by Nina Bawden
We walked to the glass door and gave up our tickets. We climbed in the coach and I looked back at James through the rear window. Through the glass panel, he raised his hand in farewell.
We took our seats opposite a young French boy and an elderly man. They both stared at Maggie, the boy with open interest and the old man with a sideways, avid glint. She did not seem to notice them. The plane taxied to the end of the runway, turned and paused, quivering, as if gathering strength. Then it accelerated faster and faster, with a little bump we were airborne. Maggie turned from the window, pale and breathless.
“Isn’t it wonderful? To be in the air.…” She looked at me secretively, as if we were conspirators.
“We’re safe now, aren’t we? From Ann and Daddy and Uncle Cyril and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.…”
A moment later I told myself it was not to be taken seriously, although I was not sure whether she had smiled as she spoke or a few seconds later in response to the surprise on my face. But certainly she smiled, with a delightful, sly air of mockery as if she knew it was a childish joke between us, and no more. And yet it left a chill, a mere brush of alarm, as delicate as a sudden soft wind on a hot summer’s evening.
I turned to her to ask her what she meant, to have it out. A little plain speaking could disperse the shadow or, at least, we could bear it together. But her face reflected only simple disappointment.
“Oh, Harriet,” she said, “it’s so cloudy. We shan’t be able to see anything at all.”
Chapter Ten
At first the days of our holiday seemed to stretch endlessly before me. I was alone and free, I had a sudden exuberant sense of safety. But by the end of the first week I knew the security was false, the time that remained would slip through my fingers like quicksilver, I would have to go home.
Throughout the long, bright day, it was easy to be brave; if fear was there, it trod softly at my heels, a gentle and diffident companion. Only at night, alone, I was forced to recognise its face.
If I slept at all, it was restlessly with bad dreams in which I seemed to be so nearly awake that I was always surprised to find that I could not remember them in daylight. I came to know my room as intimately as my own face, every damp patch in the faded, flowered wallpaper, every lump in the sagging, double bed. The cracks on the ceiling formed into shapes, contours as on a map. There were mountains and valleys, roads and lakes. I knew to an inch the place where the first sunlight would fall on the shabby floor and the time it took for the shaft to lengthen across the shaky table at the foot of the bed.
The moon was full and at night the room was always silver grey and ghostly, never dark. Once I drew the curtains, but they were thick and heavy and the blackness in the room was so complete and suffocating that I could feel it pressing me down into the bed. I stumbled to the window in a panic and looped the curtains back with their soiled gilt tassels. The material rasped against my fingers, it smelt of garlic and dust.
Opposite the window of my room was the back entrance to the Crillon; the hotel dustbins were emptied at four o’clock in the morning with a shattering sound of metal lids hurled to the pavement. The proprietor said that the dustmen were Communists and the noise they made when people were asleep their effective weapon in the cold war. I welcomed their angry presence as a sign that the night was almost over; they were followed by the early traffic and the welcome day.
Maggie had a room next to mine; on the other side there was a man whose morning habits I learned in every detail. He rose early; released from his weight, the bedsprings twanged loudly. He snorted into the wash-basin, coughing and hawking. Each time he rinsed himself the water gurgled in the waste pipe of my bidet. Then he blew his nose savagely and spat. After he had drank his coffee he belched ferociously. I imagined him as a powerful, swarthy man with a great deal of hair on his body. A labourer of some kind—the hotel was a cheap one and had a number of residents—who had been used to washing himself under a country pump, sluicing the water generously over his head and body. I saw him on our last day; we came out of our rooms at the same time. He was thin and slightly built, a clerk, perhaps, with an air of nervous gentility. His face was pinched and pale, rimless glasses framed his light, shy eyes. He glanced at me briefly and delicately, and then minced down the stairs with a kind of prudish femininity, like a poodle.
