Family and Friends (7 page)

His position as head of the household elect, to which he has been steadily moving and for which Sofka has been preparing him, is absolutely consolidated when Frederick returns. Frederick, who is under the impression that he has delivered Betty to the Lausanne train, is ready to receive congratulations, and indeed Sofka has prepared a congratulatory meal for him. It is in the course of this meal, and under the closest questioning from Alfred, that Frederick reveals that he last saw Betty at the Hôtel Bedford et West End the night before she was due to leave for Lausanne and he to see her to the train. It was with a promise of good conduct from Betty that Frederick sailed off into the blue Parisian evening for a late stroll and a last brandy. It is, after all, much easier for him to catch the morning train to London, and Betty is not a child. She is quite capable of catching a train at her age. ‘She is quite capable of catching a train at her age,’ he says affably to his mother, not focusing on her dawning look of uneasiness. ‘How do you know she caught it?’ demands Alfred stonily. ‘Why wouldn’t she catch it?’ asks Frederick, his eyebrows lifted. ‘It’s not as if she knows anyone in Paris.’ For a moment they sit, digesting this sentence. Try as they may, they cannot dispute it. Betty knows no
one in Paris. She has not been there since she was a very small child, with her mother and her nurse and her father, just before he died. She must have remembered it, in some mysterious way, as an agreeable alternative to home, as a place where life is a holiday.

With a stifled exclamation, Sofka gets up from the table, dropping her napkin, and is on the telephone, placing a call to Mme Renaudin in Clarins. There is no conversation during her absence, but Alfred fixes Frederick with his increasingly stony glance. At that moment he feels that he can discount and discard his brother; it is almost a moment of triumph. Mimi is pale and frightened; she is also guilty, for she thinks she knows something of what Betty has in mind. If Mimi knew for certain what she thinks she knows she would faint with the grief of that knowledge; therefore she puts it away from her. But she cannot recover her colour, even when she reflects that her mother must be more anxious, and it is only due to her abiding innocence that she does not in that moment renounce her obligations altogether.

In the brief interval of Sofka’s absence, telephoning to Mme Renaudin, Frederick’s status has undergone a slight but permanent alteration. Frederick’s agreeable lightheadedness is perceived in that moment as unreliability, and when Sofka returns, pale and with a fixed expression, she ignores the hand he thrusts out towards her and waits for him to get to his feet and pull out her chair. ‘She has not arrived,’ Sofka finally says, after what seems a very long period of silence. Mimi puts her hands to her face. ‘Alfred,’ says Sofka, turning to him and disregarding the other two. ‘You had better ring the hotel. If she is still there, I’m afraid you will have to go and get her back.’

It transpires that Betty has left the Hôtel Bedford et West End, that she in fact left when she was meant to, so
as not to arouse undue suspicion. But she has not gone to Lausanne. She has moved to another, smaller hotel, the Hôtel des Acacias, the address of which she has deposited with the hall porter. How she got hold of this none of them can work out. It happens to be where Frank Cariani’s family stay when they are in Paris, and it must have been Frank who mentioned this in the course of a long-ago conversation. But Mimi, who was also present when that conversation – a mere exchange of pleasantries – took place, at the very beginning of the girls’ association with members of the Cariani family, is suddenly as cold as death. She imagines that it was Frank and Frank alone who planned this coup and for the first time in her life she recognizes the sad need to defend herself. ‘If Alfred is going to Paris,’ she says, ‘I am going with him.’ ‘Good idea,’ agrees Frederick. ‘Paris is very charming at this time of the year. You are all making a fuss about nothing. I will stay here and keep Mama company.’ None of them acknowledges this remark.

Stern but in full control, Alfred stands at the window the following morning, waiting for the car to come round. Mimi is a little delayed; as usual, before any sort of a journey, she feels unwell. She does, in fact, need all the forces at her command in order to accomplish this mission, although she does not quite know what she is going to do. One thing is certain: Betty is to be brought home. If nothing is said – and it would be better if nothing were said – then the implications of this desertion need not haunt her, and somehow they will all get over it. The unmentionable act, the image of which Mimi finds constantly in her mind, will have been, if not avoided, then certainly not consummated. That is all she can hope for now, and she begins to see, sadly, that this must be enough. She begins, in the way of all those who are born to lose, to imagine her way past this terrible damage and
to try and regain favour in Frank Cariani’s eyes. She will, she thinks, have a cheerful but honest explanation with him; no reproaches, of course, merely an indication of how she herself feels. Being a decent fellow, Frank will then compare the conduct of the two sisters in his mind and be won over by Mimi’s honesty. Mimi thinks that this is how hearts are won, not believing for a moment that Betty’s is the surer way. Behind this belief lies an unbearable vision of the world’s duplicity that must not come to full realization.

