Anna (56 page)

With the closing of the gates she took a deep breath and looked about her. The safe world of the convent lay behind. In front lay the other world. Her world. The world of trains and people travelling.

“Oh, God,” she began praying. “Tell me that I wasn't wrong to leave Annette.”

The Train was now no more than crawling and Anna looked out of the window, rubbing a small peep-hole with her finger. It was evening, and already the light was going out of the sky. The air was grey and lifeless and a thin rain was falling. Sliding along beside the train were peeling stucco buildings and tall tenements, and the pavements were gleaming. As she looked, it seemed for a moment that she was back in her own past again, that Charles would be there waiting for her. But it was only for an instant that the make-believe endured. Then she remembered again how much alone she was.

There was a long faintly hysterical scream from the engine, and the fierce clutch of the brakes. The coach shuddered for a moment and the passengers were thrown about in their seats. “We're there,” someone said. And at once there began the agitated scramble for luggage as though after twelve hours in the train a further five minutes were unthinkable.

Anna drew down her veil, and fastened it under her chin. She opened her handbag and looked inside: the little bundle of notes was there, and the address. She read it again mechanically, even though she knew it by heart already as she had once known the address of the Latourettes' apartment. There it was—Tilliards, Chislehurst, Kent—carefully copied out on a slip of paper in the fine precise writing of the Reverend Mother.

The man opposite, a small robust man with a brief-case full of papers—a manufacturer probably—raised his hat and asked Anna as she was travelling alone if he could lift her case down for her. He raised his short arms to the rack and seized the valise precariously, nearly shattering the bubbling gas mantle in its glass dome in the centre of the carriage. But the gesture of politeness pleased Anna, and she thanked him. It seemed strange to be back in a world where gentlemen raised their hats to ladies and went out of their way to be polite and pleasant.

But as she stepped out on to the platform, it was a different feeling that she was experiencing: it was loneliness. This was not her Paris any more: it was a Paris of strangers. She did not belong here now. After the quiet, the confinement of the convent, there seemed too many people here, to much bustle. She was frightened.

The row of hotel porters, the names of their proprietors written across their tall hats, began to advance upon her. She let the first of them, the porter from the Hotel de la Gare, take up her valise and place it on the barrow with the rest of his spoils. It was only one night that she had to spend in Paris—the boat train left at nine o'clock in the morning—and she did not mind where she spent those short, unimportant hours. The Reverend Mother had given her an introduction to another convent of the Order, but she ignored it: the grey habits of the Sisters had been with her for too long.

The bedroom in the hotel looked down the boulevard de Montparnasse along which the traffic in ceaseless streams was passing. The pavements were crowded and the shop fronts blazed with light. While she watched, the street lamps one by one were kindled. The room behind her was dull and uninviting: it had the strange impersonal emptiness of all hotel bedrooms where people stay only for a single night.

The chambermaid before retiring had lit the gas in the two ornamental brackets which branched from the mantel-shelf. There was a long mirror between them, and Anna went over and stood in front of it. For a moment she studied her face, noting the fine network of lines that now lay beneath her eyes, the short-uncared-for hair, the tired downward droop of the mouth. But she had already spent much of her time on the journey peering into the little tablet of mirror in her handbag, and by now she was reconciled to what the looking glass showed her. It was rather the effect of herself in her hat and with the veil drawn closely down that was her especial business; she turned her head this way and that, regarding herself from every angle. Then she went over to her case and drew out a thicker veil. With this, she was more satisfied.

“Even if he were to see me now,” she told herself, “he would not recognise me. I have nothing to fear, nothing.”

But the fear remained there just the same. It seemed that she had only to leave the hotel for a single instant for M. Duvivier's hand to descend upon her shoulder. She was still trembling when she went down into the street.

At first she was cautious, not daring to stand too long before any of the glowing windows. But at the second corner she came upon an arcade, brightly lit. It reached back from the pavement, this long cave of retail pleasures, a double avenue of gas-jets spluttering from the roof like fiery stalactites. The second shop was full of toys and she stood looking into it. Finally, it was a big doll that she bought, an Anglo-Saxon princess with flaxen hair and blue eyes.
She wrote the label for it herself and begged the shopkeeper to pack it carefully.

But the purchase saddened her. For the moment, she had been happy over buying a present for Annette. Now she could think only that she had deserted her, that she had run away and been unfaithful. The idea of returning to the convent and throwing herself upon the Reverend Mother's mercy, imploring her to take her back, came into her mind. Then she remembered that it was because some day she was going to take Annette away from the convent for ever that she was here at all.

And Paris was gradually becoming familiar once more. As she drifted aimlessly with the human tide that flowed about her, the night seemed suddenly to be full of hands that were drawing her back again into a life that had vanished, seeking desperately to recapture her. The whole street became a pageant of shadows. A young man, rather thin and very elegant, passed her singing softly under his breath; and for a moment she thought that he was Charles. Then, in the darkness, she noticed an older man, a man with long nervous fingers and a greatcoat slung across his shoulders, the sleeves dangling. A half-smoked cigarette was between his lips, and his face was drawn and lean: it was the Captain. In the doorway of every restaurant, a M. Duvivier was standing.

She walked on trying, to thrust away these shadows. But the hands that were pulling at her were too powerful, too insistent: she was not strong enough to resist them. They were demanding something that she could not refuse.

“I must go back into that life again—if only for a moment,” she told herself. “Then I can bear to leave it for ever.”

The cab that took her to the rue d'Aubon was now passing through streets that she remembered. They had not altered, these streets: the hand of siege and famine and bombardment had rested lightly on them, leaving them merely a little more faded and depressed than she had known them. Only here and there a shell had landed, leaving either a ruin like a gap in a set of teeth, or a bright new building that the smoke had not yet weathered, to mark the spot.

