The Age of Reason (4 page)

‘Nothing.’

‘One is always thinking of something.’

‘I was thinking of nothing.’

‘Not even that you like the tune they were playing, or that you wished you could play the castanets?’

‘Yes — things like that.’

‘There you are. Why don’t you tell me? I want to know everything you think.’

‘They’re not things one can talk about, they’re too trivial.’

‘Trivial! One might suppose that your tongue had been given you simply to talk philosophy with your professor.’

He looked at her and smiled: ‘I like her because she’s got red hair and looks rather old.’

‘You’re a strange boy,’ said Lola.

Boris blinked and assumed a pleading air. He didn’t like people talking about himself: it was always so complicated, and he became bewildered. Lola looked as if she was angry, but it was simply because she loved him passionately and tormented herself about him. There were moments when it was more than she could bear, she would lose her temper for no reason, and glare at Boris, not knowing how to take him, and her hands began to quiver. All this used to surprise Boris, but he was quite accustomed to it by this time. Lola laid her hand on Boris’s head: ‘I wonder what’s inside it,’ she said. ‘I feel quite frightened sometimes.’

‘You needn’t: all quite harmless, I assure you,’ said Boris, laughing.

‘Yes, those thoughts of yours are just so many ways of getting away from me.’ And she ruffled his hair.

‘Don’t,’ said Boris. ‘Please don’t uncover my forehead.’

He took her hand, stroked it for a minute or two, and laid it back on the table.

‘You are there, and quite affectionate,’ said Lola. ‘I begin to think you’re really fond of me, and then — suddenly — no one’s there at all, and I wonder where you’ve gone.’

‘I’m here.’

Lola eyed him narrowly. Her pallid face was marred by the sort of dewy, sentimental expression she assumed when singing
Les Écorchés
. She thrust out her lips, those large drooping lips that he had at first loved so much. Since he had felt them on his month, they gave him the sense of a clammy, feverish nakedness set in the centre of a plaster mask. At present he preferred Lola’s skin, so white that it did not look real.

‘You — you aren’t fed up with me?’

‘I’m never fed up.’

Lola sighed, and Boris thought with satisfaction: ‘It’s fantastic how old she looks, she doesn’t tell her age, but she must be well over forty.’ He preferred that people who liked him should look old, he found it reassuring. Added to which it gave them a sort of awesomely fragile air, not apparent at the first encounter, because they all had leathery skins. He felt an impulse to kiss Lola’s puzzled face, he said to himself that her day was done, that she had thrown away her life, and was now alone, even more so perhaps since she had fallen in love with him. ‘I can’t do anything for her,’ he thought with resignation. And he found her, in that thought, irresistibly attractive.

‘I’m ashamed,’ said Lola.

Her voice was heavy and sombre, like a red velvet curtain.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re such a kid.’

‘I like to hear you say the word — kid,’ said he. ‘It suits your voice. You say it twice in the
Écorchés
song, and I’d go and hear you just for that. Were there a lot of people tonight?’

‘A mouldy crowd. I don’t know where they came from — they just sat and chattered. And they hadn’t got any use for me at all. Sarrunyan had to ask them to keep quiet: it got on my nerves, I felt I was getting in wrong. They cheered when I came in, though.’

‘They’d always do that’

‘Well, I’m fed up,’ said Lola. ‘I loathe singing for ticks of that kind. They were the sort who came there because they’ve got to return a family invitation. I wish you could see them come in together, all over smiles. They bow, and they hold the good lady’s chair while she sits down. So really you’re interrupting them, and they just glare at you when you come in. Boris —’ said Lola abruptly: ‘I sing for my living.’

‘That’s so.’

‘If I’d thought I should finish like that, I would never have started.’

‘Well, but however you look at it, when you sang at music halls, you earned your living by singing.’

‘That wasn’t the same.’

After a short silence, Lola added hurriedly: ‘By the way, this evening I talked to the new little chap who sings next after me. He’s a very decent fellow, but he’s no more Russian than I am.’

‘She thinks she’s annoying me,’ thought Boris. And he resolved to tell her once and for all that she never could annoy him. Not today — but later on.

‘Perhaps he has learnt Russian.’

‘But you ought to be able to tell me if he has a good accent.’

‘My parents left Russia in ’17 when I was three months old.’

‘It’s funny that you shouldn’t know Russian,’ observed Lola with a pensive air.

