Night Without Stars (29 page)

“Oh, I …” She shrugged. “ I am no use to you.”

“Wouldn't you let me judge?”

“I think we come of an alien race, a different time. It's nothing to do with the miles or the years. It is out of the question, of course, for other reasons, but even if it were not, we could never have made a success of it. Our outlook, our instincts are different; we have no common ground to build anything on at all. Are we nearer the shore?”

“A good bit. I don't like your reasoning, but I'm grateful you're being reasonable. Is it the seasickness?”

“I don't know.”

“D'you think if I kept you out here till dark you'd go on getting ever gentler and kinder and more self-critical?”

“I should scream at you like a fishmonger.”

“Why,” I said, “ is our coming together quite out of the question? What are the other reasons?”

“One is—that I don't love you.”

“Is there someone else?”

“There's no one else. Now you're the Giles I don't like, who asks tiresome questions that show he's no different from other men—with sex on the brain, eternally questing, never satisfied with any explanation that doesn't include it.”

“I should have thought that more a characteristic of women.”

“Not this woman.”

“There's one last tiresome question I should like to ask; but I don't want it to split the Entente.”

“How far are we from home now?”

“About ten minutes.”

She made a grimace. “If it's the last question, ask it and then leave me in peace.”

I said: “ That last night with Pierre: what else happened between you and him—that you haven't told me—before Charles came?”

Her clear eyes for a second were startled out of their brooding.

“What makes you think something did?” “It's just the way things look to me.” She said after a minute: “I'll tell you to-night.”

We went to the little restaurant we'd visited several times last year, an ill-lit place in one of the narrow streets of the old town. There was a bistro downstairs, and you stumbled past the telephone up some uncarpeted wooden steps to a low black-beamed room with a lot of ornamental brasses on the walls and fine linen on the tables and an old grey-haired waiter who'd lost an arm at Verdun. It made a sort of fellow feeling between us. He served everything with one arm and I'd never known him drop a thing.

As usual at this time we had the place to ourselves. Alix had changed into the cream linen frock with the wide skirt and the scarlet brooch.

I said: “ I like that a lot.”

She smiled but didn't speak. The smile wasn't nearly so detached as it had once been.

I said: “You look young and innocent and very charming in it.”

“Whereas in fact I am none of those things.”

“Oh, yes, you are. Didn't you know? Young obviously. And, in a queer way, very innocent, though it doesn't please you to think so.”

“It would please me perhaps if it was true. But it isn't true.”

I said: “The odd thing is that you think of me as a sentimentalist, a dreamer, a romantic, the one who sees life through a rosy haze. Whereas in fact you and Charles are the true romantics. The only trouble is that your romanticism has got pushed off its rockers and has turned upside down. The cynic doesn't see life as it really is: he sees it through a rosy haze that's turned yellow on him. No one can be a cynic unless he's been a romantic first.”

She laughed. “ I like to listen to your arguments. I don't believe in them, but they're nice to listen to. Go on.”

I watched her teeth. “No, you go on. You tell me what you think.”

She was quiet for a bit, the laughter slowly dying from her face, the warmth going out.

She said: “D'you think we expect too much from life? Is that it?”

“I don't know. Perhaps we're all born expecting too much. It's a question of how we get around to the disappointment. What did you expect, Alix? What did you grow up wanting? What particularly have you missed?”

She said slowly: “ I wonder—if I tell you the little else there is to tell of what happened on that night—I wonder if you'll see it as something small and not important; or whether you'll see it as something big. You're detached. I'm too close—or I was too close. It seemed to take the roots out of my life. The doctors told me it was silly to feel the way I did. I wouldn't have told them, but Charles told them. They sympathised, they said, but it wasn't right to feel like that. It was always happening in this life. Disillusion, you know. The romanticism that has gone wrong; isn't that what you called it? Anyway, I'm having no more to do with it. A burnt child dreads the fire. I'm holding out no more hostages to fortune.”

The old man took away the remains of the
langouste
, brought fresh warm plates, polished them on a napkin, put them before us. Then he came back with the veal in a silver dish, apportioned it between us, scooped out savoury-smelling gravy and added mushrooms and tiny chopped carrots.

When he had gone she said: “To tell you while I'm eating shows how far I've now recovered. Twelve months ago I hardly ate at all. How silly. I can tell it you quite simply. That night when Pierre saw how I really felt towards him he wanted to hurt me any way he could. When he saw that taunting me about you had no effect he began about Jacques.… He'd been Jacques's closest friend, I told you that. You know how I loved Jacques; the memory of the six weeks of married life with him was like something nobody could touch. They'd hanged him, but they could never destroy him for me.… And then Pierre did so.…

“At first I didn't believe a word he said, thought he was inventing it. It came like a knife in my back. I couldn't think, couldn't understand. But he began to give details, details no one but Jacques and I could ever have known. He said Jacques had been persistently unfaithful all through those six weeks. You know, I told you, he was away off and on during those weeks on sabotage work. Pierre said Jacques had been with one woman after another, in Nice, in Juan, even in Villefranche. Like a dog, going with any bitch.… Pierre said he'd heard Jacques talking about me with two women in a café, making them scream with laughter, telling them about me and my inexperience, what I'd said to him and what he'd replied, telling them how I adored him, and why. And more—much more.…”

Alix abruptly put her knife and fork down and lowered her head. Then after a minute she looked up again and smiled briefly with eyes gone very dark.

I said: “ For God's sake.” I moved to get up. “Listen, darling, please.…”

She said quietly: “Feeling paternal again? I'm all right.”

I wasn't feeling that way, but I made no further move, afraid of any gesture she might think was claiming too much. I said: “You were quite right. It's better buried. Let it lie.”