On the train they say little to each other, although Alfred is considerate towards his sister. He knows that she will have a bad crossing. He himself is filled with a rising tide of distaste for this adventure, although he still derives a certain comfort from his displacement of Frederick. He is young enough to take pride in his manliness, and in the feeling of his grateful mother’s arms about him as she embraced him for the last time. He does not ask himself why Betty has chosen to disappear. He attributes this escapade to her basic instability, and he realizes, with a coldness which could be unrelenting, that she has exchanged an innocent sojourn in the company of Nettie for this grubby escapade in an unfamiliar hotel in Paris. His distaste, which is tempered in England by the knowledge of Frederick’s loss of favour (for Alfred has always been jealous of him), swells almost out of control by the time they are in France. Jolting down the corridor of the French train, in an effort to buy a cup of coffee for the woebegone Mimi, Alfred is accosted by a rough-looking individual with a tray round his neck, and is forced to purchase a bottle of some nameless cordial for a very high price. While he picks up his change and tries to work out the tip, the individual becomes restless.
‘Alors, Monsieur,’
he upbraids Alfred.
‘C’est pour aujourd’hui ou pour demain?’
There is a further muffled altercation
as Alfred attempts to squeeze past him; he stumbles a little and the man with the tray is not displeased.

This tiny incident puts Alfred off balance and when he is once again seated next to Mimi and the overhead wires and cables of the track seem to rush together as if anxious to reach the journey’s end, he surveys his sister’s pale face and suffering expression and tells her rather sharply to tidy herself up. Alfred is in fact in an agony of discomfort, feeling himself to be disregarded and unknown; although his French is excellent it is the French of Victor Hugo and it has not been of much use to him so far. And there is the business of the hotels to be sorted out – he imagines that they will have to get on the trail as soon as they arrive – and he is very hungry and they have brought too much luggage. Seeing him momentarily disconcerted, Mimi rallies her forces, and like the excellent sister that she is lays a hand on his arm and says, ‘First things first. We will go to the hotel, take a hot bath, have a meal sent up, and get a good night’s sleep. We have done quite enough for one day. Tomorrow we can start again.’

In this way, impervious to the globe-shaped lights and the ineffable blue Parisian evening, they struggle into a taxi and are speeded towards the Hôtel Bedford et West End. ‘We must telephone Mama,’ says Mimi, who, in her tiredness, has let down her hair and loosened the collar of her dress. Glancing sharply at her, Alfred is surprised to see Mimi looking so old, and is immediately glad that he has ordered a suite instead of the two rooms that were offered. Money is no problem. Their father, in one of his mysterious but so adult arrangements, has left certain funds in the care of a lawyer acting for a deceased partner, and Alfred supposes that this lawyer must be contacted as soon as possible so that they are not to starve. A further telephone call is put through and Alfred is reassured to hear a polite voice speaking in strongly accented English,
which to him at that moment means infinitely more than the French of Victor Hugo. Maître Blin will send a representative to the hotel in the morning and will meet Monsieur Dorn at the bank; a signature is all that is needed.

This conversation, together with some hot soup and a glass of wine, restores Alfred’s equilibrium. He sits with Mimi in their stuffy little salon until it seems reasonable to send her to bed. He hates to see her looking so wan and defenceless and hopes that she will have repaired herself by the morning. Left alone, he puts through another call to Sofka, and this time manages to be less testy and more reassuring. Sofka, more impressed by his testiness than by his slightly mechanical reassurances, praises him for his aptitude; already she is reacting to his assumption of control, having persuaded herself that this will carry the day. Left alone, and with no one to talk to, almost too keyed up to go to bed, Alfred pulls aside the curtain and gazes down on the rushing traffic of the Rue de Rivoli. Faced with all that speed, he knows a moment of discouragement. Leaning his head against the cold glass, he remembers that it is his birthday. He is seventeen years old.

