The House in Paris (28 page)

'So now my mother has no one?'

'No other child, no.'

He exclaimed: 'But how could she have? I never thought of another child.'

Mme Fisher did not reply. This last part of the story had laboured out in jerks, with agonized flaggings, and pauses that seemed not to know how they could end. That the halts were weakness of body, not overmastering feeling, was made plain to Leopold by her manner, which, by sustaining above the physical tussle its level of irony, made the story coldly continuous. That physical tussle was itself an emotion, behind which her purpose stayed as calm as his own. Only purpose could flog along a sick body or weight precarious breath with so many exact words. While she spoke, her eyelids slipped down with irresistible weakness; when she paused, only the sheet supported her dropping chin. Before the story was done, her face was a flaccid mask, the lips worked by some other agency. Her words showered slowly on to Leopold, like cold slow drops detached by their own weight from a tree standing passive, exhausted after rain.

Leopold, while she spoke, had sat with his eyes fixed on her, defying every fact that came from her lips. When she stopped and her face rolled away, blue-white on the pillow, he thought she saw what had been in its full shame. He had not, like Henrietta, seen this room as a sick-room since coming in here: guarded from natural light, with fumey air. Perhaps, since his own crisis in the salon, his senses were still absent, or shut off. The sweep of the dark curtains framed only her eyes as she lay, a magnet to him. Her being ill had been simply part of her presence, her personality, something put on by choice like a certain dress. If he now became conscious of her distress of body, with dismay seeing her hampered for the first time, if he could
feel
now, beyond simply knowing, how ill she was, and how illness martyrized her — he diagnosed her as prey to one creeping growth, the Past, septic with what had happened. Knowing this, how should she not be ill? He saw life as a concerted attack on himself, but noted she had been struck by one arrow too. After the exclamation that she did not reply to, he said no more, but sat with eyes reflecting the dull-white bed and the outline of her body shaken by rasping breaths. If she still knows I am here, she is not able to show it. At one time he was glad ... His eyes went anxiously to the clock. I have been here a long time, almost an hour; everyone has forgotten. Suppose they take me away?

To leave her became unbearable. He looked at the veined eyelids: her eyes stayed shut. If she is asleep she must wake, if she is dead she must live again! You make my thoughts boil: listen! Now
I
have more to say —

He heard voices through the floor, in the salon. A man's down there; perhaps that is the doctor. Oh, Madame Fisher, if that is the doctor they will bring him up and take me away. He may say you have died of talking. Oh quickly, quickly, quickly, before he comes! Do not seal me up again, listen, listen! At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything. If
this
is what men come to women for, what is love, then? Madame Fisher, listen — I could not help being helpless. Nothing makes me belong to them. Open your eyes again; make me see what I saw. You said I was not the young man with the sword, but —

Mme Fisher, as though assailed by Leopold's silent clamour, rolled her head his way, twitching her eyelids up. One curtain, coming untucked from behind the bolster, swept forward, cutting off what was left of daylight, making her pillow now entirely dark. She said: 'This is too late!'

'But let me stay!'

'However, do what you can — '

They were coming. The salon door opened; Miss Fisher came running agitatedly up. She came in, fixed her eyes on the bed immediately, then put her hand up to her lips. Then she signalled to Leopold, who stared stonily past her. 'Come along, dear,' she said in an urgent whisper. You must come now, at once. I have left you here too long.'

3

Once on the landing outside her mother's door, Miss Fisher's manner changed; she looked at Leopold collectedly.

'Listen,' she went on in a decided whisper. 'I must stay with my mother; she has made herself terribly unwell. You are not to blame; I was detained downstairs. I was detained unexpectedly — '

Leopold, looking past her through the banisters, said: 'Henrietta is sitting on the stairs again.'

'Well, I cannot help that: it is naughty of Henrietta, I told her to go and play in the dining-room. Listen — '

'Why can't she stay in the salon?'

'Someone else is in there — '

He immediately said: 'My mother?'

Miss Fisher, unnerved again, said sharply: 'Allow me to finish. No, it is not your mother. There is a gentleman there with whom I wish you to talk while — '

'Can't Henrietta talk to him? What's his name?'

