‘We are not having an affair.’
‘My name is Fabrice – may one ask yours?’
‘Linda.’
‘Linda. Comme c’est joli. With me, it usually lasts five years.’
He drove to a restaurant where they were shown, with some deference, to a table in a red plush corner. He ordered the luncheon and the wine in rapid French, the sort of French that Linda frankly could not follow, then, putting his hands on his knees, he turned to her and said:
‘Allons, racontez, madame.’
‘Racontez what?’
‘Well, but of course, the story. Who was it that left you to cry on that suitcase?’
‘He didn’t. I left him. It was my second husband and I have left him for ever because he has fallen in love with another woman – a welfare worker, not that you’d know what that is, because I’m sure they don’t exist in France. It just makes it worse, that’s all.’
‘What a very curious reason for leaving one’s second husband. Surely with your experience of husbands you must have noticed that falling in love with other women is one of the things they do? However, it’s an ill wind, and I don’t complain. But why the suitcase? Why didn’t you put yourself in the train and go back to Monsieur the important lord, your father?’
‘That’s what I was doing until they told me that my return ticket had expired. I only had 6s. 3d., and I don’t know anybody in Paris, and I was awfully tired, so I cried.’
‘The second husband – why not borrow some money from him? Or had you left a note on his pillow – women never can resist these little essays in literature, and they do make it rather embarrassing to go back, I know.’
‘Well, anyhow he’s in Perpignan, so I couldn’t have.’
‘Ah, you come from Perpignan. And what were you doing there, in the name of heaven?’
‘In the name of heaven we were trying to stop you Frogs from teasing the poor Epagnards,’ said Linda with some spirit.
‘E-spa-gnols! So we are teasing them, are we?’
‘Not so badly now – terribly at the beginning.’
‘What were we supposed to do with them? We never invited them to come, you know.’
‘You drove them into camps in that cruel wind, and gave them no shelter for weeks. Hundreds died.’
‘It is quite a job to provide shelter, at a moment’s notice, for half a million people. We did what we could – we fed them – the fact is that most of them are still alive.’
‘Still herded in camps.’
‘My dear Linda, you could hardly expect us to turn them loose on the countryside with no money – what would be the result? Do use your common sense.’
‘You should mobilize them to fight in the war against Fascism that’s coming any day now.’
‘Talk about what you know and you won’t get so angry. We haven’t enough equipment for our own soldiers in the war against Germany that’s coming – not any day, but after the harvest, probably in August. Now go on telling me about your husbands. It’s so very much more interesting.’
‘Only two. My first was a Conservative, and my second is a Communist.’
‘Just as I guessed, your first is rich, your second is poor. I could see you once had a rich husband, the dressing-case and the fur coat, though it is a hideous colour, and no doubt, as far as one could see, with it bundled over your arm, a hideous shape. Still, vison usually betokens a rich husband somewhere. Then this dreadful linen suit you are wearing has ready-made written all over it.’
‘You are rude, it’s a very pretty suit.’
‘And last year’s. Jackets are getting longer you will find. I’ll get you some clothes – if you were well dressed you would be quite good-looking, though it’s true your eyes are small. Blue, a good colour, but small.’
‘In England,’ said Linda, ‘I am considered a beauty.’
‘Well, you have points.’
So this silly conversation went on and on, but it was only froth on the surface. Linda was feeling, what she had never so far felt for any man, an overwhelming physical attraction. It made her quite giddy, it terrified her. She could see that Fabrice was perfectly certain of the outcome, so was she perfectly certain, and that was what frightened her. How could she, Linda, with the horror and contempt she had always felt for casual affairs, allow herself to be picked up by any stray foreigner, and, having seen him only for an hour, long and long and long to be in bed with him? He was not even good-looking, he was exactly like dozens of other dark men in Homburgs that can be seen in the streets of any French town. But there was something about the way he looked at her which seemed to be depriving her of all balance. She was profoundly shocked, and, at the same time, intensely excited.
After luncheon they strolled out of the restaurant into brilliant sunshine.
‘Come and see my flat,’ said Fabrice.
‘I would rather see Paris,’ said Linda.
‘Do you know Paris well?’
‘I’ve never been here before in my life.’
Fabrice was really startled.
‘Never been here before?’ He could not believe it. ‘What a pleasure for me, to show it all to you. There is so much to show, it will take weeks.’
‘Unfortunately,’ said Linda, ‘I leave for England tomorrow.’
‘Yes, of course. Then we must see it all this afternoon.’
They drove slowly round a few streets and squares, and then went for a stroll in the Bois. Linda could not believe that she had only just arrived there, that this was still the very day which she had seen unfolding itself, so full of promise, through her mist of morning tears.
‘How fortunate you are to live in such a town,’ she said to Fabrice. ‘It would be impossible to be very unhappy here.’