Then, as the block of apartments in which the Latourettes had lived came into sight, Anna stopped the cab and told the driver to wait. She approached on foot. Outside, at the edge of the kerb, the same grey-haired old witch who had guarded the place while Anna had lived there, was talking with her sister witch from the neighbouring apartment block.

The gate stood ajar and Anna went inside. She crossed the small
paved courtyard with the cage of linnets and canaries against the south wall, and stood again in the dark, uncarpeted hall. There was a frame there with the names of the residents inscribed upon it Among them the name of Latourette still stared down at her.

And, as she stood there, she remembered the first time that she had gone up those stairs when the whole brightness of the future had seemed to be waiting for her at the top. Then, having re-lived that first moment, she now re-lived the last one—she was coming down the stairs and, in the flat that she had left, M. Latourette was pacing desperately up and down waiting for his wife's return to consciousness.

“Mademoiselle wishes …?”

It was the old concierge whom nothing escaped, even when she was gossiping, who had returned.

But Anna turned away and told her that she had mistaken the block of apartments. She went back to the cab again, dreading that she might have been recognised. When the driver asked where he should take her, she started: she told him vaguely Montmartre, and sat back covering her face with her hands.

Somehow this visit that she had just made seemed less important now: there was no magic in it. And she realised that she had been striving to recover something that wasn't hidden there. Her love for Charles, her deep infatuation, had been nothing really. At that moment even the image of Charles himself grew dimmer. And, as the image faded, another set of features took its place. Firm features, hard ones. She could see the clean line of the jaw, the hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes of Captain Picard. The eyes were smiling at her.

At the same moment, a new desire, a desire so powerful that it set her limbs trembling, came over her. It was madness, she recognised. It was inviting that very disaster which she had sought so carefully to avoid. But this was something from which no reason could dissuade her, something that stirred her too deeply to care for any consequences.

“I'll go there,” she told herself. “For his sake, so that I can remember him again.”

And she called to the driver to drop her at the corner of the rue Zouave.

The trembling in her body continued and, when the cab stopped, her courage had left her. She wanted to tell the driver to take her back down again into the crowded streets that she had come from, the streets that meant nothing to her. But she was there: she had come so far that she couldn't turn back now. She paid the cabman his fare, and began to walk down the street that she knew so well
that the very stones called out to her. The ghost of Captain Picard walked beside.

But she went with caution now: she was afraid. She knew that, at any moment, it might not be the ghost of the Captain but the flesh and blood of M. Duvivier who was at her elbow. She crossed the street, and kept closely against the shut shop-fronts, trying to walk only in the shadows.

She was opposite the restaurant now; she could look inside. The table at which the Captain had always sat was there in front of her: she could see his back, as he bent forward over the tablecloth that was littered with the ends of his half-smoked cigarettes, staring at a blank wall that was to him a battlefield with men retreating.

Then, as she looked, she noticed that the name Duvivier had been erased from the shutters, and the name Laville painted there instead. And she saw that the decorations on the walls inside were different, and that the lay-out of the tables had been rearranged. The high cash-desk to which M. Duvivier had promoted her now stood, strangely isolated, beside the door. Even the chairs in the café under the awning bore the mark of a new personality upon them. In M. Duvivier's day they had been red and now they were blue and yellow.

The change of name made her bolder. Crossing the road she sat down on one of the chairs beneath the blue and yellow awning: it was only when she was seated that she realised that she was occupying the place where she had sat on that night when she had first gone there. Her heart was hammering.

But as the waiter was pouring out her coffee, she spoke to him.

“This was once Duvivier's, wasn't it?” she asked casually. The waiter shook his head.

“Pardon,” he said. “I've only been here a few months. I don't know who M. Laville took it from.”

At the words, Anna experienced a sudden pang. So he was forgotten already. The very memory of M. Duvivier was obliterated in the very hotel that had once been his. No one had troubled even to retain the name, and his disappearance was complete. She gathered her cloak around her and prepared to leave.

But as she rose, a short stout man, very spruce and with a flower in the buttonhole of his black silk jacket, threw open the door of the restaurant and stood there. His small patent leather shoes twinkled. He was obviously the proprietor.

With a quick glance across the tables he came over to Anna.

“Mademoiselle was inquiring if this was the Restaurant Duvivier?” he asked.

Anna nodded.

“I … I used to know it once,” she said.

M. Laville placed his hands on his hips and expanded his plump chest.

“I bought it nearly six years ago,” he said. “Just after the occupation. M. Duvivier was going out of business.”

He paused, and began flicking crumbs off the marble table-top with his napkin.

“You remember him?” he asked. “A Marseillais like myself. A handsome man. He made an unfortunate second marriage. His wife ran away with one of his regular patrons.”

Anna steadied her voice and avoided looking at the little man.

“What became of him?” she inquired.

“He died of a broken heart,” M. Laville replied. “It was the affair that killed him.”

Anna was staring into the darkness of the street.

“Was … was it long afterwards?” she asked. “Did he ever ask for her?”

“I scarcely knew him well enough to say,” M. Laville replied. “He spoke of her a great deal at the time, and he showed me her photograph once …”

But M. Laville had broken off abruptly, and Anna was aware that he was peering forward, trying to penetrate the dark mystery of her veil. There was ten, fifteen, seconds of silence. The only sound that she could hear was M. Laville's heavy breathing.

She rose and turned towards him.

“You are quite right,” she said. “I am the second Madame Duvivier. It was I who ran away.”

And having spoken, she went out into the night again, wondering what it was that should suddenly have prompted her to make so absurd, so flamboyant, a confession.