The Birds Fall Down (51 page)

“But we should get back to Paris as soon as possible—” She was shaking from head to foot, she would never get him alone. But her father’s rage was a hot blast in her face. Now his fury was breaking over her, as it should have broken over Kamensky, once he dared speak of what was private, hidden, black. “Sit down and be quiet. I must write this letter. I knew nothing of this endless dragging out of ceremonies. I’ll have to change my plans for days ahead, put back engagements that involve other people. I’ll have to write and warn them, don’t you see? This is the last straw. Do you want to drive me mad?”

Her answering rage streamed out of her. She choked because she could not say, “You idiot, don’t you see this animal has got your letter in his pocket before you’ve even written it?” Kamensky’s hand was gentle on her arm as he led her back to her chair and sat down beside her, closer than anybody could wish her prospective murderer. In her ear, irritatingly hard to hear, he murmured, “Don’t be so disturbed, Miss Laura, I can’t bear you to be disturbed. And how terribly disturbed you are! It’s natural, I suppose, with all that happened to you yesterday, and those horrible people who came into your room last night, they must have frightened you.”

“I’m frightened of a lot of things, but not of them.”

“But I can’t bear anything evil to come near you. You should be taken care of properly. I would not wish to do anything in the world so much as to protect you, so it is dreadful what I have to say to you. Though I will be in Paris tomorrow, I can’t be with you in the morning. Or, indeed, in the afternoon, until four o’clock. I will simply perform my sad mission very early in the morning, and then leave. Then I will be with you. I will come on the hour.”

It might be, of course, that her father was simply going to write to his secretary or to the Party Whip, and that would be just male stuff which would take only a moment or two. But it was not so. He was going to take his time. Slowly he wrote the beginning of the letter, Dear Whoever-it-was, frowning slightly, and then he raised his head and stared straight at her, straight through her. She was simply part of the space between him and the image of another person.

“I feel it a betrayal of trust,” said Kamensky, “that I won’t be with you. But, dear Miss Laura, I have prepared everything I can for the arrival of our dear one. The Metropolitan will be there to receive him, and what your mother does not know about the ritual he and the servants will recall to her. This morning when I telephoned your mother she and I agreed that the most fitting person to recite the Psalms over your grandfather’s body, you know, we call them in our Church the candlebearers, would be a very devout woman well known to us both, who’s very grateful to the Count for the charity he bestowed on her for many years. So there will be nothing for you to do except strengthen his soul with your prayers.”

“I shall be praying to God to tell me why He allowed so good a man to be persecuted to the very edge of his grave.” Now her father was writing, writing quickly, smiling down at what he wrote, dipping his pen in the inkwell and writing again. He looked happy to the point of deafness and absent-mindedness, as he used to do when there had been an election and he and her mother had just come back from the constituency, and his majority was bigger than ever. It always was.

“Ah,” Kamensky exclaimed, “if any of us could be vouchsafed the explanation of that mystery! But don’t you want to know why, feeling as I do, I’m not going to be at your side tomorrow morning?”

Her father had raised his eyes from the paper and was again looking at the person he saw behind her face. He could scarcely credit that there existed such perfection. He had to stare and stare at the remembered image, to make sure it was so perfect. The crinkles round his eyes showed how amused he felt that the perfect object would walk, and talk, and laugh, and all that perfectly too. Her father must be writing to Susie Staunton.

“Of all people,” Kamensky was assuring her, “you have the most right to know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I’m quite simply,” he said, gravely and smugly, “going to secure my future.” She nearly laughed aloud at the ferocious irony of his words. They were so true nobody could accuse him now of lying. By killing her he would do just that, secure his future. He evidently felt he had to explain away what he had said, for he went on, “You see, I’m not without means. Professionally I’ve always been very lucky, largely through your grandfather’s influence. But now I must find more lucrative employment if I’m to enjoy what’s every man’s birthright. You know very well what I mean by that, Miss Laura.”

“I know what I’d mean by it. The right to live.”

“Yes, indeed. The right to live. To live fully. To have a home. To have a wife. Whom I would love and cherish. The right to have—”

She could no longer hear what he was saying. “The right to have what?”

