The House in Paris (26 page)

'But you had been going to take Henrietta out.'

'We should have come in again.'

'Oh. Then what would you have done with Henrietta?'

'Leopold, Leopold
darling,
be more natural!'

'Why should I?'

Miss Fisher's exclamation made Henrietta burn. Leopold, however, was not embarrassed; she saw his mind gripping some kind of argument. There need be no question of saving Leopold's face; he did not think of his face, he thought of himself: he
thought.
Miss Fisher's emotion therefore did not offend him; in his own cold way he enjoyed dealing with it. Henrietta had not realized till this moment that two races, in feeling, go to make up the world, or how nonplussing it is when both meet in a room. No wonder today with Leopold had been difficult. If I had cried when he upset my dispatch case, he would have liked me much better, she thought. Picking up Charles she went to sit on the sofa, where she examined his ears to see if more stitches had come out in a manner that said: 'This is no place for you or me.'

Henrietta's resigned manner and retreat to the sofa made Miss Fisher remember, and look anxiously at her. Miss Fisher had been standing against the table, her hands hanging down, trembling, against her skirt; Henrietta's annoyed face must have made her, also, remember that there is more than one race, and quickly reproach herself. Those Chambéry carriage-drives with Mrs Arbuthnot and those sympathetic talks beside the lake must have passed through her mind, like traffic outside a silent room. So she said: 'Henrietta, where shall you and I and Leopold go to this afternoon?'

'I don't want to go anywhere, thank you,' Leopold said, surprised.

'I don't want to go anywhere, either,' said Henrietta at once.

'But your grandmother will be disappointed if you do not see Paris.'

'I shall probably see it some time.'

'I don't want to see it ever,' said Leopold.

'Oh, Leopold, what a pity!'

'I've seen Rome.'

'But — '

'No one wants me to see Paris. I only want to see important places. I want to see Moscow.'

'Some other day, I
know
you will see your mother!'

'I don't see why,' said Leopold.

'Something unforeseen must have happened. You know, even grown-up people cannot always do what they want most.'

'Oh! Then why grow up?'

Miss Fisher replied simply, '
I
never could answer any questions, Leopold.'

At this, Leopold looked mutely at Miss Fisher: for the first time Henrietta saw despair in his eye. She thought: If we stop arguing, he will weep. He wants some kind of fuss to keep going on. While she wondered what to say next, for Leopold to contradict or that should bother Miss Fisher, Leopold stooped to pull up one of his black socks. The dignity of his looks was all he had. Then he said: 'But didn't you know my father?'

'But he was older than you are when he came to this house.'

'You mean, he thought he knew everything,' said Leopold scoffingly.

His eyes, looking round the prim, vacant, crowded salon, showed that involuntary contempt for the dead — for their ignorance of the present, their impotence now — that nothing in Leopold softened to pity yet; asking: 'Who wanting really to know would have come
here?
His small dark-coloured figure, solitary before the mantelpiece, swelled with content at his own ignorance of the past. Today was his own. To stay fully himself, he no longer needed argument; he could stop putting pressure on Miss Fisher. His dark eyes darkened, their pupils expanding. Yes, his mother refused to come; she would not lend herself to him. He had cast her, but she refused her part. She was not, then, the creature of thought. Her will, her act, her thought spoke in the telegram. Her refusal became
her,
became her coming in suddenly, breaking down, by this one act of being herself only, his imagination in which he had bound her up. So she lived outside himself; she was alive truly. She set up that opposition that is love. 'Yes,' he said, 'I shall see her some other day.'

'You know — ' began Miss Fisher.

'Only she was afraid — '

— Three sharp taps on the ceiling made Miss Fisher and Henrietta anxiously look up. (Henrietta, seeing the twist of incense, grey twilight across the foot of the bed.) 'My mother,' said Miss Fisher. 'She is impatient. She has been expecting your mother to come.' Through the ceiling, silent after the tapping, came the impatience of Mme Fisher lying up there. Some sort of alarm must sound in her senses the moment she was forgotten — which happened so seldom — sound, and start angry anguish, making her strike the floor. Miss Fisher looked at Henrietta confidentially, earnestly, as much as to say: 'In this house we have two implacable people: you, Henrietta, must do what you can down here.' Aloud she said to Henrietta and Leopold: 'I must go up to my mother.' She left the room, shut the door and they heard her going upstairs. Henrietta was left with Leopold.

