The House in Paris (29 page)

'Do you know my mother, then?'

'I —'

'Are you Mr Forrestier?'

Ray nodded. Leopold, seeing Ray's eyes transfix the knot of his blouse, put up a hand to cover the knot, defensively. Staying close to the sofa, he shifted his balance on to his other foot with a creak on the parquet. 'Is that why you came?' he said.

'Yes. This seemed a chance to — '

'I came to Paris to see my mother, you know.'

'I know.' Ray leaned further back, letting his arm drop across the head of the sofa, to look straight at Leopold, with whom he was now on terms. His hand with the cigarette hung down forgotten; the cigarette presently burnt out.

'Madame Fisher said she was coming to please you.'

'Madame Fisher was wrong, then.'

'Then you wanted her not to?' said Leopold swiftly.

'I wanted her to decide.'

'Well, she did decide. Then, you see, she didn't come.'

'She's not well today.'

Leopold, without any change of expression, said, 'She dreads the past.'

Quotation marks were apparent: 'Who said —?' began Ray, then stopped, feeling the charnel convent parlour contract round him. This little brittle Jewish boy with the thin neck, putting a hand at once wherever you looked, was the enemy: she was right. No wonder she shuddered on the Versailles bed, with the gloves she had put on to go to Paris, then pulled off, dropped on the floor, and the violets she had pinned on for Leopold pressed dead between her breast and the bed. When she suddenly would not go, she saw Leopold. 'You can't not go, now,' Ray had said, standing desperate beside her. But she only drove her knuckles into the pillow, deadly quietly: 'You don't know,' she had said. 'He is more than a little boy. He is Leopold. You don't know what he is.'

He did not know; she was right. His intense feeling for Leopold had used his inner energy, without letting, all these years, any picture form. Out of known and unknown he had not tried to compound the child. 'Our child would have lived if you'd wanted him,' she said once. 'But you wanted your own ideas more. All you wanted was Leopold.'

His and her life together was an unspoken dialogue.

SHE
: I want to be back where we started.

HE
: But that is not possible.

SHE
: But I loved you the way you were.

HE
: But I never was like that.

SHE
: Yes, you were, you have changed. Why should what happened to me change you? It should be me that has changed, but I stay the same: you have changed.

HE
: If I have, it is in loving you more than I did.

SHE
: Because Max loved me?

HE
: That may be.

SHE
: Because I loved Max.

HE
: That may be, too.

SHE
:
How
much Naomi knew when she said: 'Tell him,' when she sent you to find me. But I did not agree to marry a mystic, a martyr. You feed your complicated emotion on what happened to me. For God's sake, is there no plain man?

HE
: Was Max a plain man?

SHE
:
No
; that is just the point.

HE
: Perhaps you did not know him?

SHE
: Yes. No. I don't remember. I never remember. It's time you stopped.

HE
: I only remembered your coming back.

SHE
:
No
, what you remember is taking me back. Kissing me with that unborn child there. That emotion you had.

HE
: Did you want me to hate the child?

SHE
:
No
, but — you know your kind of love appals me: mysticalness, charity. All I wanted then was to come back and be with you. I have been frightened ever since I stood with Max on the front and saw the lighthouse out there, that night.

HE
: Did you want me to hate Max?

SHE
:
No
, but — I came back to be with you. I want to be alone with you. Stop remembering.

HE
: It is you who remember.

SHE
: All I want is for us to be alone.

HE
: We are not alone: there is Leopold.

SHE
: Leave my child alone.

HE
: I can't, because he
is
your child.

SHE
: Because you love me?

HE
: Yes.

S
HE
: Then why can't we be alone?

HE
: Because he is always somewhere. Why should he miss you?

SHE
: He doesn't know.

HE
: But we never are alone, while you're dreading him. It is you who remember. If he were here with us, he'd be simply a child, either in or out of the room. While he is a dread of yours, he is everywhere.

SHE
: Simply a child! He is more to you than that.

HE
: Well, if he is?

SHE
: Stop feeding on my experience.

HE
: But I love the whole of you.

SHE
: If you loved me as you used to, not complicated emotion, not mystical ideas, I could be natural again. I could be a natural mother.

HE
: What it comes to is: you would want him if I didn't?

SHE
: Yes, no, yes. The you I wanted wouldn't have wanted Leopold.

HE
: Simply put up with him?

SHE
: But he has been adopted.

HE
:
You
gave me no chance there. You shouldn't have done that.

SHE
: I was desperate after our baby. I saw nothing but failures. I couldn't face things.

HE
: You should have told me, before you did that.

SHE
: I liked him to go to Italy.

HE
: You should have told me.

SHE
: Am I not enough?

HE
: You know that is not the matter.

SHE
: Then what is the matter?

HE
: We should have Leopold here.

SHE
: I want to be back where we started.

HE
: But that's not possible.

SHE
: But I loved you the way you were.

HE
: But
I
never was like that.

SHE
: Yes, you were: you have changed. Why should what happened to me change you?

Such dialogue, being circular, has no end. Under silences it can be heard by the heart pursuing its round, and, though it goes on deep down, any phrase from it may swim up to cut the surface of talk when you least expect, like a shark's fin. Karen's resistance to Leopold and Ray's idea of Leopold hardened each time the shark's fin showed. Feverishly, she simulated the married peace women seemed to inherit, wanting most of all to live like her mother. In nothing spoken did he and she disagree. She could not do enough for him. Their life in London, their house in the country, their travels, were pictures with each detail deliberate and intense; their peace was a work of art. She was more beautiful, kinder and less exacting than the young girl he had first asked to marry him. If Ray in melancholy were ever detectable, it was taken to be the melancholy of a successful man. There is a touch of queasiness in many Englishmen's noble and honest eyes.

