Summer Will Show (35 page)

“Never mind.” Minna spoke soothingly. “At least it will spare him the anguish of seeing us together.”

“I suppose he hopes to worm a good deal out of Caspar.”

“Of course. Why else should he trouble to take him out to lunch? Has that only just occurred to you? I saw that at once, I meant to point it out, but then my sorrow for poor Daniel drove it from my mind. Yes, he will get a lot out of Caspar. Who we see, who we don’t see, if we quarrel, how much we have to eat, if we wear each other’s petticoats, etc. Frederick likes domestic details. I have never met a man of good breeding who didn’t. Whereas your Martin — Caspar could pipe to him all day about the holes in our stockings and never get an encouraging word.”

“Oh, well, he can pipe and be damned.”

“Yes, isn’t it a comfort to feel that we are not going to do anything about it? — that one can’t do anything about it? Such serenity! One feels like the angels in heaven or poor Monsieur Thomas being kidnapped in his cab.”

The abduction of that functionary was still news, and to a certain extent, comic relief. Hardening towards the prospect of a much greater degree of violence, the mind of Paris saw in the fate of M. Thomas the rather insignificant horseplay of the clowns who only open the circus — unless one took the view of Égisippe Coton, who said in a tone of gloomy longing, “It might happen to any one of us now.” Raoul, who piqued himself on the sensitive ear which he turned to the demands of their public, had indeed suggested to Sophia that the hymns might be dropped in favour of
Partant pour la Syrie
, and anything she knew about exiles; but this change of programme did nothing to improve their takings, which were now steadily diminishing.

“Why can’t you come on Monday, Sophia?” he asked. “I always consider Monday one of our favourable days, and for this Monday I was working out ... ”

She shook her head, firmly binding up her plaits, her mouth full of hairpins.

“Why don’t you take Minna for a change?”

“No! Minna is a collector’s piece now. She’s lost any knack she may have had for street-work. In another ten years, yes. Then she would be magnificent as a crone, as a destitute grandmother reduced to hawking improper albums. But for the moment Minna is decidedly between-tides.”

“How old is Minna?” she said.

“God knows! — the old Medusa!”

How odd, she thought, walking homeward, that I felt no impulse to knock him down and dance on him. It is unlike me to be so reasonable. Nor was there any baseness in my question, however loudly my upbringing must shout to me that such questions are base. It was a practical question. For if Minna is — is old, then I ought to know it. Towards the old, the ageing, one observes a certain line of conduct. One respects them, defers to them, spares them. Translated into action, this entails not contradicting them, concealing from them one’s private opinions and seeing to it that they sit in the easiest chairs. On this last count, at any rate, she had nothing to reproach herself with. Suavely as any cat Minna always planted herself in the best chair — unless she reposed on the floor; and though dividing the food with scrupulous equity, if there happened to be any unclaimed
bonne bouche
she would crunch it up with the greatest goodwill, mop up the sauce with bread, with thoughtful greed lick out the dish.

Suavely as any cat. Even cats age, though so imperceptibly that no one agrees on the natural span of a cat’s life, some saying ten, some twelve, some a score of years. But age and die they do, dying of heart-failure, dying in their sleep before the kitchen embers as a ripe apple falls on a windless afternoon, or throwing themselves down exhausted, after a rat-hunt through the barton, never to rise up and hunt again. For all their nine lives, their guardian cunning and their whiskers, the wariest, the sleekest cats grow old and die. Or of a sudden, in their practised prime, a sore on the neck will make them peevish with life, they will turn from their food, exploit their wholesome talent of vomiting, spew up in the end nothing but froth and slime, sit gasping for breath with their blackened gaze fixed on some familiar piece of furniture as though, at long last, they recognised in it the furtive enemy of a lifetime, the unmasked foe.

“I can be sick whenever I please,” was Minna’s boast. “Like a cat, Sophia.”

After all, one need not wait for age — how long was it since she, turning from the imitation Watteau, had spoken so seriously with Minna about death, speaking as though under its shadow? But they had spoken together, with every admission re-establishing their liveliness, their power to speak, hear, communicate. It is one thing to speak of death with those one loves; but to think of it alone, walking through the streets, one does that at a different temperature.

