Providence (2 page)

She and Vadim dressed their daughter for her wedding
as if she were an expensive customer having a final fitting. Vadim, on his knees, regularized the folds. Louise, her cigarette holder put aside, pulled down and smoothed the narrow sleeves. After fifteen minutes of complete silence – for Marie-Thérèse was in a dream of her own – Vadim sat back on his heels.
‘Ça y est,’
he pronounced. Louise, her arms crossed, stepped back and viewed her daughter. A rare smile broke up her grim features. She stepped forward again and lightly pinched Marie-Thérèse’s cheeks, to give her some colour.
‘Ça y est,’
she agreed, and with a brief final pinch on the chin, added, ‘
Vas-y, ma fille.’

Marie-Thérèse and John Maule went to the coast, out of season, for their honeymoon. They walked endlessly, hand in hand, talking about their respective childhoods. They were in fact like two children who have elected each other as best friend. At night they slept soundly in each other’s arms and woke in the morning with the ease of youth. He was twenty-one, she was eighteen. At the end of their holiday, which was also the end of his leave, she saw him off at Victoria and then went home to Grosvenor Street and her mother and father. She never saw John Maule again, for he was killed shortly afterwards. She gave birth to a baby girl – Catherine Joséphine Thérèse – nine months after her wedding day.

The shock of Marie-Thérèse’s bereavement affected them in different ways. Vadim was the only one who cried, his fine-featured brown face creasing in spontaneous spasms of grief. Louise worked steadily on, every night, sketching and smoking and coughing. She let the yellow dye fade from her hair and went white; when her daughter brought the child to Grosvenor Street on her weekly visit she said little but her pouched clever eyes missed nothing. She saw that there was something wrong with Marie-Thérèse’s pallor and when the doctor diagnosed anaemia and a heart murmur she was not
surprised: her sister Berthe had been the same. She installed a series of refugees and displaced persons in the innocent little house in the suburbs that John Maule’s parents had given their son and daughter-in-law as a wedding present, and when the child was old enough to go to school she bought a larger house in Dulwich, and converted it into two flats. The child would come into John Maule’s small legacy when she was twenty-five. Until then, she must stay at home with her mother.

Marie-Thérèse showed her daughter the beautiful pale pink wedding dress and said, ‘When you are ready, Maman Louise will make one for you.’ Then she pressed her hand to her side, as she so often did these days, and murmured that she was going to have her rest. ‘Maman Louise,’ cried the child in Grosvenor Street, ‘will you make my wedding dress?’ ‘Yes, my pigeon,’ said Louise, ‘and Papa will make the cake.’

‘Vadim,’ she said to her husband after these visits. ‘How long can this last? She makes no effort to marry again. She sits at home with the child who is clever and will want to go out into the world. What is to be done about Marie-Thérèse? And I need more petersham for Miss Herbert’s skirts – you will have to go to Mortimer Street. This New Look is exhausting. The girls in the workroom complain. I could kill Christian Dior.’

But she went on, producing the crinoline ball dresses for which she became famous in the 1950s. She derived a contemptuous satisfaction from subduing the noisy exuberant debutantes who bought her dresses for their first season into some semblance of demureness. Only the advent of the miniskirt seriously disturbed her. London was suddenly filled with young and outrageous girls, like the rue Saint-Denis of her youth. The bales of satin, taffeta, and organza, the buckram for the hip padding and the whalebones for the strapless bodices of the ball dresses were suddenly obsolete. Louise’s hair
was snowy white, her face creased into folds, her eyes screwed up against the smoke of her cigarette. Vadim seemed not to have aged by a single year. He was as small, as lithe, as brown as he had been the first time she had seen him on stage at the Olympia. He did all the housework now, as well as running the errands. He was a familiar figure in Soho, in his beret and his soft-soled shoes, springing along as if in training.

Yet they were older and they felt it; they could no longer keep up. When the debutantes discovered Nepal and began to go off in Land Rovers, they decided they had had enough. After Louise’s heart attack, they pensioned off the girls in the workroom, sold the remainder of the lease, and went to live in the upper part of the house in Dulwich, to be near Marie-Thérèse. There Louise sat and smoked, against doctor’s orders, and played patience and read through her piles of
Vogue
and
l’Officiel
. Vadim, quieter now, made excursions to the shops and did the cooking.

