The Birds Fall Down (40 page)

It should have been a tedious ceremony, but Tania laughed when a hat suited her, as though she and it together were going to play an impudent fraud on the world, and when it did not suit her, she laughed even more, as if she had been caught cheating, but in any case had been doubtful of getting away with it; and she kept on turning away from the glass and calling over her shoulder to Susie, inviting her to join in this ridicule of her own beauty, or crying out some scrap of gossip she had just remembered, or propounding one of the theories which kept on bubbling up in the champagne of her mind. At that moment she was expressing her belief that Englishmen did not really like playing cricket—who could?—but had it forced on them in their schools and universities by a secret and subversive society like the Freemasons. To all this Susie, from her seat beside Tania’s broad bed, responded by her timid kind of laughter and by sounds of agreement uttered in the soft tone and with the strict rhythm of a cooing dove. Every now and then she put out a vague, hovering finger to trace the design of the creamy Venice-point counterpane, or looked up at the canopy of faded Persian brocade which fell from the crown of crystal plumes fixed high on the wall, with her air of admiring things she could never hope to possess herself. When Susie was looking up like that, one could see how long her throat was, and how curious her mouth, so indeterminate, so hard to describe or remember. The blackness of sleep was before Laura, she flung herself into it.

She woke to wonder why there was a cutlet frill on her lap, where the dance music was coming from, why she was in this faded room which smelt like an old scent-bottle, and who was whispering. Madame Verrier had been facing her at the table, but now she was sitting across the room on the sofa beside Professor Saint-Gratien, who looked very elegant in evening clothes. They were enmeshed in silent laughter, and they were struggling. He was holding close to his face the parcel Professor Barrault had sent Laura, and peering between the folds of the lilac tissue paper, while Madame Verrier tried to wrest it from him.

“Let me see what’s inside,” he was whispering, “you can easily say it was our little beauty who opened it, before she’d read the note.”

“No, no, paws down!” laughed Madame Verrier.

“How well they know each other,” thought Laura, “and what fun they’re having, for people of their age.”

“But I absolutely must open it,” chuckled the Professor. “I must know what the unfortunate Mademoiselle Elodie wears in her virginal couch. It’s impossible for me, in spite of all my experience of the human frame and human underwear, gained professionally and otherwise, to guess. This evening I’ve been watching her going round and round the ballroom looking like a giraffe. Well, what does a well brought up young giraffe wear at night? You can’t tell me, I don’t know, I’ve the information in my hands, you won’t let me avail myself of it. Ah, now I can see, now I realize what it is, and it’s not a night-dress, it’s a tent, a bell-tent—”

“You’ll tear the paper,” gasped Madame Verrier through her laughter.

“A tent, and how much rather I’d bivouac under the stars, in quite another terrain—”

“How horrible you are,” said Madame Verrier, suddenly ceasing to laugh, suddenly flushing with anger, “making fun of a poor ugly girl of whom you know nothing except that she’s ugly, rejecting her when she’s never offered herself to you. How impossible it is to imagine an ugly young man having such humiliations poured on him—”

“How you hate men,” said Professor Saint-Gratien, rocking backwards and forwards in amusement, pressing the parcel against her face and taking it away again. “How you hate men, except at the moments when you like them, when you extravagantly like them, when you like them even more than most women like them, I can assure you of that—”

“But where’s my father?” asked Laura. Everything had come back to her. Her grandfather was dead, she might die. “My father. He should be here by now, shouldn’t he?”

The couple on the sofa were still as marble. Then Madame Verrier turned to Monsieur Saint-Gratien and exclaimed, as if she were going to cry, “We woke her!”

“Please don’t mind about that,” said Laura. “It’s not of the slightest importance. But my father. Hasn’t he come?”

“Not yet,” said Saint-Gratien. “I’m sorry. Not yet.”

“But perhaps I’m being stupid,” said Laura. “I don’t know the time. I forgot to unpin my watch from my dress. Probably it’s too early for my father to have got here.”

