The House in Paris (3 page)

Henrietta, who had listened to most of this pretty blankly, said: 'I don't suppose she would bother. Where
does
Leopold live, then?'

'Oh, you see, near Spezia, with a most charming family who have a villa there — You must show him your monkey: I am sure he will like that.'

'I never ask people things,' said Henrietta coldly.

Miss Fisher went on looking wretchedly undecided. One of her troubles was, quite clearly, being unaccustomed to children. Henrietta had the advantage of her, for, as almost an only child — she had one married sister — she was only too well accustomed to grown-ups. 'Perhaps,' Miss Fisher plunged on, 'I should not have told you so much. It is hard to know what is best: it is all difficult for me, when my mother is too ill to consult.'

Henrietta regretted that Leopold was not a girl: she did not like boys much. Last night's shaken broken sleep, now the stress of being in Paris, made her thoughts over-clear, and everything had echoes. Tossing her longish fair hair back she exclaimed: 'I expect that will be all right.'

They crossed the river while Miss Fisher was speaking. In a sort of slow flash, Henrietta had her first open view of Paris — watery sky, wet light, light water, frigid, dark, inky buildings, spans of bridges, trees. This open light gash across Paris faded at each end. It was not exactly raining. Then, passing long grinding trams, their taxi darted uphill: the boulevard was wide, in summer there would be shade here. They swerved right, round the dark railings of a statuey leafless garden — 'Look, Henrietta, the Luxembourg!' — then engaged in a complex of deep streets, fissures in the crazy gloomy height. Windows with strong grilles looked ready for an immediate attack (Henrietta had heard how much blood had been shed in Paris); doors had grim iron patterns across their glass; dust-grey shutters were almost all bolted fast ... Miss Fisher, by reaching down for Henrietta's case, made it clear that they were arriving. The taxi stopped; Miss Fisher got out and paid; Henrietta got out and looked up and down the street.

The Fishers' house, opposite which the taxi stopped, looked miniature, like a doll's house: it stood clamped to the flank of a six-storied building with balconies. On its other side was a wall, with branches that in summer would toss gaily showing over the top. Up and down the narrow uphill street the houses were all heights: none so small as the Fishers'. At each end, the street bent out of sight: it was exceedingly quiet and seemed, though charged with meaning, to lead nowhere. Unbright light struck between the flanks of the houses, making their inequality odder still: some were trim and bright, some faded, crazy or sad. Henrietta's exact snobbishness could not 'place' this street — was it mean or grand? — in the unsmiling light it had unity. She saw spaces of wall, with shut grey gates and tree-tops, over which towered buildings in other streets. It was exceedingly silent, though you heard in the distance Paris still going on; the height all round would have made it darkish at any hour. A maid was shaking a mat out of one window; elsewhere, shutters were unwakingly shut. In fact, it was early for people to be about — there were no shops, nothing to get to work. But it would not really have surprised Henrietta if no one had ever walked down that street again.

The Fishers' house looked small because of its narrowness. It was three stories high, and also, stepping back, Henrietta saw another couple of windows, mansard windows, peering down from above. Its cream front was a strip marbled with fine dark cracks; it just held, below the mansards, five wide-awake windows with grey shutters fixed back; two, then two, then a window beside the door — around these pairs of windows the house made a thin frame. Miss Fisher put her latch-key into the door, which was grained brown and had a knob in the middle. Henrietta thought: Perhaps it is not really so small inside? Or perhaps it stretches back ... The house, with its clean tight blinds across inside darkness, managed to look as proud as any in the street; there was nothing 'bijou' about it; it looked stern. Henrietta heard later that the site was valuable; Mme Fisher was, in spite of her poverty, most obstinate in refusing to sell.

Miss Fisher's key turned and she pushed the door open. Henrietta took a last look at the outside of the house, which she never saw in daylight again. Shifting Charles up her arm, she followed Miss Fisher in.

The hall was dark, it had a clean close smell. Miss Fisher switched on the light, showing a red flock wallpaper; indoors, her manner became more assured and commanding. 'Now, dear,' she said, 'I expect you would like a bath.'

'No, thank you,' said Henrietta, who did not want to undress here.

Miss Fisher was disappointed. 'Oh, dear,' she said, 'I had the bath heated specially. Don't you think, Henrietta, your grandmother would like you to?'

