Act of Passion (15 page)

Add to all this, preparations for Christmas, presents for the children and for the grown-ups, the Christmas tree and ornaments to be bought, and the crèche, used in former years, which I had not yet had time to have repaired.

Is it any wonder that I am confused about the exact order of events? But I remember clearly that it was ten o'clock in the morning and that I had a patient in my office wearing a black shawl, when I gave myself a deadline of a few weeks - three weeks, I think - to bring Armande around to my way of thinking.

But that very day at noon Babette knocked on the door of my office, which meant that my bouillon was waiting for me. For in times of unusual stress I was in the habit of interrupting my consultations for a few moments to drink a bowl of hot bouillon in the kitchen. Armande's idea, as a matter of fact. When I think back, I perceive that everything I did was regulated by Armande, and so naturally that I did not even realize it.

I was really exhausted. My hand shook a little from nervousness as I picked up the bowl. My wife happened to be in the kitchen making a cake at the time.

'Things can't go on like this,' I said, taking advantage of the fact that it would be impossible to engage in à long discussion and that she would hardly have time to reply. 'If I were sure that young girl was dependable, I think I'd engage her as an assistant.. .'

But all this, all these preoccupations I have just told you about, were, your Honour, what counted the least. The real cause of my feverish state lay elsewhere.

You see I was at the painful, the important stage of the discovery.

I did not know Martine. I was hungry to know her. It was not curiosity, but an almost physical need. And every hour lost was painful, physically painful too. So many things can happen in an hour! In spite of my dearth of imagination I thought of all the possible catastrophes.

And the worst one of all was that from one moment to the next she would not be the same.

I was conscious of the miracle that had occurred, and there was no reason for the miracle to continue.

We simply had to learn to know one another at once, no matter what the cost, to complete our total knowledge, go to the end of what, without wanting to, we had started at Nantes.

Only then, I said to myself, would I be happy. Only then would I be able to look at her with calm and confident eyes. Would I then, perhaps, be able to leave her for a few hours without trembling with suspense?

I had a thousand questions to ask her, a thousand things to tell her. I could only talk to her on rare occasions during the day and always in the presence of my mother or Armande.

We had begun at the end. It was urgent, it was indispensable to fill the voids which gave me a sort of vertigo.

For example, just to hold her hand without saying a word ...

If I slept at all during this period I have no recollection of it, and I am sure it must have been very little. I lived like a sleep-walker. My eyes were glassy, my eyelids tingled, my skin was too tender - the signs that one has reached the end of one's endurance. I can see myself in the middle of the night, biting my pillow in a rage, thinking of her sleeping only a few feet away from me.

At night she would, cough a few times before going to sleep, which was her way of sending me a final message. I would cough in answer, and I'd be willing to swear that my mother understood this coughing language too.

I don't know what would have happened if things had dragged on much longer, if they had taken place as I had envisaged. One is apt to imagine that nerves can snag like violin strings which are too tightly stretched.

This is absurd, of course. But I think one fine day I would have been capable, at table or in the drawing-room, in the street or no matter where, of suddenly starting to yell for no apparent reason.

Armande said, without making any of the objections I had expected:

'Wait at least until after Christmas before speaking to her. We'll have to discuss it first, you and I ...'

I am obliged to give you a few more professional details. You know that in the provinces we doctors are still in the habit, for our most important patients, of waiting until the end of the year before sending our bill. It is a doctor's nightmare. It was mine. Naturally we do not always keep an exact account of our visits. It is necessary to go over our appointment book, page by page, make an approximate estimate that won't startle our patient too much.

Up to that time Armande had always undertaken this task. I had never had to ask her, for she liked such minute and orderly exercises and, moreover, ever since our marriage she had quite naturally taken charge of my financial affairs, to such an extent that I was reduced to asking her for money when I wanted to buy anything.

At night, as I was undressing, she would collect the money I took out of my pockets, the amount I had received in cash for my visits during the day, and would even frown sometimes and ask for an explanation. I would have to go over again my round of visits, remember all the patients I had seen, those who had paid and those who had not paid.

This year, nevertheless, Armande complained of being overwhelmed with work, and I took advantage of a moment when I saw her plunged in her accounts to say:

'She could also help you - little by little, getting the hang of it...'

Who knows if it wasn't a trait of Armande's character which so hastened matters that I was the first to be surprised? She has always liked to manage things, whether the house or anything else. If she really loved her first husband, if, as I was always being told, she was wonderful to him, wasn't it because he was ill, because he was at her mercy, could count on nobody but her, and because she could treat him like a child?

To dominate was a need of her nature, and I don't believe it was through petty vanity or even pride. It was, I think, rather to preserve and increase the feeling that she had about herself and that she needed to keep her equilibrium.

She had not been able to live with her father, for the very reason that her father was not impressed by her and continued to treat her as a little girl, to live his own life just as though she were not in the same house. As time went on, I wonder if she would not have fallen ill or become neurasthenic.

For ten years she had under her thumb, first of all, me, who had not tried to resist and who always yielded for the sake of peace, to the point of asking her opinion even about buying a necktie or the smallest instrument of my profession - to the point of accounting to her for all my movements. There was also my mother who had yielded in her own way, who had retired to the place assigned her by Armande while still safeguarding her personality, who, it is true, obeyed because she felt that she was not at home, but remained impermeable to her daughter-in-law's influence.

