Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

“I actually needed Hedwige this evening, I particularly needed her.”

Pierre was quivering with nervousness and disappointment. A woman being late is nothing very much, but as the noises grew more muffled in the fine mist, as the busy elevator came down again empty, a feeling of failure descended on him. All the tortures that are used metaphorically to describe waiting — the mouth in the water, thorns, the grill or burning coals — seemed very minor compared to what he was going through.

Pierre did not normally telephone Saint-Germain often, because it was very complicated to call and make the Boisrosés come down to the dairy. He resigned himself to doing so, however, because the dairy closed at eight o’clock. Fromentine came on the line.

“Is Hedwige with you?”

“Yes, dear Pierre. I was just about to call and tell you.”

“Will she be at Saint-Germain for long? Why hasn’t she come home?”

“She’s in bed.”

“In bed? Is she ill?”

“No.”

“Then, what’s the point?”

“She’s lying down and she’s resting.”

“If anyone goes to bed at seven in the evening, they must be ill.”

“Not in our house.”

“In my house you do,” retorted Pierre curtly.

“But haven’t you seen how she looks? You make her do too much.”

“Very well. I’m leaving straight away for Saint-Germain.”

“I’m telling you, she’s not ill. Leave her with us for one night. What difference can it make to you, dear Pierre? It would make us so happy.”

“I need her, and particularly today.”

“Listen… be reasonable… forcing her to get dressed, making her go out into the night… what time would she arrive? The road’s bad, as you well know.”

Pierre imagined Hedwige lost in the fog, with a flat tyre, unable to lift up the spare wheel herself. There were two places on her route that he dreaded: the crossroads at Louveciennes and the last bend on the hill at Saint-Germain. Fromentine was still droning on, affectionate, insistent, slightly mocking:

“Do us this little favour, my dear restless, ever-frothy brother-in-law! Tomorrow, at first light, Hedwige will be back with you.”

“She has leave until nine o’clock in the morning, then! No later,” replied Pierre who, in a hoarse voice that he tried to make softer, did his best to sound like a decent, forgiving fellow.

He hung up in a fury, turned round and saw the empty studio flat, vacated for the entire night. It is ghastly when you were counting on someone not even to have the expectation to keep you company.

He wanted to have supper, but found only a solitary egg at the back of an empty cupboard, like a diplodocus’s egg in the Gobi desert; he also found an apple, deader than a still life.

“She’s not coming back… it must be my fault if she’s not coming back. Am I horrid? Am I boring? The fact is that she doesn’t love me as I love her. Why? I’ve been aware for some time that things haven’t been going well, but why?”

Truth to tell, he had not felt anything of the sort until then, but when one is in a poor state of mind it is hard to believe that it has only just occurred and so you pretend you have been in that state for a long time.

Pierre, who lived in the future as a fish takes to water, found it hard to think back on time that had passed. Weary of searching, he resorted to another pastime and opened his Manual of American Archaeology at the chapter on Columbian silver vases. To no avail. He always started analysing his marital relationship again.

“I wonder whether, at the start of my relationship with Hedwige, I may not have made a wrong move. I thought I was being clever disguising myself as someone else, I mean as someone who was a slow mover. Whereas Hedwige was expecting me — the me , as I am; the ‘no sooner said than done’ man — and she didn’t find me.”

On each of the seven floors, the lift had brought back seven husbands to their seven wives, and now it was over. There was no longer the same noise in the building any more. Occasionally, a water pipe vibrated due to air pressure. The concierge had brought up the post. The maids had taken the dogs down to the pavement. Nothing more would happen until the distant hour when the milkman and the dustbins arrived. There would just be Pierre consulting his Archaeology . Through the wisps of smoke from all the cigarettes consumed, Pierre caught sight of his bed, the bed of a solitary man. This reminded him of his fiery, unpredictable life as a bachelor when he only went out when love summoned him. Out of habit, he got into bed, with nothing else to look at apart from the ceiling, which showed patches of damp. Above the ceiling was the terrace, with the summer garden. Every time they watered the flower beds in this garden, the water ran through the cement and also watered the furniture in his bedroom. So much for modern comfort.

“Hedwige must be having great fun right now with her mother and her sisters. This boarding-school atmosphere is ridiculous. They whisper secrets to each other from one bed to the other. What can they be talking about? What secrets? Are they at my expense? No, Hedwige probably isn’t having great fun: for her to leave me alone here, it must be something important. Let’s see: could I have taken marriage too seriously? I don’t believe in penning people in, of course, but that doesn’t mean to say I condone pick-pocketing when it’s a matter of bringing two people together. I told myself marriage was not a game, but a difficult and beautiful task to accomplish. Perhaps it’s not difficult; perhaps I made it so by imagining it to be so.”

Pierre waited a moment to fall asleep; the brass handles of the chest of drawers gleamed softly, the telephone stood outlined in black against the white wall as usual. The wickerwork pattern on the chair was so regular that merely looking at the cane latticework induced a drowsiness that made sleep very imminent. A slight nervous tremor kept Pierre on that gentle slope. He picked up his Beuchat: “ The plateau of Bogota was the scene of an open struggle among the caciques. At the time when Belalcazar was exploring Columbia… ” He switched off the light. Then the loneliness grew until it became intolerable. In the darkness, the suspension of time became appalling. Hedwige’s absence took on a huge importance.

“She’s had enough of me, it’s obvious. How was I not aware of it earlier?”

And Pierre, hurling his book away (he never put books down, he threw them across the room), started to delve into the problem once more.

“For after all, since I can’t be accused of hurrying or pestering Hedwige, since I wooed her stealthily… docilely, since I caused her no shock, since I approached her at the same pace she approached me and since nothing could have come between us given our perfect understanding, then it’s because I made a mistake in not hurrying her. Perhaps she was expecting to be taken straightforwardly and immediately; girls these days know very well what awaits them and that it’s not very pleasant the first time, and that it becomes more agreeable later on. It is we who persist in believing, through our foolishness, vanity and sadism, that we are going to hold in our arms shivering, terrified virgins who will get all worked up over this business.

“I must have been rather ridiculous and seemed fairly silly with my strategy of sitting there like a patient tom, night after night, in front of his pussycat! She thought me impotent, of that there can be no doubt. And my self-control must have won her over, I mean lost her.”

Pierre switched on the light again. He saw his shadow on the wall: it was a dispossessed, excommunicated shadow, a shadow embarrassed to be in the light, a shadow that would have preferred the shade. An unpleasant memory and one he always avoided came back to him and would not go away.