Martha, Eric, and George Read online

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  She reported but the barest bones of this interview to Eric: merely told him that she’d had a chat with Edith, and that Edith had thanked her. (Mrs. Taylor always stuck as close to the verbal truth as possible.) What she did advise Eric was to allow a little time to elapse before their next meeting, just to let Edith get over the shock.—The game was in Mrs. Taylor’s hands, she had made herself safe on all counts; she still trembled to think through what perils she’d passed; and as the image of her grandson rose cherub-like before her eyes—

  “Thank heaven Martha hasn’t seen George,” cried Mrs. Taylor uncontrollably, “since he was a baby!”

  Chapter Fifteen

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  What with the success of her show, of which the notices continued voluminous and uniformly laudatory, and her discovery of Fat Rosa’s, Martha’s final week in Paris opened very comfortably. A third circumstance was that her encounter with her ex-lover, which she would have gone to any lengths to avoid, now that it was over proved to have been a blessing in disguise. (Martha’s reflections on this point so accurately paralleled Mrs. Taylor’s, it was only a pity they couldn’t exchange congratulations.) Her mistake had lain in attempting to avoid instead of grasping the nettle; upon reflection, Martha felt positively grateful to Eric for taking the initiative and enabling her to get everything finally washed up.

  In this new mood of amenity she refrained from either scowling at critics or biting the head off M. Cerisier.—The latter, indeed, after the most startling sales in his gallery’s records, would almost have offered his head on a platter, and so far flung economy to the winds as to present Martha, at a luncheon à trois with le maître, the homage of a sizable spray of orchids. Nothing could have been less appropriate to a stout serge lapel—but nothing either, as a testimony of the art-trade’s solid interest, more encouraging; Martha and le maître exchanged cheerful looks. “Though as to where mademoiselle shows next year,” mused le maître, “of course remains to be seen. Myself, I cannot think mademoiselle entirely happy about the lighting.” “Abominable,” agreed Martha. “Next year, it will be divine!” assured M. Cerisier.

  They were all old pros together. Martha knew perfectly well that when she next showed in Paris it would be in the gallery of M. Cerisier: and so did M. Cerisier know, and so did le maître. Martha and le maître were simply staking a claim to the best two weeks of the season, also a fractionally higher percentage on sales. They all knew what they were about, as they settled down to that excellent luncheon paid for by Mr. Joyce …

  Martha, after her single letter, didn’t bother to write to Mr. Joyce again. Hadn’t he told her to forget him? Only le maître’s punctually dispatched press-cuttings informed her patron of Martha’s progress; which unhygienic scraps of newsprint Mr. Joyce in his nursing-home defied Matron by keeping under his pillow.

  Often in the small hours of the morning (his light was always on), the old man with extreme pains and precaution, employing the one hand he could still use, pulled them out and applied to them the one eye he could still use. It was an unnecessary effort; he knew every word by heart—as did his daughter Miranda, made to read and re-read each cutting aloud until she was quite sick of them. Mr. Joyce still liked to read, or pretend to read, for himself. He liked to feel the thin foreign paper between his fingers; though already it smelt of disinfectant, he liked to imagine he smelled fresh-off-the-press Paris ink. Only when he was sure of no more sleep at all, when he was a little afraid, did he pull out Martha’s letter.

  Martha was always to attract more devotion than she deserved. On the other hand, her brief scrawl and its postscript undoubtedly helped her patron to keep a grip on life.

  Mr. Joyce hadn’t let Miranda read it to him. He had deciphered it, painfully, with his one good eye, by himself. “Honestly, Dadda, a person would think it was a love-letter!” scoffed Miranda—and watched jealously for a second envelope addressed in Martha’s hand. But Martha didn’t write again, and Mr. Joyce, great man that he was, didn’t want her to. He wanted Martha in her attack on Paris to be free from all emotional preoccupation.

  So Martha was—after her interview with Eric Taylor. (Mr. Joyce, unsuspicious of any love-affair whatever, and still less so of its consequences, had in a sense the wrong sow by the ear.) Martha needed neither to feel any professional anxiety—M. Cerisier’s orchid at her buttonhole more eloquent than any number of press-cuttings. What chiefly promoted Martha’s comfort, however, during her second week in Paris, was her discovery of Fat Rosa’s.

