“You walk northwards, through thick grass, past the willows, along the river-bank where it curves
“So this English family?Mr. Howard the father, Mrs. Georgina the mother, Mr. Harry the son?live in their comfortable villa, happily and perhaps a little stodgily. Until . . .”
“Until?” prompted Miles, as Professor Rigaud paused.
“Until a certain woman arrives.”
Professor Rigaud was silent for a moment.
Then, exhaling his breath, he shrugged the thick shoulders as though disclaiming any responsibility.
“Myself,” he went on, “I arrive in Chartres in May of thirty-nine. I have just finished my
“Mr. Brooke is grey-haired, upright, reserved but friendly, a hardworking executive at his leather business. He wears plus-fours, which seem as strange in Charters as a cure’s skirts in Newcastle. He is hospitable, he has a twinkle in the eye, but he is so conventional you can bet your shilling on exactly what he will do or say at any time. His wife, a plump, pretty, red-faced woman, is much the same.
“But the son Harry…
“Ah! There is a different person!
“This Harry interested me. He has sensitiveness, he has imagination. In height and weight and way of carrying himself he is much like his father. But under that correct outside of his, he is all wires and all nerves.
“He is a good-looking young fellow, too: square jaw, straight nose, good wide-spaced brown eyes, and fair hair that (I think to myself) will be grey like his father’s if he does not control his nerves. Harry is the idol of both his parents. I tell you I have seen doting fathers and mothers, but never any like those two!
“Because Harry can swipe a golf-ball two hundred yards, or two hundred miles, or whatever is the asinine distance, Mr. Brooke is purple with pride. Because Harry plays tennis like a maniac in the hot sun, and has a row of silver cups, his father is in the seventh heaven. He does not mention this to Harry. He only says, ‘Not bed, not bad.’ But he brags about it interminably to anybody who will listen.
“Harry is being trained in the leather business. He will inherit the factory one day; he will be a very rich man like his father. He is sensible; he knows his duty. And yet this boy wants to go to Paris and study painting.
“My God, how he wants it! He wants it so much he is inarticulate. Mr. Brooke is gently firm with this nonsense about becoming a painter. He is broad-minded, he says; painting is all very well as a hobby’ but as a serious occupation?really, now! As for Mrs. Brooke, she is almost hysterical on the subject, since the impression in her mind is that Harry will live in an attic among beautiful girls without any clothes on.
“’My boy,’ says the father, ‘I understand exactly how you feel. I went through a similar phase at your age. But in ten years’ time you will laugh at this.’
“’After all,’ says the mother, ‘couldn’t you always stay at home and paint animals?’
“After which Harry goes out blindly and hit’s a tennis-ball so hard he blows his opponent off the court, or sits on the lawn with a white-faced, brooding, swearing look. These people are all so honest, so well-meaning, so thoroughly sincere!
“I never learned, I tell you now, whether Harry was serious about his life’s work. I never had the opportunity to learn. For in late May of that year, Mr. Brooke’s personal secretary?a hard-faced, middle-aged woman named Mrs. McShane?grows alarmed at the international situation and returns to England.
“Now that was serious. Mr. Brooke’s private correspondence?his personal secretary has no connection with the work at the office?is enormous. Ouf! Often it made my head swim, how that man wrote letters! His investments, his charities, his friends, his letters to the newspapers in England: he would pace up and down as he dictated, his hands behind his back, grey-haired and bony-faced, with a look of stern moral indignation about his mouth.
“As a personal secretary he must have the very best. He wrote to England for the best. And there arrived at Beauregard?that is what the Brookes called their house?there arrived at Beauregard, Miss Fay Seton.
“Miss Fay Seton…
“It was on the afternoon of the thirtieth of May, I remember. I was taking tea with the Brookes. Here was Beauregard, a grey stone house of the early eighteenth century, with stone faces carved on the walls and white- painted window-frames, built around three sides of a front courtyard. We were sitting in the court, which is paved with smooth grass, having tea in the shadow of the house.
“In front of us was the fourth wall, pierced by big iron-grilled gates that stood open. Beyond these gates lay the road that ran past, and beyond this a long grassy bank sloping down to the river fringed with willows.
“Papa Brooke sits in a wicker chair, his shell-rimmed spectacles on his nose, grinning as he holds out a piece of biscuit for the dog. In English households there is always a dog. To the English it is a source of perpetual astonishment and delight that a dog has sense enough to sit up and ask for food.
“However!”
“There is Papa Brooke, and the dog is a dark-grey Scotch terrier like an animated wire brush. On the other side of the tea-table sits Mama Brooke?with brown bobbed hair, pleasant and ruddy of face, not very smartly dressed?pouring out a fifth cup of tea. At one side stands Harry, in a sports-coat and flannels, practicing golf- strokes with a driver against an imaginary ball.
“The tops of the trees faintly moving?a French summer!?and the noise of the leaves rippling and rustling, and the sun that winks on them, and fragrance of grass and flowers, and all the drowsy peacefulness?it makes you close your eyes even to think of. . .
“That was when a Citroen taxi rolled up outside the front gates.
“A young woman got out of the taxi, and paid the driver so generously that he followed her in with her baggage. She walked up the path towards us, diffidently. She said her name was Miss Fay Seton, and that she was the new secretary.
“Attractive?
“Please to remember?you will excuse my admonitory forefinger?please to remember, however, that I was not conscious of this full attractiveness at first, or all at once. No. For she had the quality, then and always, of being unobtrusive.
“I remember her standing in the path on that first day, while Papa Brooke punctiliously introduced her to everybody including the dog, and Mama Brooke asked her whether she wanted to go upstairs and wash. She was rather tall, and soft and slender, wearing some tailored costume that was unobtrusive too. Her neck was slender; she had heavy, smooth, dark-red hair; her eyes were long and blue and dreaming, with a smile in them, though they seldom seemed to look at you directly.
“Harry Brooke did not say anything. But he took another swing at an imaginary golf-ball, so that there was a swish and a
“So I smoked my cigar?being always, always, always violently curious about human behaviour?and I said to myself, ‘Aha!’
“For this young woman grew on you. It was ode and perhaps a bit weird. Her spiritual good looks, her soft movements, above all her extraordinary aloofness. . .
“Fay Seton was, in every sense of your term, a lady: though she seemed rather to conceal this and be frightened of it. She came of a very good family, old impoverished stock in Scotland, and Mr. Brooke discovered this and it impressed him powerfully. She had not been trained as a secretary; no, she had been trained as something else.” Professor Rigaud chuckled and eyed his auditors keenly. “’But she was quick and efficient, and deft and cool-looking. If they wanted a fourth at bridge, or someone to sing and play at the piano when the lamps were lighted in the evening, Fay Seton would oblige. In her way she was friendly, though shy and somewhat prudish, and she would often sit looking into the distance, far away. And you thought to yourself, in exasperation: what is this girl thinking about?
“That blazing hot summer . . .!
