The Greengage Summer (9 page)

When he saw the tears he stopped laughing. He said, “I’m sorry. I had to do that.”

“Willmouse is
little
. He wanted to see a banquet.”

He said, “I know,” and then, “I am not as bad as you think.” He was carrying a tray; on it was the chicken chasseur from the menu keeping warm under a small glass cloche,
gaufrette potatoes, some of what we called ‘party toast’, toast melba, butter, a meringue and a glass of grenadine; it was a bit of the banquet, but I was not going to relent.

“He won’t eat it,” I said distantly.

“We shall see,” said Eliot. He unlocked the door but kept me out. “Leave him to me,” he said.

I went into the Hole because something had happened to my pain; there, in that smelly little cupboard, I found out.

Even there wonder overcame me. Wonder and fear. I shivered. “. . . with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet,” Mr Stillbotham had said; no matter how reluctant, one was
pushed into the full tide. Dazed, I came out of the Hole and went into Joss’s room and found what I needed in her drawer. It was no use trying to reach her, she was at dinner . . . and so is
Mademoiselle Zizi, I thought. Madame Corbet, Mauricette were busy. I had to manage for myself with those strange first necessities of being a woman, and it was unexpressibly lonely. When I was
comfortable I began to cry with excitement and self-pity. I was still crying when I went back on the landing.

I could hear Eliot’s voice inside our room; then I thought I heard Willmouse give a tiny laugh like a crow. Eliot was even more of a magician than I thought. Always if Willmouse were
punished he did not speak for at least two days. I listened and, yes, I heard him laugh again. Then Eliot came out. “Still here?”

“Yes,” I said, muffled.

“I think he will eat it all,” said Eliot. “He liked the drink.”

“You needn’t lock the door!” That came out like a cry.

“I said I would and I must,” said Eliot. “I will come up later.” Then he looked at me. “You are in a state, Cecil. What is the matter?”

He should not have asked that; the tears came flooding.

“Is it Willmouse still?”

I shook my head.

“What is it then?” He put his arm round me, bending down. “Tell?”

Who could resist Eliot when he was Eliot? Eliot, not that other cold stranger. “Never talk to anyone about these times,” Mother had said when she told us, “especially not to a
man. Women should be private.” In Southstone I think I should have shrunk suitably from telling Eliot, but Les Oeillets was different and it came out with a rush. “I . . . have turned
into a woman.”

I did not know how else to put it—Mother had not taught us any of the words—but Eliot did not laugh. He asked, “Just now?”

“Just now,” and the tears flowed.

“That isn’t anything to cry about,” said Eliot gently.

“It . . . hurts.”

“Not when you consider how exciting it is.”

“Exciting?” That was unexpected.

“Of course.”

“But . . . how?”

“Because now you are ready for love.”

Love! Probably nothing in the world that Eliot could have said at that moment could have helped me more. Love! Like Mademoiselle Zizi, Juliet, Cleopatra, Eve, like . . . Joss, level with Joss.
“I, Cecil,” I whispered, dazzled.

“You.”

“But . . .” The tears came back. “I am not pretty like Joss.”

“You are not pretty like Joss. You are pretty like Cecil.”

With my Bullock sturdiness, my pinkness and mouse hair? “I, pretty?”

“Very,” said Eliot, and he kissed me on the mouth.

“That scoundrel,” Uncle William called him. I only know that night he seemed like an angel to me.

He had to go to dinner, but he took me downstairs and put me to sit in the office which was empty; somehow, in the rush and hubbub, he got Toinette, who was motherly, to make me some tea. How
did he know there were only two things in the world I could have swallowed, things English and familiar, bread and butter and tea. I had not known tea could be had in France, though it was tea such
as we had not seen, served in a glass, the leaves in a little paper bag tied with a string and soaking in hot water. It was weak, but it was hot, and I made it sweet and ate four slices of bread
and butter. The pain had the edge taken off it now and Toinette patted me and called me ‘pauvre gosse’. Soon I felt much better.

It was a long peaceful wait until people began to come from dinner to dance or sit at the tables in the bar. I stole out on the stairs to watch. Nobody noticed me and I was glad. Then Hester
came to sit beside me; she had been dancing and was excited. “Joss is the belle of the ball, isn’t she?” she said.

