I RETURNED TO MY ROOMS, my head in a whirl as disorderly as the wind which gusts through stations after an express train has passed. Hurtling along the wall at the top of Queen’s College, the blast caused people to thrust numbed fingertips deep inside their pockets. My undergraduate’s gown, billowing like a black sail, tugged me backwards by both shoulders. I froze beneath this March gale, making it a point of honour to go out all year round, like my fellow students, wearing pumps, without an overcoat and without a hat. Many a habit had had to be sacrificed since that first night at school, when a French boy of fourteen had been obliged to defend the national nightshirt, made of jaconet with Russian embroidery, in a pillow fight with insulted Anglo-Saxon pyjamas.

The corpses of students that remained in the Dardanelles or at La Bassée could be lined up along the length of three canal locks, and yet even more have returned. The colleges are opening annexes. Oxford is no longer that deserted inner courtyard, traversed at certain times of the day by professors without courses, surreptitious Hindus immersed in spiritualism and touring Canadian soldiers; it is not an eminent cloister as it once was, but an industrious hamlet whose inhabitants return from Greek and Latin as though from field or factory. It is no longer contaminated by elegance and lost time. A son’s education, the most onerous of English duties, is undergoing restrictions. The days of the daily Clicquot, of balls at the Clarendon, of Latin essays bought ready-written and of life lived on credit, when it was enough to toss off the name of a respectable college to tradesmen to avoid a bill arriving before the end of the third year summer term, those days now belong to the age of the early Georges, when students ruined themselves by living in style and kept mistresses. That is why, like my colleagues, I was reverting to frugal habits, living by the rule and dining almost every evening in hall, even though I had rooms in town. We gulped down the entremets, a sort of alternating pink and yellow mocha cake, which looked like bacon and tasted of pepsin, followed by a large glass of water. While the dons were saying grace, bread rolls rained down on Harris, the elderly refectory porter who, on special occasions, brings out his album of celebrities in which one can spot viceroys of India, dukes in gaiters, or even, attired in a braided black velvet jacket, Mr Oscar Wilde, the collector of blue china, who only astonished his age because he remained a Magdalen man all his life and did forced labour instead of paying fines.

 

I was living off the Banbury Road, an area dotted with cheap cottages where there are as many Wordsworth Houses and Keats Lodges as there are nannies on benches, restraining kisses on a lipless mouth, despite twisted spectacles and the irreparable snapping of celluloid collars. A second-year undergraduate, I had passed, proud of having sworn my oath in Latin, in tails, on the Bible, in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor; of having fallen into the river; and of returning, when such a thing was possible, from London, on the last train, known as the fornicators’ train, without falling victim to the university patrol after curfew, and master of all I surveyed because of a feudal custom that allowed me the right to the inside of the pavement and the middle of the river.

In the hallway, beneath the stags’ antlers where the gong hangs and the bucolic spectacle of stuffed swifts, I found a letter addressed to me. I climbed two floors to switch on the light of a room strewn with books, saddlery, soda siphons, with, on the walls, a toasting fork, a Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a cock fight in which two gentlemen sporting sideburns and stirrups are urging one bird towards the other with the help of paper cones.

I read this:

Delphine.

The name flickers over the screen of my curtains. Landscapes merge into one another; one wonders what distraction has prompted a head to appear along a road, when suddenly there crystallises all around it some wooden panelling, a door, a window and a comfortable middle-class drawing room surrounded on all sides by a tropical landscape which, a moment beforehand, grew there; the drawing room, in turn, melted away beneath the force of one of those cinematographic squalls that visit the humblest gardens. So it is that my white varnished wooden mantelpiece, discoloured by anthracite, collapses, falls apart and dwindles into rosy hillsides in which I recognise Vouvray; the copper plaque begins to quiver and in turn diffuses into a powerful flow from which the Loire rises. I see once more a house with two wings clinging to a flight of steps, chintz curtains and a pianola. Delphine caused a spasm of asthmatic whistling to come from it and treated me to the overture to The Barber of Seville; the long, perforated roll of notes folded in a zig-zag, emitting a rippling noise. While she played, I would gaze at her hair, the tough, twisted horsehair that I loved; life has added nothing to those hours, unless it is that hair should not be allowed to be naturally wavy. Then I took her hand and thought: “Nothing else matters.” The bellows of the pianola ceased to groan, the notes stopped tumbling down. I should have liked to remain like that for ever; but we were serious children; never hearing us laugh, Delphine’s aunt began to worry and before long two foolish eyes, swimming in the water of her lorgnette, denied us all privacy.

