The Best Australian Stories (38 page)
Marion Halligan
It was the smile. Different from the one when they walked out together and he lifted his bent arm like a wing and allowed her to rest her hand in the crook of his elbow. Though the two had in common that they were hardly smiles at all, mainly a gleam in the eye. A smile on the mouth with the right messages is not too difficult, but to get the eyes to express them is quite hard. The walking-out smile conveyed a hidden, in fact quite subterranean pride, whereas the other was intended to hide. Both were cool, serene, lofty, and this other had a glint of the sardonic, only a glint, more might have seemed forced, and behind it she was safe. When she got it right she could walk, with just the slightest languid sway to her hips, out to the pavilion in the garden which was where the girls were supposed to sleep. Girls: only ever one at a time. But over time quite a number.
Sabine did not undress beforehand. At one time she had worn a black silk kimono with rose-painted peonies but then she decided that was too intimate so now she wore going-out clothes, one of the Chanel suits she favoured or perhaps a cocktail dress, something stiff-skirted and rustling. With a superb piece of jewellery. On the nights of the glamorous dresses Jean-Marie would look at her admiringly when she took his evening chocolate into him, as he sat in bed reading his daily half-hour of novel. The routine was strict: she took in the chocolate, in a china pot with a sideways spout that had belonged to his great grandmother, he sat in bed wearing one of his dark paisley nightshirts, he said: Tonight, I think, my dear. He had a way of raising his eyebrows in high arches across his forehead and opening his eyes wide and flashing them; at the same time his mouth would open in a flashing swift smile and it was as though his face had beamed a message. She would bend her cheek to be kissed. On cocktail-dress nights his mouth would curl in its sensuous way and he would twist his hand in the crackling fabric and brush it against his cheek. She would wait in the kitchen until she knew the chocolate would be finished and the novel time nearly done and then walk through the house and out of the door into the garden and cross to the small pavilion. Come now, she would say to the girl, who would follow her into the house. Provided she found the smile, she was invincible behind it. The girl might talk, ask questions, make conversation, but the smile would hold all that at bay. They would go back through the hall and up the stairs, Sabine's shoes with their small sharp heels clicking on the tiled floor, the girl's slippers shuffling. The girl wore a nightdress and robe, that was the routine, all the details were part of the routine. Sabine's mode of dressing was hers to control, but not the other details.
She would knock on Jean-Marie's bedroom door, open it, the girl would go in and Sabine disappear. She knew he would be sitting up in bed in the jewel-coloured nightshirt, but she never stepped in to the room far enough to see him, or to have to look at the expression on his face.
Jean-Marie's bed was large and with a buttoned headboard in satin the colour of one of the fine old burgundies he liked to drink. Its mattress was the most expensively sprung kind since the delicate back of an intellectual needs great care. Sabine's bed was smaller, boat-shaped, with white linen sheets and a soft old mattress, she'd slept in it since she was a small girl, had brought it with her to the marriage though not knowing then that she would be the one to sleep in it, thinking that indeed there would be a child, and when she could let the smile go, this smile faint, serene, pitying perhaps, sardonic a little, remote, untouchable, hugely hard work, she could curl up in her bed and feel she was in her own safe place, in the clean linen smells and cool smooth fabric of her childhood.
They were not there for breakfast, the girls he invited to stay in the pavilion were not invited to breakfast with him. Sabine and Jean-Marie ate alone. He dipped long slices of buttered bread into his bowl of strong milk coffee and looked out into the garden. Not the part where the pavilion was, the side, with its vegetable beds and espaliered fruit trees against the warm brick wall. Of course it looked different at different seasons, sometimes there was snow, sometimes it was end-of-summer yellowed. Their useful garden, was how he described it, and when he sat placidly drinking his coffee and gazing at it he was doing his useful thinking. Sabine, sitting in her red woollen dressing-gown and pouring two-handed the hot milk and the hot coffee so they mixed together, did not speak and tried not to think, her thinking was not useful in the way her husband's was. Once she had thought she might read a book, a new novel that she was enjoying, or a biography, but he said not to, it distracted him. She looked at the rows of cabbages and thought of Marie-Antoinette playing at being a dairymaid, because she had seen rows of ornamental cabbages at her cottage at Versailles. She wondered if anybody had ever done a study of women and the games they play, the make-believe, the ludic constructions of daily lives. Ludic was one of Jean-Marie's words.
