Vertigo (7 page)

Liège was a long way off, right up at the top of the map. What happened up there had nothing to do with Flavières. In any case, this war they talked so much about was only a tiny episode in the death-struggle which was his.

‘On the Place de la Concorde one of our customers saw a car that was fairly riddled with bullets.’

‘The next course, please,’ said Flavières.

Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Belgians! Why not Dutchmen? Silly ass! He hurried over the meat. It was tough, but he didn’t complain, since he had resolved never to complain again. He would accept anything. What was painful would be grist to his mill. With the fruit, however, he drank two glasses of brandy, and his thoughts began to emerge from the fog in which they had been floundering for the last few hours. His elbows on the table, he lit a cigarette. With the lighter, of course, and that gave the smoke he inhaled something of the substance of Madeleine. He tasted her, retained her for a moment within him.

He was certain now that Madeleine hadn’t done anything wrong before her marriage. It was a stupid supposition. Gévigne would have made enquiries: he wasn’t the man to buy a pig in a poke. Another thing: Madeleine’s remorse would have been inexplicably tardy, since for several years she had appeared quite normal. The trouble had started at the beginning of February—there was no getting away from that.

Flavières pressed on the spring of the lighter, and watched the thin tongue of flame for a moment before blowing it out. The metal was warm in his hand. No, Madeleine’s motives were not everyday ones. He had approached the problem too crudely, trying to boil everything down to simple cause and effect. He wouldn’t make that mistake again: he would purify himself, cauterize himself with red-hot needles, until one day he would be worthy to fathom the mystery of Pauline Lagerlac. In the end it would no doubt come to him in a flash. He pictured
himself a monk, kneeling down on the beaten earth which formed the floor of his cell; but it was not a crucifix to which he raised his eyes, but Madeleine’s photograph, the one he had seen on Gévigne’s desk.

He rubbed his eyes, wiped his forehead, and asked for the bill. Hell! They knew how to sting you in this place!… Never mind. No recriminations. They weren’t allowed: it was part of the punishment. He went out. It was quite dark now, except for a narrow band of stars between the tall houses. Sometimes a car passed, its lights dimmed and shaded. Flavières couldn’t make up his mind to go home. He dreaded the telephone call which told him the body had been found. And he wasn’t sorry to impose still more fatigue on this body of his which he held responsible for such a catastrophe. He walked at random in a sort of dizzy abandon. He would keep watch till dawn. It was a question of dignity. Of something else, too: where Madeleine had gone she might be in need of a friendly thought. Little Eurydice!

Tears welled up into his eyes. He tried hard to form as it were a concrete picture of nothingness, so that he could keep her company at least for her first night there. The nearest he could get to it was Paris in the black-out, and he had to make the best of that. Yes, it was good to wander through those shadows. The land of the living was far away. Here were only the dead, solitary figures slinking through the streets, haunted by the bright days of long ago, tortured by a remembered happiness. Some stopped for a moment to look down at the dark river licking its banks, then slunk on again. Were they preparing themselves for the Day of Judgment? What was it the waiter had said?

‘They’ve broken through at Liège.’

Flavières sat down on one of the seats on the quay, and threw his arms over the back. Tomorrow he’d go away… His head swayed; he shut his eyes; he had just time to formulate the thought:

‘You’re going to sleep after all. Shirker!’

He slept with his mouth wide open like a tramp spending the night on a bench in a police station. It was much later when he was woken up by the cold. He groaned. He had cramp in his right leg, and walked away, limping in the bleak daylight of early morning. Shivering and with a parched mouth, he felt ghastly, and took refuge in a café that was just opening. The wireless was blaring away, announcing that the situation was confused and that the infantry were engaged in plugging up a few breaches. He ate a couple of
croissants
dipped into his coffee, and took the Metro home.

He had hardly shut his door when the telephone rang.

‘Hallo! Is that you, Roger?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was right, you know. She’s killed herself.’

It was better to say nothing. He stood listening uncomfortably to Gévigne’s breathing. He seemed to be blowing right into Flavières’ ear.

‘I was told last night,’ he went on at last. ‘An old woman found her at the foot of a church tower at Saint-Nicolas.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘North of Mantes… A little village of nothing at all between Sailly and Drocourt… I can’t take it in.’

‘What was she doing out there?’

‘Wait a minute. I’d better tell you everything. She threw
herself from the top of the tower and crashed in the churchyard. The body was taken to the hospital at Mantes.’

