Paul Morand - Tender Shoots

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.”