It was a bizarre and anomalous family. To Kitty, who loved England as only one who is not wholly English can do, Louise and Vadim and Marie-Thérèse were almost an embarrassment. They sent her away to school and as she struggled to come to terms with her fellow-boarders, who were confident and energetic and kind and who invited her home in the holidays, she was almost glad to be anonymous and unplaceable, although she regretted not having known her father, whose fading photograph was on her mother’s bedside table, and felt a pang when she thought of the pale pink wedding dress. Returning home from these visits, she found she needed several days to change over from being Kitty to being Thérèse. Vadim, an enthusiastic cook, would put plates of food before her at odd times, urging her to taste his latest creation, which was usually both pungent and idiosyncratic. Gradually the comforting monotony of
school dinners faded from her memory. Louise would assess her grand-daughter’s graceful figure, and lively pallor, and nod her approval: she would carry clothes well. Marie-Thérèse, whom widowhood had restored to virginity, moved slowly about the little flat, watering her plants, reading the romantic novels to which she was addicted and which Kitty sometimes borrowed. Music was listened to, on the radio which Kitty had bought them with her first allowance, Vadim assessing the beat with a stern and critical hand, the muscles of his legs flexing automatically. He was in their flat for most of the day, doing odd jobs for ‘my girls’. Louise, upstairs, played patience. They ate together, since it was simpler that way, speaking French, the bottle of wine ritually recorked at the end of the meal, salad eaten from the same plates as the meat; much bread. Marie-Thérèse found Papa’s cooking too rich and gasped with discomfort.
‘Petite nature,’
said Louise, not unkindly, sticking her fork into an apple and turning it round and round to peel it.

Two years before she came into her father’s money, Kitty moved into a home of her own. Both Louise and Marie-Thérèse encouraged her to do this, although Vadim was mournful. She found a tiny flat in Old Church Street, near the river in Chelsea, filled it with second-hand furniture of no great value, and worked at her research – for Louise was right and she turned out to be clever. But she went home at the weekends, and sometimes, as she came out of the station, she would see Vadim, in his Basque beret and his tennis shoes, pinching the fruit at the greengrocer’s to see if it was ripe, smelling the fish at the fishmonger’s, and demanding to taste the cheese. Part of her cringed with the imagined antagonism of the shopkeepers. Part of her admired his tenacity. Part of her wished her English father were alive. Yet another part noted what fashion magazines
were on sale, and bought them for Louise.

To the family she was like a marvellous foreigner. ‘You know, my darling, there is no need for you to study so hard,’ said her mother. ‘I should like you to get out more and meet more people.’ She did not say where, for she did not know. Vadim unpacked her basket, inhaling with ecstasy the freshly ground coffee that she bought for him. Louise was mostly interested in her clothes. ‘Off the peg?’ she would say, incredulously. ‘Off the peg?
Mais tu es folle, ma fille
. I can still make you a dress that you would not find anywhere in London. Vadim, fetch me that piece of silk jersey in the bottom drawer.’ So Kitty would spend most of her weekend in her petticoat while Louise made her a dress and Marie-Thérèse watched or listened dreamily to the radio, her place in her novel marked by a handkerchief. After their dinner they would all watch television together, for Vadim and Louise followed the various serials with great intensity, like children. Marie-Thérèse tired quickly but felt obliged to sit up with them, vaguely moved by the absorbed expressions on her parents’ faces. ‘I can’t see much happiness there, can you, Papa?’ she would say, or, ‘You were right, Maman, she is after his money.’
‘Belle fille tout de même,’
Louise would murmur, her eyes narrowed, as if taking measurements. They went to bed early, for Kitty yawned with boredom at the end of her day, and when she retired to her small room she would take one of Marie-Thérèse’s novels, being unable to face the books she knew she should be reading. Those books were waiting for her in Old Church Street. Her subject was the Romantic Tradition.

She applied for and got a research appointment at a small but richly endowed provincial university, famous for its departments of History and Microbiology. She was immediately noticed because of her exquisite clothes. ‘Milady Maule,’ observed the head of department’s
secretary. ‘Must be rolling in it.’ Thus are reputations falsely made. In a few months the head of department’s secretary said to her friend, ‘If she can afford to go to Paris for her clothes, I wonder why she bothers to fill in time here.’ At the time when this remark was made Kitty was in Chelsea, disposing of a damp and overfilled sandwich pressed into her basket by Vadim who thought she needed a little pick-me-up after her journey home. The smell hung disagreeably about her hands, and she washed them several times before getting down to the Romantic Tradition. The transition from one life to another was not always easy.

