Tender Shoots Read online

  “I’m like a magpie,” she says.

  And like a magpie, she pounces on shiny objects and buries them away in hiding-places that she alone knows, jumbled up with other things found in the street. When will they be put on display, Clarissa? Her bedroom is full of coloured goblets, of bits of broken glass, of decanter stoppers, of crystal-ware, of fragments of chandeliers or mirrors, of spun-glass animals.

  “How lovely it is to touch all these!”

  And she runs her fingers over the corners, the surfaces and, going over to the window, she holds them against the light, rejoicing in their reflections. From the pavement, you can recognise her balcony by some crystal globes; from her ceiling she hangs glass balls in which the entire street’s truncated and multifaceted images are reflected, in which the clouds swirl, slowly, the buses, rapidly.

  Clarissa keeps up with the sales rooms, all the sales rooms, assiduously.

  In London, there is no one large market through which everything that is for sale passes from hand to hand, but a series of auction houses, each with its distinct appearance, its customs, its own clientele. It is more than a difference of neighbourhood, a social hierarchy. But Clarissa sees it merely as a short or a long trip to be made from one to the other.

  First she will go to the pretentious sales rooms, with monumental staircases, with liveried porters, where they deal with museum pieces, with precious goods forfeited by royalty, with large inheritances, under the watchful gaze of ennobled experts, of titled critics.

  Just around the corner, it will be a caricature of these same rooms—the same porters, but older, their livery threadbare; exhibitions of unknown grand masters, brazen Rembrandts, indecent Corots, sold to a gang of shifty dealers and racketeers.

  Others will specialise in jewellery; pieces of gold are passed around the dirty hands of Armenians with black woollen beards; Jews sniff out the pearls.

  She also frequents the sales rooms in the working-class districts where the crowds of those made wealthy by the war pounce on pianos, suits of armour, music boxes, thick woollen Indian rugs, silver- or gold-plated ware, plush armchairs.

  Sometimes she sets off to the source, goes to the docks where ships from the Far East unload their merchandise that is sold on the spot, at the warehouse.

  But what Clarissa likes best are the sales in the provinces where the entire house is being emptied, after death or distraint, from the wines in the cellar down to the door handles, guided by a very sure instinct for these shipwrecks of life, these forfeited items.

  Clarissa does not acquire without qualms. And for each purchase she must have a reason:

  “It will make a lovely wedding present; instead of giving something horrible …”

  “The children need one …”

  “It’s not for me, I’ve been asked to buy it …”

  “I let the same thing go last year, today you can’t get hold of it anywhere …”

  For every happy occasion, Clarissa buys herself a little something, as a memento; for every sad one, she buys herself a little something, so as to forget.

  Once I have described Clarissa’s love for yesterday’s cast-offs, half-opened her cupboards full of collections of old shoes, dolls, marionettes, braided waistcoats rescued from oblivion, formal dress-wear, military uniforms, tawdry stage costumes, glittering old rags, tatters, a whole array of trash that not even a taste for antiques can excuse, I shall still not have clarified fully all that I want to explain.

  She laughs as she shows them to me:

  “Little objects that are of no possible use!”

  Still better. Unimaginable little objects, of no antiquity, never sought after, a primitive child’s museum, oddities from lunatic asylums, the collection of a consul rendered anaemic by the tropics. She confesses:

  “You know my tastes: broken mechanical toys, burnt milk, steam organs, the smell of priests, black silk corsets with floral patterns and those bouquets of coloured beads made from all the flowers quoted in Shakespeare …”

  And I suddenly think of the delirious ravings in Une saison en enfer: “I loved the silly pictures, overdoors, decorations, canvases by mountebanks, signboards …”

  Stranger still is her liking for sham.

