Providence Read online

  At this distance and in this context Maurice took on a superhuman, almost a metaphysical significance for Kitty. His brilliance and ease, his seeming physical invulnerability, the elevated character of his decisions, the distances he covered, his power of choice and strength of resolve, cast him in the guise of the unfettered man, the mythic hero, the deliverer. For the woman whom Maurice would deliver would be saved for ever from the fate of that grim daughter, whose bare white legs and dull shoes, designed perhaps for some antediluvian hike or ramble, continued to register in Kitty’s mind’s eye. Maurice’s choice would be spared the humiliations that lie in wait for the unclaimed woman. She would have a life of splendour, raising sons. Ah! thought Kitty with anguish, the white wedding, the flowers. How can it be me? How could it be me?

  These thoughts came rarely but when they came they terrified her with their force. She saw her life, all physical geography removed, as an inexorable progress towards further loneliness. The relics of her past, of that very modest graft that had produced her, had already died away, leaving little trace. More deaths would follow. The silence in Old Church Street, broken only by the sounds of Caroline’s radio – but could she even count on Caroline? – would settle in like a long winter. And the Romantic Tradition, growing ever longer and more elaborate, would have to fill her days. I cannot bear it, she thought. I must make it come right, for I shall love no one else. There must be a place left for me, in the gaps left by the cathedrals of France. It must happen soon. She opened her eyes and looked at the sunny deserted garden, heard the sound of the traffic rumbling along the Embankment. Je joue le tout pour le tout, she thought.

  Her other self, the wise and shrewd self that had come from her grandmother, argued that she had made a good move in deciding to go to France, where she would appear to her advantage, at ease, almost at home. Propinquity, relaxation, meals and conversation shared, would cement their unaltered, their unalterable friendship. And perhaps more. For she had no idea how Maurice felt, had in fact never known. The lightness with which he treated their intimacy had thrilled her with its strangeness, for it was so unlike the brash and noisy attentions of Louise’s great-nephew, Jean-Claude, her only other lover. Jean-Claude the insistent, the athletic, the educational partner of her earlier visits to France, the one selected by Louise as a suitable husband. Jean-Claude the student, in his cheap hotel room with the shirt flung to the end of the bed and the remains of a slice of ham curling up in its greasy paper on the rickety table by the window. In vain she would try to entice him out for an evening walk, for a Sunday excursion, for she was sentimental and delicate like her mother. He would look at her in disbelief, would consent only, with much grumbling, to sit at a café for half an hour and drink coffee while she watched the crowds. He was vain, thin, bad-tempered, inexhaustible, and intrusive. He was going to be a brilliant lawyer. He thought it masculine to make a show of jealousy every time she went out, and on her return (for she could not help returning to that hotel room) he treated her as if she had been unfaithful. For a time she had thought his feral energy the most exciting quality in the world. In retrospect it had become devalued by Maurice’s delicate and inaccessible secrecy, his silence, the archaic smile which was her after-image of his every visit.

  After her last visit to Paris and to Jean-Claude Louise had assessed the situation and had given up her earlier plans for Kitty. Like mother, like daughter, she thought: it will be an Englishman. And she looked with detachment, with the sadness of remembrance, on Kitty’s dreamy nature, her willing hard work, her filial visits, even her uncertain appetite – all indications of the same character that Marie-Thérèse had so perfectly inhabited. It will be an Englishman, she had said to Vadim. ‘But not yet!’ he replied in alarm. Louise shrugged. ‘She is twenty-four. But that is all right, for men mature late in this country.’ And she had said as much to Kitty, who had every reason to believe her.

  But five years had passed since then, and both Kitty and her grandmother had felt an unstated alarm when nothing happened, when the avatar of John Maule failed to materialize and claim his bride. Louise watched, hiding her disappointment, and even when that disappointment hardened into contempt, she still watched. She designed clothes for Kitty and urged her to eat, to put on weight, for Kitty still looked as slight and as virginal as her mother had done. Kitty felt the burden of her grandmother’s supervision and knew that although Vadim was delighted to have her still at home, Louise could not wait for her to be gone, so that she could die in peace. For as long as that relic of a daughter remained, Louise must remain to protect her.

  Feeling in sudden need of protection in the small sunny stony garden, Kitty rose and turned her steps towards home. She would take her books back to the flat and then visit her grandparents for a cup of tea. In the flat – suddenly dark after the brightness outside – she found a postcard from Maurice, a view of the Christ in Majesty from the tympanum of the west door of Autun. She turned it over quickly. ‘Enchanting so far. Have heard some marvellous singing. A bientôt.’ His tiny even handwriting affected her like a powerful shock. How I miss him, she thought, when I know he is physically out of my reach. How dull I am without him. But I shall see him soon. A bientôt.

