Providence

by Anita Brookner

  But she made an effort to relax, remembering the advice offered to her by Caroline before she left. Kitty, dressed and waiting for the taxi a full hour before she was due to leave had been unable to resist the temptation to ring Caroline’s bell to ask her if she looked all right.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Caroline unenthusiastically. ‘Although, I don’t know … you don’t think a bit of colour? You want to arrive looking your best. Is your boyfriend meeting you?’

  Kitty blushed. ‘I don’t even know where he is at the moment,’ she confessed. ‘He’s going to ring me when he gets to Paris.’

  Caroline had looked wise. ‘Well, don’t panic if he doesn’t,’ she had said. ‘And try not to look so anxious. Remember, Kitty, man is the hunter.’ And she had smoothed her rather vivid green dress over her bosom, and then examined her nails. She managed to imply that she could deal competently, even expertly, with any problems that Kitty might have wished to confide in her, and that she was available for consultation. But Kitty felt that she had taken enough advice to last her for a very long time, and, with a brief kiss on both cheeks for Caroline she had gone back into her own flat to continue her waiting undisturbed.

  Nevertheless, she tried very hard to relax and to appear amiable. They will be students in a year or two’s time, she reminded herself, as a deafening game of cards got under way. And the Channel will quieten them down. She was a good sailor, herself.

  But she disliked travelling, which always seemed to increase her feeling of isolation, her sense of not belonging in any one clearly defined context. She almost envied the shaggy girls, who looked remarkably like one another, and had clearly been turned out according to some original model by an authoritative committee which knew what that model should be. She felt, as she always felt when the speed of the train increased, that she was losing her sense of identity, that she had forgotten what she looked like, or where she was going. But I am happy this time, she reminded herself; I shall not be alone. Or not for long, anyway. She cheered up, briefly. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out the strip of photographs she had had taken at the station, where she had had to wait for a further half hour for the train to come in. A grey, neat, and unnaturally watchful face, reproduced four times, peered back at her. She sighed, folded the strip over, pushed it back into her bag, and looked out of the window.

  Her right arm was nudged, none too gently, and when she turned in its direction it was to find a pleasant and rather highly coloured face, which somehow gave the impression of being as tousled as the immense growth of hair that exploded on all sides of it. It was the girl with the back-pack, which now stood blocking the area between the corridor and the window.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the girl, ‘are you French?’

  Kitty rehearsed the usual explanation, and then jettisoned it.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I speak it quite well. Are you in any difficulty?’

  ‘Actually, I wondered if you’d like an apple. My mother loaded me up from her store before I left and I can hardly move with the weight of them.’

  Kitty accepted an apple and asked the girl where they were all going.

  ‘We’re camping. My name’s Angela, by the way. We’re making our way down to Naples.’

  Kitty regarded her in consternation.

  ‘You can’t camp in Italy,’ she said. ‘And certainly not in Naples. That’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ The others glanced up from their apples and their cards and their maps and looked at her with genuine curiosity.

  ‘I don’t think unaccompanied girls of your age …’

  They roared with laughter.

  ‘We’re not unaccompanied, as you put it. The boys have already gone. We’ve got to meet them in Amiens. And anyway, there’s Mr Pascoe.’

  At the mention of this name, they doubled up. ‘Oh, don’t,’ moaned the rather pretty girl sitting opposite. ‘I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Who is Mr Pascoe?’ asked Kitty.

  ‘He’s with the boys,’ explained Angela. ‘He’s a dream. Clare’s in love with him. We shall be too busy fighting over Mr Pascoe to worry about the Italians. My dear, we shan’t even notice them.’ They shrieked again.

  Poor fellow, thought Kitty. Although, I don’t know. Maybe he’s used to this sort of thing. She was eternally uncertain about standards of behaviour and worried in case she formed or indeed gave a false impression.

  ‘Mr Pascoe is meeting us at Dieppe,’ announced Clare dreamily. ‘Just think, he’ll be on the same train.’

  ‘I must look out for him,’ said Kitty. ‘He sounds interesting.’

