Providence (12 page)

Kitty left them sitting in the taxi and came back five minutes later with a cake in a cardboard box, a half pound of mushrooms, and some yellow tulips. She had never felt so close to them, to their strange beginnings, their even stranger exile. A red sun was already low on the horizon, signalling the end of the day she had thought would be busy with her own life. Maurice’s
card was in her bag but she did not think of it. It was impossible to correlate the culture that had produced Giselbertus of Autun, the sculptor of the tympanum on the west door, with the culture that had produced her grandmother – yet they were the same. Kitty felt dizzy with the need to reconcile all these elements: Maurice’s France, her grandmother’s France, the France of the Romantic Tradition, the France of the greatly desired next two weeks, in which her own fate would be decided. She was tired, she thought; she longed to get home, to sit in her own silent street, and think of herself. For she felt peripheral, felt her personality dissolving in the strong solution of the past, felt her needs to be irrelevant.

Back in the taxi, their hands still clasped, her grandparents seemed at peace. They had little to say on the return journey, and were clearly exhausted by the emotion that had come to them that afternoon. But it had been a necessary exercise, thought Kitty. Here was something to pit against the television serials, the fashion magazines, the concierge’s shawl. Here was proof that they had been young, that they had been vigorous and confident; that without them, decline had set in. Thank you, my dear heart, said her grandfather, for a beautiful afternoon. Beautiful, beautiful, said her grandmother.

But on the pavement they seemed very old, stood swaying a little, glad to be home. The quietness of their street, previously despised, was now welcome, and the ghost of Marie-Thérèse required their presence. Kitty helped their slow steps into the house, took Louise’s coat, and sat them down. For a while they sat in the darkening room without speaking, too full of remembrance to bother with the present. ‘Do you want the television on?’ asked Kitty. She looked with love and pity at her surroundings, the grey fake Louis XV tables
and chairs with which Louise had furnished her salon and which now stood ranged, in the French style, against the walls. She saw the opaque bowl of the low-watted ceiling light, and the dusty tulle at the windows. In the dark bedroom, she knew, there was a grey fur rug on the bed which remained in place winter and summer. ‘Vadim,’ said her grandmother, ‘let us have a glass of your mixture.’ For Vadim brewed a strange and extremely potent plum brandy in a glass jar which stood in the corner of the kitchen. From time to time this exploded, filling the flat with a heady smell which never quite dispersed. It was an excellent restorative, said Vadim, but he could rarely persuade them to drink it.

They sat at the oval table, under the dim ceiling light, the cake unpacked from its box and divided into portions which they ate with spoons. They drank the sticky liqueur from small glasses. The faces of the old people looked drawn in the bad light; they were sombre and impassive, for they had much to think about. Kitty knew that they would go to bed as soon as she left. And now she was very tired herself, longing for a bath and her own bed, where she would read Maurice’s postcard over and over again. She cleared her throat. ‘You know I am going to Paris next week,’ she said. ‘I don’t know when I shall be back. But I’ll telephone every day, as usual.’ Louise sighed, and said, ‘Wear the grey for travelling. Grey is always correct in Paris.’ She seemed listless, uninterested. When Kitty rose to go, leaving them at the table, Louise recovered something of her asperity and examined Kitty. The girl seemed no older than she had done five years ago. But Louise knew that there would be no Jean-Claude on the scene now, and she sensed that there might be someone else. Nothing had been said. But Louise knew the signs: the desire to please, the preoccupation at the back of the eyes, the
involuntary half-smile. And the watchfulness, the control. The determination to make the most out of what might be very little. And the evenings when she telephoned very early, as if to get the call out of the way. Louise sensed the love in her grand-daughter, although it seemed to her without an object. No name had been mentioned, no confidences exchanged. Louise thought of her own easy courtship, of her daughter’s rapid marriage. It would be different this time, she feared. But with a last ounce of energy, even as she felt the fatigue forcing her lower in the uncomfortable chair, she raised her glass. ‘A toast,
ma fille
,’ she said. ‘A toast.
Que tous vos rêves se réalisent.
’ Vadim raised his glass, Kitty hers.
‘Que tous nos rêves se réalisent,’
they murmured. Then Kitty kissed them, and left.

