Читать книгу Not Now but Now - M.F.K. Fisher - Страница 10

two

IT WAS A pleasant meal. They sat opposite two other human beings whose age and sex Jennie could not have told a half-hour later, two courteous zeros who bowed as she sat down, wiped their silver on their napkins, and bowed as they left. Jeannetôt was more entertaining than she had expected, and they discussed with liveliness the strange subject of the scarcity of graveyard space in Switzerland. He, as an electrical engineer, thought not only that the state should forbid any burial except by cremation, but that it should build a series of federal furnaces. He had worked out a system that would, within a few burnings, start generating enough electricity in a cumulative pile to out-do any fast-running river, enough after, say, ten funerals to light a whole city for ten hours. Jennie was amused by him and pleased by the way his lumpish face lightened as he talked and by the complete lack of ghoulishness in his scientific interest in cadavers. She decided he was worth talking to, listening to.

He asked her permission to order a large bottle of the best red Bordeaux on the list, and they lifted their glasses solemnly to Burgundy as they slipped from the station in Dijon. Bordeaux traveled better, they agreed. They both liked Burgundies better, they added without haste. They would not drink them every day, they said comfortably, but for festivals and holidays and the high flavors of such feastings, what was better? This was good too, they said, touching glasses; for a railroad claret it was not bad at all.

When the bills were being made out Jennie said, “Mine is separate, please.” Jeannetôt frowned politely. She smiled at him. “You are the first man I have ever permitted to dine with me in a train,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed your wine so much. I thank you for it. But it’s a matter of principle with me to pay for my own meal.”

He smiled back at her, with a little bow, and she knew that she had moved wisely. It was not that she would have hesitated to move any other way that pleased her: it was that by now she liked this man and was interested in making him enjoy her. The fact itself interested her. Certainly he was the dull solid businessman he had first seemed to be, and yet by now the warmth of his eyes and the astonishing latent gaiety in his face were biting at her consciousness of him.

Back in the compartment they sat across from each other as before, but between them and the two other people who had got on at Dijon (or were they the zeros from the dining table?) there was a wall built of sudden compatibility. They sipped a little brandy, she straight from her flask and he from a tiny silver drinking cup he produced gleefully from his pocket. They said almost nothing. Then Jennie put her head back against the stiff crocheted tidy with PLM on it and closed her eyes. She knew that Jeannetôt would watch her as she dozed, and it did not bother her at all, because she was as sure of him as if he were a dressed trussed hare lying ready to be sold upon a marble slab, and she the one to sell him. He was a good man in his way, and he had made her day amusing, and it would be fine to see the last of him, him and his small gallantries, his wine, his silly tears.

When she looked up, her eyes clear as pond water, they were in the hilly country, nearing the border. She loved it there, so rocky, with far peeps into pretty valleys, and the air thinner. She watched Jeannetôt, reading hungrily at her book, cutting its crumbling cheap paper as he read. He scanned the pages expertly, his face impassive and his eyes so alive that it seemed as if each one were a brain by itself. She liked that. She felt that he was an intelligent man, one who had gone flabby along with his body. She wished idly that she had known him when he was twenty-five, not fiftyish.

He looked up easily at her, as if sure she would still be there for him to enjoy, unabashed by her gray gaze, and when he saw her awake and watching him, he clapped the book shut and almost stood up in his confusion. For a few seconds he was the flushed bourgeois she had dismissed from her mind in the Paris suburbs. Then they both smiled, and he sat back.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, holding out the book to her.

“Keep it. I’ve already read it, years ago.”

“It is good. I am shamefully ignorant of everything but technical writing. My wife—I find myself exasperated by her extremely uncatholic taste for Catholic literature. And what an appropriate title for me to study—Les Enfants Terribles!”

He laughed a little, unwillingly. Jennie knew that his easy conversation of lunchtime was over. He would talk now about the children, his typical banal common children, with their silly little frustrations and amours. She settled herself into the corner of her seat, her soft green slippers tucked under her, and let herself consider the exciting prospect of being alone, free, beautiful, unhampered by any obligations except to her own body and bones, her own imperious fastidious belly and bowels. Where would she sleep that night? She would have to buy more clothes in the morning, and perhaps some luggage. Geneva would be best. She would lie on smooth Swiss sheets, and eat honey on her breakfast roll, and watch the lake and the paddle-steamers . . .

“My poor daughter’s crises do not come often,” Jeannetôt was saying in a low pained voice. “I have put her under the care of the best doctors we have. Twice in the past year my poor Léonie has been in their private hospitals. When she has come home she has seemed almost happy again. But it never lasts. Now they are trying injections. She is much worse since all this trouble about Paul.”

“But surely,” Jennie said as if she cared, “surely he is old enough now to take care of himself! Why do you worry?”

“Ah, I know. But he was sickly and spoiled when he was little. Everyone spoiled him because he was so gay and so handsome. He is still. He was intelligent, much more so than I, but he always failed his examinations. Then Algeria—I gave him his head there, because I remembered how I’d wanted to live in a foreign country when I was young. And now he comes back with a Little Thing off the streets, a little female with the brains of a sparrow and the damned tenacity of a surgeon’s leech. I see him everywhere with her. It is the scandal of Lausanne. At home his mother speaks of nothing but Paul, as if it were all my fault. And Léonie weeps and faints. Les enfants terribles, my dear Madame!”

He tossed the book down beside him, mockingly, and let his hands hang between his knees, tired clown again.

Jennie was a little bored, but not enough to do more about it than ask, “Why don’t you send Léonie away?”

