In her bath, before dinner, Linda thought rather wistfully of Aunt Sadie. She, Linda, was now a kept woman and an adulteress, and Aunt Sadie, she knew, wouldn’t like that. She hadn’t liked it when Linda had committed adultery with Christian, but he, at least, was English, and Linda had been properly introduced to him and knew his surname. Also, Christian had all along intended to marry her. But how much less would Aunt Sadie like her daughter to pick up an unknown, nameless foreigner and go off to live with him in luxury. It was a long step from lunching in Oxford to this, though Uncle Matthew would, no doubt, have considered it a step down the same road if he knew her situation, and he would disown her for ever, throw her out into the snow, shoot Fabrice, or take any other violent action which might occur to him. Then something would happen to make him laugh, and all would be well again. Aunt Sadie was a different matter. She would not say very much, but she would brood over it and take it to heart, and wonder if there had not been something wrong about her method of bringing up Linda which had led to this; Linda most profoundly hoped that she would never find out.
In the middle of this reverie the telephone bell rang. Germaine answered it, tapped on the bathroom door, and said:
‘M. le duc sera légèrement en retard, madame.’
‘All right – thank you,’ said Linda.
At dinner she said:
‘Could one know your name?’
‘Oh,’ said Fabrice. ‘Hadn’t you discovered that? What an extraordinary lack of curiosity. My name is Sauveterre. In short, madame, I am happy to tell you that I am a very rich duke, a most agreeable thing to be, even in these days.’
‘How lovely for you. And, while we are on the subject of your private life, are you married?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘My fiancée died.’
‘Oh, how sad – what was she like?’
‘Very pretty.’
‘Prettier than me?’
‘Much prettier. Very correct.’
‘More correct than me?’
‘Vous – vous êtes une folle, madame, aucune correction. Et elle était gentille – mais d’une gentillesse, la pauvre.’
For the first time since she knew him, Fabrice had become infinitely sentimental, and Linda was suddenly shaken by the pangs of a terrible jealousy, so terrible that she felt quite faint. If she had not already recognized the fact, she would have known now, for certain and always, that this was to be the great love of her life.
‘Five years,’ she said, ‘is quite a long time when it’s all in front of you.’
But Fabrice was still thinking of the fiancée.
‘She died much more than five years ago – fifteen years in the autumn. I always go and put late roses on her grave, those little tight roses with very dark green leaves that never open properly – they remind me of her. Dieu, que c’est triste.’
‘And what was her name?’ said Linda.
‘Louise. Enfant unique du dernier Rancé. I often go and see her mother, who is still alive, a remarkable old woman. She was brought up in England at the court of the Empress Eugénie, and Rancé married her in spite of that, for love. You can imagine how strange everybody found it.’
A deep melancholy settled on them both. Linda saw too clearly that she could not hope to compete with a fiancée who was not only prettier and more correct than she was, but also dead. It seemed most unfair. Had she remained alive her prettiness would surely, after fifteen years of marriage, have faded away, her correctness have become a bore; dead, she was embalmed for ever in her youth, her beauty, and her gentillesse.
After dinner, however, Linda was restored to happiness. Being made love to by Fabrice was an intoxication, quite different from anything she had hitherto experienced.
(‘I was forced to the conclusion,’ she said, when telling me about this time, ‘that neither Tony nor Christian had an inkling of what we used to call the facts of life. But I suppose all Englishmen are hopeless as lovers.’
‘Not all,’ I said, ‘the trouble with most of them is that their minds are not on it, and it happens to require a very great deal of application. Alfred,’ I told her, ‘is wonderful.’
‘Oh, good,’ she said, but she sounded unconvinced I thought.)
They sat until late looking out of the open window. It was a hot evening, and, when the sun had gone, a green light lingered behind the black bunches of the trees until complete darkness fell.
‘Do you always laugh when you make love?’ said Fabrice.
