The House in Paris (8 page)

Mme Fisher's scornful exaggerations on the subject of dying levelled that and everything else flat. Caring for nothing, she seemed to keep every happening, like rows of sea-blunted pebbles with no character, in her lit-up mind. Her eyes still looked through the door to disconcert Henrietta. For growing little girls are tempted up like plants by the idea that something is happening that they will some day know about. Mme Fisher's eyes, her indifferent way of talking, made Henrietta feel that nothing was going on — never had, never would: you knew that when you knew. Henrietta could not understand why that picture of Mrs Arbuthnot walking by the seashore with her green parasol had made her so nearly blush: she only knew she felt guilty, involved in a wrong smile. The fact was, Mrs Arbuthnot did not like anybody to debunk life: though always she said she regretted nothing, she liked to feel there was much to regret if one chose.

A smell of cooking began to come upstairs: lunch would be soon — after that, Leopold's mother. Henrietta, eyeing the barlike stripes of the paper, felt a house like this was too small for so much to happen in. All these things that were still to happen waited: for all she knew this might always be so in Paris ... On the landing above the sick-room door opened; Miss Fisher began to come down. Henrietta contracted her shoulder-blades.

'Why,
Henrietta,
what are you doing here?'

'Just sitting down.'

'But it is so lonely for you.'

'In England I often sit on the stairs.'

Miss Fisher came three steps lower to say: 'Do not, please, repeat what my mother has said to Leopold.'

'Oh, goodness, no,' said Henrietta, impatient.

'I was for a short time engaged to marry his father, then we found it unsuitable.'

'Oh. Am I to see Leopold's mother at all?'

'Oh, no; I am afraid that is impossible. But I will take you to see the Trocadéro, certainly.'

'Do you think we could have tea at a shop?'

'Anything, Henrietta.'

'Thank you. Perhaps I may think of more things.' She went on in a lower voice: 'What is his mother
like?'

'English in type, beautiful. My mother took in
pensionnaires
here until her illness, and Karen — she — was one of them. Naturally, she has changed a little since then.'

'Mrs
what
is she?'

'Oh, I think it is useless to tell you. I should think of her as Mrs Brown.'

'Why?'

'That would be better.'

'What's Leopold's other name, then?'

'He is called Grant Moody.'

'Oh, goodness! That doesn't suit him!'

'He has taken the name of the family that he lives with. They are very kind, good: he should be happy with them.'

'But why is he not with her?'

Miss Fisher, tired of bending over to answer in a discreet voice, sat down also, one step below Henrietta, with an uneasy sigh. 'Please Henrietta,' she said, 'you must be content not to ask me so many things. You make the day more difficult. I did not see, I think, how difficult it might be. No doubt your grandmother will tell you more about life when she considers you old enough. I have a great regard for her understanding. I think now you should go down and play with Leopold.'

'We don't really
play
very much.'

'He is a little shy, perhaps.'

'
I
should call him superior.'

Miss Fisher, after a nonplussed silence, said: 'Have you let him play with your monkey yet?'

' — Mayn't I stay on the stairs?'

'It is a little sad for you,' said her hostess decisively.

If Miss Fisher had had the idea of going downstairs when she left the sick-room, she clearly gave this up, for she went back again, shutting the door behind her firmly: Henrietta, lagging downstairs, heard her going off behind it in French. Her head, Henrietta thought with justifiable crossness, seemed to have been affected more than her heart.

So that coming into the salon to find Leopold in exalted abstraction, an envelope to his forehead, his eyes shut, made Henrietta feel that fumes of insanity must have twisted down here. Or had he always been 'queer'? She said what she said sharply.

'I am thought-reading, naturally,' Leopold said. But she saw that he did not like her having come in.

'Can
you, Leopold?'

'Naturally, or why should I? If you hadn't come in —'

'Well, I have got to be
somewhere.
I can't just melt.'

Irritably contracting his forehead, as though the shock of her entrance had struck him there, Leopold went to the table and put the envelope back in Miss Fisher's bag.

'Oh, you oughtn't to thought-read letters to someone else!'

Leopold, stuffing a handkerchief carefully over the envelope, took no notice.

