The Gossamer Cord (49 page)

I spent a certain amount of time strolling through the streets, looking at the places which had been only names to me before. I loved the ancient bridges, and I gazed in wonder at the majestic Notre Dame. I wished I had paid more attention to my lessons, and I thought if Violetta were here she would be able to tell me a great deal about these places.

Jacques did not accompany me on these journeys. He was not the type to wander round gaping at everything like a tourist. He had work to do. He had changed a little. He was no less the ardent lover, and that part of our relationship remained. It was just that, when I expressed the excitement I felt in Paris and wished that he would show me certain places, he became remote and evasive. He had some sketches to do. He was not free that day.

“If only Violetta were here,” I said.

He smiled and nodded vaguely. He could not understand what existed between me and Violetta.

I had always imagined that artists lived in attics in abject poverty and went to cafes to celebrate when they sold a picture and there caroused with their impecunious friends.

This was not the case with Jacques.

He had a small house on the Left Bank, it was true, but he lived in a certain degree of comfort. There was an attic in which he worked because the light was from the north. But it was just his working area and below was an ordinary dwelling which one might expect anywhere.

In the basement were a husband and wife who looked after his needs. They were Jean and Marie, middle-aged, eager to please and not really surprised to see me, which was a little disconcerting.

Jacques was clearly by no means poor. He gave me money to buy clothes and, providing I could subdue my conscience, I was happy during those first weeks.

Jacques worked now and then in the attic which he called his studio. People called often. Some of them were sitters, I presumed; others came and he would take them up to the studio to talk. He did show me one or two portraits. I was hoping he would suggest painting me, but he did not.

People sometimes called in the evenings. Marie would cook a meal for them and Jean would wait at table. I would be present on such occasions, of course, but they spoke such rapid French that I could understand little of what they said. When I told Jacques this, he laughed and said I had missed nothing I needed to know. It was all gossip.

“Do they talk about what is going on in Europe?” I asked. “People were always going on about that at home.”

“It is mentioned.”

“They were all worked up about it in England. I expect they are here. Yet usually they all seem so much more excitable than we do.”

He shrugged his shoulders and I sensed he did not want to talk about the possibilities of war. I was in agreement with that. I had grown weary of the subject before I left home.

About ten days after I had been there, Hans Fleisch came to the house. We greeted each other warmly. He had been a great help to us. He bowed, and clicked his heels, which took me right back to that awful time at the schloss. He asked me in his stilted and rather Germanic English if I were enjoying France. I told him I found it most exciting.

“Jacques is very happy that you are here.”

“What happened in Poldown when they discovered I had gone?” I asked.

He was thoughtful and then said: “They believed you were drowned. That you had gone swimming. It was not a wise thing to do, they said. The sea can be treacherous, and you were lost.”

“Did you happen to see any member of my family?”

“No, but I heard they had come to the house.”

“My sister … ?”

“Yes, I think your sister.”

“I see. So … the story was accepted.”

“It would seem so.”

I thought to myself: Oh, Violetta, dear mother, dear father, I hope you don’t mourn me too much.

I think it was then that I began to regard what I had done more seriously.

I was still fascinated by Jacques. The physical relationship between us was perfect—for him, too, I was sure; but I had built up such an image of life in the Latin Quarter that I was vaguely disappointed because ours seemed so conventional. I had pictured artists coming in every day. I remembered stories I had heard of Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne, and the cafe life of the Bohemians. That was completely missing. Jacques seemed quite affluent. This was perverse of me. I should be grateful. Did I want to live in poverty because it seemed artistic for a moment or two?

I began to know one or two people who came fairly frequently to the studio. One of these, to whom I took a liking, was Georges Mansard. He was a tall man with a ready smile and blue, rather penetrating eyes. He was very fair and did not look very French. He spoke good English and was very interested in me. I always was drawn to people who were. It was something to do with an inferiority complex I had acquired, having grown up lacking Violetta’s intelligence. I enjoyed feeling superior to her in the matter of feminine charm.

The first time Georges Mansard came to the house, I was in the house alone, for Jacques had gone out that morning. He had a way of going off suddenly, not saying where, and I learned not to protest when he returned. Jacques was the sort of man who did not like his actions questioned. It was a trait which was beginning to irritate me.

I heard someone talking to Jean and Marie below and I went down to see who it was.

Jean said: “Monsieur has come to see Monsieur Dubois.”

Delighted to have a visitor, I said: “Oh, do come up. It may be he will not be long.”

The visitor looked pleased and turned to nod at Jean, who looked faintly disturbed, but I said: “That’s all right, Jean. Perhaps,” I went on, “you would bring some coffee.” Then to the guest: “Or would you prefer wine?”

The French seemed to consume a great deal of wine, so I was not surprised when he chose it.

He went up into the room which was called the
salon.
It was not exactly large but was comfortably furnished. I waved to a chair with a little table beside it and went to the cabinet to get the wine.

Then he told me his name was Georges Mansard and he was a friend of Jacques.

“I heard that you had arrived from England,” he said. “Tell me, how do you like Paris?”

“Enchanting,” I told him.

“You have visited the well-known spots, I’ll be bound. Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower. What do you think of Montmartre?”

“I was delighted by all,” I said.

“Your home was … ?”

“In Cornwall. We had a place right on the coast.”

“That must also have been enchanting.”

“It is reckoned to be so.”

He lifted his glass. “Welcome to France.”

We talked easily and his English, being only slightly accented, was not difficult to understand. He knew England. He had even been to Cornwall. He himself came from the south of France, near Bordeaux.

“Where the wine comes from,” I said.

“Exactly so. All the best wine in France … in the world … comes from the Médoc.” He lifted his hands and smiled whimsically. “Of course, there will be many who deny this … for instance those who do not have the good fortune to live among those delectable vines.” He smiled and looked into his glass. “This is a good claret.”

