The Thinking Reed (25 page)

“You attach far too much importance to Poots,” said Isabelle. “If it were not that she is trying to take from Luba the husband we hoped for her, we need never think of her.”

“You are an optimist,” said Marc. “You show it by saying, ‘trying to take.’ She has taken him. Yesterday and this morning have showed that. The idiot is infatuated. He is plucking up his courage to kiss her. I could see that this morning on the golf-course.”

“It cannot be!” exclaimed Isabelle.

“You mean, ‘it should not be,’ ” said Marc. “The two things are not the same.” She shuddered, and was displeased to realize that she was now so changed that she required words not of truth but of comfort. “You will see, she will leave Philippe and she will marry Pillans, though not for longer than is necessary to make a profitable divorce.”

“It is hard on everyone,” said Isabelle, “even on Philippe.”

“For him, no,” said Marc. “There are men who do not mind suffering from the most disagreeable diseases provided that they have contracted them from duchesses. He wants to be talked of as being on the most intimate terms with the grandest families of Great Britain. Well, he has caused a lot of talk by being married to a member of one of them, and he will cause a lot more when he is
cocu
by her.”

“He is very different from his father and mother,” said Isabelle.

“Ah, yes! They are serious,” said Marc.

“Does it not strike you that we have strayed into a difficult and detestable world?” asked Isabelle.

“Not as a rule,” said Marc. “You have made me a corner that is almost wholly free from
cochonneries,
my dear. But here I most certainly feel it. I drank too much again yesterday. What else was there to do, sitting in that golf house while it rained, and listening to all that stale rubbish? Oh God, oh God, here is Ferdy Monck.”

“Control yourself,” said Isabelle. “Some day you will ruin us all because of this inability to accept creation.”

“He is much taller than me, and far inferior,” said Marc. “That is not to be borne.”

Ferdy hovered over them, making benedictory noises, and sat down, heavily, splendidly, the Viceroy about to spend a few friendly moments with the native princes. The consent of the native princes is taken for granted on these occasions. “Light, Marc? …” he murmured, and, “Good kit you’ve got on today, Madame Sallafranque … Chanel?” and fell into a brooding, amiable silence, his eyes picking and stealing among the people in the room, his handsome, impassive head sunk on its broad shoulders, making its claim to men, “You know I am a cadger and a wastrel, but you know too I am a good soldier; if we had to fight together I would never let you down,” making its claim to women, “I will cheat you and humiliate you, but I will give you moments of utter blackness and refreshment and rebirth such as you have never had before.” Behind his monumental profile the vast windows were striped with grey running weals of water, from the blows that were being dealt them by a universe of which nothing could be seen save that it was hostile, monotonous, desolate.

“Mmm,” said Ferdy, his lips leaving a glass that had, since he had sat down at the table, somehow come to his hand. “Mmm.” He laughed suddenly, happily. “Laura and Annette have had another quarrel.”

“They quarrel at Antibes, they quarrel at St. Moritz, it is all arranged by the Syndicat d’Initiative, there is nothing spontaneous or amusing about it,” said Marc.

“Oh, it amuses me,” said Ferdy. He laughed again, richly, deeply.

“They are the kind of women who ought to die at forty,” said Marc.

“Oh, well, that’s true of all women,” said Ferdy.

A girl passed the table, raising her eyebrows and stretching her mouth without opening it, as if it were elastic, in a smile of fervent and insincere greeting to Marc and Isabelle. She turned on Ferdy a look of hostile and estranging recognition; they might perhaps have known and hated each other as children. It was Bridget, the girl he had taken home from Lady Barnaclouth’s party. He looked at his wristwatch and after five minutes went out by the same swing door through which she had gone. The human race had spent an enormous proportion of its time in devising a system of restrictions which would prevent Ferdy and Bridget getting at each other, and all those labours had come to nothing. Women who had property, or were in touch with property, were inalienably free. Isabelle reflected that the greater part of the women in the room, including herself, would have been in danger of spending their lives doing laundry work under strict religious supervision, had they been born in less fortunate circumstances. But though there had been defeat for moralists, there would be no victory for lovers. Ferdy and Bridget would perform the greatest miracle possible to the human body, they would break the universe to pieces and remake it, and afterwards they would be precisely the same as they had been before, Ferdy brooding strongly, darkly like a god, but not saying, “Let there be light,” saying simply, “Ferdy golfin’ today?” or “Ferdy not golfin’ today?” and Bridget slapping her face with floured swansdown, repairing an imagined loss of the bloom which was actually one of her few positive possessions, and gabbling, “Darling, I simply must telephone.” The law and the breach of it were equally futile. There was nothing to do in this world except to love, but that had to be done with prudence carried to a degree that amounted to agony. There was certainly Marc, but then there had also been André de Verviers and Laurence. Absently she laid her hand on the belt of her gown and reflected with satisfaction that, so far as she could see, the relationship of parents and children gave no opportunity to decent people for any dramas of humiliation.

