Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
“How do you know that?”
“I had the misfortune of running into him one day.”
“No, I mean how do you know he’s spoiled?”
Julien flushed. “Listen, lots of people would be thrilled to have this studio. You have no idea how hard it is to find somewhere affordable to live in Paris. You’re an innocent from a materialistic country.” He sounded twitchy and condescending.
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s only human nature to …” The house where Julien lived had two and a half rather fancy bathrooms, after all.
“There is no human nature.”
“Oh yes, I forgot.” How easy it was to smother sarcasm in a language not your own. What she had in fact forgotten, in all the long months of separation, was his taste for dubious aphorisms.
“So when can I meet your parents?” she asked sweetly.
“When you’ve settled in and you know what your timetable is. Speaking of which, I must get going …”
“Pas de repos pour les braves.” Odd that it was ‘no rest for the wicked’ in English. She wanted to cling to him, to blot out everything but the two of them, to plead with him not to leave her alone in this room just yet. Instead she stretched her lips into a quick, false smile.
“You should rest. You look worn out.” He reached out with one hand and smoothed her hair distractedly, which made her want to back away like a recalcitrant child and to squirm like a puppy for more. “A bientôt.”
But he did not say how soon he would see her again. When the door – plain, brown, modern – closed behind him, Paris receded, drained of all splendour and possibility. Plumping herself down on the unmade bed, she acknowledged the punishing mood that was upon her, the familiar gradient that led to a deep pit of despondency. At the same time the daylight Eleanor, the person who managed to get by in the world and could even slip into insouciance when it was called for, noticed that the mattress appeared to be new and was therefore unworthy of her squeamishness. She folded her arms about herself and sank her torso into the pile of sheets and quilt. Why was there no pillow? And why had Julien not made the bed? She remembered how Ruth would be visited, now and then, by what she called The Utter Pointlessness of Everything. TUPE had made perfect sense to Eleanor, especially when she had essays to write, but she had never spoken of her own recurring affliction: a fuzzy sense of being shut out of her proper story, as if she had failed at youth, been found wanting by life itself. Once or twice she had considered trying to describe the elusive state for Ruth, but she was afraid her friend might think her self-indulgent – or was that Mavis’s word, or even Julien’s? – to probe her own hollowness when measurable suffering and injustice were never far away and even hedonism made more sense than introspection in a world that could be blown up next week.
From the direction of the courtyard came a baby’s cry that swelled to a wail of desolation. Eleanor sat up, her body stiffening. Pick her up, someone, please. Hold her, sing to her, make things right. The baby fell silent. Infant vocal passion had dragged Eleanor back to the gummy surface of the life that must be lived. What she had to do was to go out into the streets among all those people and find the nearest market and Monoprix; buy a pillow and a pillowcase, a radio, a saucepan, food. Create order and sustenance, the wherewithal of staying alive: that was what she must do now.
She was readying herself to go out when someone knocked at the door. Perhaps it was the spoiled American come to invite her in for coffee.
It was Julien, bearing a gift: the second volume of Soboul’s Histoire de la Révolution française. He had meant to give it to her last night but had left it under the front seat of his car. Also, to make life easier for her as there was no telephone in the studio, he had drawn up a list of times when he would be free to take her phone calls at his parents’ house. He had put the list with the book and forgotten about it. How lovely she was, he said, as if he had forgotten that too. He kissed her, told her that he was glad she was here, that seeing her at the Gare du Nord was like falling in love with her all over again.
All traces of disapproval had melted in the heat of his wanting her. He pushed her gently towards the bed, but the bare mattress looked slatternly and for some reason made her think of Flaubert, who made her think of Mademoiselle Vatnaz, who made her think of Ruth’s tears of bitter rage. Her desire for him subsided. She sensed, too, that if she let him inside her now, she would founder.
Pulling away from his embrace was a victory over herself, not him. “I need to go out,” she said, brisk and no-nonsense as her mother. “I’ve got a lot to do and so have you. Do you know where the nearest Monoprix is?”
He hadn’t the faintest idea.
Eleanor Weston was not someone who complained about rain, even when floods swept away topsoil and sheep and one might, without affront to drought-stricken farmers, mutter against the incontinent continent. Rain in childhood had brought respite from the clamouring world. Like music, it gave its blessing to inward wanderings. On wet days her grandmother would bake something special; good rain lifted her mother’s spirits too. It drew out the enemy, and Mavis would put on her gumboots and patrol the front garden, crying ha! with each squash of a gastropod.
Once, after a week of heavy downpours during which some hillside houses slipped from their foundations, Eleanor opened the front door and saw a tortoise trudging its way along the driveway. She had begged for a cat or a dog and been refused both: a cat for its murderous intent towards birds and lizards; a dog for its designs on the chooks, who by day roamed free in the back garden. Now this creature had come to her, and she felt chosen. She fed the tortoise scraps of raw meat and sang to it while it ate. It lived for years among the ferns by the pond until something called it away, by which time she was reading Thomas Hardy and was quite interested in the workings of fate.
That September in Paris was the wettest on record, and everywhere Eleanor went people were puckering their lips and complaining. Oh là là / dis donc / mais c’est pas vrai, il pleut encore! She would stand among flattened cigarette butts in neighbourhood cafés, leaning her elbow on the zinc bar and observing the deft movements of the barman while she listened to the flow of words and the hiss of the coffee machine. She would order un café, not because a few mouthfuls of bitter espresso were what she really wanted – that would have been un grand crème served at a table where she could linger as long as she liked – but because it was cheap and gave her the right to use the lavatory. When the barman slid the little white cup and saucer towards her, with the two wrapped rectangular prisms of sugar, she would smile and slide the sugar right back to him, watching for the spark in his eyes that told her she was worth looking at. She needed to be reassured not so much that she was attractive but that she was there, that she had not somehow gone missing in all her mapless meandering through the city. The café conversations, for the most part, were prosaic: the rain, snatches of impenetrable gossip and, depending on the neighbourhood, the odd declamation for or against Mitterrand and his nationalisation of the banks. Someone commented that there were fewer beggars around with the wet weather, and that had to be a good thing. It seemed that the scintillating verbal exchanges on which the French were said to pride themselves were taking place elsewhere – just out of reach in the next ruelle.
It rained on the day Eleanor went to the embassy to fetch her Australian information kit for her conversation classes. The embassy woman commented tartly that it was a shame not to have made the effort to attend the orientation and meet the other assistants. Eleanor nearly said that she had not come to Paris to spend time with Australians. It rained on the day she queued for her carte de séjour and on the day she caught the train to an outer southern suburb to meet the principal of the lycée to which the French Ministry of Education had assigned her. The English teachers, the three she met, were polite but incurious: another year, another assistante. Only one spoke to her in English, composing stiff sentences that bristled with British newsreader vowels. The vowels made Eleanor self-conscious; to her own ears