Providence Page 7

  They turned down a small alley and stopped outside a mean front door painted bottle green. As Caroline rang the bell a cat, startled, plunged off the windowsill, knocking over two milk bottles. While Kitty was picking these up and restoring them to their rightful place by the step, the door opened and a neat-looking elderly woman – Madame Eva, Kitty thought to herself with a thrill of shame – appeared. ‘Hello, my darling,’ she said to Caroline. ‘Brought your friend, have you?’ Caroline made the introductions as if she were at a rather smart party. ‘Madame Eva,’ she said, taking the woman’s hand. ‘I want you to meet my friend, Miss Mortimer.’ Kitty took a deep breath. She supposed that having an abortion was something like this. ‘How do you do?’ she heard herself saying. ‘I shan’t keep you long. By the way, my name is Maule. Kitty Maule.’ She was aware of some asperity in her manner, and took another deep breath. ‘I’ll see you at home later, Caroline.’ Caroline’s face fell. Madame Eva turned a mild but shrewd glance in her direction. ‘Why don’t you wait next door, in the café?’ she said. ‘Then you can go home together.’ Anything to get this over, thought Kitty. I should never have come. I should have stayed at home with Adolphe and the Romantic Tradition. That is where I belong. But she had ventured so far outside her role that she could do nothing but follow the woman into the house, while Caroline waved encouragingly and turned her tottering footsteps towards the antique market. Kitty knew that the moment she was out of sight she would resume her normal brisk tread. As indeed she did.

  Madame Eva’s consulting room was small, dark, dingy, indeterminate and oddly comfortable. It represented perhaps the ultimate mess or primal ooze from which vatic female pronouncements would appropriately emerge. Dirty cushions softened the shapes of a couple of sagging armchairs, two of them placed in close proximity. A radio was playing very softly, a cat was asleep under a table, and on another table lay the remains of a frugal lunch. Madame Eva herself looked like the headmistress of a decent primary school. She was reassuringly plump, neatly groomed, and spotlessly clean; indeed she was rather attractively dressed in a loose flowered smock, which reinforced the infants’ school image, with her spectacles hanging on a chain round her neck. She moved slowly and with great deliberation, switching off the radio, getting rid of the cat, settling herself in one armchair while motioning Kitty to the other. Reaching into a leatherette shopping bag by the side of her chair she brought out a Thermos flask and a mug and poured herself a quantity of orange tea. While she sipped this, she studied Kitty’s face. Kitty forced herself to look steadily back. This was an initiation ten times worse than her lecture would be. Thank God Maurice will never know about this, she thought. The woman smiled. ‘Thinking of your boyfriend?’ she said.

  Because the room was so dark, Kitty was aware of the brightness and stillness of the afternoon. Sunlight glinted off the rim of the woman’s spectacles, and the warmth brought a comfortable frowsty odour out of the cushions. She did not know how long she had been there, while Madame Eva sipped her tea, and did not much care. She felt oddly safe, for this was a secret place. A total silence enveloped her, a silence ultimately broken only by the small cawing noise of the Thermos flask being screwed up. This was set aside on the table, ready for further libations. Then the hand descended again into the leatherette bag and produced a small crystal ball.

  Madame Eva leaned over Kitty’s cupped hands. ‘I see a man,’ she said. Her voice was not up to the standard of her appearance, held indeed the faint whine of the professional gipsy. Kitty’s heart began to beat rather hard. With alarm and surprise she felt herself surrendering to the occasion. ‘A man,’ repeated Madame Eva. ‘Very tall. Nice looking. Clever. You met him through your work.’ Kitty nodded. The woman breathed heavily. ‘Now I’m getting a relative. Elderly lady. Bit of trouble there. But not yet. In the future. Be prepared. I see a foreign city.’ She stopped abruptly and wiped a little moisture from the sides of her mouth. ‘Doesn’t half take it out of you, this work,’ she said to Kitty. ‘Sometimes in the evenings I can’t even do me hair, I’m so tired.’ Her hair, a heavily lacquered pyramid the colour of dirty brass, evidently took some doing. She bent over Kitty’s hands again. ‘I see a tall building. Like a church. I see you going in. Might be a wedding. Don’t think so. Might be. I can’t see. Hang on, darling, I’ll have a drop more tea.’

