The House in Paris (2 page)

Karen, like the children, defines herself by plotting extremity, disaster, against convention. Her family is happily, successfully conventional in a way nothing in the house in Paris is. They have an 'unconscious sereneness behind their living and letting live' which 'Karen's hungry or angry friends could not tolerate'. "Nowadays such people rarely appear in books; their way of life, though pleasant to share, makes tame reading ... Karen saw this inherited world enough from the outside to see that it might not last, but for that reason, obstinately stood by it.' (pages 70-71). Ray, whom she is to marry, is of it. Max, like his son, powerful and over-sensitive, has no available conventions, so has to define himself. 'Intellect, feeling, force were written all over him; he did in fact cut ice.' Mrs Michaelis, Karen's mother, sees that Karen is shaken by him, and makes one of those generalizations, true and inadequate, that together make the tone of this book: careful definition, re-definition, judgement, further judgement.

'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 need to see love socially' (page 107). Karen's dying Aunt Violet, held even when dying by the everyday, the continuous, the social, sees Karen wistfully as a woman of 'character' who could and should have 'an interesting life'. Karen, in bed with Max, contemplating the possibility of Leopold, thinks that Leopold would be disaster and realizes that Aunt Violet 'saw Ray was my mother: did she want this for me? I saw her wondering what disaster could be like. The child would be disaster.'

Karen's reflections on the impossible disaster represented by the possible Leopold are the next stage in the movement of the plot around the themes of death, sex, identity, time, violence and convention. Imagined Leopold is the imagined, improbable future. 'If a child were going to be born, there would still be something that had to be ... I should see the hour in the child, I should not have rushed on to nothing.' Karen is afraid that her act has been unreal, will come to seem unreal because it has no past or future. In fact, disaster, Leopold's birth, Max's death, are reality, the real future; they are what is, and not what is imagined.

In Part II Karen and Max, who have no shared past, and do not know that they share a future, talk about history (page 143). We are told '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.' In Part III it is Ray Forrestier and Leopold together who engineer a continuity, a movement from past through present to future which is on Leopold's part dramatic, and on Ray's the product of a profound sense of the saving value of convention, of love as seen by Karen's dead mother (who 'died of Leopold'), as protective, practical, normal. Leopold is told by Madame Fisher that he is in a story whose plot has the necessity of fairy-tale. 'No doubt you do not care for fairytales, Leopold? An enchanted wood full of dumb people would offend you; you are not the young man with the sword who goes jumping his way through. Fairy-tales always made me impatient also. But unfortunately there is no doubt that in life such things exist...' (page 200). Ray, described as looking like 'any of these tall Englishmen who stand back in train corridors unobtrusively to let foreigners pass to meals or the lavatory ... was the Englishman's age: about thirty-six ... He had exchanged the career he once projected for business, which makes for a more private private life' (pages 212-13). Ray, that is, appears to be anonymous. But Karen's dramatic act has changed him too; he is in a fairy-tale, and his wife sees him as a fanatic. He is aware that he and Karen are not alone, are not two — they are haunted, as Max and Karen, momentarily, were not — by the absent third, Leopold. Ray, mystically according to Karen, practically according to himself, sets out to rectify the situation. And when Ray meets Leopold, the identities of both are defined, in action. Elizabeth Bowen's description of this action is a marvellous continuation of the fairy-story metaphor and the practical detail of the 'non-poetic' novel working together. Leopold is both the prince and the cross, bewildered, egotistical little boy, clearly seen and taken in hand. The story has moved, in our minds, from innocence, through violence, to insight, from the child's eye, through the obsessive eye of love and the momentary act, to the extraordinary and I think unpredictable ending, where expectations are more than fulfilled and the disparate elements of plot and vision are brought together.