‘Poor chap. It’s awful for you. Are you going?’

‘I’ve just come back. Of course I went immediately. I tried to get hold of you, but you weren’t in. I’ve got a few urgent things to see to, then I’m going back to Mantes again. The police have started an enquiry.’

‘They’re bound to, though it’s obviously suicide.’

‘They’re puzzled about one or two things, why she should have come so far to do it, for instance. I don’t know how much to tell them. I don’t want it known that Madeleine…’

‘They won’t look very far.’

‘All the same, I’d have liked you to be with me.’

‘Out of the question I’m afraid. I’ve got a big case at Orléans to see to. I simply can’t put it off any longer.’

‘Will you be away long?’

‘Oh no. Only a couple of days. And I’m sure you won’t need me.’

‘I’ll give you another ring… I’d have liked you to be at the funeral.’

Gévigne was still breathing as though he’d been running.

‘My dear Paul,’ said Flavières with genuine feeling, ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

He lowered his voice to ask:

‘She wasn’t too badly…?’

‘Not her face… Her poor face! If you’d seen it!’

‘Hold tight, old man. I know how you feel. So do I.’

He rang off. Steadying himself with a hand against the wall, he tottered to his bed.

‘So do I,’ he said, choking. ‘So do I.’

And he dropped like a stone into deep sleep.

Next day he took the first train to Orléans. He couldn’t face the idea of driving. News from the front was by no means reassuring, however much it might try to be. In enormous headlines people could read:
German Offensive Contained
or
Fierce Fighting Round Liège
, but details were sadly lacking, the tone of articles was evasive, and people affected an optimism which ill-concealed their gnawing anxiety.

Flavières dozed in his corner. Outwardly he looked himself: inwardly he was ravaged, corroded, burnt-out, and blackened, his four walls left standing round a heap of wreckage. With that picture he nourished his misery, making it more bearable. He was beginning to respect his ordeal.

At Orléans he took a room in a hotel opposite the station. It was when he went out to buy some cigarettes that he saw the first car-load of refugees, a huge Buick loaded with luggage covered with dust. Some women were asleep inside. He went to see his client, but the conversation didn’t get much farther than the war. At the Palais de Justice it was being whispered that Corap’s army was retreating. The Belgians were blamed: accused of losing their heads. The older men recalled the time when for three whole days Parisians had heard the distant rumble of the guns on the Marne.

Flavières found Orléans agreeable. In the evenings he wandered along the quays watching the swallows skimming over the mauve water of the Loire. On the terraces of the cafés, people seemed all to be nursing the same secret, while the advancing summer made the long twilights pathetically lovely. What was going on in Paris? Was Madeleine buried yet? Had Gévigne returned to his shipyard at Le Havre? Flavières sometimes
raised such questions, cautiously, like a convalescent lifting the bandage to have a peep at his wound. Of course, he still suffered, but the hideous agony of the first days had given way to a chilly numbness that was occasionally pierced by a sharp stab of remembrance.

It was known now that German armour was advancing on Arras, and that the fate of the country was in the balance. Every day more cars drove through the town, looking for the bridge and the road to the South. And people stood in the streets silently staring at them, their hearts empty. They were more and more dirty, more and more ramshackle. With a shamefaced curiosity, people would question the fugitives. In all this, Flavières saw the image of his own disaster. He had no longer the strength to go back to Paris.

His eyes fell on the article by chance. He was listlessly scanning the newspaper as he sipped his coffee. The headline was on the fourth page. The police were enquiring into Madeleine’s death, were questioning Gévigne. It was so incongruous after the news on the front page with the photographs of villages in ruins. He read the article right through a second time. The police seemed to have ruled out the possibility of suicide. That just showed how much use the police were, playing with fancy theories while the roads were chock-a-block with refugees! He, at any rate, knew the truth, and as soon as the situation improved he’d go and tell them Gévigne was innocent. For the moment, trains ran very irregularly.

Other days followed, and the newspapers devoted all their space to the chaotic battle which was devastating the plains of the North. No one knew who was where: Germans, French, English, and Belgians seemed all mixed up in an inextricable
tangle. Flavières thought less and less often of Gévigne. All the same, he fully intended to straighten out the muddle at the first opportunity. That decision enabled him to regain some of his self-esteem, and allowed him to share a little more the emotions of his fellow men. He went to a mass at the Cathedral in honour of Joan of Arc, and prayed for France and Madeleine at the same time. He made little distinction now between the national disaster and his own. France was Madeleine lying crushed and bleeding at the foot of a church tower.

