Why should I have been haunted at that moment by the thought of Miss Keene? ‘Have you ever been to Koffiefontein?’ I asked.
‘No,’ my aunt said. ‘Why? Where is it?’
‘A very long way away,’ I said.
‘The really awful thing that I discovered,’ my aunt said, ‘was that Monsieur Dambreuse never went very far away. Not even as far as Toulouse. He was in fact a real Parisian. The truth, when it came out, was that he had a wife and four children (one was already employed in the PTT) no further away than the Rue de Miromesnil – ten minutes’ walk, taking the back way by the Hotel St James into the Rue Saint-Honoré, and he had another mistress installed in a first-floor suite exactly the same as ours (he was a very just man) in the St James. The weekends he spent with his wife and family in the Rue de Miromesnil and the afternoons of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, when I thought he was at work, he spent with this girl, who was called Louise Dupont, in the St James across the garden. I must say it was an achievement for a man who was well over fifty and had retired from full-time work (he was a director of a metallurgical company) for reasons of ill-health.’
‘Was he older than I am?’ I remarked before I realized what I was saying.
‘Certainly he was. He had told the other woman exactly what he had told me. She knew about the wife in Toulouse, but she had no idea at all that there was another woman more or less in the same hotel. He was a man of great fantasy and he liked women of a certain age. It was a very happy time, and sometimes he reminded me a little of your father – there were periods of lethargy punctuated by bursts of energy. He told me later, when everything was known, that he thought of me always as his lady of the night. I looked so well, he said, by full electric light. The other woman he knew as the afternoon girl – although she was only a year or two younger than me. He was a very lecherous man, quite out of place, I would have thought, in a metallurgical company.’
‘How did you discover?’
‘He traded too much on his luck. Everything had gone so easily for six months. When I went shopping I always went out by the Rue de Rivoli. When I had shopped enough I would take tea at W. H. Smith’s bookshop. And Louise was, of course, usually occupied in the afternoons. She shopped in the morning when I was engaged, for Monsieur Dambreuse never rose before eleven, and she always left the hotel by the Rue Saint-Honoré. Then one day the spirit of devilry took him. It was a weekend and he had led his wife and two younger children to the Louvre to look at the Poussins. Afterwards his family wanted tea and his wife suggested the Ritz. “It’s too noisy,” he told her, “it’s like a parrot cage of dowagers. Now I know a quiet little garden where nobody ever comes …” The trouble that afternoon was that both of us came – I and Louise.
‘I had never had tea in the garden between the St James and Albany before, nor had Louise, but some impulse – I sometimes believe in a Higher Power, even though I am a Catholic – led the two of us that afternoon into the garden. We were the only people there, and you know how sociable French women are. A polite bow and ‘Bonjour madame’, and exchange of words between our tables about the balmy weather, and within a few minutes we were seated together, offering each other the sugar and the sandwiches, and only too glad perhaps of a little female conversation after six months in a hotel-room with one man.
‘We introduced ourselves, and both of us spoke of our so-called husbands. It seemed no more than a curious coincidence when we found that the two of them worked for the same metallurgical firm. One of the things about Monsieur Dambreuse that I particularly like in memory is the fact that he always preferred to tell the truth when it was practicable – indeed he was more trustworthy than most men, who often lie uselessly from vanity. “I wonder whether they know each other,” Louise was saying when into the garden walked Monsieur Dambreuse followed by his rather stout wife and two over-grown children, the female one squinting a little and suffering from hay-fever. Louise cried, “Achille,” and when I think of his expression as he turned and saw the two of us sitting at tea together, I cannot help smiling even today.’ My aunt dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘And crying a little too,’ she added, ‘for it was the end of an idyll. A man cannot forgive being made to look foolish.’
I said with some indignation, ‘Surely it was for you to forgive?’
