Only the violent did not attend. Guests and staff crowded the hall. Excitement simmered during the afternoon and at supper there had been spurts of sultry impatience. The tow-headed boy let loose his unsteady rein and charged about the tables telling nasty jokes. He climbed on a chair and grimaced till the tears came. De Veeld had difficulty calming him. But now he perched on the crowded bench, his face pale with delight. The florid gentleman wore the defiant remnants of evening dress and stared at the curtain, as if to exclude from his urbane content the maimed and bewildered who sat beside him. The cook and the two serving maids had come from their lair. They commandeered the sofa and whispered loudly. The gaunt creature who rationed out tea looked around like a queen of cards, her eye unblinking; she knew that everyone in the room depended on her cold grace. The gardener leaned at the rear; he had put on a clean collar and moved his neck in irked pride. Now and again he winked—not at anyone in particular—but at the entire company, gathered in the curtained, steaming room in the complicity of common magic.
An arm-chair had been reserved in the front row. De Veeld reclined as if the blade of his ironic alertness had snapped closed. He drew in small puffs on one of the Player’s from his dwindling store.
Our means were ragged. A Bunsen burner, masked with red paper, served for a flambeau. The kitchen table wobbled under imagined brocade. We had patched our costumes of what eccentric or reversible clothing lay at hand and must have looked like a shabby-genteel family driven out of its house by a night fire. The sole object of unfeigned grandeur was a Victorian ink-stand. On it, a mother-of-pearl Psyche spread desolate arms over an enamelled Eros. Madame Alice had brought it to St. Aubain from some improbable corner of her past. She added it to our scarecrow furnishings with high disdain. It proclaimed a world inaccessible to our vulgarities.
But despite our starved props, the play held. In St. Aubain no one thought it absurd that a man should find society a bruising riddle, that he would try to lash its cobwebs from his face and strive for exit. The rage of Alceste played on the raw, broken nerves of our audience like intimate memories. When I spoke my worldly sermon, warning the Misanthrope that total sincerity could shade into madness, a heavy, electric wave broke over the benches. Behind my stiff make-up and the hiss of the burner, I could hear the boy breathing hard.
But it was the scene between Célimène and Arsinoé, the flash of feather and claw in Act III, which brought our performance to a pitch, and made disaster inevitable.
Madame Alice rustled on to the stage in a froth of black. She had pinned to her grey, unruly hair a cone of tissue paper. Her silhouette stole before her like a smooth bat, its wings mantled.
She opened on a note of syrupy venom: “Madame, I am here as a friend. I have come because friendship has its duties.” She dropped the word friendship from the edge of her lips, giving it the acid whisper of steam. Recounting to Célimène the censorious gossip of the town, each item a small crystal of venom, Madame Alice seemed to uncoil. Her shadow bulked over the marquise in thick, happy gloom: “Ah, my dear, how firmly I laboured to defend your honour, your reputation and good name. But there are things one cannot overlook!” She ended her tirade on a cracked chime, and the lust of condescension shone on her rouged cheeks.
Rahel soared against her. She shook from the ruffles of her light, coquet dress the brown stench of the night bird. She riposted fiercely, but in the easy vein of a duellist sure of his ground. She repeated in exact, mocking counterpoint Arsinoé’s pledge of amity, of unblemished kindness, and pirouetted into an irreverent curtsy.
The elegant gentleman began applauding, but held back in the nervous silence.
Madame Alice stood rigid; the blaze of virtuous reproof mounted in her bones. She grew with anger, and her features took on a weird, beaked sharpness: “You make a vaunt of your years! Am I so much the older of us two? Am I so ancient and despised?”
The arc of hatred flared between them. Rahel carried her youth unsheathed. Madame Alice sought to parry its cruel strokes. But under the menacing pavane with which she circled the stage pierced the fallen nakedness of the old.
She cried out in envy: “Is it your virtue, Madame, which doth draw such admiration from the town?”
But Rahel kept at her throat, gay and sharp-toothed as a lynx:
I pray you, Madame, let the gallants court,
And we shall note what charms in you are sought.
Arsinoé gripped the ink-stand. A gust of violence went through her. In a second she would hurl the murderous thing. De Veeld sat upright, and the Boxer half sprang from his place. I was paralysed by the near leap of madness.
But Madame Alice pulled herself tight. Her heavy lids closed. She cast a spell of silence, and the air went flat and stifling as in the still centre of a tropical storm. When she spoke, a breath of anguished but restored consciousness passed over the hall. Her tone was soft and deadly: “No more. We go too far. I should already have taken leave, were it not that my carriage has been slow.”
