Thalia

by Frances Faviell

  Was I? I didn’t know because I’d never been in love.

  ‘His mother will not like it—and the Madame here—what will she say? She doesn’t like the French.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me what she says,’ I retorted. ‘But his mother—that’s different. Why won’t she like me?’

  ‘She has other ideas for her son. A rich industrialist’s daughter. They live along the coast past St. Enogat. His mother’s from Paris.’

  Enough for Marie. I knew by the way she said it that she hadn’t a good word for Armand’s mother.

  She saw the displeasure in my face and caught my arm. ‘Don’t think I’m interfering, Mademoiselle Rachel, but I’m a Breton—so are they. You don’t know us. And your father, what will he say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. I hadn’t thought at all—there hadn’t been time. What would he think? And my aunt? For that Armand was serious in his intentions I sensed. He hadn’t kissed me as Terence always did. We danced, walked, drove and read poetry and books together, talked and exchanged ideas on everything. He spoke very little English but had taken my French in hand. ‘You must read and read and listen!’ he urged me. ‘And you’ll fall under the spell of my lovely language.’ But he didn’t need to urge me. I was already caught fast in its rainbow web.

  That evening after I’d come in from spending the afternoon at La Vicomté with Armand, Thalia came to me. Her face was wretched. ‘You never want me with you now—you never have time for me. It’s Armand—Armand always. I hate him! I hate him!’ and she burst out weeping.

  I was stricken with remorse as I remembered my promise to her father.

  ‘You were so lovely to me. So lovely—and now it’s all changed.’ She stood weeping bitterly. ‘I thought you were different.’

  ‘Be fair,’ I said. ‘We are together almost every evening and many afternoons. We go together to the ballet class and to Italian with Madame Valetta. On Sundays I’m with you all day and usually all Saturday too. The times I spend with Armand are short and squeezed in between my times with you—he has to work too.’

  ‘He seems to have nothing to do but enjoy himself.’

  ‘He is studying for his last examination. He’s going to be a barrister—he’s almost finished. He has to go to Rennes. He’ll be away all the week—I’ll be with you.’

  ‘He’s old. He’s twenty-five!’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘His sister told me so. She knows about you.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That Armand was mad about an English girl—and was it the Rachel who lives with us.’

  But I heard no more. Those words ‘mad about an English girl’ gave me such bewildering joy that I knew then that I loved Armand Tréfours. I loved him—loved him.

  I couldn’t look at her and turned away.

  Suddenly she began reciting in Armand’s voice the poem ‘Les Elfes’ which I particularly loved—because it seemed to fit in with the curious fairy-tale quality of the country here. Armand, although he shared my love of Pierre de Ronsard, was teaching me to appreciate Leconte de l’Isle, Paul Verlaine, François Villon, Alfred de Musset and many others. I loved Leconte de l’Isle especially.

  ‘Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine, les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine . . .’

  Her voice was exactly his—his intonation, his accent . . . She must have been sitting very close to us and studied it when he had been reading to me on the cliffs above the Rance. Every verse of Leconte de l’Isle’s lovely poem ends with the line she was quoting now. I could have struck her, I was so angry. ‘Stop it! stop it!’ I cried.

  She laughed. ‘I do it well, don’t I? Yes. I heard him reading it—not only to you—but on several other occasions.’ Then she said simply, ‘You see—I like it too. I found it in the book he gave you and learned it all—shall I say it for you? I can say it almost as well as he does.’

  ‘Thalia,’ I said, ‘d’you mind getting out of my room? I’m going to prepare my Italian lesson.’

  She flung herself on me crying again. ‘You’re angry! You’re angry! I only learned it to please you. You like it and I wanted you to be pleased.’

  I thought of Mademoiselle Caron and her complaint that Thalia wouldn’t speak a word of French. The way she had recited the poem had astounded me. I looked at her red-rimmed eyes and the tear-stained, blotched face, at the thin mousy hair, and I was immensely moved. I pushed away the fact that she must have been eavesdropping and spying on us even more frequently than I had suspected.

