The House in Paris (7 page)

'Mother!' said Miss Fisher, 'you are talking too much. I shall have to send Henrietta downstairs again.'

'You see?' said Mme Fisher. 'I am under control.'

Henrietta could not help smiling. But she was taken aback by this view of her grandmother. Miss Fisher was, clearly, mistaken; Mme Fisher had
not
enjoyed hearing about Mrs Arbuthnot. To imagine the two ladies ever together made Henrietta uncomfortable: Mrs Arbuthnot's above-the-world expression bumping against the ceiling while Mme Fisher smiled on in unmoved pain; Mrs Arbuthnot's whimsicality shattered by Mme Fisher's making one of her English jokes. It would certainly never do.

'My daughter is half English,' said Mme Fisher. 'She had a very great faculty for devotion. She was most fortunate, meeting your grandmother at Chambéry.'

'Mother ...!'

'And I have been fortunate,' pursued Mme Fisher, 'in having heard so much of her English friend. I begin to feel that I know her. Mrs Arbuthnot's friendship has meant much to my daughter, who has much to support.'

There was a pause: Mme Fisher rolled round her head to watch her daughter knitting, unmovedly. One of Miss Fisher's needles clattered on to the parquet and she dived after it: something had been too much. Henrietta wondered if she should go now. She tried hard to catch Miss Fisher's eye, but could not. So she stared at the daylit shell at the other end of the room, till she felt Mme Fisher once more turning full upon her the battery of her look.

'This is your first visit to Paris?'

'Well, yes.'

'You have seen this house only?'

Henrietta hoped that the question of going out might come up now. Oh to exchange those unseen streets, the Trocadéro, even Napoleon's tomb, for this air darkening her lungs with every breath she took, the built-in tree in the court, the varying abnormalities of Mme Fisher and Leopold. The proper French, she thought, cannot be like this. Here she had dropped down a well into something worse than the past in not being yet over. She said: 'But this house is so uncommon.'

'This house? It does very well. It is uncommon chiefly in being a house at all. It was always in my family, and was left to me by my grandfather, who was a notary; it is such a house as you find only now in the provinces. When I am dead, it will be sold at once. One cannot afford to live in a house, in Paris. But I prefer to die here.'

Miss Fisher's interruptions had alternate objects, to save her mother's breath or to turn the talk. Now she said: 'My mother's family come from Touraine: they were always notaries. But my father was a captain in the English artillery. The Fishers were always soldierly.'

'Yes,' said Mme Fisher, 'my marriage was most r-r-r-romantic.'

Mocking herself, she smiled at the memory of her marriage, as at any fanciful object, cameo or painted fan, that might have caught her notice, having its place here and valued once. Whatever she might think of, lying on this high bed, her smile was for the present and Henrietta: an un-reminiscent smile. Mrs Arbuthnot spoke so much of living among memories that it shocked Henrietta to feel Captain Fisher gone. His military rattling ardour was silent for good, for where should it be remembered if not here? A man of strange courage, who had begotten Miss Fisher, then, by dying, let flow back an undisturbed solitude. Henrietta, being not ripe for grown-up reflections, did not wonder how he had treated his wife, or speculate as to the lastingness of his passion for the ironical French governess, never pretty, not from the first young. He had married Mme Fisher. Love is the unchallenged motive for some kinds of behaviour: Mrs Arbuthnot said: You will understand some day,' and Henrietta was still willing to wait. Therefore she simply wondered what had brought him to Paris (or had they met in England?), what he had done all day here, whether he liked the house. There was comfort in the idea of the plain Englishman's presence: she looked round the crowded walls for his photograph. Mme Fisher had made her mark, she had struck his heart. See what marriage had done for Mrs Arbuthnot and Caroline! But Mme Fisher lay back disclaimingly on her pillows, seeming to say: 'We take nothing out of this world.'

'Yes, look
there
is my father's photograph.' Miss Fisher twisted round to point to it, over her head. Inside its oval frame the photograph had faded. Captain Fisher's moustache chiefly appeared; Englishness or any kind of expression had dulled out after years on the red wall. 'Just before leaving the regiment,' said his daughter. 'Before he married my mother he sent his papers in.'

His widow's hand, in the cuff of a grey bed-jacket, came out over the sheet a moment to pull the bedclothes closer still to her chin. Did she marry because she was tired of rapping knuckles and Frenchmen will not marry you with no
dot?

