Providence (13 page)

‘Never,’ said Kitty, shocked. ‘You address them as
Monsieur
. And anyway, I doubt if there will be a porter. You will just have to manage as best you can.’ The French woman who had lamented her loss of lucidity looked at them with undisguised dismay. ‘But they are drunk,’ she hissed at Kitty.
‘Mais ce n’est pas permis. Elles ne savent pas se comporter dans le monde.’
Kitty stiffened slightly. ‘They are very young, Madame,’ she replied in English. The woman looked at her suspiciously, then turned away with a ruffled air.
‘Tout de même,’
she murmured. ‘Silly cow,’ remarked Clare, thus revealing herself as the trail blazer of the group. Hoots and shrieks of laughter began to reassert themselves as the girls, and Kitty, manoeuvred their luggage down the
gangplank, on to the platform, and into the waiting train. From time to time the cortège broke down, until at one point Clare and Angela collapsed on the platform, clinging to each other, helpless, until urged by Kitty to stagger the rest of the way. To their original bundles were now added carrier bags filled with bottles and cartons of cigarettes. Kitty herself was blamelessly neat.

Inside the train the girls fell instantly and unanimously asleep and thus did not see a tall sardonic looking man in an open-necked shirt peering in from the corridor. Kitty edged the door open and looked at him enquiringly. She felt responsible for the girls. ‘Pascoe,’ he announced, in a low and bitter voice. ‘Are they all here?’ She nodded. He nodded too, shut the door, and disappeared. Five minutes later he reappeared, opened the door, and said, ‘There is a buffet car at the other end. I think we both need a cup of coffee. They won’t wake up until we get to Paris,’ he added. ‘And then, God help me.’

‘Why should God help you?’ asked Kitty as they edged their way round a small metal table and sat down. ‘They seem rather nice.’

‘Because,’ he said, even more bitterly, ‘we are to spend the night in an hotel near the Gare du Nord. They will be trying to escape all night, to see the sights, as they call it. You can imagine how plentiful those are around the Gare du Nord. They will want night clubs and champagne and they will eat all the wrong things. And to think I might be walking in the Dolomites, as I originally planned.’ He sighed theatrically.

He had, Kitty decided, a Byronic head, a fact of which he was well aware, as he kept turning his head aside so as to present himself in three-quarter profile. He was remarkably handsome and she could understand why Clare was in love with him. She did not, however, rate
Clare’s chances very highly; Mr Pascoe seemed to have enough to do just to cope with himself.

‘You don’t look like a schoolmaster,’ she ventured to remark.

‘I have a bad leg,’ was his obscure reply. That is simply not true, thought Kitty. You read that in a novel about the First World War. She blushed slightly at this evidence of bad faith on her part.

‘Wouldn’t that have held you up in the Dolomites?’ she asked.

‘Not at all,’ he said, sharply. ‘If I don’t exercise, it gets very stiff. And all the exercise I shall get this holiday is watching tents being put up and dismantled.’ He shook his handsome head and looked so genuinely disgusted that Kitty felt a little sorry for him. The girls, after all, had been rather overpowering and she had only known them for the inside of a day. And there were the boys to consider, too.

‘Have you done this job for long?’ she asked.

‘Only for a couple of terms,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t do much of anything before that, apart from a bit of farming for my father. Then I got involved in a car smash and it set me back in all sorts of curious ways and the chap at the hospital was a friend of the head of this school and they wanted a temporary replacement so I let myself be persuaded. It’s been hell,’ he added simply. ‘I shall leave at the end of the year. With relief.’

So he really has got a bad leg, thought Kitty, with a sense of shame. And the chap at the hospital was evidently a doctor. Perhaps something did go rather wrong with Mr Pascoe.

‘I’m a teacher too,’ she said. ‘I quite like it.’

He took no notice of this. ‘The kids aren’t too bad,’ he said. ‘In fact I get on better with them than I do with the so-called adults.’

My dear, thought Kitty, you probably always will.

You have not looked at me once since we sat down. Which is a pity because you seem nice and interesting and you are extraordinarily good-looking and I think I might begin to enjoy your company very much. If only you weren’t so impossibly self-absorbed. A Romantic hero, she decided. And with the limp to go with it.

