To the North (21 page)

The roads—he and she looked down with a distant sense of arrival—the railways were empty; the buildings cut out and stuck up so precisely seemed glued to the scene. Earth had lost some of its magic; the light was perhaps harder—or was this France? The soil she loved, the civilisation he honoured showed over-clear and metallic. Forests, however, with deep straight roads came back to reclaim the heart, and a cavalry school in a spreading pattern of chestnuts: below a horizon that seemed quite clear of illusion but where clouds in shadow still built embattled cities, Beauvais cathedral hung in a gauze of smoke. Recalling Markie’s most recent journey she smiled and wrote on
The Tatler
: “
You always travel with Summerses
.”

Soon after the Oise, Le Bourget surprised them before they had thought of Paris. Markie’s fingers tightened, blood roared in ears as the plane with engines shut off, with a frightening cessation of sound plunged downward in that arrival that always appears disastrous. Tipped on one wing, they appeared to spin over Le Bourget in indecision; a glaring plan of the suburb tilted and reeled; now roofless buildings gaped up at them; no one, however, looked up. Earth rejoined the wheels quietly and they raced round the bleached aerodrome in a whirr of arrival. Then, grasping their small baggage, tipped like grain from a shovel, they all stepped, incredulous, out of the quivering plane.

All round Le Bourget, France seems to be flying her flags of colour. Emmeline waving good-bye to the pilot saw flowering mustard fields stretch to the sky; the hangars were scarlet with placards; the hotel flapped with striped awnings; from under the gaudy umbrellas of cafés old men, impassive, observed the arrival; little boys swung on the fence. It all looked very merry and amateur. Over all hung the bright sky, the subsiding wind of their speed. Only the grey-painted iron of French officialdom announced the
douane
. In there between two airy doorways they submitted their suitcases; Markie, stretching gratefully, lighted a cigarette. “Well, here we are,” he said. There they were.

“What next?”

“I’m going to telephone to the Serbs.”

“Oh no, you’re not,” said Markie. “Not just yet.”

Paris, approached by its macabre north, wore its usual first air of being not quite Paris, or more like Paris than one foresaw. After hours of speed, its toppling grey immobility was impressive. Here were those facades brittle with balconies, awnings shedding hot dusk, chairs alert in the cafés and pavements running with life that crowd the eye in a moment and numb the spirit… . Emmeline liked the Hotel de Padoue in the Boulevard Raspail: Markie said this would suit him, too. As they shot through the more elegant quarters towards the river, some high white form of a fountain or fretted gloom of the chestnuts looked solider than the buildings, which creamy-grey in the sunshine were frail as plaster: odd echoes and silences ran along the arcades. The streets had been watered, the trees were already rusty and stale with summer… . Oppressed by plunging once more in this shadowy network when she had been seeing lately so clear a plan, perplexed by some new view of life that, not quite her own, lent double strangeness to everything, Emmeline sat silently in the taxi beside Markie. They crossed the river and swerved up the left bank to their hotel.

Their rooms looked out at the back, on courtyards and unfinished buildings. The afternoon with its sense of suspended crisis—an afternoon of stretched moments, as might be one’s last day on earth when fear and all sense of farewell had alike departed and only that very brief transit remained ahead— spaced itself out into pauses and hurried movement throughout the city again and again revisited but never fully known. From the hotel bureau Emmeline telephoned to the Serbs; they were affable, could not immediately see her but made an appointment for very distant to-morrow, when, to her surprise, they asked her, with her friend, to lunch… . She and Markie found themselves in that most provincial and shady quarter of Paris, looking through gates at the Observatoire with its air of perpetual autumn: later they strolled down the gardens towards the Luxembourg. They talked of the Cirque d’Hiver, regretting it was not open, and wondered where they should dine.

