The House in Paris (9 page)

Leopold, who had crawled around outside the circle and now knelt in front of her, threw down the card angrily: 'I don't think your governess knew,' he said. 'What are hearts — love?'

'Yes — ' A bell tringed through the house; Henrietta looked up, surprised — this was the first indoor bell she'd heard today. One forgets that such things go on in Paris too. Mariette shot out of the kitchen, went to the hall door, murmured to someone, shut it. Leopold, oblivious, stared at the face-down cards, but Henrietta still listened: a woman cannot ignore what goes on in any house. She heard Mariette wait, then start heavily upstairs.

'Look here, the king of hearts.'

'Oh, you'll be lucky in love — What
was
that, do you think?'

'Oh, something. Go on.'

'What do you want to happen?'

'Crossing the sea.'

They heard Miss Fisher come to the top of the stairs, where Mariette and she interrupted each other's French. Henrietta could contain herself no longer; she sat back on her heels. 'Something must be happening,' she said. 'I think someone's brought a note.'

'Well, we can't help that.'

'I wish we hadn't done cards; I think it's made things happen — It's all very well to shrug, but suppose it's about you.'

'Perhaps your grandmother's dead,' retorted Leopold sharply.

'That would be a telegram.'

'Well, perhaps it is a telegram. Oh, damn all these cards! You don't know how, you don't make anything come!' Leopold impatiently broke the circle, sweeping the cards into a porridge with both hands. The gilt ships slipped over each other, here and there a card bent, its edge caught on the parquet. 'Muddle — muddle — muddle,' he muttered, stirring them rudely. 'I thought you said you could do this. What
can
you do, then?'

'Oh, shut up, Leopold: those are my cards!'

'I don't — Here she comes!'

The cautious steps of women when something has happened came downstairs, sending vibrations up the spine of the house. The women came down with a kind of congested rush, like lava flowing as fast as it can. The soughing of Miss Fisher's petticoats made the house sound tiny. Nothing was said: Henrietta could almost hear them make warning eyes at each other. Then the flat step of Mariette went away down the passage; Miss Fisher was left waiting outside the salon door, so acutely silent you only knew she was there. Henrietta and Leopold both dreaded, as she was palpably dreading, her coming in. Their eyes met; they stared at each other; she saw his pupils had prune-coloured settings, yet seemed at once to be seeing her own eyes. Miss Fisher's entrance sent a beforehand echo, a quiver through both of them.

'I knew that would be us.'

Miss Fisher's entrance, like anything much dreaded, happened at no one moment; she seeped in round the door. She seemed,
now,
to have been standing between them always, with the telegram shaking in one hand. Her eyelids, red, were turned down in humble stupefaction, as though she had done some terrible thing. Her manner seemed to have frozen.

'Henrietta,' she said, 'run away for one minute, dear.'

This let Henrietta out. 'Why?' said Leopold sharply.

'Run and play in the dining-room.'

'I want Henrietta here,' said Leopold, going white.

Henrietta edged away round the table; it agonized her to be present but nothing would make her go. Acting abstraction, she bent over the table to see her face in a pool of shiny walnut, stamped her two hands palm down on the polish, then watched the misty prints they left disappear. She felt an intense morbid solicitude, as though Leopold were about to be executed in front of her. His cut-off air, white face and trembling defensive anger heightened the thought, as Miss Fisher, farouchely, lost to all but the crisis, held her arms out to him, dropped on her knees and advanced on her knees, arms out. Her eyes streamed as she rode at him like the figurehead of a ship. Leopold backed, his arms close to his sides. 'What is it?' he said. 'What's happened?'

'You must be very good. Your mother — '

' — Oh. Dead?' he said quickly.

'No, oh no. Only, only a change.'

Leopold, having backed as far as he could, suddenly put up nonchalance at Miss Fisher. Haughtily, he touched the tie of his blouse. His small dark figure, one arm up in the act, flattened against the mantelpiece like a specimen. She, dumb again, knelt there frustrated in the patch of weak sun — was her only object, then, to spill tears on him? Henrietta, waiting, breathed on the table and absorbedly wrote an H in the mist.

