Incidents in the Rue Laugier (10 page)

‘Look at those girls, Marie-Paule and Patricia. They are charming, but they are certainly not intelligent. Yet they know exactly what they want. They want fun, they want a good time. They don’t want to settle down—why should they?’

‘They want men.’

‘Oh, they want men all right. Why not?’

‘Do you think they …?’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’

There was a brief silence while they digested the implications of this remark.

‘Perhaps they are right,’ said Nadine. ‘Yet they are very blatant about it. Don’t they want to get married?’

‘My dear Nadine, there’s nothing to stop a girl like that getting married if she wants to. And often a marriage of that kind is very successful; the girl is experienced, and she has more partners to choose from. You’re thinking of Maud, I know.’ She shot a glance at her sister, wondering how far she
might go. ‘Maud is very beautifully brought up, and very charming. But so quiet, Nadine, almost prim. This morning I had to urge her to go out and join the others. I think she was prepared to spend the morning sitting indoors with a book.’

‘She is a little frightened by those girls, I think.’

‘Not by the boys?’

‘Frankly, she finds the girls too loud, too forward. It is not pleasant for her to watch them flirting.’

‘Then she should flirt a little herself.’

‘Maud does not know how to flirt. And if she did she would be too proud to flirt in public. She has deep feelings, I believe. And she is easily hurt. There is a lot of her father in her.’

‘Not …’

‘No, thank God. Not that.’

‘Yet you want her to marry?’

Nadine sighed. ‘I long for her to marry. If I knew that she were settled I could settle myself. My life, such as it is, would be easier. I love her, and she loves me, but we are no good for each other. We make each other lonely. I don’t want her to stay with me. I’m not a good influence.’

‘How strange that you should say that. I think my heart will break when Xavier marries. Yet marry he must, of course, and he will. He will make some girl very happy.’

‘Yes. He is a gentle boy, too gentle for those girls you have saddled him with.’

‘I thought they would bring him out, relax him.’

‘You thought wrongly. They inhibit him. Xavier and Maud are quite alike in certain respects.’

‘You are not thinking …?’

‘No, no.’ She sighed. ‘Xavier will be all right. His English friends will make a man of him. He is fascinated by them, particularly by Tyler. Both those girls are. I only wish that Maud
were having a better time. Marie-Paule and Patricia are not very kind to her.’

‘Girls like that are not kind to other girls.’

‘You take it all very lightly. Maud deserves better. Perhaps she will be happier when she gets to England; she is going to stay with her friend Jean Bell next week. Jean Bell, frankly, is a better class of girl than those two. And Maud is nothing if not refined.’

‘Quite,’ said Germaine drily. She had a faint suspicion that her hospitality was being abused by the uncensored nature of these remarks. In the brief silence that followed, something of the sisters’ old antagonism revived. Each judged it prudent to gaze abstractedly over the park to the wood which shielded the tennis court from their direct gaze. The sound of the game, and of the accompanying voices, had been in abeyance for some time before they became aware of the pause, or the interval, which in its turn gave rise to a certain tension.

‘They will be very warm,’ murmured Nadine.

‘I will bring out the lemonade. They should be coming back soon. The girls are staying for lunch. Do persuade Maud to join in more, even if you think this is all a waste of time for her.’ She was now combative. ‘She could talk to Harrison. He seems quite pleasant.’

‘She prefers Tyler. And Xavier, of course.’

‘Tyler would not look at a girl like Maud. Tyler is a scoundrel,’ she said appreciatively. ‘I doubt if he would be interested in someone who makes so little effort.’

‘And of course Maud would not look at Tyler.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘He is, as you say, a scoundrel. Maud has more sense.’

Maud, at that moment trailing dispiritedly across the lawn, did not look sensible. The rare moment of dismay was so profound that it had stripped her face of its normal expression of
impervious calm, although she was careful to rearrange her features before approaching her mother and her aunt. At least the morning’s humiliations were behind her, the humiliations she had come to expect since the arrival of the two Englishmen and their effect on Marie-Paule and Patricia. She had only to note their heightened colour, to become aware of their increased heat, to know that she would have to endure their shrieking excitement, to be followed by the portentous silence which ensued when they retired to the summer house, with Tyler, supposedly to smoke a cigarette, while Xavier and Edward played a desultory and embarrassed game of tennis and she bent her face studiously to her book
(Jane Eyre)
and attempted to summarise plot, characters, and style, as she had been taught to do.