  She prefers the imitation to the thing itself. She enjoys the disappointment she experiences and that of others. When she sees the way other women look at her pearls, she is amused at being able to arouse so much bad feeling at so little cost. She loves this paraphrase of the truth, the modern religion of window dressing, and this latent mockery of the fake, nature made ridiculous, shown to be useless or imperfect. Wearing fancy dress is one of her delights. She disguises her clothes, dyes her carpets, bleaches her hair, paints pictures of her cats. She has thousands of objects around her that are used for other purposes than one might imagine, books that open into boxes, pen-holders that are telescopes, chairs that become tables, tables that turn into screens, and also those countless bits of surprise jewellery that we owe to the bad taste of the Italians or the Japanese.

  The shabby suburban shops displaying their filigree and costume jewellery fascinate her. She has not the slightest longing for panther skins, but she cannot tear her gaze from this crude imitation, with its black patches painted on red rabbit fur.

  She has put some glass fruit, some crystal balls, in large bowls; but she reserves her affection for those fruits that are here—the oranges gleam with a viscous varnish, alongside celluloid berries, in glassy, over-swollen clusters, with small, sickly leaves. She only likes dwarf cedars when they are dead and she can smear their branches with red lacquer and make feather pistils and tinfoil petals grow there.

  “I’m contemplating an artificial garden,” she says. “It would be in the middle of the park. You would arrive there naturally, as though it were the coolest, shadiest spot, and discover sterilised vegetation. You would lie down on moss of that beautiful green that you only find in dyed moss, warm and dusty to the touch. All around there would be beds of coloured beads, tissue paper flowers, and beneath bushes made from glued bits of material, in a smooth glass pool, the motionless frolicking of gutta-percha carp.

  Clarissa has a house in town and a house in the country. Our life is spent dashing from one to the other, like a pendulum; they are shared out unequally during the year; one for the dense, brisk winter months, the other for the limpid months of summer. They are not far apart—in the city, by climbing up to the roof terrace, you can make out the country house, perched on the horizon, at the top of the blue hill that, like the well-defined brim of a bowl, marks the outer limits of London.

  The first has a noble, self-satisfied atmosphere. Byron lived there. It maintains its standing and, from the pavement and from above, does its best to keep its alignment. The frontage has a severity of line that, were it not for the thought of the myriad eccentricities it conceals, would be boring.

  The second, on the other hand, is small and precious, like a neglected piece of Empire furniture left out in a garden. Sunk into its middle is a circular anteroom crowned by a gallery onto which all the bedroom doors open; so that in the morning, from their beds, guests can hurl apples into the bedroom opposite theirs …

  Apart from her two Persian cats that sleep by the fireside where they look like cinders, Clarissa has few close friends.

  “Clarissa, let’s talk about your friends, if you wish, my companions.”

  You are the centre of a whole little world that appears to have its raison d’être solely in you. No more than your trinkets, can we conceive of any other life than the one you impose on us. (For you impose things, Clarissa. You are a tall woman, with decisive actions, a definite face, powerful lungs and an air of authority.)

  You do not say:

  “What could we do this evening?”

  But:

  “We’re going to the Alhambra, box six.”

  We are your prisoners. Everything draws us back to you. If we are far away, boredom; if we are walking down your street, everything entices us:
the large flat button of the door-bell, pleasant to touch, the noise of our footsteps on the marble of the staircase, the parrot’s swear-words, the smell of tracing paper and palette that comes from your boudoir, the cameo on your signet-ring, the mauve veins that encircle your eyes.

  None of us has any common bond but you. There is, however, a certain family resemblance between us. We are equally slim and youthful, with bright eyes and red lips. We laugh loudly, knock back our drinks, we never get up before breakfast, we dance farandoles all over the house, but we know how to keep quiet when you play music.

  You enjoy bringing us together, paying no heed to staunch friendships, yet you nevertheless detect a different virtue in each one of us and you like him or her because of that—Pamela has mahogany hair, Tom slender wrists, Rafael a pretty face and a talent for playing the banjo; as for me, I go well, you say, with your Chinese drawing room.

