The Pursuit of Love (24 page)

‘Here are some coals for Newcastle. We are tottering home by the ferry-boat. Do you think I shall get Davey back alive? I enclose something which might, one day, be useful.’

It was a note for 20,000 francs.

I must say,’ said Linda, ‘considering what cruel eyes he has, he does think of everything.’

She felt sentimental after the occurrences of the day.

‘Tell me, Fabrice,’ she said, ‘what did you think the first moment you ever saw me?’

‘If you really want to know, I thought:
“Tims, elle ressemble à la petite Bosquet”’

‘Who is that?’

‘There are two Bosquet sisters, the elder, who is a beauty, and a little one who looks like you.’

‘Merci beaucoup,’ said Linda. ‘J’aimerais autant ressembler à l’autre.’

Fabrice laughed.
‘Ensuite, je me suis dit, comme c’est amusant, le côté démodé de tout ça –’

*

When the war, which had for so long been pending, did actually break out some six weeks later, Linda was strangely unmoved by the fact. She was enveloped in the present, in her own detached and futureless life, which, anyhow, seemed so precarious, so much from one hour to another: exterior events hardly impinged on her consciousness. When she thought about the war it seemed to her almost a relief that it had actually begun, in so far as a beginning is the first step towards an end. That it had begun only in name and not in fact did not occur to her. Of course, had Fabrice been taken away by it her attitude would have been very different, but his job, an intelligence one, kept him mostly in Paris, and, indeed, she now saw rather more of him than formerly, as he moved into her flat, shutting up his own and sending his mother to the country. He would appear and disappear at all sorts of odd moments of the night and day, and, as the sight of him was a constant joy to Linda, as she could imagine no greater happiness than she always felt when the empty space in front of her eyes became filled by his form, these sudden apparitions kept her in a state of happy suspense and their relationship at fever point.

Since Davey’s visit Linda had been getting letters from her family. He had given Aunt Sadie her address and told her that Linda was doing war work in Paris, providing comforts for the French army, he said vaguely, and with some degree of truth. Aunt Sadie was pleased about this, she thought it very good of Linda to work so hard (all night sometimes, Davey said), and was glad to hear that she earned her keep. Voluntary work was
often unsatisfactory and expensive. Uncle Matthew thought it a pity to work for foreigners, and deplored the fact that his children were so fond of crossing the oceans, but he also was very much in favour of war work. He was himself utterly disgusted that the War Office were not able to offer him the opportunity of repeating his exploit with the entrenching tool, or, indeed, any job at all, and he went about like a bear with a sore head, full of unsatisfied desire to fight for his King and country.

I wrote to Linda and told her about Christian, who was back in London, had left the Communist party and had joined up. Lavender had also returned; she was now in the A.T.S.

Christian did not show the slightest curiosity about what had happened to Linda, he did not seem to want to divorce her or to marry Lavender, he had thrown himself heart and soul into army life and thought of nothing but the war.

Before leaving Perpignan he had extricated Matt, who, after a good deal of persuasion, had consented to leave his Spanish comrades in order to join the battle against Fascism on another front. He went into Uncle Matthew’s old regiment, and was said to bore his brother officers in the mess very much by arguing that they were training the men all wrong, and that, during the battle of Ebro, things had been done thus and thus. In the end his colonel, who was rather brighter in the head than some of the others, hit upon the obvious reply, which was, ‘Well anyway, your side lost!’ This shut Matt up on tactics, but got him going on statistics – ‘30,000 Germans and Italians, 500 German planes’, and so forth – which were almost equally dull.

