Inseparable Read online

  Andrée was waiting for me on the platform, wearing a pink toile dress and a straw cloche hat. But she wasn’t alone: the twins, one dressed in pink gingham, the other in blue gingham, were running toward the train, shouting: “There’s Sylvie! Hello, Sylvie!”

  With their straight hair and dark eyes, they reminded me of the little girl whose thigh had been burnt to a crisp, and who had won my heart, ten years before; except their cheeks were rounder, their expressions less insolent. Andrée smiled at me; it was a brief smile but so vivacious that she seemed glowing with good health.

  “Did you have a good journey?” she asked, holding out her hand.

  “I always do when I travel alone,” I said.

  The little girls watched us.

  “Why don’t you give her a kiss,” the blue twin asked Andrée, as if criticizing us.

  “There are people whom you love a lot but don’t kiss,” said Andrée.

  “There are people whom you kiss but don’t even like,” said the pink twin.

  “Exactly,” said Andrée. “Take Sylvie’s suitcase to the car,” she added.

  The little girls grabbed my case and skipped over to the black Citroën parked in front of the station.

  “How are things?” I asked Andrée.

  “Not good, not bad: I’ll fill you in,” said Andrée.

  She slipped in behind the wheel and I sat down next to her; the twins got into the backseat, which was full of packages. It was clear that I’d landed in the middle of an extremely regimented life. “Before picking up Sylvie, you’ll do the shopping and go and get the girls,” Madame Gallard had said. When we arrived, we’d have to unpack them all. Andrée put on her gloves and shifted gears. When I looked at her more closely, I realized she was thinner.

  “You’ve lost weight,” I said.

  “Maybe, a little.”

  “She has,” shouted one of the twins, “Mama tells her off, but she doesn’t eat a thing.”

  “She doesn’t eat a thing,” the other one repeated.

  “Don’t say such silly things,” said Andrée. “If I didn’t eat a thing, I’d be dead.”

  The car slowly began to move. The gloved hands on the steering wheel looked competent: besides, everything Andrée did, she did well.

  “Do you like to drive?”

  “I don’t like playing chauffeur all day long, but I do like driving.”

  The car continued down the road lined with locust trees, but I didn’t recognize it; the steep hill where Madame Gallard had to use the brakes, the incline where the horse took slow, heavy steps, all of it had been flattened. And we were already coming to the wide avenue. The box trees were newly trimmed. The château hadn’t changed, but borders of begonias and enormous zinnias had been planted in front of the main entrance.

  “These flowers weren’t here before,” I said.

  “No. They’re ugly,” said Andrée, “but now that we have a gardener, we have to keep him busy,” she added sarcastically.

  She took my suitcase. “Tell Mama I’ll be right there,” she said to the twins.

  I recognized the entrance hall and how it smelled like the countryside. The steps on the staircase creaked as before, but, on the landing, Andrée turned left. “You’ve been put in the twins’ room; they’ll sleep with Grandmother and me.”

  Andrée pushed open a door and put my suitcase down on the floor. “Mama claims that if we’re in the same room, we won’t sleep a wink all night.”

  “That’s a shame!” I said.

  “Yes. But at least it’s good that you’re here!” said Andrée. “I’m so happy about that!”

  “Me too.”

  “Come down as soon as you’re ready,” she said. “I have to go help Mama.”

  She closed the door. She wasn’t exaggerating when she wrote to me saying, “I don’t have a minute to myself.” Andrée never exaggerated. But she’d found the time to pick three red roses for me, her favorite flowers. I remembered something she’d written as a child: “I like roses; they are ceremonial flowers that die without fading, in a curtsy.” I opened the wardrobe to hang up my only dress; it was a pale mauve color. Inside, I found a robe, slippers, and a pretty white dress with red polka dots. On the dressing table, Andrée had set out a bar of almond soap, a bottle of cologne, and some powder, in the shade called “Rachel.” Her concern for me was touching.

