sister, so ill matched to her own.
They would shake hands; some would hail taxis, while the rest stood around on the pavement in groups, waiting for more taxis to arrive.
‘Marie, you’ll be leaving us soon,’ said a tall young man who held on to her hand a little too long. She looked at him as he went on: ‘Do let us know whenever you come back!’
And Marie would feel other hands clasping her hands, and Denis’s arm through hers, and the weight of Claudine’sdear head on her shoulder. Already, this present seemed to be monopolising the future. She would clench her teeth to stop herself from expressing her genuine desire to be left alone. ‘Please, please, leave me …’
After a while Marie was saying no to almost all invitations and Jean went to these evenings with friends on his own. Occasionally she would go out, too, walking haphazardly through a Paris which at that time seemed to belong to her alone. She always returned home well before Jean: she would read or, almost without thinking, make various preparations for their departure, tidying drawers, making a start at packing the cases.
TIME PASSED SLOWLY ; Jean was late. Marie suffered at the thought that he was enjoying himself without her, abandoning herself to a mood that still betrayed signs of the self-absorbed nature of her love. She waited for him without doing anything else. When he finally returned she’d take his beloved, familiar face in her hands and say: ‘How you wear yourself out!’
‘Are you cross?’
‘No, of course not.’
On his way to the bedroom, Jean would call: ‘Are you coming to bed, too, Marie?’
‘No, not yet.’
And she’d stay there until the blue light of dawn came through the window. Thrown back on herself, she’d feel quite alone at the heart of a well-worn past – even thoughshe had created such fine things. Jean, Claudine: links that did not want to expire, that tightened their hold in a final struggle as others tried to replace them.
‘Please, please leave me!’ She’d have liked to shout this in all the space around her. How she longed to have neither past nor future! And yet – on the one hand there were these still burning ashes and on the other there was this new thing, this thing that did not yet have a name. Like a warm beast that moved inside her, making its nest.
ONE EVENING IN THE STUDY , sorting out some papers she wanted to take with her, she came across an old letter from herself to Claudine. She remembered having written it during a short holiday she’d spent away from her family with some friends of her father’s.
Describing her journey to the provinces she wrote: ‘I have a sudden desire for solitude. I take precautions to be alone in my compartment: I shut the door to the corridor, I pull the curtains. People try to open it, they go on trying, then I hear them say: “Let’s give up.” Oh, the joy of being alone in this train that is three-quarters full! Now, for me, life is somewhere else, at the end of this railway journey …’
She told Claudine about the days passed so far away, about her delight in discovering a town that was unknown to her: ‘It is a town that is beautiful in its huge size, beautiful for its stillness, its quiet streets, its big regular houses, its well-placed lights; in the colour of the night all is absence, absence of expectation even. A fixed calm arises from thistown that I have ended up loving dearly, loving too much even, for its still, dangerous beauty.’
Such a young letter – and yet Marie liked it because it brought back her whole adolescence: her need for solitude, for an intense life, and that special fear of loving too much. She liked its youthful, graceful awkwardness of expression. And its description of a provincial town conjured up the image of another … All these things superimposed themselves on one another in her heart, as if they were related.
She re-read those short verbless sentences, so common among the two sisters