Thalia

by Frances Faviell

  ‘And as for unfaithful men—I can tell her about Armand!’ she called spitefully after Buddy and me. We left her sitting there in Madame’s salon with its crimson satin chairs and the huge photograph of Monsieur with flowing moustaches which had been taken before he’d been unfaithful.

  The party ended at midnight because our host had passed out on his own divan and there wasn’t any more food or drink left. We stopped at a bistro to have some coffee and take a last look at a corner we both knew well. It was almost one o’clock when Buddy came with me to collect Kiki. Madame had agreed to leave the door unchained. I put the key in the lock. Kiki was a wonderful house dog. The slightest sound roused him. But now he neither growled nor barked. Leaving Buddy in the hall I went into my room. Although it was dark I knew at once that it was empty. I switched on the light. The folding bed alongside mine had not been slept in.

  Alarmed, I awoke Madame. She was in one of those boudoir caps one sees in chemists’ shops in England but which I never imagined people really wore. Thalia, she said, had taken the dog round the square. She had promised to go no farther, but she hadn’t returned. Madame had waited up for some time and had naturally concluded that she had gone to the studio of the American where the dog was to sleep.

  ‘She can’t be there. She couldn’t get in,’ said Buddy.

  ‘Let’s go there. She may be on the doorstep,’ I urged.

  But she wasn’t. We went to Eugenie’s—she hadn’t been there. We went back to the Place Delambre. I was frightened and angry with Buddy. I hadn’t wanted to leave her. He had insisted. Madame was up and had made some coffee. She was worried about the girl, too. Such a strange girl and not at all like me! Madame was convinced that she would become somebody. Oh, yes. Mademoiselle Thalia could write very well. She had written a poem that very evening. She had told Madame so—and the stories she’d told of India, of snakes and wild animals. It was better than the cinema. Oh, yes, Madame had enjoyed it enormously. Thalia, in spite of her broken French, had entertained her hostess very well.

  I went back to the bedroom. On my pillow was a piece of paper.

  I’ve gone to Father. I took the money in your gold bag. If I hadn’t, Mother would have used it all. I can’t go back. Never. You’ll soon know why. You won’t miss me. You’ve got that American now.

  THALIA

  On the back of this paper was the poem of which Madame had spoken.

  TO RACHEL ON SEEING HER AGAIN

  Could I but hold this breathless moment sweet in my two hands

  And bear it to my breast to lock it in my heart

  That it would be forever there enshrined . . .

  But I read no more. I tore the paper violently across.

  ‘What are you at?’ cried Buddy, picking up a piece from the floor. ‘“Could I but hold this breathless moment sweet in my two hands. . .”’ he read aloud. ‘Did she write this? Did she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘To me.’

  ‘And you tear it up. Rachel, how could you? The poor kid. The poor, poor kid.’

  ‘It makes me sick,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a wonder if she hasn’t done something desperate,’ he said reproachfully. ‘You were everything to her. You taught her, helped her, encouraged her, even made her beautiful just to gratify some whim of yours. And then you took it all away. Don’t you see? Don’t you see what you’ve done, Rachel?’

  ‘No,’ I said angrily, ‘it just sickens me. There’s something behind all this. There’s been something wrong ever since she came. I know her. You don’t. And now? What’s she done now? Where is she?’

  I was picking up the pieces of paper and trying to fit them together. ‘She says she’s gone to her father.’

  ‘But he’s in India. D’you think she’s gone to Marseilles?’

  ‘She’s quite capable of it. She’s plenty of money,’ I said grimly, thinking of my gold bag full of francs. ‘But not enough to get her to India—unless, of course, she’s helped herself to other money besides mine.’

  We took a taxi to the Gare de Lyon. A train had left for Marseilles only two hours ago. We went to the booking office. Had a young girl with a dog taken a ticket on that train? We described her. There were several ticket guichets and the man at the far end had sold a single ticket to Marseilles, also a dog ticket. Thank heavens for Kiki, I thought, at least he provided a clue which would help to trace her.

  ‘What’s to be done?’ I asked Buddy.