  “Why isn’t she eating?” I wondered. Perhaps Madame Gallard had intercepted her letters: why should that matter? Five years had passed: was the same story about to start over again? I left my room and went down the stairs. It wouldn’t be the same story; Andrée was no longer a child. I sensed, I knew, that she loved Pascal with an undying love. I reassured myself by telling myself over and over again that Madame Gallard would find nothing to object to if they married. All in all, Pascal could be categorized as “a young man suitable in all respects.”

  A loud din of voices was coming from the living room; the idea of facing all those somewhat hostile people intimidated me: I wasn’t a child anymore either. I went into the library to wait for the dinner bell to ring. I remembered the books, the photographs, the heavy photo album with the embossed leather cover decorated in garlands and bands, like the ones used in the ceiling moldings; I unfastened the metal clasp. My eyes were drawn to the photograph of Madame Rivière de Bonneuil: at fifty, with her straight dark hair coiled around her head and her authoritarian expression, she did not resemble the sweet grandmother she’d become; she had forced her daughter to marry a man she hadn’t wanted. I turned over several pages of the photo album and looked closely at the picture of Madame Gallard as a young woman. A high-necked blouse constricted her neck, her fluffy hair sat on top of a naive face, and her mouth looked the same as Andrée’s, full and severe and unsmiling; there was something attractive about her expression. I found her again a little farther on, sitting next to a young man with a beard, and smiling at an ugly baby; the “something attractive” I’d found before in her eyes had disappeared. I closed the photo album, walked over to the French window, and opened it; a breeze was rustling through the money plant and murmuring among its delicate seed heads. The swing creaked. “She was our age,” I thought. She listened to the whispering night under the same stars and made a promise to herself: “No, I won’t marry him.” Why? He wasn’t ugly or stupid, he had a good future and many virtues. Did she love someone else? Did she have dreams for herself? Today she seemed perfectly suited to the life she’d led!

  The dinner bell rang, and I went down to the dining room. I shook a lot of hands, but no one took the time to ask anything about me, and I was quickly forgotten. Throughout the whole meal, Charles and Henri Rivière de Bonneuil loudly defended L’action française and the newspaper’s stance against the pope, whom Monsieur Gallard supported. Andrée looked annoyed. As for Madame Gallard, she was obviously thinking of other things; I tried in vain to find a trace of the young woman from the photo album on her washed-out face. “Yet she has memories,” I thought. “What kind? And what does she make of them?”

  After dinner, the men played bridge and the women got back to their crafts. That year, paper hats were all the rage: thick paper was cut into thin strips that were dampened to make them more flexible; they were then tightly interwoven and coated all over with a kind of varnish. Under the admiring gaze of the Santenay ladies, Andrée was making something green.

  “Will that be a cloche hat?” I asked.

  “No, a big wide-brimmed hat,” she said with a knowing smile.

  Agnès Santenay asked her to play the violin, but Andrée refused. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to speak to her at all that evening, so I went up to bed early. I didn’t see her alone for a single minute during the days that followed. In the morning, she did chores in the house; in the afternoon, all the youngsters piled into Monsieur Gallard’s and Charles’s cars to play tennis or go dancing at one of the châteaux in the area, or we’d be dropped off in some small village to watch a tournament of Basque pelota or
other kinds of games unique to the Landes region.* Andrée laughed when she was supposed to. But I noticed that she was, in fact, eating hardly anything at all.

  One night, I woke up when I heard someone opening the door to my bedroom.

  “Sylvie, are you asleep?”

  Andrée came over to my bed; she was barefoot and wrapped in a fleece robe.

  “What time is it?”

  “One o’clock. If you’re not too sleepy, let’s go downstairs; it will be easier to talk down there. People might hear us up here.”

  I slipped on my bathrobe and we went downstairs, avoiding the steps that creaked. Andrée went into the library and switched on a lamp.

  “Every other night, I never managed to get out of bed without waking Grandmother up. It’s unbelievable what light sleepers old people are.”

  “I’ve been dying to talk to you,” I said.

  “Me too!” Andrée sighed. “It’s been this hard since the beginning of the summer. I’ve had such bad luck: I so wanted everyone to leave me the hell alone this year!”