Dinner was the time for conversation, and that was amusing. Jean-Marie always had a lot to say, and on these occasions he often found Sabine witty and gave his dry chuckle. He would look dotingly at her; she was his wife. One of the girls might be there, or other disciples, students perhaps, if they were bright enough, or simply acolytes of the philosopher. They sat strung taut and waiting for their opportunity to be clever; if they succeeded they could be invited again. Jean-Marie raising his eyebrows, flashing his eyes and his smile, could terrify them. It was an expression that repulsed all questions. Stuffed cabbage was often on the menu at these dinners, the woman who cooked the meals made a delicious one. It is the dish of philosophers, said Jean-Marie, but he was put out when other people fed it to him. It was his role to provide the simple straight-from-the-earth food of peasants, but he did not think it should be offered to him at tables where he was a guest. Like the robust country wines he served. The simple pleasures, these things celebrating an essence of Frenchness that came from the country's ancient soil. But when being entertained he liked to be offered a good burgundy. At a pinch, a Bordeaux, he wasn't difficult.
Jean-Marie spoke with a tolerance more dismissive than contempt of the pre-war café set, the Deux Magots mob, and of the gay lads of the post-war period, all very interesting that, they had done their best, you could see what they were trying to get at. But, said Jean-Marie. He did not say, Whereas I, his acolytes could say it for him. He shrugged his shoulders. But, he said. Of course. His voice was mellifluous, he spoke fast, they had to keep their ears open and their minds sharp to follow him.
The occasions when husband and wife went out together, his arm held out like a wing and her gloved hand in the bend of his elbow, were not frequent, though there were regular outings. To mass at Saint Sulpice on Sundays, and afterwards to take coffee at one of the small bars thereabouts. Never on their own. The excursion to mass was too famous to be private. Sometimes to a dinner or a reception, when a car would come. She knew that he approved of the way she looked, examining her from head to toe and nodding. The plain expensive dresses and suits, cut to suit her slender figure, her hair styled short and shapely, its blonde colour ashing into grey, her handsome legs in fine stockings and shoes that cost a fortune. He never minded what she spent on her clothes or her appearance. She was his wife. She never went to his lectures, either the regular ones for students or the public ones, where people sat on the floor because there was no other room, sat in fact right at his feet, looking up at him as they wrote down everything he said.
She often walked the short distance downhill to the station and caught the train into the city; it was twenty minutes to the great market at Denfert-Rochereau. The delicacies she bought just for him were part of the routine too, the lobsters from a certain fishmonger who kept excellent ones, in the season, and scallops in the shell, and a particular kind of sausage fashioned from fine seafood. And sometimes she'd go right into Les Halles, where there was still a little street of merchants selling fresh foie gras. These things were served at meals for just the two of them, cooked by Sabine. His long pointed lips sucked the meat from lobster claws, his plump white hands mopped with bread the juices of the foie gras pan-fried with caramelised apples. At dinners with guests those same pointed lips mouthed succulent little blooms of discourse, but when they were alone he said things like, These beans are very fine, Sabine, really they are excellently tiny, you have done well, and the dressing with walnut oil and sherry vinegar is quite a masterly touch. For he had a good palate long-trained and noticed these things. At the finish of these meals he would smile lovingly at her, and often embrace her at the end of the evening. Sometimes they'd light the fire in the drawing room and sit reading, more often Jean-Marie would go into his library and work there.
