Tender Shoots Read online

  “None of which, in fact, is very nice.”

  “And therefore we come back to girlfriends who say: ‘I like to please’, ‘you’re a child’, ‘my car can take you home’, ‘you’re uncomfortable, take this cushion’, ‘because I know you like that …’”

  1914

  DELPHINE

  I RETURNED TO MY ROOMS, my head in a whirl as disorderly as the wind which gusts through stations after an express train has passed. Hurtling along the wall at the top of Queen’s College, the blast caused people to thrust numbed fingertips deep inside their pockets. My undergraduate’s gown, billowing like a black sail, tugged me backwards by both shoulders. I froze beneath this March gale, making it a point of honour to go out all year round, like my fellow students, wearing pumps, without an overcoat and without a hat. Many a habit had had to be sacrificed since that first night at school, when a French boy of fourteen had been obliged to defend the national nightshirt, made of jaconet with Russian embroidery, in a pillow fight with insulted Anglo-Saxon pyjamas.

  The corpses of students that remained in the Dardanelles or at La Bassée could be lined up along the length of three canal locks, and yet even more have returned. The colleges are opening annexes. Oxford is no longer that deserted inner courtyard, traversed at certain times of the day by professors without courses, surreptitious Hindus immersed in spiritualism and touring Canadian soldiers; it is not an eminent cloister as it once was, but an industrious hamlet whose inhabitants return from Greek and Latin as though from field or factory. It is no longer contaminated by elegance and lost time. A son’s education, the most onerous of English duties, is undergoing restrictions. The days of the daily Clicquot, of balls at the Clarendon, of Latin essays bought ready-written and of life lived on credit, when it was enough to toss off the name of a respectable college to tradesmen to avoid a bill arriving before the end of the third year summer term, those days now belong to the age of the early Georges, when students ruined themselves by living in style and kept mistresses. That is why, like my colleagues, I was reverting to frugal habits, living by the rule and dining almost every evening in hall, even though I had rooms in town. We gulped down the entremets, a sort of alternating pink and yellow mocha cake, which looked like bacon and tasted of pepsin, followed by a large glass of water. While the dons were saying grace, bread rolls rained down on Harris, the elderly refectory porter who, on special occasions, brings out his album of celebrities in which one can spot viceroys of India, dukes in gaiters, or even, attired in a braided black velvet jacket, Mr Oscar Wilde, the collector of blue china, who only astonished his age because he remained a Magdalen man all his life and did forced labour instead of paying fines.

  I was living off the Banbury Road, an area dotted with cheap cottages where there are as many Wordsworth Houses and Keats Lodges as there are nannies on benches, restraining kisses on a lipless mouth, despite twisted spectacles and the irreparable snapping of celluloid collars. A second-year undergraduate, I had passed, proud of having sworn my oath in Latin, in tails, on the Bible, in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor; of having fallen into the river; and of returning, when such a thing was possible, from London, on the last train, known as the fornicators’ train, without falling victim to the university patrol after curfew, and master of all I surveyed because of a feudal custom that allowed me the right to the inside of the pavement and the middle of the river.

  In the hallway, beneath the stags’ antlers where the gong hangs and the bucolic spectacle of stuffed swifts, I found a letter addressed to me. I climbed two floors to switch on the light of a room strewn with books, saddlery, soda siphons, with, on the walls, a toasting fork, a Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a cock fight in which two gentlemen sporting sideburns and stirrups are urging one bird towards the other with the help of paper cones.

  I read this:

  London, this 13th of March,

  St Mary’s Convent,

  King St,

  Leicester Square, WC

  Jean.

  I have been living in London for a week. It is ten o’clock at night, and I have gone to bed, unable to sleep. I have a room in a convent. I hide my eau de Cologne, a luxury of Delphine’s. I have not been allowed to leave my suitcase in the corridor. There is nothing but pictures of my mother all around me; she is still the person who plays the greatest role in my life. Since my husband is dead, where I am is of no importance. I don’t know why I am no longer in Touraine. I caught the boat because of a poster. I am a young woman on my own. I miss the company of men and women and am repelled by it at the same time. I am as I was in the old days, by the banks of the Loire, but with nerves that are worn out. Now I’m feeling sleepy.

