The Complete Short Stories (21 page)

Again I see Mme Dessain in the friendly
library of her house leaning over the table, those many years ago, with her
husband by her side as I began to tell her cards.

While she was shuffling
I saw that she was extremely punctilious about the performance. While I dealt
and discarded according to my secret method she watched me with an intensity
that meant, to me, a decided confidence in my powers. Her wish was evidently of
critical importance. She seemed absorbed by the cards that fell to constitute
her fortune, but I advised her light-heartedly not to give weight to them
herself, to concentrate hard on the wish, and to leave the interpretation in
due time to me.

‘There are many spades,’
observed Mme Dessain. ‘And there is an ace of spades, Madame.’ I was puzzled as
to why she insisted on addressing me as ‘Madame’ when I was plainly ‘Mademoiselle’.
I was dealing the third cycle. In my conjuring out of the meaning of cards I
never go by the tradition. It is true that no one is delighted by the ace of
spades but it does not necessarily mean a personal death. It might mean the
death of a hope, or the end of a fear. Everything depends on the combination.
Anyway, I was dealing the third cycle. I said, ‘Leave it to me,’ and finished.

Now I gathered up Mme
Dessain’s cards.

‘Will the rain never
stop?’ said Mme Dessain, her eyes wandering to the enormous french windows. She
was putting this on, this absent air as if she didn’t care in the least about her
fortune.

‘Concentrate on your
wish, Madame,’ I said.

‘Oh, I am concentrating.
The rain is a tourist attraction if they like the flooded fields, very
beautiful.’ So she laughed off her fortune-telling, but I could see she was
eager, even a little agitated. Her husband, too, watched with care. I wanted to
remind them it was only a game, but I refrained; I didn’t want to bring their
nervousness to light.

I dealt the cards under
their seven headings, which naturally I didn’t pronounce. Thirteen cards had emerged
from the process of selection. I noticed the high proportion of court cards in Mme
Dessain’s set.

Now, in the first round
to her secret self, came up the eight of spades, to her known self the six of
spades.

‘Spades in my wish!’
said Mme Dessain immediately.

‘Have patience,’ I said,
still setting forth the cards. It was obvious to me now that she was trying to
penetrate my method for when I put down the king of hearts she said, ‘a fair,
handsome lover.’ But I gave no sign, although I felt annoyed at the
interruption.

Her cards finally came
out as follows:

Secret self: eight of spades and six of clubs

Known self: six of spades and nine of diamonds

Things hoped for: king of hearts and ace of spades

Self-ignorance: five of hearts and king of clubs

Present destination: queen of hearts and three of hearts

Affairs of the heart: queen of clubs and three of diamonds

The wish: knave of hearts.

Mme Dessain was really
perplexed. She saw all seven sets of cards placed out before her, but she had
no way of guessing the private headings I had placed them under. Her eyes were
bright upon the cards as if she were telling my fortune, not me hers.

‘You have got your wish,’
I said at once, seeing that she had come in for one card only, the knave of
hearts, under that heading, and there was no opposition. ‘However, it is a wish
that you should not have made.’

‘Which cards represent
my wish?’ she asked, almost in a panic, strange for such a grand lady.

I wouldn’t tell her. I
smiled at her and said, ‘This is only a game, after all.’

She put on an air that
she was pacified, pulled together. But I could see that she was not.

Altogether, from this
moment what her cards told me was one thing and what I told her was another. I
had reason to be cautious. As I looked at the whole picture that was formed by
the seven groups of cards it was at first a coloured mass, changing into a
tableau of patterns until one idea protruded larger and more brilliantly than
the others. And so, it appeared to me all in a quick moment that Mme Dessain was
herself a natural clairvoyant; she was able to read my mind perhaps better than
I was able to read her cards. What had been to me a laughing matter, a game,
seemed now to veer rather dangerously towards myself, and I knew that her wish
had been in some way connected with me. I say connected with me, not directed
at me, because there was something indirect about it; at the same time it was
distinctly malevolent.