Henrietta began: 'My father was in the army; he — '

' — So, Henrietta,' said Mme Fisher suddenly, 'you have not only your monkey but Leopold down there?'

'Yes.'

'And, tell me, do you like Leopold?'

'Oh, I like him. Of course, today he's excited. He — he's not very tall for his age, is he?'

'I have not seen him. I may.'

'Mother ... You slept this morning. Also, I am most anxious to keep Leopold quiet until — '

'He is not quiet down there. What has he been breaking?! heard something fall just now.'

Henrietta said: 'Oh, that was my dispatch case. He, Leopold, swung it and everything fell out.'

'Ah! He likes to touch things?'

'I suppose so,' said Henrietta, perplexed.

'Excited ...' said Mme Fisher, making the first restless movement Henrietta had seen.

'They have been playing,' Miss Fisher said quickly, 'talking and eating apples. It is nice for them both.'

'Oh yes, we've been talking,' said Henrietta. Encouraged by Mme Fisher's attention, she went on brightly, 'He told me about his mother.'

' — Look, Henrietta, my mother gets so soon tired. Perhaps you should go back to Leopold now.'

'No,' exclaimed her mother, point-blank, going under the bedclothes rigid with opposition. How frantically but coldly she loved the present! Henrietta, who had got up, sat down again. The fatal topic of Leopold was magnetic: she was not nearly so anxious to go now. Mme Fisher looked at her avidly. 'Oh, so you made friends, did you, down in the salon? You must resemble your grandmother, it seems to me. Is Leopold not suspicious the whole time?'

'Mother, no; you are quite wrong!'

'I see him suspicious, but still full of himself.'

Henrietta said: 'Well, yes, he is, rather.'

'He likes to talk?'

'Very
much.'

'I have already heard him up and down on the stairs.'

'He shall come up later, Mother. After — '

'Yes, always "after" no doubt — he has a step like his father's.'

'Oh,' Henrietta said, 'did you know his father too?'

'Quite well,' said Mme Fisher. 'He broke Naomi's heart.'

She mentioned this impatiently, as though it had been some annoying domestic mishap. Henrietta, glancing across the bed, saw Miss Fisher's eyelids glued down with pain. Then, with the air of having known all along this would come, the helpless daughter rolled up her knitting quickly, as though to terminate something, perhaps the pretence of safety, jabbing her needles through it with violent calm. Set for flight by moving up in her chair, she seemed uncertain whether to fly or not, whether or not to show this was unbearable. Her face took a watchful look, as though somebody else might come in at any moment. Her prominent mouth, not unlike Charles the monkey's, formed an unwilling smile; her eyes fixed with an unmeaning expression the white quilt rolled back at her mother's feet. Sudden tragic importance made her look doubtful, as though a great dark plumed hat had been clapped aslant on her head.

Mme Fisher's detachment, Henrietta could see, had its iron side: she no longer felt, so why should anyone else? Grown-up enough to shy away from emotion, Henrietta felt she had seen Miss Fisher undressed. Half of her blindly wished to be somewhere else, while the other half of her stood eagerly by. She knew one should not hear these things when one was only eleven. All the same, she felt important in this atmosphere of importance: she liked being in on whatever was going on. Mrs Arbuthnot did not deal in broken hearts; she said only housemaids had them — but the Fishers were French. Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear. But, Miss Fisher's heart had been brittle, it
had
broken. No wonder she'd looked so odd at the Gare du Nord.

'However, we cannot judge him,' said Mme Fisher, turning to look arrestingly at her daughter as though she had not seen this so plainly before. You were determined to suffer, you gave him no alternative. Max was fatal first of all to himself.'

'Leopold's father is dead now,' said Miss Fisher, looking at Henrietta across the bed.

'Happily,' said her mother.

Henrietta began in confusion: 'Leopold didn't say —'

'Naturally,' said Mme Fisher. 'He has never heard of him.'

Having said this with some impatience, she shut her eyes. Henrietta, getting up cautiously, smoothed out the pleats of her dress. The incense cone had burnt out, its fumes were gone: the red wall opposite the window brightened; the winter sun was trying to come through. Henrietta's mind worked round to the Trocadéro: she wondered if she could ask for tea in a shop. She really dreaded another
séance
with Leopold. Shifting from foot to foot she stared at the bracket. 'It must be quite late,' she said.

'Yes. Look, Henrietta: my mother must really sleep now.'

'I must not, but I will.'

Henrietta did not know whether to hold her hand out. 'Well, good-bye, Madame Fisher, thank you so very much.'

