In Case of Emergency, page 1
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
Copyright © 1956, 1958 by Georges Simenon
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
(En Cas de Malheur) was first published in France in 1956 and in Great Britain in 1960
Translated from the French by Helen Sebba
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IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
I
Sunday, November 4
SCARCELY two hours ago, after lunch, in the drawing-room where we had gone to drink our coffee, I was standing in front of the window, close enough to the glass to feel its cold dampness, when, behind me, I heard my wife say:
'Will you be going out this afternoon?'
And these words, so simple, so commonplace, seemed to me heavy with meaning, as if they concealed between their syllables thoughts which neither Viviane nor myself dared express. I did not reply at once, not because I wasn't sure of my intentions, but because for a moment I hung suspended in that rather terrifying universe, more real, essentially, than the everyday world, which gives you the feeling of discovering the underside of life.
In the end I must have stammered:
'No. Not today.'
She knows I have no reason to go out. She has guessed it, like everything else; maybe she checks up on my actions and movements as well. I don't blame her for it any more than she blames me for what is happening to me.
At the moment she asked her question, I was watching, through the cold, dismal rain which has been falling for three days, since All Hallows to be precise, a tramp walking up and down under the Pont-Marie, slapping his thighs to get warm. In particular I was staring at a heap of dark rags, up against the stone wall, wondering whether it was really moving or whether that was an illusion caused by the quivering of the air and the movement of the rain.
It was moving, I was sure of it a little later, when an arm emerged from the rags, then a woman's face, bloated and framed in tousled hair. The man stopped walking up and down, turned towards his companion for Lord knows what dialogue, then, while she was getting into a sitting position, went and pulled out, from between two stones, a bottle, half full, which he handed to her and from which she took a swig.
In the ten years we have been living on the Quai d'Anjou in the Île Saint-Louis, I have often watched the tramps. I've seen all kinds, women too, but this is the first time I've seen any of them acting like a real couple. Why did that touch me, making me think of a male animal and his female snug in their forest lair?
Some people talk about Viviane and me as a couple of wild creatures, I've been told, and no doubt they don't fail to stress that among wild beasts the female is the more ferocious.
Before turning round and going up to the tray on which the coffee was served, I had time to register another image: a very tall man with a ruddy face emerging from the hatch of a barge anchored just opposite our house. He had his black raincoat over his head to brave the dripping universe and, an empty quart bottle hanging from each arm, he started down the slippery gang-plank between the boat and the quay. At the moment, he and the two tramps, together with a yellowish dog squeezing up against a black tree, were the only living things in the landscape.
'Are you going down to the office?' my wife asked again, while I was finishing my cup of coffee, still standing.
I said yes. I have always detested Sundays, especially Sundays in Paris, which produce in me a restlessness which comes close to panic. The prospect of going and waiting in a queue, under an umbrella, outside some cinema, makes me sick; so does the prospect of strolling along the Champs-Elysées, for example, or in the Tuileries, or of going for a drive in a line of cars, on the Fontainebleau road.
We got home late last night. After a dress rehearsal at the Theatre de la Michodiere, we went to Maxim's for supper and wound up, about three o'clock in the morning, in a basement bar somewhere near the Rond-Point, frequented by actors and film people.
I'm not as good at going without sleep as I was a few years ago. Viviane, though, never seems to feel tired.
How much longer did we stay in the drawing-room without saying anything? At least five minutes, I would swear, and five minutes of that silence seem long. I was looking at my wife as little as possible. For the last few weeks I have avoided looking her in the face and have cut short our private conversations. Did she perhaps want to talk? I thought she was going to when, as I had my back half turned, she opened her mouth, hesitating, and finally brought out, instead of the words she wanted to say:
'I'm going to Corine's soon. If you feel like it later in the afternoon, you can come and pick me up there.'
Corine de Langelle is a friend who causes quite a lot of talk and who owns one of the most beautiful town houses in Paris, in the Rue Saint-Dominique. Among her various original ideas, one is to keep open house on Sunday afternoons.
'It's not true that everyone goes to the races,' she will explain, 'and not many wives go shooting with their husbands. Why should one have to be bored just because it's Sunday?'
I walked round and round the drawing-room and finally muttered :
'See you later.'
I crossed the corridor and opened the door of the office. After all these years, it is still a queer feeling to enter it from the gallery. It was Viviane's idea. When the flat below ours came up for sale, she advised me to buy it and set up my chambers there, because we were beginning to be cramped, especially for entertaining. The ceiling of one of the rooms, the largest, was removed and replaced by a gallery at the level of the floor above.
This produces a very high room, with two rows of windows, lined with books top and bottom, which in fact looks a bit like a public library, and it took me some time to get used to working and receiving my clients there.
Still, I did fix myself up, in one of the original rooms, a more private retreat where I prepare my briefs and where a leather couch enables me to take a nap without undressing.
