The House in Paris (19 page)

'No,' she said, 'not now.'

So he picked up the menu and said: 'Well, what shall we eat?' She said she was not sure, so he chose the lunch. When the waiter had gone, they both looked at the clock. Already, there was one hour less. She saw her boat going one way, his train the other; looking away she said: 'Is Mme Fisher still ill?'

Max pressed his hair back with the side of one hand. As though a wire had been run through his forehead, his eyebrows twitched together and met. Karen saw she had let in an enemy worse than time. 'She was not ill,' he said. ' — You mean, that night? She was tired and there was nothing to say, so then she went to bed.'

'She used not to go to bed when there was nothing to say.'

'There used not to be nothing to say. But she and I had not been alone for some time, till that night, when she found me bad company.'

'How long have you known her? I never knew.'

'Since I was twenty; I was given a letter to her when I first came to Paris. Twelve years. Till this year, I have not tried to separate what she made me from what I am. From the first, she acted on me like acid on a plate.'

'Corrosive?'

'Yes. No. What her wit ate out is certainly gone. But more happened than that; as she saw me, I became. Her sex is all in her head, but she is not a woman for nothing. In my youth, she made me shoot up like a plant in enclosed air. She was completely agreeable. Our ages were complementary. I had never had the excitement of intimacy. Our brains became like senses, touching and drawing back.'

'Then you acted on her, too?'

'To an extent only. She was ready for me when I was not ready for her. She had waited years for what I had not had time to miss. We met in her house, in all senses. Women I knew were as she made me see them: they were not much. Any loves I enjoyed stayed inside her scope; she knew of them all. She mocked and played upon my sensuality. She always had time to see me; she did not turn upon me however angry she was.'

'Is she still angry?' Karen said suddenly.

Max broke a roll in two and dug the crumbs out with his thumbs. Something inside his head being at white heat, his movements were more than ever deliberating and slow; the irises of his eyes, as he turned to Karen, showed that prune-colour angry dark eyes take on in certain lights. 'She does not say so,' he said.

'I think she is in love with you.'

'I cannot think of her that way,' he said violently.

'She suggests you are marrying Naomi for her money.'

Max, unmoved, said evenly: 'I could not marry Naomi if there were not the money; I have not enough myself to support a wife.'

'What she said made me angry.'

Max smiled. 'You think heroically,' he said. 'You are thinking about my honour. Do you want me to mind?'

'Yes.
I
do.'

'When I cut myself even slightly, I bleed like a pig, profusely. Does that make me nobler?'

'But you do mind. You were overwrought when she left you to go to bed.'

'I have told you why. After twelve years — her silence humiliated me.'

'Was that all?'

'No. When she did speak, she spoke of you.'

'Oh! Why?'

Max's eyes now impassive, rested on Karen's. 'She told me you loved me.'

Karen looked at a vase of roses on a middle table, then round the restaurant, with its embossed brown wallpaper, in which they were shut up with what Mme Fisher said. She watched the waiter bring a half canteloupe packed with ice to their table and slice it precisely, then fill their glasses with Vouvray misting outside. The room was beginning to darken with Sunday people, and Mme Fisher seemed to have come in too.

She said: 'But you knew that.'

'But I had not thought about it. Thoughts I might have had would very likely offend you, and I did not wish to offend you even in thought. In regard to you, I have disliked my own mind. When she spoke I heard what I dared not think.'

'Why? What else did she say?'

'She said: "You should be gratified. What do you mean to do?" '

Karen picked up a spoon and began to eat her canteloupe. After a minute she said: 'What did you say?'

'Nothing,' Max said, carefully fitting together the halves of the hollow roll.

'I see. But you rang up.'

'To hear your voice ...'

'Yes?'

'And be certain you did exist. My only other proof, since we left London, had been the letter you wrote to Naomi.'

'She showed it you?'

'Yes. She is anxious we should be friends.'

'That is English of her, I suppose,' said Karen, looking back in her mind at those streaked white cliffs. She was silent for some minutes then said: 'What made Mme Fisher say that, do you think?'