  DELPHINE

  Delphine.

  The name flickers over the screen of my curtains. Landscapes merge into one another; one wonders what distraction has prompted a head to appear along a road, when suddenly there crystallises all around it some wooden panelling, a door, a window and a comfortable middle-class drawing room surrounded on all sides by a tropical landscape which, a moment beforehand, grew there; the drawing room, in turn, melted away beneath the force of one of those cinematographic squalls that visit the humblest gardens. So it is that my white varnished wooden mantelpiece, discoloured by anthracite, collapses, falls apart and dwindles into rosy hillsides in which I recognise Vouvray; the copper plaque begins to quiver and in turn diffuses into a powerful flow from which the Loire rises. I see once more a house with two wings clinging to a flight of steps, chintz curtains and a pianola. Delphine caused a spasm of asthmatic whistling to come from it and treated me to the overture to The Barber of Seville; the long, perforated roll of notes folded in a zig-zag, emitting a rippling noise. While she played, I would gaze at her hair, the tough, twisted horsehair that I loved; life has added nothing to those hours, unless it is that hair should not be allowed to be naturally wavy. Then I took her hand and thought: “Nothing else matters.” The bellows of the pianola ceased to groan, the notes stopped tumbling down. I should have liked to remain like that for ever; but we were serious children; never hearing us laugh, Delphine’s aunt began to worry and before long two foolish eyes, swimming in the water of her lorgnette, denied us all privacy.

  I was allowed to play with Delphine, who never got dirty and refused to climb up the ladder to the reservoir with me. But her coldness, her intelligence and “words that were not suitable for her age” displeased my grandparents.

  “Delphine,” I heard them say, “is the image of her mother.”

  Her mother lives in Toulon with a naval officer. A pallid-looking woman, with pink fingers, Annamese costumes, who never dresses up, and who lets exotic dishes grow cold without touching them; proud of days devoted to a table of specious men, wrinkled and full of maritime disillusions.

  Delphine did not live poetically except in dreams. She recounted them to me in detail every day. They always contained water, clear when she felt well, muddy when she was tired. Frequently large cats, too, lynxes and panthers, but very gentle and with silky fur. She climbed up into the trees with them as high as the topmost branches from where she let herself drop down into space. She had a thorough knowledge of the meaning of dreams, and since this surprised me, she confessed that she corresponded with Mme de Thèbes and even showed me letters in which she addressed her informally.

  Delphine meant the world to me. A world of more individual inspiration, less concerned with approval than the one to which I belonged.

  “Never,” she asserted, “shall I be like those women who say no when they mean yes.”

  She went around full of joy to be trying out words, to be putting ideas into practice. Every experience was a delight. No vocabulary struck her as unreasonable, no conduct deserving of disfavour. Though she never let herself go, she was aware, nevertheless, of all the imperfections of that world that stopped at the tollgates of Tours and, while she was very fond of me, she was not blind to my own either. She would have liked to see me wear spectacles.

  I
tried to dominate her through the mind. I lent her Dominique. She handed it back to me solemnly. “It’s beautiful”, and then concluded: “You are very sensual.” It was true. After meals, there were fiery patches on my plump cheeks, and my nose picked up some very common smells. Delphine, on the other hand, seemed to me to be restrained and private. She was a girl of her times, with a vast amount of knowledge, sure judgement; clever, proud of the influence she exerted, at a time when young men are obliged to live on credit, thanks to their hypocrisy or the leniency of older people. Everything that is languorous, rebellious, fecund and unclean in the human species seemed to have been apportioned to me. But all I could do was to improve. She had only to offer life that inscrutable face, that empty heart, to be immediately condemned by fate, to be troubled and beset on all sides, as soon as she ventured to leave home, by scandals, of which her marriage was not the least.

