Tender Shoots

AURORA

THE WINDOW OPENS onto a courtyard, where morning has not yet reached the far end. Above me, the worn sheet of the sky, studded with stars, with splashes of acid already in the east. Atrocious morning for an execution. The courtyard is an echoless in-draught. It is too narrow for a dull silence — this one is vertical, as in drainpipes.

Beneath the ground, the apprentice bakers let the heavy dough flop down again, each time for the last time.

I do not want to live here any longer, I’m choking; sleep would be possible were it not for the dreams and the overwhelming weariness of waking up; it is even more impossible to live far from one’s friends than with them. I gnaw at my nails, I pull out my hair, I have some successes; but I do not kill time, I wound it.

I should like to go away on my own, with my chequebook hung round my neck in a small metal box; with my suitcase. My suitcase whose smooth flanks are like cheeks, over which all the winds have blown, all fingers have passed; labels from hotels and stations; multi-coloured chalk marks from the customs; and the worn-out bottom that is turning blue with sweat, sea water, vomit, and red where the bottles of eau de cologne have broken inside. Unfortunately, I can no more escape from this city than from myself. There still remains the walk beneath the covered courtyard, the docile pastures of Upper Tooting, the suburban omnibuses, the parks that are as inappropriate as a flower-pot on the balcony, and, behind the Opera house, the aroma of agricultural labours, beneath the colonnade, in the midst of the market that perfumes Beecham’s art with a smell of cabbage …

Behind me, I can hear people enjoying themselves. Is there not one among them willing to forsake their entertainment, in order to follow this portent whose interpretation appears to be required of me this morning? Who may also wish to leave? Or, at least, share my sorrow at not leaving? Or console me for the anonymous farce of creation? An advertisement in the newspapers perhaps?

I turn round — it is a woman in an orange tunic tied with a gold cord; arms bare, tanned, very long. Tattooed bracelets. It is Aurora. I recognise her from having seen her dance in the rain at the open-air theatre at Bagatelle one evening in spring. And then there are the illustrated covers of the Tatler: “Aurora feeds her pumas.” “We walk badly, how Aurora places her feet.” On her forefinger, alas, a black diamond, from the Burlington Arcade.

In spite of that, she is attractive. She speaks simply, as if accustomed to controlling her breathing, with measured words. Here she is at the centre of a circle of young men — she has their slimness, their narrow hips, their short hair, their small head; her eyes are level with theirs.

She herself would say: “Women are odalisques with legs that are too short; when they confront a man, their eyes are level with his lips, he looks straight into their bosom — is that seemly?”

Aurora has no bosom and deprives us of furtive pleasures, but of those alone.

This evening there are a few society ladies. Aurora loses all her self-assurance in their presence; she does not like their expressions, conceals her bare feet in their golden sandals beneath her tunic and, pinning her brooch higher, reduces the opening of her neckline.

All the other women, on the other hand, approach her with confidence, kiss her hands, lay their pretty, made-up faces, looking like sweets, upon her shoulder and tell her smutty stories involving generals, theatre directors, servants, suicides, cocaine dealers. Meanwhile, Roger, seated at the piano, his back heaving, plays Parsifal.

I am sleepy. The weariness is such that it is restful just to stay where you are and say you are weary. The conversation is lumbering. I go to the dining room. A few dried-up sandwiches are left on the plates, shrivelled at the corners like postage stamps not properly licked, cigarette ash, corks; the level of the liquids is going down in the bottles; the beards of the guests are growing again implacably. Their hands are sticky and their faces ache.

I return to my window. The street is now bluish, steely cold. Beneath the roof, in a tube shaped like an S, a woman sews at her machine, trying to stop the fraying of the night with a hem.

I feel a pointed chin digging into my shoulder. I feel a breast swelling against my back, inhaling the air of the new day which the leaves in the parks has washed at last and sent back with their own fragrance.

“What a life!” Aurora says.

