Martha in Paris (14 page)

His single pertinent thought was still classic.

“Oh, God,” thought Eric Taylor, “why did this happen to
me
?”

4

On the other side of the door Mrs. Taylor had just finished laying lunch. It was her pride, as it was her achievement, that even after three years in Paris her kitchen remained incorruptibly British; on this particularly hot August day there awaited Eric liver and bacon, fried potatoes, and a steamed treacle sponge. Only the bottle of Vichy-water struck a jarring, exotic note; but wine Mrs. Taylor considered heating—and everyone knew what happened to people who drank out of foreign taps.

“Dear Eric!” thought Mrs. Taylor fondly.

It was the refrain of her entire existence, of a long widowhood resolutely devoted to her only son, her only child. For Eric's sake, when his night-classes in French fruited in promotion to Paris, she had dismantled an English home, uprooted herself from a whole circle of English friends, without a murmur. It was hard, but it was her duty; not for worlds would she have allowed him to face the perils of Abroad alone. The freehold house at Streatham was sold, all the furniture transported to make a little corner of England in the rue d'Antibes; really only the lawn-mower was left behind, because people in Paris didn't have gardens, and this was probably what Mrs. Taylor felt most—Eric so enjoyed mowing a lawn, and it was so good for him. But when in due course he rose to Manager, as undoubtedly he would, perhaps a little nook in Passy might afford the same healthful exercise …

“And how proud I shall be of him!” thought Mrs. Taylor.

She was proud already. No mother could have wished for a better son: dutiful, affectionate, rising steadily in his blameless career. Whatever sacrifices she made for him had been so amply repaid, few women could look forward to a more tranquil and happy future—just the two of them together in a little nook in Passy!

“Dear Eric!” repeated Mrs. Taylor aloud; and hearing his step on the landing whipped a dish onto the table and hurried to open the door before he got his key out.

Chapter Two

1

Eric achieved one stiff step over the threshold, and stood. He was so pale, for a moment his mother imagined his cold turned to influenza. The slightest shadow upon his health ever throwing her into alarm, her thoughts at once flew to aspirins, hot toddies, hot-water bottles.—For a moment only, however, no longer; for even had Eric been actually out in a rash, she couldn't have failed to notice, and be astonished by, the enormous burden clutched in his rigid arms.

“My darling,” cried Mrs. Taylor (and indeed as it were telescoping the two questions into one), “what
have
you got?”

2

He made no reply. He couldn't think of any words.

He just stood.

“Why, it's a carry-cot!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor, approaching.

He nodded.

“But whatever
for
, my darling? You didn't—you didn't win it in a raffle?”

So innocent was her experience, it really seemed to Mrs. Taylor the likeliest explanation. She herself, at a church-bazaar, had once won the equally unsuitable prize of a safety-razor …

But Eric shook his head.

“Well, at least answer me, dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor, quite impatiently.

Still he couldn't. It was another who answered for him. For the first time, from under the blankets, a sound percolated: a small, individual, peremptory cry. Abruptly as though loosed from a spell—as though stung by a hornet—Eric released his frozen clutch, he would have let the carry-cot fall, had not his mother sprung to guide its descent upon the settee.

Out from the covers pushed a tiny, grasping fist like a very small octopus. The nearest object at hand being Mrs. Taylor's ring-finger, about it the small octopus twined.

Now it was her turn to be struck dumb. For what seemed an age, while the clock on the mantelshelf ticked, while on the table the liver and bacon congealed, mother and son gazed at each other in equal silence, equal consternation, indeed equal incredulity. (Disbelief: the instinctive, protective human reaction before disaster.) But the small octopus-hand insisted. Mrs. Taylor stooped; pulled a lap of blanket aside; and raised a face white as her son's.

“Eric!” breathed Mrs. Taylor. “
Whose is it
?”

Actually the question was superfluous. It is an accepted if inexplicable fact that an infant during the very first weeks of its existence may show a marked resemblance to one or other parent. In this case, the tiny countenance now revealed was an uncanny, crumpled miniature of Eric's own. It simply looked much older: an image of Eric in toothless senility.—Not that the latter more than glanced: by this time he was … sure.