I shall never forget how that haggard, outraged woman pronounced carriage. She made it glitter with the lights of pride. It bore her away, past the box-hedges of a rococo garden, four Spanish pacers prancing.
As Rahel glided from the stage, in uneasy triumph, the audience rose at us. The boy screeched and the cook stamped her drowsy legs. De Veeld turned to his patients and waved them down, but the excited murmurs continued. Nothing in the rest of the play came near the savage glitter of that moment.
When the curtain fell, Rahel stood behind the canvas flap. She passed her hands over her face in a puzzled gesture, as if to wipe away the stain of Madame Alice’s fury. When I touched her, she said, “I’m afraid.”
De Veeld beckoned and padded ahead, conspiratorial. We trailed behind, still in our costumes. There were cups around the blue-shaded lamp and he had laid out a fresh cigarette on his blotter. He poured coffee, sour-thin and only a demi-tasse, and said it had been a fine performance. Did we realize how racked a man must be to invent such laughter? And because the thought was trite, he puckered into a shy smile. At that moment the kitchen-harpy entered, her mien torn between pride and remonstrance. She set down a covered dish. De Veeld made a large gesture over it, half sacrament, half conjurer’s flourish. He whisked off the napkin. Cake.
Small, flattened at the edges, and with only one almond in its inviolate centre; but cake. De Veeld’s assistant belched gently and bent forward. I was shamed by my own avid delight. “Our last egg powder,” murmured the magician. “A silly waste,” said the kitchen-maid. But I saw crumbs and a glint of icing on her fingers.
De Veeld plucked the almond and presented it to Rahel: “Madame la Marquise.…” I could taste its burnt brown. Then he divided and was unfair only to himself. I tried small, lingering bites, but was suddenly ravenous. I was scouring the plate before I realized that everyone else had stopped eating. Madame Alice had risen, gaunt and armoured: “Thank you for this charming feast, mon cher de Veeld. But I am a little fatigued. You will excuse me, I know. As Mademoiselle here has so eloquently pointed out, I am an old woman. Bed-time for me. Though God knows, I don’t sleep.”
“But Madame Alice, your cake … you haven’t touched it!”
We were out of our depths.
“Ah, the cake. How kind of you. But I don’t care very much for sweets. A few pralines now and again, for the children, you know, and a boule Mozart, oh ever so rarely, when we used to go to Vienna. But otherwise, no.”
The corners of her lips were moist, and she spoke in a frail tone, as if to obscure an indelicate hurt. She looked at the untouched slice, savouring the bitter edge of conquest: “I know it will not be left over.” We drank gall and stared at our plates. Then she turned and slid away, dropping a general “good night,” like an ironic, twilit fanfare over a won field.
I followed Rahel to her room and ached to find it so bare.
“No pictures?”
“We had very few. Father hated being photographed. He said that those who make a portrait of us steal a tiny piece of our souls. I don’t really know what he meant.”
“I think I do.”
“But there is this.” She took from her night-table a tall menu with Gothic lettering: Le Duc de Bourgogne, Bruges. From the paté du chef down to the brandied cherries wound a garland of signatures. Her father at the top, in a heavy surge: Nathanael Emil Jakobsen. Then her brother. Near the bottom came Annie Landau, the A round and wavy.
“We lunched there on my seventeenth birthday. There were fifteen of us. Look at the way David signs, with that kite-tail at the end. Do you know the Duc de Bourgogne?”
“Yes. It’s the only place where the chocolate mousse is really black.”
We sat on the bed.
“It’s the first time for me.”
“For me too.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t mean it in the same way. But it’s true. This is the first time that matters.”
“Have there been many?”
“No.”
“Were they beautiful? I’m sure they were prettier than I.”
“No.”
“You won’t hurt me, will you?”
“Not for the world.”
She rose and stretched her hands towards me. I held them fast. Did she say “Remember”? I think not. Her purpose was desperate but not gross.
“Please don’t look. It’s such a silly costume. I made this of cardboard and one of de Veeld’s handkerchiefs.” She undid her bodice. “I wish I was wearing something beautiful. Mother has a slip bordered with dark blue lace. She said I could wear it at my wedding.”
Her breasts were small and high. The dizziness of the wood came on me. For a moment, I was certain it was Rahel, that it was into her skin they had rubbed the cinders. Then my mind cleared. I saw her supple, guarded body.
“Please hold me. I’m cold.”
My hands were in her back. We shivered like the gently drunk. Then she closed her eyes.
Much later, nearly at the grey of morning, she began laughing. I lifted her warm cheek. “It’s Annie. She said the first time was like a saddle-sore. She had read it in a book. It isn’t.” And she laughed till I drew the blanket over us.