She Who Was No More (3 page)

‘You’re right. So I shan’t be seeing you till—till Friday.’

‘I’m afraid not. I’ve got the hospital, you know. Besides, where could we meet? Not here!’

‘I should think not!’

‘And then—this isn’t the moment for us to be seen about together. It might spoil everything, and it would be childish to take a risk like that.’

‘The day after tomorrow, then. Eight o’clock?’

‘Eight o’clock on the Quai de l’Île Gloriette. As we arranged. And let’s hope it’s a nasty night like this one.’

She went and fetched his things, his shoes, his tie, collar. Finally she helped him on with his overcoat.

‘What’ll you do with yourself during these two days, my poor Fernand?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must have some customers to see in the neighborhood.’

‘There are always customers to see.’

‘Is your bag in the car? Sure you’ve packed everything? Razor? Toothbrush?’

‘Yes. Everything.’

‘All right. Let’s go. You can drop me at the Place du Commerce.’

She carefully closed the doors, double-locking the front door, while he got the car out of the garage. The street lights seemed to be shining through layers of gauze. The fog was tepid, with a muddy smell. From the direction of the river came the sound of a diesel engine which kept misfiring. Lucienne got into the car beside Ravinel. He jerked the gears in, backed out, and stopped by the curb. Then he went back to the garage, shut the sliding door, fumbled irritably with the lock. He looked at the house, turning up his coat collar.

‘We’re off.’

The car moved forward slowly, pushing its way through the fog, which floated away on either side in straggling yellow trails and which stuck to the windshield, despite the efforts of the indefatigable wiper. A locomotive went by, disappearing almost at once, but leaving a track from which the fog had for a moment been swept and in which the rails glistened brightly.

In the Place du Commerce stood a row of lighted trolleys.

‘You can drop me here. Nobody’ll see me.’

She leaned over and kissed him on the temple.

‘Now don’t do anything silly. Keep your head. You know it had to be done.’

She slammed the door and disappeared into the fog. Ravinel was alone, his hands nervously clutching the steering wheel. He was convinced that this fog… It couldn’t be an accident. It had a precise meaning.

There he was, he, Ravinel, sitting in a little metal box, and it was as though he were appearing before the Judgment Seat. He could see himself with his great bushy eyebrows. Fernand Ravinel. He wasn’t really a bad chap at bottom. But there he was with his hands stretched out in front of him groping like a blind man. Through existence. Through eternity—through an eternal fog, at any rate. Nothing to be seen anywhere except a few shadowy figures. Deceptive figures. Mireille’s, for instance.

Fog. There was no end to it. The sun would never shine again. He was convinced of that. He was in a land which had no frontier and which he’d never get out of. He was made of the same stuff himself. A wandering soul, a phantom. He had often been tormented by that idea—that he was nothing more than a phantom…

He let in the clutch and went round the Place du Commerce in bottom gear. Blurred figures were visible through the misty windows of the cafés. Lights. Lights everywhere. That’s what Ravinel needed—light, and lots of it, enough to fill his carcass which seemed to hang loosely about him. He drew up at the Brasserie de la Fosse and went through the revolving door on the heels of a fair-haired girl who was laughing. Inside, he
found himself in another fog, that of pipe and cigarette smoke, which lay in wisps between the faces and eddied round a tray of bottles which a waiter was carrying shoulder high.

The waiter was hailed on every side.

‘What about that brandy I ordered?’

Coins clinked on the tables and on the cash desk, where a cash register worked incessantly. Someone ordered coffee for three.

‘Three
filtres
?’

‘Yes. Three.’

Balls rolled across the billiard table, colliding gently, just audible above the din. What a din! But Ravinel needed that too, for it was the sound of life. He found a seat in a corner, sat down and relaxed.

I’ve got here, he thought.

His hands rested on the table in front of him. Beside him was a square ashtray on each side of which was the word
Byrrh
in brown letters. Just an advertisement. Reassuring, though. A solid, comforting, everyday thing, pleasant to touch.

‘Monsieur?’ The waiter bent down with a mixture of deference and friendliness. Ravinel had a sudden idea.

‘Some punch,’ he answered. ‘A large glass.’

‘Very good, Monsieur.’

Little by little Ravinel forgot the night’s work and the house on the quay. He was warm here. He smoked a cigarette. It smelt nice. The waiter was busy mixing his drink. His movements were careful, expert. A little more rum. Sugar. And the next moment the liquid was ablaze. A beautiful flame seemed to come spontaneously out of the air and hover over the punch. First it was blue, then orange. It was a delight to the eye. It
reminded him of a calendar whose gorgeous colors he had admired as a little boy.