Then there were my daughters, naturally more pliable. The maid. A servant who had a 'character of her own' did not last long in our house, no more than one who did not admire my wife. Finally there were all our friends, or practically all of them, all the young women of our circle who came to ask her advice. This had happened so often that Armande no longer waited to be asked, but offered her advice of her own accord on every occasion; and people had told her so often that she was never wrong, and it had become accepted as such a foregone conclusion in certain milieus of La Roche, that she could no longer conceive of a contradiction being possible.

You see why it was a stroke of genius, mentioning those end-of-the-year bills. It was putting Martine under her thumb, it was one more human being coming under her domination.

'The girl seems quite intelligent.' she murmured, 'but I wonder if she is methodical enough?...'

Because of this, your Honour, the evening I went to see Martine for the first time in her new apartment at Mme Debeurre's, I had two pieces of good news to announce. First that my wife invited her to spend Christmas Eve with us, something I should never have dared hope. And second, that before the end of the year, in less than ten days, she would, in all likelihood, be my assistant.

In spite of this, all afternoon I had the sensation of being at a loose end. Martine was no longer in the house. At luncheon she was not at the table, and I almost began to doubt my memories, to ask myself if the day before she had really been seated there opposite me, between Armande and my mother.

She was alone in a house which I didn't know, except from the outside. She was beyond my control. She was seeing other people. She spoke to them no doubt, smiled at them.

And I couldn't rush right over to her. I had to make my round of visits, come back to my office twice for urgent cases.

One more professional detail, your Honour. Forgive me, but it is necessary. When I had to go to see patients in town, I was supposed, before leaving, like most doctors, to list the names of the patients I was about to visit, so that in case of an emergency I could be reached by telephone at one house or another. In this way every moment of my time could be checked. This was one of the established rules Armande insisted upon above all others. If, as I was leaving, I forgot to write down all the addresses in the notebook, kept in the hall for the purpose, she was quick to notice it and I would not have started my car before she was knocking on the window to call me back.

How many times in my life have I been called back like that! I couldn't say anything. She was right.

I am still not sure today if it was through jealousy she acted in this way, and I believe, without believing, that it was. Do you want me to explain what I think, once for all?

There was never any question of love between us. You know what happened before our marriage. Love for her, if love there was, and I am willing to accord her that, was in the past; it was for her first husband who had died.

Our marriage was a marriage of reason. She liked my house. She liked a certain kind of life I could give her.

As for me, I had my two daughters and no one but my old Mama to look after them, which did not seem to me desirable.

Did she come to love me later on? This question has bothered me in the last few months and especially lately. Formerly I should have replied no, without hesitation. I was convinced that she loved no one but herself, that she had never loved anyone but herself.

If she was jealous, it was of her influence over me, you understand. She was afraid of seeing me break the leash she held in her hands.

I used to think all this and many other things, for, even before Martine, I had my hours of revolt.

Now that I am on the other side and that I feel so detached from everything, I am much more indulgent, or understanding.

Take, for example, when she was on the witness-stand: she might very well have made me bristle by her attitude, by her calm, by her self-assurance. You felt - and she wanted you to feel - that she harboured no resentment towards me, that she was ready, if I should be acquitted, to take me back and to nurse me as a sick man.

That too can be explained by her need of dominating, her need of having a more and more exalted idea of herself, of her character.

Well, I no longer think so. Without speaking of love, for now I know what the word means, I am convinced that, in a sense, she really loved me a little, the way she loves my daughters.

And she has always been perfect towards my daughters. Everybody at La Roche will tell you that she has acted, and still does act, just like their own mother. She has adopted them to such an extent that I have gradually and unconsciously lost interest in them.

I ask their pardon. I am their father. How can I explain to them that it is just because, as a father, I was left too little place?

Armande has loved me as she loved them, calmly and with an indulgent severity. I have never been her husband, much less her lover. I was someone she had taken under her charge, for whom she had assumed the responsibility, in whom, consequently, she felt she had proprietary rights.

Including that of regulating all my comings and goings. That I believe is the secret of her jealousy.

Mine, damn it all, when I knew Martine, was of a different sort, and I wouldn't want anyone to know jealousy like that. I don't know why that day, more than any other, remains in my mind as a day of lights and darkness. I had the impression of spending my time going from the cold obscurity of the street into the warm luminosity of interiors. From outside I saw soft lighted windows, golden shades. I covered a few yards of darkness, I removed my wet coat, and for a moment I participated in the life of a strange fireside, conscious all the time of the darkness on the other side of the window panes...

God, what a state I was in!

'She is alone in her apartment. Fat Mme Debeurre will surely go up to see her ...'

I clung to this reassuring thought. Mme Debeurre is a woman of uncertain age who has had misfortunes. Her husband was a tax collector. She lived not far from the station in a rather pretty red brick house of two stories, with three steps leading up to a front door of polished oak overloaded with brasses. During her whole married life she wanted to have children, and had consulted me on the subject; she had seen all my colleagues, she had gone to Nantes, even to Paris, receiving always the same reply.

Her husband had got himself killed by a train in the station of La Roche not two hundred yards from their house, and since then, dreading the loneliness, she had rented her second-floor apartment furnished.

To think of my being content at the thought that a Mme Debeurre, after my mother and Armande, was with Martine!

A dozen times I was on the point of going to see her between two calls. I also passed in front of the Poker-Bar. I had even less reason for going in now, and yet I almost did.

We dined to the accompaniment of forks and plates. I still had a few calls to make in town.

'Perhaps I'll drop in to see if that young girl has everything she needs. I have to write to Artari tomorrow and tell him how she's getting on.'

I feared some opposition, some objection. Armande, although she must have heard, said nothing, and my mother alone gave a rather too insistent look.