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.