Climates by André Maurois Page A

singing her Negro songs. Then, when we left,he insisted on giving her a banjo as a gift, which I found extremely irritating.
    Two weeks later she said, “Dickie, I’ve had a letter from little Douglas, a letter in English. Would you read it for me and help me reply?”
    I cannot say what sort of demon took hold of me: I told her with ill-contained fury that I sincerely hoped she would not reply, that Douglas was a little cretin and I found him boring … None of this was true. Douglas was well brought up, charming and, before my marriage, I would have liked him very much. But I was getting into the habit of never listening to what my wife was saying without wondering what she was hiding. Every time I spotted something unexplained in what she said, I constructed an ingenious theory to clarify why she wanted it to be unexplained. There was a painful pleasure, a voluptuous torment in believing that she was lying. My memory is usually fairly poor, but where Odile’s words were concerned it became astonishing. I remembered her least utterances, made comparisons between them, weighed them. I would find myself saying, “What? You had a fitting for that jacket? But that makes it the fourth fitting. You already went on Tuesday, Thursday, andSaturday last week.” She looked at me, smiled at me with no trace of embarrassment, and replied, “You have a devilish memory …” I felt both ashamed of being found out and proud to think I had foiled her tactic. Mind you, my discoveries were pointless, I never acted on them, I had no desire to act, and Odile’s mysterious calm gave me no grounds to make a scene. I was both unhappy and passionately interested.
    What stopped me from harshly laying down the law and, for example, forbidding Odile from seeing some of her friends, was my acknowledgment of the ridiculous mistakes that my desperate deductions drove me to. In one instance I remember her complaining of headaches and tiredness for several weeks, and she said she wanted to spend a few days in the country. I could not leave Paris at the time, and for a long while I refused to let her go. Please note, I completely failed to notice how selfish it was of me to deny that she was ill.
    Eventually it struck me that it would be still more ingenious to agree, to allow her to go to Chantilly, which was what she wanted, and to surprise her there the following evening. If I did not find her alone (and I was quite sure I would not), at least Iwould know something concrete at last and, more important, I would be able to act on this, to confound her, to leave her (because I believed that was what I wanted, but I was wrong). She left. On the second day I hired a car (I was predicting a scene and did not want my own chauffeur to witness it) and left for Chantilly after dinner. About halfway there, I gave the man the order to turn back to Paris. Then, after a couple of miles, with my curiosity too acutely aroused, I made him turn toward Chantilly once more. At the hotel I asked for Odile’s room number. They did not want to give it to me. That was quite clear. I showed them my papers, proved I was her husband, and eventually a bellboy took me up. I found her alone, surrounded by books and the countless letters she had written. But surely she had had time to set up this little scene?
    “You don’t give up, do you!” she said with a note of pity. “What did you think? What were you afraid of? … That I’d be with a man? What would you have me do with a man? … What you don’t understand is that I want to be alone just to be alone. And, if you want me to be absolutely frank, what I really don’t want is to see you for a few days. I’m so exhausted by your fears andsuspicions that I have to watch what I say and be careful not to contradict myself, like a defendant in a court of law. I’ve had the most lovely day here. I’ve been reading, dreaming, sleeping, I went for a walk in the forest. Tomorrow I’m going to the château to see