She said none of this but watched his sulky handsome face and the long fingers wrapping and unwrapping the same piece of sugar. As she was studying him – and he really was rather remarkable – he surprised her by raising his eyes and gazing at her critically. They both felt a slight sense of shock and continued to look at each other, with the blood rising in their cheeks, until, reluctantly, Mr Pascoe turned his eyes away and concentrated on wrapping his lump of sugar again.

After a moment he cleared his throat. ‘You would be doing me a service if you would have dinner with me tonight,’ he said, carelessly.

Kitty smiled. ‘With the girls?’ she asked.

‘After the girls are in bed,’ he replied. ‘I really cannot be responsible for them after that. I can’t lock them in, after all. And I can’t stand outside their rooms waiting to catch them.’

‘I wonder why they didn’t send a woman teacher,’ said Kitty.

‘They did, but she was called home suddenly. Her mother fell and broke a hip. Which sounds like a long job.’

‘Cheer up,’ said Kitty, who did not normally say such things. ‘At least the weather is good. You won’t have too bad a time. And I don’t mind helping you with the girls this evening, if it will make any difference. We could both take them out.’ She felt that this was an acceptable suggestion, but he did not seem noticeably pleased with it. ‘What they would probably like,’ she went on, ‘is that self-service place in the rue de Rivoli.

They can have chicken and chips. I dare say they will be very tired when they have eaten. We can take them back on the Metro, and you can relax after that. With your bad leg,’ she added.

He brooded. He was, Kitty saw, too proud to try to persuade her. And too used to getting his own way with women to acknowledge that she had deflected him from his original purpose. Which is a pity, she thought again. I might have enjoyed having dinner with him. It would have filled in this evening. But supposing Maurice is already there? Supposing there is a telephone message waiting for me at the hotel? I shall have to go there straight away, as soon as we get to Paris. And then, if there is no message, I can arrange to meet them all in the rue de Rivoli. But I must go straight back to the hotel afterwards, in case Maurice telephones.

She raised her eyes from this calculation to find him staring at her again, and again she blushed slightly.

‘Are you meeting someone in Paris?’ he asked.

‘In a way,’ she said. She did not want to offend his pride any further. ‘It’s a colleague, really,’ she went on, rather hesitantly, as his face darkened. ‘We are going to look at some cathedrals together.’

‘A male colleague?’ he asked.

Kitty thought of Maurice, driving through France, alone, without her, and felt a touch of sadness. I could have been with him all the time, she thought.

‘Yes, oh yes,’ she said hurriedly, for she felt the onset of one of her bleak moods.

‘You’re very pretty,’ he said, and looked annoyed with himself for having conceded so much. He had obviously been handsome from infancy and had long been used to the idea of the superiority of his own looks and appearance.

Kitty smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, then, turning to look out of the window, exclaimed, in genuine
surprise, ‘But we are nearly there! I have never known a journey to go so quickly!’

He sighed, with genuine heaviness. It can’t be much fun for him, she thought. ‘Mr Pascoe,’ she said, ‘would you like me to help you with the girls this evening? I could meet you at the self-service place. I just want to see if my friend has left a message for me at the hotel first.’

He turned his face to the window, and stayed in that position for a moment, exhibiting his profile.

‘Sweet of you,’ he said finally. ‘Would seven-thirty be too early? I expect they will need a wash, or something. And I had better get the rooms sorted out.’

She smiled again. ‘Seven-thirty in the rue de Rivoli, then. We had better get back to them, I suppose.’

They lurched through the train with difficulty, for the corridor was already jammed with people and luggage. In the carriage the girls were awakening from their sleep, yawning and dishevelled. They looked younger and dirtier than ever, but, Kitty noted, they recovered all the more quickly because of their youth.

‘We’re all having dinner together,’ Kitty informed them. At that moment Mr Pascoe loomed behind her, and Clare’s face registered astonishment. ‘I will see you all at the barrier,’ said Mr Pascoe. ‘Wait until everybody has got off before you attempt to move that luggage. And be as quick as you can.’

‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ Kitty told them, picking up her grip. ‘But I shall see you all later. I just want to see if there is a message for me at my hotel. Are you all right? You don’t feel sick, do you, Clare?’