During the day the April sun burned down on the glittering city; the air was golden, astonishingly clear. I had been unprepared for so much beauty, so much light, but it gave me no particular pleasure. I saw the loveliness of trees and stone flatly and dully, without feeling. The hours measured a series of feverish duties, there was so much to be seen to, so much to be done. I felt guilty if we rested too long at a café. I flung myself into a round of sightseeing.
Maggie accompanied me passively. She was good and docile and showed herself to be more thoughtful than she had ever been before. She would ask me if I were tired, insist on carrying my bag, until I became almost embarrassed by her concern for my comfort. She responded to nothing. Surrounded by beauty and art in the grand manner, she was quite untouched by it. She did not simulate pleasure, she felt nothing. With reverent Americans in sunglasses, we trailed through the sunless marble of the Louvre. She walked beside me, stopped when I stopped. Politely she gazed upon the memorials to the dead. Faced by the high, incredible windows of the Sainte Chapelle, she said that they were pretty. It was her only comment, delivered in her light, breathless voice, her head a little on one side.
In the end we began to spend some of the day apart. The arrangement suited her and seemed to give her confidence. She spoke French quite well although, while we were together, she would never do so. When we met she always looked well and gay; if I had any doubts about leaving her alone in a strange city, they were dispelled by the air of proud competence. If sometimes she seemed secretive about what she had been doing, I told myself that it was only because she was shy and not used to talking about herself. She had a street map, sometimes she walked, she said, and stopped at cafés to drink Perrier. Occasionally she talked to people.
“Should you do that?” I asked doubtfully, and she laughed.
“Only the respectable ones.” Her expression was frank and merry, I was ashamed of my cautiousness and did not question her again.
James wrote regularly, long, stilted letters that told me nothing. Each letter contained a serious and detailed summary of the television programmes. He did not say that he missed me. One day he enclosed a note from Ann. She hoped I was well and looking after myself. She would have written before but Maud was in bed with a sprained ankle so she had very little free time. The letter was typewritten but the address was printed in small neat letters. They were quite unlike those of the vindictive messages I had received, nor did they look as if she had taken any particular care to disguise her normal hand. I had been so sure that Ann had written me the anonymous letters, I had put them out of my mind as the spiteful outpourings of a frustrated woman with a grudge against James, rather than against me. Now, I saw how stupidly I had deceived myself. There was someone who hated me and wished me ill. I put Ann’s letter into my handbag. The day had suddenly grown cold.
Maggie was not at the café when I arrived. I waited for her a little while and then I walked into the Tuileries. I stood above the gardens, on the gravelled ramp that stretches towards the Place de la Concorde. It was very hot, I remember, colours and impressions were sharp and violent. There was green grass, grey dust, white sun, white diamond glints on the water and the white sails of toy boats. Beyond the gardens, the sun beat on the moving traffic in the square, reflecting in a thousand points of hard brilliance that hurt the eye.
I stood at the top of the steps. Beside me, two Englishwomen sat in spindly chairs.
One of them said, “She’s had two operations. Now she’s got to have a third.”
Then I saw Maggie. She was standing by one of the statues of Neptune, talking to a man. She was wearing a blue, linen dress and her head was bare. The
man was young, at least he looked young from the way he stood and the clothes he wore, grey slacks and a bright shirt open at the neck. Even from this distance, I could tell they were not strangers, there was no shyness, no hesitation between them. Maggie put up her hand to shield her face from a sudden spurt of dust, a small wind that whirled and dropped. The man laughed and wiped her face with his handkerchief. Then she glanced at her wrist and they walked away from the statue, towards the ramp. As they came nearer I could see that the man was good-looking in a swarthy way; with one hand he held Maggie’s elbow and his fingers were dark against her white skin. He said something to her and she swayed towards him, laughing. They looked very young and happy and alive.
I did not want them to see me. I went back to the café, ordered a Pernod and waited for her.
She came a few minutes later, running, her light hair loose about her face. She sank into a chair and fanned herself with her hand.
“Phew, it’s hot.”
