She Who Was No More by Pierre Boileau Read Free Book Online Page B

carburetor cleaned. Silly not to have thought of it. A breakdown during this drive would be no joke. About as little as an engine failure in a flight across the Atlantic! Ravinel listened to the engine. It sounded all right, but he’d better keep it under observation.
    He shut his eyes for a second. There are thoughts which bring bad luck. The airplane flying the Atlantic—he’d no business to think of a thing like that… A red light. He was overtaking a huge truck that spat out a thick cloud of fumes. The driver didn’t leave him much room to pass, but Ravinel took a chance and accelerated. When he drew out in front of the truck, he suddenly realized he was right in the glare of the other’s headlights. From his cab, the driver might be able to see into the car. Ravinel put his foot down hard, but the car didn’t leap forward as it should have done. A bit of dirt in the feed line? It certainly seemed like it.
    Lucienne was quite unconscious of it all. She was dozing. In any case she never did react to the things that worried him. Strange how little feminine she was. Even when they made love… How had she ever become his mistress? Which of them had really chosen the other? At first she had taken no noticeof him, behaved almost as if he wasn’t there. She had seemed only interested in Mireille and she had treated her more like a friend than a patient. They were the same age, those two.
    Had she sensed that their marriage stood on shaky foundations? Had she suddenly fallen for him? What had she found in him? He knew he wasn’t much to look at. Nor was he amusing. As a lover, he was no more than mediocre.
    On his side, he would never have dared touch her. She belonged to another world, refined, distinguished, cultured, the world which his father, the little black-coated provincial schoolmaster, had eyed from afar, with the respect of the poor. At first Ravinel had thought it no more than a woman’s caprice. A strange caprice. Brief, hasty intercourse, sometimes on a consultation room couch, within a yard of an enameled trolley on which stainless-steel instruments were laid out under a sheet of gauze. Sometimes she would take his blood pressure afterwards, as she was anxious about his heart. Anxious? No. Even that wasn’t certain by any means. For if at times she treated him as though she really minded, at others she dismissed his complaints quite casually, just brushing them aside with a smile. That was what was so maddening. She had him completely foxed. The most probable thing was…
    The most probable thing was that she’d had her eyes wide open right from the start. She had needed an accomplice, or rather a tool, perhaps, and had cast her net the moment she saw him. Love… That didn’t count. At least not what people ordinarily mean by the word. What had brought them together was not mutual attraction, but something residing in the deeper and darker recesses of the spirit. Was money the one thing that really mattered to her? No, it wasn’t money, not for its own sake,at all events. It was the power that went with it, the prestige, the right to command. She had to reign: it was an imperious necessity. And of course he had come under her sway at once.
    But that wasn’t all. There was also in Lucienne a sort of anxiety. Something so slight, so fugitive, that you could never put your finger on it. All the same, you knew it was there. The sense of insecurity that belongs to people who aren’t quite normal. Perhaps that’s what had drawn them together, for he wasn’t quite normal either, not normal in the sense others were—Larmingeat for instance. He lived like other men, he rubbed shoulders with other men, he even passed for a first-class traveler, but that was only an illusion…
    He was going up a steep hill, and the engine wouldn’t pull. No life in it at all. Certainly there was something wrong…
    What was he saying? Oh, yes—that he lived a bit to one side of things. Like an exile. He didn’t really