The Pursuit of Love (20 page)

It could not be said, thought Linda, as the train pursued its way through the blackness, that her life so far had been a marked success. She had found neither great love nor great happiness, and she had not inspired them in others. Parting with her would have been no death blow to either of her husbands; on the contrary, they would both have turned with relief to a much preferred mistress, who was more suited to them in every way. Whatever quality it is that can hold indefinitely the love and affection of a man she plainly did not possess, and now she was doomed to the lonely, hunted life of a beautiful but unattached woman. Where now was love that would last to the grave and far beyond? What had she done with her youth? Tears for her lost hopes and ideals, tears of self-pity in fact, began to pour down her cheeks. The three fat Frenchmen who shared the carriage with her were in a snoring sleep, she wept alone.

Sad and tired as Linda was, she could not but perceive the beauty of Paris that summer morning as she drove across it to the Gare du Nord. Paris in the early morning has a cheerful,
bustling aspect, a promise of delicious things to come, a positive smell of coffee and croissants, quite peculiar to itself.

The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy. This joy, this life, this beauty did not underline poor Linda’s fatigue and sadness, she felt it but was not of it. She turned her thoughts to old familiar London, she longed above all for her own bed, feeling as does a wounded beast when it crawls home to its lair. She only wanted to sleep undisturbed in her own bedroom.

But when she presented her return ticket at the Gare du Nord she was told, furiously, loudly, and unsympathetically, that it had expired.

‘
Voyons, madame–le 29 Mai. C’est aujourd’ hui le 30, n’est-ce pas? Donc – !’
Tremendous shruggings.

Linda was paralysed with horror. Her 18
s
6
d
was by now down to 6
s
3
d
, hardly enough for a meal. She knew nobody in Paris, she had absolutely no idea what she ought to do, she was too tired and too hungry to think clearly. She stood like a statue of despair. Her porter, tired of waiting beside a statue of despair, deposited the luggage at its feet and went grumbling off. Linda sank onto her suitcase and began to cry; nothing so dreadful had ever happened to her before. She cried bitterly, she could not stop. People passed to and fro as if weeping ladies were the most ordinary phenomenon at the Gare du Nord. ‘Fiends! fiends!’ she sobbed. Why had she not listened to her father, why had she ever come to this bloody abroad? Who would help her? In London there was a society, she knew, which looked after ladies stranded at railway stations; here, more likely, there would be one for shipping them off to South America. At any moment now somebody, some genial-looking old woman might come up and give her an injection, after which she would disappear for ever.

She became aware that somebody was standing beside her,
not an old lady, but a short, stocky, very dark Frenchman in a black Homburg hat. He was laughing. Linda took no notice, but went on crying. The more she cried the more he laughed. Her tears were tears of rage now, no longer of self-pity.

At last she said, in a voice which was meant to be angrily impressive, but which squeaked and shook through her handkerchief:

‘
Allez-vous en
.’

For answer he took her hand and pulled her to her feet

‘Bonjour, bonjour,’
he said.

‘Voulez-vous vous en aller?’
said Linda, rather more doubtfully, here at least was a human being who showed signs of taking some interest in her. Then she thought of South America.

‘Il faut expliquer que je ne suis pas,’ she said, ‘une esclave blanche. Je suis la file d’un très important lord anglais.’

The Frenchman gave a great bellow of laughter.

‘One does not,’ he said in the early perfect English of somebody who has spoken it from a child, ‘have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess that.’

Linda was rather annoyed. An Englishwoman abroad may be proud of her nationality and her virtue without wishing them to jump so conclusively to the eye.

‘French ladies,’ he went on, ‘covered with
les marques extérieurs de la richesse
never never sit crying on their suitcases at the Gare du Nord in the very early morning, while
esclaves blanches
always have protectors, and it is only too clear that you are unprotected just now.’

This sounded all right, and Linda was mollified.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I invite you to luncheon with me, but first you must have a bath and rest and a cold compress on your face.’

He picked up her luggage and walked to a taxi.

‘Get in, please.’

Linda got in. She was far from certain that this was not the road to Buenos Aires, but something made her do as he said. Her powers of resistance were at an end, and she really saw no alternative.

‘Hotel Montalembert,’ he told the taxi man. ‘Rue du Bac.
Je m’excuse, madame
, for not taking you to the Rite, but I have a feeling for the Hotel Montalembert just now, that it will suit your mood this morning.’

Linda sat upright in her corner of the taxi, looking, she hoped, very prim. As she could not think of anything pertinent to say she remained silent. Her companion hummed a little tune, and seemed vastly amused. When they arrived at the hotel, he took a room for her, told the liftman to show her to it, told the
concierge
to send her up a
café complet
, kissed her hand, and said:

‘
A tout à l’heure
– I will fetch you a little before one o’clock and we will go out to luncheon.’

Linda had her bath and breakfast and got into bed. When the telephone bell rang she was so sound asleep that it was a struggle to wake up.

‘
Un monsieur qui demands madame
.’

‘
Je descends tout de suite,’
said Linda but it took her quite half an hour to get ready.

‘A
H
! You keep me waiting,’ he said, kissing her hand, or at least making a gesture of raising her hand towards his lips and then dropping it rather suddenly. ‘That is a very good sign.’

‘Sign of what?’ said Linda. He had a two-seater outside the hotel and she got into it. She was feeling more like herself again.

