Going Ashore (16 page)

“I should hope not,” said Mrs. Freeport. She held the paper before her face, but as far as Lily could tell she was not reading it.

“The trouble is” – for Mrs. Garnett could never help giving herself away – “I don’t know where to
go
in the autumn.”

“Ask your change man.”

“Egypt,” said Mrs. Garnett, still walking about. “I had friends who went to Egypt every winter for years and years, and now they have nowhere to go, either.”

“Let them stay home,” said Mrs. Freeport. “I am trying to read.”

“If Egypt continues to carry on, I’m sure I don’t know where we shall all be,” said Lily. Neither lady took the slightest notice.

“They were perfectly charming people,” said Mrs. Garnett, in a complaining way.

“Why don’t you do the
Times
crossword, Edith?” said Mrs. Freeport.

From behind them, Mrs. Garnett said, “You know that I can’t, and you said that only to make me feel small. But William Henry did it until the very end, which proves, I think, that he was not o.h.h. By o.h.h. I mean
off his head.”

The break in her voice was scarcely more than a quaver, but to the two women on the sofa it was a signal, and they got to their feet. By the time they reached her, Mrs. Garnett was sitting on the floor in hysterics. They helped her up, as they had often done before. She tried to scratch their faces and said they would be sorry when she had died.

Between them, they got her to bed. “Where is her hot-water bottle?” said Mrs. Freeport. “No, not that one. She must have her own – the bottle with the bunny head.”

“My yoghurt,” said Mrs. Garnett, sobbing. Without her make-up she looked shrunken, as though padding had been removed from her skin.

“Fetch the yoghurt,” Mrs. Freeport commanded. She stood over the old friend while she ate the yoghurt, one tiny spoonful at a time. “Now go to sleep,” she said.

IN THE MORNING
, Mrs. Garnett was taken by taxi to the early train. She seemed entirely composed and carried her book. Mrs. Freeport hoped that her journey would be comfortable. She and Lily watched the taxi until it was out of sight on the road, and then, in the bare wintry garden, Mrs. Freeport wept into her hands.

“I’ve said goodbye to her,” she said at last, blowing her nose. “It is the last goodbye. I shall never see her again. I was so horrid to her. And she is so tiny and frail. She might die. I’m convinced of it. She won’t survive the summer.”

“She has survived every other,” said Lily reasonably.

“Next year, she must have the large room with the balcony. I don’t know what I was thinking, not to have given it to her. We must begin planning now for next year. She will want a good reading light. Her eyes are so bad. And, you know, we should have chopped her vegetables. She doesn’t chew. I’m sure that’s at the bottom of the yoghurt affair.”

“I’m off to Nice tomorrow,” said Lily, the stray. “My sister is expecting me.”

“You are so devoted,” said Mrs. Freeport, looking wildly for her handkerchief, which had fallen on the gravel path. Her hat was askew. The house was empty. “So devoted … I suppose that one day you will want to live in Nice, to be near her. I suppose that day will come.”

Instead of answering, Lily set Mrs. Freeport’s water lily straight, which was familiar of her; but they were both in such a state, for different reasons, that neither of them thought it strange.

THREE LETTERS TESTIFY
to the depth and intensity of the
amitié amoureuse
linking Dido Flute to Alfred A., valet to Ulrich von Nützlich, brother of the Bosnian Ambassador to Paris and a famous stamp collector in his own right. (See “Nützlich and the Danish Herring Crisis,” Princeton, 1977.) These letters, published here for the first time, were discovered in one of Dido’s dancing slippers. (The reader will already have observed how, even in times of war and deprivation, Dido was reluctant to perform the petit-bourgeois act of having her shoes mended, preferring to patch them with documents she truly loved.) The letters, undated, have been arranged chronologically, according to the different husbands Alfred mentions.

I

Dido’s third husband, Basile Entrepont, was a celebrated street singer who gave impromptu concerts in the courtyards of apartment houses in the First, Eighth, and Sixteenth Arrondissements of Paris. Dido accompanied him, carrying a tin cup
.

II

Clouds of conflict were gathering on Europe’s horizon. Dido made a tour of Greece. News from Norway left her worried. In Paris, the Permanganate Bank crash ruined many a small depositor, precipitating some grumbling among Paris’s “little folk.” Marcel Oriflamme, Dido’s ninth husband, was in the Santé prison, awaiting clarification of the Permanganate affair. Dido often sent him telegrams. Alfred’s generous feelings toward his friend now came into play
.

III

The legendary philosopher Gleichgewicht was giving the first of his Sonnabend lectures at the Sorbonne, attended by an overflow audience of listeners, whose
enthusiastic cries of “Louder!,” “Not so fast!,” “What?,” and “How do you spell it?” punctuated their delivery. Gleichgewicht’s difficulty in mastering the spoken word, his notorious mistranslation of German terms into approximate French, and his habit of losing his place and rambling off into a dissertation on Emmerich Kálmán, composer of “Countess Maritza,” had an impact on French intellectual life that is felt even today. “The Paris intelligentsia,” wrote Maurice Chevalier to Clara Bow, 4 April 1930, “is now nothing but a béchamel sauce full of lumps.” (See also Josephine Baker to the King of the Belgians.) Dido’s seventeenth husband, Aymar Prune, had won the classic Tour de l’Ouvrier-Spécialisé bicycle race, which wound around the Renault automobile works. This was the heyday of racing, when creeping amateurism had not yet removed the real point of sport. “In those days, no one would have been fool enough to get on a bicycle for nothing,” Dido was to tell the First Secretary of the Albanian Communist Party (First Secretary A.C.P., private conversation with the author). Dido’s husband made a considerable fortune, which, as we shall see, she impulsively shared with her friends
.

