Thalia

by Frances Faviell

  She was polishing her smallest finger-nail with a buffer. She didn’t paint her nails as I did but put on some pink stuff and then polished them. The postcard and snapshots at which we were looking were scattered all over her bed. She pushed them now towards me in a heap and without looking up said: ‘I’m going to Paris on Tuesday for a week or so. I’ll be leaving Claude and Thalia in your charge, Rachel.’

  I was so astonished that all I said was: ‘By car or train?’

  ‘Train,’ she said shortly. ‘Can I trust you to look after Claude properly?’

  ‘You should know whether or not you can trust me,’ I said reluctantly. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the responsibility of a child but that my immediate reaction was that if she went away my time with Armand would be curtailed.

  ‘I do trust you, Rachel. It’s just that you’re so young. When I see you giggling in this way with Thalia I realize how immature you are.’

  ‘Then why not get somebody else to look after them?’ I said stiffly.

  ‘I’ve made all my arrangements to go on Tuesday. I’m sure I can safely leave the household to you for a week.’

  Why didn’t she tell me with whom she was going? She wasn’t a person who would go anywhere alone.

  ‘I’m going out to dinner with Armand Tréfours to-morrow,’ I said. ‘And I shall want to go out with him while you’re away.’

  She had looked at me in an odd way when Thalia had mentioned that we had met Armand at the Pardon but had made no comment. Now she said crisply: ‘Go out to dinner with him to-morrow, by all means, but a week without seeing each other will be very good for you both.’

  ‘You mean I shan’t be able to go out with him while you’re away?’

  ‘I expect you to be here in the house when I’m away.’

  ‘Every evening? But why? Marie and Elise are both here.’

  ‘I don’t care to leave Claude with French servants.’

  ‘But you left him with Indian ones.’

  She flushed angrily. ‘Thalia has been talking again.’

  ‘Can I ask Armand here then?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘Cynthia,’ I said, ‘you don’t trust me. Otherwise you’d allow me to ask Armand here.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s that he’s most unsuitable for you—he’s a peasant—a Breton peasant. You met him at Mrs. Tracey’s, didn’t you? When you’ve finished the portrait of her, Thalia’s not to go there any more, and I’d rather you didn’t.’

  I was very angry at what she had said about Armand—but at this last I stared at her in astonishment. ‘But why ever not? What has my friendship with Armand Tréfours to do with Thalia and Clodagh’s?’

  ‘Mrs. Tracey isn’t received at the Consul’s or at any of the British houses here.’

  Thalia, who had been staring at her mother with a white, tense face, demanded: ‘D’you mean I’m not to go to Clodagh’s any more?’

  ‘I do. And she’s not to come here either.’

  Thalia got up from the bed. She gave her mother a look of open contempt. ‘But she’s at school—I see her every day—you can’t stop that!’

  ‘But why? What’s the reason?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘It is because I like Clodagh and you like Catherine,’ said Thalia angrily. ‘Mother’s like that. You’d better know it.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Cynthia. ‘I’m not prepared to discuss my reasons with you at the moment, Rachel. I’ll wait until you’ve finished the portrait. I don’t want to spoil it for you.’

  ‘It’s spoilt now. I won’t be able to finish it after this—you must tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I’ve already said that I don’t care to discuss the matter with you at present. Sufficient that Thalia is not to go there and I’d rather that your friendship with Mrs. Tracey ceases when you’ve finished her portrait.’

  ‘But I like Catherine immensely. I can’t treat my friends like that.’ I was so angry that the words were choked.

  ‘Then ask her yourself why she isn’t received anywhere.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s because she’s separated from her husband. Because she’s had the decency to be honest instead of living as a hypocrite,’ I said scornfully. ‘My uncle ran away with his cook years ago because he couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of living with a woman he didn’t love. No one receives him now except Father.’

  Cynthia lay back on her pillows. ‘You’re so young. You make me tired. You’re impossible. You tire me more than Claude did this afternoon. You’d better get to bed. It’s late. I’d like some hot milk—I’m going to take a sleeping tablet. Good night, Thalia.’

