Tender Shoots Read online

  By way of colonial offices shaped like waxen fruits, we reach Westminster Cathedral, which is some way away from the frenetic traffic that connects Victoria Station to the Thames; there I recognised the sanctuary of the new Catholic faith that had reached out over Anglican lawns at the end of the last century. The great British cardinals, Manning and Vaughan, demanded this testimony of piety and good taste, thanks to which prayer would be possible in a modern building. One could indeed rejoice at the sight of these honest, bare basilica walls, all in brick, although Delphine anxiously pointed out a darker line half way up, marking the imminent floodtide of a covering of all too precious marble beneath it, and modern mosaics above.

  In front of the sanctuary, framed obliquely in the beams of a pale and fragmented sunlight, a gigantic Byzantine cross blocked the apse. A darkness, in which incense mingled with the fog from outside, shrouded the domes punctured by timorous windows. In spite of the array of chandeliers that resembled oriental headdresses, formed of layers of iron rings from which hung lights on chains, the cathedral was a massive monument and a public utility, like a Roman aqueduct or a railway station. Vespers was being said in the chapel of the Holy Sacrament; the organ was concocting great architectures of sound. On the other side of the brass railings some of the faithful were immersed in contemplation, two nurses, a City man kneeling in front of his top hat, a Chelsea pensioner in red uniform, an Indian Army officer in a turban; three priests were officiating on the altar. Her face in her hands, Delphine was silent. Then she turned to me, an equivocal look in her eyes, and gripped my arm.

  “Why am I such a bad person?” she said. “Why do I like everything that’s bad?”

  Having revealed her thoughts to me in this way, she then smiled.

  “You are a very small someone to whom I can’t explain anything.”

  She led me over to the side chapels where the same propensity towards an art anxious to avoid pomp and archaism was manifest. We passed St Patrick’s chapel, with its covering of Irish marble and the reredos encrusted in mother-of-pearl shamrocks. All the stones of the world, from Numidia, from Thessaly, from Norway, were beginning to pave the church in mercantile luxury. A black-and-white altar, reminiscent of an actress’s bathroom, the fruit of donations from great transatlantic banks, appeared to be reserved for South American devotions. A woman was kneeling on the first step, wrapped in a homespun cape with large pleats that resembled both a monk’s habit and a raglan coat. I leant forwards and saw, beneath a hood, a little girl’s face with make-up on, swathed in curly grey hair. Her forefinger, encumbered with a large emerald cabochon, was telling the beads of a rosary. I was about to draw Delphine’s attention to this Castilian visitor from the time of the Incas, when the lady turned round, and, recognising my friend, greeted her with three hurried and breathless words, uttered in a contralto voice.

  Thus did I make the acquaintance of Pepita Warford, an Englishwoman of Cuban extraction, patroness of the convent where Delphine resided. She came up to us, kissed her, spoke to us about the Holy Virgin, about the breeding of marmosets and the advantages of nocturnal life. Delphine laughed, affectionate and excited.

  Despite my lack of concentration, I could not but take note of this unusual episode. The moment I set eyes on Mrs Warford, feelings of unimaginable hostility welled up in me, far less resoluble than the spontaneously aroused antipathy we may feel for all those called upon to play a part in the lives of our friends. She had the effect on me that a deceptive vegetable might have that you suddenly discovered was enveloping you. Her piety had the air of culpable ingenuity and when she chirped invective or praise in any language, one was also reminded of a worn-out nightingale.

  I was on the point of dissuading Delphine from allowing herself to be destroyed by such relationships. I sensed that they could lead her, via holy paths, towards some disturbing abnegations. Then, I reflected, while Mrs Warford withdrew into prayer once more, that harm never comes to anyone and that to misuse things is an essential condition for mastering them later on. Besides, danger is worth the price you pay for it. So I controlled my ill-humour and did not allow myself any display of harsh wisdom, fearing that I would incur on the part of my friend a degree of anger which I hoped, for her greater good, would soon be turned against herself.

