‘Are you Flaxman 2815?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got a call for you. You’re through.’
‘Allô – allô?’
‘Fabrice?’
‘Oui.’
‘Oh! Fabrice – on vous attend depuis si longtemps.’
‘Comme c’est gentil. Alors, on peut venir tout de suite chez vous?’
‘Oh, wait – yes, you can come at once, but don’t go for a minute, go on talking, I want to hear the sound of your voice.’
‘No, no, I have a taxi outside, I shall be with you in five minutes. There’s too much one can’t do on the telephone, ma chère, voyons –’ Click.
She lay back, and all was light and warmth. Life, she thought, is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake and here is one of them. The early morning sun shone past her window on to the river, her ceiling danced with water-reflections. The Sunday silence was broken by two swans winging slowly upstream, and then by the chugging of a little barge, while she waited for that other sound, a sound more intimately connected with the urban love affair than any except the telephone bell, that of a stopping taxicab. Sun, silence, and happiness. Presently she heard it in the street, slowly, slower, it stopped, the flag went up with a ring, the door slammed, voices, clinking coins, footsteps. She rushed downstairs.
Hours later Linda made some coffee.
‘So lucky,’ she said, ‘that it happens to be Sunday, and Mrs Hunt isn’t here. What would she have thought?’
‘Just about the same as the night porter at the Hotel Montalembert, I expect,’ said Fabrice.
‘Why did you come, Fabrice? To join General de Gaulle?’
‘No, that was not necessary, because I have joined him already. I was with him in Bordeaux. My work has to be in France, but we have ways of communicating when we want to. I shall go and see him, of course, he expects me at midday, but actually I came on a private mission.’
He looked at her for a long time.
‘I came to tell you that I love you,’ he said, at last.
Linda felt giddy.
‘You never said that to me in Paris.’
‘No.’
‘You always seemed so practical.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I had said it so often and often before in my life, I had been so romantic with so many women, that when I felt this to be different I really could not bring out all those stale old phrases again, I couldn’t utter them. I never said I loved you, I never tutoyé’d you, on purpose. Because from the first moment I knew that this was as real as all the others were false, it was like recognizing somebody – there, I can’t explain.’
‘But that is exactly how I felt too,’ said Linda, ‘don’t try to explain, you needn’t, I know.’
‘Then, when you had gone, I felt I had to tell you, and it became an obsession with me to tell you. All those dreadful weeks were made more dreadful because I was being prevented from telling you.’
‘How ever did you get here?’
‘On circule,’ said Fabrice, vaguely. ‘I must leave again tomorrow morning, very early, and I shan’t come back until the war is over, but you’ll wait for me, Linda, and nothing matters so much now that you know. I was tormented, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I was becoming useless in my work. In future I may have much to bear, but I shan’t have to bear you going away without knowing what a great love I have for you.’
‘Oh, Fabrice, I feel – well, I suppose religious people sometimes feel like this.’
She put her head on his shoulder, and they sat for a long time in silence.
When he had paid his visit to Carlton Gardens they lunched at the Ritz. It was full of people Linda knew, all very smart, very gay, and talking with the greatest flippancy about the imminent arrival of the Germans. Had it not been for the fact that all the young men there had fought bravely in Flanders, and would, no doubt, soon be fighting bravely again, and this time with more experience, on other fields of battle, the general tone might have been considered shocking. Even Fabrice looked grave, and said they did not seem to realize –
Davey and Lord Merlin appeared. Their eyebrows went up when they saw Fabrice.
‘Poor Merlin has the wrong kind,’ Davey said to Linda.
‘The wrong kind of what?’
‘Pill to take when the Germans come. He’s just got the sort you give to dogs.’
Davey brought out a jewelled box containing two pills, one white and one black.
‘You take the white one first and then the black one – he really must go to my doctor.’
‘I think one should let the Germans do the killing,’ said Linda. ‘Make them add to their own crimes and use up a bullet. Why should one smooth their path in any way? Besides, I back myself to do in at least two before they get me.’
‘Oh, you’re so tough, Linda, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be a bullet for me, they would torture me, look at the things I’ve said about them in the Gazette.’
‘No worse than you’ve said about all of us,’ Lord Merlin remarked.
Davey was known to be a most savage reviewer, a perfect butcher, never sparing even his dearest friends. He wrote under several pseudonyms, which in no way disguised his unmistakable style, his cruellest essays appearing over the name Little Nell.
‘Are you here for long, Sauveterre?’
‘No, not for long.’
Linda and Fabrice went in to luncheon. They talked of this and that, mostly jokes. Fabrice told her scandalous stories about some of the other lunchers known to him of old, with a wealth of unlikely detail. He spoke only once about France, only to say that the struggle must be carried on, everything would be all right in the end. Linda