“What a life!” I reply, but I am not really aware of what I am saying. I no longer have the strength to think about who we are, why we are there, whether I like Aurora or dislike her; I no longer care about modulating my voice, my welcome, no longer care about bothering to be charming, about opening my eyes.

Aurora says:

“Whose house are we in?”

“I don’t know … brought by friends … tepid, sweet champagne … get away … where’s the door?”

“Ah!” cries Aurora with passion—“to live simply, logically, in harmony with one’s self and with the world, the equilibrium of the Greeks, the joy …”

At these foolish words I pull myself together. Here in my nerve-ends is the strength my muscles deny me; exasperation awakens me. I want to ask her why she goes out dolled up like this, why she camps out like a gypsy instead of living under a roof, like everyone else; I want to crush her perfect feet in their gold sandals with my heel, to wring her neck. I think of fairground manoeuvres under the eye of the police, in the rain, of wretched circus entertainers, I spew up Helvetic heresies and visions of art. Nothing will soothe me other than shaming her, humiliating her.

“Can you do the splits?”

“Of course.”

She sets out two chairs and starts to split herself in two.

It is too much. I hurl myself at her so as to strangle her. I squeeze her powerful neck with all my strength, but, with a smile, she clenches her muscles so firmly from chin to shoulders, that, gasping for breath, I have to let go.

She laughs. I am furious.

“Let’s go,” I say, “I’ll take you back.”

Aurora climbs into the taxi as if she were mounting a chariot. The vehicle advances silently. Aurora sits in the shadow, her legs crossed, holding her chin.

Calmed down, I have kindly thoughts: “In fact, she has simplified herself extraordinarily. Neither lies nor bombast issue from her slender lips, nor anxiety from her eyes, nor pointless gestures from her hands. She controls her body with lucidity like a precision instrument with powerful and delicate movements on which the strains that crush us are shattered, where, even at this hour, the organs function smoothly.”

I envy her harmonious perfection, her inner life free of conflict, her joints free of arthritis, her feet free of corns, her back free of stiffness.

Were I to ask her: “What is to prevent you from behaving badly when you want to, since you are certain you won’t have a bad headache the next day?” she would reply: “My personal hygiene.”

Suddenly Aurora burst out:

“Don’t leave me alone! not alone!”

Sobs.

They contort this body with its hard muscles and violently convulse it. I try to take her fingers, their sinews protruding like steel threads, but they are riveted to her eyes, to her forehead, domed and hard like armour-plating. Warm tears drop onto my hands, which I try to make gentle, but whose gentleness is of no avail. I leave Aurora to herself.

She weeps.

She is trying to live simply, that is all.

Aurora lives near the river. First there is wasteland, then a street of workers’ cottages where a gramophone still drones behind a red blind. An iron gate, a paved passage lined with fruit trees. An unusual scene in the early hours.

Aurora strikes a match. Here I am in a room where there are trunks, crates on which can be read in black letters—TOP, BOTTOM, P&O CABIN. On the floor, in piles, some books. On a low bed, without sheets, some sable furs and a broom.

From there, we reach a studio. The darkness is pierced by four specks of light — Aurora lets four gas butterflies with blue bodies burst forth from them, one after another. At the first two, the walls draw closer, consolidate their masses, and reveal the layout of the room.

At the other two, the darkness that remained in the corners disappears, rises up to the ceiling where the eye pursues it. Along the entire height of the twenty-foot walls extend arches in relief, supporting windows.

Aurora pokes the fire in the stove. Its glow spreads over the wooden floor and settles in a distant mirror. The room is bare. Here and there, on pedestals, ancient casts with a waxy patina. At the back, a raised platform.

It is the hearing chamber of a law court not used since the end of George IV’s reign. There are still inscriptions above the doors — PUBLIC ENTRANCE, DEFENDANT, CROWN PROSECUTOR, ATTORNEY-GENERAL. Below the judge’s dais, the local Apollo; at his feet, a mechanical piano. No other furniture apart from two sofas, the jury box, some African footstools, some fabrics with geometric patterns from the Zambesi.

