Incidents in the Rue Laugier (26 page)

Her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, however, found her deeply abnormal. Polly Harrison, who had never taken to her, now disliked her more than she knew; Bibi, sent on reconnaissance missions to Tedworth Square, brought back stories of how she, with or without Jean Bell, had made helpful suggestions about voluntary work at the local hospital, or courses at the City Literary Institute (or a lover, thought Jean Bell), but had met with no response.

‘I asked her what she did with herself all day, and she said “I read,” ’ Bibi reported to her mother.

‘Well, I read, we all read,’ riposted Polly Harrison. ‘There’s no need to advertise the fact. Did you see Edward?’

‘I went past the shop, yes.’

‘Did he seem worried about her?’

‘No, why should he be? She’s all right. Just a bit odd, really.’

‘I’m afraid she has been a disappointment,’ said Polly Harrison, no more than echoing Maud’s first impression of her prospective mother-in-law. It occurred to neither Polly nor Bibi Harrison that Maud might have felt some disappointment on her own account. The Harrisons might even have appreciated some kind of argument or confrontation, as irrational people not infrequently do. But no one could fault Maud’s good breeding, an additional cause of irritation. Mrs Harrison thought Maud’s habitual calm ‘put on’, but was slightly afraid of her. For this reason her visits to London were announced with a full accompaniment of nervous symptoms, which were only allayed by a long tête-à-tête with her son over lunch, so that too little time was left for a visit to Tedworth Square. She would consent to drink a cup of tea with Maud, her eyes roving round the flat for signs of neglect. When she could find none she would return Maud’s polite enquiries with an aggressive account of how well liked she was by her friends and neighbours.

‘They often ask after you, Maud: we don’t see you, do we? That has caused some surprise, I must say. Still, I’m not one to interfere. I thought Edward was looking rather thin, by the way. I worry,’ she added, in a tone which adroitly matched concern for her son with regard for her own sensitivity. Maud said nothing, remembering how easily Polly Harrison was moved to tears. Even now the handkerchief was coming out. ‘I don’t say I’m lonely, Maud; I’ve got too many friends for that. It’s just that I’m a worrier; it’s my nature. I wish Edward lived nearer. If something goes wrong in the house it’s not very nice for a woman on her own to ask for help. Only the other day I had to ask one of Bibi’s friends to replace a washer in the kitchen.’ The voice was now heartbroken. ‘I think she’s going to get engaged, by the way. Not that I’m keen on seeing her go. I shall be all on my own then. Well, I’d better be on
my way, I suppose. Tell Edward to give me a ring tonight, would you?’

‘You know I don’t have to tell him.’

‘Yes, well, I’m glad he still remembers his mother.’

When she had gone, leaving behind a disturbed scent of dislike and unease, which managed to penetrate the superficial layer of Arpège which they had given her the previous Christmas, Maud walked to her window and once again surveyed the leafless trees in the square, noted that her downstairs neighbour, the woman with the dog, was on her third outing of the day, and saw the sun struggling through the ever present mist only as a source of cold, for all its briefly combustible appearance in the lightless sky. She reflected, as she always did, that not once during their meeting had any enquiry been made as to her own well-being. This was now standard procedure, the manner in which Polly Harrison chose to convey her resentment. Maud’s feelings were no longer hurt. She acknowledged the fact that she had failed to give satisfaction, but she also acknowledged the fact that to give satisfaction was to surrender her own life and allow herself to be remade in Polly Harrison’s image. This she had never had any intention of doing. There was a slight additional loneliness in her increasing isolation from everyone but her husband, but her own calm good sense was there to remind her that she was not at home, that she had never expected to be at home, and that those who did not rely on their inner resources, as she had been obliged to do, were forever condemned to weep in other women’s drawing-rooms, or to complain into the ears of friends who might not be displeased at this evidence of dissatisfaction.

