Thalia

by Frances Faviell

  She lay in that carved bed and the cupids above her, holding up the heart, seemed to be laughing. She had borne two children . . . and Tom Pemberton worshipped her. She lay down with her face buried in the pillows and I left her.

  XII

  ARMAND had gone to Rennes again—he was to be there for some weeks so that I would see him only at the week-ends. Thalia was overjoyed and made no bones about it. For me life lost half of its delight without those stolen meetings in the cabine on the plage. We wrote daily—and he telephoned. I didn’t go to his home unless he took me. His mother had paid a stiff, formal call on Cynthia, but the visit was not a success. I had to be present to interpret and I found it an ordeal to sit between two women, neither of whom I liked, and to translate their remarks to each other, endeavouring either to leave out or to emphasize the veiled spite in some of them. I realized then what integrity is expected and required of interpreters and what power lies in their tongues.

  The conversation was confined to the usual subjects of household, servants and food. In none of these was Cynthia really interested. Claude was a subject which never failed to absorb her and I led the talk on to their respective sons. Claude himself came in and delighted Suzanne with his perfect French accent and his beauty. ‘Armand was just such a lovely child,’ she sighed, stroking Claude’s curls, ‘and he’s such a handsome man now.’ It amused me that the very questions which she was longing to ask—those which concerned the financial status and position of my father—were ones which she couldn’t with any decency ask me to interpret. And so they were forced to sit there eyeing each other’s clothes and conversing of trivial things. Suzanne asked to see Thalia. ‘Thérèse has told me about her. We would be pleased if she came for a day with Thérèse during the holidays . . . it would be good for her English.’

  Thalia, when she reluctantly entered the salon to meet Armand’s mother, was abrupt to the point of rudeness. No, she wouldn’t care to come out. Yes, she did like horses—she loved riding but she wouldn’t care to ride with Thérèse. Suzanne’s eyes began to flash, her lids to drop over them at this veiled insolence. Cynthia couldn’t understand what was being said but she was astonished and pleased at Thalia’s French. ‘She’s got on so much better since Mademoiselle left,’ she observed. I couldn’t reprove Thalia in English, because Cynthia would have been furious with her. When Suzanne had left I tackled her.

  ‘I don’t like her,’ she said, ‘I don’t like any of that family.’

  ‘There’s no need to show it,’ I said angrily.

  ‘Isn’t that what you believe in,’ she said simply, ‘“Living in Truth”? You told me yourself that it’s deceitful to pretend to like someone when you don’t. Are you going back on your word like the Cookand?’

  What was there to say? The post had brought a whole collection of reproductions and pamphlets from my aunt—and amongst them my beloved Nefertiti.

  ‘There have been exciting new discoveries,’ wrote my aunt, ‘which may well prove that your favourite Akhenaten may have been a hypocrite indeed.’ We had been told of the discoveries of the 1922 British expedition that in several places the name of Akhenaten’s lovely queen had been erased, thus suggesting her fall from grace.

  Now some years later they were trying to blacken the name of a great king—the lover of the Amarna ‘Living in Truth’ concept, the builder of a city of dreams. I was very angry at her letter. I felt that she was glad to be able to send me this news. ‘I am sending you a book on the subject,’ she finished.

  There were several reproductions of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters—and of the two exquisite heads found by the German expedition at Tell-el-Amarna. I looked again and again at one of these. It showed only the profile. It reminded me of someone—but I couldn’t think of whom. The other was a full-face reproduction and this was not like anyone whom I had seen. Both were so absolutely beautiful that I was entranced with them.

  In the middle of the night I awoke—I had remembered of whom the profile reminded me. It was Thalia as she had leaned in the window reciting Verlaine’s Sagesse. She had a long slim neck and her profile was strangely like the one of Nefertiti—and yet Thalia was ugly. Or was she? Hadn’t I myself decided that beauty was largely a trick of light? I was terribly excited at the discovery that it was Thalia of whom the sculpture reminded me. It seemed absurd—even fantastic—but it was true. Next morning I called her in. ‘Stand over there leaning out of the window with your neck stretched out,’ I said. She was surprised—but she never questioned my whims. She went and stood there. And I was right. The modelling of her nose and upper lip which I had always thought quite her best feature was strangely like the Nefertiti —especially the brown sandstone one which was not as well-known as the painted limestone one.

