The House in Paris (21 page)

I cannot see him to see what a child would be like. Though there will not be a child, that is why I want to see him. If a child were going to be born, there would still be something that had to be. Tonight would be more then than hours and that lamp. It would have been the hour of my death. I should have to do what I dread, see them know. There would still be something to dread. I should see the hour in the child. I should not have rushed on to nothing. He would be the mark our hands did not leave on the grass, he would be the tamarisks we only half saw. And he would be the I whose bed Naomi sat on, the Max whose sleeve I brushed rain off: tender and guardable. He would be the Max I heard talking when I stood outside the salon, the I Max rang up: that other we were both looking for. I could bear us both lying tired and cast-off if it were for him, if we were his purpose. Paris then Twickenham, the boat train at Victoria, Boulogne, the sea-front last night — if he ran through those like a wire they would not fall apart. The boat going up the estuary, the silent mountains, the harbour the day I knew Aunt Violet would die — those would not have been for nothing. He would have been there then and then and then.

— He would be disaster. They would not know where to turn to save me for themselves. They would have to see me as someone poisoned. Only poisons, they think, act on you. If a thing does act on you, it can only be poison, some foreign thing. 'Your poison's not mine,' she said ... What made Naomi insist on Max and me meeting last time? What made Aunt Violet look at me like that?
She
saw Ray was my mother: did she want this for me? I saw her wondering what disaster could be like. The child would be disaster. But there's no question of him.

Looking at her clothes on the chair near the window Karen must have fallen asleep again, for she seemed to be putting them on to hurry home in and they were ice-cold, heavy and wet with rain. The way they stuck on her skin was terrifying. She woke, and the chestnut leaves cut out on dark were terrifying. Her life had been full of warnings; the first was: 'You will get wet.' They warn you because they love you and because you are theirs. Now, here she lay as it would be death to those loving warners to know she lay. Not her hiddenness now but her unhiddenness made her heart thump chokingly, as it did years ago when, playing hide and seek, she heard the steps of the seekers go by just the other side of the curtain, or heard them come into the dark room where she hid. The curtain would fall, the light would discover her before she could slip out to bolt for 'home', which used to be by the gong, at the foot of the stairs. Once you were 'home' you won, you could not be caught. So sometimes you struck the gong.

Being caught is the word for having a child, sometimes. Then Ray would not marry me; mother would not buy me the sofa I wanted to shoot. The street would stay torn up, the trams could not begin again ... How silent it is! Surely it must be time for a clock to strike? You would never think there was the street out there. Yes you would; it takes a street to be silent, a stone silence going nowhere. Besides, we walked back down a street last night ... I wonder whether so much rain tires that tree? When do they put lamps out? This is the time of night when they say you feel most afraid. Only, I have nothing to be afraid of: no one will know.

No one will ever know. When Naomi came out, the print on the grass was gone. He will never be born to be my enemy. The sky
is
paler; I see the top of the tree. Today is showing; I shall be home tonight. My clothes are not really wet; that was the dream. 'Home' was always downstairs; downstairs is always safe. Upstairs is crazy with dreams or love. Once 'home' you are safe; you cannot be caught; no one knows where you were hiding. Is Max hiding from me? He seems to sleep with his will, as though he had chosen sleep. He said: 'Naomi is like furniture or the dark.' Here are furniture and the dark, but he is asleep. Perhaps that is what he meant: you can sleep, you need not know them. For her, this will be the dearest part of the night .. . That is what Mme Fisher can't bear, the thought of their quiet sleep. She killed all wishes by saying: 'Do as you wish,' but she cannot kill their wish. If she had been standing on those stairs today, smiling, when I came up behind the maid, I should have turned back and gone, away from where Max is. But if her smiling would stop me, she would not smile. She is a woman who sells girls; she is a witch. She is here; she is that barred light. She can never have wanted Max to be quiet; when he's quiet he's not hers. He was hers tonight when we saw the lighthouse, hers when we came in. Did I dream the sky was lighter, or is it lighter? If I don't sleep again, today will be so long — She turned her pillow over and rested on the cool side; the rain was falling more loudly and heavily and she tried to imagine she was the tree.