I was allowed to play with Delphine, who never got dirty and refused to climb up the ladder to the reservoir with me. But her coldness, her intelligence and “words that were not suitable for her age” displeased my grandparents.

“Delphine,” I heard them say, “is the image of her mother.”

Her mother lives in Toulon with a naval officer. A pallid-looking woman, with pink fingers, Annamese costumes, who never dresses up, and who lets exotic dishes grow cold without touching them; proud of days devoted to a table of specious men, wrinkled and full of maritime disillusions.

Delphine did not live poetically except in dreams. She recounted them to me in detail every day. They always contained water, clear when she felt well, muddy when she was tired. Frequently large cats, too, lynxes and panthers, but very gentle and with silky fur. She climbed up into the trees with them as high as the topmost branches from where she let herself drop down into space. She had a thorough knowledge of the meaning of dreams, and since this surprised me, she confessed that she corresponded with Mme de Thèbes and even showed me letters in which she addressed her informally.

Delphine meant the world to me. A world of more individual inspiration, less concerned with approval than the one to which I belonged.

“Never,” she asserted, “shall I be like those women who say no when they mean yes.”

She went around full of joy to be trying out words, to be putting ideas into practice. Every experience was a delight. No vocabulary struck her as unreasonable, no conduct deserving of disfavour. Though she never let herself go, she was aware, nevertheless, of all the imperfections of that world that stopped at the tollgates of Tours and, while she was very fond of me, she was not blind to my own either. She would have liked to see me wear spectacles.

I tried to dominate her through the mind. I lent her Dominique. She handed it back to me solemnly. “It’s beautiful”, and then concluded: “You are very sensual.” It was true. After meals, there were fiery patches on my plump cheeks, and my nose picked up some very common smells. Delphine, on the other hand, seemed to me to be restrained and private. She was a girl of her times, with a vast amount of knowledge, sure judgement; clever, proud of the influence she exerted, at a time when young men are obliged to live on credit, thanks to their hypocrisy or the leniency of older people. Everything that is languorous, rebellious, fecund and unclean in the human species seemed to have been apportioned to me. But all I could do was to improve. She had only to offer life that inscrutable face, that empty heart, to be immediately condemned by fate, to be troubled and beset on all sides, as soon as she ventured to leave home, by scandals, of which her marriage was not the least.

The war is to blame for all that, of course. And in 1917 there was nothing in Tours to prevent a young middle-class Frenchwoman from marrying a Russian officer in leather boots, who had been pursuing her for two months, when the hospitals were overflowing with strange confessions in every language, the hospital trains were taken over by well-to-do ladies who could not cope with the smell of gangrene, tea stalls were set up around the archbishop’s palace and the sides of the roads were decked out with large umbrellas beneath which Annamese would take refuge for their oriental liaisons.

But this is well after the period when Delphine and I used to bicycle along the banks of the Loire as far as Luynes, before dinner.

Areas of flooding stretched out between the municipal poplar trees. Dusk was descending over the chalk cliffs, but it did not dim the artificial sunlight from the mustard fields in bloom. A leaden sky flowed above the river; below, in the fields, mottled cattle were advancing slowly, following their tongues.

Delphine was pedalling against the wind. She was wearing a beret and a blue woollen pullover. From time to time she moistened her lips, dried by the wind. Her face, somewhat sullen in repose or when she was at home, relaxed with the effort, became accessible; reflected in the nickel of the handlebars, it seemed broader even, coarse and bracing. At moments like those, I took heart once more; she freewheeled and willingly allowed herself to be pushed, my hand on the flat of her back. Within sight of Saint-Symphorien, the land was no longer laid waste. There was room only for vegetables, cafés and love affairs. We lay our machines on the bank and went down closer to the water. Amid a riot of clouds, the sun was setting.

