The Blessing

  ‘So what did the Reine Margot tell you?’

  ‘She isn’t really the Reine Margot, she’s Jeanne-Marie de Tournon.’

  ‘And what did she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing at all – it’s easy.’

  Sigi was sometimes quite as obstinate as his mother when it came to ‘What are the news’.

  ‘Ha!’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘So you lay together on that sofa, hour after hour, gazing into each other’s eyes and saying nothing at all. How very strange!’

  ‘She lives in the country all the year round. She is dull. I was dull when you first knew me and I lived always in the country.’

  ‘Are you not dull now?’

  ‘I am not. I can read and write and do difficult sums and I’m excellent company. I know all about the Emperor and I can say the words of – oh Papa, Papa, do look –’

  Some workmen were engaged upon Coustou’s horses. The right-hand one was being cleaned and the other, with the arm of its groom over its back, still had a long ladder poised against the stone mane.

  ‘Papa! Can I?’

  Charles-Edouard looked round. There was nobody very near them, and no policeman nearer than the Concorde bridge.

  ‘Do you know the words?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll hear, when I’m up there.’

  ‘On your honour, Sigi?’

  ‘Honneur,’ he cried, taking off his coat, ‘à la Grande Armée!’

  He nipped up the ladder and, clambering with the agility of a monkey on to the horse’s back, began to chant: ‘A la voix du vainqueur d’ Austerlitz l’empire d’ Allemagne tombe. La confédération du Rhin commence. Les royaumes de Wurtembourg et de Bavière sont crées. Venise se réunit a la couronne de fer, et I’ltalie toute entière se range sous les lois de son libérateur. Honneur à la Grande Armée.’

  The motors in the Champs Elysées and Place de la Concorde began to draw into the side and stop while their occupants got out to have a better view of the charming sight.

  ‘It must be for the cinema,’ they said to each other. ‘C’est trop joli.’

  And indeed the little boy, with his blue trousers, yellow jersey, and mop of bright black hair on the white horse, outlined against a dappled sky, made a fascinating picture. Charles-Edouard laughed out loud as he looked. Then, as several whistling policemen arrived on the spot, he decided to allow Sigismond to deal alone with the situation as it developed. He hailed a taxi and went home. It was quite another half-hour before Sigi dashed into the house with a very great deal to tell.

  Photographers, it seemed, had appeared; a man with a megaphone had told him to stay where he was. The crowd, led by Sigi, had begun to sing his favourite song, Les Voyez-vous, les hussars, les dragons, la garde. The firemen had arrived in a shrieking red car, had swarmed up more ladders to the horse, had carried him down and borne him home in triumph, shooting across red lights in the boulevard.

  ‘So these words have not remained unsaid after all, Papa, you see.’

  ‘If his mummy had been here,’ come floating into the night nursery, ‘none of this would ever have happened. That Madam Marel would never have given that wicked ball (poor little mites, I can’t get them out of my head lying about in great heaps all over the shop), and the Marquee would never have taken him for a walk – once in a blue moon was how often we saw the Marquee when Mummy was here. Allowing him to ride up on that horse indeed; it’s a mercy he didn’t fall off and crack his little skull.’

  Next morning Charles-Edouard drank the several cups of black coffee and ate the several slices of ham which constituted his so-called English breakfast, with Sigi, on the floor beside him, busily cutting photographs of himself out of half a dozen newspapers brought in by Ange-Victor.

  ‘Now guess what I’m going to do,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Ring up Mummy and tell her all about it and see if she’d like to have you over there for a bit.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Sigi. ‘Can I go tomorrow?’ He was longing to see his mother, boast to her about what Nanny called the high jinks of the last two days, and see what she could do, now, to amuse him.

  ‘Yes, unless you think she’d like to come over and pay us a visit instead? What do you say, Sigismond? We can always try to persuade her, can’t we?’

  If Charles-Edouard had seen the look Sigi gave him he might have interpreted it correctly, but he had already taken up the telephone (he seldom sat out of reach of this instrument) and was dialling the foreign exchange number.

  ‘I want a personal call to London,’ he said, giving Grace’s name and number. He then went off to have his bath. ‘Sit by the telephone, Sigismond, and call me at once if it rings.’