Everyone wanted to dance with Joss. When the men tapped one another on the shoulder, taking one another’s partner, she changed partners all the time; she was flushed, far more excited than
Hester, but that game was going on. Eliot danced with Mademoiselle Zizi, with some of the wives and daughters, with Vicky and Mauricette, but he never seemed to see Joss nor Joss him; she carefully
looked away when they passed; she smiled at her partner and tossed her hair back and fluttered her lashes up and down. “Is that flirting?” asked Hester, but I was beginning to see there
was another kind of growing pain. I knew Joss was miserable and I ached for her.

“Qui a laissé ces trucs-là dans mon bureau?” Madame Corbet had found the tray with my plate and tea glass. “Is the whole house to be a nursery?” she
scolded, and I had to take them to the kitchen. On the way back I had to wait at the service door. They were dancing the carpet dance, the danse du tapis, when the men make a circle and a woman
takes a little square of carpet and stands in the centre. When the music stops she kneels down on the carpet in front of the man she chooses, who kisses her and dances with her while everybody
claps. He takes her into the circle and this goes on till all the women are in the circle. The crowd had moved back against the wall to watch the dance and I could not get past. As I stood, there
was a loud sound of eating in my ear, a smell of sweat and garlic, Paul, and I had another glimpse of what it was like to be Paul. His face and neck were glistening with sweat, his hair hung
limply, his apron and shirt were soaked and covered with stains. He must have been washing-up for hours and had taken a moment to eat; he had a piece of sausage clamped in a length of split bread,
as he used to make our goûter.

We shouldn’t have sent him to Coventry, I thought, and this time was going to make myself speak to him when I saw he had not noticed me; he was watching Joss. When people are watching they
forget to pretend and there was something in Paul’s face that made me afraid; it was wild, like a wild animal that does not think of itself or any other animal but only of what it wants. Then
I learned part of the explanation of why he looked like that; Monsieur Armand called impatiently and Paul turned to go but left the door open and I saw him take a bottle from the shelf behind the
door; he tilted it right up before he drank so that I knew it was almost empty. When he put it back he nearly missed the shelf and a moment after I heard a crash of plates.

He came back. Three or four times I noticed him in that door, and then I saw that Joss was smiling at him. She only smiled because she was smiling at everyone, but, “It
is
flirting,” Hester said disapprovingly when I got back to the stairs.

It grew late. Some of the people were going home. Vicky had fallen asleep on a sofa; Madame Corbet looked at her two or three times, then picked her up and carried her to bed. The Brass
Instruments Band had finished, but a pianist and violin had taken its place. The music sounded very quiet after the band, and the notes of the violin came softly across the floor, sweet with a
faint throbbing that made it sound tender.

Joss was standing just below us, and for the moment she was without a partner. I think she hoped she would be left without one, for she turned this way and that and I was sure she was looking
for Eliot. Then she saw him, and for the first time that night they looked at one another. She stood still and I knew her eyes would not plead, only look, unmistakably look. She had had to humble
herself to do that, but Eliot walked away to the bar. I clenched my fists. Was Eliot quite impervious? To the throbbing music that seemed to us so beautiful? To Joss? Eliot, who had kissed me
upstairs? It was only a moment; the next, Joss was smiling at the piccolo, at the Town Clerk; then she smiled and waved at someone else. I looked to see and it was Paul. The wave was too much. He
gave a tug at his apron that broke its string, wrenched it from his neck and threw it away, combed his hair with his fingers and reached her before the piccolo, who was weaving through the dancers.
“Mademoiselle Joss,” said Paul and bowed.

If he had been clean it might have been different. Mauricette had danced and Monsieur Armand, “but not Toinette or Nicole,” said Hester. Monsieur Perrichaut called out sharply and a
gentleman, who Mauricette told us was Monsieur Dufour of the Commissariat, came up and said to Paul as he stood just below us, “Et toi, mon gaillard, rentre chez toi et restes-y.”
Monsieur Dufour was, I suppose, in charge of Paul, but Paul had emptied all of that bottle and he shouted so that the words were heard through all the rooms above the music, “Galeux! Gros
dégueulasse!” to Monsieur Dufour.

Other men came up; the older ones talked soothingly, but the Town Clerk took hold of Paul, who shook him off.

