The Dangerous Years (7 page)

Suddenly the rivulet of sound stopped, disappeared. The boy looked up at her, breathing heavily, as though he had been running beside those rapid and tiny waters. He smiled, and she saw that his eyes were exactly like those of his father, grey, deep-set, burning, the light in them darting about so rapidly that they might have been furtive, had they not been so authoritative and enquiring. The little face, with its miniature features already exquisitely defined, was one that demanded an answer to implied questions, and searching questions. Joan wanted again to rebel.

“Well!” she exclaimed, as though she had discovered him pulling the cat's tail. But he ignored her inference that he had no right to be so precocious, or that what he had done was out of the way.

“You see what I mean?” he asked eagerly, and breaking into a peal of happy laughter, rocking himself to and fro, and gradually becoming self-conscious, prolonging the movement until it was mechanical, while the laughter died away and left him swinging there like the beam of a metronome. Joan could see his eyes calculating the movement, as his interest fastened on it. She was forgotten.

“Tell me,” she demanded, “how do you … what do your parents do…?”

But she could not frame her enquiry clearly. It seemed almost indecent even to suggest that the boy had done anything abnormal. So she came down to convention, and said, “But how old are you?”

He had obviously heard that question before. His eyes looked bored, though the rest of his features had not the firmness to add to that register.

“I'm nine, and my sister's seven. She's a wild thing, but everybody likes her.”

He appeared to be obsessed by the problem of being liked or disliked. Twice in this short acquaintance he had referred to it. Joan suddenly felt sorry for him. “But everybody likes you, too, I'm sure. You are Adrian, are you not?” She had recalled this bit of information given by his sister the night before.

The boy's mind leaped ahead. Looking at Joan almost slyly, he asked, “Then you met my Uncle Tom? Did you like him?”

Joan could not answer at once because she saw the boy's attention wandering off again. He had ceased rocking himself to and fro, and now began doodling at the piano, striking abrupt chords, tinkering with them, his head turned down sideways as though testing the chords for cracks, then breaking away with running passages and delicious modulations, coming back after a while to the original chords. The meander was a nice piece of improvisation.

“That's what my uncle wants me to do,” he said.

“Tell me more about it,” said Joan, trying in vain to maintain her suspicion of all this abnormal conduct. The child was so disarming in his candour.

“He wants Father to let me play at concerts, and go on tour.”

“And what does your mother say to that?”

“She doesn't say anything. It is Father who says.”

“Oh, and he disapproves?”

“Disapproves? What does that mean?”

The boy frowned, as he had done before at meeting this word outside his own vocabulary. Joan concluded that he was not intelligent in everything, and this made her meanly triumphant. She began to tease him.

“But I told you that word just now.”

He frowned more savagely, and his face flushed. Oh, temper, she thought; and that again was one up for her. But immediately she was abashed, for he turned back to the keyboard as he replied:

“Oh yes. I know. Approved, disapproved. I see what they mean. They mean
this
!” And he broke out again into an improvisation, first a gay dance measure, then a pause, followed by a heavy series of chords, with a shifting dissonance that dragged the tone down and down. “That's it, I know! I know! I soon learn things. That's what Father wants. He says he wants me to learn a lot more before I play in public.”

Joan was too curious to change the subject, though she believed that the child ought not to be talking about his abilities in this confident way.

“And what do
you
think about it? Would you like to be a pianist?”

She could not bring herself to suggest that he might want to perform
now
in public. Her mind switched from this reluctance to the consideration that something must
be wrong with that Uncle Tom who was urging this premature publicity.

The boy was tired of the matter, however, and did not answer. He sidled down from the piano-stool and approached Joan, holding out the blue-stained hand for his engine. Joan gave it to him, and he looked up at her, peering under his mop of hair.

“You don't make a fuss, like most people,” he said. “Would you like to see my boat as well? I sail it in the Gardens. Uncle Tom is good at that. He goes with me a lot now he is staying in Paris. Mother and Father are always too busy, and Jeannette's a nuisance.”