  The war is to blame for all that, of course. And in 1917 there was nothing in Tours to prevent a young middle-class Frenchwoman from marrying a Russian officer in leather boots, who had been pursuing her for two months, when the hospitals were overflowing with strange confessions in every language, the hospital trains were taken over by well-to-do ladies who could not cope with the smell of gangrene, tea stalls were set up around the archbishop’s palace and the sides of the roads were decked out with large umbrellas beneath which Annamese would take refuge for their oriental liaisons.

  But this is well after the period when Delphine and I used to bicycle along the banks of the Loire as far as Luynes, before dinner.

  Areas of flooding stretched out between the municipal poplar trees. Dusk was descending over the chalk cliffs, but it did not dim the artificial sunlight from the mustard fields in bloom. A leaden sky flowed above the river; below, in the fields, mottled cattle were advancing slowly, following their tongues.

  Delphine was pedalling against the wind. She was wearing a beret and a blue woollen pullover. From time to time she moistened her lips, dried by the wind. Her face, somewhat sullen in repose or when she was at home, relaxed with the effort, became accessible; reflected in the nickel of the handlebars, it seemed broader even, coarse and bracing. At moments like those, I took heart once more; she freewheeled and willingly allowed herself to be pushed, my hand on the flat of her back. Within sight of Saint-Symphorien, the land was no longer laid waste. There was room only for vegetables, cafés and love affairs. We lay our machines on the bank and went down closer to the water. Amid a riot of clouds, the sun was setting.

  With its generous and shallow expanse of water, its poisonous sky, its limestone pitted with caves, Touraine became, for a moment, implacable. For a moment, too, Delphine was mine; I lay my head on her knees, my cheeks chafed by the wool of her skirt. My neck swelled; she put her hand inside my collar, motherly, sensible and exasperated, and said: “You’re dripping wet.” I kissed her warm hand, puerile and full of earthly passions. Delphine turned sour: “I loathe voluptuous people, I warn you.” I did not insist, dreading the way she made me feel ashamed of my pleasure and the fits of anger occasioned by my disappointment. The first to get to her feet, she seemed endowed with extraordinary energy. I followed her.

  I awoke one Sunday, at about two in the afternoon, in a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street, after a brief sleep broken up by nightmares, hoarse, eyes burning, back aching. I had gone to bed at dawn, after the annual Putney to Mortlake race, in which the Cambridge eight had passed the winning post after having found sufficient lift-off at the end of their blue oars to make up that three-length lead, the memory of which would remain unbearable to Oxford for a year. The two crews had begun again in the evening, a liquid and fraternal contest at the Trocadero dining rooms, then, transported in yelling clusters upon the roofs of taxis, had run the gamut of music-halls; the Empire first, where the affronted boxes exchanged, as though in couplets, college war cries; then the Oxford, where the French show permitted improprieties; then the Chelsea Palace, where there was a set battle, broken up by the police; on the stroke of midnight, London had in fact become an incandescent mass, ravaged by pleasures, where buses, festooned with advertisements, passed by making swishing noises, where the houses buckled like our indestructible shirt-fronts; portable harmonicas bathed souls in the water of psalms. The electrical sun in the lobby of the Savoy had subsided into the Thames; under cover of darkness the furtive flowers of underground nightclubs flourished: Boum-Boum, the Lotus, Hawaii, where, upon catching sight of us, the disabled porter discovered a pink curtain behind which the face of a Galician Jew, swathed in powdered ochre, dressed in tails with cornelian buttons, drew from a book with counterfoils the tickets for admission to the cellar.

  I got up, had a massage and set off for Delphine’s.

  On the edge of that nebula of dust, of electric gold, of whistles and cries that is Leicester Square, the French convent consisted of three adjoining houses with a pale brick frontage, revealed by the pointed arch of its chapel door on which was written in French Dames du Bon Accueil. Sunk into the barred hatch window of the convent door next to it was the bloodshot eye of the duty sister, wearing a dubious headdress. I found myself in a parlour, the drawing room of a middle-class God, where, on a deep-laid wooden floor, woven esparto water lilies slumbered opposite green rep chairs.

