Jezebel (15 page)

She kissed Gladys on the cheek with her painted lips; it left a smudge of lipstick that Gladys tried secretly to wipe away from her trembling face.

‘You poor, poor darling. You loved her so much …’ Gladys walked over to join her lover who was standing at the door. He had heard Lily’s last few words.

‘You had a daughter?’ he asked as he followed her through the crushed streamers and confetti that slid away beneath her high heels. ‘You never told me. Was she still a child when it happened?’

‘Yes,’ said Gladys in hushed tones, ‘a very young child.’

It was raining. The street sloped down towards the place Blanche, shimmering and flickering in the early dawn light.

In the spring of 1930 Gladys met Aldo Monti. He was handsome. He had a square, hard, clean-shaven face, a heavy, masculine head and piercing eyes. His features bore an almost inhuman expression of determination and self-control, the kind you no longer find on English faces, but only on foreigners who are trying to copy them. All his life, Monti had forced himself to appear English in his speech and mannerisms. He was even careful of his thoughts, out of fear that they might not be pure enough, English enough. He did not possess a great fortune. He skilfully managed his money, but life was starting to become difficult.

Very quickly, he pictured Gladys as a possible wife. She was beautiful. She was extremely rich, and her money was from honourable sources. He found her attractive. Certainly, she had had other lovers, he knew that, but her affairs had never been sordid or self-seeking. He courted her for several months, cunningly and cautiously, then asked her to marry him.

They were visiting some Italian friends of Monti who lived in Paris. It was a beautiful autumn day and the
garden was still full of sunlight. At the entrance of the house, you could see a shaft of light, as soft and golden as honey, through which shone the women’s light dresses.

Gladys wore a muslin dress and a light, almost transparent straw hat that half covered her lovely hair. Beneath the short white little veil, her wide, anxious eyes rarely looked directly at anyone, and even then she would quickly lower her eyelids. She walked slowly next to Monti until they reached a bronze fountain whose edges were carved with a cluster of naked children. She leaned against it and, without thinking, began stroking the beautiful, cold, polished little bodies.

‘Gladys, my darling, please be my wife. I don’t have much to offer you, I know. I’m poor, but I have one of the oldest, most respected names in Italy and I would be so proud to make it yours. You love me, don’t you, Gladys?’

She sighed. Yes, she did love him. For the first time in many, many years, she saw in a man something more than an affair with no future. Here finally was someone who was offering to be with her for eternity, to reassure her, to protect her from herself. She was deeply weary of the pursuit of love that had become her life. Anxiously counting her conquests that became more precarious and difficult, seeing lonely old age edging closer and closer with each passing day. What a nightmare! Finally, she would be sheltered away from life on a warm, strong man’s shoulder, not someone passing through her life for a moment, but another Richard; she’d found another Richard. She lowered her eyes. He looked at her fine lips; she was wearing lipstick; her mouth looked anxious, tense at the corners. She didn’t reply.

‘We’d be so happy together. Please marry me,’ he said again.

‘It would be foolish,’ she said weakly.

‘But why?’

She said nothing. Marriage … Her date of birth … He was thirty-five and she … She couldn’t admit her exact age even to herself. Mad, painful shame swept through her. No, never, never! Even if he married her in spite of that, how would she rid herself of the idea that he only wanted her money, that he would leave her one day, perhaps not soon, or in a year, but in ten years. Ten years would go by so quickly. And then … He’d still be young, but she … ‘But actually, God is granting me a reprieve,’ she thought desperately. ‘One day, if I’m ill or have a fever or am tired, I’ll wake up and I’ll be old, old, old … And he’ll know …’

‘No, no,’ she said sweetly, ‘not marriage. Can’t we go on loving each other with no obligations, no ties of any kind?’

‘If you loved me,’ he said coldly, ‘you would find such ties pleasant and easy. If I mean anything to you, Gladys, you must marry me.’

Then she thought it might be possible: with money, and running the risk of a scandal and blackmail, she could change her identity documents to hide the date that haunted her thoughts, her sleep, her dreams. She was a woman; she had never looked further than tomorrow.

‘You mean more to me than you could ever imagine, my darling,’ she said to Monti, with her dazzling, weary smile.