  ‘If you see a tall handsome man with Clare grovelling at his feet, that’s Mr Pascoe,’ said Angela. ‘Look, I must get rid of some of these apples before we get on the boat. Apart from the luggage problem, I want to buy some fags and wine and that and I haven’t got room for both.’

  ‘You’d better do it now, then,’ urged Kitty. ‘We are just coming into Newhaven.’ She accepted three more apples and inserted them into her carefully packed grip. Then she stood up, anxious to avoid the flurry of reorganization that would ensue as they tried to get themselves off the train and on to the boat.

  ‘We’ll probably see you on the French train,’ said Angela. ‘We shall have to stay with Clare on the boat because she’s going to be sick. Aren’t you, Clare?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said the pretty girl, picking up another apple and biting into it. ‘But I usually get over it quickly enough.’

  Nevertheless, thought Kitty, I shall sit somewhere else.

  The crossing was smooth, the sun warm, the breeze pleasant. Kitty sat on the deck, her book in her lap, mildly restored by the empty scene. The girls had disappeared, below deck, Kitty hoped, and the silence was beneficent. She felt the colour coming back into her face, and as snatches of French came to her through the open window of the saloon, her anxiety disappeared. Again she lifted up her face obediently to the blue sky and tried to capture an extra vigour from the clear air. The time, or rather the timeless interval between the two shores, passed easily and quickly; she was unwilling to move from her place, and lunched neatly on two of Angela’s apples.

  For the last few minutes of the journey she was joined by a large and handsome French woman with glittering eyes, to whom she nodded a greeting, and who said to her, ‘Only five hours of travel and already I am less lucid.’ Then as the coast of France came into sharper focus, the woman stood up, shook out her coat, breathed deeply as if inhaling health-giving vapours and announced fervently, ‘Enfin. Rien ne vaut la France.’

  Kitty, at this moment, agreed with her. The wider shore, the wider sky, seemed to promise her a renewal of her powers and of that confidence which, she realized, had become steadily eroded over the past few weeks. She felt as if the Marseillaise should be played and wished that someone had organized it. Picking up her bag she strode to the gangplank, where she found that she had been preceded by the girls, now rather redder in the face, more subdued, and looking more like children, despite their size, than they had on their home ground. Their tragic luggage, more disordered than ever, lay in mountains between herself and the quayside.

  ‘Hello,’ said Kitty to the girl who had given her the apples. ‘Are you all right? Was your friend sick?’

  Angela focused on her with some difficulty. She was, Kitty saw, slightly the worse for wear. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said vaguely. ‘Clare? No, she’s fine. We met some chaps in the bar and had a really good time.’ She had taken off her waterproof and her jersey to reveal a slightly grubby tee shirt with the face and pointing hand of Lord Kitchener nestling between her redoutable breasts. ‘You speak French, don’t you? Can you help us get a porter? What does one do? Just yell Garçon?’

  ‘Never,’ said Kitty, shocked. ‘You address them as Monsieur. And anyway, I doubt if there will be a porter. You will just have to manage as best you can.’ The French woman who had lamented her loss of lucidity looked at them with undisguised disma
y. ‘But they are drunk,’ she hissed at Kitty. ‘Mais ce n’est pas permis. Elles ne savent pas se comporter dans le monde.’ Kitty stiffened slightly. ‘They are very young, Madame,’ she replied in English. The woman looked at her suspiciously, then turned away with a ruffled air. ‘Tout de même,’ she murmured. ‘Silly cow,’ remarked Clare, thus revealing herself as the trail blazer of the group. Hoots and shrieks of laughter began to reassert themselves as the girls, and Kitty, manoeuvred their luggage down the gangplank, on to the platform, and into the waiting train. From time to time the cortège broke down, until at one point Clare and Angela collapsed on the platform, clinging to each other, helpless, until urged by Kitty to stagger the rest of the way. To their original bundles were now added carrier bags filled with bottles and cartons of cigarettes. Kitty herself was blamelessly neat.