“It's mine all right,” agreed Eric Taylor.

They were the first words he had spoken, and at least explicit. He still realized something more to be required.

“It was left,” Eric added.

In his very accents of ten minutes earlier—

“
Left
?” repeated Mrs. Taylor.

“At the lodge.—There's an envelope,” offered Eric.

With trembling hands his mother found and unpinned and opened it. It was a positive relief, faced by Eric's unnatural vagueness, to get something in writing. She put on her spectacles, prepared for two pages at least (probably tear-stained) of contrition, remorse, humility, but above all of
information …

In fact the envelope contained nothing whatever but a feeding-formula.

Mrs. Taylor looked on the back; not a line, not a word. It was as though not only all explanation, but all proper emotion as well had been—handed over.

“Eric,” said Mrs. Taylor, through trembling lips.

“Yes, Mother?”

“You'll really have to tell me, dear. All.”

“Yes, but I've got to be back at the Bank,” objected Eric.

For once Mrs. Taylor brushed that very mainstay of their joint existence aside. She was a woman—and as her next words showed, an uncommonly nice-minded one.

“Don't be afraid of upsetting me, dear, just tell me. Are you—are you secretly married?”

Again Eric shook his head.

“She wouldn't.”

“My darling, but
who
?” cried Mrs. Taylor desperately.

At last the name he had striven to avoid, even in thought, had to be pronounced.

“Martha.”

3

The extraordinary thing was that at that critical juncture, Mrs. Taylor's attention was diverted. As a mother deep in sleep will rouse at her infant's wail and nothing else, so it was with Mrs. Taylor, waking. No clamour of bailiffs hammering the door down—of a bombardment breaking out overhead—could have penetrated her absorbed and anxious ear: only a second and even more peremptory cry from the carrycot.

To Eric the sound was as meaningless, as unintentional, as a kitten's mew. Mrs. Taylor however at once stooped again, thrust an experienced hand beneath the blankets, then unhesitatingly gathered up carrycot and all and made for the door.

“Eat your lunch, dear,” she directed, over her shoulder. “We shan't be long!”

Once again Eric was alone.

4

Habit took over. He was so used to doing what his mother told him, he automatically pulled up a chair, sat, helped himself to congealing liver and bacon. He even managed to eat a little. But it was like eating in a dream—or in childhood, with a lump of guilt on the chest; chewing interminably round and round. Indeed, now that the physical evidence was removed, he almost asked himself (as many a young woman in like situation) whether it wasn't a dream. Could he have nodded off, at the Bank, in the midday heat, mightn't he abruptly awake, his head hitting a ledger, or a colleague's hand thumping him on the back? Even a second's unconsciousness, Eric was aware, could afford dreams of quite substantial duration—certainly long enough to include his coming home for lunch, and his encounter with Madame Leclerc, and his conversation with his mother. The very taste of the food rotating in his mouth was dreamlike; flavourless, unswallowable …

Deliberately Eric closed his eyes: waited for the blunt contact of a ledger against his chin, the clap of a hand on his shoulder.

It was no use. He might shut his eyes, and no sound percolated from beyond the dining-room door; he could still smell. After no more than ten minutes' occupation, the room smelled, very slightly, of baby.

He got up to open the window. It was open already.

He came back and sat down again. But now, as though the movement had cleared his head, his thoughts at last found their necessary focus: upon Martha.

They were bitter. The fact was that Martha, his first and only love, had tossed him aside like—there was no other phrase for it—like a soiled glove. No dashing hussar abandoning a village maiden could have behaved more cavalierly. Not that Martha was in any other sense dashing, far from it; her outstanding characteristic was rather a blunt stolidity which only Eric in his innocence could have seen as virginal shyness. The trumpet that called her from his side had been no bid from some international impresario—(the female equivalent, so to speak, of “Ha!” amid the battle)—but so far as Eric could make out must have sounded more like the scrannel scrape of an easel across a studio floor.—Inexplicable, disarraying circumstance! Of course Martha was fond of drawing, she was an art-student; but much more easily could Eric have comprehended the lure of thousand-dollar gowns at Las Vegas—that is, if Martha had been able to sing.

