The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras Page B

for you."
    "I was out on the lawn. Come, let's join them."
    "You think it's all right?"
    "I have a feeling it doesn't matter to them whether they talk in our presence. They may even prefer it."
    We enter the living room. They are both still silent.
    "Aren't you going to call John Bedford?"
    Lol gets up, goes out into the vestibule, closes a door —the sound of the violin is suddenly softer.
    "He'd just as soon not be with us tonight."
    She pours us all some sherry, and serves herself. Peter Beugner downs his in a single draft, the silence terrifies him, he can't bear it.
    "I think it's time we were leaving," he says, "whenever Tatiana is ready."
    "Oh, no! not yet," Lol begs.
    I am standing, I wander restlessly about the room, my eyes upon her. The thing ought to be obvious. But Tatiana is plunged deep into the Town Beach ball. She has no desire to leave, nor has she even bothered to reply to her husband. This ball was also Tatiana's. Oblivious to all around her, she is once again seeing a person who was there.
    "John is becoming more and more of a fanatic about his music," Lol says. "Sometimes he goes on playing till the wee hours of the morning. In fact, it happens more and more often."
    "He's a man people are talking about, I've heard people mention his concerts," Peter Beugner says. "It's rare that his name doesn't crop up in the course of a dinner or a party."
    "Yes, that's true," I say.
    Lol is talking in order to keep them, to keep me, searching for some way to make my task easier. Tatiana is not listening.
    "In fact, Tatiana, you were talking about him," says Peter Beugner, "because he married Lol."
    Lol sits down on the edge of her chair, prepared to get to her feet if anyone makes a move to leave.
    "John got married under somewhat unusual circumstances, that some people found rather amusing. That's probably another reason why people talk about him, they remember our marriage."
    Then I address my question to Tatiana:
    "What was Michael Richardson like?"
    They are not surprised, they look at each other, endlessly, endlessly, decide that it is impossible to describe,to give an account of those moments, of that evening whose veritable depth and density they, and they alone, are familiar with, that night whose hours they had seen slip by, one by one, until the last had gone, and, by that last hour, love had changed hands, identity, one error had been exchanged for another.
    "He never came back, never," Tatiana says. "What a mad night!"
    "Came back?"
    "He has no ties left in Town Beach. His parents are dead, and he's sold whatever they left him. He's never once set foot in Town Beach again."
    "I knew that," Lol says.
    Their words are for themselves alone. The sound of the violin can still be heard. It is fairly obvious that John Bedford is also practicing to avoid having to be with us this evening.
    "Do you think he may be dead?"
    "He may be. He was as dear to you as life itself."
    Lol's reply is a slight pout, indicating doubt.
    "What about the police, why did the police come?"
    Tatiana glances at us, somewhat startled, frightened: this is one fact she didn't know.
    "No, your mother mentioned the police, but they never came."
    She is reflecting. And it is when she does that the obscurity returns. But it returns only for the ball, never for anything else.
    "That's strange, I thought they had. Did he really have to leave?"
    "When?"
    "In the morning?"
    Lol Stein grew up here in South Tahla, her father was originally from Germany, he was a professor of history at the university, her mother was from South Tahla, Lol has a brother nine years her elder, he lives in Paris, she never makes the slightest allusion to this one relative, Lol met the man from Town Beach one morning during summer vacation, at the tennis courts, he was twenty-five, the only son of well-to-do parents whose land holdings in the area were extensive, he had no vocation, was a cultured, brilliant, extremely brilliant person, a moody, saturnine man, Lol fell