The Woman Destroyed (19 page)

“At that age all girls complain of their mothers: remember your difficulties with Lucienne. In fact Noëllie does not neglect her daughter at all. She is teaching her to manage by herself and to stand on her own feet, and she is quite right to do so.”

That was a jab at me. He has often made fun of my hen-and-chicks attitude. We even had a certain number of disagreements over it.

“It doesn’t worry the child that a man should spend the night in her mother’s bed?”

“It is a big apartment, and Noëllie takes great care. Besides, she does not hide from her that since her divorce there are men in her life.”

“Quaint confidences from a mother to a daughter. Frankly, don’t you find that a trifle shocking?”

“No.”

“I can’t see myself ever having a relationship of that kind with Colette or Lucienne.”

He made no reply: his silence made it quite plain that he thought Noëllie’s ideas on the bringing up of children were quite as good as mine. That wounded me. It is only too obvious that Noëllie behaves just as she chooses, without the least care for the interests of the child. Whereas I always did the very opposite.

“When all’s said and done,” I said, “everything Noëllie does is right.”

He waved his hand impatiently. “Oh, don’t always be talking to me about Noëllie!”

“How can I help it? She is part of your life, and your life is my concern.”

“Oh, you can be interested in it and you can leave it alone.”

“How do you mean?”

“My professional life—that doesn’t seem to matter to you. You never talk to me about it.”

It was an unfair counterattack. He knows very well that when he took to specializing he moved onto ground where I could not follow him.

“What could I say to you about it? Your research is totally beyond me.”

“You don’t even read my popular articles.”

“I was never really very interested in medicine as a science. It was the living relationship with the patients that fascinated me.”

“You might at least have had some curiosity about what I was doing.”

There was bitterness in his voice. I smiled at him affectionately. “The thing is that I love you and prize you far beyond anything you can do. If you were to become a great scientist, famous and all that, I should not be in the least surprised—you’re certainly capable of it. But in my eyes it would not add anything to you, that I do confess. Don’t you understand me?”

He smiled too. “Of course I do.”

This was not the first time he had complained of my indifference
to his career; and up until now I have not been altogether sorry that it vexed him a little. All at once I told myself that it was a blunder. Noëllie reads his articles; she talks about them, with her head a little on one side and an admiring smile on her lips. But how can I change my attitude now? It would be terribly obvious. I found the whole of this conversation extremely disagreeable. I am sure Noëllie is not a good mother. So hard and cold a woman cannot possibly give her daughter what I gave mine.

Monday 22 November
.

No, I must not try to follow Noëllie on to her ground, but fight it out on my own. Maurice used to be touched by all the little things I did for him, and now I am neglecting him. I spent today tidying our wardrobes. I finally put away the summer things, brought the winter clothes out of their mothballs and aired them, and drew up a list. Tomorrow I shall go and buy him the socks, pullovers and pajamas he needs. He also needs two good pairs of shoes; we’ll choose them together the next time he has a free moment. Well-filled cupboards with everything in its place are a great comfort to one. Plenty: security.… The heaps of delicate handkerchiefs and stockings and lingerie gave me the feeling that the future could not possibly let me down.

Tuesday 23 November
.

It makes me sick with shame. I should have thought of it. When he came home to lunch Maurice had the face he wears on bad days. Almost at once he flung out, “You’re
wrong to confide in your friend Diana. Noëllie has been told that she is conducting a positive inquiry about her among the lawyers and the contacts they have in common. And she tells everyone you have asked her to do it.”

I reddened, and I felt ill. Maurice had never sat in judgment against me: he was my refuge. And here I was before him, pleading guilty. What utter misery!

“I only said I should like to know what kind of person Noëllie was.”

“You would have done better to have asked me rather than have stirred up all this gossip. Do you suppose I don’t see Noëllie as she is? You’re wrong. I know her faults as well as her virtues. I’m not a lovesick schoolboy.”

“Still, I don’t imagine your opinion would be very objective.”

