The Honeyed Peace (2 page)

Now, standing in the street, Lucien said, 'You have seen many courageous people these last years, Anne?'

It was too cold and too dark for that sort of talk, Anne thougnt; it was possible talk only when drunk and warm, if at all. It was not possible ever on this solemn tone.

'I suppose so. Can I give you a lift, Lucien?'

'Thank you, I have my
bicyclette
.' He stooped, and in the blue light of the street lamp she watched him buckling metal bracelets around his trouser legs. When he stood up, he said, 'You will not have seen anyone with more courage than Evangeline.'

Here he was again, with his warnings. It made Anne impatient. Lucien had been uselessly in love with Evangeline for as long as Evangeline had been obsessedly in love with Renaud; on the other hand, that did not give him a monopoly in the understanding and interpreting of Evangeline.

'I think she's behaving very well,' Anne said in an objectionable voice.

'You know it is better than that.'

'All right, Lucien!
Et après
? What do you want me to say?'

'I want you to help her.'

'That's what I came to do, idiot. Only I couldn't very well embarrass her in front of you and Liz by pulling out a cheque-book. I'll come back tomorrow.'

'It is not that. She can of course use money, but she does not need it now. She needs support.'

'What do you mean?'

'She needs persons like you,' he said, with courteous malice, 'persons of unimpeachable character, who have always been on the right side. To give her category, and to plead her case.'

'Her case is okay. Renaud's case.'

'Renaud's case is hers, as you know.'

'I'm sorry, Lucien. I'll do whatever Evangeline needs; but I'm damned if I'll go around saying Renaud is the biggest patriot since Clemenceau.'

'You dislike Renaud?'

'Of course I dislike Renaud, so do you. We've been disliking Renaud for eighteen years. You can't expect me to break my heart over Renaud.'

'It is Evangeline whose heart I am considering.'

'No one really does anything about collaborators. Unless you call
indignité nationale
something. And I feel Evangeline will survive that, in case she happens to understand what it means.'

'You are very hard, Anne.'

'It's the doughnuts.'

'
Quoi?
'

'The doughnuts. They have made me hard.'

'
Bon soir
,' he said coldly, and did not shake hands with her.

Oh hell, Anne thought, trying to start her Liberated Ford, and listening with anxiety to the dreary but unsuccessful turning-over of the motor. Now I've quarrelled with Lucien, when I love Evangeline too; but it is too much to ask me to go about abetting Renaud. She thought of Renaud: tall, dark, vulgarly handsome and knowing it, beloved of women, always healthy, permanently successful. Damn Renaud, damn his selfishness towards Evangeline, and his cushy war in Sweden, serving
le Maréchal
, and damn him for coming home at this point and being put into gaol. Why couldn't he have stayed in Sweden, instead of returning, with Evangeline, to get arrested and make Evangeline suffer and embarrass her friends? How dared a man like Renaud pose a question of conscience to anybody?

I'm so late, she said to herself furiously, oh,
curse
this bloody car. And then the motor started, and she thought how lucky she was, in a world of feet and bicycles, to have petrol-driven transport.

Lady Elizabeth Beech, looking from the rear like a woman who would turn and offer to sell you wilted violets from a basket, stood with her nose glued to the window of Van Cleef and Arpels, in the Place Vendôme. It was a clear sunny day, and Paris was too beautiful to see all at once, so she took it in careful doses. Now she was staring at a weird diamond-and-gold collar that would weigh heavily on some rich neck, and she was thinking that nothing made sense. For all the time Van Cleef and Arpels had been fabricating this unlikely necklace, she had been fabricating aeroplane carburettors, and though clearly she was the better citizen of the two, they had their necklace and she had nothing but grained hands and a sense of soul-destroying shabbiness. Also she was tired and felt herself to be muted, unappealing, and numb. Who would have enough money, what kind of person still had enough money, to buy those aquamarine earrings which looked like carved chunks of iceberg? Who would have the money, or the hope? Where did you go, wearing such things; what sort of people did you see; and who, in fact, were you?

An arm was linked through hers and Anne Marsh said, 'Envious?'

'Yes.'

'So am I. Last year I was angry. But now I'm used to it. If it cheers you, I've seen that necklace on and off for a year; so no one can afford to buy it anyhow. That's something.'