'What change?' said Leopold.

Your mother is not coming; she cannot come.'

Part 2
The Past

1

M
EETINGS
that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected. So the mother who did not come to meet Leopold that afternoon remained his creature, able to speak the truth.

She did not come. When it was half-past two by the salon clock the door did not open, her face did not appear, he had nothing to remember on from then. But by her not coming the slate was wiped clear of every impossibility; he was not (at least that day) to have to find her unable to speak in his own, which were the true, terms. He did not have to hear out with grave discriminating intelligence that grown-up falsified view of what had been once that she, coming in actually, might have given him. She, in the flesh, could have offered him only that in reply to the questions he had kept waiting so long for her: 'Why am I? What made me be?'

He expected from her a past as plain as the present, simply a present elsewhere. She was his contemporary. When he said: 'We shall understand each other,' he had not boasted. He and she had shared experience once: to his pre-adolescent mind his having been born of her did not shut a gate between them. And there had been his father. He expected her account of what is really: apples and trains, anger, the wish to know: what else is there?

Actually, the meeting he had projected could take place only in Heaven — call it Heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word. Only there — in heaven or art, in that nowhere, on that plane — could Karen have told Leopold what had really been. Possibly when she was in love she could speak like that, but she had not been in love for more than nine years, now. Actually with him — in Mme Fisher's salon this afternoon, with her fur hanging over the scrolled end of the sofa, her gloves on the table beside Henrietta's apple — to speak would have been impossible. The moment, with its apparent reality, dwarfs and confuses us. But as she did not come he was never to know this. They might meet later, but nothing then could impair what had not been.

So everything remained possible. Suppose it had all
been
possible, suppose her not only here today in the salon but being as he foresaw, speaking without deception as he had thought she would. There is no time for the deception of her being grown-up. Having both looked at the world they know that, as you compose any landscape out of hills, houses, trees, the same few passionate motives go to whatever happens. Experience at any age has the same ingredients; the complexity of the rainbow is deceiving but its first colours are few. He has travelled less, so his imagination is wider; she has less before her but a more varied memory: referring backwards and forwards between imagination and memory she relives scenes, he sees them alive. The mystery about sex comes from confusion and terror: to a mind on which these have not yet settled there is nothing you cannot tell. Grownup people form a secret society, they must have something to hold by; they dare not say to a child: 'There is nothing you do not know here.'

Talking to a very young clever person, you do not stick at hard words; on the other hand, you do not seek mystery. In the course of that meeting that never happened, that meeting whose scene remained inside Leopold, she would have told what she had done without looking for motives. These he could supply, for he would understand. You suppose the spools of negatives that are memory (from moments when the whole being was, unknown, exposed), developed without being cut for a false reason: entire letters, dialogues which, once spoken, remain spoken for ever being unwound from the dark, word by word.

This is, in effect, what she would have had to say.

Morning comes late at sea when you lie in your berth under the porthole, hearing the sea sough past. Karen Michaelis lay watching a round of daylight whiten on the wall opposite; the ship's vibration went steadily through her body; her head was full of cloudy, half-awake thoughts. It had been calm all night. When she sat up, she saw green hills beginning to slip by; each time she looked these had come in closer, so presently she dressed and went on deck. This was an April morning ten years ago and they were steaming up the tidal river to Cork.

She felt calm enough to have steadied a ship in a rough sea. A month ago, she had promised to marry Ray Forrestier: they had been friendly and watching each other for four years, ever since Karen was nineteen. Just when she was beginning to wonder why he did not want to marry her, he had asked her to marry him; taking her more by surprise and pleasing her more deeply than she had ever imagined would be the case. Her mother had never asked questions about Ray, but when Karen told her of the engagement her exclamations, like so many fireworks, lit up what must have always been in her mind. Karen then saw that in Mrs Michaelis's view a woman's real life only began with marriage, that girlhood amounts to no more than a privileged looking on. Her own last four years showed up as rather aimless; it was true that her painting lately had been half-hearted; she seemed to have lost sight of her ambition. There is more art in simply living, Mrs Michaelis said. Karen was glad to fall back on her mother's view of things.

