The Collected Short Stories

by Jean Rhys

  ‘Yes,’ said Suzy, ‘if you want me to.’

  ‘All right. Here you are then.’ He handed her his wallet. ‘Give them each –’ He marked 10 on the table with his cigarette. ‘That’s quite enough.’ He turned away to look at the angry girl.

  Suzy opened his wallet and took out two notes. She folded them carefully and gave one to each girl. Each smiled and slipped the note into the top of her sock.

  ‘You permit me?’ said the dark one. She took off the medal and, giving it to Suzy, kissed her warmly. ‘I will be happy to see any friend of yours who visits Paris.’

  Dédé was printed on one side of the medal; on the other the address.

  ‘Alors,’ said the mare briskly. ‘Merci bien m’sieur et dame. Au ’voir. A la prochaine.’

  ‘I wish they’d go away,’ Suzy said.

  ‘Allez-vous-en,’ said Gilbert.

  No one took any notice of them as they walked down the long room.

  ‘Bonsoir Madame. Bonsoir Monsieur,’ said the woman at the door.

  They were outside.

  ‘That was rather a fiasco,’ Gilbert said. ‘Sorry. It won’t be difficult to find a more amusing place. I’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Suzy. ‘But perhaps I ought to tell you that I gave those girls a fiver each.’

  ‘You did what?’ Gilbert said. He opened his wallet and was silent. His silence lasted so long that Suzy couldn’t bear it any longer. She said excitedly: ‘Why shouldn’t they have some money? Why shouldn’t they have some money?’

  ‘If you feel like that about it,’ said Gilbert, ‘why don’t you try giving away your own instead of making free with someone else’s?’

  ‘Because I haven’t got any,’ said Suzy. ‘That’s easy.’

  ‘Of course,’ Gilbert said. ‘Other people are always expected to pay for your oh-so-beautiful ideas. And all such bloody hypocrisy. You don’t care at all really. When you’d given those girls my money you were only too anxious to see the last of them, weren’t you?’

  ‘Oh no, it wasn’t that,’ Suzy said. ‘I thought we’d better go before there was any chance of your finding out.’

  ‘What did you imagine I’d do? Make a row? Try to get the money back?’

  ‘I didn’t know what you’d do,’ Suzy said. ‘So it seemed best to get away quickly.’

  ‘Well thanks a lot.’ He walked on, to Suzy’s relief, still talking in a level voice.

  ‘And it shows how little you know about these things. If those girls had done all their stunts, all their stunts, a hundred francs would have been a royal tip. A royal tip. You’ve given them ten pounds for nothing at all. I’ll be a laughing stock. That bit at the end was a fake. It was the “cinéma” for the clients who can’t be persuaded upstairs. And you fell for it. I’ll be a laughing stock,’ he repeated.

  ‘No, I don’t think it was a fake,’ Suzy said.

  But she remembered how confidingly he had handed her his wallet and began to feel guilty.

  ‘Ten quid isn’t so very much. And you had a wad of fivers in that wallet. Was what I did so awful? Just think how you’ll be received when you go back. The tall handsome Englishman who gives ten quid for nothing at all. You’ll be a legend not a laughing stock.’

  They’d reached the end of the street.

  ‘A bus that will take you back to Montparnasse stops near here,’ said Gilbert stiffly.

  They waited. A woman’s scarlet hat was lying in the gutter.

  ‘Poor old hat,’ said Suzy. ‘Poor poor old hat. Someone ought to write a poem about that hat.’ She was still holding Dédé’s medal.

  ‘Just a word to the wise before we part,’ Gilbert said. ‘Don’t hang onto that medal. I know you, you’ll leave it on your night table and whoever brings up your breakfast will see it. Better not.’

  ‘They won’t care either,’ said Suzy.

  ‘That’s what you think. Better not. Believe you me.’

  Suzy began to giggle. She arranged the medal carefully under the red hat and holding up her head said solemnly, ‘Rest in Peace in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful.’

