The House in Paris (4 page)

He said: 'Miss Fisher says you're here for the day.'

'I'm just crossing Paris,' Henrietta said with cosmopolitan ease.

'Is that your monkey?'

'Yes. I've had him ever since I was born.'

'Oh,' said Leopold, looking at Charles vaguely.

'How old are you?' Henrietta inquired.

'Nine.'

'Oh, I'm eleven.'

'Miss Fisher's mother is very ill,' said Leopold. He sat down in an armchair with his knees crossed and, bending forward, studied a cut on one knee. The four velvet armchairs, each pulled out a little way from a corner, faced in on the round table that reflected the window and had in its centre a tufted chenille mat. He added, wrinkling his forehead: 'So Mariette says, at least.'

'Who is Mariette?'

'Their maid. She wanted to help me dress.'

'Do you think she is going to die?' said Henrietta.

'I don't expect so. I shall be out, anyway.'

'That would be awful,' said Henrietta, shocked.

'I suppose it would. But I don't know Mme Fisher.'

It is never natural for children to smile at each other: Henrietta and Leopold kept their natural formality. She said: 'You see, I'd been hoping Miss Fisher was going to take me out.'

Leopold, looking about the salon, said: Yes,
this
must be a rather funny way to see Paris.' But he spoke with detachment; it did not matter to him.

'I don't feel as if I was anywhere,' Henrietta complained.

Leopold got up and strolled away to the window. With his back turned to Henrietta, looking out at the tree, he said in an off-hand voice; 'My mother's coming today, so she and I will go out.'

'What will you do?'

'Oh — have tea at a
patisserie.'

'My grandmother's gone to live at Mentone.'

'Oh. Is that why you're going there?'

'Yes; did Miss Fisher tell you?' said Henrietta, gratified.

'I suppose she did.' Turning round from the window he said with much more animation: 'Where does your mother live?'

'Oh, she's dead,' said Henrietta, embarrassed.

'Oh, is she?' said Leopold, taken aback. His manner became a little touchy and wary, as though she had been laying a trap for him. Picking Henrietta's monkey up by the ears he examined it distantly: its limp limbs and stitched felt paws hung down.

'Don't!' exclaimed Henrietta. 'His ears may come off!'

'They seem quite firm,' said Leopold, testing them. 'Why do you say "don't"? Do you think it feels?'

'Well, I like to think he notices. Otherwise there'd be no point in taking him everywhere ... Have you been in Paris often, Leopold?'

Does it squeak?' he went on, absorbed, digging at Charles's belly.

'No. Please put him down. Have you been in Paris often?'

'No. I live near Spezia. Italy's better than France.'

'Why?' said she, nettled.

'It's hotter,' he said, raising his eyebrows, 'and not nearly so shabby. Besides, it has got a king still. Mentone used to be Italy till France took it away. Nobody goes to France when they can go to Italy.'

'Then why doesn't your mother go and see you in Italy?'

'Because it's too far,' said Leopold loftily. Silhouetted against the unsunny muslin blind he began rocking backwards and forwards, from his toes to his heels. Creak — creak went his shoes on the parquet. Intent on balance, he sometimes bowed right forward or jerked hastily back: his hands stayed in his pockets the whole time. He became his own rocking toy whose equilibrium flattered him; meanwhile showing Henrietta that he had no thoughts. She, however, refused to watch. Gazing up at the cornice picked out in grey and yellow, she thought: All he wants is somebody who will notice.

Leopold said, off-hand: 'What did Miss
Fisher
say about my mother and me?'

Henrietta, still with her feet up on the sofa, looked down from the cornice only to stare at the toe-caps of her brown shoes. Then, peering forward earnestly, she read two or three French words on the sheet of
Le Matin
under her feet. Too well she recollected Miss Fisher's taboo. But this was the subject he seemed determined to pitch on, and she found herself burning to know how he felt. 'Oh,' she said, 'she just said your mother lived somewhere else.'

'Somewhere else from where?'

'From you.'

