The children want to go out to the garden. There is a lawn, with winding paths and bushes and trees that mass and obscure one another, so that it is impossible to see where the garden ends. We go down, and out through a pair of glass doors. A warm, dry wind is blowing. I sit on the grass, and the children run away down the paths and disappear. I watch the tops of the trees, turning and bowing in the wind. I watch the grass, its dry shifting filaments electric in the sunlight. Suddenly I am cold: I feel a prickling of the skin, a sense of exposure. I go back upstairs to get a jacket. Passing the bed, I notice that the soldier book is no longer on the table. A different book is there. Someone has come in and changed it. It seems that I am being directed. I do not like being directed. I do not touch the book: I do not want to know what it is. The room is silent, full of white light. I get my jacket and quickly go back outside again. I sit on the grass, and then lie down, on my side. I am very tired. I close my eyes. The white light and the wind feel as though they are in my head. I only know that I have gone to sleep when the sound of a bell wakes me up. It is ringing in the garden, somewhere nearby. It is a handbelclass="underline" it makes a loud, sonorous, clanging sound. I can hear a woman’s voice calling. Les enfants! she shouts. Les enfants! I wonder which children she is calling: I haven’t seen any here. I sit up, and observe the fair-haired woman with the strange eyes striding down toward the end of the garden. It is she who is ringing the bell, and calling. Les enfants! La maison de jeux est ouverte! La maison de jeux est ouverte! Les enfants! A while later she returns, with my daughters running behind her. They stop to speak to me. They are excited. They say that the lady is going to show them the house of games. She has walked on ahead and vanished through the glass doors. They run after her, and I get stiffly up to follow.
In the house, in the gloom of the salon, there is a woman. She is tall, erect, gray-haired. She has a broad, bare face that is full of creases. She has small, penetrating, merciless eyes. She holds out her hand to greet me. She is Madame, the mistress of this faintly unsettling domain. She is the third and, I can see, the most powerful of the household triumvirate. While she speaks, I calculate: she is the aunt of the young girl, and the mother of the saturnine Hélène, the fair-haired woman who was ringing the bell. I see that they are a caucus, a set. I compliment her on her house, her wondrous collection of objets, and she eyes me, smiling like a snake.
The children have gone to the maison de jeux, she says. My daughter has opened it for them.
I say that it is very kind of her: the children will be pleased to find some toys to play with. It is very sensible, I say, to have such a facility. It might stop them trying to play with her antiques.
They can touch whatever they like, she says, smiling, as long as they do not break it.
Unexpectedly, the children return. I hear them running down the hallway. They fly into the salon: their faces are strange. I ask if they have seen the house of games. Yes, they say. Why did they not stay there? They do not reply. Madame is looking at them. She wears an expression of cold amusement on her face. I sense that she is offended, or disappointed: I sense that they have failed. I take their hands and ask them to show it to me, and they lead me through the hall and out across the white light of the drive toward the barn. At the door, they stop. It’s in there, they say. They do not want to come in. They have seen it already.
I go through the door, out of the white light. The barn is dark. There is music playing. It is piano music, Debussy, coming from somewhere in the middle of the large, open room. I am in a kind of tunnel of black draperies. I push my way through and find myself face-to-face with a mannequin. She is tall and flaxen-haired, and she wears a long sequined gown. For a moment I am startled: I thought she was real. Her hand is outstretched, fingers splayed, as though I might be expected to bend down and kiss them. But her eyes — her eyes are so large and liquid, so intricate in their irises, so filled with painted expression. In the end it is her hair that gives her away. She wears a beaded headdress with a blue feather stitched in the band, and her yellow synthetic hair curls stiffly around it. Beside her there is a wardrobe with its doors open. Inside there are many shelves. They are crammed with female finery, with delicate shoes and evening bags, with fans and feather boas and costume jewelry. It is a little sinister — it is a kind of mausoleum: there is something of the bureaucracy of death about the rows of old handbags, the neatly stacked pairs of worn shoes.
I move on, along the black-draped corridor. There are two more mannequins, a man and a woman. They are in wedding clothes: the woman wears a ruffled white dress with a big, bell-shaped skirt, and a veil in her hair. The man is in morning dress. They are arm in arm, looking ecstatically into each other’s eyes. Next there is a whole scene, lit with bright electric stage lights. There are children, and a baby in a cradle. There is a little dog, and a cat playing with a ball of wool. It is a room in a family house: there is a man sitting in an armchair and a woman in an apron, and a table with a cloth and plates laid out. They are so strange, so lifelike. They have such a touching air of mortality: they seem more mortal than people of flesh and blood. I pass a woman in silver lamé, two children ardently holding hands, an aviator with a stricken, ghastly face. Then more women, delicate, with tapered fingertips and fronded eyes, with slender necks and heads inclined, all clad in chiffon and satin and silk. They stand on every side, in attitudes of tragic modesty, so beautiful and forlorn; and everywhere there are cupboards of clothes and hats and jewelry, gorgeous and redundant, in whose arc of possibility, of destiny, their frozen plastic forms are contained. It is their atom of life, of art, that imprisons them. They are like painted women, sealed in their instant of reality. Is it so brief, so fleeting, the moment of perception? How is the world to be comprehended, described, if instants are all there can be?
I turn a corner and there is the woman, Hélène, sitting on a red velvet sofa. She has been waiting. She looks at me with her strange, slanting eyes. Her face is defiant and vulnerable. She reaches next to her to adjust the volume of the piano music. She tells me that the maison de jeux is all her own work. She created it herself, the whole spectacle. She has been collecting clothes and mannequins since she was a child. Her mother allowed her to use the barn: she made her first model when she was sixteen. Since then it has been her life. She has always lived here, with her mother. She has collected mannequins from many different periods, in order to demonstrate historical variations in the perception of the female form. For her, women are the victims of perception. In the mannequins she has found a new means of expressing the reality of the female body.
I say that she has painted their eyes beautifully. It is incredible: they almost seem to be alive.