The Blessing Read online

  ‘No, no, I suppose not. And as she seems to have the secret of eternal youth (sold her soul to the devil, no doubt) I suppose Sigi’s children won’t be able to do without her either. If we were savages she would undoubtedly be the chieftainess of the tribe.’

  Back in London, Sir Conrad went straight off to see Mrs O’Donovan and recount his visit.

  ‘It’s such a pity you didn’t come,’ he said, ‘next time you really must. Grace would love to put you up, she asked me to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t believe I shall ever go back to Paris,’ she said. ‘I’ve known it too well and loved it too much. I couldn’t bear to find all my friends old and poor and down at heels.’

  ‘If it’s only that,’ he said with a short laugh, ‘I’ve never seen them so prosperous, all living in their own huge houses, thousands of servants, guzzle, guzzle, guzzle, swig, swig, swig, just like old days.’

  ‘Are they really so rich? But why?’ she said querulously, as if they ought not to be.

  ‘I suppose I don’t have to enter into the economic reasons with you. You know as well as I do why it is.’

  ‘In any case you can’t deny they are all ten years older.’

  ‘But the point is you’d think they were twenty years younger. They’ve all had Bogomoletz. That is something we must look into, you know. You get the liver of a newly killed young man (killed on the roads, of course, not on purpose) pumped into your liver, and the result is quite amazing.’

  ‘My dear Conrad –’

  ‘Or if you jib at that you can press unborn chickens on to your face before going out.’

  ‘Thank you very much if by you, you mean me. I get one Polish egg a week on my ration.’

  ‘Remarkable what your cook manages to do with that one Polish egg, I must say. Hens must lay enormous eggs in Poland, or are they ostriches? But to go back to your friends, none of them looks a day more than forty. I can’t think why you’re not pleased, you’re supposed to love the French so much.’

  ‘I think it’s frightfully annoying, after all they’ve been through. Now I want to hear a great deal about other things. What is the exact situation at present.’

  ‘Situation?’

  Sir Conrad had come back in a very uppish mood, she thought, like a child after a treat.

  ‘The political situation, of course. What does Blondin say, for instance?’

  ‘My dear Meg, I didn’t see Blondin, or any of them. I was entirely given over to pleasure and fun. But you know what the silly fool says as well as I do, since I am well aware that, like me, you see all the French papers.’

  Mrs O’Donovan sighed. She did wish her English political friends could be a little more serious about the terrible state of the world. Sir Conrad, she thought, might well take a leaf out of the book of that important, well-informed Mr Hector Dexter whom she had met the day before at a dinner party, and who had told her some interesting, if rather lowering, facts about present-day French mentality.

  Sir Conrad was not unconscious of these critical thoughts, he knew Mrs O’Donovan too well for that, but he was still a little drunk with all the pleasure and fun he had been having, so he went carelessly on,

  ‘I want you to help me give a big, amusing dinner for Madame Rocher des Innouïs next month if she comes, as I hope she will, to stay at the French Embassy.’

  ‘Régine Rocher,’ said Mrs O’Donovan, faintly, ‘don’t tell me she’s got the liver of a newly run-over young man.’

  ‘I should think she’s got everything she can lay her hands on. Anyhow she’s remarkably pretty for what Charles-Edouard says is her age. He says she spends £8,000 a year on clothes, and the result, I’m obliged to tell you, is top-hole.’

  ‘Simply ridiculous, I should imagine.’

  Mrs O’Donovan, who was generally the driest of blankets, was proving such a wet one on this occasion that Sir Conrad took himself off to the House. Here he had a sensational success with all his traveller’s tales about Bogomoletz and embryo chickens, not to mention detailed descriptions, unfit for the ears of a lady, of the goings-on chez Countess Arraczi.

  13

  ‘Our visit to London,’ said Hector Dexter, ‘was an integral success. I went to learn about the present or peace-time conditions there and to sense the present or peace-time mood of you Britishers, and I think that I fully achieved both these aims.’

  The Dexters and Hughie Palgrave were dining with Grace. Charles-Edouard had told her earlier in the week that he was obliged to dine alone with Madame de la Ferté to talk family business.

  ‘My uncle is so old now, he really makes no sense at all, and Jean is no use to her either. Nobody knows whether he is a case of arrested development or premature senile decay; she is having him injected for both, and the only result so far has been a poisoned arm. Why don’t you ask some friends here to keep you company?’

  Grace jumped at the idea of having the Dexters without Charles-Edouard. Although he never said they bored him, and indeed professed to admire Carolyn, whom he always referred to as la belle Lesbienne, she could somehow never bring herself to suggest inviting them again when he was there. As for Hughie, there would clearly be an awkwardness if he were to meet Charles-Edouard. She herself saw him quite often at the Dexters, and once a certain embarrassment between them was over they had become good friends again. They had never been much more than that, never passionate lovers.

  ‘It’s not the first time you’ve seen London, is it?’ Grace said.

  ‘No, Grace, it is not. I was in London during World War II and I will not pause now to say what I felt then about the effort which every class of you Britishers was putting forward at that time because what I felt then is expressed in my well-known and bestselling book Global Vortex. This time I found a very different atmosphere, much more relaxed and therefore much more difficult to sense, harder to describe.’

  ‘Whom did you see?’

  ‘We saw a very representative cross-section of your British life. We were in London and had a good time there, many very pleasant lunch parties and dinner parties and cocktail parties being given for us. We spent some nights with Carolyn’s relatives in the North and had a good time there and some nights with some other relatives of Carolyn’s near Oxford and had a good time there too.’

  ‘So now what was your general impression, Heck?’