Leopold stopped rocking, bumped down on his heels and stood disconcertingly still, his big-pupilled eyes, set close in, transfixing her so intently that she thought for a moment he had a cast in them. He said: 'So you thought that was funny?'

'Yes, I did,' she said boldly. 'I did think that was funny.'

'If you told that to other people, would they think it was funny?'

'Well, they wouldn't
laugh,
if that's what you mean by funny. I suppose they might think it was rather sort of
peculiar.
But then I promised not to.'

'Tell other people?'

'Mmm.'

'It's not a secret,' said Leopold haughtily.

'Oh, Miss Fisher said it was.'

Did she tell you not to ask me things?'

'How do you mean?' she said, flustered.

Leopold smiled to himself. 'She told me not to answer, what
ever
you said. She hopes I won't say anything.'

'Then ought you to?' said Henrietta, reproving.

'I don't have to be obedient to Miss Fisher. It's not my fault if you are here while I talk. Look — now your mother's dead so you can't possibly see her, do you still mean to love her, or is that no good now? When you want to love her, what do you do, remember her? But if you couldn't remember her, but heard you could see her, would you enjoy loving her more, or less?'

'I don't see what you mean,' said Henrietta, distracted — in fact in quite a new kind of pain. She saw only too well that this inquisition had no bearing on Henrietta at all, that Leopold was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty. With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. Henrietta dreaded what he might say next. Helpless tears began making her eyelids twitch.

'Why, are you still unhappy about your mother?' he said.

Henrietta sharply turned her face to the wallpaper.

'I'm not thinking about her. I simply don't like Paris; I wish I was in the train.'

'Well, you will be, soon,' said Leopold, much more gently. For a moment, a smile, his first smile, comprehending and vivid, lit up his face. 'You'll be in the train tonight, and I don't know where I shall be!'

'P'raps in another train,' she replied unfriendlily.

'You see, you and I are just opposites. I
don't
remember my mother, but
shall
see her again.' He watched Henrietta closely, to see, as though on himself, the effect of this.

The effect was odd. Henrietta turned down her eyes, smoothed her dress on her knees and remarked with the utmost primness: 'You must be very glad: no wonder you are excited. I am excited, going to Mentone.' Then, swinging her feet to the ground, she left the sofa and walked to the radiator, above which she spread her hands. Glancing aloofly to see if her nails were clean, she seemed to become unconscious of Leopold. Then she strolled across to examine a vase of crêpe paper roses on the consol table behind Charles's chair. Peering behind the roses, she found they were tied on with wire to sprigs of box. She glanced across at the clock, smothered a yawn politely and said aloud to herself: 'Only twenty-five past ten.' Her sex provided these gestures, showing how bored she got with someone else's insistence on his own personality. Her dread of Leopold gave way to annoyance. Already she never met anyone without immediately wanting to rivet their thought on herself, and with this end in view looked forward to being grown up.

Her married sister, Caroline, commanded all she wanted by sailing along effortlessly, like a swan down-stream. No one overlooked Caroline nowadays. Their grandmother Mrs Arbuthnot's
distrait
expression made her look, as Miss Fisher said, quite above the world, but people did as she liked. From among the many people anxious to know her, she had sorted out two or three friends so distinguished that it was a privilege for Henrietta even to look at them. One of these friends, unbending to Henrietta, had said to her that her grandmother was unique. As no doubt she was, but who is not? And she had minor friends, sub-friends, such as Miss Fisher, whom she remembered when they could be of use. Caroline was as effective as her grandmother; everything was grist that came to Caroline's mill. At one time she had been thwarted and moody, but whatever she touched prospered now she had grown up. Having spent hours unwillingly silent with Mrs Arbuthnot and Caroline and their friends, Henrietta had noted their charm, their astuteness, their command of emotion in others, and could no longer doubt she lived in a world where it was fatal never to make one's mark. Neither Mrs Arbuthnot nor Caroline stopped at anything: possibly only Henrietta knew how far they would both go. They flourished like bay trees without being even wicked: Mrs Arbuthnot looked so vague and untidy that you saw at once that she must be good. Caroline's young husband found her perfect; and though Mrs Arbuthnot had not, this winter, been lent the villino at Beaulieu, she had been lent a flat at Mentone overlooking the sea.