I braved out the
performance. I told her a certain amount of nonsense, but as I spoke I could see
she discerned that I wasn’t as frank as I might have been. More specifically
than before I could now see under the heading of the secret self that she was
clairvoyant.

Now, for instance, I
looked at the known self in a special way. I felt that her very attractive,
haggard and aristocratic appeal was by no means as artless as it had seemed
when she was working around the outhouses or busy with the vast baronial pans
in the great stone kitchen. She looked airily up at the beautiful windows, now,
those tall windows with leaded corners. I was aware of her husband’s attention
upon her and thought he seemed jealous, wondering what had been her wish and
looking for her reaction to everything I said.

I continued to say many
sweet things with a grain of what seemed probable. ‘You are hoping,’ I said, ‘for
a visit from a tall bearded man, I should imagine an Englishman, who has an
interest in gardening —’Indeed I received from Mme Dessain’s cards a very
strong premonition concerning the garden.

‘That’s Camillo, our
odd-job man,’ said the anxious husband. ‘He’s been away for five days, and he’s
overdue. But he’s Italian.’

‘Alain!’ rebuked Mme
Dessain. ‘Let Mme Lucy continue.’

I continued. It did seem
to me very plainly that Mme Dessain had set her heart on a visitor. He would be
about her age, probably an American or an Englishman (he could have been a
German but for the fact it was extremely unlikely that a woman of Mme Dessain’s
age and ethos would have a German lover). She was, however, moving towards this
love affair full tilt. I was sure he had been a guest at the château, certainly
married then, if not now, and decidedly rich. It was a disastrous enough attachment
for her house and family.

All this I saw, and Mme
Dessain knew that I saw it. What she was unaware of, or was bound by her
infatuation to ignore, was the vast amount of bother and anxiety this course
was leading her to. Her husband, though not in the least faithful to her, would
make nothing but bitterness of the affair.

‘You may be unaware that
certain benefits will come to the house as a result of your visitor’s
appearance,’ I said. And I told her the visitor would be poor, and warned her
against unforeseen expenditure. The husband rejoiced to hear these words, and I
wound up, ‘Tomorrow you will receive a very important family letter,’ — one of
the few honest comments on Mme Dessain’s cards that I chose to make. Indeed, I thought
it was harmless, for the husband said, ‘That will be from our son, Charles,’
and Mme Dessain once more cried out ‘Alain! You interrupt.’

I said, ‘I’ve finished.’

Mme Dessain was looking
beyond me. ‘Here comes Madame’s husband,’ she said ambiguously; anyway, I
looked round and saw Raymond approaching. I guessed he had quarrelled with
Sylvia who, leaving the room, looked round smiling with that deplorable angry
leer of hers, which quite ruined her appearance.

I left next day. The
tense atmosphere between my married friends was not to be borne by me. When I
went to pay my bill Mme Dessain sent a maid to take the money and with the message
that she was occupied.

But Raymond came running
after me as my luggage went into the taxi. His face was fairly frantic. It
struck me that he would have been rather handsome without his beard.

‘Lucy,’ he said. ‘Lucy.’

‘I’m sorry, Raymond. But
I have to go.

He was really
inarticulate and I thought it quite civil of him to feel for me and my
embarrassment at being on the scene of a messed-up marriage.

‘Lucy.’

‘My apologies to Sylvia,’
I said. ‘She’ll understand.’

That was the last I saw
of Raymond, watching my taxi depart, as he did.

Everything but the
physical memory of the lovely château went far away to the back of my mind in
the general nuisance of changing my holiday plans. The next week I returned to
London and took up my life. Mme Dessain and the telling of her cards slept
latent for year after year, but with each detail regularly arranged in case it
should ever be needed, as is the way with memory.

Some time over the
following year I heard that Sylvia and Raymond had finally separated; I was
told that Sylvia was married again, to a social worker much younger than
herself, and that after the divorce Raymond had given up his good job and gone
to live abroad. Abroad is a big place and the rumours were equally too large
and amorphous for me to take any account of, so busy with my own life as I was.
When occasionally I thought of that holiday I shared with them I thought of the
beautiful château, but a cloud came over my thoughts when I remembered how
uncomfortable I felt as the third party. I didn’t know till much later that
they stayed on at the château for another week.