The happiness of the Forrestiers' marriage surpassed the hopes of those friends who had received the engagement with so much pleasure, that spring in London many years ago. As a couple, they were delightful to meet. They were a little envied, also sometimes held up to heady younger people as not having rushed into marriage: had they not suspended matters a year? No wonder it worked; they had been sure of themselves. It was understood that their childlessness, though an infinite pity, kept their companionship uninterrupted and close; when Ray went abroad on business she travelled with him. Karen's critics found her a little passive, but thought all the more of Ray for staying in love with her. The intimates of her youth saw Ray becoming prosaic and were impatient with her for deferring to him. They often wondered why she had given up painting, she might have done something — no one specified what. Not a soul in England knowing about Leopold, there was no one to take what would have been the middle view: 'He has been more than good, really superhuman. She is right to make any sacrifice, the child should never have been and not a breath of his name ought to trouble their marriage. It is hard on her, as things are, but it was much harder on him. One cannot expect everything of the best of men. As things are, the child is better off where he is.'

No one knew about Leopold. The husk of silence round him was complete. Even outside England, not a soul whose discretion was not absolute knew the facts of his birth. For Mrs Michaelis — with whom, after the terrible weeks in Germany, it had become difficult for her daughter to be — had died more or less peacefully not long after Karen's marriage to Ray. It was seen that the shock of her sister's death must have been greater than she herself had realized; doctors dated her break-up in health from this. After his wife's death Mr Michaelis, who knew nothing — not even the height of her greatness in passing anything off — came to live at the Forrestiers' country house, devoting himself to the garden when they were away. They were sometimes visited, also, by Colonel Bent, but he stuck on the whole obstinately to Ireland. Mr Michaelis's presence, when they were in the country, drove in deeper the vital silence between Karen and Ray — though at the same time, often, in the constraint of his company their unspoken dialogue most loudly marched its round, Karen's and Ray's eyes meeting, urgent with trouble, across the placid old man who so plainly regretted their childlessness. Karen's eyes would say: 'Look how he loved my mother. That is the love I wanted.
He
is the plain man.'

When, travelling, they might have been most together objects would clash meaningly upon those open senses one has abroad. That third chair left pushed in at a table set for a couple. After-dark fountains playing in coloured light, for no grown-up eye. The transcontinental engine, triumphant, with flanks steaming, that men and boys stop to look at when they get out at the terminus, while the woman hurries ahead thinking: Here I am. Cranes and fortifications. Someone being arrested, a good street fight. The third bed in their room at the simple inn. France being France at nights, with lights under trees, over tables, a band, an outdoor cinema. (But, after all, he has Italy.) A tale of blood in a guide-book. The quickening steamer-paddle churning the lake. The woman sitting unmoving, smiling at cramp, with a child's head on her shoulder. The man explaining how something works. Venice, New York, places seen too often, their marvel faded, crying out to be seen for the first time. Children's eyes excited and dark from sitting up so late.

Their dialogue was not entirely unspoken. Phrases from it made quarrels leave them trembling. When Karen lay awake beside Ray sleeping, she thought: Where is he? Who is with him now? When they both lay awake she thought: Is that what he wants so much? When they made love she thought: We are not alone, so this is not love; or else: He is pitying me. When she thought, she thought: Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him. So he has not forgiven. He forgives me for wanting Max while there is my not wanting Leopold not to forgive me for. If I gave in to wanting Leopold, Ray would bring Max back. He won't let us be alone. He does not forgive.

But one afternoon in Berlin she stopped at a street corner, pulling her furs round her and staring at a tram. She said, 'Ray, I should like to see Leopold somehow. For an afternoon, even. If it could be arranged? I should like to see him alone, if you don't mind. Not where he lives: perhaps at Naomi's house. Do you think it could be arranged?'

— Leopold, who, looking at Ray, so defiantly and acutely, chin up, had said: 'She dreads the past.' That the phrase he had picked up and was using meant nothing to Leopold, meant nothing to Ray. A child knows what is fatal. The child at the back of the gun accident — is he always so ignorant? I simply point this thing, it goes off:
sauve qui peut.
No one could be less merely impish than Leopold. Behind the childish
méchanceté
Ray saw grown-up avengingness pick up what arms it could ... Karen's unalarmed smile appeared in Leopold's lips when he had said this, but his deliberate look was from someone else's eyes. Ray saw for the moment what he was up against: the force of a foreign cold personality.

'What do you mean?' Ray said bluntly.

'If I don't mean anything, why should you mind?' said Leopold.

'It wastes time saying things you don't understand.'

'Well, I've got to do something till I go back to Italy.'

'You waste my time. I didn't see why you should go back.'

'I belong to them. They adopted me. She said they might,' said Leopold implacably.

'Who said all that?'

'Madame Fisher.'

'So you swallowed it, did you?'

'Do you mean she tells lies?'

'When people are ill alone they think things crooked, you know. She's been ill ten years, on and off, and she's pretty old. She counts much less than you think.'

Leopold said calmly: 'Have you
met
Madame Fisher — '

Ray admitted he hadn't; upon which Leopold, shrugging, wheeled round on his heel to look at the mantelpiece, against which he had wept. He saw not the mantelpiece but a woman with long hair being propped up in bed to sign away Leopold, then his own head helplessly bobbing and rolling on that journey to Italy, like a kitten's or puppy's. Nothing said undid that. He understood that this Mr Forrestier had begun by wooing him, but now liked him less. This left Leopold cold; he wanted not just one ally but everybody's submission. Twitching a shoulder under his square collar he said, without turning around: 'Didn't you
know
my mother gave me away?'