Things and A Man Asleep (5 page)

They would dream, half aloud, of chesterfield settees.

L'Express
would dream with them. They would spend a large part of their holidays doing the country-house auctions; there, at bargain prices, they acquired pewter, straw- bottomed chairs, glasses that asked to be drunk from, horn-handled knives, shiny bowls which they made into precious ashtrays. All these things, they knew, had been, or would be mentioned in the
L'Express.

Their actual purchasing practice, however, was quite significantly different from the shopping habits put forward by
L'Express.
They were not yet quite "settled down" and, although their "executive" status was broadly acknowledged, they did not enjoy the job security or the bonus payments or the salary enhancements of permanent staff under contract.
L'Express
suggested, in that case, by way of pleasant but inexpensive boutiques (the boss is a pal, he'll give you a drink and an open sandwich whilst you're making up your mind), little businesses where fashion had required, in order to create an appropriate impression, a thoroughgoing improvement of all previous fixtures and fittings: whitewashed walls were indispensable, dark brown carpeting a necessity, which could be replaced only by a mosaic of antiquated floor tiles of different kinds; exposed beams were obligatory, and little internal staircases, real fireplaces with a fire burning, rustic or (even better) Provençal furniture were highly recommended. These conversions which were spreading across Paris and affecting, indiscriminately, bookshops, art galleries, haberdashers', novelty and furniture stores, and even grocers' shops (it was not uncommon to see some formerly down-at-heel corner-shop grocer turn into a Cheese Consultant complete with a blue apron giving him a very expert air, and his shop acquire roof-beams and straw decking . . . ), such conversions, therefore, brought more or less legitimately in their wake a rise in prices such that the purchase of a raw-wool, hand-printed dress, of a cashmere twinset woven by a blind Orkney crofter
(exclusive genuine vegetable-dyed hand-spun hand-woven)
or of a sumptuous jersey wool and leather jacket ( for weekend wear, for hunting, for driving) proved permanently impossible. They would eye the wares of antique-dealers closely, but to furnish their flat they actually relied on country sales or the less-publicised auctions at Drouot (and even there they went less often than they would have liked); similarly, all of them only enlarged their stock of clothes by assiduous excursions to the Flea Market or, twice a year, to jumble sales organised by English ladies in aid of the Saint George's English Church's charitable works, where there were plenty of diplomats' cast-offs, in perfectly acceptable condition of course. Often they felt awkward about it: they would have to push their way through a milling crowd and rummage through piles of ghastly stuff - the taste of the English is not all it's cracked up to be - before unearthing a splendid tie, no doubt too frivolous for an Embassy under-secretary, or a shirt that had once been exquisite, or a skirt that would just need taking up. But, of course, it was that or nothing: the incommensurability, perceptible in every domain, between the quality of their taste in clothing (nothing was too fine for them) and the amount of money they normally had available was an obvious, if ultimately secondary, sign of their material situation. They were not the only ones; rather than shop at the sales, which happened everywhere, three times a year, they preferred to buy second-hand. In the world that was theirs it was almost a regulation always to wish for more than you could have. It was not they who had decreed it; it was a social law, a fact of life, which advertising in general, magazines, window displays, the street scene and even, in a certain sense, all those productions which in common parlance constitute cultural life, expressed most authentically. That was why they were wrong to feel, on some occasions, that they were losing their dignity. For minor mortifications - having to ask the price of something, hesitantly; having to think twice; trying to haggle; window-shopping, not daring to go in; wanting; appearing mean and petty - are also what keep business going. They were proud of having got something cheap, of having spent nothing on it, hardly a penny. They were even prouder (but the pleasure of paying too much for something has its own price, which is always a bit too high) to have paid a great deal, the highest possible price, on an impulse, without questioning, almost in blind excitement, for something that could not fail to be the finest, uniquely fine, perfect. These moments of shame and pride both had the same function, brought identical disappointments, identical inner rages. And they grasped - since all around them, everywhere, everything made them grasp, since slogans, posters, neon-lit signs and floodlit shop windows drummed it into their heads from morning to night — that they were for ever one rung down on the ladder, always one rung too low; even though they were fortunate enough not to be, not by a long chalk, at the bottom of the pile.

