The House in Paris (27 page)

'Well, Leopold,' she said, 'this is hard, I am afraid.'

'My mother being delayed?'

'Your long journey for nothing.'

'I liked the journey.'

'You have been long enough in Italy, I expect?'

'It depends where in Italy,' said Leopold.

Mme Fisher smiled and, raising her hand a little, looked at it reflectively, as though glad life should have been renewed, for a moment even, by its meeting with Leopold's for this old friend that had nothing to do now but lie on a counterpane. Then regretfully she drew the hand back under the bedclothes, to signify that the forgotten old are chilly and must seek warmth above any other food.

So she lay rigid, sheets up to her chin, turning a little on one side to the red wall against which Leopold stood. 'Well, we meet,' she said.

Leopold said nothing.

'Will you sit down, Leopold?' said Mme Fisher. He looked at Miss Fisher's chair, moved the knitting off it and drew the chair closer to the head of the bed. Here he sat hands pressed palms down on the chair-arms, chin up and bare knees crossed, his attitude saying: 'Well?'

'You must not, of course, judge your mother,' said Mme Fisher. 'She always had courage, but could not always command what courage she had.'

'People change their minds,' said Leopold.

'My daughter says you ask curious questions: do you?'

Leopold thought over this with his eyes turned down. 'It depends who I ask.'

'You may ask me curious questions, but not plain ones. We — my daughter and I — are not to answer questions: that was made the condition of your coming here. So you must not embarrass me,' said Mme Fisher, smiling. 'No doubt you do not care for fairy-tales, Leopold? An enchanted wood full of dumb people would offend you; you are not the young man with the sword who goes jumping his way through. Fairytales always made me impatient also. But unfortunately there is no doubt that in life such things exist: we are all very much bound up in what happens. So you must be content to see me as so much gingerbread, or whatever you wish ... It is not easy for me to talk to you naturally, for fear of perhaps inadvertently telling you something you do not know and they mean you never to know.'

'Who are "they"?'

'Your good friends in Italy, my daughter, your mother.'

'But those people in Italy —
do
they know anything?'

'That is the point; they cannot wish you to learn in this house more than they know themselves.'

'People who knew me must not know I was born, and people who knew I was born must not know me?'

'Exactly,' she said, in the dry avid quick voice she kept for exact talk.

'No one except you here and, of course, my mother, knows I
was
born, then, do they?'

'And your mother's husband — or so I am told.'

'Oh ... Mr Forrestier?'

'This Mr Forrestier may have urged her to see you. He has an incalculably romantic mind.'

'But then why — '

' — Will you take Naomi's knitting off the foot of my bed? On the table, perhaps: yes. I do not care for things on the foot of my bed.'

'I'm sorry,' said Leopold, moving the knitting. He sat down again and said: 'Did you know my father, too?'

'Fairly well,' Mme Fisher said. 'But you do not know of him.'

'I know one must have a father to have been born.'

'Oh, your American friends have told you so much have they?'

'I suppose so,' he said, indifferent. 'They told me once he was dead. That is true, I suppose?'

'Perfectly,' she said, nodding on the pillow.

'Then he must have known I was born.'

Mme Fisher deliberately shut her eyes, which till the moment before had been burning at Leopold like an old lion's out of their caves of bone. As though the strength she was saving by not looking had all gone with her voice, she said with energy: 'Never. He was at the time he died still more ignorant of you than it is generally wished you should be of him. In one thing, you have the advantage of him, Leopold: you know it is necessary to have a father, he did not know it was necessary to have a son.'

Leopold looked at the stretches of sheet between them, dyed grey by afternoon dusk. 'Then why did nobody tell him?'

'He was not there; he was dead.'

'But — '

'I think you must not ask me any more questions; your questions are curious in being so plain.'

'There aren't any more — '

Mme Fisher's chin moved on the sheet, derisive.

'To ask
you,'
he ended up with polite distinctness.

'Good,' she said. 'Then we shall not waste more time.' So, inside her tabernacle of bed-curtains, she relaxed to a hardly human flatness and stillness, in which to lie steadily watching Leopold — his fine eyebrows and narrow pale-skinned forehead tense with thought, his lashes cast on his checks, his unchildish deliberate and tactile fingers feeling their way over the padded arms of the chair, sounding creaks in the stuffing, stopping at every button. His blouse-cuffs fell away from his wrists, which she glanced at. Not an object in this unknown room had, since he came in, distracted his eyes a moment, but, sitting still, he knew of everything there. Everything, to the last whorl of each shell on the bracket, would stay sealed up, immortal, in an inner room in his consciousness. That her presence ran against him like restless water showed only in the unmovingness of his face. She reread a known map of thought and passion in miniature.

