To the North (22 page)

When they got back from St. Cloud, about five o’clock, the sun was off their hotel, which was cool and dark again: shutters letting in slats of light were across the windows. They parted mutely; Emmeline had a bath, then wrote Peter a full account of the Serbs: she would not see him to-morrow, for now she and Markie were staying till Monday night. Markie rang for drinks to be brought up, drank, and recovered himself: he discovered he had been feeling guilty and nervous. Having sat for a time with no collar, looking through his glass filled and refilled at the stripy dusk of his room in which the ice slowly melted, he reflected that these things were, as he had once said to Emmeline, after all quite usual: he went down the passage and tapped on Emmeline’s door. No answer; she must still be in her bath. Or possibly she was asleep; he tried the door-handle thoughtfully, though better of it and returned to stretch out again on his hard green sofa… . He woke up to find Emmeline in the doorway, in black and white, very fresh again: ready, she said, to go out. But as they stepped from the lift she had frowned at her gloves, which had dirty fingertips: they were the wrong gloves, she said, and she had forgotten that very important letter to Peter Lewis. So she had disappeared again, like Euryd-ice: knowledgeable, the concierge put somebody else into their waiting taxi. Markie, unused to going about with a woman on these terms, had yet to learn that a woman who seems to be ready early is never ready.

They would be late going out: already beyond the glass doors a hot after-light filled the boulevard: shadowy trams crashed by … Markie shut his eyes, sick of the vestibule pavement which repeated itself on his eyelids in red and yellow. “You’ve been
hours
? he said, hearing her step at last.

Emmeline, smiling, gave in the key of her room to the concierge. Turning, she said: “Darling …” her voice quite different and startled. In the glimpse she had had of him through the lift gates—to no other eyes very beautiful, eyes shut, slumping down in his chair without the least vestige of expectation—the fact of their being lovers had come close to her. Drawing her long fresh gloves up her wrists she smiled at him, dazzled and dazzling. Collecting himself, he stood up to face the innocence and entire confidence of her look. He was amazed, the uneasy moralist in him staggered to see her emerge in such radiant assurance from the distant and rather misty gentleness of the day. He could not account for her radiance, which nearly shocked him. The very fine conscience is, however, its own law; knowing no wrong, only what is repugnant.

The concierge, smiling, brought up another taxi. Emmeline, who had preserved throughout, with regard to their plans, her independence of attitude—for was she not here on business?— said: “Where shall we dine?” Markie told her.

“Half the evening’s gone,” he complained, as the taxi plunged down the boulevard.

“But you were asleep,” said Emmeline. “I looked in.”

“It’s been sheer waste.”

“I forgot to say anything to the lift boy, so he took me right up to the top. When I found where I was he had gone, so I walked down again: it took years.”

“Why not ring for the little beast?”

“One felt so silly. And then the chambermaid kept me: she was doing my room.”

“So you had quite a chat?”

“It was difficult not to talk. She hoped we’re enjoying Paris: she thinks you’re my husband—how pleased servants always are that one should be married. She asked if we’d been up the Eiffel Tower; I said no.”

Swerving violently at a corner, the taxi flung Emmeline against Markie, then out of his arms again. “I like Paris taxis,” she said, holding on to the window-frame, “they’re like the Last Ride Together.—Do you remember your cook that night? How annoyed you were.”

“One never knew where one was with you.”

“You made me feel rather a disappointment—Markie,
you
don’t ever think I’m inhuman?”

He assured her she was not, with fervour: some tenebrous fear seemed to let her go. How much anxiety for this assurance had marked her surrender he had not the wit to enquire. Relaxing, Emmeline said: “It feels funny, telling you everything that I do. Such little things get important.”

“You lead such a funny life, like a cat; always coming and going.”

“Don’t all women?”

“
I
don’t know: do they?”

“I don’t know.” She looked out of the window at Paris, blurred tourist’s Paris in which a few branches and figures were cut out distinctly on the pink-violet evening and brassy long lights began to blink in the cafés, catching the syphons and gilding the tired trees: everyone moved in a fever or feverishly stood still.

“Just how much,” he said, “do you tell Cecilia?”

More than curiosity may have prompted the question. Emmeline turned in surprise. “Oh …” she said, considering. “She is so busy; we know each other so well. I don’t think we say much—she knows, of course, that you’re here in Paris.”