Kitty wore the grey for travelling, more to please her grandmother than for any other reason. She felt that if she obeyed her in this small particular, Louise would somehow be all right. Her life was governed by small irrational superstitions of this kind.

In the event it did not matter what she wore, for she was alone and quite indifferent to her fellow travellers, whom she perceived as toiling and untidy and rather younger than herself. Some major move was obviously afoot; some school or association was being shifted across the Channel for an extensive holiday of an undefined but educational nature. Large girls, larger than Kitty herself, occupied themselves with amorphous bundles of luggage; they wore waterproof jackets and tennis shoes, and showed a tendency to take sporting kicks at any bundles left in their idiosyncratic path. No one seemed to be in charge of them, and indeed they were very assured, shouting to each other as they boarded the train, manoeuvring their possessions in and out of carriages, flinging themselves down in their seats for an instant and then jumping up to look for their friends or to bawl encouragement out of the window to late-comers. They were rather handsome and their hair did not appear to have been brushed for days. Kitty looked up from her book as a roar of laughter signalled
the late appearance of one of their number. The windows suddenly darkened as jerseyed and trousered bodies veered to one side of the train to cheer a grinning red-faced girl bent double under the weight of a towering structure strapped to her back. There was a round of applause as she squeezed through the door. Kitty went back to her book. And we shall have this all over again at the other end, she thought.

But she made an effort to relax, remembering the advice offered to her by Caroline before she left. Kitty, dressed and waiting for the taxi a full hour before she was due to leave had been unable to resist the temptation to ring Caroline’s bell to ask her if she looked all right.

‘Very nice,’ said Caroline unenthusiastically. ‘Although, I don’t know … you don’t think a bit of colour? You want to arrive looking your best. Is your boyfriend meeting you?’

Kitty blushed. ‘I don’t even know where he is at the moment,’ she confessed. ‘He’s going to ring me when he gets to Paris.’

Caroline had looked wise. ‘Well, don’t panic if he doesn’t,’ she had said. ‘And try not to look so anxious. Remember, Kitty, man is the hunter.’ And she had smoothed her rather vivid green dress over her bosom, and then examined her nails. She managed to imply that she could deal competently, even expertly, with any problems that Kitty might have wished to confide in her, and that she was available for consultation. But Kitty felt that she had taken enough advice to last her for a very long time, and, with a brief kiss on both cheeks for Caroline she had gone back into her own flat to continue her waiting undisturbed.

Nevertheless, she tried very hard to relax and to appear amiable. They will be students in a year or two’s time, she reminded herself, as a deafening game of cards
got under way. And the Channel will quieten them down. She was a good sailor, herself.

But she disliked travelling, which always seemed to increase her feeling of isolation, her sense of not belonging in any one clearly defined context. She almost envied the shaggy girls, who looked remarkably like one another, and had clearly been turned out according to some original model by an authoritative committee which knew what that model should be. She felt, as she always felt when the speed of the train increased, that she was losing her sense of identity, that she had forgotten what she looked like, or where she was going. But I am happy this time, she reminded herself; I shall not be alone. Or not for long, anyway. She cheered up, briefly. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out the strip of photographs she had had taken at the station, where she had had to wait for a further half hour for the train to come in. A grey, neat, and unnaturally watchful face, reproduced four times, peered back at her. She sighed, folded the strip over, pushed it back into her bag, and looked out of the window.

Her right arm was nudged, none too gently, and when she turned in its direction it was to find a pleasant and rather highly coloured face, which somehow gave the impression of being as tousled as the immense growth of hair that exploded on all sides of it. It was the girl with the back-pack, which now stood blocking the area between the corridor and the window.

‘Excuse me,’ said the girl, ‘are you French?’

Kitty rehearsed the usual explanation, and then jettisoned it.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I speak it quite well. Are you in any difficulty?’

‘Actually, I wondered if you’d like an apple. My mother loaded me up from her store before I left and
I can hardly move with the weight of them.’

Kitty accepted an apple and asked the girl where they were all going.

‘We’re camping. My name’s Angela, by the way. We’re making our way down to Naples.’