With its generous and shallow expanse of water, its poisonous sky, its limestone pitted with caves, Touraine became, for a moment, implacable. For a moment, too, Delphine was mine; I lay my head on her knees, my cheeks chafed by the wool of her skirt. My neck swelled; she put her hand inside my collar, motherly, sensible and exasperated, and said: “You’re dripping wet.” I kissed her warm hand, puerile and full of earthly passions. Delphine turned sour: “I loathe voluptuous people, I warn you.” I did not insist, dreading the way she made me feel ashamed of my pleasure and the fits of anger occasioned by my disappointment. The first to get to her feet, she seemed endowed with extraordinary energy. I followed her.

 

I awoke one Sunday, at about two in the afternoon, in a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street, after a brief sleep broken up by nightmares, hoarse, eyes burning, back aching. I had gone to bed at dawn, after the annual Putney to Mortlake race, in which the Cambridge eight had passed the winning post after having found sufficient lift-off at the end of their blue oars to make up that three-length lead, the memory of which would remain unbearable to Oxford for a year. The two crews had begun again in the evening, a liquid and fraternal contest at the Trocadero dining rooms, then, transported in yelling clusters upon the roofs of taxis, had run the gamut of music-halls; the Empire first, where the affronted boxes exchanged, as though in couplets, college war cries; then the Oxford, where the French show permitted improprieties; then the Chelsea Palace, where there was a set battle, broken up by the police; on the stroke of midnight, London had in fact become an incandescent mass, ravaged by pleasures, where buses, festooned with advertisements, passed by making swishing noises, where the houses buckled like our indestructible shirt-fronts; portable harmonicas bathed souls in the water of psalms. The electrical sun in the lobby of the Savoy had subsided into the Thames; under cover of darkness the furtive flowers of underground nightclubs flourished: Boum-Boum, the Lotus, Hawaii, where, upon catching sight of us, the disabled porter discovered a pink curtain behind which the face of a Galician Jew, swathed in powdered ochre, dressed in tails with cornelian buttons, drew from a book with counterfoils the tickets for admission to the cellar.

I got up, had a massage and set off for Delphine’s.

On the edge of that nebula of dust, of electric gold, of whistles and cries that is Leicester Square, the French convent consisted of three adjoining houses with a pale brick frontage, revealed by the pointed arch of its chapel door on which was written in French Dames du Bon Accueil. Sunk into the barred hatch window of the convent door next to it was the bloodshot eye of the duty sister, wearing a dubious headdress. I found myself in a parlour, the drawing room of a middle-class God, where, on a deep-laid wooden floor, woven esparto water lilies slumbered opposite green rep chairs.

 

Delphine entered, dressed in mourning, the oval of her face accentuated by a strip of white crêpe. I had not seen her for five years. We embraced.

“Your cheeks are a little less hard as they used to be,” I said, out of affection.

Her face, as smooth as a porcelain bowl, receded at the sides in an equal curve, drawing up to the surface two dark eyes, liquid and flat, but my memory hesitated at the sight of a softened mouth, tired at the corners and which bore her even teeth without any pleasure. Her nostrils were more flared, and being elongated, no longer formed part of the line of her very delicate nose, hooked and slender as to be almost transparent, the one relief in the mask. Her expression, too, had changed, more taciturn, rarely embellished by her former eloquence or self-assurance. The joy in seeing one another again was non-existent.

“I’m not taking the veil,” she said with a laugh, “but I need rest and this convent had been recommended to me and suits me. God provides us with many a pitfall after misfortune, in order to punish us,” she added.

I saw her bedroom, just as basic as those in the gloomy furnished lodgings in the neighbourhood. The walls were covered in old nursery paper, blue with gold stars. Some lilies were soaking in the cracked washbasin. Delphine was getting dressed to go to vespers; I agreed to accompany her.

The sash window decapitated a segment of the square streaked with telephone wires which propped up the immediate weight of a sightless sky. The oriental domes of the Alhambra, the shabby Restaurant Cavour with its dark Chianti stains on the tablecloths, cheered up the image of Sunday with their southern protestations.

