Thalia
Page 22
But I couldn’t. ‘It’s quite different. Quite!’ I cried.
‘But what has it to do with you?’ he insisted.
What had it to do with me? Was he mad?
‘Tell me,’ I said coldly, ‘do you intend to keep a mistress after our marriage—as your father has apparently done?’
‘Rachel!’ He was furious now. ‘What are you saying? Think! What are you saying?’
‘I am asking you a question—that’s all. Are you going to continue this after our marriage?’
‘I won’t answer such an infamous question,’ he said, his eyes hard and his voice unlike I had ever heard it before.
‘Then take back your ring,’ I cried, taking it from my finger and holding it out to him.
‘No! No!’
‘Take it!’ I shouted, furious now.
But he wouldn’t—and, darting to the low terrace wall, I hurled the ring violently over into the sea below. ‘That’s what your promise is worth! That!’
He caught me by the shoulders. ‘You had no right to do that. It’s a family ring! It belonged to my grandmother. You had no right to throw it away.’ He was so angry that he shook me violently back and forth. I struggled to free myself and when I couldn’t, I struck him across the face. He released me abruptly. We stood staring at each other. And then I heard footsteps, and there was Thalia coming out. Armand cursed viciously. ‘That limpet . . . that lovesick limpet. She’s the cause of everything. We’ve never had a chance with her trailing us everywhere. Rachel, darling . . . darling. . . . Can’t you understand and forgive me?’
‘No,’ I said furiously, ‘I can’t. If you had to do that—why not with me?’
‘Are you mad?’ He stared incredulously at me. ‘With the woman who is to be my wife?’
‘No. No . . . I see. It’s all a filthy lie! On the surface everything must be comme il faut, while underneath there’s all this.’
Thalia was approaching now and Armand turned roughly to me. I could not bear the misery on his usually debonair face, the wretchedness in his eyes. I loved him so . . . I longed to be in his arms again—no matter if Julie Caron had been in them last night. But I could not get over his treachery—his deceit. I could not. It wasn’t what he had done with her, it was what he had not asked me to do. His life was his own—his body was his own—according to his code. But I loved him. My body was his according to my code, and of that he had taken no thought at all; and I let him walk away up the path and out of the gate without moving from the wall on the terrace.
I collected Claude’s milk and biscuits from Marie. She looked hard at me.
‘Eh bien! You know now. You’ve found out for yourself. You wouldn’t have believed anyone had they told you. All men are the same. Salauds!’
‘Don’t, please, Marie. Don’t!’
‘He’s not worth your tears! Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I?’
There was no need to ask her how she knew. It was a small place—especially in winter—and Madame Caron was known as a gossip. ‘Am I crying?’ I asked fiercely.
‘Non. It would be better if you did,’ she said sharply.
I hadn’t wept—not one tear. Something in me was shattered—as a vase holding roses so that the water and blooms lie indecently exposed. And so I felt. Indecent—naked—exposed to all and everyone’s interested stares and comments. The whole Colony must know the story of last night’s horror —at least I felt so.
Cynthia said very little, but she at least refrained from saying, ‘I told you so.’ When I was saying good night to her she had said, ‘Rachel . . . if it would help you, tell me about this. . . . Thalia has told me the bare details. . . . You realize, of course, that she isn’t blameless in the matter. . . . She’s terribly jealous.’
‘She may be jealous—but she couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with last night.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Cynthia. ‘I’m going to tell you something. Sit down there. Where is Thalia, by the way?’
‘Writing poems in her room.’
Listen. She must have told you why Terence Mourne had to resign? She hates him—and she is responsible for his having had to resign. Yes . . . a girl of fourteen. You wouldn’t think it possible, would you?’
She told me something about a despatch,’ I said unwillingly. Couldn’t she see that I was bruised, crushed, flattened? That all I wanted to do was to hide from myself?
She told you that it was found in the pocket of my négligée?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I tell you that she put it there.’
‘No, no,’ I said, sickened. I couldn’t bear any more.
‘And the snake? You heard about that?’
‘Yes,’ I said wearily, ‘even Claude told me about the snake.’