He looked at her in a strange, cynical fashion. “Madame, perhaps I should explain the intricate ties that bind a neurasthenic convent girl to her own town, her own confessor. Or would I offend your religious susceptibilities?”

Jennie laughed. “Not mine, Monsieur. I have one religion—if any. There is me. And there is nothing. At least, that is as far as I have guessed, up to now.”

He looked a little taken aback before he nodded. “Perhaps you are right. At least it is something to have surmised that much. I myself, I have always thought that if I acted honestly and did my best—but now I doubt that too. Where is there any reward for being a respectable husband and father?”

Jennie felt mirthful and excited, as she had earlier, before he became a pleasant table companion and was simply an actor in this old play rewritten and restaged to ease her train ennui. Now he was reading his lines again, timing them skillfully, as unsuspecting as all earnest mountebanks must be that what he said had ever been said before. He was back on the stage.

“I see my colleagues, men almost as successful as I, leading their lives as if they were irresponsible youngsters, as if they were Paul’s age. Their wives are neglected, wronged. And yet they look like healthy women and full of animation when I meet them. What a contrast they are to my own poor companion! Their children make good marriages—they even accept their fathers’ mistresses socially in some cases . . .”

Yes, Jennie thought, he is definitely considering the obvious pleasures of infidelity before it is too late! He is trying not to say to himself that if his son can do it, he still can too. Poor clown! How easy it would be, she thought casually, to give him a really fine fat holiday from all his cautious ways. Perhaps she could talk a little more to him before Geneva, and goad him to take the Little Thing away from Paul! She felt highly amused, and looked with solemnity out the window until she was sure her eyes would not betray her.

Then they were at the border. There was a long wait: some trouble with two thin little men in kaftans and bowler hats, who were trying to take a rug into Switzerland. They spoke only Polish. One of them stood silently weeping. The other wept too, and screamed and wrung his delicate hands, as tiny and bleached as a pickled frog’s. Jennie watched, frowning a little with distaste for their abandon. She moved away from them, her own simple luggage already inspected, and drank a glass of beer at the station restaurant. It was good to be alone. She would have dinner served in her room that night, perhaps on her balcony, unless the lake breeze blew too coolly. In the morning she would shop. She loved the clothes in Geneva, such a mixture: Bavarian ski suits for the English, English tweeds and pullovers for the French, French scarves and dainty silver purses and little nonsensities for the fat Germans. She might go to see the consul and hear all the gossip about people she had left behind her . . .

“Why didn’t you wait for me, my dear lady?” Jeannetôt’s implication that there was any reason why she should annoyed her almost to the point of snubbing him again, but when she looked up over her last swallow of beer at his eager eyes, the surprising youthfulness underneath his flabby graying skin, she could only smile at him.

“I wanted to be alone,” she said candidly. “I am used to it. I told you that this morning. Do you remember?”

“There is only one thing I can say—it’s not right! It’s against the laws of nature!”

“Others have thought so too,” she said, and they were laughing at their foolishness. “But here I am. And now do we have time for you to drink a beer with me?”

“No,” he said. “Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for my digestion and my waistline, we do not.”

“You could have ordered one of those bottles of lemonade,” she said as they went toward the train. “I’ve always wanted to see someone drink it. I’m sure it’s ghastly.”

“On the contrary. I often enjoy it. It is very good on hot walks in the country on Sundays, slightly acidulous and highly carbonated.”

How pompous he was! No wonder his daughter had hysterics, his wife megrims, his son a succulent Little Thing. No wonder he was lonely. Was it too late for him after all? Jennie hoped not, in an easy uncaring way.

As they got into the train she saw the two little black-gowned refugees again. One was half lying against his companion’s shoulder, his mouth open like a dead child’s. They and the station slid past the window. Perhaps they had been arrested. It was too bad, Jennie thought. They should stay in their own countries, all those thin pale people . . . although Poland was not a pretty homeland for the Jews, she’d heard. But they should at least know better than to travel with rare rugs over their shoulders, delaying trains and making trouble . . .

In the compartment she felt upset and sat looking remotely out of the window at the craggy hills of the borderland. It annoyed her not to have now any of the morning’s excitement. She always felt this way in the afternoon on trains. Perhaps the English were right to insist on pots of bad tea and slabs of cake in the dining-car, no matter what country they sped across. She leaned forward impulsively.

“Monsieur Jeannetôt,” she said, “let’s go see if there is any of that lemonade in bottles! On the train, I mean.” He smiled delightedly at her and stood up.

“We’ll drink one bottle,” she said, and all her happiness was back again, as if the swiftness of the train had wiped from her spirits the remembrance of the refugees, of Jeannetôt’s sententiousness, of whatever it was that for a few minutes had been treacherous. “That will give me plenty of time to collect myself before I get off.”

He stood as still as a tree, as if the train could not possibly make him sway and jiggle. “Get off?” he asked.

“Certainly,” Jennie said, and as she stood close beside him in the narrow aisle between the seats she looked up at him with her wide gray eyes.

He was still immobile, in a way that suddenly excited her so that she wanted to touch him, to test her power to break what it was that held him thus. She wanted to embrace him. She drew back, still looking up at him, and as she looked she remembered how free she was, how far now from the past. She was Jennie, looking for people who could give to her, not take and take. Jeannetôt could give. He was brimming with eagerness to give, to give as he had never known it possible . . . Jennie could teach him how.

She smiled a small polite smile as she answered. “Certainly,” she said. “At Lausanne. I’m staying at the Palace.”