Georges soon began to take care of her. He had less than half-an-hour to do it, but he put her into a chair carefully sheltered from the wind, offered her a Gauloise, and approved her acceptance of it, and then sat down beside her with every appearance of liking to be there.
Nell hardly noticed any of it. But she was still confusedly relieved not to be alone.
Presently Georges said, leaning towards her:
“Mam’zelle, you worry about something. Forgive me I offend you. But I have so many girl-friends (only pour la camaraderie, you understand) and they tell me all their problèmes. I only know you one hour, but I know you worry.”
His small fair face, appearing younger than it probably was because of the silky moustache and the great cap, was full of sentiment and kindness. He looked like a saucy but well-meaning adolescent chicken. Nell, like most Englishwomen, had always heard that Frenchmen were lecherous and cynical, but if Georges were either she would be prepared (the thought surprised her) to eat his cap. She could not of course tell him even half, but she found herself answering without hesitation:
“That’s very kind of you. I am rather worried. You see, I’m going to Paris to see someone who’s—very ill.” To her dismay she had to swallow a lump.
“Ah. I drive you there,” said Georges in a satisfied tone. “No,” holding up a white hand and displaying a pink cuff, “all is arranged. I have to drive myself to Paris and I have my car on board. We go together.” Hand and cuff descended in two quick pats on her knee. “You permit? I am your camarade: I’ll look after you; you’ll be quite safe. My family is very well known in Le Touquet and Calais and Boulogne, all along the coast. We have chain of hotels—six of them. You can ask the captain of this ship if you want, or any of the matelots, they all know la famille Simon and Monsieur Georges.”
As if to prove his words true, here a matelot slouching past saluted him; somewhat, it was true, as if he would have preferred to shout à la lanterne! but it was undeniably a greeting.
Georges said cheerfully, “You see? Everybody knows me. So now I go and see my car. Oh, she is a beauty. You’ll adore her.”
Nell had not made up her mind whether to be driven to Paris or to refuse; only, the more she thought of three hours in the train, with those feelings and thoughts for company, the more she feared the journey. But it was the remark which Georges made over his shoulder as they approached the deck where the cars were ranged, that made her decide to accept.
“Of course, we shall be there sooner by car. We can get away before the train.”
There were no police, helmeted or otherwise, waiting for Nell at the harbour and in less than half an hour the car was away.
The road was very white; it ran rolling over a country large and calm and fair, with lanky golden poplars blowing and bowing and shedding their leaves under an enormous sky filled with light. The glittering chill grey sea fell behind, and the dazzling dunes; the red villages with grey churches began, and blue blouses appeared, bending over the earth of the fields. It was large and lonely; few cars on the roads; few advertisements anywhere; rank country smells drifting off the farms as they sped by; few tractors; no villas lining the roads outside the towns that were grey and old and dirty and dourly self-contained; there were large red and white villages of houses with coloured shutters; bicycles, bicycles, and more bicycles. This was France.
Nell saw it all in a dazed way, for a slight drunkenness was now added to the strain of twenty hours of unbroken anxiety.
Georges had bought a bottle of wine for their journey, and produced a glass (he never drank, he assured her, when he was driving) for herself, and a loaf as long as his arm, and some sausage slices, and some rather dry oranges. The part of Nell’s mind that retained normal powers of judgement was relieved to see him greeted in the épicerie where he bought these things as a known and respected customer … but really, she did not care if he weren’t. He would hardly try anything on while he was driving, and she felt quite capable of dealing with him, even in her present state, if he tried while they were lunching; and anyway, she was sure that he was not going to try anything. He couldn’t, certainly, have been more kind.
The car, which was undeniably a beauty, sped on steadily towards the heart of France. He drove remarkably well; very fast, with an unshakable, relaxed, indolent sureness of touch that impressed Nell even through her increasing weariness and anxiety.