“This is my house,” says Aurora. “It’s a trunk, really. I’ve nothing else in the world apart from these plaster-casts, my dresses and my guns. I once had a large house in Portman Square, with furniture, guests and servants who passed things around on trays. I’m not possessive, I’ve kept nothing. I’m poor. I’ve gradually detached myself from all the bonds that the things we love impose on us, for their beauty, their value or the memories we attach to them.”

“And now?”

“Now I am on my own in life, sitting on crates, face to face with myself.”

“You are as beautiful as another man’s wife, Aurora. Is it true you don’t belong to anyone?”

“No one must come into my life.”

“Do you love your body?”

“It’s a storeroom that is consigned to me. I don’t put foul thoughts or food that is unclean into it, I look after it, I respect it, I dress it simply … I’m thirsty.”

From the floor, by the wall, she picks up a bottle of Australian burgundy, Chambertin Big-Tree, and takes a swig.

Once again Aurora got on my nerves:

“You’re probably a reformist, a vegetarian, a eurhythmist, a teetotaller? I loathe this defiance of good manners, this puritan and pagan readjustment of society.”

“You’re mistaken, there’s nothing systematic about me; I’m a Canadian girl who’s fond of the simple life.”

“Since when?”

“Always. I don’t remember having danced or held a gun for the first time … but tonight, for the first time, I feel weary. Gina dragged me off after the theatre to the place where we met. I’m sorry. I’m very weary. I look at the distance I still have to cover, as bad runners do, and I hesitate. Theatrical displays eat up my vitality. You saw me in the car … I am weak, nervous … and you’re witnessing all that … It’s weird …”

Morning sleep will restore her. But she begs me not to leave her alone, to come upstairs with her, saying that she is going to take a bath.

I am learning about the simple life.

Above the door of the little staircase — LORD CHIEF JUSTICE’ S ROB ING-ROOM. We go in — it is the bathroom.

She cries out:

“Into the water, Aurora! …”

She undresses in the most natural way, gets into the water, soaps herself, lets the water flow over her body. Perfect body. The muscles in her back ripple like balls of ivory beneath her taut, tanned skin, a substance that is both sturdy and priceless, like the silk used for air-balloons; they can be deciphered as easily as on an anatomy chart, where they cover our organs with pink arborescences; arched loins where the water streams, protruding breasts and, shorn of all heaviness through dancing, long legs, elongated at the ankles, hollowed out on the inside of the thighs, swollen at the supple junction of the knees.

“Come on, Aurora! Out of the water!”

She talks to herself like this, just as she talks to her clothes, to objects. (A habit, she explains, common to all lonely people who spend months without seeing their fellow creatures and for whom the human voice is necessary, as the tuning-fork for all other sounds.)

She pats herself dry, rubbing her face unceremoniously until it turns blood-red. No powder, no make-up, no perfume.

“Why are you laughing?”

“For the first time,” I say, “I am laughing when I think of a corset, a detachable collar or boots with buttons …”

In the room there is a pleasant smell of washed flesh, soap, alcohol, steam. Aurora pulls open the chest of drawers where ribbons and scarves are laid out in colours, as if in a prism — she puts on a crêpe-de-chine veil and goes downstairs to the studio again.

The gas butterflies return to their cocoons. Aurora wraps herself in woollen blankets, stretches out on a mattress laid out on the floor. Then she makes sure that her revolver is under the bolster. Her arms and her bare shoulders jut out from the improvised bed. You can see her straight nose in the midst of tousled hair. You can see her eyes. Then you see them no more.

I leave the studio and set off to have a coffee in the cab drivers’ shelter.

I went back to Aurora’s.

My work completed, I was making my way to the area by the river where the North Sea breeze was driving the smoke clouds towards the west, and beating back the seagulls and the smell of exposed mudflats towards the City. The roads that led me were barely made up and pitted with puddles, and already had a smell of the fields, a promise of countryside.

