Fulke knew enough about the Chatham to wonder whether this was meant in fun. He was probably looking – he must be looking, after his night on the town – thoroughly scruffy, not to say grotty, and more likely to be shacking up in some student dump on the Left Bank.
‘It’s called the Daunou,’ he said. The Daunou wasn’t exactly the Chatham or the Bisson or the Astor. But it was pretty grand, all the same. He rather wished he’d been more modest in his choice.
‘I hope it is comfortable – and quiet and discreet?’
‘Oh, yes – it’s all right.’ Fulke had been obscurely perturbed by that last word. Although he knew it to be crazy, he felt that it hinted unutterable things. ‘But, really, Madame—’
‘Get in, Monsieur.’
The lady was now in her car – it was a Rolls-Royce, and of that badge of Anglophilia there weren’t as yet many around post-war Paris – and the chauffeur was standing by with an enormous fur rug. Fulke got in – with surprising address, considering that his head was now swimming badly. The rug instantly extended its charity over both the lady and himself. The sensation, as the Rolls glided into motion, was of being together in a luxurious mobile bed.
‘You know Paris well?’ the lady asked politely. ‘But, no – for all through your boyhood Paris was closed, alas, to our English friends.’
‘Well, yes. I haven’t had much chance, I’m afraid. I have a brother who knows Paris better than I do. He’s a friend of Monsieur Sartre.’
‘That is indeed interesting.’ The lady had taken a moment to trace this name, leaving Fulke leisure to feel that he had said a supremely idiotic thing. The lady, however, judged it to be merely amusing. Even more briefly and low-breathed than before, the laugh came again. Fulke was aware of shivering all over.
‘And the Beaver?’ the lady asked. ‘Is your brother a friend of hers as well?’
Although Fulke was in a confused state in a general way, his mind was working in patches with commendable speed. English aspirants to French literary society (of whom there were always plenty going) probably didn’t commend themselves to it by splashing around English-type nicknames for its members in their familiar talk. This alarming woman, in fact, was tempting him to be rather crass. As if he hadn’t been that in a big enough way already!
‘I don’t know,’ he said politely, ‘whether my brother has the honour of Madame de Beauvoir’s acquaintance.’ He was rather pleased with this; it was the same tactic as Caspar’s ‘Monsieur Sartre’. But he was also increasingly in sheer physical disarray. Was it possible that, under the all-embracing rug, the lady’s thigh was pressing lightly against his own? Or had he shifted his own posture in an unmannerly way so as himself to secure this heady contiguity? Or, again, was he merely imagining something, and was some fold of the furry object securely interposed between them?
‘Where were you at school?’ the lady asked. ‘And your brother too, perhaps?’ These questions seemed somehow to follow logically upon the discretion Fulke had just exhibited over M. Sartre’s distinguished friend. In England, and upon the strength of so short an acquaintance, they would scarcely, perhaps, have been quite the drill. But something had to be allowed to a foreigner, and Fulke gave his answer at once.
‘Ah, but yes! I have a nephew at just such a school in England. It is near Windsor.’
Fulke was without any high regard for Eton College. It was an overgrown place, with plenty of decent chaps in the middle, no doubt, but well sandwiched between scum above and dregs below. All the same, this information, if authentic, did seem to dispose of the Odette theory of his companion. Anglomaniac though she was, it was impossible to conceive of the real Odette, whether as Mme Swann or as Uncle Adolphe’s ‘Lady in pink’, accommodated with such a young male relative, and the same must hold of a real-life person in the same profession. So there was only one other explanation of her. He was being conveyed to his destination at the Daunou by one of the veritable grandes dames of Parisian society. This needn’t, of course, mean that she had missed her vocation in not becoming a nun. Very cautiously, Fulke shifted his right leg a little further to the right. There was nothing there – which was fair enough, the Rolls being the capacious vehicle it was. He had been imagining things. So that was the answer to that.
‘And here is your hotel,’ the grande dame said, as the car put on a superb show in the way of rapid but imperceptible deceleration. ‘I hope your bedroom is comfortable – and quite undisturbed during the day?’
The word ‘bedroom’ – not necessarily emotive in itself – effected a further disturbance in Fulke – one of a definitely physiological order. Aware of this stirring, he answered rather wildly.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not at all bad. Everything rather on the small side, perhaps. But not so that one couldn’t make do.’