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  She lost no time in becoming a regular patron. Besides the excellence and cheapness of its ices, the little shop offered the further advantage of being handy to the studio; le maître could easily find her there, or leave a message. Another thing Martha appreciated was the complete lack of chi-chi: the cloths on the four small tables within, though clean, were frankly darned; the four tables outside on the pavement did without cloths at all. The glass was as thick as the china, the metal of the spoons anonymous. There was no more chi-chi about the proprietress: Fat Rosa wasn’t statuesque, she wasn’t Rubens-like, she was simply fat. “Observe the corset-maker’s despair!” chuckled Fat Rosa, jovially slapping her exuberant stomach—also digging a friendly elbow into Martha’s own well-fleshed ribs …

  Martha liked it at Fat Rosa’s. She felt at home there. She was only sorry she hadn’t discovered Fat Rosa’s sooner, and made up for lost time by leaving the Relais earlier and earlier each morning to drop in for a supplementary café-crème; also in the late afternoon was usually to be found there consuming chocolats and gossiping with Fat Rosa.—It was remarkable that Martha, who had practically no French, and Fat Rosa, who had practically no English, managed to carry on quite long conversations—mainly on the subject of food; they spoke a sort of culinary lingua franca. Of course there was no fashionable audience to inhibit, as Martha twisted her tongue to discuss such favourite dishes as coq au vin and tripes à la mode; but she undoubtedly expended far more effort on behalf of Fat Rosa than on behalf of a last link with Proust.

  All Martha’s movements at this time making news, a journalist who trailed her there put Fat Rosa’s in the news too. Luckily Fat Rosa never looked at a newspaper unless there was a good murder, and didn’t raise prices; Martha herself learnt of the circumstance only through le maître. “‘Modest celebrity shuns fashionable restaurants,’” quoted le maître sardonically. “What did I tell you? ‘Continuez!’ It is all publicity!” “Is it the right sort?” asked Martha. “Undoubtedly,” grinned le maître. “It is the best sort possible, to be so celebrated, also so modest!” For a moment Martha reflected: a brief, rare moment of self-examination. “I shouldn’t call myself particularly modest,” she said. “No more than Lucifer,” agreed le maître. “The publicity is still excellent.—Might it not be charitable to let your friend cash in on it?”

  “Then she would put her prices up,” said Martha sensibly. “Besides, if she knew who I am, she might start on Art.”

  So Fat Rosa, to Martha’s satisfaction, continued to entertain a celebrity unawares.—Actually what Fat Rosa felt for Martha was chiefly pity, as a person of obviously sound instincts born in a country of twenty religions and only one sauce; and learning on the Saturday afternoon that Martha was to depart in two days’ time, took the opportunity of the shop’s being empty to write out a dozen recipes, in violet ink on the back of old menu-cards, for the latter to carry home to her barbarous, fog-bound shores.

  “Merci very much,” said Martha sincerely—and reflecting that there was usually at least one of her female students who could read French. “Si je could, I’d give you one for steak-and-kidney pudding.”

  “Ah! Le steak-and-kidney boudin!” exclaimed Fat Rosa eagerly.

  “Mais je can’t,” apologized Martha.

  It crossed her mind that there was une dame in the rue d’Antibes who made smashers; but any conjunction between Fat Rosa and Mrs. Taylor was obviously too bizarre to contemplate.—It was a coincidenc
e nonetheless that the memory just then occurred; as Rosa returned behind her counter, as Martha glanced towards the door, half-expectant of le maître, in walked Eric Taylor.

  He wasn’t this time, as at the Relais, alone; his hand trembled on a child’s shoulder. For the first time since he was two weeks old, Martha beheld her son.