They were the "new generation", young executives who had not yet cut all their teeth, technocrats on the way, but only halfway, to success. Almost all of them came from the lower middle classes, whose values, they felt, were for them no longer adequate. They cast their eyes enviously, desperately, towards the visible comfort, luxury and perfection of the upper middle classes. They had no past, no tradition. There were no inheritances to wait for. Of all of Jérôme's and Sylvie's friends, only one came from a wealthy, well-established family: they were textile wholesalers in Lille, with a comfortable pile conveniently invested in property in Lille, in a portfolio, a country house near Beauvais, gold and silver plate, jewellery, and roomfuls of antique furniture. All the others had spent their childhoods in dining rooms and bedrooms with imitation Chippendale or imitation rustic furniture as such things were imagined initially at the dawn of the 1930s - full-size beds covered with puce taffeta, three-door wardrobes with mirrors and gilded mouldings, horribly square tables on turned-wood legs, imitation antler coat-stands. In such surroundings, in the evening, beneath the family lamp, they had done their homework. They had taken down the rubbish, they had gone "off with the pail" to fetch the milk, they had slammed doors behind them. Their memories of childhood were all similar, just as the paths they had followed, their slow departures from their family backgrounds, and the vistas they thought they had chosen for themselves, were identical.

They were therefore of their own time. They were at ease with themselves. They were not, so they said, completely fooled. They could keep their distance. They were relaxed, or at least they tried to be. They had a sense of humour. They were by no means dim.

A detailed analysis would have detected easily enough, within the group they constituted, divergent trends, stifled enmities. Any sociometrist with an eye for finicky detail would have easily discovered in their midst fault lines, reciprocal exclusions, latent hostilities amongst them. It sometimes happened that one or another of them, in response to some more or less fortuitous accident, or a camouflaged provocation, or a misunderstanding all in hints, would spread discord amongst them. Their fine friendship would then disintegrate. They would then realise, with simulated amazement, that X, whom they'd always thought a generous chap, was the very soul of stinginess, that Y was nothing but a desiccated egoist.

Strains followed, and matured into break-ups. Sometimes they took malicious pleasure in setting one group up against another. Or alternatively there were protracted periods of sulking, of pronounced distance, of coldness. They would avoid each other and continually find ways of justifying their avoidance, until the hour of forgiving, forgetting and of reconciliation came round. For in the last analysis they could not manage without each other.

They played these games intensely and they spent on them precious time which they could have used without disadvantage to quite different ends. But they were such that, even if it occasionally irritated them, the group they constituted defined them almost entirely. Outside of it they had no real life. They were wise enough, none the less, not to see each other too often, not to work together always, and they even made an effort to keep up individual pursuits, private spheres to which they could withdraw, where they could forget, up to a point, not the group itself, the mafia, the team, but, obviously, the work on which it was based. Their almost shared lives made it easier to launch surveys, to go on trips to the provinces, to spend nights on analyses or on drafting reports; but it also tied them down to working like that. That, to tell the truth, was their awkward secret, their common weak spot. That was what they never mentioned.

Their greatest pleasure was to forget together, that is to say to indulge in distractions. They loved drinking, in the first place, and they drank a lot, often, together. They were habitués of "Harry's New York Bar", denizens of Rue Daunou, frequenters of the cafés in the Palais-Royal arcades, of "Le Balzar", of "Lipp", and a few other bars. They liked Munich beer, Guinness, gin, hot or cold punch, fruit liqueurs. Sometimes they spent whole evenings just drinking, huddled round two tables put together for the purpose, and they would talk, interminably, about the life they would have liked to lead, about the books they would write one day, about the things they would like to do, about the films they had seen or were going to see, the future of humanity, the political situation, their next holiday, their last holiday, an outing to the country, a short trip to Bruges, Antwerp or Basel. And on occasions, as they plunged ever deeper into these collective daydreams, not seeking to wake from them but continually refuelling them in unstated collusion, they would, eventually, lose all touch with reality. On such occasions, now and again a hand would simply emerge from the conclave: the waiter was there, to clear the empty tankards and bring full ones; and then their conversation, as it once again thickened, would consist solely of matter related to what they had just drunk, to their drunkenness, their thirst, their happiness.

