Читать книгу Not Now but Now - M.F.K. Fisher - Страница 11

three

BY FIVE O’CLOCK the next afternoon she was inexpressibly bored, and cross too. The day had seemed endless. If she had only bought a pretty little watch in one of the souvenir stores, Jennie thought wryly, she would have been the perfect tourist, killing time between trains.

She sat now on the terrace at Ouchy-Lausanne, watching the silly gulls swoop and cry and the silly people toss crumbs at them along the quai, drinking her tea like a proper lady, dribbling her stiff brown honey on her toast so neatly, so sweetly. God, how dull it was! The slanting sun twinkled in a well-bred way upon the orderly lake, and behind Jennie in the teashop three decayed gentlewomen sawed expertly at “Tales from the Vienna Woods” on their stringed instruments, with the youngest doubling on a bird whistle when the score called for it. Tweet tweet tweet, she went, embarrassed to the top of her graying head. Murmurmurmur went all the English people above the tweets and the sound of their own relentless chews and swallows.

Well, what had she expected, Jennie asked herself savagely—hampers of red roses with her breakfast tray, protestations of undying passion before lunch, lovers’ flight to Lake Como with her demitasse? She had acted stupidly, like a gauche schoolgirl, and that was what irked her so, and she sat turning the little goads round and round in the raw wound to her self-respect. It was intolerable that she, Jennie the inviolate, had let herself be so clumsy.

She paid her bill impatiently and sped from the place. The tram up to the city crept like a toad. Halfway there she swung down to the cobbles. She could feel the other passengers staring back at her as they ground on upward.

She walked swiftly, past the little stores all on a slant on the steep hill, their windows palely lighted in the summery twilight, their sausages and baby clothes and carefully iced cakes a kind of respectable soporific to her too wakeful nerves. By the time she turned the corner to the hotel door she was breathless and no longer angry, except in a remote, scornful way, as she might have been toward a long dead and almost forgotten family scapegoat, the kind whose small sins soon became a ridiculous and faintly affectionate legend. Yes, once Jennie, drunk with freedom, got off a train with a fat burgher and sat waiting in a fat-burgher-town for him to say he loved her, so that she could laugh at him and go on. But he never said it, not he; he left her politely, from his taxi, at the hotel door; and there Jennie was, feeling like a fatuous ninny, until suddenly she came to her cool, intelligent, proud senses and got on the train again and went away from that fat-burgher-town.

She walked straight to the desk in the lobby. A tea-dance orchestra sounded faintly, teasingly, through the endless marble pillars and the aspidistras. She would have the concierge call the station for her. What train was the best and the soonest, going south or west or east? She must have first class in a wagon-lit. No, she would sit up, third class. She would put her head in its little skullcap upon the nearest shoulder and sleep peacefully, going far away.

Jeannetôt stood at the long desk. She bowed politely to him and he to her, and he raised his stiff wintery hat to her and stood holding it while Jennie took her key and a letter from the clerk.

“I have just left that for you, dear lady,” Jeannetôt said. “Until very soon, let us hope, until very soon.” And he bowed and hurried away.

Jennie went to her room without speaking to the concierge. She would read the letter, pack her things peacefully, go to the station and eat a good dinner in the first-class dining-room, take any train anywhere.

What an uncouth man, Jeannetôt! How it would ease her to give him one final hurt! She would go away and forget him, but he would be there in Lausanne for the rest of his life, wondering.

“Madame,” the letter said. “I beg you to forgive my writing in the place of my wife, unhappily indisposed. She presents her compliments and the assurance that as soon as possible she will be happy to send cards, awaiting the pleasure of making your acquaintance. Meanwhile, may I have the great honor of introducing my daughter Léonie to you over a cup of tea or an ice tomorrow at 4:45 at the Tea Salon St. Martin. Please accept, dear Madame, my most respectful salutations. Emile Jeannetôt.”