In the street she took my arm and traces soon appeared of our former camaraderie.

“I’m glad to be here,” she said, “the English are strange creatures, with hands pitted in freckles, who cry at the sight of squirrels and sweet peas. They talk in a garrulous way like southerners without lips, are victims of their nerves and have no resistance to emotions when they happen to feel them. They are all like Miss Mabel, my governess in Tours, deferential and distracted at the same time. She had a prestigious pocket watch inside which was an elegant miniature. In the early days she believed her husband was in love with her. You never knew my husband? He looked like Michel Strogoff, in the first act, when he still has his fine uniform and all his eyelashes; like a tenor whom I had seen in Hernani. That’s why when I met him for the first time, I turned round. For two months he followed us. He wrote me letters on a paper alternately red and violet. I was thrilled. He asked to marry me. I made up my own mind to refuse. Once I was in his presence I was overcome with panic and two weeks later we were married. You know how he was killed outside Odessa, shortly afterwards. I have not forgotten him; he was good, boisterous and mad like all Russians. Each time I was in the wrong he would weep and beg my forgiveness as he brought out his revolver. I would have been very happy with him.”

Delphine describes to me what her widowhood has been. Like a long, fruitless vigil in which, meticulously, she tried initially to detect signs of hope in herself.

“Leaving me alone and keeping me company,” she would say, “are the two worst favours anyone can do for me.”

Then, treacherously, she spent weeks in Paris in a similar state of anxiety, among different circles, in search of what she termed a system for living, or for not disappearing. She found little there apart from brief reprieves, in which her time was divided among creatures without radiance, bereft of any intelligence or atrophied by a hideous pursuit of pleasure. She refused their mediation.

I certainly recognised the same bravery as before in Delphine, but I perceived a lesser degree of resistance and, with every word, more vehement oscillations. I am no longer much accustomed to young women of my age, having paid only brief visits to France for exams in the course of recent years. Are they all like Delphine? The elder ones had always struck me as abysses of devotion, some dedicated to their duties, those who preferred pleasure imposing on themselves responsibilities no less onerous; all of them ultimately mindful of obligations, loving life and not in the least rebellious against the obstacles it offered them. Delphine, on the other hand, does not parade her selfishness as a disgrace; she treats it as a highly intelligent lesson, as a precise and respected concept that nonetheless exhausts her. She acknowledges her hard-heartedness, which is not the same as it was six years ago, but which was probably being primed then, with such independence that I refrain from thinking badly of her. I reckon that far from finding reasons for persevering, Delphine is waiting impatiently to destroy herself, which lends her a tolerable and fleeting grandeur.

By way of colonial offices shaped like waxen fruits, we reach Westminster Cathedral, which is some way away from the frenetic traffic that connects Victoria Station to the Thames; there I recognised the sanctuary of the new Catholic faith that had reached out over Anglican lawns at the end of the last century. The great British cardinals, Manning and Vaughan, demanded this testimony of piety and good taste, thanks to which prayer would be possible in a modern building. One could indeed rejoice at the sight of these honest, bare basilica walls, all in brick, although Delphine anxiously pointed out a darker line half way up, marking the imminent floodtide of a covering of all too precious marble beneath it, and modern mosaics above.

In front of the sanctuary, framed obliquely in the beams of a pale and fragmented sunlight, a gigantic Byzantine cross blocked the apse. A darkness, in which incense mingled with the fog from outside, shrouded the domes punctured by timorous windows. In spite of the array of chandeliers that resembled oriental headdresses, formed of layers of iron rings from which hung lights on chains, the cathedral was a massive monument and a public utility, like a Roman aqueduct or a railway station. Vespers was being said in the chapel of the Holy Sacrament; the organ was concocting great architectures of sound. On the other side of the brass railings some of the faithful were immersed in contemplation, two nurses, a City man kneeling in front of his top hat, a Chelsea pensioner in red uniform, an Indian Army officer in a turban; three priests were officiating on the altar. Her face in her hands, Delphine was silent. Then she turned to me, an equivocal look in her eyes, and gripped my arm.

“Why am I such a bad person?” she said. “Why do I like everything that’s bad?”

Having revealed her thoughts to me in this way, she then smiled.