  But Thalia had rushed from the room and was waiting for me on the stairs. Her eyes were wretched. ‘I shall go to Clodagh’s. I shall. She’s the first school friend I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We can meet her in the town. I’ll take you both to Le Bras sometimes.’

  This was the large patisserie which Thalia and I liked to visit.

  ‘Oh, Rachel! Will you? Will you really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘Unless Cynthia gives me a good reason for your not going there I’ll certainly take you both out in the town.’

  ‘And I’ve got Quiquengrogne now!’ she said. ‘He’s better than anyone—except you.’

  Cynthia had made surprisingly little fuss about the dog. She had been thinking of nothing but her trip to Paris—and except for stipulating that he slept outside in a kennel she made but a feeble objection. ‘It’s not a bad idea to have a dog if he’s a watch-dog,’ she said. ‘We have no man in the house.’

  Thalia had named the creature after the famous tower of the Duchesse Anne. It got shortened by us all to Kiki—but Thalia stuck firmly to his full name. With a bath and daily brushings he improved out of all recognition. He adored Thalia and the two were soon inseparable.

  IX

  I WORE my first black frock to dine with Armand that night. Madame Cérise had made it for me, and it was the first dress of mine which really pleased me. She had told me to strip when I went to her. ‘Walk,’ she said to me when I was naked. ‘Walk, bend, stretch, up and down. Allez! Allez!’

  As I paced up and down her work salon she studied me carefully.

  ‘I shall design something to make the best of your figure. To flatter your good points—to eliminate your bad ones,’ she said. ‘By the time you are twenty there won’t be any bad ones.’

  Did she tell everyone this? I asked Cynthia if Madame Cérise had made her strip and walk naked up and down the work salon.

  ‘She had the impertinence to suggest something of the sort, but I soon put her in her place,’ said Cynthia. ‘I hope you did no such thing?’

  I admitted that I had. Cynthia was horrified. ‘How stupid you are, Rachel—she’s a divine couturière but she’s definitely odd. I should have thought you’d know about such things.’

  ‘She isn’t odd,’ I retorted hotly. ‘If you were an artist you’d understand why she needs to study a naked figure. Everybody is different, it’s she who has to camouflage the bad points, how can she do that if she hasn’t actually seen them?’

  ‘My figure has no bad points to hide,’ said Cynthia shortly, ‘so there’s no possible excuse for it in my case.’

  When the black frock arrived I thought it a dream. Thalia watched me dress in silence. I had twice asked her to get out of my room. She had been sulking ever since she’d discovered that I was dining with Armand. When I stood surveying myself in the inadequate mirror she set her lips tightly together. ‘You look about forty!’ she wailed. ‘I think it’s an awful dress.’

  ‘You need to be blonde to wear dead black,’ was Cynthia’s only comment. And Armand didn’t like it.

  ‘Too sophisticated for you,’ he said thoughtfully, screwing up his green eyes. ‘I like you better in that silly little-girl English dress that you usually wear.’

  I could have cried with disappointment for Madame Cerise wasn’t cheap and I had spe
nt all that money just to please him. He must have seen this in my face for he said: ‘Little idiot, wanting to look older than you are. Most women want to look younger.’ And he had laughed at me.

  There was a curious embarrassment in our meeting that night. Between us lay not only the letters but the Calvaire. We had said in the letters what we hadn’t spoken and it was as if the bridge which they should have made had become a gulf. The formality of his greeting had shattered me. What had I expected?

  I couldn’t eat, the food stuck in my throat. We sat opposite each other in the restaurant and the silence grew unbearable. Quite suddenly he took my hand and gathered my fingers into the palm of his own. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  There were still flowers in the ornamental gardens on the Clair-de-Lune Promenade and on the dark bushes by the sea; in the moonlight their everyday form and colour was transformed. They were strange, exotic, unknown blooms.