  ‘I’m not pleased,’ I said. ‘How can I be? If you can learn a poem like that you can learn all that Mademoiselle Caron is trying to teach you.’

  ‘I hate Mademoiselle Caron. She’s two-faced.’

  What could I say? I had disliked Mr. Cookson-Cander for no good reason at all. ‘I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.’ She didn’t like her French governess and that was that.

  ‘Rachel.’ She put a timid hand on me. ‘We don’t laugh like we did. It’s all changed. It was so lovely—so lovely! I was so happy. This Armand’s spoilt it all.’

  I pushed back the straggling hair and looked at her eyes. Unblinking and steady now they stared back at me. They were like the eyes of my spaniel Rags. She pressed her face against mine and her tears wetted my cheek.

  ‘Thalia. Don’t, don’t,’ I said, but she broke into dreadful sobs and it was ten minutes before I could comfort her.

  I spent all the following week with her. Armand had gone to Rennes. He hadn’t said that he would write but the day after he left Marie stumped up with a letter.

  ‘From him!’ she said dourly. ‘Not content with telling you lies he must write them!’

  I took it with my heart thumping in a sudden surge of emotion and with my hands shaking so much that I could scarcely tear open the envelope. . . .

  ‘Rachel, petite fleur, Ici seul dans ma chambre je t’écris . . .’

  Marie was standing there, her head on one side. ‘Une lettre d’amour?’

  I read on . . . ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a love letter . . . my first.’

  After that, knowing that his letters would come by the early post, I would run down and snatch them from Marie before Thalia woke. For they were love letters—the first I had ever received. Armand loved me. He loved me! I was radiantly, deliriously happy. ‘When I come back, darling little English Miss,’ he wrote, ‘I will take you to my mother. I have told her about you, and she wants to see you.’

  I had suggested to Cynthia that Thalia should go out sometimes with Marie’s niece, Elise. But Thalia had other views. ‘I won’t go with her. I want to go out with Rachel.’

  ‘You haven’t been sketching lately,’ said Cynthia languidly.

  ‘It’s not so warm now,’ I said. It was never cold, but the wind could be very sharp and unless one could find a sheltered spot as Armand and I often did in the thick wooded slopes of the Rance, it wasn’t possible to sit about for long.

  ‘But you don’t talk French with me,’ I said.

  ‘I think you’d better have French at the school now,’ said Cynthia. ‘You’re not getting on at all with Mademoiselle Caron.’

  Thalia said nothing. She knew that it would take her mother a long time to summon up energy enough to do anything about her French. Cynthia was strangely apathetic and seemed to have something on her mind. I asked her several times if she was well. She was often sleepy and looked dazed. She always replied that she was all right—it was just a tired heart. But she always managed to get up and look absolutely lovely for her afternoon bridge. She went out, as I often did, with Terence Mourne. I liked to dance with him, and he talked to me about all kinds of things. He was travelled and well read, and could be very good company. We never mentioned Cynthia. Since that first evening when I had made such a gaffe I knew better than to offend him again. Had it not been for this I would have asked his advice about her now—for he had known her in India. I asked Thalia if her mother was always sleepy and dazed like
this. ‘She’s been taking her stuff,’ said Thalia contemptuously.

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Some drops she gets in India. Ayah gets them for her. They cost a lot of money.’

  ‘But what does she take them for?’

  ‘She gets migraine . . . and she can’t sleep.’

  Remembering my promise to Tom Pemberton I asked Cynthia. She wouldn’t look at me as she answered, ‘They’re quite harmless. They just make me sleep and forget things. No, they’re not really for sleeping. I’ve got tablets for that.’

  What could these drops be? My aunt took sleeping pills. It seemed extraordinary to me. I just got into bed, read a little because I wanted to—and when I wanted to sleep I slept. It was as simple as that.

  Letters were coming fairly regularly from Tom Pemberton. After the incident of which he had written, which had got into the papers so that Cynthia had known about it, things seemed to be quieter on the N.W. Frontier. But there were constant skirmishes and the Fakir of Ipi was always stirring up trouble against the British. I had asked Terence to tell me about Frontier life and he had described it vividly to me. I had shown him Tom Pemberton’s letter and he had told me about the Nahakki Pass and of the terrific heat there—so great that one could see it quivering and dancing on the great barren rocks.

