Paul Morand - Tender Shoots

“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 another.”

“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.”

“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

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.