Speaking of death had led them to speak about Martin and the Communists. Now she was thinking again of death, and every step of her thought went with a step leading her towards the Alpine Laundry. She had left Minna at her most exasperating: plunged into a martyrdom of domesticity, counting and darning Caspar’s underclothes, washing his handkerchiefs, gloomily bruising her fingers in an attempt to hammer the heel more firmly on his boot. Over her shoulders, despite the heat of the day, she had pinned a little shawl, unbecomingly too skimpy for them. From her ears dangled a pair of disgustingly meagre and lack-lustre jet ear-rings, ear-rings which, since they had never appeared there before, it was tempting to suppose had been borrowed from Madame Coton — that soul of sour domestic virtues — for dressing this particular part.

And all this, as Sophia knew quite well, was because not Minna but she had been bidden so mysteriously to visit the Alpine Laundry. Thither she could go, flourishing her heels, the child of good fortune, destiny’s pet. Whereas Minna, the daylong labourer in the vineyard, Minna the nursing-mother of revolutions, must stay at home, devoting her slighted talents to Caspar’s socks. In this mood Frederick would find her. Then God help Frederick!

She was immoderately early for her appointment, Minna’s grand renunciation had begun with the smarting punctuality of any attack at dawn, and despite the muddle which her efficiency bred on every hand it had been impossible not to leave the rue de la Carabine at least half an hour too soon. She leaned her elbows on the parapet of the bridge, staring at the barges below her, watching with approval a man who came out of a cabin with a little mat, and shook out its dust into the river. It was obvious that such a man kept house alone.

A hundred times she had injured Minna intentionally, dealt shamelessly blows below the belt, cuffed her vanity, trapped her into the wrong, trampled over her wishes and her principles — and all without a pang. Now, when really for no fault of hers, Minna was thrusting her breast against the thorns of wounded vanity, and caterwauling beyond the powers of any impassioned nightingale, she must feel her heart, wrung with sympathy and a conviction of guilt, cry out, “The poor angel!” But long, long ago, she had thrown her reason into this river flowing beneath her — perhaps even on that winter’s afternoon when crossing from the other bank to visit great-aunt Léocadie she had wished that she could hold Madame Lemuel beneath the cold flood until she came up gasping, and having revised her metaphors.

Meanwhile, whatever might or might not comfort Minna, to turn back from the Alpine Laundry certainly would not do so.

Thanks to Minna, who knew her way through Paris very much as a mongrel might, she had her directions. But now, staring at the decrepit fortress of the Marais, it seemed to her that she would never disentangle her way thither. But why did the word fortress come to mind? Rat’s Castle rather — a quarter even more entangled, tattered, secretive of everything except stinks, than that which lay behind her. They did not even look historical, those tall jostling house-blocks, with their stooping gables and crooked roofs. They were past mark of mouth.

“If I stay here much longer,” she said to herself,” I shall begin to feel courageous.”

This she had determined not to feel. And with a last glance at the river’s clear highway she set forward for the Alpine Laundry.

Before she found it she had grown sufficiently accustomed to the Rat’s Castle to be observing the prices of the food on the open shop-counters, and thinking that this would be an even more advantageous place to shop than the rue Mouffetard. The language of the country too was extraordinarily grand, never had she read such lofty sentences in cookshop windows nor seen such flowery recommendations of wine and butter. It was as though they had picked their phrases from the second-hand shops, she thought, running her eye over a dusty interior where chairs and gilded bedposts in the grandest manner struggled pell-mell with broken mangles, gaping concertinas, old mattresses and odd coffee-cups. It was from shops like these that Minna liked a fairing. But it would be better to take her something clean; and from a shoemaker’s window she selected a pair of magnificent slippers, made of spotted crimson plush and trimmed with sparkling tinfoil Cupids. Each slipper cost rather more than the result of a morning of song, and she was, as she agreed with the woman who sold them, highly favoured to buy such slippers so cheap.

This transaction emptied her of time as well as of money. Reaching the Alpine Laundry, a hasty glance told her no more of the exterior than that it was painted blue and white, that the paint was thin but well-scrubbed, that in the window two highly gauffered infant’s long petticoats flanked a man’s shirt, whose starched arms extended towards the baby-clothes as though in a gesture of family affection.

