Wordsworth said, You give three hunded francs to these ladies for private show.
The price seems to be going up.
Maybe ar make them say two hunded francs. You lef it to Wordsworth. O.K.?
It was no use appealing to Wordsworths sense of morality. I said, As you have a British passport, you should know that an Englishman is allowed to take only fifteen pounds in currency out of the country. Two hundred francs would exhaust the whole amount.
This was a reason Wordsworth could understand. He looked down at me from his great height with melancholy and commiseration. Governments all the same no good, he said.
One must make sacrifices. The cost of defence and the social services is very high.
Travellers cheques, Wordsworth suggested quickly.
They can only be exchanged at a bank, an official exchange or a registered hotel. In any case, I shall need them in Istanbul.
Your auntie got plenty.
She has only a travel allowance too, I said. I felt the weakness of this last argument, for Wordsworth cannot have lived for very long with my aunt before learning that she resorted to ways and means. I changed the subject by attacking him. What on earth did you mean, Wordsworth, by sending me away with Cannabis in my mothers urn?
His mind was elsewhere, brooding perhaps on the travel allowance.
No cannibals, he said, in England. No cannibals in Sierra Leone.
Im talking about the ashes.
Cannibals in Liberia, not Sierra Leone.
I didnt say cannibals.
Leopard Society in Sierra Leone. They kill plenty people but not chop them.
Pot, Wordsworth, pot. I hated the vulgar word which reminded me of childhood. You mixed pot with my mothers ashes.
At last I had embarrassed him. He drank the whisky quickly. You come away, he said, ar show you much better damned place. Rue de Douai.
I harried him all the way up the stairs. You had no business to do such a thing, Wordsworth. The police came and took the urn.
They give it you back? he asked.
Only the urn. The ashes were inextricably mixed with the pot.
Old Wordsworth meant no harm, man, he said, halting on the pavement. Those bloody police.
I was glad to see there was a taxi rank close by. I was afraid he might try to follow me and discover the whereabouts of Aunt Augusta.
In Mendeland, he said, you bury food with your ma. You bury pot. All the same thing.
My mother didnt even smoke cigarettes.
With your pa you bury best hatchet.
Why not food with him too?
He go hunt food with hatchet. He kill bush chicken.
I got into the taxi and drove away. Looking through the rear window, I could see Wordsworth standing bewildered on the pavement edge, like a man on a river bank waiting for a ferry. He raised his hand tentatively, as though he were uncertain of my response, whether I had left him in friendship or anger, as the traffic swept between us. I wished then that I had given him a bigger CTC. After all he meant no harm. Even in his size he exhibited a clumsy innocence.
Chapter 10
I found Aunt Augusta sitting alone in the centre of the large and shabby salon filled with green velvet chairs and marble mantelpieces. She had not bothered to remove the suitcase, which lay open and empty on the floor. There were traces of tears in her eyes. I turned on the dim lights of the dusty chandelier, and my aunt gave me an uncertain smile.
Has something happened, Aunt Augusta? I asked. It occurred to me that she might have been robbed by the man with sideburns and I regretted having left her alone with such a large amount of cash.
Nothing, Henry, she said in a voice surprisingly gentle and wavery. I decided after all on a deposit account in Berne. What banalities they drive us to with their rules and regulations. At this moment she had all the weary manner I would have expected of an old lady of seventy-five.
You are upset.
Only by memories, Aunt Augusta said. For me this hotel has many memories, and very old ones at that. You would have been only a boy
Suddenly I felt a real affection for my aunt. Perhaps a hint of weakness is required to waken our affections, and I remembered Miss Keenes fingers faltering over her tatting as she spoke of unknown South Africa it had been then that I came nearest to a proposal.
What kind of memories, Aunt Augusta?
Of a love affair, Henry. A very happy one while it lasted.
Tell me.
I was moved, as I had sometimes been at the theatre, at the sight of old age remembering. The faded luxury of the room seemed like a stage set at the Haymarket[100]. It brought to my mind photographs of Doris Keene in Romance, and who was it in Milestones? Having very few memories of my own to linger over, I appreciate sentiment all the more in others.
She dabbed at her eyes. Youd be bored, Henry. An unfinished bottle of champagne found in an old cupboard with all the sparkle gone The jaded phrase was worthy of a Haymarket author.
I drew up a chair and took her small hand in mine: it was creamy to the touch and I was much moved by a small brown grave-mark, which she had failed to cover with powder. Tell me, I repeated. We were both silent, thinking of very different things. I felt as though I were on the stage taking part in a revival of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. My aunt had led a very mixed-up life that was certain but she had loved deeply in her time, in the Hotel Saint James and Albany, and who knew what excuses in her past there might be for her relations with poor Wordsworth? This sitting-room of the hotel reminded me of that other Albany in London where Captain Tanqueray had lived.