“There is Luba, standing at the door over there,” said Marc, “but unfortunately the carcass of the dead camel has attached itself to her.”

“I thought it would be so,” said Isabelle. “I manoeuvred it that she and Mr. Pillans should be invited together to Sally Bourges’s lunch, because I know Gustave Bourges was in love with Luba when she was a girl, and he treats her like a great lady and an irresistible beauty. I was as clever as I could be. But I knew all the time that it would end as everything has that we have tried to do for them during the last two days, with Poots separating them, and coming back with one or other of them, her meagreness gorged with her mean little triumphs.”

“But how does she do it?”

“Oh, quite simply. There is a technique of leaving people out. Horrible little girls master it for life at their first kindergarten. Today probably she made some excuse to call at Sally Bourges’s house after lunch and then she saw that Mr. Pillans was falling under Luba’s rich, warm, autumn-afternoonish spell, and that they would probably have spent some exquisite hours walking slowly about the streets here, eating bad ices at a little patisserie, and looking at the rubbish in the shops, and that something might happen which she would not be able to break. It would have seemed too crude if she had stepped forward and taken Mr. Pillans from Luba, so she took Luba from Mr. Pillans. I expect she suggested that they should go and do something peculiarly feminine, to which he could not accompany them. But you will see.”

“Well, so here you are,” said Poots.

“Yes,” said Marc. “Will you have a cocktail, you two?”

“No, thank you, Marc, darling,” said Luba. She seemed tired. She put her elbows on the glass table and rested her chin on her cupped hands.

“I will not ask you what cocktail you are going to have, Madame Renart,” said Marc, “because always you ask for cocktails they have not got, for the speciality of the bar, the name of which you unfortunately cannot remember, on the other side of the town. If you do not mind, you will have a side-car. So it will be much simpler. Now, tell me how it is that you two are together.”

“Oh, that!” said Poots. “Well, it was like this. She was at lunch with Sally Bourges, and I’d promised Connie Bridger to give her a Paul Robeson record Bogey gave me and I heard she was having lunch at Sally Bourges’s, and I had to go to the villa next door, so I just went in and left the record.”

“Oh, she is a funny woman, that Lady Bridger,” said Luba, laughing. “Isabelle, she is worse than I am. You say I forget everything, but she forgot things and did not remember when she was told about them, which I always do. She told Madame Renart she did not know anything about this record, she got quite cross about it, it was too ridiculous.”

“And then?” said Marc.

“Then I noticed the varnish was all splittin’ on the Princess’s nails,” said Poots, “so we went off to a little woman who does manicures that somebody told me about.”

“Was she good?” said Isabelle.

“She was very nice,” said Luba. “You need not have been frightened to go alone, Madame Renart. She was so nice, and she had the sweetest fat black cat.”

There was a silence. A fresh gale spattered the plate-glass with bullets of water.

“Ever want a cat?” said Poots to Isabelle in a burst of hopefulness. “I got a cousin, married to a man in the Air Force; they haven’t got a bean, she breeds Siamese.”

Isabelle shook her head.

“Funny how nobody’s talkin’,” said Poots. “Ruins anything, I always think, this devastating sort of weather.” She appeared to be visited by a suspicion that the silence at the table where she sat was perhaps specially intense, and they could see her wondering whether she had betrayed too grossly her indifference towards them, and determining to disguise it. “Good shade of varnish you got on your nails,” she said to Isabelle, with a sudden, jerky smile. “But then I think you’re terribly well turned out, I really do.”

“There is no reason why I should not be,” said Isabelle.

“Well, I know it’s easier if you got a flair for it, but it’s hard to get good clothes,” said Poots. “Who dresses you?”

“All sorts of people,” said Isabelle.