  “Does your mother suspect anything yet?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately!” said Andrée. “She finally noticed the envelopes with a man’s handwriting. Last week she questioned me about it.” She shrugged. “In any case, I was going to have to talk to her about him one day or another.”

  “Well? What did she say?”

  “I told her everything,” said Andrée. “She didn’t ask to see Pascal’s letters, and I wouldn’t have shown them to her; but I did tell her everything. She didn’t forbid me from continuing to write to him. She said she needed some time to think it over.”

  Andrée glanced around the room, as if trying to find something to help her; the austere-looking books and portraits of her ancestors were not the kinds of things to reassure her.

  “Did she seem very annoyed? When will you know what she’s decided?”

  “I have no idea,” said Andrée. “She didn’t comment, just asked questions. Then said rather dryly, ‘I have to think it over.’”

  “There’s no reason at all for her to object to Pascal,” I said heatedly. “Even from her point of view, it’s not a bad match.”

  “I don’t know. In our social circle, marriages don’t happen like this,” said Andrée. “A love match is suspicious,” she added bitterly.

  “Still, they won’t prevent you from marrying Pascal simply because you love him!”

  “I don’t know,” Andrée said again, sounding vague. She glanced quickly at me, then looked away. “I don’t even know if Pascal thinks about marrying me,” she said.

  “Come on now! He hasn’t talked to you about marriage because it goes without saying. To Pascal, loving you and wanting to marry you are the same thing,” I said.

  “He never told me he loves me,” said Andrée.

  “I know. But recently, in Paris, you were sure he does,” I said. “And you were quite right: it was completely obvious.”

  Andrée started fiddling with the medals on her necklace; she remained silent for a moment.

  “In my first letter, I told Pascal that I loved him. Maybe I was wrong, but I don’t know how to explain it to you: keeping silent seemed like a lie in a letter.”

  I nodded; Andrée had always been incapable of deception.

  “He replied with a very beautiful letter,” said Andrée. “But he said he didn’t feel he had the right to use the word ‘love.’ He explained that in his worldly life as in his religious life, he had never had any certainty: he needs to test his feelings.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Pascal always reproached me for deciding what my opinions were instead of putting them to the test: that’s how he is! He needs to take his time. But his experiment will quickly be conclusive.”

  I knew Pascal well enough to know he wasn’t playing games; but I hated his reticence. Andrée would have slept better, eaten more, if she’d been assured of his love.

  “Did you tell him about your conversation with Madame Gallard?”

  “Yes,” said Andrée.

  “You’ll see: as soon as he fears your relationship is in danger, he’ll be sure.”

  Andrée was biting on one of her medals.

  “I’ll wait and see,” she said, without much conviction.

  “Honestly, Andrée, do you really believe that Pascal could love another woman?”

  She hesitated. “He might realize that he does not have a vocation for marriage.”

  “You don’t imagine that he’s still thinking about becoming a priest!”

  “He might still have thought about it if he hadn’t met me,” said Andrée. “Perhaps I’m a trap put on his path to turn him away from his true calling . . .”

  I looked at Andrée and felt worried. She was a Jansenist, Pascal had said, but it was worse: she suspected God of diabolical conspiracies.

  “That’s absurd,” I said. “In a pinch, I could imagine God might tempt souls, but not deceive them.”

  Andrée shrugged. “People say you have to have faith because believing is irrational. So I end up thinking that the more irrational things seem, the more likely they are to be true.”

  We’d been talking for a while when suddenly the library door opened.

  “What are you doing in here?” asked a little voice.

  It was Dédé, the twin in pink, the one Andrée preferred.

  “Well, what about you?” said Andrée. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  Dédé walked over to us, holding up her long white nightgown.

  “Grandma woke me up when she turned on the lamp; she asked me where you were: I said I’d go and see . . .”

  Andrée stood up. “Be a good girl. I’m going to tell Grandmother that I couldn’t sleep so I came down to the library to read. Don’t say anything about Sylvie: Mama will scold me.”

