I'm Dying Laughing (37 page)

In the evening they heard from their two agents that apartments they had hoped for were out of reach. This created domestic disorder, real trouble in the Howard family. Giles wept, under the impression that they would never get a home and be too poor to pay the rent in the hotel. While Emily and Stephen took it in turns to calm him, Olivia and Christy began to quarrel again, with shrieks, scuffling and hard words. ‘Is this our serene, sweet little princess?’ said Emily, sadly, to Stephen; ‘and look at Christy drooling insults! In the taxi the other day he was a genuine scion. I was so proud of him. Stephen, the family’s breaking under the strain.’

Stephen separated the two, found them at it again in a moment, sat down dismally, ran his fingers through his hair and, dragging off his tie and shoes, threw them into corners of the room. He whined, ‘And if that house, that little den, had come through—what about the ton or so of cargo that’s coming by the next boat? Eh? Store them with the concierge? The water-filter, the record-player, the records, Christy’s piano? We’re crazy. If I could, I’d go back to the USA tonight. All right, let the bogyman get me.’

Immediately after this, Mr Harrap, who thought of the Howards as very rich and distinguished persons, rang from downstairs, waiting to take Stephen to see a small house to let. Stephen beat his hands on the table.

‘I won’t, I won’t go about the world taking houses.’

‘What about the children? What about the furniture? What about me getting to work? Let’s take anything, provided there’s a flush toilet and a kitchen. By gosh, I’ll buy a rubber bath, I’ll install plumbing, if there’s a toilet or two, for the first couple of nights.’

Giles stopped wailing and asked if they had a house. Olivia came in looking wicked, but she said gently, ‘A house! Oh, let’s take a house!’ Christy came in and looked with melancholy sweetness at them.

‘I’ll go, all right, all right, don’t scream at me,’ said Stephen.

Emily asked, ‘Because how are we going to fit in everything without a house? Maybe we could go to the Cote d’Azur). We’d have a garden too; and I could be quiet.’

Stephen flew into a rage, ‘And what would I do in a garden? You want to keep me for a pet? Of all the damnfool adventures I let myself be persuaded into—OK, OK, I know we’re political refugees; but maybe we could simply have bought our way out of it with less money than this. Just bowed out and said nothing.’

‘And Florence? What would she think—?’

Stephen seized his hat and made for the door,

‘Don’t say another word or I’ll fly back to the USA tomorrow. Oh, God, if only I could. I can’t see the kids suffering in grandeur at these towering prices. You don’t count; I have to. We’ll soon be kaput at this rate. Pieces of eight wouldn’t keep us alive with this band of kids, a week. There’s my nephew, a relative of the Federal Reserve Bank in my sight, and I have to buy cellar to attic to keep up with him, and my daughter, a dainty midget, relative of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, you might say, and I must get a sixteenth-century china-closet to put the Meissen beauty in. Shut up, Olivia. Papa’s mad. You moneybag kids ought to be ashamed of yourselves seeing Papa suffer.’

He began to laugh. Emily dimpled. ‘Oh, Stephen, you should be ashamed.’

He was presently back, telephoning from below saying he had a car. Their friend had a little house in Auteuil, which seemed just right for them. Off they went, after cautioning the children, and found a house with three floors and basement, completely furnished with Persian carpets, silk damask and lace curtains, Louis-Quinze and Empire furniture, engravings, candelabras with crystals, linen, silver, central heating and even a stock of coals and wood. The price was very high, but it was to let for a year and possibly renewable. At first they were rejoiced. A rather large guarantee had been asked by the owner, a Spanish nobleman for the moment in the Argentine; and they had to sign an extensive inventory and pay for wear and tear. The owner had been anxious when he heard Americans might tenant it. ‘They throw wild parties.’

‘And where is the room for our own furniture and goods?’ asked Emily sadly.

‘But look at the coal! It needs a strong man as well as a butler,’ said Stephen.

Emily said wearily, ‘Oh, what stupid harassments! No, we can’t take it.’

On the way home, Emily declared she could not go home to the battling and disappointed children. They could telephone Christy and tell him to look after his brother and sister. The hotel would send up food and drink if they wanted it. Stephen said, ‘I’m in despair. Why the devil couldn’t we have got something before we came? What was Uncle Maurice doing to let us come here like this with all these children? Damn his eyes.’