He drank, sip by sip, and the warm potent liquid went down his gullet like a river of gold. The sun rose again, banishing the shadows, the fears, the scruples, the horrors. After all he had a right to live a full, varied life, and he wasn’t accountable to anyone. He felt as if he had at last shaken off something which for a long time had been suffocating him. For the first time, he was able to look straight into the eyes of that other Ravinel, the one that looked back at him from the mirror. Thirty-eight. His face, however, looked old already. Yet he hadn’t really begun to live. Not really. Was it too late? Certainly not. Why should it be?

‘Waiter! The same again. And bring me a timetable.’

Ravinel fished a postcard out of his pocket. Naturally it was Lucienne’s idea that he should send a line to Mireille.
I’ll be returning Saturday morning
… He shook his fountain pen. The waiter came back.

‘By the way, what’s the date?’

‘The fourth…’

‘Of course. How silly of me to forget. I’ve been writing it all day long. You wouldn’t have a stamp, I suppose?’

The timetable was dirty and dog-eared, but Ravinel was beyond being disgusted by such things. He turned the pages over till he came to the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée line.

Dijon, Lyon, the Rhône valley. The Riviera Express. His fingers moved down the list of stations. Antibes 7:44. This train went right up the coast to the Italian frontier and beyond. He turned over the pages. More trains to Italy. Through the Simplon or the Mont Cenis. He could almost see them as he gazed into his cigarette smoke—long trains with dark blue
sleeping cars and dining cars. He could see them rumbling with a leisurely rhythm through a clear, bright, starry night, a night in which there was no shame…

The punch left an aftertaste of caramel in his mouth. His mind was full of distant travel.

‘We’re closing now, Monsieur.’

It was now Ravinel’s turn to throw some coins onto the table. He wouldn’t take the change. With a lordly sweep of his arm he brushed aside the waiter, brushed aside the past, and dived at the revolving doors, which for a moment caught him in their arms and discharged him on the pavement. There he stopped for a moment, leaning against the wall. His thoughts were in a turmoil. For no reason at all a word came to his lips. Tipperary. Something the English have a song about. What on earth would it mean?

Only a day and a half to wait. Only a day. And now only a matter of hours. Ravinel had expected the wait to be terrible, but it hadn’t been. Not in the least. Though, in a way, it had been worse—interminable and dreary. Time seemed to have lost its sense of proportion. Someone starting to do a five-year sentence might feel like that about time. And if it was a life sentence… But Ravinel banished the thought. Why should those words keep teasing him like an obstinate fly?

He drank a lot. Not to attract attention. Nor to get drunk. Simply to make the time pass a bit quicker. It’s extraordinary how quickly an hour can slip away between two glasses of brandy. You don’t have to think of anything particularly interesting—with the most commonplace details it’s just the same. The hotel he’d stopped at last night, for instance. An awful bed. Still more awful the coffee in the morning. People coming and going all night long, and trains whistling. He ought to have left Nantes. Gone on a trip, to Redon for instance, or Anceny. He had been unable to leave, however. Each morning he had woken up in the wrong frame of mind. Everything seemed sharp and crystal clear—and utterly discouraging. Weighing his chances, they appeared so small that it simply wasn’t worth while putting up a struggle. It wasn’t till ten o’clock that confidence suddenly returned. A glow of light that made everything look different, the pros as well as the cons. By the time he barged
into the Café Français, he was in a different mood altogether and could greet his friends breezily. There were always two or three of them there drinking coffee laced with rum.

‘Hallo, Fernand!’

‘I say! You’re looking queer…’

So his looks betrayed something. Not much, though. It was easy to invent a reason. Toothache. A bad night.

‘I had one last year,’ said Tamisier. ‘A molar. God! What pain!… I could have thrown myself out of the window.’

Ravinel listened gravely. Really, it was astonishingly easy to lie. You just said you had toothache, and the next minute you almost believed it yourself. With Mireille, for example, the other evening… Other evening indeed! Last night, to be exact! Impossible! It seemed ages ago.

No. It wasn’t merely a question of time. It was more complicated than that. You’d suddenly become another man leading another life. Like an actor. With this difference, that when the curtain falls the actor is back where he was. Whereas…

‘What’s this new reel of yours like? The Rotor. Is there anything in it? I saw an ad for it in the
Pêche Illustrée
.’

‘It’s not bad. Not bad at all. Particularly for sea fishing.’

That was the
day after
. A November morning with wet pavements and a pallid sun trying to shine through the fog. From time to time a streetcar swept round the bend just outside the café, its wheels screeching against the rails. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, however—at least not to Ravinel’s ear.

‘All well at home?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

Was that a lie? Not really. It all depended on who was speaking, the old man or the new.

‘Not much of a life,’ remarked Belloeil. ‘Always on the road. Haven’t you ever wanted to change to the Paris area?’

‘No. In any case it’s the territory of the most senior travelers. Besides, I get a much better turnover here.’