  The Thermos flask was unscrewed once more. Cathedrals of France, thought Kitty, it can only mean that. The heat in the room became more intense, generated apparently by the efforts of the woman to put her thoughts into words. For although Kitty was impressed by her insights, she was distracted by Madame Eva’s evident inarticulacy. As a teacher she found herself rephrasing the information, and felt it growing richer as she did so.

  ‘You’re very clever,’ said the fortune teller. ‘There’s a lot of success ahead. You’ve no need to worry about money. You’ll be well looked after. Even more in the future.’ Kitty was not interested in this information, for she possessed it already. But she supposed it was just this that people came to hear.

  The woman turned the crystal ball in Kitty’s palms. ‘I keep getting this big building. And this foreign city.’ She looked at Kitty over the tops of her glasses. ‘Were you thinking of going abroad?’ Kitty found herself nodding, appalled and enthralled at the prospects opening in front of her. ‘That’s it, then,’ said Madame Eva. ‘You’re going away somewhere.’ She breathed heavily again. ‘I see a lady. Your mother? Has she passed?’ Kitty looked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Mother,’ repeated the woman. ‘Has she passed on?’ Kitty nodded again, her throat thickening. This surprised her, for she had never wept for her mother, had never dared to. Did not even dare to think of Marie-Thérèse as her mother. The conjunction of the person and the concept would have moved her in a way she could not afford to imagine. ‘Mother’s watching,’ said Madame Eva. Tears spilled over from Kitty’s eyes. ‘All right, darling,’ said Madame Eva. ‘Mother’s watching.’

  She sat back with a sigh and poured out the last dregs of tea from her flask. ‘Was there anything you wanted to ask me, dear?’

  ‘Tell me about the man,’ said Kitty, lost to all sense of propriety.

  Madame Eva sighed again and bent once more over the crystal ball. ‘I think he loves you,’ she said. ‘But it’s not clear. Someone’s holding him back. Is he married?’

  Kitty shook her head, unable to speak.

  ‘He’s connected to someone,’ said the medium. ‘A girl.’ She seemed suddenly abstracted. ‘Very clever,’ she said vaguely. ‘Ends badly.’ This meant nothing to Kitty but echoed her own feelings about the Lucy story. ‘He’s clever, and all,’ said the woman with a sudden return of sharpness. ‘Try your luck, dear. Try your luck abroad.’

  Kitty handed over ten pounds in a daze of gratitude. She crept out into the sun-struck alley on shaking legs, her course of action at last clear to her. Without noticing, she found herself wandering into the antique market, where a blaze of colour indicated Caroline, perched on a stool, with two cups of tea waiting. All this tea, thought Kitty, but drank it gratefully. Her hands, she was not surprised to note, were trembling. I must grow up, she thought. I must stop being so humble. I can make decisions and initiate actions like anyone else. I am not stupid. I am not poor. If I want to do something I do not have to wait for permission. I am old enough to make up my own mind. My mother was a widow at eighteen. My father was a corpse at twenty-one. I am wasting time. I shall waste no more.

  ‘Well?’ said Caroline.

  ‘She’s good,’ said Kitty soberly, although she could no longer remember precisely what she had been told. She remembered the little room, and the sunlight glinting off the spectacles, and the smell of the cushions, and the improbably coiffed hair bending over the crystal ball in front of her. She had gathered no information but some kind of shift in her consciousness had taken place.

  She found it difficult to tell Caroline, who of course had to be told, what she herself had heard. She remembered with a stab of alarm what Madam
e Eva had said about an elderly relative, and resolved to go and see her grandparents that evening and not to wait until the weekend. She felt tired and sad and somehow older.

  ‘But what about your boyfriend?’ Caroline persisted. This was what it was all about, in her opinion. This was the point of visiting Madame Eva in the first place.

  There was an odd obscurity surrounding what Madame Eva had said about Maurice. She had grasped the essentials of his situation, of the circumstances of their meeting; she had seen Lucy. She had mentioned love. She had seen his ‘marriage’, still, apparently, in operation. She had seen them abroad. A church. A large church. A cathedral, in fact.