'No name you would know. Henrietta has talked to him. Now will you please go down? Stop — ' She ran her eye over Leopold, straightened his collar and gave an unnecessary touch to his crest of hair.

'Leave my hair alone!' exclaimed Leopold, backing. 'You've interfered quite enough.'

Miss Fisher's hand at once dropped to her side. She glanced at her mother's door: no explanation was needed. 'You must not accept all you hear,' she said steadily. 'Now go down. Quietly, please.' Leopold, starting contemptuously downstairs, looked back once to see her still facing the door, composing herself, preparing to go back again. He went on down, sliding his hand on the banisters. His head sang and he wanted to be alone.

He reached Henrietta, who looked up and said: 'Hullo?'

'Who
is
in there?' The salon door was shut.

'They said I wasn't to say.'

'Santa Claus, perhaps,' said Leopold bitterly.

'This is February,' said Henrietta, unmoved. 'Leopold, what did you think of Mme Fisher?'

'I don't know,' said Leopold, pushing past.

'Did she make jokes?'

'I don't know. I've got to talk to this man.'

'Yes,' she agreed primly, 'you ought to go on down.' He went on down.

Ray Forrestier had Naomi's leave to smoke. She had taken the lid off a white alabaster crock and, putting it upside down near the edge of the salon table, left it to be an ashtray; they had no other now. He connected resourcefulness with Naomi, who had been resourceful the other time they had met.

When she had gone upstairs, he stood half-way across the room, wishing the room were likely to be empty for longer. He looked at the plush monkey propped up on the sofa, asking himself if this hideous toy could be Leopold's. The other child in the house, the unexplained Henrietta, had been turned out by Naomi after he had been shown in, and told to play in the dining-room: he strongly wished to believe the monkey hers. But if it is, she may come back for it, he thought.

Ray stood smoking his cigarette incisively, pinching the butt with his lips, sipping the smoke, turning to knock ash off into the marble lid. He felt as dry as cuttlefish all through. He had not met Naomi for nearly ten years, but it was not surprising that she had not changed. He remembered her as being calm and decisive, so the way she took his just walking in just now had been what you would expect. By not telegraphing to say he would be coming, he might, had Naomi been any other woman, have been saving his balance at the expense of hers. He had wanted to feel free. He had wanted to feel, till he came to this very door, that he was not
bound
in any way. He had stayed free up to the moment when he walked in. He stayed as free as he had been when he had picked up his hat and walked, without another glance at Karen, out of the Versailles door. He stayed free all the way here. So free, he had walked in. If this walking in
was
a shock, Naomi's nerves had rallied to it well. Was there so much, though, to rally to? He was here, that was all. The world had come to an end.

It seemed so likely that Leopold would be in the salon that the walking in and the seeing him had appeared one act, for which act he was keyed up when he rang the bell. Expectation of this had been so knit up with walking behind the fat French maid down the hall that when the salon door opened — 'When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing' — and
Henrietta
had started up, staring at him inside her falling fair hair, he thought they had all been mad: Leopold was a girl.

Yes, Naomi had taken his walking in calmly, making him feel how natural it was, as indeed it was. Had he not the right to present himself at their door like an inspector, saying: 'You have a boy here, my wife's son?' In fact, he had had only to say compactly: 'I've come instead of Karen,' for her to stare expectantly back with those eyes that would have been extraordinary if he had not been certain how calm she was, he was, they both were.

She had said next: 'Karen is where?'

He said: 'Versailles: didn't you see on the telegram?' Naomi then said: 'Oh, Versailles? Oh, I didn't look.' He said: 'She's not well — ' just that, not 'Not well in mind,' because that was not cogent, also because the staring girl Henrietta had not yet been ordered out of the room. By being not well in mind in the Versailles bedroom, Karen had done him one good turn — drained him into herself, so that nothing in him resounding or fluid was left, no nerves left and no blood, so that when he had had to come here, as he saw he had had to come here, he came as brittle and dry as dried cuttlefish. What else had been him stayed resisting, suffering with her in the hotel bedroom, or was perhaps now walking away among the trees in the park.