“The right to have my children growing up around me.”

Well, snakes and bats could reproduce their kind, so she supposed he could, and she was glad that she had a good chance of preventing it.

“Oh, forgive me. Please forgive me, Miss Laura. I didn’t want to embarrass you. I feel quite ashamed—”

Her father had taken a second sheet of writing paper. What could he possibly find to write about at such length, if he were writing to Susie? “You are very beautiful you are very beautiful you are very beautiful you have marvellous hair you have marvellous hair you have marvellous hair you have a curious mouth you have a curious mouth you have a curious mouth.” That was all there was to say about Susie, except that she looked poor and was not, and that one would hardly be able to tell her. Anything else would be rubbish. She was glad that Kamensky would certainly read the letter and that Susie might never get it. For once she was grateful to Kamensky because he was evil, and she turned to him in thankfulness.

He bewildered her by saying, “I’m happy that that makes you happy.” She must have missed some essential part of his twaddle. Apparently he was telling her about the business which had kept him running about Paris all the day before, between the time she and her grandfather had left him at the chemist’s shop and his arrival at the apartment in the Avenue Kléber. “Well, I can assure you that the salary the French company offers me is beyond anything I had expected. It wouldn’t mean riches, of course. There’s no way by which a man like me can acquire a fortune such as comes automatically to those who have pillaged the people for many generations—” Too late he checked himself.

“That’s not the way we used to talk in the drawing-room in the Avenue Kléber,” she said to herself, “you slipped there.” Again she told herself that her chances of escape were good because Kamensky was not as clever as she had thought, again she rebuked herself for overconfidence, because her father was stupider than she had thought. If he could go on and on writing to Susie Staunton, he had changed into someone else, someone else too obtuse to understand in time that Kamensky was Gorin. Again she wished that Chubinov was sitting beside her, the one man who knew the whole story, who was kind.

“That sounded as if I were a liberal! Don’t misunderstand me. What I meant was that it is God’s will that some should be rich and some should be poor, and it is not for us to kick against the pricks. But if I take this post abroad I shall have enough. Enough to make plans which intoxicate me.” He stopped and drew his handkerchief across his lips. “You must not mind if I draw nearer to you. I don’t wish to distract your father’s attention while he is trying to write his letter.”

“You couldn’t,” said Laura, bitterly. She would have liked to go back to the salon upstairs and lie down on the camp-bed and bury her face in the pillow. It was terrible to sit so close to one’s murderer, while one’s father went on and on making a fool of himself.

“I believe Rio de Janeiro is a delightful place to live. There’s a magnificent mountain by the sea, a huge sugar-loaf. Living is expensive, but my salary, as I say, should be enough. I should be able to give my wife a home. Not a palace. But a home where I could make her happy. We would not have many servants, but we would have some servants. We could not have great stables, but we would have a carriage and pair. An official of the company whose superior I would be tells me that he keeps his carriage. I chose well, becoming a hydraulic engineer, though little did I know. The climate, I believe, is agreeable and healthy.”

Edward Rowan lifted his head from his letter and again stared into and through his daughter’s face. She could not bear it, and she rose in her chair, and called to him. She knew he had heard her, but only because he frowned and looked away into the corner of the room. There was a faint smile on his lips, which brightened into silent laughter. Then it was as if his face were burning. It might have been that tears came into his eyes, he looked down at the paper again and paused before he began to write again, and then was solemn as he wrote. He must have been remembering some happy time he had spent with Susie.

But he should never have been happy with Susie, not for a second. The proof of that had come that afternoon when Tania had been trying on hats, and the bedroom floor had been covered with round yellow buckram hat-boxes and clouds of tissue paper, and Susie had sat quiet as a mouse in the background beside the bed, while Tania sat at her dressing-table and Hélène brought her hat after hat. Tania had sprung up from her chair and held out to Susie a hat she thought would suit the fine small bones of her face; and as she threw out her arm in the gesture of giving, one of her shoulder-straps broke, and she had had to clap her hand against her chemise to prevent it falling clear away. As it was, the lace edging fell forward over her fingers, showing the rise of her breast, and in the triple glass behind her there was reflected and re-reflected, golden under the sunshine pouring in through the high windows, the cord of her spine, her strong shoulder-blade, like a wing cut off near its base, her long waist tapering down into her satin corset. “If the other shoulder-strap goes,” Laura thought to herself, “she’ll be left there all Elgin marble, and the silly dear won’t notice, she’s so keen on giving Susie that hat.”

