Providence

by Anita Brookner

  But there was no message waiting for her. Rather slowly she went up the stairs and unlocked the door of her room. She walked to the window as if she might see him coming. Then she sat on the bed for a few minutes. Eventually she sighed and stood up and started to unpack; she washed her face and brushed her hair, and then, when she could put it off no longer, she went down the stairs again and out into the cooling evening, and made her way to the rue de Rivoli, for chicken and chips, with Mr Pascoe, and the girls.

  TEN

  The sort of hotel which Kitty thought it appropriate to afford on this occasion had rooms which were neither warm enough nor light enough. In the daytime she managed to forget these very slight irritations, for there was plenty to see and to do, and she had had many useful ideas for her work. But she hated going back in the evenings, had developed a dread, more acute than the ennui of Old Church Street, of sitting alone, with her books, when she had so much to say, so many ideas to offer. She was full of words and she had to keep them all to herself. After dinner, eaten at a bistro on the corner of the street, a sadness which she did not fully comprehend, set in, and the thought of sitting at a small table under a weak light in a bedroom furnished in shades of tired crimson, while she grappled with the task of writing her lecture, an exercise which she found easy in the daytime and impossible in the evenings, came to be associated in her mind with the thought of solitude, of exile. Exile, she thought. I have felt this before. But she could not remember in what context.

  She was usually in bed by nine. Trying to read, under an even weaker light, she forced herself to ignore the fact that Maurice had not telephoned and that there had been no message waiting for her. She had been installed for a week. Every morning she took great pains with her appearance, in case he should have arrived without telling her. Every morning she informed the woman at the desk of the hotel when she would be back, after her day’s reading and walking. ‘I am expecting a message,’ she said. By now they all knew this, and shook their heads sympathetically in the evenings when she returned. She knew that such humiliation was not the normal lot of women who were loved, and although she schooled herself to remember that Maurice never made plans very far ahead, that he frequently got dates wrong, and that in any case he did not know – must not know – that she waited with such intensity for a sign from him, a disappointment had insinuated itself into her and she knew that it would not easily be dislodged.

  So that when he finally telephoned, she was almost dull with anticlimax and answered him slowly. ‘Did I wake you up?’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted myself.’ ‘Where are you?’ was all she wanted to know. ‘In an enchanting little hotel just outside Chartres,’ he said. He sounded not at all tired. ‘I’ve just had the best meal of my life. And the cathedral’s floodlit, it’s quite perfect. Listen, Kitty. I could be with you tomorrow for lunch. I want one last look in the morning. I could pick you up at your hotel around one. You’ll have time to have your hair done, my love.’

  She shrank back against the headboard of the old-fashioned bed and tried to assess the situation. Where was he going to stay in Paris? He had said nothing about that. He had sounded airy, almost euphoric. And he had called her ‘my love’. Surely that meant something? Her endearments to him, which she had had to curtail because she knew that he would not welcome any show of fervour on her part, were always irrepressible and sincere. She thought that this was how the matter should be. Words meant such a very great deal to her – and more than that, information conveyed by means of words – that she wanted them to mean a great deal to everyone else. For some reason she thought of her student Mr Mills and his clumsy translations. You are accurate, she had told him, and yet you are not very near the meaning. Aim at both. This way you are losing a great deal of the available information. You are eliding it. He had looked at her uncomprehendingly: he had always been perfectly satisfied with his own translations.

  Enough of this, she thought. It is important that I sleep well tonight, that I look well tomorrow. I will have my hair done, although it was done only two days ago. The lecture can wait. I am on holiday, she reminded herself. And Maurice will be here tomorrow. I shall see him at last and we shall be together. We shall get in the car and go to Saint-Denis. Nevertheless she did not sleep well.