And then one morning the inhabitants of Orléans in their turn began to load up their cars. Flavières’ client was one of the first to disappear.

‘Why don’t you go south, too?’ said one of his friends. ‘There’s nothing to keep you here.’

With a sudden spurt of courage he tried to ring Gévigne up. No answer. The station at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps was bombed. With death in his soul, Flavières boarded a motor-coach bound for Toulouse. Little did he realize he was leaving for four years.

‘Take a deep breath… Cough… Another deep breath… Fine… As for the heart… Hold your breath a moment… Hum!… Not so good… You can put your clothes on again.’

The doctor looked at Flavières, who put on his shirt, then turned away a little awkwardly to do up his fly-buttons.

‘Married?’

‘No… I’ve just come back from Africa.’

‘Were you a prisoner?’

‘No. I was called up in 1940, but the doctors wouldn’t pass me. It was my lungs, I believe. The result of a pleurisy I’d had two years before.’

‘Are you thinking of living here in Paris?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a practice at Dakar, but I might go back to my former one here.’

‘Lawyer?’

‘Yes. The trouble is, my flat’s been taken over by somebody else. And to find a place these days…’

The doctor scratched an ear, still studying Flavières, who was fumbling irritably with his tie.

‘You drink, don’t you?’

Flavières shrugged his shoulders, but his face had fallen.

‘Do you mean you can see signs of it?’

‘It’s your affair, of course,’ said the doctor.

‘Yes, I drink a bit,’ Flavières admitted. ‘Life’s not that beautiful.’

It was the doctor’s turn to shrug his shoulders. He sat down at his desk and removed the cap of his fountain pen.

‘Your general condition is far from satisfactory,’ he observed. ‘You need a good rest. In your place, I’d settle somewhere in the Midi—at Nice for instance, or Cannes… As for the obsessions you’ve told me about, they’re not within my field. You must see a specialist about that. I’m giving you a note for my colleague, Dr. Ballard.’

‘In your opinion,’ muttered Flavières, ‘is it serious?’

‘Go and see Ballard.’

His pen scratched over the paper. Flavières took out his wallet and produced some notes.

‘Go to the Food Office,’ said the doctor, still writing. ‘With this certificate you’ll be given an extra ration of meat and fats. But what you need most is warmth and rest. Avoid all worries. No correspondence, and no reading… It’s three hundred francs… Thanks.’

He was already conducting Flavières to the door while a fresh patient came in through another. Flavières went down the stairs, grumbling. A specialist! A psychiatrist who would unearth all his secrets, would make him talk about Madeleine’s death. Out of the question! Rather than that, he would go on living with his nightmares, losing himself every night in a labyrinth of corridors crawling with vermin, or searching frantically for someone in the dark. It was the heat of Dakar and the glaring light that had got him down. Now he was saved.

He turned up his coat-collar and started towards the Place des Ternes. He hardly recognized this Paris, still plunged in the mists of winter, these great empty spaces, these broad avenues along which hardly anything passed but bicycles and jeeps.
He felt a little out of place, being too well dressed. He hurried along quickly like everyone else. The Arc de Triomphe loomed up indistinctly in the grey mist. Everything was the colour of the past, the colour of memory. What feast of the dead had he come here to celebrate? Wouldn’t he have done better to have stayed where he was? What did he expect from this pilgrimage? He had known other women: the old wound was healed. So, at least, he had thought.

He went into
Dupont’s
and chose a seat near the window. A few officers, lost in the immense round room. Except for the hissing of the percolator, dead silence. A sulky waiter looked him up and down, studying the cloth his overcoat was made of, his crêpe-soled suede shoes.

‘A cognac,’ said Flavières, ‘and mind it’s a real one.’

He knew how to rap out his words in a café or restaurant. He possessed authority, perhaps because of the intense passion which ravaged his face. He put down the brandy at a single gulp.

‘Not bad,’ he muttered. ‘Give me another.’

He threw some money on the table. That was another habit he’d acquired at Dakar. He handled the crumpled notes with an off-hand air, as though he had returned from the ends of the earth, as though all men owed him a debt which they would never be able to pay.