‘Not impossible,’ he said. ‘One’s emotions are intensified in Paris – one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town. The rest of the world seems unbearably cold and bleak to us, hardly worth living in.’ He spoke with great feeling.
After tea, which they had out of doors in the Bois, he drove slowly back into Paris. He stopped the car outside an old house in the rue Bonaparte, and said, again:
‘Come and see my flat.’
‘No, no,’ said Linda. ‘The time has now come for me to point out that I am une femme sérieuse.’
Fabrice gave his great bellow of laughter.
‘Oh,’ he said, shaking helplessly, ‘how funny you are. What a phrase, femme sérieuse, where did you find it? And if so serious, how do you explain the second husband?’
‘Yes, I admit that I did wrong, very wrong indeed, and made a great mistake. But that is no reason for losing control, for sliding down the hill altogether, for being picked up by strange gentlemen at the Gare du Nord and then immediately going with them to see their flat. And please, if you will be so kind as to lend me some money, I want to catch the London train tomorrow morning.’
‘Of course, by all means,’ said Fabrice.
He thrust a roll of banknotes into her hand, and drove her to the Hotel Montalembert. He seemed quite unmoved by her speech, and announced he would come back at eight o’clock to take her out to dinner.
Linda’s bedroom was full of roses, it reminded her of when Moira was born.
‘Really,’ she thought with a giggle, ‘this is a very penny-novelettish seduction, how can I be taken in by it?’
But she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that other person
for him. Linda was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her. That it should come so casually, so much by a series of accidents, was frightening. She tried to remember how she had felt when she had first loved her two husbands. There must have been strong and impelling emotion; in both cases she had disrupted her own life, upset her parents and friends remorselessly, in order to marry them, but she could not recall it. Only she knew that never before, not even in dreams, and she was a great dreamer of love, had she felt anything remotely like this. She told herself, over and over again, that tomorrow she must go back to London, but she had no intention of going back, and she knew it.
Fabrice took her out to dinner and then to a night club, where they did not dance, but chatted endlessly. She told him about Uncle Matthew, Aunt Sadie and Louisa and Jassy and Matt, and he could not hear enough, and egged her on to excesses of exaggeration about her family and all their various idiosyncrasies.
‘Et Jassy – et Matt – alors, racontez.’
And she recounted, for hours.
In the taxi on their way home she refused again to go back with him or to let him come into the hotel with her. He did not insist, he did not try to hold her hand, or touch her at all. He merely said:
‘C’est une résistance magnifique, je vous félicite de tout mon cœur, madame.’
Outside the hotel she gave him her hand to say good night. He took it in both of his and really kissed it.
‘A demain,’ he said, and got into the taxi.
‘Allô – allô.’
‘Hullo.’
‘Good morning. Are you having breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought I heard a coffee-cup clattering. Is it good?’
‘It’s so delicious that I have to keep stopping, for fear of finishing it too quickly. Are you having yours?’
‘Had it. I must tell you that I like very long conversations in the morning, and I shall expect you to raconter des histoires.’
‘Like Schéhérazade?’
‘Yes, just like. And you’re not to get that note in your voice of “now I’m going to ring off”, as English people always do.’
‘What English people do you know?’
‘I know some. I was at school in England, and at Oxford.’
‘No! When?’
‘1920.’
‘When I was nine. Fancy, perhaps I saw you in the street – we used to do all our shopping in Oxford.’
‘Elliston & Cavell?’
‘Oh, yes, and Webbers.’
There was a silence.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Go on, what?’
‘I mean don’t ring off. Go on telling.’
‘I shan’t ring off. As a matter of fact I adore chatting. It’s my favourite thing, and I expect you will want to ring off ages before I do.’
They had a long and very silly conversation, and, at the end of it, Fabrice said:
‘Now get up, and in an hour I will fetch you and we will go to Versailles.’
At Versailles, which was an enchantment to Linda, she was reminded of a story she had once read about two English ladies who had seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette sitting in her garden at the Little Trianon. Fabrice found this intensely boring, and said so.
‘Histoires,’ he said, ‘are only of interest when they are true, or when you have made them up specially to amuse me. Histoires de revenants, made up by some dim old English virgins, are neither true nor interesting. Donc plus d’histoires de revenants, madame, s’il vous plaît.’
‘All right,’ said Linda, crossly. ‘I’m doing my best to please – you tell me a story.’
‘Yes, I will – and this story is true. My grandmother was very beautiful and had many lovers all her life, even when she was quite old. A short time before she died she was in Venice with my mother, her daughter, and one day, floating up some canal in their gondola, they saw a little palazzo of pink marble, very exquisite. They stopped the gondola to look at it, and my mother said: “I don’t believe anybody lives there, what about trying to see the inside?”
