Читать книгу Not Now but Now - M.F.K. Fisher - Страница 12

four

FIRST LÉONIE WAS just as anyone who had heard Jeannetôt’s confessions in the train would expect, a tall pale girl with nails bitten to the quick and a bad hat. She made conversation as if she were still in the convent parlor, called down from her studying by the Sister Superior to meet a correctly introduced relative. She leaned forward with an artificial interest in everything Jennie said, her eyes flatly bright, her head tipped a little to show her politeness.

It was easy. Jennie went to work on her like a chess master disposing of an important but unfrightening adversary in a tournament. She was as good with women as with men when it seemed wise, and Léonie unfolded innocently in the wily sunshine of her attentions.

It was the same with Jeannetôt. Plainly, he thought as he saw his daughter lose her first strained air, as she talked more easily and smiled without putting one hand nervously against her mouth, this was what she needed, a little more fun, a little gaiety. He pressed jam and iced cakes upon the two women and beamed with a kind of relieved smugness at them through the smoky hubbub of the smart tearoom. Yes, Léonie needed companionship . . .

Jennie could have laughed in his face, his sagging tired face. She looked coldly at him from behind her own smooth smiling creamy one. What had made her think, ever in her life, that he was still capable of gaiety? It was too late for him now. But Paul? Someday Paul would be old. Before he was she would see how gay he could be, see what the father might once have been.

“But I feel lost here,” she was saying with a hint of gallant pathos that she found revolting and very funny. “I am used to being alone, as your father knows, but I must admit that Lausanne frightens me a little bit. Where are the good shops? Where do you go for—for gloves, that sort of thing?”

“Léonie, my dear,” Jeannetôt said, heavily inspired, “what about your mother’s glovemaker? Why don’t you make a rendezvous with Madame, if she will permit, and take her to some of those little places all you women know about?”

He sat back contentedly behind his empty parfait glass, convinced, from his expression, that he had brought off a complex coup. Jennie gazed happily at him: he was perfect.

She glanced at Léonie. The girl looked eagerly back at her for a minute and then dropped her eyes. They were good eyes, blue like her father’s but large, and promising of depths to them if ever they could grow less restless. “If Madame would enjoy that,” she murmured in her immature way.

“Oh, but I would,” Jennie said, smiling with wide-eyed candor. “I must probably move on soon, and I do need decent things again. Tomorrow? Tomorrow morning?”

Léonie started to assent and then withdrew. “Not tomorrow,” she said, and she rolled crumbs nervously about on the glass-topped table under her long white fingers with the unpleasantly blunted tips.

Jeannetôt stirred irascibly in his chair. “Why not? Why not, Léonie?”

She straightened herself and looked coldly at him. “Tomorrow is Paul’s saint’s day,” she said in a flat voice.

“But, my dear girl, you haven’t even nodded to him for a month, for God’s sake, so what of it?” Jeannetôt spoke with a kind of repressed frustrated fury, quite forgetful of his guest’s supposed ignorance of the family troubles.

Jennie sat watching the two of them silently, the discreet stranger.

Léonie leaned forward, stiff as wood, her cheeks suddenly an ugly spotted red. “That is why I shall pray for him,” she said, her voice flatter than before. “But I cannot believe, dear Papa, that this is at all interesting to Madame. Thank you, Madame, I am completely at your services after I have come from Mass at noon.”

Jennie smiled. “I am delighted,” she said, as if there had been no interruption to their girlish planning. “Shall we say two o’clock then? Or will you join me for lunch?”

“Tomorrow is not a day of celebration for me.”

Jennie heard Léonie’s father let out a kind of puff of annoyance, as if he had been tapped on the solar plexus.

She did not look at him, but answered in a warm understanding voice, “Of course, of course. It is good of you to bother with me. Let us say three o’clock then. And now, before I must hurry away, may I smoke just one cigarette?”

Jeannetôt fussed confusedly with his lighter, and Jennie gave Léonie time from behind the screen of smoke to compose herself. The girl had more self-control than her father had hinted at, at least in public. Jennie watched the white line fade from around her lips, and her fingers calm themselves a little on the tabletop. What a fuss! Les enfants terribles, Jeannetôt had said. Were all thwarted sisters as obviously jealous of their handsome brothers and their handsome brothers’ little half-breed tarts? It would be interesting to find out.

As Jeannetôt paid the bill Jennie said confidingly, intimately, to Léonie, “I have so enjoyed this! You are a darling to bother with me. I really look forward to tomorrow.”

Léonie flushed, this time becomingly, and smiled a little, so that fleeting as a comet Jennie saw her brother in her, her father even, a gay spirit, before she was the proper young lady making a proper speech again. And as Jennie stood up, with apologies and thanks, and walked alone past all the little tables covered with cakes and fashionable elbows, she knew that Léonie was watching her with a new excitement, that Jeannetôt was watching her with an old, almost forgotten one. His was less important than the girl’s. Jennie smiled to admit it and then hurried a little: she must win a bet made with herself that Paul Jeannetôt would be at the Palace bar—alone.