Incidents in the Rue Laugier (18 page)

Maud found the dark pink silk kimono on her bed. The extravagant garment, with its fringed sash and its wide sleeves slashed at the armpit, fitted loosely over her cotton frock, changing her into a beauty. Instinctively she stood up straight, swept the silk skirts around her, saw herself objectively as a handsome woman, one who might in other circumstances have had a promising future.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘My mother’s father brought it back from China. He had business connections there. That is Chinese silk, real silk. It was the only thing of my mother’s that I kept. I wore it on my honeymoon. Then I packed it away. It suits you very well. Where are you going?’

‘I’d like a hot bath: I’ve got a slight chill, I think. And thank you, Mother. I shall treasure it.’

She reckoned that the bleeding started even before she reached her bedroom and she hurried to remove the kimono before it got soiled. Her heart beating rapidly, her joy and shock vertiginously mingled, she ran to the bathroom, tore off her clothes, and lowered herself into the hot water, watching it turn red. Within a few moments she was alarmed by the volume of the loss. Faint, she wondered how she would ever disguise the evidence, wondered in fact how she would get back to her room. She cleaned up as best she could, at last managed to accommodate the red tide. The buzzing in her ears gradually subsided, leaving behind a lightness of the heart which she could hardly remember.

That evening at dinner she ate voluptuously. Her mother
watched her as she peeled a pear. ‘You have got your appetite back, I see. Mind you don’t put on weight.’

‘I’ve come to a decision, Mother,’ said Maud, patting her lips. ‘I don’t think I’m ready for this marriage. It was, after all, very sudden. And I am very young. So I think you’d better cancel the Hôtel de la Cloche. I think what I’d really like to do is study. I always wanted to be an interpreter anyway. Women marry much later these days, and it’s not as if …’

Nadine’s face was very pale. ‘You were saying? It’s not as if …?’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean anything,’ said Maud joyously. ‘I’m just relieved at having come to a decision. I’m sorry, Mother. I hope you’re not too disappointed. After all,’ she added, as this last remark met with no response, ‘I take it I’m allowed to please myself in this matter?’

‘And how nearly were you not able to please yourself? And for how long do you suppose you are allowed to please yourself?’

‘Surely I can decide …’

‘You shock me, Maud. I hadn’t realised …’

‘Please, Mother, don’t look like that.’

‘I don’t want you here, Maud. You had better make up your mind to that.’

‘Yet it was you who let me go to Paris. What right have you to be shocked now?’

‘Very little, no doubt. But it is not a question of rights. It is a question now of what is appropriate.’

Maud, shocked herself at her mother’s sudden pallor, saw at a glance the obverse of her mother’s boldness: a fear of consequences. A love affair was to be permitted only if it left the woman intact. Her mother’s gift to her carried an important proviso: that a return to blamelessness be assured. And witnessed.

‘I don’t want you here,’ Nadine repeated. ‘And don’t think you can please yourself. No woman can please herself indefinitely.’

‘Now I am shocked.’

‘Perhaps. I can’t help that. I too want a life of my own.’

‘At the expense of mine.’

‘He is pleasant. You said yourself how kind he is.’

‘Kinder than you, Mother.’

They stared at each other.

‘Then you had better marry him.’

‘Yes,’ she said, getting up to clear the table. ‘As you say, I had better marry him. Then you can be happy even if I can’t.’

‘Maud …’

‘Goodnight, Mother.’

She saw her mother’s head droop, saw her shade her eyes with her hand. She herself felt quite blank. But she had a sense of being no longer at home. She thought at last of Edward, who had gone to buy a flat, and she supposed she must live there, with him, and call it her home.

A
S THE PLANE BEGAN ITS DESCENT HARRISON CELEBRATED
his return to England with a series of jaw-cracking yawns, as if he had awoken after a particularly puzzling dream. He was too tired to make such sense of his situation, or rather he told himself that he was too tired: what he most actively experienced was an onslaught of restless boredom. He felt burdened, impatient, aware that he had wasted too much time, spent too much money, and made a disastrous decision about which he would rather not think. Somewhere, in some deep recess of consciousness, was a feeling of hurt, as if he were suddenly friendless, doomed to make his way in an adult world in which he had no place. The previous night, in that dark hotel in the Boulevard Raspail, he had dreamed of his sister again, and of that sunlit garden which contained all of his banal but to him enchanted childhood. He had woken with his usual sense of gladness, only to hear Maud’s breathing from the
other bed. His one instinctive thought, as he registered her presence, was that somehow she must be inducted into this childhood pattern, must become a part of his reverie, must love his family, must love him; otherwise there was no hope for either of them. He knew that he could not join her in her sleeping fastness, that he would never become part of her own dreams, would always to a certain extent have to strive for her attention. For the present she was too distant for him to reach. Her abstraction, the deeply preoccupied expression which she banished when he took her hand, hurt him, though he accepted them as inevitable. What affected him more deeply was the contrast between the effortless universe of his dream and the painful dark of the room in which he and Maud lay separated. He wanted to wipe her mind clear of the memory of recent events, to restore her to innocence, transparency, sinlessness, to be able to take her hand without that tiny moment of withdrawal which told him that she too looked back, but looked back only as far as that very recent summer. It was as if she had no childhood with which to endow him, as he hoped to endow her. What she brought to him was a kind of widowhood, the immense blankness of shock.