‘That was bad enough—although I accepted her explanation that it was meant as a joke, one of the silly pranks she’s so fond of playing. She knew I would put my hand in the hat-box and that I had a weak heart. But the other—that was deliberate. It was malicious, to put it mildly. Do you think I like having to tell you these things about my own daughter? I’m doing it to warn you. I’m not at all sure that Thalia had not a hand in last night’s happenings.’
Tom Pemberton’s words in the letter, in spite of myself, came back to me. ‘She will go to any lengths for those she loves.’
‘She couldn’t have!’ I cried angrily. ‘She begged me not to go up to the flat.’
‘And why? What reason had she for not wanting you to go there? It’s obvious that she knew what you would find.’
‘No, no,’ I insisted. ‘She couldn’t have known. It’s monstrous to think such a thing.’
‘It’s the effects of her pranks which are monstrous!’ said Cynthia wearily.
‘She’ll grow out of them. They’re all part of her unhappiness. I know how she feels. I know what it is to feel like that . . . uncertain . . . fumbling, groping . . . being hurt. . . .’
But this feeling I had now . . . of death . . . of complete nothingness. This I didn’t know. It engulfed and suffocated me with emptiness while still allowing me the anguish of pain.
And now I felt again as I had a year ago. As if I were a human elephant that everyone must notice—on which every glance must rest in amusement. They all knew! They must. I gathered from Marie that the story was all over the market. From Cynthia’s set white face that the Colony were revelling in it. They knew about Suzanne coming in a fury because I had thrown away the ring and telling me that I would have to make good its value to them. They knew that she had called me badly brought up, badly behaved, and most unsuitable for her son. They knew because Marie and Elise must have heard us shouting at each other in the salon while they had been laying the table most conveniently in the salle-à-manger. I had seen them through the glass doors and was too proud to ask them to go away.
And Madame Caron? According to Marie her tongue ran away with her all too often. When I went with Claude on the Promenade where the children were roller skating outside the great Casino while their governesses and nurses huddled gossiping on the seats in the sheltered corners, I could feel their lascivious delight in the details of the denouement of the silly English girl and the handsome French Adonis—as they had called the runner on the beach. The wind rushing round the corners and hurling its blinding spray in my eyes couldn’t erase for me the picture which was imprinted as a wood-cut on my mind . . . and it wasn’t only its violence which made me shrink into the shelter of my coat.
When Thalia came back from school and said that all the girls were talking about it and that Thérèse hadn’t come in for her English lesson I remained silent. She shouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing how I felt.
‘You’re not engaged any more, are you, Rachel?’ she said, and she couldn’t hide the delight in her voice.
‘No,’ I said evenly, ‘I’m not engaged.’
All the time I was listening . . . waiting . . . hoping. Armand would write. He would telephone. He would come. But he didn�
��t. All the evening Thalia kept on rubbing her head against my arm—as my aunt’s spaniels did when they were wanting food. She kept looking at me with fixed vague eyes all the time she was doing her Italian homework for Madame Valetta. I ached in some place where I had never ached before—but I couldn’t have said where it was. And nothing mattered . . . nothing . . . this, I thought, is what death must be like . . . extinction . . . nothingness . . . only in death the ache would be gone and now it was an agony not to be borne.
At midnight I was still awake and as if in a trance I got up. I knew what I had to do. I put a few things into a small suitcase, packed up my paint-box, took my sketch books and strapped them on to the case. I dressed in the suit my aunt had had made for me and which I hated, and crept downstairs. It was quiet, a sleeping house which was now hostile and alien to me. I could hear the faint ticking of a clock—Marie’s alarm clock . . . the sigh of Claude as he turned in his sleep as I passed his room . . . and knew the strange, unreal feeling of being the one soul alive in a sleeping-beauty world. I unlatched the heavy door and closed it noiselessly so as not to wake Kiki, picked up my cases and went silently down the pebbled path.
At the station I found that there was no train until five o’clock—the market one to Dol. It was bitterly cold. There was a light in the window of the little house where Yves lived. I knocked. Yves came to the door. He peered at me uncertainly just as Marie did. ‘I have to wait for a train—it’s too cold in the station,’ I said.