  I resumed my studies at the University. I did not belong to any club and I played no games. Adulterated champagne, dry cigars, and the cost they incurred had distanced me from the cliques where Russian princes and the sons of Australians and German landowners set the tone. No less did I fear the bookish brains from Balliol, the Yankees from St John’s and the would-be scholars from Worcester or Wadham.

  I received some letters from Delphine. They exhibited a poignant desire to have fun. Whether sorrowful or cheery, they brought with them from London a strange flavour of recalcitrance, that touch of precision and premeditated boldness that is peculiar to the French and can seem like excessive politeness. I enjoyed rereading them while working in the Bodleian Library, a sort of barn in which the six centuries-old beams, like the sound post of a violin, registered the slightest noise, while on shelves resembling a fruiterers’ displays, fragrant manuscripts lay drying.

  One Sunday evening, as I was leaving my rooms to go and dine, I came across Fraser, a fellow of All Souls, whose poet’s vanity led him fairly frequently to Chelsea on a Saturday evening. He took me to dine at his college’s high table, and, while a Master, violet-veined from the second course onwards, having lined up in front of him wines in cut-glass decanters, passed the port around the table, I learnt that Fraser had made Delphine’s acquaintance in London the previous evening.

  “She entered,” he said pompously, selecting affected words from that outmoded 1880 vocabulary that is no longer used except in university circles, “a public dance hall in the low district of Hammersmith. There is exceptional jazz there and for sixpence you can hire your male or female dancing partner. She appeared hung in black crêpe like a humorous catafalque, as if grieving in repentance, an Anactoria bearing the languor of each waltz like a new sin, flanked on one side by my friend Father W … (he mentioned the name of a Jesuit who had made a name for himself as a comic preacher) and on the other by a strange elderly Spanish child who enveloped her ill-defined features in a panther skin.

  “She asked me whether I knew you and we talked about you. After the dance we all went to have breakfast at her home. We really did have a very good time, but she followed us with a sort of sinister pleasure, her eyes aflame and her mouth ashen. Her bruised and precocious heart appealed to me.

  “‘Heart bruised with loss and eaten through with shame.’ One day I’ll read to you what I have written about that.”

  And so Delphine, in a few weeks, had gone from the prayer stool to noisy revelry. I was not in the least irritated. Besides, I could not impose my own prejudices to the point of picking a quarrel with her. I did not yet know how quickly certain things are possible in London which Paris will always be unaware of as long as people live there side by side, divided by disdain or fear of the unusual. London is a furtive hermitage which those who have experienced it find hard to relinquish. The streets alone are filled with throngs, with cries, with advertising, with snobbishness, with commercial or sporting feats; they do not encroach upon the sweet open spaces where pleasure seems less perishable than elsewhere. And thus, I explained to myself, Delphine had moved from despair to pastimes that appeared to be going from bad to worse. “What will happen to this childhood friend?” I kept asking myself, without being able to create anything other than a false bond, as superficial as a relationship. “Why am I such a bad person?” I thought again of these words of Delphine’s as being the confession of a creature overwhelmed by mere consequences and who is unaware of the origins of the dispute in which she is the unreliable wager. Her childish despotism, that discipline she instigated around her, her revulsion for everything that was easy and likely to become a pleasure, could these be explained by the fear she had of herself ?
<
br />   “I don’t feel well,” she wrote to me; “the moment I’m no longer having fun, I fret to the point of fury. I waste my energy to such a degree that I’ll soon have to think of writing nothing but death announcements. But who is there to say goodbye to? A funerary summer mist and the whole city heated like an oven plate and my ignominy and your disapproval which I sense, is that spleen or what the Abbé Prévost called the ‘English vapours’? The sun looks as if it is shining through smoked glass, my food tastes of phenol, I can’t sleep any more, and only at night do I find brief moments of coolness, in the parks, or thanks to the powder, well mixed with borax alas, from a little pharmacy in the Commercial Road …”

  June had come. The university students, dressed in white flannel, were devouring a false summer consisting of icy sunshine, unkempt greenery and too much water. Doctors in mortarboards passed by along the river, preceded by a boat with a brass band on board. Families, hailing from surrounding areas, on coaches, offered each other sugar from one top deck to another; drapery shop assistants brought out end-of-the-year dress suits and did their best not to feather their oars, not to bump their boats, to show good manners and to call each other “Mister”.

