The House in Paris (15 page)

Mrs Michaelis was wise: whatever she saw, she said nothing. Only, when Karen came back from Paris, her mother saw to it that Ray, for one, was about. The rule of 'niceness' resumed in Karen's life. She grew up, her regard for order overtook her sensations. She took herself up again from where she had been at twelve: a discriminating little girl who spent her tips on antiques. What would not do, did not do. She had come to look back at Max as a person who would not do. But in that she had been unjust, as she discovered on Sunday; as Naomi's husband he would do very well; her Michaelis view of life quickly fitted him in. She was ashamed, looking at Max across the table, of the unfair way her fancy, then her revenge on her fancy, had misused him.

For Max was very nice. As her host at lunch today she met him for the first time.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse: they hardly know tenderness. 'The Queen of Spain has no legs' ... But in the Adelphi dining-room, Max reappeared dependable, solid, shyish, with a touch of Ray about him: domestic man — hanging Karen's fur over a chair-back for her, slipping Naomi's gloves out of reach when she played with them, refusing sauce, looking anxiously down the wine-list, failing once or twice to catch the waiter's eye. His wish to lunch somewhere gayer had been evident, but Naomi had said it would be quieter here. He looked the Frenchman with a good English tailor, and had a slight cut on his chin. Only those small worries of hospitality at an English hotel altered the pleased unsmiling calm of his face. His and Karen's talk was light, unadvancing: proper Michaelis talk. Naomi listened to them with pride and pleasure, not adding much. A weight, some remaining preoccupation, seemed to have lifted off her since they had sat down. She looked ten years younger than she had ever been.

But Karen, looking at Max, against a stuffy draped curtain, thought: This is like an epilogue to a book. You hardly read on, the end is so near: you know.

That had been yesterday.

Besides the pink cherry tree, there was not much in the garden: a stretch of lawn, now unmown, between the tree and the window, two lolling bloomy borders of lupins not yet in bud. The aunt must have lived indoors. But every blade of grass, pricking up, shone; the wind puffing the poplars in other gardens shook white light from the April sappy leaves. Many sensations of pleasure made up the moment and hummed in the silence between Max and Karen like bees in a tree. The yellow-brown brick house with its dark windows glared at them down the lawn. Not speaking, and their pleasure in not speaking, made an island under the boughs of the cherry. But silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

'What can Naomi be doing?'

Max said: 'Still standing beside the kettle.'

'She must be making it shy.'

'Are you thirsty?' he said with his oddly inflected voice.

'This time tomorrow, you'll both be — where?'

'Still in the Nord train. We do not reach Paris till six.'

At his words, the English Channel rose to cut them off like a blade of steel. The fine-weather blue the sea would have tomorrow, puffed into smiling ripples, could not disguise from her how fatal it was. She even smelt the salt air that would blow on deck. She said with a touch of pretty-woman extravagance: 'I feel you are both going away for ever.'

'Please miss us,' said Max with the same ease. 'But we are a couple of foreigners, after all.'

'Foreigners, though, belong somewhere else, and you and Naomi don't.'

'No; we are not rooted anywhere like you are.'

'Am I? All I meant was, I wish you lived here.'

'No,
that
would be the pity,' he said with surprising force. 'In London, we three should soon not even meet. No, we make better visitors.'

The ironic humbleness of his manner offended Karen, who looked up through the tree wishing she had not spoken.

'I do not want to go back,' he went on briskly, 'or, at least, not to go back yet. But there can be no question of anything else. I must return to work — yes, this has been a holiday — and now Naomi has finished in this house she has no good reason to stay on, either.'

'It is those wretched American girls, waiting. I suppose they feel, as I probably felt at their age, that the Fishers exist for them.'

'You still exist in that house — haunt it, if you prefer. They are not likely to.'

'How I wasted that year!'

'How?'

'In being eighteen.'

'But you were studying art.'