‘Come in,’ he said, ‘come in,’ drawing me into the malodorous little room and taking my cases from me. ‘You’ll be catching the five o’clock train to Dol?’
He stated it as a simple fact, showing no surprise, and I was grateful now for the curious pity with which we English were regarded here—as if we were semi-idiots to be tolerated and petted. I was English. If I wanted to get up at midnight and go to Paris on the five o’clock train there need be no other reason except that I belonged to a nation which chose to be ridiculous.
He pulled a large turnip-type watch from the pocket of his rough blue trousers. ‘You’d better get to sleep for a few hours. . . . I’m getting up at half-past four to harness Napoleon. I’ll wake you. You can sleep in Marie’s bed.’
He showed me to a cell-like little room with a small palliasse bed with a white, starched counterpane. A jug and basin were on a rickety table—and over the bed a large crucifix.
‘If you hear thuds . . . it’ll be Napoleon. He kicks in his sleep . . . and his stable is on the other side of this wall . . . we built it on. It’s only wood—thin wood. Sleep well, Mademoiselle. Sleep safely. I’ll wake you and take you to the station in good time for the train.’
I lay down on Marie’s hard bed and covered myself with my coat. It was cold. . . . Yves didn’t go to bed, he told me. In winter he slept in his clothes by the stove.
It wasn’t Napoleon’s constant kicking which kept me awake. It was an agonized longing for Armand.
Dol was crowded with peasant women, their great baskets full of clucking hens and angry ducks . . . with workmen in their blue overalls and berets. The little train disgorged us all on the small junction platform. My things were handed out to me by cheerful, appraising men who remarked on my legs and body in the same breath as they commented on the livestock in the baskets. One of them offered me some coffee from his flask—another a piece of fresh bread. It was still dark—but the sky had those eerie streaks of uncanny light already and the darkness wasn’t thick as velvet but like chiffon. The train was almost empty—it was a slow one. I was cold—not with the cold of the body, although my feet and hands were numb, but with the deadly cold of fatigue. Since Armand and I had had that terrible scene on the terrace I hadn’t slept at all nor had I been able to eat.
My stomach rumbled now and I clutched it firmly and held my hands tightly over it. There were ten minutes to wait. I went into the salle and got a cognac. I drank it down very quickly, bought a roll with some ham in it and huddled back in a corner with my coat pulled round my ears. I dozed a little . . . Rennes! . . . Rennes! . . .
Armand had a room here . . . a room where he studied. He had brought me to it . . . kissed me there . . . shown me his books, his desk. And she? Had he brought her here too? I couldn’t think of her any more as Julie. She was the other woman—the one who had caused all this. She was old . . . thirty-five or more . . . horrible, revolting, to love such an old person. I looked out of the window at Rennes. I hated it—hated it. Armand had used this town as his excuse to be away from me and with her. ‘I shall never love Rennes . . . I shall never love Rennes . . .’ the words went round with the wheels . . . and then I slept again. I had left a letter for Marie. Yves had promised to deliver it to her. And two lines for Cynthia. ‘I have gone to Paris—Forgive me. Rachel.’ Eugénie lived in Paris. Eugénie who had been at the Slade . . . she was old, too. Older than Julie—but with the charm and insouciance of a child—an ugly child. I would find Eugénie. She had a little pavillon in Montparnasse. My ticket said Gare Montparnasse; the train would take me there. And the street—what was it? In my haste I had left the piece of paper with her address on my dressing-table. Edgar something . . . Edgar Quinet, that was it. Presently when I felt better I would remember the number.
And now it was light—mournful grey light—not like that of the coast. The coast was gone . . . tall poplars lined the roads . . . and there were hills and rivers and beautiful fields. The track was terribly bumpy, the carriage swayed from side to side. The old woman opposite me grumbled and put a handkerchief smelling of naphthaline to her nose. Coal dust came in the window and covered the seats. The old woman shut it angrily. I slept again. Le Mans . . . Le Mans . . . more poplars . . . and heath like England . . . like the country round my aunt’s home. The sun began to flicker timidly through the steel sky. My head ached . . . I felt sick . . . I couldn’t move. Suddenly I smelt eau de Cologne . . . the old woman opposite was holding it under my nose. I sniffed it gratefully. The rocking of the train was appalling and the noise ‘formidable’ as she said angrily. She had to shout at me to make me hear and I felt too sick to answer. Chartres . . . Chartres! a name drummed into my ears by the history mistress at school. The cathedral . . . the rose windows. I staggered up and let the fresh air in with a rush.