  Chapter Sixteen

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  He favoured, as the phrase goes, his father. There was no trace of the engaging sturdiness that had led a grosse bourgeoise, in the train as Martha returned to Paris from her lying-in, to offer instant adoption, no questions asked. For his age young George was tall, but narrow across the shoulders; his large head, upon a too-thin neck, repeated feature by feature Eric’s peculiarly undistinguished countenance. The resemblance, originally a welcome surprise (as enabling Martha to deposit him on the Taylor doorstep without explanation), now definitely repelled her.

  Eric himself wasn’t looking his best. His pale, quivering features gave the impression of being out of control. He had in fact screwed himself up to an act so foreign to his gentle nature, nature was taking physical revenge. Only his mother’s words—“Thank heaven Martha hasn’t seen George!”—could have impelled him to it—Eric always believing everything his mother told him, especially about women. But where was now that explosion of maternal affection the rash exclamation so obviously adumbrated, and which Mrs. Taylor so obviously feared, and of which the expectation had brought Eric new hope? Martha looked so little either affectionate or maternal, his heart sank.

  He advanced nonetheless—advancing the child with him.

  “Say good afternoon, George,” prompted Eric, “to your mother.”

  In the ensuing flash of antagonism between his elders the fact that the child said nothing of the sort, but remained completely mute, passed unnoticed.—Martha’s glance at her ex-lover was blasting; though she hadn’t herself heard Mrs. Taylor’s rash words, and though she’d never read the older melodramatists, she immediately both perceived Eric’s aim and mentally dug in her heels against all emotional blackmail.

  “He’d better say good-bye,” said Martha. “I’m off on Monday and thank God for it.”

  Martha’s glance blasted as readily as a Gorgon’s. With more effort, Eric thrust out his jaw.

  “Sit down, George,” ordered Eric.

  The child sat. So did his father. Since Martha, who had just started on a second chocolat, wasn’t going to budge, they made up quite a family party.

  “I suppose you know,” said Martha coldly, “that you’re probably knocking his psyche or whatever it is into a cocked hat?”

  “Not at all,” said Eric. “I’ve spent all afternoon preparing him.”

  “He’ll have a trauma or whatever it is all the same,” said Martha. “Don’t blame me when he takes to shoplifting.”

  It was perhaps fortunate that at this instant Fat Rosa bore down on them with a plate of pastries. She had observed the encounter with the greatest interest and sympathy. “For the little one!” cried Fat Rosa. “With the compliments of the house!”—George instantly shot out a paw towards a cherry-tartlet. He had all this while said nothing at all. The one thing he seemed to have inherited from his mother was her taciturnity.

  For a moment Eric sat equally dumb. As at the Relais d’Angoulême, he’d come too well prepared with a single line of approach to shift at all readily to any other.

  “If you’d like a coffee,” offered Martha disagreeably, “I dare say that’ll be on the house too.”

  “Thank you, no,” said Eric.

  “Have it your own way,” said Martha.

  There was a second slight, by no means relaxed pause while Eric reassembled his wits. At least mother and son were confronted—and when might such a conjunction lie in his power to bring about again? All his best instincts already violated, as a last desperate throw he determined to be a thorough-going cad. Actually in the presence of young George—

  “I’ll tell you what will give him a trauma,” said Eric deliberately, “and that’s knowing his mother’s ashamed of him.”

  “But I’m not,” said Martha.

  She was genuinely surprised. It wasn’t a point of view that had occurred to her, nor had it cropped up, so far as she could recollect, at the Relais.—What surprised her even more was the enthusiasm with which Eric greeted a mere off-hand statement of fact.

  “Martha! Then you really would?” exclaimed Eric eagerly. “You really would acknowledge him?”

  “Well, it depends what you mean by acknowledge,” said Martha hastily. “Not if it means getting him endorsed on my passport and taking him home and all the rest of it. But if I had to have him round, of course I’d say he was my son. I’m too busy to keep telling lies. Which is the whole point, if you’d only realize it; I’m too busy. Some people,” added Martha censoriously, “don’t seem to know what work is.”

  “If you call messing about with paint, work—” began Eric furiously; and checked himself. He’d read the art-columns of the Figaro. In the face of Martha’s notorious Parisian success, he had to admit the phrase inadequate. It was indeed but the sudden dashing of his latest hopes (quick as mushrooms to rear, and as easily trampled on) that prompted so foolish a retort. As at the Relais d’Angoulême, Eric perceived the only adequate retort a physical one. Once again, he almost clouted Martha.