Their engagement was made official and a little while
afterwards Gladys left to go back to the country where she’d been born. There, she got a copy of her birth certificate, scratched out a number from the date and, with this fake document, she saw to it that all the other documents she’d ever been given throughout her life were corrected. When she got all the revised papers back, she returned to the little village where she’d been born and found some official pen-pusher who was willing to change her birth certificate to the same date as the other documents. It cost her a fortune, but in the spring of 1931 she finally managed officially to take ten years off her age. Just ten years, because far away there was a child’s marble tombstone with a false date, and that date was impossible to change.

Ten years. She could admit to being forty-six, ten years older than Monti. Her age, her sin, her crime still haunted her. To this man whom she loved, she wanted to be a child, weak and delicate once more, held tightly in his strong arms. She had to be understanding, maternal, but she wanted to be loved and admired, the favourite among all women, not as a friend, not as a wife, but as a mistress, as the radiant young woman she once had been in the past.

She never found the courage to marry Monti.

One autumn day five years later, Gladys was on her way home; she was walking down an empty road that ran alongside a wood. It was getting dark, even though it was barely four o’clock. Dusk in Paris had the scent of a damp forest. Gladys had sent the car and driver away; she walked quickly, enjoying the smell of the fresh, humid air. There was not a soul in sight. Only a dog ran on ahead of her, sniffing the ground. The houses were dark behind their closed shutters; the empty little gardens glistened, moist from the rain.

Suddenly she saw a young man standing beneath a lamppost; he was wearing a grey raincoat but no hat and he seemed to be waiting for her. She looked at him in surprise and automatically reached up to touch her pearls beneath her fur jacket. He let her pass, but when she was a few steps ahead of him he began to follow her. She walked more quickly, but he soon caught up with her; she could hear him breathing behind her. She walked faster. Then he stopped, seemed to disappear into the fog, but a moment later, after she’d forgotten about him, she could hear his footsteps behind her once more. He followed her
in silence until they reached a lamppost and then called out to her quietly, ‘Madame …’

He had a thin young face; his long, delicate neck tilted forward, as if it were being pulled by the weight of his heavy head.

‘Won’t you listen to what I have to say, Madame? Are you afraid? I’m not a thief. Look at me.’

‘What do you want?’

He didn’t reply, just continued walking behind her, so close to her that she could hear the sound of his breathing. Then he began whistling
The Merry Widow
, endlessly repeating the first few bars. She listened with strange anxiety to his whistling and the rhythmic, halting sound of his footsteps in the empty street.

She stopped and opened her handbag.

The young man gestured her to stop. ‘No, Madame …’

‘Well, then, what is it that you want?’

‘To follow you,’ he said in a low, passionate voice. ‘It isn’t the first time. You won’t be angry with me, will you, Madame? It’s not the first time this has happened to you, is it? A man hiding in the shadows, following you? In despair? You’ve never noticed me? Yet I’ve been watching you in the street for a month now. I see you leave your house and come home late at night. I see your friends. I see you get into your car. You can’t imagine how all that makes me feel. But until now I’ve never managed to find you alone. You won’t be angry with me, will you, Madame?’ Gladys looked at him and shrugged her shoulders slightly. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty.’

‘And you’re following a woman you don’t even know?

Why waste your time like this?’ murmured Gladys. Her demon, the desire to be seductive took hold of her and, without meaning to, her voice grew softer.

‘You seem like a good person, Madame. Would you happily be charitable and grant a look, a smile, at a young man who thinks only of you? Oh, and for such a long time now,’ he said, his voice strange, trembling as if in a passionate dream.

‘You’re just a boy,’ said Gladys. ‘Look, be reasonable. I’ve listened to you patiently, but you do understand, don’t you, that you must leave me alone. I have a husband,’ she said, smiling. ‘He might not take this childishness very well.’

‘You don’t have a husband, Madame. You are perfectly free and alone. Oh, so alone …’

‘In any case,’ said Gladys nervously, ‘I am asking you to go away.’

He hesitated, bowed and leaned back against a wall. She saw him fiddling with his long red scarf. She walked more quickly, looking for a car, but the street was deserted. After a few moments she heard the young man’s footsteps echoing behind her once again.

This time she stopped and waited for him. When he caught up with her, she said angrily, ‘Look! That’s enough now. You are going to leave me alone or I will make a complaint to the first policeman I see.’