'The wish to hear me say what I would hate.'

'What would you have hated?'

'Anything I could say. Her other motive — if you want to hear it — to show I should set my cap higher than Naomi.'

Karen coloured. 'That's hideous,' she said.

'That is why I do not think.'

'Oh. Then what does go on?'

'Only images, and desire.'

They did not look at each other. Karen drank Vouvray, pressing her thumb on the stem of the cold glass.

'Nothing I say sounds pretty to you, Karen. But our position is not pretty, you see. Perhaps you have not thought, either? Perhaps you dread thinking, too ... I knew you first as someone to leave alone. One of her young girls that I might bow to but not meet. That rule of the house still stands.'

'Yes. But you rang up.'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'I felt: Why not? ... Why
not?'

Karen, moving despairingly, caught an edge of the cloth between her knees and the table, pulling the knives crooked: some wine splashed from his glass. She exclaimed: 'Why must I listen to all this when you never say you love me?'

Max's eyes fell from her eyes to her breast.

He and she sat side by side like two wax people while the waiter stretched across to unwrinkle the tablecloth and straighten the knives. Bowing, he took the canteloupe rinds away and, bringing two grilled trout on a bed of cress, served monsieur and madame, refilled their glasses and spread a napkin over the spilt wine. This worked like a change of scene. How well waiters knew their entrances, Karen thought, squeezing a round of lemon over her trout.

'Not too much lemon,' Max said in a friendly critical way.

Karen wiped it off her fingers. 'No,' she said. 'But you do take this for granted, and how can I?'

'The trouble is, you see, that already we've said too much. How can one discuss an unwilling love?'

'And we didn't meet to talk.'

'Is that true of you, too?'

'Yes,' she said, looking round at him quickly and blindly.

'If there had been something to say, anything that we could say, we would have written each other letters, I suppose, or talked more when we telephoned. Because there
was
nothing, we're here. There is nothing to say about wanting to be together.'

'Nothing. Except to wish we were alone.'

'If we were, we might not look at each other.'

'I am horribly ungentle to you, Karen. But I dare not be different. What would become of us?'

Speaking as calmly as possible, bending over her plate and trying to look like the other women at lunch here, Karen said: 'But what is worse than being apart always?'

'Think. Yes you must think once. We should never tolerate one another if we were not in love. Even today here, we are both estranged from half of ourselves. You would find my life mean. A good deal of what you are I should not care to touch. I am calculating and like to see my way to my pleasures; to love you would be a leap in the dark. You were not made to leap in the dark either. We were not laughing, at Twickenham, when I said you got on so nicely — too nicely. You do; in my way I do too. We admire that in each other. Why should we bring each other to a full stop? And to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground, somewhere. You have a romantic idea — '

' — No, I have no ideas left.'

'Would you come back to Paris with me?'

Karen felt like a piece of paper rearing up in the fire the instant before it catches, on the tense draughty flame. She put down her glass carefully.

'That
was an idea,' he said calmly. 'They have too much power with you.'

'Oh! Then you didn't mean ...'

'You see why it is impossible.'

'Naomi.'

'One cannot simply act.'

'Yes, I saw that once.'

Max looked across the restaurant — at the solid people lunching, the trays of fruit in the middle, the glazed advertisements on the walls — with abstract interest, as though he were alone. Watching a bottle of wine being opened, he said: 'Why are you so anxious to run away from home?'

She could in no way account for her own strangeness, and did not see why she should — to him above all.

Troubled defiance made her look away from him saying nothing, though all sorts of exclamations darted up in her mind. Max went on eating composedly, till he had finished his trout. 'What a pity, Karen,' he said, 'you are letting your trout get cold.'

'Yes, I am,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

While the next dish came, he said: 'Can you tell me how many times the English besieged Boulogne?'