He seized her hand, and again she was conscious of a bird-claw, tight in grip, firm and absolute. A tiny shiver of animal magnetism went up her arm.

“Yes, I'll come,” she answered, docilely, and allowed herself to be dragged eagerly through the communicating door to the smaller sitting-room. It was Uttered with toys, like a million other nurseries, picture-books scribbled on with coloured crayons, a doll's house, a pile of tin railway-lines, bent and battered, fragments of rolling-stock, and the pot of paint, standing on a chair protected by a newspaper, the source of the blue paint on Adrian's person. Under the french window stood a model sailing-boat, with the sails set. The boy rushed to it, and began to demonstrate proudly how the sails were worked. His quick fingers pulled the lilliputian ropes, and switched the tiller to and fro, while he chattered to Joan about the prowess of his craft on the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens.

She studied him meanwhile, more sympathetic now that he was in normal childlike mood and scene. He was really a nice little boy. What a pity that he had to grow up to become a man! At this the old misery swept over her, and she turned away, fearing that her conflict might be seen by him. It was.

“Don't you like my boat?” he asked, in a pitiable little voice.

“Oh, Adrian, yes, of course I do,” she cried, and to her own horror she took him in her arms and hugged him, putting him down almost instantly and withdrawing again as though she were a wild creature who had stumbled close to a trap.

Colonel Batten did not offer to accompany Mrs. Winterbourne back to the flat in the Rue Boissonade, and she walked thoughtfully through the Gardens, still intrigued by this man after she had left him, asking herself what it could be that made him so fugitive in his social approach. Was he really running away from something? If so, he was poorly equipped to disguise his fears. She believed he needed help. That hunted look: it was almost childlike. She smiled gently, and once stopped under the bare trees of the long avenue, to say to herself, “Poor man.”

Thus preoccupied, she arrived at the flat to find Joan sitting with Mrs. Batten, who was in outdoor clothes, not patently French in
chic;
indeed, she looked like a stage version of a happy English landlady, genial, bland, with her hat tumbling off the back of her head. There she sat, chatting away happily, from time to time putting up a plump hand and pushing the hat back approximately into position: a vain effort that did not dismay her.

Joan looked pale, as though she had been overworking the whole morning. Why was that, wondered her mother. Is it that John again? Is she fretting after him?

“Did you find what you wanted?” she asked Joan, after greeting Mrs. Batten, who had risen to welcome her and pour her a glass of Dubonnet. She saw a small boy kneeling at the bed-end, peering at a volume of something
or other, turning over the pages slowly. She observed that it was music.

“Come and be introduced, Adrian,” said his mother. Mrs. Winterbourne had small experience of little boys, and she looked at him shyly as he advanced, and she thought that his mother might keep him more tidy.

“Is that your sister, whom I saw last night?” she said, by way of an opening.

“Yes,” said the urchin, “she's about somewhere now. I'll go and find her if you want to see her again.”

He disappeared, and Mrs. Winterbourne forgot him. She was anxious about Joan.

“No, Mother,” said Joan, rising and drawing on her gloves, “but I wrote a letter to M. Duhamel, who is in the country. And the person whom I saw there was very kind. I can go and consult the library there; though I don't know if that will be much good for what I'm after for the professor. But it will be something to do.”

“Oh, come!” cried Mrs. Batten. “Not in Paris, and on holiday! My dear child, you must be a little more frivolous than that. I suspect you of being too much nose to the grindstone.” This, in broken English, dispelled the solemnity. With laughter and friendly protestations, the three ladies drifted to the front door of the flat, and Mrs. Batten came out to the stone staircase, to stand there smiling down at them until they reached the ground floor. They heard her close her front door.

“What a leisurely soul,” said Mrs. Winterbourne. “Is she ever in a hurry? She might be a little neater in the home.”

“Impossible for a woman of that bulk to be neat,” said Joan sharply.