“Oh, she
does
?” said Markie.

His tremendous air of concern—for he took a rather low view of Cecilia, suspecting her of suspicion and worldly vigilance— impressed Emmeline in spite of herself. Rather anxiously, she went over that doorstep talk with Cecilia, who had certainly seemed annoyed but not really concerned. Cecilia had said with some force, she thought Markie’s presence in Paris unnecessary and foolish. Would there not be the Serbs? And in the evenings two or three of Cecilia’s friends, to whom she had written, would be expecting Emmeline—Emmeline had her own friends, but Cecilia did not think them as nice; they lived wretchedly and might not offer Emmeline dinner.

A slight chill passed over Emmeline, leaning closer to Markie who had stripped off her glove to turn over and kiss her hand. She felt untrue to Cecilia: an unspoken good faith, based on some understanding that life must not be allowed to pass out of a certain compass, existed between them and was not lightly to be abused. Upon the extravagances of Cecilia’s behaviour something which seemed to be most of all her regard for Emmeline exerted a strong backward pull. Their alliance remained, on Cecilia’s side certainly, largely defensive: Henry’s death had been something ravaging, disproportionate; around Oudenarde Road a kind of pale was put up against one kind of emotion: nothing on that scale was to occur again. In their life together, as in a quiet marriage, Emmeline and Cecilia, enquiring less and less, each affectionately confronted the other’s portrait of her own painting, finding it near enough to reality. It is this domestic confidence, this happy and willing ignorance of another heart that is most quick to suffer and least deserves betrayal. Emmeline, looking across the Channel, suddenly felt a stranger in her own home, a home she had perhaps never fully inhabited. Her new soaring confidence faltered, she dropped nearer the earth. Feeling how Cecilia’s idea of her must persist, unchangeable as a ghost, that idea of an Emmeline like a cat, disengaged and placid, she knew she would not have the heart to say: “That was never me”; and pain began to attend this birth in her of the woman. The new power, momentarily not bearing her up, became like wings dragging, a heaviness at the shoulders.

Looking down at her hand in Markie’s she said: “Don’t let’s talk about her.”

“
I
don’t want to.”

“I love you so much,” she said, withdrawing her hand to steady herself, a little away from him, against the side of the taxi. Markie—either in protest at her withdrawal or because she deprived him of words—looked at her oddly, a shade satirically. These rare declarations of Emmeline’s—preceded always by just such a little unconscious gesture of independence, as though she wished when she spoke to be most her own—had an effect on him that was silencing and disturbing: they had the frightening relevance of an indiscretion or something said unawares. He did not know how much he had come to rely in feeling on the enmity of the will, or how much he had counted in her on an alarmed reaction, on having her most his own in that precious sense of delinquency lovers enjoy. It was in the idea of outrage, of those tender agonies of the conscience, that he was most a voluptuary; the idea of guilt so enflamed him that the form surrendered in innocence seemed as cold as marble.

Their taxi steered between two lorries, bumped on an island and spun just clear of a bus. Emmeline laughed, seeing Paris spin round, and blinked at the crash of light. Markie stiffened and swore: his nerves were never too good.

“They’re always like this,” she said, placid.

“Dagoes,” said Markie, no fatalist.

“Oh well, if one’s killed one’s killed.”

Markie was going to say he should mind very much, but at this point, fortunately, with a jerk that wrenched at its vitals the taxi drew up at Foyot’s.

Parties of tourists strolled at the foot of the Sacre Cceur that was blanched with moonlight, or stood looking over the city. Markie and Emmeline mounted the last flight of steps: he was surprised to find himself right up here. Emmeline, who had been perhaps faintly tiresome, would not come round Paris with Markie, who knew indoor intimate Paris so well, and rejected firmly the evening he had designed for her: though she agreed that it might be amusing she feared that it might be stuffy. Though Markie could hardly regret a few naive pleasures, he was amazed to find himself here in the moonlit dust. She liked the night air, she had said. “Well, here you have it,” said Markie, puffing indignantly at the head of the steps.

Emmeline could not help glancing professionally at the tourists, wondering whose they were, if they were satisfied, whether in arranging to view the city of sins from this eminence they had contracted for a full moon. Their chars-a-bancs waited at the foot of the steps.