“And do you think Diana and her little friends are objective? They are malignance incarnate. And you can be sure they don’t spare you, either.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell Diana to hold her tongue.”

“You had better!”

He made an effort to change the conversation. We talked civilly. But I burn with shame. I am lowering myself in his eyes—doing it myself.

Friday 26 November
.

When I am with Maurice I cannot prevent myself from feeling I am in front of a judge. He thinks things about me that he does not tell me: it makes my head swim. I used to see myself so clearly through his eyes. Indeed I saw myself only through his eyes—too flattering a picture, perhaps, but one in which I recognized myself. Now I ask
myself,
Whom does he see?
Does he think me mean-minded, jealous, blabbing and even disloyal because I make inquiries behind his back? It’s unfair. He forgives Noëllie so much—can’t he understand my restless curiosity about her? I loathe gossip; and I have stirred it up, but I have plenty of excuse for doing so. He never mentions that business, by the way: he is as kind as can be. But I realize that he no longer talks to me quite without reserve. And sometimes I think I read in his eyes … not exactly pity. Shall I say a very faint mockery? (That odd look he gave me when I told him about going out with Quillan.) Yes: it’s as though he saw right through me and found me touching and slightly ludicrous. For example, the time he came upon me listening to a Stockhausen record: in an indefinable tone of voice he asked, “What? Are you taking to modern music?”

“Isabelle lends me records she likes.”

“She likes Stockhausen? That’s new.”

“Yes, it is. Tastes do evolve, you know.”

“And what about you? Do you like it?”

“No. I don’t understand it at all.”

He laughed: he kissed me, as though my frankness comforted him. In fact it was a calculated frankness. I know that he knew why I was listening to that music and he would not have believed me if I had pretended to like it.

Result: I can’t bring myself to talk to him about what I have been reading recently, although in reality I have liked a certain number of these
nouveaux romans
. He would immediately think I was trying to go one better than Noëllie. How involved everything becomes as soon as one begins to have hidden motives!

Difficult, confused talk with Diana. She swears by everything
she holds sacred that she never said she was getting the information for me. That was a supposition Noëllie must have thought up on her own account. She admitted having told a friend in confidence, “Yes, just at present I am interested in Noëllie Guérard.” But that really did not compromise me at all. She has certainly been clumsy. I asked her to drop the whole thing. She looked hurt.

Saturday 27 November

I must learn to control myself. But it’s so foreign to my nature! I always used to be spontaneous and completely open: serene, too. Whereas now my heart is filled with anxiety and bitterness. When he opened a magazine directly after leaving the table, I thought,
He wouldn’t do that at Noëllie’s
. And I couldn’t help it—I burst out, “You wouldn’t do that at Noéllie’s!”

His eyes flashed. “I just wanted to glance at an article,” he said evenly. “Don’t bristle like that over trifles.”

“It’s not my fault. Everything makes me bristle.”

There was a silence. At the table I had told him about how I had spent the day, and now I could not find anything to say. He made an effort. “Have you finished Wilde’s
Letters
?”

“No. I didn’t go on.”

“You said they were interesting—”

“If only you knew how unspeakably dreary I find Wilde, and how little I feel like talking to you about him!” I went to fetch a record out of the shelves. “Would you like me to put on the cantata you brought?”

“All right.”

I did not listen for long; sobs rose in my throat; the music
was now merely a refuge. We no longer had anything to say to one another, haunted as we were by this affair that he did not want to discuss.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, in a longsuffering voice.

“Because you’re bored when you’re with me. Because we can’t talk to one another anymore. Because you have built a wall between us.”

“It’s you who built it: you never stop going over and over your grievances.”

I irritate him a little more every day. I don’t mean to. And yet there is a part of me that does. When he seems too cheerful and unconcerned I say to myself,
This is too easy
. And then any excuse is good enough for me to destroy his peace of mind.

Monday 29 November
.