I ordered her drink and asked her if she had had a good morning. She said yes, she had been sitting in the gardens, watching the children. There had been a man with a big bunch of coloured balloons. They weren’t ordinary balloons, she thought they were filled with some kind of gas. A baby boy had carried one as big as himself. He had looked so proud and so sweet. She smiled at me with happy innocence.
When I suggested we should go to Montmartre for lunch, her smile faltered for a fraction of a second.
“Won’t it take a long time to get there?”
“Does it matter? We have all the time in the world.”
“Oh!” She looked, frowning, at her lap.
I pressed the point home. “We shan’t be back till the late afternoon. Was there anything else you wanted to do?”
“Oh, no.” She smiled straight at me and sipped her Perrier.
We walked round the Place du Tertre, choosing our café. The waiters touted for custom as we passed; it was too early in the season for the tables to be full. Above us, the Sacre Cœur swelled against the shimmering sky, white, Eastern, splendidly vulgar. We sat at a table beneath a pink and white umbrella, the paper covers flapped on the tables. The waiter brought us white wine and trout. There was a pair of middle-aged lovers at an adjacent table. The woman was big, plump and smiling, brown eyes shone like candles in her golden face. The man was commonplace, in his face you saw the ghost of eager, gifted youth, narrowed down now into mediocrity. He looked successful and well to do, the lines round his eyes were ironed smooth by content. They held hands and toasted each other with the dark wine; in this brief, gilded moment no one else existed for them.
Watching them, I felt isolated and dull and envious. This was a tourist restaurant and the food was dull.; I picked a little flesh off my trout and left the rest at the side of my plate.
A man moved between our table and the lovers. He was carrying a sketching block. He spoke too quickly for me to catch what he was saying, but I thought he was offering to draw a picture of the woman. She laughed, showing white teeth, and shook her head. The man shrugged his shoulders in amused dismay and said something to the artist. They both laughed indulgently and the artist wandered away between the tables. Something about the wide, stocky shoulders and the square back to the head produced a prickle of recognition, then Maggie said that she would like some cheese and, trying to catch the waiter’s eye, I lost sight of him.
He came back about five minutes later, he stood by the table and spoke before I knew he was there.
“Well, Mrs. Random, you’re a long, long way from home.”
The words were said nervously and with a kind of false emphasis as if he had rehearsed the simple speech until it meant nothing at all. His pale eyes looked enormous behind the distorting lenses, his smile was as shy and sweet as I remembered it to be. He was uglier than I remembered but it was an appealing ugliness, the crushed, defenceless face of a bulldog.
I asked him what he was doing and he looked at his sketching block with an embarrassed grin.
“It’s a hobby. Not entirely, of course, because it pays its way. Paris is expensive. I’m always meaning to go somewhere more suited to my station—Margate, perhaps—but I never do.”
“Or Montgomeryshire,” I said, and he blushed to the roots of his hair.
I remembered Maggie and asked him hastily if he knew Paris well.
“As well as I know anywhere. My mother was a Frenchwoman. We lived in Birmingham all my childhood but she never liked it. Disliking England was a religion with her. She refused to speak English as a protest. She was the stuff of which martyrs are made. After the war she came back to Paris. She had talked of nothing else for years, and when she finally got here she was miserable. She was like someone who had lost her faith. She couldn’t stand having to like living in France. So after a bit she began to speak English and to hate the French. She died happy.”
We laughed. Maggie looked at us both blankly and smiled politely. Ross asked her if she were enjoying Paris and she said yes, thank you, like a good child. To please her, he drew her picture. He sketched roughly in charcoal, catching the odd set of her eyes and her fragile beauty with more talent than I had expected. He was aware of my surprise and I think it embarrassed him.
I forget what we talked about. I know that, at first, he behaved with less assurance than he had done at our first meeting, feeling his way, perhaps, in a personal relationship that was more delicately balanced than a professional one. He tried rather too hard to be amusing; I think he must have always felt that he must make up somehow for his unattractiveness, pay his way, as it were, by clever clowning. He asked us if we would have dinner with him that evening; he did so hesitantly, as if afraid of a rebuff.