They were in love with liberty. It seemed to them that the whole world was tailor-made for them. They lived at the exact tempo of their thirst, and their exuberance was irrepressible; their enthusiasm knew no bounds. They could have walked, run, danced, sung all night.

They wouldn't meet the day after. The couples would stay at home, dieting, feeling queasy, overindulging in black coffee and soluble aspirin. They would venture out only once night had fallen, to go and eat a plain steak in an expensive café. They would make draconian resolutions: no more smoking, no more drinking, no more wasting money. They would feel empty and stupid, and in their memory of their magnificent drinking bout there would always be a hint of yearning, a vague annoyance, a feeling of ambiguity, as if the very impulse which had made them drink had only reawakened in them a much deeper perplexity, a more hermetic contradiction from which they could not abstract themselves.

Or else, in the flat of one or another of them, they would hold almost monstrous dinner parties, veritable feasts. For the most part they had only tiny and sometimes unusable kitchens, and mixed sets of crockery with an odd few rather high-class pieces amongst them. Extremely delicate cut glass stood on the table beside recycled mustard jars, kitchen knives lay alongside little silver spoons with coats of arms.

They would return all together from Rue Mouffetard, arms laden with edibles, with whole trays of melons and peaches, and baskets filled with cheeses, legs of lamb, poultry, and paniers of oysters in season, and dishes of pâté, and fish roes, and, of course, with bottles, whole stacks of bottles of wine, port, mineral water, Coca-Cola.

Nine or ten people filled the narrow room, which was lit by a single window looking out on to the courtyard. A settee upholstered in coarse brown velvet occupied a recess at the far end; three would be placed there, the table set in front of them, and the others would sit on unmatched chairs and on stools. They would eat and drink for hours on end. The exuberance and the copiousness of these meals were odd: to be honest, and from a strictly culinary point of view, they were rather poor meals: roast meat and poultry without any sauce; the vegetables were almost invariably boiled or sauté potatoes or even, on days before pay-day, the main dish might be just pasta or rice garnished with olives and some anchovies. They didn't experiment at all; their most complicated dishes were melon in port, bananas
flambé
, cucumber salad in cream. It took them several years to realise that there was a technique, if not an art, of cookery, and that everything that they had enjoyed eating had been plain fare, unadorned, devoid of subtlety.

In that respect they demonstrated the ambiguity of their situation in life. What they took to be a feast corresponded in every particular to the only kind of meals they had known for years, namely student canteen food. By dint of eating tough and wafer-thin steaks, they had taken to worshipping Chateaubriand and fillet steaks. Meat in gravy - for years they looked askance at braised meat - did not attract them; they had too clear a memory of lumps of fat swimming around three slices of carrot in close proximity to a soggy piece of soft cheese and a spoonful of gelatinous jam. In a way, they liked anything which made a show without showing it had been cooked. They liked the visible signs of abundance and riches; they would have no truck with the slow process of elaboration which turns difficult raw materials into dishes, and which implies a whole world of pans, pots, slicers, strainers and ovens. But the sight of salami sometimes almost made them faint, because it was all immediately and entirely edible. They liked pâtés and ready-made diced vegetable salads decorated with mayonnaise whorls, boned ham and eggs in aspic: they yielded too often to such temptations, and regretted it, once their eyes had had their fill, almost as soon as they plunged their forks into the jelly enhanced by a slice of tomato and two sprigs of parsley. After all, it was only a hard-boiled egg.