2
THE DENTIST’S APOLOGY was not a thing of any grace. After breakfast duty in the dining-room, Anne was summoned to Mme Bouin’s niche and there told that the matter of the previous night would not be referred to again.
‘Monsieur the Patron has decided to keep you on the staff. No doubt, like the rest of us, he greatly regrets what took place, but he is a generous man as well as an extremely busy one and he will take no further action.’
She warned Anne that any further lapses would not be viewed so tolerantly. ‘And before you go, mademoiselle, there is one further thing. If it had not been for the intervention of certain persons you would now be waiting at the station with your suitcase packed. What’s done is done, but it is not permitted for the staff of this hotel to fraternise with the clients. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, thank you, madame.’
‘You will now return to the kitchen where I have given the chef instructions on your duties for the day.’
‘Thank you, madame.’
In the kitchen Bruno was sitting at the big wooden table, dipping some bread into a bowl of coffee.
‘Floors,’ he said. ‘Then the vegetables. And then if there’s time before lunch, the windows.’
‘But that’s Roland’s job.’
‘Shut up, woman. And don’t come whining to me this morning. My head’s made of wood.’
‘I see.’ It seemed the dentist’s half-bottle of wine was not all the alcohol Bruno had consumed. ‘Did you drink a lot?’
Bruno grunted and waved a fat wrist at Anne, who laughed.
‘Why do you do it, Bruno? You know it only makes you feel ill.’
‘Don’t ask me questions, you wretched girl, or I shall put you over my knee and spank you. Good and hard. I think that’s what you need – you and your Parisian manners.’
‘All right, not another word, I promise. Two bottles, was it?’
‘Good and hard, I tell you. I’d have that tight skirt off your bottom and your knickers down and –’
‘Bruno! You’re still drunk! I’m going, I’m going.’
She went quickly to the store cupboard by the back door where the mops and pails were kept. It was boring work and the constant jar of the wooden handle on the palm of her hand began to irritate the dormant eczema. This morning, however, she didn’t mind. She opened the back door and let through a thin breeze which was clear and cool after the previous night’s rain. She felt protected. It was as if Hartmann’s intervention had not only saved her job but had also insulated her from some of the tedium involved in performing it.
That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.
Her husband had said he would be up late preparing some papers. He seemed to work late with increasing frequency these days. Christine registered the change but said nothing.
Hartmann sat at the desk in his study and stared blankly ahead of him, his pen abandoned on the papers.
All his life he had felt the implacable nagging of desire. The feeling was more of a frustration than a pleasure, because the relief was only ever momentary. Sometimes, in fact, the length of time between the relief and the first intimations of the next frustration seemed so brief as hardly to constitute an interuption in the continuous longing. He had been affected by a mood of frivolity that had been widespread in people of his class after the war. The sustained feeling of euphoria – even if it was shadowed by a suspicion that such a climate couldn’t last long – coincided with the period of his own greatest youthful vigour. After the sight of the wall of dead men in the mud, of severed limbs, of blown muscle and sinew; after the stench of decomposing flesh and field latrines, the landscape of blackened trees and gaping shell-holes; after the constant sense of fear and of life valued only by the day, and then the return to decimated villages, there had seemed no reason for self-restraint. The free embrace of womanhood, the touch and scent of femininity, were tokens of the peace.
For Hartmann and his friends in Paris there was serious work to be done in offices and banks and galleries, but there was also a parallel life of passion and sexual encounter. Hartmann and Mattlin, though they barely knew each other, were alike in one respect, that they each spent many hours wondering how to stave off the battering of desire. For Mattlin the solution lay in numbers: by increasing the aggregate of women he slept with he felt he could eliminate the potential sources of frustration. For Hartmann the answer always seemed to lie in the next encounter. He did not accumulate in the same way as Mattlin but saw each lover as potentially definitive. The next woman, he was sure, would prove so complete, so satisfying, that she would at last extinguish the tormenting itch that made it hard to concentrate for so much of the working day. Mattlin valued the difference in each woman he made love to because, by isolating each new trait, he hoped to inoculate himself against the frustration it might otherwise have caused; Hartmann found in individual differences only varying and sometimes tantalising degrees of incompleteness.
The insoluble nature of his dilemma had been one of the factors that had reconciled Hartmann to marrying Christine. He knew he would never find a woman to end all desire, but there was much in his relationship with Christine, leaving aside the problem of her pregnancy, which disposed him to think they might be happy. There had been various outcomes and problems in his dealings with women, but the presence of sexual desire was something he had always taken as axiomatic. Yet now, with Christine, it had gone. Where once this feeling had been the most dependable presence in his life, now there was nothing.
Hartmann got up from the desk and turned out the lights. He went through to the hall, pulled the bolt across the front door and climbed the stairs to bed. Christine was still awake and smiled to him as he came in. He stood barefoot on the boards and gazed out across the lake to the swell of the woods on the other side. He was conscious of deferring an action, and knew that Christine would be aware of it too. When he climbed into bed he saw that she was naked – a sight which on countless previous occasions had caused a simple response in him. When he looked at her now, he felt something not unlike compassion. He saw her legs and arms, her heavy breasts and her face, eager and friendly, and he thought of all the difficulties of her life and of the way she had overcome them.
It occurred to him that really this was the normal way to view a naked woman. It was the way one would look upon a mother or a sister, or a work of art: with affection, with understanding, with an appreciation, even, of their elegance, but not through the filter of desire. It seemed that the way in which he had previously seen women was false. Here was this aggregation of flesh and skin and hair, not repulsive, but merely human, like his own body. No doubt its owner could view it with detachment, wishing it were different in some respects, but also with kindliness and respect. Why, then, shouldn’t he also see it in this way? Was this not the most civilised approach? It was not absence of sexual desire that was strange, he thought; on the contrary, the strangeness was in the leap of imagination and sustained belief, against all the evidence, that allowed men to see women through a veil of make-believe allure.
Christine wanted him to make love to her, and he felt baffled by his disinclination. It was as though he had cut himself and not bled, or opened his eyes and not seen. In his mind he thought of all the other women he knew, and in this mood he viewed them all in the same way. None was arousing. It didn’t occur to him to think of Anne or of what he had felt so strongly in the attic only a few days earlier.