He wanted to get to bed quickly.
“He was like a man possessed of a god.
I never thought it was possible for a man to love a woman as he loved me that night.
I never knew a woman was capable of such adoration as I was filled with.
He was insatiable.
It seemed impossible to slake his passion.
No woman ever had such a wonderful lover as I had that night.
And he was my husband.
Mine!
Mine!
I worshipped him.
If he’d let me I would have kissed his feet.
When at last he fell asleep exhausted, the dawn was already peeping through a chink in the curtains.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I looked at his face as the light grew stronger; it was the unlined face of a boy.
He slept, holding me in his arms, and there was a tiny smile of happiness on his lips.
At last I fell asleep too.
“He was still sleeping when I woke and I got out of bed very quietly so as not to disturb him.
I went into the kitchen to make his coffee for him.
We were very poor.
Robert had worked in a broker’s office, but he’d had a quarrel with his employer and had walked out on him, and since then he hadn’t found anything regular to do.
He was crazy about racing and sometimes he made a bit that way, though his mother hated it, and occasionally he earned a little money by selling secondhand cars on commission, but all we really had to depend on was his mother’s pension, she was the widow of an army doctor, and the little money she had besides.
We didn’t keep a servant and my mother-in-law and I did the housework.
I found her in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for lunch.
“ ‘How is Robert?’ she asked me.
“ ‘He’s still asleep.
I wish you could see him.
With his hair all tousled he looks as if he was sixteen.’
“The coffee was on the hob and the milk was warm.
I put it on to boil and had a cup, then I crept upstairs to get Robert’s clothes.
He was a dressy fellow and I’d learnt how to press them.
I wanted to have them all ready for him and neatly laid out on a chair when he woke.
I brought them down into the kitchen and gave them a brush and then I put an iron on to heat.
When I put the trousers on the kitchen table I noticed there were stains on one of the legs.
“ ‘What on earth is that?’ I cried.
‘Robert has got his trousers in a mess.’
“Madame Berger got up from her chair so quickly that she upset the potatoes.
She snatched up the trousers and looked at them.
She began to tremble.
“ ‘I wonder what it is,’ I said.
‘Robert will be furious.
His new suit.’
“I saw she was upset, but you know, the French are funny in some ways, they don’t take things like that as casually as we Russians do.
I don’t know how many hundred francs Robert had paid for the suit, and if it was ruined she wouldn’t sleep for a week thinking of all the money that had been wasted.
“ ‘It’ll clean,’ I said.
“ ‘Take Robert up his coffee,’ she said sharply.
‘It’s after eleven and quite time he woke.
Leave me the trousers.
I know what to do with them.’
“I poured him out a cup and was just going upstairs with it when we heard Robert clattering down in his slippers.