‘She’s fantastic,’ thought Boris. ‘She’s ashamed of being in love with me because she’s older than I am. It seems perfectly natural to me — after all one party must be older than the other.’ Above all, it was more moral: Boris wouldn’t have known how to treat a girl of his own age. If both parties are young, they don’t know how to behave, they get across each other, and the whole thing feels like a doll’s dinner-party. With older people, it’s quite different. They’re reliable, they show you what to do, and there’s solidity in their affection. When Boris was with Lola, he had the approval of his conscience, he felt himself justified. Of course he preferred Mathieu’s company because Mathieu wasn’t a girl: a man was more intriguing all the time. Besides Mathieu taught him all sorts of dodges. But Boris often found himself wondering whether Mathieu had any real regard for him. Mathieu was casual and brusque, and of course it was right that people of their sort shouldn’t be sentimental when they were together, but there were all sorts of ways in which a fellow could show he liked someone, and Boris felt that Mathieu might well have shown his affection by a word or a gesture now and again. With Ivich, Mathieu was quite different. Boris suddenly recalled Mathieu’s face one day when he was helping Ivich put on her overcoat; and he felt an unpleasant shrinking at the heart. Mathieu’s smile: on those sardonic lips that Boris loved so much, that strange, appealing, and affectionate smile. But Boris’s head soon filled with smoke, and he thought of nothing at all.

‘He’s off again,’ said Lola.

She eyed him anxiously. ‘What were you thinking about?’

‘I was thinking of Delarue,’ said Boris regretfully.

Lola smiled sadly.

‘Couldn’t you think of me too sometimes?’

‘I don’t need to think of you, since you are there.’

‘Why are you always thinking of Delarue? Do you wish you were with him?’

‘I’m quite glad to be here.’

‘Do you mean that you’re glad to be here, or glad to be with me?’

‘It’s the same thing.’

‘It’s the same thing for you. Not for me. When I’m with you, I don’t care where I am. Besides. I’m never glad to be with you.’

‘Aren’t you?’ asked Boris with some surprise.

‘No, not glad. Don’t pretend to be stupid, you know just what I mean: I’ve seen you with Delarue, you’re all of a twitter when he’s there.’

‘That’s quite different’

Lola set her lovely, ravaged face quite close to his: there was an imploring expression in her eyes.

‘Look at me, you little stiff, and tell me why you like him so much.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t like him as much as all that. He’s a good chap. Lola, I hate talking to you about him, because you told me you couldn’t stand him.’

Lola smiled with a rather embarrassed air.

‘Now you’re twisting. Bless the little creature, I didn’t tell you I couldn’t stand him. It was simply that I couldn’t understand what you found in him. I wish you would explain. I want to understand.’

And Boris thought: ‘It isn’t true — she’d start yawning before I’d said three words.’

‘I find him sympathetic,’ said he sedately.

‘That’s what you always say. It isn’t precisely the word that I should choose. Tell me he’s intelligent, well-read, and I’ll agree: but not sympathetic. Look here, I’ll tell you what I think of him: sympathetic is a word I should use about somebody like Maurice, a straight sort of fellow — but Mathieu makes everyone uncomfortable because he isn’t fish nor flesh, you don’t know how to take him. Look at his hands, for instance.’

‘What’s the matter with his hands? I like them.’

‘They’re workmen’s hands. They’re always quivering a little, as though he’d just finished some heavy job of work.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘Yes, but the point is he’s not a workman. When I see his great paw gripping a glass of whisky, he looks like a man who means to enjoy life, and I don’t think the worse of him for that: but take care not to watch him drinking, with that odd mouth of his — why, it’s a parson’s mouth. I can’t explain it, I get the feeling he’s austere, and then if you look at his eyes, you can see he knows too much, he’s the sort of fellow who can’t enjoy anything in a simple way, neither eating, nor drinking, nor sleeping with women: he has to think about everything, it’s like that voice of his, the cutting voice of a gentleman who is never wrong — I know it goes with the job of having to explain things to small boys. I had a teacher who talked like him, but I’m not at school any more, and I find it tiresome: I can understand a man being completely one thing or the other, a genial brute, or the intellectual type, a schoolmaster or a parson, but not both at the same time. I don’t know if there are women who like that sort of thing — I suppose there are, but I tell you frankly, I couldn’t bear a fellow like that to touch me, I shouldn’t like to feel those ruffianly hands on me while he soused me with his icy look.’