“Paul! Fais-pas l’imbécile,” cried Mauricette and ran for Madame Corbet.

“Rentre,” said Monsieur Dufour curtly. “C’est ce que tu as de mieux à faire,” but Paul had Joss by the hand.

Joss did not know what to do. Gently she tried to take her hand away. “Dance me,” said Paul in his poor English.

“They don’t want me to,” said Joss.

“Foutez-nouse la paix!” Paul shouted at them. “Elle n’est pas une sacrée snob.”

Without his apron Paul looked tall and, in his untidiness and dirt, almost savage among those Sunday clothes. Joss shrank from him though she was trying not to shrink. “Attendez,
Paul,” she said, “wait,” but he was putting his arm round her, when suddenly between them was Eliot.

He had cut in front of Paul so quickly that no one had seen him come up and almost from inside Paul’s arm he took Joss and danced with her away down the room. At the same moment Monsieur
Dufour caught Paul by the shoulder, the Town Clerk took his other side, and between them they marched him to the door where Madame Corbet and Monsieur Armand were waiting. “Tordu!”
shouted Paul as they took him away. “Pelé! Galeux! Fumier!” The words died away along the passage. Hester was crying, “Poor Paul! Poor Paul!” I felt too miserable to
speak.

Joss and Eliot did not speak either as they danced. She kept her eyelids down so that her face looked closed; Eliot’s was set.

The music stopped when they were by Mademoiselle Zizi, who had come to the foot of the stairs and was watching. Eliot slowly took his arm away but kept Joss’s hand. Joss’s chin began
to shake. For a moment I thought they would have made it up, that he would take her into the garden in the moonlight among the fair lights, but Eliot did another of his incomprehensible
things—“He was trying to look after her,” said Hester; “he always did look after us,”—he held out his free hand to Mademoiselle Zizi, who gave him her hand
wonderingly. He put Joss’s into it. “Take her to bed, Zizi,” he said.

“No!” They said it together. Joss’s was a curt refusal, while Mademoiselle Zizi sounded as if she were being stifled. “No!”

“Yes,” said Eliot gently and inexorably. “The party is over now.” He turned away abruptly and said, “Good night.”

“Eliot, where are you going?” It was a cry from Mademoiselle Zizi.

“Into the garden to smoke,” he said, still gently, and stepped outside.

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CHAPTER 15

I
T WAS
a morning filled with absences. That sounds contradictory, but it was the absences that made themselves felt. There were two chars-à-bancs
parties for breakfast, Americans on their way from Germany to Paris, and we saw once again how hard hotel people worked. Mauricette told us that when the Brass Instruments Ball had finished it had
been past one o’clock, but she, Madame Corbet and Paul had had to set to work, sweep out the dining-room and hall and lay sixty places for breakfast . . . “And they will not have coffee
and rolls,” Vicky told us. “They will have grapefruit, bacon and eggs, hot rolls, jam, coffee and tea and milk.” Monsieur Armand, Madame Corbet and Mauricette had to get up at
half past six; we knew that because we were woken by cries for Paul.

A long time had gone by last night before I had taken myself out of that room and got into my own bed with Joss and Willmouse. All I could think of was how heavenly warm she was.

“Well?” She had been wide awake.

Why did I not tell her what I had seen? ‘I have seen nothing, nothing at all’, that was what I was saying over and over again in my head, and aloud I said briefly, “He has
gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

I had imagined myself lying awake, seeing it over and over again, but at once I had fallen asleep.

“Paul. Pa-ul.
Paul!
” That was Mauricette. Then came Madame Corbet’s steps and she flung open our door, ‘without knocking’, as Joss observed. Madame Corbet
was too hurried to see we were three in the bed together and she did not scold us. “Have any of you children seen Paul . . . Paul Brendel?” She always spoke as if we did not know
him.

It was a relief to see Madame Corbet. If she wanted Paul I could not believe he would not come. “When did you see him?” she asked.

“At the party last night,” said Joss.

“Tscha!” and Madame Corbet shut the door.

Wakened by the noise Hester and Vicky came in. We were all awake now, in spite of our late night, wide awake except Willmouse, who was fast asleep on the far side of our bed. Nor would he
wake.

“Madame Corbet, Willmouse, our little brother, hasn’t woken.”

“Then wake him.”

“We . . . we can’t.”