The House in Paris (14 page)

'That will make me very happy,' said Naomi.

Evidently, her heart had been set on this. When Karen was eighteen, the immense store Naomi — so often disappointed — set by small things had seemed natural to her. But since those Paris days they had seldom met without Karen's beginning to wonder which of them could be mad. The strength of Naomi's feeling about marriage could be foreseen; also, she had loved unrewardedly for so long. But at any time she had a way of making straight lines bend and shapes of things fluctuate as though a strong current were flowing over them. With her there, there seemed to be no more facts. Under her unassumingness, Naomi had a will that, like a powerful engine started up suddenly, made everything swerve.

In Paris she had been subject to Mme Fisher and her own tongue-tied silence. Karen and Max, two people, were her objects; even with them she did not pursue anything; she was pure in heart. No wonder she frightened you ... The hall clock struck: it was now half-past eleven. Karen thought how much she should like a bath. Would Braithwaite have told her mother she had come home?

'Your poison's not mine,' she quoted.

Naomi, meekly pulling off her gloves, said: 'Please?'

'A woman on the boat was saying that last night.' Both Naomi's hands emerged with an odd nude air. Karen suddenly said: 'And Max loves you very much?'

'Yes,' answered Naomi. 'Naturally, I have asked myself many times, am I stealing him? I am in no way his type; I am utterly unlike anyone he frequents. I am not
femme du monde.
You know how it is, how nobody looks at me. My mother has all the wit: I inherit nothing from her. How often have I said: "But what can I
do
for you?" There seems to be nothing that I can do. But he says yes, that there is, and wishes me to believe him. I, necessarily, believe him.' She straightened out, then folded her gloves gently, as though they knew better than she did what Max meant.

Karen felt she should say something at once. 'Mme Fisher is very pleased, I expect?'

'No. Oh no. My mother opposed the match.'

'But he and she are such friends.'

Naomi's face went pinched and monkey-like, lines appeared round her mouth. She stared at the gas-fire. 'That alters nothing,' she said. 'She is not pleased with us.'

Karen, startled, said, 'Does she interfere?'

'Not any more now. She simply smiles and says nothing. She washes her hands of me.'

This brought up a lively picture of Mme Fisher. Karen herself had more than once been the victim of that un-speaking smile. Mme Fisher always withdrew opposition in such a way as to make your motive snap. If you went against her, she said: 'But naturally, you know best,' which at once drove dismay in. If you knew best too often she packed you back to your mother, writing: 'Your daughter is growing too wise for me.' The waiting list for a place in her house was so long that she could afford to be high-handed. The girls in her house (of whom Karen had been one) were her guests (at a price) not her charges: she always made this clear. She undertook to exercise no direct authority. If that was what mothers wanted, there were the finishing schools. She did not undertake, she said, to impart any kind of 'finish', or, in fact, to receive young girls still lacking that quality. She would receive only young girls of good understanding and manners, who would not abuse a freedom she had no means to restrict. In short, she would keep no girl who did not know how to behave. They were there to attend the Sorbonne or to study music or painting. She offered, simply, she said, a roof, a modest table, the French of Touraine and a nominal chaperonage. She was, herself, a blue stocking, an unworldly woman. Not for nothing had Mme Fisher lived years with the English and discovered their liberalness and liking for the half-way. All this went down with some English and more American mothers. Her unofficial prospectus (always the same letter in answer to an inquiry) pleased mothers to whom the trimming and stuffing of daughters, in Paris or elsewhere, for an immediate market did not commend itself, or who wanted for their dependable daughters freedom inside the bounds of propriety. A mark between student wildness and the suspicious primness of an 'establishment' was thus brilliantly struck. Mme Fisher met a felt need. Mothers were enthusiastic and daughters did not complain. Mme Fisher appeared to put herself to no trouble; once you were there you were there, and she hoped your studies went well. She put up with your presence amiably. She asked no questions, but knew: she knew where you went, why, with whom and whether it happened twice. Though Paris was large, you were never out of her ken. The girls, discussing this, hovered between an idea of the supernatural and Naomi's having been told off to shadow them. Nobody knew how Naomi spent her days — but how could Naomi shadow two girls at once? There must be more to Mme Fisher than that: her marked unobservingness and withheld comment gave her terrific power over the girls' ideas. They might do as they wished, but did not, for she made it too clear that nothing they did could be what they really wished to do. If she did not apply polish, of which she said she knew nothing, she applied to young wood that emery-friction of satire without which first, no polish will 'take'. Her non-presence in the salon, on those afternoons when she handed over the room to the girls for their friends' visits, was as constant, uncommenting as the tick of her clock. She was jomewhere all the time. For ten years now, ever since Captain Fisher's death, well-bred, well-fed, well-read English-speaking girls had been passing, two at a time, through her small house in the Rue Sylvestre Bonnard. Of all these, only Karen had left a mark, known Naomi, had more than a word with Max or crossed Mme Fisher without being packed home. Perhaps only Max knew how far all this had gone. Now the English aunt's death, the small legacy, Naomi's coming marriage — no more girls.