  ‘You were in the same regiment?’ I asked him.

  ‘For a time, yes. I left it rather suddenly.’

  ‘Something funny happened,’ Thalia had said. ‘Something funny.’ But Thalia’s idea of fun was not everybody’s. There was something cruel in it as Cynthia had warned me. What was that something funny? He didn’t tell me and I couldn’t ask him. Nor could I ask Cynthia. Whenever I mentioned Terence a little flicker crossed her face and she usually changed the subject. And yet she went out with him —or anyhow in his parties. He entertained a good deal both at the Casino, which was now only open at week-ends, and in the lovely Crystal. Cynthia and I could never be in his parties together because Cynthia wouldn’t leave Claude in the house with Thalia and Marie. She didn’t trust her beloved son to either of them. Sometimes Thalia took him on the beach or for a short walk—but Cynthia would be in a fever of anxiety until they came back.

  ‘But Thalia will soon be sixteen!’ I protested. ‘She’s got quite a sense of responsibility.’

  ‘You don’t know her yet. She’s unpredictable. I don’t trust her with Claude. She’s jealous of him.’

  Claude and I still sat opposite one another every morning wrestling with reading. He was getting on very slowly—but he could read a little. I had found that by drawing objects and animals he learned far more quickly. I had made some large sheets with letters and the objects they represented in bright chalks. He loved these, and really tried hard. The day he actually read a whole page of the reader I hugged him. I felt the same strange intense happiness which achieving a difficult feat in the ballet class gave me. Cynthia was delighted and praised me warmly. When she came back from the town that afternoon she gave me a pair of very fine silk stockings and some perfume I had liked when she had used it.

  Every afternoon of that week, Thalia and I went for long rambles round the coast. The path wound above the steep cliffs through thick dark tunnels of bushes emerging into dazzling glimpses of sea. Sometimes we would be standing sheer above a little bay, its white virgin sand untouched as yet by a mark. The water was so green and translucent that we could lie on our stomachs and see the fish and each frond of sea-weed. I remembered legends Armand had told me, and told them to her, lying on the rocks looking up at the sky with the sea far below us. I told her about Vivian and Merlin, Gilles de Bretagne and of Tristram and Iseult. This last was her favourite. She liked to say that she hated history—but she was entranced with these legends. ‘Can we get them to read?’ she asked.

  ‘Only in French.’

  We went to St. Lunaire to Judy, and took Claude to play with Mimi. They fought and scratched each other, but Judy only laughed. It was good for Mimi—for them both, she said. But Claude had a long angry scratch down his left cheek and Cynthia was furious. ‘American children are so ill-behaved.’

  ‘Mimi’s much better brought up than Claude,’ said Thalia, who had loved Judy’s fat bundle of a daughter.

  ‘It may leave a mark,’ said Cynthia.

  ‘Good thing if it does. He looks like a girl.’ Thalia was contemptuous.

  ‘You would be lucky if you had his skin and complexion,’ said her mother angrily, and at Thalia’s sudden withered look I was angry too. I put some ointment on Claude’s face and that night when I was bathing him, he said, ‘I didn’t mind her scratching me. I’d like to be covered all over with wounds and scars—like some of the Gurkhas and Pathans! They’re all criss-crossed!’

  ‘Did you like Mimi?’

  ‘Not much. Rachel, I wish I had some boys to play with.’

  I asked Cynthia if he couldn’t go now to the kindergarten part of the school. They had a number of little English and American boys there. But she was dubious. ‘He’s so young.’

  ‘He’s getting on for seven,’ I said. ‘In England he’d have to go to school.’

  ‘He’s doing very well with you and Mademoiselle says his French is excellent. He has a perfect accent.’

  He had. It was far better than mine.

  I took Thalia to St. Malo and we visited the ramparts, the dungeons and the tower built by the Duchesse Anne, the famous Quiquengrogne Tower. I took her into the museums there and told her about the history of Brittany and of how the Duchesse Anne had united it with France. We pored over maps and engravings and portraits of Chateaubriand, and of Jacques Cartier, the discoverer of Canada.