“Well, he could have done it,” said Saint-Gratien, smiling at her as if they were speaking about something of great moment, “but he hasn’t, and there’s sure to be some very good reason for that.” He went on telling her, in his sharper way, what Barrault had already told her, that messages sent to the relatives of the sick and dying took far longer than exchanges between the hale and the hearty. “It’s as if,” he explained, still inappropriately smiling, “the patient’s malady slowed down the pulse of the telegraph wires and set up inflammation in the telephone exchanges. So I was quite prepared, when I came up here after having made my bows down in the ballroom, to find that your father wasn’t here, and indeed my only aim was to see how you were getting on, and perhaps to give a fillip to Madame Verrier’s genius for nursing by bringing her some champagne. I’m not sure how that’s worked out, but as for you, I’m very pleased. You’ve done what people of your age can do, you’ve had new life put into you by just a couple of hours’ sound sleep.” He was not smiling now, his tone of voice did not match his words, he was watching her. He knew quite well that more than grief was the matter with her.

Madame Verrier crossed the room and knelt beside her, and in a hard, pressing voice, but with some endearments, reminded her that her father could do nothing to the point if he were there, her grandfather was dead and nobody could do anything for the dead. But was there nothing they could do for her, was she worried about anything? Her eyes were tender, vigilant, fierce, detective. Certainly these people were not on Kamensky’s side. Laura felt like saying, “You’re quite right, I’m frightened,” and telling them the whole story. But she remembered how Kamensky, that day at the stamp-market in the Champs Elysées, had guided her away from the Russian dealers, and how she had asked, “But are the terrorists here too? In France?” and how he had answered in his sweet, sad voice, so softly that she could hardly hear him, “They are everywhere.” Well, he should know. Catherine had said that there were Russians at the medical college here. Though the surgeon and the nurse were all right, they might go for help to people who were not. She put her hand to her bewildered head, and the scalloped cuff of her
peignoir
caught her eye. For an instant that too amazed her. She was wearing something that was not hers. Then she remembered how that came about, and she said, “Professor Saint-Gratien, it was so nice of you to ask Madame Verrier to do all this shopping for me. I must own, that though it’s all been so terrible, my grandfather dying, and my father not coming, I like wearing these lovely things.”

The tautness of their stares relaxed. They still knew that she was keeping something back. But they were not annoyed. They were resigned. They were not going to pester her. The Professor had said of the hotel staircase that for a staircase, it was a staircase. Now he and Madame Verrier were thinking that for a trouble, her trouble was a trouble; and though they were still watching over her, they were going to leave her undisturbed, as a sick patient for whom little could be done till her malady took a more definite course. “I’m glad you like what Madame Verrier bought,” said the Professor, putting his head on one side, narrowing his bright grey eyes, “but I was wondering, I was just wondering, if Madame Verrier’s taste hadn’t been a thought too severe. Isn’t that peignoir on the plain side?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” said Madame Verrier, giving a comedienne’s impersonation of impatience, “Mademoiselle, think of it, the great surgeon’s mad about frills.”

“Yes, indeed I’m mad about frills,” he said, acting too. “Nor do I see why I shouldn’t be and why everybody else isn’t. Why frills are delicious. Be truthful, Mademoiselle, don’t be intimidated by this gorgon, wouldn’t you have preferred a peignoir all foaming, all sparkling, all bubbling with rows and rows of little frills?”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t have borne it. Frills are awful, perfectly awful.” All three of them were laughing now, out of pity, out of gratitude for pity, out of a desire to get the unspoken truth about the occasion out of the way, not to admit that it was there.

“You see, Professor Saint-Gratien,” said Madame Verrier, pretending to regain the self-control she had never lost, “you just haven’t got taste.”

“You’re wrong. My taste is all right, but my luck is not. I adore frills, but the women I adore always detest them. Well now, it’s getting late. Try,” he said, his eyes sensitive while he said these dreamy, unsensitive mechanical things, “to cultivate a little sympathy for me in your hard young heart before we meet tomorrow morning, and let Madame Verrier give you a sleeping draught.” But there came a knock on the door. He dropped her hand and exclaimed, “Ah, after all.”

But it was Professor Barrault who entered, searching the room with his vague, violent gaze while he saluted Laura. Seeing two other people in the room he sent a social smile in their direction, put on his pince-nez, saw who they were, drew back his bearded chin, and greeted them coolly. Then, after knitting his brows, he greeted them all over again, warmly. Saint-Gratien guffawed; he liked taking a holiday from his own delicacy every now and then by laughing hugely. But Madame Verrier raised her head, thrust forward her fine small chin, and looked blindly past Barrault, who all at once became the only truly piteous person in the room. Madame Verrier took the steel out of her face and said, “There’s no news yet, Professor,” and Saint-Gratien said, “The young lady’s still sad. I’ve brought up some champagne to cheer her, and perhaps you’ll take a glass to show her what we really call drinking in Grissaint, Professor,” and Laura said, “If you’re really going to have some, Professor Barrault, I will.”