'It's dishonourable to
touch
other people's letters,' Henrietta went on.

'I've no idea what you mean,' he said scornfully. 'Anything from my mother is mine, of course. But this letter had been taken.'

'Your mother would hate you to!'

You don't know her.'

'Neither do you, either.'

'She's the same as me; she would see why I do things!'

'Is
her name Brown?'

This, for some reason, sent him into a passion. Colour rose under his eyes; he looked at the handbag as though he meant to fling it across the room. Then his eyes met Henrietta's. Control made his unchildish passion alarming and Henrietta retreated behind a chair. He said at last: 'Her name's Forrestier.'

'Do you really know?'

'I found out.'

'Then why are you Grant Moody?'

'Because no one knows I'm born.' He said this with such an air of enjoying the distinction that Henrietta exclaimed: 'I should hate that!'

'I expect you would. You couldn't possibly be me.' He went back to lean on the mantelpiece with his hands in his pockets, as she had seen him after she first woke up. 'Everyone else is the same as everyone else. That is what
I
should hate.'

Henrietta said: 'My comb is still on the floor.' Tears of chagrin, angrier than her first tears, started into her eyes as she knelt down to pick the comb up, letting her hair fall over her flaming cheeks. The lines of the parquet swam. 'You go on like God,' she said.

'I haven't hurt your comb. Whatever is the matter? You've got your grandmother. And when you got out of the train you didn't know there was me.'

'I wish I didn't know now.'

'I don't see why you're crying.'

'Well, I think when you upset my things you might pick them up. Miss Fisher talks as if we get on so well.'

'I think she's mad, don't you?' he said, far more engagingly. The weeping-willow fall of her hair as she stooped and the sturdy way she got up, tugging her belt round to bring the buckle over her navel again, pleased Leopold. Whenever he looked direct at Henrietta she was not an enemy. Her grey eyes, stretched wide open to keep the tears back, met his when he said Miss Fisher was mad: he saw in her eyes the elm-grey autumn park where the little girl in the lithograph bowled her hoop. Instantly, she became part of his mother's English life.

'She almost married your father.'

'Who almost did?'

'Miss Fisher. She said so on the stairs.'

'Then he must have been mad too. I don't believe it. What did Mme Fisher say?'

'I think she made some joke.'

'If Miss Fisher is not mad, then she is a liar. When we were coming here last night from the station she told me it was my mother she liked. Anyhow, it doesn't matter: he's dead.' He looked at the clock and added: 'She's coming at half-past two.'

'That's when I am going out,' said Henrietta, sighing.

'Perhaps you may see her some day. We're going to live in England.'

'Miss Fisher doesn't say so.'

'She doesn't know.'

'But you live in Italy.'

'No, I don't now.'

Leopold's calmness dumbfounded Henrietta. He looked again at the clock with masterful confidence, as though its hands moved faster the more he looked. A great many 'buts' shot up in Henrietta's mind, the first being: But we're children, people's belongings: we can't — Incredulity made her go scarlet. 'Do you mean you're going
back
with her? When?'

'Oh, today or tomorrow.'

'But the people in Italy — '

'They can't do anything.'

'But where can you go if nobody knows you're born?'

'They will; she'll soon tell them about me,' he said. 'She wants me more than anything. She did not say this to Uncle Dee and Aunt Sally because of the fuss they make when it's anything about me. Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.'

'But don't you like them?'

'I had to when I was there — '

'But how do you
know
you're going to England?'

'I know.'

Fascinated by what was going on inside him, Henrietta was drawn across the salon to where he stood. Still looking doubtfully at him, she came to stand by his side with her back to the mantelpiece, bracing her shoulders, also, against the marble, to feel as nearly as possible how he felt, and, as though in order to learn something, copying his attitude. She thought: I am taller, but... He noted her nearness without noticing her. She studied the stiff blue folds of his sailor-blouse sleeve, and looked attentively at the lines round his collar. A scar from some operation showed on his neck; at her side, under the jaw. She looked at his ear and, unconvinced, touched her own, to assure herself he and she were even so much alike. She found herself for the first time no more asking for notice than if she had stood beside an unconscious strong little tree: moving her elbow his way she felt his arm as unknowing as wood. Perplexity and sudden un-childish sadness made her remove her touch. 'But what are you going to do in England?' she said.