  She was ready and waiting by ten o’clock the next morning, and only the repeated knocks of the chambermaid got her out of her room, for she would have been content just to sit there until he arrived. She wandered haphazardly through the uninteresting streets of her immediate district, unwilling to venture far, her own plans and wishes suspended. The sunshine of the previous weeks had given way to a grey humidity which was not unpleasant but which imparted a slight feeling of unreality. She was now in a world of low definition. The previously acute angles made by the streets were softened, blurred; even sounds were more remote. And although it was morning it felt like afternoon, as if the weather had brought with it a prolonged siesta. Kitty Maule sat drinking a cup of coffee with precise and deliberate gestures. Nothing in her appearance indicated strain. She wanted, quite perversely, given the boredom of the preceding week, to get on with her work. This was, in fact, she had to admit, something of an error of timing. And she did not know how long she would be staying or how much time she had left.

  She went back to the hotel to change her shoes and repair her appearance, and when she had done these things she simply sat at the window and waited. She heard twelve o’clock strike, and then, much earlier than she had expected, she saw Maurice. He was wearing a blue checked shirt and his scarlet pullover and he was carrying an armful of books. He looked as if he had just emerged from the library after a peaceful morning’s work, but he was in fact coming towards her hotel. He could not see her, and because he could not see her she rushed down the stairs and out into the street so that they could meet face to face.

  He kissed her lightly on both cheeks. He looked very well, even tanned. ‘Oh, come in quickly and tell me all about it,’ she said. ‘Let me leave these books at the desk,’ he said, ‘and let’s get something to eat. I’m absolutely starving.’ Oh, but I am a fool, thought Kitty, looking at his long brown hands. I should have booked him a room here. Where are my wits? But maybe he did that on the telephone, last night. In which case, why does he not bring his books upstairs? ‘Maurice,’ she urged, ‘won’t you stay here?’ and she put her hand lovingly on his.

  ‘But I’m just round the corner, my love. At the Franklin Roosevelt, no less. But I couldn’t get a room with a bath. Have you got a bath, Kitty? Darling, can I have a bath later?’ So it will have to be love in the afternoon, thought Kitty. Merde, alors.

  My love. Darling. Kitty took more nourishment from these words, and from the sight of Maurice’s teeth biting into a plateful of radishes, than she did from her own tomato salad, to which she referred abstractedly from time to time. She took an inventory of his lowered eyelashes, his pale brown skin, his careful hands. Then she switched their plates so that he could finish her tomato salad, as she knew he wanted to do, and took more bread and gave it to him. Her earlier disappointments had faded from her mind and she could only concentrate on what she had in front of her: Maurice, captive, his mouth limpid with oil.

  A little while later, she said, ‘Where did you leave the car?’ By this time he was carefully stripping the meat from a chop. ‘Gone on ahead,’ he answered. ‘I found someone to drive it back for me. Are you going to eat your potatoes, Kitty?’ She handed over her plate. His physical presence so bemused her that her own awakened appetite seemed subsumed into his. He was eating for them both, and that was how she would have it. To feed him, at that moment, was all she wanted to do; the food was enhanced by his enjoyment of it and she speared a potato from his plate because it looked so much more appetizing than when it had previously featured on her own. A man at the next table, eating alone, smiled faintly at her absorption; she caught his eye, and smiled back. Across Maurice’s bent head they looked at each other gravely and with complete understanding. I lo
ve him, you see, she said, without uttering a word. The man sighed, called for his bill, and raised his coffee cup to her. Yes, she thought, luck. I have it at last. When she turned her head to Maurice, she found him smiling at her. ‘Why, Kitty,’ he said, ‘I believe you are misbehaving.’

  ‘Right,’ he continued, looking at his watch. ‘Now how do we get to Saint-Denis? In a train, I suppose. A dreary little train from the Gare du Nord.’

  ‘Oh, but Maurice,’ she protested. ‘We don’t have to go today, do we? I thought you wanted a bath.’

  ‘I can have one when we come back. And yes, we do have to go today, my love, because I have to fly home in the morning.’

  ‘But Maurice …’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s a bore, but my godmother’s coming to stay, and I promised my parents. So you see, Kitty, there is not a moment to lose.’

