Having said it, Lonergan felt apprehensive. What comment could she conceivably make on so extraordinary, so premature a confidence? Almost anything she said must be wrong, and it would be he who had forced inadequacy upon her.
Valentine spoke.
“Were they terribly happy years?”
“Ah, you’re wonderful! That was the one right thing you could have said!” he exclaimed with a rush of spontaneous delight that gave him no time to choose his words. “They were happy. She was very lovely. We used to fight, and have terrible rows, but it was a good relationship, and she was perfect in so many ways.”
“I’d like you to tell me,” said Valentine.
She sat leaning forward, her serious face, with its curiously childlike look of innocence, supported on her hand.
Lonergan caught his breath.
“I’d like to tell you,” he said.
V
Looking into the fire away from Valentine, he spoke, hesitatingly at first.
“It’s difficult to begin. You see, it’s hard to make you understand what she was like. (Her name was Laurence, by the way.) I should imagine that you’ve never come very much across the kind of French people that she belonged to, however much you’ve lived abroad. French provincial bourgeoisie, keeping themselves to themselves, in a little close circle of relations and old family friends.… The father had a job with one of those big firms that used to import wines. He wasn’t a partner, nor anything like that, but he was important, in his own way. They’d a house at Saumur — one of those tall, pink, narrow houses with a garden at the back that ran down to the river and a tonnelle where they always had their meals in summer.”
Lonergan paused; conscious of confusion, laughing a little.
“The way I’m going on — It’s because I’m finding it difficult to describe Laurence to you.”
Valentine helped him.
“Where did you meet her?”
He threw her a look of gratitude.
“In her own home. It was when I was doing a whole lot of sketches of provincial France for a newspaper, and they sent me down to the Loire country. One of the introductions they gave me was to Monsieur Houlvain, and I went to his office in Saumur. He was a nice old friendly chap. I don’t think he’d have asked me to the house, if I’d been an Englishman and a Protestant instead of an Irish Catholic. But he invited me there for a Sunday déjeuner and off I went, little knowing what awaited me.—”
He recaptured, for a fleeting, unexpected instant, the blinding heat-haze of the long-ago July morning when he had walked the streets of Saumur, looking for the house of Monsieur Houlvain — le numéro dix-huit.
“A holy show I made of myself, that day! For some reason I couldn’t find the house, and it was a scorching hot morning and I arrived late, and then I was only wearing some old shabby clothes I’d been walking in, and Madame Houlvain was all in black satin and a white collar, and monsieur in a new alpaca coat. I don’t suppose he’d put it on in my honour, but it made me feel what kind of a mannerless lout was I, not to have taken a bit more trouble to look decent. They were rather ceremonious, too, to start with. You know how French people are.”
Valentine assented.
“Laurence didn’t come in till the déjeuner was ready. I imagine she’d been cooking it, and a nice time of it she must have had with everything getting spoilt because I’d not arrived. I didn’t fall for her straight away, though I thought her extraordinarily pretty — she’d dark hair and eyes, and that sort of dead-white skin, and she was slim and rather tall, with good bones. Her forehead was lovely — I honestly can only think of one word that could ever describe the kind of breadth and purity of it, with dark thin eyebrows and very deep dark eyes underneath — and that’s luminous. She had that quality, and it was all in that beautiful wide brow.”
“How old was she?”
“Twenty-one. Nine years younger than I was. Well, you know what it’s like in a French family. She never batted an eyelid all through lunch. Monsieur laid down the law a bit about politics, and madame asked questions about what I was doing, and told me which were the best restaurants in practically every town in the Loire country. And they asked about Ireland, and we agreed that the English were difficult for the more civilized races to understand. Am I being very rude?”
“I don’t think so. We are uncivilized, compared with the French. I’m not quite so sure about the Irish, but then I’ve never been to Ireland.”
“Well,” said Lonergan, “I don’t know that I’m quite so sure myself, nowadays. But anyway, I agreed with monsieur. I daresay I’d have agreed with whatever he said. It was my idea of the way to make myself agreeable, I suppose.”
He broke off abruptly.
“I’m making this story too long. It was all very simple, really. I did the sketches, going down the river, and then I went back to Saumur to finish them off because I’d liked the town; and I wanted to see the cadre noir, and Monsieur Houlvain had said he could take me there.
“He and madame were very kind to me — I saw a lot of them, off and on — and Laurence and I fell in love. We thought it wouldn’t be any use, I was a foreigner, and hadn’t any money except what I earned, and anyway, who wants their daughter to marry an artist?”
Lonergan fell silent.
Valentine asked:
“Was she their only child?”
“There was a son, doing his service militaire, and an older daughter, married. And there was a parti being arranged for Laurence. They still do that, in provincial France — or they did then. No compulsion, exactly, but the whole of the families talking it over — uncles and aunts, and a couple of priests, and the married ones and their husbands and wives. Laurence told me she liked the boy, and she’d been quite ready to say she’d marry him until she met me. We were crazy about one another. I’d decided long ago I wasn’t ever going to marry — domesticity has never appealed to me, nor fidelity either for that matter, and I knew I’d be no sort of a husband for any woman, let alone a girl of twenty-one. But I had to ask Laurence to marry me. I was mad about her, and I thought I’d never get her any other way.”