'Let's have a drink.'

'The Ritz? For auld lang syne?'

'No.'

'Georges is back in the dear old bar. It makes me feel a hundred years old.'

'Let's go anywhere,' Lady Elizabeth said and they started walking up the rue de la Paix towards the rue Daunou.

They turned at Dunhill's and headed for the rue Royale. Elizabeth Beech had it vaguely in mind that Weber's would be a good place to go, and sit in the sun, and stare at strangers.

'Everyone looks so loud,' Lady Elizabeth said. 'Not chic any more, just loud. Those revolting pompadours and those shoes for club feet and the short skirts and long coats. I hate the way they look. It's such a disappointment to me. I counted on being delighted.'

'They claim they started it to repel the Germans, I imagine they're keeping it up to repel the British and Americans.'

'It's very inconsiderate. If you haven't seen anything pretty for six years, it does seem mean of them to look as loathsome as possible.'

'There's one good one,' Anne said. Across the street a tall slender woman, dressed in black, walked unhurriedly among the little hurried people. She was as conspicuous as if she had been dressed in flames. She moved better than the other women, because she knew how to walk and also because she was wearing low-heeled shoes, an improved version of Russian boots done in black suède. All they could see, since she was turned away from them, was the loose, full, but tightly belted black coat, and a hood of dark cloth banded in mink, and a huge square black bag swinging from her shoulder. She looked as if she had stepped out of her sleigh (which would be made of teakwood with pale blue satin cushions) to stroll around Paris, in case Paris happened to be a ballet set of Czarist Moscow.

'Oh dear,' said Lady Elizabeth, 'what a pleasure. That's what I mean. Why can't they all look like that, so beautiful and pointless? It isn't much to ask.'

The tall woman turned into a doorway.

'Gone to buy herself a pair of underpants,' Anne said, 'made of pure crêpe-de-Chine and trimmed with Venetian lace, for five hundred dollars the pair.'

'It still makes you angry, doesn't it?'

'Yes.'

'That's because you're American, and Americans are moral.'

'Shall we just get across the street while the light is red and you spare me your observations on Americans?'

'Huffy. Well, it's the war,' Lady Elizabeth said cheerfully, 'it's done terrible things to people's dispositions.'

They were across the street and in the sun and Anne was saying, 'If anything bores me, it's Americans are moral, and Frenchmen lecherous, and Englishmen empire-builders. ...'

The tall woman came out of the shop. They could imagine the scent of the shop, which would come with her; they could imagine the grey-clad enamelled saleswomen standing there, in the scented grey room behind her, folding up the transparent underwear. The tall woman had opened the door and walked out with ease and assurance, and now she stopped in the sun, as if she were alone in the street or alone in a streetless world, and leaned against the wall, out of sight of the shop, and put one black-gloved hand over her eyes. She stood this way for a moment, and anyone passing might have thought the lady was suddenly ill, dizzy, feeling faint. Her shoulders, which were thin and stylishly square, lost their shape, and she no longer seemed tall. Then she took her hand from her eyes, straightened herself, and turned, walking towards the Place de la Concorde. The ease and assurance were there, but she had commanded her body and was walking as she intended to walk, by act of will.

They had seen it was Evangeline, at once, and started to join her when she covered her eyes. They stopped and pretended to be looking in a shop window and waited. They watched Evangeline pass through the crowds on the pavement and did not move.

'Should I hurry and cross over by the Louvre and get home first?' Lady Elizabeth said, 'or let her go and come in a little later?'

'She'll be going home?'

'Of course.'

'What do you suppose happened?'

'They refused to serve her, obviously. You can't think how patriotic these people are, if their clientele was entirely Black Marketeers or collaborators or Germans. And if your husband is in gaol, you are really fair game.'

'And then again,' Anne said, 'maybe some of them lost their husbands in the war or their boy friends to the Gestapo. You never can tell.'

'Why don't you go in and have a lovely time being patriotic with them?'

'Oh, Liz, for God's sake, don't let's quarrel about this. What is the use?'

'I'll give her time to get home. Come on, let's have a gaseous at Weber's. I'll give her a quarter of an hour.'

