The House in Paris (30 page)

'Not at the time. Later.'

'Then were you angry with her?' said Leopold, curious.

'Yes,' Ray said, without hesitation.

'But you love her, don't you?'

'Yes; that was why I was.'

'Oh ... Did you say just now I needn't go back to Italy?'

'I said I didn't see why you should.'

'But don't I belong to them?'

Turn round,' Ray exclaimed. 'I won't talk to your back.'

Leopold turned round. In the February afternoon dusk beginning to fill the room, the two eyed each other intently, but so impersonally that each might have been a photograph. Leopold thought wordlessly, like his mother: This grey man is a fanatic. Ray thought: It can still be done. Their immaterial closeness up to each other, the silence after Leopold had turned round, made their sudden common demand for an understanding tower outside this afternoon and this room. There was not a sound over the ceiling: Mme Fisher lay in rigid silence upstairs.

Leopold said: 'But, look — '

'I think that could be got round.'

'Then where should we be tomorrow?'

'We might stay somewhere here, somewhere in Paris.'

Leopold said: 'But you don't like what I say ... Had my
mother
been meaning I shouldn't go back?'

'I've no idea, I tell you.'

'What should we do in Paris?'

'Walk about, I suppose.'

'For how long?'

'I tell you, I've no idea.'

'And she'd be with us?' Leopold said, casual.

'I haven't — I don't know. Yes. Sometime. Of course.'

'She's where now?'

'Versailles.'

'Where the king lived — But then what?'

'It's no good keeping on asking me. I don't know myself.'

Ray, getting up, abruptly for such a big man, walked to the mantelpiece. Here he discovered the dead cigarette between his fingers, dropped it and lit another. His dropping the charred cigarette on to the speckless parquet startled Leopold more than anything yet. Ray moved again — to the window, where he stood behind the curtain, looking out at the tree. From now on it was Leopold who watched Ray, first each step he took, then that fanatic immobility. He was made conscious of someone's being consciously other than Leopold. (He had felt other people
as
other only in opposition.) He had never seen a decision come at before, or been there when a mind went round like machinery in the dark. He had recognized impulse in grown-up people, never yet its adoption by the entire will. Vacillating outside his own iron scheme of things, grown-up dictatorship, therefore, had seemed to Leopold arbitrary and purposeless; his idea was: They dispose of but do not affect me. But
this
present decision being come at was vital. This man affects me; I cannot affect him. He is he, but not his, hers. My mother, my mother, always my mother. I must not speak while he wonders what she will say. Watching Ray's cigarette being held between his fingers, fuming, watching smoke being puffed out sharply against the light, Leopold contemplated this theft of his own body that was being proposed, rejected, decided upon. Ray, still looking out of the window, said: 'I am taking it that you
don't
want to go back to Italy?'

'No.'

'And that that's not just an idea someone just put into your head?'

'Mme Fisher said I was wrong to mind where I go.'

'She did? ... But you've been all right there?'

'I didn't think, till — '

' — Till your mother wrote? You know, till things get fixed up — if they ever do get fixed up — this amounts to stealing you?'

'I don't mind.'

'There's no doubt, you know, that I ought to have kept out of this.'

'Doesn't my mother know you —?'

'I daresay she guesses. Because when I went out, I — '

'Are you afraid?' said Leopold.

'We can put in time somewhere,' his mother's husband went on. 'Across the river from here. At the hotel we always — '

'Put in time? You mean, wait till — '

'Yes, I mean wait.'

'For her. Oh. Yes.'

Turning round from the window, Ray looked at the boy in the dark blouse who sat gripping the wooden kerb of the sofa on which he sat. For how long, Ray thought, have I thought? For how long has he not stopped gripping the sofa? All he has to say is: 'Oh. Yes.' Ray stared at the child's outline against the wallpaper. But after the outside light behind the branches the salon was so dark that he hardly saw what he saw.

A door shut over their heads and Miss Fisher came downstairs. She looked in and said it was five o'clock.

4

The significance of its being five o'clock was that Henrietta's train left the Gare de Lyon at half-past six, so Miss Fisher wanted to know where she was. She was not still on the stairs, so must have crept either up or down. Miss Fisher feared she might have returned to the salon, breaking in on the conversation there.