‘Because sleep is what you need, I think.’ The laugh had come again, and this time it was more aphrodisiac (for that was the brutal word for it) than ever. ‘You speak in English of “sleeping it off”, I think?’
‘Yes. But—well, I’m not drunk, you know.’
‘No, no—not that. Some other experience. An intoxication that is metaphorical, shall we say? A charming encounter, Monsieur. Goodbye.’
Fulke became aware that the door of the car was open; that the chauffeur – he was of the disagreeably impassive sort – had whipped away the rug; and that he himself was meekly scrambling to the pavement. He was aware, too, that the lady was holding out her hand, and in a manner indicating that it was to be kissed, not shaken. He tried to remember about this. Was it correct in France so to perform the action that what you kissed was your own thumb – or was that just some nonsense he had read about Vienna before the Kaiser’s War? He took a peck at the lady’s glove, and heard the low laugh for the last time. He said something like ‘Awfully kind of you’, stepped back, and had the presence of mind to add a formal bow. But would an ingenuous wave and a shy grin be more in the picture she had conceived of him? He was still asking himself this question when the car vanished from sight.
Rather to the surprise of both brothers, Fulke gave Caspar a detailed account of these adventures. This didn’t happen while they were at home together during the final week of the vacation. For at Mallows their boyhood’s habit of a good deal of reticence over intimate matters at once reasserted itself. More than they realised, they remained much under the thumb of the Ferneydale family ethos, which discouraged any emphasis upon the inner mind as a kind of bad form, or at least as something uselessly aside from the practical affairs of life. They both respected their parents’ code here, although each was in his own way aware of its deficiencies. It wasn’t a particularly burdensome awareness, since they were confident that other worlds awaited them. To these other worlds Oxford was already something more than a halfway house. So at once when they returned there they took up their lately acquired habit of more open communication.
The first colloquy along these lines occurred in Caspar’s rooms in New College. These owned an amplitude similar to Fulke’s in Christ Church, but were more austere in effect. Veneration was required not for an original salmon-pink lady by Modigliani but for a colour-print of Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, and beyond this there was nothing of artistic interest in evidence. Caspar had already amassed a great many books: a substantial minority relevant to what Oxford at that time understood as providing a basis in philosophy, but the great majority being in French and representing les belles lettres very much at large. Fulke picked his way around these cautiously, with a care not to pause before unfamiliar names. On the scholarly side of things there could be no doubt that his brother was getting well ahead of him.
‘Good Lord, Cass,’ he said, ‘acres of Gide! A bit old-hat, isn’t he, in the ambiance of Monsieur Sartre?’
‘Rubbish.’
‘And all his boring diaries and letters! Christ, man, you should go back to Baudelaire’s Journaux Intimes.’
‘I do, from time to time.’
‘And a chap c
avorting round so very much en prince all on the strength of one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack. La Symphonie Pastorale, and that’s about it. Or I’ll throw in La Porte Étroite.”’
‘You show every sign of developing into a vulgar sciolist, Fulke. Do you kid yourself you have nothing to learn from Les Faux-Monnayeurs?’
‘It suggests a method, I admit. Chinese boxes. But it puts him with the trick writers: Pirandello, and the like.’ Fulke paused on this, but it was received with the impassive silence by which an examiner in a viva marks his sense that a singularly insufficient thought has been enunciated by the candidate before him. ‘But I’ll tell you,’ Fulke went on, ‘one thing that has been striking me about the French – about the highly-educated French. It’s something, actually, that peeps out in that very novel. Intellectually speaking, they allow their children no childhood at all. They have to be turned into little egg-head adults as if they belonged in a mediaeval world and were more likely than not to die at thirty. At what age did Proust die?’
‘I don’t know. But he was barely over fifty, I imagine.’
‘You could have foretold it from his Marcel.’
‘Well, that brings us to what you were beginning to burble about: your chat with Odette. And I’d like to hear about its prelude, please, in all its salacious detail.’
‘Then won’t you have to tell Father Fisher in his funny little confessional that you have deliberately solicited an impure communication?’