It made me feel protective. I said, “We’d love to. Wouldn’t we, Maggie?”
She blinked at me. “Oh, yes.” She had only hesitated for a moment. She had talked very little, sitting silently at the table she had sipped her wine and occasionally smiled. At no point had she entered into the conversation in any very real sense; if I had not been so used to her air of detachment, I might have thought she was sulking. I noticed that once or twice Ross looked at her in a puzzled way, and after we had left the café and she was walking ahead of us down the steep street, he said:
“You treat her as if she were a child. How old is she?”
“Sixteen. She’s young for her age.”
“She looks older.” He glanced at me, the sun reflecting on his glasses so that I could not see the expression in his eyes. “Is she always so disassociated?”
I thought it an odd word to use. “I’m not quite sure what you mean. I don’t think so. She’s been alone a good deal. Like most young girls she’s imaginative and shy. She lives inwardly rather more than most.”
He grinned. “I wasn’t criticising. Do you always fly to her defence so hastily? You sounded quite angry.”
Suddenly I was disquieted, I did not know why. I said uneasily, “There are two kinds of girls, surely? The ones that are eager and bouncing and the ones who sit and dream dreams.”
He said softly, “To some people the things that might happen are as real as the things that do happen. Is she like that, do you think?”
I said in an affronted way, “I have really no idea.” I wasn’t sure why I did not want to discuss her; perhaps it was simply that I felt it was disloyal. But I was troubled, both then and later, by my reluctance as if it arose from a cause which I did not wish brought out into the open, something which, once admitted to, would have to be faced.
Because I did not want to talk about Maggie, I accused him openly, “Why didn’t you tell me that you knew Archie and that you were staying with his aunt?”
“Because you would never have let me in. And I wasn’t just prying, I was sent by my editor though I didn’t relish the job.” He glanced at me sideways. “You knew I’d not been working long, didn’t you? I’d never met your husband, but I had to have some kind of introduction. Anyway, I did my bit and then I told the paper there w
as nothing doing. But it was the beginning of my holiday so I thought I might as well stay with the Dennisons for a while.”
“It was very dishonest,” I said priggishly. Then curiosity overcame me and I asked, “What’s he like? Archie, I mean?”
He looked abashed. “Not a bad chap. We were at Oxford together. He went down in his second year—after he got his name in the papers for being a bad boy.” He paused and said slowly, “I never understood his part in the business at all.”
“I should have thought it was simple.”
“Simple? Oh, no. You see, he’s the sort of chap who’d have talked about it. Particularly after the whole thing had split wide open. Instead, he kept as tight as an oyster. And why? There was nothing to hide any longer. It wasn’t as if we were just acquaintances, I was his friend. He’d always treated me as a guide and mentor.” He smiled sheepishly. “I liked that. He was everything that I wasn’t, you see, handsome and popular—clever enough, too, though not obstructively so—destined, you’d have thought, to be enormously successful, a young man of promise. I’d always been flattered because he sought me out and seemed to look up to me, value my advice. I must admit when this business blew up I’d looked forward to long cosy chats about it. I was even excited, in a nasty kind of way, because it wasn’t the sort of thing that could ever have happened to me. But he said nothing. He came to stay with me for a bit when he knew he couldn’t go back to Oxford, and he never said a word. And I got the feeling that there was more behind his silence than just the ordinary feelings, guilt and remorse. He’d been shocked, badly shocked, and he wasn’t the sort of person who’d have been shocked by the simple facts of the situation, he’s too simple, not imaginative enough. If it was true, as it seemed it was in the beginning, that his mistress had died because of him, he’d have talked himself silly, blamed himself and justified himself in the same breath. He’d have been horrified, but the horror wouldn’t have lasted long. I got the feeling, after I’d been with him for a while, that there was much more to the thing than appeared on the surface, that he’d found himself up against something that he couldn’t cope with, couldn’t put into words.” He grinned at me. “He has a very limited vocabulary.”