W
HEN MIMI
awakes, after a profound sleep, she is strangely calm, passionless, devoid of all the fears that usually beset her. For a short while she lies in the broad French bed, gazing at the milky rectangle of light that is only faintly obscured by the yellowish tulle curtains, for she was too tired, on the previous evening, to let the maid in to make all secure for the night. She reviews the events that have brought the two of them to Paris; she is well aware of Alfred’s distaste for this adventure, of his misery at having to deal with his father’s lawyer – a meeting for which he would have liked to be thoroughly briefed and prepared – and his discomfort in this vast, shabby and respectable hotel. Alfred has rarely been away from home before, does not remember being a baby in Paris and never thought that he would make his first excursion into that wide world, of which he has read so much, in so unseemly and so wretched a cause. Mimi is aware of his disappointment; she is also aware that his birthday was spent largely on a French train, and although she knows that Sofka will have prepared a festive meal for Alfred to celebrate his return, it will seem as if he is only being congratulated for having carried out her wishes, not for any merit of his own. Mimi is aware of all this. She knows, too, that her sister is lost to them, and for a moment she falters as she remembers how they
used to brush each other’s hair, dreamily, in the old nursery. But after this moment of weakness, she recovers and rediscovers that strange blessed calm that descended on her when she awoke that morning.

She bathes and dresses quietly; then, writing a note for Alfred to tell him that she will be back in time for lunch and that he is not to worry, she slips out of the door and runs lightly down the red-carpeted staircase. It has somehow come to her, without much thought on her part, that Alfred will recover his equilibrium if he is left to walk about Paris on his own for a short while, and that she, in the meantime, will proceed to the Hôtel des Acacias, there to confront Betty. She knows quite well that this meeting will in effect change nothing and she is prepared to say goodbye to Betty, this very morning, if necessary. In fact, rather than bring about this purely formal exchange, which, she knows, Alfred would only spoil, Mimi would rather like to know how things stand between her sister and Frank Cariani. In fact, Mimi is quite adamant on this point; she requires this knowledge, not in any spirit of panic or despair, but in order to plan her future conduct. Mimi is not even surprised to find herself thinking in these terms, so becalmed is she by the strangeness, yet the dreamlike familiarity of the pearl-grey Parisian morning. So radical has been the shift in her consciousness during those hours of perfect sleep that she is not even surprised to have exchanged the past, by which she was previously bound, for the present, which now absorbs all her attention.

Quite without her habitual nervousness, Mimi sits down outside a café in the Place des Pyramides and orders a cup of coffee and a croissant. No one seems to think she should not be there and she is served quickly and efficiently. Then she puts a discreet hand to the embroidered collar of her blouse, another discreet hand
to her heavy chignon of hair, gets up, and crosses the street into the Tuileries gardens. She does not know why she has done this, for the Hôtel des Acacias is in the opposite direction, somewhere near the Parc Monceau. But it is still early, very early, and Mimi desires to use her few free moments in order to bring home from this strange visit some memory of her own. It is so beautiful there in the gardens, the only other presence being that of the tiny whispering water jets turned on to sprinkle the flowers in the beds. These flowers – begonias? – glow redly but their fierce colour is muted by the surrounding greyness of the dusty paths, the heavy dew on the grass, and the thick autumn mist that will shortly rise to reveal a majestic late sun. Mimi drifts noiselessly under the chestnut trees, now heavy with the last of their green leaves; already the sap has left them and the brown and gold colours have begun their invasion. Like a child, Mimi stoops and picks up a chestnut, green, prickly, and hard, too young to split and reveal its glossy fruit. Down the paths, past gesturing statues, mute, stern, occasionally agonized, Mimi walks sedately, as if conscious of the statues’ august and adult passions. She skirts the round pond, where she strolled as a child with her nurse, and sets her course for the Place de la Concorde. Mimi knows Paris well; she used to accompany her parents when they came over for the Salon d’Automne, and this was one of her daily promenades. But in the solitude of this early morning she is able to notice the bones of a landscape that was previously hidden to her by a press of people: here, for example, are the curving stone balustrades that form, as it were, the prelude to that great enclosure, now alive with traffic, with the obelisk in the centre and the arch at the far end and the policemen’s whistles putting an end to her morning reverie.