A Fairly Good Time Read online

  “Everyone confides in Shirley,” Philippe said once.

  “And Shirley confides in everyone too,” said Madame Roux, always good-natured.

  “She does not gossip,” said Philippe.

  “She is not looking for ordinary gossip. What is she looking for, our little one? I often ask myself.”

  Their little one sat with a cup in both hands, wishing her hair were long enough to cover her face. She felt slightly cross-eyed because she did not know where to look except in the cup.

  Something else that Ruskin missed, she thought.

  The class difference Philippe had once implied between Madame Roux and himself dissolved; and Philippe, who never breathed a word about his private feelings, Philippe the prudent, the discreet, had a topic in common with the woman in the shop downstairs—his marriage to Shirley. But it was not gossip either: Shirley knew that he considered it merely as a problem in logic.

  •

  It was Madame Roux who on the morning of Whitmonday brought Shirley news about Philippe. This was the news: as Philippe had stood waiting for his sister at Orly airport on Sunday morning his throat became inflamed. The pain worsened during lunch and then became a crisis that spread to his liver. He was nauseated—even his mother’s cooking made him sick.

  “He has the temperature of a horse,” said Madame Roux. “It is infectious hepatitis. So the doctor says.” She stood in Shirley’s doorway huffing and panting with a hand upon her heart. She seemed to have gained weight these recent weeks; the exertion of climbing only one flight of steps had turned her crimson.

  Today was a national holiday. Shops and banks were closed, which meant that Madame Roux had no logical reason for being in the neighborhood since she lived in the suburb of Saint-Maur, which she pretended to love, and praised bitterly for its quiet and the quality of the air one breathed. Gasping, she glanced all round her now with something between amazement and wonder, much as Claudie Maurel had seemed astonished at the sight of Sunday drivers.

  It is because she never comes up here, Shirley guessed. We have all confided in her, laughed at our friends and our lovers, but always down in the shop. Within that limit. I never once asked her to a party, and I ask anyone—any dog without a collar, as Philippe says.

  Madame Roux had been leaning against the wall; she straightened up and, still uninvited, astonished Shirley by pushing past her and stalking, as best someone short and rounded can do, straight into the living room. She was not a concierge, her attitude said for her, even if she did deliver messages—she was not to be kept standing in doorways, Her bold, interrogative staring continued; she might have been inspecting the advantages of an abandoned house, seeing beyond the trash and the litter and the bread left to molder what she could make of the place. Madame Roux had an eye for the value of ruins. If something could not fetch money in a devastated form she patched it up, but only to be better rid of it. When anything ceased to interest her it was only because she had ceased to make it pay. She was a devoted buyer of broken toys, blistered mirrors, indelibly stained teacups and slum dwellings: some people are born to own them.

  “How did you find out about Philippe?” said Shirley. She tied the sash of her bathrobe and yawned, trying to adjust her sleeping mind to the news. “My God, what time is it? Noon? It can’t be! Am I supposed to be anywhere? Maybe not.” Because she and Madame Roux had been friends once, she found it impossible to be formal. She shook a cigarette out of a pack and tossed the pack over to her former sympathizer, who let it fall to the ground. “It’s true, you don’t like French cigarettes,” Shirley went on, trying to make the rudeness seem normal. “Did you come all the way in to Paris just to tell me about Philippe? You could have called me—that’s what phones are for. He could have, for that matter. I wonder why Colette . . . oh, it doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

  Of course it mattered. Her first mother-in-law, Mrs. Higgins, rose up in her memory, and she heard Mrs. Higgins saying quietly, “. . . just be dignified.” Shirley said, “I’ll make us some coffee, shall I?” in English, because when she and Madame Roux had been friends they had talked English together. But Madame Roux had no time for harmony. She said, “Philippe will remain at his mother’s until he has completely recovered. He is overtired and undernourished and he has many mental problems.”