Going on standing up in a rather rigid way, as though lashed to the tree-trunk, she looked at the shadows moving at their feet on the grass. Max's sudden unhumour made her feel silly, as though he and she had been playing catch idly and he had got bored and flatly let the ball drop. This too often happened. He was a foreign man, with no idea of saving anyone's face. Unconscious, and thinking rapidly on beyond this, Max sat down at the foot of the tree, clasping his hands, ridged with fine stretched bones, round his knees and leaning his body back. It had been foolish to stand, as they had, so long. She looked down uncertainly at the top of his head. Then she slid down too and sat with her feet stretched out at the far side of the packing-case. The cracked white cups took pink lights as the sun, already descending, slanted across the cherry; the tree filled the air with its heavy scentlessness.

Max brought out his cigarette case, opening it thoughtfully. 'But how should it waste time to be eighteen? Any year of one's life has got to be lived. Five years hence, you may dislike what you are now.'

'I may. But not so much.'

'You were more serious then — will you smoke?'

'After tea, thank you — to be serious is absurd; it is useless: what can one do?'

'So you gave that up, since eighteen?'

'I had no sense of humour then.'

'Oh, good God!' said Max sharply.

'Why?'

'What you say is deadly. Must everything be funny?'

'One's life is.'

'No wonder you get on nicely.'

Karen, with an uninnocent sigh, bowed over her knees and pressed the back of a hand to her forehead, staying like this. To burlesque despair at herself was the only way she had to make his reproof absurd. The movement was so quiet that it might have been natural; the curled ends of her hair fell over cheeks, which she felt burning unintentionally. Beyond the tray, Max sat smoking, not looking at her.

'When I was eighteen,' she said, 'you were unfair to me because you made me exaggerate. I had to say something when I didn't know where I was. Did you expect me to be like Mme Fisher? To say what one means one has to be her age.'

'To
know
what one means is always something,' he said.

'Well, I know now,' said Karen, hearing a hard note in her own voice. 'If I exaggerated again just now, it was because today is hardly a day, is it? Here we are in a place that's hardly a place at all, in a house belonging to somebody dead. I'd never been to Twickenham till today, and I suppose I may never come again. If I did come, I might never find this house. I don't know the address; I suppose it has one.'

'Yes,' said Max. 'You are certainly off your beat.'

'As a rule, you are quite right: I get on nicely.'

Max looked up and smiled at the French window. He said: 'Here comes Naomi.'

6

Naomi stepped through the window, in one hand a brown teapot, in the other a kettle with a trail of steam. Having been busy up to the last moment, she still wore a white overall over her dress and a white handkerchief round her head like a coif.

'How cool you look there,' she said, coming happily down the lawn.

'Come and sit down, Naomi.'

'I think I have done now — how sweet the tree smells,' she added, looking up.

'Not the flowers,' said Max. 'Simply, the leaves smell gummy.'

Perhaps it was his exactness that had such a calming effect and made her sit back quietly on her heels. He never went rocketing off — so she would check in mid-air and come quietly down again. His precision about any fact was passionate: she would not have loved him for years if he had been cold. Her second look at the tree was meek and tutored, as though she expected to see its gumminess drawn out by the sun. Her hands, reddish from being scrubbed in cold water, lay peacefully on her white overall. Being Martha became her now. She had always been hard-working, mechanical with her fingers, but in Paris she raced through work in a grey abstraction, exiled from half she did. At Twickenham her hands became herself; putting away her aunt's home she began building her own. She touched no object without sympathy; Max's touch had given all others nature. She threw herself into the day's business for him.

For Karen, she was the after-dark Naomi who used to slip into your room after lights were out to put mended stockings back in your drawer. She was not supposed, of course, to mend Karen's things. Thinking you were asleep she would creep softly past the bed; as she pulled the drawer open you heard her hold her breath. Light coming in from the landing fell on her face — unconscious, intent, calm. But a word brought her to sit on your bed and talk — in a whisper, because of the other girl. She was Naomi then, not Miss Fisher.

This afternoon, the shadow under the tree lay on her as soothingly as the dark. Her brown eyes, whose sockets looked less hollow, turned contentedly from Karen to Max. Touching the packing-case to make sure it was steady, she said: 'Have I kept you waiting long?'

'I meant to have helped more in the house,' said Karen. 'I went in, but everything seemed to be packed up.'