“You are a very small someone to whom I can’t explain anything.”

She led me over to the side chapels where the same propensity towards an art anxious to avoid pomp and archaism was manifest. We passed St Patrick’s chapel, with its covering of Irish marble and the reredos encrusted in mother-of-pearl shamrocks. All the stones of the world, from Numidia, from Thessaly, from Norway, were beginning to pave the church in mercantile luxury. A black-and-white altar, reminiscent of an actress’s bathroom, the fruit of donations from great transatlantic banks, appeared to be reserved for South American devotions. A woman was kneeling on the first step, wrapped in a homespun cape with large pleats that resembled both a monk’s habit and a raglan coat. I leant forwards and saw, beneath a hood, a little girl’s face with make-up on, swathed in curly grey hair. Her forefinger, encumbered with a large emerald cabochon, was telling the beads of a rosary. I was about to draw Delphine’s attention to this Castilian visitor from the time of the Incas, when the lady turned round, and, recognising my friend, greeted her with three hurried and breathless words, uttered in a contralto voice.

Thus did I make the acquaintance of Pepita Warford, an Englishwoman of Cuban extraction, patroness of the convent where Delphine resided. She came up to us, kissed her, spoke to us about the Holy Virgin, about the breeding of marmosets and the advantages of nocturnal life. Delphine laughed, affectionate and excited.

Despite my lack of concentration, I could not but take note of this unusual episode. The moment I set eyes on Mrs Warford, feelings of unimaginable hostility welled up in me, far less resoluble than the spontaneously aroused antipathy we may feel for all those called upon to play a part in the lives of our friends. She had the effect on me that a deceptive vegetable might have that you suddenly discovered was enveloping you. Her piety had the air of culpable ingenuity and when she chirped invective or praise in any language, one was also reminded of a worn-out nightingale.

I was on the point of dissuading Delphine from allowing herself to be destroyed by such relationships. I sensed that they could lead her, via holy paths, towards some disturbing abnegations. Then, I reflected, while Mrs Warford withdrew into prayer once more, that harm never comes to anyone and that to misuse things is an essential condition for mastering them later on. Besides, danger is worth the price you pay for it. So I controlled my ill-humour and did not allow myself any display of harsh wisdom, fearing that I would incur on the part of my friend a degree of anger which I hoped, for her greater good, would soon be turned against herself.

 

I resumed my studies at the University. I did not belong to any club and I played no games. Adulterated champagne, dry cigars, and the cost they incurred had distanced me from the cliques where Russian princes and the sons of Australians and German landowners set the tone. No less did I fear the bookish brains from Balliol, the Yankees from St John’s and the would-be scholars from Worcester or Wadham.

I received some letters from Delphine. They exhibited a poignant desire to have fun. Whether sorrowful or cheery, they brought with them from London a strange flavour of recalcitrance, that touch of precision and premeditated boldness that is peculiar to the French and can seem like excessive politeness. I enjoyed rereading them while working in the Bodleian Library, a sort of barn in which the six centuries-old beams, like the sound post of a violin, registered the slightest noise, while on shelves resembling a fruiterers’ displays, fragrant manuscripts lay drying.

One Sunday evening, as I was leaving my rooms to go and dine, I came across Fraser, a fellow of All Souls, whose poet’s vanity led him fairly frequently to Chelsea on a Saturday evening. He took me to dine at his college’s high table, and, while a Master, violet-veined from the second course onwards, having lined up in front of him wines in cut-glass decanters, passed the port around the table, I learnt that Fraser had made Delphine’s acquaintance in London the previous evening.

“She entered,” he said pompously, selecting affected words from that outmoded 1880 vocabulary that is no longer used except in university circles, “a public dance hall in the low district of Hammersmith. There is exceptional jazz there and for sixpence you can hire your male or female dancing partner. She appeared hung in black crêpe like a humorous catafalque, as if grieving in repentance, an Anactoria bearing the languor of each waltz like a new sin, flanked on one side by my friend Father W … (he mentioned the name of a Jesuit who had made a name for himself as a comic preacher) and on the other by a strange elderly Spanish child who enveloped her ill-defined features in a panther skin.