  ‘Here comes your bus,’ said Gilbert. ‘It stops quite near the Dôme and I suppose that you can find your way from there.’

  ‘Yes I’ll be all right. Au ’voir Gilbert. A la prochaine.’

  ‘There’s not going to be a next time,’ said Gilbert as he walked away.

  Suzy got into the bus relieved that it was half empty. She sat down and listened to the voices in her head as she thought about the evening.

  ‘Same old miseries. No more splendour. Not now. Et qu’est-ce que tu veux que ça leur fasse?’

  The Chevalier of the Place Blanche1

  He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed.

  ‘Sacré Floriane,’ muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu’ils ont, was how he put it.) The place was full, but he was certainly the only French client. Then he felt a draught: someone had come in and left the door open. He turned to scowl, and, as he did so, the girl who had entered walked past him and sat down in the chair opposite. She took possession of his table, as it were, without looking at him and with only a slight gesture of apology. Evidently another foreigner. But the presence of a youthful female was soothing, and his ill humour vanished. She was a tall, blonde girl, not beautiful, not pretty, not chic; nevertheless, there was something. The Chevalier, who was used to labelling women accurately, decided that she was of the species femme du monde. Then he began to feel sure that she was an artist, a painter, one of those young people who come to Paris with the express purpose of making the fortunes of all the hotel and restaurant proprietors of the quartier Montparnasse.

  The girl spoke to the waiter. Her accent, though slight, was unmistakable – English or American. English, he decided, after carefully observing her hat. At this point an old man, carrying a concertina, came into the restaurant and asked permission to play. The proprietor nodded from behind the counter, and he began a waltz which the Chevalier vaguely remembered having heard when a small boy. He remarked aloud: ‘Tiens! That makes me feel young again.’

  ‘It gives me the cafard,’ said the girl, answering him in French.

  ‘Madame,’ said the Chevalier seriously, ‘one must kill a cafard at once, cruelly and without scruple.’ The girl laughed, but her eyes were so unhappy that he looked away from her, fearing that she was about to cry.

  He said: ‘After all, it is always possible to kill a cafard. For that champagne is best. That costs money naturally, but there are other ways.’ She did not answer, and he went on: ‘Do you know Montmartre well?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Hardly at all.’

  ‘A pity. I live there. Shall I tell you about it?’ He spoke in English.

  She said hastily, ‘No, I understand you perfectly. Where did you learn your English? It doesn’t matter, don’t tell me. When you speak to me, will you speak French? I like your voice in French so much.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he asked politely. ‘As you wish.’

  It was about an hour later that she said, ‘Will you take me to Montmartre tonight?’

  ‘But certainly.’ He looked steadily at her with bright, hard eyes. ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t mind. Anywhere.’

  ‘Bon. We’ll go about half past ten to look at Montmartre, and if you are still sad when we come back you are a neurasthénic. Hereditary, hopeless.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But there’s one condition. I pay my share.’

&nb
sp; The Chevalier thought this reasonable, acceptable, and in no way contrary to his dignity as a male. He had the habit of pleasing women, but not spending much money on them. Indeed he had organized his life quite otherwise.

  They shook hands solemnly. ‘Come along,’ he said, ‘let’s go and kill the cafard.’

  They took the métro. ‘Place J. B. Clément’ she read as they emerged by the light of a street-lamp. ‘It sounds like a Deputy.’

  The Chevalier, who had seemed preoccupied, told her that J. B. Clément had been, on the contrary, a poet.

  ‘He composed the most beautiful song in the world, the “Temps des Cerises”.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ she said.

  ‘But you must know it.’ He stopped to gesticulate eagerly. ‘It begins like this: “Lorsque reviendra le temps des cerises”.’ He sang the line in a voice that was suddenly grave and profound.

  She said that she remembered vaguely that it was not a lively song.

  ‘Comment, not lively?’ He sounded scandalized. ‘It is beautiful, and that is enough. It finishes: “Profitez en bien des temps des cerises . . .” There’s good advice for you.’ He began to laugh and walked on.