‘Oh no, dear. I was quite ready to continue as we were. Louise too would have agreed to share him, and I don’t think Madame Dambreuse ever quite realized the situation. His name really was Achille and he introduced us to her as the wives of two fellow directors of the metallurgical firm. But Monsieur Dambreuse never quite recovered his self-esteem. Now when he was rather tranquil in mid-week he knew I realized the cause and it embarrassed him. He was not a promiscuous man. He had loved his little secret. He felt naked, poor man, and exposed to ridicule.’
‘But surely, Aunt Augusta,’ I exclaimed, ‘you couldn’t bear the man after you had discovered how he had deceived you all those months?’
She got up and strode towards me with her small hands clenched. I thought she was going to hit me. ‘You young fool,’ she said as if I were no more than a schoolboy. ‘Monsieur Dambreuse was a man, and I only wish you had been given a chance of growing up like him.’
Suddenly she smiled and put her hand comfortingly against my cheek. ‘I am sorry, Henry, it is not your fault. You were brought up by Angelica. Sometimes I have an awful feeling that I am the only one left anywhere who finds any fun in life. That was why I was crying a little when you came in. I said to Monsieur Dambreuse, “Achille, I love the things we do just as much as before. I don’t mind knowing where you go in the afternoons. It doesn’t make any difference.” But of course it did to him, because he had no secret any more. His fun had been in the secret, and he left us both only so that somewhere he could find a new secret. Not love. Just a secret. The saddest thing he ever said to me was, “There’s no other St James and Albany in all Paris.” I said, “Couldn’t you take two rooms at the Ritz on different floors?” He said, “The lift man would know. It wouldn’t be really secret.”’
I had listened to her with amazement and some perturbation. I realized for the first time the perils that lay ahead of me. I felt as though I were being dragged at her heels on an absurd knight-errantry, like Sancho Panza at the heels of Don Quixote, but in the cause of what she called fun instead of chivalry. ‘Why are you going to Istanbul, Aunt Augusta?’ I asked.
‘Time will show,’ she said.
A far-fetched idea came to me. ‘You are not looking for Monsieur Dambreuse?’
‘No, no, Henry. Achille is probably dead just like Curran – he would be nearly ninety years old by now anyway. And Mr Visconti – poor foolish Mr Visconti. He too will be getting on – eighty-five at least, an age when you need a woman’s company. There was a story that he came back to Venice after the war and was drowned in the Grand Canal after a fight with a gondolier about a woman, but I never really believed that. He wasn’t the kind who fought about a woman, he was up to so many tricks, he always survived. What a long life I have had – just like your uncle Jo.’
She was touched again by melancholy, and for the first time I thought that perhaps dahlias were not a sufficient occupation for a man’s retirement. ‘I’m glad to have found you, Aunt Augusta,’ I said on an impulse.
She replied in a slang expression quite out of character, ‘Oh, there’s life in the old girl yet,’ with a smile so speculative, so carefree and youthful, that I was no longer surprised by Wordsworth’s jealousy.
11
THE Orient Express left the Gare de Lyon just after midnight. The two of us had spent an exhausting day – first at Versailles, which my aunt curiously enough was seeing for the first time (she found the palace a little vulgar). ‘I didn’t get very far afield,’ she told me, ‘in the days of Monsieur Dambreuse, and in earlier times when I lived in Paris I was much too occupied.’
I had become very curious about my aunt’s history, and I was interested to arrange her va
rious periods in some kind of chronological sequence. ‘Would that earlier time have been before or after you went on the stage?’ I asked her. We were standing on the terrace looking down towards the lake, and I had been thinking how much more pretty and homely Hampton Court was than Versailles. But then Henry VIII was a more homely man than Louis XIV; an Englishman could identify more easily with a man of his married respectability than with the luxurious lover of Madame de Montespan. I remembered the old music-hall song, ‘’Enery the Eighth I am’.
I married the widder next door,
She ’ad ’ad seven ’Eneries before.
’Enery the Eighth I am.
Nobody could have written a music-hall song about the Sun King.