  Her usual reaction to Maurice was a tremor compounded of fear and longing followed by a mood of intense exhilaration. Waiting by the window, card in hand, for her heart beats to subside, she saw Caroline, in yellow, making her way in the direction, she supposed, of Harrods. A sudden desire to move in crowds, to disperse her tremendous feelings, to share her golden prospects, impelled her towards the telephone. She dialled her grandparents’ number. ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘Get ready. We are going out. I shall collect you in a taxi and we shall make a little tour.’ Intense silence followed this pronouncement. ‘Papa,’ urged Kitty. ‘There is no need to dress up. We shall simply take advantage of the fine weather and come back when you are tired. Yes, I know she doesn’t go out. But she will not have to walk anywhere. And just think how much good it will do her.’ She was resolute and saw no reason why she should not be.

  When she got to her grandparents’ house she saw them from the window of the taxi, waiting for her on the doorstep, their faces stern with anxiety. Vadim, exceptionally, wore a tie, knotted with force and precision, Louise had stoically splashed some powder over her face and changed into a smart but outmoded black silk coat and painful black shoes. She stood, breathing heavily and with some difficulty, her hand under Vadim’s arm. He, his brown eyes darting to either side, was eager, nervous, torn between his fear for Louise and his desire to see the shops, the streets, the people whom he so craved and whom he had abandoned without a murmur. ‘Maman Louise,’ said Kitty, embracing her, ‘don’t look like that. It is just a little drive. You must not get bored and sit there smoking all day. We will take care of you.’ Louise smiled faintly. Kitty took her other hand, pressed it, kissed it. Louise smiled again. ‘Vilaine,’ she murmured. And they got into the taxi.

  They drove slowly through the brilliant empty afternoon streets of their suburb. They said nothing. Louise sat upright, between them, very straight, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. Vadim and Kitty, on either side of her, stole glances at her from time to time and after a while exchanged congratulatory looks. Louise’s breathing steadied, and gradually she relaxed. She saw the buses, the small patient queues, the children coming out of school. Corner shops, an abandoned playground, and then the river, wide and dirty, the city opening out. ‘Where would you like to go?’ asked Kitty. ‘Would you like to go to Kenwood? Or to St James’s Park? We could have tea there.’ Louise took a long breath, looked at Vadim, looked at Kitty, patted her mouth with her handkerchief which smelt of the violet scent she had always used, and said with a sigh, ‘Grosvenor Street.’

  In Park Lane, Louise held their hands tightly against the speed and whine of the traffic, then sat up straighter, and began to look intently out of the window. Vadim, his face creased with smiling, made an elaborate gesture of triumph at Kitty. Finally
Louise relaxed, lit a cigarette, and assumed something of her old air of dominance, preparing to pass in review what Grosvenor Street had to offer that spring. The brick façade of the house in which they had had the salon was unchanged, but the street was choked with parked cars, and seemed to be more full of men with briefcases than of elegant women. The success of the visit was assured when they saw a young girl emerging from the house. ‘Blue jeans!’ expostulated Louise. ‘Tu vois, Vadim? Never in my day. And the pullover tied round the waist! Like an artisan!’ ‘All my students dress like that,’ said Kitty. ‘Mais c’était une demoiselle,’ protested Louise. ‘Mais c’est la dégringolade, quoi?’ She sat up again, superb, her indignation giving her new life. Vadim patted her swollen hand. ‘Ma Louisette, our time was different. Of quality. You were the last. And the best.’

  They refused tea, seemed wedded to the hot taxi, in which all the windows had to be kept closed. ‘And the foreigners!’ said Louise with indignation. Kitty smiled. ‘They are tourists,’ she assured her. ‘And where would you like to go now? It’s getting late. We don’t want to be caught in the traffic.’ Vadim and Louise exchanged a look, and turned to Kitty with supplication in their eyes. ‘Percy Street,’ they said in unison.

  They marvelled at the hot dog and ice cream stands in Park Lane, they shuddered at the thought of the underground car park, they winced at the confusion of cars and buses, they shrank back appalled at the somnambulistic shoppers in Oxford Street. They could not understand how different types of rock music could be blaring from all the doorways at once. ‘La dégringolade,’ repeated Louise. In Soho, Vadim screwed up his eyes in ecstasy, imagining the smells, imagining his younger self springing along the pavements. The house in Percy Street was just the same and Kitty ordered the taxi to stop. Suddenly everything seemed quiet, the sunlight fading into a serene and melancholy grey. ‘Would you like to walk a bit?’ she asked. They did not answer. Their hands were tightly entwined. ‘Tu te souviens, ma Louise?’ murmured Vadim. ‘Everything,’ said Louise, in a voice that Kitty had never heard before. ‘I remember everything.’

  Kitty left them sitting in the taxi and came back five minutes later with a cake in a cardboard box, a half pound of mushrooms, and some yellow tulips. She had never felt so close to them, to their strange beginnings, their even stranger exile. A red sun was already low on the horizon, signalling the end of the day she had thought would be busy with her own life. Maurice’s card was in her bag but she did not think of it. It was impossible to correlate the culture that had produced Giselbertus of Autun, the sculptor of the tympanum on the west door, with the culture that had produced her grandmother – yet they were the same. Kitty felt dizzy with the need to reconcile all these elements: Maurice’s France, her grandmother’s France, the France of the Romantic Tradition, the France of the greatly desired next two weeks, in which her own fate would be decided. She was tired, she thought; she longed to get home, to sit in her own silent street, and think of herself. For she felt peripheral, felt her personality dissolving in the strong solution of the past, felt her needs to be irrelevant.