They found a small sticky table at Weber's and the waiter was hostile. There was no beer, they knew better than to order coffee, and the
gazeux
— which became their inevitable choice - was the colour of blood and tasted of chemical cherries. Around them shabby pallid people read the newspapers with some sort of desperation, and no one laughed about anything at all. There was not even one couple holding hands. Anne remembered Weber's with tenderness, but it was a ten-year-old memory. That was the time when one's friends were just one's friends, and there were no problems that could not be solved, and in the morning one came here, serene and smoothed, and ate breakfast with a man one loved, and read only the parts of the paper which were funny, and made plans for another untroubled day.

After a while, Lady Elizabeth said, 'Have you seen Clarice de Rémont?'

'No.'

'Or Agnès Farde or Bea de Branhaut or
notre chère Germaine
?'

'No.'

'They're doing awfully well,' Lady Elizabeth said dreamily, 'oh, frightfully well. You can barely push your way into their salons, for the American officers. Or else they're stuffing themselves at the Embassies. It seems they were all really magnificent during the war.'

'I'm not responsible for the poor half-witted American officers,' Anne said.

'And they've all cut Evangeline,' Lady Elizabeth went on. '"Cut" is perhaps the wrong word, because to cut someone you must of course see them. Which they have not done. They speak very ill of her and Renaud and are full of virtue.'

'What did you expect them to do?'

'I moved to Evangeline's as a protest. It is very uncomfortable, I must say. But I wasn't going to let those girls get away with that.'

'But Renaud still is a collaborator.'

'No more than a lot of other people, and certainly no more than those lovelies.'

'It's probably my American morality, as you say. I cannot seem to forget that stinking war.'

'And Renaud couldn't have done much harm, stuck off there in Sweden, not nearly as much as that little ordure Michel Varennes, who is walking around quite happy and free as air.'

'Yes, I know,' Anne said wearily. 'But it doesn't mean you have to be blood brothers with Michel.'

'And Evangeline of course never collaborated with anybody. All she seems to have done is make fun of the Germans, because she found them grotesque. I don't know why Evangeline should be insulted by those dear old pals of hers, who collaborated as hard as they could until they saw that the Germans were losing, and then maintained a discreet silence until liberated. Since when they talk as if they were all Joan of Arc, nipped from the stake at the last moment.'

'Have another gaseous.'

'I hated this war,' Lady Elizabeth said with passion. 'I hated every minute of it. I'm not going to let it destroy everything.'

'It's done pretty well, if you ask me.'

'I'm not going to let it destroy the thing of being friends along with every other bloody thing.'

Anne drank some more of the sickening cherry mixture, and gave Elizabeth Beech time to hide inside herself again. Then she said, 'I used to know Pierre Lanier.'

'Did you?'

'Yes. He was by way of being a beau of mine.'

'He was shot a few weeks ago, wasn't he?'

'Yes. Do you think I should have rallied round?'

'It's different, Anne. He worked for the Germans, he excused the concentration camps. Evangeline didn't understand anything about them.'

'And Renaud?'

'How do I know about Renaud? I'm talking about Evangeline. She never knows anything except loving Renaud. She doesn't concentrate on anything else. She may be a fool but she was never wicked. I must go now. She'll be home and all pulled together.'

'I'll come and see her late this afternoon.'

'She hasn't given a sign of how she feels about Renaud, but she doesn't sleep and sometimes she forgets to act and you can see in her eyes that she's going mad. You know, that's another thing about Evangeline, she has almost the best manners there are.'

Anne Marsh had paid for the blood-red drinks and they stood in the street, with the driven anxious people breaking around them like water breaking against a bridge, and Anne said, 'I wish I hadn't come.'

'So do I. But there it is.'

'Will I see you again?'

'You will find me any morning, window-shopping in these streets. I don't seem to have much money any more. Do you?'

'No. Not much.'

'Ah well,' said Lady Elizabeth, 'we've still got our youth and beauty.'

They looked at each other and laughed. Then Elizabeth Beech started walking fast towards the river and the grey cold apartment and Anne wandered up towards the Opéra. There was an hour to lose before lunch. She might do down to Notre Dame and look at the Seine and the two great square towers holding back the sky. She might do anything, if there was anything she wanted to do. And then she would have lunch with a British major, and cocktails with an American colonel, and dinner with another captain who happened to be French. Giddy life, she thought, gay mad Paree.