  Warm, windless, still as glass, the sea washed with the regular pulsating beat of a heart on beach and rocks, making a little sighing swish as each successive wave broke. We walked with our arms twined, our bodies pressed closely together. I looked from his downbent head to the enchanted sea and sky behind us and I knew that for the beauty of this moment the whole of my life had been waiting. When, as his hands caressed me, there tumbled from him all the lovely endearments he had used in the letters they seemed, because they were what I wanted so much to hear, as beautiful as the poetry he had read so often to me on the banks of the Rance.

  How long we stayed there in the shadows of the tamarisks and ilex I don’t know but it was very late when I threw a pebble up at Marie’s window. She came down grumbling and disapproving, but I flung my arms wildly round her old neck and cried that I was deliriously happy.

  She put her hands on my shoulders, pushing me back a little so that she could peer into my face. ‘So you’re in love with him! I was worried, it’s terribly late. It’s a scandal!’

  ‘But it’s all right. I’m quite safe with Armand. He loves me, Marie. He loves me!’

  ‘Dear Mother of God, just listen to her. No one who loves is safe. No one. You’ll weep before this business is finished. Two candles have burned down almost to their sockets for your protection this night!’

  Dear, gloomy old Marie. I pulled a handful of notes from my bag and stuffed them down the neck of her thick flannel nightgown. ‘Take these for some more candles.’

  She hurried me grumbling under her breath up the stairs past Cynthia’s door.

  ‘She’s only just put out her light. Packing! For Paris.’

  Even in the whisper there was venom in her pronunciation of the town whose name spelled magic for so many others.

  I stood at the window. The last sounds of Armand’s car had died away but the feel of his kisses still burned me up. I put my arms across my chest and hugged myself. ‘I’m in love! I’m in love!’ I told the sophisticated woman in the black dress who smiled back at me from the mirror.

  Cynthia left in a taxi for the station and didn’t want me to see her off. She had left me an address in Paris in case of emergency. It was an hotel in the Passy district.

  ‘But I don’t want you to bother me with letters and things. I need a complete rest for a few days,’ she insisted.

  Thalia came in very late from school with a smug self-satisfied look on her face. I asked her where she had been.

  ‘Seeing Mother off.’

  ‘She wouldn’t allow me to go with her to the station,’ I said, astonished that she had permitted Thalia to do so.

  ‘She didn’t know I was there,’ said Thalia. ‘And she wasn’t alone.’

  ‘Who was with her?’

  ‘Two guesses,’ she said in a maddeningly mysterious voice. I was giving Claude his lunch and hadn’t time to waste. I offered the names of two women with whom Cynthia frequently played bridge.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, who was it then?’ I was impatient.

  ‘The person I knew she would be with—Terence Mourne.’

  I stared in disbelief. Cynthia was correct in every detail of conventional social life—that she would go to Paris with Terence astounded me. I didn’t believe Thalia. I was becoming accustomed to her love of telling extraordinary stories about happenings in India and then saying calmly that she had invented them.

  ‘Alone with him?’ I said sharply.

  She blinked, but I stared unmercifully at her. ‘Was she alone with him?’

  ‘There were two others,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘But maybe they’d just met on the station.’

  Claude finished his meal and ran off.

  ‘What happened to Terence Mourne in India?’ I asked, ‘tell me—and I want the truth.’

  ‘You’re very fond of truth, aren’t you, Rachel? Sometimes it’s better not to know it.’

  ‘It’s always better to know it. There is nothing else that matters.’

  ‘Well, if you must know. There was an urgent despatch which came for Terence and he should have done something at once. He should have been in the station but he was off somewhere with Mother. Ayah said a runner was sent after him but that Mother took the despatch and kept it from him because it would have spoilt their week-end.’

  ‘And?’

  Seven men got killed in the riots because no reinforcements were sent.’

  ‘And your father, where was he?’

  ‘Dealing with the riots—waiting for the reinforcements which Terence never sent.’

  I hated myself for asking the girl about all this—but it seemed to me essential to know the truth of it.

  ‘And where was all this?’

  ‘In the Cantonments. Ayah says that Terence hates Mother since that. She says that Mother ruined his career . . . he had to resign from the Regiment.’