The misery of these mornings was all but unendurable. Worst of all was her ignorance of quite what went on in the summer house. She had only to see the tennis racquets thrown down on to the grass, as if at a prearranged signal, to imagine scenes of lubricity which brought a colour to her normally matte cheeks. She longed to know exactly what went on; she longed to be included. But, more than to be included, she longed for exclusivity. In her mind she eliminated Marie-Paule and Patricia, for they were her intimate enemies. She did not distinguish between them, although Marie-Paule was marginally the more gentle of the two. To Maud they were grossly obscenely physical, with the abundant rippling hair they tossed back from their necks and foreheads, the beading of perspiration on their upper lips, and their insistent odour of scent and sweat. Yet she found that their very grossness bred a kind of excitement. She imagined them ready for anything, like prostitutes, and allied in some terrible
camaraderie
in their desire to please Tyler. So naked was their intention that it had the grandeur of fearlessness, and this was very occasionally enough to
tempt the other man, Harrison, to join them, while Xavier gallantly kept her company and asked her about her book. At such times she was tempted to get up and run into the shelter of the wood to hide her burning face.

She envied them, and yet how she despised them. They made her feel awkward, but they made her feel superior. ‘Good book, Maud?’ Patricia would ask, emerging from the summer house, and, picking up her racquet and striding away, she would not wait for an answer. Above all they made her feel lonely. In her fierce remoteness she sensed rather than observed Xavier’s kindness, and the Englishman Harrison’s humble curiosity. But most of all she was aware of Tyler and of what he was doing in the summer house. Or rather what was being done to him, for she imagined him being set upon, being tormented by those two Amazons, who, in their dreadful way, seemed unmoved by gratitude or love, but simply energised by victory. Tyler, when he emerged, would sit ruminatively on the steps of the summer house, sucking the stem of a blade of grass, equally unmoved. Did she detect, or did she simply want to detect, a very slight moodiness in his attitude, the head bent, the arms clasped round the knees, the expression absent? Could she have thought up anything to say at such moments she would have approached him. But nothing appropriate ever came to mind, and so the moments passed.

Walking under the trees, in an attempt to calm her furious disapproval, her unhappiness, she would sometimes encounter Harrison, with a disconcerted expression on his not unattractive face. Harrison too was unhappy but supposed it did not matter. He had not chosen to stay in this place; it had been chosen for him by Tyler. And out of a sense of how it behoved him to conduct himself, he modelled himself as best he could on Tyler, since Tyler appeared to be giving satisfaction all round. On one occasion he had allowed himself to be led into
the summer house by Patricia, only to come upon the other two furiously engaged. To stay would have been unthinkable, to leave equally so: he stayed. This went so sharply against his instincts that he thought back almost with nostalgia to his quiet days in the rue Laugier, where at least no one outraged him. In his worst moments, the moments following the scene in the summer house, he saw himself pensive, his head bent to a glass case containing Egyptian scarabs, his mind on higher things. He discounted the loneliness. Loneliness, he felt, was sometimes the price one paid for integrity. Yet he felt uneasily that he was bound to stay here for as long as Tyler did, for he was in some sense Tyler’s guest. And Tyler showed no desire to leave, although Harrison knew that at some abrupt and unheralded moment Tyler would decide the day of their departure. Then, he supposed, he would be free, free even to go home, although at this juncture he could hardly remember the shop, which he saw as some kind of fiction. He dismissed the part of his life that he knew would be lived in shadow, away from the light of this place, which he could see was beautiful, but with a beauty not entirely meant for him. When he came upon Maud, whose expression indicated that her thoughts were not dissimilar to his own, he felt a shock. Something inside him softened; at the same time he rejected the sense of failure that apparently united the two of them, or would have done, had they been more in sympathy.

‘I’ll walk back with you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It must be nearly one o’clock.’