  ‘We must go after her, of course. If she’s trying to get to India she’ll be at the shipping agents.’

  There was a fast train to Marseilles which would get us there only an hour and a half after the one she had apparently taken. We hadn’t enough money for the return fare and I was still in my party dress.

  ‘It’s the young girl? She has run away?’ asked the man at the guichet who thought he had sold Thalia a ticket. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fifteen—almost sixteen.’

  ‘Alors . . . she’s under age—she’s a foreign girl, too—you can ask the police to meet the train and hold her. They can identify her by the dog.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ I protested. Thalia, feeling as she did when she wrote that letter, being met and held by a gendarme? No. No. It was unthinkable.

  ‘Mademoiselle, believe me, it’s better so. Anything can happen to her. Marseilles is no place for a child alone.’

  But Thalia wasn’t a child—that was it. She was swung in that painful, uncharted place between two worlds. ‘There’s a policeman here in the station,’ urged the man.

  I couldn’t bear the idea. But Buddy was adamant.

  ‘Suppose she gets off that train and finds she hasn’t enough money for a passage. What’s she going to do in a place like Marseilles?’

  ‘Thalia isn’t like other girls. She’s travelled a lot. Backwards and forwards to India several times. She’s used to ports.’

  ‘Let’s go and talk to the police.’

  ‘We don’t even know that it was her on the train,’ I said. ‘There could be other girls with dogs.’

  ‘It can do no harm to ask the police to look out for her. She must have her passport with her if she plans to get to India.’

  We argued excitedly and I got angry with Buddy. We counted our money again and the interested ticket-collector said that if we went third class we could just do it.

  We sat on the deserted, dreary station and waited for the train. I pulled my jacket tightly round me—it was cold. Buddy kept urging me to go back and get some sleep—but I couldn’t rest from anxiety. I felt somehow that everything was my fault, that if only I could get to Marseilles I would be able to find Thalia when no one else might be successful. The station, dead, empty and impersonal, devoid at this hour of the excited crowds of passengers jostling each other to reach the trains, was like a nightmare. As we sat there we could have been anywhere in the fourth unknown dimension, so phantom-like did it appear in this grey loneliness, so detached from all reality. Only the smell was real—of stale, wet humanity, although it wasn’t raining. I think I slept most of the way on the long journey in spite of the hard wooden seats. I know I woke up once to find my head on the shoulder of a very fat business man. Later when it began to grow light I began looking at the landscape.

  By mid-day it was quite hot. We were due at Marseilles soon after three in the afternoon. Buddy knew it all—he’d been often in the Midi. He wasn’t interested in the country through which we were passing, but I was fascinated by the changing vegetation with its gradual and subtle emergence to the sub-tropical. Vines, peaches and figs! And the colour was different—even the earth was warmer, if less lush and soft. But the gnawing anxiety over Thalia never left me. I would doze, wake, notice some new and interesting aspect of nature, doze again and wake with but one thought . . . Thalia.

  The poem she had written me had been a shock. And all that weeping in the night after laughing all day? What was the truth behind it all? It was something more than a desire to leave her mother and
be with me. She had, when off guard, almost a desperate, trapped look.

  Why hadn’t Cynthia answered the telegram? ‘You’ll soon know why,’ Thalia had said in the note. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get back to that villa—so impatient was I to find out what was going on there. And for the first time I began to doubt the wisdom of what I had done. Thalia had taken me as a pattern—how could I blame her? The train crawled . . . slower and slower. The dust came in at the windows. People began eating from bundles and the smell of garlic filled the compartment. We had had breakfast on the train but if our money was to last we couldn’t contemplate lunch. The fat man offered me a roll. It was filled with garlic and butter. I accepted it gratefully and although Buddy loathed garlic he ate half of it with relish.

  And here was the sea . . . smooth, lazy . . . lapping the white rocks. Marseilles . . . Marseilles . . . we crawled into the great station and were pushed with the crowd down the steps into brilliant sunshine. Thalia here alone! The thought frightened me.