She pushed her hair back with her fingers. “ Perhaps you can guess how I felt when I began to believe what he said. While I was there with Pierre the worst didn't come. Just then I still carried on like someone who makes the motions of ordinary life without feeling anything. My brain went on, pretending to him, trying to save myself, scheming to call you instead of my apartment, determined that whatever happened to me Pierre shouldn't escape. It wasn't till afterwards, until I came round after he'd tried to strangle me—even later than that: it wasn't really till the next day that the worst happened. There was a sort of great blackness here.” She touched her middle. “It was as if something had gone, and there was an empty desert. I didn't care if I lived or died. In fact I wanted to die, just to be rid of the bitterness and the pain.”

I didn't say anything. She went on: “After a bit, after some weeks it began to change. The need to die was gone, but there was never any more need to feel anything again. Not only was it bitter, it was cheap. All life was cheap and useless: empty puppets, all worthless, jigging on strings. It didn't matter whether Pierre was dead or alive. I'd gone to all that trouble to find out who had betrayed Jacques; but in the end it didn't matter, there was nothing to punish, nothing to betray. The others who'd gone; they were like Jacques; no doubt of it; there wasn't anything left to believe in any more.”

The waiter came in and said: “Is there something not to your liking, 'sieu-m'dame? The veal, perhaps?”

When we'd reassured him and he'd gone we made a pretence of getting on with the meal.

She said wearily: “It was about Jacques that he gave himself away. He was so anxious to destroy that he lost his caution. He said he'd seen Jacques in Hyères with a certain woman. As it happened, though I didn't know what Jacques did with his time, I always knew where he was because one of my jobs was to bring him instructions. And I know he hadn't been anything like as far away as Hyères—not from our marriage until the tenth or eleventh of May. He went there then, but that was twelve days after Pierre was ‘ arrested.' ”

I said: “ I'm very sorry—and ashamed of my insistence.”

“No. You'd a right to know. And perhaps your theories are right. I was born expecting too much. Well now—I expect nothing. That's all over—for good.”

There was a longish silence.

I said slowly: “ D'you think you'll be content to live for ever in a vacuum?”

“… Not a vacuum. But one can get along with other things.”

“Such as living well, dressing extravagantly, gambling as the mood takes you, and helping in occasional black-market enterprises?”

“Yes, if you like.”

I shook my head. “It won't do.”

“What?”

“Plenty of people can get along like that but not you. It won't do, Alix. You're deluding yourself now just as badly as when you thought Jacques a saint. Instead of overrating him you're underrating yourself.”

“Oh, no, I'm not.”

“Oh, yes, you are, my darling. May I call you that?”

“No.”

“Well, it doesn't alter anything. You can't change yourself
inside
to order. The person you're doing your best to be—in self-defence—couldn't ever have gone through what you've gone through. She'd have shrugged her shoulders … carried on living just the same.”

She said rather gently: “But, Giles, don't you see, it's
because
I went through such a time that I'm determined never to go through it again. I'm not waiting about to be trampled on any more. I'm not going to depend upon another person for my happiness.”

I smiled back at her. “ You're making certain of not being let down.”

“Yes.”

“There's no one now who can let you down except yourself.”

“That's it.”

“But
aren't
you rather letting yourself down by thinking as you do?”

“I don't think so.”

“God knows, I've no right to preach. But it looks to me to be a question of courage.”

She coloured slightly. “
I
think it needs courage to live to yourself alone.”

“Or funk dressed up as courage. Real courage, surely, is in doing something about it, not in running away.”

“Like the goat butting against the wall. He won't learn.”

I said: “ What a big advance we've made since last Saturday.”

“Have we?”

“I think so. We sit and argue like friends instead of playing ricochets in the water.”

She smiled again. “All right,” she said. “ I admit that.”

After dinner we walked up towards Mont Boron, as we'd done once before. It was a beautiful night; not yet quite dark in the west but the short twilight was going. The profile of the land was blurred against the steely haze of the sea and the sky. I'd suggested Mont Boron. It was calculated perhaps, but there was simply no other way. We might get one more meeting, and at that, after a break and seeing Charles again, her defences might have gone up double height. At present she was curiously soft—as if the telling of her trouble had got rid of some of the hurt inside her.

We got out on the path where we'd been that other night, and watched the lights of Nice winking and brightening below and all over the distant wooded hillside.

I said: “ To-night you haven't to tell me what you can see.”

“No.…” She stopped and looked over the wall. “Have I ever told you how glad I am about that?”

“I'm glad you're glad. I only wish I could have made something of the rest.”

“Don't think of me as someone who's injured,” she said. “ I don't feel it. I feel fine. Why shouldn't I be fine? I've everything I want. When you go home don't think of me as a poor stunted creature shut off from the Kingdom of Heaven, or something of the sort. Think of me dancing and singing outside the Gates.”

I said: “I shall think of you among the Dryads. May I make a last request too?”

“Of course.”

“When I go home don't think of me as sitting
inside
the Gates of Heaven reading a lecture to the poor souls shut out.”

She laughed. It was her old laugh really back this time. “I know you're not like that.”

“Perhaps I've come near sounding as if I believed it. That's your fault for rousing a contentious spirit.”

We went on a bit further, and then I said: “Stop here.”

“Why?”

“This was where we stopped before.”

“So it was. I don't know how you can tell.”

“Well, I can. But there's no music. Last time we had music.”

“Yes. I remember, a rumba.”

“And an Italian tenor singing about being in prison and not able to escape.”

“You said something—no, I said something about my mind being hilly, and you quoted …”

“ ‘The vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in.' ”