'We shall be together.'

Henrietta thought: Which is ordinary, after all. But his manner had made it sound supernatural. She tried to see him going to school on a bicycle, or being asked by his mother to clean his nails. But each picture had a heroic light: she could not see them lower or less happy. She thought dauntedly: They may really live like that. Henrietta's abstract of another child's mother was a lady with tight pearls and a worried smile. But Leopold's mother swept brilliantly through one's fancy; he commandeered, to make her, every desire, not only his own. He was a person whose passion makes its object exist. She will be in his image, she will not hesitate or mind what they say. There seemed no doubt he and she would go to England together to live a demi-god life there, leaving Henrietta forgotten, luckless, cold.

(But they haven't met yet: they may disappoint each other. She may be wrinkly now, with timid fussy ways, a face just like a mouse, the tight pearls and the smile.)

'But look here,' she said, 'who do you really belong to? I mean, who buys your clothes?'

'Well, they can keep those, can't they?'

'But haven't they been kind to you?'

'I can write and thank them.'

'I really do think you're selfish!' Henrietta exclaimed.

A parade of uncaring expressions crossed Leopold's face. Stepping away from her, still without seeming to notice she had been standing there, he picked up her box of playing-cards with the pink and gold ship and rattled the packed box with a sardonic, but, she noticed, faintly placating smile. He said suddenly: 'Can you tell fortunes by cards?'

'A governess I had did.'

But as she spoke, the kitchen door at the end of the hall, opening, let out a blast of finished cooking. A tray rattled past the salon; the purposeful stump of the maid's returning footsteps, then a heavier rattle, told Henrietta lunch must be coming in.

After lunch, Miss Fisher left them to go back to Mme Fisher; they saw her go upstairs with a special tray. It was still only half-past one. Leopold had not eaten much; he jabbed blindly at his food with his fork, leaving his knife propped at the edge of his plate — but Henrietta's stomach felt as tight as a drum and she had far fewer thoughts. The salon felt chilly after the dining-room. Leopold, as though lunch had never happened, went straight back to the cards. 'Did you say you
could
tell fortunes?'

'I said my governess did.'

'Can you remember how?'

'Twenty-six cards in a ring ... The knaves used to be lovers.'

'Then throw them out. It's the future I want to know.'

'But I don't think — '

'Try. Make up anything. If it's really the future it will come out somehow.'

'Then why don't you try?'

'No. I want to watch.'

'Very well,' she said quickly, tossing her hair back. 'Shuffle and cut to me.'

Having done this with alarming concentration, Leopold pushed the round table to one side and turned back the edge of the rug. He pressed the reshuffled pack between his palms. Henrietta, between misgiving and self-importance took the pack and, kneeling down on the parquet, dealt out in a circle round her twenty-six cards, face down. Leopold squatted outside the circle and they both breathed intently. She said:

'You mustn't think.'

A tide of pale sun reflected from outside swept over the parquet and caught the tips of her hair. Looking up to think, she saw the limbs of the plane glisten and wet yellow light sweep over the wall behind. Upstairs, Miss Fisher shut the other shutter: her mother would now be entirely in the dark. Inside courtyards and twisted alleys, the sound of Paris took on a clearer ring. The sun coming out made Henrietta more nervous, as though heaven opened a window to watch. Leopold's soles creaked as he squatted behind her.

'Turn up any card,' she said.

He did. 'Ten of spades.'

'Oh, that's misfortune. A death.'

'Why?'

'Spades are used to dig graves.'

'Perhaps that is Madame Fisher. What do you do with those other twenty-six cards?'

'Oh, they come in later. Draw again. Show me. Oh, a woman is going to cross your path. Is your mother fair or dark?'

'I don't know. What are diamonds?'

'Money.'

'Look here, are you sure you're getting this right?'

'I don't see why I shouldn't be. Go on drawing. Oh dear, Leopold; really you
are
unlucky. Spades again. Ace, too: that's the worst.'