Somebody at the Door

by Raymond Postgate

  “I know,” said Renata, and held on to the stone parapet silently for a second or two. “I never walk about here— I’ve been here before—without feeling unreal,” she went on. “I don’t mean feeling that it’s unreal, but that I’m somehow out of place; or rather out of time, I suppose I mean. Did you ever hear about the two English spinsters?”

  Hugh indicated ignorance.

  “I forget exactly what the story was intended to prove. Something about reincarnation, or perhaps it was Dunne’s time theory. Anyway, I read about it once. There were two middle-aged English spinsters before the war—about 1906, I think it was—walking in the Trianon, just about where we are, I suppose, when they noticed that it all seemed very empty. I think the first thing definitely queer that they saw was a man in what they thought was fancy dress, outside one of those wooden imitation peasant huts, walking up and down waiting for something or somebody. He was in a very bad temper and dressed like the eighteenth century. I forget whether he saw them or not; but the next person did see them; he was a woodman or park attendant in uniform and he seems to have been very surprised. And one of the old ladies described exactly what his uniform was, and it was something like the uniform of the attendants about 1788, but not quite right. So, because it wasn’t quite right, it was taken as proof that the old girls’ story was made up; but apparently later investigation into the records kept here showed that the Court was always fiddling round with the uniform and for quite a short period of one year just exactly those changes had been made. Well, when they got out of here into the main gardens the two Englishwomen began to hear some thin and pretty music and one of them was able to reproduce it afterwards more or less. Also they saw a great crowd of people in the distance, all in eighteenth-century dress. I forget how it ended or what exactly the proofs were; but I believe the evidence seemed to suggest that they had actually found themselves somehow in the middle of a fête champêtre given by Marie Antoinette on some particular day for which that music had been composed, and while those changes in the uniform had been enforced.”

  “Do you believe that?” said Hugh.

  “Of course not,” she answered. “There is some explanation—some sane explanation, I mean. But while you were reading it it was very convincing. I only mentioned it because I feel like those two old women. All this doesn’t belong to us, or to the rest of the tourists wandering round here. I wouldn’t in the least be surprised to find the trees suddenly smaller and younger, the peasant houses inhabited by courtiers, and the fish only a few, small, new, carp. It’s we who aren’t real; this belongs to other people; and it isn’t dead yet, like a museum is.”

  “I don’t mind being a ghost, in a place like this,” said Hugh, smiling and looking up, to where the branches of the elms interlocked and formed a green ceiling through which bright blue shone in squares and diamonds and broken shapes.

  “Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,” she answered, a half-embarrassed quotation, to cover her lapse from reason.

  “I love other things than trees,” he said, looking down at her with an affection that was almost fatuous.

  They walked back to the main gardens, found a warm place on the edge of the trees, not too far from the artificial lakes, and lay down. They watched the sun make patterns on the grass, through the leaves of the trees, and flash irregularly in the water as it was troubled by the fountains. Both were tired; dark rings were under Renata’s eyes.

  “Don’t let’s be ashamed,” quoted Hugh suddenly, “if the knowing know, We rose from rapture but an hour ago,” and then blushed scarlet and nearly apologized. She held his hand firmly for a moment; her fingers were thin, long and strong. “You ought,” she said contritely, “to get to know more about the facts of life. I’m really rather a bitch, but I suppose it’s no use telling you that.”