Soon after this, the findings of the Canary Report were made public. (Two per cent of the middle classes owned ninety-eight per cent of all the Harz Mountain canaries in the greater Paris area.) This was to have a devastating effect on postwar attitudes. The time for dalliance was over. Some people attempted to keep alight their old
amitiés amoureuses
, but the heart had gone out of it. The age of the standard six-figure income was on its way. Alfred was retired on a pension that soon bore the tooth marks of inflation, while Dido continued to two-step on the hearts of the great men of Europe (see preceding 998 pp.).

I WAS EIGHTEEN
when I married Walt and nineteen when I followed him to Salzburg, where he was posted with the Army of Occupation. We’d been married eleven months, but separated for so much of it that my marriage really began that autumn day, when I got down from the train at Salzburg station. Walt was waiting, of course. I could see him in the crowd of soldiers, tall and anxious-looking, already a little bald even though he was only twenty-nine. The first thought that came into my head wasn’t a very nice one: I thought what a pity it was he didn’t look more like my brother-in-law. Walt and my brother-in-law were first cousins; that was how we happened to meet. I had always liked my brother-in-law and felt my sister was lucky to have him, and I suppose that was really why I wanted Walt. I thought it would be the same kind of marriage.

I waved at Walt, smiling, the way girls do in illustrations. I could almost see myself, fresh and pretty, waving to someone in uniform. This was eight years ago, soon after the war; the whole idea of arriving to meet a soldier somewhere seemed touching and brave and romantic. When Walt took me in his arms, right in front of everyone, I was so engulfed by the
idea
of the picture it made that I thought I would cry. But then I remembered my luggage and turned away so that I could keep an eye on it. I had matching blue plaid suitcases, given me by my married sister as a going-away present, and I didn’t want to lose them right at the start of my married life.

“Oh, Walt,” I said, nearly in tears, “I don’t see the hatbox.”

Those were the first words I’d spoken, except for hello or something like that.

Walt laughed and said something just as silly. He said, “You look around ten years old.”

Immediately, I felt defensive. I looked down at my camel’s-hair coat and my scuffed, familiar moccasins, and I thought, What’s wrong with
looking young? Walt didn’t know, of course, that my married sister had already scolded me for dressing like a little girl instead of a grownup.

“You’re not getting ready to go back to school, Cissy,” she’d said. “You’re married. You’re going over there to be with your husband. You’ll be mixing with grown-up married couples. And for goodness’ sake stop sucking your pearls. Of all the baby habits!”

“Well,” I told her, “you brought me up, practically. Whose fault is it if I’m a baby now?”

My pearls were always pink with lipstick, because I had a trick of putting them in my mouth when I was pretending to be stubborn or puzzled about something. Up till now, my sister had always thought it cute. I had always been the baby of the family, the motherless child; even my wedding had seemed a kind of game, like dressing up for a party. Now they were pushing me out, buying luggage, criticizing my clothes, sending me off to live thousands of miles away with a strange man. I couldn’t understand the change. It turned all my poses into real feelings: I became truly stubborn, and honestly perplexed. I took the trousseau check my father had given me and bought exactly the sort of clothes I’d always worn, the skirts and sweaters, the blouses with Peter Pan collars. There wasn’t one grown-up dress, not even a pair of high-heeled shoes. I wanted to make my sister sorry, to make her see that I was too young to be going away. Then, too, I couldn’t imagine another way of dressing. I felt safer in my girlhood uniforms, the way you feel in a familiar house.

I remembered all that as I walked along the station platform with Walt, awkwardly holding hands, and I thought, I suppose now I’ll have to change. But not too soon, not too fast.

That was how I began my married life.

In those days, Salzburg was still coming out of the war. All the people you saw on the streets looked angry and in a hurry. There were so many trucks and jeeps clogging the roads, so many soldiers, so much scaffolding over the narrow sidewalks that you could hardly get around. We couldn’t find a place to live. The Army had taken over whole blocks of apartments, but even with the rebuilding and the requisitioning, Walt and I had to wait three months before there was anything ready for us. During those months – October, November, December – we lived in a farmhouse not
far out of town. It was a real farm, not a hotel. The owner of the place, Herr Enrich, was a polite man and spoke English. When he first saw me, he said right away that he had taken in boarders before the war, but quite a different type – artists and opera singers, people who had come for the Salzburg Festival. “Now,” he said politely, “one cannot choose.” I wondered if that was meant for us. I looked at Walt, but he didn’t seem to care. Later, Walt told me not to listen to Herr Enrich. He told me not to talk about the war, not to mix with the other people on the farm, to make friends with Army wives. Go for walks. I wrote it all down on a slip of paper like a little girl: Don’t talk war. Avoid people on farm. Meet Army wives. Go for walks. Years later, I came across this list and I showed it to Walt, but he didn’t remember what it was about. When I told him this was a line of conduct he had laid down for me, he didn’t believe it. He hardly remembers our life on the farm. Yet those three months stand out in my memory like a special little lifetime, neither girlhood nor marriage. It was a time when I didn’t like what I was, but didn’t know what I wanted to be. In a way, I tried to do the right things. I followed Walt’s instructions.