Again Lonergan was silent, and this time it was a little while before he spoke again.
“It’s hard to make the next bit clear. But what happened was that Laurence told me she’d come and live with me in Paris, and not marry me.
“She knew I didn’t want marriage. That was the thing about Laurence — she understood and accepted things that were quite outside her own tradition.
“I didn’t know what to do. Or perhaps I did, and couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was a terrible, mad, muddled week when I told monsieur I’d fallen in love with his daughter and he assured me that he was very sorry but she was already promised, and madame gave me a lot of good advice of which the whole point was that I must go back to Paris at once and not see Laurence again, and Laurence and I said goodbye in the tonnelle, and I told her it wasn’t any good, she was too young and I couldn’t ruin her life for her. Even if we were to marry, it would mean breaking with her family — her mother’d made that quite clear — and I couldn’t afford to keep a wife.
“I can see her now — the little, poor child — with the tears streaming down her face, telling me that she wasn’t too young — she knew what she wanted. I don’t know how I ever left her.
“I went back to Paris and I thought, God forgive me, I’d forget her in time, the way I’d forgotten other girls before. But I found I didn’t. And one day, about two months after I got back, I had a telegram asking me to meet her train that same afternoon — she was coming to Paris.
“From their point of view monsieur and madame had made the most idiotic mistake they could have made. They’d tried to rush her into this marriage, and she’d got angry and told them she wouldn’t be persecuted and there’d been some terrible rows and one day she couldn’t bear it any more and just packed a bag and walked out of the house without a word to anyone. The trust she showed — the courage — coming
to me like that, never having had a word or a line from me since I’d left Saumur — I’ll never forget it.”
A log, burnt through, fell with a soft crash into the bed of white ash on the hearth and Valentine stirred to replace it by another one.
Then she said:
“Go on.”
“Will I? You’ve a lot of patience. We didn’t ever marry — neither of us wanted it. We didn’t want children, either. Does that seem to you extraordinary?”
He saw from her face that she was surprised, and wondered whether it was because she found such an attitude of mind regrettable, or incomprehensible, or because it surprised her that he should have put it into words.
When she spoke, slowly and as though she had never before expressed what she felt on this matter, he saw that he had been mistaken.
All that surprised her was they should think so much alike.
“It doesn’t seem at all extraordinary. I don’t know that I’d quite realized before — but I feel like that about it, too. I mean — a really perfect companionship would be interfered with, wouldn’t it, if there were children?”
“Of course.”
“For anything less than the best,” she said, with a timidity that touched him deeply, “I think children would be a great help. They take up such a lot of time and thought.”
So that’s been your life, thought Lonergan. Aloud he said:
“Laurence and I never meant to have Arlette. It was a mistake. She wanted to stop it, but I was afraid of the risk for her. We fought over that like blazes, and while we were still fighting, it was too late. It would have been too impossibly dangerous, even if we’d had the money.”
“But did you have a child, then?”
“We did. Laurence was nearly as upset about it as I was and she swore it shouldn’t ever make any difference.”
“Did it?”
“It did, a little. That was inevitable, in a tiny appartement that had one and a half rooms and a studio. When I was making more money, and Arlette was old enough, she went to the convent every day and she was very good from the start, and didn’t give us much trouble. She was eight when Laurence died, and the nuns took her as a boarder. They kept her through the holidays — it’s quite often like that in France, as you probably know.”
“Yes. Then where is Arlette now?”
“Well, she’s in Ireland, of all things. I had to get her out of France somehow, when the war started. I don’t need to tell you that my family never knew of her existence, and I’d the work of the world deciding what I’d tell my poor old sister Nellie. I wrote her a letter in the end, and asked her to talk it over with Father Conroy, her confessor, who has sense — and I said the child’s mother was dead and that Arlette had been brought up by the holy nuns and I wanted her in a Catholic atmosphere where I knew she’d be taken care of. I put in a lot of old cod, too, about her being the innocent result of something that had happened long ago in my youth. I felt disloyal to Laurence when I said that, well knowing that Nellie would think it was a terrible mortal sin I’d committed and repented of, please God. She did, too. I’d pages from her afterwards. But she sent me a telegram, almost directly after she got my first letter, telling me I could send Arlette to her. She’s there still, the poor child, with Nellie and old Maggie Dolan, in the wilds of Roscommon.”
“Is she happy there?”
“I think so. And poor old Nellie, who’s been all by herself since father died, is devoted to her. I got over there once, in the beginning of nineteen forty, and saw them. It seemed to be working all right. When all this is over, if I’m still living, I’ll have Arlette with me.”
“Is she like Laurence?”
