5

She slept a dull, greyish sleep, as exhausting as walking through desert sands. She didn’t dream. There was nothing, no shadows or light, no action, no people, nothing but the dragging, monotonous rhythm of her heart, which skipped the occasional beat.

Then she heard a bell, real or unreal, she didn’t ask herself, she was so tired. The shrill sound pierced her skull and she hoped it would stop, as with the departure of trains and ships, for instance, but the ringing became more and more insistent and eventually she realized that it was the telephone by her bed.

She didn’t want to hear anyone speak or to speak herself. She answered it purely to stop the clamour, dropping the receiver on to the pillow.

Then a voice said, distant, distorted as if from an old broken-down gramophone:

‘Madame Étamble! … Madame Étamble! … Are you there? … Can you hear me? … Madame Étamble! … Madame Étamble! …’

At length she mumbled:

‘Who is this?’

‘The hotel switchboard, Madame Étamble. You had me worried. I’ve been calling you for five minutes. I was about to send someone up to your room.’

‘Why?’

The previous evening, Laure had given her two sleeping pills, but it wasn’t the medication that was making her body ache. Something had snapped, at a certain point when she wasn’t paying attention, and now, somewhere inside her, a switch had been turned off.

‘There’s a call for you from Paris.’

She did not react, didn’t think of her husband or of anyone who might telephone her. The room was dark, with only a wan light filtering between the slits in the shutters.

‘I’ll put the call through.’

She wished she could go back to sleep.

‘Is that you, Betty?’

She didn’t recognize the voice. She had already closed her eyes and her breathing was becoming deeper.

‘This is Florent.’

She stammered reluctantly:

‘Yes.’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can hardly hear you. Are you well?’

‘Yes.’

He was in a world of light, he was awake, washed, shaved, dressed and fully alive.

‘I saw Guy early this morning. You gave him a big fright by not getting in touch. It was only last night, thanks to the driver, that he finally learned your address.’

His name was Florent Montaigne. He was a friend of Guy’s, a friend of the family. He was sure of himself because he was a very successful lawyer.

‘Are you certain that everything is fine?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not unwell? You sound very far away. Are you still in bed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I talk to you?’

He added hesitantly:

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Guy has told me everything and has asked me to contact you. In my opinion, the sooner the better, you understand? It is my intention, if it is convenient for you, to make a quick trip to Versailles this afternoon, late afternoon preferably, and we could have dinner together.’

‘Not today.’

‘Tomorrow morning, then? Tomorrow afternoon I can’t because I’m in court.’

‘Not tomorrow.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll call you.’

‘Are you certain that everything is all right, that you don’t need any help?’

‘Certain. Goodbye, Florent.’

She exerted herself to stretch out her arm and replace the receiver. The communicating door was half-open and, in the adjacent room, the curtains were drawn back, everything was bathed in daylight, life had already begun. She had the impression that the sun was shining for the first time in days and days.

Laure must have heard. She would probably come in and ask if she needed anything, but Betty wanted neither to see nor talk to her.

It wasn’t because of the slap, which she remembered as she remembered everything she had said the previous evening.

On the contrary, the slap had done her good and, had she been capable of it, she would have given it to herself, to put a stop to her outburst.

Until now, she had always avoided uncomfortable home truths. She knew what they were. She had no delusions as to her character. The slap, which was long overdue, had abruptly brought her back down to earth.

There was no longer that ambivalent inconsistency between her words and thoughts, no more fever, no more artificial heat, no more vagueness. Instead was the reality in all its rawness, in black and white, in stark, cruel lines.

And that was impossible to communicate. It was already overwhelming to think of it. It was dangerous.

She had cheated, this time like other times, instinctively, because it was her nature. Out of an innate need to protect herself?

She always found a way, afterwards, to make it bearable, for it not to be too ugly, too dreadful.

She wouldn’t speak to Laure any more, or to anyone. She didn’t have the energy. She felt listless and empty. All she wanted was to lie still in her bed, her eyes open, gazing at a corner of the mirror where she could glimpse a little light and a flower on the curtain.