Linda heard no more about Jacqueline, and the wretchedness into which she had been thrown by those few chance words overheard at the Ritz were gradually forgotten. She reminded herself that nobody ever really knew the state of a man’s heart, not even, perhaps specially not, his mother, and that in love it is actions that count. Fabrice had no time now for two women, he spent every spare moment with her and that in itself reassured her. Besides, just as her marriages with Tony and Christian had been necessary in order to lead up to her meeting with Fabrice, so this affair had led up to his meeting with her: undoubtedly he must have been seeing Jacqueline off at the
Gare du Nord when he found Linda crying on her suitcase. Putting herself in Jacqueline’s shoes, she realized how much preferable it was to be in her own: in any case it was not Jacqueline who was her dangerous rival, but that dim, virtuous figure from the past, Louise. Whenever Fabrice showed signs of becoming a little less practical, a little more nonsensical, and romantic, it was of his fiancée that he would speak, dwelling with a gentle sadness upon her beauty, her noble birth, her vast estates, and her religious mania. Linda once suggested that, had the fiancée lived to become a wife, she might not have been a very happy one.

‘All that climbing,’ she said, ‘in at other people’s bedroom windows, might it not have upset her?’

Fabrice looked intensely shocked and reproachful and said that there never would have been any climbing, that, where marriage was concerned, he had the very highest ideals, and that his whole life would have been devoted to making Louise happy. Linda felt herself rebuked, but was not entirely convinced.

All this time Linda watched the tree-tops from her window. They had changed, since she had been in the flat, from bright green against a bright blue sky, to dark green against a lavender sky, to yellow against a cerulean sky, until now they were black skeletons against a sky of moleskin, and it was Christmas Day. The windows could no longer be opened until they disappeared, but, whenever the sun did come out, it shone into her rooms, and the flat was always as warm as a toast. On this Christmas morning Fabrice arrived, quite unexpectedly, before she was up, his arms full of parcels, and soon the floor of her bedroom was covered with waves of tissue paper through which, like wrecks and monsters half submerged beneath a shallow sea, appeared fur coats, hats, real mimosa, artificial flowers, feathers, scent, gloves, stockings, underclothes, and a bulldog puppy.

Linda had spent Lord Merlin’s 20,000 francs on a tiny Renoir for Fabrice: six inches of seascape, a little patch of brilliant blue, which she thought would look just right in his room in the Rue Bonaparte. Fabrice was the most difficult person to buy presents for, he possessed a larger assortment of jewels,
knick-knacks, and rare objects of all kinds than anybody she had ever known. He was delighted with the Renoir, nothing, he said, could have pleased him more, and Linda felt that he really meant it.

‘Oh, such a cold day,’ he said. I’ve just been to church.’

‘Fabrice, how can you go to church when there’s me?’

‘Well, why not.’

‘You’re a Roman Catholic, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I am. What do you suppose? Do you think I look like a Calvinist?’

‘But then aren’t you living in mortal sin? So what about when you confess?’

‘On ne précise pas’
said Fabrice, carelessly, ‘and in any case, these little sins of the body are quite unimportant.’

Linda would have liked to think that she was more in Fabrice’s life than a little sin of the body, but she was used to coming up against these closed doors in her relationship with him, and had learnt to be philosophical about it and thankful for the happiness that she did receive.

‘In England,’ she said, ‘people are always renouncing each other on account of being Roman Catholics. It’s sometimes very sad for them. A lot of English books are about this, you know.’

‘Les Anglais sont des insensés, je l’ai toujours dit
. You almost sound as if you want to be given up. What has happened since Saturday? Not tired of your war work, I hope?’

‘No, no, Fabrice. I just wondered, that’s all.’

‘But you look so sad,
ma chérie
, what is it?’

‘I was thinking of Christmas Day at home. I always feel sentimental at Christmas.’

‘If what I said might happen does happen and I have to send you back to England, shall you go home to your father?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Linda, ‘anyway, it won’t happen. All the English papers say we are killing Germany with our blockade.’

‘Le blocus,’
said Fabrice, impatiently,
‘quelle blague! Je vais vous dire, madame, ils ne se ficbent pas mal de votre blocus
. So where would you go?’

‘To my own house in Chelsea, and wait for you to come.’