He did not talk much, but he talked enough to prevent her from falling again into the maze of questions, problems and wonderings, and painful feelings lying like some great illness within herself; she began, in a dazed way, to feel grateful to him, and to Providence that she had met him.
He had just been spending a month in London, he told her, studying the Espresso bars and the Fortes milk bars; his father was considering a scheme for opening some cafés in Boulogne and Calais, and, although they would not of course entirely resemble those Georges had studied in London, he was taking back with him ‘many notes’ on English equipment and management.
He was naturally very interested when he heard that Nell had been a waitress, though she thought that he gave her an odd dry look. Her disclosure led on to Uncle James, and the Espresso bar, and more interest, comment, and exchange of promises to keep in touch. The hypnotic road unrolled, the engine hummed deeply, the vast white sky drooped to the remote horizon. A château floated by, with fair towers looking out of noble golden woods; the stag, the hounds, and the riding ladies in steeple hats were surely just out of sight; the horn surely sounded even as the vision passed. Georges sounded the car’s, at a dilatory horse and cart, and Nell, dozing now, awoke with a start at the mellow sound.
“Soon we are at Longchamps,” he said, “and that is not far from Paris.”
Nell felt in her pocket for the scrap of paper torn from the front pages of the telephone directory on which she had written the address. ‘18 rue des Cloches, Paris 8.’ Georges knew Paris well; he thought he knew the rue des Cloches. It was a quartier devoted to commerce, he believed. But there must be apartements there, of course, and chambres à louer also. Her friend would doubtless be in one of those.
With delicate tact he asked neither the sex of the friend nor any other details, and Nell, on the few occasions that she could not avoid doing so, referred to ‘my cousin’. It was now about half-past two, and the landscape skimming by, the monotonous droning of the engine, and the wine she had drunk were making her drowsy. Her eyelids began to droop. It was delicious to feel unhappiness receding gradually to a distance: remote: unpainful: it was there, she did not feel it: it was just there, nothing more.…
Georges gently bumped her so that she slid off him and rested against the side of the car; chivalry was something, but driving to the public danger with a girl asleep on your shoulder was something else again, and so far he had a clean licence. He regretted having to do this: he liked having her there. He sighed, not unhappily. So many girls in the world! and almost all of them nice.
The outskirts of Paris. Wooded hills; then cliffs of white apartments, and railway lines under a gentle haze of domestic, non-industrial smoke. Soon the elegant, grey, peeling houses began, and the tables arranged on the pavements under the cynical city trees. The sun had come out and set their yellow leaves glowing.
“Mam’zelle.” Nell stirred, and began to come back to where she was. “Mam’zelle,” she opened her eyes to see a quite unfamiliar face with a huge check cap on top of it smiling down at her, “I think you will want to wake up. We are in the next street to the rue des Cloches. I have park the car here and now we must walk to the apartment of your cousin. You will want your mirror. I have it here.”
She supposed that she did; it saved time, anyway, not to argue. He had taken it from her bag and now held it while she tidied her hair. She wore no hat, as she followed the fashion; one pale cheek was creased from lying against the side of the car, and her eyes were a little reddened, from sleeplessness and strain.
“You are élégante, Nell,” G
eorges observed impersonally, as he put the mirror away. This was the first time he had used her name, which she had observed him repeating, when she told it to him, as if to memorize it.
“I am?” but she scarcely heard what he said. She was getting out of the car, and her eyes were already searching the narrow, busy, sunlit street, between the trees, over the tables of the cafés, for the entrance to the rue des Cloches. She was trying to pull herself together, for in a few moments she would see him.
“Certainly. Without a doubt.” Georges hopped out of the car after her, and paused to lock it and give it a final loving over-all glance. “When I see you I think, this is a top-flight English mannequin on holiday, in her chic little ‘tweed’. When you say you are waitress I do not believe you at once.”
She did not hear him. She was standing on the pavement of Paris, looking anxiously about her. “Permit me,” Georges took her hand and led her across the road.
