‘Just for an hour then,’ she said.
They went to a White Russian night club, a stuffy, dark, enclosed room with music from the Steppes. Cossacks, in boots and white blouses, have keened here night after night for thirty years over a life that has gone for ever. The hours of darkness seem too short for them to express the whole burden of their desolation, so that any reveller who will sit up and listen to the wails and whimpers of their violins until late into the next day becomes their brother and their best beloved. Whereas in other night places the band may be anxious to catch the last metro and go home, these Russians would rather anything than that a lack of customers should drive them out to the first metro. The little room has come to represent Holy Russia to them, and when they leave it in the morning exile begins again. It is really a place designed for lovers or for drunkards, people who like to sit all night engulfed in sound rather than for those who want an hour of sober chat.
Hughie had come to unburden himself about Albertine, and he had to talk very loud so as to be heard over the scream of the violins. From time to time the noise suddenly dropped to a dramatic hush, intended to represent the lull in a storm, and then Hughie’s powerful English voice would ring out into the silence so that he was embarrassed, and Grace wanted to giggle. As soon as he had lowered it a gusty crescendo would swallow up his next sentence. It was a very fidgety way of confiding.
‘Of course she’ll never want to marry me, I know. I don’t allow myself to think of it. She is far above me, far too clever and wonderful. She knows everything, not only all French literature but English and German too – she has even read Mrs Henry Wood, for instance. I wish you could hear her reciting – by the hour, it’s extraordinary. When I think of all the years I’ve wasted – but I never guessed there was somebody like that just round the corner or I would have tried to educate myself a bit. You can’t be surprised she rather looks down on me, as it is. So now I’m trying terribly hard to make up for lost time, just in case one day she might think of marrying me. Not very likely, I know, but in life things do sometimes happen. For instance she might be ruined and need a home, or have a fearful accident and be disfigured, or lose a leg –’
The words ‘lose a leg’, falling into one of the pools of sudden silence, echoed round the room so that Grace could not help laughing.
‘Lose a leg?’ she said.
Hughie laughed himself, saying, ‘Oh well, of course it sounds ridiculous; it’s one of those things which I sometimes think of. After all Sarah Bernhardt did, it can happen, and then she’d need somebody to push her about. The worst of it is such hundreds of people do want to marry her, she’d be unlikely to choose me. There’s another terrible worry. She talks of going into a convent. I wake up in the night and think about it. Supposing one day I were to call at her house only to be told “Madame Marel-Desboulles is no more. Pray for Soeur Angélique”?’
Grace laughed again, and said, ‘You’ve been reading Henry James – so do I, in the hopes of understanding them all better. But I don’t think Albertine is another Madame de Cintré, nor do I think she’ll ever marry again. I guess you’ll be able to go on like this for years, if it’s any consolation to you.’
‘It’s very much better than nothing, of course. So, as I say, I read a lot to try to educate myself, but I must have let my mind go badly and it’s an awful strain. Have you ever tried the Mémoires of Saint-Simon? Heavy weather, I can tell you. Then I try and see as many clever people as I can. That’s why I go such a lot to the Dexters.’
‘D’you think them so very clever?’
‘Carolyn is brilliant of course, she takes me sight-seeing and we go to lectures. As for old Heck, well, if he is a bit muddle-headed about some things, he’s got the gift of the gab, hasn’t he? I wish I could talk like that, on and on.’
‘I always think he talks as if he doesn’t quite know English.’
‘Really, Grace, what an idea. All those words – I’m English, but I don’t know what half of them mean. Albertine would like me much better if I could put on an act like Hector, I’m sure she would. But when I’m with her I seem to get so tongue-tied.’
At this moment a large party of people got up to go. The violinists came forward, still playing, to try and persuade them to stay. They surrounded them, playing with all their souls. But the people, though smiling, were firm, and made a passage through the deeply bowing, still playing Cossacks. When they had gone, and the violinists had returned to the band, Grace suddenly perceived, in a very dark corner, hitherto obscured by these other people, the figures of Charles-Edouard and Juliette. Their backs were turned, but she could see their faces in a looking-glass. They were evidently enjoying themselves enormously, heads close together, laughing and chattering sixteen to the dozen. Grace was particularly struck, stricken to the heart indeed, by Charles-Edouard’s look, a happy, tender, and amused expression, which, she thought, she herself used to evoke at Bellandargues but which she had not seen of late.
She felt weak, as if she were bleeding to death. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘but I think I might faint. Could we go home please, Hughie?’
‘Goodness,’ he