I took a nap today. Did I really sleep? I'm not sure. In the dusk I closed my eyes and I don't think I stopped hearing the water running down the rainpipe. I suppose Viviane took a rest too, in the red silk boudoir she fixed up for herself next to our bedroom.
It is a little after four o'clock. She must be dressing and she will probably drop in to kiss me goodbye before she goes to Corine's.
I feel that my eyes are swollen. For a long time I haven't been looking well, and the medicine Dr. Pémal has prescribed does no good. All the same I keep on conscientiously swallowing the drops and pills which form a small arsenal in front of my place at table.
I have always had big eyes, a big head, so big that there are only two or three shops in Paris where I can find hats to fit me. At school they used to compare me to a toad.
Every now and then I hear a crack, because the wood of the gallery warps in damp weather, and each time I raise my head, as though caught doing something I shouldn't, expecting to see Viviane coming downstairs.
I have never hidden anything from her and yet I shall hide this from her and keep it locked up in the Renaissance cupboard in my den. Before beginning to write, I made sure that the key, which no one has ever used, hadn't been lost and that the lock works. I shall have to find a place for this key, too: behind certain books in the library, for instance; it is enormous and wouldn't fit into my pocket.
I have taken from my desk drawer a cream-coloured manila folder with my name and address stamped on it.
Lucien Gobillot
Avocat à la Cour d'Appel de Paris
17 bis, Quai d'Anjou—Paris
Hundreds of these dossiers, more or less stuffed with tragedy—those of my clients—fill a metal filing cabinet which Mademoiselle Bordenave keeps up to date, and I hesitated to write my name in the place where, on the others, the client's name stands. In the end, with an ironical smile, I traced one single word in red pencil: Myself.
It is, in fact, my own dossier that I am beginning, and it is not impossible that it may some day be put to use. I waited more than ten minutes, apprehensive, before writing the first sentence, tempted as I was to begin it like a will with:
I the undersigned, being sound in body and in mind . . .
Because it is something like a will, too. To be more precise, I don't know yet what it will be like and I wonder if there will be, in the margin, the cabalistic signs I use for my clients.
It is, in fact, my practice to jot down, in their presence, while they are talking, the essence of what they say, the true and the false, the half-true and the half-false, the exaggerations and the lies, and, at the same time, I record my momentary impressions by means of signs which make sense only to me. Some of these signs are unexpected, baroque, like those little men or those shapeless doodles that some judges sketch on their blotters during long speeches by counsel.
I am trying to make fun of myself, not to treat myself as a tragic case. And yet, isn't it already a symptom that I need to explain myself in writing? For whom? Why? I have no idea. In case of emergency, in short, as those estimable characters say who lay money by. Against the possibility that things should turn out badly.
Can they turn out any other way? Even in Viviane I sense a feeling which has always been foreign to her and which looks the very image of pity. She doesn't know, either, what is in store for us. She understands, just the same, that things can't go on like this, that something is bound to happen, no matter what.
Pémal, too, who has been looking after me for fifteen years, suspects it, and when he gives me prescriptions I'm sure he does it without conviction. Besides, when he comes to see me, he puts on that free and easy, jaunty air, behind which he must hide when he visits someone who is seriously ill.
'What's the trouble today?'
Nothing. Nothing and everything. Then he talks about my being forty-five and about the terrific load of work I've always carried and keep on carrying. He makes a joke:
'There comes a time when the most powerful and the most perfect motor needs some minor repairs. . . .'
Has he heard about Yvette? Pémal doesn't move in the same circles as we do, where my private life is no secret. He has doubtless read, in magazines, certain echoes which make real sense only to people in the know.
Besides, it's not only a matter of Yvette. It's the whole machine, to use his expression, which isn't running properly, and that doesn't date from today, or a few weeks or a few months ago.
Am I going to pretend that I have known for twenty years that it would end badly? That would be exaggerated, though no more so than to claim that it began a year ago with Yvette.
I want to . . .
* * *
My wife has just come downstairs, dressed in a black suit under her mink coat, with a little veil which lends mystery to the upper part of her slightly faded face. When she came up to me, I could smell her scent.
'Do you think you'll join me?'
'I don't know.'
'We could have dinner out afterwards.'
'I'll ring you at Corine's.'
For the moment I want to stay by myself in my corner, in my own sweat.
She put her lips to my forehead and walked towards the door, her step brisk.
'See you later.'
She didn't ask what I am working on. I watched her go out and got up to press my forehead against the window-pane.
The tramp couple are still under the Pont-Marie. Just now the man and the woman are sitting side by side, leaning against the stone embankment and watching the water flowing under the arches. From this distance you can't see their lips move and it is impossible to know whether they are talking, the lower part of their bodies tucked up in the ragged covers. If they are talking, what do they find to say to each other?
The bargeman must have come back with his ration of wine, and one can make out, in the cabin, the reddish glow of a petroleum lamp.