  “I suppose he has.” Shirley felt humbled. Her voice had an extraordinary sadness. She considered Philippe’s mental problems, one of which must have been his wife. But what was all his new intimacy with Madame Roux about? What was it? He used to despise her, Shirley remembered; then he started taking her seriously. They would talk and stop talking only when they noticed me; then they would smile as if that was all they had ever been doing. Until this morning Madame Roux had spoken of him as “your husband.” To his face she had called him “monsieur.” Now a new Madame Roux, with new ash-blond fluffy hair and new tight underclothes sat crossing her short legs in Shirley’s parlor, discussing “Philippe.” That was a change, that and her recent hatred. Shirley could not understand being hated: she could not keep it in mind. Surely there must be a line of behavior to follow when someone hated you, a new vocabulary to try to learn, an ear to train for new music. How easy it seemed for Madame Roux, who must have been taught from childhood—in affection you think this, in enmity you mean that. She wanted to tell Madame Roux about yesterday, about Mrs. Castle and The Peep of Day, about the children in the Luxembourg Gardens, and the girl in the restaurant, the flight to the suburbs, the dog and the staircase and the frightened woman wearing the golden brooch, but Madame Roux sent one final scorching look around the walls and got up to leave.

  “I wouldn’t call too much, if I were you,” she said. “The telephone disturbs his mother.”

  The door closed behind Shirley’s new enemy. Why an enemy? Only because Madame Roux could not like two people at once. She heard Madame Roux halting, pausing for breath or for a look at something freshly discovered on the stairs. She has found out about Saturday, Shirley decided. Someone has told her. She knows I didn’t come home. That law she was always telling me about—it’s in Philippe’s favor now. Can they put me out of here, even supposing that Philippe would so much as touch on the idea? There was no settlement. He owns everything. But what if I had asked for an agreement—wouldn’t that have been a rude, suspicious thing? As if I had always been prepared for a bad ending? With Pete nothing like that ever came up, probably because he had everything and I had nothing. What if Philippe expected not to be trusted and has been despising me because I did trust him?

  Something about her own living room began to trouble her now. She felt that eyes might appear in the wall or Doré faces peer out of the leaves of wallpaper. Shirley felt a sharp pain, as though someone had thrown a stone between her shoulder blades. Her head was a weight: her neck did its best to give this leaden burden support. She pushed off her slippers and lay on the sofa. She was going to be twenty-seven. Madame Roux had told her it was a desperate age, one in which women made disastrous choices.

  “ ‘A woman of seven-and-twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again,’ ” Shirley had quoted, answering her.

  “Say it in French,” said Madame Roux. Shirley did her best with it. “True,” said Madame Roux, “but, at the same time, nonsense. The truth lies in the picture the woman has of herself. Only the objective truth can prevent her from behaving like a madwoman.” Madame Roux was partial to phrases like “the objective truth,” which she picked up from the front-page editorials of her morning newspaper, and which Shirley did not understand at all. “Who were you quoting?” said Madame Roux, rather severely, afraid of having been caught out. “Balzac?”

  Jane Austen had said it.

  Who was Jane Austen? The author of Wuthering Heights?

  No—Jane Eyre was the author of Wuthering Heights.

  Had Laurence Olivier played in that?

  Yes, Shirley thought he had. It was an old movie—almost as old as the book. In that case Madame Roux knew about it
, though she could not remember when Laurence Olivier had made that remark.

  A legion of older women had been waiting their turn, trying to catch Shirley’s fickle attention. Mrs. Castle, Mrs. Higgins and Mrs. Norrington, her mother, said in chorus, “Do you mean to say you’re going to lie there moping just because that bleached-blonde hussy told you not to call your own husband? You mean you’re going to stand for that? Do you think any of us would have given in?”