She stalked ahead, striding along, with shoulders hunched and mouth set. Her mother said nothing, and indeed was hard put to it to keep up with her. Joan resumed, as though she had been ruminating further on
this handicap that dogged poor Mrs. Batten's efforts to be a good housewife.

“Perhaps that is my trouble too. Far too clumsy and uncouth to make a success of my affairs. It's the gesture that counts. A little woman who knows how to purr and stroke gets away with it every time.”

“I'm not very large, darling,” said her mother, taking her arm to slow her down somewhat, “and I don't seem to accomplish much in that way.”

Joan looked down at her affectionately, perhaps with a touch of remorse.

“Oh, but that was not a personal matter. You and Father were harmonious enough, so far as I know. You told me so only the other day; and I can see it by your—your fidelity to his memory.”

Mary looked ahead, saying nothing. Joan was quite right, of course. She had a gift for putting truth only too plainly, and leaving one to take up the consequent responsibility. Certainly the memory of a dead husband had been maintained without any dilution for fifteen years. And she mourned him still. No doubt about that. Joan's reference to him touched the scar afresh. It was hidden away underneath a multitude of busy purposes and resolutions; her good works, her devotion to Joan's welfare, her determination to make a success of what remained of life at the end of the war.

Her silence made Joan study her again. The girl saw a charming figure, perfectly tailored, the silver hair shining under a model hat; the gloves and bag, the shoes, all in harmony. She did not often notice these things; but this morning she compared her mother's appearance with her own; the camel-hair coat, spotted here and there, the fur toque long past respectability, the brogue shoes quite out of keeping with the rest; the inevitable brief-case. Oh God! she thought. I'm a blue-stocking! And whose fault is that? My own? Not entirely. I had no encouragement
to be a woman. John would not have noticed whether I wore a sack or a Schiaparelli. There was no encouragement there. And how could I compete with Mother, so heroic, so lovely? It's hopeless, hopeless!

During this morbid soliloquy she was guiding her mother northwards, through the Gardens, where the juvenile crowd had thinned out, and gone to luncheon.

“For heaven's sake, let us have a good French meal to-day, our first lunch in Paris since—how long is it?”

“Nearly twelve years, Joan,” said her mother demurely, still subdued by the old and greatest privation, “and you were too young then to be interested in the quality of your meals.”

The bright sunshine had disappeared, and the crisp winter air thickened and grew fetid. The sky turned to lead, and a midday darkness began to settle over the streets.

“We'd better hurry, Mother,” said Joan, “it looks like a storm.”

A few drops of tepid rain urged them on, as Joan had said, and the pace was too fast for talking. They arrived breathless at a small restaurant in the Carrefour de l'Odeon. The ground floor was already crowded, and they were directed by a tiny spiral staircase to a room above, where they found a table by a window looking across the ancient Square to tall houses that might have served as a backcloth to a tale by Balzac.

“What a ramshackle place,” said Mary, disturbed by the lack of space within, and the raffish aspect without.

“Yes, but the food isn't,” said Joan, with almost a masculine gusto. “This ought to make us forget our complexes. Not that
you
have any, Mother.”

“My dear child, why do you criticise yourself so much?”

“Oh well,” Joan growled, her mind intent on the menu, which was unfurled like a medieval scroll in her hands. She looked at it, and then at the map of the Burgundy
vineyards on the wall. “Yes, the food is good, and the wines come from their own vineyard in the Beaujolais district. This will do us good, Mother.”

“But not my figure.”

“Let us not be so womanly for once. Why should either of us care about our figures, after all? Not a damn!”

Mary was not so sure. Maybe Joan was right; but even so, it was just as well to preserve a good appearance. Even memory needed to be elegant. But for once she would share this indulgence, if only to cheer the girl up and help her to put aside her ridiculous grievances.

Joan was recognised by the proprietor when he came up the tiny doll's staircase to look round the upper room. He shook her by the hand, and enquired after Monsieur. Joan grunted something, with a scared look in her eye, and introduced her mother, which caused the Frenchman to bow with respect, and to bow a second time as soon as he perceived her September beauty, a quality which instantly provoked gallantry.