  In the train he dropped lightly off to sleep, his head cradled in his hand. When she turned her head away from watching him she looked out of the window, a smeared hopeless window, on to a landscape of high-rise flats, small factories, complicated overhead electrical connections. The rumbling suburban train was filled with slight dark-skinned men in eccentric hats, looking furtive yet business-like, their belongings, in cardboard suitcases, kept firmly between their knees. Kitty felt nervous and woke Maurice up. ‘Please don’t relax too much,’ she pleaded. ‘I shall never know when we ought to get off. It all looks the same. It is probably the same as this all the way to the coast. It always is when you go north.’ He looked at her mildly. His brief sleep seemed to have subdued him, made him into the controlled and inaccessible creature she had always known, without that effervescent lightness, that … that jauntiness, yes, that was what it was, that he had shown ever since he had arrived. Only three hours ago, she marvelled. And he must have been as excited as I was. Then why can’t he stay? Why won’t he stay?

  Her very slight melancholy increased during the walk to the basilica, which she perceived as a dungeon surrounded by abattoirs. The grey afternoon cast a bad light on what was already unprepossessing: a street filled with inexpensive shops, horse-meat butchers, launderettes. Several stuporose figures sat slumped in the Bar des Sports. Outside a café a waiter in shirtsleeves and a long black apron stood yawning. The day had darkened and a light rain was falling. He will get his lovely pullover wet, she thought, as they stumbled over the greasy cobbles to the façade of the west front.

  She was very disappointed with what she saw. The rose window was mean, the stone neither properly weathered nor entirely clean, the single tower heavy and graceless. The carving of the central portal was in such low relief that she felt as if she were looking at something executed in metalwork. Above the main door, which was firmly and inexorably closed, sat a sculpted Christ in Majesty, of indeterminate age, His arms prolonged by scrolls proclaiming His glory. Above Him, tiny figures of saints, angels, and doctors of the church wheeled round the semi-circular archivault, meeting in head-on collision above His head. ‘Maurice,’ said Kitty longingly, ‘there seems to be a fine eighteenth-century building to our right. Couldn’t we look at that?’ She craved something elegant and rational, something that would allow her to keep her balance, for Saint-Denis, she felt, contained the unreason of God, and the Christ figure seemed to bar the door to her unworthiness. Maurice, his eyes uplifted to the Christ, ignored her question; he stood transfixed, in the rain, his hair darkened by the damp drizzle, while she darted in the side door for shelter.

  Inside, for a while, she could see nothing, could only hear footsteps, did not know if Maurice had followed her. She was in a vast necropolis, an indoor cemetery reserved for the rich, the famous, and the very dead. She could hear the voice of a guide, somewhere ahead of her, although she could not make out anyone else in the building. She supposed that the voice was a recording. An inexplicable feeling of dread made her linger near the door. Maurice, distinguishable by his red pullover, seemed somehow to have got in front of her. He was quite oblivious to her presence, or had forgotten it, and she was too uncertain of herself to inflict it on him.

  After a while she began to wander fearfully among the tombs. She was momentarily diverted by the beauty of the names: Dagobert, Childebert, Carloman, Frédé-gonde, Ermentrude, Blanche of Castille, Isabelle of Aragon. Little by little, her acute unease left her and she dared to look at the sculpture, referring to her guidebook to see if she were going the right way about it. The tomb of Dagobert I was like a well-ordered linen cupboard, with rows of figures placed on shelves and Dagobert stowed away neatly underneath them. Around the tomb of Louis de Valois marched tiny figures in hooded cloaks, doing their work of mourning for the dead. That same prince, lying flat but not quite dead, his eyes open, his hands raised in prayer, gave her pause; she saw on his Gothic face something of the intransigence and the integrity of the faith that she had glimpsed in Maurice. But Blanche of Castille was very definitely dead, so flat that she did not even inhabit her fine dress with the goffered edging, her empty head now at one with her metal crown in mineral consistency.