  ‘We’d better make a round of the shipping agents,’ said Buddy, ‘I got a list at the Gare de Lyon.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, let’s go to Thomas Cook’s. They’ll be able to give us a list of the sailings.’

  Cynthia always dealt with Thomas Cook’s. What more likely than that Thalia would go to them?

  We dared not take any more taxis, our money had reached a level where every sou counted. Buddy knew Marseilles a little and we set out to walk. After several incorrect directions and a long, devious walk we reached the right street. We were hot, tired and hungry—and both of us somewhat short-tempered. ‘Thomas Cook’s,’ I read, ‘Wagon-Lits.’ Outside, tied to a railing, was Kiki!

  He set up a terrific barking and leaping at the sight of me. He was extremely dirty and woebegone.

  ‘Well. What d’you say? The very first place.’ Buddy was astonished.

  ‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘She must be inside.’

  I walked into the place and up to the part marked ‘Voyages Étrangères’. Sitting on a tall chair studying a number of illustrated brochures was Thalia.

  I stood there for several seconds before she looked up. There were smudges under her eyes and her face was as dirty as the dog’s. There was a huge hole in the knee of one of her stockings as if she had fallen as a child does—and stains on her tweed skirt.

  ‘Thalia!’ I said gently.

  When she saw me her face blanched. She began blinking nervously and rapidly, and her tongue passed over her lips.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘They won’t give me a passage to Bombay,’ she said sullenly. ‘They say they haven’t got one—but I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Mademoiselle wants to go to Bombay immediately,’ said the suave young man attending to her. ‘I regret that we cannot offer her a passage for two weeks. We are very busy and all the tourist is full up until then.’

  ‘Come outside,’ I said sharply to her. I told the young man we’d let him know about the S.S. Strathnaver.

  I took her by the arm and piloted her through the door. Outside she came face to face with Buddy. Her face hardened and she set her mouth in a tight line. The dog jumped madly round her feet.

  ‘Where’s the money you took from my bag?’ I asked mildly.

  ‘You’re not angry? I thought you wouldn’t mind—you don’t care much about money or you’d never have left it lying in your cupboard.’

  ‘I don’t mind your having taken it. I was going to write and ask you to send it on to me. I had to pawn my bracelet,’ I said. ‘But you can just hand it over now. We’re extremely hungry and we want a meal.’

  ‘I can’t get it out here. It’s pinned to my knickers.’

  We went to a restaurant which didn’t object to the dog and, in the ‘Ladies’, Thalia produced a cotton bag which she had pinned to the top of her knickers with a safety-pin. I stared at the bag. I had seen it before. Where? She handed it over to me without a word. Then I realized that it was one of the cotton bags in which Cynthia wrapped all her small things during the monsoon in India.

  ‘Thalia,’ I said, ‘you didn’t take anything of your mother’s, did you?’

  She saw me handling the cotton bag. ‘No—I had to go to her drawer to get my passport—I saw the bag and thought it’d do to hide the notes in.’

  ‘Some people would call it stealing,’ I said meaningly.

  ‘But the passport’s mine. It says so on it.’

  ‘I mean the money.’

  ‘But you said yourself that the money was no one’s—that you’d made it out of nothing. That it came from nowhere.’

  ‘True,’ I agreed. I didn’t count the notes—there seemed to be a lot of money there.

  ‘You were actually trying to get to India?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll be sorry you’ve stopped me.’ Her face was tragic.

  ‘Let’s go and eat,’ I said. ‘You must be starving.’

  ‘So’s Quiquengrogne. He’s had nothing since yesterday afternoon and that was only scraps.’

  We had lunch looking out at the port. I was determined that Thalia should have anything she wanted. She would have to realize as quickly as possible that her dream of getting to India was ended. I wanted to soften the blow. ‘I want bouillabaisse,’ she kept saying. ‘A man in the train told me it was a special dish of Marseilles.’