With his arms folded, he contemplated the yellow liquor which was so cunningly able to reawaken the phantoms. No, Madeleine wasn’t dead. From the moment he had stepped down on to the station platform she had never left him alone. There are faces which you forget. They get worn down gradually by the wind and the rain till the features are lost in vagueness, like the figures of stone round the doorway of a cathedral.
She would never be like that: her image was intact, and he could see the afternoon sunshine round her, glowing like a halo. The final image of her, the horrid bloody one, had been effaced. If it ever tried to intrude, it was easily pushed back again. The others, all of them, were miraculously fresh, animated, engaging.

His hand closed round the glass, Flavières sat absolutely motionless. He could feel the warmth of early May, could see streams of cars sweeping round the Arc de Triomphe. And she came, her bag tucked under her arm, her eyes shadowed as though made up by her little veil… She leant over the parapet of the bridge and dropped the red tulip… She tore the letter into little bits which she scattered in the wind…

Flavières drank his cognac. He felt old now. What had he got to look forward to? Solitude and illness!… While the other survivors of the war were busy gathering together their bits and pieces, rebuilding their homes, renewing their friendships, in short, reconstituting the future, he had nothing but ashes to poke… So why should he give up the one thing which…

‘Waiter! The same again.’

He would limit himself to that. He didn’t really like alcohol. He only took it to rekindle the embers deep down within him, making them give out a faint glow of hope. When he went out, the cold air made him cough, but Paris was no longer hostile to him. He reached the Etoile and for a moment stood on the kerb pretending he was waiting for her. The fine misty drizzle floated past him, but she didn’t come. She never would. Gévigne had perhaps left Paris, too. Flavières turned into the Avenue Kléber and looked for the house. The shutters on the second floor were closed. The Talbot had no doubt been requisitioned
for some general. What about the pictures? Would they still be up there, the dreamy girl over the mantelpiece, the birds of paradise?… When he went in he found the concierge sweeping the hall.

‘Monsieur Gévigne, please.’

‘Monsieur Gévigne?’

She stared blankly at Flavières, then said:

‘He’s been dead a long time, poor man.’

‘Paul! Dead!’ muttered Flavières.

What was the good of going on? That’s what he would find all along the line. Death, death, nothing but death!

‘Come in, won’t you?’ said the concierge.

She shook out her broom and opened the door of her lodge.

‘I left in ’40,’ said Flavières.

‘Ah! That explains it.’

By the window was an old man with steel-rimmed glasses who had one hand in a shoe, which he was thoughtfully examining. He looked up.

‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ said Flavières.

‘You can’t even buy a bit of cardboard to mend a shoe with,’ grumbled the old man.

‘Were you a friend of Monsieur Gévigne’s?’ asked the concierge.

‘A very old one. He rang me up to tell me of his wife’s death. But I had to leave Paris that very day.’

‘Poor man. He couldn’t bear to go back there alone, and, as there was nobody else, I went with him myself. And it was I who laid her out and dressed her, for, as you can imagine…’

Flavières longed to ask her in what clothes she dressed Madeleine. The grey suit perhaps…

‘Sit down,’ said the concierge. ‘I expect you’ve got a minute to spare.’

‘Thank you… I did hear that the police were bothering him.’

‘Bothering him! I should think they were. It was touch and go whether they arrested him or not.’

‘But that’s absurd. I thought she committed suicide.’

‘Of course she did. But you know what the police are… He had enemies—people who envied him his money… And when the police start rummaging in a man’s past… I couldn’t tell you how many times they came here. As for the questions they asked! About him… About his wife… Did they get on together?… Was he here the day it happened?… On and on till you hardly knew what you were saying… Do you remember, Charles?’

The old man, with the aid of a kitchen knife, was cutting out a sole from the lid of a box.

‘Yes,’ he growled, ‘it was a pretty mess. Like it is now.’

‘But how did he die—Monsieur Gévigne?’

‘He was killed on the road, near Le Mans. One morning he came down in a great state. “I have had enough of this,” he said. “I’m clearing out, and if they want me they can damned well come and fetch me.” He’d known us a long time, you see, and always spoke his mind… So he threw a few bits of luggage into his car, and off he went… We heard afterwards… machine-gunned. He died while they were carrying him to the hospital… It’s a shame…’

‘If I’d been there,’ thought Flavières, ‘he wouldn’t have had to clear out. The plane would have machine-gunned someone else. Some unknown person. Anyhow, not him. And I should have been able to talk to him now and explain to him…’

He wrung his hands. He ought never to have come back.

