Martha in Paris

by Margery Sharp

  “Mother’s back,” he announced mournfully.

  “Well, that was pretty quick,” said Martha.

  “She took the night boat,” said Eric. “So I’m terribly afraid, Martha—”

  “Well, of course not,” said Martha. “How’s your grandfather?”—She meant it as a kindly piece of tact, but his look was ungrateful.

  “Passed on,” said Eric, rather shortly. “Mother came straight from the funeral. You don’t seem to feel it much.”

  “Well, I never knew him,” pointed out Martha.

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Eric. “Martha, don’t you know what I meant?”

  “Of course I do,” said Martha hastily. “But as your mother is back,” she added, with soothing illogic, “I can still come on Friday.”

  4

  And on Friday there was Martha as usual, with her nosegay, also her packet of clean underwear, just as though nothing had happened. “Did you have a nice time?” enquired Martha politely, if thoughtlessly. Mrs. Taylor, fresh from burying a parent, forgave the gaffe in true Christian spirit, and said how sorry she was she hadn’t been able to see Martha’s people, to give them first-hand news of Martha. “Though even if I’d had time to get their address, Birmingham,” admitted Mrs. Taylor, “is a little far, from Harrogate!” The implied superiority of domicile was lost on Martha, who was in fact reflecting that it was just as well the alarm had gone off. “But in any case you’ll be seeing them quite soon, at Christmas,” added Mrs. Taylor. “You must give your aunt my regards.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Martha, making towards the bathroom …

  She passed the door into Eric’s room without so much as a blush. It was Eric who blushed. Fortunately his mother wasn’t looking.

  “I’m so glad you two young people saw something of each other, while I was away!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor, a little later. “My poor boy tells me you quite cheered him up.”

  “Well, of course he was very worried,” said Martha, “but we had some lovely pâté.”

  For once, and at Martha’s suggestion, when Eric put her on the ’bus his mother came too. The frustrated glances Eric had been shooting her all evening (so irritatingly like those shot at her by Angèle) promised such a scene of emotion on the pavement as Martha was determined to avoid.

  “After you’ve been so worried too,” invited Martha, “wouldn’t you like a breath of fresh air?”

  It was clumsily put, but without any effort at all Mrs. Taylor thought it very sweet of her.

  Chapter Nine

  This was in fact the last time Martha saw the Taylors before the Christmas holiday. Term ended at the studio with almost the gay party of Dolores’ imaginings; but Martha didn’t attend it. (Not after red wine; after a nice hot bath.) “Mother Bunch, d’you mean you aren’t coming?” cried Sally. “It’s only half-a-dollar!” “I don’t like parties,” said Martha truthfully. “Then I’ll have to give you my present now,” said pretty, generous Sally. It was a charming French powder-compact, which Martha in fact economically transferred, as a Christmas gift from Paris, to her appreciative aunt. Angèle’s wilder offering of a pen-painted match-box cover for Mr. Joyce, Martha instinctively mislaid at once.

  “And what is he giving you?” asked Angèle avidly.

  “Money, I hope,” said Martha.

  “Sly one! Not Mr. Joyce, Mr. Taylor!” cried Angèle.

  “It’s going to be a surprise,” said Martha, just to keep her quiet. Angèle was quite satisfied; less so when Martha absolutely refused her offer to steal round very very early on Christmas morning with Martha’s own surprise for Eric Taylor. Angèle would have enjoyed above all things to creep out before breakfast, heavily muffled, clutching some small precious packet to leave with the Taylor concierge; if it were snowing, so much the better—or if the concierge leaped to a wrong conclusion, better still …

  Actually such an error was impossible. However heavily muffled, Angèle could never be mistaken for Martha, with whose appearance the concierge in the rue d’Antibes was as familiar as she was with the time-table of Martha’s visits during the absence of Mrs. Taylor—including the first. Had such an escapade been repeated—(not at all dans le genre de la maison)—Madame Leclerc the concierge might indeed have felt herself bound to lay information—but what could be more respectable than the succeeding hour, of Martha’s departures, at ten o’clock? “One swallow does not make a summer!” thought Madame Leclerc tolerantly. Also Eric had had the sense to give her a whacking great tip.

