Part 10

“I expect the maze was laid out on a May-day,” said Richard, “and the monument is nothing more than a stone maypole, or something with the same signification.”

“I can tell you about the monument,” said Anne. “It commemorates the restoration of Charles II, and was put up by a young man of nineteen, who must have come back from France with the King and recovered his sequestered estate:--a small enough one, I should guess, and the Old Hall. I suppose the maze might have been cut on a May-day, and no doubt they had a maypole on the green again: they had been put down under the Commonwealth, but I doubt if there were many to dance. All the better people had served in Cromwell’s regiments. Except in Huntingdon itself, they were all Puritans.”

“Then we must imagine your young cavalier setting up a maypole on the green and dancing with gypsy girls and all the riff-raff he could assemble, while the village people held aloof under the elm trees round the edges of the green and prayed for a thunderstorm,” said Richard.

“There were oak trees in those days, not elms,” said Anne.

“How do you know that?” he asked her sharply.

She knew positively, but she had forgotten how she knew and, as she repeated that she was sure, she felt that she must seem very stupid to Mr. Grandison.

“Well, he danced in a scarlet coat with lace ruffles, which he had brought back from France, with the gipsy girls in their rags, and Maggie Pattle joined in for the sake of the beer, but all the respectable tenants stood under the oak trees looking glum and hating him. But how do you explain that the monument is still standing and that, though it is the most striking thing in the village, nobody ever looks at it or knows anything about it? If one asks a question they just shake their heads and change the conversation.”

“The young cavalier lived to be eighty-eight,” answered Anne. “It is natural that nobody would dare disturb his maze while he was living, or to pull down the stone column sculptured with his arms. All the Puritans were dead before he was, and the significance of the monument was forgotten by 1729.”

“But the civil war isn’t forgotten,” said Richard.

“I have often heard a villager say when someone has got into trouble for poaching hares: ‘We want another of the Cromwells in this country. There were no game laws in Nolly’s time.’”

“I expect there is a tradition that the maze represents something out of harmony with the village: they have ignored it for so long that they have forgotten everything except that it is something which ought to be ignored,” said Anne.

Richard agreed with her, and an hour passed before she remembered the drawings she had brought to show him.

“Leave them for me to look at,” said Richard, but she would not be put off. As she untied the portfolio she felt that her fingers were trembling, and she became confused as she explained that she knew her drawings were not fashionable: she had done them at Dry Coulter in ignorance of what the latest fashions might be, thinking that they would serve as specimens to show her workmanship. Instead of explaining this clearly, what she said was something very silly, but Richard did not smile at her absurdity, and there was an absolute silence as she laid the first of the drawings on the table, propping it up against a wine bottle.

For a long while Richard Sotheby stood wrinkling his nose and Gerald and Ginette stood silent.

“And the next,” said Richard sharply, but, going to the portfolio himself, he turned over the other drawings rapidly. There was a silence again as he carefully fastened the clasp of the portfolio, and then turned and walked a few steps away. Suddenly, however, he began to speak, and the words fell so rapidly that Anne could scarcely follow them.

“Dress designers are very stupid people,” he began. “Don’t be discouraged when I advise you not to show these actual drawings. In order to create an impression you must first obtain a thorough knowledge of the mode. There is just as much fashion in the drawings of dresses as in the dresses themselves. What would have been all right last year or the year before is quite out of date now.” And he began to explain very rapidly what these changes in styles of drawing had been.

He was interrupted suddenly by Ginette. Anne could not follow her words, but she noticed Grandison nod his head vigorously and say: “An excellent idea,” while an expression of exasperation came over Richard’s white face.

When he turned to Anne she felt a sudden conviction that her drawings were bad and that Richard was concealing his opinion of them.

“Ginette is of the opinion that you are the right figure, and that you have acquired, Heaven knows how, the right appearance for a mannequin. She wants to introduce you to a man she knows who works in one of the wholesale houses. I think that you would dislike such a life and would soon wish that you were back in England. But don’t despair about your drawings,” he added, almost shouting the last words.

