9
EARLIER IN THE evening Christine had telephoned to say she would be back the next day. She and Marie-Thérèse had quarrelled, though Christine didn’t sound too upset. Hartmann said he would tell Marie to prepare lunch for two.
He couldn’t eat the dinner she had left him, but took a bottle of wine into his study where he tried to read. The sentences seemed to sit meaninglessly in front of his eyes, however many times he looked at them. He walked around the room and sorted out some papers into different files, but there was nothing really left to do. He had prepared all he needed for the insurance case arising from the negligence at the marsh reclamation works and none of the other cases he was working on needed attention. Marie came to ask him if there was anything else he wanted, and he told her she could go to bed.
He thought of driving into town for a drink at one of the small bars up by the station, but since he didn’t want to talk to anyone it seemed pointless. Normally he liked being on his own, but on this occasion he found his thoughts exhausting company. For minutes at a time he was quite calm, and then it was as if a sluice had been opened and his mind was filled again with anguish. He didn’t know if it was his own or someone else’s.
At about eleven he turned off the lights downstairs and went up to bed. He fastened the shutters tight, shivering in the cold blast that drove in between the insubstantial flaps of wood. He climbed into the wide expanse of unwarmed bedclothes and closed his eyes in the darkness. He thought of the dawn at Merlaut when he sat beneath the apple tree before returning to find Anne’s arm childishly reach out to him. When briefly he had been able to step aside from the sensuous delight of the evening’s events his thoughts had turned to the book of essays, by Montaigne, that he had seen in Anne’s rooms. At Merlaut he knew he had gone against one of Montaigne’s precepts: I desist. Now by banishing Anne was he following more closely the philosopher’s advice? He was desisting in a way; but too brutally and far too late.
After an hour or so he got out of bed and took his dressing-gown from the chair. The floorboards on the landing creaked comfortably beneath his bare feet, and as he descended the stairs he felt the risen banister smooth against his palm. Running his fingers through his hair in some automatic vanity he crossed the cold marble floor of the hall to the piano, on top of which he found a box of cigarettes and some matches. He began to smoke as he walked about the silent house, leaving a thin grey trail behind him. In the dining-room he found his feet lifted by the sprung parquet floor, and he thought of how his father used to sit at the head of the table on one of his rare visits home and of the cowed anxious looks his mother used to give him as she supervised the dinner.
He pulled back the shutters and sat in the window seat gazing out towards the lake. He placed the flat of his right hand against his forehead and leaned his elbow on the window sill. Twice, when Christine had been away, he had slept with Anne. In the course of the night he had been woken by her restlessness and had wondered if the past would ever leave her, even when she slept.
He had loved her then, he was certain, when he had put out his arm to still her troubled movements and willed a sense of peace into her heart. What strange connections in his mind had then corroded that pure feeling?
The energy that had driven him when he had first made love to her at Merlaut had been diverted. Instead of gusting, as it should have done, fitfully and playfully in his dealing with her, it had precipitated a long inward storm of compassion. His obsessed identification with her plight had prevented him from seeing her as someone opposite, discrete, and satisfactorily herself.
It was not through cruelty that he had turned her away, he thought now, as he tried to forgive himself for what he had done, but through an excess of sympathy. The dark-eyed waitress he had longed for when she first stood beside him in the attic of his house, the lover whose name had erased the memory of all others when he whispered it in her ear – Anne, whose every action towards him had been illuminated by the gentlest trust and hope, had gone from his mind. In the slow rage of his imagination, he had subsumed her.
These thoughts were not all clear in Hartmann’s mind. Often he saw only a man’s hand slip itself around the butt of a revolver. He began to feel rage towards Anne’s father. He too could have desisted. What consequences he had unleashed; what chain of despair and loneliness that would contaminate the lives of so many people for decades yet to come.
When Anne had come that day to the Manor and he had stroked her hair, he had felt as though the pain passed through his hand, as though he were a medium of some greater evil. When she had said, ‘This is worse than anything I have ever known,’ all his frantic imaginings had been confirmed; they were the words he had most dreaded to hear.