“She asked me whether I knew you and we talked about you. After the dance we all went to have breakfast at her home. We really did have a very good time, but she followed us with a sort of sinister pleasure, her eyes aflame and her mouth ashen. Her bruised and precocious heart appealed to me.

“‘Heart bruised with loss and eaten through with shame.’ One day I’ll read to you what I have written about that.”

 

And so Delphine, in a few weeks, had gone from the prayer stool to noisy revelry. I was not in the least irritated. Besides, I could not impose my own prejudices to the point of picking a quarrel with her. I did not yet know how quickly certain things are possible in London which Paris will always be unaware of as long as people live there side by side, divided by disdain or fear of the unusual. London is a furtive hermitage which those who have experienced it find hard to relinquish. The streets alone are filled with throngs, with cries, with advertising, with snobbishness, with commercial or sporting feats; they do not encroach upon the sweet open spaces where pleasure seems less perishable than elsewhere. And thus, I explained to myself, Delphine had moved from despair to pastimes that appeared to be going from bad to worse. “What will happen to this childhood friend?” I kept asking myself, without being able to create anything other than a false bond, as superficial as a relationship. “Why am I such a bad person?” I thought again of these words of Delphine’s as being the confession of a creature overwhelmed by mere consequences and who is unaware of the origins of the dispute in which she is the unreliable wager. Her childish despotism, that discipline she instigated around her, her revulsion for everything that was easy and likely to become a pleasure, could these be explained by the fear she had of herself ?

“I don’t feel well,” she wrote to me; “the moment I’m no longer having fun, I fret to the point of fury. I waste my energy to such a degree that I’ll soon have to think of writing nothing but death announcements. But who is there to say goodbye to? A funerary summer mist and the whole city heated like an oven plate and my ignominy and your disapproval which I sense, is that spleen or what the Abbé Prévost called the ‘English vapours’? The sun looks as if it is shining through smoked glass, my food tastes of phenol, I can’t sleep any more, and only at night do I find brief moments of coolness, in the parks, or thanks to the powder, well mixed with borax alas, from a little pharmacy in the Commercial Road …”

 

June had come. The university students, dressed in white flannel, were devouring a false summer consisting of icy sunshine, unkempt greenery and too much water. Doctors in mortarboards passed by along the river, preceded by a boat with a brass band on board. Families, hailing from surrounding areas, on coaches, offered each other sugar from one top deck to another; drapery shop assistants brought out end-of-the-year dress suits and did their best not to feather their oars, not to bump their boats, to show good manners and to call each other “Mister”.

At the sight of their sons, the war-profiteers took their revenge on a back-shop childhood and came down from the north in nickel-plated cars with the face of a footman in each headlight. Worn out by provinces that had their fill, the actor Benson arrived with his Shakespearean troupe, his wretched watery scenery, his torn and wobbling fortresses, and we endured thirty-five acts in one week, by subscription. The sides of the roads were adorned with picnics, with irises, with injured motorcycles. The countryside had become a green desert in which peasants in jackets and bowler hats paraded. No hollow, limed apple tree could avoid bending over the cloud-dappled water, the wake of a boat and the smell of a spirit lamp; the hay-fever of phonographs broke out from among the reeds, restoring to nature the poetry which, in order to succeed, they had borrowed from her. A full liquid fair now held court until the end of the summer term, ushering in as at the finish of a race, with encouraging cries, amid a noise of rattles, fire-crackers, rag-time and a smell of insipid lemonade and cut-price tea, the end of the academic year.

There was a nocturnal fête over Mesopotamia. The college jetties formed brightly lit shapes, half of which vibrated. Corks popped into the river, rockets became tangled in aqueducts, Bengal lights diffused a creamy layer striated by the water. Alone, I drove my canoe and its cushions damp with dew towards the locks. Searchlights streamed directly over the warm obscurity of the layers of electricity ensnaring Islington church where black ivy and boats that sang drooled. One of them appeared, as though through a suddenly opened door, in the path of the beam. I remained in the darkness, alongside it, and I recognised Delphine, all white, the jet of light full in her face, who was smoking. She seemed drunk and appeared to be gently drifting away. Mrs Warford was also at the bottom of the boat, from where her grey, frizzy hair, which enabled me to recognise her, emerged. In the bow, his feet above the water, playing the banjo, perched an individual of doubtful aspect whom I took for an Italian Yankee. Between his gorilla-like jaws, he held a lighted Chinese lantern, which illuminated from below a Charlie Chaplin moustache and two black nostrils. The night engulfed them again all of a sudden. I saw Delphine throw overboard a lighted cigarette which sputtered.

