You had locked your door, of course.
I had done no such thing. He was a man I trusted absolutely. I told him to come in. I knew he wouldnt have woken me for any trivial reason.
Certainly I would not describe his reason as trivial, my aunt said, go on, but Miss Paterson was far away again and her teeth clicked and clicked. She was gazing at something we could not see, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes. I put my hand on her arm and said, Miss Paterson, dont talk about it any more if it hurts you. I was angry with my aunt: her face looked as hard as a face stamped on a coin.
Miss Paterson looked at me and I could watch her beginning to return from that long time ago. He came in, she said, and he whispered, Dolly, my darling, and he fell down on the floor. I got down beside him and put his poor poor head in my lap and he never spoke again.
I never knew why he came or what he meant to say to me.
I can guess, Aunt Augusta said.
Again Miss Paterson coiled herself back in her chair and struck back. It was a sad sight to see these two old women at loggerheads[199] over something that had happened so many years ago. I hope you are right, Miss Paterson said. I know well what you are thinking and I hope you are right. I would have done anything that he asked me without hesitation or regret. And I have never loved another man.
You didnt have the time to love him, it seems, my aunt said.
There you are quite quite wrong. Perhaps because you dont know what love is. I loved him from the moment he got off the bus at Chelsea Town Hall, and I love him today. When he was dead I did everything for him everything there was no one else to help my poor dear his wife wouldnt come. There had to be a post-mortem, and she wrote to the authorities to bury him in Boulogne she didnt want his poor poor mutilated body. So there was only myself and the concierge
You have certainly been very constant, my aunt said, but the remark did not sound like a compliment.
No one else has ever again used that name he called me, Dolly, Miss Paterson said, but in the war, when I had to use an alias, I let them call me Poupée[200].
Why on earth did you have an alias?
They were troubled times, Miss Paterson said and she began to look for her gloves.
I resented the way my aunt had behaved to Miss Paterson, and a slow flame of anger still burned in me when we went out to dinner for the second and last time in the deserted station. The gay wave-worn fishing boats lay against the jetty, each with a painted pious phrase across the bridge: DIEU BÉNIT LA FAMILLE and DIEU A BIEN FAIT[201], and I wondered what comfort the mottoes brought in a strong Channel gale. There was the same smell of oil and fish, the same train from Lyon was awaited by no one, and in the restaurant there was the same disgruntled Englishman with the same companion and the same dog he made the restaurant seem all the emptier with his presence, as though there had never been a different customer.
My aunt said, You are very silent, Henry.
I have a lot to think about, I said.
You were quite taken by that miserable little woman, Aunt Augusta accused me.
I was touched to meet someone who loved my father.
A lot of women loved him.
I mean a woman who really loved him.
That little sentimental creature? She doesnt know what love is.
Do you? I asked, letting my anger out.
I think I have had rather more experience of it than you, Aunt Augusta replied with calm and careful cruelty. It was true I hadnt even answered Miss Keenes last letter. My aunt sat opposite me over her sole[202] with an air of perfect satisfaction. She ate the shrimps that went with it one by one before she tackled the sole; she enjoyed the separate taste and she was in no hurry.
Perhaps she did have reason to despise Miss Paterson. I thought of Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr. Visconti they lived in my imagination as though she had actually created them: even poor Uncle Jo struggling towards the lavatory. She was one of the life-givers. Even Miss Paterson had come to life, stung by the cruelty of her questions. Perhaps if she ever talked about me to another I could well imagine what a story she could make out of my dahlias and my silly tenderness for Tooley and my stainless past even I would come to some sort of life, and the character she drew, I felt sure, would be much more vivid than the real I. It was useless to complain of her cruelty. I had once read, in a book on Charles Dickens, that an author must not be attached to his characters, he must treat them without mercy. In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickenss wife and mistress had to suffer so that Dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank managers money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesnt leave a trail of the martyred behind him. Where was Curran now? Did even Wordsworth still survive?
Have I ever told you, my aunt asked, of a man called Charles Pottifer? In his way he clung to a dead man as fervently as your Miss Paterson. But in his case the dead man was himself.