Yves hailed a taxi. Inside the cab he grabbed Denise and crushed her in his arms. ‘My darling, my love …’

She melted into his arms, very pale, her eyes closed. He bruised her cheeks, her neck, the delicate skin on her wrists with passionate kisses. Then he had the driver stop outside a florist’s shop and got out; she waited a moment for him. He came back carrying a single orchid, wrapped in tissue paper, as if it were a jewel, an expensive thing of beauty with twisted petals and a velvety trumpet of deep red, glowing with fire.

‘Oh! It’s so beautiful!’ cried Denise, enthralled.

‘Do you really like it?’ asked Yves. ‘I like orchids though I prefer roses. But they didn’t have any left, so I got this. There are women who look like these flowers, aren’t there?’ he added, smiling. ‘At least, that’s what they think. Not you, fortunately. You’re so pure and simple. You’re like a rose, Denise, really you are. You are like one of those fragrant roses that grow in English gardens, with delicate, flesh-pink petals and a deeper colour at the heart; and their scent reminds me of your perfume, my darling, it truly does.’

Denise had buried her head in the hollow of Yves’s shoulder and was listening to him speak, overwhelmed, her eyes closed, drinking in his words, like a child hearing a fairy tale. He fell silent and began rocking her very gently. Then she whispered ‘I love you’, offering her passionate heart to him. All her feminine instinct made her expect to hear him say the same words back to her, the eternal ‘I love you’, like an echo, sensed even more than heard. But he said nothing. He just pressed her more tightly to him.

12

SHE WAS RATHER apprehensive about going to his apartment: she was afraid he might live in some nondescript furnished place where she would feel ill at ease. She was pleasantly surprised when she went into the apartment; he had managed to hold on to it since 1912. You could tell that every object had been chosen with love; it had comfortable furniture, bought in England before the war, and a large fireplace where logs were burning brightly. A little table was set up in the bedroom; there was some fruit in a splendid Bohemian crystal bowl and wine in a small old silver decanter; everything was lit by a pair of lamps with rose-coloured shades mounted on two old silver-gilt candelabra of meticulous workmanship.

Yves seemed truly at home among all these beautiful, expensive objects; how surprising it was to see the sudden change in his face, she thought to herself. Yesterday he was old, lifeless, almost ugly; today he was young and handsome.

She met Pierrot, the white Spitz who looked like a curly sheep out of some pastoral scene, with a pale pink ribbon round his neck. Then he showed her his favourite but modest collection of perfume flasks. He insisted she accept one as a gift; it dated back to Elizabeth I of England and bore the princess’s coat of arms carved in darkened silver on deep blue glass that shone beneath the light like a precious stone.

‘Please, please take it,’ he urged, when she first tried to refuse. ‘If you only knew what a rare pleasure it is for me to give presents, too rare, sadly … Please …’

Then he showed her portraits of his family; he told her about his father and some of his romantic adventures, especially the time when he fell in love with a Russian artist and left his wife and son to be with her; he’d lived with her near Nice for almost a year, in a villa called ‘Sniegurochka’, ‘snow maiden’. Since she was very blonde and adored white, all the rooms in the house were white, decorated with marble, alabaster, crystal, and white peacocks roamed the grounds were planted exclusively with white flowers – tuberoses, camellias, snow-white roses – while wonderful swans glided across its three lakes. She had died there, so he went back to his wife.

‘She forgave him, as she had so many other times,’ Yves said. ‘She always forgave him … his betrayals were like works of art … You couldn’t hold it against him … he was irresistible … He had the hypnotic charm of people who are loved too much. It’s true that when he was in love he gave himself entirely, and each time, for ever … We don’t know how to love like that any more …’

He was sitting at Denise’s feet, leaning against her legs, in front of the fireplace; he stared into the fire.

‘Why?’ asked Denise.

He made a vague gesture.

‘Ah, why? I don’t know … First of all, life these days is too harsh … The effort we used to spend on passion, on love, is now used up on the thousand stupid, poisonous little problems we face every day … To love the way they did, you have to be wealthy and have all the time in the world … and of course, they were so happy … their lives were peaceful, secure, easy, pleasurable … they needed emotions, but all we need is rest.