There were the lectures to write, and articles, and of course the books. It was Sabine's job to see that the house ran, not like clockwork, which ticks, or like a machine, which hums or purrs or even roars; rather like an animal organism whose gentle breathing you might hear as a kind of comforting rhythm if you listened quietly but which was silent, as thinking is, and digestion, when it is healthy. Jean-Marie occasionally praised Sabine for the fine art she made of it, but mostly it was so efficient in never impinging upon him that he never remarked it. The woman who came in to clean, the cook who made the stuffed cabbage and peasant stews, the man who gardened, the plumber, the roof mender, the washing machine repairman, all came without his knowing. Sabine kept the accounts and wrote the cheques. In the evenings when he was in his library she sat at her pretty desk in the morning room and did the books, double entry in big ledgers with marbled endpapers, meticulous columns of figures written in tiny black script and always balancing. Occasionally he glanced at the figures; this was the nearest he got to an awareness of the mechanisms that kept his life running so smoothly. He admired them as a work of art as much as of expenditure and provided the end figures had a pleasing discrepancy on the plus side he hardly registered them. Sabine was a thrifty woman. She spent an enormous amount of money, but to excellent and careful purpose. It was in the high bourgeois tradition that he liked to proclaim was the glory of France. As of course was the peasant tradition, there was no contradiction there, not as he described it. Rather a pleasing symmetry.
The pearl-grey three-piece suits always clean and pressed, the professionally laundered grey-blue shirts, the polished house and tended garden, the elegant meals, none of these things disturbed the large expensive gently breathing animal in which his mind did its thinking.
Sometimes when Sabine went into the city she met her friend Cathérine for a cup of tea. Not very often. They had kept in touch, just, since they were girls together, at college, students in bookkeeping, and had a firm but discreet friendship. Cathérine knew Sabine was married to the great man and was too polite to give in to her curiosity about him. Sabine offered titbits of her life, knowing that a friendship deserves some intimacy, but she did not invite Cathérine into it. She knew quite a lot of things about her friend, and Cathérine's daughter Fanny, mainly insignificant confidences. The wedding, the apartment, the son-in-law's skills. In turn she said, I am buying lobster for Jean-Marie's dinner, he is so fond of it. Cathérine might say, How will you cook it? And then they'd discuss sauces and whether it was better hot or cold. Sabine might mention that they were dining at the Palace and what the food would be like there. Cathérine might say, I saw Jean-Marie mentioned in
Le Monde
last week, you must be very proud.
Yes, said Sabine.
The girls in the pavilion were not there every night. In their singular quality. But some nights. Jean-Marie in his paisley nightshirts, which Sabine ironed carefully, he hated wrinkled nightclothes, leaning against his padded satin bedhead, drinking his hot chocolate. And Sabine escorting the young woman into the house, to the door of the bedroom.
Sometimes one of them would get pregnant, in the tiresome way of young girls, and look at her with triumphant fearful eyes. Sabine would give her a slip of paper with an address and a cheque and that was the end of it. No children, was the rule. No carelessness, either. Sabine abided by the rules, so must they.
The incident was recorded in small figures in Sabine's account book, coded as financial transactions so often are, a sum of money and a name, that might have been a hotel, or a holiday house, but was in fact a clinic. The House in the Pines. In the suburbs, in fact. If Jean-Marie ever wondered what it was, he did not ask. Following these sums of money spent on The House in the Pines, not immediately but shortly afterwards, would be items for large sums spent at jewellers. Sabine had superb jewellery, not glittering gold stuff like every other well-dressed woman on the metro but discreetly rich and beautifully made pieces. An antique half-hoop of diamonds, worn beside her engagement ring. A looped brooch of corals, with pear-shaped earrings to match. And her pearls, a quite long string of comfortably but not vulgarly large baroque pearls, so flattering to the complexion, and costing considerably more than The House in the Pines, their date shortly after the first occurrence of the girls in the pavilion.
Sabine poured the weak tea she and Cathérine liked into fine cups. They often met at an old-fashioned tea shop with spindly chairs and ethereal cakes. Cathérine looked at the large topaz ring that slipped heavily around Sabine's thin pale brown finger. She said, I think Fanny would like to have a baby, but it doesn't seem to be happening. So long they have been married now.
Babies, said Sabine. What is this habit with babies. Always where they are not wanted, and not where they are. She sighed.
Some friends, after a sigh like that, would have said, Did you ever ⦠Would you have liked ⦠but these women were not given to asking questions, except about lobsters and such. They offered their small pieces of information and the questions never got spoken.