'Where shall you live, Naomi?'

'Oh — with my mother.'

Karen opened her eyes. Naomi added: 'I could not leave her, you know, and Max would not wish me to. And there is the house; we cannot — '

'No. I see. So you'll all go on just the same?'

Naomi looked at Karen askance, as though hearing something unfriendly in her friend's tone. A little stiffly she said: 'With no more girls.'

Mrs Michaelis — who, it turned out later, had been told Naomi had called and been put in the morning-room, and heard later that Karen was back and in the morning-room too — came downstairs firmly, at this point, and looked in. She had been waiting some time, full of patience and humour, for Naomi to finish her heart-to-heart, but felt it really ought to be done now. She very naturally wished to talk to her daughter herself. She greeted Naomi with absolute friendliness, but Naomi, going governessy and frightened, looked about for her gloves, preparing to go away.

5

Naomi's dead aunt had a flowering pink cherry at the foot of her garden at Twickenham. Karen spread a sheet of newspaper on an upturned packing-case under the tree: dark pink lights and splashes of sunshine where wind parted the branches came spilling through. This last day of April was warm and idle, like summer. Inside the French window with its white frame in sunshine, the aunt's house was hollow, completely dead. But someone else would move in almost at once, and be here next spring, no doubt, to enjoy the cherry.

This was Monday, the afternoon before they went back to Paris. While Karen spread the newspaper tablecloth, putting a stone at each corner to keep it on — and, even so, the slight wind came creeping under — Max and Naomi were indoors, boiling the kettle and looking about the kitchen for left-over china for tea. They made a great point of tea when they were in England. In an hour or two they were going to lock up the house, and drop the key at the agent's on their way into London. Karen kept half turning to watch the windows; she wondered which would come out first, Naomi or Max.

It was Max's step she heard on the basement stairs, then crossing the bare drawing-room. He stepped carefully through the window, carrying the laden black iron tray. The sun struck on his forehead, wrinkled with carefulness, and on the white china. He put the tray precisely down on the packing-case, so that a rim of newspaper stuck out all round. Then, straightening himself, he looked up through the cherry, which was so pleasant there was nothing to say.

However: 'Where shall we sit?' he asked. 'There are still those three chairs, but they are too high.'

'Why not the grass?'

Max felt the grass. 'Yes, it's dry enough,' he said. 'But whoever pours out must kneel.'

'That will be Naomi — what is she doing now?'

'Still waiting for the kettle to boil.' There was no teapot on the tray yet.

With nothing more to arrange, they became silent. Karen stood pressing her back against the tree-trunk, touching the bark behind her with one hand.