It revived me a little—and apologizing to the kind old woman I stood there breathing it in deeply in spite of her warnings that I was swallowing coal dust. Suddenly to my astonishment she pulled out a packet of Gauloises and offered me one. Who could have imagined that she smoked? But she sat there contentedly puffing at cigarettes until the fields and poplars gave way to houses . . . to the familiar and hideous back views of dwellings flanking the railway line, giving quick cinematic glimpses of humans eating—cooking—washing, through the dingy windows with their soiled sordid curtains.
Then the hoardings with great shrieking advertisements—Eau Javel . . . Eau Javel, beloved of Marie. La vache qui rit! La vache qui rit! . . . Thalia’s favourite cheese in a round box with the laughing cow on it . . . Thalia . . . Thalia . . . I thrust her remorselessly away as I had Armand. The old woman was busying herself with her packages. ‘On arrive, Mademoiselle. On arrive!’ ‘PARIS . . . PARIS . . .’ With a shriek like that of a soul entering the Hell which Marie considered it to be, we stopped with a violent jerk. Doors opened, voices in a babel of excited argument . . . porters eager for baggage and tips.
‘Au revoir, Mademoiselle,’ my travelling companion was saying. Montparnasse, stated the huge notices on the station. . . . I was there.
PART II
XV
WORK, work, and more work. That was what Xavier had said. I would work. Eugénie had taken me to a friend of hers, an elderly woman with a large appartement in the Place Delambre. She took four women students as paying guests. . . . ‘You can’t possibly stay in a hotel, it’s expensive as well as asking for trouble. You must get a fixed price for the month out of Madame Robert—leave it to me,’ she had said.
Madame Robert lived on the fifth floor in one of the tall grey houses with grey shutters. It was over-furnished, prim and hideous, with no air of comfort or repose in it. She fed us extremely well but she was very strict about the hours we kept. If we came in after eleven the chain was up on the door and not for anything would she open it. The other three guests were all French. One was a sculptress with the largest goitre I had ever seen. She was studying at the Beaux Arts and was fanatical about Maillot. The others were both studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. Eugénie, when I had found her little pavillon off the rue Edgar Quinet, had been upset that she couldn’t take me in herself. She had a lodger, she explained—a painter like herself. He was a sad-faced Swiss whom she called Théodore.
After a week of working at the hard routine of the Chaumière, as they called the académie in the street of the same name, I began to settle down. Eugénie and Théodore worked here, and it was due to them that I was so quickly accepted and given a place in the painting room under Monsieur Prinet. He was an exacting master and one who would accept no compromises. Everyone worked in deadly earnest with an enthusiasm unknown in my former fellow-students. But although I put all that I could, everything of which I was capable, into my efforts, it seemed it was not enough. Monsieur Prinet was never satisfied. Never.
I was fascinated with Théodore’s painting. He had been a hairdresser in Switzerland. He had left a wife and four children to come to Paris and express himself in painting.
‘Like Gauguin,’ said Eugénie proudly. And he painted in the style of that genius. I couldn’t work for the fascination of watching Théodore’s canvas. He was a curiously honest person and yet he could stand all day in front of our blonde, pink-and-white model and on his canvas would appear a dark-skinned, slit-eyed squat girl with a banana tree behind her and scarlet blossoms in her hair. Monsieur Prinet would stand scratching his chin thoughtfully as if wondering how to take this phenomenon. The whole room was divided into violent controversy over Théodore’s paintings. The Americans would defend fiercely his right to paint as he pleased and his right to respect. The young French students would bring in their friends at the mid-day break and take them round the easels, giggling and shrieking with mirth when they came to the determined follower of Gauguin. Théodore remained completely unmoved and went on producing more and more exotic canvases.