He raged, beat his knees, loosened his tie. ‘I’m ill, I’m really ill, Emily. I’m not joking. I can’t stand any more of this. It will kill me. I’ve suffered too much for the only decent thing I ever did, giving up my country for my family. Why didn’t I remain at home, a quiet little louse, like the rest of my family, except Florence; but she has moneybags and the demon rum to console her.’

‘This is an occasion to celebrate, how we turned down our last palace and I’m too nervous to go home,’ said Emily. She opened the taxi window and told the driver to drive to the Ritz.

Stephen said, ‘I won’t. It’s vulgar and we haven’t the money. Ask him where’s a decent, modest, quiet place.’

‘Take us anywhere that’s decent, modest and quiet and don’t spare the expense,’ said Emily, to the driver, a gaunt, ragged man with dry hair and a harsh foreign accent.

He took them to an American night-club, where Stephen sat nursing his stomach and looking miserable and Emily got very drunk and jolly and made a few friends.

The next morning early they went shopping to get some extra clothes for the children, berets for the boys, ribbons for Olivia. The Printemps, the Galeries Lafayette, the Trois Quartiers and other shops up and down the Madeleine and Opéra quarter were even at this moment well-filled with household and luxury goods.

Emily, and Stephen too, kept saying, ‘Oh, for a colour photograph to send to the old folks at home!’

For many days they lived this life. They were robustly, angrily but gloriously employed in inspecting empty houses, even small palaces, attending auctions and visiting shops for antiques. They bought books on fine furniture, pictures and old silver, they ate here and there, drank aperitifs, wine and brandy; and all the time hurried, argued, spent, but with the serious feeling that what they were looking for was a place for a quiet, well-organized life, tranquil rooms for themselves and the children tucked away with tutors and schools, so that Stephen and Emily could attend to their real business in life, writing. At last, said Emily, in so inspiring a city, where artists and writers were respected, not for the money they made but in proportion to their achievement, at last they would settle down and, after tossing off a few things to make their bread and pay their rent, she would turn to her serious aim, write good books, make an honest fame, become a master of her craft. At last. And Stephen too. Now he would have the leisure and atmosphere to indulge his learned bent; and he too might try his hand at something lighter. He was very amusing when he wanted to be, a real sour wit, but laced and decorated with fruits and cherubs like the old ceilings they saw; the mark of what she called ‘his scionage’.

Emily said to him enthusiastically at a breakfast, ‘This is not wander-lusting. It’s our future life, our work. We’re preparing for it as you prepare for a family; the work’s in the making!’

The children however, were getting spoiled. They had only to ring a bell to get any kind of service; their parents kept buying them novelties to pass the time; they went out a good deal; they looked after themselves. They developed perhaps, but they needed a home and a more modest life. Christy worried about the amount of money they spent. They found a long record of accounts in the back of his diary. Olivia, reticent and clever, passed primly before the expensive novelties she coveted, as a desirous woman passes before Molyneux, Worth, Cartier, not revealing her great needs and her small purse. But she became more irritable because they did not spend enough. Stephen kept them occupied for a few days by telling Christy he must make his sister understand how the rich kept accounts and watched their money, compared prices and avoided waste. The rich ‘brother and sister’ travelled round Paris for a few days, looked in shops, visited other rich children in the afternoons and Olivia had a chance to see how girls her age behaved and dressed. She at once behaved like them and wished to dress like them, in the simple and expensive clothes they wore.

The Howards, meanwhile, took Giles with them to view small houses at Fontainebleau; Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb; a villa at St-Germain-en-Laye. They considered villas on the Cote d’Azur, near Menton and Cap d’Antibes, Juan-les-Pins (‘we would save the expense of holidays’), they thought of buying a house near Montparnasse: and near the War Ministry and elsewhere. At Fontainebleau was a complete house for a million francs, suitable, but cold, dark, furnished in a style fifty years old, and with a bleak garden back and front, not yet awake to spring, perhaps never awakening to spring. Yet it was near the magnificent forest and the frozen ponds, trees blue and grey and green rising slowly in the distance. Near the Arc de Triomphe they found a large six-room apartment kept by the concierge for an American tenant who had not come back; and in Neuilly, a little house in a garden belonging to a woman who had got it from a lover and who had gone to live in the south forever, disgusted, frightened; a woman who had been a Pétainiste and collaborator and now feared the people of Paris.

