Chapter SEVENTEEN

August was a hot, oppressive month, the sun beating down on sleepy streets, the cafés and restaurants nearly empty, the staircase and passages of the Hôtel du Bosphore and its fellows pervaded by an extraordinary mixture of smells. Drains, face powder, scent, garlic, drains. Above all, drains, Heidler decided. He reached the second floor and knocked at Marya’s door.

‘I’m not late,’ he said when she opened it. ‘Your clock’s fast.’ He sat down, with a sigh, thinking: ‘Oh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.’ He looked at the bed, averted his eyes instantly and lit a cigarette. When he had smoked it, he suggested:

‘Why shouldn’t you go into the country for a bit? Somewhere not too far from Brunoy. Paris is hateful in August. And you really aren’t looking well.’

‘I can’t go away just now,’ she told him. ‘What’s the good? I must be here when my husband comes out of jail.’

‘Oh! Of course,’ said Heidler. He coughed and added: ‘But look here, my dear, you surely don’t intend....’

‘Intend what?’

There was an edge to her voice.

‘If you go back to your husband,’ he declared, ‘I can’t see you again, you understand that?’ He leaned back, looking impenetrable and alert, like a chess-player who has just made a good move.

It was a greyish day and she was sitting with her back to the light. He couldn’t see her face well. She answered sharply:

‘I’m certainly going to see Stephan and do what I can for him. It won’t be much. Are you thinking of trying to stop me, you and your damned Lois?’

She was astonished at herself. ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘I’ve still got a kick left in me.’

Heidler began to argue patiently, talking as it were from the other side of a gulf between them.

‘You don’t seem to realize that I’m merely trying to save you from a very dreadful existence, an unthinkable existence. Your husband is going to be expelled from France. And he’s in trouble with the Belgian police, you say. Have you imagined what your life will be? You’ll career about Europe without any money or any friends in a perpetual and horrible insecurity. And sooner or later he’ll probably try to get back to Paris. That’s what they all do, it seems. They come back to Paris and hide till they’re arrested again. I mean, I’m not going to be mixed up with all that sort of thing. I can’t be. I can’t afford to be. You simply don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, my dear. I’m trying to stop you from having anything to do with him for your own sake.’

‘I shall never live with him again. That’s finished,’ said Marya.

‘Oh!’ answered Heidler. ‘That’s all right then.’

She went on: ‘But d’you think I could possibly be more miserable than I have been during the last few months? How could I? Don’t you understand that I’m unbearably miserable?’

‘No,’ he answered, still patiently. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t understand--I do my best.’

‘Oh, don’t you? Don’t you?’ She was excited and bitter. ‘Don’t you understand that I hate this _louche_ hotel and the bedroom and the wallpaper and the whole situation, and my whole life?’

‘Why don’t you change your hotel?’

‘All these sort of hotels are the same,’ she said drearily. ‘It’s the whole situation, I tell you. It’s my own fault. I’ve been a fool. I’ve let Lois--’

‘Why not leave Lois out of the question? She has nothing to do with it. She had nothing to do with it.’

‘Oh, one word to that,’ said Marya rudely. ‘She had a lot to do with it, and you know it. You drink in every word she says about me.’

‘You imagine that.’ He looked at his watch and sighed.

‘You’ve smashed me up, you two,’ she was saying.

That was pitiful because it was so obviously true. It was also in an obscure way rather flattering.

She put her hands up to her face and began to cry. Long-fingered hands she had with very beautifully shaped nails. She cried quietly, all soft and quivering, her little breasts heaving up and down in painful, regular jerks.

‘I’m still fond of her,’ he told himself. ‘If only she’d leave it at that.’

But no. She took her hands away from her face and started to talk again. What a bore! Now, of course, she was quite incoherent.

‘The most utter nonsense,’ thought Heidler. Utter nonsense about (of all things) the visiting cards stuck into the looking-glass over Lois’s damned mantelpiece, about Lois’s damned smug pictures and Lois’s damned smug voice. She said that Lois and he pretended to be fair and were hard as hell underneath. She said they couldn’t feel anything and pretended that nobody else could. She said that she hated their friends.

‘Imagine they know a thing when they know its name,’ said Marya. ‘And guzzling and yapping at Lefranc’s.’

Heidler was stung and interrupted coldly:

‘It’s extraordinary that you don’t see how unintelligent it is of you to abuse Lois.’

But she didn’t take the slightest notice. She just went on talking. She drank so much that she was getting as hoarse as a crow. He tried not to listen. He wouldn’t listen to this torrent of nonsense. Then he heard her say in a cold hard voice:

‘Didn’t you say that sex was a ferocious thing?’

He answered: ‘Oh yes. So it is. A terrible thing. I ought to know that.’

He was still watching the shape of her breasts under the thin silk dress she wore--a dark-coloured, closely fitting dress that suited her.

‘Terrible as an army set in array. Terrible and pitiful and futile,’ he thought. ‘All that. And a nuisance, too.’

She mocked: ‘So it is. So it is. But you don’t really believe it, do you? Well, one day I’ll walk into your studio and strangle your cad of a Lois--kill her, d’you see? Get my hands round her thick throat and squeeze. Then, perhaps, you’ll believe it.’

He said calmly: ‘I know. As a matter of fact, I’ve thought several times that you might try some nonsense of that sort. So has she. So I’ll simply give the concierge orders not to let you up in future if you do come. I’m not going to have Lois threatened, don’t you make any mistake.’

‘Oh, H. J.,’ she said. ‘Oh, H. J.,’ in a little voice like a child.

In the shadow he saw her face crimson and then go white. He got up then because she was so white and trembling and took her in his arms and said pityingly:

‘There! There! There!’

When he kissed her her lips were cold.

He said again: ‘There! There! There!’ And took two clumsy steps forwards, still holding her. She collapsed on to the bed and lay there breathing loudly and quickly as if she had been running. He stood looking down on her, feeling helpless and rather alarmed. He knelt down and stared at her. Her head had dropped backwards over the edge of the bed and from that angle her face seemed strange to him: the cheek-bones looked higher and more prominent, the nostrils wider, the lips thicker. A strange little Kalmuck face.

He whispered: ‘Open your eyes, savage. Open your eyes, savage.’

She opened her eyes and said: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you. Oh, please be nice to me. Oh, please say something nice to me. I love you.’

She was quivering and abject in his arms, like some unfortunate dog abasing itself before its master.

They dined at a restaurant on the other side of the river, and he felt tender towards her and very anxious to see her smile and be happy. He began to talk about the studio he was going to take on the Boulevard Raspail and the way they were planning to decorate it.

Then: ‘I suppose that will get on her nerves, too,’ he thought. And stopped abruptly.

She was tired, unable to respond to his gentleness as eagerly as usual.

While they were drinking coffee she said suddenly: ‘I’m going to see Stephan, you know.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Heidler. ‘I quite understand that you want to help him. I meant that your going back to live with him would make an impossible situation.’

* * * * *

The next time he saw her he suggested a meeting with Stephan in the Taverne du Panthéon, and Marya lost herself in wonder at this suggestion. Was it his idea of playing the game? Or was Lois curious? Probably it was that, she decided.