Anne took up her portfolio, turning Ginette’s advice over in her mind.

“How should I get a job as a mannequin?” she asked, but an argument had broken out between Richard and Ginette and her question went for some time unanswered. At last he turned from the French girl in exasperation, and she repeated her question.

“Ginette will let you know,” he said. “Come to tea to-morrow at five o’clock.” The tone of the invitation was so cross that Anne said good-bye at once. Grandison had scarcely spoken a word during the discussion, but as she left the room he made a gesture as if he would speak, but he said nothing.

“What have I done to upset them all so much?” she asked herself as she hurried down the stairs, but she could find no answer. Richard’s words had been encouraging, yet she was tempted to tear up her wretched drawings then and there.

“Yes, my fashion plates are hopeless,” she said to herself, but she found it hard to understand why Richard should have been so exasperated by Ginette’s suggestion. “If my drawings are no good I must find some other way of earning my living. Richard would keep me in a fool’s paradise until my money is exhausted.”

Her train of thought was interrupted by the sound of footsteps, and she heard a voice calling her. It was Richard.

“I meant to ask you: if you are short of money, let me lend you ten pounds. You must have time to look about you.”

Anne stared at him in surprise. He was very white; out of breath with running and his words came with an effort, but his tone was still one of exasperation.

“Thank you,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “Thank you, I have still seventeen pounds.”

“Well, later on,” answered Richard. “Whenever you want a loan, come to me. While one has money it is one’s duty to share it. That is what Grandison and I believe, and after all you and I come from the same village.”

After saying this he turned round and walked back, quietly cursing her existence.

FOURTEEN: A REMOVAL

“How could I ever have imagined that I was in love with Richard Sotheby?” Anne asked herself in astonishment as she walked back across Paris. “It turns out I don’t love him enough to borrow money from him. He would always behave well, he would always be kind, yet I think he would be delighted if he were never to see me again. I shall never ask him for help or for advice; I shall never go near his studio after to-morrow.” And it occurred to her suddenly that the money he had offered to lend her had been earned by his father, and that it might have been spent on Rachel, or on the Temperance Hotel.

“I wonder why it is that Ginette loves him?” she asked herself. “If she really does. If I were her I should lose my heart to Mr. Grandison.” And saying this she recalled the look in Grandison’s eyes and how he had kept them fixed on her, how he had seemed to be going to speak and the gesture with which he had sunk back into his chair as she went out of the studio. “Richard has robbed me of knowing him. We should easily have become intimate, we should have been friends,” she said with her heart full of bitterness. Every detail of her walk with Grandison came back and hurt her.

“Well, I am to be a mannequin if they like my figure.” The more she thought of Ginette’s suggestion the better she liked it, and the more difficult she found it to understand Richard’s annoyance. She was puzzled to find an explanation, and tried one theory after another, but nothing she could imagine seemed to her probable, and when five o’clock came on the following afternoon she had almost persuaded herself that the explanation of Richard’s ill-humour must be something quite unconnected with herself. She knocked and Richard opened the door, and stood for a moment in the threshold before admitting her. He stared at her with a grin on his face and said: “Oh! So it is you, Anne!”

“Weren’t you expecting me?” she asked, noticing his surprise. “You said I was to come to tea.”

Richard Sotheby led her into the studio, and Ginette rose from the sofa, where she had been lying. The girl’s face had changed; Anne could see that she had been crying, but there was so much pride in her greeting that she felt shy of looking her in the face.

“Here is a letter for you,” said Ginette gravely, speaking in French and pronouncing her words with the greatest distinctness. “You are to present it personally to M. Kieselyov at that address at eight o’clock to-morrow morning. If he thinks you are in the English style he will engage you.”

“Thank you with all my heart. Your goodness....” Ginette did not wait for Anne to finish her sentence, but walked away across the room.

