And say what you like, it’s not in my line to be a victim.’
Françoise returned her smile. She would have liked to advise her, but it was a difficult thing to do. What was necessary, was for Elisabeth not to be in love with Claude.
‘Putting an end to it in your own mind only won’t get you very far,’ she said. ‘I wonder if you shouldn’t compel him outright to make a choice.’
‘This isn’t the moment,’ said Elisabeth sharply. ‘No, I think that when I’ve won back my inner independence, I’ll have made great progress. But to do that, it’s essential for me to succeed in dissociating the man from the lover in Claude.’
‘Will you stop sleeping with him?’
‘I don’t know. But what I do know is that I shall sleep with other men.’ She added with a shade of defiance: ‘Sexual faithfulness is perfectly ridiculous. It leads to pure slavery. I don’t understand how you can tolerate it.’
‘I swear to you that I don’t feel that I’m a slave,’ said Françoise.
Elisabeth could not help confiding in someone; after which she invariably became aggressive.
‘It’s odd,’ said Elisabeth slowly, and as if she had been following a train of thought with surprised sincerity. ’The way you were at twenty, I would never have thought you would be a one-man woman. Especially as Pierre has affaires.’
‘You’ve already told me that, but I am certainly not going to put myself out,’ said Françoise.
‘Nonsense. You’re not going to tell me that it’s never happened to you to feel a desire for a man,’ said Elisabeth. ‘You’re talking like all the people who won’t admit they have prejudices. They pretend they are subject to them as a matter of personal choice. But that’s just so much nonsense.’
‘Pure sensuality does not interest me,’ said Françoise. ‘And besides, does pure sensuality even have a meaning?’
‘Why not? It’s very pleasant,’ said Elisabeth with a sneering little laugh.
Françoise rose.
‘I think we might go down. The sets must have been changed by now.’
‘You know, that young Guimiot is really charming,’ said Elisabeth as she walked out of the room. ‘He deserves more than a small part. He could be a worthwhile recruit for you. I’ll have to speak to Pierre about it.’
‘Do speak to him,’ said Françoise. She gave Elisabeth a quick smile. ‘I’ll see you later.’
The curtain was still down. Someone on the stage was hammering. Heavy footsteps shook the flooring. Françoise walked over to Xavière who was talking to Inès. Inès blushed furiously and got up.
‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ said Françoise.
‘I was just going,’ said Inès. She shook hands with Xavière. ‘When am I going to see you?’
Xavière made a vague gesture.
‘I don’t know. I’ll ring you up.’
‘We might have dinner together tomorrow, between rehearsals.’
Inès remained standing in front of Xavière looking unhappy. Françoise had often wondered how the notion of becoming an actress could have entered that thick Norman skull: she had slaved for four years without making any appreciable progress: out of pity, Pierre had given her one line to speak.
‘Tomorrow …’ said Xavière. ‘I’d rather ring you up.’
‘You’ll come through all right, you know,’ said Françoise encouragingly. ‘When you’re not excited your diction is good.’
Inès smiled faintly and walked away.
‘Will you never ring her up?’ asked Françoise.
‘Never,’ said Xavière irritably. ‘Just because I slept at her place three times, there’s no reason why I should have to see her all my life.’
‘Didn’t Gerbert show you round?’
‘He suggested it,’ said Xavière.
‘It didn’t interest you?’
‘He seemed so embarrassed,’ said Xavière. ‘It was painful.’ She looked at Françoise with unveiled bitterness. ‘I loathe foisting myself on people,’ she said vehemently.
Françoise felt herself in the wrong. She had been tactless in leaving Xavière in Gerbert’s hands, but Xavière’s tone surprised her. Could Gerbert really have been off-hand with Xavière? That certainly wasn’t his way.
‘She takes everything so seriously,’ she thought with annoyance.
She had decided once and for all not to let Xavière’s childish fits of surliness poison her life.
‘How was Portia?’ said Françoise.
‘The big dark girl? Monsieur Labrousse made her repeat the same sentence twenty times. She kept getting it all wrong.’ Xavière’s face glowed with scorn. ‘Is it really possible for anyone as stupid as that to be an actress?’
‘There are all kinds,’ said Françoise.
Xavière was bursting with rage: that was obvious. Without a doubt she felt that Françoise was not giving her sufficient attention. She would get over it. Françoise looked at the curtain impatiently. The change of scenery was taking far too long. At least five minutes would have to be saved.
The curtain went up. Pierre was reclining on Caesar’s couch and Françoise’s heart began to beat faster. She knew Pierre’s every intonation, his every gesture. She anticipated them so exactly that she felt as if they sprang from her own will. And yet, it was outside her, on the stage, that they materialized. It was agonizing. She would feel herself responsible for the slightest failure and she couldn’t raise a finger to prevent it.
‘It’s true that we are really one,’ she thought with a burst of love. Pierre was speaking, his hand was raised, but his gestures, his tones, were as much a part of Françoise’s life as of his. Or rather, there was but one life and at its core but one entity, which could be termed neither he nor I, but we.
Pierre was on the stage, she was in the audience, and yet for both of them it was the same play being performed in the same theatre. Their life was the same. They did not always see it from the same angle, for through their individual desires, moods, or pleasures, each discovered a different aspect. But it was, for all that, the same life. Neither time nor distance could divide them. There were, of course, streets, ideas, faces, that came into existence first for Pierre, and others first for Françoise; but they faithfully pieced together these scattered experiences into a single whole, in which ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ became indistinguishable. Neither one nor the other ever withheld the slightest fragment. That would have been the worst, the only possible betrayal.
‘Tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock, we’ll rehearse the third act without costumes,’ said Pierre. ‘And tomorrow morning we’ll go through the whole thing,