It might be months, or years.’

‘I shall wait,’ she said.

*

The skeleton tree-tops began to fill out, they acquired a pinkish tinge, which gradually changed to golden-green. The sky was often blue, and, on some days, Linda could once more open her windows and lie naked in the sun, whose rays by now had a certain strength. She always loved the spring, she loved the sudden changes of temperature, the dips backward into winter and forward into summer, and, this year, living in beautiful Paris, her perceptions heightened by great emotion, she was profoundly affected by it. There was now a curious feeling in the air, very different from and much more nervous than that which had been current before Christmas, and the town was full of rumours. Linda often thought of the expression
‘fin de siècle’
. There was a certain analogy, she thought, between the state of mind which it denoted and that prevailing now, only now it was more like
‘fin de vie’
. It was as though everybody around her, and she herself, were living out the last few days of their lives, but this curious feeling did not disturb her, she was possessed by a calm and happy fatalism. She occupied the hours of waiting between Fabrice’s visits by lying in the sun, when there was any, and playing with her puppy. On Fabrice’s advice she even began to order some new clothes for the summer. He seemed to regard the acquisition of clothes as one of the chief duties of woman, to be pursued through war and revolution, through sickness, and up to death. It was as one who might say, ‘whatever happens the fields must be tilled, the cattle tended, life must go on.’ He was so essentially urban that to him the slow roll of the seasons was marked by the spring
tailleurs
, the summer
imprimés
, the autumn
ensembles
, and the winter furs of his mistress.

On a beautiful windy blue and white day in April the blow fell. Fabrice, whom Linda had not seen for nearly a week, arrived from the front looking grave and worried, and told her that she must go back to England at once.

I’ve got a place for you in the aeroplane,’ he said, ‘for this
afternoon. You must pack a small suitcase, and the rest of your things must go after you by train. Germaine will see to them. I have to go to the Ministère de la Guerre, I’ll be back as soon as possible, and anyhow in time to take you to Le Bourget Come on,’ he added, ‘just time for a little war work.’ He was in his most practical and least romantic mood.

When he returned he looked more preoccupied than ever. Linda was waiting for him, her box was packed, she was wearing the blue suit in which he had first seen her, and had her old mink coat over her arm.

‘Tiens,’
said Fabrice, who always at once noticed what she had on, ‘what is this? A fancy-dress party?’

‘Fabrice, you must understand that I can’t take away the things you have given me. I loved having them while I was here, and while they gave you pleasure seeing me in them, but, after all, I have some pride.
Je n’étais quand méme pas élevée dans un bordel.’

‘Ma chère
, try not to be so middle-class, it doesn’t suit you at all. There’s no time for you to change – wait, though –’ He went into her bedroom, and came out again with a long sable coat, one of his Christmas presents. He took her mink coat, rolled it up, threw it into the waste-paper basket, and put the other over her arm in its place.

‘Germaine will send your things after you,’ he said. ‘Come now, we must go.’

Linda said good-bye to Germaine, picked up the bulldog puppy, and followed Fabrice into the lift, out into the street. She did not fully understand that she was leaving that happy life behind her for ever.

A
T
first, back in Cheyne Walk, she still did not understand. The world was grey and cold certainly, the sun had gone behind a cloud, but only for a time: it would come out again, she would
soon once more be enveloped in that heat and light which had left her in so warm a glow, there was still much blue in the sky, this little cloud would pass. Then, as sometimes happens, the cloud, which had seemed at first such a little one, grew and grew, until it became a thick grey blanket smothering the horizon. The bad news began, the terrible days, the unforgettable weeks. A great horror of steel was rolling over France, was rolling towards England, swallowing on its way the puny beings who tried to stop it, swallowing Fabrice, Germaine, the flat, and the past months of Linda’s life, swallowing Alfred, Bob, Matt, and little Robin, coming to swallow us all. London people cried openly in the buses, in the streets, for the English army which was lost