by James Wilson
It didn’t take long for us to stumble on what we were looking for: a small, snug, softly lit restaurant in one of the streets leading inland from the casino. It was still early, and the only other customer was a lone man with a fierce moustache who sat half lost in shadow next to the fireplace.
A waiter bustled to the door to greet us, and – with a kind of grave but teasing courtliness that made me think he must have taken us for a honeymooning couple – led us to a table by the window. It might just have been a coincidence, but I couldn’t help observing that, as we settled ourselves, and I offered her my packet of Players, Alice Dangerfield slipped her left hand under the table before taking the cigarette with her right – as if she had noticed the fellow’s manner, too, and wanted to preserve the illusion that we were married by concealing her naked ring-finger.
‘Monsieur dame, can I bring you something to drink?’
‘Perhaps just some wine with our meal?’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Dangerfield. ‘That would be nice.’
He nodded. ‘I will bring the menus.’
Before he left, he leaned forward to light our cigarettes, dropping the matchbox on the table to coax the flame into life with his cupped hands. As he did so, Miss Dangerfield’s face was thrown suddenly into sharp relief. I could not imagine how I had failed to see her before – the startling brilliance of her amber-flecked eyes, and the way her cheek glowed as if there were fire trapped under the skin, like a burning phoenix inside its egg. Had my dismay, the first time we had met, at discovering that she was not Mary Wilson, and my irritation and embarrassment at what she asked me to do, simply blinded me to her? Or had I merely assumed that I should never experience again the millrace of feelings that was all at once tumbling through me as I watched her across the table?
I took a deep breath, and prepared to try to navigate my way out of danger.
‘So,’ I said, in what I hoped was a tone of polite interest, ‘what were you doing in Paris?’
‘Oh, I had come to see Gertrude Stein.’ The Stein was on a rising note, suggesting that I ought to recognize it.
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, I dare say I should know who she is, but I don’t.’
She laughed. ‘Well, I can only say I wish I didn’t, either.’
I unfolded my napkin as carelessly as I could, and wafted it debonairly on to my knees.
‘It wasn’t a success, then?’
She shook her head.
‘She’s not French, though, is she, with a name like that? American, I take it? Or –?’
She nodded. ‘But one of those Americans who don’t like America very much. She was always trying to make me feel like an ignorant little country girl. You know, talking about writers and painters I’d never heard of. Or pretending to be surprised that I didn’t know what Cubism was.’
The waiter reappeared with the menus, and hovered nearby as we scanned them. When we had ordered, I said:
‘And what exactly is Cubism?’
She laughed again. ‘Oh, that makes me feel so much better!’ She cast around, like a magician at a children’s party looking for a watch or a trinket he can make vanish into thin air. ‘Ah,’ she said, picking up the waiter’s matchbox and rattling it. ‘Do you think I could have this?’
‘Why?’ I said, nodding at her burning cigarette.
‘It’s the box itself I need.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, we can always offer to pay for it, I suppose.’
She slipped out the tray of matches and set it down. Then she split open the cardboard cover, unfolded it, and laid it flat on the table. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Do that to a human head, and you’ve got Cubism.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘I was shown something of the kind in Paris.’ And then, seeing a tiny spasm of disappointment in her face: ‘Though I haven’t a clue what the point of it was. Can you enlighten me?’
‘Miss Stein did try to explain to me. And I … well, I think I can understand it, in a way. The object is to show several different aspects of something at the same time. So when you look at it, you’re not just seeing what you expect to see. You’re taken by surprise, and forced to examine the thing afresh, perhaps even from quite contradictory points of view. And that makes you really think about it.’
It took me a few seconds to assimilate this idea. And when I had, finally, the first thing that came into my mind, for some reason, was Mme. Bournisien, and how poorly the priest’s and Françoise Revel’s snap-shots of her character had prepared me for the reality.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can see that makes a certain sense, though I should never have thought of it myself, if you hadn’t told me.’
She nodded. ‘And I wouldn’t have thought of it, if Miss Stein hadn’t told me. It’s the future, she says. Not just of painting, but of everything – poetry, novels –’
She broke off as the waiter arrived with our wine. While he was opening it I showed him the flattened carcass of his matchbox.
‘We must apologize,’ I said. ‘But it was sacrificed on the altar of art.’
He waved his hand and made a contemptuous phhh, as if it were too trivial to mention.
‘Thank you,’ I said – and the next instant found myself, without quite knowing why, slipping the thing into my pocket.
‘So are we to expect a Cubist Mr. Largo Frog one day?’ she asked.
‘Possibly. But the only way to do it would be to have him run over by a motor-car.’
She flinched. ‘Oh, please! Don’t!’ She was quiet for a moment, fingering the stem of her glass. Then she seemed to shake off her melancholy, and looked up with a smile.
‘Anyway,’ she said, toasting me. ‘Thank you. Your very very good –’
I raised my glass in return. ‘And yours.’
‘This really is such a treat for me,’ she said.