It hadn’t occurred to her to ask Florent for news of her husband and her children. For his part, he hadn’t seemed surprised at what had happened and had only been concerned on finding her voice unrecognizable. Admittedly, it was a different Betty he had known.

Florent was married, and Guy was not exactly indifferent to his vivacious, sparkling wife, Odette.

Every so often, the two couples used to go out together. The previous winter, they had been to the theatre, and on leaving, had decided to have dinner in a restaurant on Place Blanche. As they got into their cars, Florent had said:

‘Will you take my wife? And I’m kidnapping yours.’

The car had barely started up when the lawyer, one hand on the wheel, had begun caressing Betty with the other. There had never been anything between them. He hadn’t wooed her. He hadn’t said anything. He still wasn’t saying anything but stared straight ahead as he weaved in and out of the traffic.

It had never entered her head that she could say no, and, docilely, as he seemed to be expecting, she had reached out her hand in turn.

The previous evening, she had told Laure that at the age of eleven, unlike some of her friends in La Pommeraye, she refused to touch boys.

It was true. As was everything she had told Laure. But it was only part of the truth, the aspect that can be communicated.

What held her back then, despite her curiosity, was the fear of sullying herself, of materially dirtying herself. Only much later had the word ‘dirty’ taken on another meaning, developing into an obsession, perhaps because she had heard it said too often by her mother.

‘Don’t touch, Betty. It’s dirty!’

‘Don’t pick your nose, it’s dirty!’

And, if she knocked over a glass of milk:

‘There you go again! Making everything dirty as usual!’

She was a dirty girl. Her father too was dirty, as her mother kept telling him:

‘You should change your overalls, Robert. Those are so dirty they could stand up on their own.’

There were dirty customers and clean customers.

‘Madame Rochet is filthy as sin.’

While Madame Van Horn’s home, on the other hand, was so clean you could have eaten off the floor.

Betty wanted to be dirty so as to be like her father. She was angry at her mother for nagging him, for talking to him as if she had rights over him, whereas he was head of the family.

‘Are you coming downstairs? You’re not going to spend the evening doing your filthy experiments again?’

He would laugh. He didn’t get annoyed. Perhaps, alone in the back of the shop where he had set up a laboratory, he imitated his wife the way at the table he imitated his customers to make Betty laugh?

She dreamed of being older, of being her father’s wife and treating him as he deserved.

She tried to go back to sleep, to stop thinking, but when she wasn’t thinking, she still had the same sense of inevitability.

She had delayed the final moment as long as possible. Because of Bernard, the doctor with the hypodermic needles, who had picked her up in Rue de Ponthieu and driven her to Le Trou instead of taking her to the nearest hotel as she had expected, and then, thanks to meeting Laure, who had taken it upon herself to rescue her, everything had become a muddle.

Two or three times since, she had talked to her heart’s content, going round and round the truth, taking care to avoid the crux of it.

It was both true and false that she had wanted to be dirty as a sort of mystical protestation. She would have liked to be clean too. All her life she had yearned for order and cleanliness, and that was why she had married Guy.

She had been working in an office at the time, on Boulevard Haussmann, a stone’s throw from Boulevard Malesherbes and the Union des Mines. They’d met in a snack bar where Guy would grab something to eat when he didn’t have time to go home for lunch.

At first, it hadn’t occurred to her that the relationship could be serious. She was peeved that he didn’t ask her to sleep with him, as the others did, and in the end, out of sheer frankness, she had almost demanded it.

On realizing that he loved her and wanted to make her his wife, she had been thrown into such a panic that she’d decided not to see him again.

‘I have to tell you, Guy …’

‘Tell me what? That you don’t love me enough?’

‘You know that’s not true.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t marry me. It’s for the best.’

‘For what reason, I’d like to know?’

‘Because of everything. Because of me. My life.’

She intended to tell him everything, everything she’d done, everything she’d almost done.

‘Look, Betty. I wasn’t born yesterday. What you have been is none of my business and is no longer yours. It’s wiped clean, understood? Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

She believed it. She was certain. She probably still loved him. She surely still loved him because she was continuing to hurt herself.