  It was no use. He did not even trouble to say so. She chose, for her own reasons no doubt, to say such things about herself; but they had no meaning, and he did not regard them. All that mattered for him was how to keep the unexampled privileges he had secured, how to retain the graciousness of this marvellous, self-contained and experienced lover, how to hide his incompetence and rusticity. To this he devoted himself steadily until they caught the early morning Boulogne-Folkestone train on Tuesday. He recollected anxiously all that he had ever known, or been told, about Paris restaurants and cafés. That night he took her down to Montparnasse, and they had aperitifs on the terrace of a café called the Closerie des Lilas, looking at an iron statue of Marshal Ney on a horse, half-hidden among young yellow-green leaves. They drank a mixture called mandarin-citron, a bitter highly alcoholic brown liquid, with a dash of syrup, soda, and ice. It was exhilarating and (though they did not find this out till later) slightly purgative. They went on to a small restaurant called for unknown reasons the Negro of Toulouse, and ate what was no more than an ordinarily good Parisian dinner; that is, it was greatly superior to anything that could be got without prevision and thought in London or New York. A dignified man in black, with a flowing cerise tie and large belly, stopped in front of the restaurant, took a violin out of a shabby case, tucked it underneath his partly-shaved chin and began to play and sing I kiss your little hand, Madame. The French was Ce n’est que votre main, madame. He noticed the English couple, bowed, and began to sing and play a more ambitious number, unknown to Hugh and obscure in tune, which seemed to be called Ce ne fut qu’un moment de folie. Hugh was enraptured and sent him twenty francs: Renata said nothing, but watched her lover. Her expression might have been anguish, guilt, maternal anxiety, plain love, or even for a moment humility; it passed almost at once.

  Lovers’ nights are all the same, and yet never the same. He felt, in the quieter delights of Saturday, as if he had been shown, in order that he might know everything, what love would be like with Renée (the name was coming easier now, though he still sometimes pronounced it Renie) after years of married life. An absence of hysteria, a quiet confidence of affection. He did not hope for married life with her; he knew it was impossible, and why, anyhow, should he expect it? (If he could have expected it, would he have felt the same way about her? He would have had to have been much older to ask, let alone answer, such a question.) Only, he wished for a fleeting minute that he could have stayed all night with her. Surely, in a small Paris hotel, there was no one to ask questions. But she had said what she wanted, and he had to do as he was told. Perhaps she just preferred to have her bed to herself. He looked for a longer time, that dawn, out of the window. He craned his neck and could see the statue of Ste. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. It is (or was; it may not still stand) a white torso rising from one of the pillars of a bridge across the Seine. It looks eternally, watchfully, and ultimately in vain, to the East. He wondered about it for an idle minute. It was probably, he thought, symbolic. Watching for the German invader. He disliked the thought; and forgot it.

  That Sunday, wiser than he was, she demanded exercise and made him take her to Fontainebleau. They walked the whole day in the forest, among the great trees, and had lunch in a small inn on the western edge of it. The road outside was white and sunny; inside it was dark and almost too cool. The room was furnished with wooden tables on a few of which were blue and white check cloths. On the walls were an advertisement of Rossi vermouth (an orange), the faded text of the LOI SUR L’IVRESSE, the words DUBO DUBON DUBONNET and an elaborate announcement of a society called La Chablisienne, which had been formed to combat the pernicious habit of le cocktèle, so destructive to population, and had therefore arranged that a glass of genuine Chablis could be purchased for 3 fr. 50, which was an œuvre de remoralisation; and in this work of remoralizing they joined.

  The meal was simple and very cheap. The hors d’œuvre contained most of the things that they expected, and in addition a dish of what looked like sliced rubber and gristle in oil and vinegar but which turned out to be very tasty, masticable (though only just), but ultimately enigmatic. There was next a great deal of veal in a dark orange-colo
ured sauce, fruit which was no more than reasonably good, and the cheese which is called Pont l’evêque, in excellent condition. The wine was a light red burgundy named Juliénas, which does not travel well but is very rarely bad (as it is also very rarely extremely good; it was in this case neither). Hugh, who was still young, took with his coffee a liqueur called Parfait Amour, and wished he had not. Renata asked for brandy—fine maison—and to her distress realized she had humiliated him once more by showing a greater knowledge of the world. She did all that she could by holding his hand under the table and smiling at him.

  That was their Sunday. At night, their lovemaking was little more than the equivalent of the brief kiss of two tired but affectionate people; he did not stay with her and was, to his surprise, glad to lie in his bed and sleep uninterruptedly, peacefully and very late into the morning.