I almost said for me, too, but managed to stop myself. Instead I murmured:
‘Well, I’m delighted. But still I’m sorry to hear you’ve been having such a rotten time of it.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say rotten, exactly. Just … Just not quite what I expected, I suppose.’
‘How was Mr. H. G. Wells?’
She flushed and her eyes widened. ‘Why do you ask about him all of a sudden?’
‘Oh, for no particular reason.’
‘Did he say something?’
I laughed. ‘No. Or not to me, at any rate. I’ve never met the man. His was more or less the only name on your list I knew, if you want the truth.’
‘Oh.’ She slackened, like a sail that’s lost the wind.
‘Why? What did he do?’
‘He …’ She drew in her breath, and started fiddling with her glass again. ‘He didn’t seem much interested in literature, to my surprise. Instead he gave me what amounted to a lecture on eugenics, and the need for the Anglo-American stock of my country to renew itself before it’s too late.’ She paused a moment, glanced over her shoulder, as if she imagined the place might be thronged with eavesdroppers, then went on in a half-whisper: ‘American gentlemen, I know, are meant to be freer than the English kind, but no American I ever met would have dared to touch me where he did.’
‘Really?’
She nodded, and tapped her haunch with one finger.
‘Good God!’
‘It was a purely scientific investigation, you understand. To discover whether or not I have good child-bearing hips.’
I had to bite my thumb to keep myself from bursting out laughing.
‘Apparently I do, you’ll be glad to hear. And I think he’d have been only too happy to prove it there and then, if I’d let him.’
I could contain myself no longer. ‘Oh, do forgive me,’ I said. ‘It’s just so … so … oh …’
‘I know. It’s totally outrageous, isn’t it?’ She was laughing too, now, but more with embarrassment than mirth. ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t know why I just told you that. I haven’t mentioned it to a single other living soul.’
‘No,’ I sa
id. ‘I’m sure you haven’t. But don’t worry: I’ve heard worse things.’
She shook her head in disbelief – though whether at what I had said, or at her own audacity, I couldn’t tell – then stopped abruptly as the waiter materialized with our soup. She waited until he had gone again, before gratefully seizing the opportunity to change the subject.
‘And what about you?’ she said. ‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here?’
I smiled, trying to make light of it. ‘No, I haven’t, have I?’
She gave me a moment to elaborate. When I didn’t, she said softly:
‘Is it something very shaming, then? More shaming than being touched on the you-know-what by H. G. Wells?’
I laughed. ‘I hope not. Just a small matter of private business, that’s all.’
‘Ah.’
‘Anyway, what about the other authors you went to see? They didn’t all behave as disgracefully as he did, I hope?’
‘No.’ She took a sip of wine, watching me all the while, with an odd, contradictory expression that seemed both to reproach me for having evaded her question, and to implore me to trust her as she had trusted me.
‘That’s good,’ I said. But it had no more effect than a pebble kicked into the abyss. She did not even dignify it with a nod, but simply went on looking at me.
I tried to swallow, but the saliva had dried in my mouth. She seemed, simultaneously, unsettlingly close, and enormously far away. I suddenly had the strange sense that for days, perhaps weeks, without even being conscious of it, I had been living in utter darkness. Mme. Bournisien had opened a tiny chink, allowing in just enough light for me to glimpse the barn-like extent of the place in which I had unknowingly imprisoned myself. And now Miss Dangerfield stood outside, offering to share my confinement with me if I would only unbar the door and let her in.
‘Why will you not tell me?’ she said suddenly, putting her head to one side and smiling at me.
‘What?’
‘You know what.’ She darted out a hand and touched mine. ‘Does it concern a woman?’
‘Well, yes. Though not in the way I think you mean.’
‘In what way, then? I’m quite broad-minded, you know – and very discreet. I promise it’ll go no further.’
I longed to do it – to feel the immense release of unburdening myself to another human being. But suppose the weight of it was too much for her? What if, having heard me out, she concluded I was mad, and recoiled in disgust – leaving me more acutely alone than I had been before? Even more alarming still, in some ways, though less dispiriting: what if she accepted it? I had given Miss Robinson and Jessop edited versions of my story, and Enticknap rather more – but none of them had heard the entire thing. What would it be like to wake up in the morning, and go
to the window, and know that somewhere out there in the world I had a confidante? And not just any confidante, but a dizzyingly attractive young American woman, for whom my feelings seemed suddenly to have become dangerously complicated?
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a strange tale.’
‘I love tales. Especially yours.’
I smiled. ‘You may feel differently about this one.’
May rather than might: that was a slip. The wine and the warmth must be melting my resistance.
‘I’m sure I shan’t,’ she said.
‘There’s a complete absence of talking frogs and hares and enchanted woods, I’m afraid.’
She gave a quick shake of the head: it doesn’t matter.
‘Though there is … something.’
‘Mm?’
‘And it’s that something, frankly, that makes me so hesitant.’
‘Oh, you have to tell me now!’ she cried. And then, catching the imperiousness in her own voice, her new self hastily intervened. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry, of course you don’t have to. But I’d be so honoured if you would.’
I was undone.
‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘But only if you promise me one thing. If you find yourself getting weary, or thinking this man is a lunatic, and I don’t want to listen to any more of his ravings, you are to tell me at once, and I’ll stop.’
‘All right. I promise.’
So I told her. To begin with, fearing I might be tiring or repelling her, I was careful to pace myself, pausing every five minutes or so to ask her about her food, or make some hushed comment about the waiter. But these interruptions always seemed to frustrate her, and she would invariably draw me back again by nodding impatiently and muttering go on, go on – with the result that I soon lost the queasy feeling that I was taking out a basketful of soiled linen and exposing it to the gaze of a complete stranger, and found myself becoming more and more expansive. Only when I got to my second meeting with Mary Wilson did I slow down again for a moment, like an engine-driver approaching a particularly tricky stretch of track. But – though she put a hand to her mouth and gasped with astonishment – even the fantastic idea of the still-born child having found its way inside my head did not make Miss Dangerfield instinctively shrink from me, or dissolve into embarrassed sniggers. Instead, the next second she impulsively reached out and touched me again, and – her eyes full of tears – murmured:
‘Oh, my goodness!’
After that, I held back nothing – not even my suspicions about Dolgelly, or my wife’s request for a separation, or Dr. Enticknap’s needling questions about the state of my marriage, and his unsettling theory as to the cause of my disturbance. I did not finish, finally, until we had eaten the last of our tarte tatin, and the waiter had cleared away the plates and brought coffee. My throat was so sore from the talking that the first gulp I took made me wince.
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then I said:
‘Well?’
She shook her head, as if she were still trying to take in everything I had said, and didn’t know what she made of it yet.
‘You deserve a medal,’ I said. ‘Please forgive me. I have never talked so much in my entire life.’
‘No, no, not at all. I’m grateful to you. Truly.’
‘What, for boring you silly?’
She smiled. ‘I wasn’t bored. Not for a moment. It was fascinating.’
She said it pleasantly enough, but there was an unmistakable change in her manner. I couldn’t have defined it – she didn’t seem angry, exactly, or repelled, or disapproving – but the effect was as palpable as the sudden disappearance of the sun behind a cloud.
‘You don’t think I’m insane, at least?’ I said.
‘Insane people drool and slaver, don’t they? And I don’t see you drooling and slavering.’
I hesitated a second. Then, ashamed of my own nakedness, I said:
‘What do you think, then?’
‘I think you’re an exceptionally kind man.’
‘Just rather misguided.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No. But it’s obviously what you mean.’
She reddened, and drew in her breath sharply.
‘I’m sorry, but you’ve no right to put words into my mouth like that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. You made it pretty clear, when we met before, how you thought I ought to be spending my time, so it was quite unreasonable of me to expect you to understand why I decided to devote myself to this instead. I should have stood firm, and not told you about it. All I’ve done by giving in, I’m afraid, is spoil what ought to have been a lovely evening, and place you in an impossible position.’
‘I don’t know how I gave you that impression,’ she said quietly, shaking her head in wonderment at my obtuseness. ‘It simply isn’t true. But …’ She crumpled her napkin and dropped it on to the table. ‘Excuse me, I have to go wash my hands.’
I felt humiliatingly close to crying. When she had left, in an effort to preserve the appearance of normality, I summoned the waiter as nonchalantly as I could, and asked for the bill.
But the sudden
cooling of our relations had evidently not gone unnoticed. While I was paying, the man who had been sitting in the corner when we arrived got up and sauntered towards the door. As he passed my table, he leaned over and murmured:
‘Your wife is very beautiful, monsieur. But be careful. If you make her unhappy, she will look for consolation elsewhere. And she will have no difficulty finding it.’
*
When Miss Dangerfield returned, she did not sit down, but hovered by her chair, saying she was tired and would like to go back to the Grand Hôtel.
‘All right,’ I said, signalling for our coats. ‘I’ll walk with you.’
She did not refuse, but neither did she take my arm again. On the way, I tried several times to coax her into conversation, but it was useless as struggling to re-light a fire with wet tinder. Every time I asked a question or made an observation she would reply with one or two words, before lapsing back into silence.
And then, when we reached the hotel entrance, she surprised me again. As I held out my hand, preparing to say goodbye, she snatched it suddenly, drew herself towards me, and – to my utter amazement – kissed me on the mouth.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And I am your friend, whatever you may think. Don’t forget I said so.’
*
I plodded back to the auberge, feeling as knocked-off-balance and removed from myself as if I’d had a blow to the head. My room was simultaneously frowsty and cold, and permeated – like the rest of the place – with a heavy stench of garlic and drains so potent that it lay on my tongue like a coating of oil. I opened the window, hoping to let in some fresh air, but all I got was the same ubiquitous smell, laced with a faint tang of sea-salt, and the sour rotten-cabbage odour of the market.
I half-undressed, then lay down and folded the counterpane over myself. There was, I knew, no immediate prospect of sleep; so, rather than closing my eyes, I twined my fingers under my head, and stared up at the cracks and patches on the ceiling, which – in the dim glow of the street-lamps – looked as remote and mysterious as the surface of the moon.