The rue des Cloches was much wider than the pretty street in which they had left the car. It was lined with shops containing typewriters and motor-cars and agricultural machinery. And the upper windows of the buildings bore the names of commercial firms which evidently had offices there; shipping lines, solicitors, agents, merchants of all kinds. There were no signs at all of domestic or private life. It was a hard, busy, crowded street, through which the traffic rushed hooting, loudly; a characterless street which might have belonged to any great city in the world. The afternoon light was bright and chill.
“Numero dix-huit.” Georges had been studying the shop fronts keenly from under the peak of his cap. “Ah, it is lucky. There is the number seventeen and the number eighteen is of course next to it. See,” pointing over the road, “it is a shop of wholesale cosmetics. (I have passed through a course in the commercial expressions, therefore that is how I know so many of them.) But …”
He checked himself. But Nell was also looking at the windows above number eighteen. They were inscribed in white lettering, Raoul Frères, Importeurs des Fruits Algériens, and apparently the firm occupied the building’s entire upper storeys. Georges seemed to think some comment necessary, for he said:
“Sometimes there is an apartement at the back.”
He was leading her across this road now, strolling in what was evidently the accepted Parisian manner in and out of the darting traffic, as coolly as he drove his car. But Nell was hardly seeing the traffic and was noticing neither Georges nor the comforting pressure he was giving to the fingers linked with his. She was thinking of nothing now. In a moment she would be with him.
Should she have brought anything—fruit, aspirin, clean pyjamas? But there hadn’t been time to ask him if he wanted anything.
Now they were on the pavement. Georges turned to her.
“You will like to go in alone, won’t you? But will you permit me to wait here? I should like to know how the affair goes.”
She nodded. But even while she was nodding, she was moving away from him and towards the door of the wholesale cosmetics shop.
Inside, there were green walls, a dirty floor, and set in one of the walls a kind of pigeonhole with a movable slatted trap-door. There was a table with a tin ashtray advertising some brand of bière, a chair, and a strong and rather pleasant scent of verbena.
Nell went across and tapped on the slats of the pigeonhole. Her heart was starting to beat fast. Everything she had ever known suddenly appeared to her as being infinitely far away. But that was not what she was minding.
When she felt she could stand it no longer, the pigeonhole flew up. A dark face with full cheeks, which at first she could not identify as to sex, demanded something brusquely, hardly looking at her; giving an impression of having been interrupted …
Nell pulled herself together.
“Oh, pardonnez-moi … est-ce qu’il y a un jeune homme anglais qui demeure ici, s’il vous plaît?”
“’don?” snapped the man, staring now.
“Un jeune homme anglais, Monsieur Gaunt. Il m’avait téléphoné, à Londres, hier soir. C’est mon cousin. Il est malade, je pense, et je …”
“Personne.” He scarcely looked at her as he shook his head, and added something so rapidly that she could not gather one word of it. The trapdoor slammed down.
She marched out of the door into the street and caught Georges by the arm.
“Please can you come and talk to them? I can’t understand a word he’s saying. …”
He hurried after her, looking pleased.
She waited while he talked to the man, her eyes moving stonily from face to face. She knew, by that time, what the end of it was going to be. When Georges turned to her, not smiling, and began apologetically to speak, while the other man now watched with an expression of curiosity, even of sympathy, through his pigeonhole, she interrupted him before he could say it.
“He isn’t here.” She said it as a statement, not as a question.
“It seems to be that he is not. There are no appartements nor chambres à louer here at all; the nearest are in the street where we have left the car. All here is for commerce. You do not think … perhaps, Nell, you have mistaken yourself?”
“Impossible,” she said frozenly. “I repeated the number and the name after him, twice. I am sure this is the place … he said.”
Georges shook his head, looking down at the floor.
Nell began to move towards the door before he did. He followed her, having said something to the man at the pigeonhole, and the latter shut it, but more quietly this time.