I was confused and troubled as though I had been done a wrong. Not because I had, with my own eyes, glimpsed in Delphine this new persona that I had foreseen, defiled and prey to deformed people, but because she had concealed her presence from me in a place where I considered myself to be at home. Shortly afterwards, I received a letter from her that did not mention she had left London. My friendship regarded this as a deception, then, reckoning that she may no longer be free, became alarmed. I felt sorry to see a once perfect creature surrendering herself to this abandon, ready to rejoin the sinister herd of lone women, sustained by affairs, one of those whom a vague but imperious calling distances both from the love of self which rescues beautiful women and from the natural attachments which satisfy the others.

 

It was the very displeasure that this incident caused me, or the interest I suddenly took, despite my mood, in Delphine that led me one month later, at the end of the academic year, to the Ebury Street studio whose address Fraser had given me.

It was reached through a disused cemetery beneath whose lush grass, inert, large Anglo-Saxon skeletons, not deformed by death, continued to live. Outside the garages, the cars being washed filled with freshness a street already lightened by its curtains, its brasses, its red doors, its mirror and ‘panorama-ball’ merchants, and its glazed paper manufacturers. In the windows of estate agents, photographs eroded by the light provided rustic scenes of bungalows, of bushy trees, of spacious lawns.

I had to knock a long time, even though noise could be heard behind the door. Then Delphine’s voice. There was a jingle of keys and chains and the door half-opened onto a pale, puffy face, in which the nose was prominent; the eyelids seemed too short for the eyes. I was so taken aback, that a friendly joke about the way she bolted herself in like an octogenarian failed to pass my lips.

“So, it’s you,” she said, looking at me without surprise.

Passively, she let me come in.

More than anything else, her expression had changed. Set in a look of fearful stupor, it only came to life to quiver beneath my gaze, refusing to meet it and take it to the core of a heart that one assumed was rotten like a fruit. Following Delphine, I made my way into the studio where a livid light completely divested a woman with greasy, discoloured, almost tomato-red hair, with a bent back, enveloped in shantung, with stockings half pulled up and old slippers. Her rolled up sleeve revealed an arm scattered with pink, blue or black patches. She anticipated my reproaches.

“I’ve been very ill. I had boils, and then I was blind for twenty-four hours last week. They’re hatching plots against me …”

Delphine looks at herself in the mirror, pulls at her cheeks, rubs her forehead.

“I look like an ecchymosis towards the fourth day.”

“In the old days you always refused to be a victim.”

“I can no longer remember the old days, it’s funny, for some time now I’ve completely lost my memory.”

Her sentences faltered. She could see in my eyes that I clearly thought her mad. Pulling herself together, she made an effort to choose her words.

“It’s a strange thing,” she said, “to be in a milieu. You don’t know how it starts, although afterwards, you have the impression that it was planned beforehand, through mysterious forces. You’re taken somewhere, you come back the next day and it’s a magic circle that snaps shut. You live in the intimacy of people you don’t know and whom you would never have chosen. It’s a time when you have a great deal of fun, when companionship, a general good mood, the exchange of life forces, turn the group into a useful entity for which you gradually neglect, on a variety of pretexts, everything that is not a part of it. Then, cracks appear. The less good elements seem naturally to gain the upper hand. You are bound together by repulsion, by enmities, not to mention affection. In the end, you want, if not to withdraw, then at least to put some space between yourself and the others. There isn’t time. A contact is born, absolute, tacit. You want to fight on your own, to travel, to enjoy yourself; but the group is there, watching; by way of injunctions, circumstances, it finds you again, waits for you at home, recaptures you; everything outside of it seems unacceptable, out of reach. You don’t communicate any more except among the initiated, through strange words which are a language. All of this would still be nothing if one day, under the influence of dangerous or more hardened elements, which one imagines stem from other groups that are now dispersed, you did not arrive at a complete revision of the facts of consciousness, at a calling into question of everything, to the verge of nothingness.”

