Prodigies

by Francis King

  Harriet continued to watch them intently. At first, as she had handled the dead man’s clothes, she had been overcome by sadness. It was like entering a once familiar and much loved house, to find it suddenly emptied of its furniture, inhospitable, cold. But now, as the room was gradually stripped of everything that might remind her of him, she felt, to her surprise and shame, a tide of exhilaration slowly sweep into her, as into some secret, narrow creek. She was alone now, and she had never been alone before in her life. But she was also something else that she had never been before. She was free.

  ‘You can’t carry all those valises,’ she told Hans, when at long last he and John had finished the packing. ‘You’d better get Harry to take you in one of the carriages.’

  ‘Oh, no, madam. I wouldn’t dream of that.’

  ‘I insist, I insist!’

  ‘Well, in that case …’

  ‘Since the master’s death, Harry’s had an easy time of it. He won’t mind.’

  Hans, who was used to the Englishman’s truculence, was not sure of that. But he did not care. If the mistress said that he was to be driven home in the carriage, then he would be driven home.

  The house and the near-slum in which Hans lived with his widowed mother, in a three-roomed attic apartment under the eaves of gaunt, grey tenement, were at opposite ends of the city. On the long drive home, he therefore had ample time to busy himself with plans for the future. Philip had left him a legacy far bigger than he had ever expected; and the two brothers had, in effect, promoted him in the business, making him their agent in The Hague. Now, like Harriet so shortly before him, he realized that, as a result of the wholly unforeseen death – Philip, so vigorous and decisive even in his seventies, had always struck him as immortal – he had suddenly achieved the one thing that he always thought to be beyond his grasp: his freedom.

  For years Hans had shared the small apartment with his mother, because neither of them could afford a separation. She had once been a dressmaker, of a far humbler sort than Madame Molnar, but failing eyesight had eventually obliged her to give that up. Former clients were generous to her, and her husband, a bank clerk, had left her enough money to buy a small annuity. She spent most of her time seated in the tiny little parlour, under the open dormer window in the summer, hunched close to the stove in the winter, knitting on large wooden needles, since it was only with them that she could see what she was doing, and carrying on endless conversations with a tiny, mongrel bitch, herself as frail as her mistress, which Hans (how much he regretted it now!) had found straying in the street and, on an impulse, had brought home with him. She would, he had decided, be the companion to his mother that he himself, constantly going abroad with Philip, could so seldom be. The bitch had long since become incontinent, filling the house with an ammoniac stench. When he could not walk her himself, Hans had to pay the young son of a neighbour to do so.

  Yes, he mused, looking out of the carriage window but seeing nothing, he would rent a large, sunny apartment on a ground floor of a house in a decent quarter for his mother; and he would persuade his spinster sister, now discontentedly working as a lady’s maid in Delft, to return to The Hague and look after her in it. He himself would rent another apartment, not as large, not as expensive, near them but not too near. At last he would get away from his mother’s constantly prying, censorious presence, and that voice that pursued him to his own room with incessant questions and demands, when she herself was not lumbering up out of her chair to do so. At last, like his former master, he could lead the sort of life that he had always wanted to lead. Only money could give one that sort of freedom.

  Yes, he would be happy, at last he would be happy.

  Chapter Eleven

  AT BREAKFAST less than two weeks after Philip’s death, Harriet announced to Alexine that on the following Monday Aunt Addy would be taking her to Paris. Aunt Addy had a number of things to do there, Harriet said, and it would be nice both for her to have Alexine’s company and for Alexine to see a city so much larger and more beautiful than The Hague. Harriet did not specify the nature of the things that Addy had to do. Prey, like her father, to bouts of hypochondria, she had in fact decided to consult a Russian physician, a disciple of Mesmer, widely reported as being extraordinarily successful in his treatment of nervous disorders, particularly in women.

  ‘Why can’t you come?’ Alexine at once demanded.

  ‘Because I have so much to see to here.’

  ‘Can’t you see to it later?’