Hartmann clasped his hands tight on the window-ledge as he looked out into the darkness. He felt angry, and this anger was better than the aimless anguish he had felt before, but it depended on his being able to hold in his mind the picture of the murder and on his being sure that the consequences followed so surely on the events.
At other moments he felt that every action in the world was alone and complete in itself without reference to others, and then he was filled with a sorrow he could not bear.
Anne did not awake till noon the next day. She washed and changed her clothes and began to pack her suitcases, placing in them the picture of the Parisian roofs, the coffee pot, the doll, and throwing her clothes on top. The first train she could take was at three o’clock, and this would give her time to prepare for the journey. She wrote letters to Mlle Calmette, to Pierre and to her friend Mathilde, promising the last two she would write again from Paris. She had just enough money from her wages and from what she had earned by sewing for Mlle Calmette to pay for lodgings for a day or two in Paris until she could find a job.
She tried to put the episode with Mattlin out of her mind. It troubled her that she had done the same thing with him as with Hartmann; that the most joyous thing to her could also be the most regrettable. Her sense of repulsion, however, was not as great as her sadness. Because she had no respect for Mattlin she determined not to waste her thoughts on him.
She bumped the heavy cases down the scrubbed stairs and out into the courtyard, then looked back for a moment at the window of her sitting-room, where she had sat and watched the sun on the old walls below. ‘Goodbye, Zozo,’ she called out to the empty space as she moved towards the street.
She hoped she would see no one she knew as she made her way along the back streets towards the station. Luckily it was cold, and such people as were out had their chins buried in their coats and their gaze on the pavements in front of them. Down a diagonal road Anne saw the sweep of the Place de la Victoire and she remembered that she had promised the Patron to look at the war memorial and think about the men who had died. She glanced towards the station, where she could see the clock: twenty to three. She dragged her cases down into the square and went over to the obelisk with its large stone slab whose inscription bore witness to the town’s unwilling sacrifice. What was it the Patron had said? That they would be only names for her? And so they were – sixty or so, with initials, some bizarre but mostly local, homely names with two or three sets of people with the same surname. She wondered what their families must have thought. She tried to put a face and a laugh to some of them, to imagine what they had been like to those who knew them, but it was impossible. At least their names remained; against the gore and squalor of their deaths there was this tiny counterweight of balance.
She bought her ticket and sat down in the station waiting-room. She had not been able to bring the gramophone with her because it was too much to carry; she might send for it later. Or perhaps, she thought, as she began unconsciously to rub the swollen palm of her right hand against the rough waistband of her skirt, she might not.
Hartmann sat at the desk of his study. He had told Christine at lunchtime that Anne would not be returning, and she had tactfully concealed her elation beneath some neutral talk about replacing her.
Hartmann knew what Anne was doing. He knew that she would move swiftly to escape and start again, just as she had done before. He knew how hard she would be fighting in her mind. She was saying to herself that it had not been so very wonderful in any case; that most of her time had been taken up in frustration and waiting. He could feel the energy of her mental processes and wished that she would drain him of his resources and use them too. He willed her to succeed, sitting with his hands folded staring straight ahead in his reverie.
He recalled the time he had first watched her in the bar at the hotel and how she used to swing her long black-stockinged leg backwards and forwards as her shoe grazed the floor in time to an imaginary dance beat. And then the flush of colour in her cheeks, and those long-lashed eyes that had begun their slow undermining of his self-control. He remembered how he had wondered what her life might be like; and then how, some time after that at Merlaut, he had stroked her hair as she lay in her troubled sleep and how he had tried to bring calm to her through the gentle touch of his fingers. Then he thought of the explosion of a revolver shot, echoing in a shocked silence underground, and the cry of a small girl running alone into a field.
He looked out of the window, across the lake, with his head in his hands. In his mind he saw a girl, sitting in a railway carriage with two heavy suitcases on the rack opposite her. He saw her hair, her face, her eyes and all her movements. He believed that now his long effort of imagination was over, and he knew truthfully what she was feeling, and so, when he lowered his hands from his face, he found at last that tears were streaming from his eyes.