I was very much surprised that Maurice had not yet spoken about winter sports. Coming back from the cinema yesterday evening I asked him where he would like to go this year. He answered evasively that he had not thought about it yet. I smelled a rat at once. I am growing very good at catching the scent—in any case it’s not difficult: there are rats everywhere. I pressed him. Speaking very quickly, without looking at me, he said, “We’ll go wherever you like; but I must warn you that I also count on spending some days at Courchevel with Noëllie.”

I always expect the worst: and it’s always worse than I had expected. “How many days?”

“About ten.”

“And how long will you stay with me?”

“About ten days.”

“That’s really too much! You are taking half our holidays away from me to give them to Noëllie!” Anger choked me. I managed to get out the words: “Did you two decide that together, without consulting me?”

“No, I have not talked to her about it yet.”

I said, “Fine! Keep it that way! Don’t talk to her about it at all.”

Speaking quietly, he said, “I want those ten days with her.” The words held a scarcely concealed threat—if you deprive me of them I will make our stay in the mountains hell. The idea that I was going to give in to this blackmail made me feel sick. No more concessions! It gets me nowhere, and it disgusts me with myself. One has to look things in the face. This is not a mere affair. He is cutting his life into two, and I don’t have the larger part. I’ve had enough. Presently I shall say to him, “Her or me.”

Tuesday 1 December
.

So I was not wrong: he did manipulate me. Before reaching the point of the full confession, he “wore me down” as a bull is worn down. A suspicious confession that was in itself a maneuver. Is he to be believed? I did not keep my eyes shut for eight years on end. Then he told me that it was untrue. Or was it in saying
that
that he was lying? Where is the truth? Does it still exist?

What a rage I sent him into! Was I really so very insulting? It is hard to remember the things one says, above all in the state I had reached. I wanted to hurt him, that’s certain: I succeeded only too well.

Yet I started off very calmly. “I don’t want any sharing: you must make your choice.”

He had the overwhelmed look of a man who is saying to himself,
Here we are! It had to happen. How can I get myself out of this one?
He adopted his most coaxing voice. “Please, darling. Don’t ask me to break with Noëllie. Not now.”

“Yes, now. This business is dragging on too much. I have borne it too long by far.” I looked at him challengingly. “Come now, which do you like best? Her or me?”

“You, of course,” he said in a toneless voice. And he added, “But I like Noëllie too.”

I saw red. “Admit the truth, then! She’s the one you like best! All right! Go to her! Get out of here. Get out at once. Take your things and go.”

I pulled his suitcase out of the wardrobe, I flung clothes into it higgledy-piggledy, I unhooked coat hangers. He took my arm: “Stop!” I went on. I wanted him to go; I really wanted it—it was sincere. Sincere because I did not believe in it. It was like a dreadful psychodrama in which they play at truth. It is the truth, but it is being acted. I shouted, “Go and join that bitch, that schemer, that dirty little shady lawyer.”

He took me by the wrists. “Take back what you have said.”

“No. She’s a filthy thing. She got you by flattery. You prefer her to me out of vanity. You’re sacrificing our love to your vanity.”

Again he said, “Shut up.” But I went on. I poured out everything I thought about Noëllie and him. Yes: I have a confused recollection of it. I said that he was letting himself be taken in like a pitiful fool, that he was turning into
a pretentious, on-the-make vulgarian, that he was no longer the man I had loved, that once upon a time he had possessed a heart and given himself up to others—now he was hard and selfish and concerned only with his career.

“Who’s selfish?” he cried. And he shouted me down. I was the one who was selfish—I who had not hesitated to make him give up a resident post, who would have liked to confine him to a small-time career all his life long so as to keep him at home, I who was jealous of his work—a castrating woman.…

I was shouting. As for the staff job, he had dropped the idea of his own free will. He loved me. Yes, but he had not wanted to marry right away, and I knew it; and as for the baby it would have been possible to manage somehow.

“Shut up! We were happy, passionately happy—you said yourself that you only lived for our love.”

“That was true—you hadn’t left me anything else. You ought to have thought that one day I should suffer for it. But when I tried to escape you did everything you could to prevent me.”