  Delphine entered, dressed in mourning, the oval of her face accentuated by a strip of white crêpe. I had not seen her for five years. We embraced.

  “Your cheeks are a little less hard as they used to be,” I said, out of affection.

  Her face, as smooth as a porcelain bowl, receded at the sides in an equal curve, drawing up to the surface two dark eyes, liquid and flat, but my memory hesitated at the sight of a softened mouth, tired at the corners and which bore her even teeth without any pleasure. Her nostrils were more flared, and being elongated, no longer formed part of the line of her very delicate nose, hooked and slender as to be almost transparent, the one relief in the mask. Her expression, too, had changed, more taciturn, rarely embellished by her former eloquence or self-assurance. The joy in seeing one another again was non-existent.

  “I’m not taking the veil,” she said with a laugh, “but I need rest and this convent had been recommended to me and suits me. God provides us with many a pitfall after misfortune, in order to punish us,” she added.

  I saw her bedroom, just as basic as those in the gloomy furnished lodgings in the neighbourhood. The walls were covered in old nursery paper, blue with gold stars. Some lilies were soaking in the cracked washbasin. Delphine was getting dressed to go to vespers; I agreed to accompany her.

  The sash window decapitated a segment of the square streaked with telephone wires which propped up the immediate weight of a sightless sky. The oriental domes of the Alhambra, the shabby Restaurant Cavour with its dark Chianti stains on the tablecloths, cheered up the image of Sunday with their southern protestations.

  In the street she took my arm and traces soon appeared of our former camaraderie.

  “I’m glad to be here,” she said, “the English are strange creatures, with hands pitted in freckles, who cry at the sight of squirrels and sweet peas. They talk in a garrulous way like southerners without lips, are victims of their nerves and have no resistance to emotions when they happen to feel them. They are all like Miss Mabel, my governess in Tours, deferential and distracted at the same time. She had a prestigious pocket watch inside which was an elegant miniature. In the early days she believed her husband was in love with her. You never knew my husband? He looked like Michel Strogoff, in the first act, when he still has his fine uniform and all his eyelashes; like a tenor whom I had seen in Hernani. That’s why when I met him for the first time, I turned round. For two months he followed us. He wrote me letters on a paper alternately red and violet. I was thrilled. He asked to marry me. I made up my own mind to refuse. Once I was in his presence I was overcome with panic and two weeks later we were married. You know how he was killed outside Odessa, shortly afterwards. I have not forgotten him; he was
good, boisterous and mad like all Russians. Each time I was in the wrong he would weep and beg my forgiveness as he brought out his revolver. I would have been very happy with him.”

  Delphine describes to me what her widowhood has been. Like a long, fruitless vigil in which, meticulously, she tried initially to detect signs of hope in herself.

  “Leaving me alone and keeping me company,” she would say, “are the two worst favours anyone can do for me.”

  Then, treacherously, she spent weeks in Paris in a similar state of anxiety, among different circles, in search of what she termed a system for living, or for not disappearing. She found little there apart from brief reprieves, in which her time was divided among creatures without radiance, bereft of any intelligence or atrophied by a hideous pursuit of pleasure. She refused their mediation.

  I certainly recognised the same bravery as before in Delphine, but I perceived a lesser degree of resistance and, with every word, more vehement oscillations. I am no longer much accustomed to young women of my age, having paid only brief visits to France for exams in the course of recent years. Are they all like Delphine? The elder ones had always struck me as abysses of devotion, some dedicated to their duties, those who preferred pleasure imposing on themselves responsibilities no less onerous; all of them ultimately mindful of obligations, loving life and not in the least rebellious against the obstacles it offered them. Delphine, on the other hand, does not parade her selfishness as a disgrace; she treats it as a highly intelligent lesson, as a precise and respected concept that nonetheless exhausts her. She acknowledges her hard-heartedness, which is not the same as it was six years ago, but which was probably being primed then, with such independence that I refrain from thinking badly of her. I reckon that far from finding reasons for persevering, Delphine is waiting impatiently to destroy herself, which lends her a tolerable and fleeting grandeur.