Anna (30 page)

From her high chair, behind the counter, Anna could see the hard profile of the man. He would sit for minutes on end sometimes, without moving, simply looking out into space at things that were not there. He never turned his head, never glanced for a moment at the girl who sat, so close, regarding him. And when
at last he got up from the table he would go past her to the bleak bedroom up above without even pausing to nod in her direction.

It was because she was sorry for him that she tried to show him little kindnesses, tried to make his existence more bearable. She took him copies of the day's papers—poor two-page affairs that were all the presses could manage on their starved ration of paper—but the officer scarcely glanced at them. She had the chandelier at his end of the room lit so that his table should not be quite so sunk in gloom—and he apparently noticed no difference. She arranged the paper flowers for him herself—and he moved them away as he sat down.

“Poor man,” she told herself, “he is so little in the mood for comforting that he does not even recognise it when it comes.”

The first time that he spoke to her was nearly a week later. He was sitting as usual at his corner table, a lonely man in an empty restaurant. Then the door opened and a flower-seller came in. The flower-seller was an old woman; and there is no city in the world where beggars and flower-sellers live longer than in Paris. She surveyed the deserted salon with rheumy defeated eyes, and then turned hopefully in the direction of the officer. He waved her away without even looking at her.

But she was not easy to be rid of. They were not ordinary flowers, she explained; they were flowers made of feathers. She made the little posies herself, she said, with an invalid daughter helping her.

The officer remained unmoved. He ignored her. Then with a gesture of irritation he took out his purse and gave her a franc. It was more than the old dame had expected. She blessed him. Blessed him, and chose the prettiest of all her bouquets—it was a collection of dyed chicken feathers—to put down on the table beside him. She went out, still delivering her benediction.

The officer regarded the spray of flowers for a moment. It was obvious that he did not know what to do with it. Then he turned to Anna. He raised his hand and beckoned her over.

“For you, Mademoiselle,” he said.

Anna looked at the flowers.

“Poor sweet,” she thought, “he does not know how worthless they are. He thinks they will please me.”

She held them up against her bosom, bending her face down over them.

“I shall wear them there,” she told him, and she began fixing the spray into the brooch that was pinned already to her bodice.

“They will look charming on you, Mademoiselle,” he said.

He gave a little bow to show that so far as he was concerned the incident was now ended. But as he went upstairs afterwards he said good-night to her.

When he had gone, Anna unpinned the flowers and threw them down on to the counter.

“The ridiculous things,” she said. “They are like the trimmings for some old spinster's hat.”

The flowers were still there on the counter when M. Duvivier came back into his restaurant. He had been in the kitchen for upwards of an hour devising fresh disguises for the food and, when he emerged, his face was flushed and steaming. He went over to the cupboard of which he alone held the keys and took out the bottle that he was keeping from the Germans.

“Has my love been lonely?” he asked.

He was at his most affectionate at that moment. For nearly six days now there had been nothing to disturb the placid flow of their matrimony. And M. Duvivier felt that he had every reason to congratulate himself.

Then his eye caught sight of the flowers.

“Hullo,” he said, “has someone been giving my little Anna flowers?”

Anna grew irritated.

“He is more gross than ever when he is drunk,” she told herself. “How can I bear it that he talks to me in this way? He speaks as though he owned me.”

And she replied indifferently.

“Do you like them? Don't you think they are nice?”

“But who gave them to you?” M. Duvivier persisted. “Where did they come from?”

“It was someone who came into the restaurant,” Anna told him, and turned her back on him to pick up the book that she had been reading.

“Someone who came into the restaurant,” M. Duvivier repeated. “There has been only Captain Picard.”

He paused and frowned slightly.

“It is not the Captain who has been giving you flowers, is it?” he asked.

The question irritated Anna still further. She merely shrugged her shoulders.

“What if he did?” she asked. “Is there anything so strange about it?”

Her reply alarmed M. Duvivier. He realised, in a flash of what
came to him as revelation, how often Anna and the Captain had been left alone together. And he blamed himself. He became terrified, and supposed the worst.

“To think that this should have been happening here,” he told himself. “Here in my own restaurant, and I never suspected it!”

He came forward and leant across the counter so that his face was close to hers.

“Is this the first present that he has given you?” he demanded.

Anna looked at him scornfully.

“He has never even spoken to me before to-night.”

Her tone of voice, her too deliberate indifference, alarmed M. Duvivier still further.

“Then why should he have given them to you?” he went on.

Anna threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Am I never to be left alone?” she asked.

She picked up the spray and threw it into the waste-box that stood behind the counter.

“I had not even given it a thought until you reminded me of it,” she said.

M. Duvivier's face cleared: he began smiling again.

“It is only because I am so much in love with you that I am made so easily jealous,” he said simply.

Afterwards Anna recovered the foolish spray of flowers and hid it away in her drawer as though the thing were precious. For some reason, the simple fact of the gift still pleased her.

But the incident of the flowers was by no means ended. With the new awareness of Captain Picard in his mind, M. Duvivier became jealous—jealous as only a middle-aged man can be jealous; hopelessly and pathetically jealous. He no longer left Anna alone in the restaurant for a single moment. He saw her himself to her high chair, and then sat down at his little side-table watching her, He followed her on to the pavement whenever she went as far as the front door for a breath of fresh air. He searched the house for her if he discovered that even for an instant she was missing. He pestered. He made himself ridiculous.

