The House in Paris (16 page)

A doorbell sounded inside the empty house. 'That must be the carrier come for Helen's books.'

'Aren't you selling all the books?'

'No, Helen wants to keep some. They are going across to Highgate.'

Max said quickly: 'Shall I go to the door?'

'No, I must go,' said Naomi. She got up and went in.

Max threw away the handful of torn grass. He gave Karen a cigarette and, pushing the tray away from between them, lit it for her. Shielding the match for himself, he said: 'She thinks you are hurt.'

'She always thinks things will hurt people she likes.'

'What a good thing,' said Max, 'you are not as touchy as I am.'

Karen had nothing to say. She wondered how much of the Saturday morning talk Naomi had repeated: Naomi's own good faith was so entire that it would never occur to her not to repeat anything ... Outside the edge of shadow, the lawn blazed in sunshine up to the French window: Naomi's voice and the carrier's echoed indoors and Karen sat trying to fix her mind on them, trying to think what books Helen Bond would be likely to choose to keep. Naomi was coming home with Karen this evening, to spend her last night in London at Chester Terrace, but Max had a business dinner tonight, so, when the rattling journey back to London was over, that would be all. Looking down the garden, she saw ink-dark lines round everything, even between the roof and the blue sky: for a moment the garden looked as unbearably vivid as a garden the moment before you faint. Thinking: Gone tomorrow, she felt her own hands clasped round her knees loosely: surely if this were frightful they would be clasped tight? A coin of light from the trees slid off Max's foot. She said: 'All the same, I don't like being attacked, Max.' Watching the coin of light, he said nothing, which had been what she had dreaded.

'I will let Miss Bond know,' said Naomi, now in the hall.

Mrs Michaelis, who had met Max once, yesterday afternoon, thought him an excellent person for Naomi to marry, though that she should be marrying still seemed odd. He belonged to an order of people she felt about most kindly, who, agreeably present when they are present, melt into air when the servant has shown them out. Knowing this is to be, you part excellent friends. Being a very exact and sincere woman, she knew where a thing should stop. She did not make copy of people by drawing them out; no one had cause to regret the success they had had with her, or feel small or betrayed later. She said Max's personality was striking — of course, it might seem more striking to her than it was, as she met so few people like that. However, it had struck her. She liked his intellect; you could feel his ability. Though she found him nice rather than exactly attractive, no doubt many people would find him attractive too. Though it was nice for the Fishers that he was marrying Naomi, he could, she thought, have done better if he had wished. But this unambitious marriage showed a good heart.

'Oh, he knows what he is doing,' said Mrs Michaelis. 'Though he has such good manners, I don't think he is as confident as he seems. He looks sensitive, and might easily be touchy. I don't think he would be happy for long married to a woman who made him feel in any way not right. The question of background: curious, isn't it? For instance: here today at tea he was charming; not suspicious or "sticky", not tiresomely at ease. But then, he was alone with us: if we had had him here with so many other people no nicer than he is, and not nearly so clever, he might have been different, on the defensive at once. Yes, it is curious: social things matter so little, yet somehow one cannot be with people who do not "mix" when they have to. But Naomi is odd — and from one's own point of view sometimes a little trying — in exactly the way that would make him feel most at ease. Yes, a wrong marriage, I think, would be fatal for him; he is a man who would quickly outlaw himself. And there is always that touch — Jewish perhaps — of womanishness about him that a woman would have to ignore and yet deal with the whole time. He would see through a strategic woman at once; only a simple good woman would do for him And Naomi is so good — perhaps that's what's trying about her.
Her
trouble has always been all that bottled-up feeling: he will give that an outlet, and at the same time quiet her down. At tea today I thought she seemed so much calmer. It will be good for her getting away from Mme Fisher, who I have no doubt is rather a wretch.'

'But they are going to live with her.'

'I don't suppose that will last long,' said Mrs Michaelis tranquilly. 'Either he will put down his foot, or Mme Fisher will die — Well, Karen, about tonight...'

So Mrs Michaelis dismissed Max; he melted into thin air while still on his way to the bus. Should he ever come up again — which was unlikely, for no one they knew in Paris had heard of him — she would have him at her fingers' ends, to discuss once more with understanding and tact.