  Here we are, seated around a table, at Murray’s, for our common pleasure, which is hers. Clarissa dominates us all with her height; she has more sparkle than the women, more self-assurance than the men; the maître d’hôtel naturally goes over to her. We gather around her, happy to be here in this comfortable cellar, in this padded catacomb where pleasure presides. The women in this basement have their nails polished, their faces well painted; you can see their armpits. Couples are dancing, circling around an imaginary axis, wringing out the waltz as if it were a tea towel from which the melody oozes. The men in this basement have their arms in slings, bandaged heads; the Negro music tires them a little, takes them back to the indelible memory of the trench where they fell, of the first glass of water. The waiters, as they serve them, stumble over the crutches that are lying on the floor.

  There are others, too, fatter, more florid, drinking Pommery in cider bottles, for it is after ten o’clock—the neutrals. They are Scandinavians, Dutchmen, Americans. They exchange knowing glances and under the tablecloth offer two hundred thousand Mausers which can be delivered straight away by sea off Barcelona, or they take out from their hip pocket samples of all the uniform materials worn by the warring armies. They buy back good-humouredly orders that have been rejected (the Russians will take them for sure), overdue contracts. All the tempests of machine-gun fire that will one day be unleashed on men stem from here. Tom sniggers at this interpretation:

  “Very much the latest thing; the very last word,” he says. “The last word of the dying.”

  Then, handing one of them a piece of shrapnel recently removed from his head:

  “If this may be of use to you again? …” We are five, gathered around a small table on which elbows and plates are touching. Pamela remains wrapped up in her ermine coat, silent, her eyes tired from the beam of the footlights, rouge still on her cheeks, looking wretched. Then she eats her bacon and eggs, lights an amber-tipped cigarette and bursts like a camellia out of her coat, which slips down her arms. Narrow shoulders, what Rafael calls “being built like a soda-water bottle”. She is sad. She says:

  “I can’t keep a cook.”

  Tom, whose left eardrum was burst at La Bassée, raises his hand to his good ear to hear better and, thinking that she is joking, begins to laugh, which creases his shiny cheeks, chapped by the great Flanders winds.

  Rafael orders himself a large supper and eats it phlegmatically. His face, that of an eighteen-year-old (although he was decorated in the Boer War), is perfectly calm; he himself is collected amid all the turmoil as he always has been during his life which was and is the most unstable, the most humdrum imaginable. He is stubbornly extravagant. You feel he has no connection with the rest of the world. Without obligations, without cares, without a home, without a bank account, without anything apart from the jewellery he wears. Nothing about him reveals his past—the nights partying in Montmartre or in Rome, the nights gambling in Deauville, the nights dancing in St Moritz, the nights of love in Poland or in Madeira have skimmed over his well-bred face without leaving a trace.

  Neither insolent, nor obsequious, he goes through life, indolent as a pet animal, with, like all old Etonians, those somewhat spineless mannerisms of the dandy who does not enjoy working.

  Clarissa keeps him near her like a pretty cat; like a cat he expects and receives much respect for the kindness of which he is the object, mitigating the condition of dependency in which he places himself by a show of affected indifference.

  Clarissa watches him eat.

  From time to time, in between two dances, Louisa comes to sit down with us. She is really beautiful, but it is a beauty that is indigestible; we derive no pleasure from it. She does not radiate and at close range she fades.

  Louisa is about to speak, her eyes move slowly (she must have been brought up near a line on which only slow trains went by); her mouth opens. She says:

  “I …”

  But Rafael interrupts her. She closes her mouth again, opens her handbag, peers into it as if into the bottom of a well; then: cigarette-case, cigarette-holder, cigarette, cotton thread, lighter; then: powder-puff, rouge; she readjusts her beauty-spot.

  She is about to speak; her mouth opens again in the shape of a lozenge; she declares:

  “I …”

  She is so surprised that she does not continue. She wipes her mascara. She thinks.