  Sigi perched on his father’s bed, reflecting.

  As soon as the water began to run loudly in the bathroom next door he lifted the receiver and cancelled the call to London. When the water stopped running Charles-Edouard heard ‘That you, Mummy? We’re coming back tomorrow. Yes, Nanny and me, on the Arrow. Yes. Unless you’d like to pay us a visit here, Papa says? Oh! Mum!’ a tragic, reproachful note in the voice. ‘Won’t you even speak to him? Here he is, out of his bath – oh! She’s cut off,’ he said, handing the receiver to Charles-Edouard, who, indeed, only heard a dialling tone. He slammed it down furiously and went back to his bath, saying ‘Go and tell Nanny to pack, will you?’

  Sigi went slowly off, twisting his hair until it was a mass of tangles.

  In London Grace cried over her coffee. ‘Paris wants you’ to her had meant that in a minute or two she might hear the voice of Charles-Edouard. But when her telephone bell rang again and she answered it with beating heart it was only to hear: ‘Sorry you have been troubled. Paris has now cancelled the call.’

  8

  Grace now had two suitors, Hughie Palgrave, and a new friend, Ed Spain. Ed Spain was a leading London intellectual, known to his contemporaries as the Captain or the Old Salt, which names he had first received at Eton, on account, no doubt, of some long-forgotten joke. He had a sort of seafaring aspect, accentuated later in life by a neat beard; his build was that of a sailor, short and slight, and his keen blue eyes looked as if they had been concentrated for many years on a vanishing horizon. In fact he was a charming, lazy character who had had from his schooldays but one idea, to make a great deal of money with little or no effort, so that he could lead the life for which nature had suited him, that of a rich dilettante. When he left Oxford somebody had told him that one sure road to a quick fortune was the theatre. With his small capital he had bought an old suburban playhouse called, suitably enough, the Royal George, and had then sat back awaiting the success which was to make him rich. It never came. The Captain had too much intellectual honesty to pander to his audiences by putting on plays which might have amused them but which did not come up to his own idea of perfection. He gained prestige, he was said to have written a new chapter in theatrical history, but certainly never made his coveted fortune.

  However he soon attracted to himself a band of faithful followers, clever young women all more or less connected with the stage and all more or less in love with the Captain, and these followers, by their energy and devotion, kept the Royal George afloat. He called them My Crew, and left the management of his theatre more and more in their hands as the years went on, a perfect arrangement for such a lazy man. The Crew were relentlessly highbrow, much more so, really, than the Captain, whose own tastes, within the limits of what was first-class of its kind, were catholic and jolly. The Crew only liked plays written by sad young foreigners with the sort of titles (This Way to the Womb, Iscariot Interperson) which never seem to attract family parties out for a cheerful evening. Unfortunately these are the mainstay of the theatre world. The Crew, however, cared nothing for so contemptible a public. Their criterion of a play was that it should be worthy of the Captain, and when they found such a work they did not rest until they had translated, adapted, and produced it at the Royal George.

  They took charge, too, of the financial side of the venture, which they ran rather
successfully on a system of intellectual blackmail. Nobody in a certain set in London at that time, no clever Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, would dare to claim that he was abreast of contemporary thought unless he paid his annual subscription, entitling him to two stalls a month, to the Royal George. These subscriptions, payable through Heywood Hill’s bookshop, ensured a good, regular income for the theatre, but would not necessarily have brought in an audience but for the Captain’s own exertions. Nobody minded forking out a few pounds a year to feel that they were in the swim, but the agony of sitting through most of the plays was hardly endurable. However, if the theatre was quite empty for too many performances the Crew was apt to get very cross; it was the Captain’s job to see that this did not happen. He let it be understood that those who wished to keep in his good graces must put in an occasional appearance at the Royal George.