‘In that case, say to yourself that life is just beginning, as if we were both new, and that on Saturday I’m taking you to Lyon to introduce you to my mother.’

He imagined it was easy. For him it was easy. He never looked back. He had decided on the place she would occupy and had put her in it. And so there were no problems.

‘I’m not even capable of running a household.’

‘Olga is there to do that, and she would hand in her apron if I were to make the mistake of marrying a woman who interfered with her household management.’

She had ended up believing in it, and, full of good intentions, she had slipped into the skin of her new character.

All that was a mistake. Not only because of her past.

It was a mistake because she and Guy didn’t want the same thing. Proud and protective, he would say:

‘You are my wife!’

Was that not enough? His wife! The mother of his children! The woman he came home to every evening to tell about his troubles and his hopes.

‘You look a little pale today.’

‘That’s because I haven’t been out.’

‘You shouldn’t spend so much time indoors. I’ll have to ask Ménière to examine you.’

Their doctor. For Guy, if something was wrong, it was Ménière’s business, and had she shouted at him, as she so often wanted to:

‘Pay a little attention to me!’

He would have replied, in good faith:

‘I do nothing but pay you attention!’

It was true that he was concerned about her health, bought her dresses and little gifts, and that he often thought to send her flowers.

‘To me. Don’t you understand that word?’

She needed him to pay attention to her, to her real self, to the person she truly was. Not pay attention according to his needs, but according to hers.

In short, it was out of cowardice, for his personal ease, for his peace of mind, that he hadn’t allowed her to confess. She had tried several times. Each time, he had put a finger on her lips, smiling.

‘What did we decide?’

It was too easy. He wanted the pleasant, convenient side of her, the one that suited his life, happy to brush aside anything that could have complicated their relationship, and in so doing, almost condoning it.

The moment something didn’t exist for him, it must no longer exist for her.

‘Aren’t you happy with me?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Why don’t you go out with Marcelle more often? She’s a bit dull, but she’s decent at heart, worth getting to know better.’

Only one person in the world had cared about her for who she was: her father.

When she was still only a little girl, he had understood – he the eccentric – that she was a budding woman and had treated her as such.

She had been very young when the war had separated them, and so they hadn’t been able to have long conversations. Most of the time, they played and joked, and yet, with one look from her father, a squeeze of his hand, she felt that he understood her and that for him she was a human being.

Might he even have known her well enough to be worried about her future?

Schwartz, later, had almost been the second man. She had hoped so, until she realized that for him she was no more than a sort of guinea pig. He too knew her. He had dismantled her like a piece of machinery. He’d forced her to confront things that she had always refused to see. He would sometimes interrupt her, laughing:

‘Careful, darling. There you go sublimating again!’

That was his word. And yet, despite his cynicism, sometimes he was moved.

‘You would so like to be a heroine, my poor Betty! I’m coming to the conclusion that that’s your downfall. You aim so high, you have such ideas about what you could, what you should be, that each time you fall a little lower.

‘You’re a born liar. You spend your life lying to yourself because you’re unable to face yourself in the mirror.

‘When you are bored or you feel bad about yourself, instead of going to the cinema like other people, or buying yourself new shoes or dresses, you start telling yourself lies.’

Once, overwrought as she often was with him, she had talked a great deal and he had muttered, half-joking, half-serious:

‘You’ll end up in the mortuary or in a psychiatric hospital.’

Had he done her harm? Had he done her good? His diagnosis was accurate, because she now found herself well and truly at the threshold of the mortuary or the hospital.

She could hear muffled footsteps. Out of tact, Laure had not joined her immediately after the telephone call. No longer hearing her voice, she had now come in to make sure that Betty had gone back to sleep.

Betty could have closed her eyes and pretended, but she was too weary to cheat.

‘I thought you were asleep.’