Richard was making the tea. “Have you heard from your father?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t,” said Anne, feeling rather guilty. She had not written to him since her arrival.

“I had a letter from mother with messages for you from Rachel.” He was half tempted to add that their names must be coupled together in the village by now, and that this was disagreeable to him, but he looked at Anne and refrained.

She had taken off her hat, and the short, closely cropped hair shone like straw. There was a worried look on her pale face.

“My God, what innocence!” he said to himself.

“Ginette and Richard have been quarrelling,” thought Anne, wondering if Grandison would come in, for she was miserably disappointed not to see him.

But instead of asking if he would be back to tea she said: “I wonder if the swallows are building again in our dove house.”

“Do they build there?” asked Richard, and the whole expression of his face altered at her words.

“Yes, they have a nest on the joist. Father leaves the top half of the door open for them and they fly in and out. They are the prettiest of the birds; my favourites, for no birds exceed them in loveliness of colouring: the steel-blue back, the crimson throat and the white belly. The flight of the swallow is more beautiful than that of any other bird, but this pair are prettiest when they sit side by side on the rails outside the dove house. Their spirits always seem to me a little low: she moves one wing and then the other, as though she were shrugging her little shoulders, and then, suddenly, he bursts into song. Do you know the swallows’ song?”

“No,” said Richard. “I have never heard a swallow sing.” He sat down and buried his face in his hands, and repeated in tones of utter wretchedness: “No, I have never heard a swallow sing.”

“He has the clear note of a contralto; not loud or defiant, nor yet feeble, but full of love, subdued because he can never forget that the world is full of cruelty and unkindness.”

Ginette broke in with a question as to what Anne had said.

Richard told her, and the French girl smiled wearily.

“In England it is only the swallows apparently which have discovered such platitudes.” Then she added: “Why is she staying?”

“It appears we invited her to tea,” answered Richard in a low voice.

There was the sound of a heavy tramp on the stairs and then a knock. Richard stood up and went to the door. Anne looked across at Ginette and saw that she was gazing at her with a strange expression.

“I must go,” she said to herself. “Why does she look at me as if she felt contempt for me?” But it seemed impossible to go after that look without an explanation. The memory of that expression would haunt her.

She looked up and saw that Richard had come back from the door, and that a workman had followed him, and together they crossed the studio and disappeared into the little room at the back.

Anne sat and sipped her tea, tortured by the need to speak, to ask a question, to see light, and by the desire to escape, to go out of the studio and never to set foot in it again. But she could not find the words with which to ask her question or to take her leave, and she sat on, dumbly watching the workman crossing the room, first with a rolled-up mattress in his arms and then with a little folding bed or carrying a wash-hand-stand. Richard came back and threw himself down in a chair. There was a silence, prolonged until the workman reappeared, crossed the studio and went out once more with a chair and a looking-glass.

Ginette gave Richard an appealing look and he said:

“Anne, I think perhaps you had better go now. Ginette and I are both rather upset.” He paused for a moment and said in colourless tones: “Besides, someone who wishes to see you is waiting.”

Anne rose. “Good-bye, Mademoiselle Lariboisière,” she said, holding out her hand. The brown hand gripped hers firmly.

“Till we meet again,” she said, and then added in broken English: “You have a lucky face.”

“Thank you for telling me about the swallows,” said Richard as he stood above her at the top of the stairs.

The French workman was struggling with a small table on the staircase and it was some moments before she could reach the street.

“Never to know the meaning! Never to learn the secret! Never to understand anything at all!” Anne cried with tears coming into her eyes. “I have never seen into another person’s heart. I never shall. Wherever I am, my curse clings to me!” A vague project of suicide, of being found floating in the river, passed through her mind as she stepped out into the street. The workman was still in front of her lifting the table into a small motor-van; in avoiding him she ran into Grandison’s back.

“Good God! You here! Don’t go away!” he exclaimed, as though she was running from him. Anne stepped back and stood for a moment staring in astonishment into his red face.