She said: 'Have they told you downstairs that I am dying?'

'Henrietta said you might be.'

'But I have not been alive for nearly ten years.'

'Have you been in bed?' said Leopold.

'That does not matter. Wherever I am now, I do not feel and am not felt.'

'Do you not feel anything?'

'I am fortunate in being as ill as I am.'

Searching consideration of what she said, not awe or timidity, kept Leopold silent. He turned once to glance at the right chair-arm, to see for the first time what he had been touching so long. Then he said, in the exact voice that had a ring of her own in it: 'How do you mean, not been felt?'

'What would you mean?'

Leopold's eyes narrowed between their lashes; he looked towards Mme Fisher cautiously, penetratingly. 'People not knowing I'm there.'

'Then all you want, Leopold, is the exercise of a vulgar power, simply.'

Leopold's mind checked at the knotted sentence, like a horse refusing a blind jump. He thought his way round to the far side of it, calmly, then said: 'But till they do know, I cannot do anything.'

'Yes, you are quite right. But to have been born is to be present — though I find one may cease to be present before dying. For you or me, Leopold, to have been born at all is an opportunity. For you or me, to think may be to be angry, but remember, we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.'

'Does a tree do that?'

'They need not stay ignorant of you. That is in your hands. But you must grow faster, more strongly than other people. There is no question, for you, of having someone to cherish you. For the man it may be you may be, that your father was not, the father and mother have only been instruments. Their faces and names do not matter. By deluding themselves with each other, they served you without knowing.'

'Must I go back to Italy?'

'Why should it matter where you go immediately?'

'It does matter,' he said, raising his eyes.

Under the blankets, Mme Fisher's hands moved with muffled force at her sides. Pressing back among the pillows, arching herself weakly, she stared up at the canopy that was her sky now. Rapidly, she exclaimed under her breath.

'What did you say?' said Leopold, relentless.

'I said: "My God, it is terrible that you are still a child." '

'In French?'

She nodded, her eyes darkening inside their caves.

'Which you do not speak?' she said. 'Naturally.'

'No. Hardly. Only some words.'

'They have clipped your wings for you nicely, then,' said she.

'What made you say it was terrible, me being a child?'

Mme Fisher kept her smile and, with it, a frightening lightness of humour, like someone pretending she has not looked through a door. "You overheard me,' she said, 'addressing myself to God, who for all I know may be sitting on top of my canopy, if Naomi has not already dislodged Him, dusting along the cornice with her feather broom. From what I hear of Him from friends who are
croyantes,
He takes an exaggerated view of things: one would naturally speak to Him in His own terms. In your and my terms, Leopold, your childishness is simply a pity for me — for me, solely: naturally I regret it. If you were less a child, I could enjoy more fully my short time of being alive again. As it is — yes, I may still say to you frankly: rather you as you are than some grownup sot. But it is a pity for me: I am dying too early.'

'It is more a pity for me, if I must go back to Italy!'

'If you have to, you will go. As I say, it is not important.'

Leopold drew his head back; he looked at Mme Fisher like a child prisoner, not knowing whom to turn to, a cup of something doubtful being held to his lips. He stared; he seemed to suspect for the first time that she might be either mad or laughing at him. Then, pushing hard with both hands against Naomi's chair-arms, he broke out suddenly: 'Why?

'Why should I have iodine stung on my knees when I fall down, and see one of them on a rock the whole time I'm on the shore, and be weighed every Saturday like something to eat, and be asked about my ideas when their friends come, and have them whispering round when I shut my eyes in bed, and be taken away from Rome and not let drink wine even with water and told about Shelley the whole time? I'm glad he was drowned; I wish he had never been born. The servants laugh at them because they never had children, so they never let me alone, which is like finding ants in everything. When I am angry they whisper in other rooms and when I use dirty words they look away from each other. They show off to other people to make them think I am theirs. They keep trying to make me be things. Have they bought me, or what? Why should I have to kiss them when I wish every time I have to that their faces would fall off, like the outsides of onions. When they walk about in the sunset not saying anything because of the sunset, or look poetically at things, their bodies look so silly. You can't say, "I don't love you" any more than you could say that to a sheep. They make me feel like a place with sheep eating on it the whole time. They are so pleased because I cannot remember anything else but them.'

