Free The Wine of Solitude by Irène Némirovsky Page B

mouth, which was as thin and red as a trickle of blood.
    Hélène suddenly remembered Lydia Safronov’s horse-drawn carriage, which she sometimes came across on thestreets of the town where she’d been born; she pictured the stiff woman with her little serpent’s head poking out of the fur stole she wore, recalled her dark eyes and the cold way she looked at her.
    ‘Max, here? Oh, they really must be very rich,’ she thought.
    She was fascinated by how pale the young man looked; it was the first time she ’d ever seen the pale skin common to the inhabitants of St Petersburg, skin that seemed to have no blood at all, as pallid as a flower growing in a cave. He had a haughty, affected manner, a slim, delicate nose slightly curved into an eagle’s beak, wide green eyes and blond hair that was already receding towards his temples, even though he was barely twenty-four years old.
    He lightly stroked Hélène’s cheek with one finger, then pinched her upraised chin. ‘Hello, my little cousin. How old are you now?’ he asked, clearly not knowing what he should say to her and staring at her with his bright, mocking green eyes.
    He didn’t listen to the reply.
    ‘Look at how she stoops,’ he murmured. ‘You should stand up straight, my girl. When my sisters were your age they were a head taller than you and stood up as straight as an arrow.’
    ‘It’s true,’ cried Bella, annoyed, ‘just look at your posture! You should scold her, Mademoiselle Rose.’
    ‘The journey has worn her out.’
    ‘You always make excuses for her,’ said Bella, irritated.
    She slapped Hélène between her slim shoulder blades as soon as they slumped. ‘You’re not making yourself look any more attractive, my poor girl. No matter how often you scoldher, she simply won’t listen. And see how sickly she looks, Max. Your sisters seem so athletic, so strong.’
    ‘It’s the English education, you know,’
Max murmured in English.
‘Cold baths and bare knees and not encouraged to feel sorry for themselves. She doesn’t look like you, Bella.’
    ‘How’s Papa?’
asked Hélène.
    ‘Well, Papa is fine; he came home very late, so you’ll see him before you go to bed; he’s very busy.’
    They said no more. Hélène stood as stiff and straight as if she were in a parade, not daring to leave or sit down.
    ‘All right, then,’ Bella finally whispered, sounding weary and annoyed. ‘Don’t just stand there staring at me with your mouth hanging open. Go to your room; go and see your bedroom …’
    Hélène went out, wondering with anguish what this stranger would bring her, happiness or misery, for she knew very well that from that moment on he would be the true master in her life. Later on, when she had grown up and remembered the way her mother’s face leaned towards his, their silence, her mother’s smile, everything she had noticed, guessed, sensed in a single look, she would sometimes think, ‘It’s impossible … I was only twelve, after all. The truth is that I came to understand gradually and now I’ve convinced myself that I saw everything in a flash. I understood what was happening little by little, and not in the space of an instant. I was a child and they didn’t say anything that day; they weren’t even sitting close to each other …’ And yet whenever a colour, a sound, a scent took her back to the past, whenever she managed to remember the exact shape of Max’s face when he was young, she immediately felt her child’s soul rise up within her, as if awakened after a longsleep, whispering, passionately calling to her: ‘You also cast your childhood aside! Don’t you remember how you had the body of a young girl but a heart as old, as mature as it is today? So I clearly had good reason to feel sorry for myself: you had abandoned me, and even now you have forgotten all about me …’
    On that day, that sad day, she knew for certain they were having an affair; she had feared for herself; she had immediately