‘I am perfectly all right, thank you,’ Clare replied in a repressive tone of voice. She will be a formidable woman in a couple of years’ time, thought Kitty, and she turned her attention to finding a taxi, for now her mind was on what awaited her at the hotel, and she had
almost forgotten that the girls existed.

As the taxi jerked through the early evening traffic she fell into a dream. Supposing that Maurice had in fact already arrived? She somehow was sure that he was there, that she would see him very soon, that they would spend the whole of the next two weeks together, and that life would be irremediably changed by this fact. She did not notice the beautiful evening, for her gaze was turned inwards, and she held her head still, using the tall slices of building sliding by on either side of her as blinkers, shutting out that part of the world that was irrelevant to her preoccupations. She gave herself over to the business of anticipation, for she suspected that she might need to become rather good at doing so. Paris seethed past her unnoticed as she tried to remember whether or not she had given Maurice her telephone number. She had told him the name of the hotel and where it was. Oh, this is ridiculous, she said to herself. He probably called in and left a note, telling me where to find him.

But there was no message waiting for her. Rather slowly she went up the stairs and unlocked the door of her room. She walked to the window as if she might see him coming. Then she sat on the bed for a few minutes. Eventually she sighed and stood up and started to unpack; she washed her face and brushed her hair, and then, when she could put it off no longer, she went down the stairs again and out into the cooling evening, and made her way to the rue de Rivoli, for chicken and chips, with Mr Pascoe, and the girls.

The sort of hotel which Kitty thought it appropriate to afford on this occasion had rooms which were neither warm enough nor light enough. In the daytime she managed to forget these very slight irritations, for there was plenty to see and to do, and she had had many useful ideas for her work. But she hated going back in the evenings, had developed a dread, more acute than the ennui of Old Church Street, of sitting alone, with her books, when she had so much to say, so many ideas to offer. She was full of words and she had to keep them all to herself. After dinner, eaten at a bistro on the corner of the street, a sadness which she did not fully comprehend, set in, and the thought of sitting at a small table under a weak light in a bedroom furnished in shades of tired crimson, while she grappled with the task of writing her lecture, an exercise which she found easy in the daytime and impossible in the evenings, came to be associated in her mind with the thought of solitude, of exile. Exile, she thought. I have felt this before. But she could not remember in what context.

She was usually in bed by nine. Trying to read, under an even weaker light, she forced herself to ignore the fact that Maurice had not telephoned and that there had been no message waiting for her. She had been installed for a week. Every morning she took great pains with her
appearance, in case he should have arrived without telling her. Every morning she informed the woman at the desk of the hotel when she would be back, after her day’s reading and walking. ‘I am expecting a message,’ she said. By now they all knew this, and shook their heads sympathetically in the evenings when she returned. She knew that such humiliation was not the normal lot of women who were loved, and although she schooled herself to remember that Maurice never made plans very far ahead, that he frequently got dates wrong, and that in any case he did not know – must not know – that she waited with such intensity for a sign from him, a disappointment had insinuated itself into her and she knew that it would not easily be dislodged.

So that when he finally telephoned, she was almost dull with anticlimax and answered him slowly. ‘Did I wake you up?’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted myself.’ ‘Where are you?’ was all she wanted to know. ‘In an enchanting little hotel just outside Chartres,’ he said. He sounded not at all tired. ‘I’ve just had the best meal of my life. And the cathedral’s floodlit, it’s quite perfect. Listen, Kitty. I could be with you tomorrow for lunch. I want one last look in the morning. I could pick you up at your hotel around one. You’ll have time to have your hair done, my love.’

She shrank back against the headboard of the old-fashioned bed and tried to assess the situation. Where was he going to stay in Paris? He had said nothing about that. He had sounded airy, almost euphoric. And he had called her ‘my love’. Surely that meant something? Her endearments to him, which she had had to curtail because she knew that he would not welcome any show of fervour on her part, were always irrepressible and sincere. She thought that this was how the matter should be. Words meant such a very great deal to her – and more than that, information conveyed by means of
words – that she wanted them to mean a great deal to everyone else. For some reason she thought of her student Mr Mills and his clumsy translations. You are accurate, she had told him, and yet you are not very near the meaning. Aim at both. This way you are losing a great deal of the available information. You are eliding it. He had looked at her uncomprehendingly: he had always been perfectly satisfied with his own translations.