Maud presented no surface which was permeable to her mother-in-law’s attacks, to Bibi’s well-meaning exasperation. Her solution to her very great sadness, which was never apparent,
was, as always, to read. Here Edward was of very great help to her, continuing to find her books with women’s names as their titles. In this way she read not only
Anna Karenina
and
Mme Bovary
, once the subject of her half-forgotten studies, but
Manon Lescaut, Effi Briest
 … What she read confirmed her in her knowledge that love was a vital and terrible thing, that men and women die for it, that it is the lack of love that makes a woman desperate, but that the partners on whom she pins her hopes will not always meet her needs. Why should they? How could they? How could the conformist Vronsky take on a woman who had left her husband and child, or the seedy Rodolphe, who had never read a book in his life, understand Emma Bovary, whose notions of chivalry proceeded from a mind stuffed with romantic novels? The appalling lack of suitability in these pairings oppressed Maud, who wondered if all women suffered from this imbalance between their hopes and the reality they were forced to endure. It was all very well for Jean Bell to urge her to attend the lectures at the National Gallery (‘You might meet someone’), she knew, as if she had been unalterably programmed to do so, that it was her destiny to live with the reality of her situation and to keep a closely guarded secret the fact that she had once defied reality, that she knew the difference between acceptance and danger, and that even as she went about her ordinary everyday tasks she would be filled from time to time with the incandescence of a certain memory, and the momentary conviction—or was it merely hope?—that that memory was shared.

Therefore the realisation that she was pregnant was something of an irony, although the version of reality that the situation proposed was certainly an improvement. Edward’s delight, the welling of tears in his eyes, when she told him the news of her visit to the doctor, she privately dismissed as sentimental. She did not intend to be a sentimental mother; indeed
the pregnancy made her think more kindly of her own mother and less kindly of Polly Harrison, who, she suspected, would have preferred her to be barren, as she had for so long suspected she might be. It was immediately and mutually decided that they must move to a bigger flat. Edward made enquiries in the modern building on the other side of the square, saw what he wanted, and bought it immediately, without even a telephone call to Maud. Prospective fatherhood had given him an authority that had not been there before; to his wife he appeared bigger, weightier, more able to make decisions. Again they were lucky: the previous owner wanted to sell everything, so that they moved into what was virtually a furnished flat, bigger and more spacious than the flat they were leaving, with higher ceilings, taller windows, built-in bookshelves on either side of a marble fireplace. To Maud it did not appear to be comfortable; she regretted her
chaise-longue
, left behind because there was no room for it, and made her way instinctively to the sofa, flanked by two brass-stemmed lamps, which she thought would give a good light for reading.

There was one change: a very large double bed in the spacious and formal bedroom. Since the bed was weighty and had been obviously expensive, and since it came fully furnished with a white padded rococo headboard and a white quilted counterpane, they accepted their altered state and settled down together quite naturally. Edward thought he had never been happier, although, waking in the night and feeling Maud’s increasingly bulky body beside him, it did occur to him to regret the fact that his freedom was now truly gone, as were his dreams, that he would never again enjoy the sunlight in that remembered childhood garden, nor would he plan to travel the world, only to realise that he lacked the requisite courage. Now he too could look back selectively, recasting in his mind his solitary days in Paris, before the encounters which in their
mysterious way had brought him to this bed. In his mind’s eye he saw himself peering into a glass case in the Louvre at tiny secretive figures, saw the expression on his face as he gazed. He deplored his innocence at that time, but regretted it now that it had gone. Then Maud, who slept badly at this time, would turn over and lodge against him, and he would think how grateful he would have been for such an intimacy in the early days of their relationship, and how time occasionally respects one’s wishes, but always with a significant alteration in what it delivers.