  Hughie revered Hector, who seemed to him quite the cleverest man he had ever met. His own ambition was to go into politics as soon as he could get a seat to contest, and he liked picking Hector’s brains on international subjects, or rather, allowing Hector’s brains to flow over him in a glowing lava of thought.

  ‘I must be honest with you, Hughie, my impression is not quite satisfactory.’

  ‘Oh dear, that’s bad. In what way?’

  ‘An impression, I am sorry to say, of a great deal of misplaced levity.’

  ‘Levity? I never see much levity at home; nothing much to levitate about, I shouldn’t have said.’

  ‘I must explain a little further. My government expects and gets, reports from me on the political equilibrium, stability, and soundness of the various countries I visit. At first sight this stability, equilibrium, and soundness seem very great in Britain. At first sight. But there is a worm, a canker in this seemingly sound and perfect fruit which I for one find profoundly disquieting. I refer to the frivolous attitude you Britishers have adopted, just as it has been adopted here (the difference being that nobody expects the French to be serious whereas we do most certainly expect it of you Britishers), the frivolous attitude towards – we are all grown-up and I guess I can speak without embarrassing anybody – sexual perversion.’

  ‘Have we adopted a frivolous attitude?’ said Hughie. ‘The poor old dears are always being run in, you know.’

  ‘I think I will put it this way. I think it cannot be generally understood and realized in Britain, as we understand and realize it in the States, that morally and politically these people are lepers. They are sickly, morbose, heal
thless, chlorotic, unbraced, flagging, peccant, vitiated and contaminated, and when I use the word contaminated I use it very specifically in the political sense. But I think you British have absolutely no conception of the danger in your midst, of the harm these perverts can do to the state of which they are citizens. You seem to regard them as a subject for joking rather than as the object of a deep-seated, far-reaching purge.’

  ‘But they’re not in politics, Heck – hardly any, at least.’

  ‘Not openly, no. That’s their cunning. They work behind the scenes.’

  ‘If you can call it work.’

  ‘For the cause of Communism. The point I am trying to make is that they are dangerous because politically contaminated, a political contamination that can, in every traceable case, be traced to Moscow.’

  ‘I say, hold on, Heck,’ said Hughie. ‘All the old queens I know are terrific old Tories.’

  ‘I am bound to contradict you, Hughie, or rather I am bound to put forward my argument, and you are going to see that it is a powerful argument, to persuade you of the exact opposite of what you have just said and to persuade you that what you have just said is the exact opposite of the truth as known to my government. We Americans, you may know, have certain very very sure and reliable, I would even say infallible, sources of information. We have our Un-American Activities Committee sections, we have our F.B.I. agents, we have countless very very brilliant newspaper men and business men all over the world (men like Charlie Jungfleisch and Asp Jorgmann); we have also other sources which I am not at liberty to disclose to you, even off the record. And our sources of information inform us that nine out of every ten, and some say ninety-nine out of every hundred, of these morally sick persons are not only in the very closest sympathy but in actual contact with Moscow. And I for one entirely believe these sources.’

  Hughie was unconvinced. ‘But my dear Heck, in Russia you go to Siberia for that. I’ve got a friend of mine who’s awfully worried about it in case they come –’

  ‘Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. There are some very curious anomalies, things you would hardly credit, Hughie, but of which our agents are cognizant, going on in that great amorphous blob of a country today. But I am not concerned with the pervert in Russia, my concern is with the pervert in Western Europe because my professional concern at the moment is with Western Europe, more especially in its moral and ethical aspect.’

  ‘Then what about the pervert in America?’ said Hughie.

  ‘And I am very very glad to say that this very unpleasant problem does not exist in the States. We have no pederasts.’

  ‘How funny,’ said Grace, ‘all the Americans here are.’

  She was thinking of various gay, light-hearted fellows whom she met with Charles-Edouard and his friends. Mr Dexter was displeased with this remark and did not reply, but Hughie said,

  ‘Perhaps they have a bad time at home and all come here, like before the war one used to think all Germans were Jews. But honestly you know, Heck, what you’ve just said makes no sense, and the more one thinks of it the less sense it makes.’

  ‘I will make one more attempt to explain my meaning to you, Hughie, and then we must go. If a man is morally sick, Hughie, he is morally sick, if he is sick in one sense he will be sick in another, and if he is sexually sick he will be politically sick as well.’

  ‘But, poor old things, they’re not sick,’ said Hughie, ‘they just happen to like boys better than girls. You can’t blame them for that, it’s awfully inconvenient, and they’d give anything to be different if they could. But I don’t see that it’s any reason for calling them Bolshevists. I probably know more about them than you do, having been at Eton and Oxford, and if there’s one thing they’re not it’s Bolshevists. Anything for a quiet life is their motto. I’m afraid, old man, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, and if this is what your infallible sources are telling you, I should advise a comb-out of the sources.’

  The Dexters now got up to leave. The Jungfleisches, they explained, were giving a party for important people, and they had promised to be there early.

  ‘Poor old Heck,’ said Hughie when they had gone. ‘He does see things in black and white. Funny, really, for such a clever man. I can’t help remembering how all over the Russians he used to be, in Italy. He bit my head off the other day for reminding him, but it’s true.’

  ‘Like Carolyn,’ Grace said, laughing, ‘she used to be our school Communist. I know it was she, though now she pretends I’ve been mixing her up with another girl. She gets furious when I tease her about it.’

  Hughie said, ‘Let’s go and have a glass of wine somewhere before bed-time, shall we?’

  Grace felt tired, as she often did now, but it seemed rather a shame to send him away so early, and she consented.

  ‘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 said, ‘you are white, Grace.’ He hurried her to the motor, full of self-reproach. ‘I should never have suggested this, you’re not strong enough yet.’