“Of course I’ll go on. So the three of us chatted. You know what it’s like when girls get together. We have no idea of the time. We talk about clothes and all kinds of things, and the time flies by. All of a sudden I realized that it was six o’clock.”
Just then Robert Marjanne had such a clear sense that Claire was going to lie that he thought she could feel it. And in fact, she seemed not to dare to go any further into her tale.
“I realize that it’s six o’clock,” she repeated. “My friends are surprised. I leave them at last and then, remembering I had something to buy, I catch a cab to the Printemps department store.”
“It must have been closed!”
“How annoying you are! Will you let me finish already? Don’t you know that the department stores close at six-thirty?”
“What was it that you wanted to buy so urgently?”
“What I wanted to buy? You want to know?”
Claire went to her room and returned a moment later with a small package that she opened in front of her husband. It contained a pair of gloves.
“You see. Nothing to worry about.”
Then, showing him the paper in which the gloves had been wrapped and on which was printed in a modern font “Le Printemps,” she added:
“Here’s the proof.”
“None of that tells me where you spent the night. You had to sleep somewhere, after all!”
“If you interrupt me one more time, I’m warning you I won’t tell you another thing. You think it’s amusing to recount everything in such detail? Listen to me now. So I leave Le Printemps. It was exactly six-thirty and I say to myself, ‘Robert must be waiting for me, I’ve got to hurry.’ But instead of taking a cab in front of the store—you know how crowded it is there, I would have waited for an hour—I go on foot to boulevard Malesherbes. And right then, when I am on the corner of rue du Havre, I run into—you’ll never guess who. Who do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, guess.”
“Maud!”
“No, no. I told you a moment ago that I had left her at Madeleine’s.”
In Monsieur Marjanne’s mind Claire was only trying to give the illusion of truth. To be less alone with her lie, she wanted to make her husband participate in it. But he was determined not to let himself be dragged into it and simply answered: “I don’t know” and “What can I say?”
“Well! I’m going to tell you. I ran into Olga and her mother.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember? You have no memory! In Nice, at the Hotel Beauséjour.”
“Of course I remember, but you are not going to make me believe that you ran into them just like that, out of the blue.”
Right after their wedding, Claire and Robert Marjanne had gone on a long trip to Italy. When they came back to France, they had stopped in Nice for two weeks. Mme. Kalinina and her daughter Olga were staying in the same hotel as the Marjannes. They had become acquainted easily, even more so because at first Mme. Kalinina had thought that Monsieur Marjanne was Claire’s father. Claire had sensed, to the point of teasing him about it, how flattered her husband had been—coming as he did from a family where everything was always a question of self-interest and from which he had dreamed of escaping all his life—to make the acquaintance of Mme. Kalinina, who had been admitted to the court of the Czar, who belonged to one of the greatest families in Russia and who now, driven out of her country, had taken refuge in Nice.
Thus the idea immediately occurred to Robert Marjanne that his wife, having remembered his high regard for the two foreigners, had thought that simply mentioning Mme. Kalinina would cause his suspicions to fade.
“So they are in Paris?” he asked.
“And they asked about you first thing.”
Monsieur Marjanne then remembered the two delightful weeks he had spent in Nice where, the only man among these three women, he had accompanied them to the casino, to the theater, to tea, and how considerate everyone had been to him, and how proud he had been, and also the thought he had so often had: “If only my family could see me now!”
But Claire had begun speaking again.
“You can imagine, Robert, how surprised we were to meet again. All they could talk about was you. They asked me a thousand things, how you were, if you were happy, if you still loved me, if you spoiled me, if you hadn’t changed, absolutely everything!”
Robert Marjanne still remembered the look of admiration for Claire’s beauty he had seen in Mme. Kalinina’s eyes.
“They were on their way home,” Claire continued. “You can easily imagine that I felt I should accompany them. And as we walked they spoke to me for a long time, very frankly, as if I were part of the family. And I learned a lot of things about which you have no idea. They made me swear not to tell you anything, but now that they have gone, and I may never see them again, I will tell you everything.”
“They’re gone?” Robert Marjanne asked anxiously because he’d had a glimmer of hope at the thought that everything might be true, that he would go to see Mme. Kalinina that very day, and from her very mouth he would get confirmation of his wife’s words.
“Yes,” said Claire, looking surprised. “Didn’t I tell you? If they hadn’t had to leave for London this morning, you know very well that I would have had the time to see them again and I would not have stayed with them until now.”
With these words Monsieur Marjanne had the feeling that everything was collapsing around him. All this was nothing but lies. He was sure of it. However, he forced himself not to show his distress.
“They’ve left?” he asked again without even realizing he was speaking.
“This morning, on the train to Boulogne. I don’t know what time exactly, but you can check the schedule.”
Monsieur Marjanne ran a hand across his forehead.
“So I won’t see them?”
“Did you want to see them so badly?” Claire asked, feigning jealousy to tease him.
“But what did you do all night?”
“I was about to tell you a moment ago, but you interrupted me. I wanted to tell you everything. It’s not very nice of me, though. If only you’d heard how they especially asked me not to say anything to you.”
“But why didn’t you invite them to come back here?”
“Why, why? Well, what I was about to tell you would have answered your question. It would have been perfect. You thought you were laying a trap for me, but you’re the one who got caught in it. I don’t know if you recall in Nice when we met them they had jewelry, furs, real furs from Siberia. Well, already back then they were selling everything to live on. I knew it. They had told me but begged me not to say anything. I kept my word and always hid it from you. Now it’s different. When I met them yesterday, you cannot imagine how painful it was for me. They were not the same women. Mme. Kalinina was wearing a thin little black coat with a rabbit-fur collar dyed black to match. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry, not even a wedding ring, and neither was her daughter. Naturally I pretended not to notice, but I was quite upset. They were too. When they talked about you, one could feel that their laughter, their cheerful tone was not natural, that they were trying to be as carefree as when we’d met them. As soon as we had exchanged a few words, they wanted to be on their way. It was then that I realized they felt abandoned and that they wished I would stay with them and say to them: ‘Don’t go, let’s talk, let’s spend the evening together.’ And that’s what I said. The thought of inviting them home came to me of course, but I sensed how much their pride would suffer seeing you again dressed as they were. So we walked and then quite naturally I said you were going to be with friends that evening and I invited them out to dinner. Because they felt my affection for them, little by little they became more trusting and told me everything they had endured. I took a taxi with them to accompany them back to their hotel and on the way Olga began to cry. She had been terribly upset by what her mother had recounted. Once we got there, I went up to their room with them, I consoled them. We ordered tea, we talked some more. And that’s how it got to be midnight. And then I wanted to come home to you. I don’t know if you know how it is, but when you’ve had a lot of sorrows and have given an account of them to someone else, you want that person to stay with you. If she leaves, you feel more depressed than before. When I said I was going home to you, you should have seen them! Olga stopped crying and grew very pale. Mme. Kalinina took my hand. They didn’t say a word, but from their faces and everything about them I sensed that their situation would seem even more distressing to them once I had gone.”