They raised their glasses to each other in gaiety which was false yet true; it was a container for their kindness to her. Professor Barrault, who was moving and speaking more slowly than in the afternoon, put down his empty glass and murmured, “It’s impossible to do all one wants, impossible to prevent things going wrong,” and helped himself to a plate of strawberry mousse. “This appeared to be plentiful downstairs,” he said sadly, “but that was an illusion. All over the place I saw people eating it, but when I tried to get some, there was none. Strange.” It was remarkable, the way he raised the spoonful of pink foam to the orifice in the regular waves of his chestnut beard and never missed.

When she thanked him for having sent her his daughter’s nightdress he waved his spoon at her and replied, as if he had been waiting for the cue: “Not at all, it was a privilege for my daughter Elodie, who is a good girl but of mortal stock, to offer a garment for the use of a stranger who seemed to come from another world. I think of the words that Odysseus used to the princess Nausicaä when he met her on the Phaeacian shore. ‘Art thou a goddess, who came from a home in the infinite heaven? If thou art divine it must be Artemis I see, the daughter of Zeus the All-Powerful, for both in thy form and stature and beauty thou art cast in her mould. Or art thou a daughter of man, who dwells on earth as a mortal? Happy then I deem, yes, thrice happy, thy mother and father—’”

“You bad old man,” said Saint-Gratien, “I remember that passage perfectly well, and Odysseus didn’t believe a word he was saying, he knew perfectly well she wasn’t a goddess, he rather despised her as a provincial lady, but he wanted to get something out of her. Credit from her father’s tailor, I think it was, as he’d been washed ashore as he was born. Why, Barrault, when you’ve got an authentic goddess here, do you greet her with that humbug?”

“My friend is irreverent,” Professor Barrault told Laura, “but he has an excellent heart. An excellent heart,” he repeated, as if to keep up his courage, but vaguely, muzzily, he was only remotely distressed. “So he’ll be the first to understand how glad I am to have a moment’s leisure to talk of what’s so dear to me, the antique world, in the company of a young lady who might have walked on Aegean shores in the Golden Age. I regret it often that I never devoted my life to the study of the classics, but I had no choice, science revealed itself to me as my true master—”

“But medicine’s no science,” jeered Saint-Gratien, “it’s a guessing game, played by the more backward and brutal among university students on the steps of the laboratory buildings, always the least aesthetically satisfying parts of our universities, and it’s a condition of the game that once one starts playing it one has to play it till the end of one’s life.”

“We may be as ridiculous as you say, but nevertheless, on our lucky days, we heal,” said Professor Barrault meekly. “But anyway, here I am in a profession associated with science which constantly confronts me with events arousing in me thoughts and emotions impossible to express within the limits of the scientific vocabulary. It’s then that I thank God for the hours we spent at school studying the classics, for if it were not for the voice given me by the writers of the antique world, I should be mute, mute, and strangled by my mutism.”

“Oh never that, my dear friend,” laughed Saint-Gratien.

“You also,” said Professor Barrault, blinking his wonderful eyes like an owl in daylight. “My wife says I talk too much, and you evidently agree with her, but it never seems to me that I do. Which is it, I wonder, do I talk too much or does it merely seem to people that I talk too much? And which of those alternatives is the most disagreeable? Well, never mind. I haven’t, of course, much to say that’s worth saying when the grave things happen. But then neither has Professor Saint-Gratien. When he and I lose a patient, we feel a great deal, and we can find nothing to say that’s to the point. When your grandfather died this afternoon, neither of us had anything to say, not of our own invention, which might not just as well have remained unspoken. But what we felt was said long ago in our dear Latin tongue. Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso Quidve dolens regina deum tot volvere casus Insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores Impulerit. Tantaene animis caelistibus irae? Muse, tell me the reasons: what injury to her godhead and what passionate pain made the Queen of Heaven drive a man so manifestly good to brave so many perils and endure such trials? Can heavenly spirits harbor such anger?”