I preferred to wait till we got home and merely to make conventional conversation on the way. I observed that it was cold, foretold that we should have more snow and that the singing-lessons on Sundays and Thursdays would probably be amusing … But I spoke without conviction, and she too realized that all this chatter meant nothing at all.
When we were settled under the lamp in the library, I opened my exercise-books and I looked at her. She was prettier than she had been the other evening; a little paler, and there were shadows round her eyes that made them look larger.
‘Are you tired? You look as if you were.’
She was embarrassed by all my questions. Whyever should she be?
She turned quite pink again and looked everywhere but at me.
I was certain she felt vaguely guilty about me.
I went on remorselessly:
‘Tell me, is she still being so frightfully friendly towards you, the loathsome Redhead?
Have the rages and the kisses of the other night started up again?’
‘No, of course not … She’s being very kind to me … I assure you she takes tremendous care of me …’
‘She hasn’t “mesmerized” you again?’
‘Oh no, there’s no question of that … I think I exaggerated a little the other evening because my nerves were rather on edge.’
As she said it, her face became very confused.
I didn’t care – I wanted to know the truth.
I went up close to her and took her hands – her tiny little hands.
‘Oh darling, do tell me what else!
Don’t you want to say anything more to your poor Claudine who was so wretched the day before yesterday?’
But anyone would have said that she had managed to restrain herself and had suddenly decided to say nothing. By degrees she assumed a calm little expression, artificially natural, and looked at me with those clear, untruthful cat’s eyes of hers.
‘No. Look, Claudine, I assure you that she leaves me completely in peace and that she’s even gone out of her way to be very kind.
You and I made her out to be much nastier than she is, you know …’
What was that cold voice and those eyes that were shuttered in spite of being open to their widest extent?
It was her classroom voice and that I couldn’t stand.
I thrust back my desire to cry, so as not to make a fool of myself.
So it was all over between us then?
And if I tormented her with questions, shouldn’t we part at loggerheads? … I took up my English Grammar; there was nothing else to do. She opened my exercise-book with marked alacrity.
That was the first – and the only – time I took a serious lesson with her.
With a heart swelling and ready to burst, I translated whole pages of:
‘You have some pens but he had not a horse.’
‘We should have your cousin’s apples if he had plenty of pen-knives.’
‘Have you any ink in your ink-pot?
No, but I have a table in my bedroom, etc., etc.’
Towards the end of the lesson, that extraordinary Aimee asked me point-blank:
‘My little Claudine, you aren’t angry with me?’ I was not altogether lying when I answered:
‘No. I’m not angry with you.’
It was almost true.
I did not feel angry, only unhappy and exhausted.
I escorted her to the door and I kissed her, but she turned her head so much away as she held out her cheek that my lips almost touched her ear.
The heartless little thing!
I watched her go off under the lamp-post with a vague desire to run after her.
But what would have been the good?
I slept pretty badly and my eyes proved it. There were shadows under them that reached to the middle of my cheeks.
Luckily, that rather becomes me. I noticed this in the looking-glass as I was fiercely brushing my hair (quite golden this morning) before setting off for the singing-lesson.
I arrived half an hour too early and I couldn’t help laughing when I found two out of my four classmates already installed in the school!
We inspected each other closely and Anais gave an approving whistle at my blue dress and my charming apron.
She had trotted out for the occasion the apron she wears on Thursdays and Sundays. It’s red, embroidered in white and makes her look paler than ever. Her hair was done in a ‘helmet’ with the puff in front pushed well forward, almost overhanging her forehead, and she’d squeezed herself till she could hardly breathe into a new belt.
Charitably, she observed out loud that I looked ill but I replied that it suited me to look tired.
Marie Belhomme came running in, harum-scarum and scatter-brained as usual.
She too had adorned herself, in spite of being in mourning.
Her big frilly collar of ruched crepe made her look like a bewildered black Pierrot. With her long, velvety eyes and her lost, innocent expression, she was quite charming.
The two Jauberts arrived together, as always, ready to behave irreproachably and never to raise their eyes and to speak ill of all the rest of us after the lesson.