As Karen here sat on the lawn beside Max, looking at her clasped hands, what her mother had said after tea yesterday raced through her mind. What Max had said about touchiness set it going. How right Mother had been, how right she was always. All the same, her well-lit explanations of people were like photographs taken when the camera could not lie; they stunned your imagination by
being
exact. Would those unmysterious views in a railway carriage make you visit a place, even in dreams? You could not fall in love with the subject of an Edwardian camera-portrait, with polished shoulders, coiffure and curved throat. The lake showing every ripple, the wood showing every leaf, or the stately neck with pearls are too deadeningly clear. It is more than colour they lack. Without their indistinctness things do not exist; you cannot desire them.

Blurs and important wrong shapes, ridgy lights, crater darkness making a face unhuman as a map of the moon, Mrs Michaelis, like the camera of her day, denied. She saw what she knew was there. Like the classic camera, she was blind to those accidents that make a face that face, a scene that scene, and float the object, alive, in your desire and ignorance. Nowadays, a photograph is no more than an effort to apprehend. So Mrs Michaelis did not like modern photography, which she found exaggerated and woolly. Some recent studies of Karen by one of her friends had been regretfully put away in a drawer. She, not unfairly, found that an over-great sense of mystery too often leads to artiness. Nothing annoyed her more than to be told that the personality is mysterious; it made her think of Maeterlinck, people in green dresses winding through a blue wood. It is inexcusable not to be clear, she said. She preferred to think of people in terms of character.

Karen enjoyed her mother's anti-romanticism. God forbid indeed, that one should have cloudy ideas, or impart to objects one's own shifting moodiness. But the exercise of any sense, sight most, starts up emotion. You cannot debunk everything. Karen's mother was so far right: no objection is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

What Mrs Michaelis said about Max and his reasons for wanting to marry Naomi would be, no doubt, true — if you pressed him flat like a flower in a book. But he had a thickness you had to recognize, and could not be pressed flat without losing form. Looking up to stare at the French window, Karen felt him nearer, as though he had moved — but he had not, he sat still. She glanced round: he was splitting a blade of grass with his thumb nails; he drew a breath to speak, and then did not. Why split a blade of grass, and not speak? Everything that she knew of him disappeared at a point, like a road running into a dark tunnel.

He took another breath, and looked at the sky. 'An angel must be flying over,' he said.

Infected by his uneasy lightness she said: 'I didn't know you had been in England so much.'

'Long enough to learn what you say when no one speaks. I suppose the French, from talking so much more, more easily let a silence pass. Yes, I stayed here for three years once, working with one of my uncles. I never lived here, naturally.'

'Why, naturally?'

'Why, if I had lived here I should still be someone who speaks English quite remarkably well. It was my father's language, but never mine: he died when I was so young. What I say is correct, but never spontaneous, is it? It is too tight or too loose; it never fits what I mean.'

'How can I tell? It depends what you do mean.'

'Possibly it is an advantage to me,' he said.

'Shall we bring the tray in?' Karen said suddenly.

Leaning over the tray, Max stacked up the odd cups and saucers, and tipped the buns back into their paper bag. Karen saw his face with a tense look, like the face of someone expecting the first arrow, against the fringe of lupins. She felt worlds away from where they sat. He went on doggedly, determined to finish: 'What I say would often be right if I meant something else.'

'We had better give the buns to some child, hadn't we?'

'Where shall we find some child?'

'Oh, on the way home.'

Indoors, Karen heard Naomi shutting the hall door. The carrier must have taken the case of books. No doubt they were sets of classics, better bound than the classics Helen Bond had already. Naomi would be pushing the handkerchief back from her forehead, looking round to see what to do next. There was nothing left to do but lock up the house; a church clock struck six somewhere behind the gardens; they ought to start back soon. The poplars, the crimson-showering cherry, the lawn, the window belonged to the past already. An indoor chill, like in some room where nothing ever goes on, began to settle on Karen.

'We'll bring the tray in when we go.'

But they both sat back, her hand lying near his. Max put his hand on Karen's, pressing it into the grass. Their unexploring, consenting touch lasted; they did not look at each other or at their hands. When their hands had drawn slowly apart, they both watched the flattened grass beginning to spring up again, blade by blade.

Naomi came out busily through the window, taking off her overall, flapping the white sleeves. 'Alas,' she said, 'this time tomorrow we shall be gone, Karen!'

7

Next morning they left for Paris.

