At last she said, in a voice which was meant to be angrily impressive, but which squeaked and shook through her handkerchief:
‘Allez-vous en.’
For answer he took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
‘Bonjour, bonjour,’ he said.
‘Voulez-vous vous en aller?’ said Linda, rather more doubtfully, here at least was a human being who showed signs of taking some interest in her. Then she thought of South America.
‘If faut expliquer que je ne suis pas,’ she said, ‘une esclave blanche. Je suis la fille d’un très important lord anglais.’
The Frenchman gave a great bellow of laughter.
‘One does not,’ he said in the early perfect English of somebody who has spoken it from a child, ‘have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess that.’
Linda was rather annoyed. An Englishwoman abroad may be proud of her nationality and her virtue without wishing them to jump so conclusively to the eye.
‘French ladies,’ he went on, ‘covered with les marques extèrieurs de la richesse never never sit crying on their suitcases at the Gare du Nord in the very early morning, while esclaves blanches always have protectors, and it is only too clear that you are unprotected just now.’
This sounded all right, and Linda was mollified.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I invite you to luncheon with me, but first you must have a bath and rest and a cold compress on your face.’
He picked up her luggage and walked to a taxi.
‘Get in, please.’
Linda got in. She was far from certain that this was not the road to Buenos Aires, but something made her do as he said. Her powers of resistance were at an end, and she really saw no alternative.
‘Hotel Montalembert,’ he told the taxi man. ‘Rue du Bac. Je m’excuse, madame, for not taking you to the Ritz, but I have a feeling for the Hotel Montalembert just now, that it will suit your mood this morning.’
Linda sat upright in her corner of the taxi, looking, she hoped, very prim. As she could not think of anything pertinent to say she remained silent. Her companion hummed a little tune, and seemed vastly amused. When they arrived at the hotel, he took a room for her, told the liftman to show her to it, told the concierge to send her up a café complet, kissed her hand, and said:
‘A tout à l’heure – I will fetch you a little before one o’clock and we will go out to luncheon.’
Linda had her bath and breakfast and got into bed. When the telephone bell rang she was so sound asleep that it was a struggle to wake up.
‘Un monsieur qui demande, madame.’
‘Je descends tout de suite,’ said Linda, but it took her quite half an hour to get ready.
17
‘Ah! You keep me waiting,’ he said, kissing her hand, or at least making a gesture of raising her hand towards his lips and then dropping it rather suddenly. ‘That is a very good sign.’
‘Sign of what?’ said Linda. He had a two-seater outside the hotel and she got into it. She was feeling more like herself again.
‘Oh, of this and that,’ he said, letting in the clutch, ‘a good augury for our affair, that it will be happy and last long.’
Linda became intensely stiff, English, and embarrassed, and said, self-consciously:
‘We are not having an affair.’
‘My name is Fabrice – may one ask yours?’
‘Linda.’
‘Linda. Comme c’est joli. With me, it usually lasts five years.’
He drove to a restaurant where they were shown, with some deference, to a table in a red plush corner. He ordered the luncheon and the wine in rapid French, the sort of French that Linda frankly could not follow, then, putting his hands on his knees, he turned to her and said:
‘Allons, racontez, madame.’
‘Racontez what?’
‘Well, but of course, the story. Who was it that left you to cry on that suitcase?’
‘He didn’t. I left him. It was my second husband and I have left him for ever because he has fallen in love with another woman – a welfare worker, not that you’d know what that is, because I’m sure they don’t exist in France. It just makes it worse, that’s all.’
‘What a very curious reason for leaving one’s second husband. Surely with your experience of husbands you must have noticed that falling in love with other women is one of the things they do? However, it’s an ill wind, and I don’t complain. But why the suitcase? Why didn’t you put yourself in the train and go back to Monsieur the important lord, your father?’
‘That’s what I was doing until they told me that my return ticket had expired. I only had 6s. 3d., and I don’t know anybody in Paris, and I was awfully tired, so I cried.’
‘The second husband – why not borrow some money from him? Or had you left a note on his pillow – women never can resist these little essays in literature, and they do make it rather embarrassing to go back, I know.’
‘Well, anyhow he’s in Perpignan, so I couldn’t have.’
‘Ah, you come from Perpignan. And what were you doing there, in the name of heaven?’
‘In the name of heaven we were trying to stop you Frogs from teasing the poor Epagnards,’ said Linda with some spirit.
‘E-spa-gnols! So we are teasing them, are we?’
‘Not so badly now – terribly at the beginning.’
‘What were we supposed to do with them? We never invited them to come, you know.’
‘You drove them into camps in that cruel wind, and gave them no shelter for weeks. Hundreds died.’
‘It is quite a job to provide shelter, at a moment’s notice, for half a million people. We did what we could – we fed them – the fact is that
