Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Lapin-Défunts were spared the indignity of being tied up, but as both of them had felt pointlessly shackled to one another for many years, they wordlessly agreed to forgo any congratulations. Marcel spent the day reading an old novel for the third time, occasionally staring out their window at the snowdrifts, while Petunia fantasised about the perfectly crafted witticisms with which she’d regale the firing squad in the moments before her execution for the murder of her husband.
In the middle of the night, monsieur awoke, but this time, resolved to stay in bed. He might have been influenced by the book he’d been reading—some tosh about knights and damsels and honour—but he elected to endure his lot, and to respect the sanctity of marriage. After meditating proudly on his unsuspected capacity for integrity, he started to drift back off on that tar-black sea—which imbibes so completely even the drip-drip light of the moon—which we call “sleep”, when a very faint scratching from the vicinity of the door to his room insinuated itself into his incipient dream. Murderers, odious inspectors, perverts tying people up in their bedclothes, and now mice—in short, he couldn’t wait to recommend this place to all his enemies in Zurich.
“Marcel!” whispered the mouse. But hang on—that couldn’t be right!
He cinched his robe in full expectation of an imminent confrontation with a giant rodent. But, he was elated to find upon opening the door with a growl and a ready fist, it was quite the opposite: it was Miss Deirdre Laoghaire.
“Why, you’re not a rat at all!” he cried, albeit it in a whisper, so that his wife would not awake and wonder with which class of animal, if not rodent, her husband was tempted to commit adultery.
“What do you mean?” she asked, rising from her knees.
He closed the door behind him and, taking her arm, started walking down the hall. “I should think it was obvious. I mean, just look at you! No one could mistake you for a rat! Not even a blind man. Not even a blind man who was dead!”
Despite herself, her mouth curled into what could almost, if viewed by someone who didn’t know her, be read as a smile.
“You must forgive me, Miss Laoghaire, for you’ve woken me from my slumber and thrust me into something of a giddy mood.”
“It won’t last.”
She led him to her room, where she tugged off all her clothes, with the attitude of one who held them in contempt, then attempted to debase herself—for him, and for the satisfaction she would reap from her own debasement—but he held her gently away from him, by the arm, and proceeded to conjoin with her in a manner that could only have been described, as any observers tasked with the job of describing it, had any been present, would have agreed, as romantic.
He wished her to reach culmination as well as he; just as, if they’d been reading a newspaper together, and he, the faster reader—such was his talent—finished a page before she, he would have waited till she reached the end before turning to the next—for why should the fulfilment of reaching the satisfying conclusion of the article, in which the editor tidily sums up the state of the world into level-headed, reassuring, unambiguous simplicities which could be smugly understood by even a stupid child, be savoured by him, but not her? It was on this principle that he now acted, although, it must be said, the analogy was not present in the forefront of his mind. But she smiled, such as it was, sadly, and whispered that she couldn’t; that she wasn’t, in her words, “built for pleasure”. Ever French, he gallantly insisted, but it was not to be, and her delicate sinews squeezed all protestation out of him.
His life flashed by him: his gilded childhood; rising through the ranks of the civil service; the endless disposable girlfriends through which he flipped like the pages of a thick tome whose continuing chapters the author was still dashing off and couriering in faster than he, Marcel, could read them; meeting Petunia, then so exquisite that he would have sawn off his left arm to savour her body (though the chances of her wanting to gift her body to a man with a bloody stump in place of a left arm would have been, he had to admit, difficult to calculate); his flagrantly dishonourable wooing, and wholly accidental impregnation, of her; the marriage coerced by both their fathers; the speedy realisation that they despised each other; her possibly wilful, possibly inherent, inability to satisfy him sexually; the tiresome string of mistresses; and stasis.
And now: this very minute: an unbearable feeling of being young.
He blinked at her, and whispered, in shock: “I think I’m falling in love with you!”
She shrugged. “It would have no meaning either way.”