  Fortunately, once again—since to have clouted the mother of his son in the presence of that son would probably have given Eric a trauma of his own—their colloquy was interrupted: not this time by le maître, nor by Fat Rosa, but by the sudden incursion of Edith Allen.

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  It wasn’t so much any womanly instinct on Martha’s part that so swiftly put her in the picture, as her accurate eye. Edith’s tea-pot profile and wishy-washy colouring didn’t rate a second glance; but somewhere in Paris she had managed to find a nice saxe-blue suit, and a hat, also saxe-blue, with a brim and a crown and a ribbon round it, and a pair of sensible low-heeled shoes: all in all presenting such a striking example of what could be achieved in the capital of fashion to put fashion out of countenance and win the love of an Anglo-Saxon bank-clerk, Martha was in the picture at once before a word had been spoken. Then—

  “Edith!” cried Eric.

  “Eric!” cried Edith. “Forgive me! I suspected this was where you might have taken George, so I came! Tell me you forgive me!”

  Eric’s answering glance forgave her at once. Martha had never in fact seen a man look more relieved. Thus encouraged, Edith hastened on.

  “We haven’t seen each other for days,” pursued Edith rapidly, “not since your mother told me all! And it’s so vitally important! George, run along to the English Library and tell Miss Macbeth you’re to have any book you choose.”

  Unexpectedly, George looked not at his father but at Martha. The latter sat perfectly expressionless however, declining (though all for getting rid of him) any slightest assumption of authority. “George, do as Miss Allen tells you!” ordered Eric; and only then did young George slope off.

  Edith had meanwhile sat down and removed a pair of white fabric gloves. Like Eric she was pale, but now at least far more composed.

  “It’s such a nuisance,” she explained lightly, “not to be able to speak French in front of a child!—because of course George understands French perfectly.”

  “He’d be a half-wit if he didn’t,” agreed Martha.

  It was noticeable that no introduction had been performed. Actually none was necessary; as Martha had recognized Edith so Edith had recognized Martha—from her picture in the papers; but Edith was still displaying great aplomb.

  “And of course we wouldn’t want him to hear anything that might give him a trauma,” she continued. “I mean, whatever we have to say to each other—”

  Released from the presence of his son, Eric exploded.

  “What Martha has to say,” he interrupted furiously, “is that she isn’t ashamed of George, and is perfectly capable of supporting him, only she’s just t
oo damned selfish.”

  Martha regarded him wearily.

  “I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said I was too busy. You simply either can’t or won’t see my point.”

  “No, I’m damned if I can!” shouted Eric.

  “But I do,” said Edith Allen.

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  Martha blinked. So indeed did Eric. As for Edith, she smiled the sweet, smug smile of an angel swanning over troubled waters bearing an oil-can. It was obvious that she had begun to enjoy herself—as what woman would not, mistress of such a situation?

  “Eric doesn’t know it yet, but I’m really a terrific feminist,” explained Edith—shooting her beloved nonetheless a reassuring glance. “I dare say it’s because our school had such a wonderful Head; who always taught us that any one woman’s achievement should be a pride to all. Oh, Martha—may I call you that?—wouldn’t it be wonderful if you were ever damed?”

  Martha, dimly perceiving amongst all this rigmarole something emerging to her advantage, grunted encouragingly.

  “And of course you couldn’t be, could you, if everyone knew you’d a … little illegit,” pronounced Edith daringly. “I believe they’re terribly strict about these things!—And I’ve been thinking and thinking, ever since Mrs. Taylor talked to me; and though Eric may think you heartless, what I think is how wonderful of you, to give up your only child to strike a blow for all women everywhere!”

  Before this rewarding gloss on her conduct Martha could only sit silent, digesting it. (Without remarking, for example, that what would really strike a blow for women would be for one to turn up at an Investiture accompanied by half-a-dozen little illegits.) In any case, Eric spoke for her.

  “Darling, it’s you who’re being wonderful!” cried Eric.