‘I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I’m happy and cry when I’m not, I am a simple character, you know. Do you find it odd?’
‘Very disconcerting at first, I must say.’
‘But why – don’t most women laugh?’
‘Indeed they do not. More often they cry.’
‘How extraordinary – don’t they enjoy it?’
‘It is nothing to do with enjoyment. If they are young they call on their mothers, if they are religious they call on the Virgin to forgive them. But I have never known one who laughed except you. Mais qu’est-ce que vous voulez, vous êtes une folle.’
Linda was fascinated.
‘What else do they do?’
‘What they all do, except you, is to say: “Comme vous devez me mépriser.”’
‘But why should you despise them?’
‘Oh, really, my dear, one does, that’s all.’
‘Well, I call that most unfair. First you seduce them, then you despise them, poor things. What a monster you are.’
‘They like it. They like grovelling about and saying “Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait? Mon Dieu, hélas Fabrice, que pouvez-vous bien penser de moi? O, que j’ai honte.” It’s all part of the thing to them. But you, you seem unaware of your shame, you just roar with laughter. It is very strange. Pas désagréable, il faut avouer.’
‘Then what about the fiancée,’ said Linda, ‘didn’t you despise her?’
‘Mais non, voyons, of course not. She was a virtuous woman.’
‘Do you mean to say you never went to bed with her?’
‘Never. Never would such a thing have crossed my mind in a thousand thousand years.’
‘Goodness,’ said Linda. ‘In England we always do.’
‘Ma chère, c’est bien connu, le côté animal des anglais. The English are a drunken and an incontinent race, it is well known.’
‘They don’t know it. They think it’s foreigners who are all those things.’
‘French women are the most virtuous in the world,’ said Fabrice, in the tones of exaggerated pride with which Frenchmen always talk about their women.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Linda, sadly. ‘I was so virtuous once. I wonder what happened to me. I went wrong when I married my first husband, but how was I to know? I thought he was a god and that I should love him for ever. Then I went wrong again when I ran away with Christian, but I thought I loved him, and I did too, much much more than Tony, but he never really loved me, and very soon I bored him, I wasn’t serious enough, I suppose. Anyhow, if I hadn’t done these things, I shouldn’t have ended up on a suitcase at the Gare du Nord and I would never have met you, so, really, I’m glad. And in my next life, wherever I happen to be born, I must remember to fly to the boulevards as soon as I’m of marriageable age, and find a husband there.’
‘Comme c’est gentil,’ said Fabrice, ‘et, en effet, French marriages are generally very very happy you know. My father and mother had a cloudless life together, they loved each other so much that they hardly went out in society at all. My mother still lives in a sort of afterglow of happiness from it. What a good woman she is!’
‘I must tell you,’ Linda went on, ‘that my mother and one of my aunts, one of my sisters and my cousin, are virtuous women, so virtue is not unknown in my family. And anyway, Fabrice, what about your grandmother?’
18
Their life now began to acquire a routine. Fabrice dined with her every night in the flat – he never took her out to a restaurant again – and stayed with her until seven o’clock the following morning. ‘J’ai horreur de coucher seul,’ he said. At seven he would get up, dress, and go home, in time to be in his bed at eight o’clock, when his breakfast was brought in. He would have his breakfast, read the newspapers, and, at nine, ring up Linda and talk nonsense for half an hour, as though he had not seen her for days.
‘Go on,’ he would say, if she showed any signs of flagging. ‘Allons, des histoires!’
During the day she hardly saw him. He always lunched with his mother, who had the first-floor flat in the house where he lived on the ground floor. Sometimes he took Linda sight-seeing in the afternoon, but generally he did not appear until about half-past seven, soon after which they dined.
Linda occupied her days buying clothes, which she paid for with great wads of banknotes given her by Fabrice.
‘Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,’ she thought. ‘And as he despises me anyway it can’t make very much difference.’