'You see this all very plainly,' said Mme Fisher.

'Since my mother's letter came, I — '

'It might have been better if she had never written. When one has to live among sheep, exaltations are dangerous. I have lived among sheep, they have been my life; I have found that. How many times have I heard the door of this house shutting behind my friend — and each time it seemed the last time — then gone back to my sheep! Do you think I could not have struck the faces I saw then?'

Leopold only said: 'But you weren't theirs.'

Mme Fisher said in an open, reasonable voice: 'But look: they have been very good to you. What you say does not shock me, but, you know, it is shocking.'

'Why must I go back?'

'You and I,' said Mme Fisher, 'must not waste too much time rebelling.'

'Shelley was a rebel,' Leopold remarked bitterly.

She said decidedly: 'Shelley went beyond that. But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time. It is that phase, no doubt, in a young dead man that your friends would enjoy. Let them like to cry for Shelley; it does no harm.'

'Because Shelley's dead. But
me
? I was never asked.'

'No, you were never asked: that is true. The unwilling helplessness that you had as a baby offered you to their hearts, before you knew. Until you were two, since not long after your birth, you lived by your mother's wish with a German friend of Naomi's, a lady with a family of her own. How you might have grown up there one cannot say. The lady died. Her sudden death made a crisis for Naomi: what was to become of you? Stress was laid on the fact that you must never come here. Your mother was not able to be consulted: that year, the second after her marriage, she was very ill from the birth of a dead child. Naomi, whose right to act in the matter you and I must not question, therefore acted alone. These three Americans whom you call sheep were relatives of a young American lady who had been for some time with us in this house. During her stay they had sometimes visited us, and so, happening to pass through Paris, they visited us again, at a time when my daughter's anxiety as to your future was at its height. She recalled having heard from their young relative that, being childless and disappointed, they had expressed the wish to adopt a child. So her thoughts flew to a plan. She knew their affairs were secure and their characters amiable, and she satisfied herself in the course of one interview as to their highly natural cravings of heart. Optimism, and a regard, which I do not share, for certain qualities, made my daughter fix upon the Grant Moodys as proper parents for you. For their part, they did not put out many inquiries; they appear to have been content to know nothing must be known. I have no doubt, myself, that they took the child to be Naomi's, but what she thought fit to tell them later I do not know. My daughter, as always, acted incontinently but, again as always, as she thought for the best. I played no part in the matter: if she appeared impulsive it was not for me to say — '

Mme Fisher broke off, moved on the pillows with wasting impatience, and slid one hand outside the sheet again. Downstairs, the street doorbell rang, somebody was admitted, but she and Leopold, eyeing each other closely, did not for a moment turn from the past. Her breathing was laborious; in her face, for a minute, appeared despair at having to go on. Then she pushed back the fatigue falling over her.

'As the result of her choice, you were brought up from Germany, made the appeal she hoped and soon after left for Italy with the Americans' baggage, like any puppy or kitten that has changed hands. No doubt the idea of Italy tempted Naomi for you. Your father and she (who at one time proposed to marry) used, I understand, often to talk of Italy, planning to travel there. She does not dread the friends of Shelley as you do. Also, no doubt, they promised her access to you, a promise of which — having been since then unable to leave Paris for longer than her little visit to Chambéry, where she met your friend Henrietta's grandmother — she could not avail herself. At all events, the arrangements she had concluded left my daughter Naomi in an exalted fervour. With fervour she must have written of it to your mother, as soon as health let your mother receive news. Everyone being satisfied, it was not for me to question. Your mother, convinced by Naomi, whom she had always trusted, permitted the formalities of adoption, which made you these people's property, to go through. You and I must not judge her, then or today. Courage as much as passion made her your mother. Dread of the past and nervous weakness of body must have made her, later, grasp at what appeared to be peace. Dread must have made her shrink, on her own account or her husband's — whom she dared not wrong further — from knowing you. That must still be so, since she has not come today. That she must not love you was written on her heart. Since she loved your father she has changed very much, they say. Also, the death of her husband's child must have closed what heart she had against you, in panic. No doubt, too, she hoped to have other children. But I have heard lately that this may not be so.'