‘Fate was against them, poor things,’ went on the concierge. ‘Yet they got on very well together.’

‘Wasn’t she a bit… a bit odd?’

‘Not in the least… She always looked rather sad, particularly in those dark clothes she wore, but it was just her nature… And she was always so happy when she could go out with him.’

‘Which wasn’t often,’ sneered the old man.

She rounded on him.

‘With things as they were, he never had the time. Always having to rush to and fro between Paris and Le Havre. You can’t deny it.’

‘Where’s she buried?’

‘At Saint-Ouen. And misfortune pursued her even there. When the Americans bombed La Chapelle, all that part of the cemetery which touches the railway was properly churned up. Bones lying about everywhere, mixed up with fragments of gravestones. I think they held a service there and buried the bones again.’

Flavières trembled in his overcoat, the collar of which concealed half his face.

‘Her grave?’ he just managed to ask.

‘Same as the others. Nothing left of it. They’ve filled up the holes in the ground—craters they call them—and tidied the place up, but that’s all they’ve been able to do as yet.’

‘No need to pity the dead,’ grunted the old man. ‘They’re better off than we are.’

Flavières pushed back the horrible images which rose to his mind. He felt the bitter impotence of tears that would not flow. More than ever now, it was finished: the page was turned.
Madeleine was annihilated. In antique manner she had had her funeral pyre—of T.N.T.—and her ashes had been scattered by the blast. That face which came to haunt him was now nothing, nothing at all. He must push it back into the shades where it belonged, and try to live…

‘The flat?’

‘Shut up for the moment… Some kind of cousin of hers has inherited the building… It’s all very sad.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Flavières, ‘it’s very sad.’

He picked up his hat and rose to his feet.

‘It’s a shock, I know,’ said the concierge, ‘when you suddenly hear of the death of an old friend.’

The old man began nailing on the new sole, the blows of his hammer making ugly thumps. Flavières almost ran into the street, where the drizzle deposited a slimy film on his face. He could feel the fever once more, rising in his arteries. Crossing the road, he sat down in the little café where he had once filled in the time, waiting for Madeleine.

‘Give me something strong.’

‘You look as if you needed it.’

The man looked round, then lowered his voice to ask:

‘A little whisky?’

Flavières lolled against the bar. A glow of warmth was spreading through his chest. His grief was melting like a lump of ice, was changing into a calm melancholy.

The doctor was right, of course. He had to go slow; he needed sunshine and an easy mind. That was the most important thing of all—an easy mind. He mustn’t think of Madeleine. He had meant, in coming to Paris, to visit her grave. She no longer had one. That was all to the good: the last link was broken.
His pilgrimage had come to an end, here in this little
bistrot
in front of a glass of sunny yellow liquor. All that he had loved, the vagrant spirit, the gentle stranger he had dragged back from the shadows that lured her, all led up to this glass of whisky in which it was now to dissolve.

Perhaps the whole story had been a dream, conceived in a moment of exaltation. No, it couldn’t be: he still had the lighter. He put a cigarette between his lips, took the gold lighter from his pocket. For a second or two he weighed it in the hollow of his hand. Should he throw it away? Or if he hadn’t the courage for that, he might merely lose it, like a dog one hasn’t the heart to destroy. Perhaps, but later on. For the moment…

He had just made a decision, succumbed rather to one that had been made for him, as always. He put down his empty glass and paid royally. He liked to see faces light up with a servile joy.

‘Is it possible to get a taxi?’

‘Hum! It’s not easy. How far do you want to go?’

‘Near Mantes.’

‘Gracious! Still, I’ll see what I can do.’

Smiling all the time at Flavières, he put through three telephone calls. After the last, he said:

‘Gustave’ll take you. It may be a bit expensive, of course. With the price of petrol on the black market…’

The taxi, an old bone-shaker, was there in no time. Before leaving, Flavières stood drinks all round. He had no scruples when he had an aim in view. He explained carefully to Gustave:

‘We’re going to a little place north of Mantes. Between Sailly and Drocourt there’s a tiny village… But I’ll show you the way… I shan’t be there long…’

They drove off. The wintry roads told a mournful story of
skirmishes, battles, and bombings. Chilled to the bone, Flavières sat huddled in his corner, watching the black fields sweep past, trying to conjure up pictures of budding trees and beds of white flowers. In vain. Madeleine was slipping away from him: she was beginning really to die. Come on! Another effort!