  “But that’s a lie,” said Dédé.

  “I’m the one who will lie, all you have to do is say nothing; you won’t be telling a lie. When you’re big, you’re sometimes allowed to lie,” Andrée added, reassuring her.

  “It’s convenient being big,” said Dédé with a sigh.

  “Sometimes, sometimes not,” said Andrée, stroking her head.

  “How tyrannical!” I thought as I went back to my bedroom. Every one of her actions was controlled by her mother, or her grandmother, and automatically became an example to her little sisters. She couldn’t have a single thought that wasn’t accountable to God!

  “That’s the worst part,” I thought the next day, while Andrée was praying next to me on a pew where a brass nameplate had reserved it for the Rivière de Bonneuils for over a century. Madame Gallard was holding a harmonium; the twins were walking up and down the church with baskets full of consecrated bread. Andrée, her head in her hands, was talking to God: what was she saying? She couldn’t have had a simple relationship with Him. I was certain of one thing: she had not managed to convince herself that He was good, yet she didn’t want to displease Him and was trying to love Him. Things would have been simpler if she had lost her faith, like me, as soon as her faith had lost its naivete. I watched the twins. They were busy and important; at their age, religion is a very amusing game. I had waved banners and thrown rose petals before the priest dressed in gold who carried the Eucharist; I had joined the parade in my Communion dress and kissed large amethyst rings on the hands of bishops; velvety monstrances, altars in the month of the Virgin Mary, nativity scenes, displays, angels, incense, all those scents, ritualized activities, brilliant trappings—those things had been the only luxuries of my childhood. And how pleasant it all was, being in awe of so much magnificence, feeling within oneself a soul as pure and radiant as the Host at the heart of the monstrance! And then, one day, the soul and the heavens become enveloped in darkness, and you find, lodged deep within yourself, remorse, sin, fear. Even when she limited herself to considering the worldly aspects, Andrée took everything that happened around her terribly seriously. How could she not be filled with anguish whe
n she imagined her life in the mysterious light of the supernatural world? Defying her mother was perhaps her way of revolting against God Himself: but perhaps by rebelling, she was proving herself unworthy of the blessings she had received. How could she know if, by loving Pascal, she wasn’t serving Satan’s schemes? At every instant, blessed eternity was in play, and no clear sign was given to indicate if you were about to achieve it or lose it! Pascal had helped Andrée overcome those terrors. But our conversation that night had shown me that she might easily fall back into their grip. It was certainly not at church that she found peace in her heart.

  I was depressed the whole afternoon and watched gloomily as the cows charged at terrified young men. For the next three days, all the women in the house were continually busy in the cellars; I even shelled peas and took the pits out of plums. Every year, all the wealthy landowners in the area got together on the banks of the Adour River to picnic on cold food; this innocent feast demanded time-consuming preparations. “Every family wants to outdo all the others and, every year, do better than the last,” Andrée told me. The morning of the feast, they filled a rented van with two baskets stuffed with food and dishes; the youngsters piled into whatever space was left; the older ones and the engaged couples followed in cars. I’d put on the red polka-dot dress Andrée had loaned me; she was wearing a raw silk dress with a green belt that matched her big hat, which you could hardly tell was made of paper.

  Blue water, old oak trees, thick grass; we would lie down in the grass, eat a sandwich, talk until evening: an afternoon of perfect happiness, I told myself gloomily as I helped Andrée unpack the baskets and hampers. What a fuss! We had to put up the tables, spread out the tablecloths in the right places, set out the food. Other cars arrived: two brand-new, shiny cars; a few antique jalopies, and even a carriage with two horses. The young people immediately started to pull out the dishes. The elderly ones sat down on tree trunks covered with tarpaulins or on folding chairs. Andrée greeted them with smiles and curtsies: she was particularly liked by the middle-aged men, with whom she spoke for a long time. In between, she took over from Malou and Guite, who were turning the handle of a complicated piece of equipment that had been filled with cream; they were trying to make ice cream. I helped them too.