‘So they rang the bell, and an old servant came and said that nobody had lived there for many, many years, and he would show it to them if they liked. So they went in and upstairs to the salone, which had three windows looking over the canal and was decorated with fifteenth-century plaster work, white on a pale blue background. It was a perfect room. My grandmother seemed strangely moved, and stood for a long time in silence. At last she said to my mother:
‘“If, in the third drawer of that bureau there is a filigree box containing a small gold key on a black velvet ribbon, this house belongs to me.”
‘And my mother looked, and there was, and it did. One of my grandmother’s lovers had given it to her years and years before, when she was quite young, and she had forgotten all about it.’
‘Goodness,’ said Linda, ‘what fascinating lives you foreigners do lead.’
‘And it belongs to me now.’
He put up his hand to Linda’s forehead and stroked back a strand of hair which was loose:
‘And I would take you there tomorrow if –’
‘If what?’
‘One must wait here now, you see, for the war.’
‘Oh, I keep forgetting the war,’ said Linda.
‘Yes, let’s forget it. Comme vous êtes mal coiffée, ma chère.’
‘If you don’t like my clothes and don’t like my hair and think my eyes are so small, I don’t know what you see in me.’
‘Quand même j’avoue qu’il y a quelquechose,’ said Fabrice.
Again they dined together.
Linda said: ‘Haven’t you any other engagements?’
‘Yes, of course. I have cancelled them.’
‘Who are your friends?’
‘Les gens du monde. And yours?’
‘When I was married to Tony, that is, my first husband, I used to go out in the monde, it was my life. In those days I loved it. But then Christian didn’t approve of it, he stopped me going to parties and frightened away my friends, whom he considered frivolous and idiotic, and we saw nothing but serious people trying to put the world right. I used to laugh at them, and rather long for my other friends, but now I don’t know. Since I was at Perpignan perhaps I have become more serious myself.’
‘Everybody is getting more serious, that’s the way things are going. But, whatever one may be in politics, right, left, Fascist, Communist, les gens du monde are the only possible ones for friends. You see, they have made a fine art of personal relationships and of all that pertains to them – manners, clothes, beautiful houses, good food, everything that makes life agreeable. It would be silly not to take advantage of that. Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art, nature does not enter into it. You should never despise social life – de la haute société – I mean, it can be a very satisfying one, entirely artificial of course, but absorbing. Apart from the life of the intellect and the contemplative religious life, which few people are qualified to enjoy, what else is there to distinguish man from the animals but his social life? And who understand it so well and who can make it so smooth and so amusing as les gens du monde? But one cannot have it at the same time as a love affair, one must be whole-hearted to enjoy it, so I have cancelled all my engagements.’
‘What a pity,’ said Linda, ‘because I’m going back to London tomorrow morning.’
‘Ah yes, I had forgotten. What a pity.’
‘Allô – allô.’
‘Hullo.’
‘Were you asleep?’
‘Yes, of course. What’s the time?’
‘About two. Shall I come round and see you?’
‘Do you mean now?’
‘Yes.’
‘I must say it would be very nice, but the only thing is, what would the night
porter think?’
‘Ma chère, how English you are. Eh bien; je vais vous le dire – il ne se fera aucune illusion.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘But I don’t imagine he’s under any illusion as it is. After all, I come here for you three times every day – you’ve seen nobody else, and French people are quite quick at noticing these things, you know.’
‘Yes – I see –’
‘Alors, c’est entendu – à tout à l’heure.’
The next day Fabrice installed her in a flat, he said it was plus commode. He said, ‘When I was young I liked to be very romantic and run all kinds of risks. I used to hide in wardrobes, be brought into the house in a trunk, disguise myself as a footman, and climb in at the windows. How I used to climb! I remember once, half-way up a creeper there was a wasps’ nest – oh the agony – I wore a Kestos soutien-gorge for a week afterwards. But now I prefer to be comfortable, to follow a certain routine, and have my own key.’
Indeed, Linda thought, nobody could be less romantic and more practical than Fabrice, no nonsense about him. A little nonsense, she thought, would have been rather nice.
It was a beautiful flat, large and sunny, and decorated in the most expensive kind of modern taste. It faced south and west over the Bois de Boulogne, and was on a level with the tree-tops. Tree-tops and sky made up the view. The enormous windows worked like the windows of a motor car, the whole of the glass disappearing into the wall. This was a great joy to Linda, who loved the open air and loved to sunbathe for hours with no clothes on, until she was hot and brown and sleepy and happy. Belonging to the flat, belonging, it was evident, to Fabrice, was a charming elderly femme de ménage called Germaine. She was assisted by various other elderly women who came and went in a bewildering succession. She was obviously most efficient, she had all Linda’s things out of her suitcase, ironed and folded away, in a moment, and then went off to the kitchen, where she began to prepare dinner. Linda could not help wondering how many other people Fabrice had kept in this flat; however, as she was unlikely to find out, and, indeed, had no wish to know, she put the thought from her. There was no trace of any former occupant, not so much as a scribbled telephone number or the mark of a lipstick anywhere to be seen; the flat might have been done up yesterday.
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 84