His words sounded angry, and his blue eyes glittered angrily so that she felt afraid and her first impulse was to run back into the house. “I cannot go up there again,” flashed through her mind, and she turned again to Grandison.

“Miss Dunnock,” said the young man, still looking at her, almost murderously. “I must make an explanation.”

The word explanation caught her ears. “No, that is impossible,” she said to herself for some reason. “An explanation is impossible.”

“I don’t understand,” she said in a weak voice, giving up all thoughts of flight. She was almost in tears. “I don’t understand anything.”

Grandison’s anger or passion seemed suddenly to have completely disappeared. He looked at her appealingly with an expression in which she could read pity for her and misery on his own account. For a moment he tried to speak and choked, and then, swallowing, went on rapidly:

“It is rather complicated. I am taking away my furniture to a new room and must superintend the man unpacking it. If you could come with me in the van we could talk to each other.”

The van was packed; the man was waiting, impatient of their conversation. Anne did not hesitate, but scrambled up on to the tail-board of the van and settled herself on the rolled-up mattress.

She was excited without knowing why, and suddenly, looking at Grandison perched beside her on the edge of the wash-hand-stand, she felt happy and secure.

“I want to explain,” he said suddenly, as though he were defending himself. “This is my furniture. I am taking it away from the studio because I cannot live with Richard or with Ginette any longer. I have broken with them completely, and have taken a room of my own.”

There was so much suffering in his voice that Anne understood that there had been a quarrel. At that moment all seemed suddenly to have become clear to her, and she felt that she was a very experienced person. “What foolishness!” she exclaimed to herself.

“Why should they have quarrelled?” And she decided to persuade Grandison to turn back.

“Why do you want to leave them?” she asked gently. She was preparing to reason with him sympathetically, and softly to lead him back to Richard. For a moment Grandison sat silent, and something in his sullen expression, his trembling lip and the way in which he opened and then shut his hand, moved her very much.

“I must explain,” he repeated. “Ever since I met you at the station I have been madly in love with you.”

Anne felt cold all over as she heard these words; she shivered and gazed at Grandison with frightened eyes, asking herself if she had heard what he had said aright; a suspicion crossed her mind that he was playing a joke on her, a heartless practical joke. She gazed at him in terror, but he went on without turning his head to look at her: “It has been awful. I could not speak to you while I was still living in Richard’s studio. I think Ginette guessed but Richard did not suspect until I told him after you went yesterday. I did not think it would upset him so much or that it would upset me so much.”

“I don’t understand why he should be upset or why he dislikes me, but I feel he does. There has never been anything between Richard and me,” said Anne. She stopped, feeling that she had said something foolish.

“I know, but there has been a great deal between Richard and me,” answered Grandison. “Just now he hates you, though it is not your fault that I am in love with you, and he knows that.”

“He has got Ginette,” said Anne.

“Oh, my God!” cried Grandison, making the most awful face. “Ginette was my mistress. Surely you knew that?”

Anne gazed at the cuff of Grandison’s coat: a check material with a little wavy thread of purple running among the fawns and greys. She was overcome with shame and confusion at her ignorance and her stupidity. There was a long silence.

“This doesn’t seem like a trick,” she said to herself, but the fear that Grandison might in some way be playing some strange and terrible joke at her expense remained at the back of her mind.

“For some reason I thought that Ginette and you were the same person before I arrived,” she said. “You see I overheard Richard spelling out a telegram to you in French before I had ever spoken to him.”

“A telegram?” Grandison asked in astonishment. “Oh, yes, perhaps he did telegraph. I wrote and told him that I was in love with Ginette and that I proposed taking her to live with us.... That was a dreadful thing to have done. You see, Richard was very fond of me; he cares about nobody else,” he said suddenly, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

“I have always, all my life, mismanaged my love affairs. But that is because I have never been in love before. Now I am in love with you and I determined not to mismanage that but to make a clean sweep of everything.”