‘Yes, of course. And he may have something to say about the delicate balance often operative in such situations. It would be wrong in me to coax images of carnal excitement out of my brother. But it would be equally wrong to turn away from some frailty of which he wanted to disburden himself.’
‘It sounds to me like a theory of confession at second hand. Whether I want to disburden myself, I don’t at all know. Perhaps I just want to boast. These things are confusing, it can’t be denied.’ Fulke scowled, as he sometimes did when remembering that the first duty of a serious artist is a searching analysis of experience. ‘Anyway, I’ve told you the brute fact. I went to Paris because I hadn’t the nerve to pick up a tart in the West End.’
‘I think that was perfectly sensible.’ Caspar’s gaze was on the Duccio. To pick up a woman of that order, he might have been reflecting, you had to go to Florence or Siena. But when he turned back to his brother his body had tautened a little. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘She had to be slapped out of a performance altogether too perfunctory for the money.’ Fulke already had this phrase lodged in his note-book; and perhaps from his memory of what he had there further written rather than from straight recollection he went on to say a good deal more. Caspar received the information without interrupting. It bore, perhaps, more of the genuinely informative than it would have done twenty years later, when novelists in particular had taken leave to enliven their pages with copiously explicit material on the activity involved. But presently, of course, Fulke had to dry up, and then Caspar did speak.
‘What was she like?’
‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? What you might call her proportions were a surprise. Sometimes she seemed to be pretty well all buttocks.’
‘Bother her buttocks! What sort of person was she? Where had she come from and where did she think she was going? All that.’
‘Good heavens, Cass, I haven’t a clue.’
‘You felt no curiosity about her? Curiosity’s understood to be your line.’
‘My dear man, it’s just not that sort of situation.’ When Fulke called his brother ‘my dear man’ there was commonly something uneasy involved, and in a sense he faced up to this now. ‘If anything is entitled to be called the bare bones of a personal relationship it’s tumbling a strange woman on an apology for a bed.’
‘Bare bones doesn’t seem to go with big buttocks.’ Caspar scarcely seemed to approve of having contrived this witticism. ‘Tell me more about the other thing. I expect you weren’t so utterly mindless over your Odette.’
Obediently, Fulke elaborated for some minutes on his encounter with the grande dame, and this time Caspar interrupted with several questions.
‘You find the Rolls rather less distasteful than the brothel, or whatever it was, don’t you?’ Fulke eventually asked.
‘Definitely not. In fact, I judge your second day to be the nastier of the two. More radically depraved, that is.’
‘So that if I’d just pushed a little harder—’ Fulke broke off, perhaps recalling his feeble remarks on the possible conveniences of his hotel.
‘Nothing of the sort. You weren’t within a mile of her, even if she was as vicious as they come. Amusing herself with ten minutes’ titillating of a bewildered English boy! The first bitch was at least securing herself her next day’s dinner.’
‘I take your point.’ Fulke said this quite soberly. ‘But there, within a few hours of each other, were those two strongly contrasted situations. It was almost a trouvaille. Think of getting those two women together, and working out what they’d make of one another.’
‘Sole survivors from a shipwreck, isolated on a desert island? Scarcely a novel device.’
‘Or stranded just for the night, say, in a mountain hut. Something could be made of it.’
‘Certainly it could. But on a basis of intuition and empathy rather than jottings in a note-book. You’d need a whack of Maupassant along with a whack of Proust. Honestly, Fulke, you have to begin thinking seriously about yourself as a writer. About the twitch of your tether, if it’s to be brutally put. There’s observing, and mucking in with what goes on, I don’t doubt. There may even be merit – although I distrust it – in your pet theory of the portable psychological lab. But there’s seeing into the life of things, as well.’
‘God, Cass, you do set my sights for me! But thanks a lot. It’s something, I suppose, to have one of Nature’s dons as a brother. And, talking of dons, I’ve a tute at five, and the bloody essay still to write. So see you again soon.’