Moonlight fell glacial, sinister, Doréesque on the roofs of the city and caught a curve of the Seine. The breath of Paris came up chilled by the hour. It was nearly midnight: on this mean bare terrace one was served up cold to the moon. You could have seen a bird, but there were no birds, in the glassy sky.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “I wish this were for ever.”

Markie, alarmed by the first approach of something he had been dreading, said quickly: “It wouldn’t last.”

“No. But we’ve got tonight and another day.”

“But you wouldn’t have liked to marry me, would you?” he said, as though this were years from now and the whole thing over.

“I don’t expect so,” said Emmeline, looking his way uncertainly in the moonlight.

“It would be a fiasco,” he went on, rather excitedly. “I’m not the sort of person anybody could marry, much less you. You’d be disappointed: I couldn’t bear that.”

“I wonder.”

“You delude yourself,” he said ungently. “I couldn’t live with you: point blank, Emmeline, I don’t want to. I should feel myself dropping to pieces before your eyes.”

“That’s as you feel,” she said, helpless.

“And also: what an impossible end for youV

“But how am I to end?”

“I’ve no idea,” he said, with that nervous coldness she dreaded.

“But people do seem to marry.”

“Not people like you and me.”

“I should get in your way?” she suggested, trying to understand.

“Not much more, I daresay, than I should in yours. It would be impossible.”

“But if we love each other—this always parting, this always going away!”

Taking her arm rather roughly he steered Emmeline clear of a party of trippers: she spoke distinctly and might have been overheard. Frowning at her in the moonlight with some conviction—for he felt he was taking, if an ungentle, the honest way—he repeated: “I couldn’t live with you: it’s impossible.”

Her clearness of mind deserted her; she could only feel he was angry. “But what am IP What have I done?”

“Do you
want
to be married?”

“No—” she said, terrified. Distracted by her short sight that could keep no count of his movements, the moonlight, the staring church and gaudy unreal scene, she made a bewildered gesture, like a deserted woman’s. The church—for Markie an oppressive monument to futility—towered up high and frosty. An idea of the stored-up darkness of its interior—only apart from them by a door and curtain—stale gilt, cold incense and peering images in the perpetual scarlet of hanging lamps, created for Markie a kind of suction, setting up in him a nervous frenzy unlike the coldness of disbelief. The edge of his mind was restless with superstition: like natives before the solid advance of imperial forces, aspiration, feeling, all sense of the immaterial had retreated in him before reason to some craggy hinterland where, having made no terms with the conqueror, they were submitted to no control and remained a menace. Like savages coming to town on a fair day to skip and chaffer, travestying their character in strange antics, creating by their very presence a saturnalia in which the conqueror may unbend, feeling crept out in him from some unmapped region. His brain held his smallish, over-clear view of life in its rigid circle.

Emmeline could not bear him to be unhappy. She took his arm gently, glad to renew some contact. “Never mind,” she said. “Why are we talking? We’re so happy. You make me so happy I don’t know what to do.”

“Of course: we’re in love, aren’t we?”

Emmeline nodded. “Now let’s come away from here.”

“I’m horrible to you, angel!”

“
No
.”

“But you make me anxious: I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

“I’ll never be sorry.”

“We waste time,” he said passionately, as though for the first time seeing her, “we waste time.”

The terrace was empty, but they did not wait to enjoy their solitude. As they went down the steps together—Emmeline recollecting how Cecilia had told her men always chose to explain things at the most curious times—Markie said much more cheerfully: “If I shot anyone, I am the sort of man I should shoot.” One clock struck midnight, a little before the hour.

LADY WATERS HAD NOT MUCH DIFFICULTY in getting in touch with Julian, Sir Robert having unwittingly lent himself to the enterprise. She found Julian an unexpectedly difficult subject, but was at pains to maintain the connection through Pauline, for with Pauline’s headmistre JJ; Antonia Cherril, she rediscovered a friendship formed years ago on a Spanish journey. So she went down to visit the school, introducing herself to Pauline as a friend of her uncle’s— Dorothea, even, admitted herself unnerved. She had Antonia to lunch to discuss adolescence and Antonia and Pauline to tea when the child was brought up to the dentist. Finally, hearing that Pauline had nowhere to go for the half term exeat, she invited the orphan to Farraways.