For Bonne, the hour of battle had finally struck; she was going to begin her struggle against this weak and meticulous adversary, so full of ideas that they made him seem foolish, so fearful that he found safety in flight — in a word, her struggle against the man. In snatching his booty from him, Bonne proved to be a surprising and totally immoral bandit, with a speed of execution that Pierre would have admired; but Pierre suspected nothing, had not sensed anything, and anyway, if he had been forewarned, he would not have understood.
“Angélique, your sister looks tired; go and make her bed,” ordered a radiant Bonne.
Hedwige would return to the obeisance of Saint-Germain. She could certainly go to Pierre’s house, lend him her presence, accept the written rule of conjugal life and even give birth to a child, but it would make no difference. It was now certain that no new law would stipulate attachment to the mother and that an obligation all the more powerful for not being contracted would always bind the child first and foremost to its own family. There would simply be another human being on earth and, if it was a girl, one more Boisrosé.
“I’m fine,” Hedwige repeated, without letting her mother go, “I’m absolutely fine…”
She gazed at her mother’s bedroom as though she were returning to it after a long journey, just as the traveller who has been all over the world and endured deserts, shipwrecks and revolutions is amazed to see the white porcelain owl still perched on top of its box. She recognized the strong smell of oranges studded with cloves in the Creole manner. She was returning to her native soil, to the body of her mother which, in spite of its shapelessness and caducity, had a strange grandeur about it, blameworthy and comical perhaps when seen from outside, but which had the wild beauty of those passionate landscapes where selfishness is rated so highly that it is impossible to distinguish it from love.
Half past seven. Hedwige is not back.
Pierre, who had arranged to leave work early, is astonished. Nowadays, when he returns to his home, to their home, he hates finding his house empty. When it is said of a parcel that it is “awaiting delivery”, no one realizes how painful it is for a parcel to be unclaimed.
Hedwige is not there and it is as if the pictures had been taken down and the furniture sold in her absence. Where can she be? She had set off to visit her mother at about four o’clock and she should have left Saint-Germain to return to Neuilly at about six. The road via Marly is direct: branch off at Abreuvoir, uphill, then down to Saint-Cloud, through Garches. She had done it many a time. Unless she had gone through the forest and had broken down in the woods?
“People will say that I shall always, always, always be waiting! Waiting, hoping. Driven to despair, waiting again. Being on the lookout, yet still within these four walls! How well I understand that caged animals die prematurely! It’s appalling to be on your own once you have been a couple. And on one’s own at seven in the evening without anyone for company apart from that idiot whose name is ‘me’. The lack of imagination of mirrors is astounding. When I was a child, I longed for a looking glass in which I could see movements other than my own.”
Pierre presses his nose against the window so that he can see the street better. But his nose creates several large blotches that soon prevent him from seeing a thing. In any case, there is nothing to see other than a view of Paris that looks diminished through the mist. It is pretty chilly. In modern houses, all the benefit of radiators is lost because the walls are so thin. Moping around, feeling gloomy: these words quite appropriately link feeling cold with waiting. Expectancy is a blockage in which all our plans find themselves frozen.
“I actually needed Hedwige this evening, I particularly needed her.”
Pierre was quivering with nervousness and disappointment. A woman being late is nothing very much, but as the noises grew more muffled in the fine mist, as the busy elevator came down again empty, a feeling of failure descended on him. All the tortures that are used metaphorically to describe waiting — the mouth in the water, thorns, the grill or burning coals — seemed very minor compared to what he was going through.
Pierre did not normally telephone Saint-Germain often, because it was very complicated to call and make the Boisrosés come down to the dairy. He resigned himself to doing so, however, because the dairy closed at eight o’clock. Fromentine came on the line.
“Is Hedwige with you?”
“Yes, dear Pierre. I was just about to call and tell you.”
“Will she be at Saint-Germain for long? Why hasn’t she come home?”
“She’s in bed.”
“In bed? Is she ill?”
“No.”
“Then, what’s the point?”
“She’s lying down and she’s resting.”
“If anyone goes to bed at seven in the evening, they must be ill.”
“Not in our house.”
“In my house you do,” retorted Pierre curtly.
“But haven’t you seen how she looks? You make her do too much.”
“Very well. I’m leaving straight away for Saint-Germain.”
“I’m telling you, she’s not ill. Leave her with us for one night. What difference can it make to you, dear Pierre? It would make us so happy.”
“I need her, and particularly today.”
“Listen… be reasonable… forcing her to get dressed, making her go out into the night… what time would she arrive? The road’s bad, as you well know.”
Pierre imagined Hedwige lost in the fog, with a flat tyre, unable to lift up the spare wheel herself. There were two places on her route that he dreaded: the crossroads at Louveciennes and the last bend on the hill at Saint-Germain. Fromentine was still droning on, affectionate, insistent, slightly mocking:
“Do us this little favour, my dear restless, ever-frothy brother-in-law! Tomorrow, at first light, Hedwige will be back with you.”
“She has leave until nine o’clock in the morning, then! No later,” replied Pierre who, in a hoarse voice that he tried to make softer, did his best to sound like a decent, forgiving fellow.
He hung up in a fury, turned round and saw the empty studio flat, vacated for the entire night. It is ghastly when you were counting on someone not even to have the expectation to keep you company.
He wanted to have supper, but found only a solitary egg at the back of an empty cupboard, like a diplodocus’s egg in the Gobi desert; he also found an apple, deader than a still life.
“She’s not coming back… it must be my fault if she’s not coming back. Am I horrid? Am I boring? The fact is that she doesn’t love me as I love her. Why? I’ve been aware for some time that things haven’t been going well, but why?”
Truth to tell, he had not felt anything of the sort until then, but when one is in a poor state of mind it is hard to believe that it has only just occurred and so you pretend you have been in that state for a long time.
Pierre, who lived in the future as a fish takes to water, found it hard to think back on time that had passed. Weary of searching, he resorted to another pastime and opened his Manual of American Archaeology at the chapter on Columbian silver vases. To no avail. He always started analysing his marital relationship again.
“I wonder whether, at the start of my relationship with Hedwige, I may not have made a wrong move. I thought I was being clever disguising myself as someone else, I mean as someone who was a slow mover. Whereas Hedwige was expecting me — the me, as I am; the ‘no sooner said than done’ man — and she didn’t find me.”