Aimez-vous Brahms by Françoise Sagan Read Free Book Online Page A

dreadful driving back on Sundays . . . But at least the motorway is quick, even when it's crowded ..."
    Had he not changed his tone, she would doubtless not have noticed it. She would have immediately imagined—thanks to an unconscious mental reflex, that terrible, self-protective reflex which had grown so over the past two years—she would have imagined a wonderful, brand new motorway to Lille. But he had broken off, she had not looked at him, and it had been left to her, fifteen seconds later, to steer their talk back on to its unruffled path. Their dinner had ended on the same note, but it seemed to Paule that the tiredness and dejection she felt, far more than any jealousy or curiosity, would never leave her. Across the table his face was taut: that loved, familiar face, scanning hers to discover whether she had realised, scanning it for signs of suffering, as though they would cause him intolerable pain. At this she thought: isn't it enough for him to make me suffer; does he have to care about it? And it seemed to her that she would never be able to rise from her chair and cross the restaurant with the ease and grace which he expected of her, or even to bid him au revoir at her doorstep. She would have loved to behave differently: she would have loved to insult him, to fling her glass at him, to forget herself, forget everything that made her seem fine and upstanding, everything that distinguished her from the pack of sluts he went around with. She would have loved to be one of them. He had told her often enough how little they meant to him, that he was like that and had no wish to hide it from her. Yes, he had been honest. But she wondered whether honesty, the only honesty possible in this inextricable life, did not consist in loving someone enough to make her happy. Even if it meant being less self- indulgent.
    Simon's letter still lay on the carpet and she trod on it getting out of bed. She picked it up and read it again. Then she opened the drawer of her desk, took out pen and paper, and replied.
    * * *
    Simon had hung back in the drawing-room, not wishing to mingle with the crowd congratulating the Grand Maître on the outcome of the case. The house was cold and dismal. There had been a frost in the night and the window revealed a captive landscape, two bare trees and a moribund lawn where a pair of rattan seats were quietly rotting, sacrificed to autumn by a neglectful gardener. Simon was reading an English book, a strange story about a woman who turned into a fox, and from time to time he laughed aloud. But his legs would not keep still; he crossed them, then uncrossed them, and gradually his feeling of malaise came between him and the book until finally he rose, set the book down and went out.
    He walked as far as a small pond at the foot of the garden, inhaling the smell of coldness and the smell of evening, to which was added the more distant smell of burning leaves: he could barely distinguish the smoke behind a hedge. He liked this final smell more than anything and momentarily halted and closed his eyes, so that he could really take it in. Occasionally a bird would give a small, graceless cry, and the perfect unity and cohesion of its yearnings dimly consoled him in his own. He bent over the murky water, plunged his hand in and stared at his lean fingers to which the water gave the appearance of sloping almost perpendicularly from the palm. He did not move, but closed his hand in the water, slowly, as though to capture some mysterious fish. He had not seen Paule in seven days now, seven and a half days. She must have received his letter, given a slight shrug and hidden it so that Roger should not find it and make fun of him. For she was kind, as he well knew. She was kind and affectionate and unhappy, and he needed her. But how was he to let her know? He had already tried, one evening in this sinister house, tried to think of her so long and so intensely that he would get through to her in her far-off