After the birth, which was perfectly normal, Maud was ill, with an unspecified illness which lasted for some months and which left her significantly weakened for a long time after that. A nurse had to be engaged to look after the little girl, at whose sight Maud often wept, the irruption of strong feeling proving too much for her. The nurse, a girl called Eve, proved a godsend, not only to the child but to Maud as well, and indeed to Edward; the presence of a third person relieved them of their preoccupations and proved useful at dealing with the child’s respective grandmothers, who, on one fateful weekend, arrived simultaneously and gave conflicting orders. Polly Harrison was persuaded, with rather more tact than Maud could have managed, to retire, while Nadine was allowed to stay, but under strict supervision. This, oddly enough, she did not appear to mind, as long as she was allowed to watch, if not to touch, the baby. ‘Ah,’ she sighed, as she contemplated the dark head in the crook of Edward’s arm, ‘Ah.’ Eve judged her superior to Polly Harrison, whose dislike of Maud spilled over into dissatisfaction with the baby, whom she found too thin, too dark (though the darkness was Edward’s) and too placid. They could see that she did not know how to deal with these feelings, that her strongest desire was to distance herself from the whole event, and to blame Maud for the languid state into
which she had fallen, thereby laying up any future condemnation of the child’s behaviour at the mother’s door. ‘I don’t think your mother’s good for Maud,’ said Eve to Edward, and he was obliged to agree. His own mother-in-law, whom he had never liked, now appeared to him in a far more favourable light, as she sat, humble and attentive, in the bedroom they had made into a nursery. Maud deduced that throughout her own childhood, which she remembered as austere, all that her mother had lacked was a language. She lacked a language for endearments even now, but there was no mistaking the love in her eyes, or the eloquence of her sighs.

‘So that’s where you get the habit of sighing from,’ said Edward to Maud.

‘I never heard her sigh before,’ Maud replied. ‘But then I never saw her so moved.’

Nadine alone addressed the child as Françoise: to her parents she was always Maffy. She was a calm competent child who seemed to have her own development well in hand. Under Eve’s expert guidance she presented no difficulties in eating or sleeping: indeed she rapidly adapted to adult food, though she continued to have her meals in the room they designated as a playroom, although she was not much given to play, being of a staid disposition which took more readily to sensible walks, and eventually to school, which she attended early. Edward, in the strange awkward fits of exuberance which overcame him when his love for her could find no easy outlet, would sweep her into his arms and dance her round the room, singing, ‘You’re the tops, you’re the Coliseum,’ only to be immeasurably cast down when she wriggled free and stood within the protective circle of her mother’s arms, judging him with eyes that were disconcertingly like Maud’s own. Faced with what was palpably a rejection (or so it seemed to him) Edward tended to lose his head and accuse his wife of an
infidelity which was more imagined than real, but none the less powerful for that. And Maud said nothing to rebut his accusations, perhaps judging them well deserved, but more often so atrophied by her strange illness that she no longer knew whether or not she had truly merited them. Her thoughts these days were more on the level of dreams, reveries: she left Maffy to Eve, read her Proust, took her walks. Sometimes, when she turned the corner of Tedworth Square and met Eve and the child coming home from school, an inexpressible pang of joy overtook her and she would run forward, her arms wide open. And the little girl would run to her with equal joy, although quick to disengage herself and run back to Eve, to continue the conversation to which Maud was only occasionally admitted. Nevertheless, as they proceeded home to tea, she would consent to hold their hands, and be quite content with them both.

Maud persisted in her state of languor, which the doctor qualified as depression, for two or three years, although presenting few signs of illness. She performed her household duties as scrupulously as ever, providing excellent meals for the four of them, though she ate little herself. They were glad to keep Eve on as a safeguard, mainly to protect Maffy from her mother’s dreaminess, although the child accepted this as entirely natural, and would sometimes lean against her mother’s knee and turn the pages of her book, as if reading were her mother’s true and only occupation.

‘Depressed? What’s she got to be depressed about?’ Mrs Harrison would demand indignantly of her son. Privately she considered Maud to be mad. ‘After all, she never fitted in,’ she would say to those sympathetic friends of hers, for whom she now provided an agreeable serial story of her daughter-in-law’s inadequacies. ‘Pregnancy sometimes does that to a woman,’ they assured her, unwilling to let the delightful
subject drop. ‘The hormones, you know. Has she seen a gynaecologist?’

‘She only sees her own doctor. Not that he’s done any good.’

‘And I suppose the little girl will be coming down here for her holidays?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Harrison enthusiastically. To her own considerable shame she disliked the child. ‘But I shan’t have much time for her, now that I’ve got Bibi’s wedding to prepare.’ For Bibi was to marry a local dentist. Her wedding was the last occasion on which Maud accompanied her husband to Eastbourne. She wore a long flowered dress, which was judged inadequate, although her mother had sent it from France, and it became her wonderfully. To critical eyes, which had not seen her recently, she appeared neither older nor younger, and certainly not ill. It was when she escaped to the garden that lips were pursed and knowing glances were exchanged.