It was the hour when the buses run less frequently, when the métro amplifies its underground noise by a few seconds, when those who are on their own are mistaken for couples because of the echo in the reverberating streets and the shadows on the walls, when the night belongs to elderly journalists, and to all women, the women who make scenes and the women who are kind and gentle.
While she was tossing pads of cotton wool stained pink by make-up into the waste-paper basket, Hedwige was glancing behind her in the looking glass, like a driver watching the car that is about to overtake him in his rear-view mirror. She had realized that this was the night. She had guessed from a very slight hint of hoarseness in Pierre’s voice that he was hungry for her. He was taking up more space, talking far less and gradually settling into the thick wool of the mattress which, in spite of the padding, had adapted to her shape. All she could see was his black hair. The only sign on earth of this world of unsatisfied impulses that he typified was a lock of hair. This restless, over-excitable and intrepid man now lay as stock-still as a post. It was both touching and worrying. Pierre had often romped about on Hedwige’s bed in the morning and the evening. He had occasionally slipped beneath her eiderdown, but he had never got into her bed. He had never remained there as he was doing now. Was he one of those who like to be tucked in or someone who moves around in the night and pulls up the covers in the morning? She was going to discover all about him, to be able to explain him in straightforward language, to keep him in an enclosed field of linen from which he could not shy away again; she was going to find out whether her seductive powers would cause him to lie still or make him move about; she was going to get to the core of his secret, to discover finally whether Pierre’s haste was generated by muscles or just nerves, by strength or weakness.
So intense was her curiosity that she felt none of that sweet shame experienced by girls who have never slept with a man.
CHAPTER XVI
THE BOISROSÉ FAMILY’S wounds healed slowly, and they all maintained a silence about their amputation. Hedwige’s marriage which, after all, was natural, even honourable and certainly desirable so long as it was merely a marriage of convenience, became, from the moment it took on the appearance of a love match, an object of scandal, a notion all the more obsessive the more firmly it was swept aside. Contrary to the laws of perspective, Hedwige grew taller once she moved away. No one dared talk about her, at least not “plainly”, because they did not refrain from speaking in that sort of coded language that families use without danger of conflict to control their most explosive secrets.
The happiness that a loved one discovers when he or she has left us, after previously having experienced it with us alone, is not merely immoral, but humiliating too, because it forces us to reach difficult conclusions about ourselves and to make admissions of suspicion and distress. Shame is not always the awareness of the harm we do, it is often the awareness of the harm done to us. The Boisrosés felt ashamed because of Hedwige, and even more so in her presence than when away from her, for Hedwige frequently came to Saint-Germain, even though Bonne claimed that “we never see her”. (For Bonne, there was never a halfway point between all and nothing, and if she had not spent twenty-four hours with her head on her mother’s knees then she had not come at all.) And yet she suffered less from Hedwige’s disloyalty than her daughters did because, being more experienced than them and being endowed with a more dependable sixth sense, she had no doubt that the lost sheep would return. For Fromentine and Angélique, the absence of Hedwige was a disaster; their grief was heightened by a sense of impoverishment; in addition to their individual beauty the three sisters had a kind of beauty in togetherness. Like an ancient cellar full of liqueurs in which a clumsy servant had broken one of the three carafes, like a triptych in which one of the three sections had vanished, they were left incomplete and depreciated, having lost ninety per cent of their value.
Although Angélique had also married, and had also gone through her crisis of growing up, her conscience was clear: in her, there was nothing to exorcize. Her sorrow was thus tinged with disapproval. As for Fromentine, she harboured a host of small demons, silly, grimacing creatures that teased her like a thousand needling irritations caused by uric acid, and they made her envy, loathe and adore Hedwige simultaneously. Secretly, she admired her for becoming self-sufficient and she was half upset and half delighted at the thought of the wave of melancholy that had so troubled the Boisrosés. Being a better person than her, Angélique felt sorry for her mother and she had settled herself on the chaise-longue at Saint-Germain in a bedridden attitude entirely in keeping with this disaster. She looked after Bonne de Boisrosé, massaging her, and carrying her from one part of her bedroom to another just as Aeneas carried his father on his shoulders, while Monsieur de Rocheflamme took his part in the family grief and jealousy as uncle, old man and antique dealer.
Only Vincent Amyot, intrigued by Pierre’s achievement and dazzled by this inexplicable marvel — a Boisrosé girl living away from the nest — allowed his delight to show; disregarding the general inhibition, he mentioned the name of the missing girl purely for the pleasure of doing what was forbidden and for the spectacle of a mother-in-law in a state of distress. He took pleasure in teasing, from which he derived flimsy revenge, informing Fromentine that Hedwige was wearing new fox furs and that she would not lend them to her; telling Angélique that Hedwige had confessed to making Creole dishes for Pierre; letting Bonne know that from the moment she was first married her daughter had not once spent a night away, that is to say she had slept with her husband, and that there was therefore no point in keeping her room and her bed untouched unless it was to do so for a beloved person who had died. The family allowed him to drone on; secretly, they had not entirely given up hope of seeing an end to the profligate daughter’s lawful vagrancy. But for the time being Hedwige was in love. Hedwige loved someone outside the permitted perimeter, and her love was remarkable for the time it had lasted; Hedwige had disappeared; the family waters had closed over Hedwige’s plunge.
The doorbell rang, but the ring was not unfamiliar; that succession of light, delicate trills that was like music, everyone knew that ring, it was her. She came in, as tall as the door, with that sumptuous air that all tall women have, even the poorest, wearing a white scarf round her neck like a flag of truce.
“Hedwige!”
She made her way over to her mother’s outstretched arms, mounted the steep folds of the eiderdown and the snowfield of drapery, and collapsed onto the beloved breast like someone returning to their homeland. Bonne de Boisrosé, at the risk of spoiling the triumph that was unfolding, took Hedwige’s head in her hands and gazed into the velvety white face pitted with golden, dutiful eyes. No blemishes? Yes, two wrinkles, the first, at the corners of her mouth. They were scarcely wrinkles; they began like small lines, but at each side of the small aperture and contracted by the muscles of the mouth, there were the beginnings of a slight furrow, a fissure that no transversal line would stop as it made its way to the crevice and the gully.
At a glance, Madame de Boisrosé had seen all she needed to see: Hedwige was unhappy, Hedwige was pregnant. Two things which often go together, that need to be explained to men so that they understand, but which a mother can decipher like an open book. Her perfect nose had become translucent and taut due to repeated bouts of sickness. Her fine features had softened and faded; skeletal bones were pushing the flesh from behind and stretching it, making her eye sockets hollow and revealing the depths of her soul in the prison of her eyes, which had acquired a distracted, distant expression, a sort of aversion to the outside world, as the eyes of those who are very ill do.