This remark, and the defiant tone in which it was uttered, struck Anne as comic; she laughed but immediately regretted having done so, for Grandison burst into tears.

She had never seen a man weep before and was alarmed. The tears streamed down his cheeks and hung on the stubble of his beard, for he had not shaved that day, and then fell one after another on to his knees.

Anne jumped up from the mattress, hitting her head on the top of the van. “Oh! Damn!” She clutched Grandison round the shoulders while her eyes filled with tears from the pain. “Don’t cry; I have hit my head such an awful crack, but you see I am not crying,” she said, hugging him and then slipping on to her knees. He looked at her, and the van pulled up with a jerk just as they found each other’s faces in a kiss. They alighted, and Grandison led the way into the meanest building that Anne had ever seen. His room was on the top floor, and as they ascended, an odour of cooking, of accumulated filth, of bugs and of boiled rags took them by the throat. But they climbed on, up and up, and behind them toiled the indignant workman, sweating under the mattress in his arms, and pausing to curse the smells and the filthiness of the house under his breath.

“The view is magnificent,” said Grandison with a sweep of his arm as he threw open the door of a tiny attic.

“Put the things down anywhere, just as you like,” he added to the workman. He was right, the view was magnificent. All Paris lay glittering at their feet in the sunshine, and Anne forgot the malodorous staircase as she leant out of the open window.

“Yes, the view is lovely,” she said, turning to Grandison, but an altercation was going on with the workman, who was repeating again and again: “This place stinks.”

Grandison could understand the words well enough, but he was offended and resolutely shrugged his shoulders, repeating: “Don’t understand. Fetch my furniture.”

“This place stinks,” repeated the workman with appropriate gestures. “It gives me a bad throat.” He made sounds as if he were going to be sick.

“I don’t understand what you say; fetch the furniture,” repeated Grandison in a rage, and began to push the man out of the room. “A house full of Poles and bugs,” said the man as he made off down the staircase.

“It’s quite an accident,” said Grandison, “that there is such a wonderful view. I took the first room I could find, by candle light. It is dirty, but I had it scrubbed out with disinfectant this morning. I shall get some sulphur candles in case what he says about the bugs is true.”

Anne sniffed: a smell of Jeyes fluid hung in the air. They were silent, gazing out of the window, waiting while the slow tramp of feet and muttered curses drew nearer and the man came in carrying the bed.

“It stinks,” he announced, returning to Richard.

Grandison cursed suddenly with great obscenity in fluent French.

“You mustn’t talk to me like that,” answered the man, but he left the room after looking at Anne with an air of icy disapproval. “Damn the fellow,” said Grandison, and they remained silent while the table, the wash-hand-stand, a piece of drugget and the chairs were brought in.

Grandison had recovered his temper by then, and gave the man a tip. “One doesn’t say such things,” said the workman, pocketing it, and he went down the stairs clearing his throat. They listened to the tramp of feet descending the stairs without looking at each other, and stood motionless through the minutes of dead silence which followed. “He must be waiting and poking about in the hall,” was their unspoken thought and, exchanging a swift glance, they nodded their suspicions. A sudden crash resounded up the stairs of the outer door being slammed, and they smiled happily at each other, for love is impossible except in secret. But although they smiled the silence continued, their hearts beating faster and faster and confusion coming upon them.

“We must put up the bed,” said Anne.

Grandison helped her mechanically; the pleasure of her presence near him was so great that he was afraid to speak lest some word of his might scare her away. Together they unfolded the legs of the narrow iron bedstead, set it upon its feet, covered it with a weedy mattress and a coverlet. Then they laid the carpet on the floor, set the trunk in one corner, the washstand in another, and put the table in the middle of the room. There was nothing more to be done, and after speaking once or twice of buying such necessaries as a broom and a looking-glass, they became silent again, Anne sitting in the only chair, Grandison upon the bed, while darkness closed in on them very slowly.