“You must come out of town with me,” Aurora said. “I shall teach you to live as we savages do. In the time you need to have lunch in the restaurant, we shall be naked in a river or else we shall go for a run in the woods. On summer nights I shall take you to sleep in the open air on Oliver’s roof terrace, from where you can see the Crystal Palace, gleaming in the distance like a carbuncle in the moonlight. You’ll feel much better, you won’t have any more headaches, your hair will stop falling out and you’ll stop desiring your friends’ mistresses, as Frenchmen do.”

The taxi pulls up in the middle of the road, as though it had broken down. But the driver does not blaspheme, does not open his bonnet. He opens the door for me — I have arrived. I had promised to be in Epping Forest at seven o’clock, here I am.

It is a September evening, slightly chilly. The giant beech trees do not appear to weigh heavily on the fresh, springy earth, nor do their shadows, or the human toil (though does the toil of English farmers weigh heavily?). On the river the gramophones have ceased crackling. The deer are grazing in the dawn mist.

Aurora had promised to be here at seven o’clock. But she probably sets her path by the sun and will use this cloudy weather, just as her sisters would a traffic jam, as an excuse for being late. Suddenly the branches crackle beneath the lightest of weights, like that of a doe. I turn round — here is Aurora. She runs towards me and her tunic clings to her body like those of the Victories. She holds an attaché case in her hand. She runs on tiptoes, in even strides, well balanced with the motion of her hips. At thirty paces from me, she slows down. Her face, which was merely a clear disc, takes shape, divided in two horizontal parts by her prominent cheekbones, enhanced by a short, mobile nose, like a police dog’s. Her momentum gradually relaxes and by the time she reaches me, she is walking. She lays her bag on the ground, then both hands on my arm.

“I’m glad you’ve come.”

“How long have you been here, Aurora?”

“Since yesterday evening. I slept out in the open. On leaving the theatre, Gina drove me here and left me. I climbed up to the Hollow Oak; stretched out on the grass, I ate apples; I could see London between the branches. This morning, I went down to the village, from where I telephoned you.”

“This outfit, Aurora, you’re going to get yourself arrested.”

“The forest warden is a friend. I imagine you’ll get undressed too?”

I refuse to. She takes me by the hand, leads me over to a hut covered in dried oak branches. Squatting in front of me, she rekindles the fire, lays the frying pan between two stones and cooks bacon and eggs. I am not used to seeing her like this, her knees black with earth, her hands oily, dirty and unadorned, her tunic pulled up, revealing to the rosy sunlight polished, muscular thighs, those exquisite recesses that a long family inheritance had made so secret and so desirable to me.

I have to give in to Aurora and I take off my socks, my collar. At a glance from her, I relinquish my braces. And here I am undressed in turn with, on my neck, the red mark from my stiff collar, on my legs, the blue mark from my suspenders, blinded by the acrid smoke of the fresh herbs, and like a general in a kepi, stripped by the Touaregs, naked, but still wearing his crown of oak leaves.

Wood pigeons dart through the sky. Aurora takes my stick, aims at them, fires twice, but the birds continue, in a hurry to arrive at Nelson’s column before nightfall.

“I was born in Canada,” Aurora says, “on the lakes. The men there use coloured flies to catch large salmon, which two men carry back between them having passed a stick through the gills. Women give of themselves freely upon beds of white heather. I became poor very young with all that a fortune used up within a few years is worth to us in experience and pleasure. My parents are both dead. They came from Westmoreland originally. My mother had been very beautiful. I scarcely knew her. She had the smallest foot in the world (I could not fit even a toe into any of her shoes). She had black hair and the complexion of a heroine from The Keepsake.

“Like waves on a lake came her hair

To die on the strand of her brow,

“Wordsworth has written. When she came to London for the season, she broke every heart. But she loved my father. She followed him to Canada when he decided to live there. She spent most of her life in bed and died young.

