‘You could ring the bell there and have a peep,’ he would say, ‘nobody knows you as yet – but I shall remain here, out of sight.’
So Grace would ring, put her head round the wicket, apologize to the concierge, and be rewarded by a transparency of stone and glass and ironwork, placed, like her own house, between courtyard and trees. When the ground floor was the width of one room these trees would be visible through the two sets of windows.
‘Well, did you like it?’
‘Oh wonderful – I can’t get over it, Charles-Edouard!’
‘Please do not demonstrate in front of these policemen. Please remember that I am a well-known figure in this neighbourhood. Did you notice the sphinxes in the courtyard?’
Grace never noticed any details of that sort; her eye was quite untrained, and she was content to take in a general impression of beauty, to which she was very receptive. Unlike her husband, however, she really preferred natural beauty to things made by man.
‘I am loving it, oh I am loving it. I didn’t know Paris was like this. When I was at school here it was different – rue de la Pompe and Avenue Victor Hugo (the hours we spent in the Grand Magazin Jones!) in those days. And even so I was always happy here, but now –! I suppose it’s got something to do with you as well, my happiness.’
‘Something!’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Everything.’
‘How lucky I am! I could never have loved anybody else half as much.’
‘I know.’
‘Still, I wish you wouldn’t say “I know” like that. You might say that you’re lucky too.’
‘I’m awfully nice,’ he answered, ‘never could you have found anybody as nice as I am. Admit that you amuse yourself when you are with me. Now look – the Fountain of Bouchardon, so beautiful. But how foolish to put those horrible modern flats just there.’
‘You ought to have a Georgian Society,’ said Grace. ‘Do you think you’re really the whole reason for my happiness?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Oh dear, I hope not, so dangerous when it all depends on one person. Perhaps the Blessing has a bit to do with it too.’ But she knew that if so it was a very minor bit, much as she loved the pretty little boy.
‘Look, the gateway of the Hôtel de Bérulle, is it not a masterpiece of restraint and clever contrivance? See how a coach would be able to turn out of this narrow street, and drive in.’
‘Oh yes, how fascinating!’
‘Please do not demonstrate –’
But he was really delighted at the way she was taking to everything French. He saw that, in spite of her bad education, she showed signs of a natural taste which could easily be developed. As for Charles-Edouard, art was a religion to him. If he had a few moments to spare he would run into the Louvre as his grandmother would run into church for a short prayer. The museums were awakening one after another from their war-time trance, and Charles-Edouard, intimate with all the curators, spent hours with them discussing and praising the many improvements.
Grace said, ‘How strange it is that you, who really take in everything through the eyes, should hate the country so much.’
‘Nature I hate. It is so dull in the country, that must be why. But Art I love.’
‘And pretty ladies you love?’ she said, as he turned to peer at a vision in black and white flashing by in a little Rolls-Royce. September was nearing its close and the pretty ladies had begun to trickle back into town, filling Grace with apprehension.
‘Women I love,’ he said with his guilty, interior laugh. ‘But also I am a great family man, and that will be your hold over me.’
But how to have a hold, she thought, unless one’s own feet are firmly planted on the ground? And how can they be so planted in a strange country, surrounded by strangers at the very beginning of a strange new life?
In due course Nanny and Sigi arrived on the night train from Marseilles, and that afternoon Grace took them across the river to the Tuileries Gardens. Nanny was in a wonderfully mellow mood, delighted to have got away from the heat of Provence, from Canari, and, temporarily, at any rate, from M. l’Abbé. (He was coming to Paris after Christmas, when the lessons would be resumed.) Delighted, too, to be in a town again, where a child is so much easier to control than in the country. She entirely approved of the fact that the door to the street could only be opened by the concierge, and that the garden was surrounded by walls high as the ramparts of a city. No means of escape here for little boys. She was not even entirely displeased with the nursery accommodation; arranged for Charles-Edouard by his English mother it was like an old-fashioned nursery in some big London house, and had none of the strange bleakness of the rooms at Bellandargues.
Her smiles, however, always on the wintry side, soon vanished when she was confronted with the goat carts, the donkeys, the Guignol, and the happy crowd of scooting, skating children in the Tuileries Gardens. Sigi had, of course, no sooner seen the goat carts than he was in one.
‘We shall never get the little monkey away from these animals – is there nowhere else for us to go, dear, more like Hyde Park? I’m not going to stand the whole winter in this draughty-looking square waiting for him to ride round hour after hour.’
‘Oh no, darling, you mustn’t. We must ration him. But