Inside also the little office was all that honest poverty should be — well-scrubbed, orderly, a chastened sentimentality manifesting itself in a vase of marguerites on the counter. The air had the bitter-sweet almond tang of starch, and behind a glass-panelled door the top part of some piece of machinery rose slowly, and dropped, and rose and dropped again, and with every rise and fall there was a sighing whistle and a gush of water released.

The woman sitting behind the counter was making-up accounts. Her thick red fingers held the pen clumsily, her right hand was ink-stained. As Sophia entered the shop she glanced up with a look at once placid and earnest, and it was obvious that she was holding a thread of addition in her mind.

“
Vous désirez, Madame —— ?
”

Sophia spoke her wish. The woman made a little tick on the column of her addition, noted a sum on the blotting-paper, rose and opened the door, calling for Mademoiselle Martin.

“This lady wishes to inspect the laundry.”

Mademoiselle Martin was lame, she threw out her hip as she walked, and with each halting step a cordlike muscle stood out in her neck. Her eyes were dark and beady, her face was pinched, dutiful, and industrious. Her arms below her rolled-up sleeves were extraordinarily full and muscular.

Behind the glass-panelled door there was only whitewash and scabby iron for the blue and white paint of the office. There was a great deal of steam, the squelch of wet clothes, the hissing of irons. Four women were at work, their faces shining with sweat, their skirts bunched round their hips. Moving on pattens over the wet floor they seemed in their bunched white pinafores like the creatures of some queer aviary. They looked at Sophia no more mysteriously than any other washerwomen might, good-dayed her in affable voices.

Limping beside her, glancing up sometimes with her beady mouse’s eyes, Mademoiselle Martin showed off to Sophia the washing tubs, the mechanical pump, the mangles, the stove where the irons stood heating, the racks of clean linen. Sophia asked questions, examined, approved; and in the moist heat of the workroom her ears sang, her heart pounded.

“One moment, Victoire.”

The woman at the heavy ironing-block stood aside. Thrusting with her strong arms, Mademoiselle Martin swung back the ironing-block; and there was a hole in the floor, a dark square, the tips of two iron uprights just showing.

“If you will go down the ladder — ” she said. “It is quite easy. Nine rungs. No one will observe you from below.”

I am glad it is so decent, thought Sophia, holding on to the uprights, feeling the well-oiled darkness overhead move back into place again. Still, I should like to have some idea of what to expect next.

Rats, said reason promptly.

Standing in the darkness at the foot of the ladder, snuffing up the natural mouldy smell of cellar and with it a queer, a Spanish-Inquisition-like tang of red-hot pokers, waiting for her senses to reassemble themselves, her eyes to gather patches of dusk from patches of darkness, her ears to disentangle the rats below from the clatter of the laundry, the far-off continuing whine and gush of water overhead, it was extraordinary to remember that in this position she was wearing a bonnet, a still quite ladylike bonnet.

“Though really,” she said to the rats, “there is nothing extraordinary about it. Considering the matter rationally, it would be more remarkable if I were not wearing a bonnet.”

“True,” said a voice, the same voice which had cried
Bread or Lead
. And at the same moment she heard a door open and close behind her.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting. I was delayed for a moment. But there was no wish to be dramatic, we are not freemasons.”

“I don’t like drama either.”

“If you will step this way? Can you see better now? There is nothing to trip over, no steps.”

His voice was brittle and businesslike. In the darkness she remembered those bright adder-coloured eyes.

“You do trust me?”

For answer he pulled open a door, stood back for her to enter.

The cellar was lit by a couple of oil lanterns. It was an old wine-cellar, its walls were arcaded for casks, but in the niches where the casks had been were heaps of scrap-metal, old fire-irons, pots and kettles, a bird-cage, chains and bolts, broken tools, lengths of piping, clock-weights and trivets. Against one wall where a gas-pipe ran there was a roughly set-up bench, and on this, tapping the gas-supply, were half a dozen little tubed stands, each with its gas-jet hissing and flaring. Over these they were melting down the lead, like so many intent toffee-makers. The table was strewn with moulds, tools, neat little heaps of bullets and ball. For all that it was crowded and makeshift, it was orderly. And the look of a busy kitchen was enforced by the bottles of cheap wine, the assemblages of food, which stood here and there on the bench.