  ‘No. You know how I hate putting things off. Papa’s death left me with a lot of things to do, and I want to get them done as quickly as possible. So that I can then got on with my own life,’ she added.

  ‘If you came with us now, I could help you when we got back.’

  Harriet laughed. ‘That’s sweet of you, chérie. But I think that you’re still too young to do that.’

  ‘If you can’t come, can Sammy come?’

  Harriet and Addy looked at each other. Addy raised her eyebrows, Harriet shrugged her plump, rounded shoulders.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Harriet said. ‘A journey like that would only be wasted on him. He’ll be far happier here, in a familiar environment, among people he knows.’

  Addy nodded. ‘Yes, he would feel totally lost in Paris. You must try to understand what it must be like for him, wholly cut off from the world around him.’

  It was, in fact, something that Alexine had often tried to understand.

  ‘I’d always be with him. I’m sure he’d like to come. Oh, please, mama!’

  Harriet shook her head. Addy used often to say to Alexine, ‘You are the girl who always gets what she wants’ – sometimes in admiration and awe and sometimes, since she herself had rarely got what she wanted, in envy. But on this occasion it was clear to Alexine that she was not going to get what she wanted. Her mother, so often criticized for giving in to her, was not going to do so now.

  Nonetheless, though knowing the fruitlessness of continuing the argument, she persisted. ‘But why can’t he come with me? Why? Why? It’s so unfair. I want him to come.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you can’t always have what you want.’ Since her father’s death, Alexine had sensed, with puzzled apprehension, a new toughness in her mother. In the past, it was he who had denied her things and her mother who had then pleaded for her to have them.

  ‘It’s only for a week,’ Aunt Addy said. ‘What are you making such a fuss about? Don’t you like my company?’

  Alexine did not answer.

  Later that same day, Harriet announced that, since Aunt Addy would so often be occupied in Paris, Mademoiselle would also be going, to look after her pupil.

  Alexine, who did not like Mademoiselle and who knew that Mademoiselle knew that, was aghast. ‘Oh, no. No!’

  ‘You can’t be left on your own in an hotel,’ Harriet told her severely. ‘You’re far too young for that. Mademoiselle can take you to the museums and churches and parks.’

  ‘Why does she have to come? Why can’t Nanny Rose come?’

  Harriet and Addy laughed. ‘ Nanny doesn’t speak a word of French. And she’s never been to France. Don’t be silly! You’d both of you get lost as soon as you set foot outside the hotel.’

  In fact, Alexine all too often found herself alone in the suite that she and Addy shared, with Mademoiselle occupying a smaller room next to it.

  ‘I just have to slip out for an hour or so,’ Mademoiselle announced to Alexine, who was alone in the suite, on the second day after their arrival. She was resplendently dressed, in a frock passed on to her by Harriet and then altered by one of Madame Molnar’s drudges to fit her much slimmer figure. Her dark eyes under finely arched eyebrows were lambent with expectancy. ‘Now don’t leave this room, remember? Just ring for the maid if you want something. Do not leave this room! And don’t’ – suddenly she looked furtive and embarrassed – ‘ don’t say anything to your aunt about my leaving you like this. Promise? You know how she f
usses.’

  Alexine, busy with drawing at a table under the window, nodded.

  ‘Now you promise me to do what I’ve told you?’

  Again, without looking up, Alexine nodded.

  Sometimes Alexine would disobey such instructions and slip out of the room, to trail along the labyrinthine corridors or up and down the two vast staircases. It was absurd, she thought, that a girl of nine should be kept a prisoner like that. Once or twice, she became so bored and exasperated that she even wandered out into the street. But the crowds streaming up and down the rue de Rivoli, the deafening clatter of horses and carriages, and the fine snow drifting from the leaden sky, soon drove her back.

  On one occasion, Mademoiselle returned to the hotel before Alexine did. Hearing the girl enter the suite, she at once jumped up and rushed out of her own room to scold her. Her eyes were even brighter than when she had gone out, her cheeks were unusually flushed. When she approached, Alexine could catch the same smell that she used to catch when her father returned from a dinner-party or from playing cards with his cronies.