‘No!’ said the young man harshly.

‘You’re mad!’

‘Don’t you want to know my name?’

‘Your name? You are mad!’ she said again. ‘I don’t know you and I am not interested in knowing your name.’

‘That’s not exactly right. You don’t know me, it’s true, but you will be extremely interested in me once you know my name.’

He paused for a moment, then said once more, very quietly, ‘Extremely interested.’

Gladys said nothing, but he could see the corners of her mouth tremble and droop.

‘My name is Bernard Martin,’ he said finally.

She let out a strange little sigh, like a stifled sob.

‘Were you expecting a different name?’ he asked. ‘I have no other names.’

‘I don’t know who you are.’

‘Yet I’m your grandson,’ said Bernard Martin.

‘No,’ she stammered. ‘I don’t know you. I don’t have any grandchildren.’

She was almost sincere; she couldn’t manage to link the memory of a nameless child, that little red creature she’d seen twenty years before, with the sight of this young man standing in front of her in the rain. Twenty years … Time would never pass as slowly for her as it did for other people.

‘Come on, now, Grandmother, you’ll have to accept it; I really am your grandson and, believe me, it wouldn’t be difficult to prove it: I have a letter from Jeanne, your old chambermaid, who brought me up. She died, but her letter is very moving. I have my rights …’

‘Your rights? I owe you nothing!’

‘Ah? Well, then, I’ll lose my lawsuit. But what about the scandal? Can you imagine the scandal, Grandmother?’

‘Don’t call me that!’ cried Gladys, starting in blind fury.

The young man didn’t reply. He put his hands in his pockets and started whistling
The Merry Widow
again.

Gladys dug her nails into her hands to control the trembling that shook her whole body. ‘Is it money you want? Yes, I … I have been neglectful. How could I have forgotten you for such a long time, my God? I told Jeanne to contact me as soon as the money ran out. She never did, and I … I forgot,’ she said quietly.

‘I never wanted for anything. It’s not money that I’m after.’

His disgusted tone of voice dispelled any remorse and pity she might have felt.

‘It’s the scandal, then? Of course. My poor boy. You must come from some godforsaken hole in the country. The scandal, as you call it, in Paris …’

He said nothing and continued walking alongside her, whistling in a low, thoughtful way.

‘He’s Marie-Thérèse’s son,’ she thought.

But that idea aroused no emotion within her heart: it was completely filled with the dull echo of fear.

‘Is it money you want?’ she asked again in despair.

The young man spoke with difficulty. ‘Yes.’

She quickly opened her handbag, pulled out a thousand-franc note and put it in his hand.

The boy shook his head and said, ‘Your lover is called Aldo Monti, is he not?’

‘Do you think you’re frightening me? Exactly why do you think my lover would care if my daughter once had a child?’

‘That’s true, Grandmother, that’s true. But I’ve spoken to Carmen Gonzales, you see, and Jeanne who brought me up. Those two women know you as only servants can know their masters; not a single bit of your heart was
unknown to them. You didn’t abandon me because I was an illegitimate child, but because you didn’t want anyone to know how old you really were. I detest you.’

‘Leave me alone!’

‘It’s true that you still look young. What do people say about you? “She’s forty? Fifty?” Have you resigned yourself to being forty-five? A grandson of twenty, after all, isn’t so terrible. Perhaps I’m mistaken? Am I? Well, am I? Oh! How I wanted to see you close up, hear you speak! You’re just as I imagined you … But no, no, even though I’d heard you were still a beautiful woman who looked young, I imagined you as a monster. And you are a monster.’

He leaned in towards her intently. He looked at her blonde hair and her made-up face, and she tried to see in his features something of Marie-Thérèse and Olivier Beauchamp. But all that was in the past. They were dead. There was only one true thing in the world: Aldo, her lover! This thin, delicate boy looked no more like Marie-Thérèse and Olivier than a caricature looks like a charming photograph. He was pale; his heavy mop of hair fell forward over his forehead; he was badly shaven and still had some hair above his lip; his long cheeks were so thin they were almost transparent. Only his eyes resembled Marie-Thérèse’s eyes: passionate, clear, with long, dark eyelashes, even more beautiful because they shone in his thin, ugly face.