Jacqueline’s baby was to be born in December. Until the very end,
Jacqueline confided to us, she hoped something would happen to prevent
the birth. So many women had miscarriages. But she continued in good
health and the child stirred within her.
Sometimes she placed her hand on her belly and felt the movement of the
infant. Then she would think of De Prade, and it would seem to
Jacqueline that each of these movements of the baby should have been for
De Prade, that he should have been there to lay his cheek against his
true wife’s body, and hear the beating of the secret heart of his child.
Now all these movements were quite useless and lost. And it would always
be so. The first smile of the baby and his first steps and his first
words, all would be lost, without De Prade.
As for the material difficulties, Jacqueline was not frightened. She
came from the sort of aristocracy that took additional pride in being
able to do common tasks better than common people; she was an excellent
cook, and she knew how to design and sew her own clothes. She prepared
the baby’s layette.
For a time Jacqueline continued to go out in town with a number of her
men friends, all of whom were in love with her, and some of whom would
certainly have been willing to marry her, even knowing that she was
pregnant. But when her condition became quite obvious, Jacqueline ceased
to see them; she didn’t want anyone’s pity. Actually, she slipped quite
easily into the role of the unmarried mother, taking a certain pleasure
in playing the courageous young woman, poor and abandoned. The family in
whose house she roomed was proud of her. The husband was a bit in love
with this pretty and unlucky little Frenchwoman. The ten-year-old son
secretly offered Jacqueline his ration of sweets, without saving a
single ticket for himself.
When the final month arrived, Jacqueline realized that she was really
going to have this baby, and that she alone would be responsible for it.
And then she began to be afraid. She had play-acted all her life. Now
suddenly the role she had been acting became terribly real; indeed, she
felt that with the child, the role would be beyond her.
The child came into the world in a hospital in London. Jacqueline told
us she would have liked to spend all her life in that hospital, for
there were nurses to take care of the baby and to bring food to the
mother; she had nothing to do, no worries. Everything was sure, simple,
and well-regulated. And in a few days, she knew she would have to
confront life, fight for the sustenance of her child, suffer for her
child, and she felt herself absolutely alone and entirely without force
in the face of this task.
All of us were struck with the little girl’s resemblance to Jacqueline;
she had her fresh complexion, her shining eyes, and her soft hair,
already quite long. Jacqueline looked as helpless as the baby. With her
finger, she opened the fist of her little girl, undoing it as one might
a delicate flower.
After ten days she left the hospital with her baby in her arms. A French
welfare worker accompanied her. The welfare organization had found a job
for her, and a family where the baby could be cared for.
But after a month we heard that Jacqueline had changed her job and found
another family to take care of the child. Bit by bit, the little girl
became the center of her life. Whenever we saw Jacqueline, she
complained that the baby wasn’t well enough cared for. And she wanted to
have her daughter with her all the time, instead of being able to see
her only once a week. Finally she placed the little girl in a day
nursery, but only to take her out and leave her with another family.
Despite all these changes, the child thrived.
Jacqueline was working in an office. Her job was utterly uninteresting,
and she earned very little. But there was an astonishing energy in
Jacqueline. After work she sewed clothes for herself and knitted for the
baby. She fixed her own dinner when she wasn’t going out with some of
us. She went to bed late and rose early.
A new fixation began to appear in her. She wanted to find a father for
her child. This was now her one idea. Jacqueline was determined to
return to France at the end of the war with a suitable father for her
little girl.
But this was not easy. Young officers took her out and treated her with
respect, as always, and talked to her of love, as always, but Jacqueline
now felt that not one of them wanted to marry her.
It was at this time that Jacqueline met John. I had been doing a good
deal of liaison work with the British, and now the American Information
Service people began to appear on the scene too. I was invited to a
reception for them, at which the guest of honor was to be the famous
English conductor John Wright, who was doing a good deal of cultural
propaganda work. I took Jacqueline along. She was excited, for she had
often seen his name on posters, and she had watched him conducting the
symphony at Albert Hall. He was a man of about fifty, tall, spare,
graying, and rather distant with people. His wife was at the reception,
but it was whispered that they had not lived together for years.
The guest of honor glanced toward Jacqueline. She gave him one of her
ravishing smiles, and they began to talk. His absorption in the
beautiful young Frenchwoman did not go unnoticed. A friend of mine told
me something I had not known: John Wright had been in love with a young
French girl, who had recently died. She had had just such a ravishing
smile.
All that evening they remained together. Wright’s wife was flirting in
another corner of the room.
“What did you talk about?” I asked Jacqueline on the way home. She said,
almost reverently, that John Wright had talked to her of the girl he had
loved and so tragically lost.
“I _must_ see him again,” Jacqueline said.
I remembered De Prade. She was deciding again that a man, this man, had
to love her.
* * * * *
One day tickets for a concert at Albert Hall were passed out at the
barracks, and Ursula and Mickey and I went together. Mickey’s husband
was away on maneuvers in Scotland, and was to be absent all week.