  ‘She didn’t say much,’ Kitty told Caroline, to the latter’s evident disappointment.

  Kitty felt a sudden warmth for Caroline, who had taken the trouble to dress up simply in order to sit in the malodorous antique market, when she could have been putting in an afternoon at Harrods. But as Caroline wound and unwound her scarf, putting the final touches to her appearance for the short journey home, Kitty knew that she could not tolerate playing the supporting role any longer.

  ‘I’ll have to leave you here,’ she said. ‘I want to go over and see my grandmother. If I go now, I can just beat the rush hour.’ She marvelled at her own ruthlessness, and as Caroline’s expression darkened – for she was upset, she had not heard what she wanted to hear – Kitty leaned forward and kissed her, a thing she had never done before, and turned resolutely out into the sunny street, and, after a minute, was on a bus to Victoria.

  During the short but tedious journey to her grandparents’ house, Kitty Maule reflected on her present situation. Now that the emotion was ebbing away (but leaving her very tired), she thought pityingly of her former passivity, her illusion that time would sort out the present, that she need only wait, feeding on the sort of hope represented by a random passage from her mother’s Bible. But I must act, she thought. I am a total bore as I am. A nonentity. Not even a pawn in the game. She began to review her clothes, mentally consigning those which were safe and neutral and represented her grandmother’s outdated notions of classic good taste to the back of her cupboard. All around her in the train were girls not much younger than herself in trousers and pullovers, their hair long and unkempt and naturally untidy, their faces bare of artifice. Kitty in fact thought they might look better with a little make-up, with a little more effort. But I may be wrong, she said to herself. I may be too static, too formal.

  She put her key in the lock of her grandparents’ house, and heard voices raised in enquiry, in French. Then the television was turned off. An exquisite aromatic smell drifted out from under the door of their living room. As she opened it, she met Papa’s alarmed face on the other side.

  ‘What is it, Thérèse?’ he said. ‘Are you ill, my darling?’

  She gave him the bunch of narcissus she had bought at the florist’s next to the station. She kissed him. ‘I just felt like seeing you,’ she said. His face flooded with his great final-curtain smile.

  Kitty saw them both, with napkins tied round their necks, butter smeared on their chins, the leaves of artichokes discarded on an extra plate between the two of them. They had been eating in front of the television, for they no longer bothered much with the formalities of living. Louise, Kitty noted with relief, did not look particularly ill. She did not look particularly well, either. She had become enormously stout, and tended to wear the same dusty black dress all the time, a small crocheted triangular shawl, like that of a concierge, around her shoulders. Louise noted her glance. She smiled, but her eyes narrowed slightly.

  ‘Eh, oui,’ she conceded. ‘Nous dinons en grande toilette, comme d’habitude.’

  After which they all laughed. Kitty laughed in gratitude, for her grandmother was undiminished. Madame Eva had said there was no need to worry yet. And indeed there was no time. She decided to postpone Pauline Bentley’s invitation to the following weekend; she would be the daughter at home again, once more. Perhaps for not much longer, she thought.

  Together they watched a television programme about baby seals. The heartfelt commentary, destined to awake their compassion, fell on deaf ears, for Louise thought that sealskin made a marvellous coat for the older woman, and Vadim and Kitty were not listening anyway.

  When she left them, after a cup of tisane, it was dark, but she was aware that the year was opening up, that the blue dusk was not so impenetrable as it had been. Easter, which was late, would soon be here. A faint keen sharpness, rather than a smell, was in the air, from uncurling privet buds. On an impulse, she took the one taxi outside the station and rode all the way back to Old Church Street. At home, Caroline’s radio was too loud, as usual, but she could afford to ignore that now. Without taking off her coat, she went to the telephone and dialled Maurice’s number. There was no answer. She wandered into the kitchen and ate an apple, then into her bedroom. She was oddly nervous, her earlier resolution faltering now that she was back in familiar surroundings. She tried Maurice’s number again. Still no answer. She took a bath, ate another apple, got into bed and tried to read. Shortly after eleven, she telephoned again. This time he answered immediately.

