the same road and the same sky; but between us, invisible and intangible, there was an insulating layer. Was he aware of it? Yes, certainly he was. The reason why he had suggested this drive was that he hoped it might bring to life the memory of other drives in the past and so bring us wholly together again: it was not like them at all, however, because he did not look forward to deriving the least pleasure from it. I ought to have been grateful for his kindness: but I was not. I was hurt by his indifference. I had felt it so distinctly that I had almost refused, but he would have taken the refusal as a mark of ill-will. What was happening to us? There had been quarrels in our life, but always over serious matters—over the bringing up of Philippe, for example. They were genuine conflicts that we resolved violently, but quickly and for good. This time it had been a great whirling of fog, or smoke without fire; and because of its very vagueness two days had not quite cleared it away. And then again, in former times bed was the place for our stormy reconciliations. Trifling grievances were utterly burnt away in amorous delight, and we found ourselves together again, happy and renewed. Now we were deprived of that resource.

I saw the signpost; I stared and stared again. ‘What? Already? We only set off twenty minutes ago.’

‘I drove fast,’ said André.

Milly. When Mama used to take us to see Grandmama, what an expedition it was! It was the country, vast golden wheat-fields, and we picked poppies at their edges. That remote village was now nearer to Paris than Neuilly or Auteuil had been in Balzac’s day.

André found it hard to park the car, for it was market-day—swarms of cars and pedestrians. I recognized the old covered market, the Lion d’Or, the houses and their faded tiles. But the square was completely changed by the stalls that were set up in it. The plastic pots and toys, the millinery, tinned food, scent and the jewellery were in no way reminiscent of the old village fairs. It was Monoprix or Inno shops spread out in the open air. Glass. doors and walls: a big glittering stationery shop, filled with books and magazines with shiny covers. Grandmama’s house, once a little outside the village, had been replaced by a five-storey building, and it was now right inside the town.

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘It’s not my Milly any more.’ Nothing is the same any more, and that’s certain: neither Milly, nor Philippe, nor André. Am I?

‘Twenty minutes to reach Milly is miraculous,’ I said as we got back into the car. ‘Only it’s not Milly any longer.’

‘There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heart-breaking, both at the same time.’

I reflected. ‘You’ll laugh at my optimism again, but for me it’s above all miraculous.’

‘But so it is for me too. The heart-breaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.’

‘I don’t think so. You do lose in yourself as well, but you also gain.’

‘You lose much more than you gain. To tell you the truth, I don’t see what gain there is, anyhow. Can you tell me?’

‘It’s pleasant to have a long past behind one.’

‘You think you have it? I don’t, as far as mine is concerned. Just you try telling it over to yourself.’

‘I know it’s there. It gives depth to the present.’

‘All right. What else?’

‘You have a much greater intellectual command of things. You forget a great deal, certainly; but in a way even the things one has forgotten are available to one.’

‘In your line, maybe. For my part, I am more and more ignorant of everything that is not my own special subject. I should have to go back to the university like an ordinary undergraduate to be up to date with quantum physics.’

‘There’s nothing to stop you.’

‘Perhaps I will.’

‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘We agree about everything; yet not in this. I can’t see what you lose in growing old.’

He smiled. ‘Youth.’

‘It’s not in itself a valuable thing.’

‘Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigour, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.’