School for Love (24 page)

‘Are you expecting me to contradict that statement?’

‘No, but I mean – he thinks that’s what’s wrong with her.’

Mrs Ellis gave an acid little laugh; she started fumbling in her bag for her cigarettes and matches, murmuring as she did so, not very distinctly:

Felix leant towards her and said: ‘What did you say?’ She laughed again, more pleasantly: ‘Don’t you know that poem? I thought everyone learnt it at school,’ and as she put her matches and her squashed packet of Camels on the table, she recited:

Noticing his troubled, puzzled face, she broke off and said: ‘Don’t you know it?’

‘No. Do go on. I don’t know any poetry. My mother didn’t like it much. She once said it was nonsense.’

‘Oh!’ her tone and expression implied she was not going to be drawn into any further criticism of his mother; she said in an offhand way: ‘Well, that piece is something more than sense.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘I suppose it means that life is a sort of school for love.’

‘But is it a . . . what you said?’ After a pause, he repeated self-consciously: ‘A school for love?’

She shrugged her shoulders but would not speak. She swallowed in her throat: he thought her eyes were aswim but she shut them so quickly, he could not tell for sure. He felt completely mystified. He wondered if his experience could ever widen enough to bring within his understanding anyone who behaved and talked as Mrs Ellis did. One thing he did know, it would be useless to ask her for an explanation of herself.

At last he ventured to beg: ‘Please recite it again,’ but she shook her head and lit a cigarette. Knowing her obstinacy, he could only revert to Miss Bohun.

‘Do you think that’s what’s wrong with her?’

‘I don’t know.’ Mrs Ellis put out her match with irritable decision. ‘If it is, she’s past saving now. She’s a frustrated, spiteful, power-mad old so-and-so. No amount of love could unpack that bundle of neuroses.’

Felix sighed unhappily. He felt Mrs Ellis’s to be an extreme judgment: he was worried by her anger and the violence of emotion he felt beneath it. His mother had shown him nothing like this. In reaction he found himself about to repeat Mr Jewel’s words: ‘Miss Bohun’s not a bad sort, really,’ but he stopped himself, feeling that that was not true either.

After luncheon they went down to the bar below. The counter was shut: the small room was hot and stuffy and smelt of stale tobacco smoke, but it was somewhere to sit out of the afternoon heat. She said to Felix: ‘What about your lessons?’

He said: ‘I haven’t anything much.’

‘And what about Faro?’

‘She’ll be all right. Maria always feeds her.’

Mrs Ellis settled in a corner to read a book called
Put
Out More Flags
and to smoke her way through her cigarettes. Felix read a shabby copy of the
Palestine Post
someone had left on the floor. He could not bring himself to leave Mrs Ellis, and when at last she decided it was tea-time he trailed after her to a tea-shop. After that they wandered slowly about the streets as the shops closed and the lights came on through the delicately coloured summer twilight. Now that the black-out was lifted, the streets were alive after dark and the café gardens were packed with people. Mrs Ellis took Felix to a large garden behind Zion Circus and bought wine for herself and lemonade for him.

‘Aren’t you going to the Innsbruck?’

‘I don’t know. I’m rather tired of it.’

Felix’s heart leapt as though the fact that she was tired of the Innsbruck should reconcile her to him, but she showed no more interest in him and it was clear she was indifferent to his company. They were sitting near some coloured electric lights so she was able to read her book again; she seemed to find it funny, but when Felix urged her to tell him the jokes, she ignored him. At last she said: ‘Shouldn’t you go back to supper?’

He would not move. He said: ‘I’m not really hungry.’

‘Well,’ she said with resignation, ‘I suppose we can get something here.’ She ordered an omelette for each of them.

Mrs Ellis finished her book and there was nothing to do, yet they sat around doing nothing until nearly eleven o’clock: then they walked home slowly. Felix, reflecting on the complete emptiness of the day that, despite her company, had stupefied him with boredom, supposed even that was better than not seeing her at all. When they got back to the house and she was about to enter her room, he tried to pin her down to another similar day.

He said: ‘I say, what time are you going out to-morrow?’

‘My dear boy, how on earth do I know?’ She closed the door on him before he could speak again.