Naomi liked to be seen off, so Karen drove with her in the taxi to Victoria, where Max in a dark overcoat waited beside the barrier. Raising his hat with no change of expression, he watched them come through the crowd. Rock-still among all the pushing and agitation, he looked like a nervous Frenchman determined to travel well. The tip of a long magnetic wave from the Continent touches Victoria platform whenever a boat train starts: Max already belonged among the returning foreigners, though Naomi, keeping her hand on Karen's arm sadly, seemed for those minutes more to belong where she stood.

On the platform before their journey, to speak of a next meeting would have been out of place: even Naomi did not attempt to comfort herself with this. Goodbyes breed a sort of distaste for whoever you say goodbye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again. Any other meeting will only lead back to this. If today goodbye is not final, some day it will be; doorsteps, docks and platforms make you clairvoyant ... Naomi had set store by Karen's coming so far: would she expect her to stay and see the train out?

Once they had found their places and their luggage was on the rack, Karen turned round quickly to embrace Naomi standing in the compartment door. The kiss stopped any protest; in its womanish closeness Karen breathed eau-de-Cologne and camphory fur, and felt Naomi's gloved hand, her wrist with buttons, pressing between her shoulders in an imploring way.

Max, outside, looked along the dark corridor with the expression men wear while women say goodbye. He turned to shake hands, then Karen turned to go. But her way was blocked: from each end of the narrow corridor late-comers just in time, with porters hauling their baggage, came jostling in on them. Stout men agitating from carriage to carriage bore down on Karen and Max, who, standing with their shoulders against the window, found themselves jammed face to face. There was no escape. She stared at his right shoulder. This undid their touch on the lawn yesterday; they faced each other unwillingly, defiant, dead. Then their eyes met; they looked steadily into each other's pupils. All your youth, you are dreading more than can happen. But this was more than she had dreaded in Paris, when she used to wait trembling outside the salon door.

A porter passed, with baggage pitching on his shoulder; Max put up his hand to shield Karen's head. The people had found places; the corridor was now empty. The train stood as though built on to the platform, but Karen walking away down it, steadied herself against the frames of the windows as though the train was rocking at top speed. The platform under the glass roof was quiet; everybody for Paris was now aboard; with used-up smiles their friends waited to see them go. It was five to eleven; today was the first of May. The weighing hall with its pulled-up trolleys was aimless, as though the train had started, as though the last train of all to Paris had gone. This part of the station is quiet between departures, like a country halt, with nobody about. Outside the entrance, under the smoky glass porch, the taxis had all gone. Karen walked into Wilton Road, looking doubtfully at the buses, which like big particles in shaken water swam past. She felt she had left London. Crossing the street, she stood by a shop window, frowning, pressing her thumb to the clasp of her handbag, like a spoilt pretty girl with some contretemps in her day.

She was at home for lunch. Mrs Michaelis said: 'Well, did they get off all right?' She added, she was sorry that they had gone, but after all they did not live here; it would not do if they did. Glancing through the dining -room window at the trees, she smiled and said: 'May today. How nice, Karen, that everything's beginning.' By 'everything' she meant the London season, which sends ripples up every little channel, even making unworldly people smile. That afternoon she and her daughter went to a young man's private view. A picture of a flower-pot on a balcony made Karen decide to go on painting: next morning she returned to the studio.

That end of April had been in itself a summer: no more came after it for some time. The Twickenham cherry must have moulted its petals before another day came when you could sit on the grass. It grew colder; the season had lost its way. May is seldom quite up to time; this year there was a grey chilly pause before her undisappointing brightness settled down over London. Then, tulips blazed in the parks, geraniums hung on balconies, gay awnings unrolled, warm air blew through your thin dress as you walked. Frowsty streets where little dressmakers live began to be full of light and echoes of barrel-organs playing the new tunes. Pattering spring showers brought the trees right out; the last leaves cast their sheaths; thundery light, toppling ink-purple clouds across the ends of streets made the green burn. The suburbs tossed with lilacs and red may. Between thunder and sun, the Nash terraces round the Regent's Park, the trees in their May haze, took on their most theatrical air — but indoors at Chester Terrace, Michaelis family life continued as ever: intelligent, kind, calm. Mrs Michaelis joined two more un-cranky committees. Mr Michaelis left home for his office at half-past nine every morning, enjoying his walk through the park to the Underground. From ten o'clock on, the telephone rang cheerfully; invitations came rattling into the letter-box. They went to the Opera. The cook cooked even better. Two or three really good new books appeared. Everybody they wanted to see was in town.