‘Yes,’ said Fabrice, with a sigh. ‘I admit that she was a great sinner. But she was also une très grande dame, and she died fully redeemed by the rites of the Church.’
18
Their life now began to acquire a routine. Fabrice dined with her every night in the flat – he never took her out to a restaurant again – and stayed with her until seven o’clock the following morning. ‘J’ai horreur de coucher seul,’ he said. At seven he would get up, dress, and go home, in time to be in his bed at eight o’clock, when his breakfast was brought in. He would have his breakfast, read the newspapers, and, at nine, ring up Linda and talk nonsense for half an hour, as though he had not seen her for days.
‘Go on,’ he would say, if she showed any signs of flagging. ‘Allons, des histoires!’
During the day she hardly saw him. He always lunched with his mother, who had the first-floor flat in the house where he lived on the ground floor. Sometimes he took Linda sight-seeing in the afternoon, but generally he did not appear until about half-past seven, soon after which they dined.
Linda occupied her days buying clothes, which she paid for with great wads of banknotes given her by Fabrice.
‘Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,’ she thought. ‘And as he despises me anyway it can’t make very much difference.’
Fabrice was delighted. He took an intense interest in her clothes, looked them up and down, made her parade round her drawing-room in them, forced her to take them back to the shops for alterations which seemed to her quite unnecessary, but which proved in the end to have made all the difference. Linda had never before fully realized the superiority of French clothes to English. In London she had been considered exceptionally well dressed, when she was married to Tony; she now realized that never could she have had, by French standards, the smallest pretensions to chic. The things she had with her seemed to her so appallingly dowdy, so skimpy and miserable and without line, that she went to the Galeries Lafayette and bought herself a ready-made dress there before she dared to venture into the big houses. When she did finally emerge from them with a few clothes, Fabrice advised her to get a great many more. Her taste, he said, was not at all bad, for an Englishwoman, though he doubted whether she would really become élégante in the true sense of the word.
‘Only by trial and error,’ he said, ‘can you find out your genre, can you see where you are going. Continuez, donc, ma chère, allez-y. Jusqu’à présent, ça ne va pas mal du tout.’
The weather now became hot and sultry, holiday, seaside weather. But this was 1939, and men’s thoughts were not of relaxation but of death, not of bathing-suits but of uniforms, not of dance music but of trumpets, while beaches for the next few years were to be battle and not pleasure grounds. Fabrice said every day how much he longed to take Linda to the Riviera, to Venice and to his beautiful chateau in the Dauphine. But he was a reservist, and would be called up any day now. Linda did not mind staying in Paris at all. She could sunbathe in her flat as much as she wanted to. She felt no particular apprehensions about the coming war, she was essentially a person who lived in the present.
‘I couldn’t sunbathe naked like this anywhere else,’ she said, ‘and it’s the only holiday thing I enjoy. I don’t like swimming, or tennis, or dancing, or gambling, so you see I’m just as well off here sunbathing and shopping, two perfect occupations for the day, and you, my darling love, at night. I should think I’m the happiest woman in the world.’
One boiling hot afternoon in July she arrived home wearing a new and particularly ravishing straw hat. It was large and simple, with a wreath of flowers and two blue bows. Her right arm was full of roses and carnations, and in her left hand was a striped bandbox, containing another exquisite hat. She let herself in with her latchkey, and stumped, on the high cork soles of her sandals, to the drawing-room.
The green venetian blinds were down, and the room was full of warm shadows, two of which suddenly resolved themselves into a thin man and a not so thin man – Davey and Lord Merlin.
‘Good heavens,’ said Linda, and she flopped down on to a sofa, scattering the roses at her feet.
‘Well,’ said Davey, ‘you do look pretty.’
Linda felt really frightened, like a child caught out in some misdeed, like a child whose new toy is going to be taken away. She looked from one to the other. Lord Merlin was wearing black spectacles.
‘Are you in disguise?’ said Linda.
‘No, what do you mean? Oh, the spectacles – I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me.’
He took them off and blinked.
‘What have you come for?’
‘You don’t seem very pleased to see us,’ said Davey. ‘We came, actually, to see if you were all right. As it’s only too obvious that you are, we may as well go away again.’
‘How did you find out? Do Mummy and Fa know?’ she added, faintly.
‘No, absolutely nothing. They think you’re still with Christian. We haven’t come in the spirit of two Victorian uncles, my dear Linda, if that’s what you’re thinking. I happened to see a man I know who had been in Perpignan, and he mentioned that Christian was living with Lavender Davis –’
‘Oh good,’ said Linda.
‘What? And that you had left six weeks ago. I went round to Cheyne Walk and there