Kitty regarded her in consternation.

‘You can’t camp in Italy,’ she said. ‘And certainly not in Naples. That’s asking for trouble.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ The others glanced up from their apples and their cards and their maps and looked at her with genuine curiosity.

‘I don’t think unaccompanied girls of your age …’

They roared with laughter.

‘We’re not unaccompanied, as you put it. The boys have already gone. We’ve got to meet them in Amiens. And anyway, there’s Mr Pascoe.’

At the mention of this name, they doubled up. ‘Oh, don’t,’ moaned the rather pretty girl sitting opposite. ‘I can’t stand it.’

‘Who is Mr Pascoe?’ asked Kitty.

‘He’s with the boys,’ explained Angela. ‘He’s a dream. Clare’s in love with him. We shall be too busy fighting over Mr Pascoe to worry about the Italians. My dear, we shan’t even notice them.’ They shrieked again.

Poor fellow, thought Kitty. Although, I don’t know. Maybe he’s used to this sort of thing. She was eternally uncertain about standards of behaviour and worried in case she formed or indeed gave a false impression.

‘Mr Pascoe is meeting us at Dieppe,’ announced Clare dreamily. ‘Just think, he’ll be on the same train.’

‘I must look out for him,’ said Kitty. ‘He sounds interesting.’

‘If you see a tall handsome man with Clare grovelling at his feet, that’s Mr Pascoe,’ said Angela. ‘Look, I must get rid of some of these apples before we get on the boat. Apart from the luggage problem, I want to buy some
fags and wine and that and I haven’t got room for both.’

‘You’d better do it now, then,’ urged Kitty. ‘We are just coming into Newhaven.’ She accepted three more apples and inserted them into her carefully packed grip. Then she stood up, anxious to avoid the flurry of reorganization that would ensue as they tried to get themselves off the train and on to the boat.

‘We’ll probably see you on the French train,’ said Angela. ‘We shall have to stay with Clare on the boat because she’s going to be sick. Aren’t you, Clare?’

‘I expect so,’ said the pretty girl, picking up another apple and biting into it. ‘But I usually get over it quickly enough.’

Nevertheless, thought Kitty, I shall sit somewhere else.

The crossing was smooth, the sun warm, the breeze pleasant. Kitty sat on the deck, her book in her lap, mildly restored by the empty scene. The girls had disappeared, below deck, Kitty hoped, and the silence was beneficent. She felt the colour coming back into her face, and as snatches of French came to her through the open window of the saloon, her anxiety disappeared. Again she lifted up her face obediently to the blue sky and tried to capture an extra vigour from the clear air. The time, or rather the timeless interval between the two shores, passed easily and quickly; she was unwilling to move from her place, and lunched neatly on two of Angela’s apples.

For the last few minutes of the journey she was joined by a large and handsome French woman with glittering eyes, to whom she nodded a greeting, and who said to her, ‘Only five hours of travel and already I am less lucid.’ Then as the coast of France came into sharper focus, the woman stood up, shook out her coat, breathed deeply as if inhaling health-giving vapours and announced fervently,
‘Enfin. Rien ne vaut la France.’

Kitty, at this moment, agreed with her. The wider
shore, the wider sky, seemed to promise her a renewal of her powers and of that confidence which, she realized, had become steadily eroded over the past few weeks. She felt as if the Marseillaise should be played and wished that someone had organized it. Picking up her bag she strode to the gangplank, where she found that she had been preceded by the girls, now rather redder in the face, more subdued, and looking more like children, despite their size, than they had on their home ground. Their tragic luggage, more disordered than ever, lay in mountains between herself and the quayside.

‘Hello,’ said Kitty to the girl who had given her the apples. ‘Are you all right? Was your friend sick?’

Angela focused on her with some difficulty. She was, Kitty saw, slightly the worse for wear. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said vaguely. ‘Clare? No, she’s fine. We met some chaps in the bar and had a really good time.’ She had taken off her waterproof and her jersey to reveal a slightly grubby tee shirt with the face and pointing hand of Lord Kitchener nestling between her redoutable breasts. ‘You speak French, don’t you? Can you help us get a porter? What does one do? Just yell
Garçon
?’