When he got into his own room he saw that Faro was not lying, as she always lay, on his bed. There was no dent on the counterpane and when he touched it, no warmth. He felt a sudden premonition of loss that was the more acute because of the frightening justice of its happening on this very day when he had left her so long alone. But perhaps she had merely grown tired of waiting for him. He had to find her. He could not sleep if he did not find her. He leant from the window calling her name. There was no rustle or movement in the garden below. He ran downstairs and looked for her in the room. She was not there. Then he went out in the pale starlight and found his way around the garden. He sensed the emptiness of her absence. He knew she was not there. He felt acute fear at the thought she might have run away, that she might have been stolen, that she might be dead. At last in despair he returned to his room and lay in bed, tensed and listening for any noise that might mean her return. At the back of his fear there was a desolation of guilt. He had been told that Siamese cats could not live without love – and since Mrs Ellis’s arrival he had often forgotten Faro. He imagined her feeling deserted, suffering as he had suffered when his mother died. He was desolated in pity and self-accusation.

He slept at last, but woke early with the sense of some unbearable misery weighing upon him. As soon as Miss Bohun appeared at breakfast he said at once: ‘I can’t find Faro.’

She said: ‘I must speak seriously to you, Felix.
Yesterday you did not come in for lunch, tea or dinner. I was very . . .’

He interrupted her to ask: ‘Where is Faro?’

‘If you ask politely, I will be happy to reply.’

‘Oh, Miss Bohun,
please
, where is Faro?’

‘She has gone,’ said Miss Bohun, brightly informative, taking her seat at the table.

‘Gone? Where?’

‘I have given her away.’

‘But you can’t,’ Felix found it difficult to speak. He stammered painfully: ‘You didn’t say anything . . .’

‘Did I have to say anything? You forget Faro is my cat.’

Felix, not knowing what to say, stood at the table, gazing at Miss Bohun with an expression of such dismay that an explanation seemed to be forced from her: ‘She’s gone to Madame Sarkis, who has a male Siamese. She’ll come to no harm and one day perhaps, if you’re a sensible boy, we’ll have her back again.’

‘Where does Madame Sarkis live?’

‘Sit down, Felix,’ there was an appeal in her voice to which he refused to listen. ‘I’ll take you to see her if . . .’

As Felix started over towards the door, Miss Bohun raised her voice: ‘Sit down and have your breakfast.’ He took no notice. ‘Felix!’ she suddenly paused him with a command and then changed her tone. ‘Really, it is too bad. This is my house, but you’d think I was a nobody. Mrs Ellis refuses to leave when I ask her to go; you don’t come in for your meals; you don’t warn me – food is wasted. Now your breakfast – there’s a fried egg, too. All the trouble of running this house and yet I’m treated like a mere – a mere housekeeper. Now, don’t be a silly boy. You forget Faro is a cat, and a female. She’s coming into season.’

Felix, paused by the table, turned on her a mystified face. He could feel no reassurance in her change of tone: he was fearful and filled with distrust. For a moment, seeing her sitting there calmly and running at will through the gamut of her tones of command, exasperation, self-pity and disapproval, he was suddenly certain of her falsity. His faith in her as a human being had gone and he could believe her to be capable of anything – perhaps even of cruelty to Faro or indifference were Faro suffering. He remembered suddenly the burning rats in the cage and an agony of apprehension seized him – but Miss Bohun, flicking up her eyelids in a momentary glance, saw only his bewilderment and she said with satisfaction:

‘There! You see, you don’t know what I mean by “coming into season”. You think you’re so clever, but really you’re only an ignorant little boy. You don’t know anything. Now have your breakfast.’

With a quick movement Felix got out of the room into the courtyard and closed the door after him. It had been in his mind to ask Nikky about Madame Sarkis, but he was afraid to stop so near the house for fear Miss Bohun caught him. He hurried out to the road and then made his way at a half-run to the Innsbruck, where he might get Madame Sarkis’s address from one of Nikky’s friends. There was no one there. He could, he supposed, ask Mr Posthorn at the Educational Offices, but he was due there for a lesson that morning so he could not risk being caught. He decided to try the General Post Office, where he stood in a queue for twenty minutes before he reached the counter.