  “This war is very boring,” she says. “They must get very bored in the trenches. The dentist, too, is very boring. I spent two hours at my dentist’s this morning—and so this evening I’ve got headaches, and how … To think that I’ve waited twenty years to know what toothache’s like. Look, I wanted to have a filling in this one—no this one; the bottom molar … ’

  But she only receives polite interest. She lacks confidence when she is with us. She sees Clarissa whose expression seems to be saying:

  “Will you never understand?”

  She gets up and goes and shows her bottom tooth to the Duc d’Orléans who places his finger on it.

  It is four o’clock. We climb up to ground level, leaving the heavy cigar smoke, the smell of perfume and foie gras beneath us. Outside, it is still night, in the dark street the lampposts wreathed in shadows cast down a circle of furtive light like that of a dim lantern; the policeman checks the locks; some dustmen are reading the French communiqué in the glimmer of a lamplight.

  I suggest a taxi, but Clarissa prefers to return home on foot.

  “Take my arm,” she says. “I so love the night. Why squander half our precious life in slumber? Why, as children, were we sent to bed so early just because it was nighttime—is it not for children? Used you to get up at night? Tell me!”

  “Yes, Clarissa. As soon as my mother had kissed me and tucked me up, I would get out of bed. The open window gave onto the balcony and the street below. This balcony was my delight. I can still feel my bare feet on the lead warmed by the sun that used to linger there till evening; I can still recall the fresh taste of the iron railing which I used to lick; I had planted some nasturtiums in tubs into which some real earth bought in the Cours-la-Reine market had been put for me. From the window next to mine, I could see my father in the shade of the studio. He used to draw standing up, with an easy motion of his fine pale hand, beneath the lamp. A grey and violet July dusk was falling over gentle and languid Paris. The horses were pawing the cobbles in the stables, the concierges were smoking at their doorways, in the soft air, the Eiffel Tower did not yet have its necklace of light waves, but sported an emerald on its forehead, menservants were gulping down their liqueurs in tarts’ apartments, and as for the tarts, I used to see them at the end of the street, in muslin dresses, in carriages drawn by rose-coloured horses, making their way up the Champs-Elysées, towards the Arc de Triomphe. The sun was going home to bed at Neuilly; they were dining at the Chalet du Cycle.”

  Clarissa squeezes my arm, takes my hand.

  “That’s right,” she says, “I’m like you; I’ve the same blood that, on cold mornings, flows through my veins like warm wine, I’m on edge like you on stormy evenings. We are very like one ano
ther.”

  “Very alike, Clarissa. It’s a duet; we are in touch. Our thoughts keep pace with one another. In the street, our gazes alight upon a funny feather on a hat at the same moment, our curiosity upon the same blouse …

  “I am going to point out this Frenchman to you, with his medals, whose trousers are unbuttoned, and who is washing his hands with imaginary soap, but you have noticed him some time ago.”

  You say:

  “Frenchmen’s faces are like those drawing rooms in which there are too many objects. You discover moustaches, a beard, spectacles, warts, moles with downy hair on them.”

  And I, feeling upset, reply:

  “My dear girl, that fellow’s a Belgian.”

  “You love me a little bit then, Clarissa?”

  “Well … it annoys me when you take the phone off the hook or when you go off to Paris.”

  “I ask for no more.”

  “And you, do you love me?”

  “No, but you are to women what London is to other cities.”

  “?”

  “A city which does not totally satisfy you, but which spoils all the others for you.”

  You are jealous. Anything in my life that is beyond your reach makes you anxious. You do not permit freedom; you find silence difficult to bear. You are eager to know, and knowing does not satisfy you.

  You say:

  “Describe your girlfriend to me!”

  I answer:

  “She has a smooth belly, firm flesh that does not show bite marks, wide-apart breasts.”

  “Young?”

  “Very young—she pulls corks out of bottles with her teeth, sits facing the light, is not necessarily at home, gives of herself freely, does not want to make love every day.”