  They spent what was left of the morning wandering about Paris like tourists. There was a flower market by the riverside, not far from the Prefecture of Police; she prevented him with difficulty from loading her with new bouquets of lilies of the valley. They walked around the tiny lle St. Louis, and were surprised to see how much it still resembled a small French village set down in the middle of the city. They went north of the river and spent a lot of time and some appreciable amount of money in a shop called “Le Bon Rire Gaulois,” on small practical jokes, including a toilet roll which released a black snake, a sort of whistle which could be placed beneath a cushion and would make an indecorous noise when anyone sat down on it, and a cruet which was composed of tiny models of necessary domestic china articles. In the afternoon they went to the pictures, to see a French film that Hugh did not understand.

  That night, Monday night, was their last night. They said good-bye ardently; at one point Renata told Hugh to look away (which he obediently did) for she found she was quietly weeping for no reason that she knew. They separated next midday at Victoria, hurriedly and without a word. Fear and calculation had returned to them as soon as they passed the Customs at Folkestone.

  §

  It is almost certain that Renata Grayling’s chief anxiety, as she sat in the train for Croxburn on that morning of 1939, was not for her husband’s possible clairvoyance, but for her own balance. Ever since she had begun to think about herself connectedly at all, her chief object had been to secure her own poise. She must be in control of herself and, so, in control of what happened around her. She could not order the world, that she knew; but she could make sure that the world did not overcome her. Her chief characteristic—she had decided it as early as fourteen years old—should be a calm superiority to outward circumstances, an elegant nonchalance, a self-adequacy which would not be upset by anything outside herself. Dignity was not the word: it was rather the sure self-possession of a woman of the world which was (she decided) the only reliable protection except money.

  Age is more important in women’s lives than in men. Here, then, are the dates. Renata Grayling, née Torrens, was born in 1904. She was fifteen in 1919, the first year of peace. She was twenty when she married Grayling. She was thirty-five when she went to Paris with Hugh Rolandson, probably as beautiful as she ever would be (which was, at the least, exceedingly good-looking), full of vigour and ambition, but not with the future before her. She was thirty-eight when her husband died. Nearly forty.

  All through her life, she had concentrated her attention, successfully, on controlling herself, on being (as she phrased it to herself) in the driving seat of herself. Only in Paris had it seemed, for a minute, as if the car would run away with the driver; and that would be terrifying. For all her life had enforced on her the moral that “They”—the outside world—would oppress her if they could, if she let anyone but herself for one minute gain any control.

  Her father, Clarence Kirkpatrick Torrens, had been Senior Classical Master at a reputable boys’ school on the South Coast which was already in 1904 at the beginning of slow decline. Parents even then were wondering whether they were really wise to send their boys to be flogged by Mr. Torrens and taught Latin and Greek and very little else; in the years in which Renata grew up more and more of them decided they were not. Mr. Torrens had never been a jovial man: the slow decay of his prospects and the death of his wife in 1909 made him finally into a morose one. His six children were named Alexander, Desiderius, and Augustine (the boys) and Alethea, Sophronia and Renata (the girls). It might have been conjectured from their names that he was a classical scholar, and a second deduction could have been that he was High Church. In fact, he had not taken his religion seriously until shortly before the birth of Renata: he then became consciously an Anglican (he had been nominally one all his life) and proceeded slowly but steadily towards Roman Catholicism. Shortly after his wife’s death he became convinced that he ought to have been a priest, and celibate. He found in this belief a consolation for his worldly ill-success; but at the same time the sight of his children became an offence to him. They were present reminders that he was not a priest, that even if his convictions did, as they intermittently threatened to, carry him into the Roman Church, it would have to be at the cost of repudiating his whole past life, or of remaining a layman.

  He treated his family, as he believed, with exact justice. He did not reflect on any need they might have for the affection their mother would have shown them, or on his possible duty to replace her. He showed them the way to the love of God, which was greater than any mortal love, by means of morning and evening prayers; he disciplined them for untruthfulness, uncleanliness, or noise; for the rest, he treated them exactly as he did his pupils, without favouritism of any kind. That, incidentally included punishing them not infrequently in the somewhat indecent manner common in boys’ schools of the last generation. He made, in pursuance of his principle of fairness, no difference between the sexes. There is nothing like intermittent beating on the bare posteriors in adolescence to encourage in after life an almost morbid determination to keep one’s life wholly private, and to forbid others even the most indirect control or the most innocent and emotional rights.