She didn’t move her head, didn’t attempt to smile. This morning she didn’t want any human contact, any presence. She felt as if she had gone beyond that point. She had tried. She had drunk. She had talked until she was gasping for breath. She had more or less distorted all the truths, for herself even more than for others, and on wakening, she was confronted with them despite everything.

It wasn’t worth starting over again!

‘I hope you haven’t had bad news?’

Out of kindness rather than politeness, she shook her head.

‘Are you hungry? Would you like me to order your breakfast?’

For a moment, she was tempted by the idea of eggs and bacon, but she knew that, if she gave in, she would have to start all over again.

Then there’d be the whisky, the elation, the need to talk and then … What was the point, since there was no solution?

‘Not even a cup of coffee?’

Frowning, Laure grasped her wrist, staring at her watch. Her lips could be seen moving. Betty studied her as if she were seeing her for the first time and thought to herself that she had probably never been pretty. She had masculine features. Only her very soft, very warm brown eyes belied her mannish looks.

She read the numbers on her lips:

‘Forty-nine … Fifty … Fifty-one … Fifty-two …’

Laure stopped, surprised.

‘Does your pulse rate often slow down suddenly?’

What was the use of answering? To answer what?

‘Would you rather lie in the dark?’

Her mouth opened a fraction at last to murmur:

‘I don’t mind.’

The atmosphere in the room must have been depressing and Laure went to draw back the curtains and open the shutters. Instead of flowers, Betty saw a patch of sky and the treetops in the mirror.

‘But you didn’t have a bad night, did you? I didn’t hear you moving. Are you in pain?’

She indicated that she wasn’t.

‘A headache?’

Still no. She was impatient for it to be over, she wanted to be left alone.

‘Would you mind very much if I called a doctor? I know one here, in Versailles, who looks after me and is very thorough. I promise he won’t ask any awkward questions.’

She repeated, annoyed, as if she were being forced to make an effort for nothing:

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Shall I splash a little water on your face?’

Her skin must be shiny. She was perspiring. She smelled of sweat but she still said no, no again, and Laure, anxious, understood that her presence in the room was unwelcome. She went into her own room and picked up the telephone.

‘Hello, Blanche, put me through to 537 … Yes … I’ll hold on …’

Betty could hear, even though it was happening in another world that was nothing to do with her.

‘Hello … Mademoiselle Francine? … Is the doctor at home? … Can you put me through to him without disturbing him? … Hello! … Is that you, doctor? … This is Laure Lavancher … No, I’m very well … I’m not calling about myself, but for a friend who’s here with me and who I’d like you to come and see … It’s difficult to tell you … Last night I gave her two phenobarbital tablets and this morning her pulse rate is fifty-three. No! I don’t think she has a particular drug intolerance … Twenty-eight years old … Thank you, doctor … I’ll be expecting you … Come straight up to my room …’

She was loath to return to Betty and could be heard lighting a cigarette and walking over to the window, which she opened. She lingered over her cigarette, inhaling the fresh air from outside, before coming back through the communicating door.

‘It’s one o’clock. The doctor will drop by at around a quarter to two, before his surgery. Would you like to get washed and dressed? Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat or drink?’

Betty merely flickered her eyelids.

‘I’m going to have them send up a little something to eat. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call me.’

Laure pressed a button and a bell could be heard ringing at the far end of the corridor. While waiting for the food, she poured herself a drink, and Betty felt nauseous at the thought of the viscous yellow whisky in the glass.

She had the impression that she could smell it and she wondered how she could ever have drunk it.

If any man other than Bernard had spoken to her at Le Ponthieu, right now she would probably be in a hospital bed with rows of patients, nurses and a junior doctor doing his rounds at set times.

Was that not what she had been blindly seeking for three days and three nights? She hadn’t actually considered it. She’d had so few moments of real lucidity that she’d barely given it a thought.

All she knew was that she was tearing her life apart, that she was doing so with a sort of frenzy, and that this gave her relief.

In short, it was a defiance, revenge. It was also a climax. It was an end. She was dirtying herself through and through, to the maximum, with no possible going back.

It had to come to this. It had been brewing inside her for months, and she was deliberately defying fate to provoke disaster.