Naturally, Henrietta would not have done this. She turned out to be in the dining-room; she sat at the table rereading
The Strand Magazine,
which she had brought in here from the salon when Miss Fisher sent her to go and play. When Miss Fisher looked in she did not look up, pointedly. She had switched on the hanging light, which shone on the glazed pages and her fair falling hair. The room, still smelling of
blanquette de veau
at lunch and packed with bracketed furniture of a dull reddish grain, like pencilwood, had not from the first pleased her; by now she was bored, too, with looking through the tight blind at a street with so little animation and telling herself that this was a street in Paris. She had hitched her heels on to the rung under her chair.

'Oh, dear,' said Miss Fisher, 'you haven't had any tea.'

'No, I suppose I haven't,' said Henrietta remotely.

'You shall have tea now, at once — or would you prefer chocolate?'

'Do you think I ought to, before a journey?'

'Perhaps not, no: tea, perhaps. You know, Henrietta, your train goes at half-past six? So soon we must...' She put her hand to her forehead. 'I reproach myself,' she said, 'that you have not seen more of Paris.'

'I shall some day, I suppose.'

'And that there has been no tea yet. I have attended to nothing. Just now, my mother is not at all well.'

'Isn't Leopold going to have tea?'

'I shall go and see,' said Miss Fisher. She darted back to the salon, went right in, shut the door. This did not seem the way to order anyone's tea. Henrietta's inside rumbled politely; she pressed her hand to her belt and returned to
The Strand Magazine.
It had been waste being wise with Miss Fisher too much agitated to notice; she wished now she
had
said chocolate inside of tea. After several minutes the salon door opened, let out the gentleman's voice saying — 'full responsibility — ' and, apparently, Leopold, who appeared in the dining-room.

Hands clasped behind his back, electrically silent, he stood looking at Henrietta, who thought: Heavens, what has been happening now?

Aloud she said: 'Did they send you in here, too?'

'No, I just came.'

'We're supposed to be having tea now.'

'Oh, I shan't want any tea; I'll have mine out.'

'Why?' Henrietta said with a sinking heart.

'I'm going away in a minute with Mr Forrestier. He's telling her now. I shan't come back.'

'Neither shall I,' she said quickly. 'My train goes at half-past six.'

'I haven't got to catch any damned train now.'

'I don't see why you should show off, even if you haven't.'

'He says I needn't go back to Italy.'

'Aren't you sorry
at all,
when you've lived with them all your life?'

Leopold looked embarrassed, and then angry.

'Besides,' pursued Henrietta, 'why should
he
interfere?'

'He's married to my mother.'

'Then he's your step-father?'

Leopold hesitated, he said quickly, 'Yes.'

'Well, I hope you will like him,' said Henrietta. She was beginning to say: 'But look at Mr Murdstone — ' when she found tears of mortification pricking her eyes, bent over
The Strand Magazine
and said nothing more. The matter might simply be that she wanted her tea so much.

When she looked up, Leopold still stood by the sideboard; having taken an orange from the dessert basket he rolled and squeezed the orange between both hands, smiling down at it in a secret way. His eyes were darker than ever, his face whiter, his nostrils distended like her rocking-horse's. She did not like to look at him with the orange. She steadied her voice and said: 'You do have your ups and downs.'

'I knew this would happen somehow.'

'Tomorrow I shall be seeing the south of France,' Henrietta said, as though to herself.

'Have you seen a tree growing out of a crack in a grave?'

'They don't.'

'Yes, they do; Madame Fisher says so.'

'To begin with, no one would plant a tree in a grave ...
She
says Madame Fisher's worse tonight.'

'Is she?' said Leopold, looking at the orange.

'Poor thing,' said Henrietta. She added: 'I shall see oranges growing, and, of course, palms.'

Leopold held the orange up to the light at arm's length, against the dark dusk showing over the blind. His demoniac pride, his remorseless egotism made Henrietta lower her shocked eyes. She heard Miss Fisher hurry out of the salon, open the kitchen door and give an order in French. 'That sounds more like tea,' she said. As Leopold stayed like a statue, looking up at the orange, she decided to go to the bathroom before tea, and left the room without saying another word. On the landing she thought: He has forgotten crying ... There was dead silence behind Mme Fisher's door.

