Silent and withdrawn, she was given to sudden outbursts, and had a splendid appetite. Noticing that she was gaining weight, Patrice scolded her: ‘You’re disgusting. A lovely creature is not entitled to grow ugly.’
But Rose intervened: ‘Please stop tormenting the child. Eat, Claire darling.’ And the day turned from the rising sun to the setting sun around the hills and over the sea, inside the delicate light.
They laughed, teased each other, made plans. Everyone smiled at appearances and pretended to submit to them. Patrice proceeded from the face of the world to the grave and smiling faces of the young women. Sometimes he was amazed by this universe they had created around him. Friendship and trust, sun and white houses, scarcely-heeded nuances; here felicities were born intact, and he could measure their precise resonance.
The House above the World, they said among themselves, was not a house of pleasure, it was a house of happiness. Patrice knew it was true when night fell and they all accepted, with the last breeze on their faces, the human and dangerous temp-tation to be utterly unique.
Today, after the sunbathe, Catherine had gone to her office. ‘My dear Patrice,’ Rose announced, suddenly appearing, ‘I have some good news for you.’
The Boy was conscientiously lounging on a couch in the ter-race room, a detective-story in his hands. ‘My dear Rose, I’m all ears.’
‘Today is your turn in the kitchen.’ ‘Splendid,’ Patrice said, without moving.
Rose stuffed into her student’s satchel not only the sweet peppers for her lunch but also volume three of Lavisse’s boring History and left. Patrice, who would be cooking lentils, loafed around the big ochre room until eleven, walking between the couches and the shelves decorated with green, red and yellow masks, touching the beige-and-orange curtains; then he quickly boiled the lentils, put some oil in the pot, an onion to brown, a tomato, a bouquet-garni, fussed over the stove and cursed Gula and Cali for announcing their hunger, despite the fact that Rose had explained to them yesterday, ‘Now you ani-mals know it’s too hot in the summer to be hungry.’
Catherine arrived at a quarter to twelve, wearing a light dress and open sandals and insisted on a shower and a nap in the sun — she would be the last at table. And Rose would admonish her: ‘Catherine, you’re intolerable.’ The water hissed in the bathroom, and Claire appeared, breathless from the climb. ‘Lentils? I know the best way of …’
‘I know too: you take thick cream … We’ve all learnt our lesson, dear Claire.’ It is a fact that Claire’s recipes always began with thick cream.
‘The Boy is absolutely right,’ said Rose, who had just arrived. ‘Yes,’ the Boy agreed. ‘Let’s sit down.’
Meals are served in the kitchen, which looks like a prop-room: there is even a pad to write down Rose’s good lines.
Claire says: ‘We must be chic, but we’re simple too,’ and eats her sausage with her fingers. Catherine comes to table duly late, drunk with the sun, and plaintive, her eyes pale with sleep. There is not enough vitriol in her soul to do justice to her office — eight hours she subtracts from the world and her life to give to a typewriter. The girls understand, thinking of what their own lives would be with those eight hours amputated. Patrice says nothing.
‘Yes,’ Rose says, made uneasy by any show of feelings. ‘Well, it’s your own business. Besides, you talk about that office of yours every day. We’ll forbid you to speak.’
‘But …’ Catherine sighs.
‘Put it to a vote. One, two, three, you’re outvoted.’
‘You see,’ Claire says, as the lentils are brought on, too dry, and everyone eats in silence. When Claire does the cooking and tastes her food at the table, she always adds with a satisfied expression: ‘My goodness, that’s quite delicious!’ Patrice, who has his dignity, prefers to say nothing, until everyone bursts out laughing. This is certainly not Catherine’s day, for she lec-tures them all about reducing her office hours and asks someone to go with her to complain.
‘No,’ Rose says, ‘after all, you’re the one who works.’ Exasperated, the ‘force of nature’ goes outside and lies in the sun. But soon everyone joins her there. And absently caressing Catherine’s hair, Claire decrees that what this ‘child’ needs is a man. For it is common practice in the House above the World to settle Catherine’s fate, to attribute certain needs to her, and to establish their extent and variety. Of course she points out from time to time that she’s old enough, etc., but no-one pays any attention. ‘Poor thing,’ Rose says, ‘she needs a lover.’ The everyone surrenders to the sun.