Lola paused to get her breath. ‘She
has
got a down on him,’ thought Boris. But he remained unruffled. The people who liked him were not obliged to like each other, and Boris thought it quite natural that each of them should try to get across the others.

‘I understand you quite well,’ said Lola with a conciliatory air: ‘You don’t see him with the same eyes as mine, because he has been your master and you’re prejudiced: I can see that from all sorts of little tricks: for instance, you’re always so critical of the way people dress, you never think them smart enough, whereas he is always got up like a scarecrow, he wears ties that my hotel waiter wouldn’t look at — but you don’t mind.’

But Boris was not to be roused: ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he explained, ‘if a man is badly dressed when he doesn’t bother about his clothes at all. What is rotten is to try to make a splash, and not pull it off.’

‘Well, you don’t do that, my little tyke.’

‘I know what suits me,’ said Boris modestly. He reflected that he was wearing a blue-ribbed sweater, and was glad: it was a handsome sweater. Lola had taken his hand and was tossing it up and down between her own. Boris watched his hand rise and fall, and he thought: ‘It doesn’t belong to me, it’s a sort of pancake.’ It had in fact grown numb: this amused him, and he twitched a finger to bring it back to life. The finger touched the palm of Lola’s hand, and Lola flung him a grateful look. ‘That’s what makes me nervous,’ thought Boris irritably. He told himself that he would certainly have found it easier to show affection if Lola hadn’t fallen so often into these appealing, melting moods. He didn’t in the least mind letting his hands be played with in public by an ageing woman. He had long thought that this was rather in his line: even when he was alone, in the metro, people looked at him rather quizzically, and the little shop girls on their way home laughed in his face.

‘You still haven’t told me why you think him such a fine fellow.’

She was like that, she could never stop once she had begun. Boris was sure that she was hurting her own feelings, but she enjoyed that. He looked at her: the air around her was blue, and her face was whitish blue. But the eyes were feverish and hard. ‘Why? — tell me.’

‘Because he is a fine fellow,’ groaned Boris. ‘Oh, dear, how you do pester me. He doesn’t care about anything.’

‘Well, does that make a fine fellow? You don’t care about anything, do you?’

‘No.’

‘But you do care a little about me, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I care about you.’

Lola looked unhappy, and Boris turned his head away. Anyhow, he didn’t much like looking at Lola when she put on that expression. She was upset: he thought it silly of her, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He did everything expected of him. He was faithful to Lola, he telephoned to her often, he went to call for her three times a week when she came out of the Sumatra, and on those evenings he slept in her flat. For the rest, it was a question of character, probably. A question of age, too — older people grow embittered, and behave as though their lives were at stake. Once, when Boris was a little boy, he had dropped his spoon: on being told to pick it up, he had refused, and flown into a passion. Then his father had said, in an unforgettably majestic tone: ‘Very well, then, I will pick it up.’ Boris had seen a tall body stiffly bending down, and a bald cranium, he heard sundry creaking sounds — the whole thing was an intolerable sacrilege, and he burst out sobbing. Since then Boris had regarded grown-ups as bulky and impotent divinities. If they bent down, they looked as though they were going to break: if they slipped and fell, the effect they produced in the onlooker was a desire to laugh and a sense of awe-stricken abhorrence. And if the tears came into their eyes, as into Lola’s at that moment, one was simply at a loss. Grown-up people’s tears were a mystical catastrophe, the sort of tears God sheds over the wickedness of mankind. From another point of view, of course, he respected Lola for being so passionate. Mathieu had explained to him that a human being ought to have passions, and Descartes had said so too.

‘Delarue has his passions,’ he said, pursuing his reflections aloud: ‘but that doesn’t prevent him caring for nothing. He is free.’

‘By that token I’m free too. I care for nothing but you.’

Boris did not answer.

‘Aren’t I free?’ asked Lola.

‘That’s not the same thing.’

Too difficult to explain. Lola was a victim, she had no luck, and she appealed too much to the emotions. Which was not in her favour. Besides, she took heroin. That wasn’t a bad thing, in one sense: indeed it was quite a good thing, in principle: Boris had talked to Ivich about it, and they had both agreed that it was a good thing. But there were ways of doing it: if one took it to destroy oneself, either in despair or by way of emphasizing one’s freedom, that was entirely commendable. But Lola took it with greedy abandonment, it was her form of relaxation. It didn’t even intoxicate her.