  An idea was slowly revolving in my head. She wanted to be beautiful. More than anything in the world she wanted to be beautiful. I would make her beautiful—for one evening she should be the most beautiful girl at the children’s fancy-dress ball which the Casino was holding at the end of the holidays. I had been racking my brains to find a suitable costume for her. She should be Nefertiti—‘the Beautiful One who has Come’.

  She stared at me in disbelief when I told her. Then she turned away. ‘Don’t make fun of me, Rachel. You know I’m ugly—Nefertiti was one of the most beautiful women in the world, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She was. That’s exactly why you’re going to be her at the ball.’

  ‘No, no. I can’t. I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Thalia,’ I said, fired now with my idea, ‘I want you to. I’ll make you beautiful—so that everyone will look at you and admire you. I can, you know. I’m an artist. I can do it.’

  I got to work at once copying the dresses in the reproductions of the paintings on the tombs of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. When I had drawn the dress I wanted I went with it to Madame Cerise. ‘Yes. I can do it . . . but bring her here so that I can look at her.’

  I decided to make the great crown myself from papier mâché and then paint it.

  At the ballet class I asked Madame Anastasia to help me. She was teaching Thalia to walk beautifully, balancing something heavy on her head. Already she was far less awkward in her movements. The ballet class was doing wonders for her although she hated it. And she was slimmer and less angular. She was taller than me—but still not too tall for a girl—and the freckles would all be covered with paint.

  I worked with enthusiasm at the crown and with Madame at the dress. We spared no pains. I sat up night after night and when it was ready and the crown was finished I began rehearsing Thalia in wearing it. From the first moment when she put it on I saw that I had been right. With the straggly hair ruthlessly pulled back and plastered down under the crown, her face made up to a warm golden tint and her eyes painted and outlined heavily in kohl, her weak eyebrows sharply outlined and her mouth painted out and beyond its normal shape, she was astonishingly like the head of Nefertiti; and with the lovely dress she assumed an unconscious dignity.

  I wouldn’t let her look until her face was painted and the crown on. Then I said, ‘You are Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt. Great of Favour, Lady of Grace, charming in loving kindness, Mistress of South and North, the Great Wife of the King whom he loves, the Lady of Two Lands living for ever and ever! Repeat it after me.’ She did so and unconsciously her whole demeanour took on the spirit, feeling and grandeur of the lovely words. Her head held high, bearing proudly the great crown of the South and North, she stood there. I turned her round to face the full-length mirror in my room. ‘Look at Nefertiti, Great Queen of Egypt,’ I said.

  She looked and looked. She couldn’t speak. Her tongue went nervously over her painted lips—then she turned, and as she smiled with incredulous delight I noticed the evenness and whiteness of her teeth. She held out both her hands to me, then with a little cry, flinging herself at my feet, pressed her crowned head against my thighs. I could feel the shuddering sobs of her frame. ‘Get up. The Queen must never kneel. She is
the Great One-Beloved of the King. Get up!’

  I pulled her to her feet and repaired the ravages the tears had made on her make-up. She was lovely. And as I looked at her I knew that here was my best work of art. Better than any portrait I had painted or would ever paint was this living, moving image of Nefertiti the lovely one. And I had created her. She was my living work of art. Just as the toy-maker must have felt when he created Coppelia and Pygmalion when he had fashioned Galatea, so I felt now. Exhilaration, excitement and that incomparable thrill of satisfaction which creation and nothing else—not even Armand’s caresses—could give me.

  I called Cynthia and Claude, Marie and Elise. They stood and stared as Thalia walked slowly and with great dignity down the stairs to the salon. Cynthia caught her breath, then she said to me, ‘Rachel, you have many faults . . . but you are an artist. . . .’ And Claude stood there speechless at his Egyptian sister.