  Inside the train the girls fell instantly and unanimously asleep and thus did not see a tall sardonic looking man in an open-necked shirt peering in from the corridor. Kitty edged the door open and looked at him enquiringly. She felt responsible for the girls. ‘Pascoe,’ he announced, in a low and bitter voice. ‘Are they all here?’ She nodded. He nodded too, shut the door, and disappeared. Five minutes later he reappeared, opened the door, and said, ‘There is a buffet car at the other end. I think we both need a cup of coffee. They won’t wake up until we get to Paris,’ he added. ‘And then, God help me.’

  ‘Why should God help you?’ asked Kitty as they edged their way round a small metal table and sat down. ‘They seem rather nice.’

  ‘Because,’ he said, even more bitterly, ‘we are to spend the night in an hotel near the Gare du Nord. They will be trying to escape all night, to see the sights, as they call it. You can imagine how plentiful those are around the Gare du Nord. They will want night clubs and champagne and they will eat all the wrong things. And to think I might be walking in the Dolomites, as I originally planned.’ He sighed theatrically.

  He had, Kitty decided, a Byronic head, a fact of which he was well aware, as he kept turning his head aside so as to present himself in three-quarter profile. He was remarkably handsome and she could understand why Clare was in love with him. She did not, however, rate Clare’s chances very highly; Mr Pascoe seemed to have enough to do just to cope with himself.

  ‘You don’t look like a schoolmaster,’ she ventured to remark.

  ‘I have a bad leg,’ was his obscure reply. That is simply not true, thought Kitty. You read that in a novel about the First World War. She blushed slightly at this evidence of bad faith on her part.

  ‘Wouldn’t that have held you up in the Dolomites?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, sharply. ‘If I don’t exercise, it gets very stiff. And all the exercise I shall get this holiday is watching tents being put up and dismantled.’ He shook his handsome head and looked so genuinely disgusted that Kitty felt a little sorry for him. The girls, after all, had been rather overpowering and she had only known them for the inside of a day. And there were the boys to consider, too.

  ‘Have you done this job for long?’ she asked.

  ‘Only for a couple of terms,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t do much of anything before that, apart from a bit of farming for my father. Then I got involved in a car smash and it set me back in all sorts of curious ways and the chap at the hospital was a friend of the head of this school and they wanted a temporary replacement so I let myself be persuaded. It’s been hell,’ he added simply. ‘I shall leave at the end of the year. With relief.’

  So he really has got a bad leg, thought Kitty, with a sense of shame. And the chap at the hospital was evidently a doctor. Perhaps something did go rather wrong with Mr Pascoe.

  ‘I’m a teacher too,’ she said. ‘I quite like it.’

  He took no notice of this. ‘The kids aren’t too bad,’ he said. ‘In fact I get on better with them than I do with the so-called adults.’

  My dear, thought Kitty, you probably always will.

  You have not looked at me once since we sat down. Which is a pity because you seem nice and interesting and you are extraordinarily good-looking and I think I might begin to enjoy your company very much. If only you weren’t so impossibly self-absorbed. A Romantic hero, she decided. And with the limp to go with it.

  She said none of this but watched his sulky handsome face and the long fingers wrapping and unwrapping the same piece of sugar. As she was studying him – and he really was rather remarkable – he surprised her by raising his eyes and gazing at her critically. They both felt a slight sense of shock and continued to look at each other, with the blood rising in their cheeks, until, reluctantly, Mr Pascoe turned his eyes away and concentrated on wrapping his lump of sugar again.

  After a moment he cleared his throat. ‘You would be doing me a service if you would have dinner with me tonight,’ he said, carelessly.

  Kitty smiled. ‘With the girls?’ she asked.

  ‘After the girls are in bed,’ he replied. ‘I really cannot be responsible for them after that. I can’t lock them in, after all. And I can’t stand outside their rooms waiting to catch them.’

  ‘I wonder why they didn’t send a woman teacher,’ said Kitty.

  ‘They did, but she was called home suddenly. Her mother fell and broke a hip. Which sounds like a long job.’

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Kitty, who did not normally say such things. ‘At least the weather is good. You won’t have too bad a time. And I don’t mind helping you with the girls this evening, if it will make any difference. We could both take them out.’ She felt that this was an acceptable suggestion, but he did not seem noticeably pleased with it. ‘What they would probably like,’ she went on, ‘is that self-service place in the rue de Rivoli.

