Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

La Planche à plonger was by Jean Alavoine, a dashing young playwright who, with his lively dovetailing of situations, his use of effects that had not been attempted before and a few very well-plotted scenes, had made many of those who produced plays for Paris audiences seem outmoded.

“I was very keen on seeing the first act,” said Pierre. “I know Alavoine, he gets straight to the point.”

This was true of the author’s early work, two-act plays staged in an avant-garde theatre where the director, a saintly man, awaited the takings before he could go and eat. But success had come in the past two years and Alavoine now did as his colleagues did: he took his time, did not fritter away his small amount of capital, and stretched out a sketch into a three-act play.

“It’s amazing, we can’t endure expository scenes any more,” Pierre sighed. “The audiences have been primed by film, they have guessed from the third line what they won’t be told until three-quarters of an hour later and, as with German grammar, they get bored waiting for the verb.”

“I’m not bored. I’m just happy sitting beside you.”

Only the stage set looked new. It depicted a camping site in the mountains. But the dialogue, although brilliantly syncopated in the way a tennis championship is, was that of a scribbler.

From the beginning of the second act, the author, having said all he had to say, had turned to the director and given him the task of spinning things out. During a ball, the young male lead is reminded of his former lovers: through a brilliant innovation, the various women he had favoured appear, just as he is naming them, and they descend a staircase, each wearing a mask and hat of the period. In order to fill out this meagre curtain-raiser-cum-fairy tale, a certain number of characters walk to and fro bearing Chinese lanterns.

“This is really intolerable!” moaned Pierre.

This time he did not dare say: “Suppose we went somewhere else?”, but he thought it nonetheless.

“I’m enjoying myself,” said Hedwige.

“And to think that Aeschylus is so short!”

“Would you like a sweet?” said Hedwige affectionately, offering him one.

“The Oresteia fits into the hollow of your hand.”

“Suck it. Don’t crunch it!”

“Have you ever timed Agamemnon ? Barely half an hour’s reading! What takes up time in Greek theatre is the chorus with its bear-dancing, three steps to the right, three steps to the left. As for the rest, Fate has no sooner been mentioned than it has knocked already and all those famous murderers are already lying rigid without having bothered to justify themselves. Are you really sure that there’s no fourth act at least?”

Pierre held on until the middle of the last act. But then things began to take a turn for the worse. In Alavoine’s play, an irresolute Fate was unable to bring down its quarry. And yet he wasn’t being asked to make his characters die, merely to make them live.

Pierre suddenly got to his feet, for the image of his warm house, his inviting bed, his pyjamas with their arms laid out in a fan and Hedwige’s pink nightdress, its glint of gold lace rolled out on a fur rug and made to look pinker still by the embers of the fire, had suddenly affected him like a finger on a trigger. He pushed open the door of the box, grabbed Hedwige by the arm and gulped in what little fresh air there was in the narrow corridor.

“Hadn’t you promised to stay until the end?”

“I made a mistake, that’s all.”

They went home. Pierre started to get undressed on the stairs. Firstly, his waistcoat; secondly, his tie; thirdly, his braces. When he reached their door, he was holding his clothes miraculously in his hand. And while Hedwige was turning the key in the lock, he took the opportunity to unlace his shoes.

“I’m getting into your bed to warm it,” he said.

He was under the blanket before Hedwige had removed her hat. He watched her making her preparations for bed: a large bag of cotton wool, cream for taking off make-up, skin lotion, tissues, large combs, looking glasses etc. (And she wasn’t concerned about her appearance!) Noises of cupboard drawers, of running or gushing water.

It was the hour when the buses run less frequently, when the métro amplifies its underground noise by a few seconds, when those who are on their own are mistaken for couples because of the echo in the reverberating streets and the shadows on the walls, when the night belongs to elderly journalists, and to all women, the women who make scenes and the women who are kind and gentle.

While she was tossing pads of cotton wool stained pink by make-up into the waste-paper basket, Hedwige was glancing behind her in the looking glass, like a driver watching the car that is about to overtake him in his rear-view mirror. She had realized that this was the night. She had guessed from a very slight hint of hoarseness in Pierre’s voice that he was hungry for her. He was taking up more space, talking far less and gradually settling into the thick wool of the mattress which, in spite of the padding, had adapted to her shape. All she could see was his black hair. The only sign on earth of this world of unsatisfied impulses that he typified was a lock of hair. This restless, over-excitable and intrepid man now lay as stock-still as a post. It was both touching and worrying. Pierre had often romped about on Hedwige’s bed in the morning and the evening. He had occasionally slipped beneath her eiderdown, but he had never got into her bed. He had never remained there as he was doing now. Was he one of those who like to be tucked in or someone who moves around in the night and pulls up the covers in the morning? She was going to discover all about him, to be able to explain him in straightforward language, to keep him in an enclosed field of linen from which he could not shy away again; she was going to find out whether her seductive powers would cause him to lie still or make him move about; she was going to get to the core of his secret, to discover finally whether Pierre’s haste was generated by muscles or just nerves, by strength or weakness.

So intense was her curiosity that she felt none of that sweet shame experienced by girls who have never slept with a man.

THE BOISROSÉ FAMILY’S wounds healed slowly, and they all maintained a silence about their amputation. Hedwige’s marriage which, after all, was natural, even honourable and certainly desirable so long as it was merely a marriage of convenience, became, from the moment it took on the appearance of a love match, an object of scandal, a notion all the more obsessive the more firmly it was swept aside. Contrary to the laws of perspective, Hedwige grew taller once she moved away. No one dared talk about her, at least not “plainly”, because they did not refrain from speaking in that sort of coded language that families use without danger of conflict to control their most explosive secrets.

The happiness that a loved one discovers when he or she has left us, after previously having experienced it with us alone, is not merely immoral, but humiliating too, because it forces us to reach difficult conclusions about ourselves and to make admissions of suspicion and distress. Shame is not always the awareness of the harm we do, it is often the awareness of the harm done to us. The Boisrosés felt ashamed because of Hedwige, and even more so in her presence than when away from her, for Hedwige frequently came to Saint-Germain, even though Bonne claimed that “we never see her”. (For Bonne, there was never a halfway point between all and nothing, and if she had not spent twenty-four hours with her head on her mother’s knees then she had not come at all.) And yet she suffered less from Hedwige’s disloyalty than her daughters did because, being more experienced than them and being endowed with a more dependable sixth sense, she had no doubt that the lost sheep would return. For Fromentine and Angélique, the absence of Hedwige was a disaster; their grief was heightened by a sense of impoverishment; in addition to their individual beauty the three sisters had a kind of beauty in togetherness. Like an ancient cellar full of liqueurs in which a clumsy servant had broken one of the three carafes, like a triptych in which one of the three sections had vanished, they were left incomplete and depreciated, having lost ninety per cent of their value.