“I suppose you might say,” he said, as they both sat down near the Luxembourg, “that I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Then what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Her attitude even said: “Must I think at all?” as though, most alive in the heat and shade of the tree, she were reprieved from living. She spread out her fingers along the hot seat: he looked from her hand past her face up into the branches. An intense sense of being each forced so close to the other as to be invisible, a fusion of both their senses in burning shadow obscured for the two, as they sat here, the staring quivering city, making remote for Markie a picture he must believe for always imprinted: Emmeline in her white dress watery with green shadow looking down at his hand approaching her hand—for Emmeline, Markie looking her way in an instant of angry extinction as though he would drown. A slackening of tension, the gentleness of the bemused afternoon—in which like someone who has lost his memory he was tentative and dependent and she, like someone remembering everything, overcome— carried them on to night with the smoothness of water, quickening to the fall’s brink with a glassy face.

Past midnight, some few voices, or sounds with metallic echoes, dropped into the extraordinary silence behind the hotel.

THAT SUNDAY EVENING Markie sat waiting for Emmeline on a gold wicker settee, facing the lift gates, in the vestibule of the Hotel de Padoue. She had gone up for a pair of fresh gloves and a letter to post and would be only a moment, she said: she had not come down again. Mobility was not present in Markie’s expression and attitude; impatience had burnt itself out to a dull smoulder. His eyes in a kind of extinction, blank of their evidence of an intelligence ravenous and satirical, fixed a shimmering point in the black-and-white vestibule tiles: passers-by stepped knee-deep into their cold light. Travelling at high velocity he had struck something—her absence— head on, and was not so much shattered as in a dull recoil. His mouth that Cecilia distrusted—too mobile, greedy, never unguarded even in its repose—sagged in lines of passivity. Something nonplussed in his attitude might have commended itself to the facile sympathy: a little checked Napoleon sunk into his flesh. He was tired from reading the unexpectedly difficult score of the day. In a stupor beyond impatience he sat waiting for Emmeline.

Sliding heavily in its grooves the lift came down twice, twice the gates clicked open: there was no Emmeline. She might have melted in some corridor of their hotel, her bodily vanishing would, to the nascent uneasiness underlying his reason, hardly have been incredible; for he had been oppressed since last night by sensations of having been overshot, of having, in some final soaring flight of her exaltation, been outdistanced: as though a bird whose heart one moment one could feel beating had escaped from between the hands. The passionless entirety of her surrender, the volition of her entire wish to be his had sent her a good way past him: involuntarily, the manner of her abandonment had avenged her innocence. As though she were conscious of her unwilling departure, of a disparity isolating for him in their two expressions of passion, he had read in her look to-day a kind of entreating gentleness. Following him with eyes that saw at once nothing and too much, she had seemed unwilling to be a moment apart from him: her fingertips in the palm of his hand, in which every swerve and jar of the taxi became recorded, they had motored to Neuilly this morning to lunch with the Serbs.

They had lunched with the Serbs in a close little room with glass doors hot with sunshine. An urbane animation increased as their hosts refilled the pink wineglasses.
Mme.
Scherbatskoff, French wife of one of the Serbs, laughed cautiously, glancing all ways and touching her steel necklace. Emmeline, pale but now very much the woman of business, swayed a little way like a reed in this current of sociability, but remained always rooted: Markie’s respect increased. Over a dish of green figs their two notions of “interplay” had been determined: the smoke of rich cigarettes scrawled the terms of the entente above the lunch-table. After lunch Markie, sitting with
Mme.
Scherbatskoff in an arbour at the end of the villa garden, embarked rather wearily on a conversation at which they were both adept, while Emmeline indoors concluded her business with the two partners. She came out smiling—everything promised well—and walked down the red gravel path to the arbour with the two dark young men. There was a quiver of rockeries and hot gravel, burnt petrol hung over the privet and perfume from
Mme.
Scherbatskoff’s abundant corsage. They said good-bye, got a taxi and Markie and Emmeline drove out through the Bois to St. Cloud.