  No, none of them would have, but who were their husbands? Shirley’s father had admired his wife; Mrs. Higgins had been quiet and secretive—she and her husband had never quarreled. Mr. Higgins had never taken a holiday away from her. Her death, it had been thought, would kill him. Shirley knew nothing about Mr. Castle, but she could not imagine Mrs. Castle, at Shirley’s age, receiving news of her own husband by way of a nearby shop. She swung her feet around, sat up, pulled the telephone onto her lap. She dialed Galvani again. Oh, who was he? Who was Galvani? One of Napoleon’s generals? Married to one of Napoleon’s sisters? Ringing flooded the Perrigny dining room, where the table had been cleared. Someone—Philippe—was watching television. On and on, waves of ringing filled the room. Madame Perrigny bent over her sewing. Her plum-colored curls, dyed by the expert Colette, slid onto her powdered cheeks. Shirley saw all this, saw large spools of black and white thread and the old-fashioned snap case for Madame Perrigny’s glasses open, adrift, on the gleaming table. Assaulted by the ringing, still no one moved. Colette slept, sighing; her face was bloated. Then the ringing stopped and Madame Perrigny smiled over her sewing, smiled with her mouth turned down.

  “I’ll give him time,” Shirley said aloud. Yes, I had better give him time to get over being sick or being mad. I’ll give him until next Saturday. That’s enough time. She dialed eleven then and asked for the Paris message service, which would deliver words to his door. The message would resemble a telegram; he would be certain to open it. To a clear-voiced person, who repeated her words back to her, she said that she would call on Philippe next Saturday after work. She was about to sign it “Shirley” but remembered the confusion this would create; it would be spelled wrong and thus make her message look foolish. So she gave “Perrigny” instead, spelling it with the official alphabet—Pierre Eugene Raoul Irma Gaston Nicholas Yvonne.

  7

  THE NAME that no one in Paris could spell, pronounce or appreciate had been chosen by the doctor who attended Shirley’s birth. Mrs. Norrington would have called her infant daughter Michael, had her husband not objected. She was of a generation that believed the subservience of women would come to an end if girls were named Anthony, Jonathan, Walter or Ralph. It was difficult for Shirley to imagine her mother’s having ever been subservient to anyone: even in childhood pictures Mrs. Norrington seemed nearly six feet tall, with hair parted to form sloping curtains on each side of a severe and elderly face. She was middle-aged when the signs of pregnancy occurred; she took them to be connected with the menopause. After twelve weeks she supposed she had developed a tumor. Rather than worry her husband by mentioning it, she simply made her will. Her dismay when she understood the truth was not based on dislike of the incipient Shirley, but on her own ignorance of children, of whom she knew nothing except that they were loud-mouthed and dirty in their habits. She was prepared to be open-minded, but her husband was elderly now and he could not imagine a third presence in the house.

  In one of her regular birthday letters to Shirley she said, “I feared that your advent might bring my mental activities to a close, for most mothers seemed to me provincial and stupid.” At one time these “activities” had been innocently political, almost without her knowing it, for the word “politics” suggested to Mrs. Norrington a kind of blundering male obsession, or else someone beefy, Irish and drunk. Though passionately conservative on one topic—England and the British royal family—she was a natural revolutionary when it came to virtually anything else. Soldiers’ firing on workers’ houses in Vienna, the siege of Madrid, they-shall-not-pass, the Socialist martyrs of Rome, Saccovanzetti (one name and, to Shirley, one person), still colored a personal monologue in which abhorrence of pain and a fierce defense of virtue prevailed. Later on, “justice” came to mean avoiding meat as food and refusing vaccination because the enemies of man embody life. She was surprised when Shirley told her that the Higginses, Shirley’s first parents-in-law, had spoken of her as a socialist. All she had ever done was draw the line between possible and inconceivable behavior, which were her personal substitutes for right and wrong. In a society where eccentricity was not encouraged, she had acted out her beliefs; native of a country that welcomed neither passion nor poetry, she was shown to be naturally endowed for both, but she had somehow made her daughter suspicious of either.

