“I,” said the young man, “am René Imbert. Mrs. Danvers has written to me about you. I will call a taxi.”
He bowed and passed out again through the revolving door, and Julia heard the taxi arrive. She went out and joined him on the pavement. She jumped briskly into the taxi, and noticed that Monsieur Imbert climbed in with a certain difficulty, dragging one leg behind him. This soon passed from her mind.
The morning was taken up with strenuous work. Monsieur Imbert took her to various model-houses and she chose her models, including one of the new trousered evening-frocks. The first house they arrived at was, like most of those to which she went afterwards, beautiful, but decrepit and dirty, with a lovely staircase, painted ceilings and beautiful panellings. Monsieur Imbert paid off the taxi in the street, and stood aside to allow Julia to precede him through the big doors at the entrance of the courtyard, at the far end of which was an old house that looked as though it might fall to pieces at any moment. Julia hesitated a moment in its dark doorway. Could it be possible that all the things which she had heard about Paris were true? Was it possible that Herbert had been right when he had darkly hinted about the white slave traffic and all that sort of thing? She shook herself impatiently. Yet she had never imagined it was to such places that one came to buy models. For one awful moment she hesitated in the hall, Monsieur Imbert behind her, and a flight of rather dark and evil-smelling stairs before her. Then her fear of being ridiculous triumphed, and she started to go upstairs. All the way up the four flights she heard the heavy, dragging step of René Imbert, oddly ominous in that strange place. A light step and then a heavy one, a light step and then a heavy one; the repetition hit upon her mind with a curious sense of doom. At the top of the house she found a pleasant little Frenchwoman with an egg-shaped bust, and a dark moustache, who displayed for her the most lovely model underclothing.
Julia had been used to pretty underclothing in the war, when crêpe de Chine had come into fashion, and young women had had their chemises and drawers embroidered with the regimental badges of their young men. But these “undies,” in the language of the shop, were lovelier still. Julia bought enthusiastically, but with caution. By the time they had left that particular house she was free of her fear of the white slave traffic, and she and Imbert lunched together in amity.
René Imbert looked very pale, and Julia wondered whether his leg, which obviously had something wrong with it, was paining him. She asked him timidly, for she was afraid lest reference to his disability might hurt his feelings: “Ought you to go up all these stairs—I mean, doesn’t it hurt?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Not a bit. It sounds worse than it is; at first I thought I would never get used to it, but now they have made me a splendid new one.”
“A new one?” She stared at him.
“Yes, a new one. This fellow,” and he slapped his right thigh resoundingly, “never grew on me.”
“Oh,” said Julia, her face crimsoning, “I’m sorry. How dreadful for you!”
“Ah,” he said, and unable to express himself fully in English, he broke into French: “Ah, mademoiselle, pour ma jambe—je m’en fiche de ma jambe. Elle reste en Alsace regagnée, où elle se trouve fort bien.”
Julia stared at him and then her eyes suddenly filled with tears. He wasn’t boasting. He wasn’t even being dramatic. It was as natural to him to say such a thing as it would have been unnatural to an Englishman. He was unfolding for her the fine flower of his thought without any self-consciousness.
“Oh,” said Julia, “that’s beautiful … the way you said it … I mean, the way you think about it.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m glad that you should feel it so,” and turned the subject as shyly as any Englishman might have done.
After lunch he signalled another taxi and took her to a couple of dress shows; and though Julia was at first bewildered by the stage setting, the clever lighting, the luminous grey walls, the beautiful creatures who swung forward in dress after dress, yet she kept her head, and noted down the models that she thought would be best for l’Etrangère’s. She was exhausted by the time the two dress shows were over, and went back to her hotel.
The next morning young Imbert arrived punctually, and spent the morning in taking her round the wholesale model-houses. She found that the houses themselves were nearly all dirty and ill-kept, but that the models were exquisite.
They spent the afternoon at René’s office. He had already taken the references of the models she had chosen at the dress shows for her, and telephoned the various wholesalers for the materials and trimmings that she wanted. It was a queer, stuffy little office, with black linen-covered boxes arranged one upon the other almost up to the ceiling. It was eminently business-like and, as ever, René Imbert was extremely correct. He took her back to her hotel at about six o’clock in the evening.
“How long are you going to be here, mademoiselle?” he asked.
“One more whole day,” said Julia. “Mrs. Danvers wanted me to look at the novelties, the new bags and things like that.”
“Yes, I can manage that, and then perhaps you will dine with me, as it will be the last evening, and business will be over?”
“I’d love to,” said Julia, and wondered to herself whether he was going to be what she called a “real Frenchman” at last.
The next day dawned clear and exquisite, and Julia put on a lavender-coloured frock and a wide summery hat of the same colour. She saw René Imbert’s eyes light up as he caught sight of her.
“You look like summer,” he said. “Do you know that colour takes the English grey out of your eyes, and makes them lilac? Your eyes are French to-day.”
Julia laughed gaily.
“That’s splendid,” she said, “as I’m in France I’ll try and keep them French as long as I’m here.”