As for the Captain, he remained wholly unaware of the consternation that he had caused. He still sat alone; he was still gloomy and preoccupied. But now that he had once spoken, the first of the barriers was already down. And as he entered the restaurant he
would pause for a moment at the counter and bow to Anna and pass the time of day with her. It was an innocent and brief interlude—to be reckoned in seconds almost—but every word that he spoke, every gesture, was committed under the anxious and suspicious eye of M. Duvivier.

It was the illness of the chef that interrupted M. Duvivier's vigilance. The malady took the man quite suddenly one Sunday afternoon. He was bending over a devil's brew of offal and entrails that he was seeking to make into a dainty and appetising entrée, when he placed his hands upon the pit of his stomach, groaned and collapsed. He had, he declared, been poisoned; poisoned by some of the food that he had himself prepared. He complained that he was dying. But whether he were dying or not, he was certainly of no use. And to keep the restaurant open M. Duvivier was compelled to put on the chef's white apron, roll up his sleeves and get down to it. He was now both chef and waiter; and the work in the kitchen kept him out of the salon.

It was boredom, as much as anything else, Anna told herself, that drew her over to the Captain's table. He was alone, and she was alone, and there was only the width of three tables between them. She began by nothing more than asking politely if the food had been to his liking.

“How I despise myself,” she thought as he heard the words upon her lips. “I am even growing to speak like a waitress.”

But the officer did not appear to question the level of their talk. He replied vaguely about the weather, about the Germans and about the rise in prices. It was obvious that he attached no importance to the conversation.

And then quite suddenly, one evening, his manner changed. He broke through his reserve, the reserve that he had kept so carefully wrapped round him, and he talked—talked as only a man who has been silent for so long can talk. He asked Anna about herself; said that he had detected at once that she was not a native; inquired how long she had been at the restaurant, how long she had been married to M. Duvivier. And he raised his eyebrows when he heard. Then he asked her other things about herself—if she liked Paris, whether the noise of the daily bombardment bothered her, what steps she would take to protect herself if the Germans entered. He spoke of himself as well. He mentioned a village in the South which he said was in his mind always—though what his ties were, what bound him to it she could not discover. He spoke of the intolerable strain of waiting, simply waiting, for something—anything—to happen.

“If I were only still in the army …” he began once, and then stopped abruptly, almost as though surprised at his own candour.

The half-uttered sentence, indeed, marked the end of this conversation: he withdrew into himself again, and disclosed nothing further.

But there were other opportunities. M. Duvivier was still his own chef. He was forced to spend most of the evening preparing those mysterious unnameable dishes of his in the kitchen, and Anna and the Captain talked quite freely together. He now seemed to expect her, to wait for her. He did not attempt to leave his table until they had spoken. And with each evening that passed, their conversation became less general, less empty. It became charged and personal.

But when he asked her to tell him more about her own life, she merely shrugged her shoulders and said briefly: “It was unhappy, my life. It has been unhappy always. But it is not very interesting. I would rather not talk of it.”

And she prayed that he would ask again.

Then one evening the Captain apologised to her. He had allowed himself a second carafe of wine, and had become more expansive than usual.

“You were the first thing that I noticed when I came here,” he said. “And I have looked for you every day since. On evenings when you have not been here I have missed you. I owe you an apology for having behaved so rudely at first. I was tired.”

Anna felt herself blushing. But before she could reply, M. Duvivier had interrupted them. His heavy feet could be heard ascending the street staircase. Anna rose hurriedly and excused herself.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I shall be needed at the desk now.”

And he understood what she meant.

When M. Duvivier entered, Anna was sitting at the high chair where he expected to find her. The Captain, his elbows resting on the table, was gazing fixedly out across the salon into nothing. He was smoking one of his innumerable cigarettes.…

After that evening, her talks with the Captain became for Anna the fixed moment of her day. He had told her what she had been waiting to hear—that he missed her when she was not there. And there was about these meetings the exquisite savour of all illicit things; they were guilty and delicious. One night the Captain kissed her hand.

And then, with the same suddenness with which he had first
spoken to her, his mood changed for the second time. He became sombre and melancholy once more. His conversation faded away as he talked to her. He left sentences unfinished and sat there simply looking at her. At her, and beyond.

For two whole days he scarcely left his room. He even took his meals there; and M. Duvivier, grunting at the stairs, was compelled to carry the trays up to him. When at last the Captain emerged he was paler and more haggard. He was the same man again who had come to the restaurant that night asking if there was a room there. He sat in his old way at the accustomed table, his head resting on his hands, his eyes staring into the emptiness of the room. When Anna went over to him, he started.

Then he raised his eyes and looked into hers; looked so hard, so steadily, that she was frightened.

“Why couldn't I have been left to find my own way out without this happening?” he asked. “I
had
decided, you know,” he said. “My mind was all made up. I could have done it then. It won't be so easy now. I shall have to go through it all again.”

He leant forward and dropped his voice so that she could scarcely hear him.

“It was you that stopped me,” he said. “It was you that made it difficult. But it's not safe to turn back now. It's time to say good-bye.”

“You're going away?”

The Captain paused.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I'm going away. I shan't be here in the morning.”

He suddenly took hold of her hand and, raising it to his lips, he kissed it repeatedly. He was for the moment oblivious to everything, oblivious even to the elderly couple sitting in the far corner.

Then before she could speak to him again, before she could question him, he had risen from the table and was gone.

She was still standing there beside his empty place, when M. Duvivier emerged from the doorway that led downwards to the kitchen. He stood there, the sweat pouring from him. His hands were red and flabby, like a laundress's: he had been
plongeur
as well as chef that night.

“No Captain?” he asked.

Anna did not even glance up as she answered.

“He has gone back to his room,” she said. “Did you want him?”