  Did this explain the rather cynical, bitter outlook which one couldn’t fail to notice in Terence Mourne? Did he regret his career? ‘Thank God I’ve finished with all that . . .’ he had said lightly to Tom Pemberton when we had been standing on the quay at St. Malo. I was suddenly ashamed of having listened to this gossip—but hadn’t I asked a child to tell it me? That was worse. But the story intrigued me. I had to know.

  ‘Where were you at that time?’

  ‘In the bungalow with Ayah and Ali.’

  ‘Weren’t you lonely?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There were the animals. We had a little tiger called Samshi. He was a darling and played with our Sealyhams. Daddy found him in the jungle as a tiny cub—and we brought him up with the dogs. And I had a mongoose—and the loveliest little fawn. . . .’

  Her voice, as always when speaking of India, was full of a nostalgic longing.

  ‘Didn’t you have a pet snake too?’ I shot at her. She flushed, and an alert look replaced the dreamy one. ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘Rachel, Clodagh has asked me for the week-end. I must go! I can—can’t I?’

  Cynthia had said that she wasn’t to go to the Traceys’ again. I looked at her eager expression. If only Thalia was given a chance she would become very friendly with Clodagh and perhaps she would leave Armand and me in peace. I was becoming sick of her unreasonable jealousy of him, of her constant spying and following of us wherever we went. I never felt alone with Armand. There was always the horrible feeling that we were being watched. If Thalia could only make a real friend of her own age surely she would leave me alone. I had thought that the dog would help her. Now I saw that he would merely provide another and more expert tracker of my footsteps.

  ‘You can go. I’ll take the responsibility,’ I said.

  She gave a cry of pleasure, then said: ‘I’d love to go—but I’d rather stay with you. You’ll be alone here.’

  ‘Go on Saturday. I’ll come out on Sunday to finish Catherine’s portrait and bring you back.’

  ‘And Claude?’

  ‘He can come with me or stay with Elise and Marie.’

  ‘You won’t be able to see Armand.’ Her eyes had a malicious pleasure as sh
e said this.

  ‘No. I won’t,’ I said shortly.

  ‘Thérèse won’t speak to Clodagh in the English classes.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’ll find out. No one likes those Tréfours.’

  ‘I do. I like Armand . . . and when I meet his mother and sister I know I’ll like them too.’

  ‘You don’t know what he’s really like.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re really like. But I’m beginning to think that you like to make mischief,’ I said brutally.

  ‘No. No. That isn’t true! Anyhow, about you it isn’t true. I only want to stop you from getting hurt.’

  ‘I shan’t get hurt,’ I said impatiently. ‘I can look after myself. Do stop interfering with my affairs.’

  Julie Caron came into the room with Claude. I had asked her to stay to lunch, Cynthia never invited her. She looked, as usual, compact, cheerful and competent.

  ‘He’s been a very naughty boy to-day,’ she said laughing. ‘But he’s a boy. They never like learning.’

  ‘We’ve been talking about the Tréfours family,’ I said, handing her an apéritif. ‘Thalia says they’re not popular here.’

  Julie had a glass of Rancia in her hand—Cynthia and I often drank a little before lunch—and it dropped suddenly with a crash on to the parquet floor.

  ‘Dirty girl! What’ll Marie say?’ said Claude delightedly. Thalia went at my bidding to fetch Elise to clear up the mess and in the excitement of finding all the splinters of glass my question was never answered.

  With Cynthia’s departure I was a prisoner to the house and children. Armand telephoned me in the evenings, and every morning I met him on the plage for ten minutes. I would hurry along the Promenade past the gossiping nurses and governesses and their charges, barely acknowledging the greetings of the ever-increasing number who were becoming acquainted with us. Claude played with any child who would suffer his arrogance on the beach. At last I would reach the cabine which belonged to Armand and in which he changed into his running things. He was always there first, and would pull me in and in the dark stuffiness of the small sandy place we would kiss and cling together. Cynthia had been away three days and except for cards of the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe to Claude she hadn’t written.