“Hurry up, hurry up!”
“Release me, please don’t allow me to be upset any more, dear husband.”
When Hedwige put things in this way, tenderly, emphasizing her own incompetence, exaggerating her own foolishness, Pierre immediately relaxed.
“If I’m made the scapegoat, then it will have served you right!” he said. “Anyway, no one’s thinking of complaining. And rightly so.”
“You haven’t invited anyone else, I hope?” said Hedwige affectionately. “Rushing around must be so enjoyable for you that one doesn’t really feel guilty for having made you wait,” she concluded, tying her hat veil into a knot as if putting a full stop at the end of the sentence.
At the restaurant, Pierre once again skipped the rituals. He refused to put his coat in the cloakroom. He went straight over and raided the cold buffet; he came back, his plate loaded with cold meats, jellied eggs, and with some oranges in his pockets. People used to say that every time he went to a restaurant, Pierre would create a fuss.
“Not so much bread, darling…”
“I can’t stand slow table service. I feel I want to eat my neighbour’s helping. So I go and serve myself.”
“You swallow without chewing. On the fireplace in our dining room I shall have engraved—”
“You must…?”
“No. The remark Brillat-Savarin liked most of all and which they used to say to me all the time at boarding schooclass="underline" ‘You’re eating too quickly.’’’
“When I was little, Mother used to say that I didn’t suck my feeding bottle, I hurled myself at it. When I was older, I used to go to an automat bar on the boulevards, near the Parisiana. I was never as happy as when I was there. I gobbled everything down; I became dyspeptic (they had to dose me with pigs’ gastric juices). It was wonderful, that bar: one click and piles of sandwiches would descend straight into your mouth…”
Hedwige was fiddling nervously with the corner of the tablecloth.
“You don’t eat, you swallow your plate! And look at those stains on your tie!”
“Would monsieur like some strawberries? They’re the early crop.”
The maître d’hôtel presented them to him in their packaging, rather like a nurse presenting you with your appendix after an operation.
“Strawberries in January! They’re not the early crop, they’re late strawberries from last year!” Pierre replied.
Coffee was brought, together with hygienically wrapped sugar lumps. Pierre tossed them into his cup without unwrapping them.
“You really are impossible, my love! It’s as though things didn’t belong to you, as though you were stealing them.”
“Because the paper will end up floating on top of its own accord!”
At the theatre, Pierre bought two stalls seats, 85 and 87. They set off, following the usherette.
“85 and 87 are already occupied,” said the usherette.
“Any more of this and I’ll jump onto the stage!”
“Wait on these folding seats until the interval, monsieur. They must have put the people in 185 and 187 in 85 and 87…”
“Then let’s sit in 185 and 187,” said Pierre peremptorily.
“Unfortunately, 185 and 187 are occupied.”
“There’s nothing in the world slower and more foolish than an usherette,” groaned the man in a hurry.
And supporting himself on the partition of a groundfloor box, he stepped into it, fell inside it with a great deal of noise, and refused to leave. Amid much murmuring, Hedwige came and sat beside him.
La Planche à plonger was by Jean Alavoine, a dashing young playwright who, with his lively dovetailing of situations, his use of effects that had not been attempted before and a few very well-plotted scenes, had made many of those who produced plays for Paris audiences seem outmoded.
“I was very keen on seeing the first act,” said Pierre. “I know Alavoine, he gets straight to the point.”
This was true of the author’s early work, two-act plays staged in an avant-garde theatre where the director, a saintly man, awaited the takings before he could go and eat. But success had come in the past two years and Alavoine now did as his colleagues did: he took his time, did not fritter away his small amount of capital, and stretched out a sketch into a three-act play.
“It’s amazing, we can’t endure expository scenes any more,” Pierre sighed. “The audiences have been primed by film, they have guessed from the third line what they won’t be told until three-quarters of an hour later and, as with German grammar, they get bored waiting for the verb.”
“I’m not bored. I’m just happy sitting beside you.”
Only the stage set looked new. It depicted a camping site in the mountains. But the dialogue, although brilliantly syncopated in the way a tennis championship is, was that of a scribbler.
From the beginning of the second act, the author, having said all he had to say, had turned to the director and given him the task of spinning things out. During a ball, the young male lead is reminded of his former lovers: through a brilliant innovation, the various women he had favoured appear, just as he is naming them, and they descend a staircase, each wearing a mask and hat of the period. In order to fill out this meagre curtain-raiser-cum-fairy tale, a certain number of characters walk to and fro bearing Chinese lanterns.
“This is really intolerable!” moaned Pierre.
This time he did not dare say: “Suppose we went somewhere else?”, but he thought it nonetheless.
“I’m enjoying myself,” said Hedwige.
“And to think that Aeschylus is so short!”
“Would you like a sweet?” said Hedwige affectionately, offering him one.
“The Oresteia fits into the hollow of your hand.”
“Suck it. Don’t crunch it!”
“Have you ever timed Agamemnon? Barely half an hour’s reading! What takes up time in Greek theatre is the chorus with its bear-dancing, three steps to the right, three steps to the left. As for the rest, Fate has no sooner been mentioned than it has knocked already and all those famous murderers are already lying rigid without having bothered to justify themselves. Are you really sure that there’s no fourth act at least?”
Pierre held on until the middle of the last act. But then things began to take a turn for the worse. In Alavoine’s play, an irresolute Fate was unable to bring down its quarry. And yet he wasn’t being asked to make his characters die, merely to make them live.
Pierre suddenly got to his feet, for the image of his warm house, his inviting bed, his pyjamas with their arms laid out in a fan and Hedwige’s pink nightdress, its glint of gold lace rolled out on a fur rug and made to look pinker still by the embers of the fire, had suddenly affected him like a finger on a trigger. He pushed open the door of the box, grabbed Hedwige by the arm and gulped in what little fresh air there was in the narrow corridor.
“Hadn’t you promised to stay until the end?”
“I made a mistake, that’s all.”
They went home. Pierre started to get undressed on the stairs. Firstly, his waistcoat; secondly, his tie; thirdly, his braces. When he reached their door, he was holding his clothes miraculously in his hand. And while Hedwige was turning the key in the lock, he took the opportunity to unlace his shoes.
“I’m getting into your bed to warm it,” he said.
He was under the blanket before Hedwige had removed her hat. He watched her making her preparations for bed: a large bag of cotton wool, cream for taking off make-up, skin lotion, tissues, large combs, looking glasses etc. (And she wasn’t concerned about her appearance!) Noises of cupboard drawers, of running or gushing water.