It was a beautiful warm day. Once more it was summer. We had been
permitted to remove our jackets and to roll up the sleeves of our
shirts. On the grass in the park, ATS girls were stretched out beside
their soldiers. And again there had been no second front in Europe. No
one was even disappointed any more, for everyone had got used to
disappointments.
Actually, Mickey preferred jazz to any other music, and classical music
generally bored her. But she had come along because in Peter’s absence
she had nothing to do, and this had seemed to her as good a way as any
of passing the afternoon.
At the intermission, we suddenly heard ourselves called. “Tereska!
Mickey! Ursula!” We looked toward the boxes and saw the smiling face of
Jacqueline. She was signaling to us. We had lost track of her the last
few weeks. Now we hurried to her, delighted to see her again. And we
found, instead of poor unlucky Jacqueline, an extremely elegant young
woman, as fresh and pretty as ever.
She wore high-heeled shoes, which made her seem taller, and her hair was
bleached and worn shoulder-length, à la Veronica Lake. Breathlessly
Jacqueline demanded, “How did you like John Wright? Isn’t he
extraordinary?”
Then I remembered the party. So there had been developments.
People came into the box, kissing Jacqueline’s hand and congratulating
her. “Jacqueline, he was astonishing!”
Ursula stared at this new Jacqueline, who looked so triumphant and
happy. Mickey said, “Do you know John Wright?”
“I’m his secretary,” answered Jacqueline, with a particularly glowing
smile for me.
We asked her about her little girl, and she talked of her daughter as
though she were the only beautiful and intelligent baby in the world.
The baby lived with her at Wright’s house in Surrey. She had a nurse,
who was, of course, the best nurse in all London.
After the concert, Wright came to the box. There was something at once
brusque and timid in his manner, but when he looked at Jacqueline his
expression softened. He scarcely spoke. We all went out through the
stage door so as to avoid the crowd, and Jacqueline invited us to come
and spend the weekend in Surrey.
“I didn’t know she was John Wright’s mistress,” said Mickey when we had
left them.
“But how do you know she’s his mistress?” Ursula asked, astonished. She
would never be able to divine relationships of this sort. “Jacqueline
said she was his secretary.”
“His secretary night and day,” Mickey said, laughing.
Ursula managed a small smile. “Well, at last she looks happy,” she said
uncertainly.
* * * * *
In the car that carried them to Surrey, Jacqueline pressed herself
against John. She closed her eyes. Yes, she was happy. She was in a
beautiful car that was carrying her toward a house in the midst of a
lovely garden, and in the house was her well-cared-for child, waiting
for her. She was John’s mistress, and all the world was attentive to
her. John said he was going to introduce her to his friends in the
theatrical world, and that she would certainly become a great actress.
Everything in life had become so easy, thanks to him. She was proud of
him, and proud also of the role that she played at his side.
Jacqueline studied John’s face. His hair was almost white. Her father
would have been exactly John’s age. And John had given her what a father
gives to his child: security.
De Prade had given her passion, and this had hurt her; and then he had
left her. But to John she owed nothing but joy. He was nevertheless a
strange man, rather unsociable. He didn’t like people, and he preferred
the solitude of his home in Surrey. But Jacqueline told herself that she
would succeed little by little in taming him. After all, he was an
artist, a genius, and therefore he had a right to his idiosyncrasies.
John spent all his days working. In the evenings, Jacqueline would come
and sit on a stool at his feet. She had told him all about the death of
her father, her mother’s second marriage, the advances of her
stepfather, her broken engagement, the war, her attempt at suicide, the
hospital, De Prade, the baby, her solitude, her struggle for life. John
stroked her face and told her, “It’s over now. You shall never suffer
again, my dear. You are with me. Don’t worry about anything.”
Long afterward, she told me that their sexual contacts were quite rare.
John didn’t seem to feel frequent sexual needs, and Jacqueline didn’t
really care for the physical side of love. With De Prade she had
experienced the joy of having conquered, nothing more. And physical
love-making had always seemed a sort of degradation to her. She felt
flattered that John loved her “without that.” For “that” was the
barracks, the sailors, girls who came home drunk, Ginette and her
lovers, everything that was coarse. John gave her music, art,
sensitivity, the beauty of this house, and that sufficed.
She knew that there would be no marriage. John had told her that he
would never get a divorce. Jacqueline knew this, but she didn’t believe
it. Nothing had ever withstood her will; whatever she wanted she could
obtain, even though she had to pay dearly. And she wanted to marry John,
she wanted John to adopt her little girl, she wanted to re-enter France,
her head high, with her husband and her child, and with no one knowing
anything of what had happened to her.
As she fell asleep that night, Jacqueline thought of us, her friends
from the barracks. She was glad to have seen us again. We were her best
friends from Down Street, and besides, we were sure to tell everybody at
the barracks that she was the mistress of a famous man, and that she was
rich and happy. She smiled in the dark. At last she had her revenge on
life. She no longer needed anyone, and everybody would know it. She
decided to invite us to dinner.
Yes, everything was simple now, and she was happy.