IV
Henry Rich’s reluctance to despatch his daughter Penelope to boarding-school had presented the appearance of a transitory feeling, unlikely to amount to much. There had been an element of muddle in it. He wasn’t clear in his head about how he should apply what he was sure was his just regard for traditional ways of life to the specific problem of the right form of education for boys and girls respectively: this in point both of the range of studies provided and the environment within which the providing should take place. He had also been in a bit of a muddle – surely of an ephemeral sort – about Mrs Martin, an admirable and entertaining woman with whom he would be sorry to lose touch, and with whom he could even imagine himself, if fleetingly, as graduating to touch in a different sense. In this last thought there was a thoroughgoing confusion. He could, if he chose, propose marriage to Mrs Martin upon the very morrow of the day upon which Penelope and her trunk and tuck-box departed together. (That there actually had to be anything so entirely masculine in suggestion as a tuck-box had startled him a good deal.) Alternatively, if he felt indisposed to abandon his now settled predilection for a celibate ministry, there would be no impediment (barring the lady’s own mind in the matter) to his enjoying almost as much of Mrs Martin’s society as hitherto. Provided a due decorum be observed alike in appearance and fact, there is held to be nothing censurable in an acknowledged warmth of regard between a middle-aged incumbent who is a widower and an all-but middle-aged parishioner who is a widow.
When Penelope did set out – with what in retrospect presented itself as a slightly wounding lack of lamentation on her part – the real problem proved to be different. Mr Rich was confident that she was going to be in good hands. He knew that, assisted at the end by Mrs Martin, he had come to a right decision, and that it was indeed going to be to his child’s advantage that she was now to cope with, and doubtless enjoy, a larger society than Mallows afforded. But it soon emerged that he missed her; that he missed her very much. Nor did
his sense of having done the right thing here help him greatly. He recalled with dismay that he had sometimes felt his sole responsibility for her as burdensome and even tedious. He had always answered her questions carefully, knowing it to be important that a child’s curiosity should be sharpened and enlarged. But it had often been with his mind on other matters; and often, too, he must have chosen his topics of conversation ineptly, and with a sense that the world of Penelope’s imagination was closed to him as it ought not to be. There had even been times when he had avoided a walk with her, or the prolonging of a meal, because of the slight tiresomeness of matching one’s mind with a child’s. Had his own insufficiencies in such matters, his own mere liking for ease, been a lurking element in his decision to shoo her off to school?
He soon discovered, too, that what might have amused the child if casually and immediately reported at the breakfast-table or in the schoolroom could look distinctly flat in a weekly letter. Such a letter, however, he conscientiously wrote every Saturday afternoon without pause after the composition of the following day’s sermon. He made a point of mentioning and discussing anything in Penelope’s last obligatory letter home that could with any appropriateness be thus taken up. He did this by way of demonstrating that he had read with attention whatever she had to say – but also with the further thought that, as she moved up the school and her powers of rational discourse developed, there might here be a useful vehicle for serious debate between father and daughter on matters easier to venture upon in epistolary communication than in direct dialogue. Mr Rich was inclined to distrust the spontaneity that may lurk in the tongue. He was aware that even in his pulpit a divagation into extemporary utterance had frequently been of unhappy effect.
In the years immediately following upon its installation in the grounds of the vicarage the hard tennis-court proved a considerable success – as was to be expected of a project entered upon on the strength of much prudent consideration. Its previous non-existence was now quite clearly to be discerned as having been, in Mr Rich’s own phrase, almost an unsuitable thing. The Ferneydale boys had played on it regularly for a time when at the Hall there had been that trouble with the moles. Their father and the vicar occasionally engaged in a set or two together while Mrs Ferneydale, who was not athletic, looked on from within the shade of an unassuming but agreeable rustic shelter. Mr Rich was much the stronger performer, and was able to congratulate himself on his command of the unobtrusive tact which the discrepancy called for. When the moles had finally been vanquished there were the due return occasions on the grass court at the Hall, so that in this small matter there was a reciprocity proper between the two principal gentlemen’s houses in the neighbourhood. And nothing of this became burdensome. Mr Ferneydale was a man of affairs who held his leisure to be limited, and already during their undergraduate years his sons spent a good part of their vacations away from home. They enjoyed, Mr Rich supposed, allowances distinctly above the average, and found numerous opportunities to improve themselves by travel. In former times they would have been held on a tighter rein until suddenly, upon coming of age or thereabout, launched upon some species of Grand Tour. In this particular Mr Rich was willing to see a measure of merit in modern ways, the annals of his family affording numerous instances of undesirable consequences succeeding upon too abrupt a transition to liberty in such regards.
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