  Angèle saw Martha onto the boat-train; without incident Martha completed the journey; and arriving back at Richmond told her Aunt Dolores, and her Uncle Harry, and her patron Mr. Joyce, all she thought necessary to tell them, of her first term in Paris.

  2

  It wasn’t much.

  “I’m still in Life,” grumbled Martha. “If Mr. Joyce says so, that’s where you ought to be,” affirmed Harry Gibson loyally. Dolores’ enquiries as to Paris fashions—the waist up or down, hats large or small?—met an absolute blank. “I don’t believe you even keep your eyes open!” cried Dolores disappointedly; for she had been awaiting Martha’s return to buy a chic winter outfit. Another disappointment was when she asked if Martha hadn’t met any nice young men.

  “No,” said Martha flatly.

  “I don’t mean students,” said Dolores. (It was in fact a great relief to her to find that Martha hadn’t attended a single orgy.) “But there must be some nice English people, in Paris?”

  Martha, sinking the Taylors and their circle without trace, replied that if there were, she hadn’t met them.

  “Anyway, I’m not supposed to speak anything but French,” added Martha virtuously.

  Her presumed ability to parlez-vous (the phrase, inevitably, Harry Gibson’s) was in fact very useful. It afforded precisely the cut-and-come-again sort of joke needed, to tide such a disparate household over the Christmas festival. Harry Gibson, in addition to his “Gay Paree,” could say things like “Bon soir, Mam’zelle,” and “Ooh-la-la!”—to which Martha could respond with a reasonably apposite “Allez-vous-en.” It wasn’t the language of Racine, but it sufficed. Martha’s triumph, however, was to succeed in teaching him the whole rhyme about la peinture à l’huile, which even more usefully replaced their old, rather out-worn question-and-answer joke about Martha and Mary. “La peinture à l’huile—?” Martha would begin. “Est bien difficile,” agreed Harry Gibson. “Mais c’est beaucoup meilleure—?” encouraged Martha. “Que la peinture au beurre!” finished Harry triumphantly. If it was an odd exchange to echo through a flat above a furrier’s shop in Richmond, philistine Harry (the meaning re-explained to him) enjoyed it very much; and Mr. Joyce laughed his head off.

  Mr. Joyce’s examination of Martha, unlike her aunt’s, was strictly professional. Actually Mr. Joyce had his own source of information, from the horse’s mouth, and Martha could hardly have dissatisfied him. Only let your young savage continue, scrawled that large, big-knuckled, freckled hand, and one day, old friend, we may see marvels! Only let her continue!

  “Are you prepared to continue?” asked Mr. Joyce of Martha. “In Paris?”

  “Yes,” said Martha unhesitatingly.

  “Why?” asked Mr. Joyce.

  Martha pondered.—Between them, after the Gibson Christmas dinner, a couple of candles flickered out above the remains of Dolores’ plum-pudding. Dolores was washing up, with Harry to help—not Martha. Martha and Mr. Joyce consulted together as artist and patron should, unencumbered by domesticity.

  “Art,” said Martha at last—pronouncing the word with far more difficulty than she’d have pronounced the name Eric—“in Paris, isn’t something silly. It’s something serious.”

  “And how have you found that out?” asked Mr. Joyce.—“The dealers haven’t been after you?” he added anxiously.

  “No,” said Martha. “I haven’t met any dealers. Anyway, I don’t think le maître thinks I’m ready yet, for a show.”

  “Heaven
forfend,” said Mr. Joyce. (Now they were getting down to brass tacks: two professionals together.) “At least three more years you need, before your first show; and even then perhaps only because I am an old man. If in my senility I ever say ‘show,’ and le maître says not,” said Mr. Joyce, “take his word, not mine.”

  He was the best friend Martha ever had. He also gave her five pounds.

  Martha’s Aunt Dolores, by a peculiar coincidence, gave Martha a very nice powder-compact. It was an additional disappointment to her that three months in Paris had so little improved Martha’s personal appearance. Whatever Martha wore still looked like a pup-tent; no trace of make-up—after three months in Paris!—civilized her broad, bucolic countenance. “You might just as well never have gone to Paris at all,” cried Dolores despairingly, “for all the change it’s made in you!”