“I get my feelings for the wild from my father. He used to allow me to climb trees, and cliffs from the top of which I took gulls’ eggs, and from the bottom, seashells. I always went with him when he went hunting. From my earliest childhood he put me on a horse. I followed him like a dog. And my education was really that of a hunting dog. I learned to judge cities from their smell, people by their footsteps, to know which way the wind is blowing, to retrieve game from the most difficult places, and in midwinter I would wade into the water up to my waist to search for the ducks he shot and that fell into the lakes. I can still see him waiting on the shore with his checked trousers, his velvet cap with flaps and his duck-shooting gun; he smiled into his white beard.”

I am very cold, but I want to stay here this evening. I have discarded the man-about town; the simple life is good and beautiful; I am giving up my room in Mayfair and the steaming bath that is being run for me at this moment and my fresh, starched shirt that awaits me, unfolded, on the bed. I am relinquishing the benefits of clothes with padded shoulders, of sleek hair, of witty conversation. I do not care about a salary at the end of the month, a pension in my later years, I have no further needs, I expect nothing from anyone, social upheavals do not frighten me and I despise working people who need cinemas and drinks. All I own are the two hundred and eight pieces of my skeleton. I am on a level with the earth, the first to benefit from the magnetic currents in the ground; I am the one burning all the oxygen in the air. It is Aurora whom I shall rely on to look after me, to think healthily and to live according to the law of nature.

“Good night, child,” she says. “May God watch over you!”

She leaves me to this nocturnal journey as if it were a perilous enterprise from which we may not return. Already, I can hear trumpets sounding. The pure air anaesthetises me; I am sleeping beneath the sky for the first time in my life.

I have acquired a sore throat from sleeping out in the open. Aurora is making me herbal teas by the fire, in the studio. Then she says:

“I arrived in India in the autumn of 1909, sailing from Aden. One autumn morning, on a tin-plate sea over which our speed had been cut to twelve knots, Bombay turned its brick façade towards me. Like a silk canopy, the sky stretched out above the factory chimneys, to the right, and to the left, the Elephanta rocks. The trail of smoke in the sky altered less than did the wake from the propellers in the water.

“I stayed on the peninsula for six weeks. I yearned for solitude, for treks in the dry air, which were not satisfied by remaining on low-lying land. The rivers were like corrosive swamps for me, and the ports were dreadfully depressing. I loathe suffocating valleys where there are only small creatures to hunt. I resolved to set off for Kashmir, then Tibet. Leaving Srinagar, I arrived in a country of high lakes, planted with fir trees. The higher we climbed, the lower the temperature dropped. The natives, overcome with torpor, slept as they walked. I had to whip them to wake them up. Cutting out steps in the ice, we continued to climb …”

Aurora points to the studio window from where night was about to fall, for a few all too brief hours. Then her hand took mine once more. Why should it have need of mine, this hand which cuts steps in the ice, which bends pennies as if they were marshmallow? Here are her feet that have only ever worn sandals, that have trod the burning snow, the red sand of Somaliland and scattered the underground palaces of ants in Gabon which, at night, spend their time sawing the earth in two.

Over her body has passed ice, salt, rain, mud, sweat, showers, perfumes. Iron, lead, stone have inscribed wounds on it. In my hands I hold her round head, hard as a paving stone and her thick hair does not deaden the touch. Incomparable caress over the short, bushy hair, which, layered initially by the scissors, ends abruptly on the neck shorn by the clippers. I burnish my fingers on her granite forehead, then on her cheekbones that protrude like pebbles. While she talks, I amuse myself by moving her arms and legs about. The muscles fluctuate silently.

Aurora is covered in scars. One by one I point them out to her and she explains. Here, trampled by a buffalo in Rhodesia; there, in Carolina, a dangerous double jump with her horse, beneath which she was left as if for dead. This hole in her head, a fall at the Olympia, at the bottom of a trap door.