You know what Naomi's like,' said Max. 'There is only one way she can bear to have things done; while you do them some other way she looks on like a wounded bird.' He watched Naomi's stiff-overalled figure, like a white wood-carving, kneel down beside the tray. She touched the handkerchief bound round her forehead, knelt upright and started pouring out tea as if this were home. Perhaps it was their first home. As lovers, Max and she were a couple of refugees, glad to find themselves anywhere. He had been right in saying they were not rooted. Now they had interlocked, like two twigs on a current that, apart, would have gone on twisting perplexedly. They both had the hybrid's undefendable shyness that no one else can gauge. She had waited years for him to discover her as a refuge; his smile as she came through the window was her reward.

For Karen, the silence of that first minute with Max under the cherry had been spoilt since: they had both spoken and not said what they meant. Still, she could not wish herself back in London, or any place but here. 'All the same, I came here to help,' she said.

'I have only to lock up now — what have you talked about?' Naomi said eagerly.

Max wrinkled his forehead. 'Sense of humour,' said Karen.

'She thinks so oddly,' said Max. 'Naturally, so much belongs to the English, they can afford to be moderate. But nowadays the world is in bad taste; it is no longer "history in the making", or keeps rules or falls in with nice ideas. Things will soon be much more than embarrassing; I doubt if one will be able to save one's face. Humour ... no longer possible. Karen will have to find herself something else.'

Karen putting down her cup on the grass, said: 'Irony seems less childish, I daresay.'

Max glanced across the tray to see if she were angry. She sat pressing her hand with Ray's ring into the grass, feeling the helpless colour come up her face. He was behaving like those rather cruel young uncles who mock one's youth.

'Possibly, less childish,' he said. 'Humour is being satisfied you are right, irony, being satisfied that they should think you wrong. Humorous people know there is nothing they need dread. English good-natured jokes seem to me terrible; they are full of jokes about mortification — the dentist, social ambition, love.'

Naomi, looking ever so slightly anxious, said: 'Oh, you have nothing to eat yet. You did not unpack the buns!' She tipped the bagful of buns she had bought at a pastrycook's, on their way here, on to a plate. 'I think that humour is English courage,' she said.

'Ostrich courage,' said Max.

'Please,' said Naomi, 'do not be anti-English — Karen, please eat a bun.'

Max ate two mouthfuls of the bun, then said: 'Humour is like a silly vow of virginity.'

'Max was saying,' said Karen, 'how well I get on these days.'

'You should be glad,' said Max, 'I wish I got on as well.'

She saw him glance at the ring on her hand on the grass without comment in his dark eyes — as though her hand were exposed in a museum glass case or the ring itself had been dug up out of a tomb: something that mattered once. 'But chaff is English, Max: you are being jolly,' she said.

'Max thinks too much of ambition,' Naomi said, like a loving young governess.

'So does Karen; she is ambitious to live.'

'What old friends we are,' said Naomi, 'telling each other truths.' She refilled the teapot happily.

Karen smiled across at Naomi briefly, then dropped her eyes, refusing to look at Max. She sat with her knees crossed, digging the heel of one shoe into the grass. With three or more people, there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public, you feel safe; the person so close before becomes a face at the other side of a tray. Are you less yourself than you were? You will never know.

'But take care, Max, or Karen will never visit us.'

'I am sorry,' said Max. 'I am not accustomed to holidays. Satan finds mischief for me, I daresay. Will you have more tea, Karen?' He reached round and took her cup.

Naomi filled his cup too, and put it down by him. Still propped on the grass on one elbow, he irresponsibly tore a handful of grass, and, smiling, tossed the blades on his hand, to show how much he was enjoying his holiday. Then he kept his hand still and stared at the grass; his thoughts had gone somewhere else. They were not thoughts but thought, hardening his eyebrows into a metal line. A man with two women, devotedly watched by one, unwillingly watched by the other, often looks foolish: whatever he does is too weighty. His thought withdraws and there is an attentive hush — but all the same, they are making a child of him. 'Look how hard he can think.' It said much for Max that Naomi's adoration did not make him more foolish. But his silence, cutting across the idle warm afternoon, had the proper ring: forbidding and unemotional. However fondly she spoke, it was true: he was ambitious. Wind fanning across the gardens through the poplars, knocking off pink petals, the absurd tray, the smell of torn grass made the afternoon a pleasure he did not share any more. Had the holiday lasted a day too long?