Their meeting, yesterday, had been pointless and pleasant. Karen and Naomi had lunched with Max at his hotel in the Adelphi. In five years Max had not changed; he was still very much himself in unmoved disregard of how you might feel. What Karen remembered best about him in Paris was what she had kept expecting and he was not. What he was on Sunday in the Adelphi he must have been always: whatever more she had seen she had made herself. This year, he must be thirty-two, but still looked, as in Paris, some special age of his own. That nervous, rather forbidding stillness still swung back on him, now and again, like something that he would rather you had not touched. What few gestures he made, from the wrists only, moulded sharp surprising shapes on the air. The turn of his head was polite, attentive, slow. Slowness of movement in a quick-thinking person makes you feel some complication of thought or feeling behind anything that is done. His smile, which was gentle, narrowed his eyes slightly; Karen saw why she had thought him sarcastic then ... All the same, her memory had exaggerated him. The meeting she tried to avoid amounted to almost nothing. All through lunch, she was conscious of something missing its mark in her, and did not know whether she were sorry or glad.

Max's forehead was high and narrow, his dark hair with a spring at its roots brushed carefully back. Bony structure showed at his temples and cheek-bones, the bridge of his nose and along the line of his jaw. His dark eyes, softened by childishly long lashes, were set rather close in. An unexpected movement of those long lashes would make his face appear flinching and sensitive: mostly, it was impassive. He looked either French or Jewish, perhaps both; his mother had been French and his father an English Jew. Intellect, feeling, force were written all over him; he did in fact cut ice. Mme Fisher had once remarked that a darting womanish quality, enforced by a manly steadiness of will, made him the figure he was, or promised to be, in his own, the banking, world. In any field (she said) success is possible for the artist. But he must put up with being more admired than trusted. He might not arrive where he should for many years more; he would have, first, to be right an unfair number of times, and must lack scope to be right until he was recognized. No plain man would ever care for his mouth. But he was in no way supersubtle or florid, and no doubt could have been a gentleman had he wished.

But Mme Fisher did not want Max as a son-in-law. Karen wondered how he took his old friend's unfriendliness. What Naomi said was true, he
did
mind everything; a harsh edge you sometimes felt in his manner being chagrin, perhaps, at minding so much.

This Sunday, away from Paris, it was startlingly simple: they were all three good friends. Karen had blushed inwardly to remember the scene she had made with Naomi — though it was quite a small scene — yesterday morning, about not wanting to meet him. Whatever did I think could happen to me? His charm remained — if it ever had been charm. But by now, she had lived several years in a world where it was almost everyone's business to please. She looked back at that broken-off talk with Aunt Violet both watching the trawler:
then
she had thought she had something still to dread. It had been the air of Ireland, perhaps, or the shock of having just heard about Aunt Violet. But now I am back here, where I really belong ... Sunday London silence filled the half-empty dining-room, with its unbright silver and lifeless wall-mirrors. She watched Max's hand, while he talked, touching objects — the stem of a glass, a salt spoon, a cigarette — she looked at objects he picked up when he had put them down. Becoming Naomi's lover 'placed' him, and far away.

All through lunch, the Paris past stayed unreal. Karen looked back at it boldly, surprised. She remembered, for instance, being so much unnerved by the bare idea of meeting him that she would turn back upstairs again when she heard him cross the hall. But if he did not cross the hall, but stood back himself in the open door of the salon, she would creep on down, casting round for something to say: at the same time feeling her heart thump. She saw now that his frequent presence about a house where young girls were could have been thought irregular, had he not made such a point of ignoring Mme Fisher's young girls. A cold, withdrawing bow was the most most of them got. Those darkish late afternoons he was there so often, waiting for Mme Fisher to come in or be free to talk to him: when he was not really there, some shadow often deceived Karen, or she would be misled by a door ajar: uncertainty, at that special time of day, made her life pump through her furiously, uselessly. When they were in the same room, his weight shifting from foot to foot, as he leaned on the mantelpiece talking to Mme Fisher, filled her with uneasiness. Every movement he made, every word she heard him speak left its mark on her nerves. He was the first man I noticed, she thought now.

She thought, young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right: not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially. This natural fleshly protest against good taste is broken down soon enough; their natural love of the cad is outwitted by their mothers. Vulgarity, inborn like original sin, unfolds with the woman nature, unfolds ahead of it quickly and has a flamboyant flowering in the young girl. Wise mothers do not nip it immediately; that makes for trouble later, they watch it out.