Not long ago I came across M. Dessain. I
didn’t recognize him at first. I was aware only of a little wizened man walking
out of the Black Forest at Baden-Baden. I should say that it isn’t unusual for
anything whatsoever to walk out of the Black Forest, so I took no particular
notice. Moreover he was dressed in beige, and I might say that every visitor to
Baden-Baden wears beige, both men and women. Their clothes and their shoes are
beige and their faces are beige; in which respect they are quite lovable.

But I noticed him again
that day seated alone at a lunch table in the dining room of my hotel. Even
then, I failed to see anything familiar about him; I only noticed that he
looked at me once or twice, briefly, but in a decidedly curious way.

That evening I was
sitting in the public room of the hotel playing with my cards. I was alone,
waiting for a friend to join me there the next day. I shuffled my cards and
dealt them out in my own style which seems so haphazard; I don’t ever tell my
own fortune, but I can’t keep away from the cards. I shuffle and deal and see
what comes up, and in the meantime my ideas take form as if the cards were a
sort of sacrament, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
grace,’ as the traditional definition goes.

Up to me at my table
came the wizened guest, him of the Black Forest. He sat down on the edge of a
sofa, watching me. I felt he was sad, and I was about to ask him if he would
like me to tell his fortune.

‘Mlle Lucy,’ he said.

Then I recognized him,
the once chubby little husband of Mme Dessain, and I saw how the years had
withered him. In all its formal detail of ten years ago or more, I remembered
the features of the room in the château where I told Mme Dessain’s fortune
while she, intense and distressed, perceived in her clairvoyance all that I was
about. I remembered the two chess players sitting quietly apart, the tall
shapes of Sylvia and Raymond moving away impatiently from the scene, the worn
floral fabric on the chairs. I wondered if Mme Dessain’s lover had
materialized, and I recalled vaguely some of my light-hearted predictions which
hadn’t fooled Mme Dessain one bit. ‘You are hoping for a visit from a tall,
bearded Englishman, interested in the garden.’ And my own sincere prediction, ‘You
will have a family letter.’

I looked at M. Dessain
and said, ‘What a long time ago. Are you on holiday?’

‘I am here for my
health.’

‘How is Mme Dessain?’ I
said.

‘She does very well. As
you predicted, the letter came next day.’

‘Oh, dear. I hope it was
a good letter.’

‘Yes. It came from her
cousin Claude. It announced his engagement. I was delighted, because Claude was
my wife’s lover.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well,
that must have solved a problem for you, M. Dessain.’

‘It was a good thing for
Claude,’ he said. ‘And a good thing for you, Mlle Lucy.’

‘For me?’

‘My wife changed your
destiny,’ said the said and withered man. He repeated, ‘Your destiny, Mlle
Lucy. She saw that you were destined to marry your friend Raymond, and she
intervened.’

‘Marry Raymond? I never
thought of such a thing. There was nothing at all between us. He was on bad
terms with his wife but that had nothing to do with me.

‘Nevertheless, my wife
foresaw the outcome. You would have married Raymond, but after your departure,
before the week was out she had him for her new lover. He is still at the
château. She forestalled your destiny.’

‘Not my destiny, then,’
I said, ‘only my destination.’ And seeing that he looked so sad and so beige, I
asked, ‘Would you like me to tell your fortune, M. Dessain?’

He didn’t answer the
question. He only said, ‘Raymond is very good in the garden and in the grounds.’

The Fathers’
Daughters

She left the old man in his deck-chair on
the front, having first adjusted the umbrella awning with her own hand, and,
with her own hand, put his panama hat at a comfortable angle. The beach
attendant had been sulky, but she didn’t see why one should lay out tips only
for adjusting an umbrella and a panama hat. Since the introduction of the new
franc it was impossible to tip less than a franc. There seemed to be a
conspiracy all along the coast to hide the lesser coins from the visitors, and
one could only find franc pieces in one’s purse, and one had to be careful not
to embarrass Father, and one …