  At the sight of their sons, the war-profiteers took their revenge on a back-shop childhood and came down from the north in nickel-plated cars with the face of a footman in each headlight. Worn out by provinces that had their fill, the actor Benson arrived with his Shakespearean troupe, his wretched watery scenery, his torn and wobbling fortresses, and we endured thirty-five acts in one week, by subscription. The sides of the roads were adorned with picnics, with irises, with injured motorcycles. The countryside had become a green desert in which peasants in jackets and bowler hats paraded. No hollow, limed apple tree could avoid bending over the cloud-dappled water, the wake of a boat and the smell of a spirit lamp; the hay-fever of phonographs broke out from among the reeds, restoring to nature the poetry which, in order to succeed, they had borrowed from her. A full liquid fair now held court until the end of the summer term, ushering in as at the finish of a race, with encouraging cries, amid a noise of rattles, fire-crackers, rag-time and a smell of insipid lemonade and cut-price tea, the end of the academic year.

  There was a nocturnal fête over Mesopotamia. The college jetties formed brightly lit shapes, half of which vibrated. Corks popped into the river, rockets became tangled in aqueducts, Bengal lights diffused a creamy layer striated by the water. Alone, I drove my canoe and its cushions damp with dew towards the locks. Searchlights streamed directly over the warm obscurity of the layers of electricity ensnaring Islington church where black ivy and boats that sang drooled. One of them appeared, as though through a suddenly opened door, in the path of the beam. I remained in the darkness, alongside it, and I recognised Delphine, all white, the jet of light full in her face, who was smoking. She seemed drunk and appeared to be gently drifting away. Mrs Warford was also at the bottom of the boat, from where her grey, frizzy hair, which enabled me to recognise her, emerged. In the bow, his feet above the water, playing the banjo, perched an individual of doubtful aspect whom I took for an Italian Yankee. Between his gorilla-like jaws, he held a lighted Chinese lantern, which illuminated from below a Charlie Chaplin moustache and two black nostrils. The night engulfed them again all of a sudden. I saw Delphine throw overboard a lighted cigarette which sputtered.

  I was confused and troubled as though I had been done a wrong. Not because I had, with my own eyes, glimpsed in Delphine this new persona that I had foreseen, defiled and prey to deformed people, but because she had concealed her presence from me in a place where I considered myself to be at home. Shortly afterwards, I received a letter from her that did not mention she had left London. My friendship regarded this as a deception, then, reckoning that she may no longer be free, became alarmed. I felt sorry to see a once perfect creature surrendering herself to this abandon, ready to rejoin the sinister herd of lone women, sustained by affairs, one of those whom a vague but imperious calling distances both from the love of self which rescues beautiful women and from the natural attachments which satisfy the others.

  It was the very displeasure that this incident caused me, or the interest I suddenly took, despite my mood, in Delphine that led me one month later, at the end of the academic year, to the Ebury Street studio whose address Fraser had given me.

  It was reached through a disused cemetery beneath whose lush grass, inert, large Anglo-Saxon skeletons, not deformed by death, continued to live. Outside the garages, the cars being washed filled with freshness a street already lightened by its curtains, its brasses, its red doors, its mirror and ‘panorama-ball’ merchants, and its glazed paper manufacturers. In the windows of estate agents, photographs eroded by the light provided rustic scenes of bungalows, of bushy trees, of spacious lawns.

  I had to knock a long time, even though noise could be heard behind the door. Then Delphine’s voice. There was a jingle of keys and chains and the door half-opened onto a pale, puffy face, in which the nose was prominent; the eyelids seemed too short for the eyes. I was so taken aback, that a friendly joke about the way she bolted herself in like an octogenarian failed to pass my lips.