  In this she was wrong. Actually Martha herself wasn’t yet entirely sure what change Paris (and life without the capital) had made in her. There were certain physical signs and warnings; like many another young woman in her situation, Martha contrived to ignore them. She quite definitely preferred not to remember Eric Taylor, with whom, to be frank, she now regretted all intercourse.

  The Christmas holiday at Richmond passed off well enough, though towards its end Martha began to feel extremely bored. She had determined, and Mr. Joyce agreed with the decision, to give both eye and hand a complete rest; but for Martha to keep off drawing was as hard as for an alcoholic to keep off the bottle, and she was in fact so glad when the day came for her to return to Paris, she showed it.

  “Oh, Martha,” cried Dolores reproachfully, “aren’t you going to miss me at all?”

  To be frank, Martha wasn’t. She couldn’t even pretend she was—hypocrisy being one of the many polite virtues she had never wasted energy in acquiring. But she let Dolores kiss her, and shook hands with Harry Gibson, before turning with relief to Mr. Joyce, whose flat contribution to the farewells had been a suggestion that she was now capable of taking a taxi to the station alone.

  “As she is now capable of making the whole journey alone,” said Mr. Joyce—an eye on Dolores.

  “Well, of course,” said Martha. “Good-bye.”

  Chapter Ten

  The flat in the rue de Vaugirard seemed almost like home. Martha, dumping her suit-case in the hall, sniffed its familiar, distinctive odour of floor-polish and French cooking with pleasure. Across the dinner-table, the little clothes-peg head of Madame Dubois, the long bony countenance of Angèle, were objects as pleasingly familiar as might have been a pair of china dogs on a mantelpiece. And Madame Dubois and Angèle, after their breather, seemed glad to see Martha too: Angèle having missed her only source of vicarious romance, and Madame Dubois having missed Martha’s pension …

  “No doubt Mr. Joyce made many enquiries, about our little ménage?” suggested Madame Dubois.—It was a point on which she felt some anxiety. Those evenings she’d permitted Martha to sit with Mrs. Taylor still weighed on her; her own very pretty Christmas-card addressed to Martha’s patron had been answered, late, by one obviously designed for colleagues in the fur-trade: Madame Dubois very much hoped that nothing had been said at Richmond to reflect on her discharge of duty. Martha’s cheerful reply that no, Mr. Joyce didn’t seem to be interested, left Madame too thankful to take offence, and she spontaneously offered a second helping of coeurs à la crème.—Poor Angèle fared worse. “Did he appreciate my little remembrance?” asked Angèle eagerly. “I’m sorry, I lost it,” said Martha, with equal cheerfulness. “Just as well!” cried Madame Dubois. “Did I not warn you, Angèle, against being forward?” Angèle flushed. Yet even to have attempted to be forward—and foiled, too, but by another’s carelessness!—was an achievement, to so frustrate a vestal, and she also helped to finish up the coeurs à la crème with unusual appetite.

  Pleasurably Martha settled back into her big, bare room. Even the bathroom didn’t seem so bad: certainly preferable, despite flaking enamel and inadequate water-supply, to that in the rue d’Antibes and all that went with it …

  Martha had in fact returned to Paris firmly resolved to have nothing more to do with Eric Taylor whatsoever. Involvement with him took up too much energy. When she recalled how sluggish she’d been, at the studio, three mornings running, Martha (after the break at Richmond) could only marvel at, and chide herself for, her flippancy. It was with extreme distaste that she apprehended even the one further interview probably necessary, to give Eric the brush-off.

  “When do you see him again?” whispered Angèle—invading Martha’s room that same night.

  “I hope soon,” said Martha grimly.

  “Has it seemed so long?—Ah, but how fortunate you are!” sighed Angèle. “And he too!” added Angèle loyally. “And he too!”

  2

  Martha’s period of apprehension in fact lasted not much more than twenty-four hours. As the first day of the new term ended, there stood Eric waiting for her outside the studio.

  He got in first. After but one glad cry of greeting—

  “Martha, I’ve got to talk to you,” said Eric.