In the salon Naomi, who had come back to find Ray still standing as she had left him, repeated for the last time: 'Yes, I agree. Well? But you
are
forcing her hand.'

For the last time he said: 'I cannot help that.'

They had both said what they had to say. Naomi had given in. She was tired, clearly in pain of mind; he saw he would never know what she really felt. Dropping her head and looking for the first time at the broken alabaster on the table, she said: 'My dear Karen ... My dear poor Karen.'

He saw what she saw. 'Yes, I broke that,' he said. 'I'm very sorry. It skidded off the table and broke. I'll get you another somehow. I hope this one wasn't precious?'

'Only, my mother liked it — Then I am not to write to Spezia, only to send the telegram?'

'Just that. We — I — we will write.'

'You understand that it all may be difficult?'

'We'll keep you out of it, naturally.'

'They have good hearts, too good, perhaps. But this is much to expect.'

'Naturally. It's preposterous.'

'I think it is sometimes simpler to do preposterous things,' she said, looking across at him.

Seeing her dark-circled eyes with pity, he said: 'This has been a hard day.
Is
there anything I can do?'

'No, no,' she said quickly. 'Up to now it has all been perfectly possible. The two children have both been quiet and good; one would have hardly known they were in the house. The accident of Henrietta's crossing Paris today has, of course, made things more difficult, but that could not be helped. And without her there I should have been more anxious about Leopold; they played together with cards and her magazine. But about Henrietta — yes: I
have
one favour to ask.' She stopped, smiling, then said: 'And it is not a small one, either. Henrietta must be accompanied to the Gare de Lyon to meet her escort for the Mentone train. The train goes at half-past six, and she must be there early. I have expected all day to take her myself. But since I last saw my mother I am in a predicament. I find my mother is worse; she has agitated herself. She has not been so unwell for a long time. It has not been possible to keep what has been going on in the house away from her, as I should have wished. In consequence, she is restless and very weak; in some pain and demanding me constantly by her side. I blame my own negligence, leaving Leopold with her for so long: I had meant him, originally, not to enter her room. It was not good for him, either ... At such times, my mother cannot sleep but lies constantly watching one. Her state tonight has made me send for the doctor, though I do not think he can do much. This makes it impossible for me to leave the house. All this I could not foresee when I promised Mrs Arbuthnot — '

'In fact, we have all made her ill.'

'No, she is always ill. Tonight she makes herself more ill.'

'So you would like me to see off Henrietta?'

'That was what I wanted to ask.'

'I wish I could do more.'

'I know you are very kind. But we can only help ourselves.'

'I think that is true of you. Look how you helped Karen.'

'I helped myself; at that time we needed each other — If you will really do this, I shall be greatly helped. With Henrietta in your charge, I can feel confident. Look, I must give you Mrs Arbuthnot's letter; this makes it all clear, I think. Also I have a letter from Miss Watson confirming everything. It is carefully worked out — Then when you come back I will have Leopold's clothes packed; he has not much here, you know.'

'Just as well,' said Ray. He looked at Naomi oddly. 'I somehow stick at making off with his clothes, on top of everything else. Can't he do with what he stands up in?'

'Only luggage for three days. Yes, a little boy must have that — pyjamas, vests, a clean blouse. You will not want to waste time buying him clothes in Paris.'

'I suppose it will all square up. Look, need they take long to pack? If you could pack them now I think we might make one job of it — all leave at once, I mean.'

'You would prefer that?'

'Yes,' Ray said, nervy and definite.

'Perhaps you are right.'

'We'd leave your house quiet sooner.'

'Yes,' she said. 'That is true.'

At half-past five Henrietta came quietly downstairs, ready to start at once. But nobody was about, so she had to wait in the hall. Like smoke coming under a door the dead silence of Mme Fisher seemed to pervade everywhere. She peeped into the salon, but Mr Forrestier, writing, did not look up. Her hat was put on straight, her hair brushed smooth hung over her overcoat, her gloves were firmly buttoned at each wrist. Of a crumb of
brioche
on one cheek she was unconscious; her morale was better since she had had tea. She was holding her dispatch case and had Charles the monkey under the other arm. On the right lapel of her coat was pinned the cerise cockade. The taxi had been ordered and should be here soon.