Henrietta inherited from her father, Colonel Mountjoy, fair hair and self-mistrust; her ambitiousness came from the other side. Her father could not do with Mrs Arbuthnot and was always uneasy alone with her. During his mother-in-law's visits, he had the air of wearing his coat-collar up. His wife's death left him helpless: it had seemed highly natural that Mrs Arbuthnot should take Henrietta on. Henrietta trusted her grandmother breathlessly, as one must trust the driver on the Cornici road.

'Twenty-five past ten,' Henrietta repeated. 'How I should like to go out!'

'Well, why don't you go?'

She said firmly: 'I couldn't go by myself.'

Leopold, whom the ever possible fate of little girls in Paris did not concern, looked at her curiously. Now he had said so much his excitement eased a little: he felt a cloudy liking for Henrietta and began to be glad she was in the room. Her matter-of-fact manner made him feel less extraordinary. At the Villa Fioretta, outside Spezia, the solicitude of his relations by adoption, his aunts Sally and Marian and his uncle Dee, who was at the same time his tutor, drove him into a frenzy about himself. He was over understood. The repercussions of all that he said and did echoed through the hollow rooms of the villa, and he knew too well these people found him remarkable. The chosen childish children with whom he played made a crook of him, and all the time he impressed them he despised them for being impressed; he wanted to crack the world by saying some final and frightful thing. Only the men on the beach and the clattering servants did not make him feel he knew more than anyone else. Aunt Marian and Aunt Sally were faded aesthetic expatriate American women; Uncle Dee, incredibly, was the husband of Aunt Marian. Before they had bought the Villa Fioretta the family had lived in Rome, and Leopold still regretted the bands, the clamour, the pomp. The city became the image of his ambition, communicating its pride to him so violently and immediately that antiquity went for nothing: the hills and columns seemed to be made for himself. To have been born became to be on the scale of emperors and popes, to be conspicuous everywhere, like the startling white Vittorio Emmanuele monument. He was, in fact, full of the bastard's pride ... But Rome had not been good for Aunt Marian's asthma, so the family moved. Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.

The displeased cool manner in which Henrietta had peered behind the roses, and her glance at the clock, made Leopold value her: she showed he was nothing to her. All he had said, having left her cold, was still his. Where he came from, kindness thickened the air and sentiment fattened on the mystery of his birth. Years before sex had power to touch his feeling it had forced itself into view as an awkward tangle of motives. There was no one he could ask frankly: 'Just how odd
is
all this?' The disengaged Henrietta had been his first looking-glass. The idea of her travelling away tonight to Mentone, with the monkey she had always had and her recollection of Leopold, the idea of her gone, made Leopold glance her way with an interest that was half sad. His eyes, at once sharp and shy, rested on the symbol of her departure: the paper-leather dispatch case near the door.

'Is that yours, too?'

'Yes,' she said, with a certain amount of pride. 'It was bought for me yesterday. They're useful travelling, you see.'

'Bought in London?'

'Yes. Have you been there?'

'No. Is it heavy?'

'Depends what you call heavy,' she said.

Leopold, going across to pick up the dispatch case, weighed it and swung it boastfully. '
That's
not heavy,' he said. 'What are all those things rattling about inside?'

'Apples,' said Henrietta, ' — it's not meant to be swung.'

It was not. Its two clasps indignantly sprang open: two apples, a cake of soap and an ebony-backed hairbrush came bouncing and crashing out; the sponge-bag made a damp thud,
The Strand Magazine
and the pink
Malheurs de Sophie
fluttered face down on the floor. The pack of playing cards, happily, stayed in their box. 'There now!' said Henrietta. This confirmed her opinion that all little boys were rough.

Leopold stood grasping the gaping dispatch case, watching one apple roll off under a chair. A smell of shut-up apples and soap filled the room. There was nothing he could say: he stood there unmeaningly. Someone moved upstairs; they heard a step on the ceiling.