  I had been fascinated at the other side of history—the French version of famous battles and events. Cynthia, when I had commented on this, had said stiffly that she was surprised that I could even entertain their veracity. There was only one version of history—the British one—and for me to doubt its integrity was in her opinion treachery to my country.

  And I don’t want Claude taught such distorted facts!’ she had said severely.

  ‘Mother’s just like that over anything Indian,’ said Thalia scornfully. ‘Anything Indian must be wrong—only the British can be right.’

  But Tom Pemberton did not think that way. From the few conversations with me on the subject he had made it abundantly clear that his whole outlook was to be of service to India—even if that involved, as it undoubtedly did, considerable sacrifices. Whenever Cynthia spoke of this, and of how she could have pulled strings for her husband’s promotion if he would give up some of his ideas, it was with unmistakable bitterness.

  All that Armand had showed me I showed Thalia, all that he had told me I told her. We went up the steep narrow streets of St. Malo with the open drains running down each side and with people throwing slops into it from their windows, we went over the old cathedral which was more like a great fortress than a church and was used as such in the days of the constant sieges and sea battles. I bought her books and pictures to remember what I had told her, postcards and souvenirs, and then we sat in a café and ate as many vedettes—little cakes shaped like the boats, filled with green and white cream—as we could.

  When we were going back to Dinard she said, ‘I wish you taught me history and English literature. I hate it at school—and when you tell me it’s so alive that I’ll never, never forget it.’ And that’s how it was when Armand told it to me. I would never forget it. Never.

  ‘Thalia,’ I said, as we passed St. Servan and the estuary of the Rance, ‘will you do something for me?’

  ‘What?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘Write a letter to your father and tell him a little of what we’ve been doing to-day and all this week.’

  We were sitting over the built-in engine of the boat and foul smoke kept coming up and obliterating us from one another, but the wind was keen and it was warmer here in the centre.

  Her face was hidden now in a puff of evil-smelling smoke but I heard
her say, ‘I’d have done that anyway. I write everything we do—you and I—to him, just as I write it in my diary.’

  ‘He’ll like all the bits of history—tell him all about the Quiquengrogne Tower and the Duchesse Anne—you liked that, didn’t you?’

  ‘Quiquengrogne! Quiquengrogne!’ she repeated. ‘I like it . . . did you notice that everything had been named after it? Cafés, restaurants, shops and streets?’ She took my ungloved hand. ‘You’re cold, Rachel. Put it in my pocket.’

  I put my hand in her pocket. She pressed her hand over the pocket. ‘Only two more days,’ she sighed.

  ‘What d’you mean? Two more days of what?’

  ‘Two more days of you. He’ll be back on Monday.’

  My heart leaped. I could have shouted and sung with the sudden rush of feeling. ‘Yes. He’s coming back . . . he’s coming back—and then he’ll take me to his mother.’ But what I said was, ‘I’ll take you to the concert in the Casino on Saturday, and there’s the Pardon on Sunday . . . we’ll get Cynthia to let us go with Marie and Yves, after all, she’s got Elise now.’

  She was pressed into my side trying to keep the wind off me. ‘You’re so frail-looking, Rachel,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t blow away in the wind.’

  There was a colour in her cheeks from the whipping air, her hair blew all over her face and her beret had slipped over one eye. I had never been so drawn to her as at that moment. Poor lonely, unhappy child . . . what could I do about her insistent following of us? Suddenly I had an idea. I would get her a dog. She missed her pets, she said so frequently. I had seen how she loved Clodagh’s dogs. She should have a dog—and perhaps she would leave Armand and me alone.

  VIII

  CYNTHIA had to be coaxed about our going to the Pardon. It was not the religious ceremony to which she objected most, although she didn’t approve of that, it was the fact that we were going with Yves and Marie and that their relatives had invited us to midday dinner with them.

  ‘You’ve been to the Mont St. Michel Pardon, and to the fishing fleet one at St. Malo—they’re all the same. Why go to this particular little affair?’