“Not a bit. She’s like her grandmother — old Madame Houlvain. Tough and small and dark — you’d never mistake her for anything but what she is — a nice little girl of the French bourgeoisie. The only way she’s different is in having a good brain. She’s extremely intelligent. The funny thing is, I wasn’t interested in her at all till the last year. And now I am. And I was touched, when I went over to Ireland, and she was so madly pleased to see me. Of course, she was in a nation of strangers and I was part of the only life she’d known. But I got a much deeper feeling of responsibility about her then. I’m afraid I’d never really felt it before — except that I’d got to make the money to pay her convent bills.”
“I didn’t think of you as having children, or a child. I thought you’d have married, though.”
“To all intents and purposes Laurence and I were married. I felt the same obligations. I loved her — I wasn’t always faithful to her, God forgive me — I could never have left her.”
“I understand,” Valentine said. “Why did she die? She must have been very young.”
“She was thirty-one. It was in the autumn of nineteen thirty-four. She got pneumonia, and died in ten days.”
“Perhaps,” said Valentine slowly. “she’d known only the best things. I don’t mean just happiness, but all the things — real pain, and hard work, and——” She stopped, and then went on speaking very diffidently. “You did say you and she had fought over things. I may be talking of what I know nothing about, but I’ve some times thought that to care enough to quarrel — not just bickering but a serious quarrel — and still want to stay together, must mean a really vital relationship.”
“How right you are!”
Lonergan looked at her, drawn back from his world of Laurence and the Paris flat that was only one and a half rooms and a studio, and the pink house at Saumur, and even the little dark French girl over in Ireland. He was in the world to which Valentine belonged, and a strange survival of a world it seemed to him — an islet upon which the tide of destruction was swiftly and surely advancing, impelled now by the forces of war but inevitably due to come, war or no war.
His thoughts veered rapidly to Valentine herself.
“How good you are, to have let me go on and on, telling you all this! Have I tired you out?”
“No. I wanted to hear.”
In the silence that followed Lonergan knew that, into her mind as into his, had come the remembrance of the two children they had once been, making love in the Pincio Gardens by a broken fountain.
“You didn’t altogether forget, then. I mean that time in Rome?”
“I know what you mean. I did, and I didn’t. There have been years during which I never thought about it at all, if that’s forgetting — and yet every now and then I’ve got back the — the atmosphere of those afternoons and—”
She left a blank to complete the sentence, not, he thought, as though the word she wanted had eluded her but of deliberate intention. With all her poise, all the finished social technique that belonged to her class and her upbringing and was in her so highly developed, he found in Valentine the delicate shyness of a young — a very gracefully young — girl.
“It’s been like that with me too,” he told her. “I’ve forgotten for years at a time, and I’ve turned into quite another person since then, so that I can’t even always remember what I was like, or what I thought I was like, in those days — but it used to come back to life with me too, sometimes. And when I saw you this afternoon, I remembered you perfectly. I think that was a queer thing, too.”
“Yes.”
“How simply you say ‘Yes’ as though it didn’t surprise you at all, and you’d felt just the same.”
“Oh, but I did,” Valentine answered.
The gentle, candid manner in which she made the admission dumbfounded him completely.
He thought: “It’s no good. I’m in love with her. I adore her.” And following on the conviction came its graceless, inevitable concomitant: “God, what a muddle! What a complicated, god-damned muddle!”
A clock chimed, startlingly audible in the silence, and Valentine said:
“It’s late. Did you mean to do any work to-night?”
“No. I wanted to talk with you. When you went up to show Sedgewick his room, I was afraid you mightn’t come down
again. I was terrified you wouldn’t.”
“But I wanted to,” returned Valentine, and he thought how far removed was the quiet, considered way in which she said it from the quality, to him detestable, implied in the odious word “coquettish”.
“I’ve talked to you a lot about myself, and you’ve listened so graciously — won’t you tell me a little about what’s happened to you, since the time in Rome?”
“In terms of actual happening, very little, and what there was, all came quite close together — between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, really. When the war started my father sent my mother and me back to London and we took a flat in Sloane Street. It seems absurd now, but in spite of the war I came out in the way girls did then — one had to be presented at a Royal garden-party instead of at a drawing-room and so on — and I did some very casual war work that really only meant getting to know other girls.”
Lonergan noticed her old-fashioned, oddly elegant pronunciation of the word and smiled at it.
She smiled back, in a shy, friendly way as though she understood what had amused and perhaps pleased him.
“I think my mother was afraid of my being at a disadvantage, because of having lived abroad so much. But all our relations were very kind and everyone was giving informal dances and parties, that were supposed to be for men home on leave, from the Front. I expect I had more fun, really, than I should have had before the war, doing the London season properly. Every girl I ever knew seems to have hated her first season.”
“You know,” said Lonergan, “that you’re talking about a world of which I know absolutely nothing whatever? I don’t mean — I’ve no need to tell you — that I’m not interested. But my own origin is so completely different — middle-class Irish. I know nothing whatever about the kind of background you’re describing. Forgive me. I didn’t want to interrupt you. Please go on. Were you happy, going to the dances and parties?”
“I was very young for my age. I think perhaps very young people aren’t really happy but they always think that one day they’re going to be. I used to feel quite certain that happiness of some marvellous kind must be waiting for me just round the corner.”
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