  ‘Where have you been? I told you, told you, not to leave this room!’

  Alexine lied. ‘The bell wasn’t working. I rang and rang. I was hungry. So I went out to see if I could find a maid.’

  ‘And …?’ Mademoiselle did not believe her.

  ‘I got lost.’

  ‘Lost?’ At that, Mademoiselle gave up. She did not really care. She was far too much taken up with her own thrilling, totally unexpected love-affair with a young man who had walk-on parts at the Coméedie Française to bother about her charge.

  One day, Addy announced to Alexine that a French friend of hers, a Monsieur Thierry, had invited them both to lunch at Le Grand Véfour. He was about to go to The Hague as Head of Chancery at the French Embassy. Would Mademoiselle also be coming? Alexine asked. Addy gave a derisive laugh. No, of course not. Would this Frenchman be bringing his wife? ‘No, I don’t think so. I think he said she was on a visit out of Paris.’

  Monsieur Thierry was plump and pale, with soft hands, sparse, unnaturally dark hair parted in the middle, and a crooked smile under a small, heavily waxed moustache, the ends of which stuck out like wires. He was deferential, in a stiffly formal way, to Addy – like a courtier to a queen, Alexine thought. But with Alexine he was totally relaxed, pulling faces, performing simple tricks of sleight of hand with coins on the starched white damask table-cloth, and making silly jokes – many of them puns which, being in French, she could not always follow. At first Addy laughed far more than was usual with her, throwing back her head, while a blush flooded up her throat. But then she began to look wary and even, by the end of the meal, vaguely displeased.

  ‘He’s a silly ass,’ Addy told Alexine, when they had got into their carriage to return to the hotel. He had offered to see them back there, but Addy had told him that that wasn’t necessary. ‘ He has a little girl of about your age,’ she added. ‘ She’ll make a nice friend for you.’

  ‘I have too many friends already,’ Alexine said peevishly.

  ‘Yes, you have too much of everything,’ Addy said sourly. ‘ You’re lucky in that.’ Then, repenting, she put a hand on Alexine’s knee. ‘It’s lovely being with you like this. I’m so glad that Mama agreed to my bringing you with me.’

  Addy was now taking drops prescribed by the Russian doctor. ‘They make me feel so much better,’ she said. ‘I’m a changed woman.’ She certainly seemed to smile and even laugh far more than in the past, and she was uncharacteristically restless in her desire constantly to be doing something. ‘Remind me to take my drops,’ she would tell Alexine. ‘ Dr Pavloski says that I must be sure to take them every four hours.’ She would even wake up in the middle of the night in order to take them, the sudden flare of the gas all too often arousing Alexine in the bedroom that they shared.

  The three of them had a reserved carriage for the journey home. They had just settled themselves into it when, suddenly, there at the window beside Alexine, was Monsieur Thierry, a porter hefting two valises behind him. He had a carnation in his button-hole. A gold-capped tooth, unnoticed by Alexine at their previous meeting, gleamed as he smiled. ‘May I join your party?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Addy said. ‘But what a surprise! I’d no idea that you’d be travelling on the same train.’

  Was it really a surprise for her? No. Alexine knew that Addy was lying – something she rarely did, and then so clumsily that the lie, as on this occasion, was instantly apparent.

  Monsieur Thierry began to explain. He had decided to arrive at the Embassy ahead of his wife and family. That way, he could, as he put it, ‘acclimatize’ himself without distractions. It was, in any case, more convenient and – he laughed – cheaper if he were to put up alone in a hotel while looking for a suitable house to rent. The lease on the house rented by his predecessor had unfortunately expired and the owner did not wish to renew it.

  Mademoiselle had begun to turn over the pages of a woman’s magazine as soon as Addy had made the introductions between her and Monsieur Thierry. For her, he was too old to be of interest, let alone attractive.

