It’s done me good to listen to it and it’s done me good to be with you.
Your mother must love you very much.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“Why are you so good to me?
I’m tiresome, dull and exasperating.
You don’t even like me very much, do you?”
Charley considered this for a moment.
“Well, I don’t very much, to tell you the truth.”
She laughed.
“Then why do you bother about me?
Why don’t you just turn me out into the street?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Shall I tell you?
Goodness.
Just pure, simple, stupid goodness.”
“Go to hell.”
They dined in the Quarter.
It had not escaped Charley’s notice that Lydia took no interest in him as an individual.
She accepted him as you might accept a person with whom you find yourself on a ship for a few days and so forced to a certain intimacy, but it does not matter to you where he came from and what sort of a man he is; he emerged from non-existence when he stepped on board and will return to it when, on reaching port, you part company with him.
Charley was modest enough not to be piqued by this, for he could not but realize that her own troubles and perplexities were so great that they must absorb her attention; and he was not a little surprised now when she led him to talk about himself.
He told her of his artistic inclinations and of the wish he had so long harboured to be an artist, and she approved his common sense which in the end had persuaded him to prefer the assured life of a business man.
He had never seen her more cheerful and more human.
Knowing English domestic life only through Dickens, Thackeray and H. G. Wells, she was curious to hear how existence was pursued in those prosperous, sober houses in Bayswater that she knew but from their outside.
She asked him about his home and his family.
These were subjects on which he was always glad to talk.
He spoke of his father and mother with a faintly mocking irony which Lydia saw well enough he assumed only to conceal the loving admiration with which he regarded them.
Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their security.
The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by their neighbours according to their lights; and there was in them neither harm nor malice.
If Lydia saw how much of their good nature, their kindliness, their not unpleasing self-complacency depended on the long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building castles on the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face.
“How lucky you English are,” she said.
But Charley was a trifle surprised at the impression his own words made on him.
In the course of his recital he had for the first time seen himself from the standpoint of an observer.
Until now, like an actor who says his lines, but never having seen the play from the front, has but a vague idea of what it is all about, he had played his part without asking himself whether it had any meaning.
It would be too much to say that it made him uneasy, it slightly perplexed him, to realize that while they were all, his father, his mother, his sister, himself, busy from morning till night, so that the days were not long enough for what they wanted to do; yet when you came to look upon the life they led from one year’s end to another it gave you an uncomfortable feeling that they, none of them, did anything at all.
It was like one of those comedies where the sets are good and the clothes pretty, where the dialogue is clever and the acting competent, so that you pass an agreeable evening, but a week later cannot remember a thing about it.
When they had finished dinner they took a taxi to a cinema on the other side of the river.
It was a film of the Marx brothers and they rocked with laughter at the extravagant humour of the marvellous clowns; but they laughed not only at Groucho’s wise-cracks and at Harpo’s comic quandaries, they laughed at one another’s laughter.
The picture finished at midnight, but Charley was too excited to go quietly to bed and he asked Lydia if she would come with him to some place where they could dance.
“Where would you like to go?” asked Lydia.
“Montmartre?”
“Wherever you like as long as it’s gay.”
And then, remembering his parents’ constant, but seldom achieved, desire when they came to Paris: “Where there aren’t a lot of English people.”
Lydia gave him the slightly mischievous smile that he had seen on her lips once or twice before.
It surprised him, but at the same time was sympathetic to him.
It surprised him because it went so strangely with what he thought he knew of her character; and it was sympathetic to him because it suggested that, for all her tragic history, there was in her a vein of high spirits and of a rather pleasing, teasing malice.
“I’ll take you somewhere.
It won’t be gay, but it may be interesting.
There’s a Russian woman who sings there.”
They drove a long way, and when they stopped Charley saw that they were on the quay.
The twin towers of Notre-Dame were distinct against the frosty, starry night.