After Marie-Thérèse’s death, quickly and quietly one evening at the dinner table, the old people became older and seemed to revert to their less illustrious days in Paris, before success had brought them their modest affluence. Louise’s dress was now dusty with ash; her swollen feet were stuck into slippers. Vadim did not bother to remove his beret in the house. Only when Kitty came, at the weekends, did he indulge in his vigorous and haphazard cooking: soft-boiled eggs greeted her when she arrived, longing for coffee, and cups of soup, rocking in their saucers, broke up the afternoon. She swallowed it all down for she was terrified of hurting him still more, and found it difficult to endure the long day sitting with Louise, whose eyes were now dull and vague. She asked them questions about the past in an effort to animate them, for she remembered them as the liveliest people she had ever known. All Louise would say was, ‘If only she had married again!’ ‘But Maman Louise, she is with Father now,’ said Kitty, her voice sounding as false to her as had the prayers she had murmured at school. Louise would shrug and an expression of pity would pass over Papa’s face, as if only now registering the fact that his grand-daughter had been affected by an alien and
sentimental culture. In his world, and that of Louise, you had your youth and your energy and your determination. Nothing else was given to you, but all could be taken away. As it had been.

Gradually Kitty came to dread the weekends which were symbolized for her by the food thrust lovingly in front of her. She began to refuse it and her heart ached as Vadim, dejected, bore it away again. They spoke little, her attempts at cheering them up proving fruitless. They were waiting for news and she had none to tell them. Occasionally Louise, energized by a strange kind of malice, would stir from her semi-permanent doze, would open her eyes, survey Kitty from head to foot, and question her. ‘Well,
ma fille
, where are your lovers? Who will take you home tonight? For whom do you wash your hair? And your studies, will you ever finish them?’ Turning her puffy hands in her lap in a strange mute appeal, she said, ‘I do not understand your life. Are your colleagues real men? Is it so different here? What do you discuss over your tea and biscuits? Come,’ she would say, with a glint in her eye, but the hands still turning, sadly, ‘come,
ma fille
, tell me about England.’

When dining alone, Kitty Maule tended to dispatch the meal as quickly as possible and also to distract herself from the actual business of eating. She found it helpful to balance a tray on her knees rather than to sit down forlornly at an empty table, and to read, listen to the radio, or even sometimes to wander about, as if only lending herself to the task of digestion. The vagaries of her appetite had increased since her mother’s death, at dinner, some three years earlier. It had been a strange and peaceful death, her mother collapsed in her chair, one small hand trailing through some fragments of walnut shell. The faintly sour scent of her grandmother’s discarded fruit peel was still in Kitty’s nostrils, as well as the sight of her grandfather, with tears pouring down his face, crying, ‘Marie-Thérèse! Marie-Thérèse!’ Somehow the event had been incorporated into their family life, but Kitty Maule could never sit down to a hearty plateful of food without hearing the plaint, ‘Marie-Thérèse! Marie-Thérèse!’ Her throat would close and a faint trembling would start in her hands. People had given up asking her out. She was better off at home, where she could concentrate on feeding the birds with the crumbs from her plate. Sometimes she was perfectly all right, as now. Sometimes she ate with enjoyment, as when she prepared a
meal for her lover, Maurice Bishop. But when she was alone, there hovered faintly in the background of her mind the memory of the hand and the walnut shells, and the cry, ‘Marie-Thérèse! Marie-Thérèse!’

On an evening such as this, a Friday, she made an omelette and ate it carelessly, wandering about her little kitchen, absently waving her fork. In her mind she was going over her last conversation with Maurice, who had telephoned earlier and thus both calmed and unsettled her. She would see him, officially and discreetly, at a lecture the following week; she would sit in the audience with all his other admirers while he discoursed on the cathedrals of England, for, although an historian by profession, he was also a romantic and devout Christian, a strange combination which appeared to keep him perfectly happy. His dispositions and predispositions manifested themselves in a series of public lectures which regularly filled the main theatre of the small provincial university lucky enough to retain him as its Professor of Mediaeval History, although offers were continually coming from Oxford, where, it was predicted, he would take up his next post. His devotion to the cathedrals of England, on which he offered a series of inaccurate but moving insights (with slides), entranced his audience and enraged the Roger Fry Professor of Significant Form who writhed in his seat but was forced to attend through sheer pressure of public opinion. ‘Charismatic shit,’ he was once overheard muttering to his wife. ‘Sanctimonious bastard. How does
he
know what Canterbury was supposed to look like? I suppose he’ll get Durham sorted out next. Is there no end to this?’ ‘I thought it was lovely,’ said his wife, clapping stolidly, along with all the other ladies, the Friends of the University, the departmental secretaries, the retired librarians. ‘And anyway, he comes to your lectures on Cézanne. You can hardly do
less than return the compliment.’ ‘Oh yes, he casts his nets wide, does our Maurice,’ agreed the Roger Fry Professor. ‘Nothing human is alien to him. He really feels at one with those simple mediaeval masons.’ ‘Oh, shut up, David,’ said his wife, adding, fatally, ‘You’re jealous, that’s all.’ After which, they said nothing to each other for the rest of the evening.