She was not married yet: at the same time, she had no right to be still looking about; she had to stop herself asking: 'What next? What next?' She had firm ground under her feet, but the world shrank; perhaps she was missing the margin of uncertainty. The day after the engagement appeared in
The Times,
Ray had had to sail for the East as secretary to a very important person, on a mission so delicate that it must not appear to be a mission at all: Karen was left to deal with everyone's pleased excitement and to find out how uninfectious this was. 'You must be so very happy,' they kept saying: she felt the expected smile so pasted across her face that she even sometimes woke with it. Having to speak of Ray so publicly and constantly began to atrophy private tender thoughts; she began to dislike London where everybody knew everything. Wanting to rescue something at any price, she had written to the most unconscious of her relations, Aunt Violet Bent, inviting herself on a fortnight's visit to Rushbrook, County Cork. Aunt Violet had written back with warm vague pleasure. So Karen was crossing to Ireland, not long after Easter, which fell early that year. Having since last night left London behind, she already felt calm enough to steady a ship.

It was natural that she should feel everybody knew everything: she had been born and was making her marriage inside the class that in England changes least of all. The Michaelis lived like a family in a pre-war novel in one of the tall, cream houses in Chester Terrace, Regent's Park. Their relatives and old friends, as nice as they were themselves, were rooted in the same soil. Her parents saw little reason to renew their ideas, which had lately been ahead of their time and were still not out of date. Karen had grown up in a world of grace and intelligence, in which the Boer War, the War and other fatigues and disasters had been so many opportunities to behave well. The Michaelis's goodness of heart had a wide field: they were not only good to the poor but kind to the common, tolerant of the intolerant. Karen, seeing this, had been surprised to discover that her family roused in those friends she had made for herself, at the school of art and elsewhere, a writhing antagonism. Had the Michaelis been bigoted, snobbish, touchy, over-rich, over-devout, militant in feeling or given to blood sports — in fact, absurd in any way — Karen's new friends might have found them easier to stomach. But they offered nothing to satire; they were even, in an easy endearing way, funny about themselves. That unconscious sereneness behind their living and letting live was what Karen's hungry or angry friends could not tolerate. Nowadays, such people seldom appear in books; their way of life, though pleasant to share, makes tame reading. They are not rococo, as the aristocracy are supposed to be, or, like the middle classes, tangles of mean motives: up against no one, they are hard to be up against. The Michaelis were, in the least unkind sense, a charming family. Karen had had no reason to quarrel with anything, no dull times to be impatient in. She went where she wished and met whom she liked where she liked; but those easy guests at her mother's table made her less easy friends look one-sided and uncouth. She saw this inherited world enough from the outside to see that it might not last, but, perhaps for this reason, obstinately stood by it. Her marriage to Ray would have that touch of inbreeding that makes a marriage so promising; he was a cousin's cousin; they had met first at her home. Her only brother, Robin, had come safely through the war to marry a very nice woman with property in the North; he managed his wife's property, hunted two days a week, sometimes published clever satirical verse and experimented in artificial manures. This was the world she sometimes wished to escape from but, through her marriage, meant to inhabit still.

While Karen sat at breakfast in the saloon, trees began to pass the portholes; soon she went back on deck. The sun brightened the vapoury white sky but never quite shone: both shores reflected its melting light. The ship, checking, balanced uncertainly up the narrowing river, trees on each side, as though navigating an avenue, leaving a salt wake. Houses asleep with their eyes open watched the vibrating ship pass: against the woody background those red and white funnels must look like a dream. Seagulls, circling, settled on mown lawns. The wake made a dark streak in the glassy river; its ripples broke against garden walls. Every hill running down, each turn of the river, seemed to trap the ship more and cut off the open sea.