She couldn't sing.

Bitterly listing, as a discarded lover will, his lost one's every disadvantage, Eric further reminded himself that no more could Martha cook. All those Friday evenings in the preceding autumn, when she'd been coming round for a proper English meal and then a proper hot bath, such as her humble student's lodging couldn't afford, had Martha ever offered to lend a hand in the kitchen? Not she.—Had she ever offered even to help wash up? Not Martha. Still Mrs. Taylor's kindness persisted, she felt it her duty to extend a hand to a shy young English girl alone in Paris—and if she had been ill enough repaid then, thought Eric confusedly, how was she being repaid
now!

He was of course partly to blame. He admitted it. During a certain week of his mother's absence he had undoubtedly—seduced Martha. But whose fault was it they
weren't
married, to the palliation of their common misdoing? Naturally Eric would have preferred to get his step, to Assistant Manager, before taking on a wife; but hadn't he instantly, or at least as soon as Martha returned from Christmas in Birmingham, assured her of his honourable intentions if anything … happened?

The scene was as vivid as if it had taken place that morning: on a bench in the Tuileries Gardens, opposite the
trompe l'oeil
statue of Tragedy and Comedy …

“
You know if anything
…
happens, Martha, we can be married straight away? Of course you'd give up your painting
—”

And she left him flat. What she actually said Eric preferred not to remember. All he remembered was Martha's back as, portfolio under arm, she stumped out of the Tuileries Gardens, out of his life.

Or not quite all.

From that wintry interview certain other words of his own re-echoed.

“
I want to look after you, Martha. To shoulder all your burdens for you …”

Evidently she had taken him at his word.

5

It wasn't any clap of a colleague's hand, nor the abrupt contact with a ledger, that roused Eric from these painful memories, and reflections, but the reappearance of his mother.—To Eric's surprise her whole aspect had changed. Her step was elastic; she was still pale, but with upon each cheek a patch of scarlet; her lips still trembled, but in a joyful smile.

“Oh, my darling,” cried Mrs. Taylor, “
it's a boy!”

In her eye gleamed the spark that lights bonfires, sets oxen a-roasting; whole villages, whole counties, could hardly have contained her overflowing benevolence, as there stood Mrs. Taylor rejoicing in the possession of a grandson.

Eric also observed that she had her hat on.

“Mother, you're not going
out
?” asked Eric nervously.

“But of course I am, dear,” replied Mrs. Taylor. “He's as good as gold on my bed, but he can't be left alone!—so I'll just pop round to the English chemist for his formula, before you go back to the Bank.”

Chapter Three

1

“Poppity-pin!” crooned Mrs. Taylor.

It was about four that afternoon. Eric had long returned to the City of London (Paris branch) Bank—so punctually, in fact, there had been no time, during the few minutes that elapsed between his mother's reappearance and his own departure, for any further colloquy. (Eric actually preserved an almost total silence; his whole bearing struck Mrs. Taylor as odd. She'd expected to find him
hanging over
Baby—not impatiently watching the clock. It had even crossed her mind that he might take the afternoon off.) His absence promoted nonetheless a singular, nursery peace; indeed the infant, after taking its bottle quite beautifully—just a little wind, easily patted up—should theoretically have been back in its carry-cot; but what grandmother could resist the pleasure of cradling a first grandson in her arms?

“Poppity-pin, Gran's little treasure!” crooned Mrs. Taylor.

The moment was far too delightful to spoil by thinking about Martha, so Mrs. Taylor didn't. This involved no particular feat of will-power, merely a complete if unconscious surrender to wishful thinking. To possess a grandchild without the encumbrance of a daughter-in-law is many a grandmother's unadmitted dream. “Dear Anne, dear Lucy, dear Susan!” cry the grandmothers—happy to welcome with small bottles of Chanel No. 5 at Christmas each necessary transmitter of a family face; but even happier to water with easy tears a rose-bush on an early grave …