  She had it—also chicken, asparagus, strawberries and cream—and we fed Kiki. None of us mentioned her flight from Paris or her plan to go to India. She seemed to accept her capture passively. It wasn’t like Thalia—I didn’t like it. There were several hours to put in before the night train to Paris. We bought some English papers, they were full of nothing but the forthcoming Coronation, with photographs of the little princesses, and we went exploring in the old part of the port. The sun was glorious and it was when we were leaning over the old harbour wall looking at a negro asleep on a narrow ledge high above the water that she said, ‘Rachel, I can’t go back. You’re bound to know soon. I’ve killed Claude. That’s why I ran away. I pushed him over that steep bit round by the Pointe.’

  At first I thought that she was trying one of her jokes on me. But to my horror she soon convinced me. The story came out gradually between sobs and gulps and long silences.

  She had been sent out with Claude one afternoon and he had been kicking his football along the Promenade. He was in one of his tiresome moods and when they reached the dangerous unguarded walk round the cliffs to the Pointe she ordered him to give her the football. But he wouldn’t give it up and kept on kicking it near the edge of the path and running after it, giving her a shock each time he almost lost his balance.

  I knew very well how he loved to do this; unless I held his hand very tightly he would tease me by standing on the extreme edge with that sheer drop below him. He wouldn’t give up the ball to Thalia but ran away with it tucked under his arm. She had chased him, shouting threats and warnings to him, and he had continued to taunt and tease her—eluding her grasp each time she caught up with him. At last, exasperated, she made a sudden lunge at him. The impetus had given him a shove which sent him clean over the edge.

  ‘He fell right on to those rocks below and lay quite still—he was dead,’ she said, hopelessly.

  Cynthia had been, as usual, playing bridge. Thalia had stood there petrified, watching Claude—but he didn’t move. ‘Not even a leg or an arm,’ she said, sobbing.

  There had been no one about. She went home—running like a mad thing. There was no one in the villa, Marie and Elise both having left. No one saw her enter or leave the place. She had found the piece of paper with Eugénie’s address and taking the gold bag from my cupboard and her passport from Cynthia’s drawer, she had packed a few garments in her school satchel and, with Kiki, had caught the train to Paris.

  We were still standing there in the sun, the masts and sails of the ships in the harbour spread out before us.

  ‘But why did you rush away? Why?’ I insisted.

&
nbsp; ‘You see, I thought I hated Claude—he’s always been so spoiled and always came first with everyone—but when I saw him lying there dead, I knew that I loved him. I was terrified, I ran away.’

  ‘Thalia,’ I said shakily, ‘is this true? Will you swear to me that it’s true?’

  She turned so that she faced me. The wretchedness in her eyes was her answer.

  ‘Mother only lives for him. She adores him. He’s dead—I killed him. I can’t go back. Never.’

  ‘But you were trying to get to your father. Didn’t he love Claude, too?’

  ‘Yes. But Father would have understood.’

  I wondered. My father hadn’t understood me. ‘You didn’t climb down and see if he were really dead?’ I asked gently.

  ‘I started to—but I was too frightened. I knew he must be dead.’

  Did this explain the silence after I’d sent the telegram? But if the child were dead, surely Cynthia would have made efforts to get Thalia back? I was too shocked to think clearly. But I could understand her action. Hadn’t my brother run away and left me knocked unconscious by his cricket ball? He had thought I was dead and rushed off in sheer panic.

  Thalia had put her hands over her face and was sobbing unrestrainedly. I felt an aching, anguished pity for her. When she had expressed her love for me I had been disgusted. But now, when she was in trouble, it was I who wanted to comfort and reassure her. I put my arms round her and we stood there by the sun-warmed wall. The negro woke up and smiled happily, stretched his arms above his head lazily as a cat does, and jumped down.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this as soon as you arrived?’ I asked at length.

  ‘I tried to. I did, really. But you were so glad to see me. I didn’t expect that. It was so lovely with you—and they were all kind and liked me. I just couldn’t break it all up. I knew that you would rush back to Mother as soon as I told you.’

  So she had decided to try and get to her father. She was sure that the police would be looking for her. When I had insisted on our returning to Dinard she knew that she must get away.

  ‘But there wasn’t enough money for a passage to Bombay and they were funny about my booking a passage for myself,’ she finished.