  Back in the taxi, their hands still clasped, her grandparents seemed at peace. They had little to say on the return journey, and were clearly exhausted by the emotion that had come to them that afternoon. But it had been a necessary exercise, thought Kitty. Here was something to pit against the television serials, the fashion magazines, the concierge’s shawl. Here was proof that they had been young, that they had been vigorous and confident; that without them, decline had set in. Thank you, my dear heart, said her grandfather, for a beautiful afternoon. Beautiful, beautiful, said her grandmother.

  But on the pavement they seemed very old, stood swaying a little, glad to be home. The quietness of their street, previously despised, was now welcome, and the ghost of Marie-Thérèse required their presence. Kitty helped their slow steps into the house, took Louise’s coat, and sat them down. For a while they sat in the darkening room without speaking, too full of remembrance to bother with the present. ‘Do you want the television on?’ asked Kitty. She looked with love and pity at her surroundings, the grey fake Louis XV tables and chairs with which Louise had furnished her salon and which now stood ranged, in the French style, against the walls. She saw the opaque bowl of the low-watted ceiling light, and the dusty tulle at the windows. In the dark bedroom, she knew, there was a grey fur rug on the bed which remained in place winter and summer. ‘Vadim,’ said her grandmother, ‘let us have a glass of your mixture.’ For Vadim brewed a strange and extremely potent plum brandy in a glass jar which stood in the corner of the kitchen. From time to time this exploded, filling the flat with a heady smell which never quite dispersed. It was an excellent restorative, said Vadim, but he could rarely persuade them to drink it.

  They sat at the oval table, under the dim ceiling light, the cake unpacked from its box and divided into portions which they ate with spoons. They drank the sticky liqueur from small glasses. The faces of the old people looked drawn in the bad light; they were sombre and impassive, for they had much to think about. Kitty knew that they would go to bed as soon as she left. And now she was very tired herself, longing for a bath and her own bed, where she would read Maurice’s postcard over and over again. She cleared her throat. ‘You know I am going to Paris next week,’ she said. ‘I don’t know when I shall be back. But I’ll telephone every day, as usual.’ Louise sighed, and said, ‘Wear the grey for travelling. Grey is always correct in Paris.’ She seemed listless, uninterested. When Kitty rose to go, leaving them at the table, Louise recovered something of her asperity and examined Kitty. The girl seemed no older than she had done five years ago. But Louise knew that there would be no Jean-Claude on the scene now, and she sensed that there might be someone else. Nothing had been said. But Louise knew the signs: the desire to please, the preoccupation at the back of the eyes, the involuntary half-smile. And the watchfulness, the control. The determination to make the most out of what might be very little. And the evenings when she telephoned very early, as if to get the call out of the way. Louise sensed the love in her grand-daughter, although it seemed to her without an object. No name had been mentioned, no confidences exchanged. Louise thought of her own easy courtship, of her daughter’s rapid marriage. It would be different this time, she feared. But with a last ounce of energy, even as she felt the fatigue forcing her lower in the uncomfortable chair, she raised her glass. ‘A toast, ma fille,’ she said. ‘A toast. Que tous vos rêves se réalisent.’ Vadim raised his glass, Kitty hers. ‘Que tous nos rêves se réalisent,’ they murmured. Then Kitty kissed them, and left.

  NINE

  Kitty wore the grey for travelling, more to please her grandmother than for any other reason. She felt that if she obeyed her in this small particular, Louise would somehow be all right. Her life was governed by small irrational superstitions of this kind.

  In the event it did not matter what she wore, for she was alone and quite indifferent to her fellow travellers, whom she perceived as toiling and untidy and rather younger than herself. Some major move was obviously afoot; some school or association was being shifted across the Channel for an extensive holiday of an undefined but educational nature. Large girls, larger than Kitty herself, occupied themselves with amorphous bundles of luggage; they wore waterproof jackets and tennis shoes, and showed a tendency to take sporting kicks at any bundles left in their idiosyncratic path. No one seemed to be in charge of them, and indeed they were very assured, shouting to each other as they boarded the train, manoeuvring their possessions in and out of carriages, flinging themselves down in their seats for an instant and then jumping up to look for their friends or to bawl encouragement out of the window to late-comers. They were rather handsome and their hair did not appear to have been brushed for days. Kitty looked up from her book as a roar of laughter signalled the late appearance of one of their number. The windows suddenly darkened as jerseyed and trousered bodies veered to one side of the train to cheer a grinning red-faced girl bent dou
ble under the weight of a towering structure strapped to her back. There was a round of applause as she squeezed through the door. Kitty went back to her book. And we shall have this all over again at the other end, she thought.