I suppose you’ve read the Vie de Boheme?
Rodolphe now wears a neat blue suit that he’s bought off the nail and puts his trousers under his mattress every night to keep them in shape.
He counts every penny he spends and takes care to do nothing to compromise his future.
Mimi and Musette are hard-working girls, trade unionists, who spend their spare evenings attending party meetings, and even if they lose their virtue, keep their heads.”
“Don’t you live with a girl?”
“No.”
“Why not?
I should have thought it would be very pleasant.
In the year you’ve been in Paris you must have had plenty of chances of picking someone up.”
“Yes, I’ve had one or two.
Strange when you come to think of it.
D’you know what my place consists of?
A studio and a kitchen.
No bath.
The concierge is supposed to come and clean up every day, but she has varicose veins and hates climbing the stairs.
That’s all I have to offer and yet there’ve been three girls who wanted to come and share my squalor with me.
One was English, she’s got a job here in the International Communist Bureau, another was a Norwegian, she’s working at the Sorbonne, and one was French—you’d have thought she had more sense; she was a dressmaker and out of work.
I picked her up one evening when I was going out to dinner, she told me she hadn’t had a meal all day and I stood her one.
It was a Saturday night and she stayed till Monday.
She wanted to stay on, but I told her to get out and she went.
The Norwegian was rather a nuisance.
She wanted to darn my socks and cook for me and scrub the floor.
When I told her there was nothing doing she took to waiting for me at street corners, walking beside me in the street and telling me that if I didn’t relent she’d kill herself.
She taught me a lesson that I’ve taken to heart.
I had to be rather firm with her in the end.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“Well, one day I told her that I was sick of her pestering.
I told her that next time she addressed me in the street I’d knock her down.
She was rather stupid and she didn’t know I meant it.
Next day when I came out of my house, it was about twelve and I was just going to the office, she was standing on the other side of the street.
She came up to me, with that hang-dog look of hers, and began to speak.
I didn’t let her get more than two or three words out, I hit her on the chin and she went down like a ninepin.”
Simon’s eyes twinkled with amusement.
“What happened then?”
“I don’t know.
I suppose she got up again.
I walked on and didn’t look round to see.
Anyhow she took the hint and that’s the last I saw of her.”
The story made Charley very uncomfortable and at the same time made him want to laugh.
But he was ashamed of this and remained silent.
“The comic one was the English communist.
My dear, she was the daughter of a dean.
She’d been to Oxford and she’d taken her degree in economics.
She was terribly genteel, oh, a perfect lady, but she looked upon promiscuous fornication as a sacred duty.
Every time she went to bed with a comrade she felt she was helping the Cause.
We were to be good pals, fight the good fight together, shoulder to shoulder, and all that sort of thing.
The dean gave her an allowance and we were to pool our resources, make my studio a Centre, have the comrades in to afternoon tea and discuss the burning questions of the day.
I just told her a few home truths and that finished her.”
He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him.
Charley had several things to say, but did not know how to put them so that they should not sound affected and so arouse Simon’s irony.