So many accidents and so few adventures. Such a lot of shipwrecks and so great a love of ships, of departures, of all of life if life is movement. No habits — just a few cooking recipes, a few tips on hygiene. A courage acquired from meals without meat, from rooms without heating. So much goodness; silent, practical goodness; basic teaching that I had never been given, that you won’t find written down anywhere. Finally, an organic gaiety that never changes, drawn from the oxygen in the air and reproduced all around, the kind of gaiety that endears one more than vice, snobbery or love. A soul cleansed like the body, like the barrels of a gun; helpful hands, a generous heart, a transformer of energy; sweet fruit of the earth, product of my quest, precious beast momentarily captured, Aurora …

Aurora has rented a shed in Dulwich where she has deposited her saddlery and her hunting and fishing equipment. She also has a few wild beasts’ heads at a taxidermist’s shop in Covent Garden. But her real wealth, her guns, they are at Kent’s.

They are shapeless things, wrapped up in old cloths, makeshift bandages for steel damaged by oxidation. But as Aurora unwinds the strips, the weapon appears gleaming and primed. Aurora places on her index finger, in perfect balance, a Holland and Holland sixteen-bore rifle. The barrel is blue. The screws, loosened, inactive, can be turned by the fingernail. The gun, with a duplex-choke, is shaped initially in a rounded horse-pistol butt from which the straight barrel emerges. Carried beneath its heavy belly, like pointed eggs, are the reinforced bullets.

“This is my favourite — a Wollaston ten-bore, for big game,” says Aurora. “It came from Major X’s sale … This gun’s a pal, a real pal. We kill hippopotamuses like rabbits.”

And she runs her hand over the hammerless rifle from backsight to butt.

Hippopotamuses, your monstrous innards steaming in the mud of the deltas, crocodiles with your small, round bellies soft as lettuces, hamadryads sitting on your cheeks, brown bears, the pads of your paws more delectable than honey, hyenas like bags stuffed with bones, all of you who died by Aurora’s hand, victims of the ten-bore, am I going to fall in love with her?

No. Things turned out differently.

That evening, which was the last, had nevertheless started well. We had dined, Aurora and I, at Old Shepherd’s, in Glasshouse Street, which I like for its huge tables, its low ceiling, its toasting fork, its cold buffet adorned with daffodils in ginger ale bottles. We were separated from other people by wooden partitions, above which we could catch a glimpse of Sargent’s opulent baldness and Roger Fry’s mop of hair.

Aurora was explaining to me how she hunted in Abyssinia, in East Africa, in Nigeria. Well-known hunters granted her their company. They were simple people, “strong and silent men”, trappers, solitary individuals hunting wholeheartedly, ruggedly, fearlessly, “of the great breed of those who have slogged away through Africa” when ivory was a trade, before it became a sportsman’s trophy; these men held their lives into their own hands, with only an old rifle that took a minute to load standing between them and death, man against beast, men who ate what they had killed and who — the excuse for hunting — when they had not killed anything, ate nothing.

Aurora despises the rich young man of today who sets out from Mombasa with sixty bearers for hunting grounds that are easy and healthy.

Aurora’s stories made me drowsy. It was past nine o’clock. The nightclub, like an old hulk from the time of Nelson, had already closed its shutters shaped like portholes. We were eating cheese spread and drinking port.

And thus I arrived, with her, in lands that were inaccessible and unhealthy where little by little you have to leave behind you, firstly objects that are of no use, then the bearers suddenly struck down by a mysterious disease, then the friends killed by luminous flies …

I thought: “Will Aurora abandon me like this one day, in the antipodes, to return on my own, after such extraordinary years, or will she desert me on a bench tomorrow morning? Everything is possible. Deep down I don’t much care for extreme adventures.”

Another glass of fruity port.

“No, Aurora shall not influence me. She amuses me, nothing more. She will pass and I shall remain all alone slumbering beneath my old Buddha’s sallow fat …”

We leave. Aurora suggests the Café Royal. It is the hour for absinth, taken there, ritually, after dinner. Human beings slowly materialise in the acrid smoke of Burmese cheroots, beneath a gilt ceiling, red velvet, and mirrors with a thousand pillars. Artists in khaki, with Polish inflections, are playing dominoes with their mistresses, their sisters. One recognises sour YMCA females, once encountered in exhibitions of woodcuts. Musicians of the “eligible for call-up” school are preparing distant propaganda tours. Jewish special constables, with their armbands and an eye-glass chained to their protruding ears, await the moment to climb up to the searchlights.