Fabrice was delighted. He took an intense interest in her clothes, looked them up and down, made her parade round her drawing-room in them, forced her to take them back to the shops for alterations which seemed to her quite unnecessary, but which proved in the end to have made all the difference. Linda had never before fully realized the superiority of French clothes to English. In London she had been considered exceptionally well dressed, when she was married to Tony; she now realized that never could she have had, by French standards, the smallest pretensions to chic. The things she had with her seemed to her so appallingly dowdy, so skimpy and miserable and without line, that she went to the Galeries Lafayette and bought herself a ready-made dress there before she dared to venture into the big houses. When she did finally emerge from them with a few clothes, Fabrice advised her to get a great many more. Her taste, he said, was not at all bad, for an Englishwoman, though he doubted whether she would really become élégante in the true sense of the word.
‘Only by trial and error,’ he said, ‘can you find out your genre, can you see where you are going. Continuez, donc, ma chère, allez-y. Jusqu’à présent, ça ne va pas mal du tout.’
The weather now became hot and sultry, holiday, seaside weather. But this was 1939, and men’s thoughts were not of relaxation but of death, not of bathing-suits but of uniforms, not of dance music but of trumpets, while beaches for the next few years were to be battle and not pleasure grounds. Fabrice said every day how much he longed to take Linda to the Riviera, to Venice and to his beautiful chateau in the Dauphine. But he was a reservist, and would be called up any day now. Linda did not mind staying in Paris at all. She could sunbathe in her flat as much as she wanted to. She felt no particular apprehensions about the coming war, she was essentially a person who lived in the present.
‘I couldn’t sunbathe naked like this anywhere else,’ she said, ‘and it’s the only holiday thing I enjoy. I don’t like swimming, or tennis, or dancing, or gambling, so you see I’m just as well off here sunbathing and shopping, two perfect occupations for the day, and you, my darling love, at night. I should think I’m the happiest woman in the world.’
One boiling hot afternoon in July she arrived home wearing a new and particularly ravishing straw hat. It was large and simple, with a wreath of flowers and two blue bows. Her right arm was full of roses and carnations, and in her left hand was a striped bandbox, containing another exquisite hat. She let herself in with her latchkey, and stumped, on the high cork soles of her sandals, to the drawing-room.
The green venetian blinds were down, and the room was full of warm shadows, two of which suddenly resolved themselves into a thin man and a not so thin man – Davey and Lord Merlin.
‘Good heavens,’ said Linda, and she flopped down on to a sofa, scattering the roses at her feet.
‘Well,’ said Davey, ‘you do look pretty.’
Linda felt really frightened, like a child caught out in some misdeed, like a child whose new toy is going to be taken away. She looked from one to the other. Lord Merlin was wearing black spectacles.
‘Are you in disguise?’ said Linda.
‘No, what do you mean? Oh, the spectacles – I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me.’
He took them off and blinked.
‘What have you come for?’
‘You don’t seem very pleased to see us,’ said Davey. ‘We came, actually, to see if you were all right. As it’s only too obvious that you are, we may as well go away again.’
‘How did you find out? Do Mummy and Fa know?’ she added, faintly.
‘No, absolutely nothing. They think you’re still with Christian. We haven’t come in the spirit of two Victorian uncles, my dear Linda, if that’s what you’re thinking. I happened to see a man I know who had been in Perpignan, and he mentioned that Christian was living with Lavender Davis –’
‘Oh good,’ said Linda.
‘What? And that you had left six weeks ago. I went round to Cheyne Walk and there you obviously weren’t, and then Mer and I got faintly worried to think of you wandering about the Continent, so ill suited (we thought, how wrong we were) to look after yourself, and at the same time madly curious to know your whereabouts and present circumstances, so we put in motion a little discreet detective work, which revealed your whereabouts – your circumstances are now as clear as daylight, and I, for one, feel most relieved.’