When Ray ground out his cigarette in the white lid, the lid skidded off the table to smash on the waxed floor. That is very odd, he thought, I must have pressed very hard. Going down on one knee to pick up the broken pieces, he thought: I behave like a man under a strain. The pieces of alabaster shook his hand. He thought: I am still free, I can still get out. I can go back alone and take up the old fight that makes us three all the time.

Henrietta, apparently, had not stayed in the dining-room. But the children's mutters he heard on the stairs stopped. Ray stood up and looked about for another ash-tray. His eye lit on the lid of one more alabaster crock, but the door opened and Leopold came in.

Ray was made conscious of his own height by the angle at which Leopold's eyes looked up. Leopold stayed with the door at an open angle behind him, crooking his arm round to hold the outside handle, spine pressed to the edge of the door, swinging a little with it nonchalantly. His eyes measured Ray with no kind of expression. But his nonchalance was, still, faintly polite: he had the resigned air of a child sent down to see someone.

Ray saw Leopold thinking: Oh yes, an Englishman! (It should be clear that Ray looked like any of these tall Englishmen who stand back in train corridors unobtrusively to let foreigners pass to meals or the lavatory, in a dark grey suit with a just visible stripe, light blue shirt, deep blue tie with a just visible stripe, a signet ring of some dull stone, trimmed spade-shaped nails, a composed unclear romantic evenly coloured face with structure behind it, a slight moustache two tones darker — and, if you look down, deeply polished brown shoes. He was the Englishman's age: about thirty-six. To make marriage with Karen entirely possible he had exchanged the career he had once projected for business, which makes for a more private private life. In business he had done well.)

Ray still held the pieces of alabaster, so Leopold looked to see what he had in his hand, then glanced at one piece Ray had overlooked on the floor, and at the ash scattered round it.

'I've just broken the lid of something,' Ray said.

Leopold's eyes of unsmiling intelligence travelled to the chiffonier on which the lidless crock stood. 'How did the lid come off?'

'I had it for an ash-tray.'

Leopold, with the smile so naturally like Karen's, said, 'It's marble, too.'

'You are Leopold?'

'Yes,' said Leopold vaguely.

'I'd better put these pieces ...?'

'If you shake them, you'll drop them.'

Ray frowned at his own hand. He tipped the pieces quickly on to the table, then looked round to see where he could least unnaturally sit. Every line of the room, like a convent parlour, suggested an interview. So he sat on the sofa, budging Charles from its head with a quiet savageness. 'That's not yours,' he said, 'is it?'

'No, Henrietta brought it.'

Leopold, who had let go the outer door handle, now shut the door and advanced into the room. The same lack of reason to sit anywhere seemed to present itself to him also; he pulled out a chair from the wall beside the window and sat on it, crossing his black-socked legs. Looking across with his father's dark, unknown eyes he said detachedly: 'Have you come to tea?'

'Yes. I suppose so. Yes.'

Leopold leaned forward to study his knees attentively. Every movement he made underlined Ray's oddness of manner by making Leopold's consciousness of it clear; he behaved from now on with unnerving tact. The effect he had seen his eyes, and before that his smile, make had been so remarkable that his leaning forward said as clearly as possible: 'Of course, if you'd rather I didn't look -' He behaved as an actor might who, deprived of the lead for no reason, comes impassively round in front to watch someone else play his part, but then, at one or two moments, gravely lowers his eyes. Today was no longer his, but even as a spectator he could not yet become entirely cold. He said in the same detached voice: 'Miss Fisher didn't say what your name was.'

Ray, taking a cigarette, paused. 'I don't think you'd know it.'

'I don't know anybody in Paris,' said Leopold — 'Will you want another tray for your ash?'

Ray, with his thumb on his lighter but not pressing the cog, looked intently into the air between them, deciding whether to speak. He did not answer the question about the ash-tray; Leopold having waited, got up, went to the chiffonier and took the lid off the second crock. Coming across the room, with princely politeness he placed the lid on the sofa beside Ray, who was busy making his lighter kick. Instead of 'Thank you,' Ray turned his haggard direct eyes on the Karen-like small cleft chin, and said: 'Stop — stay where you are.' The reach of wax floor was gone for the first time. 'I was wrong,' he said, 'perhaps you may know my name. Forrestier ...' His eyes fell to the knot on the front of Leopold's sailor blouse.