“But who brought you to this?”

“Like everywhere else, I’ve been involved with decent people and with some very bad people, the former led by the latter. And then, it’s so odd here … in Paris, there are limits. In London, you have no bearings.”

“But what about me?” I said, moving closer to her, “Am I not here to help you?”

She was not listening, exhausted by the effort she had made to think, to speak.

“Come with me, Delphine, I can’t leave you like this. I’m going back to Paris tomorrow; would you like me to book you a ticket?”

“I won’t be able to.”

“Steel yourself.”

“I can’t anymore.”

She sneezed, her mucous membranes swollen, her eyelids red.

“Leave me alone. I need neither your advice nor your criticism. I won’t tolerate that from anyone. Besides, everything you to say to me is tainted with selfishness and spite. You’d do better to let me rest. Every day, at the same time, I have a temperature. Don’t examine those bottles like that; it’s none of your business. Have you come here to spy on me? Don’t expect to make enquiries of the servants. None of them was willing to stay with me …”

She listens.

“Do you hear that nibbling sound? It’s the mice again; I’m infested.”

She sees me looking incredulous.

“I’m a sick woman, am I not? Do you take pleasure in humiliating me now that I have let myself go, that I have dyed hair, dirty nails and look coarse? It’s a steep decline, I’m well aware. You have observed the regression while taking care not to intervene; from now on I beg you not to involve yourself at all. Have you not aroused my avidity sufficiently in the past? Nowadays I obey a system of loose living; I feel at ease there. Your superior manner annoys me. Go away.”

“My dear Delphine, calm yourself. I am not pitiless, I assure you. Let’s try to find a way out of all this together.”

She weakens, lays her forehead on my hand and suffers excessively. Her joints crack; she claws her nails into the palms of her hands.

I detach myself from where she is lying, get to my feet and search for reasons for her to resist, for excuses.

“Everything that happens to me,” she says, “is due to pride.”

I was expecting this dreadful word which all women have on their lips and by which they define their humility.

 

Delphine had arranged to meet me in Regent’s Park. I had been to check in my luggage beforehand, for the train leaves for France in one hour. All around me the park, worn away by the drilling of recruits over five years, is recovering again. A soldier in peacetime uniform walks by, glowing like a red pepper in a jar of pickles. Dropped by an invisible squirrel, a nut falls from branch to branch and breaks open on the ground.

I cannot say that the visit to Ebury Street the previous day has upset me. Rather, it has offended me. Delphine was suffering, discontented, attached to her misfortune, prey to a disconcerting vulgarity. Then she came out with words from a cheap novel, and a fainting fit managed to ruin everything. But as soon as I was on my own, the rigorous, resolute image of earlier days returned to me, out of which, reproduced as if on a tracing, the recollection of her recent disorder still grimaced from time to time. It pained me. Not that Delphine’s happiness was precious to me, but it grieved me to see this character, whom neither pleasure nor misfortune had managed to destroy until now, so weighed down. I had reckoned her to be incapable of changing for the better, but also resistant to contagion. Her proud integrity had often been intolerable to me, but no less tiresome was this sudden appropriation of her whole being by a pointless destiny.

I then experienced an upheaval of feelings, and thought only of devoting myself to her. All night I wore myself out with worry, and ardently I longed for the joy of rescuing her. Overwhelmed with emotion, I almost got up and went to wake her …

 

Time goes by, Delphine does not come. London no longer gives back what is given to it. Like a loose net, it receives and retains everything. There are, in this gamut of houses, many creatures like her, who are not living there because of a grief or specific pleasures, but who do not know how to leave. Without chewing them up, between neat quays, London swallows up in its marine oesophagus all the products of the globe which, continuously, remain there when the ships’ toil is ended.

She won’t come. In the zoo nearby, the roaring of the lions makes the reinforced concrete caverns quiver. Macaws gash the evening with their cries. I remain alone with a heart full of charity.