LITMIR.BIZ

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of children, and give parties every night.’

      Gabrielle laughed. ‘What’s the hurry? You’re only ten.’

      Louise Gély looked sideways at her. ‘I don’t mean to wait until I’m old.’

      ON 13 JULY there were hail-storms; to say this is to give no idea of how the hail fell – as if God’s contempt had frozen. There was every type of violence and unexplained accidents on the streets. The orchards were stripped and devastated, the crops flattened in the fields. All day it hammered on windows and doors, like nothing in living memory; on the night of the 13th to 14th, a cowed populace slept in apprehension. They woke to silence; it seemed so long before life flowed through the city; it was hot, and people seemed dazed by the splintered light, as if all France had been pushed under water.

      One year to the cataclysm: Gabrielle stood before a mirror, twitching at her hat. She was going out to buy some lengths of good woollen stuff for Louise’s winter dresses. Mme Gély would not contemplate such a fool’s errand, but Louise liked her winter clothes in her wardrobe by the end of August; who knew what the weather would do next, she asked, and if it should suddenly turn chilly she would be stranded, because she had grown so much since last year. Not that I go anywhere in winter, she said, but perhaps you will take me to Fontenay to see your mother. Fontenay, she said, is the country.

      There was someone at the door. ‘Come in, Louise,’ she called, but no one came. The maid Catherine was rocking the screaming baby. She ran to the door herself, hat in hand. A girl she didn’t know stood there. She looked at Gabrielle, at the hat, stepped back. ‘You’re going out.’

      ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

      The girl glanced over her shoulder. ‘Can I come in for five minutes? I know this sounds unlikely, but I’m sure the servants have been told to follow me about.’

      Gabrielle stepped aside. The girl walked in. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, shook out her dark hair. She wore a blue linen jacket, tight-fitting, which showed off her hand-span waist and the supple line of her body. She ran a hand back through her hair, lifted her jaw, rather self-conscious: caught sight of herself in the mirror. Gabrielle felt suddenly dumpy and badly dressed, a woman getting over a pregnancy. ‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that you must be Lucile.’

      ‘I came,’ Lucile said, ‘because things are so awful and I desperately need to talk to somebody, and Camille has told me all about you, and he’s told me what a kind and sympathetic person you are, and that I will love you.’

      Gabrielle recoiled. She thought, what a low, mean, despicable trick: if he’s told her that about me, how can I possibly tell her what I think of him? She dropped her hat on a chair. ‘Catherine, run upstairs and say I’ll be delayed. Then fetch us some lemonade, will you? Warm today, isn’t it?’ Lucile looked back at her: eyes like midnight flowers. ‘Well, Mlle Duplessis – have you quarrelled with your parents?’

      Lucile perched on a chair. ‘My father goes around our house saying, “Does a father’s authority count for nothing?” He intones it, like a dirge. My sister keeps saying it to me and making me laugh.’

      ‘Well, doesn’t it?’

      ‘I believe in the right to resist authority when it’s wrong-headed.’

      ‘What does your mother say now?’

      ‘Nothing much. She’s gone very quiet. She knows I get letters. She pretends not to know.’

      ‘That seems unwise of her.’

      ‘I leave them where she can read them.’

      ‘That makes neither of you any better.’

      ‘No. Worse.’

      Gabrielle shook her head. ‘I can’t condone it. I would never have defied my parents. Or deceived them.’

      Lucile said, with passion, ‘Don’t you think women should choose who they marry?’

      ‘Oh yes. Within reason. It just isn’t reasonable to marry Maître Desmoulins.’

      ‘Oh. You wouldn’t do it then?’ Lucile looked as if she were hesitating over a few yards of lace. She picked up an inch of her skirt, ran the material slowly between her fingers. ‘The thing is, Mme d’Anton, I’m in love with him.’

      ‘I doubt it. You’re just going through that phase, you want to be in love with somebody.’

      Lucile looked at her with curiosity. ‘Before you met your husband, were you always falling in love with people?’

      ‘To be honest, no – I wasn’t that sort of girl.’

      ‘What makes you think I am, then? All this business of going through phases, it’s just a thing that older people say, they think they have the right to look at you from their mouldy perches and pass judgement on your life.’

      ‘My mother, who is a woman of some experience, would say it is an infatuation.’

      ‘Fancy having a mother with that sort of experience. Quite like mine.’

      Gabrielle felt the first stirrings of dismay. Trouble, under her own roof. How can she make this little girl understand? Can she understand anything any more, or has common sense loosened its hold for good, or did it have a hold in the first place? ‘My mother tells me,’ she said, ‘never to criticize my husband’s choice of friends. But in this case – if I tell you that with one thing and another I don’t admire him…’

      ‘That becomes clear.’

      Gabrielle had a mental picture of herself, in the months before the baby was born, waddling about the house. Her pregnancy, delightful in its results, had been in one way a trial and embarrassment. Even by the end of the third month she’d been quite big, and she could see people sizing her up, quite unashamedly; she knew that after the birth they would count on their fingers. As the weeks passed, Georges-Jacques treated her as interesting but alien. He talked to her even less about matters not strictly domestic. She missed the café, more than he could know; she missed that undemanding masculine company, the easy talk of the outside world.

      So…what did it matter if Georges always brought his friends home? But Camille was always arriving or just about to leave. If he sat on a chair it was on the very edge, and if he remained there for more than thirty seconds it was because he was deeply fatigued. A note of panic in his veiled eyes struck a corresponding note in her heavy body. The baby was born, the heaviness dispersed; a rootless anxiety remained. ‘Camille is a cloud in my sky,’ she said. ‘He is a thorn in my flesh.’

      ‘Goodness, Mme d’Anton,’ Lucile said, ‘are those the metaphors you feel forced to employ?’

      ‘To begin…you know he has no money?’

      ‘Yes, but I have.’

      ‘He can’t just live on your money.’

      ‘Lots of men live on women’s money. It’s quite respectable, in some circles it’s always done.’

      ‘And this business of your mother, that they may have been having – I don’t know how to put it.’

      ‘I don’t either,’ Lucile said. ‘There are terms for it, but I’m not feeling robust this morning.’

      ‘You must find out the truth about it.’

      ‘My mother won’t talk to me. I could ask Camille. But why should I make him lie to me? So I dismiss it from my mind. I regard the subject as closed. You see, I think about him all day. I dream about him – I can’t be blamed for that. I write him letters and I tear them up. I imagine that I might meet him by chance in the street – ’ Lucile broke off, raised a hand, and pushed back from her forehead an imaginary strand of hair. Gabrielle watched her with horror. This is obsession, she thought, this parody of gesture. Lucile felt herself do it; she saw herself in the glass; she thought, it is an evocation.

      Catherine put her head around the door.

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