When she woke, Max was standing in daylight by the window: Sunday footsteps had begun in the street. She put her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes.

'I thought your things would get wet; I got up to move them.'

'Are they wet?' she said indifferently.

'No, the rain did not come so far. The things on the table are wet, though.'

'Need we wake up?'

'No.'

He stood looking at her, then presently came back to the bed and took Karen in his arms.

When the bells had stopped, after eleven o'clock, and everyone was in church, they walked uphill by one of the asphalt pathways broken by steps. Near the top, the churchyard with wet crosses lay behind a flint wall; across the path, gardens of sodden flowers. The heaviness of the climb in rain-muffled air, in their dragging mackintoshes, made them feel bent on something that must be done. They stopped and turned to look down at the town roofs making the rain smoky, the smudge of sea. Max leaned on the churchyard wall, his hands in his pockets, locked into himself by the first pause since they had started out.

'Can you imagine living here?'

'No,' he said, as though speaking for the first time today. 'No-'

'I — a port with no sea, a hill you could not drive up without going a mile round — it has too much nonsense about it.'

'Never mind,' she said calmly.

'You're right; it doesn't hurt me.'

'Do you want a funicular?'

'Yes — I like hills better without places, but if there are places there should be funiculars.'

'But what should we do this morning?'

'Go up in it.'

A martial hymn tune came from trees beyond the canal. Karen said: 'The Salvation Army Band.'

'If they are out of doors, their music will get wet. But perhaps they are not?' Looking at her dispassionately, he said: 'The rain gives you pink cheeks; you don't look like yourself, you look like an English girl.'

'Is that all right?'

'Yes,' he said, with that ironic tilt-up in his voice, like a smiling shrug, that she could never account for. Talk between people of different races is serious; that tender silliness lovers employ falls flat. Words are used for their meaning, not for their ring. If she had learnt to dread that kind of talk about art and life, most of all about love, to which literalness is deadly, she would have suffered more ... Above where they stood, a level road behind a row of white posts cut across the path, along the face of the hill. When they went on, they took it and walked more easily. Max seemed indifferent to the rain; though he certainly would not seek it, alone, for pleasure — in fact he might feel a cat's repugnance for it. Possibly this steep walk, this driving damp on his face, seemed part of the desperateness of their meeting, to be taken in his stride like their being here at all. What they had said had always been under pressure, the quick talk of people who act without asking why. She had seen, before this, his dislike of romantic inconvenience, and was not surprised that he liked funiculars.

This road had, on its uphill side, villas with climbing gardens and new white gates; on the other a brick-topped wall overhung the town, and, as the hill bent inland, a wide view of the marsh. Midday smoke blurred the roofs and rain-veiled trees: you could almost hear, below, the clatter of oven doors as Sunday joints were put in. Women in white gloves would be coming home from church, and after lunch the bells for children's service would ring. Sunday comfort, peace hung over all she saw, as though this were a picture saying only one thing. The stretch of forlorn marsh and sad sea-line made the snug town an island, a ship content to go nowhere ... Karen, walking by Max, felt more isolated with him, more cut off from her own country than if they had been in Peru. You feel most foreign when you no longer belong where you did ... A lady, opening one of the white gates, glanced at them curiously, then turned away her polite eyes. About a mile further on, the road ended in a path cut through a hazel wood.

10

After lunch, Max went to a table in the Ram's Head lounge and sat down. to write a letter. Someone played the piano and several people were talking round the wet-day fire, but he wrote straight ahead, immovably, stopping once to crumple a sheet and pull another impatiently from the rack. From the window-seat, Karen kept looking across — at first, because she
had
never watched him writing, later, because she began to dread what he wrote. Nothing said at lunch had led to the writing-table, and this unexpected act of his struck cold on her; that unaware face with the lower lip pressed in, that unpent speed starting from the tip of the pen. At all other times he paused before any action — like a car slowing up for a cautious minute where a railway with no gates crosses the road. (The motorist, sitting back, hears the wind in the wires and looks at the skull-and-cross-bones warning nailed to a post.) But writing he did not deliberate. He writes like a man on the stage, she thought, so much not caring who watches, he almost writes to be watched. Not a pause: what he writes must have been here all this morning, mounting up. So we were not alone ... She knew she paid the penalty for having come too close, but had not looked in him for any one enemy. His cigarette-case was open on the table beside him, and she came over once for a cigarette. He did not look up; she went back to the window-seat.