'She doesn't sound like anyone ill,' she said.

'I had only imagined her.'

'Madame Fisher?'

'My mother.'

'Oh .. . But you must be disappointed; I'm awfully sorry, Leopold,' said Henrietta firmly.

'Are you? Why? I'm not, I'm excited.'

'I don't see why.'

'No, I didn't expect you would.'

'Then why say so?'

'Oh ... Because you are somebody here.'

'Oh,' said Henrietta, looking at Charles again.

'Do you think
Miss Fisher's
natural?'

'Well, I suppose she must be.'

'Yes, I suppose she must be .. . She knew them both.'

'Leopold, I think you ought to stop being excited. It was all very well this morning, when something was going to happen, but now it hasn't happened I think you might calm down. I know you are being brave, but I think you are showing off rather. If me being here makes you show off I'll go and sit on the stairs.'

She got up from the sofa. Leopold said nothing but watched her till she had got as far as the door and put her hand on the knob. Then he said sharply: 'No. Don't.'

'I will: you give me the creeps.'

'Then I shall come and sit on the stairs too.'

'I do think you are beastly,' said Henrietta.

'Why didn't you go and see Paris? She said you could.'

'Because I was feeling sympathetic with you.'

'I don't call you sympathetic,' he said coldly. 'You get upset whenever I say a thing.'

'It's the things you say.'

'Well, I don't say them to you.'

'Then, my goodness, why — '

'I want to hear what they're like.'

'Well, I really did want to look at the Trocadéro, only Miss Fisher gave me the creeps too. I'm sure she is quite different from everyone else in Paris. I'd much rather look at Paris with somebody ordinary — if it comes to that, though, why wouldn't you go out?'

Leopold looked at her.

Henrietta pursued: 'You might just as well.'

'Because my mother is not here.'

Leopold, having said this in an experimentary voice, stopped to hear it echoed, looking, meanwhile, self-compellingly at and through Henrietta, as though
'My mother is not here
', were written all over her — face, dress, hair — and he were forcing himself to read it again and again and again. Henrietta
became
the fact that he could not escape or bear. Her eyes, her chin, the brooch joining her collar, the red buttons down her stomach, her belt-buckle and her shoes each added pain of knowing to Leopold's eyes, which travelled down her steadily. But when Henrietta's hand, making another nervous move to the door-knob, reminded him that she was in fact,
Henrietta,
animosity made him more frightening still. You are here, she is not. Pressed tightly together, his lips went white. This collapse of his pride in his isolation left him without one ally. His hands went behind his back and she saw his shoulders shake. He became like a boy who is the butt of a dancing class. 'Well,
say
something!' he said.

She only clutched the door-knob.

When she could not speak, Leopold turned round facing the mantelpiece and suddenly ground his forehead against the marble. One shoulder up dragged his sailor collar crooked; his arms were crushed between his chest and the mantelpiece. After a minute, one leg writhed round the other like ivy killing a tree. The clock ticked away calmly above his head.

If it were just crying ... thought Henrietta. The first sound torn from him frightened her so much that she began to count the white lines round his collar. At first each sob was like some terrible accident, then they began to come faster. He wept like someone alone against his will, someone shut up alone for a punishment: you only weep like that when only a room hears. She thought: But none of us are punished like that now. His undeniable tears were more than his own, they seemed to be all the tears that ever had been denied, that dryness of body, age, ungreatness or anger ever had made impossible — for the man standing beside his own crashed plane, the woman tearing up somebody's fatal letter and dropping pieces dryly into the grate, people watching their family house burn, the general giving his sword up — arrears of tears starting up at one moment's unobscured view of grief.