Admittedly, sometime before, there had been Schwartz and the business with Florent in the car, which hadn’t led anywhere because Florent had been afraid.

There had been others, and it had happened that she would sometimes, in the afternoons, go into certain inconspicuous bars in Rue de l’Étoile, for example, or Rue Brey, where there were only couples sitting in the shadows and men waiting and chatting with the bartender.

It was in one of these bars that she had met Philippe, a gangling, secretive young man who played the saxophone in a cabaret in Rue Marbeuf. Philippe didn’t question her like Schwartz. He spoke little and was usually content just to gaze at her dreamily.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she would ask.

‘About you.’

‘What do you think of me?’

He would reply with a vague gesture.

‘It’s very complicated.’

When she lay sprawled on the bed after making love, he would grab his saxophone and improvise tunes that were both ironic and haunting. She knew nothing about him, other than his mother was Russian and he had a sister. He rented furnished lodgings on Rue de Montenotte, where Betty would sometimes darn his socks for fun.

He knew that she was married and had children, because she had told him so, but he never asked any questions.

In the end, he had become a need. The hours spent at Avenue de Wagram were dead time, indifferent, like that wasted in a waiting room. She was impatient for the afternoons, when she would go and meet Philippe. The concierge greeted her when she arrived, calling her the lovely little lady. It was Betty who brought bottles purchased from the grocer’s on Place des Ternes, and cakes and sweets.

Not yet twenty-four, he was still awkward, defenceless and unconcerned about his future. When she tried to encourage some ambition in him, he merely gave a thinly veiled smile.

‘You sound like my sister.’

He appeared oblivious to the millions of people living around him, jostling one another and elbowing their way, and in the street a sort of aura of solitude clung to him.

‘What would you do if I didn’t come to see you?’

‘I don’t know, because you do come. Maybe I’d go and look for you?’

‘Where?’

‘At your place.’

‘What about my husband?’

He didn’t reply. He didn’t ask himself any questions either.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow.’

But, the last tomorrow, as it happens, Betty had not been able to go to Rue de Montenotte. Guy’s mother had arrived in Paris without warning, taking advantage at the last minute of a lift from a friend who had a driver. Marcelle had a dentist’s appointment which she couldn’t postpone, so it fell to Betty to entertain General Étamble’s widow.

It was Elda’s day off and she was visiting a friend in the suburbs. She wouldn’t be back until the last train, just before midnight.

After lunch, when it was time to go back to his office, Guy had said to his wife:

‘I’ll leave Mother in your hands, and this evening, I’ll take her to the theatre.’

Because her main reason for coming to Paris was to see a new play. The afternoon had dragged on endlessly, and until Marcelle came back from her dentist’s, Betty hadn’t had a moment alone to telephone Philippe.

‘I have to be quick. Walls have ears. I can’t get away this afternoon. I’ll call you tonight at around nine.’

In Elda’s absence, it was the servant who mainly looked after the children but, because her mother-in-law was there, Betty was forced to act the proper mother.

They had dined early, at Antoine’s. Guy and his mother had left for the theatre. When Betty arrived back at the third floor, Olga was lingering in the apartment.

‘You can go upstairs. I’m not moving from here.’

It was as if Olga had a suspicion, because she agreed only reluctantly to go up to her room on the seventh floor.

‘Hello! Is that you?’

He replied ironically with a few notes on the saxophone.

‘Are you sad?’

A musical-clown glissando.

‘Answer me, Philippe. I’m a nervous wreck. If you knew what an afternoon I’ve had!’

‘What about me!’

‘Did you miss me? Listen. You know where I live. The children are asleep. It’s the nanny’s day off. The maid’s just gone up to bed and my husband’s at the theatre.’

‘So?’

‘Don’t you understand?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘You don’t sound very keen.’

He hesitated.

‘I’ve wanted to do this for ages. You’ll understand better once you’ve been here.’

Standing by the door in her bathrobe, she’d watched out for him, wondering what was taking him so long. When at last he was beside her, she sensed that she had been in danger of losing him, and she leaned against the door for a long time, her lips glued to his.

