Read Marie for Free Online Page A

tired?’
    He got up and turned towards the mirror. ‘What do you mean – I look fine!’
    He was right: that was just the way he looked. His face was neither tired nor old; it was only thirty-two.
    ‘Did you see your mother?’ he asked.
    ‘No, I spent an afternoon with her last week.’
    ‘Usually you can’t go two days without running over to her to find out whether she has any problems!’
    ‘I preferred to be alone.’
     
    THERE WAS A KIND OF CONFIDENCE in Marie’s voice, in her gestures, in the way she held her head. Jean took in the brightness of her gaze, the darkness of her eyes. How beautiful she is, he thought.
    ‘Have you seen Claudine?’ he asked. ‘She must have got back from holiday several days ago.’
    Her sister Claudine. Marie and Claudine shared an intimacy that made them more like friends than sisters. She had last written to her when they were on holiday, three days before her encounter, and in the days that followed she’d scarcely thought about her at all. For the last three days she had forgotten Claudine.
    Although Claudine was the elder sister she had always seemed the more childish. When they were little it was Claudine who smeared her exercise books with ink and chocolate. She was smaller than Marie, with small features and light, mousy hair. Their mother used to call them, jokingly, ‘my little brunette and my big redhead’ – it used slightly to annoy Marie that she should exaggerate the colour of her hair in this way. As an adolescent Claudine liked the same books as Marie, quoted the same passages, had the same desires, the same enthusiasms, the same dislikes. And Marieadmired her sister, thought her destined for a full, dramatic life. She didn’t know then that whereas all those things were deeply rooted in her, for Claudine they were only superficial passions, as if she were acting. When Claudine talked, she dazzled their friends, but she was only parroting the words of Marie – who was taciturn and inscrutable, confiding in no one but her sister. Marie thought Claudine was the only person who could understand her; she spoke to her without realising that she was speaking to her own image.
    At the age of eighteen Claudine gave herself to a student, just because he was the first man to make a pass at her. Afterwards, in a state of shock after a visit to an obliging doctor, she had taken refuge in her sister’s arms. Marie could still see the bedroom they shared as girls: the lamp they had to cover so that no one would see it was still on, and Claudine’s childish fears, which she continually tried to allay. She had put her hand rather firmly on Claudine’s mouth to stop her calling out to their mother; later she’d hidden the blood-soaked sheets.
    Claudine blocks out the episode and begins to play around again, carelessly abandoning herself to fortune. She knows nothing of love, of joy or of sorrow, but she speaks of them in big, extravagant words that lose meaning on her lips. At twenty-three, she marries a man of forty, because ‘everything is hopeless anyway’, because ‘I’m fed up’ and because she wants to be free. Free to do what, for God’s sake? ‘Hopeless’, ‘fed up’: Marie has a horror of such words. Can Claudine really be the kind of person who uses them,one of those desperate little people who says that ‘nothing is worth the effort’? Marie agonises over this: how she would like to save her!
    Claudine travels a lot, usually without her husband. Her nights are spent without love, joy or danger: she goes no further than bold embraces, not performing any act that might commit her: ‘It’s much easier that way.’ She tells Marie everything, not knowing whether she should laugh or cry at her own behaviour. Finally, laughing and with a great declamatory gesture, she announces, by way of explanation: ‘Whenever I sleep alone, I’m afraid I will die.’
    It had been a long time since Marie stopped admiring Claudine, but she never stopped loving her