She could not know how sharply Leopold realized everything that at this moment perished for him — landscapes, his own moments, hands approaching making him unsuspicious. She had seen the country he had thought he would inherit — her certainty of it made it little, his passionate ignorance made it great — trees rounded, standing in their own shadow, spires glittering, lakes of land in light, white puffs from the little train travelling a long way. He is weeping because he is not going to England; his mother is not coming to take him there. He is weeping because he has been adopted; he is weeping because he has got nowhere to go. He is weeping because this is the end of imagination — imagination fails when there is no
now.
Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

Leopold's solitary despair made Henrietta no more than the walls or table. This was not contempt for her presence: no one was there. Being not there disembodied her, so she fearlessly crossed the parquet to stand beside him. She watched his head, the back of his thin neck, the square blue collar shaken between his shoulders, wondering without diffidence where to put her hand. Finally, she leant her body against his, pressing her ribs to his elbow so that his sobs began to go through her too. Leopold rolled his face further away from her, so that one cheek and temple now pressed the marble, but did not withdraw his body from her touch. After a minute like this, his elbow undoubled itself against her and his left arm went round her with unfeeling tightness, as though he were gripping the bole of a tree. Held close like this to the mantelpiece he leant on, Henrietta let her forehead rest on the marble too: her face bent forward, so that the tears she began shedding fell on the front of her dress. An angel stood up inside her with its hands to its lips, and Henrietta did not attempt to speak.

Now that she cried, he could rest. His cheek no longer hurt itself on the marble. Reposing between two friends, the mantelpiece and her body, Leopold, she could feel, was looking out of the window, seeing the courtyard and the one bare tree swim into view again and patiently stand. His breathing steadied itself; each breath came sooner and was less painfully deep. Henrietta, meanwhile, felt tears, from her own eyes but not from a self she knew of, rain on to the serge dress, each side of the buttons that were pulled a little crooked by Leopold's hand. They stayed like this some time.

'Leopold ...'

'What?' he said.

'Nothing.'

Leopold touched her belt and followed it round a little; for the first time his fingers had a reasoning touch. Then he turned, his eyes that had reflected the plane tree now reflecting her face flushed with tears. He looked at her with no thoughts. A strand of dark hair from the crest above his forehead had fallen down and lay on his white skin; he looked drowned, as though sea had been washing for some time over his unstruggling face and eyes unchangingly open between the matted lashes, ceasing to see. But then she saw consciousness march back into his eyes, which became Leopold's looking at Henrietta. Like a grown-up hand coming between their bodies, something outside put them gently apart. Leopold's arm round her loosened and fell away. Still unalarmed, they stood as they had been standing, but Leopold slid his hands into his pockets; she stared at the clock and the striped paper behind.

Miss Fisher must have stood by Mme Fisher, telling her what was not going to happen, but now they heard her once more above the ceiling, moving about busy with something else. Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time. In this carpetless, sounding French house the rustle, patter and click of people being alive became, only, more audible: Henrietta knew it was everywhere. Leopold was more happy than Henrietta in having learnt already to keep this outside himself, more happy in having intellect. So he stood no more than noting the steps to which she listened, fatalistic but with a sinking heart, waiting for Miss Fisher to make inroads on her again. Soon the upstairs door did open; Miss Fisher was on the stairs.

Henrietta walked back defensively to the sofa. Picking up Charles, she acted the self she had been before. Miss Fisher came in, her face extremely perplexed.

'I hope Madame Fisher is better?' said Henrietta at once.

'Thank you — oh really, yes. She is wonderfully herself: nothing today has tired her ... Leopold?'

'Yes, Miss Fisher.'

'My mother insists — my mother would like very much to see you for a few minutes. That is, if you wish, she says ...?'

'I don't mind,' said Leopold. 'Shall I go up now?'

2

Mme Fisher's hand was lying outside the bedclothes, ready for Leopold's. He came to the head of the bed, on the wall, not the window side, and they shook hands. She stayed with her head screwed round his way on the pillows, and in the red half-dark they looked at each other gravely: one shutter was shut. Leopold had brushed back the strand of hair from his forehead and straightened his square collar before coming up.