  His tones were at once tender and masterful—or so they sounded to Eric; to Martha they sounded bossy. Observing a half-empty ’bus nearing her stop, her immediate impulse was to catch it. But the opportunity, to get things over, was too good to miss: she stood pat.

  “Not here,” said Eric. “We’ll go to our seat.”

  It was a bare five minutes’ walk to the Tuileries; again, Martha accepted. She herself thought those very five minutes amply sufficient to make her intentions plain in; and indeed hoped to do so. But Eric, his hand under her elbow, hurried her on at too fast a pace for more than the slightest exchange, such as asking if she’d had a nice Christmas in Birmingham. “All right,” said Martha, briefly surprised—before she remembered the lie she’d told. “Ours was pretty flat too,” said Eric, “without you there. Even if I hadn’t felt so ghastly—” “Did you eat too much?” asked Martha. “No!” said Eric, rather loudly. “Look, Martha, there’s our seat!—and with no one on it!”

  They sat; opposite the trompe l’oeil statue of Tragedy and Comedy.

  3

  It was slightly unfortunate that the next bench should be similarly occupied by a couple—or rather, that the woman’s fashionable high-crowned hat, as the man bent towards her, formed the exact apex of a triangle that flowed down through his shoulders to a base suggested by four extraordinarily well-placed feet. Also the lines of the bench afforded the necessary parallels … Martha couldn’t help trying to memorize, and so missed Eric’s first few sentences altogether.

  “So you see what a brute I’ve felt,” Eric (evidently) continued, “ever since I realized how you must be worrying. No wonder you made Mother come to the ’bus-stop with us, to punish me! But you do know—don’t you, Martha?—you do trust me that far?—that if anything … happens, we can get married straight away?”

  Martha listened perfectly appalled.

  “I mean, without waiting for my step,” explained Eric eagerly. “Because of course as soon as I do get my step we’ll be married anyway.—Has anything happened?” asked Eric anxiously.

  “No,” said Martha instantly.

  “Then I’m glad I haven’t said anything to Mother,” acknowledged Eric, “though I really believe she’s almost as fond of you as I am. And you can’t think what a relief it is,” he added practically, “because of course she’ll live with us …”

  It was time for Martha to gather her forces. No prospect had ever appalled her more, not even that of painting Christmas-cards in Richmond, than this loyally-offered prospect of honourable matrimony. But every word Eric spoke, while Martha struggled for words herself, thrust her so far deeper into furious, tongue-tied dismay, he had for the moment a clear run.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll want to go on with art,” meditated Eric, “unless for a bit of teaching, perhaps, in a nice school—and until something does happen!” He smiled at her warmly. “I�
�ve been thinking about that quite a lot, Martha!—and now I can think about it just thinking how happy we’ll all be, Mother and all of us, when the time comes …”

  Martha found utterance at last. The unfolding vista of domestic bliss so nauseated her, she literally choked as she spoke. But she spoke.

  “And I’ve been thinking too,” said Martha, “and what I’ve been thinking is that we’d better not see each other ever again.”

  4

  The affronted surprise on his countenance was nearly ridiculous. Only his new-found masculinity prevented its being so entirely. For what more can a male offer, than honourable matrimony?—the complete shouldering of all responsibility for wife and child? In incredulous but not undignified reproach—

  “Martha!” exclaimed Eric. “You don’t understand! I want to look after you! I want to shoulder all your burdens for you—”

  “I don’t want to be looked after,” snarled Martha.

  “You will. All women do,” Eric assured her. He cast about for some to him rational explanation of her extraordinary behaviour. “If you think because I said that about teaching I won’t be able to support us—good heavens, that’s all right, as soon as I get my step! And even if we do have to pinch a bit, won’t it be easy, together?”

  She had to say something, to stop him. She might have said that she’d been engaged from youth to an art-master in Birmingham: or that there was insanity in her family. But Martha was by now so alarmed, and so infuriated, she told the crude, plain truth.

  “I don’t want to get married to anyone,” stated Martha deliberately, “and if I did it wouldn’t be you. I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with you, and I don’t like your mother either.”