Dear Aunt Augusta, I said and put my arm around her shoulders. It helps sometimes to speak to another person. I know I belong to a different generation perhaps a more conventional generation
Its a rather disgraceful story, my aunt said and she looked down in her lap with an air of modesty which I had never seen before.
I found myself kneeling uncomfortably beside her, one knee in the empty suitcase, holding her hand. Trust me, I said.
Its your sense of humour, Henry, that I dont fully trust. I dont think we find the same things funny.
I was expecting a sad story, I said rather sharply, climbing out of the suitcase.
It is a very sad story in its special way, my aunt said, but its rather funny too. I had let go her hand and now she turned it this way and that like a glove in a bargain basement. I must really have a manicure tomorrow, she said.
I felt some irritation at her quick change of mood. I had been betrayed into a feeling of sentiment which was not natural to me. I said, I saw Wordsworth just now, thinking to embarrass her.
What? Here? she exclaimed.
I am sorry to disappoint you, no. Not here in the hotel. In the street.
Where is he living?
I didnt ask. Nor did I give him your address. I hadnt realized that you would be so anxious to see him again.
You are a hard man, Henry.
Not hard, Aunt Augusta. Prudent.
I dont know from which side of the family you inherited prudence. Your father was lazy but never, never prudent.
And my mother? I asked in the hope of trapping her.
If she had been prudent you would not be here now. She went to the window and looked across the Rue de Rivoli into the Tuileries gardens. So many nursemaids and perambulators, she said and sighed. Against the hard afternoon light she looked old and vulnerable.
Would you have liked a child, Aunt Augusta?
At most times it would have been inconvenient, she said. Curran was not to be trusted as a father, and by the time I knew Mr. Visconti the hour was really getting late not too late, of course, but a child belongs to the dawn hours, and with Mr. Visconti one was already past the blaze of noon. In any case, I would have made a very unsatisfactory mother. God knows where I would have dragged the poor child after me, and suppose he had turned out completely respectable
Like myself, I said.
I dont yet despair of you, my aunt said. You were reasonably kind about poor Wordsworth. And you were quite right not to give him my address. He wouldnt fit in with the Saint James and Albany. What a pity that the days of slavery are passed, for then I could have pretended that he served some utilitarian purpose. I might have lodged him in the Saint James across the garden. She gave a reminiscent smile. I really think I ought to tell you about Monsieur Dambreuse. I loved him a lot, and if we didnt have a child together, it was purely owing to the fact that it was a late love. I took no precautions, none at all.
Were you thinking about him when I came in?
I was. They were six of the happiest months of my life, those which we shared, and they were all spent here in the Albany. I met him first one Monday evening outside Fouquets. He asked me to join him in a coffee[101], and by Thursday we were installed here, a genuine couple on good terms with the porter and the maid. The fact that he was a married man didnt worry me at all, for I am not in the least a jealous woman, and anyway I had far the larger slice of him, or so I thought. He told me he had a house in the country, where his wife lived with his six children, happy and occupied and requiring very little attention, somewhere near Toulouse. He would leave me on a Saturday morning after petit dejeuner[102] and return in time for bed on Monday evening. Perhaps as a sign of his fidelity, he was always very loving on a Monday night, so much so that the middle of the week would often pass very quietly. That suited my temperament well I have always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine. I really loved Monsieur Dambreuse perhaps not with the tenderness I felt for Curran but with more freedom from care than I had ever experienced with Mr. Visconti. The deepest love is not the most carefree. How Monsieur Dambreuse and I used to laugh. Of course I realized later that he had a very good reason for laughter.
Why should I have been haunted at that moment by the thought of Miss Keene?
Have you ever been to Koffiefontein? I asked.
No, my aunt said. Why? Where is it?
A very long way away, I said.
The really awful thing that I discovered, my aunt said, was that Monsieur Dambreuse never went very far away. Not even as far as Toulouse. He was in fact a real Parisian. The truth, when it came out, was that he had a wife and four children (one was already employed in the PTT) no further away than the Rue de Miromesnil ten minutes walk, taking the back way by the Hotel Saint James into the Rue Saint-Honore, and he had another mistress installed in a first-floor suite exactly the same as ours (he was a very just man) in the Saint James. The week-ends he spent with his wife and family in the Rue de Miromesnil and the afternoons of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, when I thought he was at work, he spent with this girl, who was called Louise Dupont, in the Saint James across the garden. I must say it was an achievement for a man who was well over fifty and had retired from full-time work (he was a director of a metallurgical company) for reasons of ill-health.