  ‘Maurice,’ she said. ‘Am I disturbing you? It’s Kitty, by the way.’

  ‘I know it’s Kitty,’ he said mildly. ‘What can I do for you?’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘I’ve decided to go to Paris to work on my lecture a bit. There are one or two things I need to look up. Can we meet there?’

  He laughed. ‘That might be a bit difficult, my dear. I’m driving around, as you know. When will you be there?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Kitty. ‘But it seems so silly, our being practically in the same place and not meeting.’ She was aware that she was pleading and took hold of herself.

  ‘If you’re going to do Saint-Denis, you’ll have to come through Paris. Although,’ she added scrupulously, ‘Saint-Denis is an abbey church, not a cathedral.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he pondered. ‘But I do love all those tombs.’ There was a silence. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I could pick you up on my way back. Where will you be?’

  ‘At the Hotel West End,’ she said. ‘Just off the Avenue Montaigne.’ She had already decided this in the taxi.

  He laughed. ‘Ridiculous Kitty. But it would be nice. I’ll give you a call there at the end of the month, then.’ And he rang off.

  Kitty Maule slept badly that night. But the following morning she woke up with renewed energy and began to make further plans.

  SEVEN

  Kitty, who had become rather thin, looked at her pale face in the glass and decided after all to accept Pauline Bentley’s invitation for the weekend, hoping that she might return to London looking rosy and refreshed. The whole point of this was to appear in a good light when she got to Paris. She did not know Pauline Bentley well but they enjoyed the unsentimental abstracted comradeship of those who understand each other’s work. Pauline Bentley lived with her mother in a cottage in Gloucestershire, and to Kitty Gloucestershire was hallowed ground. I might as well familiarize myself with the layout, she thought, as if Gloucestershire were a piece of research.

  As indeed it seemed to be. For as she sat in the train, and the mild country opened out on either side of her, she searched herself in vain for a response to nature that would do honour to one whose subject was the Romantic Tradition, and found none. But maybe this is the wrong terrain, she thought. Romantic heroes always seem to be wandering among ruins or cataracts or mountains; the weather is stormy or it is nightfall; they have been thinking about immortality or going mad; they wear dishevelled frock-coats and have one foot braced against a rock; and, as is well known, they think it better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Nature imposes such obligations upon them to understand it or rather her. Nature, the great female corollary to God, is as uncomprehending and as incomprehensible as her masculine analogue. This Kitty understood. She also understood the need to get closer to both, to scan them fo
r a meaning or for an answer. If possible for an answer. But any response was usually one of their own fabrication and so that argument was circular. On the whole, she thought, looking out gravely on to the sunlit fields, there is less obfuscation when nature is out of the way. The author of Adolphe is entirely correct when he sets his story ‘dans la petite ville de D——’. I hadn’t realized how very clever the book was. Everything in it is accurate and pitiless, and contained in the author’s own reflections. There are no objective correlatives. There are no answers. And there are no excuses, either.

  Pauline Bentley was waiting at the small station, dressed in her usual tweed suit, a King Charles spaniel seated mournfully at her feet. At the sight of Pauline, a thin clever woman, Kitty was once again reminded of what awaited her if her life failed to change. Pauline was a gifted and honourable teacher but she was admired rather than liked, for years of hiding her feelings had made her sarcastic, unsentimental, in a way that was good for departmental efficiency but bad for students looking for the sort of glamorous governess figure they were prepared to tolerate in a female tutor. Pauline lived with her widowed mother, who was nearly blind; she drove from the university every night to this small place, with the shopping in the back of the car. When she got home, she would switch on the lights, for it made no difference to her mother whether she sat in the dark or not, put a match to the fire, and cook the dinner. Her mother liked to hear all the news. She had been a distinguished don herself, and prided herself on keeping in touch. She found her daughter praiseworthy but unambitious, and urged her constantly to publish more. Washing up in the chilly kitchen, Pauline would shift from one aching foot to the other and think only of her electric blanket and the World Service of the B.B.C. which would keep her company through her increasingly sleepless nights. She was glad that Kitty had come down to take some of the weight off her shoulders.