As a matter of fact, Henrietta's grandmother, Mrs Arbuthnot, seldom looked beyond her finger-nails, except once or twice when she had peered into her ears to see if they could be waxy; when Henrietta did not at once answer a question or reply to an observation, kindness led her to think that the child must be getting deaf. Henrietta, though already a little vain, did not yet like washing; she repeated firmly: 'No, thank you; I feel too sleepy to have a bath.'

'Poor Henrietta — look, you shall go to bed!'

'No, thank you, I'm too sleepy to have a bath but not sleepy enough to sleep,' Henrietta explained — glancing, meanwhile, at the shut doors, then up the staircase, wondering where Leopold might be. Was he, with some excitement, hearing her arrive? It made her jealous to think his unknown mother must be most in his thoughts, if he
were
awake, so that her own arrival must mean less. If he woke up excited, the cause would not be Henrietta; he might be thinking about her without curiosity, or perhaps not even thinking about her at all. Already, she longed to occupy people's fancies, speculations and thoughts.

It was agreed by Miss Fisher, after some more discussion, that Henrietta should wash as much as she liked, then come down to the salon for coffee, rolls and butter, then lie on the salon sofa to sleep or not, as she wished. She should be quiet in there, nobody should disturb her. Turning warningly at the foot of the steep stairs Miss Fisher put a finger to her lips, to remind Henrietta someone was ill somewhere. So up they crept like thieves. You saw no windows; the hall and stairs were undraughty, lit by electric light. The inside of this house — with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes so artfully shadowed as to appear bars — was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry. Bumped all over the senses by these impressions, Henrietta thought: If
this
is being abroad ...

They went through Miss Fisher's room, where the bed was not yet made and which smelled of Miss Fisher and eau-de-Cologne, into her
cabinet de toilette.
Here a window opened on steep roofs; raw town air came in. The
cabinet
with its unexpected fittings enchanted Henrietta, who thereupon decided that Miss Fisher's humility could have nothing to do with money; she was clearly well off. Henrietta had once crossed London with a 'distressed lady' and had not failed to observe her jotting down what she spent in a little pocket-book as they went along. Miss Fisher, more lordly, had omitted to do this ... Henrietta chased a cake of sandalwood soap in the foreign water, feeling it lap her wrists. Rubbing round the rim of her face with a fringed towel she thought: I am washing in Paris ...

Behind one of those landing doors, the sick French lady lay. And which would be Leopold's? Or was he a floor higher? Hearing china clink, Henrietta went downstairs, to follow the fragrance of coffee into the salon. Here at a round table Miss Fisher sat pouring out, moving cups in a placid, settled way. Now she had her hat off, daylight through the white window-blind showed up her face in its true proportion and character. Her hair was dark, with a dullish gloss on it; she wore it bound round her head in two plain bands. Her rather fine forehead added sense and solidity to the rest of her over-mobile face: agitation must count for less than had first appeared. In bony sockets still full of brown shadow her eyes had an incalculable depth. Her prominent, not beautiful mouth had lines round it that looked patient, not grim or ironic. She was thin all over. She enjoyed pouring out coffee: when she was calm she was perfectly calm. She had led Henrietta to think her a greater fool than she was. Henrietta had no way of estimating her age, which turned out later to be about thirty-nine.

'My mother still feels well,' she said as Henrietta sat down. 'She had been asleep again.'

'I hope I didn't wake her?'

'No, she was ready to wake. When she woke, she asked at once if you had come.'

Henrietta's heart sank slightly: she felt like a meal being fattened up for a lion. However, she buttered a roll and ate: Miss Fisher, meanwhile, broke a
croissant
in two and dipped it with perfect naturalness into her coffee, smiling away to herself for some interior reason and not observing Henrietta's surprise. Henrietta was sure you did not do this with bread: travel had still to do much for her priggishness about table manners. Today was to do much to disintegrate Henrietta's character, which, built up by herself, for herself, out of admonitions and axioms (under the growing stress of: If I am Henrietta, then what is
Henrietta
?) was a mosaic of all possible kinds of prejudice. She was anxious to be someone, and no one having ever voiced a prejudice in her hearing without impressing her, had come to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be a someone without disliking things ... Now she sat biting precisely into her half of roll, wondering how one could bear to eat soppy bread.

