The Prize

consisted of saucisson chaud, pistache, truffe, salade de pommes a l’huile d’olive et romarin, but the pommes sparingly for both.

Claude was distressed at eating this early. It was barbaric. Gisele and he had never discussed it, but the necessity was understood by both. Neither could afford to be discovered. At this hour, there was less chance of being seen. Even the restaurant, Le Petit Navire, found during a stroll early in their courtship, had been made their place, because it was in that obscure, dark side street, the rue des Fosses-St.-Bernard. While it was occasionally patronized by some of the finest gourmets and restaurant collectors in Paris, its main clientele consisted of the management and better-paid labourers of the Halle aux Vins across the street. None of these customers, Claude and Gisele were confident, would be likely to recognize a distinguished chemist of the Institut Pasteur or a Balenciaga mannequin.

Gisele had finished her dessert. Her napkin was at her mouth.

‘Cafe?’ Claude asked.

She shook her head. ‘No. But I will have a cigarette.’

He found the thin silver case in his pocket, extracted two English cigarettes, lit one, then lit the second off the first and passed the first to her. She brought it to her lips and inhaled deeply.

‘Perfect,’ she said.

‘Because I kissed it first,’ he said.

She smiled, and impulsively reached her long, tapering hand across the table to touch his hand. He turned his hand, palm up, and encompassed her own.

‘I love you, Gisele.’

‘I love you,’ she replied softly, but her face wore its professional public mask of beauty, emotionless, seemingly detached, and it always made him momentarily unsure.

Eager to be reassured, to consume the steps of ritual that would bring him to the exact moment of reassurance, he asked, ‘Shall we walk?’

‘After the cigarette.’

‘Very well.’

They sat in silence, Gisele toying with the matchbox, looking down at it, inscrutable, and he unable to take his eyes off her public face. It was an incredibly lovely face, he decided again, and now it belonged to him. He studied it in an indulgence of self-congratulation. Her hair was ash-blonde and bouffant, the eyebrows pencilled dark and high, and the eyes an icy pale blue, set wide apart. Her nose was straight, as in those Grecian statues in the Louvre, and the lips generous, full, soft, and the deepest hue of red. Her cheekbones were high, leaving shadowed hollows beneath them. The large diamond earrings she always wore made her face seem even narrower.

Suddenly, she ground out the remnant of her cigarette, pushed back her chair, and rose. Taking her purse, she said, ‘I’ll be right back. Don’t go.’

‘Never.’

His eyes followed her across the room. He saw that the three waiters were observing her, too. She moved like a mannequin, with fluid grace, tall, thin, hips slim, thighs and legs long, all elegant and aloof and slithering. As she walked, her legs, close together, provocative, stretched straight before her, the pointed pumps turned slightly outward, her smooth buttocks undulating in the manner of all practised mannequins. At last, she pirouetted around a corner and was out of view. Straight out of Elle or L’Officiel, Claude Marceau thought, all haute couture, clothes, face, figure, all glacial and unruffled and not merely mortal. Perhaps it was this that had attracted him first, the challenge of what was or seemed emotionless and unattainable and too near perfection.

Yes, this had attracted him first, he knew definitely, and what had held him, finally, against all caution and scientist’s reason, was not her public presence but her private behaviour. From the very first time, she had become a different person. Two weeks ago-when it had stimulated him beyond anything he had ever felt before- she had undressed before him, boldly, almost tauntingly, first slowly, the shoes, the long sheer stockings, the dress, the half-slip, and then faster and faster, the bra and garter belt and pants. Wholly naked to him, she had become a different person. Once stripped of fashion and pretence, once basic white flesh, and breasts considerable in circumference but stylishly flat, these accentuated by her elongated bony body, she had become pure animal. She shed with her apparel all vanity and studied sophistication. There remained no single artifice. In nudity, she withheld nothing, became the epitome of the French courtesan, displayed desire rawly, and enjoyed the sexual coupling completely without pretending a special gift in giving but revealing a passionate gratefulness in receiving.

Although Claude had possessed her half a dozen times in the two weeks, the anticipation of it-the transformation-again aroused him more keenly than ever, and he longed for her to return and be off with him. As he called to the waiter for the check, his mind was still on the miracle of their union. He had a certain pride in the affair. It was not only her evident desirability and beauty, which, after all, he could not show the world, but the fact that she enjoyed him.

He was forty-six, and she twenty-seven, and he had been an intellectual and a man of science since his youth. He had been too long devoted to tubes and bottles and counters that smelled of acid, and too devoted to introspections, to regard himself as debonair or attractive, although now, in these last weeks, he had felt attractive. His hair was bushy and greying, his broad face not yet fleshy but regular except for the narrow eyes and beaked French nose, his body inclined to weight and called by one newspaper ‘heavy-set’, but still strong and firm, so that he continued to play tennis once a week and play boule in the Bois twice a week. She could have younger men, gayer men, richer men, and certainly unmarried men. Yet she had him and wanted no more. Here was another mystery of chemistry that he and Denise must investigate. He realized, immediately, that he had subconsciously thought of the name of his wife. That was improper, and he erased her name. He would not think of her on this night. He was in no mood for brooding over his culpability.

Again, attempting to see himself through Gisele’s eyes, he tried to weigh his value. Assets: intelligence, sensibility, modest fame. Liabilities: age, a certain stodginess, married.

About to continue his reverie, he saw Gisele approaching, the bouffant impeccable, the bowed lips wine, the long legs crossing in lazy strides against her tight purple skirt. He tried to rise as youthfully as possible, opening his wallet and counting out the necessary francs and despite service compris a generous tip to the serving people who would understand the bribe.

He took up her full-length natural brown mink coat, held it as gallantly as a cloak, and she spun gracefully into it, coolly enwrapped and beauty enhanced.

Outside, in the balmy Parisian night, they stood in the dark, narrow street, her hand in his, gazing at the great fenced Halle aux Vins.

‘I should like to go in there some night and sample everything,’ he said.

‘We do not need that,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

‘Still want to walk a little?’

‘Oh, yes. The Seine.’

There were small dangers in this, he knew, but here was a night in November such as the one during which they had met, really met, in September. So he agreed.

She linked her arm in his, and they strolled leisurely across the rue des Chantiers to the Boulevard St.- Germain, glanced into the corner cafe to see if there were anyone they might recognize, then crossed and walked to the Quai de la Tournelle. They crossed again to the low stone wall above the Seine, passed several closed wooden bookstalls, and halted to survey the placid river. On the river, like a floating chandelier, one of the bateaux-mouches, its curious glass dome shining in the half-moon, approached. Beyond it, the lights of the city were spectacular, and to the left, they could see the towering bright mass of Notre- Dame.

He nodded at the sight-seeing boat. ‘I have never been on a bateau-mouche. Have you?’

‘Several times. It is wonderful fun.’

‘I had always supposed it was for tourists-’

‘It is for us first, the way the Seine is.’

‘Yes. Some night, let us do it. I almost feel like a tourist anyway-everything new-’