  As he was one of the most amusing people in London, as his presence was a talisman that ensured the success of any party (so long as he was well fed and given what he considered his due in the way of superior French wines, otherwise he had been known to sulk outrageously) this exacting tribute was paid from time to time by his friends and acquaintances. There was no special virtue, however, in going to a first night, since the house was always full on these occasions. First nights at the Royal George were very interesting affairs, and the Captain himself allocated all the seats for them. M. de Tournon’s anguish over the placing of dukes at his dinner-table found its London counterpart in the Captain’s anguish over the placing, on these first nights, of the grand young men of literature and the arts. His own, or Royal box, only held four. Neither he nor the Crew were ever likely to forget the first night of Factory 46 when Jii Mucha, Nanos Valaoritis, Umbro Apollonio, Chun Chan Yeh, and Odysseus Sikelberg had all graciously announced their intention of being present. The situation was saved by Sikelberg getting mumps, but only at the very last minute.

  Grace and her father went with Mrs O’Donovan, who was what she called ‘abonnée’, to the first night of Sir Theseus. Naturally they were not in the Royal box, full, on this occasion, of darkies, but they were well placed, in the second row of the stalls. The Captain, who often saw Sir Conrad at White’s, came and sat with them for part of the time, a signal honour. Sir Theseus was, in fact, Phèdre, written with a new slant, under the inspiration of modern psychological knowledge, by a young Indian. Phaedra was the oldest member of the Crew and really rather a terror, only kept on by the Captain because she was such an excellent cook. She was got up to look, as Sir Conrad said, like a gracious American hostess, with crimped blue hair and a housecoat. When she bore down upon Hyppolitus, whose disgust at her approach, as he cowered against the backcloth, had nothing to do with histrionic art, Sir Conrad said in his loud, politician’s voice, ‘She’s got young Woodley on the ropes this time.’ The Captain loved to laugh, as he did at this, though really he half-hated the sort of joke which implied that art might not be sacred. He half-loved and half-hated, too, the sort of person represented by Sir Conrad. If the Captain had known in which direction he wanted to set his compass, life would have been that much easier for him. However on this occasion, attracted by the beauty and elegance of Grace, he invited her father to bring her and Mrs O’Donovan back to his house for supper after the play.

  The Captain lived in a large, rambling, early 19th-century house, built to be an hotel or lodging-house, on the river, hard by the Royal George. This he shared with such members of the Crew who were able and willing to do housework. They lived in attics and cellars which no servant would have considered for a single moment, but which the clever Captain had invested with romance. ‘Les toits de Paris’ he would murmur, craning through a leaky skylight and squinting at les toits de Hammersmith, while the cellars, damp and dripping, were supposed to be the foundations of a famous convent, ‘the English Port Royal’. He reserved for himself big, sunny rooms on the first floor furnished in the later manner (much later, some said) of Jacob. Here an excellent supper, withdrawn from oven and hay-box by Phaedra with the assistance of Oenone, was served to quite a large party, consisting mostly of critics and fellow highbrows, such as the editors of Depth and Neoterism. The Indian author of Sir Theseus lay on the floor reading a book and never spoke to anybody.

  ‘What really wonderful champagne,’ said Sir Conrad.

  ‘I’m so glad you like it.’ The Captain was pouring out two sorts of wine, a Krug 1928 for some and an Ayala for others. This had nothing to do with meanness; he really could not bear to see the bright, delicious drops disappear into a throat that would as soon receive any other form of intoxicant. There were many such throats among them on this occasion.

  Presently those members of the Crew who had been engaged upon the more mechanical jobs at the theatre began to arrive. They looked very much alike, and might have been a large family of sisters; their faces were partially hidden behind curtains of dusty, blonde hair, features more or less obscured from view, and they were all dressed alike in duffel coats and short trousers, with bare feet, blue and rather large, loosely connected to unnaturally thin ankles. Their demeanour was that of an extreme sulkiness, and indeed they looked as if they might be on the verge of mutiny. But this appearance was quite misleading, the Captain had them well in hand; they hopped to it at the merest glance from him, emptying ash-trays and bringing more bottles off the ice. The Royal George, if not always a happy ship, was an intensely disciplined one. Like the Indian, however, the Crew added but little to the gaiety of the party. They sat in silent groups combing the dusty veils over their faces and thinking clever thoughts about The Book of the It, The Sheldonian Synthesis, The Literature of Extreme Situations and other neglected masterpieces.