When they were out in the street again, Nell said composedly:
“I’m so sorry to have given you so much trouble. You have been awfully kind. I hope when you come to London again you’ll ring me up.”
He took her arm and pulled her into step with him.
“Nell, you try on your flegme Britannique with me. You are so calm, so brave. But I do not permit it. No. We are camarades. We go back to the car, and I drive you to nice place near the Faubourg Saint Honore for le thé anglais. And then we don’t talk. But you have your thé and you feel better. Then I drive you to the airport and I lend you the money for you to fly home. No?”
He shook her arm lightly, and she nodded.
“You will be at your home by eight o’clock. Now, see how good I get out the car from the street.”
She was so angry that she could not think. She watched, carefully and with genuine interest, his skilful manœuvring of the car, and congratulated him with a smile when they were out again on the wide road and driving towards the fashionable quarter of the city. All through the thé anglais, the drive to the airport, the securing of her ticket, their almost affectionate good-bye, she was so angry that she could not think.
“Au revoir, Georges. Thank you so much again.”
“Au’voir, Nell. Take care of yourself. Bon voyage.”
“Oh, I will. And when your uncle comes to London next Wednesday, I’ll have the money waiting for him in francs at the Regent Palace. Monsieur Max Simon. I won’t forget.”
“I shall think often of you, Nell. But we meet again soon, eh?”
“Oh yes. Good-bye, Georges … good-bye …”
“Good-bye … au’voir … good-bye.”
Lights were beginning to shine down in Paris now, like rivières and pendants lying on blue velvet. They fell behind and away as night rushed up from the dim empty countryside.
She dropped her burning cheek on her hand and shut her eyes at last.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“YOU’RE FRIGHTENING DANDY”
SHE CAME SLOWLY up the steps searching in her bag for her key, but before she could touch the door, it opened quickly.
“My dear child, where have you been? We’ve been quite worried.” Anna almost pulled her inside.
“I’m sorry, Mother. John telephoned me last night, pretending he was ill in Paris and asking me to go over. So I went this morning.” Nell sat down on the stairs and looked up at her mother’s incredulous face. “But he wasn’t
at the address he gave, of course … I flew home. A very nice French boy lent me the fare.” She smiled faintly. “All quite respectable. Don’t worry.”
“John? But the police are looking for him. We’ve had an awful day of it, with,” she lowered her voice, “Charles and Peggy and Margie here, all squabbling … haven’t you seen the papers?”
Nell’s eyes were fixed on the banner headline of the Evening News lying on the hall table. ‘Police Seek Lady Fairfax’s Son.’ She saw it without having any feelings; she could feel no more.
“In Paris?” Anna now said, realizing it. “What an extraordinary …” she began to follow Nell down the hall. “What on earth is he … but you said that he wasn’t there?”
“No.” Nell opened the drawing-room door, then stopped. Three very glum faces and one resigned one were turned towards her.
“Well, here’s one of them turned up,” Lady Fairfax said, from a seat by the fire. “You look tired to death, poppet. Where have you been?”
“With John, of course. He makes people look like that.” The spite in Margie’s voice was embarrassing.
“Have you, Nell? Where is he?” Charles Gaunt demanded.
Nell almost turned and went out of the room again. Had she to admit in public that she had been played up, humiliated, and generally made a fool of? To these people, who none of them cared a damn for anything but their own careers? Well, that was all she cared about now.
“I don’t know where he is,” she said, looking at Charles. “I haven’t been with him.”
“Apparently he sent her on some wild-goose chase to Paris.” Anna’s voice came lightly from the little table where she was testing the coffee-pot for warmth with her clasped fingers. “(Nell, I think there’s some left, if you’d like it.) Telephoning that he was at death’s door or some such rubbish. She liked the idea of seeing Paris, so she went. But he wasn’t there, needless to say, and she borrowed the fare from a charming Frenchman and flew home. It must have been an amusing day.”
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