‘You gave us a fright,’ said Lord Merlin, crossly. ‘Another time, when you are putting on this Cléo de Mérode act, you might send a postcard. For one thing, it is a great pleasure to see you in the part, I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. I hadn’t realized, Linda, that you were such a beautiful woman.’
Davey was laughing quietly to himself.
‘Oh, goodness, how funny it all is – so wonderfully old-fashioned. The shopping! The parcels! The flowers! So tremendously Victorian. People have been delivering cardboard boxes every five minutes since we arrived. What an interest you are in one’s life, Linda dear. Have you told him he must give you up and marry a pure young girl yet?’
Linda said disarmingly: ‘Don’t tease, Dave. I’m so happy you can’t think.’
‘Yes, you look happy I must say. Oh, this flat is such a joke.’
‘I was just thinking,’ said Lord Merlin, ‘that, however much taste may change, it always follows a stereotyped plan. Frenchmen used to keep their mistresses in appartements, each exactly like the other, in which the dominant note, you might say, was lace and velvet. The walls, the bed, the dressing-table, the very bath itself were hung with lace, and everything else was velvet. Nowadays for lace you substitute glass, and everything else is satin. I bet you’ve got a glass bed, Linda?’
‘Yes – but –’
‘And a glass dressing-table, and bathroom, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your bath were made of glass, with goldfish swimming about in the sides of it. Goldfish are a prevailing motif all down the ages.’
‘You’ve looked,’ said Linda sulkily. ‘Very clever.’
‘Oh, what heaven,’ said Davey. ‘So it’s true! He hasn’t looked, I swear, but you see it’s not beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to guess.’
‘But there are some things here,’ said Lord Merlin, ‘which do raise the level, all the same. A Gauguin, those two Matisses (chintzy, but accomplished) and this Savonnerie carpet. Your protector must be very rich.’
‘He is,’ said Linda.
‘Then, Linda dear, could one ask for a cup of tea?’
She rang the bell, and soon Davey was falling upon éclairs an
d mille feuilles with all the abandon of a schoolboy.
‘I shall pay for this,’ he said, with a devil-may-care smile, ‘but never mind, one’s not in Paris every day.’
Lord Merlin wandered round with his tea-cup. He picked up a book which Fabrice had given Linda the day before, of romantic nineteenth-century poetry.
‘Is this what you’re reading now?’ he said. ‘“Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois.” I had a friend, when I lived in Paris, who had a boa constrictor as a pet, and this boa constrictor got itself inside a French horn. My friend rang me up in a fearful state, saying: “Dieu, que le son du boa est triste au fond du cor.” I’ve never forgotten it.’
‘What time does your lover generally arrive?’ said Davey, taking out his watch.
‘Not till about seven. Do stay and see him, he’s such a terrific Hon.’
‘No, thank you, not for the world.’
‘Who is he?’ said Lord Merlin.
‘He’s called the Duke of Sauveterre.’
A look of great surprise, mingled with horrified amusement, passed between Davey and Lord Merlin.
‘Fabrice de Sauveterre?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘Darling Linda, one always forgets, under that look of great sophistication, what a little provincial you really are. Of course we know him, and all about him, and, what’s more, so does everyone except you.’
‘Well, don’t you think he’s a terrific Hon?’
‘Fabrice,’ said Lord Merlin with emphasis, ‘is undoubtedly one of the wickedest men in Europe, as far as women are concerned. But I must admit that he’s an extremely agreeable companion.’
‘Do you remember in Venice,’ said Davey, ‘one used to see him at work in that gondola, one after another, bowling them over like rabbits, poor dears?’
‘Please remember,’ said Linda, ‘that you are eating his tea at this moment.’
‘Yes, indeed, and so delicious. Another éclair, please, Linda. That summer,’ he went on, ‘when he made off with Ciano’s girl friend, what a fuss there was, I never shall forget, and then, a week later, he plaqué’d her in Cannes and went to Salzburg with Martha Birmingham, and poor old Claud shot at him four times, and always missed him.’
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 85