‘On the stage, did you say?’ my aunt asked rather absentmindedly.
‘Yes. In Italy.’
She seemed to be trying hard to recollect, and I was aware as never before of her great age. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, yes, now I remember. You mean the touring company. That came after my Paris days. It was in Paris that I was spotted by Mr Visconti.’
‘Was Mr Visconti a theatrical manager?’
‘No, but he was a great amateur of what you insist on calling the stage. We met one afternoon in the Rue de Provence and he said I had a fine talent, and he persuaded me to leave the company I was with. And so we travelled together to Milan where my career really started. It was fortunate for me; if I had stayed in France I would never have been able to help your uncle Jo, and Jo, having quarrelled with your father, left me most of his money. Poor dear man, I can see him still, crawling, crawling, down the corridor towards the lavatory. Let us go back to Paris and visit the Musée Grévin. I need to be cheered up.’ And cheered up she certainly was by the waxworks. I remembered how at Brighton she had told me that her idea of fame was to be represented at Tussaud’s, dressed in one of her own costumes, and I really believe she would have opted for the Chamber of Horrors rather than have had no image made of her at all. A bizarre thought, for my aunt was not of a criminal temperament, even though some of her activities were not strictly legal. I think that the childish saying, ‘Finding’s keeping’, was one of her ten commandments.
I would myself have preferred to visit the Louvre and see the Venus of Melos and the Winged Victory, but my aunt would have none of it. ‘All those naked women with bits missing,’ she said. ‘It’s morbid. I once knew a girl who was chopped up that way between the Gare du Nord and Calais Maritime. She had met a man in the place where I worked who travelled in ladies’ underwear – or so he said, and he certainly had an attaché case with him full of rather fanciful brassières which he persuaded her to try on. There was one shaped like two clutching black hands that greatly amused her. He invited her to go to England with him, and she broke her contract with our patronne and decamped. It was quite a cause célèbre. He was called the Monster of the Chemin de Fer by the newspapers, and he was guillotined, after making his confession and receiving the sacrament, in an odour of sanctity. It was said by his counsel that he had a misplaced devotion to virginity owing to his education by the Jesuits, and he therefore tried to remove all girls who led loose lives like poor Anne-Marie Callot. The brassières were a kind of test. You were condemned if you chose the wrong one like those poor men in The Merchant of Venice. He was certainly not an ordinary criminal, and a young woman who was praying for him in a chapel in the Rue du Bac had a vision of the Virgin, who said to her, “The crooked ways shall be made straight,” which she took as proclaiming his salvation. There was a popular Dominican preacher on the other hand who believed it to be a critical reference to his Jesuit education. Anyway quite a cult started for what they called “the good murderer”. Go and see your Venus if you want, but let me go to the waxworks. Our manager had to identify the body and he said it was just a torso, and that gave me a turn against all old statues.’
In the evening we had a quiet dinner at Maxim’s, in the smaller room where Aunt Augusta thought to escape the tourists. There was one however whom we could not escape; she wore a suit and a tie, and she had a voice like a man’s. She not only dominated her companion, a little mousy blonde woman of uncertain age, she dominated the whole room. Like so many English abroad she seemed to ignore the presence of foreigners around her and spoke in a loud voice as though she were alone with her companion. Her voice had a peculiar ventriloquial quality, and when I first became aware of it I thought it came from the mouth of an old gentleman with a rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole who sat at the table opposite ours, and who had obviously been taught to chew every morsel of his meat thirty-two times. ‘Four-legged animals, my dear, always remind me of tables. So much more solid and sensible than two legs. One could sleep standing up.’ Everyone who could understand English turned to look at him. His mouth closed with a startled snap when he saw himself the centre of attention. ‘One could even serve dinner on a man with a broad enough back,’ the voice said, and the mousy woman giggled and said, ‘O, Edith,’ and so identified the speaker. I am sure the woman had no idea of what she was doing – she was an unconscious ventriloquist, and surrounded as she believed by ignorant foreigners and perhaps excited a little by unaccustomed wine, she really let herself go.