“I am glad. I am sure that Monsieur Dubois, like most of his countrymen, would drink only the best.”

He told me a great deal about Bordeaux and how he came to Paris on business, marketing his wines.

“We have an office here, you see.”

“So I suppose you travel back and forth to Bordeaux frequently,” I said.

“That is so.”

“I thought you must be an artist when you first came.”

“Oh, do I look like one?”

“No … I don’t think so. How does an artist look? One imagines them in flowing smocks, splashed with paint—but I have found them not like that at all.”

“This is the Latin Quarter. This is where they abound.”

“I suppose the days of La Bohème are no more.”

“I expect things have changed now. There is the art of commerce. What do you say, commercial art? This is more now to employ the artists. They are not so poor. It is not a matter of exchanging a picture for a meal, if you understand.”

“I do.”

He stayed for two hours and I felt elated by his visit.

When Jacques returned and I told him Georges Mansard had called, he received the news nonchalantly.

“He’s a charming man,” I commented. “We got on very well.”

“I am sure you did. I knew he would be enchanted by my little cabbage.”

He seized me and swung me round. We danced. Our steps, like everything else, fitted perfectly.

He stopped suddenly, kissed me intensely and said: “It seems years since I saw you.”

That was how it was with Jacques.

Georges Mansard called the next day and went up to the attic where he remained with Jacques for a long time. He greeted me like an old friend before he went up. I guessed they were talking about wine and Georges was going to get an order. He had talked very enthusiastically about his products during our conversation the previous day and had betrayed his pride in them.

“I hope you got a good order,” I said to him as he was leaving.

Georges Mansard smiled broadly.

“Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed.”

He came fairly frequently. I gathered that he was a friend of Jacques besides being his wine merchant, but I met him often in the streets, so often, in fact, that I began to think he sought me out.

Violetta always said that I changed when I was in the company of men. I opened out, she said, like a flower does in the sun or when it is given needed water. She is right, of course. I am frivolous and susceptible to admiration, but I do pride myself in knowing my weaknesses.

When we met he would suggest we take a glass of wine together; he knew the right place to take me. It was a kind of wine bar with secluded corners where people could talk in peace. He told me a great deal about his family’s winery and was quite eulogistic describing the gathering of grapes; then he would tell me about the pests, the inclement weather, and all the hazards that had to be watched.

He knew, of course, that I had left my home to go off with Jacques. He talked often of Jacques and the people who called at the studio; he was one of those people who is very interested in others and in what is going on.

When I was alone I liked to stroll in and out of the secondhand book shops which abound on the Left Bank. I constantly thought how much Violetta would like to have been there. Then I would grow morbid, wishing that she were with me and thinking how different it would have been if she were and we were on holiday together, carefree, eventually to return to our real home in Caddington. Then the enormity of what I had done would be brought home to me. I thought of them all mourning me.

If I had known then that Violetta would become engaged to Jowan Jermyn and in the course of events would become my neighbor, I might never have left Tregarland. But what was the use? It was done now. Characteristically, I had plunged into this adventure. It was the sort of thing I had been doing all my life—but never so irrevocably as I had now.

I had realized it was a mistake—perhaps the greatest of my life. What I had felt for Jacques was slowly slipping away. Not only for me, but for him. I recognized the signs. As for myself, here I was, in a foreign land, dead to all I had known in the past … my sister … my beloved family … my husband, who, after all, had cared for me, and my child.

It was no use. I deserved whatever was coming to me. I knew I did. But that did not make it any easier to bear—in fact, it only made it harder because of the knowledge that it was my own actions which had brought it about.

One day when I was wandering rather aimlessly round the secondhand bookshops, I met the Baileys. It was one of those encounters which happens simply because one meets fellow countrymen abroad, like that other occasion when we had met Dermot. He had heard us speaking English in the cafe near the schloss and had stopped. Then he noticed me. I believe that he would have found some way of getting to know me, but it was the language which had first attracted his attention.

I had paused by a shelf to look at a book—a very old one called
Castles of France.
As I stood there, a middle-aged man standing close to me reached out to take a book from a shelf and, as he did so, another book was dislodged. It was a heavy one and it fell, grazing my arm as it dropped to the floor.

The man turned to me in dismay.
“Mademoiselle,
” he stammered,
“Pardonnez-moi.”

The accent was unmistakably English and I replied in our tongue. “That’s all right. It hardly touched me.”

“You’re English,” he said with a delighted smile.

The woman who was obviously with him was beaming at me. I guessed that they were in their late forties. Their look of pleasure at finding a compatriot amused me.

“And you knew that we were,” added the man.

“As soon as you spoke,” I said.

He grimaced. “Was it so obvious?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

We all laughed. We might have passed on and that would have been an end of it, but the man showed concern about the book which had hit me. He picked it up and said: “It’s rather heavy.”

He replaced it on the shelf while the woman said: “Are you on holiday?”

“No. I’m staying with a friend.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I hope the book didn’t hurt you,” said the man. “Look. Why don’t we sit down for a bit? Have a coffee. There’s a nice place a step or two away.”

“I do like those little cafes,” said the woman. “And isn’t it a relief not to have to think how to say what you want to for a little while? And if you do get it out fairly well, they rush back at you so fast that I for one am completely lost.”

I was thinking: Why shouldn’t I have a coffee with them? It will be something to do.

So I found myself sitting with them in the cafe near the bookshop. They told me they were Geoffrey and Janet Bailey. He was working in the Paris branch of an insurance company and they had been here for six months or so. They were not sure how long they would stay. They had a house at home near Watford, convenient for the City, and they had a married daughter who lived close by who was keeping an eye on things for them.