  ‘If we were really Egyptian you would have to marry me, Claude,’ said Thalia shakily. ‘Nefertiti was married to her brother.’

  Claude was dressed in a replica of an early grenadier guardsman’s uniform. I had sent to London for an old print and drawn the design for Madame Cérise, whose assistants had made it up. She herself made Thalia’s.

  ‘Why don’t you take up dress designing?’ she asked me when she was examining my drawings for Thalia’s dress. ‘You could study in Paris and go into partnership with me. We’d do very well together.’

  I told her about Armand and my engagement to him. She was contemptuous. ‘You want to get married with talent like that? You are very stupid. Anyone can marry and have children—but not all can draw like this.’ But how could I tell her that I wanted Armand? That I was suffocated with my love for him?

  Cynthia and I went to the parade of the fancy dresses at the end of the children’s ball. Chairs were put all round the great salon where the sea and the twinkling lighthouses flashed through the windows. The children, over two hundred of them, were lined up and paraded slowly round the room. There was never the slightest doubt as to the winner. A terrific burst of applause greeted Thalia, as, walking erect with the great crown perfectly balanced on her head, and with the slow, graceful glide taught her by Madame Anastasia, she came slowly round the room. Exclamations of surprise and pleasure burst out all round us. She took no notice, as, looking straight ahead as if in a trance, she completed the round of the huge room. Knowing the weight of the crown I didn’t breathe freely until she was safely back at the starting point. Armand came up to me afterwards. He was excited. Xavier had been one of the judges and all four had unanimously awarded the first prize to Thalia. She received a beautiful enamel and silver toilet set. I don’t think she had ever had such a present in her life.

  ‘You worked a miracle! When I think of that girl and how she looks—and then see this transformation. Why, she’s beautiful—quite beautiful! You must be fond of her to have taken all that trouble.’ He didn’t sound too pleased—and neither did Cynthia.

  But Xavier called me over to him at the table where he was still sitting chatting to some of the children. ‘You designed her costume, I hear. Let me congratulate you. It’s a real work of art. Lovely. And she was in perfect keeping with the role. Proud, dignified and aloof!’

  ‘She’s really ugly—quite ugly,’ said Armand contemptuously. ‘You’d never recognize her. Rachel has re-created her.’

  ‘There is no such thing as an ugly woman,’ said Xavier sternly. ‘And Rachel has proved it. She can’t be ugly with that line of the nose and upper lip—Rachel couldn’t have altered that.’

  ‘She has,’ insisted Armand. ‘The girl has thin, unattractive lips. Rachel painted them.’ And now I was angry.

  ‘You seem to have studied her very carefully that you know so much about her,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t avoid it—she’s always trailing us,’ he retorted.

  When I had taken all the thick make-up off her face and washed the stiff lacquer out of her hair there once again was the plain, mousy Thalia. But it no longer mattered to me, any more than it did to her. She would remember all her life, as I would too, that flashing moment of beauty when, as Egypt’s Queen, she had enchanted everyone.

  ‘Was I really beautiful?’ she asked wistfully as I laid the dress and crown away in the armoire.

  ‘So beautiful that I’m going to immortalize you in that costume—I’m going to paint your portrait like that,’ I said. ‘Now go and have your bath and get the rest of that grease-paint off your arms and legs.’

  And then I saw laid out on my dressing-table the toilet set she had won as her prize. Under one of the hand mirrors was a note. ‘For Rachel—whom I love more than anyone in the world—even more than Father.’

  I stood there stupidly with the note in my hand and into my mind came some disturbing lines in the last letter Tom Pemberton had written me. ‘All her letters are full of you . . . what you do . . . what you say . . . what you think. She adores you . . . is almost obsessed with you . . . she’s in love with you, Rachel. For God’s sake try to understand and be good to her. I’m so afraid for her. She will go to any lengths for those she loves. . . .’

  Girls at school had these crushes on older girls or teachers. But never me—and it had never happened to me. And I loved Armand. Only Armand. I wanted him now as never before. I didn’t understand as Tom Pemberton hoped I would. A sickness came over me as I looked at the toilet set. Late as it was I went to the telephone. His mother answered me. No, Armand wasn’t in. He’d gone to a party. I was surprised. He had told me he was going to work all the evening. Her voice sounded curiously pleased to give me the information.