Jennie burst out laughing, so spontaneously and loudly in the emptiness of her big room that she looked around, feeling foolish. This was wonderful! Never had she imagined anything so amusing, so completely in character. The stolid arrogance of the man! Who else in the world would dare issue such a royal order to Jennie, Jennie, to appear to eat at a certain hour, a certain place, to enjoy the favors of his sallow-faced daughter, simply because he had been spoken to on a train? Oh, poor Jeannetôt!

Gaily she dressed in thin wool shot with silver, bought that morning near the Palace, perfect for the hour of the cocktail, the sales-duchess had assured her, infinitely more perfect for the tea dancing. But when she got downstairs the orchestra was silent, and there was a pre-dinner hush everywhere. She shrugged and walked light as thistledown along the dim corridors to the bar.

As she pushed open the heavy door, so soundproof that it made her feel as if she were sneaking into the sanctum sanctorum of a Piccadilly club, two people stood aside for her, and she knew in the first second of her cool glance at them that they were Paul Jeannetôt and his Petit’ Chose. He was tall and sulky and well dressed in the inevitable brown tweed jacket and gray Oxford-bags that all young stylish Europeans believed was English-style. She was tiny and as toothsome as a piece of molded almond paste, deeply tinted, soon to be mustached. They looked furious.

Jennie ordered a dry Martini. There were two or three couples sitting at the low tables, and she sat easily by herself at the bar, watching the man behind it and remembering him at every good hotel bar she had ever drunk in, on every good ship. He would be named Duval and be called Harry. She felt comfortable and at home, and amused at her certainty that young Jeannetôt would soon be back, which he was, and alone, which he was.

He stood scowling near the door for a minute, quarrel still heavy on his face, and then he said, “Another, Harry,” to Duval. The first half of the Scotch and soda he drank in one swallow, and then he swirled the rest slowly in his glass and looked down into it, and his expression lightened so that it was merely sulky, not furious. When he was twenty-three years older and twenty-three kilos heavier, Jennie saw, he would look almost like his father, except for his dark un-Swiss eyes.

She waited to see if he would have another drink. When he did, she said casually to Duval, “That is the younger Monsieur Jeannetôt at the end of the bar, isn’t it?”

The man nodded, his face as bland and dead as a croupier’s. “Yes, Madame,” he said in a way that told her he recognized that she would behave herself, that she might be a whore but she was also a lady. “The Martini was as it should be?”

“Perfect, of course,” Jennie smiled at him, to thank him for his completely Duvalish estimation of her.

“Shall I inform Monsieur Jeannetôt that Madame wishes to speak to him?”

Jennie shook her head. The bar was empty now. She would give herself the pleasure of being misunderstood for a second by the young man waiting so unsuspectingly a few steps away from her. “No, thank you. I shall surprise him,” she murmured to Duval, who permitted himself an almost invisible smile and turned his back upon his last two customers.

Jennie looked candidly at Paul as she stepped to his side, her full glass steady in her smooth silver glove. He started, and then looked back at her with polite cynicism and an obvious but restrained smirk of flattered manhood on his face. Before he could bow to her and make the second move in what was plainly a pick-up, she asked, “You are Paul Jeannetôt, are you not?”

He was startled, and became at once the well-bred family scion. He bowed as if she were his grandmother’s long-lost second cousin. Jennie smiled to herself, murmuring implications that she was an old friend of his father’s, that many many years had passed, that he resembled dear Emile so startlingly . . .

Paul smiled incredulously at the fact that she could possibly have known his father long ago, and she approved of his recognition of her untarnishable beauty. She sat on the stool beside him and saw his young tired face grow merry and mischievous, the way yesterday Emile’s old tireder one had done, because of her magic. Power sang in her bones, and when she had finished her drink and paid Duval and told Jeannetôt’s son that she was having tea with his sister the next day, she walked from the room like an empress who has just sealed her enemy’s death sentence.