CHARLEY HAD NO IDEA how long he had been sitting at the window, absent-mindedly gazing out into the dark court, when he was called back from the perplexed welter of his thoughts by the sound of Lydia’s voice.
“I believe I’ve been asleep,” she said.
“You certainly have.”
He turned on the light, which he had not done before for fear of waking her.
The fire was almost out and he put on another log.
“I feel so refreshed.
I slept without dreaming.”
“D’you have bad dreams?”
“Fearful.”
“If you’ll dress we might go out to dinner.”
There was an ironic, but not unkindly, quality in the smile she gave him.
“I don’t suppose this is the way you usually spend Christmas Day.”
“I’m bound to say it isn’t,” he answered, with a cheerful grin.
She went into the bathroom and he heard her having a bath.
She came back still wearing his dressing-gown.
“Now if you’ll go in and wash, I’ll dress.”
Charley left her.
He accepted it as quite natural that though she had slept all night in the next bed to his she should not care to dress in his presence.
Lydia took him to a restaurant she knew in the Avenue du Maine where she said the food was good.
Though a trifle self-consciously old-world, with its panelled walls, chintz curtains and pewter plates, it was a friendly little place, and there was no one there but two middle-aged women in collars and ties and three young Indians who ate in moody silence.
You had a feeling that, lonely and friendless, they dined there that evening because they had no place to go.
Lydia and Charley sat in a corner where their conversation could not be overheard.
Lydia ate with hearty appetite.
When he offered her a second helping of one of the dishes they had ordered she pushed forward her plate.
“My mother-in-law used to complain of my appetite.
She used to say that I ate as though I had never had enough in my life.
Which was true, of course.”
It gave Charley a turn.
It was a queer sensation to sit down to dinner with someone who year in and year out had never had quite enough to eat.
And another thing: it disturbed his preconceived ideas to discover that one could undergo all the misery she had undergone and yet eat voraciously.
It made her tragedy a little grotesque; she was not a romantic figure, but just a quite ordinary young woman, and that somehow made all that had happened to her more horrible.
“Did you get on well with your mother-in-law?” he asked.
“Yes. Reasonably.
She wasn’t a bad woman.
She was hard, scheming, practical and avaricious.
She was a good housekeeper and she liked everything in the house to be just so.
I used to infuriate her with my Russian sloppiness, but she had a great control over her temper and never allowed an irritable word to escape her.
After Robert, her great passion was for respectability.
She was proud of her father having been a staff officer and her husband a colonel in the Medical Service.
They were both officers in the Legion of Honour.
Her husband had lost a leg in the war.
She was very proud of their distinguished record, and she had a keen sense of the social importance their position gave her.
I suppose you’d say she was a snob, but in such a pretty way that it didn’t offend you, it only made you laugh.
She had notions of morality that foreigners often think are unusual in France.
For instance, she had no patience with women who were unfaithful to their husbands, but she looked upon it as natural enough that men should deceive their wives.
She would never have dreamt of accepting an invitation unless she had the power to return it.
Once she’d made a bargain she’d stick to it even though it turned out to be a bad one.
Though she counted every penny she spent she was scrupulously honest, honest by principle and honest from loyalty to her family.
She had a deep sense of justice.
She knew she’d acted dishonourably in letting me marry Robert in the dark, and should at least have given me the chance of deciding whether, knowing all, I would marry him or not—and of course I would never have hesitated; but she didn’t know that, and she thought that I should have good cause to blame her when I found out and all she could answer was that where Robert was concerned she was prepared to sacrifice anyone else; and because of that she forced herself to be tolerant of a great deal in me that she didn’t like.