  Renata was not worse treated than her brothers and sisters, but she was ill-served by her age. She was thirteen and fourteen in the last two years of the first world war: that is to say, like most English children, she suffered from a slight lack of sugar and meat and a grave lack of fats in 1917, intensified in 1918. This left a marked effect on her physique—she was pallid, leggy, spotty, and underweight. She wanted to be called “Diane,” because of a picture entitled Diane de Poitiers in her father’s encyclopaedia, but the family did not encourage romantic dreaming. Her brothers called her Skinny and told her the only place she had any fat was on her bottom. They could be excused: she was not pretty, her brown hair was sparse and done in two plaits, she was gauche and ill-mannered.

  Her emancipation was by no act of her own. The very day after her decision already mentioned to cultivate poise and self-adequacy, her father spanked her quite smartly with the study door wide open. The younger children laughed, with the treachery of their kind, and tears and humiliation were all her lot. It was an event which was repeated more than once, even after her fifteenth birthday: twenty years later she had not quite forgotten the sensation. One July evening in 1919, her father, finding some fault with her and Desiderius, her seventeen-year-old brother, strapped her moderately severely—enough to reduce her to tears—and then turned to her brother.

  Desiderius, watching his sister’s ignoble struggles, had made up his mind. He seized his father’s right hand and twisted it sharply, so that the strap fell out.

  “How dare you?” thundered the schoolmaster.

  Desiderius’ answer was to twist his father’s arm in the way he had learnt at school. He discovered his muscles were better than the older man’s: he nearly twisted his father to his knees.

  “If you ever try to touch me again, I’ll break your arm,” he said.

  The two glared at each other. After a minute the father walked away.

  “And leave the kid
alone too,” called Desiderius after him, with lordly generosity.

  §

  There can have been fewer young women of eighteen more unfit to take care of themselves than Renata Torrens in 1920. Her father never attempted to reassert himself after his defeat by Desiderius, even though his son left the house three months later. He withdrew himself, allowing her the minimum of pocket money, offering neither enmity nor affection, nor, for days on end, even conversation. He would not, if he could avoid it, speak to her or to any of his children. He expected of her, as his financial circumstances declined, more domestic duties, which she fulfilled fairly adequately. She was not well clothed, but gained considerable skill in making a good show from poor materials. She still regarded herself humbly as an ugly girl, the automatic derision of her family preventing her knowing that she was developing a brown-haired, pale, slightly elfin beauty. She read all the modern books that she could get from the local library, indiscriminately but eagerly. She was not qualified for any work—not even as a shopgirl or a typist—and her acquaintances in the High School she had just left were silly. It was an especial misfortune that not one of her friends’ mothers took an interest in the lonely girl.

  She was in consequence, as Brandon Lee told his friends, a pushover. He seduced her, with an ease that astonished himself, on a July afternoon. She had been flattered and surprised at the short but enthusiastic court paid to her by one who was incontestably the beau of the town. He had been a pupil at her father’s school, and even there had been adored by his juniors of both sexes (including herself), and by at least one indiscreet senior, wife of one of the staff. That he should have picked her out from among the girls of their acquaintance, even for a week, astonished her. She walked proudly with him along the esplanade, dressed in a blue coat and skirt, which she had herself made over into a well-fitting garment, hands thrust clenched into its pockets, swinging along with a free long stride, a wild surmise forming in her mind. Perhaps she was not the ugly duckling she had been; perhaps others than the great Brandon could see beauty in her. When, after scarcely a week, he claimed, and with smooth efficiency took, complete intimacy, she made no resistance. She was not, yet, sufficiently proud to do so; and in any case she wanted to lose her ignorance. He reassured her against possible consequences and called her “my sweet Ipsithilla.” Not till she consulted her father’s Catullus at home did she discover that Ipsithilla was a cheap harlot, and that all she had immediately received from Brandon was an insult in Latin and some physical discomfort.