‘This is not an Enquiry Counter,’ said the assistant, a young man with the hauteur that characterised junior members of the Administration.

But Felix, holding to his place and refusing to be pushed on by the person behind, said urgently: ‘Haven’t you a book or something you could look up? It’s very important.’

Fortunately the young man was a Christian Arab so knew where each rich and important Christian Arab family was to be found. He jerked his head to his right and replied: ‘She’s in the Greek Colony. Ask down there.’

As Felix went, his relief and gratitude were so great he could scarcely control his tears. He hurried down through the olive groves to the German Colony. The day was already growing hot and a slight haze hung over the pink, stony hills with their patches of green-silver olives. In the main road of the German Colony he slackened his speed a little, to regain his breath. Here the houses, built by a German sect that like the ‘Ever-Readies’ had settled in Jerusalem to await the Second Coming, stood back behind trees. The road was heavily powdered with dust. Felix walked through the dust heaped at the verges silently as through sand. It rose in puffs over his shoes and coloured them fawn. The gardens were dry with summer but there was a delicate herbal fragrance in the air that came perhaps from the rosemary or the sticky, blue plumbago flowers that survived the early summer.

There was no one about. There was no noise except the hum of insects, monotonous as silence, and the thump, thump from the ice factory over by the railway line. The windows of the houses, half-hidden by trees, had the watchful look of windows behind which people are asleep. Felix started to hurry again, fearful because he could see no one from whom to enquire about Madame Sarkis. He could hear in the distance a thud of tennis balls, but the
players were out of sight. He began to fear he might have passed the house. He was uncertain where the German Colony ended and the Greek Colony began. At last he came on a small café where two tables stood out on the pavement beneath red umbrellas. No one was sitting at the tables. A fat man leaning at the counter moved his face enquiringly when Felix entered, but when asked about Madame Sarkis, he shrugged his shoulders indifferently and looked the other way.

‘What? What is it you are asking?’ A young woman came from the inside room, ‘Madame Sarkis? An Arab lady, no? Yes, you turn up the road there and on, on to the top.’

At last, at the top of the road, Felix wakened an Arab sleeping against a wall. The man opened one eye and waved vaguely at the garden within the wall.

‘Aywah, Madame Sarkis, henna.’

As Felix went up the path between the rockeries and flower-beds, he repeated to himself: ‘I love Faro; I love Faro; I love Faro better than anyone,’ and that got him safely to the front door of the large, ugly house.

Felix knew and cared nothing about Madame Sarkis or her importance in the Arab social and political world. For him she was merely someone who had his Faro and, having her, might be induced to treat her well. He was let into the house by an Arab servant and left on a seat in the hall. The house was dark and very cool after the outer heat. Felix sat shivering slightly as he gazed up the mahogany staircase and at the panelled walls opposite him on which hung an enormous steel-engraving of a stag lifting its cry across a frozen waste. He felt concerned for Faro in this gloomy house. He stood up as Madame Sarkis,
dressed in black and leaning on a silver-headed cane, came slowly down the stairs from the dark and cavernous heights. Without smiling, she came to a standstill opposite Felix and looked steadily at him, her head quivering all the time. She looked and spoke like an elderly English lady. Yes, she assured him, Faro was there. Would he like to see her?

In silence they moved at her pace across the black-and-white marble chequer-board of the hall into a mahogany dining-room full of massive furniture. How could Faro be happy here? But they went out through french windows into the garden at the back and Madame Sarkis lifted her stick and pointed to the glitter of a conservatory: ‘I keep her in there,’ she said. ‘She likes the warmth and the plants.’

Felix let out his breath with relief at this understanding of Faro’s tastes. When they reached the conservatory they could see the leaves of the plants pressing against the damp-pearled glass. Inside, the atmosphere, hot and steamy as a jungle, smelt of wet earth. Felix saw Faro at once. She was lying dozing along a bough shaded by ferns. Her fur, extremely soft and fitting like a loose glove, was pressed into folds along her legs and the line of her belly. Her summer coat had come in pale; there was a sheen over her whole body and a glisten of silver-white at her throat.