  She glanced sideways at him. Childlike, that’s what he was. What could he possibly do to earn his living, she wondered, and ended by asking him.

  ‘I work in an office.’

  ‘You work in an office?’ she said astonished.

  ‘Yes. I cheat Americans before they have time to cheat me.’

  ‘You do it first,’ she said. ‘A good motto.’

  He repeated, delighted, ‘That’s it! I do it first. Look at the grey house opposite. I live there. One evening, will you come to see me and look down on the lights of Paris?’

  They were at the end of the old rue Vincent.

  ‘Oh, but it’s beautiful here,’ she said.

  ‘You must see it from my window,’ insisted the Chevalier.

  He tried to see the expression of her eyes, for he felt that there was only one logical end to all this, but she neither answered nor looked at him, and her height and what seemed to him the extraordinary austerity of her clothes were rather alarming. He added hastily that that would be for another evening.

  They went to a nightclub but after an hour she told him that she wished to go home. ‘The cafard is dead for the moment.’

  In the taxi he asked her name. ‘Margaret Lucas. And you? I imagine that a letter addressed to the Chevalier of the Place Blanche won’t find you’ (for she had heard someone in the nightclub hail him by that name – how was she to know with what irony?).

  ‘Ah, you wish to write to me?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Perhaps. Next time I have a cafard.’

  He told her ceremoniously: ‘Maurice Fernande, 139 rue Vincent. Pour vous servir, Mees Margaret.’

  ‘No – just Margaret.’

  He said: ‘We should drink Auf Bruderschaft as the Germans do.’

  ‘Some other evening.’

  ‘Haven’t you got any relations here, Margaret? It must be lonely for a young girl by herself in Paris.’

  ‘I’m not a young girl,’ she answered indifferently, ‘and I’ve several friends here.’

  ‘Send me a pneu when you wish to see me.’

  The street was deserted; the last métro had gone, and as a taxi willing to climb to the Butte at that hour would be expensive, he decided to walk. As he walked he calculated his chances of escape from a very unfortunate situation. He should not have wasted an evening, evidently.

  It was perfectly true that he worked in a Tourist Office. He had waited his opportunity there for three long months. At length the opportunity had come. A cheque for thirty thousand francs had disappeared to be converted, as he knew only too well, into a couple of Impressionist pictures fabricated by a friend of his, and several new suits of clothes.

  Things had not gone according to plan. He had not resold the pictures nearly as profitably as he had hoped and he would have to give an account of the cheque much sooner than he had expected. Well, what did it matter, he thought? He could find the money. He could always find the money. There were many women in the world and for what purpose but to aid and comfort in just such an emergency?

  There was the Baronne, a doubtfully authentic Baronne, but her money was authentic enough; there was Madame Yda, who had lately set up in business as a Grande Couturière. Both these ladies had some affection for him and had never hesitated to prove it in more ways than one. As for the Englishwoman . . . perhaps Fate had sent him the Englishwoman, and he looked anything but childlike as he thought it.

  During the following week he got busy, calling several times at the hotel of his friend, the Baronne, always to be told that Madame was unable to receive him. He wrote and his letter was unanswered. She was obviously suspicious or resentful and he concluded, without wasting time on vain regrets, that there was nothing doing. And addressed himself to Madame Yda.

  That lady observed him carefully with the eyes of an intelligent monkey; she was thin, elegant and wore pearls, which, if real, were certainly worth having. He spoke lengthily and fluently.

  ‘Sorry mon vieux,’ she said when he had finished. ‘Business is bad just now. Besides, one never sees you except when you want money. That is not clever of you. Thirty thousand francs is a sum.’

  ‘Then it’s no?’ he demanded.

  ‘For the moment, impossible.’

  ‘Very well, we won’t speak of it.’

  When she asked him, with a hesitation not without pathos, if he would dine with her that evening – sans rancune – ‘Impossible,’ he said, smiling charmingly, and added with his most insolent expression: ‘I’ve something better to do, ma vieille!’