Art provides war with only conditional support. While the Royal Academy paints fervently at General Headquarters, the Independents, weighed down with their conscientious objections, concern themselves with the trucks.

Daniel comes to our table.

“Montjoye is giving a supper party this evening. He has asked me to tell you that he’s been trying in vain to ’phone you and that he would like you to bring Aurora, whom he would like to get to know.”

Montjoye, or rather Aronsohn (old Norman family, says Daniel), is the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s private secretary. He has a set, decorated in the Adams style, in Albany, containing still lifes (still, due to a violent death) against a blue background, armchairs in black satin painted by Conder, and some of those Coromandel pieces carved with thick leaves for sideboards. He is happy to offer post-theatre drinks.

“I won’t go to Montjoye’s,” Aurora says. “He’s an unwholesome man. He exudes a stench of corruption.”

“You talk like the Archbishop of Westminster.”

“He’s been asking me to come to his house for a long time. I’ve never wanted to go there. Let’s call it pure unsociability on my part …”

I shrug my shoulders.

How irritating remarkable human beings are. I know that Aurora will go to Montjoye’s. She wants to go there. She will go just as she goes everywhere, when she is invited. Just as she stays in town extolling the virtues of the forests, just as she dines at the Carlton declaring that she likes to cook her food between two stones; just as she goes naked, out of snobbery and shyness; just as she claims to have introduced order into her life which is nothing but incoherence, ineptitude and confusion. What is the point of these rituals if they culminate in the absurd and ephemeral existence of those women one meets on ocean liners, in hotel lobbies, at fund-raising shows, and who, for their part at least, have the merit of naivety, of vice, or of foolishness?

I know, from having often attended them, that Montjoye’s parties are not suitable for Aurora, or for any woman one cares about. But she has to go; she will learn for herself that there are not only boars, but boors too.

“I’ve got a taxi,” says Fred. “I’ll drop you.”

Montjoye himself opens the door to us. His bulk stands out against a yellow curtain in the entrance hall. He opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and fear, as though he were frightened that the interest he shows in one might be punished with a slap. (Whenever he happens to call on me, his words of greeting are always: “I must be going.” Then, he hovers in the doorway until I say to him: “Well, close the door.” “In front of me or behind me?” he ventures timidly.) He has eyes only for Aurora, takes no notice of Fred and me, and greets our friend familiarly.

“Aurora! You’ve come, at last.”

He takes both her wrists, strokes them, leads her beneath the lantern with black tassels, uncovers her shoulders with that degree of nerve that only he possesses.

“How beautiful you are!”

In the circular drawing room, supper is served for eight. Grünfeld, the Bolsheviks’ unofficial agent, the Duchess of Inverness, a Dutchman by the name of Bismark, Gina and several actors.

Montjoye takes Aurora by the arm, laughs at her embarrassment, pours her a drink and seats her next to the duchess. I loathe Montjoye. He is the person who comes to mind when I try to recall how long I have had a horror of people of taste. I cannot describe the irritating minutiae of his home. From the tongs to the doorknobs, from the candelabras with their green candles to the engraved glasses, everything is perfect. On the work table, which has been pushed into a corner of the room so that people can dance, there are a pile of documents: Credits to the Allies, Loans to the Banque de France, Special Expenses. All of the minister’s work is there, in a jumble, amid tuberoses and photographs. But with his genius for figures, his work that can be done in an instant, Montjoye will be able to make sense of it all overnight, on his boss’s behalf, the day before questions in the House or a conference.

“We can’t manage to get you drunk, Aurora. However, promise me you will drink this, which I have prepared specially with you in mind.”

Feverishly, he shakes a bottle that contains four compartments for liqueurs and walks over to the fireplace where his strange face, his large head, his grey hair, are lit up.