  “So, it’s you,” she said, looking at me without surprise.

  Passively, she let me come in.

  More than anything else, her expression had changed. Set in a look of fearful stupor, it only came to life to quiver beneath my gaze, refusing to meet it and take it to the core of a heart that one assumed was rotten like a fruit. Following Delphine, I made my way into the studio where a livid light completely divested a woman with greasy, discoloured, almost tomato-red hair, with a bent back, enveloped in shantung, with stockings half pulled up and old slippers. Her rolled up sleeve revealed an arm scattered with pink, blue or black patches. She anticipated my reproaches.

  “I’ve been very ill. I had boils, and then I was blind for twenty-four hours last week. They’re hatching plots against me …”

  Delphine looks at herself in the mirror, pulls at her cheeks, rubs her forehead.

  “I look like an ecchymosis towards the fourth day.”

  “In the old days you always refused to be a victim.”

  “I can no longer remember the old days, it’s funny, for some time now I’ve completely lost my memory.”

  Her sentences faltered. She could see in my eyes that I clearly thought her mad. Pulling herself together, she made an effort to choose her words.

  “It’s a strange thing,” she said, “to be in a milieu. You don’t know how it starts, although afterwards, you have the impression that it was planned beforehand, through mysterious forces. You’re taken somewhere, you come back the next day and it’s a magic circle that snaps shut. You live in the intimacy of people you don’t know and whom you would never have chosen. It’s a time when you have a great deal of fun, when companionship, a general good mood, the exchange of life forces, turn the group into a useful entity for which you gradually neglect, on a variety of pretexts, everything that is not a part of it. Then, cracks appear. The less good elements seem naturally to gain the upper hand. You are bound together by repulsion, by enmities, not to mention affection. In the end, you want, if not to withdraw, then at least to put some space between yourself and the others. There isn’t time. A contact is born, absolute, tacit. You want to fight on your own, to travel, to enjoy yourself; but the group is there, watching; by way of injunctions, circumstances, it finds you again, waits for you at home, recaptures you; everything outside of it seems unacceptable, out of reach. You don’t communicate any more except among the initiated, through strange words which are a language. All of this would still be nothing if one day, under the influence of dangerous or more hardened elements, which one imagines stem from other groups that are now dispersed, you did not arrive at a complete revision of the facts of consciousness, at a calling into question of everything, to the verge of nothingness.”

  “But who brought you to this?”

  “Like everywhere els
e, I’ve been involved with decent people and with some very bad people, the former led by the latter. And then, it’s so odd here … in Paris, there are limits. In London, you have no bearings.”

  “But what about me?” I said, moving closer to her, “Am I not here to help you?”

  She was not listening, exhausted by the effort she had made to think, to speak.

  “Come with me, Delphine, I can’t leave you like this. I’m going back to Paris tomorrow; would you like me to book you a ticket?”

  “I won’t be able to.”

  “Steel yourself.”

  “I can’t anymore.”

  She sneezed, her mucous membranes swollen, her eyelids red.

  “Leave me alone. I need neither your advice nor your criticism. I won’t tolerate that from anyone. Besides, everything you to say to me is tainted with selfishness and spite. You’d do better to let me rest. Every day, at the same time, I have a temperature. Don’t examine those bottles like that; it’s none of your business. Have you come here to spy on me? Don’t expect to make enquiries of the servants. None of them was willing to stay with me …”

  She listens.

  “Do you hear that nibbling sound? It’s the mice again; I’m infested.”

  She sees me looking incredulous.

  “I’m a sick woman, am I not? Do you take pleasure in humiliating me now that I have let myself go, that I have dyed hair, dirty nails and look coarse? It’s a steep decline, I’m well aware. You have observed the regression while taking care not to intervene; from now on I beg you not to involve yourself at all. Have you not aroused my avidity sufficiently in the past? Nowadays I obey a system of loose living; I feel at ease there. Your superior manner annoys me. Go away.”