Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
of feeling stirred by the memory of her mother’s song, Eleanor was astonished to find pity.
Did you know, Ruth would ask (knowing that Eleanor did not, as it was something she herself had only just discovered); did you know that … And there would follow some little offering of fact or surmise about the natural world, as a child brings a trusted adult a shell or a piece of bark or something quite mysterious. It pleased Eleanor to think for a moment about a tiny desert marsupial – a dunnart, Ruth would insist, not a marsupial mouse – that urinated crystals; to marvel at the adaptive genius of other organisms. But on this Saturday morning, several weeks after their visit to Wollongong, Eleanor had something for Ruth.
“No more of that French sicko, for pity’s sake,” said Ruth, without looking up from the newspaper. She meant Story of O, which was doing the puzzled rounds of their friends.
“This is Flaubert,” said Eleanor, waving L’Éducation sentimentale at her. “I just want to read you one little paragraph.”
“Oh, all right, but translate.”
“This is the narrator on a minor character called Mademoiselle Vatnaz: ‘She was one of those Parisian spinsters who, every evening, when they’ve given their lessons or tried to sell their little drawings or place their miserable manuscripts, go home with – I think that’s nineteenth-century mud, not dog shit – on their petticoats, make their dinner, eat it all alone, and then, with their feet on … a foot-warmer, by the light of a dirty lamp, dream of a love affair, a family, a home, a fortune, everything that is lacking in their lives. So, like many others, she had welcomed the Revolution as the advent of revenge, and she was devoting herself to – extreme, probably, I’ll have to look up effrénée – Socialist propaganda.’ ”
Eleanor had imbued her delivery with all the masculine contempt she sensed flowing through the passage. When she looked up, it was to see rills of tears running down Ruth’s cheeks.
“It’s a wonder he didn’t make her a Jew as well,” Ruth sniffed. “I suppose she’s too ugly to find a husband.”
“Too plain to be a high-class tart, apparently. But Ruth, it’s only a novel. It’s the view of one syphilitic old sourpuss with a private income who thinks he’s superior to everyone.”
“But it’s not!” Ruth wailed. “What could be more conventional? There are versions of it around still, in 1977. Plain women like me, no matter how intelligent or talented, are pathetic without a man.”
Eleanor felt a shock as sharp as betrayal. Somehow she had believed her friend to be above the common run of female fears. Indeed, she had grown to depend on Ruth’s good sense, consulting it like a respected dictionary. It may have been, in the first minutes of their meeting early in the previous year as they chatted in the dinner queue at Women’s College, that she had stuck some kind of label on Ruth Sonnenberg’s looks – une jolie laide, perhaps, because she was drawn to paradox – but whatever it was had long been eclipsed by affection. She loved the caprices of Ruth’s dark curls, her noble profile, the lively and sometimes solemn way her eyes drew your attention. Hers was a face for men to cherish; a face to take on its own terms; a face as dear to Eleanor as the person herself.
“Plain is not the word for you. There is nothing plain about you. You’re magnificent.”
“Ugly, then. I hate my hair, I hate my nose …”
“Would you like my silly little nose? Would you like my boring straight hair? I’d swap you any day.”
“I’m fat …”
“Ruth, for heaven’s sake! You’re not fat, you’re a bit plump. And you wouldn’t even be plump if you stopped making puddings from that Presbyterian cookbook.”
“I’m just curious about what I missed out on.”
Eleanor unfolded her legs, stood up and took three steps to the other armchair. Kneeling beside it, she felt the bite of sisal matting on her knees. “Now, tell me what this is all about. What’s really going on? Who is it?”
“Plant ecology.”
“What?”
“My plant ecology lecturer.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh. The one who takes us on the best field trips. The one who is utterly inspiring and funny and honourable and unlike any man I’ve ever met. The one who’s happily married.”
“Oh. The one who wears shorts all winter.”
“Most of the winter. And stop saying ‘oh’.”
“But has there been anything between you? Has he given you any signs?”
“I don’t know, it might just be my imagination. He’s always friendly, but he’s friendly to everyone. He sometimes looks at me when he says something funny, but that might be because I laugh more than the others. And what does it matter anyway? It’s impossible. Just don’t tell me – whatever you do, please don’t tell me – that it’s only a crush like that six-week attack of lust you had for your German tutor and then got over because he kept clearing his throat or slurping his coffee or whatever it was. It isn’t like that, and I can’t just forget it and console myself with some boring young fart.”
“Oh, Ruthie,” said Eleanor, taking her friend’s hand. “Poor you.”
From that day forth, Mademoiselle Vatnaz took up residence at 17 Dartmoor Street, and Eleanor and Ruth amused themselves with scheming on her behalf. They had her write one great novel, an antidote to L’Éducation sentimentale, in which bruised love found its awkward way, the hapless heroine grew strong and wise and at least one friendship was true. Then they packed la Vatnaz off to England where George Eliot befriended her and organised the translation of her masterpiece. The translator, a phlegmatic Cornish widower, fell deeply in love with her but lacked the courage to declare himself. Great men fell at her feet, but no one understood her origins or guessed at her Jewishness save the translator, himself a man of mysterious birth. Many impediments and wrong turns later – quite a few Saturday mornings were expended on those – they married and later adopted from an East End orphanage two Jewish sisters called Grace and Susannah. Grace became a famous contralto, and Susannah, through her field work in Australasia and South America, made significant contributions to evolutionary biology that were recognised in her lifetime.
Before she saw Julien, Eleanor had not known that desire might assail her unannounced. Before Julien, desire had begun as a low hum outside herself, and she would, if she felt like it, invite it in and feed it with the imagination. One overcast Friday afternoon in July, in her fourth year at the university, she walked out of the library, the fusty smell of dictionaries still in her nostrils, and noticed a dark-haired young man talking to the Trotskyite who slouched behind a trestle table piled with pamphlets and books. The stranger wore a trenchcoat, which guaranteed his foreignness, and he was gesticulating in a controlled, emphatic way that she recognised. Last January, in Parisian cafés with Ruth, she had watched through the haze of cigarette smoke the movements of such hands – hands that knew how to touch (or so she imagined) as well as to assert and refute.
As Eleanor approached she heard the wearer of the raincoat defending, in tentative English at odds with the confident hands, the PCF, which she knew meant the French Communist Party. He and the porky Trot appeared to be arguing about whether the French party was Stalinist or not. She couldn’t see how it could still owe anything to Stalin when he had been dead so long and everyone knew what a monster he was. She moved as close to the trenchcoat as she decently could, close enough to be sure he didn’t reek of cigarettes or antediluvian sweat. Ruth claimed French BO was sui generis and that she could sniff it out in a crowded room, but Eleanor couldn’t smell anything in the least discouraging.
“Aucun rapport.