She was sorry to find she did not know. They began to talk about French kings. He and she could not be, like lucky lovers, provincial, full of little references and jokes. They had been nowhere together, their childhoods had been different, of what people they had in common they dreaded to speak. Their worlds were so much unlike that no experience had the same value for both of them. They could remember nothing that they could speak of, and memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup. But for lovers or friends with no past in common the historic past unrolls like a park, like a ridgy landscape full of buildings and people. To talk of books is, for oppressed shut-in lovers, no way out of themselves: what was written is either dull or too near the heart. But to walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. Art does its work even here in clarifying their faces, but they are dead, immune, their schemes and passions are legacies. For the first time, he and she went into company together. His view of the past was political, hers dramatic, but now they were free of themselves they were one mind. Outside, the street, empty, reeled in midday sun; the glare was reflected in on the gold-and-brown wall opposite; side by side in the emptying restaurant, they surrounded themselves with wars, treaties, persecutions, strategic marriages, campaigns, reforms, successions and violent deaths. History is unpainful, memory does not cloud it; you join the emphatic lives of the long dead. May we give the future something to talk about.

At three they left, to walk up to the battlements. The wide uphill Grande Rue of Boulogne is certainly not gay. Trams crawl unwillingly up it to the boulevards. It is without interest, uncertainly modern, abstract; its steepness, so tiring to the body, is calm to the eye. Shut shops, this afternoon, made its blankness absolute; massed trees at the top were summer-dark with heat. Max and Karen walked up silently, in what shade there was. They found themselves in the tranquil leafy dullness of the boulevards, out of which the old citadel rose.

The utter silence of the glaring, shuttered streets inside the citadel oppressed them. Everyone in here must be asleep, if not dead of a plague. Karen's feet began to ache from the cobbles; an afternoon unreality fell on her. The cathedral had the same stricken look: its façade was caked with autumn greyness, as though mists left a sediment. People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place. Max and Karen looked about them vaguely, not knowing why, they were not sightseeing — lost to each other in fatigue and vacancy. Then they turned back to the archway they had come in by and climbed the steps beside it, up inside the old wall to the ramparts.

Trees growing up here, and deep silent grass, make the walk round the ramparts dark green. Between branches there were rifts of blue; the bright sea-lit day shimmered and broke in. They passed the first angle, where a tower-top bulges, then sat down on the parapet. No one else was in view; the afternoon was too hot. The stone up here gave out heat, even in shadow. On the outside, below the parapet, the wall dropped sheer to the boulevards: there were seats the other side of the path, but they preferred this unsafe parapet. Having looked up and down the perspective of green walk they turned to look at each other, still with afternoon vacancy in their eyes.

You're tired,' he said.

'It's the time of day. And the stones. Will you give me a cigarette?'

The leaves behind their heads and the leaves under them kept sifting in the uncertain air that drew out the flags. An incoming tide of apartness began to creep between Max and Karen, till, moving like someone under the influence of a pursuing dream, he drew the cigarette from between her fingers and threw it over on to the boulevard. Moving up the parapet, he kissed her, and with his fingers began to explore her hand. Their movements, cautious because of the drop below, were underlined by long pauses. They were hypnotized by each other, the height, — the leaves ... Later, they began hearing voices on the steps; as the sun went down a little, other people came up to walk on the ramparts. Interruptions, making them draw apart, did not alter their sad and desperate calm. Karen could only tell how the time passed by the changing shadows on the roofs below. They got up once and walked right round the citadel, coming back again to where they had been. The apse of the cathedral, the sad windows of houses had looked at them through the boughs.

Before they left, a bar of glittering light struck across the path exactly where they stood, making their figures blaze. They stood and looked at each other. The town below began humming with early evening life. Karen saw his face, drowned in the light, full of tiredness and agony.

At six o'clock, they were walking on the quay again, past the café where they had sat when they first met. The town had high shadows and was vivid with colour now that the sun was amber and less fierce. They had looked into the empty Casino gardens, they had looked at the shore, but they dreaded solitude now. The tide was out, the glass-green harbour water had sunk, leaving dark slime on the embankment walls; Karen's boat waited across the water, against the railway quay. He and she sat down in another café, shabbily modern, full of steel and red paint. He ordered Pernod Fils, she had a vermouth and soda. This ice had no sawdust, but looked grey. Max spooned a wedge of ice into Karen's drink.