  They can have chicken and chips. I dare say they will be very tired when they have eaten. We can take them back on the Metro, and you can relax after that. With your bad leg,’ she added.

  He brooded. He was, Kitty saw, too proud to try to persuade her. And too used to getting his own way with women to acknowledge that she had deflected him from his original purpose. Which is a pity, she thought again. I might have enjoyed having dinner with him. It would have filled in this evening. But supposing Maurice is already there? Supposing there is a telephone message waiting for me at the hotel? I shall have to go there straight away, as soon as we get to Paris. And then, if there is no message, I can arrange to meet them all in the rue de Rivoli. But I must go straight back to the hotel afterwards, in case Maurice telephones.

  She raised her eyes from this calculation to find him staring at her again, and again she blushed slightly.

  ‘Are you meeting someone in Paris?’ he asked.

  ‘In a way,’ she said. She did not want to offend his pride any further. ‘It’s a colleague, really,’ she went on, rather hesitantly, as his face darkened. ‘We are going to look at some cathedrals together.’

  ‘A male colleague?’ he asked.

  Kitty thought of Maurice, driving through France, alone, without her, and felt a touch of sadness. I could have been with him all the time, she thought.

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ she said hurriedly, for she felt the onset of one of her bleak moods.

  ‘You’re very pretty,’ he said, and looked annoyed with himself for having conceded so much. He had obviously been handsome from infancy and had long been used to the idea of the superiority of his own looks and appearance.

  Kitty smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, then, turning to look out of the window, exclaimed, in genuine surprise, ‘But we are nearly there! I have never known a journey to go so quickly!’

  He sighed, with genuine heaviness. It can’t be much fun for him, she thought. ‘Mr Pascoe,’ she said, ‘would you like me to help you with the girls this evening? I could meet you at the self-service place. I just want to see if my friend has left a message for me at the hotel first.’

  He turned his face to the window, and stayed in that position for a moment, exhibiting his profile.

  ‘Sweet of you,�
� he said finally. ‘Would seven-thirty be too early? I expect they will need a wash, or something. And I had better get the rooms sorted out.’

  She smiled again. ‘Seven-thirty in the rue de Rivoli, then. We had better get back to them, I suppose.’

  They lurched through the train with difficulty, for the corridor was already jammed with people and luggage. In the carriage the girls were awakening from their sleep, yawning and dishevelled. They looked younger and dirtier than ever, but, Kitty noted, they recovered all the more quickly because of their youth.

  ‘We’re all having dinner together,’ Kitty informed them. At that moment Mr Pascoe loomed behind her, and Clare’s face registered astonishment. ‘I will see you all at the barrier,’ said Mr Pascoe. ‘Wait until everybody has got off before you attempt to move that luggage. And be as quick as you can.’

  ‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ Kitty told them, picking up her grip. ‘But I shall see you all later. I just want to see if there is a message for me at my hotel. Are you all right? You don’t feel sick, do you, Clare?’

  ‘I am perfectly all right, thank you,’ Clare replied in a repressive tone of voice. She will be a formidable woman in a couple of years’ time, thought Kitty, and she turned her attention to finding a taxi, for now her mind was on what awaited her at the hotel, and she had almost forgotten that the girls existed.

  As the taxi jerked through the early evening traffic she fell into a dream. Supposing that Maurice had in fact already arrived? She somehow was sure that he was there, that she would see him very soon, that they would spend the whole of the next two weeks together, and that life would be irremediably changed by this fact. She did not notice the beautiful evening, for her gaze was turned inwards, and she held her head still, using the tall slices of building sliding by on either side of her as blinkers, shutting out that part of the world that was irrelevant to her preoccupations. She gave herself over to the business of anticipation, for she suspected that she might need to become rather good at doing so. Paris seethed past her unnoticed as she tried to remember whether or not she had given Maurice her telephone number. She had told him the name of the hotel and where it was. Oh, this is ridiculous, she said to herself. He probably called in and left a note, telling me where to find him.