Neither made any reference to the events of the morning. Those events were experienced, in retrospect, as alien. Yet what shame they felt was not the shame of onlookers but of outsiders. Fate had ordained that they should be unclaimed, uninitiated. Harrison knew that Patricia had exhibited not kindness in leading him into the summer house, but a sly pleasure
in his confusion. How these women liked to take the lead! He had a passing moment of compassion for Maud, the unqualified, until he remembered how disastrously unqualified he was himself.

On the terrace the heat was extravagant. A wasp settled on the sticky rim of Tyler’s empty lemonade glass.

‘It will be too hot for tennis this afternoon,’ said Germaine. ‘I dare say you will want a siesta.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Tyler abstractedly. ‘I like the heat.’

‘Ah, here are the others. Take my sister in, Tyler. She thinks she may have a touch of the sun.’

‘It is cooler in Dijon,’ Nadine explained, her hand to her forehead. ‘I am not used to such sun.’

‘Then no doubt you are looking forward to going back,’ said Germaine tartly.

‘Yes, perhaps we should think about that. Maud goes to London next Monday.’

Germaine, moved against her will by her sister’s red face—how quickly she had lost her looks!—said, ‘Then you could stay here for a few more days. Xavier will drive you to the station when you want to go. Perhaps we are both a bit tired. It has been a busy time.’ She sighed. It was time the others went too, she thought. The girls would surely melt away as soon as the visitors left. She had thought her words to contain the most delicate of hints to Tyler, although at night, alone, she willed him to stay after the others had left. In the light of day she thought differently, and otherwise, longing to be left alone again, among more manageable sensations. Tyler, however, appeared not to have heard her.

At lunch they were more silent than usual. Germaine regretted that the roast veal with endives was too heavy a dish for so hot a day, although the young people ate mechanically but with good appetite. Marie-Paule and Patricia, like the
healthy animals they were, wanted only to eat and to fall asleep. Maud and Harrison ate precisely, not looking at each other. Even Tyler seemed abstracted, while Nadine, her hand moving gingerly to her forehead, drank glass after glass of water. Nobody wanted cheese. Only Harrison and Maud ate a peach. It was almost with a sense of relief that they rose and moved away from each other.

‘I will ask Marie to make you more lemonade,’ said Germaine, tired now. ‘Remember that the servants are not to be disturbed. They are going out anyway. The cinema, I believe. In this heat! But it is probably cooler in the dark. Come, Nadine. We will leave these young people to their own devices. But perhaps Marie-Paule and Patricia have something planned? Your aunt will not have seen much of you today.’

Harrison and Tyler saw the girls down the drive and across the road to the house inaptly named Le Colombier, where their aunt was lying down in the dark with a headache and desirous not to be disturbed. Harrison yawned, and quickly effaced the yawn with his hand. ‘I think I’ll go in,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel up to much after that lunch. I’ll see you later.’ After they had watched him go back into the house Maud turned resolutely away, determined not to ascertain whether Tyler was following her. She made her way instinctively to the summer house, and sat on the steps, as she had seen Tyler do that morning. After a few minutes she registered the fact that she was entirely alone. She sighed and lifted her face to the sun, tired of the holiday, which was not a holiday, tired of the further politeness that would be demanded of her, and which she would offer, with her usual dignity, to Jean Bell’s parents. It would be all art galleries and ancient buildings in London, she thought, and when Jean Bell returned with her it would be all questions about the date of the tombs in the Dijon museum.

She surrendered herself to the heat of the day, opening the
collar of her blouse a little wider to allow the afternoon sun to reach her skin. The heat met some desire in her for expansion; she wanted to melt, to be absorbed. To be taken over! With this desire came a sorrow that she could not be more active, could not hold, or, it seemed, even attract attention like those girls had done this morning, could not in fact energise or convert the feelings that had so disconcerted her when Tyler had disappeared into the summer house and then reappeared alone, and had sat as she was now sitting, his back view expressing something new, solitariness, as if he were subject to ordinary human feeling, even as she was. But that was the difference between them, the insuperable barrier that would hinder any exchange, for while she was aware of her inadequacies, Tyler appeared to have none. Even the other man, Harrison, whom she had initially thought to be more interested in her, had given way to easier distractions. They were like some primitive species, she thought, like mayflies, or plants that bloomed only once, with the difference that their more evolved condition, their higher animality, enabled them to revive again and again, ready for further play in the humming summer air.