  XIII

  SUZANNE TREFOURS got her way and Thalia and I had no choice but to accept her invitation to spend a day with her and Thérèse. It was Cynthia who insisted. ‘If she’s going to be your mother-in-law the sooner you get to know her the better. You’ll find that she may be somewhat different to you when your fiancé isn’t there.’

  There was an intentional accent on the way she spoke the word mother-in-law and on an impulse I said, ‘Did you get on with your mother-in-law, Cynthia?’

  ‘I made it my business to get on with her,’ she said coolly, ‘and that’s exactly what you’re going to find difficult. You’d better get to know her now.’

  Thalia didn’t want to come. She didn’t like Thérèse whom she considered to be stuck up and vain. But Cynthia was adamant. She was to go—behave herself and use her French.

  ‘I’m being asked so that Thérèse can use her English,’ said Thalia. ‘Her mother wants to see if the lessons at our school are worth while.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’ asked Cynthia.

  ‘Thérèse told me so. She said that was the reason why I have been invited.’

  Thalia looked at me and I at her—and we began to giggle. We were both amused at the idea of two mothers and their respective daughters.

  ‘I shan’t talk any English with her at all, and she won’t speak any French, so there’ll be silence,’ said Thalia triumphantly.

  ‘You’re ridiculous!’ said Cynthia dispiritedly.

  ‘Bring your riding things,’ they had said on the telephone.

  ‘Are you going to ride?’ asked Thalia.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘I am,’ said Thalia decidedly. ‘That’s one thing I can do better than Thérèse Tréfours—she looks like a dressed-up doll balancing on her horse.’

  A smart young chauffeur came to fetch us on the morning arranged for the visit. Armand was in Rennes. I was terrified at having to face Suzanne Tréfours without him. We hadn’t been encouraged to take Claude with us. I had wanted him as a buffer between Suzanne and me. It was a cold, grey day—cheerless and heavy. Thalia looked sulky and untidy in her old jodhpurs which were rapidly becoming too small. She had no riding coat and wore a thick, Fair Isle jersey. My riding coat was much too large, for I was still rapidly shedding the unwelcome fat which had so upset my aunt last
year, my breeches were equally loose now—but neither the coat nor breeches fitted Thalia when we had tried to exchange.

  ‘I must say,’ remarked Cynthia as we stood waiting in the hall, ‘that you both look a poor advertisement for your country.’

  She had generously brought out all her own riding wardrobe for us in an attempt to help put up a better show. But perfectly cut as her things were, they were useless for us. She was much taller than I and much slimmer than Thalia.

  We didn’t mind in the least that we were anything but smart. Our things were old and comfortable and we loved them.

  ‘What an awful house!’ exclaimed Thalia as the car wound round the last bend of the drive. ‘It looks like tomatoes.’

  ‘Now you sound exactly like your mother.’

  ‘Well, no one could call it beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’s frightening, Rachel. It’s not a friendly house, is it?’

  It wasn’t. It had a forbidding conventional air of self-complacency and a stiffness which was strange for a country house. My aunt’s house had the same air of stiffness inside—but its exterior was a charming, welcoming one.

  Suzanne and Thérèse stood by the windows in the great salon and came over at our entrance. Thérèse was as cool and at ease as her mother. Her fair, naturally curling hair was drawn back into a loose knot and tied with a ribbon. She was slim, graceful and very much mistress of herself.

  We all sat down and stared surreptitiously at one another. The cold morning light streamed through the windows and on to the pale yellow carpet and the yellow and grey curtains. Suzanne Tréfours was in grey; she seemed to melt into the walls and only the white hair and face stood out sharply. Thérèse, immaculate in smart black riding clothes and white shirt, had a little smile on her pretty mouth as she looked from Thalia’s old jodhpurs to my worn breeches. Suzanne inquired after Cynthia, my father and my aunt.