“Funny, you look as if you had got somebody who understood you and you stuck to them,” said Poots. “But I suppose living in Paris you go to see all the collections.” Her eye was ranging over Isabelle’s clothes with an admiration that was without generosity, that announced nothing but an eagerness to steal a secret and use it.

“No,” said Isabelle.

“Then how do you get your clothes?” said Poots.

“By telephone,” said Isabelle.

Suddenly Luba clapped her hands. “Ah, I had forgotten!”

“What have you forgotten?” asked Isabelle.

“Oh, it is terrible of me to have forgotten! Today it used to be one of our greatest feasts in Russia. We used to kiss each other on both cheeks and say, ‘Christ is risen.’ ”

“No, you did not!” cried Isabelle. “This is Easter Monday, not Easter Sunday! Oh, Luba, there really had to be a revolution!”

“Ah, Isabelle, you must not be cross with our Luba,” said Marc. “If you come to think of it, how little it matters whether they said it on a Sunday or a Monday.”

“No, no,” said Luba. “Isabelle is quite right. I am an idiot, and usually people are too kind to tell me, and so I just go on getting stupider and stupider. It is quite right, it is very kind of you to pull me up when I am getting too dreadful.”

“No, Luba, it is you who are right, you are far righter than any of us,” said Isabelle. “You only make mistakes about things that do not matter. Forgive me, Luba.”

“But I tell you it was nothing at all,” said Luba. Their hands met on the table.

Poots pushed away her glass and said, “Don’t like the cocktails here, I believe they put something in them. Foul stuff.” She tried to light a cigarette with a lighter that was out of order, so that it rasped again and again without achieving the climax, till Marc took it away and held his in front of her face. “Here’s Serge,” she said, peering along her immense cigarette-holder. “Divine looks.” She said it in curious thick accents, suggestive of incurable laryngitis and immediately curable lust, but it sounded insincere, as if she were merely obeying a sexual convention of her kind.

Serge bent on the aliens the tired springtime of his boyish charm, which he had exploited among them for so many years. After he had kissed the women’s hands, he asked Marc, “Have you any news from the Ukraine?” but he made the inquiry from habit, his eyes did not lighten, he did not wait for an answer. Then he turned to Luba and said, with something of a realler springtime in his eyes, “Luba, do you remember the quince jelly Aunt Tania always brought us when she came back from France?”

Luba smiled down between her hands at the table. “I can taste it now,” she said. “There was never any jelly like it.”

“It was called cotignac,” said Serge. “I do not know why.”

“It was poured into little round boxes made of bast, and one ate it out of the box with a teaspoon,” said Luba. “But one will never eat it again. It is only made at Orleans, that is where Aunt Tania’s husband’s château was, and there is no reason why one should go to Orleans.”

“You are wrong about that,” said Serge, “for I have found a patisserie here where they have it. It is no distance, it is not far from L’Atlantique. I found it today; when I was taking out Gladys’s dogs.”

“Ah, no!” cried Luba. “It cannot be the same!”

“It is,” said Serge. “Let us take a taxi and go there, and eat cotignac and talk about Aunt Tania and the girls, until it stops raining.”

“You will excuse me,” said Luba to Marc and Isabelle, standing up. She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, it is not to be believed that there is cotignac here! Perhaps it is an omen, and we will all go home again, and be happy. Though I am very happy here,” she told them politely. “Goodbye, Madame Renart. Ah, be careful! You will lose that pretty scarf, it is slipping right off your shoulders.”

“I know, the damn thing keeps on doing that,” said Poots. “It ought to button on to the dress, but the buttonhole is too big. It’s disgustin’.”

“But you must not lose that scarf,” said Luba. “It is so pretty, and the dress would not be the same without it.” She put her hand to her breast and unfastened a brooch. “Here, fix it with this. You need not give it back to me.”

Marc and Isabelle exchanged a long look. They were sure now that at last Luba understood where her fate had led her and in what desert it was about to abandon her. For though they found it impossible to foresee what she would do on any ordinary occasion, they knew with complete certainty that, if she ever suffered a deadly injury, she would feel compelled to offer the enemy who inflicted it the most cherished possession she had about her at the moment. It was not her folly but her wisdom that made her do this. She was laying down a principle, she was mildly affirming that she would prefer life not to be conducted so harshly, even if she had to suffer by it. They looked at the jewel in her hand and were glad she did not draw it back.