Emily said, ‘Again the tumbrils. She’s afraid!’

They began French lessons and yet could not make out the headlines, and the headlines were on the wrong pages. They disliked the make-up, found the information obscure, the presentation grandfatherly, the local passions absurd. They tried to participate, but they remained, they were as yet, tourists. In the end they took all the newspapers written in English and began to spend more peaceful mornings as they scanned them.

They severely criticized the French. But Stephen said, ‘This remains capitalism. It is in its way as good a capitalism as ours, perhaps better. I don’t know what would survive in Oshkosh and Painted Post after an invasion, after we were stripped of everything. Here at least there have survived the thick walls of villas, the polished floors and the engravings of Louis XVIII. After all, all the world is capitalism but one experiment in the East—’

Emily exclaimed, ‘Experiment! If all the world was in its dotage and there was one young person alive, we would say, an experiment in living. And after all, too, the USA is for Europeans still an experiment. Especially for the sour old English. It’s a point of view, it’s arguable, too. And let’s not backbite the boys who stayed at home. Someone has to stay at home. A country is made up of people who stay at home. We can’t all run before the storm. One ought to like one’s country, even with its faults. I feel quite guilty. What the hell! Who kept France alive? Not those who ran but those who stayed, collabos and Pétainistes and all, they stayed. They stayed through the long night; and the refugees were out wandering in another night.’

Stephen sighed, ‘I wonder what we are doing really wandering round the dead suburbs of a devastated foreign city whose wars we didn’t fight, sorrows we didn’t suffer, whose cemeteries we aren’t going to fill? I’m here to eat their groceries, I’m not here, for one thing, to eat off their sorrows, or hurrah for the revolutions they make in blood and despair. We’re bastards. We’re lowdown bastards. I feel like a louse.’

They were at this moment crossing the Seine. It was night and the Seine, from recent rains, was a plump broad satin flood with long trails of red and white coming down to them from the Pont-Neuf. It was cold. There were miserable people about. The taxi-driver, who had cursed them in bad Russian French, the thin ragged porters at the station, the people hanging around outside the station to pick up fifty devalued francs for finding them a taxi, the scarecrows with nowhere to sleep, depressed them.

Stephen went on, ‘Are we any better than the Germans, coming here like a master-race, full of money, eating like swine, with schemes for their improvement which happen to suit ourselves?’

Said Emily, ‘We make our money somewhere else and spend it here. The fifty francs we gave that man was to the good.’

Stephen wrung his hands and shrieked, ‘But I don’t want to see it. I’m a coward as well as a parasite. At home, I don’t see the poor. I’m used to my country. It’s perfect. I don’t see what’s wrong. I live there in a blue daze.’

Emily asked harshly, ‘What are you going back to? To prison, contempt and sneers—because you couldn’t make a go of it abroad either? Every one of our old friends is an enemy now. We’re just as lonely there as we are here; only that here it is they who said the American Party was wrong; people have opinions like us here. Listen, Stephen, you’ll learn French and get in with the heads of the Party here; and if not here, we’ll go somewhere where you can get in with them, to England or somewhere, we’ll go to the east if you like, anywhere, so that you can feel yourself fulfilled. You’ve got to, Stephen. Otherwise, I’d feel guilty at having dragged you abroad.’

Stephen replied, ‘Oh, you didn’t drag me. If I’d had any serious objection I wouldn’t have gone. But where are we going? What’s our aim? You’re full and I’m empty. Wherever you go, you’ve got a full cargo; but even at home and rusting in the old harbour I’m empty. But you expect to find empty hulls in an old weedy harbour. There are plenty rusting away there and no one knows whether they didn’t in the time of their youth bring in full freights and get a great name for heroically battling the storms. If we had only thought of that—a greening, rusting old harbour and waiting for our old age, till no one knew our names any more.’

Emily said after a time, ‘Gosh, I’ll never be able to forgive myself if I’ve brought you abroad and you don’t find yourself here. But let’s find a home and we’ll settle in, you’ll work and I’ll work and you’ll have responsibilities, a future, you’ll find the Party again. You’re tired. You’re not used to being without a home. I am. I wouldn’t give a damn if I had no home. But you would and so would the children.’