Her eyes left the microscope and fastened wholly on what M. Sarraut discreetly termed the lady in question. The mystery of sex, the eternal enigma. Why, Denise asked herself, is her offering better than mine? Because it is younger? Newer? Different in feeling? Or is the seat of captivity her total entity and not localized in her organ? Is she more interesting, more amusing, more vivid, more energetic, more flattering, more passionate?
She stared at the outlines of the lengthy, lovely limbs pressed against the satin sheath of gown, and the hateful image superimposed itself-Claude luxuriating in that superior female body, Claude lost, lost forever. Denise was crushed, routed, and another second of this would be unendurable.
She signalled that she had seen enough of the gown, and she did not bother to watch her conqueror leave.
She heard a voice. It was the vendeuse addressing her. ‘What does Madame think? Is it not enchanting?’
‘Oui,’ she was saying, ‘but it is not for me. Merci.’ She felt thick and graceless and old. She felt the unwanted orphan in the rear. She turned to her friend. ‘Je ne veux rien acheter maintenant. Let us go.’
Suddenly the painful memory was interrupted, and she realized that she was not in the salon of Balenciaga but in the cabin of a jet headed for Sweden.
The amplifier crackled. A hostess was speaking, first in French, then in accented English.
‘We are landing in five minutes. Please refrain from smoking. Please fasten your seat belts. Please fasten your seat belts. Thank you.’
Denise uncurled from her chair, and sat up, patting her suit where it had wrinkled. Outside the window there was no motion. Only a monotonous expanse of iron-greyness, like her mind. She found the belt straps, and after fumbling a moment, she hooked them around her waist.
She saw that Claude had closed his novel-damn him, able to read at a time like this-and was grinding out the butt of his cigarette. Now he, too, locked himself in his seat belt.
He looked at her. ‘Did you get any sleep?’
‘Like an innocent child,’ she said viciously.
He said no more, but stuffed his book into the Air France bag, zipped it, and pulled it between his feet.
Sitting erect, waiting, she again despised the whole idea of the trip, with its enforced togetherness. A year ago, the honour would have been the greatest event of their lives. Today, this afternoon, the honour was empty-no, not empty, but something that leered and mocked. There would be little more than a week in Stockholm. It would be tolerable, possible, only if they were endlessly occupied. This would keep her from being alone with Claude, and give her time to regain her poise and to think out the immediate future. In two weeks they would be home, and they would be three, and the decision that was her own would have to be made.
She felt the slight lurch of the jet in descent, and felt also momentary panic at what lay ahead. She tried to imagine what would be demanded of them. She wondered if she and Claude would have to undertake all the rituals together. She dreaded the ordeal of their single celebrated face, the required oneness of happy marriage and happy collaboration that the world expected to see. Marie and Pierre Curie were what everyone wanted. The irony was not amusing to her. Marie and Pierre and Gisèle Jordan.
There was a crunching, grating noise, as the jet touched down and began the noisy process of braking to a halt on the 11,000-foot cement runway. Outside the window she saw a streak of forest, of parked aeroplanes and trucks, of modern buildings, and a hangar with futuristic upswept roofs, of people in dark clusters. It was the people that frightened her the most. They had invented a certain celebrated chemist named Dr. Denise Marceau, cool, detached, dedicated, profound, when really she was entering their lives as a cheated middle-aged wife named Madame Claude Marceau, befuddled, unsettled, angry, broken. Which of them would dream that Nobel could have been erased by Balenciaga? The test would be her reservoir of strength. Could she survive this week of exposure without precipitating a scandal?
‘Come on,’ Claude was saying, ‘we have arrived.’
When they came down the temporary stairs to the runway, they were engulfed at once in a mob of howling people. Claude had her arm, holding her against the crush, and somehow she found a bouquet of flowers in her hand. Indistinctly, she heard the names of the reception committee, Count Something Jacobsson, Ingrid Something, and Something Krantz.
The Count Something Jacobsson was between Claude and herself, saying, ‘We announced the press conference for tomorrow. We wanted it orderly. But somehow they find out-try to catch you here anyway. You do not have to answer the questions-not now.’ He was pushing them through the crowd, as cameras, lifted high, captured them, and reporters shouted at them in four tongues.
Hurried along, pressed and guided by the committee, with the pack close behind, she found herself stumbling through the gate towards a limousine. Count Something Jacobsson was speaking in her ear. ‘Accommodations-Grand Hotel-rest until tomorrow-then-’
Breathless, she reached the open door of the limousine. As she stooped to enter it, she heard one reporter’s voice, more raucous than the others. ‘Dr. Marceau!’ he cried out to her. ‘Do you recommend all married couples have work in common-more in common-more-?’
The voice trailed off as she buried herself in the interior of the car, fighting the urge to weep and scream. Claude was beside her, and Somebody Something beside him, and two Somebody Somethings in the jump seats. The automobile was moving, only to Denise Marceau it did not feel like an automobile but like a ferryboat, the one driven by Charon, across the ‘Abhorred Styx’…
By the time the Nobel reception committee had deposited the Drs. Denise and Claude Marceau in their Grand Hotel suite-‘I am sure they were happy to see us go, they seemed so exhausted and nervous,’ said Ingrid Påhl-and assigned a Foreign Office attaché to attend their wants, there was barely time to dine and return to Arlanda Airport to greet the seven o’clock Caravelle jet bringing Dr. Carlo Farelli and his wife Margherita from Rome.
The three committee members were finishing their dinner in the Cattelin Restaurant, behind the Royal Palace in the Old Town, but their conversation was not of Farelli.
‘What time does Professor Max Stratman’s ship arrive in Göteborg tonight?’ Carl Adolf Krantz wanted to know.
‘I am not certain,’ Jacobsson now replied. ‘I know it will be late. In any event, we are to expect him at the Central Station by eight tomorrow morning.’
‘I hope he had a good crossing,’ Krantz mused into his beer.
‘Why all this fussing about Stratman?’ Ingrid Påhl was addressing herself to Krantz. ‘I have not seen you this excited about a physicist since the year Heisenberg came here from Leipzig.’ She smiled with malicious innocence. ‘After all, Stratman is only an American.’