She looked over to Susie to share the joke. But though Susie had seen a joke, it was not the same one. Her mouth was no longer vague as it trembled and twisted, as she altered a smile of derision to a smile of compliance, and with difficulty kept it so. She was wearing a black dress that covered her from neck to wrist and ankles, and it was an ambush from which she watched Tania making a fool of herself, romping like a schoolgirl, flinging out her arms so that she ended half-naked in front of her daughter and a servant. It was not mollifying Susie at all that, if Tania was half-naked, it was simply because she had wanted so much to give her a present. It could not be the spectacle of accidental nakedness which had thrown Susie off her balance; nobody could call Susie common. Of course it had to be allowed that Susie was finickingly neat by nature, and that untidiness always seemed to strike her as a threat, a hole in the dike that kept the waters out. But it came to Laura suddenly that Susie had some large, coarse reason for despising Tania at that moment. Her lips went on twitching when Tania cried out, in a voice made pure as a blackbird’s by her ecstasy of giving, “Quick, try it on, we’re longing to see you in it. There was never anybody who had so many different ways of looking lovely as you!”

Susie had at first not responded to the invitation, modestly shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head, as so often before miming her role of one doomed to go without, to go without what, to go without almost everything, while her narrow hand passed backwards and forwards, out of time with her other movements, over the Venice-point counterpane on Tania’s broad bed, just below the pillows, for a foot or so. Ultimately Susie had been persuaded to come forward and take Tania’s place before the dressing-table, to try on the hat, and to accept it, eyes enormous with surprise. She went on sitting there for some time, while Tania set the hat this way and that on her pale golden head, infatuated with the delight of making her beautiful friend more beautiful, preoccupied with it, so that she never paused to put on the négligée which Hélène was patiently holding ready for her. In the triple glass Tania’s bare arms, bare shoulders, half-bare breast, and all the rest that was too little obscured by her cloudy chemise, wove a pattern of rosy flesh round Susie’s black figure, still covered to the throat. Laura felt that at any moment Susie might push back her chair and stand up and burst into laughter unnaturally loud and long and cruel. This had not happened. Yet Laura could never recall the scene without thinking that it had, and that Tania had then turned into a statue, her hands above the little hat, while she grew pale and rocked on her feet under the force of the insult. Now Laura knew her memory to be only slightly mistaken, and that through being too intelligent. This was what had nearly happened. Her father should not have been able to be happy with Susie for a single second.

Till then she had not known that she had stopped loving her father, that he was nothing to her. She said aloud, “There shall be no more sea.”

So strong was her sense of loss that her fingers closed on her handbag lest that go too. Everything seemed gone from her body except her heart, which felt as if it were made of glass and had been cracked into a thousand sharp-edged fragments, which were holding together, as the pantry-window at Radnage Square was still holding together, though Osmund had sent a cricket-ball through it in the spring. “I feel as if my heart would break,” Dolly the housemaid had said, when her brother was killed at Spion Kop, and Laura had thought she simply meant that she was very sad. But Dolly had been telling the literal truth: real grief meant a feeling of fracture inside one’s body, on the left side, just above one’s waist. What happened when the pieces of glass fell apart? There must be a crucial ending if people were as wretched as she was, abandoned, feeble, betrayed, unjustly sentenced, exiled, taken for less than they were, put below others who were their inferior. She supposed they died. Well, she hoped that dead her father would realize that he had killed her. With that for prize, her mind went down into the pit. But it came back to her that for the last twelve hours at least she had been under threat of death, and that real death was quite different from the sort of dying she had been contemplating, which was like death in a picture or a poem, not death at all, just something about it. If there was one thing she had learned from that threat it was that she did not want to die, and that the sense in which her father might kill her was unimportant compared to the sense in which Kamensky meant to kill her.