Aimez-vous Brahms by Françoise Sagan Page A

day had found him at the same office, each evening with the same companion, in the same flat, clinging to the same desire, the same anxiety, the same pain. For Paule still broke away at times, avoided his eyes, smiled fondly at his impassioned speeches. Paule still said nothing when there was talk of Roger. Often he had the impression of waging an absurd, exhausting and hopeless struggle, for, as he fully sensed, the passage of time was getting him nowhere. He had not simply to efface Paule's memory of Roger; he had to kill something inside her which was Roger, a kind of painful, ineradicable root which she endured with forbearance, and there were times when he reached the point of wondering whether it were not this forbearance, this accepted suffering that had first made him fall for her and now, perhaps, even kept his love alive. But generally he said to himself: "Paule is waiting for me; in an hour I shall have her in my arms," and it seemed to him that Roger had never existed, that Paule loved him, Simon, and that everything was simple and ablaze with happiness. And these were the times Paule preferred him—when he treated their relationship as an inescapable fact to which she could only subscribe. She was tired of her own diffidence. But when she was alone, the thought of Roger living without her would seem a fundamental mistake; she would ask herself how they had landed where they were. And 'they', 'we' still meant her and Roger. Simon was 'he'. Only, Roger knew nothing of this. When he was weary of his present life, he would come and grumble to her and no doubt try to win her back. And perhaps he would succeed. Simon would be well and truly hurt and she would be alone again, waiting for unreliable telephone calls and unfailing slights. And she rebelled against her own fatalism, against the impression that all this was inescapable. There was someone inescapable in her life: Roger.
    But this did not prevent her from living with Simon, from sighing in his arms at night and sometimes from holding him to her in response to one of those impulses which only children and slick lovers can inspire, an impulse so possessive, so terrified at the idea of the precariousness of all possession, that he himself did not notice its intensity. At these moments Paule was close to old age, to that incomparable love that comes with age, and afterwards she was angry with herself and angry with Roger (who did not compel her to withdraw into herself) for not being there. When Roger took her, he was her master, she was his property, he was only a year or two older than she, and everything complied with certain moral or aesthetic rules which she had never till then suspected herself of harbouring. But Simon did not feel himself to be her master. He had adopted, through an unconscious 'hamming' which he could not have supposed would lead to his downfall, a complete attitude of dependence which made him fall asleep on her shoulder, as though for protection, get up at dawn to make breakfast, and consult her over the smallest thing—an attitude which moved Paule, yet somehow embarrassed her, discomforted her, as though she were faced with something abnormal. She respected him: he was working now; on one occasion he had taken her to a trial, in Versailles, where he had given a remarkable performance as the young lawyer, shaking hands, smiling condescendingly at the journalists and always returning to her as to the pivot of all his activity, at times interrupting his effusions to strangers so as to confirm that she was looking at him. No, he made no show of detachment. So she kept her eyes on him, putting every ounce of admiration and interest into her expression, which changed, the moment he turned his back, into one of affection and a certain pride. The women looked at him a good deal. She felt good: someone was living wholly for her. For her, at last, the question of the difference in their ages did not arise; she did not ask herself: "And in ten