  He departed without giving her time to answer and went home deep in thought. In his pocket was a pneumatique from Margaret which informed him that she would dine with him that evening in rue Vincent. They had seen each other several times and the second time they had met she had confided in him. At least she had said that she was tired of Paris and wished to go to Austria or Spain – yes Spain; she had many things to forget, and he had instantly diagnosed an unhappy love affair. He had not encouraged her to give details, for all unhappy love affairs are alike and he had heard the history of so many. He thought that women were all the same; they complicated things in the most idiotic fashion. He began to discuss with real interest the details of her tour in Spain. He calculated rapidly. Yes, this must be her last night in Paris. He knew the importance of a mise-en-scène on these occasions and he bought crimson roses to place in a yellow vase, white roses for a black one. He bought things to eat which he supposed English girls to like. He bought two bottles of Extra Dry. He tied two pink silk handkerchiefs over the crude electric light and strewed cushions from his divan (of which he was very proud) on the floor. Finally he arrayed himself in the garment or garments which he called his ‘smoking’ and sat down to wait. He made no definite plans – he seldom planned things in detail but her conquest had now become a necessity.

  She arrived rather late wearing a dress which, though she had bought it in a French shop, yet gave the impression of being completely English. She admired the roses and the view but did not appear to notice the smoking.

  They stood at the window looking down on a glittering silhouette of Paris and he took her hand, kissed it and was instantly possessed with a real wish to kiss her mouth and an intense curiosity. It was with genuine desire that he tried to take her into his arms. ‘Don’t do that. I dislike it very much.’ Her voice was calm, she had not even moved, but his arms dropped to his sides and he stared at her as if she had flung icy water in his face.

  Why then had she come? Was the little fool trying to provoke him? Then he remembered having heard that the English, before becoming animated, must be given something to drink, and without a word he brought her an apéritif. But he was a temperamental animal and all his élan had departed; he looked gloomy and resentful as they sat down at the carefully decorated litt
le table. She would give him money all the same before she left – la garce.

  Towards the end of the meal she said: ‘Tell me, Maurice, will you come and join me in Madrid?’

  ‘I?’ he said. ‘I come to Madrid! Ah, if I could – if I had the money. But voilà. Remember the office I told you about? I owe thirty thousand francs there and I must give them back tomorrow or I’m fichu, done for.’

  ‘Give them back then,’ she advised.

  ‘You have good ideas,’ he said with a rather embarrassed laugh. ‘I to give them back trente mille balles? Why, I haven’t the first sou of it!’

  ‘I will give you the money,’ she said, lighting a cigarette and watching him thoughtfully.

  ‘You will give me thirty thousand francs! Mon Dieu, but this is funny.’

  ‘On condition that you come with me to Madrid. We can send the money from there. Is it amusing, Madrid?’

  He answered mechanically: ‘I think Madrid is ugly – Seville is beautiful.’

  She drew a deep breath and thought: ‘Seville.’

  ‘What do you find strange in all this? If you knew how unutterably bored I am, how much I disliked my life, you wouldn’t find anything I did to get away from it strange. I think it’s a very reasonable bargain indeed. I’ll give you the money you need – I’ve got lots of money – you will try to amuse me and make me happier. I’m not asking you to make love to me, I’ve a horror of that sort of thing . . . A horror,’ she repeated.

  He listened with a growing uneasiness as she went on picturing their life together in Spain. ‘I think you are a type, Maurice. You make me see things more vividly and I want to study you. I’m sick of trying to paint,’ she said. ‘I want to write a book about the modern Apache.’

  ‘The modern Apache!’ echoed the Chevalier. And my smoking then, he thought indignantly, hasn’t the woman noticed my smoking? Does she think that an Apache . . .

  ‘Well they do exist, don’t they?’

  He answered with a shrug. ‘Oh yes, they existed. And plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’

  ‘And they’re brutal, reckless, all that?’ She quoted in a cold amused voice: ‘Du sang, de la volupté, de la mort.’