‘For my part,’ said Tamisier, ‘I’ve never been able to make out how you came to choose a job like that. With your education.’

And he explained to Belloeil that Ravinel had taken a degree in law. But how could the latter explain something he’d never understood himself? Was it just that everything to do with water had an irresistible attraction for him?

‘Still hurting?’ asked Belloeil.

‘A jab now and again.’

Water and poetry, yes. For there is poetry in instruments that are beautifully made, perfectly balanced and highly polished. A bit childish, no doubt. A sign that he’d never grown up. Perhaps he hadn’t. But why should he want to? To turn into a Belloeil, selling shirts and ties and steadily pickling himself in alcohol? Slowly and patiently. Without hope.

So many people in the world! All anchored by invisible chains to their own particular hole and corner. Is there any point in telling them you despise them because you yourself belong to another race, because you’re a nomad, because you sell airy playthings, lovingly displaying your fishhooks and flies on your customer’s counter? It’s a job, of course, like everyone else’s. Only it’s different. It has affinities with painting and literature. Difficult to explain. But there’s no getting away from the fact that fishing is an escape.

An escape for what? That was the whole problem…

Ravinel started. Half past nine. For three quarters of an hour he had been turning over the events of the previous day.

‘Waiter. A brandy.’

After that talk in the café, what had happened next? He had called on Le Flem, near the Pont de Pirmil. Le Flem had given him an order for three punt guns. They had been joined by a hairdresser who went fishing every Monday and never failed to come home with a huge pike. A lot of heavy fishermen’s talk. The hairdresser didn’t believe in artificial flies, and he wasn’t won over until Ravinel had tied a Hitchcock then and there before his eyes, using bits of partridge feather for the wings. Ravinel had the knack. For tying flies, there was no one to touch him in France, possibly in the whole of Europe. It takes some doing, particularly if you haven’t got a vise to hold the hook. The body and the hackle are comparatively easy, but tying on the wings—that really is tricky. It’s certainly a knack, tying flies. An art, rather. For even when the fly doesn’t imitate any known insect, the illusion is so perfect that it is difficult to believe it isn’t real.

‘My word!’ said the hairdresser.

Brandishing an imaginary rod, Le Flem went through the motions of casting. Then his arms quivered as though he really had a fish at the end of his line.

‘You see! That’s the way to do it. Come here, little fellow…’

And he thrust an imaginary landing net under his victim. His movements were expressive. Ravinel could see at once that the hairdresser had fishing in his blood.

The hours had dragged on. In the afternoon he had gone to the moving pictures. Ditto in the evening. That night he had stayed at a different hotel. This time it was too quiet, and his mind had been obstinately haunted by Mireille. Not the Mireille in the bath. The one at Enghien, very much alive. It would have been nice if he could have talked things over with her.

‘Look here, Mireille. What would you have done in my place?’

It was impossible to get away from the fact that he still loved her. Or rather that he was beginning to. Shyly. It was fantastic, monstrous if you like, and yet…

‘Why! If it isn’t Ravinel!’

Two men had stopped in front of him. One of them was Cadiou, the other a tall, spare man in a fur-lined jacket, who looked hard at him as though…

‘Larmingeat,’ said Cadiou, introducing his friend.

Larmingeat! That’s who it was! Ravinel had known him as a schoolboy in a black smock who had helped him with his sums. For a second they stared at each other, then Larmingeat held out his hand.

‘Fernand. Fancy meeting you again! It must be quite twenty-five years since we last saw each other.’

Cadiou clapped his hands.

‘Three brandies.’

There was a moment of embarrassment all the same. To think that this was Larmingeat! This tall fellow with a beaky nose and cold eyes!

‘What are you doing now?’ asked Ravinel.

‘I’m an architect. And you?’

‘Oh, just a salesman.’

That was slightly embarrassing too. It established a certain distance between them. Larmingeat turned quickly to Cadiou.

‘Yes. We were at school together. In Brest. And if I remember rightly we graduated at the same time. But what a long time ago!’

He warmed his brandy in the hollow of his hand.

‘What about your parents?’ he asked, turning back to Ravinel.

‘They are both dead.’

Larmingeat sighed.

‘His father was a master at the Lycée,’ he explained to Cadiou. ‘I can see him still, with his briefcase and his umbrella. He rarely smiled.’

That was quite true. He hardly ever smiled. For one thing, he had T.B. But there was no need for Larmingeat to know that. In fact Ravinel had much rather they talked of something else than his father, a dull stick of a man, always in black. It was really because of him that Ravinel had become fed up with his studies. Always saying: ‘When I’m no longer with you,’ and enjoining his son to work harder and harder. Sometimes at meals he would stop eating and contemplate him from under his enormous Ravinel eyebrows. Then a volley of questions would be fired at him. What was the date of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the formula for butane gas, the sequence of tenses in Latin. A precise, meticulous man, in whose brain all information was neatly classified. For him geography consisted of lists. Towns, mountains, rivers. History was a list of dates. Man himself was a list of bones, muscles, and organs.

