Christian did not show the slightest curiosity about what had happened to Linda, he did not seem to want to divorce her or to marry Lavender, he had thrown himself heart and soul into army life and thought of nothing but the war.
Before leaving Perpignan he had extricated Matt, who, after a good deal of persuasion, had consented to leave his Spanish comrades in order to join the battle against Fascism on another front. He went into Uncle Matthew’s old regiment, and was said to bore his brother officers in the mess very much by arguing that they were training the men all wrong, and that, during the battle of Ebro, things had been done thus and thus. In the end his colonel, who was rather brighter in the head than some of the others, hit upon the obvious reply, which was, ‘Well anyway, your side lost!’ This shut Matt up on tactics, but got him going on statistics – ‘30,000 Germans and Italians, 500 German planes’, and so forth – which were almost equally dull.
Linda heard no more about Jacqueline, and the wretchedness into which she had been thrown by those few chance words overheard at the Ritz were gradually forgotten. She reminded herself that nobody ever really knew the state of a man’s heart, not even, perhaps specially not, his mother, and that in love it is actions that count. Fabrice had no time now for two women, he spent every spare moment with her and that in itself reassured her. Besides, just as her marriages with Tony and Christian had been necessary in order to lead up to her meeting with Fabrice, so this affair had led up to his meeting with her: undoubtedly he must have been seeing Jacqueline off at the Gare du Nord when he found Linda crying on her suitcase. Putting herself in Jacqueline’s shoes, she realized how much preferable it was to be in her own: in any case it was not Jacqueline who was her dangerous rival, but that dim, virtuous figure from the past, Louise. Whenever Fabrice showed signs of becoming a little less practical, a little more nonsensical, and romantic, it was of his fiancée that he would speak, dwelling with a gentle sadness upon her beauty, her noble birth, her vast estates, and her religious mania. Linda once suggested that, had the fiancée lived to become a wife, she might not have been a very happy one.
‘All that climbing,’ she said, ‘in at other people’s bedroom windows, might it not have upset her?’
Fabrice looked intensely shocked and reproachful and said that there never would have been any climbing, that, where marriage was concerned, he had the very highest ideals, and that his whole life would have been devoted to making Louise happy. Linda felt herself rebuked, but was not entirely convinced.
All this time Linda watched the tree-tops from her window. They had changed, since she had been in the flat, from bright green against a bright blue sky, to dark green against a lavender sky, to yellow against a cerulean sky, until now they were black skeletons against a sky of moleskin, and it was Christmas Day. The windows could no longer be opened until they disappeared, but, whenever the sun did come out, it shone into her rooms, and the flat was always as warm as toast. On this Christmas morning Fabrice arrived, quite unexpectedly, before she was up, his arms full of parcels, and soon the floor of her bedroom was covered with waves of tissue paper through which, like wrecks and monsters half submerged beneath a shallow sea, appeared fur coats, hats, real mimosa, artificial flowers, feathers, scent, gloves, stockings, underclothes, and a bulldog puppy.
Linda had spent Lord Merlin’s 20,000 francs on a tiny Renoir for Fabrice: six inches of seascape, a little patch of brilliant blue, which she thought would look just right in his room in the rue Bonaparte. Fabrice was the most difficult person to buy presents for, he possessed a larger assortment of jewels, knick-knacks, and rare objects of all kinds than anybody she had ever known. He was delighted with the Renoir, nothing, he said, could have pleased him more, and Linda felt that he really meant it.
‘Oh, such a cold day,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been to church.’
‘Fabrice, how can you go to church when there’s me?’
‘Well, why not.’
‘You’re a Roman Catholic, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am. What do you suppose? Do you think I look like a Calvinist?’
‘But then aren’t you living in mortal sin? So what about when you confess?’
‘On ne précise pas,’ said Fabrice, carelessly, ‘and in any case, these little sins of the body are quite unimportant.’
Linda would have liked to think that she was more in Fabrice’s life than a little sin of the body, but she was used to coming up against these closed doors in her relationship with him, and had learnt to be philosophical about it and thankful for the happiness that she did receive.
‘In England,’ she said, ‘people are always renouncing each other on account of being Roman Catholics. It’s sometimes very sad for them. A lot of English books are about this, you know.’
‘Les Anglais sont des insensés, je l’ai toujours dit. You almost sound as if you want to be given up. What has happened since Saturday? Not tired of your war work, I hope?’
‘No, no, Fabrice. I just wondered, that’s all.’
‘But you look so sad, ma chérie, what is it?’
‘I was thinking of Christmas Day at home. I always feel sentimental at Christmas.’
‘If what I said might happen does happen and I have to send you back to England, shall you go home to your father?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Linda, ‘anyway, it won’t happen. All the English papers say we are killing Germany with our blockade.’
‘Le blocus,’ said Fabrice, impatiently, ‘quelle blague! Je vais vous dire, madame, ils ne se fichent pas mal