“I was thinking,” observed Imbert at lunch, “that it would be a pity if you went away without seeing something of Paris. Would you perhaps be kind enough to come to the theatre with me to-night? It will at least be a good French lesson for you.”
“Oh, I’d love to,” said Julia, “if you’ll explain all the bits I don’t understand. What shall we go to?”
He studied her thoughtfully. “You are very young,” he said unexpectedly, “although you are an English miss, and I know they have much freedom; I must be careful where I take you.”
Again that too ready colour, which Julia felt was her curse, burned in her cheeks. This was the moment to tell him that she wasn’t really a “miss” at all.
“Oh, but you know,” she said, “Miss Almond is my name at the shop, because I went there when I was Miss Almond. I’m really Mrs. Starling. I’ve been married for ages and ages, nearly a year.”
A curious expression flitted across his face. He seemed, she felt, to look at her differently, though quite where the difference lay she could not have told.
“Even so,” he said, “there are things to which I should not take you. Places where your husband wouldn’t like you to go, except perhaps in his company. You are still very young, even if you are a married woman. With us it makes all the difference when a woman is married, but Englishwomen seem to remain the same, sometimes all their lives.”
“Do you know many Englishwomen?” said Julia; “you seem to know a lot about us. Where did you learn English so well?”
“I was in a family for two years at Hampstead, but then came the war and I had to go and fight.”
Julia, looking at him, wondered.
“Were you,” she hesitated, “were you a liaison officer?”
Such funny people were officers nowadays; after all, look at Herbert, and she knew so little of the French, and anyway Monsieur Imbert seemed to be such a perfect gentleman that she didn’t like to assume he had been a private.
He threw back his head and laughed, and she noticed how white and even his teeth were.
He ran his finger thoughtfully up and down the amusements list in the newspaper, eyebrows raised, and mouth pursed, so that he looked, with his pallor and the dark, close-cropped cap of his hair, oddly like a pierrot. Finally, he decided on a fairly innocuous little comedy, which still seemed to Julia when she saw it, very daring. Nobody seemed to pretend anything in it, and the happy ending consisted of the husband being left in a contented state of deception, and the wife equally contented in her lover’s arms. Beds were mentioned freely; at one point the lovers were discovered in bed.
Julia was a little shocked, because she was so used to the habit of thought which knows that such things exist, but which pretends that they do not. She had seen many plays that centred round adultery in England, but it was always taken seriously, which somehow made it seem all right. Yet there was something restful about this point of view, and she couldn’t help enjoying herself. René seemed to notice nothing odd about the piece, it neither made him goatish nor puritan, and it would have made Herbert both. René saw her back to her hotel and, since he knew that she was a married woman, bent down and kissed her hand when he said good-bye. Nobody had ever kissed Julia’s hand before.
“Oh,” breathed Julia, “I do hope I’ve done everything all right. I hope Mrs. Danvers will be pleased.”
“You have done splendidly. You see when I tried to show you the models for England and America you wouldn’t look at them more than once. And you did not buy any ‘Fords’! Everything you have chosen, you have chosen well. You have a sense of clothes in a way that is rare in an Englishwoman, if you will forgive my saying so.”
The next day René saw Julia off at the station. They lunched together first. She felt that he was interested in her, and yet his eyes were not passionate; they were quizzical and kind and disconcertingly intelligent, as usual.
“You have not been in France before? You are—if I may say so—not usual, not the young lady one would have expected. And you are married. Has that been long?”
Julia found herself describing her life, Two Beresford, Dad’s death, Uncle George, Saint Clement’s Square. … Herbert. … Not Alfie.
Julia had never before been out with anyone who wanted her to talk about herself. The men on leave had wanted to make love, or to say how their wives misunderstood them, or how lonely they were. Herbert had never been interested, she could see now, in her as a person apart from herself, and her relationship with him. Alfie had been a flame that might have consumed her, but never a mind that wanted to know hers. At the shop she was that capable Miss Almond, but no one was interested in what her life was like day by day, although everyone had been kind about her wedding. Ruby would say to her: “Darling, now you simply must tell me everything you’ve been doing. I’m dying to know. Did I tell you what an awful time I’ve been having with young Carruthers? My dear, too awful. He swore he’d shoot himself, and I said …” At home Julia had always been accepted as a matter of course.
The exquisite and stimulating flattery of René’s interest flowed over her like sunlight, flowed into her like wine. She was, after all, the person she had imagined herself being when she was at school, an interesting, thrilling person.
She knew she was talking well. She wasn’t explaining too much, she wasn’t indulging in self-pity, but her eagerness about life brimmed in her eyes and on her lips. She felt twice as alive as she felt in London.
“You should have been a Frenchwoman,” said René, at last, as they sipped their coffee.
“Oh, why?”
“I don’t think I will tell you, not this time anyway. Perhaps next time you come over to Paris. Perhaps then we will become really friends. You must not forget that now you are still Miss Almond to me. I have only just begun to know you, although I think already I know the woman in you better perhaps than anyone else has ever done.”