When Ravinel took his examinations—that was the worst of all. To think of it was enough to make him break out into a cold sweat. And even now strange words would suddenly jump up at him out of the past, menacing as in a nightmare. Words like cretaceous or monocotyledonous. It’s not with impunity that you’re the son of a schoolmaster—at any rate of one like that.

What would Larmingeat say if Ravinel told him he had actually prayed for his father’s death? He had. And he had watched intently for every sign of the approaching end. He had known enough about the symptoms. He knew the meaning of a little froth at the corner of the mouth, or that peculiar hollow cough in the evenings. And all his life he had known what it meant to be the son of an invalid. Always thinking of one’s own health, conscious of one’s temperature and of the least change in the weather.

‘We don’t live long in our family.’

That’s what his mother used to say. And she backed it up by dying a few months after her husband, just fading away, worn out by years of worry and scraping.

He was an only child, Ravinel, and, though he was well in his teens when his parents died, it seemed to him ever after that he had always been an orphan. And he had remained rather like one. Something in him seemed to have been nipped in the bud. He always started if a door slammed or his name was called out and became nervous if a question was fired at him suddenly. Of course nobody asked him the date of the Treaty of Campo Formio nowadays. But that didn’t make any difference: he was afraid of being caught on the wrong foot. Another thing: he was apt to forget his own telephone number or the number of his car. One day, perhaps, he’d forget his own name! An awful thought! He’d no longer be a son or a husband or anything else. Just a man among millions of others…

As a matter of fact, on second thoughts, it might be rather nice. Only, it would be one of those
forbidden
pleasures.

‘Do you remember those outings to the Pointe des Espagnols?’

That was Larmingeat. Ravinel came slowly up to the surface.

‘I’d like to have known Ravinel in those days,’ said Cadiou. ‘What they call a tough guy, I bet.’

‘A tough guy?’

Larmingeat and Ravinel exchanged glances. They smiled at one another, and it was like sealing a pact. Because Cadiou couldn’t possibly understand.

‘Tough enough. In his way,’ answered Larmingeat. Then he asked:

‘Married?’

Ravinel caught sight of his wedding ring. He blushed.

‘Yes. We live near Paris. At Enghien.’

‘I know the place.’

There were pauses in the conversation. They had plenty of time to study each other. Larmingeat too wore a wedding ring. Occasionally he wiped his eyes, for he wasn’t in the habit of drinking spirits. There were any number of questions Ravinel might have asked him. But what was the use? Other people’s lives had never interested him.

‘How’s the housing programme getting on?’ asked Cadiou.

‘Not too badly.’

‘What does it cost nowadays to build a bungalow? A decent one, but nothing out of the way.’

‘It depends. Four rooms and a bathroom—a really well-fitted bathroom, mind you—it’d run you into a couple of million francs, I dare say.’

Ravinel called the waiter.

‘Shall we make it the same again?’ suggested Cadiou.

‘Afraid I can’t stop,’ said Ravinel. ‘Got an appointment. You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Larmingeat.’

They shook hands with him limply. Larmingeat looked a trifle put out, but he was too discreet to ask any questions.

‘You might just as well stop and have lunch with us,’ grumbled Cadiou.

‘Another time.’

‘That’s a deal. And I’ll take you to see the bit of land I’ve bought at the Pont de Cens.’

Ravinel hurried away. He had behaved awkwardly and he cursed himself for having lost his nerve. But he had always been sensitive. Was that his fault? Besides, under the circumstances… Would anyone else in his place?…

The hours dragged on. Darkness fell. In the evening he drove to a garage. Oil and grease. Gas. To be on the safe side, he had two cans filled up as well. That done, he drove slowly to the Place du Commerce, past the Bourse, and crossed the esplanade of the Île Gloriette. On his left was the port, the lights trembling on the broken surface of the Loire. A Liberty ship was moving downstream. He had never felt so close to things, so detached from himself. All the same his nerves were stretched taut and his chest contracted at the thought of the ordeal that lay ahead.

An interminable freight train rumbled past. Ravinel counted the cars. Thirty-one. Lucienne must have left the hospital by now. He would leave it to her to finish the work. After all, it was her idea, the whole thing… The canvas. He suddenly thought of the canvas. He knew very well it was in the back of the car, yet he couldn’t keep turning round to make sure. A ‘California’ canvas sheet which he carried round as a sample, for he dealt in all kinds of camping equipment too. When he turned back, there was Lucienne, coming up noiselessly on her crêpe soles.

‘Hallo, Fernand! All right? Not too tired?’

Before even opening the door, she took off a glove to feel his hand. Having done so, she made a face.