There is much more that could be said. This is both a very elegant and a very melodramatic novel. Again in the
Notes on Writing a Novel,
Elizabeth Bowen discusses the concept of 'relevance' which she declares is 'imperative'. Everything, she concludes, Character, Scene, Dialogue, must be strictly relevant to the Plot. The elegance of this novel bears witness to her triumphant skill in this field. Not a dialogue in the book does not turn in some way on the central problems and forces it deals with. No situation is described which does not illuminate others. (Consider Mme Fisher's marriage, as it is presented by Mme Fisher to Henrietta, and its relation both to Leopold's idea of love and marriage and to Henrietta's own.) Images recur: mirrors, and eyes as mirrors of identity, Leopold as a growing tree. There are times when such formal elegance, such energetic pursuit of total relevance, can seem narrowing, or claustrophobic, or detracting from our sense of reality and importance. Elizabeth Bowen learned much from James, and much from Virginia Woolf. One of the things she learned was James's respect for developed form in fiction, his sense that one could achieve subtleties unavailable to the creators of the 'loose, baggy monsters' of the nineteenth century. In her weaker works this preoccupation can create a sense of strain, contrivance, even fuss, which diminish the force of the poetic truth. In this novel her priorities seem to me vindicated by the power of the plot. She writes, for all her elegance, with a harshness that is unusual and pleasing. There are moments of vision and metaphor, akin both to James and to Virginia Woolf, but recognizably Elizabeth Bowen's own. As when Naomi's 'sudden tragic importance made her look doubtful, as though a great dark plumed hat had been clapped aslant on her head'. Or Henrietta who, 'feeling like a kaleidoscope often and quickly shaken, badly wanted some place in which not to think'. But the characteristic tone is the author's cool judgement of the power of events, the true nature of events, of the Plot, as she sees it. As a child, I thought I was learning sensibility and fine discrimination from this novel. Now, more importantly, I feel that Elizabeth Bowen's description of Ivy Compton-Burnett's quality applied also to her own work. She wrote of her in 1941: 'Elizabethan implacability, tonic plainness of speaking, are not so strange to us as they were. This is a time for
hard
writers — and here is one.'

A. S. B
YATT

Part I
The Present

1

I
N
A
TAXI
skidding away from the Gare du Nord, one dark greasy February morning before the shutters were down, Henrietta sat beside Miss Fisher. She embraced with one arm a plush toy monkey with limp limbs; a paper-leather dispatch case lay at her feet. Miss Fisher and she still both wore, pinned to their coats, the cerise cockades which had led them to claim one another, just now, on the platform: they had not met before. For the lady in whose charge Henrietta had made the journey from London, Miss Fisher's cockade, however, had not been enough; she had insisted on seeing Mrs Arbuthnot's letter which Miss Fisher said she had in her bag. The lady had been fussy; she took every precaution before handing over a little girl to a stranger at such a sinister hour and place. Miss Fisher had looked hurt. Henrietta, mortified and embarrassed, wanted to tell her that the suspicious lady was not a relation, only a friend's friend. Henrietta's trunk was registered straight through to Mentone, so there had been no further trouble about that.

There was just enough light to see. Henrietta, though dazed after her night journey, sat up straight in the taxi, looking out of the window. She had not left England before. She said to herself: This is Paris. The same streets, with implacably shut shops and running into each other at odd angles, seemed to unreel past again and again. She thought she saw the same kiosks. Cafés were lit inside, chairs stacked on the tables: they were swabbing the floors. Men stood at a steamy counter drinking coffee. A woman came out with a tray of mimosa and the raw daylight fell on the yellow pollen: but for that there might have been no sky. These indifferent streets and early morning faces oppressed Henrietta, who was expecting to find Paris more gay and kind.

'A Hundred Thousand Shirts,' she read aloud, suddenly.

Miss Fisher put Mrs Arbuthnot's letter away with a sigh, snapping the clasp of her handbag, then leaned rigidly back in the taxi beside Henrietta as though all this had been an effort and she still could not relax. She wore black gloves with white-stitched seams that twisted round on her fingers, and black furs that gave out a camphory smell. At the Gare du Nord, as she stood under the lamps, her hat had cast a deep shadow, in which her eyes in dark sockets moved, melancholy and anxious. Her olive-green coat and skirt, absorbing what light there was, had looked black. She looked like a Frenchwoman with all the animation gone. Her manner had been emotional from the first; there was something emotional now about her tense way of sitting. Henrietta, nervous, tried to make evident, by looking steadily out of the window on her side, that she did not expect to be spoken to. She had been brought up to think it rude to interrupt thought.

But Miss Fisher, making an effort, now touched one of the monkey's stitched felt paws. 'You must be fond of your monkey. You play with him, I expect?'

'Not nowadays much,' said Henrietta politely. 'I just always seem to take him about.'

'For company,' said Miss Fisher, turning upon the monkey a brooding, absent look.