Fred sits down at the piano. Grünfeld, having discovered some Pushkin in the library, recites—

“Don’t believe a word of it,” says Montjoye. “He doesn’t know Russian.”

From behind her lorgnette, the duchess, sitting motionless, appraises each of us with her cold eyes. She has that sterile youthfulness of fifty-year-old American women, exquisite feet, grey hair, teeth of white jade. She is dressed in nurse’s uniform with a large ruby cross over her forehead.

Aurora is enjoying herself in a gloomy sort of way. She is accompanying Fred at the piano. I try to get closer to her and to join in myself singing All Dressed up and Nowhere to Go, which Hitchcock, who created it and who is dozing in an armchair, professes not to know. Aurora turns away from me moodily. On a corner couch, Montjoye is talking in a low voice with muffled laughter to the duchess.

“Aurora’s going to dance,” he cries, suddenly jumping to his feet.

And he leads her to the middle of the room.

“Wait, Aurora, I’m going to make a carpet for you, a carpet of flowers, a carpet of pearls, a carpet for your beauty, for your grace …”

He hesitates, no longer knowing what he is saying, demolishes the vases and scatters the flowers on the ground.

Everything spins round. Everything still spins round in my memory, and Grünfeld’s red beard and Montjoye’s pale features, and Aurora, especially Aurora, scantily clad, between four lotus-shaped lanterns, her arms outstretched, streaming with sweat, as if possessed, making mad leaps from one end of the room to the other, twirling round with machine-like speed, impressing on our retinas something resembling a Hindu image, with multiple legs and arms. She falls to the ground. Montjoye kneels down beside her, wipes her brow with his handkerchief. He bends over her to inhale her, his eyes closed. I can see the vein in the middle of his forehead bulging, his neck bursting out from under his collar. His head moves closer and closer, then draws back; then, unable to control himself any longer, Montjoye places his lips on Aurora. Aurora shudders, opens her eyes, gets to her feet and, with the speed of a pugilist, sends Montjoye sprawling across to the firedog with a punch to the jaw. Montjoye screams in agony. A bottle of crème de menthe spills its emerald contents over the floor.

“Aurora has created a pogrom,” says Fred very calmly from the piano.

I try to intervene.

“Leave me alone, you,” says Aurora. “I hate you.”

And before any of us could have lifted a finger, she jumps through the window into the little ground-floor garden and disappears.

When I enter her studio, Aurora is sitting on her bed, her chin in her hands, her elbows on her clenched knees. She does not turn her head towards me, I walk straight over to her, in the direction of her eyes, but her gaze goes through me and remains fixed to the wall.

I place my hands on her shoulders: she flinches.

“Leave me. Leave me. I don’t want to see you anymore. Go away.”

I sit down.

“Go away.”

I stand up.

She softens and reaches out her hand to me.

“Sit down. I only wanted to tell you that it would be best to leave me alone from now on. You are of no use to me. I don’t want to say more.”

She pokes the tip of her umbrella through the straps of her sandals.

“I was beginning to reap the fruits of all my voluntary labour. I am not a nun. I have to both invent the rule and observe it at the same time. And abnegation is not easy for the wild creature I am. You who have not been aware of this long struggle wouldn’t be able to understand … Parties like the one last night don’t help matters …”

Tears flow down her cheeks. I want to say … But she interrupts me as she gets to her feet and covers herself with a violet veil.

Large zinc clouds jut through the rays of the setting sun. It thunders. Taxis rush madly by.

As soon as we are out of her neighbourhood, people start to look round. Aurora stops, places her hand on mine. Between us this layer of very skimpy veil.

Aurora trembles.

“Will you forgive me, Aurora?”

A vague gesture from Aurora which I interpret:

“It’s not your fault.”

She waves her hand. The number 19 bus draws up obediently at her feet, by the edge of the pavement. She climbs up to the top deck as if she were walking on a length of unrolled frieze.

The panel states that she can go as far as Islington.

I am very sad. I feel that I shall not really be upset until after dinner.

1916