“‘The woman in me?’ What do you mean?”
“I mean the thing that makes you interesting and attractive to a Frenchman.”
“Just because I’m a woman, do you mean? Would you be interested in any woman?”
“To a certain degree, of course. But not as much as in you. You have a quality that is appreciated and recognised with us more than it is in England.”
“It’s funny,” said Julia, “that you wanted me to talk about myself, and do you know, I never even realised I was doing it? I’ve always found men wanted to talk about themselves.”
He threw back his head and laughed.
“To take you out and talk about oneself! What a waste! A Frenchman would naturally want a woman like you to tell him all she could about her heart and her mind. I know that you thought Frenchmen are bold, bad men, who only want one thing from a woman. Is that not so?”
“Of course not,” said Julia violently, but her blush betrayed her.
“We may want that one thing, but we don’t want it without knowledge. Woman to us is the most precious thing in the world, the most interesting.”
“Oh,” said Julia naïvely, “I do wish I had been born a Frenchwoman.”
“I too wish it for your sake. You would have had quite a different sort of life. I think a better life. You might not think so.”
He signalled to the waiter, and after carefully scrutinising the bill, paid it. Julia stood up, and he helped her into her coat. They drove to the station, and Julia wondered whether he would put an arm round her and kiss her; but he seemed to have become quite impersonal, and Julia felt vaguely disappointed. He bought her a Daily Mail and saw her into the train.
“I won’t wait to see the train go. There is nothing more stupid than standing about trying to think of things to say.”
“Good-bye,” said Julia, “you’ve been so kind. It’s made such a difference.”
“It is I who thank you. It has been most charming.”
She couldn’t hear his limping footfall this morning, because of the noise on the platform, porters with trolleys shouting to people to get out of the way, the banging of trucks and the babble of voices, but she watched his slim, grey back till it disappeared through the barrier. He didn’t look round.
Herbert seemed very dull that night. He asked her about her trip, but his question seemed prompted by suspicion. What had this agent fellow been like?
“Oh, a little man,” said Julia vaguely, “pale, with a wooden leg.”
Herbert seemed pleased, though he said: “Poor fellow, I suppose that’s the best sort of job he can get, even though I must say it doesn’t seem a man’s work dealing with women’s clothes.”
“I don’t see that it isn’t just as good as dealing with men’s clothes,” said Julia unkindly.
“Of course it’s different. Obviously it’s different. One’s a man’s job and the other isn’t.”
Julia yawned. “I’m frightfully tired, Herbert. I must be at the shop early to-morrow. I’ll go to bed. Don’t come in and disturb me, will you?”
Herbert stared at her, his mouth and eyes fallen open with dismay. Julia kissed him lightly on one cheek and went upstairs to bed.
Gipsy was very pleased with Julia. All the models proved a success, and were copied for l’Etrangère by the wholesale house, Coppinger’s, with which Gipsy dealt. Mr. Coppinger was rather a friend of Julia’s, and he was an obliging little man who flattered himself he was something of a dog and took a keen interest in racing. His tips were followed by the staff at l’Etrangère’s, from Gipsy downwards. The bets were generall
y laid with the milkman who served the shop, and Mr. Coppinger might say to Julia: “Like to have half a crown on the Lincoln? I’m putting a quid to win on ‘Blushing Bride,’ and you shall have half a crown of it.” He always paid up when she won, and Julia always paid up when she lost; but Mr. Coppinger would sometimes put on half a crown for her without asking, and on these occasions he never told her if she lost.
“You know, Mr. Coppinger,” said Julia one day, “when you put on money for me without asking me, the horse always seems to win.”
His little kindly eyes twinkled at her out of his weather-beaten face—somehow he always contrived to look a countryman. Julia almost suspected him of using that liquid advertised as giving a sunburned complexion, for his harmless vanity was to be taken for a horsy character.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Almond. If I put on a horse for you without your authority it’s only right I should stand the racket if it loses.”
He was friendly and respectful, and sometimes when she had finished transacting business with him he would take her into the Regent Palace Hotel, which was near his place of business, and they would have cocktails together, or even split what he called “a half-bottle of the boy.” Julia had the knack of getting on well with her business associates, and though there was nothing to stimulate her mind or her curiosity about her relationship with Mr. Coppinger, as there was about this new friendship with René Imbert, she was always pleased to see the pleasant, capable little man.
He was as pleased as Gipsy with her choice of models, and took her cheerfully round to the Regent Palace, and ordered sandwiches and the “half-bottle of the boy” that marked a successful deal. Julia watched him curiously, she felt quite different about him since she had been to Paris. She liked him as much, but she no longer felt he was on an equality with her, though he was a prosperous man with his own business. He didn’t realise what she was really like, at least he only realised what one side of her was like, the side that was a good sort and put on no frills and knew how to do a job of work. It was all very nice and pleasant. She was glad after a hard day’s work of the champagne and the sandwiches, but that was all. It was not in his twinkling eyes that she could find mirrored the Julia that she wished to be.
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