It's still raining and it's almost dark.
Before beginning to write again, I picked out, on the telephone dial, the number of the flat in the Rue de Ponthieu, and it hurt me to hear the bell ringing there and not be there myself. This is a sensation I'm growing familiar with, a kind of cramp or spasm in the chest, which makes me press my hand to it like a heart patient.
The bell rang for a long time, as though in an empty apartment, and I was expecting it to stop when I heard a click. A sleepy, irritable voice muttered:
'What is it?'
I almost didn't answer. Without giving my name, I asked:
'Were you asleep?'
'It's you! Yes, I was asleep.'
There was a silence. Why ask what she did last night and what time she came home?
'You've not been drinking?'
She has had to get out of bed to answer the telephone, because the instrument isn't in her bedroom but in the sitting-room. She sleeps naked. Her skin, when she first wakes up, has a special smell, her woman's smell mixed with that of nicotine and alcohol. She is drinking much more just lately, as if she too had an intuition that something is in store.
I didn't dare ask her if he was there. What's the use? Why shouldn't he be, since I have, somehow, made way for him? He must be listening, propped on his elbow, fumbling for cigarettes in the half-light of the bedroom with the curtains drawn.
There are clothes scattered about on the carpet, on the chairs, glasses and bottles lying around, and, as soon as I hang up, she will go to the refrigerator to get some beer.
She makes an effort to ask, as if she were interested:
'Are you working?
'Is it still raining?' she adds—and this tells me that the curtains are drawn.
'Yes.'
That's all. I search for words to say and perhaps she searches too. All I find is a ridiculous:
'Be good.'
I think I can see her pose, on the arm of the green armchair, her pear-shaped breasts, her thin back like that of a scraggy teen-ager, the dark triangle of hair below her stomach which for some reason always looks pathetic to me.
'See you tomorrow.'
'All right: tomorrow.'
I have gone back to the window and already you can't see anything but the garlands of street lights along the Seine, their reflection in the water, and, in the blackness of the wet facades, here and there the rectangle of a lighted window.
I re-read the passage I was writing when my wife interrupted me.
* * *
'I want to...'
I can't remember what I had in mind. Besides, I think that if I want to go on with what I already call my dossier, it will be as well not to re-read anything: not even one sentence.
'I want to…'
Oh yes! That's probably it. To treat myself as I treat my clients. At the Palais de Justice they say I should have made a terrific examining magistrate, because I can get the truth out of the toughest customers. My attitude hardly ever varies and I admit that I take advantage of my physical appearance, my famous toad's face, my protruding eyes which, staring at people as if not seeing them, inspire them with awe. My ugliness is useful to me, giving me the mysterious look of a Chinese porcelain figure.
I let them talk for a time, taking notes myself with a relaxed hand, let them run through the rosary of phrases they prepared before knocking at my door, then, just when they are least expecting it, I interrupt, without moving, my chin still in my left hand:
'No!'
This little word, pronounced without raising my voice, as though in a void, hardly ever fails to disconcert them.
'I assure you . . .' they try to protest.
'No.''
'You accuse me of lying.'
'Things did not just happen as you say
With some people, especially women, that does it, and they immediately smile confidentially. Others go on resisting.
'But I swear . . .'
With these people, I get up as if the consultation were over, and walk towards the door.
'I'll tell you?' they stammer, worried.
'I don't need an explanation; I need the truth. It's up to me, not you, to find the explanations. As long as you prefer to tell lies . . .'
Rarely do I have to press the buzzer.
Obviously I can't go through that act with myself. But if I write, for instance:
'It began a year ago when . . .'
I'm justified in interrupting myself, just as I do other people, with a simple, categorical:
'No!'
That 'no' confuses them even more than the ones before and now they don't understand.
'And yet? they persist, 'it was when I met her that . . .'
'No.'
' Why do you insist it's not true ?'
'Because you have to go further back.'
'Back where to?'
'I don't know. Try.'
They try, and nearly always discover an earlier event to explain their tragedy. I've saved plenty of people that way, not, as they say at the Palais, by trick of procedure or by playing to the gallery for the benefit of juries, but because I have made them find the reason for their behaviour.
I myself, just like them, was about to write:
'It began . . .'
When? With Yvette, that evening when, getting back from the Palais, I found her sitting all alone in my waiting-room? That's the easy answer, what I'm tempted to call the romantic answer. If it hadn't been Yvette, it would probably have been someone else. Who knows even that the intrusion of a new element into my life was inevitable?
Unfortunately I haven't got, as my clients have when they sit down in what we call the confessional chair, someone facing me to help me find out my own truth, even if it were only by means of a commonplace:
'No!'
I won't allow them to begin at the end or in the middle, and yet that is what I am going to do, because the question of Yvette obsesses me and I need to get rid of it. Afterwards, if I still have the desire and the courage, I'll try to dig more deeply.
