Fabrice took her out to dinner and then to a night club, where they did not dance, but chatted endlessly. She told him about Uncle Matthew, Aunt Sadie and Louisa and Jassy and Matt, and he could not hear enough, and egged her on to excesses of exaggeration about her family and all their various idiosyncrasies.
‘Et Jassy – et Matt – alors, racontez.’
And she recounted, for hours.
In the taxi on their way home she refused again to go back with him or to let him come into the hotel with her. He did not insist, he did not try to hold her hand, or touch her at all. He merely said:
‘C’est une résistance magnifique, je vous félicite de tout mon cœur, madame.’
Outside the hotel she gave him her hand to say good night. He took it in both of his and really kissed it.
‘A demain,’ he said, and got into the taxi.
‘Allô – allô.’
‘Hullo.’
‘Good morning. Are you having breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought I heard a coffee-cup clattering. Is it good?’
‘It’s so delicious that I have to keep stopping, for fear of finishing it too quickly. Are you having yours?’
‘Had it. I must tell you that I like very long conversations in the morning, and I shall expect you to raconter des histoires.’
‘Like Schéhérazade?’
‘Yes, just like. And you’re not to get that note in your voice of “now I’m going to ring off”, as English people always do.’
‘What English people do you know?’
‘I know some. I was at school in England, and at Oxford.’
‘No! When?’
‘1920.’
‘When I was nine. Fancy, perhaps I saw you in the street – we used to do all our shopping in Oxford.’
‘Elliston & Cavell?’
‘Oh, yes, and Webbers.’
There was a silence.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Go on, what?’
‘I mean don’t ring off. Go on telling.’
‘I shan’t ring off. As a matter of fact I adore chatting. It’s my favourite thing, and I expect you will want to ring off ages before I do.’
They had a long and very silly conversation, and, at the end of it, Fabrice said:
‘Now get up, and in an hour I will fetch you and we will go to Versailles.’
At Versailles, which was an enchantment to Linda, she was reminded of a story she had once read about two English ladies who had seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette sitting in her garden at the Little Trianon. Fabrice found this intensely boring, and said so.
‘Histoires,’ he said, ‘are only of interest when they are true, or when you have made them up specially to amuse me. Histoires de revenants, made up by some dim old English virgins, are neither true nor interesting. Donc plus d’histoires de revenants, madame, s’il vous plaît.’
‘All right,’ said Linda, crossly. ‘I’m doing my best to please – you tell me a story.’
‘Yes, I will – and this story is true. My grandmother was very beautiful and had many lovers all her life, even when she was quite old. A short time before she died she was in Venice with my mother, her daughter, and one day, floating up some canal in their gondola, they saw a little palazzo of pink marble, very exquisite. They stopped the gondola to look at it, and my mother said: “I don’t believe anybody lives there, what about trying to see the inside?”
‘So they rang the bell, and an old servant came and said that nobody had lived there for many, many years, and he would show it to them if they liked. So they went in and upstairs to the salone, which had three windows looking over the canal and was decorated with fifteenth-century plaster work, white on a pale blue background. It was a perfect room. My grandmother seemed strangely moved, and stood for a long time in silence. At last she said to my mother:
‘“If, in the third drawer of that bureau there is a filigree box containing a small gold key on a black velvet ribbon, this house belongs to me.”
‘And my mother looked, and there was, and it did. One of my grandmother’s lovers had given it to her years and years before, when she was quite young, and she had forgotten all about it.’
‘Goodness,’ said Linda, ‘what fascinating lives you foreigners do lead.’
‘And it belongs to me now.’
He put up his hand to Linda’s forehead and stroked back a strand of hair which was loose:
‘And I would take you there tomorrow if –’
‘If what?’
‘One must wait here now, you see, for the war.’
‘Oh, I keep forgetting the war,’ said Linda.
‘Yes, let’s forget it. Comme vous êtes mal coiffée, ma chère.’
‘If you don’t like my clothes and don’t like my hair and think my eyes are so small, I don’t know what you see in me.’
‘Quand même j’avoue qu’il y a quelquechose,’ said Fabrice.
Again they dined together.
Linda said: ‘Haven’t you any other engagements?’
‘Yes, of course. I have cancelled them.’
‘Who are your friends?’
‘Les gens du monde. And yours?’
‘When I was married to Tony, that is, my first husband, I used to go out in the monde, it was my life. In those days I loved it. But then Christian didn’t approve of it, he stopped me going to parties and frightened away my friends, whom he considered frivolous and idiotic, and we saw nothing but serious people trying to put the world right. I used to laugh at them, and rather long for my other friends, but now I don’t know. Since I was at Perpignan perhaps I have become more serious myself.’
‘Everybody is