The Bois with tall hemlock meeting the trees against a glitter of lake had been cool and glady: at St. Cloud urbanity still had a ring round them. Versailles, St. Germain would have been much the same. From the balustrades, from the stone rims of pools where there were no fountains heat quivered up; they looked over at tanks of opaque green water, an unpierceable wall of lime-trees (one had no sense of an eminence), back up the steps at the long perspective of statues and pollarded chestnuts slate-grey with summer. The terrace and hidden alleys were populous as a boulevard: this was a sultrily-bright Paris Sunday of Maupassant’s, dramas behind the leaves. Voices made a sharp network throughout the forest, in which there was no silence. Round the chalets, parties sipped syrups; lovers sat somnolent in the shade: up the steep slope inlaid with flowerbeds crowds stared out citywards from the high-up terrace. Distant, this fine hot Sunday, by less than three hours of airy transit, at Richmond, Kew, Hampton Court, love, family life, recreation were being conducted, in a manner perhaps less steely and less accomplished but much the same. Round Paris and far to the south, empty France spread her plan of baked plains and highways, treed river-valleys and splintery limestone hills. West of London, slopes rushing with cars diluted in sunshine; the Farraways hedge arched its view of an older summer, the lime showered shadow on to a lawn with Cecilia sitting: from the air you would look at chimneys that reeled as you flew… . Emmeline asked herself if this distended present, this oppressive contraction of space could be properties of air-mindedness. Emmeline, who had sent so many clients flying that her Bloomsbury offices seemed to radiate speed, now stood still with her hand on the bark of a tree in St. Cloud—for they had gone a short way up an avenue—bark whose actual roughness blurred to the touch at the thought of so many forests, and longed to stand still always. She longed suddenly to be fixed, to enjoy an apparent stillness, to watch even an hour complete round one object its little changes of light, to see out the little and greater cycles of day and season in one place, beloved, familiar, to watch shadows move round one garden, to know the same trees in spring and autumn and in their winter forms.

“This is frightful,” said Markie, “let’s go on somewhere else.”

But Emmeline, very pale, leaning against the chestnut, said: “I don’t mind where we are so long as we
stay
where we are.”

Markie, seeing how tired she was, with a lover’s tenderness and self-reproach slipped a hand under her elbow. “Come along,” he said gently.

“Where?”

“Well, let’s sit down somewhere.”

Emmeline walked slowly beside him. There seemed to be nowhere to sit; other couples were everywhere—he could have no idea how little she cared. “This is a wretched place,” he said angrily, “to have brought you.”

“There wasn’t anywhere else.”

Emmeline—hearing footsteps everywhere on the baked slippery grass, and leaves tearing as couples pushed through the undergrowth, seeing through the haze of myopia the shadowy hot-green forest—looked round her vaguely as though she did not know where she was, though a thought may have crossed her mind: had their triumphant cool flight been simply for this? Markie, reading into her look distress and embarrassment, felt that to-day of all days he should not have brought her here. The forest humming with pleasure translated itself for his anguished senses into a saturnalia; distraught with the agitations of a vicarious delicacy he hurried Emmeline on, drawing her, with a hand still under her elbow, up avenue after avenue, wheeling her angrily round where perspectives met. They described, in their pursuit of a solitude always painted ahead, a deceptive mirage of space between further tree-trunks, a fairly wide circle, bringing them back to the terrace.

She said faintly, “
Where
are we going?”

“Back.”

“But we’ve only just come.”

“You know you’re hating this place.”

“I’m not; I haven’t had time. I just hate moving.”

“Then come somewhere quiet.”

“We’re in Paris,” said Emmeline reasonably. Looking hard at her, he longed to suggest they should go back to their hotel, but did not know how she would take this. Two little girls, passing, looked curiously at the islanders with their hard bright eyes. Markie, characteristically forgetting the Serbs, felt their presence in Paris, the entire city and its environment to be his responsibility: overrating the afternoon’s vulgarity and confusion he wondered she did not hate him for his imperfect control of circumstance. Sliding his fingers along her arm, he expressed penitence. Passion, with Markie, went in curves of caprice: under the fairly imposing surface of his masculinity there whirled currents of instability, of exactingness, of an incapacity to be satisfied, of whose ravages on serenity he was not aware: missing repose vaguely he made it impossible… . Leaning on the balustrade, they looked over the tops of the limes at a hazy glare coming up from the Seine and Paris. All day the violent humility of his manner had been surprising Emmeline, who did not know what she expected, but not this. Her sense of the day was her sense of him: she felt bound to him closely but did not know where they were.