It was a deep cultured professorial voice. I could imagine it lecturing on English literature at one of the older universities, and for the first time my attention strayed from Aunt Augusta. ‘Darwin – the other Darwin – wrote a poem on the Loves of the Plants. I can well imagine a poem on the Loves of the Tables. Cramping it might be, but how deliciously so, when you think of a nest of tables, each fitting so blissfully, my dear, into one another.’
‘Why is everyone staring at you?’ Aunt Augusta asked. It was an embarrassing moment, all the more so as the woman had suddenly stopped speaking and had plunged into her carré d’agneau. The trouble is that I have an unconscious habit of moving my lips when I am thinking, so that to all except my immediate neighbours I seemed to be the author of her ambiguous remark.
‘I have no idea, Aunt Augusta,’ I said.
‘You must have been doing something very odd, Henry.’
‘I was only thinking.’
How I wish I could conquer the habit. It must have been established first when I was a cashier and silently counted bundles of notes. The habit betrayed me very badly once with a woman called Mrs Blennerhasset who was stone-deaf and a lip-reader. She was a very beautiful woman who was married to the mayor of Southwood. She came to my private office once about some question of investments, and while I turned over her file my thoughts couldn’t help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness. One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up I saw that she was blushing. She finished her business very quickly and left. Later to my surprise she dropped in to see me again. She made some small alteration to the decision we had reached about her War Loan and then said, ‘Did you really mean what you told me?’ I thought she was referring to my advice about National Savings Certificates.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That is my honest opinion.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t think I am at all offended. No woman could be when you put it so poetically, but, Mr Pulling, I must tell you that I truly love my husband.’ The awful thing, of course, was that she couldn’t in her deafness distinguish between the lip movements made by spoken words and the movements which expressed my unspoken thoughts. She was always kind to me after that day, but she never came to my private office again.
That night at the Gare de Lyon I saw my aunt into her couchette and ordered her petit déjeuner from the conductor for 8 a.m. Then I waited on the platform for the train from London to come in from the Gare du Nord. It was five minutes late, but the Orient Express had to wait for it.
As the train moved slowly in, drowning the platform with steam, I saw Wordsworth come striding through the smoke. He recognized me at the same moment and cried, ‘Hi, fellah.’ He must have learnt the Americanism during the war when the convoys for the Middle Eas
t gathered in Freetown Harbour. I went reluctantly towards him. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. I have always disliked the unexpected, whether an event or an encounter, but I was growing accustomed to it in my aunt’s company.
‘Mr Pullen, Mr Pullen,’ Wordsworth said, ‘you an honest man, Mr Pullen.’ He reached my side and grasped my hand. ‘Ar allays was your friend, Mr Pullen.’ He spoke as if he had known me for years and that I had been a long time in his debt. ‘You no humbug me, Mr Pullen?’ He gazed wildly up and down the train. ‘Where’s that gel?’
‘My aunt,’ I said, ‘if that’s whom you mean, is fast asleep by now in her couchette.’
‘Then please go double quick tell her Wordsworth here.’
‘I have no intention of waking her up. She’s an old lady and has a long journey ahead of her. If it’s money you want, you can take this.’ I held out to him a fifty-franc note.
‘I no wan CTC,’ Wordsworth said, waving one hand hard for emphasis, while at the same time he took the note with the other. ‘I wan my bebi gel.’
Such an expression used in connection with Aunt Augusta offended me and I turned away to climb the steep steps into the coach, but he put his hand on my arm and held me back on the platform. He was a very strong man. ‘You jig-jig with my bebi gel,’ he accused me.
‘You’re preposterous, Wordsworth. She is my aunt. My mother’s sister.’
‘No humbug?’
‘No humbug,’ I said, though I hated the expression. ‘Even if she were not my aunt, can’t you understand that she is a very old lady?’