  Shirley had not inherited her mother’s moral temper: she wanted life to be passionate in itself and could only imagine this in terms of being loved. She had seen how a mind as strong as her mother’s collapsed when faced with a sentimental obstacle, and this reinforced her own hostility to ideas. For her mother, the limit of reason seemed to have been 1940, the White Cliffs of Dover, and the introduction into the Norrington household of four small British refugees and their nymphomaniac mother. Shirley felt and resented a new, slavish quality in her mother where the Team-Browning family was concerned. It embarrassed the little girl and made her ashamed. By the time she was seven or eight she was heartily sick of the flaxen heads and adorable accents her mother admired; nor did she share Mrs. Norrington’s delight in the four cases of precocious intelligence the Team-Browning children were said to constitute. It occurred to the child that four loud, finical, humorless voices were passing for brains, and she wondered whose fault it was that she had been taught nothing more piercing than a Canadian mumble. At nine, she was old enough to judge the flight back to England and to piece together an attitude out of a few dropped words. Mothers who had not paid a penny in private school fees now discovered the inadequacy of the schools and rushed their children away “to be educated all over again.” The word “heritage,” which had been lying in the corner like an old tennis ball, now bounced everywhere. The independence children had acquired in Canada was suddenly known as “growing up too soon,” and so they were repatriated “to learn to be little boys and little girls all over again.” There was no doubt in Shirley’s mind that the purgatory of the Team-Brownings had shortened her father’s life; for once the children’s mother had seduced those neighbors who were still civilians, then a postman, two headmasters, several taxi drivers, and the accountant who prepared Dr. Norrington’s declaration of income tax, there was no one left except her own sons and her host; but Shirley’s father was old and ailing, and the sight of Mrs. Team-Browning waggling her bottom along the passage from bath to bedroom merely made him feel that no one understood him any more. Long after his death, when the correspondence with the Team-Brownings had trickled down to an exchange of Christmas cards, Mrs. Norrington would still feel called on to justify her act of kindness. She attempted the abstract terms she liked, but as Shirley immediately assumed a deaf face at the mention of “our traditions,” her mother had to remind her that refugees from any society and castoffs of any political turnabout had her sympathy. Being displaced was so contrary to Mrs. Norrington’s notion of the way people should live that the fugitives had to be either criminals or victims. Criminals could always benefit from the example of disinterested assistance, she reasoned, while victims required it. And yet she was not instinctively generous. A crust of bread given away made her heart swell with anxiety. Her own father had been one of those Westerners who will deprive his family for the sake of outsiders, so that her early memories were there, nagging and repeating that even old shoes worn by others mean food out of one’s mouth. Still, she gave, wincing and flinching. What she preferred, for her own tranquillity, was a pretense at exchange. She would buy anything if the seller were poor enough. She became the protector of a family of Bulgarians who painted flowers in oil paints all over rough l
inen. Material thus decorated was eminently useless, but that did not prevent Mrs. Norrington’s buying yards and yards of it and having it made up into frocks. Her long figure encased in a linen tube, a support for clambering roses, once seen could not have been imagined otherwise. No one laughed. Her appearance was always inevitable. And she was at peace, because she had rewarded the Bortoloffs for having spent their time around the kitchen table employed in producing something preposterous. Shirley thought that her mother’s charity lay chiefly in the way she seemed to understand suffering, though she would not always acknowledge its importance. Mrs. Norrington was an attentive listener; only Shirley had ever failed to catch her ear. No family voice could ever find the right pitch, probably. On hearing a recital of woe and abuse, Mrs. Norrington would at once look for its confirmation in poetry. Her comprehension of other lives came out of literature—the only form of art she trusted. As a result, Shirley’s suspicion of ideas was as nothing to her dislike of poetry: the very sight of her mother’s books, their dark green and maroon bindings, their tarnished gold titles, and the opaque bricks of words they contained, could raise but one desire in her mind—Resist! She had too often seen her mother pushing through the pages until her long hand stopped at the lines she wanted. She read aloud, flatly. Every variation of grief and anguish had its summing-up in Herrick, Bunyan or Pope. Shirley had been told from tricycle age, “But die you must, fair maid, ere long,/as he the maker of this song,” and “He that is down needs fear no fall,/He that is low, no pride . . .” and “A heap of dust alone remains of thee,/ Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!” and her rage, resentment and jealousy because of the presence of the Team-Brownings had produced frequent readings of Wordsworth’s disgusting “Ode to Duty”!