‘Oh, of this and that,’ he said, letting in the clutch, ‘a good augury for our affair, that it will be happy and last long.’

Linda became intensely stiff, English, and embarrassed, and said, self-consciously:

‘We are not having an affair.’

‘My name is Fabrice – may one ask yours?’

‘Linda.’

‘Linda.
Comme c’est joli
. With me, it usually lasts five years.’

He drove to a restaurant where they were shown, with some deference, to a table in a red plush corner. He ordered the
luncheon and the wine in rapid French, the sort of French that Linda frankly could not follow, then, putting his hands on his knees, he turned to her and said:

‘
Allons, racontez madame.
’

‘R
acontez
what?’

‘Well, but of course, the story. Who was it that left you to cry on that suitcase?’

‘He didn’t. I left him. It was my second husband and I have left him for ever because he has fallen in love with another woman – a welfare worker, not that you’d know what that is, because I’m sure they don’t exist in France. It just makes it worse, that’s all.’

‘What a very curious reason for leaving one’s second husband. Surely with your experience of husbands you must have noticed that falling in love with other women is one of the things they do? However, it’s an ill wind, and I don’t complain. But why the suitcase? Why didn’t you put yourself in the train and go back to Monsieur the important lord, your father?’

‘That’s what I was doing until they told me that my return ticket had expired. I only had 6
s
3
d
, and I don’t know anybody in Paris, and I was awfully tired, so I cried.’

‘The second husband – why not borrow some money from him? Or had you left a note on his pillow – women never can resist these little essays in literature, and they do make it rather embarrassing to go back, I know.’

‘Well, anyhow he’s in Perpignan, so I couldn’t have.’

‘Ah, you come from Perpignan. And what were you doing there, in the name of heaven?’

‘In the name of heaven we were trying to stop you frogs from teasing the poor Epagnards,’ said Linda with some spirit.

‘E-spa-gnols! So we are teasing them, are we?’

‘Not so badly now – terribly at the beginning.’

‘What were we supposed to do with them? We never invited them to come, you know.’

‘You drove them into camps in that cruel wind, and gave them no shelter for weeks. Hundreds died.’

‘It is quite a job to provide shelter, at a moment’s notice,
for half a million people. We did what we could – we fed them – the fact is that most of them are still alive.’

‘Still herded in camps.’

‘My dear Linda, you could hardly expect us to turn them loose on the countryside with no money – what would be the result? Do use your common sense.’

‘You should mobilize them to fight in the war against Fascism that’s coming any day now.’

‘Talk about what you know and you won’t get so angry. We haven’t enough equipment for our own soldiers in the war against Germany that’s coming – not any day, but after the harvest, probably in August. Now go on telling me about your husbands. It’s so very much more interesting.’

‘Only two. My first was a Conservative, and my second is a Communist’

‘Just as I guessed, your first is rich, your second is poor. I could see you once had a rich husband, the dressing-case and the fur coat, though it is a hideous colour, and no doubt, as far as one could see, with it bundled over your arm, a hideous shape. Still,
vison
usually betokens a rich husband somewhere. Then this dreadful linen suit you are wearing has ready-made written all over it’

‘You are rude, it’s a very pretty suit.’

‘And last year’s. Jackets are getting longer you will find. I’ll get you some clothes – if you were well dressed you would be quite good-looking, though it’s true your eyes are small. Blue, a good colour, but small.’

‘In England,’ said Linda, ‘I am considered a beauty.’

‘Well, you have points.’

So this silly conversation went on and on, but it was only froth on the surface. Linda was feeling, what she had never so far felt for any man, an overwhelming physical attraction. It made her quite giddy, it terrified her. She could see that Fabrice was perfectly certain of the outcome, so was she perfectly certain, and that was what frightened her. How could she, Linda, with the horror and contempt she had always felt for casual affairs, allow herself to be picked up by any stray foreigner, and, having seen him only for an hour, long and long
and long to be in bed with him? He was not even good-looking, he was exactly like dozens of other dark men in Homburgs that can be seen in the streets of any French town. But there was something about the way he looked at her which seemed to be depriving her of all balance. She was profoundly shocked, and, at the same time, intensely excited.

After luncheon they strolled out of the restaurant into brilliant sunshine.

‘Come and see my flat,’ said Fabrice.

‘I would rather see Paris,’ said Linda

‘Do you know Paris well?’

‘I’ve never been here before in my life.’

Fabrice was really startled.

‘Never been here before?’ he could not believe it. ‘What a pleasure for me, to show it all to you. There is so much to show, it will take weeks.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Linda, ‘I leave for England to-morrow.’

‘Yes, of course. Then we must see it all this afternoon.’

They drove slowly round a few streets and squares, and then went for a stroll in the Bois. Linda could not believe that she had only just arrived there, that this was still the very day which she had seen unfolding itself, so full of promise, through her mist of morning tears.

‘How fortunate you are to live in such a town,’ she said to Fabrice. ‘It would be impossible to be very unhappy here.’

‘Not impossible,’ he said. ‘One’s emotions are intensified in Paris – one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town. The rest of the world seems unbearably cold and bleak to us, hardly worth living in.’ He spoke with great feeling.

After tea, which they had out of doors in the Bois, he drove slowly back into Paris. He stopped the car outside an old house in the Rue Bonaparte, and said, again:

‘Come and see my flat.’

‘No, no,’ said Linda. ‘The time has now come for me to point out that I am
une femme sérieuse.’