  The Captain was very much struck by Grace with her French name and Paris clothes, a year old, but all the easier for that on an English eye. He knew about the General de Valhubert killed at Friedland because this General had been a great friend, indeed one of the few known friends, of General Chaderlos de Laclos. He took Grace to his library and showed her what he said was his greatest treasure, General de Valhubert’s own copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It was bound in red morocco with the Valhubert coat of arms, a stag and a rose tree, and the General had written a sort of journal, or series of notes, during one of his campaigns, all over the margins. It was a collector’s piece of rare interest. That coat of arms, so familiar to Grace, who during her short and happy life in France had seen it every day on china, silver, carpets, books, and linen, gave her a dreadful pang.

  ‘How strange. It must have been stolen from Bellandargues,’ she said, looking sadly at the book.

  ‘Thrown away, more likely. No respectable French family would have cared to have Les Liaisons Dangereuses lying about their house, in the 19th century.’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s it, of course. And then my husband always said they were really ashamed of the Marshal, though in another way pleased to have had a Marshal of France in the family. All very complicated.’

  ‘French people are complicated. Did you like the play?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, though I like the real Phèdre better.’ It was Charles-Edouard’s favourite play, she remembered.

  ‘The real Phèdre is wonderful poetry, but, as my friend Baggarat has shown us this evening, it is psychologically quite unsound. Racine’s Phèdre has two psychological weaknesses – the first is that we can never believe in Hyppolite’s love for Aracie, and the second we cannot understand why he should recoil in such horror from this fascinating woman who loves him.’

  ‘Except that she was as old as the hills.’

  ‘How do you know? My guess is that she was half-way between the ages of Thésée and Hyppolite, and still very attractive. But if Hyppolite was homosexual, everything is explained – he adores Hara-See the dancing boy, he loathes the idea of making love to a woman. I think my friend Baggarat has done a very fine piece of work, valuable for the future of the theatre.’

  Grace was impressed. She liked the Captain very much, she li
ked his jolly, careless, piratical look, she thought his house most original and charming, and she was quite prepared to like the Crew. But the Crew despised her and made no effort to conceal the fact. They could not be the clever girls they were without seeing life a little bit through Marx-coloured spectacles, and to them Grace was the very personification of the rich bourgeoisie. They despised the rich bourgeoisie. Her presence in the house made them uneasy, superstitious, it was as though Jonah had come aboard the Royal George.

  They sat in a sulky, silent group, combed their hair over their faces and watched the Captain through it. To their distress they saw that he was putting himself out to be as agreeable to Grace as if she had been Panayotis Canellopoulos in person. Why? What could he see in this spineless creature, who, unable to get on with her husband, had run back to her father like a spoilt child? When the various members of the Crew had been unable to get on with their husbands they had struck proudly out on their own, taken rooms near the Deux Magots, hitch-hiked to Lithuania, or stowed away to the Caribbean. She was the sort of woman, with no self-respect, whom they positively execrated. They combed and watched, but if they harboured mutinous thoughts, they still hopped to it at a look from the Captain. In those days it seemed unthinkable that actual rebellion should ever break out on that ship while the Captain was at the helm.

  The Captain soon fell in love with Grace, if that can be called love which has nothing physical in its composition. He was not attracted to her physically, she was too clean, too tidy, and too reserved for him; impossible to conceive of cuddling or rumpling Grace. Her stiff Paris dresses, lined with buckram and padded petticoats, in themselves precluded such cosy goings on. He could not even imagine her sitting on his lap. But in every other way he loved her; he loved her elegance, her sad, romantic look, and the serious attention which she bestowed upon everything he said. Above all he loved his own mental picture of what life with her would be like if they were to marry. He imagined a small 18th-century villa not too far from London, where great luxury would prevail. Large, delicious, regular meals would arrive with no effort to himself, none of the expense of spirit which it cost him to keep Phaedra up to the mark; he would have a gentleman’s library, a first-class cellar, intellectual friends would come and stay, he would be able to chuck the Royal George and write a masterpiece. Later, when Sir Conrad was dead, they would live at beautiful Bunbury. Sex would not play much part in all this. The French husband, it was to be hoped, would have satisfied her in that respect for ever, and after all people could live together very happily without it. He knew many cases. They would just have to sublimate their sexual desires, it was really quite easy.