Several more people, crowding through the swing doors, sat down in the ring of chairs between her and him, where she and he had sat at tea yesterday.

Their looking at Karen made her at once pick up an old copy of
The Sketch.
Her night thoughts in a heavy flock had now settled at the pit of her mind. At last Max stood up and looked about for her sharply, not knowing where she sat; then he came over and said: 'I want a stamp; where can I get one here?'

She looked straight at the letter in his hand: it was to Naomi.

'Max ...'

'I suppose we can get a stamp at the office?'

'Must it go today?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Why else should it be written?'

She did not know what to say. They went out and bought the stamp at the office, and he stamped the letter. He went to the hall letter-box, but Karen caught at his wrist: the manageress stared. Face to face, as when they got jammed in the train corridor, Max stared Karen out with unnaturally dark eyes. 'Don't post it here,' she said. 'Not this minute, not here. Let's take it out somewhere.'

'Out?' Max said, touching the envelope corners with unkind finger-tips. 'Surely we've walked about enough.'

'I want air very much.'

'Why — is your head aching?'

'No — yes. Wait while I get my things.' She began to go upstairs, but turned at the bend to say: 'Max, you won't post it? Wait!'

'Don't be long,' he said. When she came down the letter was still in his hand.

From the Ram's Head door they turned right, down the High Street in the direction of Romney, the silent ranges, the marsh. Shutters up, blinds down behind shop windows darkened the street: the street reflected the blind windows and a strip of unalive wet sky. Today having been blotted out of its place in summer, everybody had taken to indoor sleep; fumes of sleep seemed to creep round the windows, staling the out-of-doors.

Karen looked at Max once or twice, but her lips stayed gummed together, and he walked fast, not looking at anything.

'What made you write?' she said at last.

He turned an iron face to her. 'What makes you ask?'

'What are you saying to her?'

'That we cannot be married.'

'Give me the letter.'

'Why?'

'Only to carry.'

Max passed her the letter without looking at it. 'Keep it dry,' he said. 'Put it in your pocket.'

'But you cannot — '

Someone opened a window with a creak of the sash: Max started and said: 'We are in the street.'

'They don't care,' she said, but stopped all the same.

At that end, the High Street bends into a square where the Folkestone buses turn to go back. Max guiding Karen's elbow in keyed-up silence, they crossed the empty square to the Romney road canal bridge. On from the bridge the canal and the road straighten out and run parallel, with a strip of grass between them, both overcast by trees. Max and Karen, seeing a trodden path beside the canal, took it: the grass deadened their steps. On to the dark unmoving canal water drips fell from the trees on the far bank. From behind the trees, through a thicket, a row of barracks peered across the canal. Though rain fell no faster the sky steadily darkened, filling the air between trees and water with dusk.

She went on: 'But you cannot do that to Naomi.'

'Did
you
always think so much of her?'

Karen flinching, said: 'I suppose that's fair.'

You foresaw nothing?'

'Not this, no. Nothing. No change. This was quite apart from her. I did not see it would hurt her in any way. I thought this left you unchanged.'

'You thought I would come so far for a little thing?'

'Little when it had happened.'

'Little to you?'

'No. But I thought you felt as I did, that this finished the past but did not touch the future. Being here does not seem to belong to now, it belongs to the year in Paris when I used to want you so much even to look at me. If I had not felt this was something that should have happened long ago, and that belonged to when it should have been, if I had known you loved her and felt she was the
now,
I should never have come, Max.'