  It was a slow journey. At first Monsieur Thierry chattered away, constantly turning to Alexine, as though she, rather than Addy, was the most important person in the carriage. Mademoiselle pursed her lips, sighed from time and time, and went on with her reading. Addy laughed, but the laugh was increasingly artificial. Eventually she rested her head back on the cushioned seat, pulled her cashmere rug higher up over her knees, and shut her eyes. Soon she was snoring discreetly. When Alexine glanced over to Mademoiselle, she saw that she too was asleep. A moment later the magazine slithered across her knees and dropped to the floor. Quietly, Monsieur Thierry reached for it, picked it up and placed it on the seat beside her.

  After a few minutes, during which he kept peering at Alexine, as at a picture in an art gallery, Monsieur Thierry produced from a pocket a metal puzzle, of a number of rings that had to be disentangled from each other. ‘ See how you get on with that,’ he said in a whisper, so as not the disturb the two sleeping women.

  Reluctantly Alexine took the puzzle from him.

  She manipulated the rings for a time and then, with characteristic impatience, began to tug at them, her fingertips growing white with the pressure. Monsieur Thierry chuckled, leaned forward and put one of his soft, cold hands over hers. He eased her fingers away from the rings and then began deftly to manoeuvre them. Suddenly they were separate. Then, no less suddenly, having been manipulated by him for a few seconds, they were joined again. He handed the rings back to her. ‘Try again,’ he said. At that he jumped up from his seat opposite to her and sat down beside her. She could feel his body close to hers, pressing her up against the side of the carriage. Once again she tried to separate the rings. But she was even more maladroit than before. He was still pressing up close against her. Then she could feel his hand on her knee, resting there, like some manimate object. He leaned his head towards her, and all at once she felt his waxed moustache pricking her cheek.

  Terrified, she jumped up, crossed the carriage and stood by the farther window. Hands gripping its ledge to steady herself, she looked out at the flat, monochrome winter landscape slowly unrolling under her gaze. She saw a canal, with a horse-drawn barge stationary at a lock; a carriage lurching over the hump-backed bridge that spanned it; a small detachment of soldiers marching, in ragged order, down a narrow dirt road. She could see that the soldiers were singing but she could not hear them. Then he was standing beside her. Again he was extremely close. She could smell his cologne, at once bitter and sweet.

  ‘Look, look!’ she cried out. It was really a summons for help.

  Aunt Addy jerked up. Her eyes opened. Mademoiselle stirred, her eyes also opened. She yawned and then, this time putting the back of a hand to her mouth, yawned again.

  ‘What is it?’ Aunt Addy asked.

  ‘Some ducks on the canal,’ Alexine said, since that was the next thi
ng that she saw at that moment.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to wake me up for that. You’ve seen ducks often enough before.’

  The train arrived more than an hour late; and they were made even later because Addy offered Monsieur Thierry a lift to his hotel before they travelled on to the house.

  ‘When my little girl arrives, you must come and play with her,’ Monsieur Thierry told Alexine.

  Alexine said nothing.

  ‘That’ll be nice, won’t it?’ Addy prompted.

  Again Alexine said nothing.

  ‘She’s tired,’ Addy said.

  ‘Yes, the poor child is tired,’ Monsieur Thierry agreed.

  Once more in the carriage, Alexine said: ‘I don’t like that man.’

  ‘What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with him.’

  Mademoiselle was humming to herself a little tune that she had heard in a café to which the actor had taken her. The sound was getting on Addy’s nerves.

  ‘He touched me.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with that? He has a little girl of his own. You know that.’

  ‘I don’t like being touched. Not by a man. Not like that.’

  Mademoiselle gave a little laugh. Then she went on humming, more loudly.

  ‘You are an odd girl,’ Addy said.

  Harriet was overjoyed to see them. It had been a long week, and the house had, despite the presence of Nanny Rose and all the servants, seemed empty and cold.

  ‘Did you have a lovely time?’ she asked Alexine, as they all, with the exception of Mademoiselle, went into the drawing-room and Addy began to take off first her hat and then the dark blue redingote that she had bought on the Paris visit. Its cutaway front, hardly suitable for a long journey in an unheated train, revealed the extremely narrow waist of which she had always been proud.