'Come again to see me before you go to your train.' Her voice took for the last time its parody note. 'Who knows where I may be when you pass through Paris next time?'

Henrietta laughed politely, half-way to the door.

'Yes, that was one more of my jokes — Oh, Henrietta!'

'Yes?'

Your grandmother sent you to us. You must never distress your grandmother.'

Going with Henrietta as far as the door, Miss Fisher shut it behind her gently. She must have stayed silent by it for some time, for no sound came from inside Mme Fisher's room.

5

Henrietta's relief at finding herself alone was overcast by the prospect of returning to Leopold. Feeling like a kaleidoscope often and quickly shaken, she badly wanted some place in which not to think. So she sat down on the stairs, with her eyes shut tight, pressing her ear-lobes over her ears with her thumbs: she had found this the surest way to repress thought. But something had got at her: the idea of Miss Fisher's heart.

Why could it not mend, like Caroline's?

Caroline was eleven years older than Henrietta. Summers ago, when Henrietta was six, they had shared a seaside bedroom, a room with blowy white curtains and china knobs on the furniture: here, early one morning, she had woken to find Caroline in tears. Nothing had had time to happen, the morning was still innocent, but here in the stretcher-bed beside Henrietta her big sister lay twisting with sobs, eyes blubbered and scarlet in a tear-sunken face. Sunshine made the room foreign to any kind of despair. Henrietta, who had a regard for Caroline, had said after a moment: 'Shall I come into bed with you?' Her sister's body looked lonely.

'No, thank you. Go to sleep.'

'But it's today now.'

'I know. I hate it,' said Caroline. She sat up and looked with horror round at the furniture, as though she had hoped against hope to find something gone: her hair hung round her shoulders matted, dull. Her poise and her calm regard for herself had vanished. Something she saw on the wash-stand or some new pain made her roll round in bed again, biting her wrist. This paroxysm abated to hopeless hiccups. 'Mr Jeffcocks is married,' she said at last.

'Who to?'

'He told me last night.'

'Has he got any children?'

Caroline writhed at this like a hooked fish. 'I wish I had died,' she said, 'when I was your age.'

Henrietta, frightened, had got out of bed and looked out of the window as though for help. The sea, heartlessly blue and glittering with sunshine, carried two sailing ships: below the tamarisk hedge the shingle shelved to the sea in smooth orange steps. Mr Jeffcocks had already cast a blight on the holiday, for Caroline had devoted the fortnight to running after him, she could not be got to come on picnics or anything. She had bought a red glacé belt and spent hours up at her window re-whitening her shoes and looking out for him; she would stand against the bright sea staring down the promenade towards the glass porch of his hotel. Nobody knew for certain how she had picked him up. Their mother, who was alive then, took no notice, but Mrs Arbuthnot, who did not in those days see eye to eye with Caroline, was with them also, and the affair had made her anxious and cross, which had fallen heavy on Henrietta .. . When Caroline saw Henrietta get out of bed she had said, 'No; don't go.'

'I was going to see my starfish.'

Starfish seemed to have fatal associations, for Caroline wept again. Then she got up, sobbing, to stare at herself in the glass. 'I've gone all different,' she said. 'Say something.'

Henrietta thought, then said: 'Today we're going to Dymchurch.'

'Tell mother I'll stay in bed. And
don't
let them come in here.'

'And
miss
Dymchurch?'

Caroline picked up a comb and blindly tugged at her hair.

'Why do you comb your hair?'

'Something has gone inside me. My heart, I think.'

But Caroline had had to get up, of course. She behaved for several days as though she were ill. Meanwhile, Mr Jeffcocks took Henrietta out in a boat and showed her photographs of his two little girls. Caroline began to show she was uncertain whether he had betrayed her or were just simply common. She no longer slipped out directly after supper, but sat in the sitting-room helping Henrietta sort shells. That autumn they sent her away to a finishing school, from which she came back next year with an unchippable glaze. She said she saw now how morbid one was when one was young. Growing up very fast, she learnt to be so amusing about her early humiliations that soon no one believed they had ever been. She seemed to have been born lucky. At twenty she married, and only Henrietta, fidgeting in the aisle in her Second Empire little girl's bridesmaid's frock while Caroline, white and distant, knelt at the altar, spared a puzzled thought for Mr Jeffcocks that day. On no other occasion did Caroline speak of her heart. The vulgar affair of Mr Jeffcocks blew over, as Mrs Arbuthnot had always foreseen it would.