  Kitty was oddly disquieted by the coupled kings and queens, not necessarily man and wife, who lay together as on a bed, an eternal marriage bed. Discreetly clothed, Carloman (died 771, said her guidebook) lay next to Ermentrude, and Philippe (died 1131) next to Constance of Castille. There was a look of intimacy, of informality, for all their robes, crowns and sceptres. Kitty, in the darkening church, walked back, turned a corner, walked on, and caught her breath. In front of her she saw the soles of four bare feet and the foreshortened nude bodies of two very recognizable human beings. Under a marble catafalque lay two marble figures, caught, apparently, at the moment of their dying, the man’s chest arched, his toes separated with anguish, his hand protecting his genitals; the woman limper, but with braced knees and curling toes. Kitty looked at her guidebook: Henry II and Catherine de Medici, by Germain Pilon. On top of the catafalque, in bronze, were kneeling statues of the King and Queen as they had been in life: the woman graceful, accomplished, with pearls in her hair, the man heavy, eloquent, clever, a long political hand outstretched. Kitty returned to the gisants, the dead figures. This was the reality, then. Death. And yet a death that seemed almost acceptable if one had a companion. Henry and Catherine, their agony shared, were familiar with the disgraces of each other’s bodies. They had not been idealized: the woman’s breast was flat and her legs plump. Apart from their curling toes, they might have been asleep on any night of their lives.

  Now Kitty could see Maurice, his red pullover the only colour in the gloom. There was no one but themselves in the huge building. She listened, as if taken back in time, for the confident footsteps of the faithful. There were none. She searched for a candle to light to Marie-Thérèse and could not find one: this was a church for members only. Then she saw Maurice sink to his knees in front of the statue of the Virgin by Dagobert’s tomb and watched his bent head as he prayed. He has left me, she thought; I am alone, and she leaned against a pillar, her throat aching. She tried to pray and failed. Then she said, silently, Marie-Thérèse, dearest little mother, are you there? Is this what you wanted for me, your heart’s darling, on those evenings calm enough to quiet even your fears, when we walked together arm in arm in the tiny garden? Do you see him, my pious lover, for whom I wait in hotel rooms, whose notes I type, whose dinners I cook, and who will never marry me? He prays to the Madonna, a stone lady with a chipped face. Do you watch me, the daughter who amazed and alarmed you sometimes with her strange ambitions? Did you wish for something simpler, more docile, more predictable? You did not hand me on, as a parent should, but you were so scarcely a parent. You were a child, and perhaps all the children I shall ever have. Have you found him again, your husband, the father I never knew? Will you tell him who I am? You, so happy to be looked after by others, will you try to look after me?

  After a while she blotted her eyes carefully, and repaired her appearance as best she could. Maurice now came towards her, his mild smile restored. He seem
ed untouched by fatigue or doubt. The business of living is so simple for him, she thought, and she watched him as, hands on hips, he surveyed the capitals of the columns. She peered at her watch in almost total darkness. ‘Maurice,’ she said urgently, ‘it’s very late. Let’s go home now. I hate this place.’ He frowned slightly. ‘How can you?’ he said. ‘I could stay here for hours.’ ‘But you are going back tomorrow,’ she pleaded. ‘We have so little time together.’ With a sigh he reached out a long arm and rested it on her shoulder and looked searchingly into her face. ‘All right, Kitty,’ he said. ‘We’ll go home now.’

  On the way back he was silent. From time to time he pulled out a small notebook and wrote something down. She felt as if she had been importunate, was left with a small area of discomfort in her mind. But I am mad, she thought. It is simply that our earlier unity was broken. This is quite natural. People take some time to come together again. And Saint-Denis was not perhaps the best place for us. I hope I haven’t ruined his lecture.

  Back in her room she recovered her earlier good spirits. She had had some tea sent up, and she watched him striding about, with his cup in his hand, his ring just glinting beneath the saucer. He had taken off his wet pullover and shoes, and stood still, from time to time, abstracted, half-dressed, until she urged him to drink. She had slipped next door to the cake-shop and bought two apple chaussons and two croissants filled with almond paste. They ate ravenously, their mouths perfumed with the sweet mixtures. When they kissed, they exchanged identical breaths, and she made a vow that she would never forget that particular taste as long as she lived.