‘Come.’

She led him into the drawing room, motioning to him to walk on tiptoe and to keep his voice down.

‘Are you scared?’

‘No.’

‘Aren’t you pleased to see where I live?’

She pointed to the piano, the velvet drapes, the gilded picture frames.

‘Come close to me.’

She was febrile, with a strange glint in her eyes. She wanted to see him on the family sofa where she spent so many evenings sitting beside Marcelle and where, that afternoon, her mother-in-law had seated herself.

This was revenge. She had had to persuade Philippe to come and if he hadn’t, she would have been profoundly disappointed. The word ‘dirty’ hadn’t come into her head at the time, but it was what she intended to do.

‘You seem hesitant, as if you’re scared.’

Jumping up, she ripped off her bathrobe, beneath which she was wearing nothing, and pretended to dance, naked for the first time in the middle of the Étambles’ drawing room.

‘What about the children?’ he objected.

‘They’re here, on the other side of this door. There’s a corridor, another door on the left, the one to their room. They’re asleep. Wait!’

She half opened the door.

‘Now, if Charlotte were to get up, we’d hear her.’

He didn’t share her enthusiasm, and was still reluctant, as if he sensed that any man would have sent her into the same feverish state that night.

It was an old score she was suddenly settling, not so much with her husband as with the family, with a world, a lifestyle, a way of thinking.

Exaggerating her brazenness, she took the initiative, forcing him to take her, and he could see, up close, her eyes shining triumphantly, her clenched little teeth.

‘Come in, Mother. I’ll call Antoine and ask him to join us. Stretch out on—’

Neither Betty nor Philippe had heard the front door open, footsteps on the carpet in the hallway. The glazed door of the drawing room opened and the lovers remained frozen for a moment, too surprised to think of separating.

Philippe, who had not undressed, was the first on his feet and, bowing his head, he waited to see what the husband would do.

As for Guy, his gaze fixed, he was still supporting his mother, who had felt unwell at the theatre, and he signalled to the man to leave.

Betty, still naked, had to pick up her bathrobe from the centre of the room, while her mother-in-law protested in front of the sofa where they wanted to seat her:

‘Not on there.’

Her son settled her in an armchair.

‘Give me my drops, quickly. In my handbag. Twenty drops …’

He ran into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water, almost bumping into Betty in the corridor as she was heading for their bedroom.

She knew it was over, and was not sad. All she wanted now was for things to move quickly, and she dressed with clumsy movements, choosing a dark suit and a black beret.

She still hoped to leave via the back stairs, avoiding explanations. Someone must have thought of it, because Marcelle came and knocked on the door.

‘Guy is asking for you in the drawing room.’

Antoine was there too. Her mother-in-law’s chest was still heaving.

Guy had become a stranger, a cold, methodical man as one imagines important bankers to be. He was talking on the telephone in his study, whose door was open.

‘Thank you, Maître Aubernois. Agreed. So long as you have understood my wishes …’

He rose and turned to his wife, without curiosity, without visible anger, without any emotion of any kind.

‘Come.’

‘Where?’

‘Here. Sit down. Write.’

… renounce my maternal rights and pledge to sign any subsequent documents which …

This hadn’t happened on earth, in a big city, in a house where people were sleeping peacefully, but in a nightmare where movements dragged on in slow motion and toneless voices sounded like an echo.

‘Here’s a cheque for your initial needs. As soon as you let me know your address, I’ll send your things and then my lawyer will contact you.’

Even her mother-in-law had risen, as people do in church or at solemn moments. Her hands were pressed together on her breast. Her lips trembled as if she intended to speak, but she didn’t say a word.

All four stood stiffly upright as she walked through them and made her way to the door.

She hadn’t asked to kiss the children goodbye. She hadn’t said anything. She forgot to shut the door and one of the four – she didn’t know which one – overcame their paralysis to shut it behind her.

She declined to take the lift and, once in the street, began to walk very fast in the rain, keeping close to the walls.