'I like to think he enjoys things.'

'Ah, then you do play with him!'

It was not in Henrietta's power to say: 'We really cannot go into all that now.' Re-crossing her feet, she lightly kicked the dispatch case, which contained what she would want for two night journeys and during the day in Paris: washing things, reading matter, one or two things to eat. Turning away again to look at the street, she was glad to see shutters taken down from one shop: a woman in felt slippers was doing this. A paper-kiosk opened to take its stock in; a lady in deep mourning attempted to stop a bus: the frightening cardboard city was waking up at last. Violent skidding traffic foreignly hooted, and Henrietta wished there were more light.

'Is this a boulevard?'

'Yes. You know, there are many.'

'My father told me there would be.'

'We cross the river soon.'

'How soon will it be daylight?'

Miss Fisher sighed. 'The mornings are still so late. How happy you are to be going south, Henrietta. If I were a swallow you would not find
me
here!'

Henrietta did not know what to say.

'However,' Miss Fisher continued, smiling, 'to have been met by a swallow would not help you much. It would have been a great disappointment to me to fail your grandmother. Fortunately, my mother is better this morning: she slept better last night.'

'I'm sorry your mother is ill,' said Henrietta, who had forgotten Miss Fisher had a mother.

'She is constantly ill, but wonderfully full of spirit. She is most anxious to see you, and also hopes to see Leopold.'

Miss Fisher's mother was French and they lived in Paris: this accounted, perhaps, for Miss Fisher's peculiar idiom, which made Henrietta giddy. Often when she spoke she seemed to be translating, and translating rustily. No phrase she used was what anyone could quite mean; they were doubtful, as though she hoped they would do. Her state of mind seemed to be foreign also, not able to be explained however much English you had ... This illness made her mother sound most forbidding: Henrietta had a dread of sick-rooms.

Leopold?
thought Henrietta. The thought that Miss Fisher might have taken the liberty of re-christening her monkey, whose name was Charles, made her look round askance. She said: 'Who is Leopold?'

'Oh, he's a little boy,' Miss Fisher said with a strikingly reserved air.

'A little boy where?'

'Today he is at our house.'

'French?' pursued Henrietta.

'Oh, hardly French: not really. You will see for yourself. You will think,' Miss Fisher said, with the anxious smile again, 'that we have a depot for young people crossing Paris, but that is not so: this is quite a coincidence. Leopold is not crossing Paris, either; he came to us late last night by the train from Spezia, and will return, we expect, tomorrow or the day after. He is in Paris for family reasons; he has someone to meet.'

'Where's Spezia?'

'On the Italian coast.'

'Oh! Then he's Italian?'

'No, he is not Italian ... I have been wanting to ask you, Henrietta, to be a little considerate with Leopold when you meet him this morning: you may find him agitated and shy'-
her
agitation came on at the very idea, making her knit her gloved fingers, twisting the seams round further.

'Why? Do journeys upset him?'

'No, no; it is not that. I think I had better explain to you, Henrietta — it is Leopold's mother he is going to meet. And he has not met her before — that is, since he can remember. The circumstances are very strange and sad ... I am only telling you this much, Henrietta, in order that you may not ask any more. I beg you will not ask more, and I specially beg you to ask Leopold nothing. Simply play with him naturally. No doubt you will find some game you can both play. He is in an excited state and I do not wish him to talk. It is for the morning only: his mother will be arriving early this afternoon and before that, naturally, I shall take you out. I did not anticipate this when I promised your grandmother that you should spend the day here between your trains. Leopold's coming to us was arranged since that, very suddenly, and I was most anxious not to disappoint your dear grandmother when she had been at such pains to arrange everything. I believe she will not blame me for the coincidence. It appeared impossible that Leopold's mother should be in Paris on any other day — I was equally anxious not to put
her
out, for you can see what importance she must attach to this meeting. It has all been very difficult. Tomorrow, I am intending to write to your grandmother, explaining the matter to her as far as I may. I feel sure she will not blame me. But I feel sure she would not wish you to ask Leopold questions; it is all sad, and she might not wish you to know. By questioning him you would only distress yourself and agitate him: there is much, as a matter of fact, that Leopold does
not
know. I know how much above the world your grandmother is in her thoughts, but I should not like to upset her, or feel she might misunderstand.'