Catherine, who never holds a grudge, tells the gossip about her office: how Mademoiselle Perez, the tall blonde who’s getting married soon, had asked everyone in the office for information in order to be pre-pared for the ordeal, and what horrifying descriptions the sales-men had given her, and with what relief, back from her hon-eymoon, she smilingly declared: ‘It wasn’t so bad as all that.’ ‘She’s thirty years old,’ Catherine adds, pityingly.
And Rose, objecting to these off-colour stories: ‘All right, Catherine,’ she says, ‘we aren’t just girls here.’
At this time of day the mail-plane passes over the city, bear-ing the glory of its glittering metal over land and through the heavens. It enters into the movement of the bay, incorporates itself into the course of the world, and suddenly abandoning its frivolities, sheers off and dives down to the sea, landing in a tremendous explosion of blue and white water.
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny-adder mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and colour. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall which carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
The next Sunday, guests have been invited. It is Claire’s turn in the kitchen. Hence Rose has peeled the vegetables, set the table; Claire will put the vegetables in the pots and will watch over the cooking while reading in her room, occasion-ally emerging to glance under the lids. Since Mina, the Arab girl, has not come this morning, having lost her father for the third time this year, Rose has also cleaned the house. The first guest arrives: Eliane, whom Mersault calls the Idealist. ‘Why?’
Eliane asks. ‘Because when you hear something true that upsets you, you say, “that’s true, but it’s not good”.’ Eliane has a good heart, and she thinks she looks like The Man with a Glove, though no-one else does. But her room is lined with reproductions of The Man with the Glove. Eliane is studying something or other, and the first time she came to the House above the World, she announced that she was enchanted by the inhabitants’ ‘lack of inhibitions’.
In time, she has found this less con-venient. A lack of inhibitions means telling her that her stories are a bore, or declaring — quite amiably — as soon as the first words are out of her mouth: ‘Eliane, you’re just an idiot.’
When Eliane comes into the kitchen with Noel, the second guest and a sculptor by profession, she stumbles over Cather-ine, who never does anything in a normal position. Now she’s lying on her back, eating grapes with one hand and with the other setting about a mayonnaise that is still thin. Rose, in a huge blue apron, is admiring Gula’s perspicacity — the cat has jumped to the shelf to eat the dessert. ‘No doubt about it,’ Rose says blissfully, ‘that creature has a mind of her own.’
‘Yes,’ Catherine says, ‘she’s outdone herself today,’ adding that in the morning Gula, with more of a mind than ever, had broken the little green lamp and a vase as well. Eliane and Noel, doubtless too winded to express their disgust, decide to take a seat no-one has dreamed of offering them. Claire arrives, friendly and languorous, shakes hands and tastes the bouillabaisse simmering on the stove. She decides they can start. But today Patrice is late.
Then he appears and explains in great detail to Eliane that he is in a good mood because the girls in the street are so pretty. The hot season is just beginning, but already the firm bodies are beginning to be revealed by the light gowns — hence Patrice, as he testifies, is left in a devastated state, mouth dry, temples throbbing, loins hot.
This insistence upon detail silences Eliane. At table, a general consternation follows the first spoonfuls of bouillabaisse. Claire announces playfully: ‘I’m afraid the bouillabaisse tastes of burnt onion.’
‘Oh no,’ Noel answers politely.
Then, to test those manners, Rose asks him to purchase for the household a certain number of useful items such as a hot-water heater, Persian carpets and a refrigerator. When Noel replies by encouraging Rose to pray for him to win the lottery, Rose becomes quite realistic: ‘We might as well pray for ourselves.’
The sun is hot and heavy now, which makes the iced wine all the more precious, and the fruit welcome. With the cof-fee, Eliane bravely changes the subject to love. If she were in love, she would get married. Catherine tells her that it’s more urgent, when in love, to make love, a materialism that convulses Eliane. Rose, the pragmatist, would approve ‘if unfortunately experience did not show that marriage dissolves love’.
But Eliane and Catherine force their opinions into oppo-sition and become unfair, as anyone with spirit feels obliged to do. Noel, who thinks in shapes