The tight-scrolled crimson sofa backed on the wall opposite the window, having its head to the door. The room had a satiny paper, striped yellow and grey, and a scrolled grey marble mantelpiece with an iron shutter pulled down inside: any heat in here came from hot water pipes. Against the wall opposite the mantelpiece stood a chiffonier with gilt headings and marble ornaments; next to the window, facing the sofa, a consol table with no mirror behind. There were four green velvet armchairs, like doll's-house furniture magnified, and the round centre table on which the tray stood. Any space round the walls was filled up with upright chairs. The curtains draped stiffly round the muslin-masked window clearly did not draw. The parquet was bare and waxed: the room smelled of this.

When breakfast was over, Miss Fisher spread a sheet of
Le Matin
across the end of the sofa for Henrietta's feet, then Henrietta lay down with her feet on the newspaper. A small satin bolster, hard as a Japanese head-rest, supported her head; she lay stretched straight out in alarmed passivity, as though on an operating table. Miss Fisher having carried away the coffee tray, everything immobilized in the salon but the clock's pendulum, which Henrietta watched.

Miss Fisher looked back to say: 'Can you sleep in day-light?'

'There's not much light,' Henrietta said in a faraway voice. The room, at the back of the house, looked on to a courtyard like a well between walls, with one tree whose outline showed through the blind.

'Then try to sleep, Henrietta,' said Miss Fisher. 'Remember, you will be travelling again tonight.'

'I want to go out soon.'

'Paris won't run away,' said Miss Fisher. Her voice trailed off; she melted out of the room.

That image of streets in furtive chaotic flight, and of the Seine panorama being rolled up, was frightening for the first minute; then a lassitude in which reedy fantasies wavered began like smoke to fill Henrietta's brain. She relaxed more on the sofa, shutting her eyes. But she could not hear the clock without seeing the pendulum, with that bright hypnotic disc at its tip, which set the beat of her thoughts till they were not thoughts. Steps crossed the ceiling and stopped somewhere: was Miss Fisher standing by her sick mother's bed? She can't be dying, she wants to know about me. The stern dying go on out without looking back; sleepers go out a short way, never not hearing the vibrations of Paris, a sea-like stirring, horns, echoes indoors, electric bells making stars in the grey swinging silence that never perfectly settles in volutions of streets and empty courts of stone.

Henrietta, waking, opened her eyes.

Leopold said, 'I didn't know you were in here.'

He had come well into the room, and might have been there some time. He was still part of the dream she had not quite had.

'Have I been asleep long?'

'I don't know when you went to sleep.'

'Soon after I came here.'

'Yes, I heard you come. About three hours ago.'

'Then where did you think I was?'

'I thought I would find out.'

Going back to shut the door, which was open, Leopold added, 'As a matter of fact, she told me not to come in here.'

Having shut the door, Leopold walked across to the mantelpiece, which he stood with his back to, looking at Henrietta with no signs of shyness, in a considering way. He had a nervous manner, but was clearly too much taken up with himself to be frightened of anyone. She saw a dark-eyed, very slight little boy who looked either French or Jewish; his nose had a high, fine bridge and his hair grew up in a crest, then lay down again; he had the stately waxen impersonal air of a royal child in a picture centuries old. He wore a bunchy stiff dark blue sailor blouse, blue knickerbockers and rather ugly black socks ... Henrietta, sitting up on the sofa, pushed into place more firmly the semi-circular comb that held back her hair.

2

Henrietta, composedly sitting up on the sofa, pushing the curved comb back, made Leopold think of a little girl he had once seen in a lithograph, bowling a hoop in a park with her hair tied on the top of her head in an old-fashioned way. His own inner excitement was so great that nothing outside, in this house, struck him as odd at all. But he had seen, from the way she had lain stretched on the sofa before waking, that even in sleep Henrietta was being exposed to unfamiliar sensation. She had lain, hair hanging down, like someone in a new element, a conjurer's little girl levitated, rigid on air, her very sleep wary. But now she woke, her manner at once took on a touch of clear-sighted, over-riding good sense, like Alice's throughout Wonderland. She might marvel, but nothing, thought Leopold, would ever really happen to her.