At the airport, after he had left her, he watched his fellow travellers and remembered his earlier ambitions to see the world, to be that courteous sophisticated character whom others would report seeing in Java or Goa or Kabul, whose freedom they would recognise with envy as being none of their portion. This he now saw as an entirely childish fantasy which belonged to and reflected his own woeful immaturity. He would never see the world; more to the point, he would never be free of a certain wistful longing to be cared for. Those weeks in Paris, which he had hoped would be a period of self-discovery, had in fact left him lonely. Had he not been so lonely he would not have been so glad to see Tyler, would not
have fallen in so eagerly with his plans, would certainly not have accompanied Tyler and Maud on those terrible excursions, at which he now looked back with horror, would have seen what part he was expected to play (‘the least you can do is be pleasant,’ as Tyler had said), and have removed himself. In that way he would have reached home intact, rather than with this burden of feeling, in which regret and resentment struggled for pre-eminence, and which on reflection he identified as a sense of sheer loss.

Where he saw loss, he knew, others might see gain. His mother’s delighted reception of his news seemed to betoken a trouble-free introduction to the adult world, as if it were no more than a step on a clearly indicated path. He knew that his family would welcome Maud, rather in the spirit in which they had welcomed the friends he had brought home from school and later university; no awkward or intrusive questions would be asked. His parents believed so entirely in his own innocence that it would be impossible ever to tell them of the ache he felt when he thought of Maud, the responsibility that was to be his for making her smile, the longing that she might love him, the dread that she might not. He could never tell them that his mind was still imprinted with the image of her naked body in the Vermeulens’ bed, and that his innocence had foundered on that occasion, not simply because he had made love to her with passion that was not in his nature, but because in so doing he had imagined her making love to Tyler. This truth must never be known. The unwelcome revelation of that afternoon, and of the night that so chastely followed, was that side by side with this very ambiguous longing for her went something altogether more naked, more dolorous: a simple fearful hope that she might, spontaneously, and without any prompting on his part, continue to reach out to him, and if possible to spare him some love of her own.

He took the airport bus to Victoria, and reckoned that since he was so near he might as well go to the shop and see if Cook had made any progress in tidying up the place. Tidying up was the only activity he had envisaged: how to engage in commerce was utterly beyond him. He walked dejectedly to Denbigh Street, aware that sooner or later he must go back to his rented flat, that he must deal with the dirty washing in his bag, that he must decide how to make some money, that he must go to the bank and see the solicitor to decide what to do with Mr Sheed’s investments, and that he must both go to Eastbourne and find a flat for himself and Maud to live in. This last seemed imperative in view of the fact that in the environs of Warwick Way Maud’s image seemed to disappear. He could only remember her face now, its closed expression and its cautious smile; the rest of her seemed to have been mislaid in Paris, as if it had stayed there all the time. At least he could not mistake the reality of the shop, whose dim green façade proclaimed ‘Sheed’ for all the indifferent world to see.

‘Cook?’ he queried, throwing his bag in a corner. Here at least nothing had changed.

A thunder of footsteps down the stairs from the flat brought Cook down into the office at the back of the shop. Harrison held out his hand in gratitude at this evidence of continuity.

‘Hello, Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s Tom and Edward, by the way. How are you getting on?’

He thought it proper to ask how Tom was getting on, since he had done so little in the way of getting on himself, and since Tom, whom he did not know at all, had performed what amounted to an act of chivalry in not deserting him. The only sign that Tom had been present for the six weeks of his absence and had not just strolled through the door, a complete stranger, was that his hair had grown. This, and his apparently genuine expression of welcome, revealed him in an altogether
more advantageous light than Harrison’s impression, admittedly fleeting, had led him to expect. Cook he now saw as the sort of young man who would have been described as ‘fair’ in Elizabethan England, with a rosy anonymous face, a shy mouth, and steady eyes. He was cleanly dressed in a white T-shirt and black jeans, and there was about him an aura of soap. Harrison found his hand being warmly shaken. ‘You’ve grown your hair’ was all he could think of saying.

‘I’m going for a pony-tail,’ said Cook. ‘Coffee?’

As they stood drinking their coffee—stood, because books covered most of the available surfaces—Harrison felt a great need of renewal. The sight of the barred window at the back of the office re-awakened his sick feeling of imprisonment until he realised that in fact the shop was, or could be, a domain, a refuge. He had inherited the mantle of Mr Sheed, whose name he decided to retain on the façade, his own presence being as yet more insubstantial.

‘First of all,’ he said, helping himself to a biscuit, ‘we must get the place cleaned up. Let me know how much you’ve laid out so far. And you’ve found a kettle, I see. First the window cleaner—that should be easy enough. Then a paint job. You said navy, didn’t you? Why not? A navy blue façade and navy blue fittings in front.’

‘Won’t be too dark?’

‘Not when the windows are cleaned. This stuff had better go downstairs for the time being. Then of course we’ll have to decide what to do with it.’

‘You could put it back on the shelves for a start. Make it look as if we’re open for business.’

‘Nobody’s been in, I suppose?’

‘Well, I’ve been closed, haven’t I? Anyway I wouldn’t have known what to charge, although some of the prices are marked. Not all of them, though. It seems sort of hit and miss
to me. I found these ledgers in the basement, by the way; they might give us a clue. Can I help you, Sir?’ he said in a glad voice, fairly springing into the shop in his alacrity to greet the stranger whom Harrison could only see as a solid black silhouette against the shop door.

‘Good morning,’ Edward said, with some apprehension. ‘How can I help you?’

The visitor removed his hat to reveal a head of wavy grey hair. Close to he was seen to be fairly old, with a vaguely medical appearance, like a disreputable gynaecologist. He was formally dressed in a grey suit and highly polished black shoes, yet the hat, the gold-rimmed glasses, and the pouting childish lips seemed to indicate that he belonged in a place where the manners and customs were subtly different. When he spoke his accent was curious, part sibilant, part cockney. He gave an impression of a man of substance, just beginning to go to seed.